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• The Top 5 MDM Sessions You Can’t Miss at OpenWorld

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  Sessions, Demo pods, Hands On Labs, and much more – but where should you focus?  MDM has some excellent sessions planned for OOW –  here is a top 5 list to identify the sessions you just can’t afford to miss. October 3, 2012  1:15 PM - 2:15 PM    Moscone West - 3002/3004     What's There to Know About Oracle’s Master Data Management Portfolio and Roadmap? Hear about product strategy our vision for the future and how Oracle MDM is positioned to excel in helping organizations make the most of their customer,      partner, supplier or product data. October 3, 2012  5:00 PM - 6:00 PM   Westin San Francisco – Metropolitan I Oracle Customer MDM Applications: Implementation Best Practices, Data Governance, and ROI       Customers successes provide solid examples of technology at work and how organizations derive value from it. Attend this session and hear from our customers on how they built a business case, established governance and are realizing the benefits of Oracle Customer Hub. October 2, 2012  10:15 AM - 11:15 AM   Moscone West – 3001 Mastering Product Data: Strategies for Effective Product Information Management                                                                      Product data is vital for any enterprise in being able to provide a consolidated representation of products to their partners, customers and suppliers.  Hear how our customers leverage product information to be a leader in their respective area and how Oracle is critical to achieving this. October 2, 2012  11:45 AM - 12:45 PM   Moscone West – 2022 Enabling Trusted Enterprise Product Data with Oracle Fusion Product Hub                                                                                       Learn how Oracle Fusion Product Hub is paving the way for providing organizations with trusted product data as well as helping organizations make the most of the information and infrastructure they already possess. October 1, 2012  4:45 PM – 5:45 PM   InterContinental - Ballroom A Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management: Enabling Enterprise Transformation                                                                         Hear how Data Relationship Management drives enterprise transformation and why any organization embarking on an master data management initiative needs it, plus hear from our customers best practices as well as lessons learned.  Check out the Master Data Management Focus On document for all our sessions at OpenWorld 2012. 

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• SQL Server Table Polling by Multiple Subscribers

