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• Windows Phone 7 development: first impressions

  - by DigiMortal

  After hard week in work I got some free time to play with Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools. Although my first test application is still unfinished I think it is good moment to share my first experiences to you. In this posting I will give you quick overview of Windows Phone 7 developer tools from developer perspective. If you are familiar with Visual Studio 2010 then you will feel comfortable because Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools base on Visual Studio 2010 Express. Project templates There are five project templates available. Three of them are based on Silverlight and two on XNA Game Studio: Windows Phone Application (Silverlight) Windows Phone List Application (Silverlight) Windows Phone Class Library (Silverlight) Windows Phone Game (XNA Game Studio) Windows Phone Game Library (XNA Game Studio) Currently I am writing to test applications. One of them is based on Windows Phone Application and the other on Windows Phone List Application project template. After creating these projects you see the following views in Visual Studio. Windows Phone Application. Click on image to enlarge. Windows Phone List Application. Click on image to enlarge.  I suggest you to use some of these templates to get started more easily. Windows Phone 7 emulator You can run your Windows Phone 7 applications on Windows Phone 7 emulator that comes with developer tools CTP. If you run your application then emulator is started automatically and you can try out how your application works in phone-like emulator. You can see screenshot of emulator on right. Currently there is opened Windows Phone List Application as it is created by default. Click on image to enlarge it. Emulator is a little bit slow and uncomfortable but it works pretty well. This far I have caused only couple of crashes during my experiments. In these cases emulator works but Visual Studio gets stuck because it cannot communicate with emulator. One important note. Emulator is based on virtual machine although you can see only phone screen and options toolbar. If you want to run emulator you must close all virtual machines running on your machine and run Visual Studio 2010 as administrator. Once you run emulator you can keep it open because you can stop your application in Visual Studio, modify, compile and re-deploy it without restarting emulator. Designing user interfaces You can design user interface of your application in Visual Studio. When you open XAML-files it is displayed in window with two panels. Left panel shows you device screen and works as visual design environment while right panel shows you XAML mark-up and let’s you modify XML if you need it. As it is one of my very first Silverlight applications I felt more comfortable with XAML editor because property names in property boxes of visual designer confused me a little bit. Designer panel is not very good because it is visually hard to follow. It has black background that makes dark borders of controls very hard to see. If you have monitor with very high contrast then it is may be not a real problem. I have usual monitor and I have problem. :) Putting controls on design surface, dragging and resizing them is also pretty painful. Some controls are drawn correctly but for some controls you have to set width and height in XML so they can be resized. After some practicing it is not so annoying anymore. On the right you can see toolbox with some controllers. This is all you get out of the box. But it is sufficient to get started. After getting some experiences you can create your own controls or use existing ones from other vendors or developers. If it is your first time to do stuff with Silverlight then keep Google open – you need it hard. After getting over the first shock you get the point very quickly and start developing at normal speed. :) Writing source code Writing source code is the most familiar part of this action. Good old Visual Studio code editor with all nice features it has. But here you get also some surprises: The anatomy of Silverlight controls is a little bit different than the one of user controls in web and forms projects. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t run on full version of Windows (I bet it is some version of Windows CE or something like this) then there is less system classes you can use. Some familiar classes have less methods that in full version of .NET Framework and in these cases you have to write all the code by yourself or find libraries or source code from somewhere. These problems are really not so much problems than limitations and you get easily over them. Conclusion Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools help you do a lot of things on Windows Phone 7. Although I expected better performance from tools I think that current performance is not a problem. This far my first test project is going very well and Google has answer for almost every question. Windows Phone 7 is mobile device and therefore it has less hardware resources than desktop computers. This is why toolset is so limited. The more you need memory the more slower is device and as you may guess it needs the more battery. If you are writing apps for mobile devices then make your best to get your application use as few resources as possible and act as fast as possible.

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• Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script

  In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application With PowerShell you can add powerful scripting to your build to for example execute a deployment. If you want more information on PowerShell, please refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973757.aspx For this example we will create a simple PowerShell script that prints “Hello world!”. To create the script, create a new text file and name it “HelloWorld.ps1”. Add to the contents of the script: Write-Host “Hello World!” To test the script do the following: Open the command prompt To run the script you must change the execution policy. To do this execute in the command prompt: powershell set-executionpolicy remotesigned Now go to the directory where you have saved the PowerShell script Execute the following command powershell .\HelloWorld.ps1 In this example I use a relative path, but when the path to the PowerShell script contains spaces, you need to change the syntax to powershell "& '<full path to script>' " for example: powershell "& ‘C:\sources\Build Customization\SolutionToBuild\PowerShell Scripts\HellloWorld.ps1’ " In this blog post, I create a new solution and that solution includes also this PowerShell script. I want to create an argument on the Build Process Template that holds the path to the PowerShell script. In the Build Process Template I will add an InvokeProcess activity to execute the PowerShell command. This InvokeProcess activity needs the location of the script as an argument for the PowerShell command. Since you don’t know the full path at the build server of this script, you can either specify in the argument the relative path of the script, but it is hard to find out what the relative path is. I prefer to specify the location of the script in source control and then convert that server path to a local path. To do this conversion you can use the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity. So to complete the task, open the Build Process Template CustomTemplate.xaml that we created in earlier parts, follow the following steps Add a new argument called “DeploymentScript” and set the appropriate settings in the metadata. See Part 2: Add arguments and variables  for more information. Scroll down beneath the TryCatch activity called “Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items” Add a new If activity and set the condition to "Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(DeploymentScript)" to ensure it will only run when the argument is passed. Add in the Then branch of the If activity a new Sequence activity and rename it to “Start deployment” Click on the activity and add a new variable called DeploymentScriptFilename (scoped to the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a ConvertWorkspaceItem activity on the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a InvokeProcess activity beneath the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity in the “Start deployment” Sequence Click on the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity and change the properties DisplayName = Convert deployment script filename Input = DeploymentScript Result = DeploymentScriptFilename Workspace = Workspace Click on the InvokeProcess activity and change the properties Arguments = String.Format(" ""& '{0}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename) DisplayName = Execute deployment script FileName = "PowerShell" To see results from the powershell command drop a WriteBuildMessage activity on the "Handle Standard Output" and pass the stdOutput variable to the Message property. Do the same for a WriteBuildError activity on the "Handle Error Output" To publish it, check in the Build Process Template This leads to the following result We now go to the build definition that depends on the template and set the path of the deployment script to the server path to the HelloWorld.ps1. (If you want to see the result of the PowerShell script, change the Logging verbosity to Detailed or Diagnostic). Save and run the build. A lot of the deployment scripts you have will have some kind of arguments (like username / password or environment variables) that you want to define in the Build Definition. To make the PowerShell configurable, you can follow the following steps. Create a new script and give it the name "HelloWho.ps1". In the contents of the file add the following lines: param (         $person     ) $message = [System.String]::Format(“Hello {0}!", $person) Write-Host $message When you now run the script on the command prompt, you will see the following So lets change the Build Process Template to accept one parameter for the deployment script. You can of course make it configurable to add a for-loop that reads through a collection of parameters but that is out of scope of this blog post. Add a new Argument called DeploymentScriptParameter In the InvokeProcess activity where the PowerShell command is executed, modify the Arguments property to String.Format(" ""& '{0}' '{1}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename, DeploymentScriptParameter) Check in the Build Process Template Now modify the build definition and set the Parameter of the deployment to any value and run the build. You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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• Searching for the last logon of users in Active Directory

  - by Robert May

  I needed to clean out a bunch of old accounts at Veracity Solutions, and wanted to delete those that hadn’t used their account in more than a year. I found that AD has a property on objects called the lastLogonTimestamp.  However, this value isn’t exposed to you in any useful fashion.  Sure, you can pull up ADSI Edit and and eventually get to it there, but it’s painful. I spent some time searching, and discovered that there’s not much out there to help, so I thought a blog post showing exactly how to get at this information would be in order. Basically, what you end up doing is using System.DirectoryServices to search for accounts and then filtering those for users, doing some conversion and such to make it happen.  Basically, the end result of this is that you get a list of users with their logon information and you can then do with that what you will.  I turned my list into an observable collection and bound it into a XAML form. One important note, you need to add a reference to ActiveDs Type Library in the COM section of the world in references to get to LargeInteger. Here’s the class: namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.DirectoryServices; using ActiveDs; using log4net; /// <summary> /// Finds users inside of the active directory system. /// </summary> public class UserFinder { /// <summary> /// Creates the default logger /// </summary> private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(UserFinder)); /// <summary> /// Finds last logon information /// </summary> /// <param name="domain">The domain to search.</param> /// <param name="userName">The username for the query.</param> /// <param name="password">The password for the query.</param> /// <returns>A list of users with their last logon information.</returns> public IList<UserLoginInformation> GetLastLogonInformation(string domain, string userName, string password) { IList<UserLoginInformation> result = new List<UserLoginInformation>(); DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry(domain, userName, password, AuthenticationTypes.Secure); DirectorySearcher directorySearcher = new DirectorySearcher(entry); directorySearcher.PropertyNamesOnly = true; directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("name"); directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("lastLogonTimeStamp"); SearchResultCollection searchResults; try { searchResults = directorySearcher.FindAll(); } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to do a find all.", ex); throw; } try { foreach (SearchResult searchResult in searchResults) { DirectoryEntry resultEntry = searchResult.GetDirectoryEntry(); if (resultEntry.SchemaClassName == "user") { UserLoginInformation logon = new UserLoginInformation(); logon.Name = resultEntry.Name; PropertyValueCollection timeStampObject = resultEntry.Properties["lastLogonTimeStamp"]; if (timeStampObject.Count > 0) { IADsLargeInteger logonTimeStamp = (IADsLargeInteger)timeStampObject[0]; long lastLogon = (long)((uint)logonTimeStamp.LowPart + (((long)logonTimeStamp.HighPart) << 32)); logon.LastLogonTime = DateTime.FromFileTime(lastLogon); } result.Add(logon); } } } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to iterate search results.", ex); throw; } return result; } } } Some important things to note: Username and Password can be set to null and if your computer us part of the domain, this may still work. Domain should be set to something like LDAP://servername/CN=Users,CN=Domain,CN=com You’re actually getting a com object back, so that’s why the LongInteger conversions are happening.  The class for UserLoginInformation looks like this:   namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; /// <summary> /// Represents user login information. /// </summary> public class UserLoginInformation { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets Name /// </summary> public string Name { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets LastLogonTime /// </summary> public DateTime LastLogonTime { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets the age of the account. /// </summary> public TimeSpan AccountAge { get { TimeSpan result = TimeSpan.Zero; if (this.LastLogonTime != DateTime.MinValue) { result = DateTime.Now.Subtract(this.LastLogonTime); } return result; } } } } I hope this is useful and instructive. Technorati Tags: Active Directory

