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Calling webservice from WCF service

- by Balaji

I am having an issue consuming a webservice (c#.net) from a WCF service. The error i am getting is EndPointNotFoundException "TCP error code 10061: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it" I wrote a unit test to check if i could send a request to the web service and it worked fine [The unit test is using the same binding configuration as my WCF service] The web service and WCF service (client) have basichttp binding. Did anyone had similar kind of issue calling a webservice from a WCF service? The service Model section is as follows <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="DataService" closeTimeout="00:05:00" openTimeout="00:05:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:05:00" allowCookies="false" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" maxBufferSize="65536" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536" messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered" useDefaultWebProxy="true"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384"/> <security mode="None"> <transport clientCredentialType="None" proxyCredentialType="None" realm=""/> <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default"/> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="http://10.22.33.67/Service/DataService.asmx" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="DataService" contract="Service.DataService" name="DataService"/> </client> <services> <service name="TestToConsumeDataService.WCFHost.Service1" behaviorConfiguration="TestToConsumeDataService.WCFHost.Service1Behavior">  <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="TestToConsumeDataService.WCFHost.IService1">  <identity> <dns value="localhost"/> </identity> </endpoint> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/> </service> </services> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="TestToConsumeDataService.WCFHost.Service1Behavior">  <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>  <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel> The unit test project is also using the same service model section and it works. The only issue is while calling the service from another WCF service. Could you please suggest.

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"interface not found" in WCF Moniker without registration for excel

- by tbischel

I'm trying to connect excel to a WCF service, but I can't seem to get even a trivial case to work... I get an Invalid Syntax error when I try and create the proxy in excel. I've attached the visual studio debugger to excel, and get that the real error is "interface not found". I know the service works because the test client created by visual studio is ok... so the problem is in the VBA moniker string. I'm hoping to find one of two things: 1) a correction to my moniker string that will make this work, or 2) an existing sample project to download that has the source for both the host and client that does work. Here is the code for my VBA client: Dim addr As String addr = "service:mexAddress=net.tcp://localhost:7891/Test/WcfService1/Service1/mex, " addr = addr + "address=net.tcp://localhost:7891/Test/WcfService1/Service1/, " addr = addr + "contract=IService1, contractNamespace=http://tempuri.org, " addr = addr + "binding=NetTcpBinding_IService1, bindingNamespace=""http://tempuri.org""" MsgBox (addr) Dim service1 As Object Set service1 = GetObject(addr) MsgBox service1.Test(12) I have the following service: [ServiceContract] public interface IService1 { [OperationContract] string GetData(int value); } public class Service1 : IService1 { public string GetData(int value) { return string.Format("You entered: {0}", value); } } It has the following config file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" /> </system.web>  <system.serviceModel> <services> <service behaviorConfiguration="WcfService1.Service1Behavior" name="WcfService1.Service1"> <endpoint address="" binding="netTcpBinding" bindingConfiguration="" contract="WcfService1.IService1"> <identity> <dns value="localhost" /> </identity> </endpoint> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexTcpBinding" bindingConfiguration="" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:7891/Test/WcfService1/Service1/" /> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> </services> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="WcfService1.Service1Behavior"> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="false" /> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel> </configuration>

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WCF via SSL connectivity problems

- by Brett Widmeier

Hello, I am hosting a WCF service from inside a Windows service using WAS. When I set the service to listen on 127.0.0.1, I have connectivity from my local machine as well as from my network. However, when I set it to listen on my outbound interface port 443, I can no longer even see the wsdl by connecting with a browser. Strangely, I can connect to the service by using telnet. The cert I am using was generated for my interface by a CA, and I have successfully used this exact cert with this service before. When checking the application log, I see that the service starts without error and is listening on the correct interface. From this information, it seems to me that the config file is in a valid state, but somehow misconfigured for what I want. I have, however, previously deployed this same setup on other sites using this config file. In case it is helpful, below is my config file. Any thoughts?  <appSettings/> <connectionStrings/> <system.serviceModel>  <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="basicHttps"> <security mode="Transport"> <transport clientCredentialType="None"/> <message /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <services> <service behaviorConfiguration="ServiceBehavior" name="<fully qualified name of service>"> <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" name="OrdersSoap" contract="<fully qualified name of contract>" bindingNamespace="http://emr.orders.com/WebServices" bindingConfiguration="basicHttps" /> <endpoint binding="mexHttpsBinding" address="mex" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="https://<external IP>/<name of service>>/" /> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> </services> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="ServiceBehavior"> <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="False"/> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="True" /> <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483646"/> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel>

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WCF Service error on IIS with metadata

- by Bruno Silva

Hi, I'm trying to publish a service to IIS, it builds and runs OK on the ASP.NET dev server. When running in IIS I can get to the metadata by navigating to the service or by adding service reference in Visual Studio. But when I call a method from my client app it crashes with a internal server error. So I went to the Event Log and found this: WebHost failed to process a request. Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult/8810861 Exception: System.Web.HttpException (0x80004005): There was no channel actively listening at 'http://mysite.net/soundhubservice.svc/$metadata'. This is often caused by an incorrect address URI. Ensure that the address to which the message is sent matches an address on which a service is listening. ---> System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotFoundException: There was no channel actively listening at 'http://mysite.net/soundhubservice.svc/$metadata'. This is often caused by an incorrect address URI. Ensure that the address to which the message is sent matches an address on which a service is listening. at System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpTransportManager.HttpContextReceived(HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult result) at System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult.HandleRequest() at System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult.BeginRequest() at System.Runtime.AsyncResult.End[TAsyncResult](IAsyncResult result) at System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult.End(IAsyncResult result) Process Name: w3wp Process ID: 1080 My Web.Config looks something like this: <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> </system.web> <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="SoundHub.Services.SoundHubService" behaviorConfiguration="StreamingServiceBehavior"> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="http://localhost/SoundHubServive"/> </baseAddresses> </host> <endpoint address="service" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="httpBuffering" contract="SoundHub.Services.ISoundHubService"/> <endpoint address="stream" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="HttpStreaming" contract="SoundHub.Services.ISoundHubStreamService"/>  </service> </services> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="HttpStreaming" maxReceivedMessageSize="67108864" transferMode="Streamed"/> <binding name="httpBuffering" transferMode="Buffered" /> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="StreamingServiceBehavior"> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="True"/> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="False"/> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel> <system.webServer> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"/> </system.webServer> </configuration> Tried several combinations of settings I found while searching online but nothing helped, always the same error. Thanks Bruno

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How to expose MEX when I need the service to have NTLM authentication

- by Ram Amos

I'm developing a WCF service that is RESTful and SOAP, now both of them needs to be with NTLM authentication. I also want to expose a MEX endpoint so that others can easily reference the service and work with it. Now when I set IIS to require windows authentication I can use the REST service and make calls to the service succesfully, but when I want to reference the service with SVCUTIL it throws an error that it requires to be anonymous. Here's my web.config: <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true"/> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="basicHttpBinding" maxReceivedMessageSize="214748563" maxBufferSize="214748563" maxBufferPoolSize="214748563"> <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"> </transport> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> <webHttpBinding> <binding name="webHttpBinding" maxReceivedMessageSize="214748563" maxBufferSize="214748563" maxBufferPoolSize="214748563"> <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"> </transport> </security> </binding> </webHttpBinding> <mexHttpBinding> <binding name="mexHttpBinding"></binding> </mexHttpBinding> </bindings> <standardEndpoints> <webHttpEndpoint> <standardEndpoint name="" automaticFormatSelectionEnabled="true" helpEnabled="True"> </standardEndpoint> </webHttpEndpoint> </standardEndpoints> <services> <service name="Intel.ResourceScheduler.Service" behaviorConfiguration="Meta"> <clear /> <endpoint address="soap" name="SOAP" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="Intel.ResourceScheduler.Service.IResourceSchedulerService" listenUriMode="Explicit" /> <endpoint address="" name="rest" binding="webHttpBinding" behaviorConfiguration="REST" contract="Intel.ResourceScheduler.Service.IResourceSchedulerService" /> <endpoint address="mex" name="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" behaviorConfiguration="" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services> <behaviors> <endpointBehaviors> <behavior name="REST"> <webHttp /> </behavior> <behavior name="WCFBehavior"> <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483647" /> </behavior> </endpointBehaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="Meta"> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/> </behavior> <behavior name="REST"> <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483647" /> </behavior> <behavior name="WCFBehavior"> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/> <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483647" /> </behavior> <behavior name="">  <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />  <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> Any help will be appreciated.