  - by Daniel Hester

  Background Designing Stored Procedures that are safe for multiple subscribers (to call simultaneously) can be challenging.  For example let’s say that you want multiple worker processes to poll a shared work queue that’s encapsulated as a SQL Table. This is a common scenario and through experience you’ll find that you want to use Table Hints to prevent unwanted locking when performing simultaneous queries on the same table. There are three table hints to consider: NOLOCK, READPAST and UPDLOCK. Both NOLOCK and READPAST table hints allow you to SELECT from a table without placing a LOCK on that table. However, SELECTs with the READPAST hint will ignore any records that are locked due to being updated/inserted (or otherwise “dirty”), whereas a SELECT with NOLOCK ignores all locks including dirty reads. For the initial update of the flag (that marks the record as available for subscription) I don’t use the NOLOCK Table Hint because I want to be sensitive to the “active” records in the table and I want to exclude them.  I use an Update Lock (UPDLOCK) in conjunction with a WHERE clause that uses a sub-select with a READPAST Table Hint in order to explicitly lock the records I’m updating (UPDLOCK) but not place a lock on the table when selecting the records that I’m going to update (READPAST). UPDATES should be allowed to lock the rows affected because we’re probably changing a flag on a record so that it is not included in a SELECT from another subscriber. On the UPDATE statement we should explicitly use the UPDLOCK to guard against lock escalation. A SELECT to check for the next record(s) to process can result in a shared read lock being held by more than one subscriber polling the shared work queue (SQL table). It is expected that more than one worker process (or server) might try to process the same new record(s) at the same time. When each process then tries to obtain the update lock, none of them can because another process has a shared read lock in place. Thus without the UPDLOCK hint the result would be a lock escalation deadlock; however with the UPDLOCK hint this condition is mitigated against. Note that using the READPAST table hint requires that you also set the ISOLATION LEVEL of the transaction to be READ COMMITTED (rather than the default of SERIALIZABLE). Guidance In the Stored Procedure that returns records to the multiple subscribers: Perform the UPDATE first. Change the flag that makes the record available to subscribers.  Additionally, you may want to update a LastUpdated datetime field in order to be able to check for records that “got stuck” in an intermediate state or for other auditing purposes. In the UPDATE statement use the (UPDLOCK) Table Hint on the UPDATE statement to prevent lock escalation. In the UPDATE statement also use a WHERE Clause that uses a sub-select with a (READPAST) Table Hint to select the records that you’re going to update. In the UPDATE statement use the OUTPUT clause in conjunction with a Temporary Table to isolate the record(s) that you’ve just updated and intend to return to the subscriber. This is the fastest way to update the record(s) and to get the records’ identifiers within the same operation. Finally do a set-based SELECT on the main Table (using the Temporary Table to identify the records in the set) with either a READPAST or NOLOCK table hint.  Use NOLOCK if there are other processes (besides the multiple subscribers) that might be changing the data that you want to return to the multiple subscribers; or use READPAST if you're sure there are no other processes (besides the multiple subscribers) that might be updating column data in the table for other purposes (e.g. changes to a person’s last name).  NOLOCK is generally the better fit in this part of the scenario. See the following as an example: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_NewCustomersSelect] AS BEGIN -- OVERRIDE THE DEFAULT ISOLATION LEVEL SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED -- SET NOCOUNT ON SET NOCOUNT ON -- DECLARE TEMP TABLE -- Note that this example uses CustomerId as an identifier; -- you could just use the Identity column Id if that’s all you need. DECLARE @CustomersTempTable TABLE ( CustomerId NVARCHAR(255) ) -- PERFORM UPDATE FIRST -- [Customers] is the name of the table -- [Id] is the Identity Column on the table -- [CustomerId] is the business document key used to identify the -- record globally, i.e. in other systems or across SQL tables -- [Status] is INT or BIT field (if the status is a binary state) -- [LastUpdated] is a datetime field used to record the time of the -- last update UPDATE [Customers] WITH (UPDLOCK) SET [Status] = 1, [LastUpdated] = GETDATE() OUTPUT [INSERTED].[CustomerId] INTO @CustomersTempTable WHERE ([Id] = (SELECT TOP 100 [Id] FROM [Customers] WITH (READPAST) WHERE ([Status] = 0) ORDER BY [Id] ASC)) -- PERFORM SELECT FROM ENTITY TABLE SELECT [C].[CustomerId], [C].[FirstName], [C].[LastName], [C].[Address1], [C].[Address2], [C].[City], [C].[State], [C].[Zip], [C].[ShippingMethod], [C].[Id] FROM [Customers] AS [C] WITH (NOLOCK), @CustomersTempTable AS [TEMP] WHERE ([C].[CustomerId] = [TEMP].[CustomerId]) END In a system that has been designed to have multiple status values for records that need to be processed in the Work Queue it is necessary to have a “Watch Dog” process by which “stale” records in intermediate states (such as “In Progress”) are detected, i.e. a [Status] of 0 = New or Unprocessed; a [Status] of 1 = In Progress; a [Status] of 2 = Processed; etc.. Thus, if you have a business rule that states that the application should only process new records if all of the old records have been processed successfully (or marked as an error), then it will be necessary to build a monitoring process to detect stalled or stale records in the Work Queue, hence the use of the LastUpdated column in the example above. The Status field along with the LastUpdated field can be used as the criteria to detect stalled / stale records. It is possible to put this watchdog logic into the stored procedure above, but I would recommend making it a separate monitoring function. In writing the stored procedure that checks for stale records I would recommend using the same kind of lock semantics as suggested above. The example below looks for records that have been in the “In Progress” state ([Status] = 1) for greater than 60 seconds: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_NewCustomersWatchDog] AS BEGIN -- TO OVERRIDE THE DEFAULT ISOLATION LEVEL SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED -- SET NOCOUNT ON SET NOCOUNT ON DECLARE @MaxWait int; SET @MaxWait = 60 IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM [dbo].[Customers] WITH (READPAST) WHERE ([Status] = 1) AND (DATEDIFF(s, [LastUpdated], GETDATE()) > @MaxWait)) BEGIN SELECT 1 AS [IsWatchDogError] END ELSE BEGIN SELECT 0 AS [IsWatchDogError] END END Downloads The zip file below contains two SQL scripts: one to create a sample database with the above stored procedures and one to populate the sample database with 10,000 sample records.  I am very grateful to Red-Gate software for their excellent SQL Data Generator tool which enabled me to create these sample records in no time at all. References http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187373.aspx http://www.techrepublic.com/article/using-nolock-and-readpast-table-hints-in-sql-server/6185492 http://geekswithblogs.net/gwiele/archive/2004/11/25/15974.aspx http://grounding.co.za/blogs/romiko/archive/2009/03/09/biztalk-sql-receive-location-deadlocks-dirty-reads-and-isolation-levels.aspx

