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• View Docs and PDFs Directly in Google Chrome

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to view documents, presentations, and PDFs directly in Google Chrome?  Here’s a handy extension that makes Google Docs your default online viewer so don’t have to download the file first. Getting Started By default, when you come across a PDF or other common document file online in Google Chrome, you’ll have to download the file and open it in a separate application. It’d be much easier to simply view online documents directly in Chrome.  To do this, head over to the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer page on the Chrome Extensions site (link below), and click Install to add it to your browser. Click Install to confirm that you want to install this extension. Extensions don’t run by default in Incognito mode, so if you’d like to always view documents directly in Chrome, open the Extensions page and check Allow this extension to run in incognito. Now, when you click a link for a document online, such as a .docx file from Word, it will open in the Google Docs viewer. These documents usually render in their original full-quality.  You can zoom in and out to see exactly what you want, or search within the document.  Or, if it doesn’t look correct, you can click the Download link in the top left to save the original document to your computer and open it in Office.   Even complex PDF render very nicely.  Do note that Docs will keep downloading the document as you’re reading it, so if you jump to the middle of a document it may look blurry at first but will quickly clear up. You can even view famous presentations online without opening them in PowerPoint.  Note that this will only display the slides themselves, but if you’re looking for information you likely don’t need the slideshow effects anyway.   Adobe Reader Conflicts If you already have Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader installed on your computer, PDF files may open with the Adobe plugin.  If you’d prefer to read your PDFs with the Docs PDF Viewer, then you need to disable the Adobe plugin.  Enter the following in your Address Bar to open your Chrome Plugins page: chrome://plugins/ and then click Disable underneath the Adobe Acrobat plugin. Now your PDFs will always open with the Docs viewer instead. Performance Who hasn’t been frustrated by clicking a link to a PDF file, only to have your browser pause for several minutes while Adobe Reader struggles to download and display the file?  Google Chrome’s default behavior of simply downloading the files and letting you open them is hardly more helpful.  This extension takes away both of these problems, since it renders the documents on Google’s servers.  Most documents opened fairly quickly in our tests, and we were able to read large PDFs only seconds after clicking their link.  Also, the Google Docs viewer rendered the documents much better than the HTML version in Google’s cache. Google Docs did seem to have problem on some files, and we saw error messages on several documents we tried to open.  If you encounter this, click the Download link in the top left corner to download the file and view it from your desktop instead. Conclusion Google Docs has improved over the years, and now it offers fairly good rendering even on more complex documents.  This extension can make your browsing easier, and help documents and PDFs feel more like part of the Internet.  And, since the documents are rendered on Google’s servers, it’s often faster to preview large files than to download them to your computer. Link Download the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer extension from Google Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Integrate Google Docs with Outlook the Easy WayGoogle Image Search Quick FixView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarView Maps and Get Directions in Google ChromeHow To Export Documents from Google Docs to Your Computer TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium

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• Joins in single-table queries

  - by Rob Farley

  Tables are only metadata. They don’t store data. I’ve written something about this before, but I want to take a viewpoint of this idea around the topic of joins, especially since it’s the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this month. Hosted this time by Sebastian Meine (@sqlity), who has a whole series on joins this month. Good for him – it’s a great topic. In that last post I discussed the fact that we write queries against tables, but that the engine turns it into a plan against indexes. My point wasn’t simply that a table is actually just a Clustered Index (or heap, which I consider just a special type of index), but that data access always happens against indexes – never tables – and we should be thinking about the indexes (specifically the non-clustered ones) when we write our queries. I described the scenario of looking up phone numbers, and how it never really occurs to us that there is a master list of phone numbers, because we think in terms of the useful non-clustered indexes that the phone companies provide us, but anyway – that’s not the point of this post. So a table is metadata. It stores information about the names of columns and their data types. Nullability, default values, constraints, triggers – these are all things that define the table, but the data isn’t stored in the table. The data that a table describes is stored in a heap or clustered index, but it goes further than this. All the useful data is going to live in non-clustered indexes. Remember this. It’s important. Stop thinking about tables, and start thinking about indexes. So let’s think about tables as indexes. This applies even in a world created by someone else, who doesn’t have the best indexes in mind for you. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain Covering Index bit – the fact that if you don’t have sufficient columns “included” in your index, your query plan will either have to do a Lookup, or else it’ll give up using your index and use one that does have everything it needs (even if that means scanning it). If you haven’t seen that before, drop me a line and I’ll run through it with you. Or go and read a post I did a long while ago about the maths involved in that decision. So – what I’m going to tell you is that a Lookup is a join. When I run SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 285; against the AdventureWorks2012 get the following plan: I’m sure you can see the join. Don’t look in the query, it’s not there. But you should be able to see the join in the plan. It’s an Inner Join, implemented by a Nested Loop. It’s pulling data in from the Index Seek, and joining that to the results of a Key Lookup. It clearly is – the QO wouldn’t call it that if it wasn’t really one. It behaves exactly like any other Nested Loop (Inner Join) operator, pulling rows from one side and putting a request in from the other. You wouldn’t have a problem accepting it as a join if the query were slightly different, such as SELECT sod.OrderQty FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail as sod on sod.SalesOrderID = soh.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesPersonID = 285; Amazingly similar, of course. This one is an explicit join, the first example was just as much a join, even thought you didn’t actually ask for one. You need to consider this when you’re thinking about your queries. But it gets more interesting. Consider this query: SELECT SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276 AND CustomerID = 29522; It doesn’t look like there’s a join here either, but look at the plan. That’s not some Lookup in action – that’s a proper Merge Join. The Query Optimizer has worked out that it can get the data it needs by looking in two separate indexes and then doing a Merge Join on the data that it gets. Both indexes used are ordered by the column that’s indexed (one on SalesPersonID, one on CustomerID), and then by the CIX key SalesOrderID. Just like when you seek in the phone book to Farley, the Farleys you have are ordered by FirstName, these seek operations return the data ordered by the next field. This order is SalesOrderID, even though you didn’t explicitly put that column in the index definition. The result is two datasets that are ordered by SalesOrderID, making them very mergeable. Another example is the simple query SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276; This one prefers a Hash Match to a standard lookup even! This isn’t just ordinary index intersection, this is something else again! Just like before, we could imagine it better with two whole tables, but we shouldn’t try to distinguish between joining two tables and joining two indexes. The Query Optimizer can see (using basic maths) that it’s worth doing these particular operations using these two less-than-ideal indexes (because of course, the best indexese would be on both columns – a composite such as (SalesPersonID, CustomerID – and it would have the SalesOrderID column as part of it as the CIX key still). You need to think like this too. Not in terms of excusing single-column indexes like the ones in AdventureWorks2012, but in terms of having a picture about how you’d like your queries to run. If you start to think about what data you need, where it’s coming from, and how it’s going to be used, then you will almost certainly write better queries. …and yes, this would include when you’re dealing with regular joins across multiples, not just against joins within single table queries.

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• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

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

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

  - by AjarnMark

  I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

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• dpkg unsatisfied dependencies, now apt-get wants to remove whole system