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Transport Security with Certificate Authentication

- by Brian T

I'm getting the following error when I access my webservice localhost/MyService/MyService.svc The SSL settings for the service 'SslRequireCert' does not match those of the IIS 'Ssl, SslNegotiateCert'. I've following the web.config examples as specified in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731074.aspx Here is my wcf server web.config: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0"> <appSettings /> <system.web> <identity impersonate="false" /> <roleManager enabled="true" /> <authentication mode="Windows" /> <customErrors mode="Off" /> <webServices> <protocols> <add name="HttpGet" /> <add name="HttpPost" /> </protocols> </webServices> </system.web> <system.webServer> <directoryBrowse enabled="true" /> <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> <security> <authorization> <remove users="*" roles="" verbs="" /> <add accessType="Allow" users="*" roles="" /> </authorization> </security> </system.webServer> <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="AspNetSqlProviderService" behaviorConfiguration="MyServiceBehavior"> <endpoint binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="Interface1" bindingConfiguration="CertificateWithTransportWSHttpBinding" /> <endpoint binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="Interface2" bindingConfiguration="CertificateWithTransportWSHttpBinding" /> <endpoint address="mex" binding="wsHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="CertificateWithTransportWSHttpBinding" name="Metadata_Exchange" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="MyServiceBehavior"> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="True" /> <serviceMetadata /> <serviceCredentials> <clientCertificate> <authentication trustedStoreLocation="LocalMachine" revocationMode="Online"/> </clientCertificate> </serviceCredentials> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> <bindings> <wsHttpBinding> <binding name="CertificateWithTransportWSHttpBinding"> <security mode="Transport"> <transport clientCredentialType="Certificate" /> </security> </binding> </wsHttpBinding> </bindings> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> I've configured IIS as follows: https binding added using self signed certificate Under SSL settings, require SSL and accept client certificates is checked The self signed certificate has been added to the Local Computer Trusted Root CA. I can browse and execute the .asmx service definition, but the .svc gives me the error described above.

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Getting SQL Syntax Error in INSERT INTO statement in Access 2010

- by hello123

I have written the following Insert Into statement in Access 2010 VBA: Private Sub AddBPSSButton_Click() ' CurrentDb.Execute "INSERT INTO TabClearDetail(C_Site) VALUES(" & Me.C_Site & ")" Dim strSQL As String 'MsgBox Me.[Clearance Applying For] 'MsgBox Me.[Contract Applying for] 'MsgBox Me.[C_Site] 'MsgBox Me.[C_SponsorSurname] 'MsgBox Me.[C_SponsorForename] 'MsgBox Me.[C_SponsorContactDetails] 'MsgBox Me.[C_EmploymentDetail] 'MsgBox Me.[C_SGNumber] 'MsgBox Me.[C_REF1DateRecd] 'MsgBox Me.[C_REF2DateRecd] 'MsgBox Me.[C_IDDateRecd] 'MsgBox Me.[C_IDNum] 'MsgBox Me.[C_CriminalDeclarationDate] 'MsgBox Me.[Credit Check Consent] 'MsgBox Me.[C_CreditCheckDate] 'MsgBox Me.[Referred for Management Decision] 'MsgBox Me.[Management Decision Date] 'MsgBox Me.[C_Comment] 'MsgBox Me.[C_DateCleared] 'MsgBox Me.[C_ClearanceLevel] 'MsgBox Me.[C_ContractAssigned] 'MsgBox Me.[C_ExpiryDate] 'MsgBox Me.[C_LinKRef] 'MsgBox Me.[C_OfficialSecretsDate] strSQL = "INSERT INTO TabClearDetail(Clearance Applying For, Contract Applying for, " & _ "C_Site, C_SponsorSurname, C_SponsorForename, C_SponsorContactDetails, C_EmploymentDetail, " & _ "C_SGNumber, C_REF1DateRecd, C_RED2DateRecd, C_IDDateRecd, C_IDNum, " & _ "C_CriminalDeclarationDate, Credit Check Consent, C_CreditCheckDate, Referred for Management Decision, " & _ "Management Decision Date, C_Comment, C_DateCleared, C_ClearanceLevel, C_ContractAssigned, " & _ "C_ExpiryDate, C_LinkRef, C_OfficialSecretsDate) VALUES('" & Me.[Clearance Applying For] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[Contract Applying for] & "', '" & Me.[C_Site] & "', '" & Me.[C_SponsorSurname] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[C_SponsorForename] & "', '" & Me.[C_SponsorContactDetails] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[C_EmploymentDetail] & "', '" & Me.[C_SGNumber] & "', '" & Me.[C_REF1DateRecd] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[C_REF2DateRecd] & "', '" & Me.[C_IDDateRecd] & "', '" & Me.[C_IDNum] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[C_CriminalDeclarationDate] & "', '" & Me.[Credit Check Consent] & "', '" & Me.[C_CreditCheckDate] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[Referred for Management Decision] & "', '" & Me.[Management Decision Date] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[C_Comment] & "', '" & Me.[C_DateCleared] & "', '" & Me.[C_ClearanceLevel] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[C_ContractAssigned] & "', '" & Me.[C_ExpiryDate] & "', '" & Me.[C_LinKRef] & "', " & _ "'" & Me.[C_OfficialSecretsDate] & "');" DoCmd.RunSQL (strSQL) 'MsgBox strSQL End Sub All The MsgBox calls work, so I believe I have typed all column names and text box names correctly. I am getting a Syntax error when I get to the DoCmd.RunSQL line. Have been staring at this for quite a while trying to see if I have missed a comma or speech mark or something, but am hoping maybe another set of eyes will see my mistake. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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Bye Bye Year of the Dragon, Hello BPM

- by Ajay Khanna

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;} As 2012 fades and we usher in a New Year, let’s look back at some of the hottest BPM trends and those we’ll be seeing more of in the coming months. BPM is as much about people as it is about technology. As people adopt new ways of engagement, new channels of communications and new devices to interact , the changes are reflected in BPM practices. As Social and Mobile have become an integral part of our personal and professional lives, we’ll see tighter integration of social and mobile with BPM, and more use cases emerging for smarter process management in 2013. And with products and services becoming less differentiated, organizations will strive to differentiate on Customer Experience. Concepts like Pace Layered Architecture and Dynamic Case Management will provide more flexibility and agility to IT groups and knowledge workers. Take a look at some of these capabilities we showcased (see video) at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Some of these trends that will continue to gain momentum in 2013: Social networks and social media have provided a new way for businesses to engage with customers. A prospect is likely to reach out to their social network before making any purchase. Companies are increasingly engaging with customers in social networks to influence their purchasing decisions, as well as listening to customers via tools like sentiment analysis to see what customers think about a particular product or process. These insights are valuable as companies look to improve their processes. Inside organizations, workers are using social tools to engage with each other to design new products and processes. Social collaboration tools are being used to resolve issues where an employee needs consultation to reach a decision. Oracle BPM Suite includes social interaction as an integral part of its process design and work management to empower today’s business users. Ubiquitous smart mobile devices are trending as a tool of choice for many workers. Many companies are adopting the policy of “Bring Your Own Device,” and the device of choice is a tablet. Devices like smart phones and tablets not only provide mobility to workers and customers, but they also provide additional important information – the context. By integrating the mobile context (location, photos, and preferences) into your processes, organizations can make much more informed decisions, as well as offer more personalized service to customers. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, you can easily create user interfaces for mobile devices and also capture location data for process execution. Customer experience was at the forefront of trending topics in 2012. Organizations are trying to understand their customers better and offer them more personalized and differentiated services. Customer experience is paramount when companies design sales and support processes. Companies are looking to BPM to consistently and efficiently orchestrate customer facing processes across disparate systems, departments and channels of communication. Oracle BPM Suite provides just the right capabilities for organizations to design and deliver an excellent customer experience. Pace Layered Architecture strategy is gaining traction as a way to maximize agility and minimize disruption in organizations. It provides a framework to manage the evolution of your information system when different pieces of it are changing at different rates and need to be updated independent of one another. Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle BPM Suite are designed with this in mind. The database layer, integration layer, application layer, and process layer should not be required to change at the same time. Most of the business changes to policy or process can be done at the process layer without disrupting the whole infrastructure. By understanding the type of change needed at a particular level, organizations can become much more agile and efficient. Adaptive Case Management proposes more flexibility to manage processes or cases that do not follow a structured process flow. In such situations, the knowledge worker managing the case needs to evaluate what step should occur next because the sequence of steps can’t be predetermined. Another characteristic is that it requires much more collaboration than straight-through process. As simple processes become automated, and customers adopt more and more self-service, cases that reach the case workers are much more complex and need more investigation. Oracle BPM suite includes comprehensive adaptive case management capability to manage such unstructured and complex processes. Smart BPM or making your BPM intelligent has been the holy grail for BPM practitioners who imagined that one day BPM would become one with Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing, making it much more responsive and helpful in organizational decision making. In 2013, organizations will begin to deploy these intelligent BPM solutions. Oracle offers an integrated solution that brings together the powerful functionality of BI, BAM, event processing, and Real Time Decisions to help organizations create smart process based solutions. In order to help customers reach their BPM goals faster and remove risks associated with BPM initiatives, Oracle has introduced Oracle Process Accelerators, pre-built best practices applications built on Oracle BPM Suite that are fully production grade and ready to deploy. These are exiting times for BPM practitioners and there is so much to look forward to in 2013. We wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year 2013. Happy BPMing!

