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• ASP.NET: Using pickup directory for outgoing e-mails

  - by DigiMortal

  Sending e-mails out from web applications is very common task. When we are working on or test our systems with real e-mail addresses we don’t want recipients to receive e-mails (specially if we are using some subset of real data9. In this posting I will show you how to make ASP.NET SMTP client to write e-mails to disc instead of sending them out. SMTP settings for web application I have seen many times the code where all SMTP information is kept in app settings just to read them in code and give to SMTP client. It is not necessary because we can define all these settings under system.web => mailsettings node. If you are using web.config to keep SMTP settings then all you have to do in your code is just to create SmtpClient with empty constructor. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); Empty constructor means that all settings are read from web.config file. What is pickup directory? If you want drastically raise e-mail throughput of your SMTP server then it is not very wise plan to communicate with it using SMTP protocol. it adds only additional overhead to your network and SMTP server. Okay, clients make connections, send messages out and it is also overhead we can avoid. If clients write their e-mails to some folder that SMTP server can access then SMTP server has e-mail forwarding as only resource-eager task to do. File operations are way faster than communication over SMTP protocol. The directory where clients write their e-mails as files is called pickup directory. By example, Exchange server has support for pickup directories. And as there are applications with a lot of users who want e-mail notifications then .NET SMTP client supports writing e-mails to pickup directory instead of sending them out. How to configure ASP.NET SMTP to use pickup directory? Let’s say, it is more than easy. It is very easy. This is all you need. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">       <specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="c:\temp\maildrop\"/>     </smtp>   </mailSettings> </system.net> Now make sure you don’t miss come points: Pickup directory must physically exist because it is not created automatically. IIS (or Cassini) must have write permissions to pickup directory. Go through your code and look for hardcoded SMTP settings. Also take a look at all places in your code where you send out e-mails that there are not some custom settings used for SMTP! Also don’t forget that your mails will be written now to pickup directory and they are not sent out to recipients anymore. Advanced scenario: configuring SMTP client in code In some advanced scenarios you may need to support multiple SMTP servers. If configuration is dynamic or it is not kept in web.config you need to initialize your SmtpClient in code. This is all you need to do. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); smtpClient.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.SpecifiedPickupDirectory; smtpClient.PickupDirectoryLocation = pickupFolder; Easy, isn’t it? i like when advanced scenarios end up with simple and elegant solutions but not with rocket science. Note for IIS SMTP service SMTP service of IIS is also able to use pickup directory. If you have set up IIS with SMTP service you can configure your ASP.NET application to use IIS pickup folder. In this case you have to use the following setting for delivery method. SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis You can set this setting also in web.config file. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="PickupDirectoryFromIis" />   </mailSettings> </system.net> Conclusion Who was still using different methods to avoid sending e-mails out in development or testing environment can now remove all the bad code from application and live on mail settings of ASP.NET. It is easy to configure and you have less code to support e-mails when you use built-in e-mail features wisely.

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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• Books are Dead! Long Live the Books!

  - by smisner

  We live in interesting times with regard to the availability of technical material. We have lots of free written material online in the form of vendor documentation online, forums, blogs, and Twitter. And we have written material that we can buy in the form of books, magazines, and training materials. Online videos and training – some free and some not free – are also an option. All of these formats are useful for one need or another. As an author, I pay particular attention to the demand for books, and for now I see no reason to stop authoring books. I assure you that I don’t get rich from the effort, and fortunately that is not my motivation. As someone who likes to refer to books frequently, I am still a big believer in books and have evidence from book sales that there are others like me. If I can do my part to help others learn about the technologies I work with, I will continue to produce content in a variety of formats, including books. (You can view a list of all of my books on the Publications page of my site and my online training videos at Pluralsight.) As a consumer of technical information, I prefer books because a book typically can get into a topic much more deeply than a blog post, and can provide more context than vendor documentation. It comes with a table of contents and a (hopefully accurate) index that helps me zero in on a topic of interest, and of course I can use the Search feature in digital form. Some people suggest that technology books are outdated as soon as they get published. I guess it depends on where you are with technology. Not everyone is able to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at release. I do assume, however, that the SQL Server 7.0 titles in my library have little value for me now, but I’m certain that the minute I discard the book, I’m going to want it for some reason! Meanwhile, as electronic books overtake physical books in sales, my husband is grateful that I can continue to build my collection digitally rather than physically as the books have a way of taking over significant square footage in our house! Blog posts, on the other hand, are useful for describing the scenarios that come up in real-life implementations that wouldn’t fit neatly into a book. As many years that I have working with the Microsoft BI stack, I still run into new problems that require creative thinking. Likewise, people who work with BI and other technologies that I use share what they learn through their blogs. Internet search engines help us find information in blogs that simply isn’t available anywhere else. Another great thing about blogs, also, is the connection to community and the dialog that can ensue between people with common interests. With the trend towards electronic formats for books, I imagine that we’ll see books continue to adapt to incorporate different forms of media and better ways to keep the information current. At the moment, I wish I had a better way to help readers with my last two Reporting Services books. In the case of the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step book, I have heard many cases of readers having problems with the sample database that shipped on CD – either the database was missing or it was corrupt. So I’ve provided a copy of the database on my site for download from http://datainspirations.com/uploads/rs2005sbsDW.zip. Then for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step book, we decided to avoid the database problem by using the AdventureWorks2008 samples that Microsoft published on Codeplex (although code samples are still available on CD). We had this silly idea that the URL for the download would remain constant, but it seems that expectation was ill-founded. Currently, the sample database is found at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109 but I have no idea how long that will remain valid. My latest books (#9 and #10 which are milestones I never anticipated), Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 (McGraw Hill, 2011) and Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011), will not ship with a CD, but will provide all code samples for download at a site maintained by the respective publishers. I expect that the URLs for the downloads for the book will remain valid, but there are lots of references to other sites that can change or disappear over time. Does that mean authors shouldn’t make reference to such sites? Personally, I think the benefits to be gained from including links are greater than the risks of the links becoming invalid at some point. Do you think the time for technology books has come to an end? Is the delivery of books in electronic format enough to keep them alive? If technological barriers were no object, what would make a book more valuable to you than other formats through which you can obtain information?

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #004

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 Auto Generate Script to Delete Deprecated Fields in Current Database In early career everytime I have to drop a column, I had hard time doing it because I was scared what if that column was needed somewhere in the code. Due to this fear I never dropped any column. I just renamed the column. If the column which I renamed was needed afterwards it was very easy to rename it back again. However, it is not recommended to keep the deleted column renamed in the database. At every interval I used to drop the columns which was prefixed with specific word. This script is 6 years old but still works. Give it a look, I am open for improvements. 2007 Shrinking Truncate Log File – Log Full – Part 2 Shrinking database or mdf file is indeed bad thing and it creates lots of problems. However, once in a while there is legit requirement to shrink the log file – a very rare one. In the rare occasion shrinking or truncating the log file may be the only solution. However, one should make sure to take backup before and after the truncate or shrink as in case of a disaster they can be very useful. Remember that truncating log file will break the log chain and while restore it can create major issue. Anyway, use this feature with caution. 2008 Simple Use of Cursor to Print All Stored Procedures of Database Including Schema This is a very interesting requirement I used to face in my early career days, I needed to print all the Stored procedures of my database. Interesting enough I had written a cursor to do so. Today when I look back at this stored procedure, I believe there will be a much cleaner way to do the same task, however, I still use this SP quite often when I have to document all the stored procedures of my database. Interesting Observation about Order of Resultset without ORDER BY In industry many developers avoid using ORDER BY clause to display the result in particular order thinking that Index is enforcing the order. In this interesting example, I demonstrate that without using ORDER BY, same table and similar query can return different results. Query optimizer always returns results using any method which is optimized for performance. The learning is There is no order unless ORDER BY is used. 2009 Size of Index Table – A Puzzle to Find Index Size for Each Index on Table I asked this puzzle earlier where I asked how to find the Index size for each of the tables. The puzzle was very well received and lots of interesting answers were received. To answer this question I have written following blog posts. I suggest this weekend you try to solve this problem and see if you can come up with a better solution. If not, well here are the solutions. Solution 1 | Solution 2 | Solution 3 Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. The SQL Server Query optimizer is a very smart tool and it makes a better selection of execution plan. Suggesting hints to the Query Optimizer should be attempted when absolutely necessary and by experienced developers who know exactly what they are doing (or in development as a way to experiment and learn). Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY I have seen developers and DBAs using TOP very causally when they have to use the ORDER BY clause. Theoretically, there is no need of ORDER BY in the view at all. All the ordering should be done outside the view and view should just have the SELECT statement in it. It was quite common that to save this extra typing by including ordering inside of the view. At several instances developers want a complete resultset and for the same they include TOP 100 PERCENT along with ORDER BY, assuming that this will simulate the SELECT statement with ORDER BY. 2010 SQLPASS Nov 8-11, 2010-Seattle – An Alternative Look at Experience In year 2010 I attended most prestigious SQL Server event SQLPASS between Nov 8-11, 2010 at Seattle. I have only one expression for the event - Best Summit Ever. Instead of writing about my usual routine or the event, I wrote about the interesting things I did and how I felt about it! When I go back and read it, I feel that this is the best event I attended in year 2010. Change Database Access to Single User Mode Using SSMS Image says all. 2011 SQL Server 2012 has introduced new analytic functions. These functions were long awaited and I am glad that they are now here. Before when any of this function was needed, people used to write long T-SQL code to simulate these functions. But now there’s no need of doing so. Having available native function also helps performance as well readability. Function SQLAuthority MSDN CUME_DIST CUME_DIST CUME_DIST FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LEAD LEAD LEAD LAG LAG LAG PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Career guidance/advice for Junior-level Software Engineer [closed]