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• Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective – Part 3

  - by pinaldave

  Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Congratulations!  You are now a fully trained developer!  You spent hours in a classroom, watching webinars, and reading materials.  You are now more educated and more prepared than ever before.  Now what? Stay or Quit The simple answer is that you now have two options – stay where you are or move on to a new job.  Even though you might now be smarter than you have ever felt before, this can still be a tough decision to make.  You feel extra trained and ready for a promotion or a raise, but you and your employer might not see eye to eye on this issue.  The logical conclusion is to go on a job hunt, but that might not be the most ethical thing to do. Click Image to Enlarge Manager’s Perspective Click Image to Enlarge Try to see the issue from your manager’s perspective.  You feel that you have just spent a lot of time and energy getting trained, and you should be rewarded.  But they have invested their time and energy in you.  They might see the training as a way to help you complete the goals they require from you, or as a way to help you complete tasks that will ultimately end in a reward or promotion. Moral Compass As in most cases, honesty is the best policy.  Be open with your manager about your expectations, and ask them to explain their goals.  When there is open and honest communication, everyone can walk away happy.  If you’re unable to discuss with your manager for one reason or another, just try to keep the company policy in mind and follow your own moral compass.  If all else fails, and your company is unwilling to make allowances for your new value, offer to pay the company back for the training before moving on your way. Whether you stay at your old job or move on to a new one, you are still faced with the question of what you’re going to do with all your new knowledge.  If you feel comfortable, offer to train others around you who are interested in the same subject.  This can look very good on your resume, and if you are working in a team environment it is sure to help you in the long run! What Next? You can even offer to train other trainers at the company – managers, those above you, or even report back to your original trainer about how your education is helping you in the work place.  Obviously this should be completely voluntary on the trainer’s part.  Taking advice from a “newbie” may not be their favorite idea, but it could also show the company that you are open to expanding your horizons and being helpful to everyone around you. Last in Line for Opportunity Click Image to Enlarge At this time, let us address a subject related to training and what to do with it – what if you are always overlooked for training?  This can as thorny a problem as receiving training in the first place.  The best advice is to let your supervisors know that you are always open to training and very interested in certain topics.  If you are consistently passed over, be patient.  Your turn will probably come, but the company as a whole has to focus on other problems at the moment.  If you feel that there are more personal issues at play, be sure to bring this up with your supervisor in a calm and professional manager so that everything can be worked out best for both parties. You, Yourself and Your Future! If all else fails, offer to pay for training yourself.  Perhaps money problems are at the root of being passed over.  Even if there are other reasons, offering to pay your own way shows your dedication and could work out well for you in the long run.  Always remember – in life you have to go out and make your own way, you cannot always sit and wait for things to land in your lap. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Configuring Expert Search in Communicator 14 and SharePoint 2010

  Communicator 14 provides functionality to be able to search for contacts not just by name, but by skill.  For example a customer service agent at an airline can search for other agents with Travel Advisory experience by typing the search criteria into the Communicator search box and performing a search by keyword.  The search results will return users who have specified that skill in their profile on their SharePoint My Site.  This is actually pretty easy to configure, Ill show you how. Create Search and People Search Results Pages in SharePoint Communicator 14 Expert Search works by using the SharePoint 2010 Search Service to search SharePoint for user profiles with matching keywords.  This requires that you have an Enterprise Search site in your site collection which includes the search service and also the People Results pages.  The easiest way to do this is to create a Search Center site in your site collection. Note: I get an error when trying to create an Enterprise Search site in a Team Site in the SharePoint 2010 RTM bits, so I created it as a site collection that is evident in the URLs you see below. In the screenshots below, you can see that the URL of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection is http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx, and the URL of the People Search Results page is http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx. Point Communications Server 14 to Search and People Search Results Pages For Communicator 14 to be able to perform an Expert Search, you need to configure Communications Server 14 to point to the Search Service and People Search Results page URLs. From a server with the OCS Core bits installed, fire up the Communications Server Management Shell and type Get-CsClientPolicy. Scroll down to the bottom of the output, were interested in setting the values of: SPSearchInternalURL SPSearchExternalURL SPSearchCenterInternalURL SPSearchCenterExternalURL SPSearchInternalURL and SPSearchExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection, while SPSearchCenterInternalURL and SPSearchCenterExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the people search results pages. Well use the Communications Server Management Shell to set the values of these CS policy properties. For simplicity, Im only going to set the internal URLs here. Set-CsClientPolicy SPSearchInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx     -SPSearchCenterInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx Log out and back into Communicator.  You can verify that these settings were applied by running the Get-CsClientPolicy cmdlet again from the Communications Server Management Shell. However, theres another super-secret ninja trick to verify that the settings were applied: Find the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray Hold down the Ctrl button Click (left) the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray do not depress the Ctrl button You should now see an extra menu item called Configuration Information, click it. Scroll down and locate the Expert Search URL and SharePoint Search Center URL keys and verify that their values correspond to those you set using the Set-CsClientPolicy PowerShell cmdlet. Configure a Sharepoint User Profile Import Im not going to provide detailed steps here except to say that you need to configure the SharePoint 2010 User Profile  Service Application to import user account details from Active Directory on a scheduled basis. This is a critical step because there are several user profile properties e.g. SipAddress that are only populated by a user profile import.  When performing an Expert Search, Communicator can only render results for users who have a SipAddress specified. Add Skills to User Profiles Navigate to your My Site and click on My Profile.  This page allows you to set many contact details that are searchable in SharePoint.  Were particularly interested in the Ask Me About property of a users profile.  Expert Search searches against this property to find users with matching skills. Configure a SharePoint Search Crawl Ensure that you have a scheduled job to crawl your Local SharePoint Sites content source.  Depending on how you have this configured, it will also crawl the My Site site collection and add user properties such as Ask Me About to the search index. Thats It! SharePoint 2010 provides new social and collaboration features to help users find other users with similar skills or interests. Expert Search extends this functionality directly into Microsoft Communicator 14, allowing you to interact with the users directly from the search results. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• SQL Developer Data Modeler v3.3 Early Adopter: Collaborative Design via Excel?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  As you may have heard last week, we have a new version of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler now available as an Early Adopter release. Version 3.3 has quite a few new features and I’ll be previewing them here. Today’s topic is our new Excel integration. It builds off of last week’s lesson: Search, so you may want to go read that first. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I say it takes a team to build a data model. You have your techie folks, your business folks, your in-betweeners, and your database geeks. Who gets to define how customers are represented and stored in your database? That data lives forever, so you better get it right from the beginning, or you’ll be living in a hacker’s paradise for years to come. Lots of good rantings, ravings, and advice on this topic in general on Karen Lopez’s (@datachick) blog. But let’s say you are the primary modeler on a project. You dutifully interview the business folks for their requirements. You sit down and start to model and think you’re pretty close. Now you need someone to confirm your assumptions and provide some feedback. Do you send your model over? Take a screenshot and blow it up on a whiteboard? Export to HTML and let them take a magic marker to their monitors? Or maybe you bite the bullet and install your modeling software on their desktops and take the hours or days required to train them up on how to use the the tool. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could just mark up their corrections in Excel and let you suck the updates back in? This is what we have started to build in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Let’s say you have a new table called ‘UT_STARTUPS.’ It looks a little something like this: A table in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler What I would like to do is have my team or co-worker review how I have defined those columns. Perhaps TIMESTAMP is overkill or maybe the column names themselves aren’t up to snuff. What I am going to do is now search for all the columns in my table, then export that to Excel. So do a search for UT_STARTUPS. Search, filter, then Report With the filter set to ‘Columns,’ if I do a report I’ll be only getting the columns that are resolving to my search term. So as long as my table name is unique in the model, I should get what I’m looking for. Here’s what I see when I click on the Report button: XLS or XLSX, either format is just fine I want to decide how the Column data is exported to Excel though, so I’m going to create a report template that I can use going forward. So click the ‘Manage’ button and setup a new template. I’m going to call mine ‘CollaborativeDevelopment.’ The templates allow me to define what properties are included in the reports. Once this is set, I’ll have the XLS file generated, and get to work Now let the Excel junkies do their stuff Note that not ALL of the report properties are update-able (yes, I made up a new word there) via Excel. We’ll have the full list of properties documented going forward, but in my Excel sheet, note that I can’t change the table name or the data types for the columns. I’m going to update some column names and supply ‘nice’ comments so the database users know what’s what. Here’s my input for the designer/architect/database dude: Be kind, please rew…use comments. Save the file, email it back to your modeler. Update the model from Excel That’s right, it’s a right mouse click from your model in the tree If everything goes right, you’ll see a nice confirmation message: It’s alive! Another to-do item on tap – making this dialog more informative. We’ll be showing exactly what in your model was updated from Excel. Let’s take another look at the model now Voila! Why are we doing this again? The goal is to reduce the number of round-trips from the modeler and the business process owner. One is used to working with Excel – why not allow them to mark up their changes in the tool they already know? This is an early adopter release and I anticipate this feature getting a good bit of tuning up before we release. Why don’t you download 3.3, give it a whirl, and let us know what you think?