  - by Bruno Finger

  firstly, I'm sorry for my terminal output in portuguese, but I guess it is still understandable. I am using Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 and I tried to update the GNOME Online Accounts packages by downloading the following .deb files from packages.ubuntu.com for the Ubuntu 14.10 version: libgoa-backend-1.0-dev_3.12.4-1_amd64.deb libgoa-backend-1.0-1_3.12.4-1_amd64.deb libgoa-1.0-dev_3.12.4-1_amd64.deb libgoa-1.0-0b_3.12.4-1_amd64.deb gnome-online-accounts_3.12.4-1_amd64.deb gir1.2-goa-1.0_3.12.4-1_amd64.deb After downloading them in the same folder, I run the command sudo dpkg -i *.deb, but it didn't install the packages, instead it showed errors due to packages which them depend doesn't meet the required version (and Ubuntu have no way to install them since they are not in this version's repositories). So now every time I want to install anything through apt-get, Ubuntu tells me to run apt-get -f install to fix the errors. This is the list of packages it needs to install/uninstall/update: $ sudo apt-get -f install Lendo listas de pacotes... Pronto Construindo árvore de dependências Lendo informação de estado... Pronto Corrigindo dependências... Pronto Os seguintes pacotes foram instalados automaticamente e já não são necessários: # THESE PACKAGES HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY INSTALLED AND ARE NO LONGER NECESSARY account-plugin-windows-live gir1.2-gweather-3.0 libatk-bridge2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libcairo-script-interpreter2 libcairo2-dev libexpat1-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libharfbuzz-dev libharfbuzz-gobject0 libice-dev libpango1.0-dev libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libpixman-1-dev libpng12-dev libpthread-stubs0-dev librest-dev libsm-dev libsoup2.4-dev libwayland-dev libx11-dev libx11-doc libxau-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shm0-dev libxcb1-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxdamage-dev libxdmcp-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libxft-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxml2-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev pkg-config signon-plugin-password x11proto-composite-dev x11proto-core-dev x11proto-damage-dev x11proto-fixes-dev x11proto-input-dev x11proto-kb-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-render-dev x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev xorg-sgml-doctools xtrans-dev zlib1g-dev Utilize 'apt-get autoremove' para os remover. Os pacotes extra a seguir serão instalados: # THE FOLLOWING PACKAGES WILL BE INSTALLED debhelper dh-apparmor libatk-bridge2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libcairo-script-interpreter2 libcairo2-dev libept1.4.12 libexpat1-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libharfbuzz-dev libharfbuzz-gobject0 libice-dev libmail-sendmail-perl libpango1.0-dev libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libpixman-1-dev libpng12-dev libpthread-stubs0-dev librest-dev libsm-dev libsoup2.4-dev libwayland-dev libx11-dev libx11-doc libxau-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shm0-dev libxcb1-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxdamage-dev libxdmcp-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libxft-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxml2-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev pkg-config po-debconf x11proto-composite-dev x11proto-core-dev x11proto-damage-dev x11proto-fixes-dev x11proto-input-dev x11proto-kb-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-render-dev x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev xorg-sgml-doctools xtrans-dev zlib1g-dev Pacotes sugeridos: dh-make apparmor-easyprof libcairo2-doc libglib2.0-doc libgtk-3-doc libice-doc libpango1.0-doc imagemagick libsm-doc libsoup2.4-doc libxcb-doc libxext-doc libmail-box-perl Os pacotes a seguir serão REMOVIDOS: # THE FOLLOWING PACKAGES WILL BE REMOVED account-plugin-aim account-plugin-jabber account-plugin-salut account-plugin-yahoo empathy evolution evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-online-accounts evolution-indicator evolution-plugins gdm gir1.2-gdata-0.0 gir1.2-goa-1.0 gir1.2-zpj-0.0 gnome-contacts gnome-control-center gnome-documents gnome-online-accounts gnome-online-miners gnome-shell gnome-shell-extension-weather gnome-shell-extensions grilo-plugins-0.2 gvfs-backends-goa libevolution libfolks-eds25 libgdata13 libgoa-1.0-0b libgoa-1.0-dev libgoa-backend-1.0-1 libgoa-backend-1.0-dev libzapojit-0.0-0 mcp-account-manager-uoa nautilus-sendto-empathy ubuntu-gnome-desktop Os NOVOS pacotes a seguir serão instalados: # THE NEW FOLLOWING PACKAGES WILL BE INSTALLED debhelper dh-apparmor libatk-bridge2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libcairo-script-interpreter2 libcairo2-dev libept1.4.12 libexpat1-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libharfbuzz-dev libharfbuzz-gobject0 libice-dev libmail-sendmail-perl libpango1.0-dev libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libpixman-1-dev libpng12-dev libpthread-stubs0-dev librest-dev libsm-dev libsoup2.4-dev libwayland-dev libx11-dev libx11-doc libxau-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shm0-dev libxcb1-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxdamage-dev libxdmcp-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libxft-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxml2-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev pkg-config po-debconf x11proto-composite-dev x11proto-core-dev x11proto-damage-dev x11proto-fixes-dev x11proto-input-dev x11proto-kb-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-render-dev x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev xorg-sgml-doctools xtrans-dev zlib1g-dev 0 pacotes atualizados, 61 pacotes novos instalados, 35 a serem removidos e 22 não atualizados. 7 pacotes não totalmente instalados ou removidos. É preciso baixar 12,0 MB de arquivos. Depois desta operação, 25,0 MB adicionais de espaço em disco serão usados. Você quer continuar? [S/n] Along packages needed to be removed are even gdm. This is 100% sure to make the system useless. What can I do to fix this issue? I don't care if I can't install the new version of goa anymore.

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• Welcome to Jackstown

  - by fatherjack

  I live in a small town, the population count isn't that great but let me introduce you to some of the population. We'll start with Martin the Doc, he fixes up anything that gets poorly, so much so that he could be classed as the doctor, the vet and even the garage mechanic. He's got a reputation that he can fix anything and that hasn't been proved wrong yet. He's great friends with Brian (who gets called "Brains") the teacher who seems to have a sound understanding of any topic you care to pass his way. If he isn't sure he tells you and then goes to find out and comes back with a full answer real quick. Its good to have that sort of research capability close at hand. Brains is also great at encouraging anyone who needs a bit of support to get them up to speed and working on their jobs. Steve sees Brains regularly, that's because he is the librarian, he keeps all sorts of reading material and nowadays there's even video to watch about any topic you like. Steve keeps scouring all sorts of places to get the content that's needed and he keeps it in good order so that what ever is needed can be found quickly. He also has to make sure that old stuff gets marked as probably out of date so that anyone reading it wont get mislead. Over the road from him is Greg, he's the town crier. We don't have a newspaper here so Greg keeps us all informed of what's going on "out of town" - what new stuff we might make use of and what wont work in a small place like this. If we are interested he goes ahead and gets people in to demonstrate their products  and tell us about the details. Greg is pretty good at getting us discounts too. Now Greg's brother Ian works for the mayors office in the "waste management department" nowadays its all about the recycling but he still has to make sure that the stuff that cant be used any more gets disposed of properly. It depends on the type of waste he's dealing with that decides how it need to be treated and he has to know a lot about the different methods and when to use which ones. There are two people that keep the peace in town, Brent is the detective, investigating wrong doings and applying justice where necessary and Bart is the diplomat who smooths things over when any people have a dispute or disagreement. Brent is meticulous in his investigations and fair in the way he handles any situation he finds. Discretion is his byword. There's a rumour that Bart used to work for the United Nations but what ever his history there is no denying his ability to get apparently irreconcilable parties working together to their combined benefit. Someone who works closely with Bart is Brad, he is the translator in town. He has several languages that he can converse in but he can also explain things from someone's point of view or  and make it understandable to someone else. To keep things on the straight and narrow from a legal perspective is Ben the solicitor, making sure we all abide by the rules.Two people who make for an interesting evening's conversation if you get them together are Aaron and Grant, Aaron is the local planning inspector and Grant is an inventor of some reputation. Anything being constructed around here needs Aarons agreement. He's quite flexible in his rules though; if you can justify what you want to do with solid logic but he wont stand for any development going on without his inclusion. That gets a demolition notice and there's no argument. Grant as I mentioned is the inventor in town, if something can be improved or created then Grant is your man. He mainly works on his own but isnt averse to getting specific advice and assistance from specialist from out of town if they can help him finish his creations.There aren't too many people left for you to meet in the town, there's Rob, he's an ex professional sportsman. He played Hockey, Football, Cricket, you name it. He was in his element as goal keeper / wicket keeper and that shows in his personal life. He just goes about his business and people often don't even know that he's helped them. Really low profile, doesn't get any glory but saves people from lots of problems, even disasters on occasion. There goes Neil, he's a bit of an odd person, some people say he's gifted with special clairvoyant powers, personally I think he's got his ear to the ground and knows where to find out the important news as soon as its made public. Anyone getting a visit from Neil is best off to follow his advice though, he's usually spot on and you wont be caught by surprise if you follow his recommendations – wherever it comes from.Poor old Andrew is the last person to introduce you to. Andrew doesn't show himself too often but when he does it seems that people find a reason to blame him for their problems, whether he had anything to do with their predicament or not. In all honesty, without fail, and to his great credit, he takes it in good grace and never retaliates or gets annoyed when he's out and about.  It pays off too as its very often the case that those who were blaming him recently suddenly find they need his help and they readily forget the issues pretty rapidly.And then there's me, what do I do in town? Well, I'm just a DBA with a lot of hats. (Jackstown Pop. 1)

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• ORACLE RIGHTNOW DYNAMIC AGENT DESKTOP CLOUD SERVICE - Putting the Dynamite into Dynamic Agent Desktop

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  Untitled Document There’s a mountain of evidence to prove that a great contact centre experience results in happy, profitable and loyal customers. The very best Contact Centres are those with high first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. But how many companies really believe they are the best? And how many believe that they can be? We know that with the right tools, companies can aspire to greatness – and achieve it. Core to this is ensuring their agents have the best tools that give them the right information at the right time, so they can focus on the customer and provide a personalised, professional and efficient service. Today there are multiple channels through which customers can communicate with you; phone, web, chat, social to name a few but regardless of how they communicate, customers expect a seamless, quality experience. Most contact centre agents need to switch between lots of different systems to locate the right information. This hampers their productivity, frustrates both the agent and the customer and increases call handling times. With this in mind, Oracle RightNow has designed and refined a suite of add-ins to optimize the Agent Desktop. Each is designed to simplify and adapt the agent experience for any given situation and unify the customer experience across your media channels. Let’s take a brief look at some of the most useful tools available and see how they make a difference. Contextual Workspaces: The screen where agents do their job. Agents don’t want to be slowed down by busy screens, scrolling through endless tabs or links to find what they’re looking for. They want quick, accurate and easy. Contextual Workspaces are fully configurable and through workspace rules apply if, then, else logic to display only the information the agent needs for the issue at hand . Assigned at the Profile level, different levels of agent, from a novice to the most experienced, get a screen that is relevant to their role and responsibilities and ensures their job is done quickly and efficiently the first time round. Agent Scripting: Sometimes, agents need to deliver difficult or sensitive messages while maximising the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. After all, contact centres are now increasingly viewed as revenue generators. Containing sophisticated branching logic, scripting helps agents to capture the right level of information and guides the agent step by step, ensuring no mistakes, inconsistencies or missed opportunities. Guided Assistance: This is typically used to solve common troubleshooting issues, displaying a series of question and answer sets in a decision-tree structure. This means agents avoid having to bookmark favourites or rely on written notes. Agents find particular value in these guides - to quickly craft chat and email responses. What’s more, by publishing guides in answers on support pages customers, can resolve issues themselves, without needing to contact your agents. And b ecause it can also accelerate agent ramp-up time, it ensures that even novice agents can solve customer problems like an expert. Desktop Workflow: Take a step back and look at the full customer interaction of your agents. It probably spans multiple systems and multiple tasks. With Desktop Workflows you control the design workflows that span the full customer interaction from start to finish. As sequences of decisions and actions, workflows are unique in that they can create or modify different records and provide automation behind the scenes. This means your agents can save time and provide better quality of service by having the tools they need and the relevant information as required. And doing this boosts satisfaction among your customers, your agents and you – so win, win, win! I have highlighted above some of the tools which can be used to optimise the desktop; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. In approaching your design, it’s important to understand why and how your customers contact you in the first place. Once you have this list of “whys” and “hows”, you can design effective policies and procedures to handle each category of problem, and then implement the right agent desktop user interface to support them. This will avoid duplication and wasted effort. Five Top Tips to take away: Start by working out “why” and “how” customers are contacting you. Implement a clean and relevant agent desktop to support your agents. If your workspaces are getting complicated consider using Desktop Workflow to streamline the interaction. Enhance your Knowledgebase with Guides. Agents can access them proactively and can be published on your web pages for customers to help themselves. Script any complex, critical or sensitive interactions to ensure consistency and accuracy. Desktop optimization is an ongoing process so continue to monitor and incorporate feedback from your agents and your customers to keep your Contact Centre successful.   Want to learn more? Having attending the 3-day Oracle RightNow Customer Service Administration class your next step is to attend the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Design and 2-day Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration class. Here you’ll learn not only how to leverage the Agent Desktop tools but also how to optimise your self-service pages to enhance your customers’ web experience.   Useful resources: Review the Best Practice Guide Review the tune-up guide   About the Author: Angela Chandler joined Oracle University as a Senior Instructor through the RightNow Customer Experience Acquisition. Her other areas of expertise include Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management.  She currently delivers the following Oracle RightNow courses in the classroom and as a Live Virtual Class: RightNow Customer Service Administration (3 days) RightNow Customer Portal Design and Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration (2 days) RightNow Analytics (2 days) Rightnow Chat Cloud Service Administration (2 days)