  - by John Do

  I have quite a few questions on my mind, so please bare with me. Please don't feel obligated to answer all of them, any as you choose will do. I'd appreciate if you could share some insight on any of these. Before I begin, some context: I currently have almost two years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, mainly developing software in Java. At this point, I feel that I have reached the peak in my career growth at the current company I am at and therefore I am looking for a new job, ideally again, as a Software Engineer. I have been interviewing for the past few months casually but have not had luck with companies I have a passion for. So, in no particular order - 1) In general, what are your thoughts on having graduate degrees in CS / Software Engineering. How much does it influence a salary increase, and do you think it's beneficial when working on real-world problems? I get the sense that a graduate degree in the field is trivial unless you really have a passion for research. 2) In general, in professional practice, how often had you have to write your own data structures and "complex" algorithms from scratch? In my own work, I have found myself relying mainly on third-party frameworks and the Java standard library to implement solutions as per business requirements. What are your thoughts on this? 3) In terms of resume, I feel the most ambivalent here. I want to be able to "blemish" my resume to a certain extent so that it stands out from others', but at the same time I do not want to over-exagerate my abilities. How do you strike a balance here? For example: I say that I am proficient in Java with data structures and algorithms. This is obviously a subjective and relative statement. I've taken the classes in my undergrad, and I've applied it in my work experience. What I feel as "prociency" can be seen as junior-level to others. How do you know what to say? Most of the time, recruiters (with no technical background) will be looking for keywords that stand out. This leads me to my next question (4). 4) Just from interviewing for the past few months (and getting plenty of rejections), I've come to realize that I may not be as proficient in data structures and algorithms as I thought I was. Do you think it's a good idea to remove the "proficient in java/data structure and algorithms"? I feel that being too hoenst on the resume will impede me from scoring opportunities to even have an interview with top-notch companies. What are your thoughts? 5) What is the absolute "must-have" knowledge going into a technical interview? I've been practicing several algorithmic and data sturcture problems now, and I feel that my abilities to solve arbitrary problems efficiently has not gotten significantly better. Do you think these abilities are something innate - it's either you have in you, or you don't? How can you teach yourself to learn, if you will? 6) How easy is it to go from industry/function to the next? I work mainly with backend technologies and I'm now interested in working with the frontend, i.e javascript,jquery,php or even mobile development. In your own experience, how did you not get pidgeon holed in your career? I feel that the choices you make now ultimately decide your future. As cliche as it sounds, I think it may be true. Here's what I mean: you've worked mainly as a backend engineer, people are interested in you doing the same thing since you've already accumulated experience in that function. How do get experience in a new function if people won't accept you because you don't already have it? It's a catch 22, you see... Are side projects the only real way to help you move from one function to another that you're truly interested in? For example: I could start writing my own mobile applications, even though I've worked mainly on the backend. Thanks so much for the long read. As a relatively new engineer to the real world, I am very humble and would like those who are experienced to shed some light. Thank you so much.

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• Poor Customer Service Example

  - by MightyZot

  Lately I have been frustrated by examples of poor customer service. At least one is worth writing about because I don’t think companies realize the effects of their service policies on loyal customers. Bad Customer Service Example #1 Recently, I received an offer in the mail from my cable company, suddenLink. The offer was for an updated TiVo for $12/mo. Normally I ignore offers like this one because I already have the service they’re offering and many times advertisers are offering alternatives to what is already an excellent product offering. I tend to exhibit a high level of loyalty to the products and brands that I use. In this case, we were looking to upgrade our TiVo and this deal is attractive for several reasons: I don’t want to pay a huge amount up-front for the device, so paying a monthly amount for the device is attractive to me. My entertainment is almost all on a single invoice. I’m no longer going to be billed by suddenLink and TiVo. TiVo is still involved, so I am still loyal to the brand I love. I have resisted moving to other DVRs and services for over a decade. I called suddenLink to order the new TiVo and was rewarded with great customer service. In fact, I can’t remember ever getting poor customer service from suddenLink. They are always there to answer my technical support questions and they are very responsive to outages. Then I called TiVo. First of all, I chose the option on the phone system to change or cancel my service, which was consequently met by an inordinate hold time. (I’m calling this time inordinate because I get through very quickly if I want to purchase something.) This is a trend that I’ve noticed with companies – if you want me to be loyal to you, it should be just as easy to cancel your service as it is to purchase it. Because, I should never be cancelling because I am unhappy. And, if you ever want my business again, or more importantly a reference, then you’d better make the exit door open just as easy as the enter door. After quite some time on hold, I talked to “Victor” who was very courteous. Victor canceled my service and then told me that I could keep my current TiVo and transfer recorded programs to it from the new TiVo.  Cool I said, but what about the cost?  He said there was no extra cost.  This was also attractive to me because I paid for my TiVo and it would be good to use it for something at least.  That was four months ago. This month I noticed that TiVo was still charging me for my original service. I was a little upset, but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, I am a loyal TiVo customer and I have resisted moving to other solutions for over a decade. I’m sure they will do whatever it takes to keep my business, through TiVo or through suddenLink. After quite some time on hold, I was able to talk to a customer service representative, “Les”. I explained that I am a loyal TiVo customer, but I purchased this deal through my cable provider. I’m still with TiVo, I just wanted a single bill and to take advantage of the pay-over-time option. “Les” told me that he was very sorry to hear that I’m leaving TiVo, to which I responded again that I wasn’t leaving TiVo, I just want one invoice, and to take advantage of the pay-over-time. So, after explaining that I requested a termination of the non-suddenLink account (TiVo can see both of course), I was put on hold again for quite some time while my refund was “approved”.  “Les” said that he could see my cancellation request back in July. Note that it is now November, so they have billed me inappropriately four times. After quite some time, he came back on the line and told me that he was able to “get me most of my money back.” He got approval to refund 90 days. Even though I requested cancellation of one of my accounts, TiVo has that cancellation request on file and they admit overbilling me, I am going to get “most” of my money back. To top this experience off, when we were ready to hang up, “Les” told me that he was sorry to see me go and that he hoped I would come back to TiVo again. Again, I explained to “Les” that I have not left TiVo. I am just paying them through suddenLink. At that point, he went into a small dissertation about how this is a special arrangement they have with suddenLink and very few others. He made me feel like I was doing something wrong. Why should I feel that way? TiVo made the deal with suddenLink, not me, and the deal seemed like a good compromise for me to be able to get what I need. Here is what TiVo Customer Service accomplished on those two calls – I no longer feel like I need to be loyal to the TiVo brand or service. If I had been treated better on these two calls, I would still be recommending TiVo to my friends. They would still be getting revenue from a loyal customer, who paid the same rate for over a decade, and this article wouldn’t be here for you to read. Interesting… In my opinion, if you want brand loyalty, be loyal to your customers!

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• Microsoft Forcing Dev/Partners Hands on Win 8 Through Certification

