resource dictionary - Page 284

Clean Up the New Ubuntu Grub2 Boot Menu

- by Trevor Bekolay

Ubuntu adopted the new version of the Grub boot manager in version 9.10, getting rid of the old problematic menu.lst. Today we look at how to change the boot menu options in Grub2. Grub2 is a step forward in a lot of ways, and most of the annoying menu.lst issues from the past are gone. Still, if you’re not vigilant with removing old versions of the kernel, the boot list can still end up being longer than it needs to be. Note: You may have to hold the SHIFT button on your keyboard while booting up to get this menu to show. If only one operating system is installed on your computer, it may load it automatically without displaying this menu. Remove Old Kernel Entries The most common clean up task for the boot menu is to remove old kernel versions lying around on your machine. In our case we want to remove the 2.6.32-21-generic boot menu entries. In the past, this meant opening up /boot/grub/menu.lst…but with Grub2, if we remove the kernel package from our computer, Grub automatically removes those options. To remove old kernel versions, open up Synaptic Package Manager, found in the System > Administration menu. When it opens up, type the kernel version that you want to remove in the Quick search text field. The first few numbers should suffice. For each of the entries associated with the old kernel (e.g. linux-headers-2.6.32-21 and linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic), right-click and choose Mark for Complete Removal. Click the Apply button in the toolbar and then Apply in the summary window that pops up. Close Synaptic Package Manager. The next time you boot up your computer, the Grub menu will not contain the entries associated with the removed kernel version. Remove Any Option by Editing /etc/grub.d If you need more fine-grained control, or want to remove entries that are not kernel versions, you must change the files located in /etc/grub.d. /etc/grub.d contains files that hold the menu entries that used to be contained in /boot/grub/menu.lst. If you want to add new boot menu entries, you would create a new file in this folder, making sure to mark it as executable. If you want to remove boot menu entries, as we do, you would edit files in this folder. If we wanted to remove all of the memtest86+ entries, we could just make the 20_memtest86+ file non-executable, with the terminal command sudo chmod –x 20_memtest86+ Followed by the terminal command sudo update-grub Note that memtest86+ was not found by update-grub because it will only consider executable files. However, instead, we’re going to remove the Serial console 115200 entry for memtest86+… Open a terminal window Applications > Accessories > Terminal. In the terminal window, type in the command: sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ The menu entries are found at the bottom of this file. Comment out the menu entry for serial console 115200 by adding a “#” to the start of each line. Save and close this file. In the terminal window you opened, enter in the command sudo update-grub Note: If you don’t run update-grub, the boot menu options will not change! Now, the next time you boot up, that strange entry will be gone, and you’re left with a simple and clean boot menu. Conclusion While changing Grub2’s boot menu may seem overly complicated to legacy Grub masters, for normal users, Grub2 means that you won’t have to change the boot menu that often. Fortunately, if you do have to do it, the process is still pretty easy. For more detailed information about how to change entries in Grub2, this Ubuntu forum thread is a great resource. If you’re using an older version of Ubuntu, check out our article on how to clean up Ubuntu grub boot menu after upgrades. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Clean Up Ubuntu Grub Boot Menu After UpgradesReinstall Ubuntu Grub Bootloader After Windows Wipes it OutChange the GRUB Menu Timeout on UbuntuHow To Switch to Console Mode for Ubuntu VMware GuestSet Windows as Default OS when Dual Booting Ubuntu 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 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Daily Motivator (Firefox) FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation"

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Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!

- by mbcrump

Infragistics recently released their new Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. I saw a couple of samples and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. I first noticed the hospital floor-plan demo shown on their site and started thinking of ways that I could use this in my own organization. I emailed them asking if I could give away the Silverlight Data Visualization controls on my site and they said, Yes! They also wanted to throw in the standard Silverlight Line of Business controls. (combined they are worth about $3000 US). I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization ($3000 Value) Random winner will be announced on January 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) For extra entries simply: Retweet a link to this page using the following URL [ http://mcrump.me/iscfree ]. It does not matter what the tweet says, just as long as the URL is the same. Unlimited tweets, but please don’t go crazy! This URL will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Infragistics because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The Silverlight Line of Business Control page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. The Data Visualization page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. You can install all of that to your local HDD when you are installing it. I am going to walk you through the Silverlight Controls recently released by Infragistics. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the executable. If you downloaded the Complete bundle then you will have the following options to pick from. I like having help documentation and samples on my local HDD in case I do not have access to the internet and want to code. After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. Look for NetAdvantage 10.3 Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. I wanted to highlight a few of the controls that I liked the most: Grid – After using the Infragistics grid you will wonder how you ever survived using the grid supplied by Microsoft standard controls. This grid was designed to get your application up and running very fast. It’s simple to bind, it handles LARGE DataSets, easy to filter and allows endless possibilities of formatting data. The screenshot below is an example of the grid. For a real-time updating demo click here. SpellChecker- If your users are creating emails or performing any other function that requires Spell Checking then this control is great. Check out the screenshots below: In this first screen, I have a word that is not in the dictionary [DotNet]. The Spell Checker finds the word and allows the user to correct it. What is so great about Infragistics controls is that it only takes a few lines of code to have a full-featured Spell Checker in your application. TagCloud – This is a control that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It allows you to create keywords for popular search terms. This is very similar to TagCloud seen all over the internet. Below is a screenshot that shows “Facebook” being a very popular item in the cloud. You can link these items to a hyperlink if you wanted. Importing/Exporting from Excel – I work with data a majority of the time. We all know the importance of Excel in our organizations, its used a lot. With Infragistics controls it make importing and exporting data from a Grid into Excel a snap. One of the things that I liked most about this control was the option to choose the Excel format (2003 or 2007). I haven’t seen this feature in other controls. Creating/Saving/Extracting/Uploading Zip Files – This is another control that I haven’t seen many others making. It allows you to basically manipulate a zip file in any way you like. You can even create a password on the zip file. Schedule – The Schedule that Infragistics provides resembles Outlook’s calendar. I think that it’s important for a user to see your app for the first time and immediately be able to start using because they are already familiar with the UI. The Schedule control accomplishes that in my opinion. I have just barely scratched the surface with the Infragistics Silverlight Line of Business controls. To check all of them then click here. A quick thing to note is that this giveaway also comes with the following Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. Below is a screenshot that list all of them: I wanted to highlight 2 of the controls that I liked the most: xamBarcode– The xamBarcode supports the following Symbologies: Below is an example of the barcode generated by Infragistics controls. This is a high resolution barcode that you will not have to wonder if your scanner can read it. As long as you have ink in your printer your barcode will read it. I used a Symbol barcode reader to test this barcode. xamTreemap– I’ve never seen a way of displaying data like this before, but I like it. You can style this anyway that you like of course and it also comes with an Office 2010 Theme. Thanks to Infragistics for providing the controls to one lucky reader. I hope that you enjoyed this post and good luck to those that entered the contest. Subscribe to my feed

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Company Review: Google Products

Google, Inc offers an array of products and services to all of its end-users. However their search capabilities are the foundation for Google’s current success and their primary business focus. Currently, Google offers over twenty different search applications that allow users to search the internet for books, maps, videos, images, products and much more. Their product decisions have allowed users demands to be met while focusing on the free based model. This allows users to access Google data free of charge and indirectly gives Google a strong competitive advantage of other competitors along with the accuracy of the search results. According to Google, Inc, they offer the following types of searching capabilities: Alerts Get email updates on the topics of your choice Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics Books Search the full text of books Custom Search Create a customized search experience for your community Desktop Search and personalize your computer Dictionary Search for definitions of words and phrases Directory Search the web, organized by topic or category Earth Explore the world from your computer Finance Business info, news and interactive charts GOOG-411 Find and connect for free with businesses from your phone Images Search for images on the web Maps View maps and directions News Search thousands of news stories Patent Search Search the full text of US Patents Product Search Search for stuff to buy Scholar Search scholarly papers Toolbar Add a search box to your browser Trends Explore past and present search trends Videos Search for videos on the web Web Search Search billions of web pages Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books and more mapping Google’s free based business model is only one way it differentiates itself from its competition. There is also a strong focus on the accuracy of search results and the speed in which they are returned to the end-user. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a structured method used to help connect user needs to the design features of a project proposed to address those needs. This method is particularly useful in accounting for needs that are not easily articulated or precisely defined according to the U. S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. Due to the fact that QFD is so customer driven Google is always in a constant state of change in attempt to reengineer its search algorithms, and other dependant systems so that end-users requirements are constantly being met. Value engineering is a key example of this, Google is constantly trying to improve all aspects of its products, improve system maintainability, and system interoperability. Bridgefield Group defines value engineering as an organized methodology that identifies and selects the lowest lifecycle cost options in design, materials and processes that achieves the desired level of performance, reliability and customer satisfaction. In addition, it seeks to remove unnecessary costs in the above areas and is often a joint effort with cross-functional internal teams and relevant suppliers. Common issues that appear when developing large scale systems like Google’s search applications include modular design of a product and/or service and providing accurate value analysis. A design approach that adheres to four fundamental tenets of cohesiveness, encapsulation, self-containment, and high binding to design a system component as an independently operable unit subject to change is how the Open System Joint Task Force defines modular design. More specifically M. S. Schmaltz defines modular software design as having a large collection of statements strung together in one partition of in-line code; we segment or divide the statements into logical groups called modules. Each module performs one or two tasks, and then passes control to another module. By breaking up the code into "bite-sized chunks", so to speak, we are able to better control the flow of data and control. This is especially true in large software systems. Value analysis is a process to evaluate products and services based on effectiveness, safety, and cost. Value analysis involves assessing the quality as well as the cost of a product or service as defined by the Healthcare Financial Management Association. “Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.” (MIT,2010) Google, Inc encourages an open environment between all employees, also known as Googlers. This is reinforced by a cross-section team or cross-functional teams comprised from multiple departments assigned to every project so that every department like marketing, finance, and quality assurance has input on every project. In addition, Google is known for their openness to new ideas regardless of the status or seniority of an employee. In fact, Google allows for 20% of an employee’s time can be devoted to developing new ideas and/or pet projects. HumTech.com defines a cross-functional team as a collection of people with varied levels of skills and experience brought together to accomplish a task. As the name implies, Cross-Functional Team members come from different organizational units. Cross-Functional Teams may be permanent or ad hoc. Google’s search application product strategy primarily focuses on mass customization. This is allows Google to create a base search application and allows results to be returned to the end-users quickly based on specific parameters and search settings. In addition, they also store the data that is returned in case other desire the same results based on other end-users supplying the same customized settings. This allows Google to appear to render search results in virtually real-time to the user while allowing for complete customization of the searching criteria. Greg Vogl, a professor at Uganda Martyrs University, defines mass customization as when a business gives its customers the opportunity to tailor its products or services to the customer's specifications. The IT staff at Google play a key role in ensuring that the search application’s product strategy is maintained simply because the IT staff designs, develops, and maintains all of their proprietary applications. In fact, they also maintain all network infrastructure to ensure that it is available to all end-users. References: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/publications/ftat_user_guide/sec5.htm http://www.bridgefieldgroup.com/bridgefieldgroup/glos9.htm#V http://www.acq.osd.mil/osjtf/termsdef.html http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~mssz/Pascal-CGS2462/prog-dsn.html http://www.hfma.org/publications/business_caring_newsletter/exclusives/Supply+and+Inventory+Terms+Defined.htm http://mitsloan.mit.edu/omg/om-definition.php http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/ols/ols3.cfm http://www.gregvogl.net/courses/mis1/glossary.htm

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Training on Demand Certification Packages for DBAs