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• What Counts For a DBA: Simplicity

  - by Louis Davidson

  Too many computer processes do an apparently simple task in a bizarrely complex way. They remind me of this strip by one of my favorite artists: Rube Goldberg. In order to keep the boss from knowing one was late, a process is devised whereby the cuckoo clock kisses a live cuckoo bird, who then pulls a string, which triggers a hat flinging, which in turn lands on a rod that removes a typewriter cover…and so on. We rely on creating automated processes to keep on top of tasks. DBAs have a lot of tasks to perform: backups, performance tuning, data movement, system monitoring, and of course, avoiding being noticed.  Every day, there are many steps to perform to maintain the database infrastructure, including: checking physical structures, re-indexing tables where needed, backing up the databases, checking those backups, running the ETL, and preparing the daily reports and yes, all of these processes have to complete before you can call it a day, and probably before many others have started that same day. Some of these tasks are just naturally complicated on their own. Other tasks become complicated because the database architecture is excessively rigid, and we often discover during “production testing” that certain processes need to be changed because the written requirements barely resembled the actual customer requirements.   Then, with no time to change that rigid structure, we are forced to heap layer upon layer of code onto the problematic processes. Instead of a slight table change and a new index, we end up with 4 new ETL processes, 20 temp tables, 30 extra queries, and 1000 lines of SQL code.  Report writers then need to build reports and make magical numbers appear from those toxic data structures that are overly complex and probably filled with inconsistent data. What starts out as a collection of fairly simple tasks turns into a Goldbergian nightmare of daily processes that are likely to cause your dinner to be interrupted by the smartphone doing the vibration dance that signifies trouble at the mill. So what to do? Well, if it is at all possible, simplify the problem by either going into the code and refactoring the complex code to simple, or taking all of the processes and simplifying them into small, independent, easily-tested steps.  The former approach usually requires an agreement on changing underlying structures that requires countless mind-numbing meetings; while the latter can generally be done to any complex process without the same frustration or anger, though it will still leave you with lots of steps to complete, the ability to test each step independently will definitely increase the quality of the overall process (and with each step reporting status back, finding an actual problem within the process will be definitely less unpleasant.) We all know the principle behind simplifying a sequence of processes because we learned it in math classes in our early years of attending school, starting with elementary school. In my 4 years (ok, 9 years) of undergraduate work, I remember pretty much one thing from my many math classes that I apply daily to my career as a data architect, data programmer, and as an occasional indentured DBA: “show your work”. This process of showing your work was my first lesson in simplification. Each step in the process was in fact, far simpler than the entire process.  When you were working an equation that took both sides of 4 sheets of paper, showing your work was important because the teacher could see every step, judge it, and mark it accordingly.  So often I would make an error in the first few lines of a problem which meant that the rest of the work was actually moving me closer to a very wrong answer, no matter how correct the math was in the subsequent steps. Yet, when I got my grade back, I would sometimes be pleasantly surprised. I passed, yet missed every problem on the test. But why? While I got the fact that 1+1=2 wrong in every problem, the teacher could see that I was using the right process. In a computer process, the process is very similar. We take complex processes, show our work by storing intermediate values, and test each step independently. When a process has 100 steps, each step becomes a simple step that is tested and verified, such that there will be 100 places where data is stored, validated, and can be checked off as complete. If you get step 1 of 100 wrong, you can fix it and be confident (that if you did your job of testing the other steps better than the one you had to repair,) that the rest of the process works. If you have 100 steps, and store the state of the process exactly once, the resulting testable chunk of code will be far more complex and finding the error will require checking all 100 steps as one, and usually it would be easier to find a specific needle in a stack of similarly shaped needles.  The goal is to strive for simplicity either in the solution, or at least by simplifying every process down to as many, independent, testable, simple tasks as possible.  For the tasks that really can’t be done completely independently, minimally take those tasks and break them down into simpler steps that can be tested independently.  Like working out division problems longhand, have each step of the larger problem verified and tested.

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• Parner Webcast - Innovations in Products Program

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  We are pleased to invite you to join the Innovations in Products –webcast. Innovations in Products will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Innovations in Products will be presented on the 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Innovations in Products is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. What are the Benefits for partners? Find out how Innovations in Products helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customers's solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleague alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Application portfolio – for your and your customer’s benefit Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Note: At the latter part of this email you have also 17 links into the recent Applications Products presentations and 6 links into the Public Sector Value Proposition presentations that were presented in Innovations in Industries -program. Product breakout sessions: Topics Speaker To Register Fusion Applications Technology and Extensibility: A next-generation platform that adapts to client needs. Matthew Johnson, Sr. Director, SCM Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion Applications - Transforming your Back-Office Accounting Function: Changing how people work in back office functions to drive value add Liam Nolan, Director, ERP Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM & Talent Overview & Extensibility: A more in-depth look into a personalized HCM solution Synco Jonkeren, Vice-President HCM Product Development & Management, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM Compensation Planning: Compensate To Compete Rosie Warner, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Enterprise PLM for the Product Value Chain: Oracle Enterprise PLM offers Industry specific solutions that cover the Product Value Chain Ulf Köster, Sales Development Leader Enterprise PLM, Oracle Western Europe CLICK HERE Oracle's Asset Management and Maintenance Solution: What you need to know to successfully implement Oracle Asset Management solutions within Oracle Installed Base Philip Carey, Asset Management and Maintenance Solution Specialist CLICK HERE For more details please visit Innovations in Products and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery Format Innovations in Products –program is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the web cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Innovations in Products consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. You can also see Innovations in Products afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months. The next Innovations in Products web casts will be presented as follows: July 2nd 2012 October 1st 2012 January 14th 2013 April 8th 2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. Duration Maximum 1 hour For further information please contact me Markku Rouhiainen. Recent Innovations in Products presentations Applications Products presented on April the 2nd, 2012 Speaker To Register Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy James Penfold , Senior Director, Applications Product Development and Product Management CLICK HERE Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review Jaime Losantos Viñolas, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution Vikram K Singla, Business Development Director, Supply Chain Management Applications, UK CLICK HERE Oracle Transportation Management Dominic Regan, Senior Director Oracle Transportation Management EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management Lionel Albert, Senior Director Value Chain Planning, EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences Maria Ramirez , CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview Nicholas Cox , EMEA Sales Development Director - Enterprise Performance Management CLICK HERE Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 Daniela Lazar , Senior EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register CRM / ATG: Best-in-Class CRM & Commerce Maria Ramirez , Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / Automate Business Rules for Maximum Efficiency with OPA (Oracle Policy Automation) Marco Nilo, Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / InQuira Toby Baker, Principal Sales Consultant, CRM Product Specialist Team CLICK HERE EPM / Business Intelligence Foundation Suite – Sales and Product Updates Liviu Nitescu, Senior BI Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM / Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.1 - Sales & Product Updates Andreea Voinea, EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / JDE EnterpriseOne Fulfillment Management Overview Mirela Andreea Nasta , ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / Spotlights on iExpenses Elena Nita ,ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE MDM / Master Data Management Martin Boyd , Senior Director Product Strategy CLICK HERE Product break through session Fusion Applications Human Capital Management Rosie Warner , Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Recent Innovations in Industries Value Proposition presentations January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register Process Modernisation Iemke Idsingh Public Sector Solutions Director CLICK HERE Shared Services Ann Smith Business Development Director, Shared Services CLICK HERE Strengthening Financial Discipline Whilst Delivering Cashable Savings Philippa Headley UK Sales Development Director Public Sector - EPM Solutions CLICK HERE Social Welfare Industry Solutions Christian Wernberg-Tougaard Industry Director - Social Welfare CLICK HERE Police Industry Solutions Jeff Penrose Solution Sales Director CLICK HERE Tax and Revenue Management Industry Solutions Andre van der Post Global Director - Tax Solutions and Strategy CLICK HERE  

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• NoSQL Java API for MySQL Cluster: Questions & Answers

