quick guide to irm - Page 320

Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v5.0) is Released

- by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

Ever wanted to have a simple jQuery menu bound with ASP.NET web site map file? Ever wanted to have cool css design stuffs implemented on your ASP.NET data bound controls? Ever wanted to let Visual Studio generate logical layers for you, which can be easily tested, customized and bound with ASP.NET data controls? If your answers with respect to above questions are ‘yes’, then you will probably happy to try out latest release (v5.0) of Employee Starter Kit, which is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, the current release illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 Web Form Data Controls, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context. Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source ASP.NET project template that is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. This project template is titled as “Employee Info Starter Kit”, which was initially hosted on Microsoft Code Gallery and been downloaded 1, 50,000+ of copies afterword. The latest version of this starter kit is hosted in Codeplex. Release Highlights User End Functional Specification The user end functionalities of this starter kit are pretty simple and straight forward that are focused in to perform CRUD operation on employee records as described below. Creating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Architectural Overview Simple 3 layer architecture (presentation, business logic and data access layer) ASP.NET web form based user interface Built-in code generators for logical layers, implemented in Visual Studio default template engine (T4) Built-in Entity Framework entities as business entities (aka: data containers) Data Mapper design pattern based Data Access Layer, implemented in C# and Entity Framework Domain Model design pattern based Business Logic Layer, implemented in C# Object Model for Cross Cutting Concerns (such as validation, logging, exception management) Minimum System Requirements Visual Studio 2010 (Web Developer Express Edition) or higher Sql Server 2005 (Express Edition) or higher Technology Utilized Programming Languages/Scripts Browser side: JavaScript Web server side: C# Code Generation Template: T-4 Template Frameworks .NET Framework 4.0 JavaScript Framework: jQuery 1.5.1 CSS Framework: 960 grid system .NET Framework Components .NET Entity Framework .NET Optional/Named Parameters (new in .net 4.0) .NET Tuple (new in .net 4.0) .NET Extension Method .NET Lambda Expressions .NET Anonymous Type .NET Query Expressions .NET Automatically Implemented Properties .NET LINQ .NET Partial Classes and Methods .NET Generic Type .NET Nullable Type ASP.NET Meta Description and Keyword Support (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Routing (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Grid View (CSS support for sorting - (new in .net 4.0)) ASP.NET Repeater ASP.NET Form View ASP.NET Login View ASP.NET Site Map Path ASP.NET Skin ASP.NET Theme ASP.NET Master Page ASP.NET Object Data Source ASP.NET Role Based Security Getting Started Guide To see Employee Info Starter Kit in action is pretty easy! Download the latest version. Extract the file. From the extracted folder click the C# project file (Eisk.Web.csproj) to open it in Visual Studio 2010 Hit Ctrl+F5! The current release (v5.0) of Employee Info Starter Kit is properly packaged, fully documented and well tested. If you want to learn more about it in details, just check the following links: Release Home Page Installation Walkthrough Hand on Coding Walkthrough Technical Reference Enjoy!

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Secret Agent Man

- by Bil Simser

Just a quick one this morning as we all get started in the week. Something that comes into play (sometimes in a big way) is the user agent string your browser gives off. So for example using the User-Agent field in the request header, you can determine what browser the user is running and act accordingly.Internet Explorer 9 modified the UA string slightly so just in case you're looking for it here are the user agent strings for IE9 (in various modes):Internet Explorer 9 Mode: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)Internet Explorer 8 Mode: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Zune 4.7)Internet Explorer 7 Mode: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Zune 4.7)Internet Explorer 9 (Compatibility Mode): Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Zune 4.7)A couple of things to note here:This was from a 64-bit Windows 7 client so that might account for the WOW64 in the agent string (I don't have a 32-bit client to test from)Various applications and platforms add to the UA string just like they do in previous IE releases. So for example you can see I have various .NET versions installed as well as Zune. You can take advantage of this by querying the UA string for compatibilities and present options accordingly to the end user.As applications will continue to add and modify this string you'll want to query the string for parts not the entire string. For example if you want to detect if you're coming from IE running on a Windows Phone 7 just look for "iemobile" in the user agent stringHappy hacking!

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SQL SERVER – Query Hint – Contest Win Joes 2 Pros Combo (USD 198) – Day 1 of 5

- by pinaldave

August 2011 we ran a contest where every day we give away one book for an entire month. The contest had extreme success. Lots of people participated and lots of give away. I have received lots of questions if we are doing something similar this month. Absolutely, instead of running a contest a month long we are doing something more interesting. We are giving away USD 198 worth gift every day for this week. We are giving away Joes 2 Pros 5 Volumes (BOOK) SQL 2008 Development Certification Training Kit every day. One copy in India and One in USA. Total 2 of the giveaway (worth USD 198). All the gifts are sponsored from the Koenig Training Solution and Joes 2 Pros. The books are available here Amazon | Flipkart | Indiaplaza How to Win: Read the Question Read the Hints Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India residents only) 2 Winners will be randomly selected announced on August 20th. Question of the Day: Which of the following queries will return dirty data? a) SELECT * FROM Table1 (READUNCOMMITED) b) SELECT * FROM Table1 (NOLOCK) c) SELECT * FROM Table1 (DIRTYREAD) d) SELECT * FROM Table1 (MYLOCK) Query Hints: BIG HINT POST Most SQL people know what a “Dirty Record” is. You might also call that an “Intermediate record”. In case this is new to you here is a very quick explanation. The simplest way to describe the steps of a transaction is to use an example of updating an existing record into a table. When the insert runs, SQL Server gets the data from storage, such as a hard drive, and loads it into memory and your CPU. The data in memory is changed and then saved to the storage device. Finally, a message is sent confirming the rows that were affected. For a very short period of time the update takes the data and puts it into memory (an intermediate state), not a permanent state. For every data change to a table there is a brief moment where the change is made in the intermediate state, but is not committed. During this time, any other DML statement needing that data waits until the lock is released. This is a safety feature so that SQL Server evaluates only official data. For every data change to a table there is a brief moment where the change is made in this intermediate state, but is not committed. During this time, any other DML statement (SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE) needing that data must wait until the lock is released. This is a safety feature put in place so that SQL Server evaluates only official data. Additional Hints: I have previously discussed various concepts from SQL Server Joes 2 Pros Volume 1. SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Dirty Records and Table Hints SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Row Constructors SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Finding un-matching Records SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Efficient Query Writing Strategy SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Finding Apostrophes in String and Text SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Wildcard – Querying Special Characters SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Wildcard Basics Recap Next Step: Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India) Bonus Winner Leave a comment with your favorite article from the “additional hints” section and you may be eligible for surprise gift. There is no country restriction for this Bonus Contest. Do mention why you liked it any particular blog post and I will announce the winner of the same along with the main contest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter

- by mbcrump

So Silverlight Firestarter is over and your sitting on your couch thinking… what now? Well its time to So how exactly can you pimp the Silverlight Firestarter? Well read below and you will find out: 1) Pimp the videos: First we are going to use a program named Juice to download all of the Silverlight Firestarter videos. Go ahead and point your browser to http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/ and download the application. It works on Mac, Linux and PC. After it is downloaded you are going to want to add an RSS feed by clicking the button highlighted below. At this point you are going to want to add the following URL inside the textbox and hit Save: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Silverlight-Firestarter/RSS This RSS feed includes all the Silverlight Firestarter Labs and Presentations located below. The Future of Silverlight Data Binding Strategies with Silverlight and WP7 Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns with Silverlight and WP7 Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Select all the videos and click the Download button located below (has blue arrow): Once all the videos are downloaded you will have about 4.64GB of Silverlight fun. You can now move these videos to your MediaServer and watch them with whatever device you want. Put it on an iPad, iPhone.. emm wait I mean WP7 or WMC7. 2) Pimp the Training Material – Download the offline installer for the labs here. This will give you almost a gig of free training materials. Here is the topics covered: Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 You will notice that it install Firestarter to the default of C:\Firestarter. So you will have to navigate to that folder and double click on Default.htm to get started. Now if you followed part one of the pimping guide then you will already have all the videos on your pc. You will notice that once you go into the lab you will get a Lab Document and Source at the bottom of the article. Now instead of opening the Source Folder in a web browser you can just copy the folder C:\Firestarter\Labs into your Visual Studio 2010 Project Folder. This will save a lot of time later. 3) Pimp my Silverlight 5 Knowledge – Always keep reading as much as possible and remember that the Silverlight 5 Beta should come Q1 of 2011 and the final release at the end of 2011. Here are 5 great blog post on Silverlight 5. Scott Gu’s Blog Mary Jo’s Article on Silverlight 5 The Future of Silverlight (Official) Kunal Chowdhury Blog Tim Heuer’s Blog Thats all that I got for now. Have fun with all the new Silverlight content. Subscribe to my feed