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When OneTug Just Isn’t Enough…

- by onefloridacoder

I stole that from the back of a T-shirt I saw at the Orlando Code Camp 2010. This was my first code camp and my first time volunteering for an event like this as well. It was an awesome day. I cannot begin to count the “aaahh”, “I did-not-know I could do that”, in the crowds and for myself. I think it was a great day of learning for everyone at all levels. All of the presenters were different and provided great insights into the topics they were presenting. Here’s a list of the ones that I attended. KodeFuGuru, “Pirates vs. Ninjas” He touched on many good topics to relax some of the ways we think when we are writing out code, and still looks good, readable, etc. As he pointed out in all of his examples, we might not always realize everything that’s going on under the covers. He exposed a bug in his own code, and verbalized the mental gymnastics he went through when he knew there was something wrong with one of his IEnumerable implementations. For me, it was great to hear that someone else labors over these gut reactions to code quickly snapped together, to the point that we rush to the refactor stage to fix what’s bothering us – and learn. He has some content on extension methods that was very interesting. My “that is so cool” moment was when he swapped out AddEntity method on an entity class and used a With extension method instead. Some of the LINQ scales fell off my eyes at that moment, and I realized my own code could be a lot more powerful (and readable) if incorporate a few of these examples at the appropriate times. And he cautioned as well… “don’t go crazy with this stuff”, there’s a place and time for everything. One of his examples demo’d toward the end of the talk is on his sight where he’s chaining methods together, cool stuff. Quotes I liked: “Extension Methods - Extension methods to put features back on the model type, without impacting the type.” “Favor Declarative Code” – Check out the ? and ?? operators if you’re not already using them. “Favor Fluent Code” “Avoid Pirate Ninja Zombies! If you see one run!” I’m definitely going to be looking at “Extract Projection” when I get into VS2010. BDD 101 – Sean Chambers http://github.com/schambers This guy had a whole host of gremlins against him, final score Sean 5, Gremlins 1. He ran the code samples from his github repo in the code github code viewer since the PC they school gave him to use didn’t have VS installed. He did a great job of converting the grammar between BDD and TDD, and how this style of development can be used in integration tests as well as the different types of gated builds on a CI box – he didn’t go into a discussion around CI, but we could infer that it could work. Like when we use WSSF, it does cause a class explosion to happen however the amount of code per class it limit to just covering the concern at hand – no more, no less. As in “When I as a <Role>, expect {something} to happen, because {}” This keeps us (the developer) from gold plating our solutions and creating less waste. He basically keeps the code that prove out the requirement to two lines of code. Nice. He uses SpecUnit to merge this grammar into his .NET projects and gave an overview on how this ties into writing his own BDD tests. Some folks were familiar with Given / When / Then as story acceptance criteria and here’s how he mapped it: “Given <Context> When <Something Happens> Then <I expect...>” There are a few base classes and overrides in the SpecUnit framework that help with setting up the context for each test which looked very handy. Successfully Running Your Own Coding Business The speaker ran through a list of items that sounded like common sense stuff LLC, banking, separating expenses, etc. Then moved into role playing with business owners and an ISV. That was pretty good stuff, it pays to be a good listener all of the time even if your client is sitting on the other side of the phone tearing you head off for you – but that’s all it is, and get used to it its par for the course. Oh, yeah always answer the phone was one simple thing that you can do to move your business forward. But like Cory Foy tweeted this week, “If you owe me a lot of money, don’t have a message that says your away for five weeks skiing in Colorado.” Lots of food for thought that’s on my list of “todo’s and to-don’ts”. Speaker Idol Next, I had the pleasure of helping Russ Fustino tape this part of Code Camp as my primary volunteer opportunity that day. You remember Russ, “know the code” from the awesome Russ’ Tool Shed series. He did a great job orchestrating and capturing the Speaker Idol finals. So I didn’t actually miss any sessions, but was able to see three back to back in one setting. The idol finalists gave a 10 minute talk and very deep subjects, but different styles of talks. No one walked away empty handed for jobs very well done. Russ has details on his site. The pictures and video captured is supposed to be published on Channel 9 at a later date. It was also a valuable experience to see what makes technical speakers effective in their talks. I picked up quite a few speaking tips from what I heard from the judges and contestants. Design For Developers – Diane Leeper If you are a great developer, you’re probably a lousy designer. Diane didn’t come to poke holes in what we think we can do with UI layout and design, but she provided some tools we can use to figure out metaphors for visualizing data. If you need help with that check out Silverlight Pivot – that’s what she was getting at. I was first introduced to her at one of John Papa’s talks last year at a Lakeland User Group meeting and she’s very passionate about design. She was able to discuss different elements of Pivot, while to a developer is just looked cool. I believe she was providing the deck from her talk to folks after her talk, so send her an email if you’re interested. She says she can talk about design for hours and hours – we all left that session believing her. Rinse and Repeat Orlando Code Camp 2010 was awesome, and would totally do it again. There were lots of folks from my shop there, and some that have left my shop to go elsewhere. So it was a reunion of sorts and a great celebration for the simple fact that its great to be a developer and there’s a community that supports and recognizes it as well. The sponsors were generous and the organizers were very tired, namely Esteban Garcia and Will Strohl who were responsible for making a lot of this magic happen. And if you don’t believe me, check out the chatter on Twitter.