  - by Mat Keep

  The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster, and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability. Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs. First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers. ClusterJ and Cluster JPA ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used by JDO, JPA, and Hibernate. A simple API gives users extremely high performance for common operations: insert, delete, update, and query. ClusterJPA works with ClusterJ to extend functionality, including - Persistent classes - Relationships - Joins in queries - Lazy loading - Table and index creation from object model By eliminating data transformations via SQL, users get lower data access latency and higher throughput. In addition, Java developers have a more natural programming method to directly manage their data, with a complete, feature-rich solution for Object/Relational Mapping. As a result, the development of Java applications is simplified with faster development cycles resulting in accelerated time to market for new services. MySQL Cluster offers multiple NoSQL APIs alongside Java: - Memcached for a persistent, high performance, write-scalable Key/Value store, - HTTP/REST via an Apache module - C++ via the NDB API for the lowest absolute latency. Developers can use SQL as well as NoSQL APIs for access to the same data set via multiple query patterns – from simple Primary Key lookups or inserts to complex cross-shard JOINs using Adaptive Query Localization Marrying NoSQL and SQL access to an ACID-compliant database offers developers a number of benefits. MySQL Cluster’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture with auto-sharding and real time performance makes it a great fit for workloads requiring high volume OLTP. Users also get the added flexibility of being able to run real-time analytics across the same OLTP data set for real-time business insight. OK – hopefully you now have a better idea of why ClusterJ and JPA are available. Now, for the Q&A. Q & A Q. Why would I use Connector/J vs. ClusterJ? A. Partly it's a question of whether you prefer to work with SQL (Connector/J) or objects (ClusterJ). Performance of ClusterJ will be better as there is no need to pass through the MySQL Server. A ClusterJ operation can only act on a single table (e.g. no joins) - ClusterJPA extends that capability Q. Can I mix different APIs (ie ClusterJ, Connector/J) in our application for different query types? A. Yes. You can mix and match all of the API types, SQL, JDBC, ODBC, ClusterJ, Memcached, REST, C++. They all access the exact same data in the data nodes. Update through one API and new data is instantly visible to all of the others. Q. How many TCP connections would a SessionFactory instance create for a cluster of 8 data nodes? A. SessionFactory has a connection to the mgmd (management node) but otherwise is just a vehicle to create Sessions. Without using connection pooling, a SessionFactory will have one connection open with each data node. Using optional connection pooling allows multiple connections from the SessionFactory to increase throughput. Q. Can you give details of how Cluster J optimizes sharding to enhance performance of distributed query processing? A. Each data node in a cluster runs a Transaction Coordinator (TC), which begins and ends the transaction, but also serves as a resource to operate on the result rows. While an API node (such as a ClusterJ process) can send queries to any TC/data node, there are performance gains if the TC is where most of the result data is stored. ClusterJ computes the shard (partition) key to choose the data node where the row resides as the TC. Q. What happens if we perform two primary key lookups within the same transaction? Are they sent to the data node in one transaction? A. ClusterJ will send identical PK lookups to the same data node. Q. How is distributed query processing handled by MySQL Cluster ? A. If the data is split between data nodes then all of the information will be transparently combined and passed back to the application. The session will connect to a data node - typically by hashing the primary key - which then interacts with its neighboring nodes to collect the data needed to fulfil the query. Q. Can I use Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster A. Support for Foreign Keys is included in the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access release Summary The NoSQL Java APIs are packaged with MySQL Cluster, available for download here so feel free to take them for a spin today! Key Resources MySQL Cluster on-line demo  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA On-demand webinar  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA documentation MySQL ClusterJ and JPA whitepaper and tutorial

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

  I have certainly been reading blogs a whole lot more than writing them the last several weeks, and it’s about time I got back to writing.  I have been collecting several topics and references for blog posts…some of which will probably just never get written as the timeliness of the topics fade over time.  Nonetheless, I’m back, and I think it is time to revive my Doing Business Right series, this time coming from the slant of managing a development team rather than the previous angle of being self-employed.  First up: separating Dev, Test, and Prod. A few months ago, Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT) wrote a great post about separating your Dev, Test/UAT, and Prod environments.  This post covers all the important points such as removing Developer access from both PROD and UAT, and the importance of proper deployment (a.k.a. promotion) procedures.  I won’t repeat it all here, go read the original!  But what I do want to address is what I believe to be the #1 excuse people use for not having separate environments:  Money.  I discussed this briefly in my comment on Colin’s post at the time, but let me repeat it here and expand on it a bit. Don’t let the size of your company or the size of its budget dictate whether you do things professionally or not.  I am convinced that most developers and development teams would agree that it is a best practice to have separate environments for development, testing, and production (a.k.a. Live).  So why don’t they?  Because they think that it means separate servers which means more money.  While having separate physical servers for the different environments would be ideal, it is not an absolute requirement in order to make this work.  Here are a few ideas: Use multiple instances of SQL Server and multiple Web Sites with Headers or Ports.  For no additional fees* you can install multiple instances of SQL Server on the same machine.  This gives you a nice separation, allowing you to even use the same database names as will appear in PROD, yet isolating the data and security access.  And in IIS, you can create multiple Web Sites on the same server just by using Host Headers or different port numbers to separate them.  This approach does still pose the risk of non-Prod environments impacting performance on Prod, but when your application is busy enough for that to be a concern, you can probably afford one of the other options. Use desktop PCs instead of servers.  Instead of investing in full server-grade hardware, you can mimic the separate environments on old desktop PCs and at least get functional equivalency, if not performance matching.  The last I checked, Microsoft did not require separate licensing for SQL Server if that installation was used exclusively for dev or test purposes*.  There may be some version or performance differences between this approach and what you have in Prod, but you have isolated test from impacting Prod resources this way. Virtualization.  This is of course one of the hot topics of the day, and I would be remiss if I did not suggest this.  It is quite easy these days to setup virtual machines so that, again, your environments are fairly isolated from one another, and you retain all the security and procedural benefits of having separate environments. So the point is, keep your high professional standards intact.  You don’t need to compromise on using proper procedure just because you work in a small company with a small budget.  Keep doing things the right way! By the way, where I work, our DEV environment is not on a server.  All development is done on the developer’s individual workstation where it can be isolated from other developers’ work for the duration of writing the code, but also where the developers have to reconcile (merge) differences in code under concurrent development.  This usually means that each change is executed multiple times (once per developer to update their environments with the latest changes from others) giving us an extra, informal. test deployment before even going to the Test/UAT server.  It also means that if the network goes down, the developers can continue to hum along because they are not dependent on networked resources.  In fact, they will likely be even more productive because they aren’t being interrupted by email…but that’s another post I need to write. * I am not a lawyer, nor a licensing specialist, but it appeared to be so the last time I checked.  When in doubt, consult an expert on the topic.

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• Visual Studio Load Testing using Windows Azure

  - by Tarun Arora

  In my opinion the biggest adoption barrier in performance testing on smaller projects is not the tooling but the high infrastructure and administration cost that comes with this phase of testing. Only if a reusable solution was possible and infrastructure management wasn’t as expensive, adoption would certainly spike. It certainly is possible if you bring Visual Studio and Windows Azure into the equation. It is possible to run your test rig in the cloud without getting tangled in SCVMM or Lab Management. All you need is an active Azure subscription, Windows Azure endpoint enabled developer workstation running visual studio ultimate on premise, windows azure endpoint enabled worker roles on azure compute instances set up to run as test controllers and test agents. My test rig is running SQL server 2012 and Visual Studio 2012 RC agents. The beauty is that the solution is reusable, you can open the azure project, change the subscription and certificate, click publish and *BOOM* in less than 15 minutes you could have your own test rig running in the cloud. In this blog post I intend to show you how you can use the power of Windows Azure to effectively abstract the administration cost of infrastructure management and lower the total cost of Load & Performance Testing. As a bonus, I will share a reusable solution that you can use to automate test rig creation for both VS 2010 agents as well as VS 2012 agents. Introduction The slide show below should help you under the high level details of what we are trying to achive... Leveraging Azure for Performance Testing View more PowerPoint from Avanade Scenario 1 – Running a Test Rig in Windows Azure To start off with the basics, in the first scenario I plan to discuss how to, - Automate deployment & configuration of Windows Azure Worker Roles for Test Controller and Test Agent - Automate deployment & configuration of SQL database on Test Controller on the Test Controller Worker Role - Scaling Test Agents on demand - Creating a Web Performance Test and a simple Load Test - Managing Test Controllers right from Visual Studio on Premise Developer Workstation - Viewing results of the Load Test - Cleaning up - Have the above work in the shape of a reusable solution for both VS2010 and VS2012 Test Rig Scenario 2 – The scaled out Test Rig and sharing data using SQL Azure A scaled out version of this implementation would involve running multiple test rigs running in the cloud, in this scenario I will show you how to sync the load test database from these distributed test rigs into one SQL Azure database using Azure sync. The selling point for this scenario is being able to collate the load test efforts from across the organization into one data store. - Deploy multiple test rigs using the reusable solution from scenario 1 - Set up and configure Windows Azure Sync - Test SQL Azure Load Test result database created as a result of Windows Azure Sync - Cleaning up - Have the above work in the shape of a reusable solution for both VS2010 and VS2012 Test Rig The Ingredients Though with an active MSDN ultimate subscription you would already have access to everything and more, you will essentially need the below to try out the scenarios, 1. Windows Azure Subscription 2. Windows Azure Storage – Blob Storage 3. Windows Azure Compute – Worker Role 4. SQL Azure Database 5. SQL Data Sync 6. Windows Azure Connect – End points 7. SQL 2012 Express or SQL 2008 R2 Express 8. Visual Studio All Agents 2012 or Visual Studio All Agents 2010 9. A developer workstation set up with Visual Studio 2012 – Ultimate or Visual Studio 2010 – Ultimate 10. Visual Studio Load Test Unlimited Virtual User Pack. Walkthrough To set up the test rig in the cloud, the test controller, test agent and SQL express installers need to be available when the worker role set up starts, the easiest and most efficient way is to pre upload the required software into Windows Azure Blob storage. SQL express, test controller and test agent expose various switches which we can take advantage of including the quiet install switch. Once all the 3 have been installed the test controller needs to be registered with the test agents and the SQL database needs to be associated to the test controller. By enabling Windows Azure connect on the machines in the cloud and the developer workstation on premise we successfully create a virtual network amongst the machines enabling 2 way communication. All of the above can be done programmatically, let’s see step by step how… Scenario 1 Video Walkthrough–Leveraging Windows Azure for performance Testing Scenario 2 Work in progress, watch this space for more… Solution If you are still reading and are interested in the solution, drop me an email with your windows live id. I’ll add you to my TFS preview project which has a re-usable solution for both VS 2010 and VS 2012 test rigs as well as guidance and demo performance tests.   Conclusion Other posts and resources available here. Possibilities…. Endless!

