Search Results

Search found 10352 results on 415 pages for 'context switching'.

Page 317/415 | < Previous Page | 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324  | Next Page >

  • Silverlight Cream for April 26, 2010 -- #848

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Viktor Larsson, Mike Snow(-2-), Jeff Brand, Marlon Grech(-2-, -3-), Jonathan van de Veen, Phil Middlemiss. Shoutout: Justin Angel wants everyone to know he is Joining the Vertigo Team!... congratulations, Justin! From SilverlightCream.com: Learning Silverlight – Advanced Color Animations Viktor Larsson is demonstrating small pieces of Silverlight he's picked upon in the course of his work project. This first one is on ColorAnimations using KeyFrames Silverlight Tip of the Day #4 – Enabling Out of Browser Applications Mike Snow has Tip #4 up and it's all about OOB... from what you have to do to what your user sees, including how to check to see if you're running OOB... source project included. Silverlight Tip of the Day #5 – Debugging Out of Browser Applications Following a fine tradition he started with his first series, Mike Snow is putting out more than one Tip per day :) ... Number 5 is up and is all about debugging OOB apps. Simplifying Page Transitions in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Applications Jeff Brand has a WP7 post up discussing Page Transitions. He first discusses the most common brute-force method, then moves into the TransitioningContentControl from the Toolkit. An introduction to MEFedMVVM – PART 1 Marlon Grech, Peter O’Hanlon, and Glenn Block worked together to produce an MEF and MVVM library that works for WPF and Silverlight and allows Design-time goodness and a loosely-coupled bridge between the View and ViewModel ... and it's on CodePlex ... they're also looking for comments/additions, so check it out. Leveraging MEFedMVVM ExportViewModel – MEFedMVVM Part 2 In Part 2, Marlon Grech demonstrates using MEFedMVVM and shows off some of the basics such as Importing services, Design-Time data and DataContextAware ViewModels IContextAware services to bridge the gap between the View and the ViewModel – MEFedMVVM Part 3 Marlon Grech's 3rd post about MEFedMVVM is about IContextAwareService -- bridging the gap betwen the View and ViewModel -- a service that knows about it's context. Building a Web Setup that configures your Silverlight application Jonathan van de Veen has a post up at SilverlightShow on using a Web Setup Project to configure your Silverlight when things startup... if you're not familiar with doing this... take note! A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 4 Phil Middlemiss has part 4 of his great tutorial series up on creating a theme in Expression Blend ... this time tackling the listbox. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Sqlite &amp; Entity Framework 4

    - by Dane Morgridge
    I have been working on a few client app projects in my spare time that need to persist small amounts of data and have been looking for an easy to use embedded database.  I really like db4o but I'm not wanting to open source this particular project so it was not an option.  Then I remembered that there was an ADO.NET provider for sqlite.  Being a fan of sqlite in general, I downloaded it and gave it an install.  The installer added tooling support for both Visual Studio 2008 & 2010 which is nice because I am working almost exclusively in 2010 at the moment.  I noticed that the provider also had support for Entity Framework, but not specifically v4.  I created a database using the tools that get installed with Visual Studio and all seemed to work fine.  I went on to create an Entity Framework context and selected the sqlite database and to my surprise it worked with out any problems.  The model showed up just like it would for any database and so I started to write a little code to test and then.. BAM!.. Exception. "Mixed mode assembly is built against version 'v2.0.50727' of the runtime and cannot be loaded in the 4.0 runtime without additional configuration information." A quick bit of searching on Bing found the answer.  To get it working, you need to include the following code in your web.config file: 1: <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> 2: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" /> 3: </startup> And then everything magically works.  Entity Framework 4 features worked, like lazy loading and even the POCO templates worked.  The only thing that didn't work was the model first development.  The SQL generated was for SQL Server and of course wouldn't run on sqlite without some modifications. The only other oddity I found was that in order to have an auto incrementing id, you have to use the full integer data type for sqlite; a regular int won't do the trick.  This translates to an Int64, or a long when working with it in Entity Framework.  Not a big deal, but something you need to be aware of. All in all, I am quite impressed with the Entity Framework support I found with sqlite.  I wasn't really expecting much at all, and I was pleasantly surprised. I downloaded the ADO.NET sqlite provider from http://sqlite.phxsoftware.com/.  If you want to use an embedded database with Entity Framework, give it a look.  It will be well worth your time.

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for May 20, 2010 -- #866

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Mike Snow, Victor Gaudioso, Ola Karlsson, Josh Twist(-2-), Yavor Georgiev, Jeff Wilcox, and Jesse Liberty. Shoutouts: Frank LaVigne has an interesting observation on his site: The Big Take-Away from MIX10 Rishi has updated all his work including a release of nRoute to the latest bits: nRoute Samples Revisited Looks like I posted one of Erik Mork's links two days in a row :) ... that's because I meant to post this one: Silverlight Week – How to Choose a Mobile Platform Just in case you missed it (and for me to find it easy), Scott Guthrie has an excellent post up on Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Tip of the Day #23 – Working with Strokes and Shapes Mike Snow's Silverlight Tip of the Day number 23 is up and about Strokes and Shapes -- as in dotted and dashed lines. New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Fire a Visual State based upon the value of a Boolean Variable Victor Gaudioso's latest video tutorial is up and is on selecting and firing a video state based on a boolean... project included. Simultaneously calling multiple methods on a WCF service from silverlight Ola Karlsson details a problem he had where he was calling multiple WCF services to pull all his data and had problems... turns out it was a blocking call and he found the solution in the forums and details it all out for us... actually, a search at SilverlightCream.com would have found one of the better posts listed once you knew the problem :) Securing Your Silverlight Applications Josh Twist has an article in MSDN on Silverlight Security. He talks about Windows, forms, and .NET authorization then WCF, WCF Data, cross domain and XAP files. He also has some good external links. Template/View selection with MEF in Silverlight Josh Twist points out that this next article is just a simple demonstration, but he's discussing, and provides code for, a MEF-driven ViewModel navigation scheme with animation on the navigation. Workaround for accessing some ASMX services from Silverlight 4 Are you having problems hitting you asmx web service with Silverlight 4? Yeah... others are too! Yavor Georgiev at the Silverlight Web Services Team blog has a post up about it... why it's a sometimes problem and a workaround for it. Using Silverlight 4 features to create a Zune-like context menu Jeff Wilcox used Silverlight 4 and the Toolkit to create some samples of menus, then demonstrates a duplication of the Zune menu. You Already Are A Windows Phone 7 Programmer Jesse Liberty is demonstrating the fact that Silverlight developers are WP7 developers by creating a Silverlight and a WP7 app side by side using the same code... this is a closer look at the Silverlight TV presentation he did. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Windows 8 Live Accounts and the actual Windows Account