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Fill a Flash Drive with Portable Software using Lupo PenSuite

- by Asian Angel

A flash drive full of portable software is helpful to have along wherever you go. The Lupo PenSuite lets you choose from three different versions to get the best fit for your everyday needs. Note: If running the full version you will need a 512 MB USB flash drive or larger. Using Lupo PenSuite The one window to watch for during the setup process is where you have the opportunity to add a specific language pack if needed. Outside of that all that you need to do is sit back and wait for the suite to be extracted. Note: Extraction times will vary based on version and extraction location. Here we browsed to our flash drive to extract it to… Once the setup process is complete locate and double click the Lupo_PenSuite.exe file. This one time window will present you the opportunity to start using the suite immediately, or go directly into the options. When the suite is active you will have a new system tray icon that operates as a start menu button. At the bottom you can monitor the remaining room on your flash drive, and use the close button to exit the suite (may display as a power button based on menu theme). A quick look at the set up inside the suite. There is a pre-configured area for organizing and storing your personal files. Prefer a classic style menu? Just select for it in the options (various tab) and enjoy a smaller streamlined look. Note: You can also change the theme for the regular menu and add a user pic. The suite provides access to your portable software and online sites. You get to enjoy the best of both as shown in the following examples. Websites will open using the suite’s portable Firefox install. VLC is ready to play your downloaded videos. The suite also has some very nice photo editing programs added in. Installing Additional Apps If one of your favorite programs is not included in the suite version, it only takes a few minutes to add it in. Go to the Additional Apps webpage, download the app(s), and extract them onto your hard-drive. Note: Link for additional apps webpage provided below. Add the extracted app(s) to the MyApps folder in the suite’s folder hierarchy. Click on ASuite in the suite’s start menu. Drag and drop the portable app’s exe file into the MyApps section in the ASuite window. Your new software’s shortcut should display as shown here. Close this window when finished. Checking the suite’s start menu will show your new software ready to be used. Conclusion If you need a good portable software collection to carry with you on a flash drive then Lupo PenSuite is definitely worth taking a look at. We tested Lupo PenSuite on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 and it works great on all three. Another popular choice is PortableApps and you can check out our Review of that too they are essentially the same thing, each is just packaged differently. Links Download Lupo PenSuite (Full, Lite, & Zero versions) *Download links approximately one-third down the page. Download Additional Apps for Lupo PenSuite Download Additional Skins for Lupo PenSuite Start Menu View Video Tutorials *Has tutorial for easy updating of entire suite. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Install and Run Applications from Your iPod, Flash Drive or Mp3 PlayerRebit Backup Software [Review]BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WaySpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost 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 All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor

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HSSFS Part 2.1 - Parsing @@VERSION

- by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

For Part 2 of the Handy SQL Server Function Series I decided to tackle parsing useful information from the @@VERSION function, because I am an idiot. It turns out I was confused about CHARINDEX() vs. PATINDEX() and it pretty much invalidated my original solution. All is not lost though, this mistake turned out to be informative for me, and hopefully for you. Referring back to the "Version" view in the prelude I started with the following query to extract the version number: SELECT DISTINCT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, 12) VerNum FROM VERSION I used PATINDEX() to find the first hyphen "-" character in the string, since the version number appears 2 positions after it, and got these results: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- ------------ 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.3080.00 2005 9.00.4053.00 2008 10.50.1600.1 As you can see it was good enough for most of the values, but not for the SQL 2000 @@VERSION. You'll notice it has only 3 version sections/octets where the others have 4, and the SUBSTRING() grabbed the non-numeric characters after. To properly parse the version number will require a non-fixed value for the 3rd parameter of SUBSTRING(), which is the number of characters to extract. The best value is the position of the first space to occur after the version number (VN), the trick is to figure out how to find it. Here's where my confusion about PATINDEX() came about. The CHARINDEX() function has a handy optional 3rd parameter: CHARINDEX (expression1 ,expression2 [ ,start_location ] ) While PATINDEX(): PATINDEX ('%pattern%',expression ) Does not. I had expected to use PATINDEX() to start searching for a space AFTER the position of the VN, but it doesn't work that way. Since there are plenty of spaces before the VN, I thought I'd try PATINDEX() on another character that doesn't appear before, and tried "(": SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)) FROM VERSION Unfortunately this messes up the length calculation and yields: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- --------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (Intel X86) Dec 16 2008 19:4 2005 9.00.3080.00 (Intel X86) Sep 6 2009 01: 2005 9.00.4053.00 (Intel X86) May 26 2009 14: 2008 10.50.1600.1 (Intel X86) Apr 2008 10.50.1600.1 (X64) Apr 2 20 Yuck. The problem is that PATINDEX() returns position, and SUBSTRING() needs length, so I have to subtract the VN starting position: SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)-PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)) VerNum FROM VERSION And the results are: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- -------------------------------------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.4053.00 (I Msg 537, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function. Ummmm, whoops. Turns out SQL Server 2008 R2 includes "(RTM)" before the VN, and that causes the length to turn negative. So now that that blew up, I started to think about matching digit and dot (.) patterns. Sadly, a quick look at the first set of results will quickly scuttle that idea, since different versions have different digit patterns and lengths. At this point (which took far longer than I wanted) I decided to cut my losses and redo the query using CHARINDEX(), which I'll cover in Part 2.2. So to do a little post-mortem on this technique: PATINDEX() doesn't have the flexibility to match the digit pattern of the version number; PATINDEX() doesn't have a "start" parameter like CHARINDEX(), that allows us to skip over parts of the string; The SUBSTRING() expression is getting pretty complicated for this relatively simple task! This doesn't mean that PATINDEX() isn't useful, it's just not a good fit for this particular problem. I'll include a version in the next post that extracts the version number properly. UPDATE: Sorry if you saw the unformatted version of this earlier, I'm on a quest to find blog software that ACTUALLY WORKS.

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30 Steps to Master ASP.NET MVC Application development

- by Rajesh Pillai

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* 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";} Welcome Readers!, I am starting out a new series on ASP.NET MVC skill building which will be posted over the next couple of weeks. Let me know your thoughts on the content, which I have planned and a couple of them has been taken from ASP.NET MVC2 Cookbook. (NOTE: Only the heading has been taken, the content will be not :)). Do let me know what you would like to see, or any additional inputs or ideas to cover in this topics. The 30 steps are oultined below for quick reference. Will start filling this out quickly. Outlined is the ‘30’ step to master ASP.NET MVC. A Peek Into Model What is a model? Different types of model Presentation/ViewModel Model Mapping (AutoMapper) A Peak into View How view works in ASP.NET MVC? View Engine Design Custom View Engine View Best Practices Templated Helpers Partial Views A Peak into Controller Introduction Controller Design Controller Best Practices Asynchronous Controller Custom Action Result Action Filters Controller Factory to use with IOC Routes Explanation Routes from the database Routes from XML More complex routing Master Pages Basics Setting Master Page Dynamically Working with data in the view Repeating Views Array of check boxes Array of radio buttons Paged data CRUD Client side action Confirmation Dialog (modal window) jqGrid Working with Forms Validation Model Validation with DataAnnotations Using the xVal validation framework Client side validation with jQuery Validation Fluent Validation Model Binders Templating Create strongly typed helper using T4 Custom View Templates with T4 Create custom MVC project template using T4 IOC AutoFac Ninject Unity Application Areas jQuery, Ajax and jQuery Plugins State Maintenance Application State User state Cookies Webfarm Error Handling View error handling Controller error handling ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) Authentication and Authorization User Registration form SignOn Process Password Reminder Membership and Roles Windows authentication Restricting access to all pages Restricting access to selected pages Restricting access to pages by role Restricting access to a controller Restricting access to selected area Profiles and Themes Using Profiles Inheriting a Profile Migrating an anonymous profile Creating custom themes Using themes User personalized themes Configuration Adding custom application settings in web.config Displaying custom error messages Accessing other web.config configuration elements Adding custom configuration elements to web.config Encrypting web.config sections Tracing, Debugging and Logging Caching Caching a whole page Caching pages based on route details Caching pages based on browser type and version Caching pages based custom strings Caching partial pages Caching application data Object Caching Using Microsoft Velocity Using MemCache Using AppFabric cache Localization HTTP Handlers and Modules Security XSS/CSRF AnitForgery Encoding HtmlHelpers Strongly typed helpers Writing custom helpers Repository Pattern (Data access) WF/WCF Unit Testing Mocking Framework Integration Testing Load / Performance Testing Deployment Once again let me know your thoughts on this. Till then, Enjoy MVC'ing!!!