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• IBM Keynote: (hardware,software)–>{IBM.java.patterns}

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On Sunday evening, September 30, 2012, Jason McGee, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Cloud Computing, along with John Duimovich IBM Distinguished Engineer and Java CTO, gave an information- and idea-rich keynote that left Java developers with much to ponder.Their focus was on the challenges to make Java more efficient and productive given the hardware and software environments of 2012. “One idea that is very interesting is the idea of multi-tenancy,” said McGee, “and how we can move up the spectrum. In traditional systems, we ran applications on dedicated middleware, operating systems and hardware. A lot of customers still run that way. Now people introduce hardware virtualization and share the hardware. That is good but there is a lot more we can do. We can share middleware and the application itself.” McGee challenged developers to better enable the Java language to function in these higher density models. He spoke about the need to describe patterns that help us grasp the full environment that an application needs, whether it’s a web or full enterprise application. Developers need to understand the resources that an application interacts with in a way that is simple and straightforward. The task is to then automate that deployment so that the complexity of infrastructure can be by-passed and developers can live in a simpler world where the cloud can automatically configure the needed environment. McGee argued that the key, something IBM has been working on, is to use a simpler pattern that allows a cloud-based architecture to embrace the entire infrastructure required for an application and make it highly available, scalable and able to recover from failure. The cloud-based architecture would automate the complexity of setting up and managing the infrastructure. IBM has been trying to realize this vision for customers so they can describe their Java application environment simply and allow the cloud to automate the deployment and management of applications. “The point,” explained McGee, “is to package the executable used to describe applications, to drop it into a shared system and let that system provide some intelligence about how to deploy and manage those applications.”John Duimovich on Improvements in JavaMcGee then brought onstage IBM’s Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Java, John Duimovich, who showed the audience ways to deploy Java applications more efficiently.Duimovich explained that, “When you run lots of copies of Java in the cloud or any hypervisor virtualized system, there are a lot of duplications of code and jar files. IBM has a facility called ‘shared classes’ where we put shared code, read only artefacts in a cache that is sharable across hypervisors.” By putting JIT code in ahead of time, he explained that the application server will use 20% less memory and operate 30% faster.  He described another example of how the JVM allows for the maximum amount of sharing that manages the tenants and file sockets and memory use through throttling and control. Duimovich touched on the “thin is in” model and IBM’s Liberty Profile and lightweight runtime for the cloud, which allows for greater efficiency in interacting with the cloud.Duimovich discussed the confusion Java developers experience when, for example, the hypervisor tells them that that they have 8 and then 4 and then 16 cores. “Because hypervisors are virtualized, they can change based on resource needs across the hypervisor layer. You may have 10 instances of an operation system and you may need to reallocate memory, " explained Duimovich.  He showed how to resize LPARs, reallocate CPUs and migrate applications as needed. He explained how application servers can resize thread pools and better use resources based on information from the hypervisors.Java Challenges in Hardware and SoftwareMcGee ended the keynote with a summary of upcoming hardware and software challenges for the Java platform. He noted that one reason developers love Java is it allows them to ignore differences in hardware. He stated that the most important things happening in hardware were in network and storage – in developments such as the speed of SSD, the exploitation of high-speed, low-latency networking, and recent developments such as storage-class memory, and non-volatile main memory. “So we are challenged to maintain the benefits of Java and the abstraction it provides from hardware while still exploiting the new innovations in hardware,” said McGee.McGee discussed transactional messaging applications where developers send messages transactionally persist a message to storage, something traditionally done by backing messages on spinning disks, something mostly outdated. “Now,” he pointed out, “we would use SSD and store it in Flash and get 70,000 messages a second. If we stored it using a PCI express-based flash memory device, it is still Flash but put on a PCI express bus on a card closer to the CPU. This way I get 300,000 messages a second and 25% improvement in latency.” McGee’s central point was that hardware has a huge impact on the performance and scalability of applications. New technologies are enabling developers to build classes of Java applications previously unheard of. “We need to be able to balance these things in Java – we need to maintain the abstraction but also be able to exploit the evolution of hardware technology,” said McGee. According to McGee, IBM's current focus is on systems wherein hardware and software are shipped together in what are called Expert Integrated Systems – systems that are pre-optimized, and pre-integrated together. McGee closed IBM’s engaging and thought-provoking keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers now must understand the strengths and weaknesses of such newcomers as applications increasingly involve a complex interconnection of languages.

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• MSSQL: Copying data from one database to another

  - by DigiMortal

  I have database that has data imported from another server using import and export wizard of SQL Server Management Studio. There is also empty database with same tables but it also has primary keys, foreign keys and indexes. How to get data from first database to another? Here is the description of my crusade. And believe me – it is not nice one. Bugs in import and export wizard There is some awful bugs in import and export wizard that makes data imports and exports possible only on very limited manner: wizard is not able to analyze foreign keys, wizard wants to create tables always, whatever you say in settings. The result is faulty and useless package. Now let’s go step by step and make things work in our scenario. Database There are two databases. Let’s name them like this: PLAIN – contains data imported from remote server (no indexes, no keys, no nothing, just plain dumb data) CORRECT – empty database with same structure as remote database (indexes, keys and everything else but no data) Our goal is to get data from PLAIN to CORRECT. 1. Create import and export package In this point we will create faulty SSIS package using SQL Server Management Studio. Run import and export wizard and let it create SSIS package that reads data from CORRECT and writes it to, let’s say, CORRECT-2. Make sure you enable identity insert. Make sure there are no views selected. Make sure you don’t let package to create tables (you can miss this step because it wants to create tables anyway). Save package to SSIS. 2. Modify import and export package Now let’s clean up the package and remove all faulty crap. Connect SQL Server Management Studio to SSIS instance. Select the package you just saved and export it to your hard disc. Run Business Intelligence Studio. Create new SSIS project (DON’T MISS THIS STEP). Add package from disc as existing item to project and open it. Move to Control Flow page do one of following: Remove all preparation SQL-tasks and connect Data Flow tasks. Modify all preparation SQL-tasks so the existence of tables is checked before table is created (yes, you have to do it manually). Add new Execute-SQL task as first task in control flow: Open task properties. Assign destination connection as connection to use. Insert the following SQL as command:   EXEC sp_MSForEachTable 'ALTER TABLE ? NOCHECK CONSTRAINT ALL' GO   EXEC sp_MSForEachTable 'DELETE FROM ?' GO   Save task. Add new Execute-SQL task as last task in control flow: Open task properties. Assign destination connection as connection to use. Insert the following SQL as command:   EXEC sp_MSForEachTable 'ALTER TABLE ? CHECK CONSTRAINT ALL' GO   Save task Now connect first Execute-SQL task with first Data Flow task and last Data Flow task with second Execute-SQL task. Now move to Package Explorer tab and change connections under Connection Managers folder. Make source connection to use database PLAIN. Make destination connection to use database CORRECT. Save package and rebuilt the project. Update package using SQL Server Management Studio. Some hints: Make sure you take the package from solution folder because it is saved there now. Don’t overwrite existing package. Use numeric suffix and let Management Studio to create a new version of package. Now you are done with your package. Run it to test it and clean out all the errors you find. TRUNCATE vs DELETE You can see that I used DELETE FROM instead of TRUNCATE. Why? Because TRUNCATE has some nasty limits (taken from MSDN): “You cannot use TRUNCATE TABLE on a table referenced by a FOREIGN KEY constraint; instead, use DELETE statement without a WHERE clause. Because TRUNCATE TABLE is not logged, it cannot activate a trigger. TRUNCATE TABLE may not be used on tables participating in an indexed view.” As I am not sure what tables you have and how they are used I provided here the solution that should work for all scenarios. If you need better performance then in some cases you can use TRUNCATE table instead of DELETE. Conclusion My conclusion is bitter this time although I am very positive guy. It is A.D. 2010 and still we have to write stupid hacks for simple things. Simple tools that existed before are long gone and we have to live mysterious bloatware that is our only choice when using default tools. If you take a look at the length of this posting and the count of steps I had to do for one easy thing you should treat it as a signal that something has went wrong in last years. Although I got my job done I would be still more happy if out of box tools are more intelligent one day. References T-SQL Trick for Deleting All Data in Your Database (Mauro Cardarelli) TRUNCATE TABLE (MSDN Library) Error Handling in SQL 2000 – a Background (Erland Sommarskog) Disable/Enable Foreign Key and Check constraints in SQL Server (Decipher)