    - by Rick Strahl
    As if Windows Security wasn't confusing enough, in Windows 8 we get thrown yet another curve ball with Windows Live accounts to logon. When I set up my Windows 8 machine I originally set it up with a 'real', non-live account that I always use on my Windows machines. I did this mainly so I have a matching account for resources around my home and intranet network so I could log on to network resources properly. At some point later I decided to set up Windows Live security just to see how changes things. Windows wants you to use Windows Live Windows 8 logins are required in order for the Windows RT account info to work. Not that I care - since installing Windows 8 I've maybe spent 10 minutes with Windows RT because - well it's pretty freaking sucky on the desktop. From shitty apps to mis-managed screen real estate I can't say that there's anything compelling there to date, but then I haven't looked that hard either. Anyway… I set up the Windows Live account to see if that changes things. It does - I do get all my live logins to work from Live Account so that Twitter and Facebook posts and pictures and calendars all show up on live tiles on the start screen and in the actual apps. That's nice-ish, but hardly that exciting given that all of the apps tied to those live tiles are average at best. And it would have been nice if all of this could be done without being forced into running with a Windows Live User Account - this all feels like strong-arming you into moving into Microsofts walled garden… and that's probably what it's meant to do. Who am I? The real problem to me though is that these Windows Live and raw Windows User accounts are a bit unpredictable especially when it comes to developer information about the account and which credentials to use. So for example Windows reports folder security like this: Notice it's showing my Windows Live account. Now if I go to Edit and try to add my Windows user account (rstrahl) it'll just automatically show up as the live account. On the other hand though the underlying system sees everything as my real Windows account. After I switched to a Windows Live login account and I have to login to Windows with my Live account, what do you suppose this returns?Console.WriteLine(Environment.UserName); It returns my raw Windows user account (rstrahl). All my permissions, all my actual settings and the desktop console altogether run under that account. If I look in TaskManager (or Process Explorer for me) I see: Everything running on the desktop shell with my login running under my Windows user account. I suppose it makes sense, but where is that association happening? When I switched to a Windows Live account, nowhere did I associate my real account with the Live account - it just happened. And looking through the account configuration dialogs I can't find any reference to the raw Windows account. Other than switching back I see no mention anywhere of the raw Windows account - everything refers to the Live account. Right then, clear as potato soup! So this is who you really are! The problem is that in some situations this schizophrenic account behavior gets a bit weird. Today I was running a local Web application in IIS that uses Windows Authentication - I tried to log-in with my real Windows account login because that's what I'm used to using with WINDOWS freaking Authentication through IIS. But… it failed. I checked my IIS settings, my apps login settings and I just could not for the life of me get into the site with my Windows username. That is until I finally realized that I should try using my Windows Live credentials instead. And that worked. So now in this Windows Authentication dialog I had to type in my Live ID and password, which is - just weird. Then in IIS if I look at a Trace page (or in my case my app's Status page) I see that the logged on account is - my Windows user account. What's really annoying about this is that in some places it uses the live account in other places it uses my Windows account. If I remote desktop into my Web server online - I have to use the local authentication dialog but I have to put in my real Windows credentials not the Live account. Oh yes, it's all so terribly intuitive and logical… So in summary, when you log on with a Live account you are actually mapped to an underlying Windows user. In any application if you check the user name it'll be the underlying user account (not sure what happens in a Windows RT app or even what mechanism is used there to get the user name info).  When logging on to local machine resource with user name and password you have to use your Live IDs even if the permissions on the resources are mapped to your underlying Windows account. Easy enough I suppose, but still not exactly intuitive behavior…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

    Read the article

  • Searching for the Perfect Developer&rsquo;s Laptop.

    - by mbcrump
    I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted a true Quad-core machine, not 2 dual-core fused together). 15.6” monitor SSD 128GB or Larger. – It’s almost 2011 and I don’t want an old standard HDD in this machine. 8GB of DDR3 Ram. – The more the better, right? 1GB Video Card (Prefer NVidia) – I might want to play games with this. HDMI Port – Almost a standard on new Machines. This would be used when I am on the road and want to stream Netflix to the HDTV in the Hotel room. Webcam Built-in – This would be to video chat with the wife and kids if I am on the road. 6-Cell Battery. – I’ve read that an i7 in a laptop really kills the battery. A 6-cell or 9-cell is even better. That is a pretty long list for a budget of around $1200. I searched around the internet and could not buy this machine prebuilt for under $1200. That was even with coupons and my company’s 10% Dell discount. The only way that I would get a machine like this was to buy a prebuilt and replace parts. I chose the  Lenovo Y560 on Newegg to start as my base. Below is a top-down picture of it.   Part 1: The Hardware The Specs for this machine: Color :  GrayOperating System : Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitCPU Type : Intel Core i7-740QM(1.73GHz)Screen : 15.6" WXGAMemory Size : 4GB DDR3Hard Disk : 500GBOptical Drive : DVD±R/RWGraphics Card : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730Video Memory : 1GBCommunication : Gigabit LAN and WLANCard slot : 1 x Express Card/34Battery Life : Up to 3.5 hoursDimensions : 15.20" x 10.00" x 0.80" - 1.30"Weight : 5.95 lbs. This computer met most of the requirements above except that it didn’t come with an SSD or have 8GB of DDR3 Memory. So, I needed to start shopping except this time for an SSD. I asked around on twitter and other hardware forums and everyone pointed me to the Crucial C300 SSD. After checking prices of the drive, it was going to cost an extra $275 bucks and I was going from a spacious 500GB drive to 128GB. After watching some of the SSD videos on YouTube I started feeling better. Below is a pic of the Crucial C300 SSD. The second thing that I needed to upgrade was the RAM. It came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, but it was slow. I decided to buy the Crucial 8GB (4GB x 2) Kit from Newegg. This RAM cost an extra $120 and had a CAS Latency of 7. In the end this machine delivered everything that I wanted and it cost around $1300. You are probably saying, well your budget was $1200. I have spare parts that I’m planning on selling on eBay or Anandtech.  =) If you are interested then shoot me an email and I will give you a great deal mbcrump[at]gmail[dot]com. 500GB Laptop 7200RPM HDD 4GB of DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2) faceVision HD 720p Camera – Unopened In the end my Windows Experience Rating of the SSD was 7.7 and the CPU 7.1. The max that you can get is a 7.9. Part 2: The Software I’m very lucky that I get a lot of software for free. When choosing a laptop, the OS really doesn’t matter because I would never keep the bloatware pre-installed or Windows 7 Home Premium on my main development machine. Matter of fact, as soon as I got the laptop, I immediately took out the old HDD without booting into it. After I got the SSD into the machine, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. The BIOS was out of date, so I updated that to the latest version and started downloading drivers off of Lenovo’s site. I had to download the Wireless Networking Drivers to a USB-Key before I could get my machine on my wireless network. I also discovered that if the date on your computer is off then you cannot join the Windows 7 Homegroup until you fix it. I’m aware that most people like peeking into what programs other software developers use and I went ahead and listed my “essentials” of a fresh build. I am a big Silverlight guy, so naturally some of the software listed below is specific to Silverlight. You should also check out my master list of Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer. See a killer app that I’m missing? Feel free to leave it in the comments below. My Software Essential List. CPU-Z Dropbox Everything Search Tool Expression Encoder Update Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Foxit Reader Google Chrome Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Edition Keepass Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Microsoft Security Essentials 2  Mindscape Silverlight Elements Notepad 2 (with shell extension) Precode Code Snippet Manager RealVNC Reflector ReSharper v5.1.1753.4 Silverlight 4 Toolkit Silverlight Spy Snagit 10 SyncFusion Reporting Controls for Silverlight Telerik Silverlight RadControls TweetDeck Virtual Clone Drive Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VS KB2403277 Update to get Feature Pack 2 to work. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit Windows Live Essentials 2011 Windows Live Writer Backup. Windows Phone Development Tools That is pretty much it, I have a new laptop and am happy with the purchase. If you have any questions then feel free to leave a comment below.  Subscribe to my feed

    Read the article

  • What's the difference between View Criteria and Where clause?