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SQL Developer Data Modeler v3.3 Early Adopter: Search

- by thatjeffsmith

photo: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc The next version of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is now available as an Early Adopter (read, beta) release. There are many new major feature enhancements to talk about, but today’s focus will be on the brand new Search mechanism. Data, data, data – SO MUCH data Google has made countless billions of dollars around a very efficient and intelligent search business. People have become accustomed to having their data accessible AND searchable. Data models can have thousands of entities or tables, each having dozens of attributes or columns. Imagine how hard it could be to find what you’re looking for here. This is the challenge we have tackled head-on in v3.3. Same location as the Search toolbar in Oracle SQL Developer (and most web browsers) Here’s how it works: Search as you type – wicked fast as the entire model is loaded into memory Supports regular expressions (regex) Results loaded to a new panel below Search across designs, models Search EVERYTHING, or filter by type Save your frequent searches Save your search results as a report Open common properties of object in search results and edit basic properties on-the-fly Want to just watch the video? We have a new Oracle Learning Library resource available now which introduces the new and improved Search mechanism in SQL Developer Data Modeler. Go watch the video and then come back. Some Screenshots This will be a pretty easy feature to pick up. Search is intuitive – we’ve already learned how to do search. Now we just have a better interface for it in SQL Developer Data Modeler. But just in case you need a couple of pointers… The SYS data dictionary in model form with Search Results If I type ‘translation’ in the search dialog, then the results will come up as hits are ‘resolved.’ By default, everything is searched, although I can filter the results after-the-fact. You can see where the search finds a match in the ‘Content’ column Save the Results as a Report If you limit the search results to a category and a model, then you can save the results as a report. All of the usual suspects You can optionally include the search string, which displays in the top of of the report as ‘PATTERN.’ You can save you common reporting setups as a template and reuse those as well. Here’s a sample HTML report: Yes, I like to search my search results report! Two More Ways to Search You can search ‘in context’ by opening the ‘Find’ dialog from an active design. You can do this using the ‘Search’ toolbar button or from a model context menu. Searching a specific model Instead of bringing up the old modal Find dialog, you now get to use the new and improved Search panel. Notice there’s no ‘Model’ drop-down to select and that the active Search form is now in the Search panel versus the search toolbar up top. What else is new in SQL Developer Data Modeler version 3.3? All kinds of goodies. You can send your model to Excel for quick edits/reviews and suck the changes back into your model, you can share objects between models, and much much more. You’ll find new videos and blog posts on the subject in the new few days and weeks. Enjoy! If you have any feedback or want to report bugs, please visit our forums.

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Cox Communications' Strategic Approach to Enterprise User Experience: How Change Management and Usab

- by Applications User Experience

Author: Anna Wichansky, Senior Director, Applications User Experience, and Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board As part of our work in the User Experience group, our teams often go to Customer events such as the Higher Education User Group (HEUG) conference, Alliance 2010. This year's event was held in San Antonio, Texas, and was attended by hundreds of higher education, government, and public sector users of Oracle applications. The User Assistance team used this opportunity to reach out to customers in the Educational and Government sectors to better understand how their organizations are currently approaching help, messages, and other forms of user assistance. What is User Assistance? For us, user assistance is more than the old books of users' manuals and documentation. User assistance is anything that helps users get their jobs done quickly and efficiently. Instead of expecting users to stop and look through a guide or manual, we have been developing solutions that are embedded within the interface. We know that when people are having difficulty with a task, they want to be able to search efficiently for solutions and collaborate with coworkers. We know that they want to find their answers right there, right then, so that they can get on with their work. In our interviews at Alliance, we wanted to learn what the participants could tell us about what was happening on their campuses and in their institutions. Figure 1. For Oracle User Assistance, it's not just about books any more. So what did we do? Off to Texas, we recruited 10 people from nine different government and education organizations to come to our Oracle User Experience Onsite Usability Labs. We conducted one-hour interviews with these folks and asked them all about User Assistance--what people are doing, what they would like to do, what technologies they are using, what they would like to use, and ultimately what should we as a company be planning for our future products. We used this as an opportunity also to show them some of our design concepts for Fusion User Assistance, our next generation of user assistance based on the best of our user assistance in other products. Figure 2. Interviewing a technical user at Alliance. What we learned... People are not using paper or online manuals anymore. They don't want to see a manual that is written for technical users and that doesn't make sense to the ordinary end user. They really don't want to have to flip through a manual trying to find an answer to their question. Even when the answer might be tailored to their organization, they don't want to dig through documentation. When they need an answer now, they don't have the patience to dig for something that might or might not be clearly written. What does it mean to an organization when users don't want to deal with documentation? In many cases, it means that frustrated users make phone calls to try to find the answers that they need immediately. Phone calls are expensive to an organization and frustrating to the technical support staff who have provided documentation that no one wants to read anymore. If they don't call, they email for help often, and many users are asking for the same information. The bottom line is that if they could get that help immediately in the interface, they wouldn't have to make those calls or send those emails -- and that saves time and money. Our Fusion User Assistance options to customize help and get help for the task immediately were seen as an opportunity by these technical users to build the solutions that their users need and want. Figure 3. Joyce Ohgi and Laurie Pattison of Applications UX. Chicken Fried Steak. That was huge. But then, this was Texas, where we discovered a lot of things come very big. Drinks are served in quart-size glasses and dishes like Chicken Fried Steaks are served on platters not plates. We saw three-pound cinnamon rolls that you down with tea sweet enough to curl your hair. Deep in the heart of Texas, we learned a lot, and we ate even more.

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Silverlight Cream for February 02, 2011 -- #1039

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Tony Champion, Gill Cleeren, Alex van Beek, Michael James, Ollie Riches, Peter Kuhn, Mike Ormond, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Daniel N. Egan, Loek Van Den Ouweland, and Paul Thurott. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using the AutoCompleteBox" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Windows Phone Image Button" Loek Van Den Ouweland Training: "New WP7 Virtual Labs" Daniel N. Egan Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 most popular news articles up: SilverlightShow for Jan 24-30, 2011 Rudi Grobler posted answers he gives to questions about Silverlight - Where do I start? Brian Noyes starts a series of Webinars at SilverlightShow this morning at 10am PDT: Free Silverlight Show Webinar: Querying and Updating Data From Silverlight Clients with WCF RIA Services Join your fellow geeks at Gangplank in Chandler Arizona this Saturday as Scott Cate and AZGroups brings you Azure Boot Camp – Feb 5th 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: Deploying Silverlight with WCF Services Tony Champion takes a step out of his norm (Pivot) and has a post up about deploying WCF Services with your SL app, and how to take the pain out of that without pulling out your hair. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 3) Gill Cleeren's part 3 of getting ready for the Silverlight Exam is up at SilverlightShow... with links to the first two parts. There's so much good information linked off these... thanks Gill and 'The Show'! A guide through WCF RIA Services attributes Alex van Beek has a post up you will probably want to bookmark unless you're not using WCF RIA... do you know all the attributes by heart? ... how about an excellent explanation of 10 of them? Using DeferredLoadListBox in a Pivot Control Michael James discusses using the DeferredLoadListBox, and then also using it with the Pivot control... but not without some pain points which he defines and gives the workaround for. WP7: Know your data Ollie Riches' latest is about Data and WP7 ... specifically 'knowing' what data you're needing/using to avoid the 90MB memory limit... He gives a set of steps to follow to measure your data model to avoid getting in trouble. Using the AutoCompleteBox Peter Kuhn takes a great look at the AutoCompleteBox... the basics, and then well beyond with custom data, item templates, custom filters, asynchronous filtering, and a behavior for MVVM async filtering. OData and Windows Phone 7 Part 2 Mike Ormond has part 2 of his OData/WP7 post up... lashing up the images to go along with the code this time out... nice looking app. WP7 RoundToggleButton and RoundButton in depth WindowsPhoneGeek is checking out the RoundToggleButton and RoundButton controls from the Coding4fun Toolkit in detail... of course where to get them, and then the setup, demo project included. All about Dependency Properties in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek's latest post is a good dependency-property discussion related to WP7 development, but if you're just learning, it's a good place to learn about the subject. New WP7 Virtual Labs Daniel N. Egan posted links to 6 new WP7 Virtual Labs released on 1/25. Windows Phone Image Button Loek Van Den Ouweland has a style up on his blog that gives you an imageButton for your WP7 apps, and a sweet little video showing how it's done in Expression Blend too. Yet another free Windows Phone book for developers Paul Thurott found a link to another Free eBook for WP7 development. This one is by Puja Pramudya and is an English translation of the original, and is an introductory text, but hey... it's free... give it a look! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Overview of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor