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• Hiding an item conditionally through SPEL in OAF ( VO Extension + Personalization )

  - by Manoj Madhusoodanan

  In this blog I will explain how to conditionally set property of an item through personalization.Let me discuss using a business scenario. My customer wants to make Hold from Payment/ All Invoices column readonly when the Operating Unit is UK ( Configured in a lookup XXCUST_EXCLUDED_ORGS ). Analysis First thing is we have to find out the page and business components. Page: /oracle/apps/pos/supplier/webui/QuickUpdatePGView Object: oracle.apps.pos.supplier.server.SitesVO Solution Download oracle.apps.pos.supplier.server.SitesVO from $JAVA_TOP to JDEV_USER_HOME/myprojects.Make sure the transfer mode of the file (See below table). 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;} File Type Transfer Mode .xml ASCII .class Binary .tar Binary .java ASCII  Since there is no VO attribute available to determine the Site Org against the lookup Org we have to add the logic inside a custom VO attribute. So VO extension is required in this scenario. Add an attribute "isPymtReadOnlyStr" in the existing query.This column returns 'Y' if there is a match in the lookup otherwise 'N'. Create a transient attribute "isPymtReadOnly" of type BOOLEAN.This will return TRUE if "isPymtReadOnlyStr" is "Y" otherwise FALSE. The reason behind adding the "isPymtReadOnly" is we are setting the item property as readonly through SPEL.It will recognize only BOOLEAN.But SQL query doesn't support BOOLEAN.So we are building a BOOLEAN attribute from the SQL which will use in the personalization layer to set the item property. Steps 1) Create a new VO xxcust.oracle.apps.pos.supplier.server.XXCUSTSitesVO which extends from oracle.apps.pos.supplier.server.SitesVO. Make sure the binding style should be same as SitesVO. Create the XXCUSTSitesVO which same query of SitesVO.Later we will add the new attribute to XXCUSTSitesVO. At this point of time all the existing VO attributes are of Updatable property as "Always". Press Finish without creating XXCUSTSitesVORowImpl.java 2) Select the XXCUSTSitesVO from JDeveloper Application Navigator. Modify the query and add the extra column. 3) Create a new transient attribute as follows. 4) Once you modify the query all the existing attributes Updatable property will change to Never.So revert that property back to orginal. 5) Create XXCUSTSitesVORowImpl.java by checking the following check box. 6) Add the following code snippet in XXCUSTSitesVORowImpl.java 7) Create the substitution for SitesVO as follows. Following entry will get created in current jpx file.    <Substitutes>      <Substitute OldName ="oracle.apps.pos.supplier.server.SitesVO" NewName ="xxcust.oracle.apps.pos.supplier.server.XXCUSTSitesVO" />   </Substitutes> 8) Migrate XXCUSTSitesVOImpl.java,XXCUSTSitesVORowImpl.java and XXCUSTSitesVO.xml from desktop to actual instance. 9) Migrate the substitution using jpximporter. 10) Restart the server and verify the substitution has done perfectly. 11) Go to /oracle/apps/pos/supplier/webui/QuickUpdatePG and personalize the page.Set the item read only property to ${oa.SitesVO.IsPymtReadOnly} 12) Click on Apply and in next page click on Return to Application. Verify your output.  Note: You can remove the substitution using following script.Please click here.

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• Improve the Quality of ePub eBooks with Sigil

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to correct errors in your ePub formatted eBooks, or even split them into chapters and create a Table of Contents?  Here’s how you can with the free program Sigil. eBooks are increasingly popular with the rise of eBook readers and reading apps on mobile devices.  We recently showed you how to convert a PDF eBook to ePub format, but as you may have noticed, sometimes the converted file had some glitches or odd formatting.  Additionally, many of the many free ePub books available online from sources like the Project Guttenberg do not include a table of contents.  Sigil is a free application for Windows, OS X, and Linux that lets you edit ePub files, so let’s look at how you can use it to improve your eBooks. Note: Sigil took several moments to open files in our tests, and froze momentarily when we maximized the window.  Sigil is currently pre-release software in active development, so we would expect the bugs to be worked out in future versions.  As usual, only install if you’re comfortable testing pre-release software. Getting Started Download Sigil (link below), making sure to select the correct version for your computer.  Run the installer, and select your preferred setup language when prompted. After a moment the installer will appear; setup as normal. Launch Sigil when it’s finished installing.  It opens with a default blank ePub file, so you could actually start writing an eBook from scratch right here. Edit Your ePub eBooks Now you’re ready to edit your ePub books.  Click Open and browse to the file you want to edit. Now you can double-click any of the HTML or XHTML files on the left sidebar and edit them just like you would in Word. Or you can choose to view it in Code View and edit the actual HTML directly. The sidebar also gives you access to the other parts of the ePub file, such as Images and CSS styles. If your ePub file has a Table of Contents, you can edit it with Sigil as well.  Click Tools in the menu bar, and then select TOC Editor.  Strangely there is no way to create a new table of contents, but you can remove entries from existing one.   Convert TXT Files to ePub Many free eBooks online, especially older, out of copyright titles, are available in plain text format.  One problem with these files is that they usually use hard returns at the end of lines, so they don’t reflow to fill your screen efficiently. Sigil can easily convert these files to the more useful ePub format.  Open the text file in Sigil, and it will automatically reflow the text and convert it ePub.  As you can see in the screenshot below, the text in the eBook does not have hard line-breaks at the end of each line, and will be much more readable on mobile devices. Note that Sigil may take several moments opening the book, and may even become unresponsive while analyzing it.   Now you can edit your eBook, split it into chapters, or just save it as is.  Either way, make sure to select Save as to save your book as ePub format. Conclusion As mentioned before, Sigil seems to run slow at times, especially when editing large eBooks.  But it’s still a nice solution to edit and extend your ePub eBooks, and even convert plain text eBooks to the nicer ePub format.  Now you can make your eBooks work just like you want, and read them on your favorite device! If you feel comfortable editing HTML files, check out our article on how to edit ePub eBooks with your favorite HTML editor. Link Download Sigil from Google Code Download free ePub eBooks from Project Guttenberg Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit ePub eBooks with Your Favorite HTML EditorConvert a PDF eBook to ePub Format for Your iPad, iPhone, or eReaderRead Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PCFriday Fun: Watch HD Video Content with MeevidPreview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PC TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account

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• HTG Explains: Are You Using IPv6 Yet? Should You Even Care?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  IPv6 is extremely important for the long-term health of the Internet. But is your Internet service provider providing IPv6 connectivity yet? Does your home network support it? Should you even care if you’re using IPv6 yet? Switching from IPv4 to IPv6 will give the Internet a much larger pool of IP addresses. It should also allow every device to have its own public IP address, rather than be hidden behind a NAT router. IPv6 is Important Long-Term IPv6 is very important for the long-term health of the Internet. There are only about 3.7 billion public IPv4 addresses. This may sound like a lot, but it isn’t even one IP address for each person on the planet. Considering people have more and more Internet-connected devices — everything from light bulbs to thermostats are starting to become network-connected — the lack of IP addresses is already proving to be a serious problem. This may not affect those of us in well-off developed countries just yet, but developing countries are already running out of IPv4 addresses. So, if you work at an Internet service provider, manage Internet-connected servers, or develop software or hardware — yes, you should care about IPv6! You should be deploying it and ensuring your software and hardware works properly with it. It’s important to prepare for the future before the current IPv4 situation becomes completely unworkable. But, if you’re just typical user or even a typical geek with a home Internet connection and a home network, should you really care about your home network just yet? Probably not. What You Need to Use IPv6 To use IPv6, you’ll need three things: An IPv6-Compatible Operating System: Your operating system’s software must be capable of using IPv6. All modern desktop operating systems should be compatible — Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows, as well as modern versions of Mac OS X and Linux. Windows XP doesn’t have IPv6 support installed by default, but you shouldn’t be using Windows XP anymore, anyway. A Router With IPv6 Support: Many — maybe even most — consumer routers in the wild don’t support IPv6. Check your router’s specifications details to see if it supports IPv6 if you’re curious. If you’re going to buy a new router, you’ll probably want to get one with IPv6 support to future-proof yourself. If you don’t have an IPv6-enabled router yet, you don’t need to buy a new one just to get it. An ISP With IPv6 Enabled:  Your Internet service provider must also have IPv6 set up on their end. Even if you have modern software and hardware on your end, your ISP has to provide an IPv6 connection for you to use it. IPv6 is rolling out steadily, but slowly — there’s a good chance your ISP hasn’t enabled it for you yet. How to Tell If You’re Using IPv6 The easiest way to tell if you have IPv6 connectivity is to visit a website like testmyipv6.com. This website allows you to connect to it in different ways — click the links near the top to see if you can connect to the website via different types of connections. If you can’t connect via IPv6, it’s either because your operating system is too old (unlikely), your router doesn’t support IPv6 (very possible), or because your ISP hasn’t enabled it for you yet (very likely). Now What? If you can connect to the test website above via IPv6, congratulations! Everything is working as it should. Your ISP is doing a good job of rolling out IPv6 rather than dragging its feet. There’s a good chance you won’t have IPv6 working properly, however. So what should you do about this — should you head to Amazon and buy a new IPv6-enabled router or switch to an ISP that offers IPv6? Should you use a “tunnel broker,” as the test site recommends, to tunnel into IPv6 via your IPv4 connection? Well, probably not. Typical users shouldn’t have to worry about this yet. Connecting to the Internet via IPv6 shouldn’t be perceptibly faster, for example. It’s important for operating system vendors, hardware companies, and Internet service providers to prepare for the future and get IPv6 working, but you don’t need to worry about this on your home network. IPv6 is all about future-proofing. You shouldn’t be racing to implement this at home yet or worrying about it too much — but, when you need to buy a new router, try to buy one that supports IPv6. Image Credit: Adobe of Chaos on Flickr, hisperati on Flickr, Vox Efx on Flickr     

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• Simple-Talk development: a quick history lesson