- by Antoinette O'Sullivan

The demand for Database Administrators continues to grow.*Almost two-thirds of IT hiring managers indicate that they highly value certifications in validatingIT skills and expertise.** * Job satisfaction and DBA work growth rate: CNN Money's 2011 Best Jobs in America survey.** Survey among nearly 1,700 respondents by CompTIA, the nonprofit trade association for the IT industry, cited in Certification Magazine, Feb. 14 th., 2012. Get Certified with Training on DemandAre you an experienced Database professional eager to achieve certification?Is time your most precious resource?Then try our new Training On Demand Certification Value Package with 20% discount. These all-in-one packages give you everything you need to get certified with success: Why Training On Demand: Expert training from Oracle’s top instructors Sophisticated streaming video recording Available for 90 days, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week White boarding and training labs for hands-on experience Start, stop, pause, jump or rewind sections of the course as needed Oracle University instructor Q&A A full-text search leads to the right video fragment in a matter of seconds. Watch this demo to see how it works. Additional Certification resources: Benefits of Oracle Certification Database Certification Paths Available Database Certification Exams Getting certified has never been easier!For assistance contact your local Oracle University Service Desk. Many organizations deploy both Oracle Database and MySQL side by side to serve different needs, and as a database professional you can find training courses on both topics at Oracle University! Check out the upcoming Oracle Database 11g training courses and MySQL training courses. Even if you're only managing Oracle Databases at this point of time, getting familiar with MySQL Database will broaden your career path with growing job demand. These Value Packages are also available with the following training formats: In-Class, Live Virtual Class and Self Study: MySQL Database Administration Value Packages Your Savings plus get a FREE Retake save 5% save 20% save 20% save 20% In Class Edition Live Virtual Class Edition Self-Study Edition Training On Demand MySQL Database Administrator Certification Value Package View Package View Package View Package View Package MySQL Developer Value Packages Your Savings plus get a FREE Retake save 5% save 20% save 20% save 20% In Class Edition Live Virtual Class Edition Self-Study Edition Training On Demand MySQL Developer Certification Value Package View Package View Package Oracle Database 10g Value Packages Your Savings plus get a FREE Retake save 5% save 20% save 20% save 20% In Class Edition Live Virtual Class Edition Self-Study Edition Training On Demand Oracle Database 10g Administrator Certified Associate Certification Value Package View Package View Package View Package Oracle Database 10g Administrator Certified Professional Certification Value Package View Package View Package View Package Oracle Database 11g Value Packages Your Savings plus get a FREE Retake save 5% save 20% save 20% save 20% In Class Edition Live Virtual Class Edition Self-Study Edition Training On Demand Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Associate Certification Value Package View Package View Package View Package View Package Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Professional Certification Value Package View Package View Package View Package View Package Exam Prep Seminar Value Package: Oracle Database Admin 1 View Package Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Professional UPGRADE Certification Value Package View Package Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g and Grid Infrastructure Administraton Certified Expert Certification Value Package View Package Exam Prep Seminar Value Package: Oracle Database Admin 2 View Package Exam Prep Seminar Value Package: Oracle RAC 11g and Grid Infrastructure Administration View Package Exam Prep Seminar Value Package: Upgrade Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) to Oracle Database 11g View Package SQL and PL/SQL Value Packages Your Savings plus get a FREE Retake save 5% save 20% save 20% save 20% In Class Edition Live Virtual Class Edition Self-Study Edition Training On Demand Oracle Database Sql Expert Certification Value Package View Package View Package View Package View Package Exam Prep Seminar Value Package: Oracle Database SQL View Package View our Certification Value Packages Mention this code at the time of booking: E1245 Connect For a full list of MySQL Training courses and events, go to http://oracle.com/education/mysql.

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RIDC Accelerator for Portal

- by Stefan Krantz

What is RIDC?Remote IntraDoc Client is a Java enabled API that leverages simple transportation protocols like Socket, HTTP and JAX/WS to execute content service operations in WebCenter Content Server. Each operation by design in the Content Server will execute stateless and return a complete result of the request. Each request object simply specifies the in a Map format (key and value pairs) what service to call and what parameters settings to apply. The result responded with will be built on the same Map format (key and value pairs). The possibilities with RIDC is endless since you can consume any available service (even custom made ones), RIDC can be executed from any Java SE application that has any WebCenter Content Services needs. WebCenter Portal and the example Accelerator RIDC adapter frameworkWebCenter Portal currently integrates and leverages WebCenter Content Services to enable available use cases in the portal today, like Content Presenter and Doc Lib. However the current use cases only covers few of the scenarios that the Content Server has to offer, in addition to the existing use cases it is not rare that the customer requirements requires additional steps and functionality that is provided by WebCenter Content but not part of the use cases from the WebCenter Portal.The good news to this is RIDC, the second good news is that WebCenter Portal already leverages the RIDC and has a connection management framework in place. The million dollar question here is how can I leverage this infrastructure for my custom use cases. Oracle A-Team has during its interactions produced a accelerator adapter framework that will reuse and leverage the existing connections provisioned in the webcenter portal application (works for WebCenter Spaces as well), as well as a very comprehensive design patter to minimize the work involved when exposing functionality. Let me introduce the RIDCCommon framework for accelerating WebCenter Content consumption from WebCenter Portal including Spaces. How do I get started?Through a few easy steps you will be on your way, Extract the zip file RIDCCommon.zip to the WebCenter Portal Application file structure (PortalApp) Open you Portal Application in JDeveloper (PS4/PS5) select to open the project in your application - this will add the project as a member of the application Update the Portal project dependencies to include the new RIDCCommon project Make sure that you WebCenter Content Server connection is marked as primary (a checkbox at the top of the connection properties form) You should by this stage have a similar structure in your JDeveloper Application Project Portal Project PortalWebAssets Project RIDCCommon Since the API is coming with some example operations that has already been exposed as DataControl actions, if you open Data Controls accordion you should see following: How do I implement my own operation? Create a new Java Class in for example com.oracle.ateam.portal.ridc.operation call it (GetDocInfoOperation) Extend the abstract class com.oracle.ateam.portal.ridc.operation.RIDCAbstractOperation and implement the interface com.oracle.ateam.portal.ridc.operation.IRIDCOperation The only method you actually are required to implement is execute(RIDCManager, IdcClient, IdcContext) The best practice to set object references for the operation is through the Constructor, example below public GetDocInfoOperation(String dDocName)By leveraging the constructor you can easily force the implementing class to pass right information, you can also overload the Constructor with more or less parameters as required Implement the execute method, the work you supposed to execute here is creating a new request binder and retrieve a response binder with the information in the request binder.In this case the dDocName for which we want the DocInfo Secondly you have to process the response binder by extracting the information you need from the request and restore this information in a simple POJO Java BeanIn the example below we do this in private void processResult(DataBinder responseData) - the new SearchDataObject is a Member of the GetDocInfoOperation so we can return this from a access method. Since the RIDCCommon API leverage template pattern for the operations you are now required to add a method that will enable access to the result after the execution of the operationIn the example below we added the method public SearchDataObject getDataObject() - this method returns the pre processed SearchDataObject from the execute method This is it, as you can see on the code below you do not need more than 32 lines of very simple code 1: public class GetDocInfoOperation extends RIDCAbstractOperation implements IRIDCOperation { 2: private static final String DOC_INFO_BY_NAME = "DOC_INFO_BY_NAME"; 3: private String dDocName = null; 4: private SearchDataObject sdo = null; 5: 6: public GetDocInfoOperation(String dDocName) { 7: super(); 8: this.dDocName = dDocName; 9: } 10: 11: public boolean execute(RIDCManager manager, IdcClient client, 12: IdcContext userContext) throws Exception { 13: DataBinder dataBinder = createNewRequestBinder(DOC_INFO_BY_NAME); 14: dataBinder.putLocal(DocumentAttributeDef.NAME.getName(), dDocName); 15: 16: DataBinder responseData = getResponseBinder(dataBinder); 17: processResult(responseData); 18: return true; 19: } 20: 21: private void processResult(DataBinder responseData) { 22: DataResultSet rs = responseData.getResultSet("DOC_INFO"); 23: for(DataObject dobj : rs.getRows()) { 24: this.sdo = new SearchDataObject(dobj); 25: } 26: super.setMessage(responseData.getLocal(ATTR_MESSAGE)); 27: } 28: 29: public SearchDataObject getDataObject() { 30: return this.sdo; 31: } 32: } How do I execute my operation? In the previous section we described how to create a operation, so by now you should be ready to execute the operation Step one either add a method to the class com.oracle.ateam.portal.datacontrol.ContentServicesDC or a class of your own choiceRemember the RIDCManager is a very light object and can be created where needed Create a method signature look like this public SearchDataObject getDocInfo(String dDocName) throws Exception In the method body - create a new instance of GetDocInfoOperation and meet the constructor requirements by passing the dDocNameGetDocInfoOperation docInfo = new GetDocInfoOperation(dDocName) Execute the operation via the RIDCManager instance rMgr.executeOperation(docInfo) Return the result by accessing it from the executed operationreturn docInfo.getDataObject() 1: private RIDCManager rMgr = null; 2: private String lastOperationMessage = null; 3: 4: public ContentServicesDC() { 5: super(); 6: this.rMgr = new RIDCManager(); 7: } 8: .... 9: public SearchDataObject getDocInfo(String dDocName) throws Exception { 10: GetDocInfoOperation docInfo = new GetDocInfoOperation(dDocName); 11: boolean boolVal = rMgr.executeOperation(docInfo); 12: lastOperationMessage = docInfo.getMessage(); 13: return docInfo.getDataObject(); 14: } Get the binaries! The enclosed code in a example that can be used as a reference on how to consume and leverage similar use cases, user has to guarantee appropriate quality and support. Download link: https://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/resource/stefan.krantz/RIDCCommon.zip RIDC API Referencehttp://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/apirefs.1111/e17274/toc.htm

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Silverlight for Windows Embedded Tutorial (step 5 and a bit of Windows Phone 7)

- by Valter Minute

If you haven’t spent the last week in the middle of the Sahara desert or traveling on a sled in the north pole area you should have heard something about the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series (or Windows Phone Series 7, or Windows Series Phone 7 or something like that). Even if you are in the middle of the desert or somewhere around the north pole you may have been reached by the news, since it seems that WP7S (using the full name will kill my available bandwidth!) is generating a lot of buzz in the development and IT communities. One of the most important aspects of this new platform is that it will be programmed using a new set of tools and frameworks, completely different from the ones used on older releases of Windows Mobile (or SmartPhone, or PocketPC or whatever…). WP7S applications can be developed using Silverlight or XNA. If you want to learn something more about WP7S development you can download the preview of Charles Petzold’s book about it: http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html Charles Petzold is also the author of “Programming Windows”, the first book I ever read about programming on Windows (it was Windows 3.0 at that time!). The fact that even I was able to learn how to develop Windows application is a proof of the quality of Petzold’s work. This book is up to his standards and the 150pages preview is already rich in technical contents without being boring or complicated to understand. I may be able to become a Windows Phone developer thanks to mr. Petzold. Mr. Petzold uses some nice samples to introduce the basic concepts of Silverlight development on WP7S. On this new platform you’ll use managed code to develop your application, so those samples can’t be ported on Windows CE R3 as they are, but I would like to take one of the first samples (called “SilverlightTapHello1”) and adapt it to Silverlight for Windows Embedded to show that even plain old native code can be used to develop “cool” user interfaces! The sample shows the standard WP7S title header and a textbox with an hello world message inside it. When the user touches the textbox, it will change its color. When the user touches the background (Grid) behind it, its default color (plain old White) will be restored. Let’s see how we can implement the same features on our embedded device! I took the XAML code of the sample (you can download the book samples here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/D/B/1DB49641-3956-41F1-BAFA-A021673C709E/CodeSamples_DRAFTPreview_ProgrammingWindowsPhone7Series.zip) and changed it a little bit to remove references to WP7S or managed runtime. If you compare the resulting files you will see that I was able to keep all the resources inside the App.xaml files and the structure of MainPage.XAML almost intact. This is the Silverlight for Windows Embedded version of MainPage.XAML: <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightTapHello1.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:phoneNavigation="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="800" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}" FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}" Width="640" Height="480"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions>  <Grid x:Name="TitleGrid" Grid.Row="0"> <TextBlock Text="SILVERLIGHT TAP HELLO #1" x:Name="textBlockPageTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle1Style}"/> <TextBlock Text="main page" x:Name="textBlockListTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle2Style}"/> </Grid>  <Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" MouseLeftButtonDown="ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <TextBlock x:Name="TextBlock" Text="Hello, Silverlight for Windows Embedded!" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Grid> </Grid> </UserControl> If you compare it to the WP7S sample (not reported here to avoid any copyright issue) you’ll notice that I had to replace the original phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage with UserControl as the root node. This make sense because there is not support for phone applications on CE 6. I also had to specify width and height of my main page (on the WP7S device this will be adjusted by the OS) and I had to replace the multi-touch event handler with the MouseLeftButtonDown event (no multitouch support for Windows CE R3, still). I also changed the hello message, of course. I used XAML2CPP to generate the boring part of our application and then added the initialization code to WinMain: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1; HRESULT retcode; IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1; XRXamlSource dictsrc; dictsrc.SetResource(hInstance,TEXT("XAML"),IDR_XAML_App); if (FAILED(retcode=app->LoadResourceDictionary(&dictsrc,NULL))) return -1; MainPage page; if (FAILED(page.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1; UINT exitcode; if (FAILED(page.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1; return exitcode; } You may have noticed that there is something different from the previous samples. I added the code to load a resource dictionary. Resources are an important feature of XAML that allows you to define some values that could be replaced inside any XAML file loaded by the runtime. You can use resources to define custom styles for your fonts, backgrounds, controls etc. and to support internationalization, by providing different strings for different languages. The rest of our WinMain isn’t that different. It creates an instances of our MainPage object and displays it. The MainPage class implements an event handler for the MouseLeftButtonDown event of the ContentGrid: class MainPage : public TMainPage<MainPage> { public: HRESULT ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown(IXRDependencyObject* source,XRMouseButtonEventArgs* args) { HRESULT retcode; IXRSolidColorBrushPtr brush; IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode; if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRSolidColorBrush,&brush))) return retcode; COLORREF color=RGBA(0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff); if (args->pOriginalSource==TextBlock) color=RGBA(rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,0xFF); if (FAILED(retcode=brush->SetColor(color))) return retcode; if (FAILED(retcode=TextBlock->SetForeground(brush))) return retcode; return S_OK; } }; As you can see this event is generated when a used clicks inside the grid or inside one of the objects it contains. Since our TextBlock is inside the grid, we don’t need to provide an event handler for its MouseLeftButtonDown event. We can just use the pOriginalSource member of the event arguments to check if the event was generated inside the textblock. If the event was generated inside the grid we create a white brush,if it’s inside the textblock we create some randomly colored brush. Notice that we need to use the RGBA macro to create colors, specifying also a transparency value for them. If we use the RGB macro the resulting color will have its Alpha channel set to zero and will be transparent. Using the SetForeground method we can change the color of our control. You can compare this to the managed code that you can find at page 40-41 of Petzold’s preview book and you’ll see that the native version isn’t much more complex than the managed one. As usual you can download the full code of the sample here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/SilverlightTapHello1.zip And remember to pre-order Charles Petzold’s “Programming Windows Phone 7 series”, I bet it will be a best-seller! Technorati Tags: Silverlight for Windows Embedded,Windows CE