    - by frank.nimphius
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} A View Criteria is a filter that you apply programmatically or by definition to a View Object instance. It augments the WHERE clause in a View Object query. Named View Criteria are defined in the Query panel of the View Object and are used ·         In combination with the af:query component to build search forms. To do this, you drag and drop the View Criteria from the Named View Criteria node of the View Object in the Data Controls Panel. In the context menu, you then select the Query component - optionally with a result table ·         To restrict a View Object instance in the Application Module model. For this, select a View object instance in the right hand list of the ADF Business Component Data Model panel. Use the Edit button to add a View Criteria to the View Object instance. This ensures that the View Object instance also runs with a query filter applied. View Criteria use bind variables for query conditions that you want to pass in dynamically at runtime. Beside of the ability to apply View Criteria declaratively, you can apply them programmatically in Java. A WHERE clause, if added to a View Object query by design restricts all instances of this View Object, which usually is not what developers want. Because of the benefits - and the configuration options not explained above but in the product documentation referenced below - the recommendation is to use View Criteria. The product documentation explains View Criteria in chapter 5 of the Developer Guide: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15523_01/web.1111/b31974/bcquerying.htm#BCGIFHHF

    Read the article

  • Language Club

    - by Ben Griswold
    We started a language club at work this week.  Thus far, we have a collective interest in a number of languages: Python, Ruby, F#, Erlang, Objective-C, Scala, Clojure, Haskell and Go. There are more but these 9 received the most votes. During the first few meetings we are going to determine which language we should tackle first. To help make our selection, each member will provide a quick overview of their favored language by answering the following set of questions: Why are you interested in learning “your” language(s). (There’s lots of work, I’m an MS shill, It’s hip and  fun, etc) What type of language is it?  (OO, dynamic, functional, procedural, declarative, etc) What types of problems is your language best suited to solve?  (Algorithms over big data, rapid application development, modeling, merely academic, etc) Can you provide examples of where/how it is being used?  If it isn’t being used, why not?  (Erlang was invented at Ericsson to provide an extremely fault tolerant, concurrent system.) Quick history – Who created/sponsored the language?  When was it created?  Is it currently active? Does the language have hardware support (an attempt was made at one point to create processor instruction sets specific to Prolog), or can it run as an interpreted language inside another language (like Ruby in the JVM)? Are there facilities for programs written in this language to communicate with other languages?  How does this affect its utility? Does the language have a IDE tool support?  (Think Eclipse or Visual Studio) How well is the language supported in terms of books, community and documentation? What’s the number one things which differentiates the language from others?  (i.e. Why is it cool?) How is the language applicability to us as consultants?  What would the impact be of using the language in terms of cost, maintainability, personnel costs, etc.? What’s the number one things which differentiates the language from others?  (i.e. Why is it cool?) This should provide an decent introduction into nearly a dozen languages and give us enough context to decide which single language deserves our undivided attention for the weeks to come.  Stay tuned for the winner…

    Read the article

  • Culture Shmulture?

    - by steve.diamond
    I've been thinking about "Customer Experience Management" lately. Here at Oracle, we arguably have the most complete suite of applications for managing the customer experience across and in the context of multiple channels -- from marketing to loyalty to contact center to self-service to analytics offerings, and more. And stay tuned, because in coming months let's just say we'll have even more to talk about on this front. But that said............ Last weekend my wife and I stayed at one of the premiere hotel chains on the planet. I won't name them, but we all know the short list. It could have been the St. Regis or the Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons or Hyatt Park or....This stay, at this particular hotel, was simply outstanding. Within a chain known for providing "above and beyond" levels of service, this particular hotel, under this particular manager, exceeded expectations on so many fronts. For example, at the Spa we mentioned to the two attendants that my wife is seven months pregnant and that we had previously had a lot of trouble conceiving. We then went to our room. Ten minutes later we heard a knock at the door and received a plate of chocolate covered strawberries with a heartfelt note and an inspiring quote, signed by the two spa attendees. The following day we arranged to have a bellhop drive us to the beach. Although they had a pre-arranged beach shuttle service with time limits, etc., he greeted us by saying, "I'm yours for the day until 4 p.m. Whatever you want to do is fine by me, as long as it's legal!" The morning that we left we arranged to have a taxi drive us to the airport--a nearly 40 mile drive. What showed up was a private coach complete with navy blue suited driver dude. And we were charged the taxi fare price. And there were many other awesome exchanges I won't mention here, although I did email the GM of this hotel two nights ago and expressed our effusive praise and gratitude. I'd submit that this hotel chain would have a definitive advantage using even more Oracle software to manage and optimize its customer interactions (yes, they are a customer). But WITHOUT the culture--that management team--and that instillation of aligned values across all employees of exemplifying 'the golden rule,' I wonder how much technology really matters in providing a distinctively positive and memorable customer experience. Lest you think I'm alone in these pontifications, have you read Paul Greenberg's blog lately? Have you seen one of his most recent posts? Now this SPECIFIC post is NOT about customer service per se. But it is about people. So yes, please think long and hard about the technology you seek to deploy. But never forget who will be interacting with your systems, and your customers.

    Read the article

  • BigData and Customer Experience: Happy Together

    - by Isabel F. Peñuelas
    The two big buzzes of the year may lay closer than it appears. Both concepts intersect at various points: BigData and Return of Investment of Marketing Campaigns On a recent post Big Data Is The Future Of Marketing Jeff Dachis explains very clearly how “Big data analytics finally allows marketers to identify, measure, and manage what is positively impacting their Brand”. Regression analysis applied to big data volumes coming from social media will substitute the failed attempts to justify marketing investments on social media in terms of followers and likes, he continues, “the measurement models applied by marketers on TV Campaigns don´t work on social”, we need to study the data with fresh eyes and maybe then we will start understanding and measuring brand engagemet. Social CRM and BigData The real value of Social CRM start by analyzing mass of big data from social media in order of applying social intelligence techniques that allow us to classify new customer niches and communities and define appropriated strategies to contact potential customers. Gartner Says that the Market for Social CRM is on pace to surpass $1 Billion in Revenue by Year-End 2012 but in words of Zach Hofer-Shall, Analyst at Forrester Research “Social customer relationship management is hard” (The Social CRM Arms Race Heats ). To succeed brands need three things: Investing in new social tools, investing in consultancy and investing in infrastructure for massive data storage and analysis. Neither CeX or BigData are easy and cheap wins. But what are the customer benefits of such investments? Big Data and Brand Engagement Time is the most valuable asset of todays consumers: tired of information overload, exhausted by the terabytes of offering, anxious because of not having the same fast multichannel experience with their services’ marketers or preferred goods providers than the one they found on their social media. Yes, I know you have read this before- me too. But is real. The motto of the Customer Experience philosophy of providing a consistent experience through multiple touchpoints that makes the relationship customer/brand easier and valuable finds it basis on understanding customer/s preferences and context for which BigData analysis is another imperative. In summary, I believe that using BigData Analysis in combination with appropriated CeX strategies and technologies is a promising direction for achieving: efficiency and marketing cost-savings; growing the customer base; and increasing customer conversion and retention. In a world: The Direction of Future Marketing.