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• TGIF: Engagement Wrap-up

  - by Michael Snow

  We've had a very busy week here at Oracle and as we build up to Oracle OpenWorld starting in less than 10 days - it doesn't look like things will be slowing down. Engagement is definitely in the air this week. Our friend, John Mancini published a great article entitled: "The World of Engagement" on his Digital Landfill blog yesterday and we hosted a great webcast with R "Ray" Wang from Constellation Research yesterday on the "9 C's of Engagement". 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} I wanted to wrap-up the week with some key takeaways from our webcast yesterday with Ray Wang. If you missed the webcast yesterday, fear not - it is now available  On-Demand. We'll leave you this week with lots of questions about how to navigate these churning waters of engagement. Stay tuned to the Oracle WebCenter Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series as we fuel this dialogue. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Company Culture Does company support a culture of putting customer satisfaction ahead of profits? Does culture promote creativity and cross functional employee collaboration? Does culture accept different views of multi-generational workforce? Does culture promote employee training and skills development Does culture support upward mobility and long term retention? Does culture support work-life balance? Does the culture provide rewards for employee for outstanding customer support? Channels What are the current primary channels for customer communications? What do you think will be the primary channels in two years? Is company developing support model for emerging channels? Do all channels consistently deliver the same level of customer support? Do you know the cost per transaction across all channels? Do you engage customers proactively across multiple channels? Do all channels have access to the same customer information? Community Does company extend customer support into virtual communities of interest? Does company facilitate educating users through its virtual communities? Does company mine its customer’s experience into useful data? Does company increase the value for customers through using data to deliver new products and services? Does company support two way interactions with its customers through communities of interest? Does company actively support social CRM, online communities and social media markets? Credibility Does company market its trustworthiness through external certificates such as business licenses, BBB certificates or other validations? Does company promote trust through customer testimonials and case studies on ethical business practices? Does company promote truthful market campaigns Does company make it easy for customers to complain? Does company build its reputation for standing behind its products with guarantees for satisfaction? Does company protect its customer data with high security measures> Content What sources do you use to create customer content? Does company mine social media and blogs for customer content? How does your company sort, store and retain its customer content? How frequently does content get updated? What external sources do you use for customer content? How many responses are typically received from a knowledge management system inquiry? Does your company use customer content to design and develop new product and services? Context Does your company market to customers in clusters or individually? Does your company customize its messages and personalize them to specific needs of each individual customer? Does your company store customer data based on their past behaviors, purchases, sentiment analysis and current activities? Does your company manage customer context according to channels used? For example identify personal use channels versus business channels? What is your frequency of collecting customer activities across various touch points? How is your customer data stored and analyzed? Is contextual data used for future customer outreach? Cadence Which channels does your company measure-web site visits, phone calls, IVR, store visits, face to face, social media? Does company make effective use of cross channel marketing to promote more frequent customer engagement? Does your company rate the patterns relevant for your product or service and monitor usage against this pattern? Does your company measure the frequency of both online and offline channels? Does your company apply metrics to the frequency of customer engagements with product or services revenues? Does your company consolidate data for customer engagement across various channels for a complete view of its customer? Catalyst Does company offer coupon discounts? Does company have a customer loyalty program or a VIP membership program? Does company mine customer data to target specific groups of buyers? Do internal employees serve as ambassadors for customer programs? Does company drive loyalty through social media loyalty programs? Does company build rewards based on using loyalty data? Does company offer an employee incentive program to drive customer loyalty?