  - by Michael Williamson

  Up until a few months ago, Simple-Talk ran on a pure .NET stack, with IIS as the web server and SQL Server as the database. Unfortunately, the platform for the site hadn’t quite gotten the love and attention it deserved. On the one hand, in the words of our esteemed editor Tony “I’d consider the current platform to be a “success”; it cost $10K, has lasted for 6 years, was finished, end to end in 6 months, and although we moan about it has got us quite a long way.” On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that it needed some serious work. Among other issues, we had authors that wouldn’t blog because our current blogging platform, Community Server, was too painful for them to use. Forgetting about Simple-Talk for a moment, if you ask somebody what blogging platform they’d choose, the odds are they’d say WordPress. Regardless of its technical merits, it’s probably the most popular blogging platform, and it certainly seemed easier to use than Community Server. The issue was that WordPress is normally hosted on a Linux stack running PHP, Apache and MySQL — quite a difference from our Microsoft technology stack. We certainly didn’t want to rewrite the entire site — we just wanted a better blogging platform, with the rest of the existing, legacy site left as is. At a very high level, Simple-Talk’s technical design was originally very straightforward: when your browser sends an HTTP request to Simple-Talk, IIS (the web server) takes the request, does some work, and sends back a response. In order to keep the legacy site running, except with WordPress running the blogs, a different design is called for. We now use nginx as a reverse-proxy, which can then delegate requests to the appropriate application: So, when your browser sends a request to Simple-Talk, nginx takes that request and checks which part of the site you’re trying to access. Most of the time, it just passes the request along to IIS, which can then respond in much the same way it always has. However, if your request is for the blogs, then nginx delegates the request to WordPress. Unfortunately, as simple as that diagram looks, it hides an awful lot of complexity. In particular, the legacy site running on IIS was made up of four .NET applications. I’ve already mentioned one of these applications, Community Server, which handled the old blogs as well as managing membership and the forums. We have a couple of other applications to manage both our newsletters and our articles, and our own custom application to do some of the rendering on the site, such as the front page and the articles. When I say that it was made up of four .NET applications, this might conjure up an image in your mind of how they fit together: You might imagine four .NET applications, each with their own database, communicating over well-defined APIs. Sadly, reality was a little disappointing: We had four .NET applications that all ran on the same database. Worse still, there were many queries that happily joined across tables from multiple applications, meaning that each application was heavily dependent on the exact data schema that each other application used. Add to this that many of the queries were at least dozens of lines long, and practically identical to other queries except in a few key spots, and we can see that attempting to replace one component of the system would be more than a little tricky. However, the problems with the old system do give us a good place to start thinking about desirable qualities from any changes to the platform. Specifically: Maintainability — the tight coupling between each .NET application made it difficult to update any one application without also having to make changes elsewhere Replaceability — the tight coupling also meant that replacing one component wouldn’t be straightforward, especially if it wasn’t on a similar Microsoft stack. We’d like to be able to replace different parts without having to modify the existing codebase extensively Reusability — we’d like to be able to combine the different pieces of the system in different ways for different sites Repeatable deployments — rather than having to deploy the site manually with a long list of instructions, we should be able to deploy the entire site with a single command, allowing you to create a new instance of the site easily whether on production, staging servers, test servers or your own local machine Testability — if we can deploy the site with a single command, and each part of the site is no longer dependent on the specifics of how every other part of the site works, we can begin to run automated tests against the site, and against individual parts, both to prevent regressions and to do a little test-driven development In the next part, I’ll describe the high-level architecture we now have that hopefully brings us a little closer to these five traits.

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• SQL SERVER – CXPACKET – Parallelism – Usual Solution – Wait Type – Day 6 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  CXPACKET has to be most popular one of all wait stats. I have commonly seen this wait stat as one of the top 5 wait stats in most of the systems with more than one CPU. Books On-Line: Occurs when trying to synchronize the query processor exchange iterator. You may consider lowering the degree of parallelism if contention on this wait type becomes a problem. CXPACKET Explanation: When a parallel operation is created for SQL Query, there are multiple threads for a single query. Each query deals with a different set of the data (or rows). Due to some reasons, one or more of the threads lag behind, creating the CXPACKET Wait Stat. There is an organizer/coordinator thread (thread 0), which takes waits for all the threads to complete and gathers result together to present on the client’s side. The organizer thread has to wait for the all the threads to finish before it can move ahead. The Wait by this organizer thread for slow threads to complete is called CXPACKET wait. Note that not all the CXPACKET wait types are bad. You might experience a case when it totally makes sense. There might also be cases when this is unavoidable. If you remove this particular wait type for any query, then that query may run slower because the parallel operations are disabled for the query. Reducing CXPACKET wait: We cannot discuss about reducing the CXPACKET wait without talking about the server workload type. OLTP: On Pure OLTP system, where the transactions are smaller and queries are not long but very quick usually, set the “Maximum Degree of Parallelism” to 1 (one). This way it makes sure that the query never goes for parallelism and does not incur more engine overhead. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'cost threshold for parallelism', N'1' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Data-warehousing / Reporting server: As queries will be running for long time, it is advised to set the “Maximum Degree of Parallelism” to 0 (zero). This way most of the queries will utilize the parallel processor, and long running queries get a boost in their performance due to multiple processors. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'cost threshold for parallelism', N'0' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Mixed System (OLTP & OLAP): Here is the challenge. The right balance has to be found. I have taken a very simple approach. I set the “Maximum Degree of Parallelism” to 2, which means the query still uses parallelism but only on 2 CPUs. However, I keep the “Cost Threshold for Parallelism” very high. This way, not all the queries will qualify for parallelism but only the query with higher cost will go for parallelism. I have found this to work best for a system that has OLTP queries and also where the reporting server is set up. Here, I am setting ‘Cost Threshold for Parallelism’ to 25 values (which is just for illustration); you can choose any value, and you can find it out by experimenting with the system only. In the following script, I am setting the ‘Max Degree of Parallelism’ to 2, which indicates that the query that will have a higher cost (here, more than 25) will qualify for parallel query to run on 2 CPUs. This implies that regardless of the number of CPUs, the query will select any two CPUs to execute itself. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'cost threshold for parallelism', N'25' GO EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max degree of parallelism', N'2' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Additionally a must read comment of Jonathan Kehayias. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and I no way claim it to be accurate. I suggest you all to read the online book for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats over here is generic and it varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on the development server before implementing on the production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: DMV, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• Plan your SharePoint 2010 Content Type Hub carefully

  - by Wayne

  Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location. Setting up the Content Type Hub is not that difficult but you must make it very careful to avoid a lot of work and troubleshooting. Here is a short tutorial with a few tips and tricks to make it easy for you to get started. Determine location of Content Type Hub First of all you need to decide in which Site Collection to place your Content Type Hub; in the root site collection or a specific one. I think using a specific Site Collection that only acts as a Content Type Hub is the best way, there are no best practice as of now. So I create a new Site Collection, at for instance http://server/sites/CTH/. The top-level site of this site collection should be for instance a Team Site. You cannot use Blank Site by default, which would have been the best option IMHO, since that site does not have the Taxonomy feature stapled upon it (check the TaxonomyFeatureStapler feature for which site templates that can be used). Configure Managed Metadata Service Application Next you need to create your Managed Metadata Service Application or configure the existing one, Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications. Select the Managed Metadata service application and click Properties if you already have created it. In the bottom of the dialog window when you are creating the service application or when you are editing the properties is a section to fill in the Content Type Hub. In this text box fill in the URL of the Content Type Hub. It is essential that you have decided where your Content Type Hub will reside, since once this is set you cannot change it. The only way to change it is to rebuild the whole managed metadata service application! Also make sure that you enter the URL correctly. I did copy and paste the URL once and got the /default.aspx in the URL which funked the whole service up. Make sure that you only use the URL to the Site Collection of the hub. Now you have to set up so that other Site Collections can consume the content types from the hub. This is done by selecting the connection for the managed metadata service application and clicking properties. A new dialog window opens and there you need to click the Consumes content types from the Content Type Gallery at nnnn. Now you are free to syndicate your Content Types from the Hub. Publish Content Types To publish a Content Type from the hub you need to go to Site Settings > Content Types and select the content type that you would like to publish. Then select Manage publishing for this content type. This takes you to a page from where you can Publish, Unpublish or Republish the content type. Once the content type is published it can take up to an hour for the subscribing Site Collections to get it. This is controlled by the Content Type Subscriber job that is scheduled to run once an hour. To speed up your publishing just go to Central Administration > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions > Content Type Subscriber and click Run now and you content type is very soon available for use. Published Content Type status You can check the status of the content type publishing in your destination site collections by selecting Site Settings > Content Type Publishing. From here you can force a refresh of all subscribed content types, see which ones that are subscribed and finally check the publishing error log. This error log is very useful for detecting errors during the publishing. For instance if you use any features such as ratings, metadata, document ids in your content type hub and your destination site collection does not have those features available this will be reported here.

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• Spolskism or Twitterism: A Doctor writes...

  - by Phil Factor

  "I never realized I had a problem. I just 'twittered' because it was a social thing to do. All my mates were doing it. It made me feel good to have 'followers'; it bolstered my self-esteem. Of course, you don't think of the long-term effects on your work and on the way you think. There's no denying that it impairs your judgment…" Yes, this story is typical. Hundreds of people are waking up to the long term effects of twittering, and seeking help. Dave, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporter… "I started using Twitter at work. Just a few minutes now and then, throughout the day. A lot of my colleagues were doing it and I thought 'Well, that's cool; it must be part of what I should be doing at work'. Soon, I was avidly reading every twitter that came my way, and counting the minutes between my own twitters. I tried to kid myself that it was all about professional development and getting other people to help you with work-related problems, but in truth I had become addicted to the buzz of the social network. The worse thing was that it made me seem busy even when I was really just frittering my time away. Inevitably, I started to get behind with my real work." Experts have identified the syndrome and given it a name: 'Twitterism', sometimes referred to as 'Spolskism', after the person who first drew attention to the pernicious damage to well-being that the practice caused, and who had the courage to take the pledge of rejecting it. According to one expert… "The occasional Twitter does little harm to the participant, and can be an adaptive way of dealing with stress. Unfortunately, it rarely stops there. The addictive qualities of the practice have put a strain on the caring professions who are faced with a flood of people making that first bold step to seeking help". Dave is one of those now seeking help for his addiction… "I had lost touch with reality. Even though I twittered my work colleagues constantly, I found I actually spoke to them less and less. Even when out socializing, I would frequently disengage from the conversation, in order to twitter. I stopped blogging. I stopped responding to emails; the only way to reach me was through the world of Twitter. Unfortunately, my denial about the harm that twittering was doing to me, my friends, and my work-colleagues was so strong that I truly couldn't see that I had a problem." Like other addictions, the help and support of others who are 'taking the cure' is important. There is a common bond between those who have 'been through hell and back' and are once more able to experience the joys of actually conversing and socializing, rather than the false comfort of solitary 'twittering'. Complete abstinence is essential to the cure. Most of those who risk even an occasional twitter face a headlong slide back into 'binge' twittering. Tom, another twitterer who has managed to kick the habit explains… "My twittering addiction now seems more like a bad dream. You get to work, and switch on the PC. You say to yourself, just open up the browser, just for a minute, just to see what people are saying on Twitter. The next thing you know, half the day has gone by. The worst thing is that when you're addicted, you get good at covering up the habit; I spent so much time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard, people just assumed I was working hard.I know that I must never forget what it was like then, and what it's like now that I've kicked the habit. I now have more time for productive work and a real social life." Like many addictions, Spolskism has its most detrimental effects on family, friends and workmates, rather than the addict. So often nowadays, we hear the sad stories of Twitter-Widows; tales of long lonely evenings spent whilst their partners are engrossed in their twittering into their 'mobiles' or indulging in their solitary spolskistic habits in privacy, under cover of 'having to do work at home'. Workmates suffer too, when the addicts even take their laptops or mobiles into meetings in order to 'twitter' with their fellow obsessives, even stooping to complain to their followers how boring the meeting is. No; The best advice is to leave twittering to the birds. You know it makes sense.