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I remember 2.5 years ago when Microsoft dropped a bomb on the Microsoft Partner community: all Gold competencies would require .NET 4 based premiere certifications (MCPD). Problem was, this gave a window of about 6 months for partners to update their employees’ certifications. At the place I was working, I put together an aggressive plan and we were able to attain the certs needed. Microsoft is always open that the certification requirements will change as the industry changes. .NET 1.0 certifications are useless here in 2012, and rightfully so they’ve been retired for a long time now. But now we’re seeing a new tactic by Microsoft – shifting gears away from certifications that speak to what industry needs and more to the Windows 8 agenda. Consider that currently the premiere development certification is the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, which comes in three flavours – Web, Windows, and Azure. All require WCF and Data Access exams, as well as one that deals with the associated base technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms/WPF, Azure), and one that ties all three together in a solution-based exam. For Microsoft-based organizations, these skills aren’t just valid but necessary in building Microsoft applications. But the MCPD is being replaced with our old friend Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD). So far, Microsoft has only released two types of MCSD – Web and Windows Store Apps. Windows Store Apps?! In a push to move developers to create WinRT-based applications, desktop development is now considered a second-class citizen in the eyes of Redmond. Also interesting are the language options for the exams: HTML5 and C#. Sorry VB folks, its time to embrace curly braces whether they be JavaScript or C#. Consider too the skills being assessed for the Windows Store Apps: Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcsd-windows-store-apps.aspx Nov 21/2012 If you look at the skills being tested in each exam, you’ll find that skills like WCF and Data Access are downplayed compared to things like integrating Charms, facilitating Search, programming for the microphone and camera – all very Windows 8 focussed items. Where this becomes maddening is that Microsoft is still pushing Windows 7 with enterprise clients. According to a ZDNet article, Microsoft wants to see Windows 7 on 70% of enterprise desktops by mid 2013. Assuming they somehow meet that (its a pretty lofty goal), there’s years of traditional desktop-based development that will still be required at some level. For those thinking they’ll just write and stick with the MCPD certification, note that most exams that go towards that certification will be retired at the end of July 2013! (Read the small print). And while details haven’t been finalized, its a safe bet that MCPD certifications eventually won’t count towards Gold-level competencies in the Microsoft Partner program. What this means for Microsoft Partners and Developers is that certification for desktop development is going to be limited to Windows Store Apps unless Microsoft re-introduces a traditional desktop (WPF) based MCSD cert. Web Application Development – It’s Not All Bad There’s big changes on the web side of certification, but I actually see these changes as being for the good! Check out the new exam requirements for MCSD – Web Applications: Get your MCSD: Web Applications certification *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-mcsd-web-applications.aspx Nov 21, 2012 We now *start* with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3! Now I’m sure that these will be slanted towards web development in IE, and I can hear designers everywhere bemoaning the CSS/IE combination. Still, I applaud Microsoft for adopting HTML5 as the go-to web technology and requiring certified developers to prove they have skills in the basics of web dev. The fact that the second exam clearly states “MVC Web Applications” shows that Web Forms is truly legacy and deprecated. That’s not to say there aren’t those out there that are still supporting or (for whatever reason) doing new dev with Web Forms, but this move by Microsoft is telling the community they better get on the MVC bandwagon if they want to stay current. Fantastic! And of course Azure needs to be here as well, and this is where the Microsoft agenda fits in. It’s no secret that there’s been a huge push in getting developers on to Azure. I don’t see this as being a bad thing either, as cloud computing (whether Azure, private, or 3rd party) is a necessary skill for developers to have here in 2012. The cynic in me realizes that the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS push wouldn’t be as prominent though if not for the Windows 8 Store App play, where HTML5 is a first class citizen (and an available language for the MCSD Windows Store App cert). In this case, the desktop developers loss is the web developers gain. Get Ready for Changes In addition to the changes in certifications, the Microsoft Partner competencies are going through changes as well. Web and Software Development are being merged into a single competency, meaning that licenses you would have received from having both as Gold are reduced. Other competencies are either being removed or changed, as are the exam requirements. In the same way that we’re seeing faster release cycles from Microsoft, so too will we see the Microsoft Partner Program and MS Certifications evolve faster than ever before. Many of us got caught in the last wave of changes, but this time we can see the wave coming – and it looks pretty big!

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• VirtualBox appliance for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products

  - by chlander

  It's been quite awhile since we last blogged. This blog is written by Leif Lourie, a Curriculum Developer for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) products. For the last 8 years, Leif has worked as a Curriculum Developer for many of the telecom-oriented products that Oracle offers. He has been working in the telecom industry for about 25 years and has also worked as a software developer, project manager, and solutions architect. He is currently working on courseware for an upcoming release for one of the Service Delivery Platform products. Thanks to Leif not only for this blog, but for making the VM described in the blog available. Cheryl Lander, Oracle Communications InfoDev Senior Director To be able to download, install and test a product within a day is many times very important for people that are doing the primary evaluation of a software product. If it takes longer, it will require a bigger effort, like a proof-of-concept project with many people involved. Of course, if the product is chosen for a more thorough test, it will probably happen anyway, but then maybe with focus on integration instead of product features. We have a long tradition of creating complex software that is easy to install and test and we have often been praised for the ease of getting our products up and running. One key for this has been that there has always been an installer for Windows, as well as for the production environments that usually are Unix and Linux. And, the windows installer has, in most cases, been released for developing and testing purposes. Lately, this has changed. Our products are very seldom released for the Windows platform, at all. And even the Linux versions are almost always released for 64-bit systems. This is creating problems for many of the people that want to try out our products, since few have access to a 64-bit Linux system of the right platform. Most of us are using a laptop with Windows or Mac OS. Some of us are using Linux or Solaris, but probably a non certified distribution for the product you want to test. My job, among other things, is to develop hands-on practices for our products. For me, it is crucial to have access to environments for installing and using our products. For this reason I have been using virtual machines for many years.I have a ready-made base system, with the necessary tools installed for all the products I create hands-on practices for. Whenever I start working on hands-on practices for a new product or a new version, I just copy the base system and start working with a clean slate. This saves me a lot of time! Now, I would like to start saving time for my favorite student: You! If you are using our products and regularly test new versions you might benefit from the virtual machine that is now available on Oracle Technology Network: The Virtual Machine for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products. This virtual machine contains an installation of the 64-bit version of Oracle Enterprise Linux, version 6. It also has Oracle Database Express Edition (XE), Oracle Java and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse installed. By using Oracle VM VirtualBox you may use Windows, OS X, Linux or Solaris on your laptop. VirtualBox can be installed on top of any of these platforms and give you the ability to run virtual machines in your laptop. After downloading and starting the virtual machine you will also need to download the installation files for the product you want to test; for example Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper or Oracle Communications Online Mediation Controller. In some cases there are lessons and practices available for the products. The freely available courses are listed in Oracle Learning Library as a Collection of Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform Courses. As time goes by, we will make this list collection bigger. Also, the goal is to update the virtual machine about one to two times per year. So you will always be able to get a well maintained virtual machine for the Service Delivery Platform products from us. We Value Your Feedback If you would like to suggest improvements or report issues on any of the product documentation, curriculum, or training produced by the Oracle Communications Information Development team, you can use these channels: Email [email protected]. Post a comment on this blog. Thanks for reading!

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• Ransomware: Why This New Malware is So Dangerous and How to Protect Yourself

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ransomware is a type of malware that tries to extort money from you. One of the nastiest examples, CryptoLocker, takes your files hostage and holds them for ransom, forcing you to pay hundreds of dollars to regain access. Most malware is no longer created by bored teenagers looking to cause some chaos. Much of the current malware is now produced by organized crime for profit and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. How Ransomware Works Not all ransomware is identical. The key thing that makes a piece of malware “ransomware” is that it attempts to extort a direct payment from you. Some ransomware may be disguised. It may function as “scareware,” displaying a pop-up that says something like “Your computer is infected, purchase this product to fix the infection” or “Your computer has been used to download illegal files, pay a fine to continue using your computer.” In other situations, ransomware may be more up-front. It may hook deep into your system, displaying a message saying that it will only go away when you pay money to the ransomware’s creators. This type of malware could be bypassed via malware removal tools or just by reinstalling Windows. Unfortunately, Ransomware is becoming more and more sophisticated. One of the latest examples, CryptoLocker, starts encrypting your personal files as soon as it gains access to your system, preventing access to the files without knowing the encryption key. CryptoLocker then displays a message informing you that your files have been locked with encryption and that you have just a few days to pay up. If you pay them $300, they’ll hand you the encryption key and you can recover your files. CryptoLocker helpfully walks you through choosing a payment method and, after paying, the criminals seem to actually give you a key that you can use to restore your files. You can never be sure that the criminals will keep their end of the deal, of course. It’s not a good idea to pay up when you’re extorted by criminals. On the other hand, businesses that lose their only copy of business-critical data may be tempted to take the risk — and it’s hard to blame them. Protecting Your Files From Ransomware This type of malware is another good example of why backups are essential. You should regularly back up files to an external hard drive or a remote file storage server. If all your copies of your files are on your computer, malware that infects your computer could encrypt them all and restrict access — or even delete them entirely. When backing up files, be sure to back up your personal files to a location where they can’t be written to or erased. For example, place them on a removable hard drive or upload them to a remote backup service like CrashPlan that would allow you to revert to previous versions of files. Don’t just store your backups on an internal hard drive or network share you have write access to. The ransomware could encrypt the files on your connected backup drive or on your network share if you have full write access. Frequent backups are also important. You wouldn’t want to lose a week’s worth of work because you only back up your files every week. This is part of the reason why automated back-up solutions are so convenient. If your files do become locked by ransomware and you don’t have the appropriate backups, you can try recovering them with ShadowExplorer. This tool accesses “Shadow Copies,” which Windows uses for System Restore — they will often contain some personal files. How to Avoid Ransomware Aside from using a proper backup strategy, you can avoid ransomware in the same way you avoid other forms of malware. CryptoLocker has been verified to arrive through email attachments, via the Java plug-in, and installed on computers that are part of the Zeus botnet. Use a good antivirus product that will attempt to stop ransomware in its tracks. Antivirus programs are never perfect and you could be infected even if you run one, but it’s an important layer of defense. Avoid running suspicious files. Ransomware can arrive in .exe files attached to emails, from illicit websites containing pirated software, or anywhere else that malware comes from. Be alert and exercise caution over the files you download and run. Keep your software updated. Using an old version of your web browser, operating system, or a browser plugin can allow malware in through open security holes. If you have Java installed, you should probably uninstall it. For more tips, read our list of important security practices you should be following. Ransomware — CryptoLocker in particular — is brutally efficient and smart. It just wants to get down to business and take your money. Holding your files hostage is an effective way to prevent removal by antivirus programs after it’s taken root, but CryptoLocker is much less scary if you have good backups. This sort of malware demonstrates the importance of backups as well as proper security practices. Unfortunately, CryptoLocker is probably a sign of things to come — it’s the kind of malware we’ll likely be seeing more of in the future.     

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• How Important is Project Team Communication in the Public Sector?