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• Open World Day 3

  - by Antony Reynolds

  A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part IV My third day was exhibition day for me!  I took the opportunity to wander around the JavaOne and OpenWorld exhibitions to see what might be useful for me when selling WebLogic, Coherence & SOA Suite.  I found a number of interesting vendors and thought I would share what I found here.  These are not necessarily endorsements, but observations on companies that I thought had interesting looking products that fill a need I have seen at customers. Highly Available EBS Upgrades A few years ago I worked with a customer that was a port authority.  They wanted to tie E-Business Suite into their operations to provide faster processing of cargo and passengers.  However they only had a 2 hour downtime window to perform upgrades.  This was not a problem for core database and middleware technology, this could accommodate those upgrade timescales easily.  It was a problem for EBS however so I intrigued to find Rapid E-Suite Inc offering an 11i to 12i upgrade service that claims to require no outage.  This could be a real boon to EBS customers like my port friends that need to upgrade without disruption to their business. Mobile on WebLogic I have come across a number of customers who want a comprehensive mobile solution, connected and disconnected operation and so forth.  ADF only addresses part of these requirements currently so I was excited to discover mFrontiers Inc offering an apparently comprehensive solution that should integrate easily with Oracle SOA Suite to mobile enable a SOA infrastructure.  The ability to operate without a network is important for many applications, particularly in industries that require their engineers to enter buildings to perform maintenance or repairs, because network access is not always available – many of my colleagues don’t have mobile access from their homes because they live in the middle of nowhere – and disconnected support is crucial in these situations. Sharepoint Connector for WebCenter Content Obviously Sharepoint is an evil pernicious intrusion into a companies IT estate but it is widely deployed and many people like it but also would like to take advantage of Oracle products such as WebCenter Content.  So I was encouraged to see that Fishbowl Solutions have created a connector for Sharepoint that allows it to bring in content from WebCenter, it looks like a valuable way to maintain the Sharepoint interface end users are used to but extend the range of content by pulling stuff (technical term for content) from WebCenter.   Load Balancing The Enterprise Deployment Guides are Oracles bible on building highly available FMW environments, and each of them requires a front end load balancer.  I have been asked to help configure F5 Load Balancers on a number of occasions over my time at Oracle and each time I come back to it I find more useful features have been added to the BigIP line of load balancers that F5 sell, many of their documents are tailored to FMW.  I like F5, they provide (relatively) easy to use products that do what they say on the side of the box.  They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of their more expensive competitors but they do the job and do it well!  Besides which I like their logo! Other Stuff I saw lots of other interesting products and services, such as a lightweight monitoring tool for Coherence, Forms migration services, JCAPS migration services and lots of cool freebies to take home to the children! A Quiet Night Wednesday night was the partner appreciation event and I had decided to go back to the hotel and have an early night.  I decided to attend the last session of the day – a Maven/Hudson/WebLogic tutorial.  I got the wrong hotel for the session and snuck in 20 minutes late at the back and starting working on the hands on workshop.  One of my co-attendees raised his hand for help and as the presenter came over to help he suddenly stopped and yelled – “Is that Antony”!  It was my old friend Steve Button who used to be based in Redwood Shores but is now a WebLogic guru PM in Australia.  It was good to catch up with him.  As he yelled out a guy with really bad posture turned around to see who he was talking to, this turned out to be my friend Simon Haslan, Oracle ACE from the UK.  After the tutorial Simon and I retired to the coffee shop to catch up and share stories.  2 and half hours later we decided it was time to retire, so much for an early night but great to renew old friendships and find out what real customers are worrying about.

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• The standards that fail us and the intellectual bubble

  - by Jeff

  There has been a great deal of noise in the techie community about standards, and a sudden and unexplainable hate for Flash. This noise isn't coming from consumers... the countless soccer moms, teens and your weird uncle Bob, it's coming from the people who build (or at least claim to build) the stuff those consumers consume. If you could survey the position of consumers on the topic, they'd likely tell you that they just want stuff on the Web to work.The noise goes something like this: Web standards are the correct and right thing to use across the Intertubes, and anything not a part of those standards (Flash) is bad. Furthermore, the more recent noise is centered around the idea that HTML 5, along with Javascript, is the right thing to use. The arguments against Flash are, well, the truth is I haven't seen a good argument. I see anecdotal nonsense about high CPU usage and things I'd never think to check when I'm watching Piano Cat on YouTube, but these aren't arguments to me. Sure, I've seen it crash a browser a few times, but it's totally rare.But let's go back to standards. Yes, standards have played an important role in establishing the ubiquity of the Web. The protocols themselves, TCP/IP and HTTP, have been critical. HTML, which has served us well for a very long time, established an incredible foundation. Javascript did an OK job, and thanks to clever programmers writing great frameworks like JQuery, is becoming more and more useful. CSS is awful (there, I said it, I feel SO much better), and I'll never understand why it's so disconnected and different from anything else. It doesn't help that it's so widely misinterpreted by different browsers. Still, there's no question that standards are a good thing, and they've been good for the Web, consumers and publishers alike.HTML 4 has been with us for more than a decade. In Web years, that might as well be 80. HTML 5, contrary to popular belief, is not a standard, and likely won't be for many years to come. In fact, the Web hasn't really evolved at all in terms of its standards. The tools that generate the standard markup and script have, but at the end of the day, we're still living with standards that are more than ten years old. The "official" standards process has failed us.The Web evolved anyway, and did not wait for standards bodies to decide what to do next. It evolved in part because Macromedia, then Adobe, kept evolving Flash. In the earlier days, it mostly just did obnoxious splash pages, but then it started doing animation, and then rich apps as they added form input. Eventually it found its killer app: video. Now more than 95% of browsers have Flash installed. Consumers are better for it.But I'll do it one better... I'll go out on a limb and say that Flash is a standard. If it's that pervasive, I don't care what you tell me, it's a standard. Just because a company owns it doesn't mean that it's evil or not a standard. And hey, it pains me to say that as a developer, because I think the dev tools are the suck (more on that in a minute). But again, consumers don't care. They don't even pay for Flash. The bottom line is that if I put something Flash based on the Internet, it's likely that my audience will see it.And what about the speed of standards owned by a company? Look no further than Silverlight. Silverlight 2 (which I consider the "real" start to the story) came out about a year and a half ago. Now version 4 is out, and it has come a very long way in its capabilities. If you believe Riastats.com, more than half of browsers have it now. It didn't have to wait for standards bodies and nerds drafting documents, it's out today. At this rate, Silverlight will be on version 6 or 7 by the time HTML 5 is a ratified standard.Back to the noise, one of the things that has continually disappointed me about this profession is the number of people who get stuck in an intellectual bubble, color it with dogmatic principles, and completely ignore the actual marketplace where this stuff all has to live. We aren't machines; Binary thinking that forces us to choose between "open standards" and "proprietary lock-in" (the most loaded b.s. FUD term evar) isn't smart at all. The truth is that the <object> tag has allowed us to build incredible stuff on top of the old standards, and consumers have benefitted greatly. Consumer desire, capitalism, and yes, standards ratified by nerds who think about this stuff for years have all played a role in the broad adoption of the Interwebs.We could all do without the noise. At the end of the day, I'm going to build stuff for the Web that's good for my users, and I'm not going to base my decisions on a techie bubble religion. Imagine what the brilliant minds behind the noise could do for the Web if they joined me in that pursuit.

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• Java EE at JavaOne - A Few Picks from a Very Rich Line-up

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  A rich and diverse set of sessions cast a spotlight on Java EE at this year’s JavaOne, ranging from the popular Web Framework Smackdown, to Java EE 6 and Spring, to sessions exploring Java EE 7, and one on the implications of HTML5. Some of the world’s best EE architects and developers will be sharing their insight and expertise. If only I could be at ten places at once!BOF4149 - Web Framework Smackdown 2012    Markus Eisele - Principal IT Architect, msg systems ag    Graeme Rocher - Senior Staff Engineer, VMware    James Ward - Developer Evangelist, Heroku    Ed Burns - Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle    Santiago Pericasgeertsen - Software Engineer, Oracle* Monday, Oct 1, 8:30 PM - 9:15 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III Much has changed since the first Web framework smackdown, at JavaOne 2005. Or has it? The 2012 edition of this popular panel discussion surveys the current landscape of Web UI frameworks for the Java platform. The 2005 edition featured JSF, Webwork, Struts, Tapestry, and Wicket. The 2012 edition features representatives of the current crop of frameworks, with a special emphasis on frameworks that leverage HTML5 and thin-server architecture. Java Champion Markus Eisele leads the lively discussion with panelists James Ward (Play), Graeme Rocher (Grails), Edward Burns (JSF) and Santiago Pericasgeertsen (Avatar).CON6430 - Java EE and Spring Framework Panel Discussion    Richard Hightower - Developer, InfoQ    Bert Ertman - Fellow, Luminis    Gordon Dickens - Technical Architect, IT101, Inc.    Chris Beams - Senior Technical Staff, VMware    Arun Gupta - Technology Evangelist, Oracle* Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III In the age of Java EE 6 and Spring 3, enterprise Java developers have many architectural choices, including Java EE 6 and Spring, but which one is right for your project? Many of us have heard the debate and seen the flame wars—it’s a topic with passionate community members, and it’s a vibrant debate. If you are looking for some level-headed discussion, grounded in real experience, by developers who have tried both, then come join this discussion. InfoQ’s Java editors moderate the discussion, and they are joined by independent consultants and representatives from both Java EE and VMWare/SpringSource.BOF4213 - Meet the Java EE 7 Specification Leads   Linda Demichiel - Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle   Bill Shannon - Architect, Oracle* Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:30 PM - 6:15 PM – Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III This is your chance to meet face-to-face with the engineers who are developing the next version of the Java EE platform. In this session, the specification leads for the leading technologies that are part of the Java EE 7 platform discuss new and upcoming features and answer your questions. Come prepared with your questions, your feedback, and your suggestions for new features in Java EE 7 and beyond.CON10656 - JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond    Ian Robinson - IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM    Mark Little - JBoss CTO, NA    Scott Ferguson - Developer, Caucho Technology    Cameron Purdy - VP Development, Oracle*Wednesday, Oct 3, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/IIIIn this session, hear from a distinguished panel of industry and open source luminaries regarding where they believe the Java EE community is headed, starting with Java EE 7. The focus of Java EE 7 and 8 is mostly on the cloud, specifically aiming to bring platform as a service (PaaS) providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, and so on. Most importantly, Java EE will leverage the modularization work in the underlying Java SE platform. Java EE will, of course, also update itself for trends such as HTML5, caching, NoSQL, ployglot programming, map/reduce, JSON, REST, and improvements to existing core APIs.CON7001 - HTML5 WebSocket and Java    Danny Coward - Java, Oracle*Wednesday, Oct 3, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin IThe family of HTML5 technologies has pushed the pendulum away from rich client technologies and toward ever-more-capable Web clients running on today’s browsers. In particular, WebSocket brings new opportunities for efficient peer-to-peer communication, providing the basis for a new generation of interactive and “live” Web applications. This session examines the efforts under way to support WebSocket in the Java programming model, from its base-level integration in the Java Servlet and Java EE containers to a new, easy-to-use API and toolset that are destined to become part of the standard Java platform.