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• F# for the C# Programmer

  - by mbcrump

  Are you a C# Programmer and can’t make it past a day without seeing or hearing someone mention F#?  Today, I’m going to walk you through your first F# application and give you a brief introduction to the language. Sit back this will only take about 20 minutes. Introduction Microsoft's F# programming language is a functional language for the .NET framework that was originally developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Don Syme. In October 2007, the senior vice president of the developer division at Microsoft announced that F# was being officially productized to become a fully supported .NET language and professional developers were hired to create a team of around ten people to build the product version. In September 2008, Microsoft released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP), an official beta release, of the F# distribution . In December 2008, Microsoft announced that the success of this CTP had encouraged them to escalate F# and it is now will now be shipped as one of the core languages in Visual Studio 2010 , alongside C++, C# 4.0 and VB. The F# programming language incorporates many state-of-the-art features from programming language research and ossifies them in an industrial strength implementation that promises to revolutionize interactive, parallel and concurrent programming. Advantages of F# F# is the world's first language to combine all of the following features: Type inference: types are inferred by the compiler and generic definitions are created automatically. Algebraic data types: a succinct way to represent trees. Pattern matching: a comprehensible and efficient way to dissect data structures. Active patterns: pattern matching over foreign data structures. Interactive sessions: as easy to use as Python and Mathematica. High performance JIT compilation to native code: as fast as C#. Rich data structures: lists and arrays built into the language with syntactic support. Functional programming: first-class functions and tail calls. Expressive static type system: finds bugs during compilation and provides machine-verified documentation. Sequence expressions: interrogate huge data sets efficiently. Asynchronous workflows: syntactic support for monadic style concurrent programming with cancellations. Industrial-strength IDE support: multithreaded debugging, and graphical throwback of inferred types and documentation. Commerce friendly design and a viable commercial market. Lets try a short program in C# then F# to understand the differences. Using C#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: Sample Program. using System;   namespace ConsoleApplication9 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             var a = 2;             Console.WriteLine(a);             Console.ReadLine();         }     } } A breeze right? 14 Lines of code. We could have condensed it a bit by removing the “using” statment and tossing the namespace. But this is the typical C# program. Using F#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: To start, open Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Note: If using VS2008, then please download the SDK first before getting started. If you are using VS2010 then you are already setup and ready to go. So, click File-> New Project –> Other Languages –> Visual F# –> Windows –> F# Application. You will get the screen below. Go ahead and enter a name and click OK. Now, you will notice that the Solution Explorer contains the following: Double click the Program.fs and enter the following information. Hit F5 and it should run successfully. Sample Program. open System let a = 2        Console.WriteLine a As Shown below: Hmm, what? F# did the same thing in 3 lines of code. Show me the interactive evaluation that I keep hearing about. The F# development environment for Visual Studio 2010 provides two different modes of execution for F# code: Batch compilation to a .NET executable or DLL. (This was accomplished above). Interactive evaluation. (Demo is below) The interactive session provides a > prompt, requires a double semicolon ;; identifier at the end of a code snippet to force evaluation, and returns the names (if any) and types of resulting definitions and values. To access the F# prompt, in VS2010 Goto View –> Other Window then F# Interactive. Once you have the interactive window type in the following expression: 2+3;; as shown in the screenshot below: I hope this guide helps you get started with the language, please check out the following books for further information. F# Books for further reading   Foundations of F# Author: Robert Pickering An introduction to functional programming with F#. Including many samples, this book walks through the features of the F# language and libraries, and covers many of the .NET Framework features which can be leveraged with F#.       Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# Authors: Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet An introduction to functional programming for existing C# developers written by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. This book explains the core principles using both C# and F#, shows how to use functional ideas when designing .NET applications and presents practical examples such as design of domain specific language, development of multi-core applications and programming of reactive applications.

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• Context Issue in ASP.NET MVC 3 Unobtrusive Ajax

  - by imran_ku07

      Introduction:          One of the coolest feature you can find in ASP.NET MVC 3 is Unobtrusive Ajax and Unobtrusive Client Validation which separates the javaScript behavior and functionality from the contents of a web page. If you are migrating your ASP.NET MVC 2 (or 1) application to ASP.NET MVC 3 and leveraging the Unobtrusive Ajax feature then you will find that the this context in the callback function is not the same as in ASP.NET MVC 2(or 1). In this article, I will show you the issue and a simple solution.       Description:           The easiest way to understand the issue is to start with an example. Create an ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Then add the following javascript file references inside your page,   <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/MicrosoftMvcAjax.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>             Then add the following lines into your view,   @Ajax.ActionLink("About", "About", new AjaxOptions { OnSuccess = "Success" }) <script type="text/javascript"> function Success(data) { alert(this.innerHTML) } </script>              Next, disable Unobtrusive Ajax feature from web.config,   <add key="UnobtrusiveJavaScriptEnabled" value="false"/>              Then run your application and click the About link, you will see the alert window with "About" message on the screen. This shows that the this context in the callback function is the element which is clicked. Now, let's see what will happen when we leverage Unobtrusive Ajax feature. Now enable Unobtrusive Ajax feature from web.config,     <add key="UnobtrusiveJavaScriptEnabled" value="true"/>              Then run your application again and click the About link again, this time you will see the alert window with "undefined" message on the screen. This shows that the this context in the callback function is not the element which is clicked. Here, this context in the callback function is the Ajax settings object provided by jQuery. This may not be desirable because your callback function may need the this context as the element which triggers the Ajax request. The easiest way to make the this context as the element which triggers the Ajax request is to add this line in jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js file just before $.ajax(options) line,   options.context = element;              Then run your application again and click the About link again, you will find that the this context in the callback function remains same whether you use Unobtrusive Ajax or not.       Summary:          In this article I showed you a breaking change and a simple workaround in ASP.NET MVC 3. If you are migrating your application from ASP.NET MVC 2(or 1) to ASP.NET MVC 3 and leveraging Unobtrusive Ajax feature then you need to consider this breaking change. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.     SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Database Consistency History Report

  - by Pinal Dave

  Doctor and Database The last place I like to visit is always a hospital. With the monsoon season starting, intermittent rains, it has become sort of a routine to get a cycle of fever every other year (seriously I hate it). So when I visit my doctor, it is always interesting in the way he quizzes me. The routine question of – “How many days have you had this?”, “Is there any pattern?”, “Did you drench in rain?”, “Do you have any other symptom?” and so on. The idea here is that the doctor wants to find any anomaly or a pattern that will guide him to a viral or bacterial type. Most of the time they get it based on experience and sometimes after a battery of tests. So if there is consistent behavior to your problem, there is always a solution out. SQL Server has its way to find if the server data / files are in consistent state using the DBCC commands. Back to SQL Server In real life, Database consistency check is one of the critical operations a DBA generally doesn’t give much priority. Many readers of my blogs have asked many times, how do we know if the database is consistent? How do I read output of DBCC CHECKDB and find if everything is right or not? My common answer to all of them is – look at the bottom of checkdb (or checktable) output and look for below line. CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 0 consistency errors in database ‘DatabaseName’. Above is a “good sign” because we are seeing zero allocation and zero consistency error. If you are seeing non-zero errors then there is some problem with the database. Sample output is shown as below: CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 2 consistency errors in database ‘DatabaseName’. repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB (DatabaseName). If we see non-zero error then most of the time (not always) we get repair options depending on the level of corruption. There is risk involved with above option (repair_allow_data_loss), that is – we would lose the data. Sometimes the option would be repair_rebuild which is little safer. Though these options are available, it is important to find the root cause to the problem. In standard report, there is a report which can show the history of checkdb executed for the selected database. Since this is a database level report, we need to right click on database, click Reports, click Standard Reports and then choose “Database Consistency History” report. The information in this report is picked from default trace. If default trace is disabled or there is no checkdb run or information is not there in default trace (because it’s rolled over), we would get report like below. As we can see report says it very clearly: Currently, no execution history of CHECKDB is available or default trace is not enabled. To demonstrate, I have caused corruption in one of the database and did below steps. Run CheckDB so that errors are reported. Fix the corruption by losing the data using repair option Run CheckDB again to check if corruption is cleared. After that I have launched the report and below is what we would see. If you are lazy like me and don’t want to run the report manually for each database then below query would be handy to provide same report for all database. This query is runs behind the scenes by the report. All I have done is remove the filter for database name (at the last – highlighted). DECLARE @curr_tracefilename VARCHAR(500); DECLARE @base_tracefilename VARCHAR(500); DECLARE @indx INT; SELECT @curr_tracefilename = path FROM sys.traces WHERE is_default = 1; SET @curr_tracefilename = REVERSE(@curr_tracefilename); SELECT @indx  = PATINDEX('%\%', @curr_tracefilename) ; SET @curr_tracefilename = REVERSE(@curr_tracefilename); SET @base_tracefilename = LEFT( @curr_tracefilename,LEN(@curr_tracefilename) - @indx) + '\log.trc'; SELECT  SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),36, PATINDEX('%executed%',TEXTData)-36) AS command ,       LoginName ,       StartTime ,       CONVERT(INT,SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%found%',TEXTData) +6,PATINDEX('%errors %',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%found%',TEXTData)-6)) AS errors ,       CONVERT(INT,SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%repaired%',TEXTData) +9,PATINDEX('%errors.%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%repaired%',TEXTData)-9)) repaired ,       SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%time:%',TEXTData)+6,PATINDEX('%hours%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%time:%',TEXTData)-6)+':'+SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%hours%',TEXTData) +6,PATINDEX('%minutes%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%hours%',TEXTData)-6)+':'+SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%minutes%',TEXTData) +8,PATINDEX('%seconds.%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%minutes%',TEXTData)-8) AS time FROM::fn_trace_gettable( @base_tracefilename, DEFAULT) WHERE EventClass = 22 AND SUBSTRING(TEXTData,36,12) = 'DBCC CHECKDB' -- AND DatabaseName = @DatabaseName; Don’t get worried about the logic above. All it is doing is reading the trace files, parsing below entry and getting out information for underlined words. DBCC CHECKDB (CorruptedDatabase) executed by sa found 2 errors and repaired 0 errors. Elapsed time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds.  Internal database snapshot has split point LSN = 00000029:00000030:0001 and first LSN = 00000029:00000020:0001. Hopefully now onwards you would run checkdb and understand the importance of it. As responsible DBAs I am sure you are already doing it, let me know how often do you actually run them on you production environment? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• How to Use Steam In-Home Streaming