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

  - by sbwalker

  Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference. First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails. Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it.  This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer. In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline. So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms. The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ). At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC. While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC. In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios. So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick. Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The  “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again. And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense. So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

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• Referencing CDI producer method result in h:selectOneMenu

  - by user953217

  I have a named session scoped bean CustomerRegistration which has a named producer method getNewCustomer which returns a Customer object. There is also CustomerListProducer class which produces all customers as list from the database. On the selectCustomer.xhtml page the user is then able to select one of the customers and submit the selection to the application which then simply prints out the last name of the selected customer. Now this only works when I reference the selected customer on the facelets page via #{customerRegistration.newCustomer}. When I simply use #{newCustomer} then the output for the last name is null whenever I submit the form. What's going on here? Is this the expected behavior as according to chapter 7.1 Restriction upon bean instantion of JSR-299 spec? It says: ... However, if the application directly instantiates a bean class, instead of letting the container perform instantiation, the resulting instance is not managed by the container and is not a contextual instance as defined by Section 6.5.2, “Contextual instance of a bean”. Furthermore, the capabilities listed in Section 2.1, “Functionality provided by the container to the bean” will not be available to that particular instance. In a deployed application, it is the container that is responsible for instantiating beans and initializing their dependencies. ... Here's the code: Customer.java: @javax.persistence.Entity @Veto public class Customer implements Serializable, Entity { private static final long serialVersionUID = 122193054725297662L; @Column(name = "first_name") private String firstName; @Column(name = "last_name") private String lastName; @Id @GeneratedValue() private Long id; public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } @Override public String toString() { return firstName + ", " + lastName; } @Override public Long getId() { return this.id; } } CustomerListProducer.java: @SessionScoped public class CustomerListProducer implements Serializable { @Inject private EntityManager em; private List<Customer> customers; @Inject @Category("helloworld_as7") Logger log; // @Named provides access the return value via the EL variable name // "members" in the UI (e.g., // Facelets or JSP view) @Produces @Named public List<Customer> getCustomers() { return customers; } public void onCustomerListChanged( @Observes(notifyObserver = Reception.IF_EXISTS) final Customer customer) { // retrieveAllCustomersOrderedByName(); log.info(customer.toString()); } @PostConstruct public void retrieveAllCustomersOrderedByName() { CriteriaBuilder cb = em.getCriteriaBuilder(); CriteriaQuery<Customer> criteria = cb.createQuery(Customer.class); Root<Customer> customer = criteria.from(Customer.class); // Swap criteria statements if you would like to try out type-safe // criteria queries, a new // feature in JPA 2.0 // criteria.select(member).orderBy(cb.asc(member.get(Member_.name))); criteria.select(customer).orderBy(cb.asc(customer.get("lastName"))); customers = em.createQuery(criteria).getResultList(); } } CustomerRegistration.java: @Named @SessionScoped public class CustomerRegistration implements Serializable { @Inject @Category("helloworld_as7") private Logger log; private Customer newCustomer; @Produces @Named public Customer getNewCustomer() { return newCustomer; } public void selected() { log.info("Customer " + newCustomer.getLastName() + " ausgewählt."); } @PostConstruct public void initNewCustomer() { newCustomer = new Customer(); } public void setNewCustomer(Customer newCustomer) { this.newCustomer = newCustomer; } } not working selectCustomer.xhtml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"> <h:head> <title>Auswahl</title> </h:head> <h:body> <h:form> <h:selectOneMenu value="#{newCustomer}" converter="customerConverter"> <f:selectItems value="#{customers}" var="current" itemLabel="#{current.firstName}, #{current.lastName}" /> </h:selectOneMenu> <h:panelGroup id="auswahl"> <h:outputText value="#{newCustomer.lastName}" /> </h:panelGroup> <h:commandButton value="Klick" action="#{customerRegistration.selected}" /> </h:form> </h:body> </html> working selectCustomer.xhtml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"> <h:head> <title>Auswahl</title> </h:head> <h:body> <h:form> <h:selectOneMenu value="#{customerRegistration.newCustomer}" converter="customerConverter"> <f:selectItems value="#{customers}" var="current" itemLabel="#{current.firstName}, #{current.lastName}" /> </h:selectOneMenu> <h:panelGroup id="auswahl"> <h:outputText value="#{newCustomer.lastName}" /> </h:panelGroup> <h:commandButton value="Klick" action="#{customerRegistration.selected}" /> </h:form> </h:body> </html> CustomerConverter.java: @SessionScoped @FacesConverter("customerConverter") public class CustomerConverter implements Converter, Serializable { private static final long serialVersionUID = -6093400626095413322L; @Inject EntityManager entityManager; @Override public Object getAsObject(FacesContext context, UIComponent component, String value) { Long id = Long.valueOf(value); return entityManager.find(Customer.class, id); } @Override public String getAsString(FacesContext context, UIComponent component, Object value) { return ((Customer) value).getId().toString(); } }