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Lessons from rewriting POP Forums for MVC, open source-like

- by Jeff

It has been a ton of work, interrupted over the last two years by unemployment, moving, a baby, failing to sell houses and other life events, but it's really exciting to see POP Forums v9 coming together. I'm not even sure when I decided to really commit to it as an open source project, but working on the same team as the CodePlex folks probably had something to do with it. Moving along the roadmap I set for myself, the app is now running on a quasi-production site... we launched MouseZoom last weekend. (That's a post-beta 1 build of the forum. There's also some nifty Silverlight DeepZoom goodness on that site.)I have to make a point to illustrate just how important starting over was for me. I started this forum thing for my sites in old ASP more than ten years ago. What a mess that stuff was, including SQL injection vulnerabilities and all kinds of crap. It went to ASP.NET in 2002, but even then, it felt a little too much like script. More than a year later, in 2003, I did an honest to goodness rewrite. If you've been in this business of writing code for any amount of time, you know how much you hate what you wrote a month ago, so just imagine that with seven years in between. The subsequent versions still carried a fair amount of crap, and that's why I had to start over, to make a clean break. Mind you, much of that crap is still running on some of my production sites in a stable manner, but it's a pain in the ass to maintain.So with that clean break, there is much that I have learned. These are a few of those lessons, in no particular order...Avoid shiny object syndromeOver the years, I've embraced new things without bothering to ask myself why. I remember spending the better part of a year trying to adapt this app to use the membership and profile API's in ASP.NET, just because they were there. They didn't solve any known problem. Early on in this version, I dabbled in exotic ORM's, even though I already had the fundamental SQL that I knew worked. I bloated up the client side code with all kinds of jQuery UI and plugins just because, and it got in the way. All the new shiny can be distracting, and I've come to realize that I've allowed it to be a distraction most of my professional life.Just query what you needI've spent a lot of time over-thinking how to query data. In the SQL world, this means exotic joins, special caches, the read-update-commit loop of ORM's, etc. There are times when you have to remind yourself that you aren't Facebook, you'll never be Facebook, and that databases are in fact intended to serve data. In a lot of projects, back in the day, I used to have these big, rich data objects and pass them all over the place, through various application tiers, when in reality, all I needed was some ID from the entity. I try to be mindful of how many queries hit the database on a given request, but I don't obsess over it. I just get what I need.Don't spend too much time worrying about your unit testsIf you've looked at any of the tests for POP Forums, you might offer an audible WTF. That's OK. There's a whole lot of mocking going on. In some cases, it points out where you're doing too much, and that's good for improving your design. In other cases it shows where your design sucks. But the biggest trap of unit testing is that you worry it should be prettier. That's a waste of time. When you write a test, in many cases before the production code, the important part is that you're testing the right thing. If you have to mock up a bunch of stuff to test the outcome, so be it, but it's not wasted time. You're still doing up the typical arrange-action-assert deal, and you'll be able to read that later if you need to.Get back to your HTTP rootsASP.NET Webforms did a reasonably decent job at abstracting us away from the stateless nature of the Web. A lot of people criticize it, but I think it all worked pretty well. These days, with MVC, jQuery, REST services, and what not, we've gone back to thinking about the wire. The nuts and bolts passing between our Web browser and server matters. This doesn't make things harder, in my opinion, it makes them easier. There is something incredibly freeing about how we approach development of Web apps now. HTTP is a really simple protocol, and the stuff we push through it, in particular HTML and JSON, are pretty simple too. The debugging points are really easy to trap and trace.Premature optimization is prematureI'll go back to the data thing for a moment. I've been known to look at a particular action or use case and stress about the number of calls that are made to the database. I'm not suggesting that it's a bad thing to keep these in mind, but if you worry about it outside of the context of the actual impact, you're wasting time. For example, I query the database for last read times in a forum separately of the user and the list of forums. The impact on performance barely exists. If I put it under load, exceeding the kind of load I expect, it still barely has an impact. Then consider it only counts for logged in users. The context of this "inefficient" action is that it doesn't matter. Did I mention I won't be Facebook?Solve your own problems firstThis is another trap I've fallen into. I've often thought about what other people might need for some feature or aspect of the app. In other words, I was willing to make design decisions based on non-existent data. How stupid is that? When I decided to truly open source this thing, building for myself first was a stated design goal. This app has to server the audiences of CoasterBuzz, MouseZoom and other sites first. In this development scenario, you don't have access to mountains of usability studies or user focus groups. You have to start with what you know.I'm sure there are other points I could make too. It has been a lot of fun to work on, and I look forward to evolving the UI as time goes on. That's where I hope to see more magic in the future.

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Workshops, online content show how Oracle infuses simplicity, mobility, extensibility into user experience

- by mvaughan

By Kathy Miedema & Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle has made a huge investment into the user experience of its many different software product families, and recent releases showcase big changes and features that aim to promote end user engagement and efficiency by streamlining navigation and simplifying the user interface. But making Oracle’s enterprise software great-looking and usable doesn’t stop when Oracle products go out the door. The Applications User Experience (UX) team recognizes that our customers may need to customize software to fit their work processes. And that’s why we provide tools such as user experience design patterns to help you maintain the Oracle user experience as you tailor your application to fit your business needs. Often, however, customers may need some context around user experience. How has the Oracle user experience been designed and constructed? Why is a good user experience important for users? How does understanding what goes into the user experience benefit the people who purchase the software for users? There’s a short answer to these questions, and you can read about it on Usable Apps. But truly understanding Oracle’s investment and seeing how it applies across product families occasionally requires a deeper dive into the Oracle user experience, especially if you’re an influencer or decision-maker about Oracle products. To help frame these decisions, the Communications & Outreach team has developed several targeted workshops that explore what Oracle means when it talks about user experience, and provides a roadmap into where the Oracle user experience is going. These workshops require non-disclosure agreements, and have been delivered to Oracle sales folks, Oracle partners, Oracle ACE Directors and ACEs, and a few customers. Some of these audience members have been developers or have a technical background; just as many did not. Here’s a breakdown of the kind of training you can get around the Oracle user experience from the OAUX Communications & Outreach team.For Partners: George Papazzian, Principal, Naviscent with Joyce Ohgi, Oracle Oracle Fusion Applications HCM Pre-Sales Seminar: In concert with Worldwide Alliances and Channels under Applications Partner Enablement Director Jonathan Vinoskey’s guidance, the Applications User Experience team delivers a two-day workshop. Day one focuses on Oracle Fusion Applications HCM and pre-sales strategy, and Day two focuses on positioning and leveraging Oracle’s investment in the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. The next workshops will occur on the following dates: December 4-5, 2013 @ Manchester, UK January 29-30, 2014 @ Reston, Virginia February 2014 @ Guadalajara, Mexico (email: Shannon Whiteman) March 11-12, 2014 @ Dubai, United Arab Emirates April 1-2, 2014 @ Chicago, Illinois Partner Advisory Board: A two-day board meeting in the U.S. and U.K. to discuss four main user experience areas for Oracle Fusion Applications: simplicity, visualization & analytics, mobility, & futures. This event is limited to Oracle Diamond Partners, UX bloggers, and key UX influencers and requires legal documentation. We will be talking about the Oracle applications UX strategy and roadmap. Partner Implementation Training on User Interface: How to Build Great-Looking, Usable Apps: In this two-day, hands-on workshop built around Oracle’s Application Development Framework, learn how to build desktop and mobile user interfaces and mobile user interfaces based on Oracle’s experience with Fusion Applications. This workshop is for partners with a technology background who are looking for ways to tailor Fusion Applications using ADF, or have built their own custom solutions using ADF. It includes an introduction to UX design patterns and provides tools to build usability-tested UX designs. Nov 5-6, 2013 @ Redwood Shores, CA, USA January 28-29th, 2014 @ Reston, Virginia, USA February 25-26, 2014 @ Guadalajara, Mexico March 9-10, 2014 @ Dubai, United Arab Emirates To register, contact [email protected] Simplified UI Customization & Extensibility: Pilot workshop: We will be reviewing the proposed content for communicating the user experience tool kit available with the next release of Oracle Fusion Applications. Our core focus will be on what toolkit components our system implementors and independent software vendors will need to respond to customer demand, whether they are extending Fusion Applications, or building custom applications, that will need to leverage the simplified UI. Dec 11th, 2013 @ Reading, UK For information: contact [email protected] Private lab tour and demos: Interested in seeing what’s going on in the Apps UX Labs? If you are headed to the San Francisco Bay Area, let us know. We can arrange a spin through our usability labs at headquarters. OAUX Expo: This open-house forum gives partners a look at what the UX team is working on, and showcases the next-generation user experiences in a demo environment where attendees can see and touch the applications. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For CustomersAngela Johnston, Gozel Aamoth, Teena Singh, and Yen Chan, Oracle Lab tours: See demos of soon-to-be-released products, and take a spin on usability research equipment such as our eye-tracker. Watch this video to get an idea of what you’ll see. Get our newsletter: Learn about newly released products and see where you can meet us at user group conferences. Participate in a feedback session: Join a focus group or customer feedback session to get an early look at user experience designs for the next generation of software, and provide your thoughts on how well it will work. Join the OUAB: The Oracle Usability Advisory Board meets several times a year to discuss trends in the workforce and provide direction on user experience designs. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For Developers (customers, partners, and consultants): Plinio Arbizu, SP Solutions, Richard Bingham, Oracle, Balaji Kamepalli, EiSTechnoogies, Praveen Pillalamarri, EiSTechnologies How to Build Great-Looking, Usable Apps: This workshop is for attendees with a strong technology background who are looking for ways to tailor customer software using ADF. It includes an introduction to UX design patterns and provides tools to build usability-tested UX designs. See above for dates and times. UX design patterns web site: Cut the length of your project down by months. Use these patterns to build out the task flow you need to develop for your users. The patterns have already been usability-tested and represent the best practices that the Oracle UX research team has found in its studies. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For Oracle Sales Mike Klein, Jeremy Ashley, Brent White, Oracle Contact your local sales person for more information about the Oracle user experience and the training available from the Applications User Experience Communications & Outreach team. See customer-friendly user experience collateral ranging from the new simplified UI in Oracle Fusion Applications Release 7, to E-Business Suite user experience highlights, to Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards user experience highlights. Receive access to the same pre-sales and implementation training we provide to partners. For Oracle Sales only: Oracle-only training on the Oracle Fusion Applications UX Innovation Sales Kit.