    Read the article

  • Oracle WebCenter: Social Networking & Collaboration

    - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com
    We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter provides unprecedented Social Networking and Collaboration.We recently talked with Carin Chan, Principal Product Manager at Oracle, around the topic of Social Networking and Collaboration. In today’s work environment, employees have come to expect social and collaborative services to augment their work environment. Whether it is to post a blog or to poll fellow coworkers, employees expect and demand access to highly integrated, collaborative work environments that allow them to quickly contribute at work -- whether it is to make informed decisions, contribute on projects, or share knowledge.Social and collaborative services from Oracle WebCenter add an immeasurable amount of value to achieving a modern user experience. Oracle WebCenter Services provides rich and comprehensive social computing services that include services such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence, activity streams and graphs, and polls/surveys that offer employees access to rich collaborative services to work efficiently.Employees can create pages or spaces that mix and match collaborative services while bringing in data from other applications to share with groups, teams, or organizations. These out of the box social and collaborative services include: People Connections and Activity Streams enable users to quickly assemble and visualize their social business networks and track user activities.Activity Graphs tracks all user activities in real-time and gathers intelligence about these users, their connections and the way they use information to make educated recommendations and provide on the spot information discovery.Wikis and blogs enable the community authoring of documents and sharing of ideas and also allow for the gathering of feedback and comments on those ideas.Tags and links allow users to easily mark, connect and share information with others.RSS feeds are available to track new or changed information related to discussion forums, processes or activities in an Oracle WebCenter environment.Discussion forums enable sharing of group knowledge and easy creation of communities around specific topics.Announcements allow you to manage and publish important news to your user base.Instant Messaging and Presence enable real-time awareness and communication with available users in the context of a business task.Web and Voice Conferencing enables real-time communication with internal and external business users.Lists provide a way to manage list data directly on the web as well as export and import it from and to Microsoft Excel.Oracle WebCenter Analytics provides comprehensive reporting metrics on activity and content usage within portals or composite applications.Activity Streams allow you to track activities and visualize your business networks.While being able to integrate into your portal deployment, these services are also integrated into how users are already working. This includes integration with software such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office and mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone. These services are just a tip of the iceberg regarding social and collaborative services that Oracle WebCenter has to offer your employees. Be sure to keep checking back this week for in future posts, we’ll delve deeper into a few of these collaborative services and discuss how a combination of collaborative services offer a better portal deployment to empower business users. Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, social, activity streams, blogs, wikis

    Read the article

  • Oracle User Productivity Kit Translation

    - by ultan o'broin
    Oracle's customers just love the User Productivity Kit (UPK). I hear only great things about it from our international customers at the Oracle Usability Advisory Board meetings too. The UPK is the perfect solution for enterprise applications training needs (I previously reviewed a fine book about UPK btw). One question I am often asked is how source content created using the UPK can be translated into another language. I spoke with Peter Maravelias, Principal Product Strategy Manager for UPK about this recently. UPK is already optimized for easy source-target translation already. There is even a solution for re-recording demos. Here's what you can do to get your source content into another language: Use UPK's ability to automatically translate events and actions. UPK comes with XML templates that allow you to accomplish this in 21 languages with a simple publishing action switch. These templates even deal with the tricky business of using gender-based translations. Spanish localization template sample Japanese localization template sample Use the Import and Export localization features to export additional custom content in a format like XLIFF, easily handled by translation tools. You could also export and import in Word format. Re-record the sound (audio) files that go with the recordings, one per screen. UPK's granular approach to the sound files means that timing isn't an option. Retiming demos isn't required. A tip here with sound files and XLFF-exported custom content is to facilitate translation context by avoiding explicit references to actions going on in the screen recordings. A text based storyboard with screenshots accompanying the sound files should also be provided to the translators. Provide a glossary of terms too. Use the re-record option in UPK to record any demo from a translated application. This will allow all the translated UI labels to be automatically captured. You may be required to resize any action events here due to text expansion issues. Of course, you will need translated data in the translated application too, so plan for this in advance. However, source-target language skills aren't required for the re-recording. The UPK Player itself, of course, is also available from Oracle along with content and doc in 21 languages. The Developer and Setup is also translated in a smaller number of languages. Check the Oracle UPK website for latest details. UPK is a super solution for global enterprise applications training deployments allowing source content to be translated into multiple languages easily. See this post on the UPK blog for more insight too!

    Read the article

  • Dart and NetBeans IDE 7.4

    - by Geertjan
    Here's the start of Dart in NetBeans IDE. Basic Dart editing support is done and on saving a Dart file the related JavaScript files are automatically generated. In the context of an HTML5 application in NetBeans IDE, that gives you deep integration with the embedded browser and, even better, Chrome, as well as Chrome Developer Tools. Below, notice that the "Sunflower Spectacular" H1 element is selected (click the image to enlarge it to get a better view), which is therefore highlighted in the live DOM view in the bottom left, as well as in the CSS Styles window in the top right, from where the CSS styles can be edited and from where the related files can be opened in the IDE. Identical features are available for Chrome, as well as on Android and iOS. And if you like that, watch this YouTube movie showing how Chrome Developer Tools integration can fit directly into the workflow below. Anyone want to help get this plugin further? What's needed: Much deeper Dart editing support, i.e., right now only very basic syntax coloring is provided, i.e., an ANTLR lexer is integrated into the NetBeans syntax coloring infrastructure. Parsing, error checking, code completion, and some small code templates are needed. A new panel is needed in the Project Properties dialog on NetBeans HTML5 projects for enabling Dart (i.e., similar to enabling Cordova), at which point the "dart.js" file and other Dart artifacts should be added to the project, so that a Dart project is immediately generated and the application should be immediately deployable. Whenever changes are made to a Dart file, Dart should run in the background to create the Dart artifacts in some hidden way, so that the user doesn't see all the Dart artifacts as is currently the case. Some way of recognizing Dart projects (there's a YAML file as an identifier) and creating NetBeans HTML5 projects from that, i.e., from Dart projects outside the IDE. I think that's all... The official Dart Editor is based on Eclipse and requires a massive download of heaps of Eclipse bundles. Compare that to the NetBeans equivalent, which is a very small "HTML5 and PHP" bundle (60 MB), available here, together with the above small Dart plugin. Plus, when you look at how NetBeans IDE integrates with a bunch of Google-oriented projects, i.e., Chrome, Chrome Developer Tools, and Android (via Cordova), that's a pretty interesting toolbox for anyone using Dart. And bear in mind that ANTLRWorks, Microchip, and heaps of other organizations have built and are building their tools on top of NetBeans!

    Read the article

  • How to Name Linked Servers

    - by Bill Graziano
    I did another SQL Server migration over the weekend that dealt with linked servers.  I’ve seen all kinds of odd naming schemes and there are a few I like and a few I suggest you avoid. Don’t name your linked server for its IP address.  At some point whatever is on the other end of that IP address will move.  You’ll probably need to point your linked server to a new IP address but not change the name of the linked server.  And then you’ve completely lost any context around this.  Bonus points if a new SQL Server eventually ends up at the old IP address further adding confusion when you’re trying to troubleshoot. Don’t name your linked server based on its instance name.  This one is less obvious.  It sounds nice to have a linked server named [VSRV1\SQLTRAN01].  You know what it is and it’s easy to use.  It’s less nice when you’ve got 200 stored procedures that all reference this linked server but the database they reference has moved to a new instance.  Now when you query this you’re actually querying a different instance. (Please note: I’m not saying it’s a good idea to have 200 stored procedures that all reference a linked server.  I’m just saying it’s not all that uncommon.) Consider naming your linked server something that you can easily search on.  See my note above.  You can also get around this by always enclosing the name in brackets.  That is harder to enforce unless you use some odd characters in it. Consider naming your linked server based on the function.  For example, I’ve had some luck having a linked server named [DW] that points to our data warehouse server.  That server can change names or physically move and all I need to do is update the linked server to point to the new destination.  The descriptive name of the linked server is still accurate.  No code needs to change and people still know what it is just by looking at it. Consider naming your linked server for the database.  I’m still thinking through this one.  It may mean you have multiple linked servers that point to the same instance.  I’ve found that database names rarely change.  It also makes it easier to move individual databases to new servers. Consider pointing your linked servers to DNS entries and not IP addresses.  I’ve done this for reporting databases and had some success.  Especially for read-only snapshots that can get created on the main database or on the mirror.  What issues have you had with linked server names?  What has worked for you?  Where are the holes in my approach?