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} By Paul Bender, Director of Public Administration Strategy, Oracle Primavera It goes without saying that communication between project team members is a core competency that connects every member of a project team to a common set of strategies, goals and actions. If these components are not effectively shared by project leads and understood by stakeholders, project outcomes can be jeopardized and budgets may incur unnecessary risk. As reported by PMI’s 2013 Pulse of the Profession, an organization’s ability to meet project timelines, budgets and especially goals significantly impacts its ability to survive—and even thrive. The Pulse study revealed that the most crucial success factor in project management is effective communication to all stakeholders—a critical core competency for public agencies. PMI’s 2013 Pulse of the Profession report revealed that US$135 million is at risk for every US$1 billion spent on a project. Further research on the importance of effective project team communication uncovers that a startling 56 percent (US$75 million of that US$135 million) is at risk due to ineffective communication. Simply stated: public agencies cannot execute strategic initiatives unless they can effectively communicate their strategic alignment and business benefits. Executives and project managers around the world agree that poor communication between project team members contributes to project failure. A Forbes Insights 2010 Strategic Initiatives Study “Adapting Corporate Strategy to the Changing Economy,” found that nine out of ten CEOs believe that communication is critical to the success of their strategic initiatives, and nearly half of respondents cite communication as an integral and active component of their strategic planning and execution process. Project managers see it similarly from their side as well. According to PMI’s Pulse research, 55 percent of project managers agree that effective communication to all stakeholders is the most critical success factor in project management. As we all know, not all projects succeed. On average, two in five projects do not meet their original goals and business intent, and one-half of those unsuccessful projects are related to ineffective communication. Results reveal that while all aspects of project communication can be challenging to public agencies, the biggest problem areas are: A gap in understanding the business benefits. Challenges surrounding the language used to deliver project-related information, which is often unclear and peppered with project management jargon. Public agencies -- federal, state, and local -- have difficulty communicating with the appropriate levels with clarity and detail. This difficulty is likely exacerbated by the divide between each key audience and its understanding of project-specific, technical language. For those involved in public sector project and portfolio management, I would be interested to hear your thoughts and please visit Primavera EPPM solutions for public sector.

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• To My 24 Year Old Self, Wherever You Are&hellip;

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  A decade is a milestone in one’s life, regardless of when it occurs. 2011 might seem like a weird year to mark a decade, but 2001 was a defining year for me. It marked my emergence into the technology industry, an unexpected loss of innocence, and triggered an ongoing struggle with faith and belief. Once you go through a valley, climbing the mountain and looking back over where you travelled, you can take in the entirety of the journey. Over the last 10 years I kept journals, and in this new year I took some time to review them. For those today that are me a decade ago, I share with you what I’ve gleamed from my experiences. Take it for what it’s worth, and safe travels on your own journeys through life. Life is a Performance-Based Sport Have confidence, believe you’re capable, but realize that life is a performance-based sport. Everything you get in life is based on whether you can show that you deserve it. Performance is also your best defense against personal attacks. Just make sure you know what standards you’re expected to hit and if people want to poke holes at you let them do the work of trying to find them. Sometimes performance won’t matter though. Good things will happen to bad people, and bad things to good people. What’s important is that you do the right things and ensure the good and bad even out in your own life. How you finish is just as important as how you start. Start strong, end strong. Respect is Your Most Prized Reward Respect is more important than status or ego. The formula is simple: Performing Well + Building Trust + Showing Dedication = Respect Focus on perfecting your craft and helping your team and respect will come. Life is a Team Sport Whatever aspect of your life, you can’t do it alone. You need to rely on the people around you and ensure you’re a positive aspect of their lives; even those that may be difficult or unpleasant. Avoid criticism and instead find ways to help colleagues and superiors better whatever environment you’re in (work, home, etc.). Don’t just highlight gaps and issues, but also come to the table with solutions. At the same time though, stand up for yourself and hold others accountable for the commitments they make to the team. A healthy team needs accountability. Give feedback early and often, and make it verbal. Issues should be dealt with immediately, and positives should be celebrated as they happen. Life is a Contact Sport Difficult moments will happen. Don’t run from them or shield yourself from experiencing them. Embrace them. They will further mold you and reveal who you will become. Find Your Tribe and Embrace Your Community We all need a tribe: a group of people that we gravitate to for support, guidance, wisdom, and friendship. Discover your tribe and immerse yourself in them. Don’t look for a non-existent tribe just to fill the need of belonging though that will leave you empty and bitter when they don’t meet your unrealistic expectations. Try to associate with people more experienced and more knowledgeable than you. You’ll always learn, and you’ll always remember you have much to learn. Put yourself out there, get involved with the community. Opportunities will present themselves. When we open ourselves up to be vulnerable, we also give others the chance to do the same. This helps us all to grow and help each other, it’s very important. And listen to your wife. (Easter *is* a romantic holiday btw, regardless of what you may think.) Don’t Believe Your Own Press Clippings (and by that I mean the ones you write) Until you have a track record of performance to refer to, any notions of grandeur are just that: notions. You lose your rookie status through trials and tribulations, not by the number of stamps in your passport. Be realistic about your own “experience and leadership” and be honest when you aren’t ready for something. And always remember: nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Don’t Let Assholes Get You Down The world isn’t evil, but there is evil in the world. Know the difference and don’t paint all people with the same brush. Do be wary of those that use personal beliefs to describe their business (i.e. “We’re a [religion] company”). What matters is the culture of the organization, and that will tell you the moral compass and what is truly valued. Don’t make someone or something a priority that only makes you an option. Life is unfair and enemies/opponents will succeed when you fail. Don’t waste your energy getting upset at this; the only one that will lose out is you. As mentioned earlier, nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Misc Ecclesiastes is bullshit. Everything is certainly *not* meaningless. Software development is about delivery, not the process. Having a great process means nothing if you don’t produce anything. Watch “The Weatherman” (“It’s not easy, but easy doesn’t enter into grownup life.”). Read Tony Dungee’s autobiography, even if you don’t like football, and even if you aren’t a Christian. Say no, don’t feel like you have to commit right away when someone asks you to.

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• #OOW 2012 @PARIS...talking Oracle and Clouds, and Optimized Datacenter

  - by Eric Bezille

  For those of you who want to get most out of Oracle technologies to evolve your IT to the Next Wave, I encourage you to register to the up coming Oracle Optimized Datacenter event that will take place in Paris on November 28th. You will get the opportunity to exchange with Oracle experts and customers having successfully evolve their IT by leveraging Oracle technologies. You will also get the latest news on some of the Oracle systems announcements made during OOW 2012. During this event we will make an update about Oracle and Clouds, from private to public and hybrid models. So in preparing this session, I thought it was a good start to make a status of Cloud Computing in France, and CIO requirements in particular. Starting in 2009 with the first Cloud Camp in Paris, the market has evolved, but the basics are still the same : think hybrid. From Traditional IT to Clouds One size doesn't fit all, and for big companies having already an IT in place, there will be parts eligible to external (public) cloud, and parts that would be required to stay inside the firewalls, so ability to integrate both side is key.  None the less, one of the major impact of Cloud Computing trend on IT, reported by Forrester, is the pressure it makes on CIO to evolve towards the same model that end-users are now used to in their day to day life, where self-service and flexibility are paramount. This is what is driving IT to transform itself toward "a Global Service Provider", or for some as "IT "is" the Business" (see : Gartner Identifies Four Futures for IT and CIO), and for both models toward a Private Cloud Service Provider. In this journey, there is still a big difference between most of existing external Cloud and a firm IT : the number of applications that a CIO has to manage. Most cloud providers today are overly specialized, but at the end of the day, there are really few business processes that rely on only one application. So CIOs has to combine everything together external and internal. And for the internal parts that they will have to make them evolve to a Private Cloud, the scope can be very large. This will often require CIOs to evolve from their traditional approach to more disruptive ones, the time has come to introduce new standards and processes, if they want to succeed. So let's have a look at the different Cloud models, what type of users they are addressing, what value they bring and most importantly what needs to be done by the  Cloud Provider, and what is left over to the user. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS : what's provided and what needs to be done First of all the Cloud Provider will have to provide all the infrastructure needed to deliver the service. And the more value IT will want to provide, the more IT will have to deliver and integrate : from disks to applications. As we can see in the above picture, providing pure IaaS, left a lot to cover for the end-user, that’s why the end-user targeted by this Cloud Service is IT people. If you want to bring more value to developers, you need to provide to them a development platform ready to use, which is what PaaS is standing for, by providing not only the processors power, storage and OS, but also the Database and Middleware platform. SaaS being the last mile of the Cloud, providing an application ready to use by business users, the remaining part for the end-users being configuring and specifying the application for their specific usage. In addition to that, there are common challenges encompassing all type of Cloud Services : Security : covering all aspect, not only of users management but also data flows and data privacy Charge back : measuring what is used and by whom Application management : providing capabilities not only to deploy, but also to upgrade, from OS for IaaS, Database, and Middleware for PaaS, to a full Business Application for SaaS. Scalability : ability to evolve ALL the components of the Cloud Provider stack as needed Availability : ability to cover “always on” requirements Efficiency : providing a infrastructure that leverage shared resources in an efficient way and still comply to SLA (performances, availability, scalability, and ability to evolve) Automation : providing the orchestration of ALL the components in all service life-cycle (deployment, growth & shrink (elasticity), upgrades,...) Management : providing monitoring, configuring and self-service up to the end-users Oracle Strategy and Clouds For CIOs to succeed in their Private Cloud implementation, means that they encompass all those aspects for each component life-cycle that they selected to build their Cloud. That’s where a multi-vendors layered approach comes short in terms of efficiency. That’s the reason why Oracle focus on taking care of all those aspects directly at Engineering level, to truly provide efficient Cloud Services solutions for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. We are going as far as embedding software functions in hardware (storage, processor level,...) to ensure the best SLA with the highest efficiency. The beauty of it, as we rely on standards, is that the Oracle components that you are running today in-house, are exactly the same that we are using to build Clouds, bringing you flexibility, reversibility and fast path to adoption. With Oracle Engineered Systems (Exadata, Exalogic & SPARC SuperCluster, more specifically, when talking about Cloud), we are delivering all those components hardware and software already engineered together at Oracle factory, with a single pane of glace for the management of ALL the components through Oracle Enterprise Manager, and with high-availability, scalability and ability to evolve by design. To give you a feeling of what does that bring in terms just of implementation project timeline, for example with Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, we have a consistent track of record to have the system plug into existing Datacenter and ready in a week. This includes Oracle Database, OS, virtualization, Database Storage (Exadata Storage Cells in this case), Application Storage, and all network configuration. This strategy enable CIOs to very quickly build Cloud Services, taking out not only the complexity of integrating everything together but also taking out the automation and evolution complexity and cost. I invite you to discuss all those aspect in regards of your particular context face2face on November 28th.