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Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

- by johndoucette

I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is; A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about ½ hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1. [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations. Deliverables 1.1 Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2 Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1 Two Factor authentication recommendation document Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

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Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

- by Kerrie Foy

Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now? No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access. For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment. ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey. In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014. Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives. Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster. Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation. Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article.

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Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

- by kellsey.ruppel

Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A. Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student. Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies". There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience. There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used. With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler. But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team. In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes. Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A: The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues; and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business. It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action! Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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Testing Workflows – Test-First

- by Timothy Klenke

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-first.aspxThis is the second of two posts on some common strategies for approaching the job of writing tests. The previous post covered test-after workflows where as this will focus on test-first. Each workflow presented is a method of attack for adding tests to a project. The more tools in your tool belt the better. So here is a partial list of some test-first methodologies. Ping Pong Ping Pong is a methodology commonly used in pair programing. One developer will write a new failing test. Then they hand the keyboard to their partner. The partner writes the production code to get the test passing. The partner then writes the next test before passing the keyboard back to the original developer. The reasoning behind this testing methodology is to facilitate pair programming. That is to say that this testing methodology shares all the benefits of pair programming, including ensuring multiple team members are familiar with the code base (i.e. low bus number). Test Blazer Test Blazing, in some respects, is also a pairing strategy. The developers don’t work side by side on the same task at the same time. Instead one developer is dedicated to writing tests at their own desk. They write failing test after failing test, never touching the production code. With these tests they are defining the specification for the system. The developer most familiar with the specifications would be assigned this task. The next day or later in the same day another developer fetches the latest test suite. Their job is to write the production code to get those tests passing. Once all the tests pass they fetch from source control the latest version of the test project to get the newer tests. This methodology has some of the benefits of pair programming, namely lowering the bus number. This can be good way adding an extra developer to a project without slowing it down too much. The production coder isn’t slowed down writing tests. The tests are in another project from the production code, so there shouldn’t be any merge conflicts despite two developers working on the same solution. This methodology is also a good test for the tests. Can another developer figure out what system should do just by reading the tests? This question will be answered as the production coder works there way through the test blazer’s tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a highly disciplined practice that calls for a new test and an new production code to be written every few minutes. There are strict rules for when you should be writing test or production code. You start by writing a failing (red) test, then write the simplest production code possible to get the code working (green), then you clean up the code (refactor). This is known as the red-green-refactor cycle. The goal of TDD isn’t the creation of a suite of tests, however that is an advantageous side effect. The real goal of TDD is to follow a practice that yields a better design. The practice is meant to push the design toward small, decoupled, modularized components. This is generally considered a better design that large, highly coupled ball of mud. TDD accomplishes this through the refactoring cycle. Refactoring is only possible to do safely when tests are in place. In order to use TDD developers must be trained in how to look for and repair code smells in the system. Through repairing these sections of smelly code (i.e. a refactoring) the design of the system emerges. For further information on TDD, I highly recommend the series “Is TDD Dead?”. It discusses its pros and cons and when it is best used. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Whereas TDD focuses on small unit tests that concentrate on a small piece of the system, Acceptance Tests focuses on the larger integrated environment. Acceptance Tests usually correspond to user stories, which come directly from the customer. The unit tests focus on the inputs and outputs of smaller parts of the system, which are too low level to be of interest to the customer. ATDD generally uses the same tools as TDD. However, ATDD uses fewer mocks and test doubles than TDD. ATDD often complements TDD; they aren’t competing methods. A full test suite will usually consist of a large number of unit (created via TDD) tests and a smaller number of acceptance tests. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) BDD is more about audience than workflow. BDD pushes the testing realm out towards the client. Developers, managers and the client all work together to define the tests. Typically different tooling is used for BDD than acceptance and unit testing. This is done because the audience is not just developers. Tools using the Gherkin family of languages allow for test scenarios to be described in an English format. Other tools such as MSpec or FitNesse also strive for highly readable behaviour driven test suites. Because these tests are public facing (viewable by people outside the development team), the terminology usually changes. You can’t get away with the same technobabble you can with unit tests written in a programming language that only developers understand. For starters, they usually aren’t called tests. Usually they’re called “examples”, “behaviours”, “scenarios”, or “specifications”. This may seem like a very subtle difference, but I’ve seen this small terminology change have a huge impact on the acceptance of the process. Many people have a bias that testing is something that comes at the end of a project. When you say we need to define the tests at the start of the project many people will immediately give that a lower priority on the project schedule. But if you say we need to define the specification or behaviour of the system before we can start, you’ll get more cooperation. Keep these test-first and test-after workflows in your tool belt. With them you’ll be able to find new opportunities to apply them.

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Distinctly LINQ – Getting a Distinct List of Objects

- by David Totzke

Let’s say that you have a list of objects that contains duplicate items and you want to extract a subset of distinct items. This is pretty straight forward in the trivial case where the duplicate objects are considered the same such as in the following example: List<int> ages = new List<int> { 21, 46, 46, 55, 17, 21, 55, 55 }; IEnumerable<int> distinctAges = ages.Distinct(); Console.WriteLine("Distinct ages:"); foreach (int age in distinctAges) { Console.WriteLine(age); } /* This code produces the following output: Distinct ages: 21 46 55 17 */ What if you are working with reference types instead? Imagine a list of search results where items in the results, while unique in and of themselves, also point to a parent. We’d like to be able to select a bunch of items in the list but then see only a distinct list of parents. Distinct isn’t going to help us much on its own as all of the items are distinct already. Perhaps we can create a class with just the information we are interested in like the Id and Name of the parents. public class SelectedItem { public int ItemID { get; set; } public string DisplayName { get; set; } } We can then use LINQ to populate a list containing objects with just the information we are interested in and then get rid of the duplicates. IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list = (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>() select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.ParentId, DisplayName = item.ParentName }) .Distinct(); Most of you will have guessed that this didn’t work. Even though some of our objects are now duplicates, because we are working with reference types, it doesn’t matter that their properties are the same, they’re still considered unique. What we need is a way to define equality for the Distinct() extension method. IEqualityComparer<T> Looking at the Distinct method we see that there is an overload that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T>. We can simply create a class that implements this interface and that allows us to define equality for our SelectedItem class. public class SelectedItemComparer : IEqualityComparer<SelectedItem> { public new bool Equals(SelectedItem abc, SelectedItem def) { return abc.ItemID == def.ItemID && abc.DisplayName == def.DisplayName; } public int GetHashCode(SelectedItem obj) { string code = obj.DisplayName + obj.ItemID.ToString(); return code.GetHashCode(); } } In the Equals method we simply do whatever comparisons are necessary to determine equality and then return true or false. Take note of the implementation of the GetHashCode method. GetHashCode must return the same value for two different objects if our Equals method says they are equal. Get this wrong and your comparer won’t work . Even though the Equals method returns true, mismatched hash codes will cause the comparison to fail. For our example, we simply build a string from the properties of the object and then call GetHashCode() on that. Now all we have to do is pass an instance of our IEqualitlyComarer<T> to Distinct and all will be well: IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list = (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>() select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.dahfkp, DisplayName = item.document_code }) .Distinct(new SelectedItemComparer()); Enjoy. Dave Just because I can… Technorati Tags: LINQ,C#