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Trying to keep up with Technology and Blogging

- by Dave Campbell

A little bit of everything... The heading above got changed a bunch during writing and I finally settled on that because this has become a 'stream of consciousness' post... or maybe a stream of UNconsciousness :) If you've noticed, my blogging has been a tad slow this fall. There's been a lot going on personally. But then again, I haven't skipped anybody either. Rather than go through ALL the blogs I have aggregated, and take a week to get to the bottom, at some point in the last year, I had moved the lists around so I now have "SilverlightMVPs", "Very Prolific", "WP7", and "Top Checks". This is a total of about 250 of the more prolific bloggers. Those 250 bloggers have kept me very busy up through about //BUILD. Sometimes it would take all week to go through just that list putting out 13 posts per blog per day... but not anymore. This weekend I made it all the way through the BIG list... close to 700 blogs, and if you read my blog, you know I had one medium day (Saturday), and yesterday was very short. Why is this? To be honest, I don't know... is everybody busy re-tooling, or churning waiting for direction? I have a short list of WinRT/Metro/W8 folks... maybe I need to be pointed to more of them... but my old favorites are not pumping out posts as they have in the past. I said before that I am attracted to Metro, and I've already got My first Metro app post out there, and were it not for working with the new site, I'd have had another out last weekend... so definitely look for more from me in that area. New Site? Did I say 'new site' ? oops... didn't mean to do that, but now that the cat is out of the bag, I may as well continue... While at //BUILD, I discussed a re-tooling of SilverlightCream with lots of folks... probably more than wanted to hear about it to be honest! ... it's needed a facelift, and there's stuff on there that never worked right, plus there's a lot of manual effort that goes into a blog post. In an effort to alleviate all the above, Michael Washington and I have been working on the next iteration of SilverlightCream. Not wanting to lose that branding or mess with any saved links, I decided to change from a somewhat funky name to something more professional. I also decided to put my blog on the site, and tie my main announcement twitter feed to the site as well. The way things sit today, there are 3 different names in those locations and it's gotta be confusing for folks just stumbling in. We're going to do a series of posts talking about the site and the new backend processing (hint: Michael Washington is responsible for it, so you can take a guess at the technology), but for now, we'd like some eyes on the front end of the site, and some submittals using it to see if it falls over somewhere that we haven't tried. So... I'm going to give it up... the new site is Windows Dev News. The Twitter feed is @WindowsDevNews, and the blog will be on the site as well at Windows Dev News Blog. I've got the RSS Feed on Feedburner too, so I think all the nuts and bolts are good to go. The submittal and search pages work, as does the blog page. You'll notice we used the MasterPage from SilverlightCream to get started. That will probably change, but it's just the visual... the content is the important part. Other missing things are the tracking and 'Skim' page that we will eventually have up and running. There are some formatting issues with the blog posts but if you hang in there with me, those will be taken care of. If you're a blogger, please submit through the site and let me know if you find any problems. If you're a reader, please add this feed and site. I'll be duplicating the effort for a while but at some point will stop that foolishness. We won't lose the data from SilverlightCream though, so keep using that as a search resource... I have hopes to pull that database over to WindowsDevNews, or link to it in some manner... that part isn't set in jello yet, but it will not be lost. So there it is... let me know what you think, send me your WinRT/Metro/W8 postings along with your Silverlight and WP7 posts... it's not that different, it's just more. Stay in the 'Light

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Running Jetty under Windows Azure Using RoleEntryPoint in a Worker Role

- by Shawn Cicoria

This post is built upon the work of Mario Kosmiskas and David C. Chou’s prior postings – from here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mariok/archive/2011/01/05/deploying-java-applications-in-azure.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2010/03/21/run-java-with-jetty-in-windows-azure.aspx As Mario points out in his post, when you need to have more control over the process that starts, it generally is better left to a RoleEntryPoint capability that as of now, requires the use of a CLR based assembly that is deployed as part of the package to Azure. There were things I liked especially about Mario’s post – specifically, the ability to pull down the JRE and Jetty runtimes at role startup and instantiate the process using the extracted bits. The way Mario initialized the java process (and Jetty) was to take advantage of a role startup task configured as part of the service definition. This is a great quick way to kick off processes or tasks prior to your role entry point. However, if you need access to service configuration values or role events, that’s where RoleEntryPoint comes in. For this PoC sample I moved the logic for retrieving the bits for the jre and jetty to the worker roles OnStart – in addition to moving the process kickoff to the OnStart method. The Run method at this point is there to loop and just report the status of the java process. Beyond just making things more parameterized, both Mario’s and David’s articles still form the essence of the approach. The solution that accompanies this post provides all the necessary .NET based Visual Studio project. In addition, you’ll need: 1. Jetty 7 runtime http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/downloads.php 2. JRE http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html Once you have these the first step is to create archives (zips) of the distributions. For this PoC, the structure of the archive requires that the root of the archive looks as follows: JRE6.zip jetty---.zip Upload the contents to a storage container (block blob), and for this example I used /archives as the location. The service configuration has several settings that allow, which is the advantage of using RoleEntryPoint, the ability to provide these things via native configuration support from Azure in a worker role. Storage Explorer You can use development storage for testing this out – the zipped version of the solution is configured for development storage. When you’re ready to deploy, you update the two settings – 1 for diagnostics and the other for the storage container where the /archives are going to be stored. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="HostedJetty" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="JettyWorker"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings>  <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="JettyArchive" value="jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203b.zip" /> <Setting name="StartRole" value="true" /> <Setting name="BlobContainer" value="archives" /> <Setting name="JreArchive" value="jre6.zip" />  <Setting name="StorageCredentials" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> For interacting with Storage you can use several tools – one tool that I like is from the Windows Azure CAT team located here: http://appfabriccat.com/2011/02/exploring-windows-azure-storage-apis-by-building-a-storage-explorer-application/ and shown in the prior picture At runtime, during role initialization and startup, Azure will call into your RoleEntryPoint. At that time the code will do a dynamic pull of the 2 archives and extract – using the Sharp Zip Lib <link> as Mario had demonstrated in his sample. The only different here is the use of CLR code vs. PowerShell (which is really CLR, but that’s another discussion). At this point, once the 2 zips are extracted, the Role’s file system looks as follows: Worker Role approot From there, the OnStart method (which also does the download and unzip using a simple StorageHelper class) kicks off the Java path and now you have Java! Task Manager Jetty Sample Page A couple of things I’m working on to enhance this is to extract the jre and jetty bits not to the appRoot but to a resource location defined as part of the service definition. ServiceDefinition.csdef <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="HostedJetty" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="JettyWorker"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> <Endpoints> <InputEndpoint name="JettyPort" protocol="tcp" port="80" localPort="8080" /> </Endpoints> <LocalResources> <LocalStorage name="Archives" cleanOnRoleRecycle="false" sizeInMB="100" /> </LocalResources> As the concept matures a bit, being able to update dynamically the content or jar files as part of a running java solution is something that is possible through continued enhancement of this simple model. The Visual Studio 2010 Solution is located here: HostingJavaSln_NDA.zip

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Big Data – Role of Cloud Computing in Big Data – Day 11 of 21

- by Pinal Dave

In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the NewSQL. In this article we will understand the role of Cloud in Big Data Story What is Cloud? Cloud is the biggest buzzword around from last few years. Everyone knows about the Cloud and it is extremely well defined online. In this article we will discuss cloud in the context of the Big Data. Cloud computing is a method of providing a shared computing resources to the application which requires dynamic resources. These resources include applications, computing, storage, networking, development and various deployment platforms. The fundamentals of the cloud computing are that it shares pretty much share all the resources and deliver to end users as a service. Examples of the Cloud Computing and Big Data are Google and Amazon.com. Both have fantastic Big Data offering with the help of the cloud. We will discuss this later in this blog post. There are two different Cloud Deployment Models: 1) The Public Cloud and 2) The Private Cloud Public Cloud Public Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build by commercial providers (Amazon, Rackspace etc.) creates a highly scalable data center that hides the complex infrastructure from the consumer and provides various services. Private Cloud Private Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build by a single organization where they are managing highly scalable data center internally. Here is the quick comparison between Public Cloud and Private Cloud from Wikipedia: Public Cloud Private Cloud Initial cost Typically zero Typically high Running cost Unpredictable Unpredictable Customization Impossible Possible Privacy No (Host has access to the data Yes Single sign-on Impossible Possible Scaling up Easy while within defined limits Laborious but no limits Hybrid Cloud Hybrid Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build with the composition of two or more clouds like public and private cloud. Hybrid cloud gives best of the both the world as it combines multiple cloud deployment models together. Cloud and Big Data – Common Characteristics There are many characteristics of the Cloud Architecture and Cloud Computing which are also essentially important for Big Data as well. They highly overlap and at many places it just makes sense to use the power of both the architecture and build a highly scalable framework. Here is the list of all the characteristics of cloud computing important in Big Data Scalability Elasticity Ad-hoc Resource Pooling Low Cost to Setup Infastructure Pay on Use or Pay as you Go Highly Available Leading Big Data Cloud Providers There are many players in Big Data Cloud but we will list a few of the known players in this list. Amazon Amazon is arguably the most popular Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. The history of how Amazon started in this business is very interesting. They started out with a massive infrastructure to support their own business. Gradually they figured out that their own resources are underutilized most of the time. They decided to get the maximum out of the resources they have and hence they launched their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service in 2006. Their products have evolved a lot recently and now it is one of their primary business besides their retail selling. Amazon also offers Big Data services understand Amazon Web Services. Here is the list of the included services: Amazon Elastic MapReduce – It processes very high volumes of data Amazon DynammoDB – It is fully managed NoSQL (Not Only SQL) database service Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) – A web-scale service designed to store and accommodate any amount of data Amazon High Performance Computing – It provides low-tenancy tuned high performance computing cluster Amazon RedShift – It is petabyte scale data warehousing service Google Though Google is known for Search Engine, we all know that it is much more than that. Google Compute Engine – It offers secure, flexible computing from energy efficient data centers Google Big Query – It allows SQL-like queries to run against large datasets Google Prediction API – It is a cloud based machine learning tool Other Players Besides Amazon and Google we also have other players in the Big Data market as well. Microsoft is also attempting Big Data with the Cloud with Microsoft Azure. Additionally Rackspace and NASA together have initiated OpenStack. The goal of Openstack is to provide a massively scaled, multitenant cloud that can run on any hardware. Thing to Watch The cloud based solutions provides a great integration with the Big Data’s story as well it is very economical to implement as well. However, there are few things one should be very careful when deploying Big Data on cloud solutions. Here is a list of a few things to watch: Data Integrity Initial Cost Recurring Cost Performance Data Access Security Location Compliance Every company have different approaches to Big Data and have different rules and regulations. Based on various factors, one can implement their own custom Big Data solution on a cloud. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various Operational Databases supporting Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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Reading All Users Session

- by imran_ku07

Introduction : InProc Session is the widely used state management. Storing the session state Inproc is also the fastest method and is well-suited to small amounts of volatile data. Reading and writing current user Session is very easy. But some times we need to read all users session before taking a decision or sometimes we may need to check which users are currently active with the help of Session. But unfortunately there is no class in .Net Framework (i don't found myself) to read all user InProc Session Data. In this article i will use reflection to read all user Inproc Session. Description : This code will work equally in both MVC and webform, but for demonstration i will use a simple webform example. So let's create a simple Website and Add two aspx pages, Default.aspx and Default2.aspx. In Default.aspx just add a link to navigate to Default2.aspx and in Default.aspx.cs just add a Session. Default.aspx: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="Default" %><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html ><head runat="server"> <title>Untitled Page</title></head><body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <a href="Default2.aspx">Click to navigate to next page</a> </div> </form></body></html> Default.aspx.cs: using System;using System.Data;using System.Configuration;using System.Collections;using System.Web;using System.Web.Security;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;public partial class Default : System.Web.UI.Page{ protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Session["User"] = "User" + DateTime.Now; }} Now when every user click this link will navigate to Default2.aspx where all the magic appears.Default2.aspx.cs: using System;using System.Data;using System.Configuration;using System.Collections;using System.Web;using System.Web.Security;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;using System.Reflection;using System.Web.SessionState;public partial class Default2 : System.Web.UI.Page{ protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { object obj = typeof(HttpRuntime).GetProperty("CacheInternal", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static).GetValue(null, null); Hashtable c2 = (Hashtable)obj.GetType().GetField("_entries", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(obj); foreach (DictionaryEntry entry in c2) { object o1 = entry.Value.GetType().GetProperty("Value", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(entry.Value, null); if (o1.GetType().ToString() == "System.Web.SessionState.InProcSessionState") { SessionStateItemCollection sess = (SessionStateItemCollection)o1.GetType().GetField("_sessionItems", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(o1); if (sess != null) { if (sess["User"] != null) { Label1.Text += sess["User"] + " is Active.<br>"; } } } } }} Now just open more than one browsers or more than one browser instance and then navigate to Default.aspx and click the link, you will see all the user's Session data. How this works : InProc session data is stored in the HttpRuntime’s internal cache in an implementation of ISessionStateItemCollection that implements ICollection. In this code, first of all i got CacheInternal Static Property of HttpRuntime class and then with the help of this object i got _entries private member which is of type ICollection. Then simply enumerate this dictionary and only take object of type System.Web.SessionState.InProcSessionState and finaly got SessionStateItemCollection for each user.Summary : In this article, I shows you how you can get all current user Sessions. However one thing you will find when executing this code is that it will not show the current user Session which is set in the current request context because Session will be saved after all the Page Events.