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• Invitation to the Oracle EDGE Applications Partner Roadshow

  - by Hartmut Wiese

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is a unique opportunity for any Oracle Alliance & Channel Managers & their Partners to connect with the Oracle Edge Sales and Management Team to understand the relevance and value of the entire Oracle Edge Portfolio of Applications in solving complex customer issues and supporting a variety of evolving Partner Go-To-Market business models. Oracle Edge Applications (PLM, VCE, VCP, MDM, GRC, OPA) With strong participation from the key Oracle Edge Applications Sales business leaders, attendees will get the opportunity to hear about the benefits of the Oracle Edge Solutions within three different value-added contexts: Value 1: Oracle Edge Application Strategy Value 2: Oracle Value Chain Transformation Vision Value 3: Individual Application Business Line Differentiators Following on from the morning presentations, Oracle Partners will also get the opportunity in the afternoon to challenge and discuss the value of Oracle Edge Applications in the context of their own Go-To-Market business models. These sensitive discussions will be managed via focused 1-2-1 breakout meetings with the relevant Oracle Edge Applications Sales Business Leaders. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When Where To Register Tuesday, July 09th 2013 09 am to 04 pm Utrecht Register now Tuesday, July 16th 2013 09 am to 04 pm London Register now Wednesday, August 28th 2013 09 am to 04 pm Paris Register now IIMPORTANT NOTE: ONLY 60 ATTENDEE PLACES AVAILABLE PER LOCATION - BOOK NOW TO AVOID MISSING OUT. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} There is a strict limit to the number of people who can attend this event based on site logistics for the day. Please note that Partners will be given priority over Oracle personnel registrations. Partners however may only register a maximum of 2 personnel from their company plus the supporting local Oracle Alliance & Channel Manager /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Visual Tree Enumeration

  - by codingbloke

  I feel compelled to post this blog because I find I’m repeatedly posting this same code in silverlight and windows-phone-7 answers in Stackoverflow. One common task that we feel we need to do is burrow into the visual tree in a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application (actually more recently I found myself doing this in WPF as well).  This allows access to details that aren’t exposed directly by some controls.  A good example of this sort of requirement is found in the “Restoring exact scroll position of a listbox in Windows Phone 7”  question on stackoverflow.  This required that the scroll position of the scroll viewer internal to a listbox be accessed. A caveat One caveat here is that we should seriously challenge the need for this burrowing since it may indicate that there is a design problem.  Burrowing into the visual tree or indeed burrowing out to containing ancestors could represent significant coupling between module boundaries and that generally isn’t a good idea. Why isn’t this idea just not cast aside as a no-no?  Well the whole concept of a “Templated Control”, which are in extensive use in these applications, opens the coupling between the content of the visual tree and the internal code of a control.   For example, I can completely change the appearance and positioning of elements that make up a ComboBox.  The ComboBox control relies on specific template parts having set names of a specified type being present in my template.  Rightly or wrongly this does kind of give license to writing code that has similar coupling. Hasn’t this been done already? Yes it has.  There are number of blogs already out there with similar solutions.  In fact if you are using Silverlight toolkit the VisualTreeExtensions class already provides this feature.  However I prefer my specific code because of the simplicity principle I hold to.  Only write the minimum code necessary to give all the features needed.  In this case I add just two extension methods Ancestors and Descendents, note I don’t bother with “Get” or “Visual” prefixes.  Also I haven’t added Parent or Children methods nor additional “AndSelf” methods because all but Children is achievable with the addition of some other Linq methods.  I decided to give Descendents an additional overload for depth hence a depth of 1 is equivalent to Children but this overload is a little more flexible than simply Children. So here is the code:- VisualTreeEnumeration public static class VisualTreeEnumeration {     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root, int depth)     {         int count = VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(root);         for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)         {             var child = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(root, i);             yield return child;             if (depth > 0)             {                 foreach (var descendent in Descendents(child, --depth))                     yield return descendent;             }         }     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root)     {         return Descendents(root, Int32.MaxValue);     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Ancestors(this DependencyObject root)     {         DependencyObject current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(root);         while (current != null)         {             yield return current;             current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(current);         }     } }   Usage examples The following are some examples of how to combine the above extension methods with Linq to generate the other axis scenarios that tree traversal code might require. Missing Axis Scenarios var parent = control.Ancestors().Take(1).FirstOrDefault(); var children = control.Descendents(1); var previousSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).TakeWhile(c => c != control)); var followingSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).SkipWhile(c => c != control).Skip(1)); var ancestorsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Ancestors()); var descendentsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Descendents()); You might ask why I don’t just include these in the VisualTreeEnumerator.  I don’t on the principle of only including code that is actually needed.  If you find that one or more of the above  is needed in your code then go ahead and create additional methods.  One of the downsides to Extension methods is that they can make finding the method you actually want in intellisense harder. Here are some real world usage scenarios for these methods:- Real World Scenarios //Gets the internal scrollviewer of a ListBox ScrollViewer sv = someListBox.Descendents().OfType<ScrollViewer>().FirstOrDefault(); // Get all text boxes in current UserControl:- var textBoxes = this.Descendents().OfType<TextBox>(); // All UIElement direct children of the layout root grid:- var topLevelElements = LayoutRoot.Descendents(0).OfType<UIElement>(); // Find the containing `ListBoxItem` for a UIElement:- var container = elem.Ancestors().OfType<ListBoxItem>().FirstOrDefault(); // Seek a button with the name "PinkElephants" even if outside of the current Namescope:- var pinkElephantsButton = this.Descendents()     .OfType<Button>()     .FirstOrDefault(b => b.Name == "PinkElephants"); //Clear all checkboxes with the name "Selector" in a Treeview foreach (CheckBox checkBox in elem.Descendents()     .OfType<CheckBox>().Where(c => c.Name == "Selector")) {     checkBox.IsChecked = false; }   The last couple of examples above demonstrate a common requirement of finding controls that have a specific name.  FindName will often not find these controls because they exist in a different namescope. Hope you find this useful, if not I’m just glad to be able to link to this blog in future stackoverflow answers.

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• Data management in unexpected places

  - by Ashok_Ora

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Data management in unexpected places When you think of network switches, routers, firewall appliances, etc., it may not be obvious that at the heart of these kinds of solutions is an engine that can manage huge amounts of data at very high throughput with low latencies and high availability. Consider a network router that is processing tens (or hundreds) of thousands of network packets per second. So what really happens inside a router? Packets are streaming in at the rate of tens of thousands per second. Each packet has multiple attributes, for example, a destination, associated SLAs etc. For each packet, the router has to determine the address of the next “hop” to the destination; it has to determine how to prioritize this packet. If it’s a high priority packet, then it has to be sent on its way before lower priority packets. As a consequence of prioritizing high priority packets, lower priority data packets may need to be temporarily stored (held back), but addressed fairly. If there are security or privacy requirements associated with the data packet, those have to be enforced. You probably need to keep track of statistics related to the packets processed (someone’s sure to ask). You have to do all this (and more) while preserving high availability i.e. if one of the processors in the router goes down, you have to have a way to continue processing without interruption (the customer won’t be happy with a “choppy” VoIP conversation, right?). And all this has to be achieved without ANY intervention from a human operator – the router is most likely to be in a remote location – it must JUST CONTINUE TO WORK CORRECTLY, even when bad things happen. How is this implemented? As soon as a packet arrives, it is interpreted by the receiving software. The software decodes the packet headers in order to determine the destination, kind of packet (e.g. voice vs. data), SLAs associated with the “owner” of the packet etc. It looks up the internal database of “rules” of how to process this packet and handles the packet accordingly. The software might choose to hold on to the packet safely for some period of time, if it’s a low priority packet. Ah – this sounds very much like a database problem. For each packet, you have to minimally · Look up the most efficient next “hop” towards the destination. The “most efficient” next hop can change, depending on latency, availability etc. · Look up the SLA and determine the priority of this packet (e.g. voice calls get priority over data ftp) · Look up security information associated with this data packet. It may be necessary to retrieve the context for this network packet since a network packet is a small “slice” of a session. The context for the “header” packet needs to be stored in the router, in order to make this work. · If the priority of the packet is low, then “store” the packet temporarily in the router until it is time to forward the packet to the next hop. · Update various statistics about the packet. In most cases, you have to do all this in the context of a single transaction. For example, you want to look up the forwarding address and perform the “send” in a single transaction so that the forwarding address doesn’t change while you’re sending the packet. So, how do you do all this? Berkeley DB is a proven, reliable, high performance, highly available embeddable database, designed for exactly these kinds of usage scenarios. Berkeley DB is a robust, reliable, proven solution that is currently being used in these scenarios. First and foremost, Berkeley DB (or BDB for short) is very very fast. It can process tens or hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. It can be used as a pure in-memory database, or as a disk-persistent database. BDB provides high availability – if one board in the router fails, the system can automatically failover to another board – no manual intervention required. BDB is self-administering – there’s no need for manual intervention in order to maintain a BDB application. No need to send a technician to a remote site in the middle of nowhere on a freezing winter day to perform maintenance operations. BDB is used in over 200 million deployments worldwide for the past two decades for mission-critical applications such as the one described here. You have a choice of spending valuable resources to implement similar functionality, or, you could simply embed BDB in your application and off you go! I know what I’d do – choose BDB, so I can focus on my business problem. What will you do? /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• Most Innovative IDM Projects: Awards at OpenWorld