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Silverlight Cream for January 30, 2011 -- #1037

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Ollie Riches, Colin Eberhardt, Andrej Tozon, Arik Poznanski, Deborah Kurata(-2-), Jay Kimble, Yochay Kiriaty, Peter Kuhn, Mike Ormond, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), and Matthias Shapiro. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Missing Chart Legend" Deborah Kurata WP7: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 - Text rendering" Peter Kuhn Shoutouts: Timmy Kokke has a post up discussing What’s new in the Expression Design January 2011 preview? From SilverlightCream.com: WP7Contrib: Thread safe ObservableCollection<T> Ollie Riches, one of the two originators of WP7Contrib, has a post up on the WP7C ObservableCollection... what and why. Windows Phone 7 DeferredLoadContentControl Colin Eberhardt's latest is one we should all take notice of... a content control that defers rendering to provide a better user experience... source code is available as are some good external links Andrej Tozon on Hey weigh! WP7 application SilverlightShow interviews WP7 Dev Andrej Tozon and gets his take on his app, challenges, tips, and the future of WP7. A ProgressBar With Text For Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski demonstrates putting text up on the progress bar to let your users know what you're up to... and it looks great in the screenshots. Charting in a Silverlight Application using MVVM Deborah Kurata is checking out the Charting control this time around... using the charting control from the toolbox in the MVVM app she built in the last post... C# and VB code as always. Missing Chart Legend Deborah Kurata's latest in the world of Charting and MVVM involves using a custom theme and having your chart legend disappear... never fear, she's gonna tell you how to fix that! Silverlight/WP7 tip: Detecting when in VS Design Mode Jay Kimble has a post up that not only resolves a question you may need answered during development (are you in VS design Mode), but it also helps resolve a class of problem that Jay explains. Windows Phone GPS Emulator Yochay Kiriaty points out that while part of the issues of building a GPS-driven app for WP7 is getting your head around the tools, the next hurdle is testing... and that's what he's really discussing... "Windows Phone GPS Emulator" ... if you're playing with the GPS, you'll want this. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 - Text rendering Peter Kuhn's latest tutorial in his XNA series for Silverlight developers is up at SilverlightShow... in this tutorial, Peter discusses text... it's a vastly different game displaying text in XNA as compared to Silverlight ... check it out and see. OData and Windows Phone 7 Mike Ormond starts you off using OData on your WP7 by showing where to download the libraries, and not stopping until he has an app running that reads an OData feed, plus he plans on continuing the quest in future posts. WP7 ProgressOverlay control in depth: features and customization WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple new posts up. The first one is an in-depth look at the ProgressOverlay control in the Codeing4fun Toolkit... pretty cool to be able to put your logo or app logo up. On Testing Windows Phone 7 Applications – Part II: Dealing with the WP7 Application Model WindowsPhoneGeek also has 5 more WP7 testing tips... and these are a little more technical than the first set, and includes some good external links. Topics include: Tombstoning, Usability, Navigation, Capabilities, and Memory consumption. Fun Theme-Friendly Windows Phone Icon Matthias Shapiro explains how to have your WP7 icon change based on the theme your user has chosen... great examples, and XAML included Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it?

What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it? Agile Modeling is an add-on to existing agile methodologies like Extreme programming (XP) and Rational Unified Process (RUP). Agile Modeling enables developers to develop a customized software development process that actually meets their current development needs and is flexible enough to adjust in the future. According to Scott Ambler, Agile Modeling consists of five core values that enable this methodology to be effective and light weight Agile Modeling Core Values: Communication Simplicity Feedback Courage Humility Communication is a key component to any successful project. Open communication between stakeholder and the development team is essential when developing new applications or maintaining legacy systems. Agile models promote communication amongst software development teams and stakeholders. Furthermore, Agile Models provide a common understanding of an application for members of a software development team allowing them to have a universal common point of reference. The use of simplicity in Agile Models enables the exploration of new ideas and concepts through the use of basic diagrams instead of investing the time in writing tens or hundreds of lines of code. Feedback in regards to application development is essential. Feedback allows a development team to confirm that the development path is on track. Agile Models allow for quick feedback from shareholders because minimal to no technical expertise is required to understand basic models. Courage is important because you need to make important decisions and be able to change direction by either discarding or refactoring your work when some of your decisions prove inadequate, according to Scott Ambler. As a member of a development team, we must admit that we do not know everything even though some of us think we do. This is where humility comes in to play. Everyone is a knowledge expert in their own specific domain. If you need help with your finances then you would consult an accountant. If you have a problem or are in need of help with a topic why would someone not consult with a subject expert? An effective approach is to assume that everyone involved with your project has equal value and therefore should be treated with respect. Agile Model Characteristics: Purposeful Understandable Sufficiently Accurate Sufficiently Consistent Sufficiently Detailed Provide Positive Value Simple as Possible Just Fulfill Basic Requirements According to Scott Ambler, Agile models are the most effective possible because the time that is invested in the model is just enough effort to complete the job. Furthermore, if a model isn’t good enough yet then additional effort can be invested to get more value out of the model. However if a model is good enough, for the current needs, or surpass the current needs, then any additional work done on the model would be a waste. It is important to remember that good enough is in the eye of the beholder, so this can be tough. In order for Agile Models to work effectively Active Stakeholder need to participation in the modeling process. Finally it is also very important to model with others, this allows for additionally input ensuring that all the shareholders needs are reflected in the models. How can Agile Models be incorporated in to our projects? Agile Models can be incorporated in to our project during the requirement gathering and design phases. As requirements are gathered the models should be updated to incorporate the new project details as they are defined and updated. Additionally, the Agile Models created during the requirement phase can be the bases for the models created during the design phase. It is important to only add to the model when the changes fit within the agile model characteristics and they do not over complicate the design.

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Expression Studio 4 - without SketchFlow…

- by mbcrump

is kinda like an explosion with no “Ka-Boom”… I was excited to hear the news yesterday at Microsoft Teched that Expression Studio 4 had officially launched. MSDN subscribers could log in and download the full release. So, I logged into my MSDN account and started downloading Expression Studio 4 Premium thinking that I was only minutes away from trying out SketchFlow 4. To my dismay, I launched Blend 4 and noticed it did not say SketchFlow on the splash screen. So, I went to New Project and the template was not available. After some digging around on the net, I learned my premium MSDN subscription did not include SketchFlow and I would need to purchase the Ultimate Edition. Below is a excerpt directly from Microsoft: Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Ultimate? A: Expression Studio 4 Ultimate is comprised of 4 products, Expression Web 4, Microsoft Expression Blend® 4 + SketchFlow, Expression Encoder 4 Pro and Expression Design 4. Expression Blend 4 includes SketchFlow in Expression Studio 4 Ultimate product only. Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Premium? A: Expression Studio 4 Premium is comprised of 4 products, Expression Web 4, Microsoft Expression Blend 4, Expression Encoder 4 and Expression Design 4. Expression Studio 4 Premium is not available for retail purchase. Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Web Professional? A: Expression Studio 4 Web Professional is comprised of 3 products, Expression Web 4, Expression Encoder 4 and Expression Design 4. As you can see, we got screwed on this deal and plenty of people are complaining: Kiran Says: 6.07.2010 at 5:07 PM No SketchFlow for Expression Studio 4 Premium? What a bumper for Microsoft Partners!! Martin Says: 6.07.2010 at 6:18 PM Why does Expression Professional Subscription not include upgrades and new releases of Expression Studio. Good question hey. I bought my subscription 5 days ago thinking I would get what i purchased but no Expression upgrades or new releases for me, what a waste of money. I think I am not the only long term user of this software that feels disgruntled. Sorry john just had to tell someone. shaggygi Says: 6.07.2010 at 7:31 PM SketchFlow NOT included in Studio 4? WTF! I repeat.... WT...Freaking.... F! This is totally unacceptable. My development team purchased VS 2010 Premium w/ MSDN with the impression by Adam Kinney, Scott Guthrie, etc. that this would be included in the Premium package or some sort of free upgrade. I understand this is a Marketing thing, but come on! I believe, at very least, this should have been explained in detail before this release. John Papa... as a rep to give feedback to the team... Please please and please.... tell powers-at-be to fix this problem. Sorry for the rant. Besides this issue, I believe it is a very good product:) Thanks Vaclav Elias Says: 6.08.2010 at 4:30 AM Well, I am also not happy that SketchFlow is only for the chosen ones :-) It is very nice product. Actually, kind of foundation for web development so they could really support any MSDN subscribers.. :-( I am hoping that Microsoft will make this right for all of us with MSDN premier subscriptions. In the meantime, you can check out the 5 day training series available here.