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Steam’s In-Home Streaming is now available to everyone, allowing you to stream PC games from one PC to another PC on the same local network. Use your gaming PC to power your laptops and home theater system. This feature doesn’t allow you to stream games over the Internet, only the same local network. Even if you tricked Steam, you probably wouldn’t get good streaming performance over the Internet. Why Stream? When you use Steam In-Home streaming, one PC sends its video and audio to another PC. The other PC views the video and audio like it’s watching a movie, sending back mouse, keyboard, and controller input to the other PC. This allows you to have a fast gaming PC power your gaming experience on slower PCs. For example, you could play graphically demanding games on a laptop in another room of your house, even if that laptop has slower integrated graphics. You could connect a slower PC to your television and use your gaming PC without hauling it into a different room in your house. Streaming also enables cross-platform compatibility. You could have a Windows gaming PC and stream games to a Mac or Linux system. This will be Valve’s official solution for compatibility with old Windows-only games on the Linux (Steam OS) Steam Machines arriving later this year. NVIDIA offers their own game streaming solution, but it requires certain NVIDIA graphics hardware and can only stream to an NVIDIA Shield device. How to Get Started In-Home Streaming is simple to use and doesn’t require any complex configuration — or any configuration, really. First, log into the Steam program on a Windows PC. This should ideally be a powerful gaming PC with a powerful CPU and fast graphics hardware. Install the games you want to stream if you haven’t already — you’ll be streaming from your PC, not from Valve’s servers. (Valve will eventually allow you to stream games from Mac OS X, Linux, and Steam OS systems, but that feature isn’t yet available. You can still stream games to these other operating systems.) Next, log into Steam on another computer on the same network with the same Steam username. Both computers have to be on the same subnet of the same local network. You’ll see the games installed on your other PC in the Steam client’s library. Click the Stream button to start streaming a game from your other PC. The game will launch on your host PC, and it will send its audio and video to the PC in front of you. Your input on the client will be sent back to the server. Be sure to update Steam on both computers if you don’t see this feature. Use the Steam > Check for Updates option within Steam and install the latest update. Updating to the latest graphics drivers for your computer’s hardware is always a good idea, too. Improving Performance Here’s what Valve recommends for good streaming performance: Host PC: A quad-core CPU for the computer running the game, minimum. The computer needs enough processor power to run the game, compress the video and audio, and send it over the network with low latency. Streaming Client: A GPU that supports hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding on the client PC. This hardware is included on all recent laptops and PCs. Ifyou have an older PC or netbook, it may not be able to decode the video stream quickly enough. Network Hardware: A wired network connection is ideal. You may have success with wireless N or AC networks with good signals, but this isn’t guaranteed. Game Settings: While streaming a game, visit the game’s setting screen and lower the resolution or turn off VSync to speed things up. In-Home Steaming Settings: On the host PC, click Steam > Settings and select In-Home Streaming to view the In-Home Streaming settings. You can modify your streaming settings to improve performance and reduce latency. Feel free to experiment with the options here and see how they affect performance — they should be self-explanatory. Check Valve’s In-Home Streaming documentation for troubleshooting information. You can also try streaming non-Steam games. Click Games > Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library on your host PC and add a PC game you have installed elsewhere on your system. You can then try streaming it from your client PC. Valve says this “may work but is not officially supported.” Image Credit: Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr, Milestoned on Flickr

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• HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database

  - by Jane Story

  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:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When working with a Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Standard Costing application, there can often be a requirement to check data or allocated results using reporting tools e.g Smartview. To do this, you are retrieving data directly from the Essbase databases related to your HPCM model. For information, running reports is covered in Chapter 9 of the HPCM User documentation. The aim of this blog is to provide a quick guide to finding this data for reporting in the HPCM generated Essbase database in v11.1.2.2.x of HPCM. In order to retrieve data from an HPCM generated Essbase database, it is important to understand each of the following dimensions in the Essbase database and where data is located within them: Measures dimension – identifies Measures AllocationType dimension – identifies Direct Allocation Data or Genealogy Allocation data Point Of View (POV) dimensions – there must be at least one, maximum of four. Business dimensions: Stage Business dimensions – these will be identified by the Stage prefix. Intra-Stage dimension – these will be identified by the _Intra suffix. Essbase outlines and reporting is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s02.html For additional details on reporting measures, please review this section of the documentation:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/apas03.html Reporting requirements in HPCM quite often start with identifying non balanced items in the Stage Balancing report. The following documentation link provides help with identifying some of the items within the Stage Balancing report:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/generatestagebalancing.html The following are some types of data upon which you may want to report: Stage Data: Direct Input Assigned Input Data Assigned Output Data Idle Cost/Revenue Unassigned Cost/Revenue Over Driven Cost/Revenue Direct Allocation Data Genealogy Allocation Data Stage Data Stage Data consists of: Direct Input i.e. input data, the starting point of your allocation e.g. in Stage 1 Assigned Input Data i.e. the cost/revenue received from a prior stage (i.e. stage 2 and higher). Assigned Output Data i.e. for each stage, the data that will be assigned forward is assigned post stage data. Reporting on this data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s03.html Dimension Selection Measures Direct Input: CostInput RevenueInput Assigned Input (from previous stages): CostReceivedPriorStage RevenueReceivedPriorStage Assigned Output (to subsequent stages): CostAssignedPostStage RevenueAssignedPostStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the stage business dimensions for the stage you wish to see the Stage data for. All other Dimensions NoMember Idle/Unassigned/OverDriven To view Idle, Unassigned or Overdriven Costs/Revenue, first select which stage for which you want to view this data. If multiple Stages have unassigned/idle, resolve the earliest first and re-run the calculation as differences in early stages will create unassigned/idle in later stages. Dimension Selection Measures Idle: IdleCost IdleRevenue Unassigned: UnAssignedCost UnAssignedRevenue Overdriven: OverDrivenCost OverDrivenRevenue AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/ Idle/OverDriven Cost All the Stage Business dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/Idle/Overdriven. Zoom in on each dimension to find the individual members to find which members have Unassigned/Idle/OverDriven data. All other Dimensions NoMember Direct Allocation Data Direct allocation data shows the data received by a destination intersection from a source intersection where a direct assignment(s) exists. Reporting on direct allocation data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s04.html You would select the following to report direct allocation data Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the SOURCE stage business dimensions and the DESTINATION stage business dimensions for the direct allocations for the stage you wish to report on. All other Dimensions NoMember Genealogy Allocation Data Genealogy allocation data shows the indirect data relationships between stages. Genealogy calculations run in the HPCM Reporting database only. Reporting on genealogy data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s05.html Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType GenealogyAllocation (IndirectAllocation in 11.1.2.1 and prior versions) POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any stage business dimension members from the STARTING stage in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the INTERMEDIATE stage(s) in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the ENDING stage in Genealogy All other Dimensions NoMember Notes If you still don’t see data after checking the above, please check the following Check the calculation has been run. Here are couple of indicators that might help them with that. Note the size of essbase cube before and after calculations ensure that a calculation was run against the database you are examing. Export the essbase data to a text file to confirm that some data exists. Examine the date and time on task area to see when, if any, calculations were run and what choices were used (e.g. Genealogy choices) If data does not exist in places where they are expecting, it could be that No calculations/genealogy were run No calculations were successfully run The model/data at feeder location were either absent or incompatible, resulting in no allocation e.g no driver data. Smartview Invocation from HPCM From version 11.1.2.2.350 of HPCM (this version will be GA shortly), it is possible to directly invoke Smartview from HPCM. There is guided navigation before the Smartview invocation and it is then possible to see the selected value(s) in SmartView. Click to Download HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database (Right click or option-click the link and choose "Save As..." to download this pdf file)

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• How do I prove or disprove "god" objects are wrong?

  - by honestduane

  Problem Summary: Long story short, I inherited a code base and an development team I am not allowed to replace and the use of God Objects is a big issue. Going forward, I want to have us re-factor things but I am getting push-back from the teams who want to do everything with God Objects "because its easier" and this means I would not be allowed to re-factor. I pushed back citing my years of dev experience, that I'm the new boss who was hired to know these things, etc, and so did the third party offshore companies account sales rep, and this is now at the executive level and my meeting is tomorrow and I want to go in with a lot of technical ammo to advocate best practices because I feel it will be cheaper in the long run (And I personally feel that is what the third party is worried about) for the company. My issue is from a technical level, I know its good long term but I'm having trouble with the ultra short term and 6 months term, and while its something I "know" I cant prove it with references and cited resources outside of one person (Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob), as that is what I am being asked to do as I have been told having data from one person and only one person (Robert C Martin) is not good enough of an argument. Question: What are some resources I can cite directly (Title, year published, page number, quote) by well known experts in the field that explicitly say this use of "God" Objects/Classes/Systems is bad (or good, since we are looking for the most technically valid solution)? Research I have already done: I have a number of books here and I have searched their indexes for the use of the words "god object" and "god class". I found that oddly its almost never used and the copy of the GoF book I have for example, never uses it (At least according to the index in front of me) but I have found it in 2 books per the below, but I want more I can use. I checked the Wikipedia page for "God Object" and its currently a stub with little reference links so although I personally agree with that it says, It doesn't have much I can use in an environment where personal experience is not considered valid. The book cited is also considered too old to be valid by the people I am debating these technical points with as the argument they are making is that "it was once thought to be bad but nobody could prove it, and now modern software says "god" objects are good to use". I personally believe that this statement is incorrect, but I want to prove the truth, whatever it is. In Robert C Martin's "Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#" (ISBN: 0-13-185725-8, hardcover) where on page 266 it states "Everybody knows that god classes are a bad idea. We don't want to concentrate all the intelligence of a system into a single object or a single function. One of the goals of OOD is the partitioning and distribution of behavior into many classes and many function." -- And then goes on to say sometimes its better to use God Classes anyway sometimes (Citing micro-controllers as an example). In Robert C Martin's "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" page 136 (And only this page) talks about the "God class" and calls it out as a prime example of a violation of the "classes should be small" rule he uses to promote the Single Responsibility Principle" starting on on page 138. The problem I have is all my references and citations come from the same person (Robert C. Martin), and am from the same single person/source. I am being told that because he is just one guy, my desire to not use "God Classes" is invalid and not accepted as a standard best practice in the software industry. Is this true? Am I doing things wrong from a technical perspective by trying to keep to the teaching of Uncle Bob? God Objects and Object Oriented Programming and Design: The more I think of this the more I think this is more something you learn when you study OOP and its never explicitly called out; Its implicit to good design is my thinking (Feel free to correct me, please, as I want to learn), The problem is I "know" this, but but not everybody does, so in this case its not considered a valid argument because I am effectively calling it out as universal truth when in fact most people are statistically ignorant of it since statistically most people are not programmers. Conclusion: I am at a loss on what to search for to get the best additional results to cite, since they are making a technical claim and I want to know the truth and be able to prove it with citations like a real engineer/scientist, even if I am biased against god objects due to my personal experience with code that used them. Any assistance or citations would be deeply appreciated.