    Read the article

  • Recording Topics manually and automatically

    - by maria.cozzolino(at)oracle.com
    When you are recording UPK topics, the default mode for recording is manual recording, where you tell the system when to record each screen shot. This mode allows you to take the exact screen shot you need. However, it does get a bit tedious when you are recording long topics, especially if you forget to take a few screen shots. In UPK 3.5, a new version of recording was introduced - Automatic Recording. It was designed to simplify the recording process by automatically capturing screen shots as you perform your transaction. If you haven't experimented with Automatic Recording, I'd recommend you give it a try - it might make your recording life easier. If you are recording with sound, you can also narrate your topic while recording it. To turn on Automatic Recording: 1. In Tools/Options, there are two recorder tabs. The first tab, under content defaults, includes settings that you may want to share between developers, like whether keyboard shortcuts are automatically captured. 2. The second tab is the one that contains the personal preferences, like screen shot capture key and whether to record automatically or manually. On this tab, choose the option for Automatic Recording. 3. Save the settings. Note that this setting will NOT impact content defaults; this is for your user only. When you launch the recorder, you will notice a slightly different message with guidance on how to start and stop automatic recording. Once you start recording, the recorder window is hidden until the end of the recording session to allow you to capture your transaction. In the task tray, there is a series of icons that let you know that you are capturing content. You can pause the recording, as well as set and view your sound levels if you are using sound. A camera appears during each screen capture to help you know when the system is capturing a screen shot, and a context indicator appears to show the recognition. With automatic recording, you can let the system capture the necessary screen shots. It may provide a more natural recording experience, and is probably easier for the untrained developer. On the other hand, you have a bit more control with manual recording on which screen shot appears, but it also means you have to remember to capture the screen shot. :) We'd be interested in hearing which type of recording you do, and any rationale on why you made that choice. Please comment and let us know. --Maria Cozzolino, Manager of UPK Software Requirements and UI Design

    Read the article

  • Part 1 - 12c Database and WLS - Overview

    - by Steve Felts
    The download of Oracle 12c database became available on June 25, 2013.  There are some big new features in 12c database and WebLogic Server will take advantage of them. Immediately, we will support using 12c database and drivers with WLS 10.3.6 and 12.1.1.  When the next version of WLS ships, additional functionality will be supported (those rows in the table below with all "No" values will get a "Yes).  The following table maps the Oracle 12c Database features supported with various combinations of currently available WLS releases, 11g and 12c Drivers, and 11g and 12c Databases. Feature WebLogic Server 10.3.6/12.1.1 with 11g drivers and 11gR2 DB WebLogic Server 10.3.6/12.1.1 with 11g drivers and 12c DB WebLogic Server 10.3.6/12.1.1 with 12c drivers and 11gR2 DB WebLogic Server 10.3.6/12.1.1 with 12c drivers and 12c DB JDBC replay No No No Yes (Active GridLink only in 10.3.6, add generic in 12.1.1) Multi Tenant Database No Yes (except set container) No Yes (except set container) Dynamic switching between Tenants No No No No Database Resident Connection pooling (DRCP) No No No No Oracle Notification Service (ONS) auto configuration No No No No Global Database Services (GDS) No Yes (Active GridLink only) No Yes (Active GridLink only) JDBC 4.1 (using ojdbc7.jar files & JDK 7) No No Yes Yes  The My Oracle Support (MOS) document covering this is "WebLogic Server 12.1.1 and 10.3.6 Support for Oracle 12c Database [ID 1564509.1]" at the link https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=1564509.1. The following documents are also key references:12c Oracle Database Developer Guide http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16655_01/appdev.121/e17620/toc.htm 12c Oracle Database Administrator's Guide http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16655_01/server.121/e17636/toc.htm . I plan to write some related blog articles not to duplicate existing product documentation but to introduce the features, provide some examples, and tie together some information to make it easier to understand. How do you get started with 12c?  The easiest way is to point your data source at a 12c database.  The only change on the WLS side is to update the URL in your data source (assuming that you are not just upgrading your database).  You can continue to use the 11.2.0.3 driver jar files that shipped with WLS 10.3.6 or 12.1.1.  You shouldn't see any changes in your application.  You can take advantage of enhancements on the database side that don't affect the mid-tier.  On the WLS side, you can take advantage of using Global Data Service or connecting to a tenant in a multi-tenant database transparently. If you want to use the 12c client jar files, it's a bit of work because they aren't shipped with WLS and you can't just drop in ojdbc6.jar as in the old days.  You need to use a matched set of jar files and they need to come before existing jar files in the CLASSPATH.  The MOS article is written from the standpoint that you need to get the jar files directly - download almost 1G and install over 600M footprint to get 15 jar files.  Assuming that you have the database installed and you can get access to the installation (or ask the DBA), you need to copy the 15 jar files to each machine with a WLS installation and get them in your CLASSPATH.  You can play with setting the PRE_CLASSPATH but the more practical approach may be to just update WL_HOME/common/bin/commEnv.sh directly.  There's a change in the transaction completion behavior (read the MOS) so if you think you might run into that, you will want to set -Doracle.jdbc.autoCommitSpecCompliant=false.  Also if you are running with Active GridLink, you must set -Doracle.ucp.PreWLS1212Compatible=true (how's that for telling you that this is fixed in WLS 12.1.2).  Once you get the configuration out of the way, you can start using the new ojdbc7.jar in place of the ojdbc6.jar to get the new JDBC 4.1 API's.  You can also start using Application Continuity.  This feature is also known as JDBC Replay because when a connection fails you get a new one with all JDBC operations up to the failure point automatically replayed.  As you might expect, there are some limitations but it's an interesting feature.  Obviously I'm going to focus on the 12c database features that we can leverage in WLS data source.  You will need to read other sources or the product documentation to get all of the new features.