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List of Upcoming Appearances

- by Chris Gardner

Greetings. I know I have been in work sponsored hiding lately. We are working furiously on a beta project to secure a contract, and I can't really talk about it yet. Hopefully, the contracts will be soon signed. Not only will we then have money, but I can talk about all this really cool tech with which I have been playing. However, since the contract is not signed, I need to bring you people up to date with where I will be during the summer. Let's face it, you can't be a speaker / blogger without pandering to shameless self-promotion. First, I will, once again, be staffing the Hands-on-Labs at TechEd North America. Unfortunately, TechEd North America is already sold out for this year. However, if you're already going, drop by the labs and say Hi. Also, keep an eye on Twitter to track me throughout the event. Also, look for a post in a few hours with my specific picks for what content I'm looking forward to seeing this year. Immediately following TechEd North America, I will be flying into Knoxville to speak at CodeStock. I will be presenting my introduction and intermediate Xbox 360 development talks. There are a TON of great content at CodeStock this year, but there are only about 50 tickets left. After that whirlwind of work, things settle for awhile. That means I'm available to speak at your User Group, luncheon, bowling league, birthday party, anniversary, or bat mitzvah. Mid August brings us to That Conference. This one is going to be a blast. If you haven't heard of That Conference yet, you should really check it out. This will also be my introduction and intermediate Xbox 360 development talks. This is a new conference, and it looks like it will be a great one. Finally, we will turn our attention to DevLink. DevLink has the distinction of picking up my newest talk, Creating Stereoscopic 3D Graphics in XNA. On top of that, I'm giving an general Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 talk. DevLink has added an new "XNA and Kinect" track, so there will me a ton of great game content. That should bring us through the summer. As I solidify the Stereoscopic talk, look for some content on that to creep up on here. I will say it's the first topic I've played around with that is easier in 3D than 2D. Also, the organizers of Alabama Code Camp are still trying to reschedule the event. When that happens, I'll get that information out. Also, we are looking to expand our development team. If you are interested in working for / with me, keep an eye on the T & W Operations website. I know we're immediately looking for a junior level developer, but I think a few higher level position may come up soon. You MUST apply through the website, but drop me a personal line if you do apply. I'll keep an eye out for the application.

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Home Energy Management & Automation with Windows Phone 7

A number of people at Clarity are personally interested in home energy conservation and home automation. We feel that a mobile device is a great fit for bringing this idea to fruition. While this project is merely a concept and not directly associated with Microsofts Hohm web service, it provides a great model for communicating the concept. I wanted to take the idea a step further and combine saving energy in your home with the ability to track water usage and control your home devices. I designed an application that focuses on total home control and not just energy usage. Application Overview By monitoring home consumption in real time and with yearly projections users can pinpoint vampire devices, times of high or low consumption, and wasteful patterns of energy use. Energy usage meters indicate total current consumption as well as individual device consumption. Users can then use the information to take action, make adjustments, and change their consumption behaviors. The app can be used to automate certain systems like lighting, temperature, or alarms. Other features can be turned on an off at the touch of a toggle switch on your phone, away from home. Forget to turn off the TV or shut the garage door? No problem, you can do it from your phone. Through settings you can enable and disable features of the phone that apply to your home making it a completely customized and convenient experience. To be clear, this equates to more security, big environmental impact, and even bigger savings. Design and User Interface Since this panorama application is designed for win phone 7 devices, it complies with the UI Design and Interaction Guide for wp7. I developed the frame and page hierarchy from existing examples. The interface takes advantage of the interactive nature of touch screens with slider controls, pivot control views, and toggle switches to turn on and off devices (not shown in mockup). I followed recommendations for text based elements and adapted the tile notifications to display the most recent user activity. For example, the mockup indicates upon launching the app that the last thing you did was program the thermostat. This model is great for quick launching common user actions. One last design feature to point out is the technical reasons for supplying both light and dark themes for the app. Since this application is targeting energy consumption it only makes sense to consider the effect of the apps background color or image on the phones energy use. When displaying darker colors like black the OLED display may use less power, extending battery life. Other Considerations For now I left out options of wind and solar powered energy options because they are not available to everyone. Renewable energy sources and new technologies associated with them are definitely ideas to keep in mind for a next iteration. Another idea to explore for such an application would be to include a savings model similar to mint.com. In addition to general energy-saving recommendations the application could recommend customized ways to save based on your current utility providers and available options in your area. If your television or refrigerator is guilty of sucking a lot of energy then you may see recommendations for energy star products that could save you even more money! 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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Book Reviews: Art of Community and Eyetracking Web Usability

- by ultan o'broin

Holidays time offers a chance to catch up on some user experience and user assistance related material. So, two short book reviews (which I considered using my new Tumblr blog for. More about that another time) coming up. The Art of Community by Jono Bacon Excellent starting point for anyone wanting to get going in the community software (FLOSS, for example) space or understand how to set up, manage, and leverage the collective intelligence of communities for whatever ends. The book is a little too long in my opinion, and of course, usage of what Jono is recommending needs to be nuanced and adapted for enterprise applications space (hardly surprising there is a lot about Ubuntu, Lug Radio, and so on given Jono's interests). Shame there wasn't more information on international, non-English community considerations too. Still, some great ideas and insight into setting up and managing communities that I will leverage (watch out for the results on this blog, later in 2011). One section, on collaborative writing really jumped out. It reinforced the whole idea that to successful community initiatives are based on instigators knowing what makes the community tick in the first place. How about this for insight into user profiles for people who write community user assistance (OK then, "doc") and what tools they might use (in this case, we're talking about Jokosher): "Most people who write documentation for open source software projects would fall into the category of power user. They are technology enthusiasts who are not interested in the super-technical avenues of programming, but want to help out. Many of these people have good writing skills and a good knowledge of using the software, so the documentation fit is natural. With Jokosher we wanted to acknowledge this profile of user. As such, instead of focussing on complex text processing tools, we encouraged our documentation contributors to use a wiki." The book is available for free here, and well as being available from usual sources. Eyetracking Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Prentice Another fine book by established experts. I have some field experience of eyetracking studies myself --in the user assistance for enterprise applications space--though Jakob and Kara concentrate on websites for their research here. I would caution how much about websites transfers easily to the applications space, especially enterprise applications, as claimed in the book too. However, Jakob and Kara do make the case very well that understanding design goals (for example, productivity improvement in the case of applications) and the context of the software use is critical. Executing a study using eyetracking technology requires that you know what you want to test, can set up realistic tasks for testing by representative testers, and then analyze the results. Be precise, as lots of data will be generated (I think the authors underplay the effort in analyzing data too). What I found disappointing was the lack of emphasis on eyetracking as only part of the usability solution. It's really for fine-tuning designs in my opinion, and should be used after other design reviews. I also wasn't that crazy about the level of disengagement between the qualitative and quantitative side of this kind of testing that the book indicated. I think it is useful to have testers verbalize their thoughts and for test engineers to prompt, intervene, or guide as necessary. More on cultural or international aspects to usability testing might have been included too (websites are available to everyone). To conclude, I enjoyed the book, took on board some key takeaways about methodologies and found the recommendations sensible and easy to follow (for example about Forms layouts). Applying enterprise applications requirements such as those relating to user profiles, design goals, and overall context of use in conjunction with what's in this book would be the way to go here. It also made me think of how interesting it would be to compare eyetracking findings between website and enterprise applications usage.