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Measuring Usability with Common Industry Format (CIF) Usability Tests

- by Applications User Experience

Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience A User-centered Research and Design Process The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience was five years in the making. The development of this suite included an extensive and comprehensive user experience design process: ethnographic research, low-fidelity workflow prototyping, high fidelity user interface (UI) prototyping, iterative formative usability testing, development feedback and iteration, and sales and customer evaluation throughout the design cycle. However, this process does not stop when our products are released. We conduct summative usability testing using the ISO 25062 Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports as an organizational framework. CIF tests allow us to measure the overall usability of our released products. These studies provide benchmarks that allow for comparisons of a specific product release against previous versions of our product and against other products in the marketplace. What Is a CIF Usability Test? CIF refers to the internationally standardized method for reporting usability test findings used by the software industry. The CIF is based on a formal, lab-based test that is used to benchmark the usability of a product in terms of human performance and subjective data. The CIF was developed and is endorsed by more than 375 software customer and vendor organizations led by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a US government entity. NIST sponsored the CIF through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards-making processes. Oracle played a key role in developing the CIF. The CIF report format and metrics are consistent with the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Our goal in conducting CIF tests is to measure performance and satisfaction of a representative sample of users on a set of core tasks and to help predict how usable a product will be with the larger population of customers. Why Do We Perform CIF Testing? The overarching purpose of the CIF for usability test reports is to promote incorporation of usability as part of the procurement decision-making process for interactive products. CIF provides a common format for vendors to report the methods and results of usability tests to customer organizations, and enables customers to compare the usability of our software to that of other suppliers. CIF also enables us to compare our current software with previous versions of our software. CIF Testing for Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications comprises more than 100 modules in seven different product families. These modules encompass more than 400 task flows and 400 user roles. Due to resource constraints, we cannot perform comprehensive CIF testing across the entire product suite. Therefore, we had to develop meaningful inclusion criteria and work with other stakeholders across the applications development organization to prioritize product areas for testing. Ultimately, we want to test the product areas for which customers might be most interested in seeing CIF data. We also want to build credibility with customers; we need to be able to make the case to current and prospective customers that the product areas tested are representative of the product suite as a whole. Our goal is to test the top use cases for each product. The primary activity in the scoping process was to work with the individual product teams to identify the key products and business process task flows in each product to test. We prioritized these products and flows through a series of negotiations among the user experience managers, product strategy, and product management directors for each of the primary product families within the Oracle Fusion Applications suite (Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Projects, and Procurement). The end result of the scoping exercise was a list of 47 proposed CIF tests for the Fusion Applications product suite. Figure 1. A participant completes tasks during a usability test in Oracle’s Usability Labs Fusion Supplier Portal CIF Test The first Fusion CIF test was completed on the Supplier Portal application in July of 2011. Fusion Supplier Portal is part of an integrated suite of Procurement applications that helps supplier companies manage orders, schedules, shipments, invoices, negotiations and payments. The user roles targeted for the usability study were Supplier Account Receivables Specialists and Supplier Sales Representatives, including both experienced and inexperienced users across a wide demographic range. The test specifically focused on the following functionality and features: Manage payments – view payments Manage invoices – view invoice status and create invoices Manage account information – create new contact, review bank account information Manage agreements – find and view agreement, upload agreement lines, confirm status of agreement lines upload Manage purchase orders (PO) – view history of PO, request change to PO, find orders Manage negotiations – respond to request for a quote, check the status of a negotiation response These product areas were selected to represent the most important subset of features and functionality of the flow, in terms of frequency and criticality of use by customers. A total of 20 users participated in the usability study. The results of the Supplier Portal evaluation were favorable and exceeded our expectations. Figure 2. Fusion Supplier Portal Next Studies We plan to conduct two Fusion CIF usability studies per product family over the next nine months. The next product to be tested will be Self-service Procurement. End users are currently being recruited to participate in this usability study, and the test sessions are scheduled to begin during the last week of November.

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Unit testing is… well, flawed.

- by Dewald Galjaard

Hey someone had to say it. I clearly recall my first IT job. I was appointed Systems Co-coordinator for a leading South African retailer at store level. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an honest day’s labor and in fact I highly recommend it, however I’m obliged to refer to the designation cautiously; in reality all I had to do was monitor in-store prices and two UNIX front line controllers. If anything went wrong – I only had to phone it in… Luckily that wasn’t all I did. My duties extended to some other interesting annual occurrence – stock take. Despite a bit more curious affair, it was still a tedious process that took weeks of preparation and several nights to complete. Then also I remember that no matter how elaborate our planning was, the entire exercise would be rendered useless if we couldn’t get the basics right – that being the act of counting. Sounds simple right? We’ll with a store which could potentially carry over tens of thousands of different items… we’ll let’s just say I believe that’s when I first became a coffee addict. In those days the act of counting stock was a very humble process. Nothing like we have today. A staff member would be assigned a bin or shelve filled with items he or she had to sort then count. Thereafter they had to record their findings on a complementary piece of paper. Every night I would manage several teams. Each team was divided into two groups - counters and auditors. Both groups had the same task, only auditors followed shortly on the heels of the counters, recounting stock levels, making sure the original count correspond to their findings. It was a simple yet hugely responsible orchestration of people and thankfully there was one fundamental and golden rule I could always abide by to ensure things run smoothly – No-one was allowed to audit their own work. Nope, not even on nights when I didn’t have enough staff available. This meant I too at times had to get up there and get counting, or have the audit stand over until the next evening. The reason for this was obvious - late at night and with so much to do we were prone to make some mistakes, then on the recount, without a fresh set of eyes, you were likely to repeat the offence. Now years later this rule or guideline still holds true as we develop software (as far removed as software development from counting stock may be). For some reason it is a fundamental guideline we’re simply ignorant of. We write our code, we write our tests and thus commit the same horrendous offence. Yes, the procedure of writing unit tests as practiced in most development houses today – is flawed. Most if not all of the tests we write today exercise application logic – our logic. They are based on the way we believe an application or method should/may/will behave or function. As we write our tests, our unit tests mirror our best understanding of the inner workings of our application code. Unfortunately these tests will therefore also include (or be unaware of) any imperfections and errors on our part. If your logic is flawed as you write your initial code, chances are, without a fresh set of eyes, you will commit the same error second time around too. Not even experience seems to be a suitable solution. It certainly helps to have deeper insight, but is that really the answer we should be looking for? Is that really failsafe? What about code review? Code review is certainly an answer. You could have one developer coding away and another (or team) making sure the logic is sound. The practice however has its obvious drawbacks. Firstly and mainly it is resource intensive and from what I’ve seen in most development houses, given heavy deadlines, this guideline is seldom adhered to. Hardly ever do we have the resources, money or time readily available. So what other options are out there? A quest to find some solution revealed a project by Microsoft Research called PEX. PEX is a framework which creates several test scenarios for each method or class you write, automatically. Think of it as your own personal auditor. Within a few clicks the framework will auto generate several unit tests for a given class or method and save them to a single project. PEX help to audit your work. It lends a fresh set of eyes to any project you’re working on and best of all; it is cost effective and fast. Check them out at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ In upcoming posts we’ll dive deeper into how it works and how it can help you. Certainly there are more similar frameworks out there and I would love to hear from you. Please share your experiences and insights.

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Easier ASP.NET MVC Routing

- by Steve Wilkes

I've recently refactored the way Routes are declared in an ASP.NET MVC application I'm working on, and I wanted to share part of the system I came up with; a really easy way to declare and keep track of ASP.NET MVC Routes, which then allows you to find the name of the Route which has been selected for the current request. Traditional MVC Route Declaration Traditionally, ASP.NET MVC Routes are added to the application's RouteCollection using overloads of the RouteCollection.MapRoute() method; for example, this is the standard way the default Route which matches /controller/action URLs is created: routes.MapRoute( "Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }); The first argument declares that this Route is to be named 'Default', the second specifies the Route's URL pattern, and the third contains the URL pattern segments' default values. To then write a link to a URL which matches the default Route in a View, you can use the HtmlHelper.RouteLink() method, like this: @ this.Html.RouteLink("Default", new { controller = "Orders", action = "Index" }) ...that substitutes 'Orders' into the {controller} segment of the default Route's URL pattern, and 'Index' into the {action} segment. The {Id} segment was declared optional and isn't specified here. That's about the most basic thing you can do with MVC routing, and I already have reservations: I've duplicated the magic string "Default" between the Route declaration and the use of RouteLink(). This isn't likely to cause a problem for the default Route, but once you get to dozens of Routes the duplication is a pain. There's no easy way to get from the RouteLink() method call to the declaration of the Route itself, so getting the names of the Route's URL parameters correct requires some effort. The call to MapRoute() is quite verbose; with dozens of Routes this gets pretty ugly. If at some point during a request I want to find out the name of the Route has been matched.... and I can't. To get around these issues, I wanted to achieve the following: Make declaring a Route very easy, using as little code as possible. Introduce a direct link between where a Route is declared, where the Route is defined and where the Route's name is used, so I can use Visual Studio's Go To Definition to get from a call to RouteLink() to the declaration of the Route I'm using, making it easier to make sure I use the correct URL parameters. Create a way to access the currently-selected Route's name during the execution of a request. My first step was to come up with a quick and easy syntax for declaring Routes. 1 . An Easy Route Declaration Syntax I figured the easiest way of declaring a route was to put all the information in a single string with a special syntax. For example, the default MVC route would be declared like this: "{controller:Home}/{action:Index}/{Id}*" This contains the same information as the regular way of defining a Route, but is far more compact: The default values for each URL segment are specified in a colon-separated section after the segment name The {Id} segment is declared as optional simply by placing a * after it That's the default route - a pretty simple example - so how about this? routes.MapRoute( "CustomerOrderList", "Orders/{customerRef}/{pageNo}", new { controller = "Orders", action = "List", pageNo = UrlParameter.Optional }, new { customerRef = "^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$", pageNo = "^[0-9]+$" }); This maps to the List action on the Orders controller URLs which: Start with the string Orders/ Then have a {customerRef} set of characters and numbers Then optionally a numeric {pageNo}. And again, it’s quite verbose. Here's my alternative: "Orders/{customerRef:^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$}/{pageNo:^[0-9]+$}*->Orders/List" Quite a bit more brief, and again, containing the same information as the regular way of declaring Routes: Regular expression constraints are declared after the colon separator, the same as default values The target controller and action are specified after the -> The {pageNo} is defined as optional by placing a * after it With an appropriate parser that gave me a nice, compact and clear way to declare routes. Next I wanted to have a single place where Routes were declared and accessed. 2. A Central Place to Declare and Access Routes I wanted all my Routes declared in one, dedicated place, which I would also use for Route names when calling RouteLink(). With this in mind I made a single class named Routes with a series of public, constant fields, each one relating to a particular Route. With this done, I figured a good place to actually declare each Route was in an attribute on the field defining the Route’s name; the attribute would parse the Route definition string and make the resulting Route object available as a property. I then made the Routes class examine its own fields during its static setup, and cache all the attribute-created Route objects in an internal Dictionary. Finally I made Routes use that cache to register the Routes when requested, and to access them later when required. So the Routes class declares its named Routes like this: public static class Routes{ [RouteDefinition("Orders/{customerName}->Orders/Index")] public const string OrdersCustomerIndex = "OrdersCustomerIndex"; [RouteDefinition("Orders/{customerName}/{orderId:^([0-9]+)$}->Orders/Details")] public const string OrdersDetails = "OrdersDetails"; [RouteDefinition("{controller:Home}*/{action:Index}*")] public const string Default = "Default"; } ...which are then used like this: @ this.Html.RouteLink(Routes.Default, new { controller = "Orders", action = "Index" }) Now that using Go To Definition on the Routes.Default constant takes me to where the Route is actually defined, it's nice and easy to quickly check on the parameter names when using RouteLink(). Finally, I wanted to be able to access the name of the current Route during a request. 3. Recovering the Route Name The RouteDefinitionAttribute creates a NamedRoute class; a simple derivative of Route, but with a Name property. When the Routes class examines its fields and caches all the defined Routes, it has access to the name of the Route through the name of the field against which it is defined. It was therefore a pretty easy matter to have Routes give NamedRoute its name when it creates its cache of Routes. This means that the Route which is found in RequestContext.RouteData.Route is now a NamedRoute, and I can recover the Route's name during a request. For visibility, I made NamedRoute.ToString() return the Route name and URL pattern, like this: The screenshot is from an example project I’ve made on bitbucket; it contains all the named route classes and an MVC 3 application which demonstrates their use. I’ve found this way of defining and using Routes much tidier than the default MVC system, and you find it useful too