- by Akshay Deep Lamba

Problem Like most organizations, we are planning to upgrade our database server from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008. I would like to know is there an easy way to know in advance what kind of issues one may encounter when upgrading to a newer version of SQL Server? One way of doing this is to use the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor to plan for upgrades from SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005. In this tip we will take a look at how one can use the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor to identify potential issues before the upgrade. Solution SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor is a free tool designed by Microsoft to identify potential issues before upgrading your environment to a newer version of SQL Server. Below are prerequisites which need to be installed before installing the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor. Prerequisites for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor .Net Framework 2.0 or a higher version Windows Installer 4.5 or a higher version Windows Server 2003 SP 1 or a higher version, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP SP2 or a higher version, Windows Vista Download SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor You can download SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor from the following link. Once you have successfully installed Upgrade Advisor follow the below steps to see how you can use this tool to identify potential issues before upgrading your environment. 1. Click Start -> Programs -> Microsoft SQL Server 2008 -> SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor. 2. Click Launch Upgrade Advisor Analysis Wizard as highlighted below to open the wizard. 2. On the wizard welcome screen click Next to continue. 3. In SQL Server Components screen, enter the Server Name and click the Detect button to identify components which need to be analyzed and then click Next to continue with the wizard. 4. In Connection Parameters screen choose Instance Name, Authentication and then click Next to continue with the wizard. 5. In SQL Server Parameters wizard screen select the Databases which you want to analysis, trace files if any and SQL batch files if any. Then click Next to continue with the wizard. 6. In Reporting Services Parameters screen you can specify the Reporting Server Instance name and then click next to continue with the wizard. 7. In Analysis Services Parameters screen you can specify an Analysis Server Instance name and then click Next to continue with the wizard. 8. In Confirm Upgrade Advisor Settings screen you will be able to see a quick summary of the options which you have selected so far. Click Run to start the analysis. 9. In Upgrade Advisor Progress screen you will be able to see the progress of the analysis. Basically, the upgrade advisor runs predefined rules which will help to identify potential issues that can affect your environment once you upgrade your server from a lower version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2008. 10. In the below snippet you can see that Upgrade Advisor has completed the analysis of SQL Server, Analysis Services and Reporting Services. To see the output click the Launch Report button at the bottom of the wizard screen. 11. In View Report screen you can see a summary of issues which can affect you once you upgrade. To learn more about each issue you can expand the issue and read the detailed description as shown in the below snippet.

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Transform your Oracle Tutor Documents to Your Corporate Standard

- by mary.keane

You have all of your company's processes documented in Oracle Tutor, and now you want to get the HTML files to reflect your company's corporate look and feel. How are you going to do this without having an HTML guru to change every HTML page? The good news is you do not need to be an HTML expert to make minor changes to your documents. All Tutor HTML files are attached to a group of style sheets, so any changes you make to the style sheets will immediately be reflected in all of your HTML documents. If you want to give it a try, here's what you do (please note that these tips are applicable to release Oracle Tutor 12.2 and greater): Navigate to your Tutor HTML directory, and copy into a draft folder a representative group of HTML files (don't forget the flowchart image files that are associated with the procedures). You'll also need to copy the following files: tutor.css tutor_notabs.css tutor_scripts.js tutor_tabs.css flow_icon.gif Here's the default look to the Oracle Tutor desk manual. Let's say I want to use my company's corporate style in the HTML documents. At Oracle, we use Oracle Red (FF0000), Oracle Black (000000), and Oracle Gray (666666). So I want to incorporate those colors into the Tutor HTML files. I open tutor.css from the draft folder in a text editor. My preference is to use Notepad, but there are others. Make sure, however, that it is a text editor, and not a word processing program. I want to change the headings to Oracle Red. The desk manual title is listed as the DMPAGETITLE, so I find that in tutor.css. The style names in the style sheets are descriptive, but sometimes you may have to experiment to find the right style (this is why you're working in a draft folder). I change the color attribute to FF00000, and then I save the document. Now I look at one of the desk manuals in my draft folder. I've successfully changed the title of the desk manual, so, now that I have more confidence that I can do this, I start changing other styles. I need to make changes in the tutor_tabs.css file as well, so I open that document. Then I look at one of the procedures. Oops! All that red is distracting, and the users may not be able to follow their procedures. So I go back to the corporate style guide, and I find some shades of gray that have been approved. So I use that, and it is now more readable. It's good enough for a first draft, and I would show it to my colleagues at this point to get their input. On my next blog, I'll discuss how to change the flowchart colors to match your corporate look and feel. Have you used the cascading styles sheets to change the look of your Tutor documents? If so, let us know what you've done in your post. Mary R. Keane Senior Development Manager, Oracle Tutor & UPK Content

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Motorola Droid App Recommendations

- by Brian Jackett

Just as a disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and I’m not getting paid or compensated for anything. Ok, so I’m one of the crazy few who went out and bought a Droid the week it was released a few months back. The Motorola Droid was a MAJOR upgrade in phone capabilities for me as my previous phone had no GPS, no web access, limited apps, etc. I now use my Droid for so much of my life from work to personal to community based events. Since I’ve been using my Droid for awhile, a number of friends (@toddklindt, @spmcdonough, @jfroushiii, and many more) who later got a Droid asked me which apps I recommended. While there are a few sites on the web listing out useful Android apps, here’s my quick list (with a few updates since first put together.) Note: * denotes a highly recommended app Android App Recommendations for Motorola Droid (Updated after 2.1 update) RemoteDroid – install a thin client on another computer and Droid becomes mouse pad / keyboard, control computer remotely PdaNet – free version allows tethering (only to HTTP, no HTTPS) without paying extra monthly charge. A paid version allows HTTPS access. SportsTap – keep track of about a dozen sports, favorite teams, etc *Movies – setup favorite theaters, find movie times, buy tickets, etc WeatherBug elite – paid app, but gives weather alerts, 4 day forecast, etc. Free version also exists. (Update: Android 2.1 offers free weather app, but I still prefer WeatherBug.) *Advanced Task Killer – manually free up memory and kill apps not needed Google Voice – have to have a Google Voice account to really use, but allows visual voice mail, sending calls to specific phones, and too many other things to list AndroZip – access your phone memory like a file system Twidroid – best Twitter client I’ve found so far, but personal preference varies. I’m using free version and suits me just fine. Skype (beta) – I only use this to send chat messages, not sure how/if phone calls works on this. (Update: Skype Mobile app just released, but uninstalled after few days as it kept launching in background and using up memory when not wanted.) *NewsRob – RSS reader syncs to Google Reader. I use this multiple times a day, excellent app. (Update: this app does ask for your Google username and password, so security minded folks be cautioned.) ConnectBot – don’t use often myself, but allows SSH into remote computer. Great if you have a need for remote manage server. Speed Test – same as the online website, allows finding upload/download speeds. WiFinder – store wifi preferences and find wifi spots in area. TagReader – simple Microsoft Tag Reader, works great. *Google Listen – audible podcast catcher that allows putting items into a queue, sync with Google Reader RSS, etc. I personally love this app which has now replaced the iPod I used to use in my car, but have heard mixed reviews from others. Robo Defense – (paid app) tower defense game but with RPG elements to upgrade towers over lifetime playing. I’ve never played FieldRunners but I’m told very similar in offering. Nice distraction when in airport or have some time to burn. Phit Droid 3rd Edition – drag and drop block shapes into a rectangle box, simple game to pass the time with literally 1000s of levels. Note this game has been updated dozens of times with numerous editions so unsure exactly which are still on the market. Google Sky Map – impress your friends by holding Droid up to sky and viewing constellations using Droid screen. wootCheck Lite – check up on daily offerings on Woot.com and affiliated wine, sellout, shirt, and kids sites. Side notes: I’ve seen that Glympse and TripIt have recently come out with Android apps. I’ve installed but haven’t gotten to use either yet, but I hear good things. Will try out on 2 upcoming trips in May and update with impressions. -Frog Out Image linked from http://images.tolmol.com/images/grpimages/200910191814100_motorola-droid.gif