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• Keep IIS7 Failed Request Tracing as a sysadmin only diagnostic tool?

  - by Kev

  I'm giving some of our customers the ability to manage their sites via IIS Feature Delegation and IIS Manager for Remote Administration. One feature I'm unsure about permitting access to is Failed Request Tracing for the following reasons: Customers will forget to turn it off The server will be taking a performance hit (especially if 500 sites all have it turned on) The server will become littered with old FRT's The potential to leak sensitive information about how the server is configured thus providing useful information to would-be intruders. Should we just keep this as a troubleshooting tool for our own admins?

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• How can Hosting Providers allow .NET Full Trust?

  - by Alex

  I wondered how certain .NET hosting providers can safely grant full trust to their customers? Doesn't this open up everybody who is hosting with that company to potential safety issues? Or is there a way to safely restrict each customer, despite giving full trust, to "their" space without giving them the abiliy to bring down the system or spy on other customers?

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• SQL 2008 R2 Named Instance Client Connectivity Issues?

  - by Jerry Dodge

  We're upgrading our software from using SQL 2000 to 2008 R2. Our customers will be installing an update which uninstalls 2000 and installs 2008 R2 under the same instance. So if no instance existed, then no instance name will be set (default). However, the problem starts with the customers which have a named SQL instance. Starting in 2008 R2 (not sure of ones before), for some reason, a client connecting to the server by its instance name is unsuccessful. I'm testing from the Management Studio - if I can't connect this, then nothing can connect. I browse network servers, and find the specific server\instance in the list. But, upon trying to connect to an instance name like MyServer\INST, I get: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: -1) I do in fact have TCP/IP and Named Pipes protocols enabled, this is the first thing I did. When I connect to the server using a comma (,) and port number like MyServer, 49195, it works just fine. So it appears that client computers are just unable to identify the instance names. This has happened on all our installations of SQL 2008 R2 and from all client computers, including Win 7, XP, Vista, Server 2008, and Server 2003. We never experienced such issues on earlier versions of SQL. The problem even persists if the firewalls and antiviruses are all disabled. Now, this is a large update which we will be distributing soon to all our customers, and we want to minimize the interaction they need with us to get this installed. We absolutely hate the idea of using a port number, because it will always be different, and we would have to modify each client to point to this server/port. Some of our customers may have hundreds of client computers. How do I make client connections to a named SQL instance work again? After all, this is the whole purpose of named instances, and if a client can't connect to this instance by its name, then what is it even named for? EDIT It was mentioned to make sure SQL Browser is running, so I checked, and it is running. The server is also able to connect to its self (locally) - just external connections are refused. UPDATE After more careful checking, I learned the firewall wasn't completely disabled when testing, and upon disabling it completely, this works. So it appears that SQL Browser is being blocked by the firewall from external clients from accessing.