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top Tweets SOA Partner Community – May 2012

- by JuergenKress

Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community BPMN2.0 Oracle notations poster from eaiesb http://wp.me/p10C8u-pu Torsten WinterbergLook out for new Oracle #BPM edition coming up soon: The Oracle BPM Standard edtion! Great news for easy entry, small licence fees. Yes! Danilo Schmiedel Had a great chat with customer yesterday about #OracleBPM. Next step will be a 5day event combining modeling and implementation @soacommunity Frank Nimphius Still reading "Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g Handbook". Excellent resource for a non-SOA but ADF guy like me ;-) Oracle New webcast: Maximize #Oracle #WebLogic Server ROI with Oracle #Enterprise #Manager 12c on May 2 at 10 am PT. Register http://bit.ly/JFUrR9 OTNArchBeat@OTNArchBeat BPM in Financial Services Industry | Sanjeev Sharma http://bit.ly/HCCxui JDeveloper & ADF BPEL 11.1.1.6 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations http://dlvr.it/1V9SxR Oracle UPK & Tutor Collaborate Attendees: Visit the UPK demo pod, SIGS, and sessions: If you are attending Collaborate 2012 - Sun. http://bit.ly/J39z65 Heidi Buelow see #fmw track RT @demed: Are you going to #KSCOPE12 in San Antonio, June 24-28? http://kscope12.com/component/ seminar/seminarslist?topicsid=6 Use promo code Fusion for discount! Sabine Leitner #SIG #Middleware 15.05. Frankfurt #Oracle #DOAG Planung & Aufbau WebLogic Server #WLS http://bit.ly/HKsCWV @OracleWebLogic @soacommunity SOA Community MDS explorer by Red Samurai http://wp.me/p10C8u-pp Biemond ® Retrieve or set a HTTP header from Oracle BPEL: With Oracle SOA Suite 11g patch 12928372 you can finally retrie http://bit.ly/JejTHC Lucas Jellema Call for papers for UKOUG 2012 has opened: http://techandebs.ukoug.org /default.asp?p=9306 (deadline 1st of June) OTNArchBeat BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user | Kavitha Srinivasan http://bit.ly/IJKVfj demed SOA, Cloud + Service Tech symposium (London, Sep 24-25) call for paper is open http://www.servicetechsymposium. com /call2012.php @techsymp #oraclesoa OracleBlogs Lessons learned configuring OER 11g Workflows http://ow.ly/1iMsKh OTNArchBeat Scripting WebLogic Admin Server Startup | Antony Reynolds http://bit.ly/IH5ciU orclateamsoa A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user http://ow.ly/1iJADp Lucas Jellema Just blogged about our Live FMW Application Development show during OBUG 2012, next Tuesday 24th April in Maastricht: OracleBlogs OEG integration with OSB/OWSM - 11g http://ow.ly/1iKx7G SOA Community SOA Community Newsletter April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pl Frank DorstRT @whitehorsesnl: Whiteblog: BPM Process Spaces in Oracle Webcenter (Patch Set 5(http://bit.ly/Hxzh29) #soacommunity #bpm #oracle) David Shaffer The Advanced SOA suite training class next week in Redwood City is full! Learned a lot about accepting credit card payments. OTNArchBeat Running Built-In Test Simulator with SOA Suite Healthcare 11g in PS4 and PS5 | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IgI8GN SOA Community Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2012, Call for Nominations #ofmaward #soa #bpm #soacommunity OTNArchBeat Updated SOA Documents now available in ITSO Reference Library http://bit.ly/I3Y6Sg Oracle Middleware Data Integrator & SOA - why 2 products better than one for integration? Webcast: Apr 24 10 AM PT http://bit.ly/IzmtKR Andrejus Baranovskis Red Samurai MDS Cleaner V2.0 http://fb.me/FxLVz82w SOA Community “@rluttikhuizen: Chapter 4 of SOA Made Simple book "Classification of Services" ready for collegial review” can #soacommunity get a preview? Xavier Verhaeghe #Gartner figures are out: #Oracle top in App Server market share (43.1%) and Relational #Database, too (48.8%) in 2011 Sabine Leitner WLS12c, Exa*, IDM, EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 26.04. FFM #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity Michel Schildmeijer@wlscommunity @MiddlewareMagic @OTNArchBeat @Oracle_Fusion Oracle WebLogic / SOA Suite 11g HACMP Cluster take-over http://lnkd.in/G78qMd Oracle Middleware Hear how ODI and SOA's unified approach are key to untangling your business. April 24 10AM PT http://bit.ly/IdcsUz #Oracle OTNArchBeat Using SAP Adapter with OSB 11g (PS3) | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IswR9K SOA Community Integrating with Oracle Fusion Applications: Discovering Integration Artifacts https://blogs.oracle.com/governance /entry/integrating_with_oracle_fusion_ applications #soacommunity #oer #governance OracleBlogs Tuning B2B Server Engine Threads in SOA Suite 11g http://ow.ly/1iH5bx OracleBlogs Top Tweets SOA Partner Community April 2012 http://ow.ly/1iVHfA SOA Community Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management http://wp.me/p10C8u-pi Sabine Leitner WLS12c,Exa*,IDM,EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 24.04. München #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity SOA Community Testing Business Rules by Mark Nelson http://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/ 04/18/testing-business-rules/ #soacommunity #soa #rules #oracle SOA CommunityTop Tweets SOA Partner Community - April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pn OTNArchBeat Webcast: Untangle Your Business with Oracle Unified SOA and Data Integration - April 24 http://bit.ly/IQexqT OTNArchBeat"Do more with SOA Integration: Best of Packt" contributors include @gschmutz, @llaszews, many others http://amzn.to/HVWwYt ServiceTechSymposium Symposium agenda page coming together - page launched today with keynotes, sessions to be added shortly. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com /agenda2012.php SOA Community Shipping Specialization plaques - congratulation #Fujitsu - request yours https://soacommunity.wordpress. com/2011/02/23/who-are-the-soa-experts-specialization-recognized-by-customers/ #soacommunity #OPN http://pic.twitter.com/YMRm2ion ServiceTechSymposium call for Presentations Submission Deadline Moved Up to May 21, 2012. Send your presentations submissions ASAP! ServiceTechSymposium Symposium Keynote by Vicente Navarro, European Space Agency, added to agenda: "SOA & Service-Orientation at the European Space Agency" SOA Community Running a large #soa project? Make sure you read - Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management #soacommunity #opn SOA Community List all BPM Processes for a user by Yogesh l #bpm #oracle #soacommunity For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity, twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN,SOA,BPM

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Generate Strongly Typed Observable Events for the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

- by Bobby Diaz

I must have tried reading through the various explanations and introductions to the new Reactive Extensions for .NET before the concepts finally started sinking in. The article that gave me the ah-ha moment was over on SilverlightShow.net and titled Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight. The author did a good job comparing the "normal" way of handling events vs. the new "reactive" methods. Admittedly, I still have more to learn about the Rx Framework, but I wanted to put together a sample project so I could start playing with the new Observable and IObservable<T> constructs. I decided to throw together a whiteboard application in Silverlight based on the Drawing with Rx example on the aforementioned article. At the very least, I figured I would learn a thing or two about a new technology, but my real goal is to create a fun application that I can share with the kids since they love drawing and coloring so much! Here is the code sample that I borrowed from the article: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp"); var draggingEvents = from pos in mouseMoveEvent .SkipUntil(mouseLeftButtonDown) .TakeUntil(mouseLeftButtonUp) .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) => new { X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y, Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y })).Repeat() select pos; draggingEvents.Subscribe(p => { Line line = new Line(); line.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black); line.StrokeEndLineCap = PenLineCap.Round; line.StrokeLineJoin = PenLineJoin.Round; line.StrokeThickness = 5; line.X1 = p.X1; line.Y1 = p.Y1; line.X2 = p.X2; line.Y2 = p.Y2; this.LayoutRoot.Children.Add(line); }); One thing that was nagging at the back of my mind was having to deal with the event names as strings, as well as the verbose syntax for the Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>() method. I came up with a couple of static/helper classes to resolve both issues and also created a T4 template to auto-generate these helpers for any .NET type. Take the following code from the above example: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp"); Turns into this with the new static Events class: var mouseMoveEvent = Events.Mouse.Move.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this); Or better yet, just remove the variable declarations altogether: var draggingEvents = from pos in Events.Mouse.Move.On(this) .SkipUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this)) .TakeUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this)) .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) => new { X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y, Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y })).Repeat() select pos; The Move, LeftButtonDown and LeftButtonUp members of the Events.Mouse class are readonly instances of the ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> class that provide type-safe access to the events via the On() method. Here is the code for the class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; namespace System.Linq { /// <summary> /// Represents an event that can be managed via the <see cref="Observable"/> API. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TTarget">The type of the target.</typeparam> /// <typeparam name="TEventArgs">The type of the event args.</typeparam> public class ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> where TEventArgs : EventArgs { /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="ObservableEvent"/> class. /// </summary> /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param> protected ObservableEvent(String eventName) { EventName = eventName; } /// <summary> /// Registers the specified event name. /// </summary> /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param> /// <returns></returns> public static ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> Register(String eventName) { return new ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs>(eventName); } /// <summary> /// Creates an enumerable sequence of event values for the specified target. /// </summary> /// <param name="target">The target.</param> /// <returns></returns> public IObservable<IEvent<TEventArgs>> On(TTarget target) { return Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>(target, EventName); } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the name of the event. /// </summary> /// <value>The name of the event.</value> public string EventName { get; private set; } } } And this is how it's used: /// <summary> /// Categorizes <see cref="ObservableEvents"/> by class and/or functionality. /// </summary> public static partial class Events { /// <summary> /// Implements a set of predefined <see cref="ObservableEvent"/>s /// for the <see cref="System.Windows.System.Windows.UIElement"/> class /// that represent mouse related events. /// </summary> public static partial class Mouse { /// <summary>Represents the MouseMove event.</summary> public static readonly ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs> Move = ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs>.Register("MouseMove"); // additional members omitted... } } The source code contains a static Events class with prefedined members for various categories (Key, Mouse, etc.). There is also an Events.tt template that you can customize to generate additional event categories for any .NET type. All you should have to do is add the name of your class to the types collection near the top of the template: types = new Dictionary<String, Type>() { //{ "Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.Map, Microsoft.Maps.MapControl", null } { "System.Windows.FrameworkElement, System.Windows", null }, { "Whiteboard.MainPage, Whiteboard", null } }; The template is also a bit rough at this point, but at least it generates code that *should* compile. Please let me know if you run into any issues with it. Some people have reported errors when trying to use T4 templates within a Silverlight project, but I was able to get it to work with a little black magic... You can download the source code for this project or play around with the live demo. Just be warned that it is at a very early stage so don't expect to find much today. I plan on adding alot more options like pen colors and sizes, saving, printing, etc. as time permits. HINT: hold down the ESC key to erase! Enjoy! Additional Resources Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight DevLabs: Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) Rx Framework Part III - LINQ to Events - Generating GetEventName() Wrapper Methods using T4

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Adding UCM as a search source in Windows Explorer