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics Part 2

- by Maria Colgan

There was huge interest in our OOW session last year on Managing Optimizer Statistics. It seems statistics and the maintenance of them continues to baffle people. In order to help dispel the mysteries surround statistics management we have created a two part white paper series on Optimizer statistics. Part one of this series was released in November last years and describes in detail, with worked examples, the different concepts of Optimizer statistics. Today we have published part two of the series, which focuses on the best practices for gathering statistics, and examines specific use cases including, the fears that surround histograms and statistics management of volatile tables like Global Temporary Tables. Here is a quick look at the Introduction and the start of the paper. You can find the full paper here. Happy Reading! 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:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Introduction The Oracle Optimizer examines all of the possible plans for a SQL statement and picks the one with the lowest cost, where cost represents the estimated resource usage for a given plan. In order for the Optimizer to accurately determine the cost for an execution plan it must have information about all of the objects (table and indexes) accessed in the SQL statement as well as information about the system on which the SQL statement will be run. This necessary information is commonly referred to as Optimizer statistics. Understanding and managing Optimizer statistics is key to optimal SQL execution. Knowing when and how to gather statistics in a timely manner is critical to maintaining acceptable performance. This whitepaper is the second of a two part series on Optimizer statistics. The first part of this series, Understanding Optimizer Statistics, focuses on the concepts of statistics and will be referenced several times in this paper as a source of additional information. This paper will discuss in detail, when and how to gather statistics for the most common scenarios seen in an Oracle Database. The topics are · How to gather statistics · When to gather statistics · Improving the efficiency of gathering statistics · When not to gather statistics · Gathering other types of statistics How to gather statistics The preferred method for gathering statistics in Oracle is to use the supplied automatic statistics-gathering job. Automatic statistics gathering job The job collects statistics for all database objects, which are missing statistics or have stale statistics by running an Oracle AutoTask task during a predefined maintenance window. Oracle internally prioritizes the database objects that require statistics, so that those objects, which most need updated statistics, are processed first. The automatic statistics-gathering job uses the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_DATABASE_STATS_JOB_PROC procedure, which uses the same default parameter values as the other DBMS_STATS.GATHER_*_STATS procedures. The defaults are sufficient in most cases. However, it is occasionally necessary to change the default value of one of the statistics gathering parameters, which can be accomplished by using the DBMS_STATS.SET_*_PREF procedures. Parameter values should be changed at the smallest scope possible, ideally on a per-object bases. You can find the full paper here. Happy Reading! +Maria Colgan

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Hidden exceptions

- by user12617285

Occasionally you may find yourself in a Java application environment where exceptions in your code are being caught by the application framework and either silently swallowed or converted into a generic exception. Either way, the potentially useful details of your original exception are inaccessible. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a VM option that showed the stack trace for every exception thrown, whether or not it's caught? In fact, HotSpot includes such an option: -XX:+TraceExceptions. However, this option is only available in a debug build of HotSpot (search globals.hpp for TraceExceptions). And based on a quick skim of the HotSpot source code, this option only prints the exception class and message. A more useful capability would be to have the complete stack trace printed as well as the code location catching the exception. This is what the various TraceException* options in in Maxine do (and more). That said, there is a way to achieve a limited version of the same thing with a stock standard JVM. It involves the use of the -Xbootclasspath/p non-standard option. The trick is to modify the source of java.lang.Exception by inserting the following: private static final boolean logging = System.getProperty("TraceExceptions") != null; private void log() { if (logging && sun.misc.VM.isBooted()) { printStackTrace(); } } Then every constructor simply needs to be modified to call log() just before returning: public Exception(String message) { super(message); log(); } public Exception(String message, Throwable cause) { super(message, cause); log(); } // etc... You now need to compile the modified Exception.java source and prepend the resulting class to the boot class path as well as add -DTraceExceptions to your java command line. Here's a console session showing these steps: % mkdir boot % javac -d boot Exception.java % java -DTraceExceptions -Xbootclasspath/p:boot -cp com.oracle.max.vm/bin test.output.HelloWorld java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method) at java.util.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:127) at java.util.jar.JarFile.(JarFile.java:135) at java.util.jar.JarFile.(JarFile.java:72) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JarLoader.getJarFile(URLClassPath.java:646) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JarLoader.access$600(URLClassPath.java:540) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JarLoader$1.run(URLClassPath.java:607) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JarLoader.ensureOpen(URLClassPath.java:599) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JarLoader.(URLClassPath.java:583) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$3.run(URLClassPath.java:333) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.misc.URLClassPath.getLoader(URLClassPath.java:322) at sun.misc.URLClassPath.getLoader(URLClassPath.java:299) at sun.misc.URLClassPath.getResource(URLClassPath.java:168) at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:194) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at sun.misc.Launcher$ExtClassLoader.findClass(Launcher.java:229) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:295) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247) java.security.PrivilegedActionException at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JarLoader.ensureOpen(URLClassPath.java:599) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JarLoader.(URLClassPath.java:583) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$3.run(URLClassPath.java:333) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.misc.URLClassPath.getLoader(URLClassPath.java:322) ... It's worth pointing out that this is not as useful as direct VM support for tracing exceptions. It has (at least) the following limitations: The trace is shown for every exception, whether it is thrown or not. It only applies to subclasses of java.lang.Exception as there appears to be bootstrap issues when the modification is applied to Throwable.java. It does not show you where the exception was caught. It involves overriding a class in rt.jar, something should never be done in a non-development environment.

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Revisioning the CeBIT 2011

- by hechtsuppe

Hey guys, I am living in the CeBIT's hometown, the beautiful city Hanover. So I am visiting this exhibition since 2002 and I've seen a lot of changes during all this time. But this time, it was the most boring fair I've ever seen. Lets start with the first halls: "The same procedure as every year"- directly behind the entrance are the exhibitioners from far east (China, Taiwan...). In the past, they've shown a lot of nice toys. But this time, they got very serious, the only great gimmick was the motorcycle suitcase for the iPad, I watched the presentation until I reminded myself that I am not owning an iPad and these cases weren't suitable for my BMW motorcycle. So I started looking for the business stuff (I was there for business). I walked deeper in the exhibition area: During the way to the business halls, I came across a hall where I heard a big bass- the gamer's hall I think so I made a quick getaway from there. I saw a lot of teenagers with gaming bags on thier shoulders and I was really confused. I thought 'Damn it is tuesday 11:00 am, the trade fair is opened for public on saturday, why they are here and not at school?'. So the german schools seem to be too easy for students. At the time I was a pupil I visited the CeBIT on saturday! At the business halls: I visited IBM's booth but there were only guys looking like penguins and I weared a white chemise. So nobody was interested in talking to me. At the coffeebar I met a very nice guy from Bangladesh I think he was round about 25, but he told me that he was the first time in germany and he thought that germans are still nazis. I laughed at him and went to DELL. I was really really really interested in client solutions from DELL because I want to get away from our current client manufacturer. At the DELL booth I became recognized and a really nice guy told me where to use which client products. But there were too many people for trying the notebooks so the DELL guy asked for my business card. But I am still waiting for information, dear 'DELL dude'. I went to the Microsoft booth for informing myself about new IT trends. There were nothig new, only a few presentations about the 'new' Windows Live, Windows Phone 7 and 'the allmighty cloud'. But there was a very small presentation corner with the title 'geeks corner'. A guy inside the 'geeks corner' started Visual Studio 2010, I was really agog for the presentation. But then he started talking about Windows Phone 7 and how to program. He began with drag'n drop a textbox and a button on the form. He wrote really basic code and explained the functionality of a textbox- then I stood up and left the room. At the end: Before leaving the fairground, I've visited a few small booths and the big anti-virus program companies. But there was nothing new, I was really disappointed this year. I've seen only ten exhibition babes and the rest of the week I stood ~3 hours in traffic jams. But I really love the flair in the whole town during this exhibition. The people in the city railways, which are really confused and the people in the pubs. Cheers Vince

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SQL SERVER – OVER clause with FIRST _VALUE and LAST_VALUE – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012 – ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING