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• Windows Server 2008 R2 DFS Root Namespace Required?

  - by caleban

  I would prefer to set up our DFS such as: \domain.local\users \domain.local\customers \domain.local\support etc. Is this a problem? Do I need to instead set all of the above folders as targets under a root such as: \domain.local\files\users \domain.local\files\customers \domain.local\files\support Other than the path being shorter in the top example, which is what I would prefer, is there a difference in functionality in Windows DFS between the two examples shown? Thanks in advance.

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• How to pin either a Shortcut or a Batch file to the new Windows 7 Taskbar?

  - by Shaharyar

  We are having trouble adding our batch scripts to the new Windows 7 taskar. Our batchfiles take some arguments and just execute other application based on those arguments . To keep it simple, we created some shortcuts for our customers which they just need to click in order to get everything running. The question here is: How can we pin those shortcuts or batch files to the taskbar? (The customers aren't supposed to access the file system and that's why they can only see the taskbar)

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• Is testing every Anti-Virus definition before deployment feasible?

  - by Sim

  With the recent problems that McAfee customers have had over the last week there has been lots of opinion that not only should the AV vendors have better testing but customers should test AV signatures before deploying. Is this feasible? If you are doing this already do you take other measures to minimise exposure to malware while you are testing?

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• One to many too much data returned - MySQL

  - by Evan McPeters

  I have 2 related MySQL tables in a one to many relationship. Customers: cust_id, cust_name, cust_notes Orders: order_id, cust_id, order_comments So, if I do a standard join to get all customers and their orders via PHP, I return something like: Jack Black, jack's notes, comments about jack's 1st order Jack Black, jack's notes, comments about jack's 2nd order Simon Smith, simon's notes, comments about simon's 1st order Simon Smith, simon's notes, comments about simon's 2nd order The problem is that *cust_notes* is a text field and can be quite large (a couple of thousand words). So, it seems like returning that field for every order is inneficient. I could use *GROUP_CONCAT* and JOINS to return all *order_comments* on a single row BUT order_comments is a large text field too, so it seems like that could create a problem. Should I just use two separate queries, one for the customers table and one for the orders table? Is there a better way?

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• Sharepoint and Cross-Site Lookup

  - by Mina Samy

  Hi all I have this scenario I want to build two sharepoint 2007 sites. One for customers info and the other for products and customers orders. Now the problem is that in the second site I need to reference the customers info from the first site but unfortunately sharepoint doesnot provide out of the box cross-site lookup. I did some search and found custom cross-site fields and used one but when I upgraded the site to sharepoint 2010 this custom field was not compatible and the upgrade wizard said it could not be upgraded. so what is the solution for this ? is it to merge the two sites so that I can use the standard lookup feature or is there any workaround for this ? please if any body has faced such a scenario, share the solution with me ? thanks

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• Use Any() and Count() in Dynamic Linq

  - by ArpanDesai

  I am trying to write dynamic Linq Library query to fetch record on condition, Customers who has order count is greater than 3 and ShipVia field equal 2. Below is my syntax what i have tried. object[] objArr = new object[10]; objArr[0] = 1; IQueryable<Customer> test = db.Customers.Where("Orders.Count(ShipVia=2)", objArr); and IQueryable<Customer> test = db.Customers.Where("Orders.Any(ShipVia=2).Count()", objArr); But both are not working. In second query Any returns true so it won't work with Count. Suggest me a way to implement this.