- by kyle.hatlestad

A customer recently pointed out to me that Windows 7 supports federated search within Windows Explorer. This means you can perform searches to external sources such as Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc right from within Explorer. While we do have the Desktop Integration Suite which offers searching within Explorer, I thought it would be interesting to look into this method which would not require any client software to implement. Basically, federated searching hooks up in Windows Explorer through the OpenSearch protocol. A Search Connector Descriptor file is run and it installs the search provider. The file is a .osdx file which is an OpenSearch Description document. It describes the search provider you are hooking up to along with the URL for the query. If those results can come back as an RSS or ATOM feed, then you're all set. So the first step is to install the RSS Feeds component from the UCM Samples page on OTN. If you're on 11g, I've found the RSS Feeds works just fine on that version too. Next, you want to perform a Quick Search with a particular search term and then copy the RSS link address for that search result. Here is what an example URL might looks like: http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SCS_FEED&feedName=search_results&QueryText=%28+%3cqsch%3eoracle%3c%2fqsch %3e+%29&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=20&SearchQueryFormat= Universal&SearchProviders=server& Now you want to create a new text file and start out with this information: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><OpenSearchDescription xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/"> <ShortName></ShortName> <Description></Description> <Url type="application/rss+xml" template=""/> <Url type="text/html" template=""/> </OpenSearchDescription> Enter a ShortName and Description. The ShortName will be the value used when displaying the search provider in Explorer. In the template attribute for the first Url element, enter the URL copied previously. You will then need to convert the ampersand symbols to '&' to make them XML compliant. Finally, you'll want to switch out the search term with '{searchTerms}'. For the second Url element, you can do the same thing except you want to copy the UCM search results URL from the page of results. That URL will look something like: http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESULTS&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=20&QueryText=%3Cqsch%3Eoracle%3C%2Fqsch%3E&listTemplateId= &ftx=1&SearchQueryFormat=Universal&TargetedQuickSearchSelection= &MiniSearchText=oracle Again, convert the ampersand symbols and replace the search term with '{searchTerms}'. When complete, save the file with the .osdx extension. The completed file should look like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/"> <ShortName>Universal Content Management</ShortName> <Description>OpenSearch for UCM via Windows 7 Search Federation.</Description> <Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SCS_FEED&feedName=search_results&QueryText=%28+%3Cqsch%3E{searchTerms}%3C%2fqsch%3E+%29&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=200&SearchQueryFormat=Universal"/> <Url type="text/html" template="http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESULTS&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=20&QueryText=%3Cqsch%3E{searchTerms}%3C%2Fqsch%3E&listTemplateId=&ftx=1&SearchQueryFormat=Universal&TargetedQuickSearchSelection=&MiniSearchText={searchTerms}"/> </OpenSearchDescription> After you save the file, simply double-click it to create the provider. It will ask if you want to add the search connector to Windows. Click Add and it will add it to the Searches folder in your user folder as well as your Favorites. Now just click on the search icon and in the upper right search box, enter your term. As you are typing, it begins executing searches and the results will come back in Explorer. Now when you double-click on an item, it will try and download the web viewable for viewing. You also have the ability to save the search, just as you would in UCM. And there is a link to Search On Website which will launch your browser and go directly to the search results page there. And with some tweaks to the RSS component, you can make the results a bit more interesting. It supports the Media RSS standard, so you can pass along the thumbnail of the documents in the results. To enable this, edit the rss_resources.htm file in the RSS Feeds component. In the std_rss_feed_begin resource include, add the namespace 'xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/' to the rss definition: <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"> Next, in the rss_channel_item_with_thumb include, below the closing image element, add this element: </images> <media:thumbnail url="<$if strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@t") > 0 or strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@g") > 0 or strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@p") > 0$><$rssHttpHost$><$thumbnailUrl$><$elseif dGif$><$HttpWebRoot$>images/docgifs/<$dGif$><$endif$>" /> <description> This and lots of other tweaks can be done to the RSS component to help extend it for optimum use in Explorer. Hopefully this can get you started. *Note: This post also applies to Universal Records Management (URM).

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OTN Architect Day Headed to Reston, VA - May 16

- by Bob Rhubart

In 2011 OTN Architect Day made stops in Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, Redwood Shores, and Toronto. The 2012 series begins with OTN Architect Day in Reston, VA on Wednesday May 16. Registration is now open for this free event, but don't get caught napping -- seating is limited, and the event is just 5 weeks away. The information below reflects the most recent updates to the event agenda, including the addition of Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu as the guest keynote speaker. Kai is Senior System Engineer / Architect at Dell, Inc., and has been very busy of late as a speaker at various industry and Oracle User Group events. I'm very happy Kai has agreed to make the trek from his hometown in Austin, TX to share his insight at the Architect Day event in Reston. If you're in the area, put this one on your calendar. You won't be sorry. Venue Sheraton Reston Hotel 11810 Sunrise Valley Drive Reston, VA 20191 Event Agenda 8:30 am - 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00 am - 9:15 am Welcome and Opening Comments 9:15 am - 10:00 am Engineered Systems: Oracle's Vision for the Future | Ralf Dossman Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic are impressive products in their own right. But working in combination they deliver unparalleled transaction processing performance with up to a 30x increase over existing legacy systems, with the lowest cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year basis than any other hardware. In this session you'll learn how to leverage Oracle's Engineered Systems within your enterprise to deliver record-breaking performance at the lowest TCO. 10:00 am - 10:30 am High Availability Infrastructure for Cloud Computing | Kai Yu Infrastructure high availability is extremely critical to Cloud Computing. In a Cloud system that hosts a large number of databases and applications with different SLAs, any unplanned outage can be devastating, and even a small planned downtime may be unacceptable. This presentation will discuss various technology solutions and the related best practices that system architects should consider in cloud infrastructure design to ensure high availability. 10:30 am - 10:45 am Break 10:45 am - 11:30 am Breakout Sessions: (pick one) Innovations in Grid Computing with Oracle Coherence | Bjorn Boe Learn how Coherence can increase the availability, scalability and performance of your existing applications with its advanced low-latency data-grid technologies. Also hear some interesting industry-specific use cases that customers had implemented and how Oracle is integrating Coherence into its Enterprise Java stack. Cloud Computing - Making IT Simple | Scott Mattoon The road to Cloud Computing is not without a few bumps. This session will help to smooth out your journey by tackling some of the potential complications. We'll examine whether standardization is a prerequisite for the Cloud. We'll look at why refactoring isn't just for application code. We'll check out deployable entities and their simplification via higher levels of abstraction. And we'll close out the session with a look at engineered systems and modular clouds. 11:30 pm - 12:15 pm Breakout Sessions: (pick one) Oracle Enterprise Manager | Joe Diemer Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) provides complete lifecycle management for the cloud - from automated cloud setup to self-service delivery to cloud operations. In this session you'll learn how to take control of your cloud infrastructure with EM features including Consolidation Planning and Self-Service provisioning with Metering and Chargeback. Come hear how Oracle is expanding its management capabilities into the cloud! Rationalization and Defense in Depth - Two Steps Closer to the Clouds | Dave Chappelle Security represents one of the biggest concerns about cloud computing. In this session we'll get past the FUD with a real-world look at some key issues. We'll discuss the infrastructure necessary to support rationalization and security services, explore architecture for defense -in-depth, and deal frankly with the good, the bad, and the ugly in Cloud security. 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Lunch 1:40 pm - 2:00 pm Panel Discussion - Q&A 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm Breakout Sessions: (pick one) 21st Century SOA | Peter Belknap Service Oriented Architecture has evolved from concept to reality in the last decade. The right methodology coupled with mature SOA technologies has helped customers demonstrate success in both innovation and ROI. In this session you will learn how Oracle SOA Suite's orchestration, virtualization, and governance capabilities provide the infrastructure to run mission critical business and system applications. And we'll take a special look at the convergence of SOA & BPM using Oracle's Unified technology stack. Track B: Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture | Anbu Krishnaswamy Cloud initiatives are beginning to dominate enterprise IT roadmaps. Successful adoption of Cloud and the subsequent governance challenges warrant a Cloud reference architecture that is applied consistently across the enterprise. This presentation gives an overview of Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy (ETS). Concepts covered include common management layer capabilities, service models, resource pools, and use cases. 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm Break 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Roundtable Discussions 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Closing Comments & Readouts from Roundtable 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm Cocktail Reception / Networking Session schedule and content subject to change.

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Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c : Enterprise Controller High Availability (EC HA)

- by Anand Akela

Contributed by Mahesh sharma, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center team In Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c we introduced a new feature to make the Enterprise Controllers highly available. With EC HA if the hardware crashes, or if the Enterprise Controller services and/or the remote database stop responding, then the enterprise services are immediately restarted on the other standby Enterprise Controller without administrative intervention. In today's post, I'll briefly describe EC HA, look at some of the prerequisites and then show some screen shots of how the Enterprise Controller is represented in the BUI. In my next post, I'll show you how to install the EC in a HA environment and some of the new commands. What is EC HA? Enterprise Controller High Availability (EC HA) provides an active/standby fail-over solution for two or more Ops Center Enterprise Controllers, all within an Oracle Clusterware framework. This allows EC resources to relocate to a standby if the hardware crashes, or if certain services fail. It is also possible to manually relocate the services if maintenance on the active EC is required. When the EC services are relocated to the standby, EC services are interrupted only for the period it takes for the EC services to stop on the active node and to start back up on a standby node. What are the prerequisites? To install EC in a HA framework an understanding of the prerequisites are required. There are many possibilities on how these prerequisites can be installed and configured - we will not discuss these in this post. However, best practices should be applied when installing and configuring, I would suggest that you get expert help if you are not familiar with them. Lets briefly look at each of these prerequisites in turn: Hardware : Servers are required to host the active and standby node(s). As the nodes will be in a clustered environment, they need to be the same model and configured identically. The nodes should have the same processor class, number of cores, memory, network cards, for example. Operating System : We can use Solaris 10 9/10 or higher, Solaris 11, OEL 5.5 or higher on x86 or Sparc Network : There are a number of requirements for network cards in clusterware, and cables should be networked identically on all the nodes. We must also consider IP allocation for public / private and Virtual IP's (VIP's). Storage : Shared storage will be required for the cluster voting disks, Oracle Cluster Register (OCR) and the EC's libraries. Clusterware : Oracle Clusterware version 11.2.0.3 or later is required. This can be downloaded from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/index.html Remote Database : Oracle RDBMS 11.1.0.x or later is required. This can be downloaded from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/index.html For detailed information on how to install EC HA , please read : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E27363_01/doc.121/e25140/install_config-shared.htm#OPCSO242 For detailed instructions on installing Oracle Clusterware, please read : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e17214/chklist.htm#BHACBGII For detailed instructions on installing the remote Oracle database have a read of: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/documentation/index.html The schematic diagram below gives a visual view of how the prerequisites are connected. When a fail-over occurs the Enterprise Controller resources and the VIP are relocated to one of the standby nodes. The standby node then becomes active and all Ops Center services are resumed. Connecting to the Enterprise Controller from your favourite browser. Let's presume we have installed and configured all the prerequisites, and installed Ops Center on the active and standby nodes. We can now connect to the active node from a browser i.e. http://<active_node1>/, this will redirect us to the virtual IP address (VIP). The VIP is the IP address that moves with the Enterprise Controller resource. Once you log on and view the assets, you will see some new symbols, these represent that the nodes are cluster members, with one being an active member and the other a standby member in this case. If you connect to the standby node, the browser will redirect you to a splash page, indicating that you have connected to the standby node. Hope you find this topic interesting. Next time I will post about how to install the Enterprise Controller in the HA frame work. Stay Connected: Twitter | Face book | You Tube | Linked in | Newsletter

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XNA Notes 005

- by George Clingerman

Another week and another crazy amount of activity going on in the XNA community. I’m fairly certain I missed over half of it. In fact, if I am missing things, make sure to email me and I’ll try and make sure I catch it next week! ([email protected]). Also, if you’ve got any advice, things you like/don’t like about the way these XNA Notes are going let me know. I always appreciate feedback (currently spammers are leaving me the nicest comments so you guys have work to do!) Without further ado, here’s this week’s notes! Time Critical XNA News The XNA Team Blob reminds us that February 7th is the last day to submit XNA 3.1 games to peer review! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/31/7-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx XNA MVPS Chris Williams kicks off the marketing campaign for our book http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/01/28/143680.aspx Catalin Zima posts the comparison cheat sheet for why Angry Birds is different than Chickens Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/comparison-cheat-sheet-for-chickens-cant-fly-and-angry-birds/ Jim Perry congratulates the developers selected by Game Developer Magazine for Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://machxgames.com/blog/?p=24 @NemoKrad posts his XNAKUUG talks for all to enjoy http://twitter.com/NemoKrad/statuses/33142362502864896 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/02/03/xblig-uk-2011-january-amp-february-talk.aspx George (that’s me!) preps for his XNA talk coming up on the 8th http://twitter.com/clingermangw/statuses/32669550554124288 http://www.portlandsilverlight.net/Meetings/Details/15 XNA Developers FireFly posts the last tutorial in his XNA Tower Defense tutorial series http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/26442/451460.aspx#451460 http://xnatd.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorial-14-polishing-game.html @fredericmy posts the main difference when porting a game from Windows Phone 7 to Xbox 360 http://fairyengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/main-differences-when-porting-game-from.html @ElementCy creates a pretty rad video of a MineCraft type terrain created using XNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waw1f7wnl9I Andrew Russel gets the first XNA badge on gamedev.stackexchange http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/32322877004972032 http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags And his funding for ExEn has passed $7000 only $3000 to go http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/33042412804771840 Subodh Pushpak blogs about his Windows Phone 7 XNA talk http://geekswithblogs.net/subodhnpushpak/archive/2011/02/01/windows-phone-7-silverlight--xna-development-talk.aspx Slyprid releases the latest version of Transmute and needs more people to test http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/32452488418299904 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ SpynDoctorGames celebrates the 1 year anniversary of Your Doodles Are Bugged! Congrats! http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/32511689068908544 Noogy (creator of Dust the Elysian Tail) prepares his conversion to XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/NoogyTweet/statuses/32522008449253376 @philippedasilva posts about the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0 Input management system http://twitter.com/philippedasilva/statuses/32763393957957632 http://indiefreaks.com/2011/02/02/behind-smart-input-system-feature/ Mommy’s Best Games debates what to do about High Scores with their new update http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/02/high-score-shake-up.html @BinaryTweedDeej want to know if there’s anything the community needs to make XNA games for the PC. Give him some feedback! http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/status/32895453863354368 @mikebmcl promises to write us all a book (I can’t wait to read it!) http://twitter.com/mikebmcl/statuses/33206499102687233 @werezompire is going to live, LIVE, thanks to all the generosity and support from the community! http://twitter.com/werezompire/statuses/32840147644977153 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG) Making money in Xbox 360 indie game development. Is it possible? http://www.bitmob.com/articles/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible @AlejandroDaJ posts some thoughts abut the bitmob article http://twitter.com/AlejandroDaJ/statuses/31068552165330944 http://www.apathyworks.com/blog/view.php?id=00215 Kobun gets my respect as an XBLIG champion. I’m not sure who Kobun is, but if you’ve every read through the comment sections any time Kotaku writes about XBLIGs you’ll see a lot of confusion, disinformation in there. Kobun has been waging a secret war battling that lack of knowledge and he does it well. Also he’s running a pretty kick ass site for Xbox LIVE Indie Game reviews http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/ @radiangames releases his last Xbox LIVE Indie Game...for now http://bit.ly/gMK6lE Playing Avaglide with the Kinect controller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqAYbHww53o http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/30/kinect-hacks-take-to-the-skies-with-avaglide/ Luke Schneider of Radiangames interviewed in Edge magazine http://www.next-gen.biz/features/radiangames-venture Digital Quarters posts thoughts on why XBLIG’s online requirement kills certain genres http://digitalquarters.blogspot.com/2011/02/thoughts-why-xbligs-online-requirement.html Mommy’s Best Games shares the news that several XBLIGs were featured in the March 2011 issue of Famitsu 360 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/33455/451487.aspx#451487 NaviFairy continues with his Indie-Game-A-Day http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_epic_dungeon.html http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_break_limit_r.html and more every day...that’s kind of the point! Keep your eye on this series! VVGTV continues with it’s awesome reviews/promotions for XBLIGs http://vvgtv.com/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/03/iredia-atrams-secret-xblig-review-2/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/02/poopocalypse-coming-soon-to-xblig/ ….and even more, you get the point. Magicka is an Indie Game doing really well on Steam AND it’s made using XNA http://www.magickagame.com/ http://twitter.com/Magickagame/statuses/32712762580799488 GameMarx reviews Antipole http://www.gamemarx.com/reviews/73/antipole-is-vvvvvvery-good.aspx Armless Octopus review Alpha Squad http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/28/xbox-indie-review-alpha-squad/ An interesting article about Kodu that Jim Perry found http://twitter.com/MachXGames/statuses/32848044105924608 http://www.develop-online.net/news/36915/10-year-old-Jordan-makes-games-The-UK-needs-more-like-her XNA Game Development Sgt. Conker posts about the Natur beta, a new book and whether you can make money with XBLIG http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/a-new-book-on-the-block-and-a-new-natur-beta/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible/ Tips for setting up SVN http://bit.ly/fKxgFh @bsimser found tons of royalty free music and soundfx for your XNA Games http://twitter.com/bsimser/statuses/31426632933711872 Post on the new features in the next Sunburn Editor http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/01/28/new-editor-features-prefabs-components-and-more.aspx @jasons_novaleaf posts source code for light pre-pass optimizations for #xna http://twitter.com/jasons_novaleaf/statuses/33348855403642880 http://jcoluna.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-optimization-round-one/ I’ve been learning about doing an A.I. for turn based games and this article was a great resource. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1535/designing_ai_algorithms_for_.php?print=1