- by pinaldave

Yesterday I had discussed two analytical functions FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE. After reading the blog post I received very interesting question. “Don’t you think there is bug in your first example where FIRST_VALUE is remain same but the LAST_VALUE is changing every line. I think the LAST_VALUE should be the highest value in the windows or set of result.” I find this question very interesting because this is very commonly made mistake. No there is no bug in the code. I think what we need is a bit more explanation. Let me attempt that first. Before you do that I suggest you read yesterday’s blog post as this question is related to that blog post. Now let’s have fun following query: USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, FIRST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID) FstValue, LAST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID) LstValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO The above query will give us the following result: As per the reader’s question the value of the LAST_VALUE function should be always 114 and not increasing as the rows are increased. Let me re-write the above code once again with bit extra T-SQL Syntax. Please pay special attention to the ROW clause which I have added in the above syntax. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, FIRST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW) FstValue, LAST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW) LstValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Now once again check the result of the above query. The result of both the query is same because in OVER clause the default ROWS selection is always UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW. If you want the maximum value of the windows with OVER clause you need to change the syntax to UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING for ROW clause. Now run following query and pay special attention to ROW clause again. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, FIRST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) FstValue, LAST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) LstValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Here is the resultset of the above query which is what questioner was asking. So in simple word, there is no bug but there is additional syntax needed to add to get your desired answer. The same logic also applies to PARTITION BY clause when used. Here is quick example of how we can further partition the query by SalesOrderDetailID with this new functions. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, FIRST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) FstValue, LAST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) LstValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Above query will give us windowed resultset on SalesOrderDetailsID as well give us FIRST and LAST value for the windowed resultset. There are lots to discuss for this two functions and we have just explored tip of the iceberg. In future post I will discover it further deep. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Great ADF Content at Collaborate 12

- by Shay Shmeltzer

If you are attending the Collaborate 12 conference this month in Las Vegas and you are interested in Oracle ADF you are going to be very busy. There are more than 20 sessions covering ADF and a special Wednesday ADF Enterprise Methodology Group event focused on ADF. Session range from how to get started to deep technical dives and real world war stories of customers and their implementations. Also don't forget to drop by the Oracle ADF booth at the Oracle Demoground and say hello. Here is a quick list of session that list ADF as a keyword in their content: Sun. Apr. 22 9613 A Fusion Approach to Building Unified and Scalable Applications With Rich User Experience 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Mon. Apr. 23 669 Fusion DBA Boot Camp: Tailoring Your Application to Customer Needs in a Upgrade-safe Way - Support in ADF and Fusion Apps 9:45 am - 10:45 am Mon. Apr. 23 438 Oracle Fusion Applications Security 9:45 am - 10:45 am Mon. Apr. 23 176 How to get started with Oracle ADF 12:15 pm - 12:45 pm Mon. Apr. 23 330 Fusion DBA Boot Camp: Implementing Self-Service Portals for Partners/Distributors Using EBS/WebCenter/Fusion Technologies 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm Mon. Apr. 23 288 Working with Portlets in ADF and Webcenter 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Tue. Apr. 24 503 Who’s Converting My Portal? 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Tue. Apr. 24 9370 Coexistence of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications: Platform Perspective 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 647 Developing Custom BI Solutions - OBIEE vs. Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) 9:30 am - 10:30 am Wed. Apr. 25 173 ADF: A Path to the Future for Dinosaur Nerds 11:00 am - 12:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 581 How Will You Build Your Next System? 11:00 am - 12:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 10351 Integrating CRM On Demand With the E-Business Suite to Supercharge Your Sales Team 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 9348 Mobile,ADF, Coherence and Live Data Streaming? A Herbalife Case Study 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 566 Getting Started with ADF 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 775 WebCenter Portal Template Design and Development Best Practices 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 791 Surfacing Oracle Social Network into Your Business Applications 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 9407 The Latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release User Interface and Usability Enhancements 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 100080 Extending JD Edwards with Oracle ADF and Oracle SOA Suite 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 172 JDeveloper ADF and the Oracle database – friends not foes 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 595 Achieving Real-Time Social Collaboration in WebCenter 11g 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 164 ADF + Faces: Do I Have to Write ANY Java code? 4:15 pm - 5:15 pm Thu. Apr. 26 257 Mobile App Development with Oracle ADF Mobile: develop once and for all 8:30 am - 9:30 am Thu. Apr. 26 177 Understanding Oracle ADF and its role in Oracle Fusion Middleware 9:45 am - 10:45 am Thu. Apr. 26 523 Making Next-Generation Mobile Apps With The Latest ADF Mobile Tools 9:45 am - 10:45 am Thu. Apr. 26 356 ADF Integration with WebCenter Content 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

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OS Development. Only Few Particular Questions

- by Total Anime Immersion

I am new to this site as a member but have consulted its answers quite a lot of times. Besides my questions regarding OS Development hasn't been answered in any forum. In OS Dev. we make a bootloader. The org point is 7C00H. Why so? Why not 0000h? What are the last two signatures in the bootloader used for? People on every forum have answered that it is important for the system to recognize it as a bootable media. But I want a specific answer. What do each of those signatures do. I have the basic concept of a kernel. Point is.. it relates to different files required in a system. It sort of binds up everything that is individually developed. Now the thing is that that I have floating ideas in my mind regarding different aspects like keyboard, mouse, etc.. how do I put them all together? Which should I start with first? If possible please provide a step by step procedure of the startups of the kernel. Suppose I have developed my language entirely in C and Assembly. Now questions is will exe files work on my system.. if it doesn't then I have to create my own files and publish them. Which is a bad idea.. next step would be for me to go for a compiler for a language which I have designed myself. Now the point is.. How do I implement the compiler into my OS? After all this my final question is that.. How do you go about multitasking and multithreading? and I don't want to use int 21h as its dos specific.. how do I go about making files, renaming them, etc. and all assembly books teach 16 but programming.. how do i go about doing 32 bit or 64 bit with the knowledge I have.. if the basics and instructions are the same.. I don't mind.. but how do i go about otherwise? Don't tell me to give up the idea because I WON'T. And don't tell me it's too complex because I have a sharp knowledge of working of a system, C, Java, Assembly, C++ and python, C#, visual basic.. and not just basics but full fledged api developments.. but I really want to go deep into the systems part.. so I want professional help.. And I have gone through many OS project files but I want help particularly from this site as there are people with knowledge depth who can guide me the right way. And please don't suggest any books above 20$ and they should be available on flipkart as amazon charges massively for shipping and I prefer free shipping from flipkart.

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Speeding up procedural texture generation

- by FalconNL

Recently I've begun working on a game that takes place in a procedurally generated solar system. After a bit of a learning curve (having neither worked with Scala, OpenGL 2 ES or Libgdx before), I have a basic tech demo going where you spin around a single procedurally textured planet: The problem I'm running into is the performance of the texture generation. A quick overview of what I'm doing: a planet is a cube that has been deformed to a sphere. To each side, a n x n (e.g. 256 x 256) texture is applied, which are bundled in one 8n x n texture that is sent to the fragment shader. The last two spaces are not used, they're only there to make sure the width is a power of 2. The texture is currently generated on the CPU, using the updated 2012 version of the simplex noise algorithm linked to in the paper 'Simplex noise demystified'. The scene I'm using to test the algorithm contains two spheres: the planet and the background. Both use a greyscale texture consisting of six octaves of 3D simplex noise, so for example if we choose 128x128 as the texture size there are 128 x 128 x 6 x 2 x 6 = about 1.2 million calls to the noise function. The closest you will get to the planet is about what's shown in the screenshot and since the game's target resolution is 1280x720 that means I'd prefer to use 512x512 textures. Combine that with the fact the actual textures will of course be more complicated than basic noise (There will be a day and night texture, blended in the fragment shader based on sunlight, and a specular mask. I need noise for continents, terrain color variation, clouds, city lights, etc.) and we're looking at something like 512 x 512 x 6 x 3 x 15 = 70 million noise calls for the planet alone. In the final game, there will be activities when traveling between planets, so a wait of 5 or 10 seconds, possibly 20, would be acceptable since I can calculate the texture in the background while traveling, though obviously the faster the better. Getting back to our test scene, performance on my PC isn't too terrible, though still too slow considering the final result is going to be about 60 times worse: 128x128 : 0.1s 256x256 : 0.4s 512x512 : 1.7s This is after I moved all performance-critical code to Java, since trying to do so in Scala was a lot worse. Running this on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S3), however, produces a more problematic result: 128x128 : 2s 256x256 : 7s 512x512 : 29s Already far too long, and that's not even factoring in the fact that it'll be minutes instead of seconds in the final version. Clearly something needs to be done. Personally, I see a few potential avenues, though I'm not particularly keen on any of them yet: Don't precalculate the textures, but let the fragment shader calculate everything. Probably not feasible, because at one point I had the background as a fullscreen quad with a pixel shader and I got about 1 fps on my phone. Use the GPU to render the texture once, store it and use the stored texture from then on. Upside: might be faster than doing it on the CPU since the GPU is supposed to be faster at floating point calculations. Downside: effects that cannot (easily) be expressed as functions of simplex noise (e.g. gas planet vortices, moon craters, etc.) are a lot more difficult to code in GLSL than in Scala/Java. Calculate a large amount of noise textures and ship them with the application. I'd like to avoid this if at all possible. Lower the resolution. Buys me a 4x performance gain, which isn't really enough plus I lose a lot of quality. Find a faster noise algorithm. If anyone has one I'm all ears, but simplex is already supposed to be faster than perlin. Adopt a pixel art style, allowing for lower resolution textures and fewer noise octaves. While I originally envisioned the game in this style, I've come to prefer the realistic approach. I'm doing something wrong and the performance should already be one or two orders of magnitude better. If this is the case, please let me know. If anyone has any suggestions, tips, workarounds, or other comments regarding this problem I'd love to hear them.