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• Is it Hard to Write a Blog?

  - by Joe Mayo

  Responding to a tweet I received, asking if I found it hard to write a blog and keep it interesting. This is one of the situations where a 140 character response doesn’t do a question justice. There’s a lot to think about between the subjects of writing, subject matter, and entertainment.  Here’s my take on each of these three topics: There’s all types of writing you can do with various degrees of difficulty. If you’re writing a book and you have a gazillion editors bleeding over your every utterance, then the task becomes harder because you’re second-guessing yourself, not knowing whose opinion will be violated. However, if you’re communicating in a public forum, not too many people care about the grammar as much as whether what you have to say is correct.  For a blog, I would say it’s somewhere in-between.  Right now, I’m using Windows Live Writer, which gives me a few advantages to just typing into the blog editor, such as spelling correction and the ability to save my work and resume later.  Overall, writing is one of those things that you just need to get used to.  It’s an essential skill for developers because you need to document your work, depending on what your definition of proper documentation is, and communicate with other developers via various communications mediums. Not begin good (or not thinking that you’re good) shouldn’t hold you back.  Like most things in life, practice will improve your skill.  So, push away that inner voice that keeps you from moving forward and just do it. A good grasp on the subject matter you’re writing about helps.  However, don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you from writing about something. I recall reading something a while back by a developer who didn’t know a technology but wrote about their experience in learning it. They ended up learning more by expressing their thoughts in writing. If you look around out many blogs today, there are many items written by developers learning what they’re writing about.  So, whether you are sure or unsure, you can still write – just be honest with yourself and your readers about what you’re writing. Also, don’t be afraid to have a different opinion or worry if someone will disagree.  I’ll freely admit that it took a while for me to become accustomed to being criticized. Take the good with the bad and use the bad to make yourself better. Guaranteed, someone will disagree with one or more parts of what I’ve written here or think they have a better approach. No problem, more power to them, and whatever constructive comments they have will be a benefit to me in the future; Otherwise, to h*ll with them. :)  Every time you get knocked down, get right back up, dust the dirt off your backside, and keep moving forward.  You’ll learn in time how to align a subject with your own presentation of the material. Entertainment could be hard or could be natural, depending on the personality of yourself and your target audience. It’s even more challenging because you can say something you think is funny and someone will be offended. In fact, there are a lot of things that you shouldn’t say in the name of a joke, but I won’t mention any of them here for want of not offending anyone. Of course, I probably offended someone by saying that and there is probably an organization somewhere in the world out to get me now. I’m probably not the best person to be giving you advice on entertaining an audience.  I mean, every time I try to tell a joke on Twitter 10 people unfriend me. Okay, maybe 15, but you get my point. One thing you might be interested in knowing is that it’s not too hard for one technical person to entertain other technical people, especially when the subject is of interest.  It’s the excitement in each sentence and passion in each paragraph that will keep another developer entertained and interested in what you have to say. Not everyone will like what you’ve written, but the important part is to find your own voice and it’s likely that there is one person in some corner of the world that likes what you have to say, even if it’s your mom and she doesn’t understand a single word you write. :)   If I could leave you with one final thought; Just do it and don’t let anyone or anything hold you back.   Joe

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• Imaging: Paper Paper Everywhere, but None Should be in Sight

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Author: Vikrant Korde, Technical Architect, Aurionpro's Oracle Implementation Services team My wedding photos are stored in several empty shoeboxes. Yes...I got married before digital photography was mainstream...which means I'm old. But my parents are really old. They have shoeboxes filled with vacation photos on slides (I doubt many of you have even seen a home slide projector...and I hope you never do!). Neither me nor my parents should have shoeboxes filled with any form of photographs whatsoever. They should obviously live in the digital world...with no physical versions in sight (other than a few framed on our walls). Businesses grapple with similar challenges. But instead of shoeboxes, they have file cabinets and warehouses jam packed with paper invoices, legal documents, human resource files, material safety data sheets, incident reports, and the list goes on and on. In fact, regulatory and compliance rules govern many industries, requiring that this paperwork is available for any number of years. It's a real challenge...especially trying to find archived documents quickly and many times with no backup. Which brings us to a set of technologies called Image Process Management (or simply Imaging or Image Processing) that are transforming these antiquated, paper-based processes. Oracle's WebCenter Content Imaging solution is a combination of their WebCenter suite, which offers a robust set of content and document management features, and their Business Process Management (BPM) suite, which helps to automate business processes through the definition of workflows and business rules. Overall, the solution provides an enterprise-class platform for end-to-end management of document images within transactional business processes. It's a solution that provides all of the capabilities needed - from document capture and recognition, to imaging and workflow - to effectively transform your ‘shoeboxes’ of files into digitally managed assets that comply with strict industry regulations. The terminology can be quite overwhelming if you're new to the space, so we've provided a summary of the primary components of the solution below, along with a short description of the two paths that can be executed to load images of scanned documents into Oracle's WebCenter suite. WebCenter Imaging (WCI): the electronic document repository that provides security, annotations, and search capabilities, and is the primary user interface for managing work items in the imaging solution SOA & BPM Suites (workflow): provide business process management capabilities, including human tasks, workflow management, service integration, and all other standard SOA features. It's interesting to note that there a number of 'jumpstart' processes available to help accelerate the integration of business applications, such as the accounts payable invoice processing solution for E-Business Suite that facilitates the processing of large volumes of invoices WebCenter Enterprise Capture (WEC): expedites the capture process of paper documents to digital images, offering high volume scanning and importing from email, and allows for flexible indexing options WebCenter Forms Recognition (WFR): automatically recognizes, categorizes, and extracts information from paper documents with greatly reduced human intervention WebCenter Content: the backend content server that provides versioning, security, and content storage There are two paths that can be executed to send data from WebCenter Capture to WebCenter Imaging, both of which are described below: 1. Direct Flow - This is the simplest and quickest way to push an image scanned from WebCenter Enterprise Capture (WEC) to WebCenter Imaging (WCI), using the bare minimum metadata. The WEC activities are defined below: The paper document is scanned (or imported from email). The scanned image is indexed using a predefined indexing profile. The image is committed directly into the process flow 2. WFR (WebCenter Forms Recognition) Flow - This is the more complex process, during which data is extracted from the image using a series of operations including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Classification, Extraction, and Export. This process creates three files (Tiff, XML, and TXT), which are fed to the WCI Input Agent (the high speed import/filing module). The WCI Input Agent directory is a standard ingestion method for adding content to WebCenter Imaging, the process for doing so is described below: WEC commits the batch using the respective commit profile. A TIFF file is created, passing data through the file name by including values separated by "_" (underscores). WFR completes OCR, classification, extraction, export, and pulls the data from the image. In addition to the TIFF file, which contains the document image, an XML file containing the extracted data, and a TXT file containing the metadata that will be filled in WCI, are also created. All three files are exported to WCI's Input agent directory. Based on previously defined "input masks", the WCI Input Agent will pick up the seeding file (often the TXT file). Finally, the TIFF file is pushed in UCM and a unique web-viewable URL is created. Based on the mapping data read from the TXT file, a new record is created in the WCI application.  Although these processes may seem complex, each Oracle component works seamlessly together to achieve a high performing and scalable platform. The solution has been field tested at some of the largest enterprises in the world and has transformed millions and millions of paper-based documents to more easily manageable digital assets. For more information on how an Imaging solution can help your business, please contact [email protected] (for U.S. West inquiries) or [email protected] (for U.S. East inquiries). About the Author: Vikrant is a Technical Architect in Aurionpro's Oracle Implementation Services team, where he delivers WebCenter-based Content and Imaging solutions to Fortune 1000 clients. With more than twelve years of experience designing, developing, and implementing Java-based software solutions, Vikrant was one of the founding members of Aurionpro's WebCenter-based offshore delivery team. He can be reached at [email protected].

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• Productivity vs Security [closed]

  - by nerijus

  Really do not know is this right place to ask such a questions. But it is about programming in a different light. So, currently contracting with company witch pretends to be big corporation. Everyone is so important that all small issues like developers are ignored. Give you a sample: company VPN is configured so that if you have VPN then HTTP traffic is banned. Bearing this in mind can you imagine my workflow: Morning. Ok time to get latest source. Ups, no VPN. Let’s connect. Click-click. 3 sec. wait time. Ok getting source. Do I have emails? Ups. VPN is on, can’t check my emails. Need to wait for source to come up. Finally here it is! Ok Click-click VPN is gone. What is in my email. Someone reported a bug. Good, let’s track it down. It is in TFS already. Oh, dam, I need VPN. Click-click. Ok, there is description. Yea, I have seen this issue in stachoverflow.com. Let’s go there. Ups, no internet. Click-click. No internet. What? IPconfig… DHCP server kicked me out. Dam. Renew ip. 1..2..3. Ok internet is back. Google: site: stachoverflow.com 3 min. I have solution. Great I love stackoverflow.com. Don’t want to remember days where there was no stackoveflow.com. Ok. Copy paste this like to studio. Dam, studio is stalled, can’t reach files on TFS. Click-click. VPN is back. Get source out, paste my code. Grand. Let’s see what other comments about an issue in stackoverflow.com tells. Hmm.. There is a link. Click. Dammit! No internet. Click-click. No internet. DHCP kicked me out. Dammit. Now it is even worse: this happens 3-4 times a day. After certain amount of VPN connections open\closed my internet goes down solid. Only way to get internet back is reboot. All my browser tabs/SQL windows/studio will be gone. This happened just now when I am typing this. Back to issue I am solving right now: I am getting frustrated - I do not care about better solution for this issue. Let’s do it somehow and forget. This Click-click barrier between internet and TFS kills me… Sounds familiar? You could say there are VPN settings to change. No! This is company laptop, not allowed to do changes. I am very very lucky to have admin privileges on my machine. Most of developers don’t. So just learned to live with this frustration. It takes away 40-60 minutes daily. Tried to email company support, admins. They are too important ant too busy with something that just ignored my little man’s problem. Politely ignored. Question is: Is this normal in corporate world? (Have been in States, Canada, Germany. Never seen this.)