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• update query on multiple tables

  - by jon

  I have a schema like : employees (eno, ename, zip, hdate) customers (cno, cnmae, street, zip, phone) zipcodes (zip, city) where zip is pk in zipcodes and fk in other tables. I have to write an update query which updates all the occurence of zipcode 4994 to 1234 throughout the database. update zipcodes,customers,employees set zip = 0 where customers.zip = zipcodes.zip and employees.zip = zipcodes.zip; but i know i am not doing it right. Is there a way to update all the tables zip ina single update query?

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• Custom Logic and Proxy Classes in ADO.NET Data Services

  - by rasx

  I've just read "Injecting Custom Logic in ADO.NET Data Services" and my next question is, How do you get your [WebGet] method to show up in the client-side proxy classes? Sure, I can call this directly (RESTfully) with, say, WebClient but I thought the strong typing features in ADO.NET Data Services would "hide" this from me auto-magically. So here we have: public class MyService : DataService<MyDataSource> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(IDataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Customers", EntitySetRights.AllRead); config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("CustomersInCity", ServiceOperationRights.All); } [WebGet] public IQueryable<MyDataSource.Customers> CustomersInCity(string city) { return from c in this.CurrentDataSource.Customers where c.City == city select c; } } How can I get CustomersInCity() to show up in my client-side class defintions?

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• jqGrid editForm problem

  - by PaulStanek

  Hi, I have simply jqgrid definitions like this: jQuery("#C2").jqGrid({ url: '/Customers.mvc/GetGridData/', datatype: 'json', autowidth: 'true', mtype: 'GET', colNames: ['Nazwa', 'Symbol', 'Status', 'Miasto', 'Ulica', 'Budynek', 'Mieszkanie', 'Koda pocztowy', 'Domena', ' '], colModel: [ { name: 'Name', index: 'Name', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text' }, { name: 'Symbol', index: 'Symbol', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text' }, { name: 'Status', index: 'Status', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text' }, { name: 'City', index: 'City', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text' }, { name: 'Street', index: 'Street', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text' }, { name: 'Building', index: 'Building', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text' }, { name: 'Flat', index: 'Flat', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text'}, { name: 'PostalCode', index: 'PostalCode', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text' }, { name: 'Domain', index: 'Domain', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text'}, { name: 'ExtId', index: 'ExtId', align: 'left', editable: 'true', edittype: 'text'}, ], pager: jQuery('#C2_p'), rowNum: 30, rowList: [20, 30, 50], sortname: 'Name', sortorder: 'Asc', viewrecords: 'true', width: '80%', height: '100%', editurl: '/Customers.mvc/SaveCustomer/', postData: { gridId: 'Customers' }, caption: 'Klienci2' }).navGrid('#C2_p', { edit: true, add: true, del: true, search: false, refresh: false }, {},//Options for the Edit Dialog {},//Options for the Add Dialog {}//Options for D ); }); And when i call edit/add form it's appears without text edit inputs. I'm using jquery 1.3.2 and jqgrid 3.6.4 Any help will be appreciated.

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• DBLinq not generating where clause

  - by sipwiz

  I'm testing out DBLinq-0.18 and DBLinq from SVN Trunk with MySQL and Postgresql. I'm only using a very simple query but on both database DBLinq is not generating a Where clause. I have confirmed this by turning on statement logging on Postgresql to check exactly what request DBLinq is sending. My Linq query is: MyDB db = new MyDB(new NpgsqlConnection("Database=database;Host=localhost;User Id=postgres;Password=password")); var customers = from customer in db.Customers where customer.CustomerUserName == "test" select customer; The query works ok but the SQL generated by DBLinq is of the form: select customerusername, customerpassword .... from public.customers There is no Where clause which means DBLinq must be pulling the whole table down before running the Linq query. Has anyone had any experience with DBLinq and know what I could be doing wrong?