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Silverlight Cream for March 08, 2011 -- #1056

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Joost van Schaik, Manas Patnaik, Kevin Hoffman, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata, Dhananjay Kumar, Dennis Delimarsky, Samuel Jack, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jfo. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How I let the trees grow" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior" Joost van Schaik Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 from last week posted, plus the ECOContest is ready to be voted on: SilverlightShow for Feb 28 - March 06, 2011 Drew DeVault is a young man involved with the Microsoft Student Insiders. He gave a WP7 presentation at RMTT and has posted his material: Post-Session: Windows Phone 7 @ RMTT Rui Marinho has an app in the ECO Contest called Forest Findr. is based on the BIng Map Control for silverlight and Sql Spatial data, and helps you find Forests and get geolocated pictures and wikipedia information, and has a post up with a bunch of info on it here: Forest Findr. my entry on the SilverlightShow EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior Joost van Schaik has a behavior that makes *anything* draggable and 'flickable' in WP7 ... read the intro, scroll to the bottom to watch the demo, and then grab up the code... cool stuff, Joost! Data Aggregation Using Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4 Manas Patnaik sent me a link to his blog, and it appears he's got lots of Silverlight goodness out there so you'll be hearing more about him. This first post is on the Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4... good discussion, diagrams and code... good job, Manas! WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Advanced UI Kevin Hoffman has part 3 of an ambitious 12-part tutorial series up on WP7 development ... this go-around is concentrating on Advanced UI - Panorama/Pivot controls, DataBinding, ObservableCollections, and Converters... whew! Sterling DB on top of Isolated Storage – 2 Jesse Liberty has part 2 of his Sterling series up... this time setting up the database in App.xaml so it can be used for dealing with tombstoning. Silverlight Charting: Formatting the Tick Marks Deborah Kurata's next chart tutorial is all about showing you how to continue to dress up your charts.. this time by formatting the tick marks... if you don't know what that is... check out the first image in the post. Stored Procedure in WCF Data Service Dhananjay Kumar has a very nice tutorial up on using a stored proc with WCF Data Services... I happen to know someone working on just that at this time. If you have this in mind, here's a step-by-step guide to getting it done. Windows Phone 7 – Episode 5 – Pages Dennis Delimarsky has part 5 of his WP7 tutorial series up and is discussing Pages in this 17 minute video. Unpacking Simon Squared: My mini framework-independent animation library Samuel Jack has not only Open-Sourced the WP7 game he built and blogged about, but he's now explaining some of the structure of the game in posts such as this one about the animation library he wrote that his game is built on. How I let the trees grow Peter Kuhn shares with us the code he used for the tree animation in his ECO Contest entry. There's a lot to learn in this post about performance ... the fully-animated tree has about 20K elements... 5K branches and 20K leaves... check it out. WP7 ToastPrompt in depth WindowsPhoneGeek takes a deep dive into the ToastPrompt control in the Coding4fun Toolkit... everything you need to completely use the control including sample code. Beware the loaded event Jfo talks about another frustration point she had with WP7 development, and that is around the use of the loaded event... read these tips from someone that's been there. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Using the SOA-BPM VIrtualBox Appliance

- by antony.reynolds

Quickstart Guide to Using Oracle Appliance for SOA/BPM Recently I have been setting up some machines for fellow engineers. My base setup consists of Oracle Enterprise Linux with Oracle Virtual Box. Note that after installing VirtualBox I needed to add the VirtualBox Extension Pack to enable RDP access amongst other features. In order to get them started quickly with some images I downloaded the pre-built appliance for SOA/BPM from OTN. Out of the box this provides a VirtualBox image that is pre-installed with everything you will need to develop SOA/BPM applications. Specifically by using the virtual appliance I got the following pre-installed and configured. Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 User oracle password oracle User root password oracle. Oracle Database XE Pre-configured with SOA/BPM repository. Set to auto-start on OS startup. Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS2 Configured with a “collapsed domain”, all services (SOA/BAM/EM) running in AdminServer. Listening on port 7001 Oracle BPM Suite 11g Configured in same domain as SOA Suite. Oracle JDeveloper 11g With SOA/BPM extensions. Networking The VM by default uses NAT (Network Address Translation) for network access. Make sure that the advanced settings for port forwarding allow access through the host to guest ports. It should be pre-configured to forward requests on the following ports Purpose Host Port Guest Port (VBox Image) SSH 2222 22 HTTP 7001 7001 Database 1521 1521 Note that only one VirtualBox image can use a given host port, so make sure you are not clashing if it seems not to work. What’s Left to Do? There is still some customization of the environment that may be required. If you need to configure a proxy server as I did then for the oracle and root users to set up an HTTP proxy Added “export http_proxy=http://proxy-host:proxy-port” to ~oracle/.bash_profile and ~root/.bash_profile Added “export http_proxy=http://proxy-host:proxy-port” to /etc/.bashrc Edited System->Preferences to set Network Proxy In Firefox set Preferences->Network->Connection Settings to “Use system proxy settings” In JDeveloper set Edit->Preferences->Web Browser and Proxy to required proxy settings You may need to configure yum to point to a public OEL yum repository – such as http://public-yum.oracle.com. If you are going to be accessing the SOA server from outside the VirtualBox image then you may want to set the soa-infra Server URLs to be the hostname of the host OS. Snap! Once I had the machine configured how I wanted to use it I took a snapshot so that I can always get back to the pristine install I have now. Snapshots are one of the big benefits of putting a development environment into a virtualized environment. I can make changes to my installation and if I mess it up I can restore the image to a last known good snapshot. Hey Presto!, Ready to Go This is the quickest way to get up and running with SOA/BPM Suite. Out of the box the download will work, I only did extra customization so I could use services outside the firewall and browse outside the firewall from within by SOA VirtualBox image. I also use yum to update the OS to the latest binaries. So have fun.

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Monitor and Control Memory Usage in Google Chrome

- by Asian Angel

Do you want to know just how much memory Google Chrome and any installed extensions are using at a given moment? With just a few clicks you can see just what is going on under the hood of your browser. How Much Memory are the Extensions Using? Here is our test browser with a new tab and the Extensions Page open, five enabled extensions, and one disabled at the moment. You can access Chrome’s Task Manager using the Page Menu, going to Developer, and selecting Task manager… Or by right clicking on the Tab Bar and selecting Task manager. There is also a keyboard shortcut (Shift + Esc) available for the “keyboard ninjas”. Sitting idle as shown above here are the stats for our test browser. All of the extensions are sitting there eating memory even though some of them are not available/active for use on our new tab and Extensions Page. Not so good… If the default layout is not to your liking then you can easily modify the information that is available by right clicking and adding/removing extra columns as desired. For our example we added Shared Memory & Private Memory. Using the about:memory Page to View Memory Usage Want even more detail? Type about:memory into the Address Bar and press Enter. Note: You can also access this page by clicking on the Stats for nerds Link in the lower left corner of the Task Manager Window. Focusing on the four distinct areas you can see the exact version of Chrome that is currently installed on your system… View the Memory & Virtual Memory statistics for Chrome… Note: If you have other browsers running at the same time you can view statistics for them here too. See a list of the Processes currently running… And the Memory & Virtual Memory statistics for those processes. The Difference with the Extensions Disabled Just for fun we decided to disable all of the extension in our test browser… The Task Manager Window is looking rather empty now but the memory consumption has definitely seen an improvement. Comparing Memory Usage for Two Extensions with Similar Functions For our next step we decided to compare the memory usage for two extensions with similar functionality. This can be helpful if you are wanting to keep memory consumption trimmed down as much as possible when deciding between similar extensions. First up was Speed Dial”(see our review here). The stats for Speed Dial…quite a change from what was shown above (~3,000 – 6,000 K). Next up was Incredible StartPage (see our review here). Surprisingly both were nearly identical in the amount of memory being used. Purging Memory Perhaps you like the idea of being able to “purge” some of that excess memory consumption. With a simple command switch modification to Chrome’s shortcut(s) you can add a Purge Memory Button to the Task Manager Window as shown below. Notice the amount of memory being consumed at the moment… Note: The tutorial for adding the command switch can be found here. One quick click and there is a noticeable drop in memory consumption. Conclusion We hope that our examples here will prove useful to you in managing the memory consumption in your own Google Chrome installation. If you have a computer with limited resources every little bit definitely helps out. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersFix for Firefox memory leak on WindowsHow to Purge Memory in Google ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default Browser 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 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs