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• Subscribable World Cup 2010 Calendar

  - by jamiet

  I bang on quite a lot on this blog about ways in which data can get published over the web and one of the most interesting ways, in my opinion, of publishing data in a structured manner that is well understood is to use the iCalendar specification. There isn’t much information in the world that doesn’t have some concept of “when” so iCalendar is a great way of distributing that information. You have probably used iCalendar at some point without even knowing about it. All files with a .ics suffix are iCalendar format files and that is why you can happily import them into Outlook, Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar etc… where they can be parsed and have the semantic data (when, where and who) extracted from them. Importing of iCalendar format data is really only half the trick though; in my opinion the real value of iCalendar-formatted calendar is the ability to subscribe to them. Subscribing has a simple benefit over importing but that single benefit is of massive importance: a subscriber to an iCalendar calendar can periodically check to see if any updates have been made and, if they have, automatically update the local copy. The real benefit to the user is the productivity gain – a single update to an iCalendar means that all subscribers are automatically made aware of the change and there is zero effort on the part of the subscriber; as my former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying, “work smarter not harder” – nowhere is this edict more ably demonstrated than subscribing versus importing of calendars. If you want to read some more thoughts about iCalendar then go and read my past blog post Calendar syndication - My big hope for 2009's breakthrough technology or better still go and seek out Jon Udell who speaks very authoritatively on the issue of iCalendar. With this subject of iCalendar on my mind I was interested to discover (via Steve Clayton’s blog post Download the world cup fixtures) that the BBC had made a .ics file available containing all of the matches in the upcoming World Cup. As you can probably guess this was a file that was made available so that it could be imported into your calendar of choice. It had one obvious downside though, right now nobody knows who is going to be playing in the knock-out stages so the calendar looks like this: with no teams being named after 25th June. How much more useful would this calendar have been if the BBC had made it possible to subscribe to the calendar instead, thus the calendar could be updated with the teams for the knock out stages when they are known and every subscriber would have a permanently up-to-date record of all the fixtures in their calendar. Better still, the calendar could be updated with match results as well or perhaps even post a match report from the BBC sport pages; when calendars are made subscribable a sea of opportunity opens up for distribution of information. So with that in mind I have decided to go one better than the BBC. I have imported their .ics into a brand new Hotmail calendar and made it publicly available at the following URLs: HTML http://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/index.html iCalendar webcal://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/calendar.ics The link you’re really interested in is the second one - click on that and it should open up in your calendar software of choice. Or, if you want to view it in an online calendar such as Hotmail Calendar or Google Calendar, copy and paste that URL into the appropriate place. Some people have told me they’re having trouble with the iCalendar link in which case hit the HTML link and then click “View ICS” at the resultant web page: I shall endeavour to keep the calendar updated throughout the World Cup and even if I don’t you’re no worse off than if you had imported the BBC’s .ics file so why not give it a try? If I do keep it up to date then you will have a permanent record of the 2010 World Cup available in your calendar. Forever. If you have your calendar synced to your smartphone then you’ll be carrying match reports around with you without you having to do a single thing. Surely that’s worth a quick click isn’t it?   If you have any thoughts let me have them in the comments below. Thanks for reading. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Fun With the Chrome JavaScript Console and the Pluralsight Website

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2013/07/24/fun-with-the-chrome-javascript-console-and-the-pluralsight-website.aspxI’m currently working on my third course for Pluralsight. Everyone already knows that Scott Allen is a “dominating force” for Pluralsight but I was curious how many courses other authors have published as well. The Pluralsight Authors page - http://pluralsight.com/training/Authors – shows all 146 authors and you can click on any author’s page to see how many (and which) courses they have authored. The problem is: I don’t want to have to click into 146 pages to get a count for each author. With this in mind, I figured I could write a little JavaScript using the Chrome JavaScript console to do some “detective work.” My first step was to figure out how the HTML was structured on this page so I could do some screen-scraping. Right-click the first author - “Inspect Element”. I can see there is a primary <div> with a class of “main” which contains all the authors. Each author is in an <h3> with an <a> tag containing their name and link to their page:     This web page already has jQuery loaded so I can use $ directly from the console. This allows me to just use jQuery to inspect items on the current page. Notice this is a multi-line command. In order to use multiple lines in the console you have to press SHIFT-ENTER to go to the next line:     Now I can see I’m extracting data just fine. At this point I want to follow each URL. Then I want to screen-scrape this next page to see how many courses each author has done. Let’s take a look at the author detail page:       I can see we have a table (with a css class of “course”) that contains rows for each course authored. This means I can get the number of courses pretty easily like this:     Now I can put this all together. Back on the authors page, I want to follow each URL, extract the returned HTML, and grab the count. In the code below, I simply use the jQuery $.get() method to get the author detail page and the “data” variable that is in the callback contains the HTML. A nice feature of jQuery is that I can simply put this HTML string inside of $() and I can use jQuery selectors directly on it in conjunction with the find() method:     Now I’m getting somewhere. I have every Pluralsight author and how many courses each one has authored. But that’s not quite what I’m after – what I want to see are the authors that have the MOST courses in the library. What I’d like to do is to put all of the data in an array and then sort that array descending by number of courses. I can add an item to the array after each author detail page is returned but the catch here is that I can’t perform the sort operation until ALL of the author detail pages have executed. The jQuery $.get() method is naturally an async method so I essentially have 146 async calls and I don’t want to perform my sort action until ALL have completed (side note: don’t run this script too many times or the Pluralsight servers might think your an evil hacker attempting a DoS attack and deny you). My C# brain wants to use a WaitHandle WaitAll() method here but this is JavaScript. I was able to do this by using the jQuery Deferred() object. I create a new deferred object for each request and push it onto a deferred array. After each request is complete, I signal completion by calling the resolve() method. Finally, I use a $.when.apply() method to execute my descending sort operation once all requests are complete. Here is my complete console command: 1: var authorList = [], 2: defList = []; 3: $(".main h3 a").each(function() { 4: var def = $.Deferred(); 5: defList.push(def); 6: var authorName = $(this).text(); 7: var authorUrl = $(this).attr('href'); 8: $.get(authorUrl, function(data) { 9: var courseCount = $(data).find("table.course tbody tr").length; 10: authorList.push({ name: authorName, numberOfCourses: courseCount }); 11: def.resolve(); 12: }); 13: }); 14: $.when.apply($, defList).then(function() { 15: console.log("*Everything* is complete"); 16: var sortedList = authorList.sort(function(obj1, obj2) { 17: return obj2.numberOfCourses - obj1.numberOfCourses; 18: }); 19: for (var i = 0; i < sortedList.length; i++) { 20: console.log(authorList[i]); 21: } 22: });   And here are the results:     WOW! John Sonmez has 44 courses!! And Matt Milner has 29! I guess Scott Allen isn’t the only “dominating force”. I would have assumed Scott Allen was #1 but he comes in as #3 in total course count (of course Scott has 11 courses in the Top 50, and 14 in the Top 100 which is incredible!). Given that I’m in the middle of producing only my third course, I better get to work!

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• Scrolling an HTML 5 page using JQuery