  - by Tanu Sood

  On Tuesday at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Oracle recognized the winners of Innovation Awards 2012 at a ceremony presided over by Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President at Oracle. Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards recognize customers for achieving significant business value through innovative uses of Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. This year’s Award honors customers for their cutting-edge solutions driving business innovation and IT modernization using Oracle Fusion Middleware. The program has grown over the past 6 years, receiving a record number of nominations from customers around the globe. The winners were selected by a panel of judges that ranked each nomination across multiple different scoring categories. Congratulations to both Avea and ETS for winning this year’s Innovation Award for Identity Management. Identity Management Innovation Award 2012 Winner – Avea Company: Founded in 2004, AveA is the sole GSM 1800 mobile operator of Turkey and has reached a nationwide customer base of 12.8 million as of the end of 2011 Region: Turkey (EMEA) Products: Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics, Oracle Access Management Suite Business Drivers: ·         To manage the agility and scale required for GSM Operations and enable call center efficiency by enabling agents to change their identity profiles (accounts and entitlements) rapidly based on call load. ·         Enhance user productivity and call center efficiency with self service password resets ·         Enforce compliance and audit reporting ·         Seamless identity management between AveA and parent company Turk Telecom Innovation and Results: ·         One of the first Sun2Oracle identity management migrations designed for high performance provisioning and trusted reconciliation built with connectors developed on the ICF architecture that provides custom user interfaces for  dynamic and rapid management of roles and entitlements along with entitlement level attestation using closed loop remediation between Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Identity Analytics. ·         Dramatic reduction in identity administration and call center password reset tasks leading to 20% reduction in administration costs and 95% reduction in password related calls. ·         Enhanced user productivity by up to 25% to date ·         Enforced enterprise security and reduced risk ·         Cost-effective compliance management ·         Looking to seamlessly integrate with parent and sister companies’ infrastructure securely. Identity Management Innovation Award 2012 Winner – Education Testing Service (ETS)       See last year's winners here --Company: ETS is a private nonprofit organization devoted to educational measurement and research, primarily through testing. Region: U.S.A (North America) Products: Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Federation, Oracle Identity Manager Business Drivers: ETS develops and administers more than 50 million achievement and admissions tests each year in more than 180 countries, at more than 9,000 locations worldwide.  As the business becomes more globally based, having a robust solution to security and user management issues becomes paramount. The organizations was looking for: ·         Simplified user experience for over 3000 company users and more than 6 million dynamic student and staff population ·         Infrastructure and administration cost reduction ·         Managing security risk by controlling 3rd party access to ETS systems ·         Enforce compliance and manage audit reporting ·         Automate on-boarding and decommissioning of user account to improve security, reduce administration costs and enhance user productivity ·         Improve user experience with simplified sign-on and user self service Innovation and Results: 1.    Manage Risk ·         Centralized system to control user access ·         Provided secure way of accessing service providers' application using federated SSO. ·         Provides reporting capability for auditing, governance and compliance. 2.    Improve efficiency ·         Real-Time provisioning to target systems ·         Centralized provisioning system for user management and access controls. ·         Enabling user self services. 3.    Reduce cost ·         Re-using common shared services for provisioning, SSO, Access by application reducing development cost and time. ·         Reducing infrastructure and maintenance cost by decommissioning legacy/redundant IDM services. ·         Reducing time and effort to implement security functionality in business applications (“onboard” instead of new development). ETS was able to fold in new and evolving requirement in addition to the initial stated goals realizing quick ROI and successfully meeting business objectives. Congratulations to the winners once again. We will be sure to bring you more from these Innovation Award winners over the next few months.

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• Why everybody should do Sales!

  - by FelixWehmeyer

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

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• How to Implement Single Sign-On between Websites

  - by hmloo

  Introduction Single sign-on (SSO) is a way to control access to multiple related but independent systems, a user only needs to log in once and gains access to all other systems. a lot of commercial systems that provide Single sign-on solution and you can also choose some open source solutions like Opensso, CAS etc. both of them use centralized authentication and provide more robust authentication mechanism, but if each system has its own authentication mechanism, how do we provide a seamless transition between them. Here I will show you the case. How it Works The method we’ll use is based on a secret key shared between the sites. Origin site has a method to build up a hashed authentication token with some other parameters and redirect the user to the target site. variables Status Description ssoEncode required hash(ssoSharedSecret + , + ssoTime + , + ssoUserName) ssoTime required timestamp with format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS used to prevent playback attacks ssoUserName required unique username; required when a user is logged in Note : The variables will be sent via POST for security reasons Building a Single Sign-On Solution Origin Site has function to 1. Create the URL for your Request. 2. Generate required authentication parameters 3. Redirect to target site. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string postbackUrl = "http://www.targetsite.com/sso.aspx"; string ssoTime = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss"); string ssoUserName = User.Identity.Name; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string ssoHash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); string value = string.Format("{0}:{1},{2}", ssoHash,ssoTime, ssoUserName); Response.Clear(); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.Append("<html>"); sb.AppendFormat(@"<body onload='document.forms[""form""].submit()'>"); sb.AppendFormat("<form name='form' action='{0}' method='post'>", postbackUrl); sb.AppendFormat("<input type='hidden' name='t' value='{0}'>", value); sb.Append("</form>"); sb.Append("</body>"); sb.Append("</html>"); Response.Write(sb.ToString()); Response.End(); } } Target Site has function to 1. Get authentication parameters. 2. Validate the parameters with shared secret. 3. If the user is valid, then do authenticate and redirect to target page. 4. If the user is invalid, then show errors and return. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { Response.Redirect("~/Default.aspx"); } } if (Request.Params.Get("t") != null) { string ticket = Request.Params.Get("t"); char[] delimiters = new char[] { ':', ',' }; string[] ssoVariable = ticket.Split(delimiters, StringSplitOptions.None); string ssoHash = ssoVariable[0]; string ssoTime = ssoVariable[1]; string ssoUserName = ssoVariable[2]; DateTime appTime = DateTime.MinValue; int offsetTime = 60; // get this from config or similar try { appTime = DateTime.ParseExact(ssoTime, "yyyyMMddHHmmss", null); } catch { //show error return; } if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } bool isValid = false; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string hash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); if (string.Compare(ssoHash, hash, true) == 0) { if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } else { isValid = true; } } if (isValid) { //Do authenticate; } else { //show error return; } } else { //show error } } } Summary This is a very simple and basic SSO solution, and its main advantage is its simplicity, only needs to add a single page to do SSO authentication, do not need to modify the existing system infrastructure.

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• BYOD-The Tablet Difference