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CLR via C# 3rd Edition is out

- by Abhijeet Patel

Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition of the book was an absolute treat and this edition promises to be no less. Here is a brief description of what’s new and updated from the 2nd edition. Part I – CLR Basics Chapter 1-The CLR’s Execution Model Added about discussion about C#’s /optimize and /debug switches and how they relate to each other. Chapter 2-Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types Improved discussion about Win32 manifest information and version resource information. Chapter 3-Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies Added discussion of TypeForwardedToAttribute and TypeForwardedFromAttribute. Part II – Designing Types Chapter 4-Type Fundamentals No new topics. Chapter 5-Primitive, Reference, and Value Types Enhanced discussion of checked and unchecked code and added discussion of new BigInteger type. Also added discussion of C# 4.0’s dynamic primitive type. Chapter 6-Type and Member Basics No new topics. Chapter 7-Constants and Fields No new topics. Chapter 8-Methods Added discussion of extension methods and partial methods. Chapter 9-Parameters Added discussion of optional/named parameters and implicitly-typed local variables. Chapter 10-Properties Added discussion of automatically-implemented properties, properties and the Visual Studio debugger, object and collection initializers, anonymous types, the System.Tuple type and the ExpandoObject type. Chapter 11-Events Added discussion of events and thread-safety as well as showing a cool extension method to simplify the raising of an event. Chapter 12-Generics Added discussion of delegate and interface generic type argument variance. Chapter 13-Interfaces No new topics. Part III – Essential Types Chapter 14-Chars, Strings, and Working with Text No new topics. Chapter 15-Enums Added coverage of new Enum and Type methods to access enumerated type instances. Chapter 16-Arrays Added new section on initializing array elements. Chapter 17-Delegates Added discussion of using generic delegates to avoid defining new delegate types. Also added discussion of lambda expressions. Chapter 18-Attributes No new topics. Chapter 19-Nullable Value Types Added discussion on performance. Part IV – CLR Facilities Chapter 20-Exception Handling and State Management This chapter has been completely rewritten. It is now about exception handling and state management. It includes discussions of code contracts and constrained execution regions (CERs). It also includes a new section on trade-offs between writing productive code and reliable code. Chapter 21-Automatic Memory Management Added discussion of C#’s fixed state and how it works to pin objects in the heap. Rewrote the code for weak delegates so you can use them with any class that exposes an event (the class doesn’t have to support weak delegates itself). Added discussion on the new ConditionalWeakTable class, GC Collection modes, Full GC notifications, garbage collection modes and latency modes. I also include a new sample showing how your application can receive notifications whenever Generation 0 or 2 collections occur. Chapter 22-CLR Hosting and AppDomains Added discussion of side-by-side support allowing multiple CLRs to be loaded in a single process. Added section on the performance of using MarshalByRefObject-derived types. Substantially rewrote the section on cross-AppDomain communication. Added section on AppDomain Monitoring and first chance exception notifications. Updated the section on the AppDomainManager class. Chapter 23-Assembly Loading and Reflection Added section on how to deploy a single file with dependent assemblies embedded inside it. Added section comparing reflection invoke vs bind/invoke vs bind/create delegate/invoke vs C#’s dynamic type. Chapter 24-Runtime Serialization This is a whole new chapter that was not in the 2nd Edition. Part V – Threading Chapter 25-Threading Basics Whole new chapter motivating why Windows supports threads, thread overhead, CPU trends, NUMA Architectures, the relationship between CLR threads and Windows threads, the Thread class, reasons to use threads, thread scheduling and priorities, foreground thread vs background threads. Chapter 26-Performing Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining the CLR’s thread pool. This chapter covers all the new .NET 4.0 constructs including cooperative cancelation, Tasks, the aralle class, parallel language integrated query, timers, how the thread pool manages its threads, cache lines and false sharing. Chapter 27-Performing I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining how Windows performs synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations. Then, I go into the CLR’s Asynchronous Programming Model, my AsyncEnumerator class, the APM and exceptions, Applications and their threading models, implementing a service asynchronously, the APM and Compute-bound operations, APM considerations, I/O request priorities, converting the APM to a Task, the event-based Asynchronous Pattern, programming model soup. Chapter 28-Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discusses class libraries and thread safety, primitive user-mode, kernel-mode constructs, and data alignment. Chapter 29-Hybrid Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discussion various hybrid constructs such as ManualResetEventSlim, SemaphoreSlim, CountdownEvent, Barrier, ReaderWriterLock(Slim), OneManyResourceLock, Monitor, 3 ways to solve the double-check locking technique, .NET 4.0’s Lazy and LazyInitializer classes, the condition variable pattern, .NET 4.0’s concurrent collection classes, the ReaderWriterGate and SyncGate classes.

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Oracle Linux and Oracle VM pricing guide

- by wcoekaer

A few days ago someone showed me a pricing guide from a Linux vendor and I was a bit surprised at the complexity of it. Especially when you look at larger servers (4 or 8 sockets) and when adding virtual machine use into the mix. I think we have a very compelling and simple pricing model for both Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. Let me see if I can explain it in 1 page, not 10 pages. This pricing information is publicly available on the Oracle store, I am using the current public list prices. Also keep in mind that this is for customers using non-oracle x86 servers. When a customer purchases an Oracle x86 server, the annual systems support includes full use (all you can eat) of Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and Oracle Solaris (no matter how many VMs you run on that server, in case you deploy guests on a hypervisor). This support level is the equivalent of premier support in the list below. Let's start with Oracle VM (x86) : Oracle VM support subscriptions are per physical server on which you deploy the Oracle VM Server product. (1) Oracle VM Premier Limited - 1- or 2 socket server : $599 per server per year (2) Oracle VM Premier - more than 2 socket server (4, or 8 or whatever more) : $1199 per server per year The above includes the use of Oracle VM Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control's Virtualization management pack (including self service cloud portal, etc..) 24x7 support, access to bugfixes, updates and new releases. It also includes all options, live migrate, dynamic resource scheduling, high availability, dynamic power management, etc If you want to play with the product, or even use the product without access to support services, the product is freely downloadable from edelivery. Next, Oracle Linux : Oracle Linux support subscriptions are per physical server. If you plan to run Oracle Linux as a guest on Oracle VM, VMWare or Hyper-v, you only have to pay for a single subscription per system, we do not charge per guest or per number of guests. In other words, you can run any number of Oracle Linux guests per physical server and count it as just a single subscription. (1) Oracle Linux Network Support - any number of sockets per server : $119 per server per year Network support does not offer support services. It provides access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and also offers full indemnification for Oracle Linux. (2) Oracle Linux Basic Limited Support - 1- or 2 socket servers : $499 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management. It includes ocfs2 as a clustered filesystem. (3) Oracle Linux Basic Support - more than 2 socket server (4, or 8 or more) : $1199 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management. It includes ocfs2 as a clustered filesystem (4) Oracle Linux Premier Limited Support - 1- or 2 socket servers : $1399 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management, XFS filesystem support. It also offers Oracle Lifetime support, backporting of patches for critical customers in previous versions of package and ksplice zero-downtime updates. (5) Oracle Linux Premier Support - more than 2 socket servers : $2299 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management, XFS filesystem support. It also offers Oracle Lifetime support, backporting of patches for critical customers in previous versions of package and ksplice zero-downtime updates. (6) Freely available Oracle Linux - any number of sockets You can freely download Oracle Linux, install it on any number of servers and use it for any reason, without support, without right to use of these extra features like Oracle Clusterware or ksplice, without indemnification. However, you do have full access to all errata as well. Need support? then use options (1)..(5) So that's it. Count number of 2 socket boxes, more than 2 socket boxes, decide on basic or premier support level and you are done. You don't have to worry about different levels based on how many virtual instance you deploy or want to deploy. A very simple menu of choices. We offer, inclusive, Linux OS clusterware, Linux OS Management, provisioning and monitoring, cluster filesystem (ocfs), high performance filesystem (xfs), dtrace, ksplice, ofed (infiniband stack for high performance networking). No separate add-on menus. NOTE : socket/cpu can have any number of cores. So whether you have a 4,6,8,10 or 12 core CPU doesn't matter, we count the number of physical CPUs.

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Getting Started with Prism (aka Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight)