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• OpenSSL Versions in Solaris

  - by darrenm

  Those of you have have installed Solaris 11 or have read some of the blogs by my colleagues will have noticed Solaris 11 includes OpenSSL 1.0.0, this is a different version to what we have in Solaris 10.  I hope the following explains why that is and how it fits with the expectations on binary compatibility between Solaris releases. Solaris 10 was the first release where we included OpenSSL libraries and headers (part of it was actually statically linked into the SSH client/server in Solaris 9).  At time we were building and releasing Solaris 10 the current train of OpenSSL was 0.9.7.  The OpenSSL libraries at that time were known to not always be completely API and ABI (binary) compatible between releases (some times even in the lettered patch releases) though mostly if you stuck with the documented high level APIs you would be fine.   For this reason OpenSSL was classified as a 'Volatile' interface and in Solaris 10 Volatile interfaces were not part of the default library search path which is why the OpenSSL libraries live in /usr/sfw/lib on Solaris 10.  Okay, but what does Volatile mean ? Quoting from the attributes(5) man page description of Volatile (which was called External in older taxonomy): Volatile interfaces can change at any time and for any reason. The Volatile interface stability level allows Sun pro- ducts to quickly track a fluid, rapidly evolving specif- ication. In many cases, this is preferred to providing additional stability to the interface, as it may better meet the expectations of the consumer. The most common application of this taxonomy level is to interfaces that are controlled by a body other than Sun, but unlike specifications controlled by standards bodies or Free or Open Source Software (FOSS) communities which value interface compatibility, it can not be asserted that an incompatible change to the interface specifica- tion would be exceedingly rare. It may also be applied to FOSS controlled software where it is deemed more important to track the community with minimal latency than to provide stability to our customers. It also common to apply the Volatile classification level to interfaces in the process of being defined by trusted or widely accepted organization. These are generically referred to as draft standards. An "IETF Internet draft" is a well understood example of a specification under development. Volatile can also be applied to experimental interfaces. No assertion is made regarding either source or binary compatibility of Volatile interfaces between any two releases, including patches. Applications containing these interfaces might fail to function properly in any future release. Note that last paragraph!  OpenSSL is only one example of the many interfaces in Solaris that are classified as Volatile.  At the other end of the scale we have Committed (Stable in Solaris 10 terminology) interfaces, these include things like the POSIX APIs or Solaris specific APIs that we have no intention of changing in an incompatible way.  There are also Private interfaces and things we declare as Not-an-Interface (eg command output not intended for scripting against only to be read by humans). Even if we had declared OpenSSL as a Committed/Stable interface in Solaris 10 there are allowed exceptions, again quoting from attributes(5): 4. An interface specification which isn't controlled by Sun has been changed incompatibly and the vast majority of interface consumers expect the newer interface. 5. Not making the incompatible change would be incomprehensible to our customers. In our opinion and that of our large and small customers keeping up with the OpenSSL community is important, and certainly both of the above cases apply. Our policy for dealing with OpenSSL on Solaris 10 was to stay at 0.9.7 and add fixes for security vulnerabilities (the version string includes the CVE numbers of fixed vulnerabilities relevant to that release train).  The last release of OpenSSL 0.9.7 delivered by the upstream community was more than 4 years ago in Feb 2007. Now lets roll forward to just before the release of Solaris 11 Express in 2010. By that point in time the current OpenSSL release was 0.9.8 with the 1.0.0 release known to be coming soon.  Two significant changes to OpenSSL were made between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Express.  First in Solaris 11 Express (and Solaris 11) we removed the requirement that Volatile libraries be placed in /usr/sfw/lib, that means OpenSSL is now in /usr/lib, secondly we upgraded it to the then current version stream of OpenSSL (0.9.8) as was expected by our customers. In between Solaris 11 Express in 2010 and the release of Solaris 11 in 2011 the OpenSSL community released version 1.0.0.  This was a huge milestone for a long standing and highly respected open source project.  It would have been highly negligent of Solaris not to include OpenSSL 1.0.0e in the Solaris 11 release. It is the latest best supported and best performing version.     In fact Solaris 11 isn't 'just' OpenSSL 1.0.0 but we have added our SPARC T4 engine and the AES-NI engine to support the on chip crypto acceleration. This gives us 4.3x better AES performance than OpenSSL 0.9.8 running on AIX on an IBM POWER7. We are now working with the OpenSSL community to determine how best to integrate the SPARC T4 changes into the mainline OpenSSL.  The OpenSSL 'pkcs11' engine we delivered in Solaris 10 to support the CA-6000 card and the SPARC T1/T2/T3 hardware is still included in Solaris 11. When OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 come out we will asses what is best for Solaris customers. It might be upgrade or it might be parallel delivery of more than one version stream.  At this time Solaris 11 still classifies OpenSSL as a Volatile interface, it is our hope that we will be able at some point in a future release to give it a higher interface stability level. Happy crypting! and thank-you OpenSSL community for all the work you have done that helps Solaris.

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• Breaking up the Workday– Overcoming the Workaholic Syndrome

  - by dwahlin

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

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• Visual Studio &amp; TFS 11 &ndash; List of extensions and upgrades

  - by terje

  This post is a list of the extensions I recommend for use with Visual Studio 11. It’s coming up all the time – what to install, where are the download sites, last version, etc etc, and thus I thought it better to post it here and keep it updated. The basics are Visual Studio 11 connected to a Team Foundation Server 11. Note that we now are at Beta time, and that also many live in a side-by-side environment with Visual Studio 2010.  The side-by-side is supported by VS 11. However, if you installed a component supporting VS11 before you installed VS11, then you need to reinstall it.  The VSIX installer will understand that it is to apply those only for VS11, and will not touch – nor remove – the same for VS2010. A good example here is the Power Commands. The list is more or less in priority order. The focus is to get a setup which can be used for a complete coding experience for the whole ALM process. The list of course reflects what I use for my work , so it is by no means complete, and for some of the tools there are equally useful alternatives. Many components have not yet arrived with VS11 support.  I will add them as they arrive.  The components directly associated with Visual Studio from Microsoft should be common, see the Microsoft column. If you still need the VS2010 extensions, here they are: The extensions for VS 2010.   Components ready for VS 11, both upgrades and new ones Product Notes Latest Version License Applicable to Microsoft TFS Power Tools Beta 111 Side-by-side with TFS 2010 should work, but remove the Shell Extension from the TFS 2010 power tool first. March 2012(11.0.50321.0) Free TFS integration Yes ReSharper EAP for Beta 11 (updates very often, nearly daily) 7.0.3.261 pr. 16/3/2012 Free as EAP, Licensed later Coding & Quality No Power Commands1 Just reinstall, even if you already have it for VS2010. The reinstall will then apply it to VS 11 1.0.2.3 Free Coding Yes Visualization and Modelling SDK for beta Info here and here. Another download site and info here. Also download from MSDN Subscription site. Requires VS 11 Beta SDK 11 Free now, otherwise Part of MSDN Subscription Modeling Yes Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK Published 16.2.2012     Yes Visual Studio 11 Feedback tool1 Use this to really ease the process of sending bugs back to Microsoft. 1.1 Free as prerelase Visual Studio Yes             #1 Get via Visual Studio’s Tools | Extension Manager (or The Code Gallery). (From Adam : All these are auto updated by the Extension Manager in Visual Studio) #2 Works with ultimate only Components we wait for, not yet in a VS 11 version Product Notes Latest Version License Applicable to Microsoft       Coding Yes Inmeta Build Explorer     Free TFS integration No Build Manager Community Build Manager. Info here from Jakob   Free TFS Integration No Code Contracts Coming real soon   Free Coding & Quality Yes Code Contracts Editor Extensions     Free Coding & Quality Yes Web Std Update     Free Coding (Web) Yes (MSFT) Web Essentials     Free Coding (Web) Yes (MSFT) DotPeek It says up to .Net 4.0, but some tests indicates it seems to be able to handle 4.5. 1.0.0.7999 Free Coding/Investigation No Just Decompile Also says up to .net 4.0   Free Coding/Investigation No dotTrace     Licensed Quality No NDepend   Licensed Quality No tangible T4 editor     Lite version Free (Good enough) Coding (T4 templates) No Pex Moles are now integrated and improved in VS 11 as a new library called Fakes.     Coding & Unit Testing Yes Components which are now integrated into VS 11 Product Notes Productivity Power Tools Features integrated into VS11, with a few exceptions, I don’t think you will miss those. Fakes  Was Moles in 2010. Fakes is improved and made into a product.  NuGet Manager Included in the install, but still an extension package. Info here. Product installation, upgrades and patches for VS/TFS 11   Product Notes Date Applicable to Visual Studio 11 & TFS 11 Beta This is the beta release, and you are free to download and try it out. March 2012 Visual Studio and TFS SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cumulative Update 4 The TFS 11 requires the CU1 at least, but you should go up to at least CU4, since this update solves a ghost record problem that otherwise may cause your TFS database to not release records the way it should when you clean it up, see this post for more information on that issue.  Oct 2011 SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1

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