  - by Samantha.Y. Ma

  By Allison Kutz, Lindsay Richardson, and Jennifer Rossbach, Sales Consultants Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW 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";} Less than three years ago, Apple introduced a new concept to the world: The Tablet. It’s hard to believe that in only 32 months, the iPad induced an entire new way to do business. Because of their mobility and ease-of-use, tablets have grown in popularity to keep up with the increasing “on the go” lifestyle, and their popularity isn’t expected to decrease any time soon. In fact, global tablet sales are expected to increase drastically within the next five years, from 56 million tablets to 375 million by 2016. Tablets have been utilized for every function imaginable in today’s world. With over 730,000 active applications available for the iPad, these tablets are educational devices, portable book collections, gateways into social media, entertainment for children when Mom and Dad need a minute on their own, and so much more. It’s no wonder that 74% of those who own a tablet use it daily, 60% use it several times a day, and an average of 13.9 hours per week are spent tapping away. Tablets have become a critical part of a user’s personal life; but why stop there? Businesses today are taking major strides in implementing these devices, with the hopes of benefiting from efficiency and productivity gains. Limo and taxi drivers use tablets as payment devices instead of traditional cash transactions. Retail outlets use tablets to find the exact merchandise customers are looking for. Professors use tablets to teach their classes, and business professionals demonstrate solutions and review reports from tablets. Since an overwhelming majority of tablet users have started to use their personal iPads, PlayBooks, Galaxys, etc. in the workforce, organizations have had to make a change. In many cases, companies are willing to make that change. In fact, 79% of companies are making new investments in mobility this year. Gartner reported that 90% of organizations are expected to support corporate applications on personal devices by 2014. It’s not just companies that are changing. Business professionals have become accustomed to tablets making their personal lives easier, and want that same effect in the workplace. Professionals no longer want to waste time manually entering data in their computer, or worse yet in a notebook, especially when the data has to be later transcribed to an online system. The response: the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon. According to Gartner, BOYD is “an alternative strategy allowing employees, business partners and other users to utilize a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data.” Employees whose companies embrace this trend are more efficient because they get to use devices they are already accustomed to. Tablets change the game when it comes to how sales professionals perform their jobs. Sales reps can easily store and access customer information and analytics using tablet applications, such as Oracle Fusion Tap. This method is much more enticing for sales reps than spending time logging interactions on their (what seem to be outdated) computers. Forrester & IDC reported that on average sales reps spend 65% of their time on activities other than selling, so having a tablet application to use on the go is extremely powerful. In February, Information Week released a list of “9 Powerful Business Uses for Tablet Computers,” ranging from “enhancing the customer experience” to “improving data accuracy” to “eco-friendly motivations”. Tablets compliment the lifestyle of professionals who strive to be effective and efficient, both in the office and on the road. Three Things Businesses Need to do to Embrace BYOD Make customer-facing websites tablet-friendly for consistent user experiences Develop tablet applications to continue to enhance the customer experience Embrace and use the technology that comes with tablets Almost 55 million people in the U.S. own tablets because they are convenient, easy, and powerful. These are qualities that companies strive to achieve with any piece of technology. The inherent power of the devices coupled with the growing number of business applications ensures that tablets will transform the way that companies and employees perform.

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• Business Case for investing time developing Stubs and BizUnit Tests

  - by charlie.mott

  I was recently in a position where I had to justify why effort should be spent developing Stubbed Integration Tests for BizTalk solutions. These tests are usually developed using the BizUnit framework. I assumed that most seasoned BizTalk developers would consider this best practice. Even though Microsoft suggest use of BizUnit on MSDN, I've not found a single site listing the justifications for investing time writing stubs and BizUnit tests. Stubs Stubs should be developed to isolate your development team from external dependencies. This is described by Michael Stephenson here. Failing to do this can result in the following problems: In contract-first scenarios, the external system interface will have been defined.  But the interface may not have been setup or even developed yet for the BizTalk developers to work with. By the time you open the target location to see the data BizTalk has sent, it may have been swept away. If you are relying on the UI of the target system to see the data BizTalk has sent, what do you do if it fails to arrive? It may take time for the data to be processed or it may be scheduled to be processed later. Learning how to use the source\target systems and investigations into where things go wrong in these systems will slow down the BizTalk development effort. By the time the data is visible in a UI it may have undergone further transformations. In larger development teams working together, do you all use the same source and target instances. How do you know which data was created by whose tests? How do you know which event log error message are whose?  Another developer may have “cleaned up” your data. It is harder to write BizUnit tests that clean up the data\logs after each test run. What if your B2B partners' source or target system cannot support the sort of testing you want to do. They may not even have a development or test instance that you can work with. Their single test instance may be used by the SIT\UAT teams. There may be licencing costs of setting up an instances of the external system. The stubs I like to use are generic stubs that can accept\return any message type.  Usually I need to create one per protocol. They should be driven by BizUnit steps to: validates the data received; and select a response messages (or error response). Once built, they can be re-used for many integration tests and from project to project. I’m not saying that developers should never test against a real instance.  Every so often, you still need to connect to real developer or test instances of the source and target endpoints\services. The interface developers may ask you to send them some data to see if everything still works.  Or you might want some messages sent to BizTalk to get confidence that everything still works beyond BizTalk. Tests Automated “Stubbed Integration Tests” are usually built using the BizUnit framework. These facilitate testing of the entire integration process from source stub to target stub. It will ensure that all of the BizTalk components are configured together correctly to meet all the requirements. More fine grained unit testing of individual BizTalk components is still encouraged.  But BizUnit provides much the easiest way to test some components types (e.g. Orchestrations). Using BizUnit with the Behaviour Driven Development approach described by Mike Stephenson delivers the following benefits: source: http://biztalkbddsample.codeplex.com – Video 1. Requirements can be easily defined using Given/When/Then Requirements are close to the code so easier to manage as features and scenarios Requirements are defined in domain language The feature files can be used as part of the documentation The documentation is accurate to the build of code and can be published with a release The scenarios are effective to document the scenarios and are not over excessive The scenarios are maintained with the code There’s an abstraction between the intention and implementation of tests making them easier to understand The requirements drive the testing These same tests can also be used to drive load testing as described here. If you don't do this ... If you don't follow the above “Stubbed Integration Tests” approach, the developer will need to manually trigger the tests. This has the following risks: Developers are unlikely to check all the scenarios each time and all the expected conditions each time. After the developer leaves, these manual test steps may be lost. What test scenarios are there?  What test messages did they use for each scenario? There is no mechanism to prove adequate test coverage. A test team may attempt to automate integration test scenarios in a test environment through the triggering of tests from a source system UI. If this is a replacement for BizUnit tests, then this carries the following risks: It moves the tests downstream, so problems will be found later in the process. Testers may not check all the expected conditions within the BizTalk infrastructure such as: event logs, suspended messages, etc. These automated tests may also get in the way of manual tests run on these environments.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 4): Script Configuration

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've had a chance to play around with the Schema Compare for Oracle beta, you may have come across this screen in the synchronization wizard: This screen is one of the few screens that, along with the project configuration form, doesn't come from SQL Compare. This screen was designed to solve a couple of issues that, although aren't specific to Oracle, are much more of a problem than on SQL Server: Datatype conversions and NOT NULL columns. 1. Datatype conversions SQL Server is generally quite forgiving when it comes to datatype conversions using ALTER TABLE. For example, you can convert from a VARCHAR to INT using ALTER TABLE as long as all the character values are parsable as integers. Oracle, on the other hand, only allows ALTER TABLE conversions that don't change the internal data format. Essentially, every change that requires an actual datatype conversion has to be done using a rebuild with a conversion function. That's OK, as we can simply hard-code the various conversion functions for the valid datatype conversions and insert those into the rebuild SELECT list. However, as there always is with Oracle, there's a catch. Have a look at the NUMTODSINTERVAL function. As well as specifying the value (or column) to convert, you have to specify an interval_unit, which tells oracle how to interpret the input number. We can't hardcode a default for this parameter, as it is entirely dependent on the user's data context! So, in order to convert NUMBER to INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND/INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH, we need to have feedback from the user as to what to put in this parameter while we're generating the sync script - this requires a new step in the engine action/script generation to insert these values into the script, as well as new UI to allow the user to specify these values in a sensible fashion. In implementing the engine and UI infrastructure to allow this it made much more sense to implement it for any rebuild datatype conversion, not just NUMBER to INTERVALs. For conversions which we can do, we pre-fill the 'value' box with the appropriate function from the documentation. The user can also type in arbitary SQL expressions, which allows the user to specify optional format parameters for the relevant conversion functions, or indeed call their own functions to convert between values that don't have a built-in conversion defined. As the value gets inserted as-is into the rebuild SELECT list, any expression that is valid in that context can be specified as the conversion value. 2. NOT NULL columns Another problem that is solved by the new step in the sync wizard is adding a NOT NULL column to a table. If the table contains data (as most database tables do), you can't just add a NOT NULL column, as Oracle doesn't know what value to put in the new column for existing rows - the DDL statement will fail. There are actually 3 separate scenarios for this problem that have separate solutions within the engine: Adding a NOT NULL column to a table without a rebuild Here, the workaround is to add a column default with an appropriate value to the column you're adding: ALTER TABLE tbl1 ADD newcol NUMBER DEFAULT <value> NOT NULL; Note, however, there is something to bear in mind about this solution; once specified on a column, a default cannot be removed. To 'remove' a default from a column you change it to have a default of NULL, hence there's code in the engine to treat a NULL default the same as no default at all. Adding a NOT NULL column to a table, where a separate change forced a table rebuild Fortunately, in this case, a column default is not required - we can simply insert the default value into the rebuild SELECT clause. Changing an existing NULL to a NOT NULL column To implement this, we run an UPDATE command before the ALTER TABLE to change all the NULLs in the column to the required default value. For all three, we need some way of allowing the user to specify a default value to use instead of NULL; as this is essentially the same problem as datatype conversion (inserting values into the sync script), we can re-use the UI and engine implementation of datatype conversion values. We also provide the option to alter the new column to allow NULLs, or to ignore the problem completely. Note that there is the same (long-running) problem in SQL Compare, but it is much more of an issue in Oracle as you cannot easily roll back executed DDL statements if the script fails at some point during execution. Furthermore, the engine of SQL Compare is far less conducive to inserting user-supplied values into the generated script. As we're writing the Schema Compare engine from scratch, we used what we learnt from the SQL Compare engine and designed it to be far more modular, which makes inserting procedures like this much easier.

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• What do the participants say about the Open Day in South Africa?