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Silverlight Cream for January 08, 2011 -- #1023

- by Dave Campbell

In this Heavy and yet incomplete Issue: Mike Wolf, Walter Ferrari, Colin Eberhardt, Mathew Charles, Don Burnett, Senthil Kumar, cherylws, Rob Miles, Derik Whittaker, Thomas Martinsen(-2-), Jason Ginchereau, Vishal Nayan, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Automatically Showing ToolTips on a Trimmed TextBlock (Silverlight)" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Windows Phone Blue Book Pdf" Rob Miles Sharepoint/Silverlight: "Discover Sharepoint with Silverlight - Part 1" Walter Ferrari Shoutouts: Dave Isbitski has announced a WP7 Firestarter, check for your local MS office: Announcing the “Light up your Silverlight Applications for Windows 7 Firestarter” From SilverlightCream.com: Leveraging Silverlight in the USA TODAY Windows 7-Based Slate App Mike Wolf has a post up about Cynergy's release of the new USA TODAY software for Windows 7 Slate devices, and gives a great rundown of all the resources, and how specific Silverlight features were used... tons of outstanding external links here! Discover Sharepoint with Silverlight - Part 1 Walter Ferrari has tutorial up at SilverlightShow... looks like the first in a series on Silverlight and Sharepoint... lots of low-level info about the internals and using them. Automatically Showing ToolTips on a Trimmed TextBlock (Silverlight) Colin Eberhardt has a really cool AutoTooltip attached behavior that gives a tooltip of the actual text if text is trimmed ... and has an active demo on the post... very cool. RIA Services Output Caching Mathew Charles digs into a RIA feature that hasn't gotten any blog love: output caching, describing all the ins and outs of improving the performance of your app using caching. Emailing your Files to Box.net Cloud Storage with WP7 Don Burnett details out everything you need to do to get Box.Net and your WP7 setup to talk to each other. Shortcuts keys for Developing on Windows Phone 7 Emulator Senthil Kumar has some good WP7 posts up ... this one is a cheatsheet list of Function-key assignements for the WP7 emulator... another sidebar listint Windows Phone 7 Design Guidelines – Cheat Sheet cherylws has a great Guideline list/Cheat Sheet up for reference while building a WP7 app... this is a great reference... I'm adding it to the Right-hand sidebar of WynApse.com Windows Phone Blue Book Pdf Rob Miles has added another book and color to his collection of both -- Windows Phone Programming in C#, also known as the Windows Phone Blue Book... get a copy from the links he gives, and check out his other free books as well. Navigating to an external URL using the HyperlinkButton Derik Whittaker has a post up discussing the woes (and error messages) of trying to navigate to an external URL with the Hyperlink button in WP7, plus his MVVM-friendly solution that you can download. Set Source on Image from code in Silverlight Thomas Martinsen has a couple posts up... first is this quick one on the code required to set an image source. Show UI element based on authentication Thomas Martinsen's latest is one on a BoolToVisibilityConverter allowing a boolean indicator of Authentication to be used to control the visibility of a button (in the sample) WP7 ReorderListBox improvements: rearrange animations and more Jason Ginchereau has updated his ReorderListBox from last week to add some animations (fading/sliding) during the rearrangement. Navigation in Silverlight Without Using Navigation Framework Vishal Nayan has a post that attracted my attention... Navigation by manipulating RootVisual content... I've been knee-deep in similar code in Prism this week (and why my blogging is off) ... Creating a WP7 Custom Control in 7 Steps WindowsPhoneGeek creates a simple custom control for WP7 before your very eyes in his latest post, focusing on the minimum requirements necessary for writing a Custom Control. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Fastest pathfinding for static node matrix

- by Sean Martin

I'm programming a route finding routine in VB.NET for an online game I play, and I'm searching for the fastest route finding algorithm for my map type. The game takes place in space, with thousands of solar systems connected by jump gates. The game devs have provided a DB dump containing a list of every system and the systems it can jump to. The map isn't quite a node tree, since some branches can jump to other branches - more of a matrix. What I need is a fast pathfinding algorithm. I have already implemented an A* routine and a Dijkstra's, both find the best path but are too slow for my purposes - a search that considers about 5000 nodes takes over 20 seconds to compute. A similar program on a website can do the same search in less than a second. This website claims to use D*, which I have looked into. That algorithm seems more appropriate for dynamic maps rather than one that does not change - unless I misunderstand it's premise. So is there something faster I can use for a map that is not your typical tile/polygon base? GBFS? Perhaps a DFS? Or have I likely got some problem with my A* - maybe poorly chosen heuristics or movement cost? Currently my movement cost is the length of the jump (the DB dump has solar system coordinates as well), and the heuristic is a quick euclidean calculation from the node to the goal. In case anyone has some optimizations for my A*, here is the routine that consumes about 60% of my processing time, according to my profiler. The coordinateData table contains a list of every system's coordinates, and neighborNode.distance is the distance of the jump. Private Function findDistance(ByVal startSystem As Integer, ByVal endSystem As Integer) As Integer 'hCount += 1 'If hCount Mod 0 = 0 Then 'Return hCache 'End If 'Initialize variables to be filled Dim x1, x2, y1, y2, z1, z2 As Integer 'LINQ queries for solar system data Dim systemFromData = From result In jumpDataDB.coordinateDatas Where result.systemId = startSystem Select result.x, result.y, result.z Dim systemToData = From result In jumpDataDB.coordinateDatas Where result.systemId = endSystem Select result.x, result.y, result.z 'LINQ execute 'Fill variables with solar system data for from and to system For Each solarSystem In systemFromData x1 = (solarSystem.x) y1 = (solarSystem.y) z1 = (solarSystem.z) Next For Each solarSystem In systemToData x2 = (solarSystem.x) y2 = (solarSystem.y) z2 = (solarSystem.z) Next Dim x3 = Math.Abs(x1 - x2) Dim y3 = Math.Abs(y1 - y2) Dim z3 = Math.Abs(z1 - z2) 'Calculate distance and round 'Dim distance = Math.Round(Math.Sqrt(Math.Abs((x1 - x2) ^ 2) + Math.Abs((y1 - y2) ^ 2) + Math.Abs((z1 - z2) ^ 2))) Dim distance = firstConstant * Math.Min(secondConstant * (x3 + y3 + z3), Math.Max(x3, Math.Max(y3, z3))) 'Dim distance = Math.Abs(x1 - x2) + Math.Abs(z1 - z2) + Math.Abs(y1 - y2) 'hCache = distance Return distance End Function And the main loop, the other 30% 'Begin search While openList.Count() != 0 'Set current system and move node to closed currentNode = lowestF() move(currentNode.id) For Each neighborNode In neighborNodes If Not onList(neighborNode.toSystem, 0) Then If Not onList(neighborNode.toSystem, 1) Then Dim newNode As New nodeData() newNode.id = neighborNode.toSystem newNode.parent = currentNode.id newNode.g = currentNode.g + neighborNode.distance newNode.h = findDistance(newNode.id, endSystem) newNode.f = newNode.g + newNode.h newNode.security = neighborNode.security openList.Add(newNode) shortOpenList(OLindex) = newNode.id OLindex += 1 Else Dim proposedG As Integer = currentNode.g + neighborNode.distance If proposedG < gValue(neighborNode.toSystem) Then changeParent(neighborNode.toSystem, currentNode.id, proposedG) End If End If End If Next 'Check to see if done If currentNode.id = endSystem Then Exit While End If End While If clarification is needed on my spaghetti code, I'll try to explain.

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