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will show you how to use JQuery to scroll through an HTML 5 page.I had to help a friend of mine to implement this functionality and I thought it would be a good idea to write a post.I will not use any JQuery scrollbar plugin,I will just use the very popular JQuery Library. Please download the library (minified version) from http://jquery.com/download.Please find here all my posts regarding JQuery.Also have a look at my posts regarding HTML 5.In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School.Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor.Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here. Let me move on to the actual example.This is the sample HTML 5 page<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>Liverpool Legends</title>        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.8.2.min.js"> </script>     <script type="text/javascript" src="scroll.js">     </script>       </head>  <body>    <header>        <h1>Liverpool Legends</h1>    </header>        <div id="main">        <table>        <caption>Liverpool Players</caption>        <thead>            <tr>                <th>Name</th>                <th>Photo</th>                <th>Position</th>                <th>Age</th>                <th>Scroll</th>            </tr>        </thead>        <tfoot class="footnote">            <tr>                <td colspan="4">We will add more photos soon</td>            </tr>        </tfoot>    <tbody>        <tr class="maintop">        <td>Alan Hansen</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\Alan-hansen-large.jpg" alt="Alan Hansen">            <figcaption>The best Liverpool Defender <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Hansen">Alan Hansen</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>Defender</td>            <td>57</td>            <td class="top">Middle</td>        </tr>        <tr>        <td>Graeme Souness</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\graeme-souness-large.jpg" alt="Graeme Souness">            <figcaption>Souness was the captain of the successful Liverpool team of the early 1980s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Souness">Graeme Souness</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>MidFielder</td>            <td>59</td>        </tr>        <tr>        <td>Ian Rush</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\ian-rush-large.jpg" alt="Ian Rush">            <figcaption>The deadliest Liverpool Striker <a href="http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rush">Ian Rush</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>Striker</td>            <td>51</td>        </tr>        <tr class="mainmiddle">        <td>John Barnes</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\john-barnes-large.jpg" alt="John Barnes">            <figcaption>The best Liverpool Defender <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnes_(footballer)">John Barnes</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>MidFielder</td>            <td>49</td>            <td class="middle">Bottom</td>        </tr>                <tr>        <td>Kenny Dalglish</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\kenny-dalglish-large.jpg" alt="Kenny Dalglish">            <figcaption>King Kenny <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Dalglish">Kenny Dalglish</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>Midfielder</td>            <td>61</td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td>Michael Owen</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\michael-owen-large.jpg" alt="Michael Owen">            <figcaption>Michael was Liverpool's top goal scorer from 1997–2004 <a href="http://www.michaelowen.com/">Michael Owen</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>Striker</td>            <td>33</td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td>Robbie Fowler</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\robbie-fowler-large.jpg" alt="Robbie Fowler">            <figcaption>Fowler scored 183 goals in total for Liverpool <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Fowler">Robbie Fowler</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>Striker</td>            <td>38</td>        </tr>        <tr class="mainbottom">            <td>Steven Gerrard</td>            <td>            <figure>            <img src="images\steven-gerrard-large.jpg" alt="Steven Gerrard">            <figcaption>Liverpool's captain <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Gerrard">Steven Gerrard</a></figcaption>            </figure>            </td>            <td>Midfielder</td>            <td>32</td>            <td class="bottom">Top</td>        </tr>    </tbody></table>          </div>            <footer>        <p>All Rights Reserved</p>      </footer>     </body>  </html>  The markup is very easy to follow and understand. You do not have to type all the code,simply copy and paste it.For those that you are not familiar with HTML 5, please take a closer look at the new tags/elements introduced with HTML 5.When I view the HTML 5 page with Firefox I see the following result. I have also an external stylesheet (style.css). body{background-color:#efefef;}h1{font-size:2.3em;}table { border-collapse: collapse;font-family: Futura, Arial, sans-serif; }caption { font-size: 1.2em; margin: 1em auto; }th, td {padding: .65em; }th, thead { background: #000; color: #fff; border: 1px solid #000; }tr:nth-child(odd) { background: #ccc; }tr:nth-child(even) { background: #404040; }td { border-right: 1px solid #777; }table { border: 1px solid #777;  }.top, .middle, .bottom {    cursor: pointer;    font-size: 22px;    font-weight: bold;    text-align: center;}.footnote{text-align:center;font-family:Tahoma;color:#EB7515;}a{color:#22577a;text-decoration:none;}     a:hover {color:#125949; text-decoration:none;}  footer{background-color:#505050;width:1150px;}These are just simple CSS Rules that style the various HTML 5 tags,classes. The jQuery code that makes it all possible resides inside the scroll.js file.Make sure you type everything correctly.$(document).ready(function() {                 $('.top').click(function(){                     $('html, body').animate({                         scrollTop: $(".mainmiddle").offset().top                     },4000 );                  });                 $('.middle').click(function(){                     $('html, body').animate({                         scrollTop: $(".mainbottom").offset().top                     },4000);                  });                     $('.bottom').click(function(){                     $('html, body').animate({                         scrollTop: $(".maintop").offset().top                     },4000);                  }); });  Let me explain what I am doing here.When I click on the Middle word (  $('.top').click(function(){ ) this relates to the top class that is clicked.Then we declare the elements that we want to participate in the scrolling. In this case is html,body ( $('html, body').animate).These elements will be part of the vertical scrolling.In the next line of code we simply move (navigate) to the element (class mainmiddle that is attached to a tr element.)      scrollTop: $(".mainmiddle").offset().top  Make sure you type all the code correctly and try it for yourself. I have tested this solution will all 4-5 major browsers.Hope it helps!!!

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• Breaking up the Workday– Overcoming the Workaholic Syndrome

  - by dwahlin

  Hi, my name’s Dan Wahlin and I’m a workaholic – I admit it. It’s good from the standpoint that I get a lot done but it also has a lot of cons associated with it as well that I’m not proud of. I literally can’t watch TV without feeling like I should be doing something more productive (although I have no problem going to see movies at a theater or watching sporting events – that’s my escape I guess). On vacation it’s sometimes difficult the first few days to just “let go” of work and enjoy the time with my family. I always feel like I should be checking email and following up with different business projects. Fortunately, my wife knows me really well after 17 years of marriage and “gently” restricts my usage of laptops and other gadgets while we’re out. She also reminds me that constantly burying my face in gadgets just isn’t cool and shows a distinct lack of self control. On a given day I typically put in between 12 (at a minimum) up to 16-18 hours working on projects. My company does .NET consulting (ASP.NET/jQuery, SharePoint and Silverlight) but we also do a lot in the training space so there’s always a client project, some new courseware or some other deliverable that has to be worked on. My normal process for handling that is to just work my butt off and see how much I can get done. That process has worked well for a long time but when you start realizing that your happiness comes from how much work you accomplished that day then you have a problem. That’s especially true if you have kids (which I do….two awesome boys). It’s almost as if working more hours feels like I’m more successful or something which is of course ridiculous. It may actually mean that I’m too distracted or disorganized. Lately I’ve realized that while I’m still productive and always meet my deadlines, I’m really burnt out by the afternoon and have lost some of the excitement I used to have. Part of that’s normal I think given that I’ve been doing this for close to 15 years now, but in thinking through it more I realized that I just need to get away from the desk and take a break. By far, the happiest time of my life was my childhood. Part of that was due to having awesome parents, having far less responsibility (a big factor I suspect), being able to hang-out with friends at school, playing sports, games, etc. but I think a big part of the overall happiness came from being outside a lot. I lived on my bike as a little kid and as I grew up I shared time between riding an ATV all over the place, shooting hoops on the basketball court, playing golf and working on a golf course (all outside work of course).  Being a software developer and trainer I generally spend 95% or more of my day indoors and only see the sun when driving from place to place or by looking out the window (that’s sad because I live in a suburb of Phoenix, AZ where it’s nearly always sunny). I haven’t looked into any scientific studies on the matter, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a direct correlation between overall productivity/happiness and being outside some throughout the day (sunny or not). But, I wasn’t sure what to do about it since I do have a lot of deadlines I need to meet after all. While talking with my wife last night I mentioned how I feel like I’m in a rut and want to get the “fun” back that I used to have. She immediately said that I need to start making time for breaks (a real quick fact – she’s a lot smarter than me and nearly always right). Of course my first thought was that I’d be less productive taking breaks. If I spend 2 hours just relaxing then I’m losing 2 hours of work. But, I thought about it more and realized that I’m probably less productive when I work 10+ hours and only take less than 30 minutes for a lunch break to relax a little. I bet my brain is screaming, “Please let me relax a little so I can figure out these problems you’re trying to resolve!”. So, starting today I’m going to try to break the workaholic habit and spend time outside of the office. That could mean sitting around outside, working out, golfing, or whatever. I’ve decided that no gadgets are allowed during that time and that I shouldn’t work for more than 4 hours straight without taking a break. I have no idea how my little “break the workaholic syndrome” experiment will go or how long it will last, but I’d be very interested in hearing from others on how they keep fresh and focused without working yourself to death. If you have any specific ideas, techniques or practices you follow please share them. There’s a lot more to life than work and some of us (and I’m thinking of myself specifically) need to take a long, hard look at what kind of balance we currently have. I’d hate to look back at my life when I’m 80 years old and say, “The only thing I did was work – I missed out on life!”.

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• Beginner Guide to User Styles for Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  While the default styles for most websites are nice there may be times when you would love to tweak how things look. See how easy it can be to change how websites look with the Stylish Extension for Firefox. Note: Scripts from Userstyles.org can also be added to Greasemonkey if you have it installed. Getting Started After installing the extension you will be presented with a first run page. You may want to keep it open so that you can browse directly to the Userstyles.org website using the link in the upper left corner. In the lower right corner you will have a new Status Bar Icon. If you have used Greasemonkey before this icon works a little differently. It will be faded out due to no user style scripts being active at the moment. You can use either a left or right click to access the Context Menu. The user style script management section is also added into your Add-ons Management Window instead of being separate. When you reach the user style scripts homepage you can choose to either learn more about the extension & scripts or… Start hunting for lots of user style script goodness. There will be three convenient categories to get you jump-started if you wish. You could also conduct a search if you have something specific in mind. Here is some information directly from the website provided for your benefit. Notice the reference to using these scripts with Greasemonkey… This section shows you how the scripts have been categorized and can give you a better idea of how to search for something more specific. Finding & Installing Scripts For our example we decided to look at the Updated Styles Section”first. Based on the page number listing at the bottom there are a lot of scripts available to look through. Time to refine our search a little bit… Using the drop-down menu we selected site styles and entered Yahoo in the search blank. Needless to say 5 pages was a lot easier to look through than 828. We decided to install the Yahoo! Result Number Script. When you do find a script (or scripts) that you like simply click on the Install with Stylish Button. A small window will pop up giving you the opportunity to preview, proceed with the installation, edit the code, or cancel the process. Note: In our example the Preview Function did not work but it may be something particular to the script or our browser’s settings. If you decide to do some quick editing the window shown above will switch over to this one. To return to the previous window and install the user style script click on the Switch to Install Button. After installing the user style the green section in the script’s webpage will actually change to this message… Opening up the Add-ons Manager Window shows our new script ready to go. The script worked perfectly when we conducted a search at Yahoo…the Status Bar Icon also changed from faded out to full color (another indicator that everything is running nicely). Conclusion If you prefer a custom look for your favorite websites then you can have a lot of fun experimenting with different user style scripts. Note: See our article here for specialized How-To Geek User Style Scripts that can be added to your browser. Links Download the Stylish Extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Visit the Userstyles.org Website Install the Yahoo! Result Number User Style Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Spice Up that Boring about:blank Page in FirefoxExpand the Add Bookmark Dialog in Firefox by DefaultEnjoy How-To Geek User Style Script GoodnessAuto-Hide Your Cluttered Firefox Status Bar ItemsBeginner Geek: Delete User Accounts in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes Twelve must-have Google Chrome plugins

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