    Read the article

  • Interviews: Going Beyond the Technical Quiz

    - by Tony Davis
    All developers will be familiar with the basic format of a technical interview. After a bout of CV-trawling to gauge basic experience, strengths and weaknesses, the interview turns technical. The whiteboard takes center stage and the challenge is set to design a function or query, or solve what on the face of it might seem a disarmingly simple programming puzzle. Most developers will have experienced those few panic-stricken moments, when one’s mind goes as blank as the whiteboard, before un-popping the marker pen, and hopefully one’s mental functions, to work through the problem. It is a way to probe the candidate’s knowledge of basic programming structures and techniques and to challenge their critical thinking. However, these challenges or puzzles, often devised by some of the smartest brains in the development team, have a tendency to become unnecessarily ‘tricksy’. They often seem somewhat academic in nature. While the candidate straight out of IT school might breeze through the construction of a Markov chain, a candidate with bags of practical experience but less in the way of formal training could become nonplussed. Also, a whiteboard and a marker pen make up only a very small part of the toolkit that a programmer will use in everyday work. I remember vividly my first job interview, for a position as technical editor. It went well, but after the usual CV grilling and technical questions, I was only halfway there. Later, they sat me alongside a team of editors, in front of a computer loaded with MS Word and copy of SQL Server Query Analyzer, and my task was to edit a real chapter for a real SQL Server book that they planned to publish, including validating and testing all the code. It was a tough challenge but I came away with a sound knowledge of the sort of work I’d do, and its context. It makes perfect sense, yet my impression is that many organizations don’t do this. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that Red Gate started to move over to this model for developer interviews. Now, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the whiteboard challenges, the candidate can expect to sit with their prospective team, in front of Visual Studio, loaded with all the useful tools in the developer’s kit (ReSharper and so on) and asked to, for example, analyze and improve a real piece of software. The same principles should apply when interviewing for a database positon. In addition to the usual questions challenging the candidate’s knowledge of such things as b-trees, object permissions, database recovery models, and so on, sit the candidate down with the other database developers or DBAs. Arm them with a copy of Management Studio, and a few other tools, then challenge them to discover the flaws in a stored procedure, and improve its performance. Or present them with a corrupt database and ask them to get the database back online, and discover the cause of the corruption.

    Read the article

  • Where and how to reference composite MVP components?

    - by Lea Hayes
    I am learning about the MVP (Model-View-Presenter) Passive View flavour of MVC. I intend to expose events from view interfaces rather than using the observer pattern to remove explicit coupling with presenter. Context: Windows Forms / Client-Side JavaScript. I am led to believe that the MVP (or indeed MVC in general) pattern can be applied at various levels of a user interface ranging from the main "Window" to an embedded "Text Field". For instance, the model to the text field is probably just a string whereas the model to the "Window" contains application specific view state (like a persons name which resides within the contained text field). Given a more complex scenario: Documentation viewer which contains: TOC navigation pane Document view Search pane Since each of these 4 user interface items are complex and can be reused elsewhere it makes sense to design these using MVP. Given that each of these user interface items comprises of 3 components; which component should be nested? where? who instantiates them? Idea #1 - Embed View inside View from Parent View public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { public DocumentationViewer() { ... // Unclear as to how model and presenter are injected... TocPane = new TocPaneView(); } protected ITocPaneView TocPane { get; private set; } } Idea #2 - Embed Presenter inside View from Parent View public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { public DocumentationViewer() { ... // This doesn't seem like view logic... var tocPaneModel = new TocPaneModel(); var tocPaneView = new TocPaneView(); TocPane = new TocPanePresenter(tocPaneModel, tocPaneView); } protected TocPanePresenter TocPane { get; private set; } } Idea #3 - Embed View inside View from Parent Presenter public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { ... // Part of IDocumentationViewerView: public ITocPaneView TocPane { get; set; } } public class DocumentationViewerPresenter { public DocumentationViewerPresenter(DocumentationViewerModel model, IDocumentationViewerView view) { ... var tocPaneView = new TocPaneView(); var tocPaneModel = new TocPaneModel(model.Toc); var tocPanePresenter = new TocPanePresenter(tocPaneModel, tocPaneView); view.TocPane = tocPaneView; } } Some better idea...

    Read the article

  • Is inline SQL still classed as bad practice now that we have Micro ORMs?

    - by Grofit
    This is a bit of an open ended question but I wanted some opinions, as I grew up in a world where inline SQL scripts were the norm, then we were all made very aware of SQL injection based issues, and how fragile the sql was when doing string manipulations all over the place. Then came the dawn of the ORM where you were explaining the query to the ORM and letting it generate its own SQL, which in a lot of cases was not optimal but was safe and easy. Another good thing about ORMs or database abstraction layers were that the SQL was generated with its database engine in mind, so I could use Hibernate/Nhibernate with MSSQL, MYSQL and my code never changed it was just a configuration detail. Now fast forward to current day, where Micro ORMs seem to be winning over more developers I was wondering why we have seemingly taken a U-Turn on the whole in-line sql subject. I must admit I do like the idea of no ORM config files and being able to write my query in a more optimal manner but it feels like I am opening myself back up to the old vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and I am also tying myself to one database engine so if I want my software to support multiple database engines I would need to do some more string hackery which seems to then start to make code unreadable and more fragile. (Just before someone mentions it I know you can use parameter based arguments with most micro orms which offers protection in most cases from sql injection) So what are peoples opinions on this sort of thing? I am using Dapper as my Micro ORM in this instance and NHibernate as my regular ORM in this scenario, however most in each field are quite similar. What I term as inline sql is SQL strings within source code. There used to be design debates over SQL strings in source code detracting from the fundamental intent of the logic, which is why statically typed linq style queries became so popular its still just 1 language, but with lets say C# and Sql in one page you have 2 languages intermingled in your raw source code now. Just to clarify, the SQL injection is just one of the known issues with using sql strings, I already mention you can stop this from happening with parameter based queries, however I highlight other issues with having SQL queries ingrained in your source code, such as the lack of DB Vendor abstraction as well as losing any level of compile time error capturing on string based queries, these are all issues which we managed to side step with the dawn of ORMs with their higher level querying functionality, such as HQL or LINQ etc (not all of the issues but most of them). So I am less focused on the individual highlighted issues and more the bigger picture of is it now becoming more acceptable to have SQL strings directly in your source code again, as most Micro ORMs use this mechanism. Here is a similar question which has a few different view points, although is more about the inline sql without the micro orm context: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5303746/is-inline-sql-hard-coding

    Read the article

  • RightNow CX Cloud Service Combined with Oracle Fusion CRM in the Cloud

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    ·        The May 2012 release of Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service, the customer experience suite, is now integrated with Oracle Fusion CRM, helping organizations to achieve sustainable business growth through relevant, cross-channel customer interactions that can increase revenue opportunities and drive organizational efficiencies. Relevant Interactions Build Stronger Customer Relationships ·          Armed with a comprehensive view of all customer interactions across channels, the context and status of these interactions, and an awareness of the customer’s value to the organization, companies can now offer more relevant products and services to customers. ·         Using the combined Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion CRM solutions, organizations can increase customer retention, drive higher levels of customer advocacy, and increase sales conversion rates with tools designed to: - Provide a complete, cross-channel view of the customer to sales, marketing and service. - Empower sales and service departments to easily collaborate to proactively solve customer issues, using opportunities to provide purchase advice at the right time and with the right solutions. - Allow sales to easily review service history in preparation for sales calls. - Enable agents to understand customer value based upon prior buying habits and existing opportunities. Deeper Insight Enables Targeted, Personalized Opportunities ·          The combination of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion CRM allows sales and marketing organizations to simultaneously leverage service interactions from RightNow CX and sales prediction and segmentation capabilities from Fusion Sales. This helps companies to: - Better match products and services to specific customer needs based on customer service history.  - Deliver targeted, personalized interactions intended to help customers derive more value from purchases and to inform future buying decisions. - Identify new opportunities to increase deal size and conversion rates. Supporting Quotes ·         “Every interaction is a relationship opportunity to grow your business. When these interactions are relevant and add value for customers, customers are more likely to trust the relationship and seek purchase advice,” said David Vap, group vice president, Oracle. “This customer trust provides an opportunity to increase customer product adoption and to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, thereby increasing company profitability.” Supporting Resources ·         Oracle Fusion CRM ·         Oracle Fusion Applications ·         Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service ·         OracleCRM on Facebook ·         OracleCRM on YouTube