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• How to efficiently SELECT rows from database table based on selected set of values

  - by Chau Chee Yang

  I have a transaction table of 1 million rows. The table has a field name "Code" to keep customer's ID. There are about 10,000 different customer code. I have an GUI interface allow user to render a report from transaction table. User may select arbitrary number of customers for rendering. I use IN operator first and it works for few customers: SELECT * FROM TRANS_TABLE WHERE CODE IN ('...', '...', '...') I quickly run into problem if I select few thousand customers. There is limitation using IN operator. An alternate way is create a temporary table with only one field of CODE, and inject selected customer codes into the temporary table using INSERT statement. I may then using SELECT A.* FROM TRANS_TABLE A INNER JOIN TEMP B ON (A.CODE=B.CODE) This works nice for huge selection. However, there is performance overhead for temporary table creation, INSERT injection and dropping of temporary table. Do you aware of better solution to handle this situation?

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• Delphi Clientdataset Lookup/Aggregate

  - by TheRoadrunner

  Hi, I need a little help with ClientDatasets in Delphi. What I want to achieve is a grid showing customers, where one of the columns shows the number of orders for each customer. I put a ClientDataset on a form and load Customers.xml from Delphi demo-data. Another ClienDataset is loaded with orders.xml. Relatively simple, I can define an aggregate on the orders CDS showing the total amount per customer (or the count). (See Cary Jensens article on this: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/29272) The problem is getting this aggregate result from orders dataset into the customer dataset. It is kind of an reverse lookup, since there is a 1-n relationship between customers and orders, not an n-1 as normally in lookup scenarios. Any ideas ? Søren

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• What are good ways to guarantee business continuity with a SaaS product?

  - by tommyvdz

  For my Bachelor Thesis I am researching how SaaS providers can arrange some sort of business continuity guarantee. You probably know the Source Code Escrow arrangements for 'shrink-wrapped' software. They give customers access to the source code and all applicable documentation whenever the software supplier gets into (financial) trouble. This clearly does not work for SaaS, because customers have no use for just the source code, and customers probably can not afford not being able to login to their CRM system for a couple weeks because the SaaS provider went bankrupt. I am currently researching different methods to solve this problem. Do you know good and practical solutions to solve this continuity problem? Or companies that already offer a good solution? Thanks!

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• Rails: Design Pattern to Store Order of Relations

  - by ChrisInCambo

  Hi, I have four models: Customer, QueueRed, QueueBlue, QueueGreen. The Queue models have a one to many relationship with customers A customer must always be in a queue A customer can only be in one queue at a time A customer can change queues We must be able to find out the customers current position in their respective queue In an object model the queues would just have an array property containing customers, but ActiveRecord doesn't have arrays. In a DB I would probably create some extra tables just to handle the order of the stories in the queue. My question is what it the best way to model the relationship in ActiveRecord? Obviously there are many ways this could be done, but what is the best or the most in line with how ActiveRecord should be used? Cheers, Chris

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• ASP.Net WebSite Membership AND C# Windows Form Membership

  - by user1638362

  This is not real, it's just a project i'm working on I've created a Hotel Management system in C# WindowsForm, it allows staff members to Add/Edit/Update Rooms,Reservation and Customers etc. Along side this Windows-form i'm creating an ASP.net WebSite where customers should be able to register and reserve rooms online. I've come to the point where i need to create some-type of membership method for this website which should correspond to the membership of the windows form. However i'm not sure what method of membership would be best suited for this, i have looked into the asp.net membership, it's what i want however it creates it's own schema and i don't know how i can relate the information to my customers table and c#windows form. I would ideally like it to resemble a real-life situation as much as possible anyway, am i going about this the wrong way? in terms of the c# windows-form what other technology would a business use to manage a system like this where they can add/edit/update there system and have a website which relates. What are my options here?

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