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 On the 26th of September, a group of students who were specifically selected to attend an Open day at Oracle South Africa, joined us at our offices in Woodmead, Johannesburg. The Conference room was filled with inquisitive minds. What we had in store for them was a detailed presentation about Oracle which was delivered by Zuko - Cluster Leader: Tech GB South Africa. The student’s many questions were all answered especially when we started addressing the opportunities we have and detailed information on our Graduate Programme. Our employees then came to talk about their experience. This allowed all the students to have an integrated learning experience. By inviting the students to walk around our Oracle Offices allowed them to see, talk, experience a bit of the culture and ask more questions. Here is some of the feedback from the attendees: Maxwell Moloi: “The open day truly served its purpose and exceeded expectations in the sense that I got to find out more about Oracle and all the different opportunities it has to offer. The fact that Oracle supplies a full solution to a customer and not just part of it and how the company manages to setup professional development for their employees is what entices me to want to join the rapidly growing team of Oracle.” Nqobile Mabaso: “I found the open day to be quite informative and enlightening because coming from a marketing background I could apply the knowledge I got from varsity to the Company I was able to point out what they do as part of their corporate social responsibility (Oracle recently partnered with the department of education to build a school), how Oracle emphasizes on relationship building because they know they sell to people and not companies and how they offer the full stack of solutions which gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.” Nondumiso Mvelase: “The Open Day was a wonderful experience for me especially because I have never been part of an Open Day before, so it was absolutely amazing for me. It gave me a good idea of how it is to be part of Oracle. We were served with lovely breakfast and lunch which I enjoyed. I wish the Open Day went on for a whole week. Seeing and hearing from 2013 Graduates, telling us about their experience within Oracle was very inspiring to me. They were encouraging us to work hard if we ever got the opportunity they had. After hearing this from them I will definitely not take it for granted.” Itumeleng Moraka: “Before I walked into the Oracle offices all that was in my mind was databases and cloud storage. I was then surrounded by passionate, enthusiastic and welcoming employees. I came across a positive energy within the multinational company. I realized that Oracle is not a company that operates in survival mode. This may sound idealistic, but they operate in a non-traditional way investing more into innovation, they stay focused on what matters most about where technology is going and at the same time they are not losing sight of how their products make a difference in the world.” For more information on how to be part of the Oracle Graduate Programme please follow us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/CampusAtOracle /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Thinking differently about BI delivery

  - by jamiet

  My day job involves implementing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions which, as I have said before, is simply about giving people the information they need to do their jobs. I’m always interested in learning about new ways of achieving that aim and that is my motivation for writing blog entries that are not concerned with SQL or SQL Server per se. Implementing BI systems usually involves hacking together a bunch third party products with some in-house “glue” and delivering information using some shiny, expensive web-based front-end tool; the list of vendors that supply such tools is big and ever-growing. No doubt these tools have their place and of late I have started to wonder whether they can be supplemented with different ways of delivering information. The problem I have with these separate web-based tools is exactly that – they are separate web-based tools. What’s the problem with that you might ask? I’ll explain! They force the information worker to go somewhere unfamiliar in order to get the information they need to do their jobs. Would it not be better if we could deliver information into the tools that those information workers are already using and not force them to go somewhere else? I look at the rise of blogging over recent years and I realise that what made them popular is that people can subscribe to RSS feeds and have information pushed to them in their tool of choice rather than them having to go and find the information for themselves in a tool that has been foisted upon them. Would it not be a good idea to adopt the principle of subscription for the benefit of delivering BI information as well? I think it would and in the rest of this blog entry I’ll outline such a scenario where the power of subscription could be used to enhance the delivery of information to information workers. Typical questions that information workers ask might be: What are my year-on-year sales figures? What was my footfall yesterday? How many widgets have I sold so far today? Each of those questions includes a time element and that shouldn’t surprise us, any BI system that I have worked on includes the dimension of time. Now, what do people use to view and organise their time-oriented information? Its not a trick question, they use a calendar and in the enterprise space more often than not that calendar is managed using Outlook. Given then that information workers are already looking at their calendar in Outlook anyway would it not make sense then to deliver information into that same calendar? Of course it would. Calendars are a great way of visualising information such as sales figures. Observe: Just in this single screenshot I have managed to convey a multitude of information. The information worker can see, at a glance, information about hourly/daily/weekly/monthly sales and, moreover, he/she is viewing that information right inside the tool that they use every day. There is no effort on the part of him/her, the information just appears hour after hour, day after day. Taking the idea further, each one of those calendar items could be a mini-dashboard in its own right. Double-clicking on an item could show a plethora of other information about that time slot such as breaking the sales down per region or year-over-year comparisons. Perhaps the title could employ a sparkline? Loads of possibilities. The point is that calendars are a completely natural way to visualise information; we should make more use of them! The real beauty of delivering information using calendars for us BI developers is that it should be so easy. In the case of Outlook we don’t need to write complicated VBA code that can go and manipulate a person’s calendar, simply publishing data in a format that Outlook can understand is sufficient and happily such formats already exist; iCalendar is the accepted format and the even more flexible xCalendar is hopefully on its way as well.   I’d like to make one last point and this one is with my SQL Server hat on. Reporting Services 2008 R2 introduced the ability to publish data as subscribable Atom feeds so it seems logical that it could also be a vehicle for delivering calendar feeds too. If you think this would be a good idea go and vote for it at Publish data as iCalendar feeds and please please please add some comments (especially if you vote it down). Work smarter, not harder! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Examine your readiness for managing Enterprise Private Cloud

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Cloud computing promises to deliver greater agility to meet demanding  business needs, operational efficiencies, and lower cost. However these promises cannot be realized and enterprises may not be able to get the best value out of their enterprise private cloud computing infrastructure without a comprehensive cloud management solution . 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:"Times New Roman","serif";} Take this new self-assessment quiz that measures the readiness of your enterprise private cloud. It scores your readiness in the following areas and discover where and how you can improve to gain total cloud control over your enterprise private cloud. 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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Complete Cloud Lifecycle Solution Check if you are ready to manage all phases of the building, managing, and consuming an enterprise cloud. You will learn how Oracle can help build and manage a rich catalog of cloud services – whether it is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Database-as-a-Service, or Platform-as-a-Service, all from a single product. Integrated Cloud Stack Management Integrated management of the entire cloud stack – all the way from application to disk, is very important to eliminate the integration pains and costs that customers would have to otherwise incur by trying to create a cloud environment by integrating multiple point solutions. Business-Driven Clouds It is critical that an enterprise Cloud platform is not only able to run applications but also has deep business insight and visibility. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c enables creation of application-aware and business-driven clouds that has deep insight into applications, business services and transactions. As the leading providers of business applications and the middleware, we are able to offer you a cloud solution that is optimized for business services. Proactive Management Integration of the enterprise cloud infrastructure with support can allow cloud administrators to benefit from Automatic Service Requests (ASR), proactive patch recommendations, health checks and end-of-life advisory for all of the technology deployed within cloud. Learn more about solution for Enterprise Cloud and Cloud management by attending various sessions , demos and hand-on labs at Oracle Open World 2012 . Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Context is Everything

  - by Angus Graham

  Normal 0 false false false EN-CA 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Context is Everything How many times have you have you asked a question only to hear an answer like “Well, it depends. What exactly are you trying to do?”.  There are times that raw information can’t tell us what we need to know without putting it in a larger context. Let's take a real world example.  If I'm a maintenance planner trying to figure out which assets should be replaced during my next maintenance window, I'm going to go to my Asset Management System.  I can get it to spit out a list of assets that have failed several times over the last year.  But what are these assets connected to?  Is there any safety consequences to shutting off this pipeline to do the work?  Is some other work that's planned going to conflict with replacing this asset?  Several of these questions can't be answered by simply spitting out a list of asset IDs.  The maintenance planner will have to reference a diagram of the plant to answer several of these questions. This is precisely the idea behind Augmented Business Visualization. An Augmented Business Visualization (ABV) solution is one where your structured data (enterprise application data) and your unstructured data (documents, contracts, floor plans, designs, etc.) come together to allow you to make better decisions.  Essentially we're showing your business data into its context. AutoVue allows you to create ABV solutions by integrating your enterprise application with AutoVue’s hotspot framework. Hotspots can be defined for your document. Users can click these hotspots to trigger actions in your enterprise app. Similarly, the enterprise app can highlight the hotspots in your document based on its business data, creating a visual dashboard of your business data in the context of your document. ABV is not new. We introduced the hotspot framework in AutoVue 20.1 with text hotspots. Any text in a PDF or 2D CAD drawing could be turned into a hotspot. In 20.2 we have enhanced this to include 2 new types of hotspots: 3D and regional hotspots. 3D hotspots allow you to turn 3D parts into hotspots. Hotspots can be defined based on the attributes of the part, so you can create hotspots based on part numbers, material, date of delivery, etc.  Regional hotspots allow an administrator to define rectangular regions on any PDF, image, or 2D CAD drawing. This is perfect for cases where the document you’re using either doesn’t have text in it (a JPG or TIFF for example) or if you want to define hotspots that don’t correspond to the text in the document. There are lots of possible uses for AutoVue hotspots.  A great demonstration of how our hotspot capabilities can help add context to enterprise data in the Energy sector can be found in the following AutoVue movies: Maintenance Planning in the Energy Sector - Watch it Now Capital Construction Project Management in the Energy Sector  -  Watch it Now Commissioning and Handover Process for the Energy Sector  -  Watch it Now

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