    Read the article

  • Naming Convention for Dedicated Thread Locking objects

    - by Chris Sinclair
    A relatively minor question, but I haven't been able to find official documentation or even blog opinion/discussions on it. Simply put: when I have a private object whose sole purpose is to serve for private lock, what do I name that object? class MyClass { private object LockingObject = new object(); void DoSomething() { lock(LockingObject) { //do something } } } What should we name LockingObject here? Also consider not just the name of the variable but how it looks in-code when locking. I've seen various examples, but seemingly no solid go-to advice: Plenty of usages of SyncRoot (and variations such as _syncRoot). Code Sample: lock(SyncRoot), lock(_syncRoot) This appears to be influenced by VB's equivalent SyncLock statement, the SyncRoot property that exists on some of the ICollection classes and part of some kind of SyncRoot design pattern (which arguably is a bad idea) Being in a C# context, not sure if I'd want to have a VBish naming. Even worse, in VB naming the variable the same as the keyword. Not sure if this would be a source of confusion or not. thisLock and lockThis from the MSDN articles: C# lock Statement, VB SyncLock Statement Code Sample: lock(thisLock), lock(lockThis) Not sure if these were named minimally purely for the example or not Kind of weird if we're using this within a static class/method. Several usages of PadLock (of varying casing) Code Sample: lock(PadLock), lock(padlock) Not bad, but my only beef is it unsurprisingly invokes the image of a physical "padlock" which I tend to not associate with the abstract threading concept. Naming the lock based on what it's intending to lock Code Sample: lock(messagesLock), lock(DictionaryLock), lock(commandQueueLock) In the VB SyncRoot MSDN page example, it has a simpleMessageList example with a private messagesLock object I don't think it's a good idea to name the lock against the type you're locking around ("DictionaryLock") as that's an implementation detail that may change. I prefer naming around the concept/object you're locking ("messagesLock" or "commandQueueLock") Interestingly, I very rarely see this naming convention for locking objects in code samples online or on StackOverflow. Question: What's your opinion generally about naming private locking objects? Recently, I've started naming them ThreadLock (so kinda like option 3), but I'm finding myself questioning that name. I'm frequently using this locking pattern (in the code sample provided above) throughout my applications so I thought it might make sense to get a more professional opinion/discussion about a solid naming convention for them. Thanks!

    Read the article

  • Economic modelling - Resources for valuing goods

    - by Rushyo
    tl;dr: What economic/computer science books would you suggest for learning about economic valuation of goods and simulations thereof? I'm looking to create an economic model for a game based on goods created procedurally. Every natural resource and produced good would be procedurally generated, with certain goods being assigned certain uses. Fakesium might be used for the production of Weapon A and produced from Fakesium factories which use Dilithium and Widgets as reagents, where Widgets are also the product of Foo and Bar The problem is not creating the resources and their various production utlities - but getting the game's AI empires and merchants to correctly value the goods according to their scarcity, utility and production costs. I need to create a simulation of goods which allows the various game factions to assign a common value denominator (credits) to each resource, depending on how much its worth to that empire. I see the simulation being something like: "I have a high requirement for Weapon A. Since I don't have much of Fakesium, which is needed for Weapon A - I must have a high demand for Fakesium. If I can acquire Fakesium, devalue it. If not, increase its value - and also increase demand for Dilithium and Widgets too." This is very naive - because it may be much much cheaper for the empire to simply purchase Dilithium and Widgets directly rather than purchasing Fakesium, for example. Another example is two resources might allow the creation of Weapon A (Fakesium and Lieron), so we'd need to consider that. I've been scratching my head over the problem and it keeps growing. By the time the player joins the world, I'd expect enough iterations of this process to have occurred that prices would have largely normalised - and would then only trigger rarely to compensate for major changes (eg. if the player blows up the world's only Foo mine!) Could anyone suggest resources (books, largely) which outline this style of modelling, preferably in the context of simulations? Since this problem would never occur outside fantasy worlds, I figured this is probably the most likely place to find people who have encountered similar problems and I'm sure there's people who know of good places for Games Developers to start looking at less specific economic theory too. Additionally, does anyone know of any developers with blogs whose games or research applications perform similar modelling?

    Read the article

  • Transparent Technology from Amazon

    - by David Dorf
    Amazon has been making some interesting moves again, this time in the augmented humanity area.  Augmented humanity is about helping humans overcome their shortcomings using technology.  Putting a powerful smartphone in your pocket helps you in many ways like navigating streets, communicating with far off friends, and accessing information.  But the interface for smartphones is somewhat limiting and unnatural, so companies have been looking for ways to make the technology more transparent and therefore easier to use. When Apple helped us drop the stylus, we took a giant leap forward in simplicity.  Using touchscreens with intuitive gestures was part of the iPhone's original appeal.  People don't want to know that technology is there -- they just want the benefits.  So what's the next leap beyond the touchscreen to make smartphones even easier to use? Two natural ways we interact with the world around us is by using sight and voice.  Google and Apple have been using both in their mobile platforms for limited uses cases.  Nobody actually wants to type a text message, so why not just speak it?  Any if you want more information about a book, why not just snap a picture of the cover?  That's much more accurate than trying to key the title and/or author. So what's Amazon been doing?  First, Amazon released a new iPhone app called Flow that allows iPhone users to see information about products in context.  Yes, its an augmented reality app that uses the phone's camera to view products, and overlays data about the products on the screen.  For the most part it requires the barcode to be visible to correctly identify the product, but I believe it can also recognize certain logos as well.  Download the app and try it out but don't expect perfection.  Its good enough to demonstrate the concept, but its far from accurate enough.  (MobileBeat did a pretty good review.)  Extrapolate to the future and we might just have a heads-up display in our eyeglasses. The second interesting area is voice response, for which Siri is getting lots of attention.  Amazon may have purchased a voice recognition company called Yap, although the deal is not confirmed.  But it would make perfect sense, especially with the Kindle Fire in Amazon's lineup. I believe over the next 3-5 years the way in which we interact with smartphones will mature, and they will become more transparent yet more important to our daily lives.  This will, of course, impact the way we shop, making information more readily accessible than it already is.  Amazon seems to be positioning itself to be at the forefront of this trend, so we should be watching them carefully.

    Read the article

  • How To Build An Enterprise Application - Introduction

    - by Tuan Nguyen
    An enterprise application is a software which fulfills 4 core quality attributes: Reliability Flexibility Reusability Maintainability Reliability is the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specific period of time. Because there are no ways more than testing to make sure a system is reliability, we can exchange the term reliability with the term testability. Flexibility is the ability of changing a system's core features without violating unrelated features or components. Although flexibility can helps us to achieve interoperability easily but the opposite is not true. For example, a program might run on multiple platforms, contains logic for many scenarios but that wouldn't mean it was flexibility if it forces us rewrite code in all components when we just want to change some aspects of a feature it had. Reusability is the ability of sharing one or more system's components for another system. We should just open a component's reusability in the context in which it is used. For example, we write classes that implement UI logic and deliver them to only classes which implementing UI. Maintainability is the ability of adding or removing features to a system after it was released. Maintainability consists of many factors such as readability, analyzability, extensibility therein extensibility is critical. Maintainability requires us to write code that is longer and complexer than normal but it doesn't mean we introduce unneccessarily complex code. We always try to make our code clear and transparent to everyone. An application enterprise is built on an enterprise design which consists of two parts: low-level design and high-level design. At low-level design, it focuses on building loose-coupled classes or components. Particularly, it recommends: Each class or component undertakes only single responsibility (design based on unit test) Classes or components implement and work through interfaces (design based on contract) Dependency relationship between classes and components could be injected at run-time (design based on dependency) At high-level design, it focuses on architecting system into tiers and layers. Particularly, it recommends: Divide system into subsystems for deployment. Each subsytem is called a tier. Typical, an enterprise application would have 3 tiers as illustrated in the following figure: Arrange classes and components to logical containers called layers. Typical, an enterprise application would have 5 layers as illustrated in the following figure