- by dotneteer

Overview Prism is a framework from the Microsoft Patterns and Practice team that allow you to create WPF and Silverlight in a modular way. It is especially valuable for larger projects in which a large number of developers can develop in parallel. Prism achieves its goal by supplying several services: · Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of control (IoC): By using DI, Prism takes away the responsibility of instantiating and managing the life time of dependency objects from individual components to a container. Prism relies on containers to discover, manage and compose large number of objects. By varying the configuration, the container can also inject mock objects for unit testing. Out of the box, Prism supports Unity and MEF as container although it is possible to use other containers by subclassing the Bootstrapper class. · Modularity and Region: Prism supplies the framework to split application into modules from the application shell. Each module is a library project that contains both UI and code and is responsible to initialize itself when loaded by the shell. Each window can be further divided into regions. A region is a user control with associated model. · Model, view and view-model (MVVM) pattern: Prism promotes the user MVVM. The use of DI container makes it much easier to inject model into view. WPF already has excellent data binding and commanding mechanism. To be productive with Prism, it is important to understand WPF data binding and commanding well. · Event-aggregation: Prism promotes loosely coupled components. Prism discourages for components from different modules to communicate each other, thus leading to dependency. Instead, Prism supplies an event-aggregation mechanism that allows components to publish and subscribe events without knowing each other. Architecture In the following, I will go into a little more detail on the services provided by Prism. Bootstrapper In a typical WPF application, application start-up is controls by App.xaml and its code behind. The main window of the application is typically specified in the App.xaml file. In a Prism application, we start a bootstrapper in the App class and delegate the duty of main window to the bootstrapper. The bootstrapper will start a dependency-injection container so all future object instantiations are managed by the container. Out of box, Prism provides the UnityBootstrapper and MefUnityBootstrapper abstract classes. All application needs to either provide a concrete implementation of one of these bootstrappers, or alternatively, subclass the Bootstrapper class with another DI container. A concrete bootstrapper class must implement the CreateShell method. Its responsibility is to resolve and create the Shell object through the DI container to serve as the main window for the application. The other important method to override is ConfigureModuleCatalog. The bootstrapper can register modules for the application. In a more advance scenario, an application does not have to know all its modules at compile time. Modules can be discovered at run time. Readers to refer to one of the Open Modularity Quick Starts for more information. Modules Once modules are registered with or discovered by Prism, they are instantiated by the DI container and their Initialize method is called. The DI container can inject into a module a region registry that implements IRegionViewRegistry interface. The module, in its Initialize method, can then call RegisterViewWithRegion method of the registry to register its regions. Regions Regions, once registered, are managed by the RegionManager. The shell can then load regions either through the RegionManager.RegionName attached property or dynamically through code. When a view is created by the region manager, the DI container can inject view model and other services into the view. The view then has a reference to the view model through which it can interact with backend services. Service locator Although it is possible to inject services into dependent classes through a DI container, an alternative way is to use the ServiceLocator to retrieve a service on demard. Prism supplies a service locator implementation and it is possible to get an instance of the service by calling: ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IServiceType>() Event aggregator Prism supplies an IEventAggregator interface and implementation that can be injected into any class that needs to communicate with each other in a loosely-coupled fashion. The event aggregator uses a publisher/subscriber model. A class can publishes an event by calling eventAggregator.GetEvent<EventType>().Publish(parameter) to raise an event. Other classes can subscribe the event by calling eventAggregator.GetEvent<EventType>().Subscribe(EventHandler, other options). Getting started The easiest way to get started with Prism is to go through the Prism Hands-On labs and look at the Hello World QuickStart. The Hello World QuickStart shows how bootstrapper, modules and region works. Next, I would recommend you to look at the Stock Trader Reference Implementation. It is a more in depth example that resemble we want to set up an application. Several other QuickStarts cover individual Prism services. Some scenarios, such as dynamic module discovery, are more advanced. Apart from the official prism document, you can get an overview by reading Glen Block’s MSDN Magazine article. I have found the best free training material is from the Boise Code Camp. To be effective with Prism, it is important to understands key concepts of WPF well first, such as the DependencyProperty system, data binding, resource, theme and ICommand. It is also important to know your DI container of choice well. I will try to explorer these subjects in depth in the future. Testimony Recently, I worked on a desktop WPF application using Prism. I had a wonderful experience with Prism. The Prism is flexible enough even in the presence of third party controls such as Telerik WPF controls. We have never encountered any significant obstacle.

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Who broke the build?

- by Martin Hinshelwood

I recently sent round a list of broken builds at SSW and asked for them to be fixed or deleted if they are not being used. My colleague Peter came back with a couple of questions which I love as it tells me that at least one person reads my email I think first we need to answer a couple of other questions related to builds in general. Why do we want the build to pass? Any developer can pick up a project and build it Standards can be enforced Constant quality is maintained Problems in code are identified early What could a failed build signify? Developers have not built and tested their code properly before checking in. Something added depends on a local resource that is not under version control or does not exist on the target computer. Developers are not writing tests to cover common problems. There are not enough tests to cover problems. Now we know why, lets answer Peters questions: Where is this list? (can we see it somehow) You can normally only see the builds listed for each project. But, you have a little application called “Build Notifications” on your computer. It is installed when you install Visual Studio 2010. Figure: Staring the build notification application on Windows 7. Once you have it open (it may disappear into your system tray) you should click “Options” and select all the projects you are involved in. This application only lists projects that have builds, so don’t worry if it is not listed. This just means you are about to setup a build, right? I just selected ALL projects that have builds. Figure: All builds are listed here In addition to seeing the list you will also get toast notification of build failure’s. How can we get more info on what broke the build? (who is interesting too, to point the finger but more important is what) The only thing worse than breaking the build, is continuing to develop on a broken build! Figure: I have highlighted the users who either are bad for braking the build, or very bad for not fixing it. To find out what is wrong with a build you need to open the build definition. You can open a web version by double clicking the build in the image above, or you can open it from “Team Explorer”. Just connect to your project and open out the “Builds” tree. Then Open the build by double clicking on it. Figure: Opening a build is easy, but double click it and then open a build run from the list. Figure: Good example, the build and tests have passed Figure: Bad example, there are 133 errors preventing POK from being built on the build server. For identifying failures see: Solution: Getting Silverlight to build on Team Build 2010 RC Solution: Testing Web Services with MSTest on Team Build Finding the problem on a partially succeeded build So, Peter asked about blame, let’s have a look and see: Figure: The build has been broken for so long I have no idea when it was broken, but everyone on this list is to blame (I am there too) The rest of the history is lost in the sands of time, there is no way to tell when the build was originally broken, or by whom, or even if it ever worked in the first place. Build should be protected by the team that uses them and the only way to do that is to have them own them. It is fine for me to go in and setup a build, but the ownership for a build should always reside with the person who broke it last. Conclusion This is an example of a pointless build. Lets be honest, if you have a system like TFS in place and builds are constantly left broken, or not added to projects then your developers don’t yet understand the value. I have found that adding a Gated Check-in helps instil that understanding of value. If you prevent them from checking in without passing that basic quality gate of “your code builds on another computer” then it makes them look more closely at why they can’t check-in. I have had builds fail because one developer had a “d” drive, but the build server did not. That is what they are there to catch. If you want to know what builds to create and why I wrote a post on “Do you know the minimum builds to create on any branch?” Technorati Tags: TFS2010,Gated Check-in,Builds,Build Failure,Broken Build

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Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration

- by Kiran Mundy

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration A typical implementation pattern we’re seeing with Fusion Apps early adopters is implementing a few Fusion HCM applications that bring the most benefit to their company with the least disruption to existing programs and interfaces. Very often this ends up being Fusion Goals & Performance, Talent, Compensation or Benefits, often with Taleo for recruiting. The implementation picture looks like what you see below: Here, you can see that all the “downstream integrations” from the On-Premise Core HR, are unaffected because the master for employee data is still your On-Premise Core HR system – all updates and new hires are made here (although they may be fed in from Taleo to start with). As a second phase when customers migrate Core HR to Fusion HCM, they have to come up with a strategy to manage integrations to all their downstream applications that require employee details. For customers coming from EBS HR, a short term strategy that allows for minimal impact, is to extract employee data from Fusion (Via HCM Extract), and load the shared EBS HR tables (which are part of an EBS Financials install anyways), and let your downstream integrations continue to function based on this data as shown below. If you are not coming from EBS HR and there are license implications, you may want to consider: Creating an On-Premise warehouse for extracting data from Fusion Apps. Leveraging Fusion Apps Web Services (available to SaaS customers starting R7) to directly retrieve/write data to Fusion Apps. Integration Tools File Based Loader This is the primary mechanism for loading HCM data (both initial load and incremental updates) into Fusion HCM. Employee & related data can be uploaded into Fusion HCM using File Based Loader. Note that ability to schedule File Based Loader to run on a pre-defined schedule will be available as a patch on top of Rel 5. Hr2Hr has been deprecated in favor of File Based Loader, but for existing customers using Hr2Hr, here are some sample scripts that show how to get more informative error messages. They can be run by creating data model sql queries in BI Publisher. The scripts currently have hard coded values for request id and loader batch id, which your developer will need to update to the correct values for you. The BI Publisher Training Session recorded on Apr 18th is available here (under "Recordings"). This will enable a somewhat technical resource to create a data model sql query. Links to Documentation & Traning Reference documentation for File Based Loader on docs.oracle.com FBL 1.1 MOS Doc Id 1533860.1 Sample demo data files for File Based Loader HCM SaaS Integrations ppt and recording. EBS api's Loading Information into EBS Full or Shared HCM This could be candidate information being loaded from Taleo into EBS or Employee information being loaded from Fusion HCM into an EBS shared HR install (for downstream applications & EBS Financials). Oracle HRMS Product Family Publicly Callable Business Process APIs (A Reference Consolidation) [ID 216838.1] This is a guide to the EBS R12 Integration Repository accessible from an EBS instance. EBS HRMS Publicly Callable Business Process APIs in Release 11i & 12 [ID 121964.1] Fusion HCM Extract Fusion HCM Extract is the primary mechanism used to extract employee information from Fusion HCM. Refer to the "Configure Identity Sync" doc on MOS for additional mechanisms. Additional documentation (you'll need an oracle.com account to access) HCM Extracts User Guides (Rel 4 & 5) HCM Extract Entity/Attributes (Rel 5) HCM Extract User Guide (Rel 5) If you don’t have an oracle.com account, download the zipped HCM Extract Rel 5 Docs (Click on File --> Download on next screen). View Training Recordings on Fusion HCM Extract Benefits Extract To setup the benefits extract, refer to the following guide. Page 2-15 of the User Documentation describes how to use the benefits extract. Benefit enrollments can also be uploaded into Fusion Benefits. Instructions are here along with a sample upload file. However, if the defined benefits extract does not meet your requirements, you can use BI Publisher (Link to BI Publisher presentation recording from Apr 18th) to create your own version of Benefits extract. You can start with the data model query underlying the benefits extract. Payroll Interface Fusion Payroll Interface enables you to capture personal payroll information, such as earnings and deductions, along with other data from Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management, and send that information to a third-party payroll provider. Documentation: Payroll interface guide Sample file DBI's used for the payroll interface.Usage Patterns always accessible @ http://www.finapps.com 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";}

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SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – 5 Videos from Joes 2 Pros Series – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433

- by pinaldave

Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Learning series is indeed fun. Joes 2 Pros series is written for beginners and who wants to build expertise for SQL Server programming and development from fundamental. In the beginning of the series author Rick Morelan is not shy to explain the simplest concept of how to open SQL Server Management Studio. Honestly the book starts with that much basic but as it progresses further Rick discussing about various advanced concepts from query tuning to Core Architecture. This five part series is written with keeping SQL Server Exam 70-433. Instead of just focusing on what will be there in exam, this series is focusing on learning the important concepts thoroughly. This book no way take short cut to explain any concepts and at times, will go beyond the topic at length. The best part is that all the books has many companion videos explaining the concepts and videos. Every Wednesday I like to post a video which explains something in quick few seconds. Today we will go over five videos which I posted in my earlier posts related to Joes 2 Pros series. Introduction to XML Data Type Methods – SQL in Sixty Seconds #015 The XML data type was first introduced with SQL Server 2005. This data type continues with SQL Server 2008 where expanded XML features are available, most notably is the power of the XQuery language to analyze and query the values contained in your XML instance. There are five XML data type methods available in SQL Server 2008: query() – Used to extract XML fragments from an XML data type. value() – Used to extract a single value from an XML document. exist() – Used to determine if a specified node exists. Returns 1 if yes and 0 if no. modify() – Updates XML data in an XML data type. node() – Shreds XML data into multiple rows (not covered in this blog post). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Error Actions – SQL in Sixty Seconds #014 Most people believe that when SQL Server encounters an error severity level 11 or higher the remaining SQL statements will not get executed. In addition, people also believe that if any error severity level of 11 or higher is hit inside an explicit transaction, then the whole statement will fail as a unit. While both of these beliefs are true 99% of the time, they are not true in all cases. It is these outlying cases that frequently cause unexpected results in your SQL code. To understand how to achieve consistent results you need to know the four ways SQL Error Actions can react to error severity levels 11-16: Statement Termination – The statement with the procedure fails but the code keeps on running to the next statement. Transactions are not affected. Scope Abortion – The current procedure, function or batch is aborted and the next calling scope keeps running. That is, if Stored Procedure A calls B and C, and B fails, then nothing in B runs but A continues to call C. @@Error is set but the procedure does not have a return value. Batch Termination – The entire client call is terminated. XACT_ABORT – (ON = The entire client call is terminated.) or (OFF = SQL Server will choose how to handle all errors.) [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – SQL in Sixty Seconds #013 Query hints specify that the indicated hints should be used throughout the query. Query hints affect all operators in the statement and are implemented using the OPTION clause. Cautionary Note: Because the SQL Server Query Optimizer typically selects the best execution plan for a query, it is highly recommended that hints be used as a last resort for experienced developers and database administrators to achieve the desired results. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Hierarchical Query – SQL in Sixty Seconds #012 A CTE can be thought of as a temporary result set and are similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. A CTE is generally considered to be more readable than a derived table and does not require the extra effort of declaring a Temp Table while providing the same benefits to the user. However; a CTE is more powerful than a derived table as it can also be self-referencing, or even referenced multiple times in the same query. A recursive CTE requires four elements in order to work properly: Anchor query (runs once and the results ‘seed’ the Recursive query) Recursive query (runs multiple times and is the criteria for the remaining results) UNION ALL statement to bind the Anchor and Recursive queries together. INNER JOIN statement to bind the Recursive query to the results of the CTE. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Server Security – SQL in Sixty Seconds #011 Let’s get some basic definitions down first. Take the workplace example where “Tom” needs “Read” access to the “Financial Folder”. What are the Securable, Principal, and Permissions from that last sentence? A Securable is a resource that someone might want to access (like the Financial Folder). A Principal is anything that might want to gain access to the securable (like Tom). A Permission is the level of access a principal has to a securable (like Read). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Please leave a comment explain which one was your favorite video as that will help me understand what works and what needs improvement. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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