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The dislikes of TDD

- by andrewstopford

I enjoy debates about TDD and Brian Harrys blog post is no exception. Brian sounds out what he likes and dislikes about TDD and it's the dislikes I'll focus on. The idea of having unit tests that cover virtually every line of code that I’ve written that I have to refactor every time I refactor my code makes me shudder. Doing this way makes me take nearly twice as long as it would otherwise take and I don’t feel like I get sufficient benefits from it. Refactoring your tests to match your refactored code sounds like the tests are suffering. Too many hard dependencies with no SOLID concerns are a sure fire reason you would do this. Maybe at the start of a TDD cycle you would need to do this as your design evolves and you remove these dependencies but this should quickly be resolved as you refactor. If you find your self still doing it then stop and look back at your design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of unit tests. I just prefer to write them after the code has stopped shaking a bit. In fact most of my early testing is “manual”. Either I write a small UI on top of my service that allows me to plug in values and try it or write some quick API tests that I throw away as soon as I have validated them. The problem with this is that a UI can make assumptions on your code that then just unit test around and very quickly the design becomes bad and you technical debt sweeps in. If you want to blackbox test your code with a UI then do so after your TDD cycles not before. This is probably by biggest issue with a literal TDD interpretation. TDD says you never write a line of code without a failing test to show you need it. I find it leads developers down a dangerous path. Without any help from a methodology, I have met way too many developers in my life that “back into a solution”. By this, I mean they write something, it mostly works and they discover a new requirement so they tack it on, and another and another and when they are done, they’ve got a monstrosity of special cases each designed to handle one specific scenario. There’s way more code than there should be and it’s way too complicated to understand. I believe in finding general solutions to problems from which all the special cases naturally derive rather than building a solution of special cases. In my mind, to do this, you have to start by conceptualizing and coding the framework of the general algorithm. For me, that’s a relatively monolithic exercise. TDD is an development pratice not a methodology, the danger is that the solution becomes a mass of different things that violate DRY. TDD won't solve these problems, only good communication and practices like pairing will help. Above all else an assumption that TDD replaces a methodology is a mistake, combine it with what ever works for your team\business but only good communication will help. A good naming scheme\structure for folders, files and tests can help you and your team isolate what tests are for what.

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OWB 11gR2 - Find and Search Metadata in Designer

- by David Allan

Here are some tools and techniques for finding objects, specifically in the design repository. There are ways of navigating and collating objects that are useful for day to day development and build-time usage - this includes features out of the box and utilities constructed on top. There are a variety of techniques to navigate and find objects in the repository, the first 3 are out of the box, the 4th is an expert utility. Navigating by the tree, grouping by project and module - ok if you are aware of the exact module/folder that objects reside in. The structure panel is a useful way of finding parts of an object, especially when large rather than using the canvas. In large scale projects it helps to have accelerators (either find or collections below). Advanced find to search by name - 11gR2 included a find capability specifically for large scale projects. There were improvements in both the tree search and the object editors (including highlighting in mapping for example). So you can now do regular expression based search and quickly navigate to objects within a repository. Collections - logically organize your objects into virtual folders by shortcutting the actual objects. This is useful for a range of things since all the OWB services operate on collections too (export/import, validation, deployment). See the post here for new collection functionality in 11gR2. Reports for searching by type, updated on, updated by etc. Useful for activities such as periodic incremental actions (deploy all mappings changed in the past week). The report style view is useful since I can quickly see who changed what and when. You can see all the audit details for objects within each objects property inspector, but its useful to just get all objects changed today or example, all objects changed since my last build etc. This utility combines both UI extensions via experts and the public views on the repository. In the figure to the right you see the contextual option 'Object Search' which invokes the utility, you can see I have quite a number of modules within my project. Figure out all the potential objects which have been changed is not simple. The utility is an expert which provides this kind of search capability. The utility provides a report of the objects in the design repository which satisfy some filter criteria. The type of criteria includes; objects updated in the last n days optionally filter the objects updated by user filter the user by project and by type (table/mappings etc.) The search dialog appears with these options, you can multi-select the object types, so for example you can select TABLE and MAPPING. Its also possible to search across projects if need be. If you have multiple users using the repository you can define the OWB user name in the 'Updated by' property to restrict the report to just that user also. Finally there is a search name that will be used for some of the options such as building a collection - this name is used for the collection to be built. In the example I have done, I've just searched my project for all process flows and mappings that users have updated in the last 7 days. The results of the query are returned in a table containing the object names, types, full path and audit details. The columns are sort-able, you can sort the results by name, type, path etc. One of the cool things here, is that you can then perform operations on these objects - such as edit them, export single selection or entire results to MDL, create a collection from the results (now you have a saved set of references in the repository, you could do deploy/export etc.), create a deployment script from the results...or even add in your own ideas! You see from this that you can do bulk operations on sets of objects based on search results. So for example selecting the 'Build Collection' option creates a collection with all of the objects from my search, you can subsequently deploy/generate/maintain this collection of objects. Under the hood of the expert if just basic OMB commands from the product and the use of the public views on the design repository. You can see how easy it is to build up macro-like capabilities that will help you do day-to-day as well as build like tasks on sets of objects.

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Oracle Fusion Procurement Designed for User Productivity

- by Applications User Experience

Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience Oracle Fusion Procurement Design Goals In Oracle Fusion Procurement, we set out to create a streamlined user experience based on the way users do their jobs. Oracle has spent hundreds of hours with customers to get to the heart of what users need to do their jobs. By designing a procurement application around user needs, Oracle has crafted a user experience that puts the tools that people need at their fingertips. In Oracle Fusion Procurement, the user experience is designed to provide the user with information that will drive navigation rather than requiring the user to find information. One of our design goals for Oracle Fusion Procurement was to reduce the number of screens and clicks that a user must go through to complete frequently performed tasks. The requisition process in Oracle Fusion Procurement (Figure 1) illustrates how we have streamlined workflows. Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement brings together billing metrics, descriptions of the order, justification for the order, a breakdown of the components of the order, and the amount—all in one place. Previous generations of procurement software required the user to navigate to several different pages to gather all of this information. With Oracle Fusion, everything is presented on one page. The result is that users can complete their tasks in less time. The focus is on completing the work, not finding the work. Figure 1. Creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement is a consumer-like shopping experience. Will Oracle Fusion Procurement Increase Productivity? To answer this question, Oracle sought to model how two experts working head to head—one in an existing enterprise application and another in Oracle Fusion Procurement—would perform the same task. We compared Oracle Fusion designs to corresponding existing applications using the keystroke-level modeling (KLM) method. This method is based on years of research at universities such as Carnegie Mellon and research labs like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The KLM method breaks tasks into a sequence of operations and uses standardized models to evaluate all of the physical and cognitive actions that a person must take to complete a task: what a user would have to click, how long each click would take (not only the physical action of the click or typing of a letter, but also how long someone would have to think about the page when taking the action), and user interface changes that result from the click. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time is calculated. Task times from the model enable researchers to predict end-user productivity. For the study, we focused on modeling procurement business process task flows that were considered business or mission critical: high-frequency tasks and high-value tasks. The designs evaluated encompassed tasks that are currently performed by employees, professional buyers, suppliers, and sourcing professionals in advanced procurement applications. For each of these flows, we created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task, conducted task walk-throughs in both the Oracle Fusion design and the existing application, analyzed and documented the steps and actions required to complete each task, and applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate overall task completion times. The Results The KLM method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Procurement designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 13 percent to 38 percent, with an overall productivity gain of 22.5 percent. These performance gains can be attributed to a reduction in the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. For example, creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Procurement takes a user through only two screens, while ordering the same item in a previous version requires six screens to complete the task. Modeling user productivity has resulted not only in advances in Oracle Fusion applications, but also in advances in other areas. We leveraged lessons learned from the KLM studies to establish products like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). New user experience features in EBS 12.1.3, such as navigational improvements to the main menu, a Google-type search using auto-suggest, embedded analytics, and an in-context list of values tool help to reduce clicks and improve efficiency. For more information about KLM, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.

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