    Read the article

  • Explaining Explain Plan Notes for Auto DOP

    - by jean-pierre.dijcks
    I've recently gotten some questions around "why do I not see a parallel plan" while Auto DOP is on (I think)...? It is probably worthwhile to quickly go over some of the ways to find out what Auto DOP was thinking. In general, there is no need to go tracing sessions and look under the hood. The thing to start with is to do an explain plan on your statement and to look at the parameter settings on the system. Parameter Settings to Look At First and foremost, make sure that parallel_degree_policy = AUTO. If you have that parameter set to LIMITED you will not have queuing and we will only do the auto magic if your objects are set to default parallel (so no degree specified). Next you want to look at the value of parallel_degree_limit. It is typically set to CPU, which in default settings equates to the Default DOP of the system. If you are testing Auto DOP itself and the impact it has on performance you may want to leave it at this CPU setting. If you are running concurrent statements you may want to give this some more thoughts. See here for more information. In general, do stick with either CPU or with a specific number. For now avoid the IO setting as I've seen some mixed results with that... In 11.2.0.2 you should also check that IO Calibrate has been run. Best to simply do a: SQL> select * from V$IO_CALIBRATION_STATUS; STATUS        CALIBRATION_TIME ------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- READY         04-JAN-11 10.04.13.104 AM You should see that your IO Calibrate is READY and therefore Auto DOP is ready. In any case, if you did not run the IO Calibrate step you will get the following note in the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: skipped because of IO calibrate statistics are missing One more note on calibrate_io, if you do not have asynchronous IO enabled you will see:  ERROR at line 1: ORA-56708: Could not find any datafiles with asynchronous i/o capability ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RMIN", line 463 ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER", line 1296 ORA-06512: at line 7 While this is changed in some fixes to the calibrate procedure, you should really consider switching asynchronous IO on for your data warehouse. Explain Plan Explanation To see the notes that are shown and explained here (and the above little snippet ) you can use a simple explain plan mechanism. There should  be no need to add +parallel etc. explain plan for <statement> SELECT PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT FROM TABLE(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY()); Auto DOP The note structure displaying why Auto DOP did not work (with the exception noted above on IO Calibrate) is like this: Automatic degree of parallelism is disabled: <reason> These are the reason codes: Parameter -  parallel_degree_policy = manual which will not allow Auto DOP to kick in  Hint - One of the following hints are used NOPARALLEL, PARALLEL(1), PARALLEL(MANUAL) Outline - A SQL outline of an older version (before 11.2) is used SQL property restriction - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing Rule-based mode - Instead of the Cost Based Optimizer the system is using the RBO Recursive SQL statement - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing pq disabled/pdml disabled/pddl disabled - For some reason (alter session?) parallelism is disabled Limited mode but no parallel objects referenced - your parallel_degree_policy = LIMITED and no objects in the statement are decorated with the default PARALLEL degree. In most cases all objects have a specific degree in which case Auto DOP will honor that degree. Parallel Degree Limited When Auto DOP does it works you may see the cap you imposed with parallel_degree_limit showing up in the note section of the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 16 because of degree limit This is an obvious indication that your are being capped for this statement. There is one quite interesting one that happens when you are being capped at DOP = 1. First of you get a serial plan and the note changes slightly in that it does not indicate it is being capped (we hope to update the note at some point in time to be more specific). It right now looks like this: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 1 Dynamic Sampling With 11.2.0.2 you will start seeing another interesting change in parallel plans, and since we are talking about the note section here, I figured we throw this in for good measure. If we deem the parallel (!) statement complex enough, we will enact dynamic sampling on your query. This happens as long as you did not change the default for dynamic sampling on the system. The note looks like this: Note ----- - dynamic sampling used for this statement (level=5)

    Read the article

  • Changing the sequencing strategy for File/Ftp Adapter

    - by [email protected]
    The File/Ftp Adapter allows the user to configure the outbound write to use a sequence number. For example, if I choose address-data_%SEQ%.txt as the FileNamingConvention, then all my files would be generated as address-data_1.txt, address-data_2.txt,...and so on. But, where does this sequence number come from? The answer lies in the "control directory" for the particular adapter project(or scenario). In general, for every project that use the File or Ftp Adapter, a unique directory is created for book keeping purposes. And since this control directory is required to be unique, the adapter uses a digest to make sure that no two control directories are the same. For example, for my FlatStructure sample, the control information for my project would go under FMW_HOME/user_projects/domains/soainfra/fileftp/controlFiles/[DIGEST]/outbound where the value of DIGEST would differ from one project to another. If you look under this directory, you will see a file control_ob.properties and this is where the sequence number is maintained. Please note that the sequence number is maintained in binary form and you hence you might need a hex editor to view its content. You will also see another zero byte file, SEQ_nnn, but, ignore that for now. We'll get to it some other time. For now, please remember that this extra file is maintained as a backup. One of the challenges faced by the adapter runtime is to guard all writes to the control files so no two threads inadverently try to update them at the same time. And, it does so with the help of a "Mutex". For now, please remember that the mutex comes in different flavors: In-memory DB-based Coherence-based User-defined Again, we will talk about these mutexes some other time. Please note that there might be scenarios, particularly under heavy load, where the mutex might become a bottleneck. The adapter, however,  allows you to change the configuration so that the adapter sequence value comes from a database sequence or a stored procedure and in such situation, the mutex is acually by-passed and thereby resulting in better throughputs. In later releases, the behavior of the adapter would be defaulted to use a db-sequence.  The simplest way to achieve this is by switching your JNDI for the outbound JCA file to use "eis/HAFileAdapter" as shown   But, what does this do? Internally, the adapter runtime creates a sequence on the oracle database. For example, if you do a "select * from user_sequences" in your soa-infra schema, you will see a new sequence being created with name as SEQ_<GUID>__ where the GUID will differ from one project to another. However, if you want to use your own sequence, then it would require you to add a new property to your JCA file called SequenceName as shown below. Please note that you will need to create this sequence on your soainfra schema beforehand.     But, what if we use DB2 or MSSQL Server as the dehydration support? DB2 supports sequences natively but MSSQL Server does not. So, the adapter runtime uses a natively generated sequence for DB2, but, for MSSQL server, the adapter relies on a stored procedure that ships with the product. If you wish to achieve the same result for SOA Suite running DB2 as the dehydration store, simply change your connection factory JNDI name in the JCA file to eis/HAFileAdapterDB2 and for MSSQL, please use eis/HAFileAdapterMSSQL. And, if you wish to use a stored procedure other than the one that ships with the product, you will need to rely on binding properties to override the adapter behavior. Particularly, you will need to instruct the adapter that you wish to use a stored procedure as shown:       Please note that if you're using the File/Ftp Adapter in Append mode, then the adapter runtime degrades the mutex to use pessimistic locks as we don't want writers from different nodes to append to the same file at the same time.                    

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324  | Next Page >