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• National Give Camp Weekend - January 14-16, 2011

  - by MOSSLover

  What is a Give Camp?  I get asked this question constantly in the SharePoint Community.  About 3 years ago there was an event called "We Are Microsoft" in Dallas, TX.  A lady named, Toi Wright, gathered up a bunch of charities and gathered up a bunch of IT Professionals in the community.  They met for an entire weekend devising better ways to help these charities with 3 days projects.  None of these charities had in house IT staff or they were lacking.  The time these projects would save would help out other people in the long run.  The first give camp was really popular that a couple guys from Kansas City decided to come up with a give camp in the Kansas City regiona.  The event was called Coders 4 Charity.  I read Jeff Julian's post on the "We Are Microsoft" event that it inspired me to get involved.  i showed up to this event and we were split into teams.  On that team I met a couple really awsome guys: Blake Theiss, Lee Brandt, Tim Wright, and Joe Loux.  We created a SharePoint site for a boyscout troup.  It was my first exposure to Silverlight 1.1.  I had so much fun that I attended the event the next year and the St. Louis Coders 4 Charity.  Last year in 2010 when I moved i searched high and low.  Sure enough they had an event in Philadelphia.  I helped out with two SharePoint Projects for a team of firefighters and another charity.  This year there are a series of give camps around the U.S.  They have consolidated most of the give camps.  The first ever New York City Give Camp is on National Give Camp Day.  If you guys are interested I see there is a give camp in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Northwest Arkansas, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, and more...Here is a link to the site I would definitely encourage you to get involved: http://givecamp.org/national-givecamp/.  Also, if you feel like it's only developer focused that's entirely wrong.  They need DBAs, Project Leads, Architects, and many other roles fulfilled aside from development.  It is a great experience to meet good people and help out a charity doing what we all love to do.  I strongle encourage getting involved in a give camp.  if you are coming to the NYC Give Camp I would love to meet you.  i will be there on Saturday somewhere in the morning until around dinner time.

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• The All New Hotmail Looks Very Impressive [Video Tour]

  - by Gopinath

  With loads of new new features being introduced into GMail every now and then, Microsoft can’t sit and relax any more. Microsoft realized this and worked hard to introduce really impressive features in upcoming version of Windows Live Hotmail that was previewed couple of days ago. Most of the new features announced in the upcoming version are focusing on the important need of email users – de-clutter the mail box and effectively manage email over load easily. Here is the list highlight of new features New Features Sweep away clutter – This is the most impressive in the set of new features. It allows you to manage email overload. If you’ve subscribed to a newsletter but decided to not to allow it into your inbox, you can activate the sweep feature to move all the messages of the newsletter in to a folder other than your inbox. This may sound similar to filters option in GMail but the workflow is very easy in Hotmail. Quickly find message – Easy to use options are provided to see mails in separate views likes mails from contacts, social networking mail, mails from e-mail subscription services, etc. Now it’s easy to prioritize email checking like how you wish to. I prefer to check mails from my contacts first, then social networking messages and then the newsletter subscriptions. Improved spam detection – The span detection rules are tightened for better spam protection and also hotmail learns from user actions to effectively catch spam No more mail box storage restrictions – With a smart decision of Microsoft, users  no longer need to worry about the storage restrictions of their mail box – large attachments of hotmail can be stored in Windows Live SkyDrive. With Hotmail, we’ve combined the simplicity of sending photos through email with the power of Windows Live SkyDrive so that you can send up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size, all in a single email. You can send all your vacation photos at once without worrying about attachment limits, Excellent Integration With Office Web Apps -  View and editing of office documents attached to the emails are made very easy by integrating Office Web Apps with Hotmail. When you receive a document/presentation/spreadsheet in hotmail, you can view it, edit it, save it or even you can send the modified document to original sender – all these without leaving hotmail. Inline viewing options for Photos, Videos, Social Network Messages – You can view photos embedded in the mail as slideshows(with the help of SilverLight), YouTube  & Hulu videos can be played inline  and track shipping notifications. Threaded conversations – emails in Hotmail are grouped just like it happens in GMail Others - enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management Video Tour Of New Features Here is an impressive video tour of new Hotmail features. When are these new features coming to Hotmail? Majority of the new features announced today are rolled out in coming weeks gradually to all the users. But advanced features like Office Integration with Hotmail is expected to take couple of months for general availability. Will You Switch back to Hotmail? Will these features lure GMail/Yahoo users to switch back to Hotmail? May be not immediately but these features may hold the existing users from leaving Hotmail. I used Hotmail, in the pre GMail era and now I use  Hotmail id only to sign-in to Microsoft websites that requites Hotmail authentication. It’s been years since I composed a new email in Hotmail. Even though the new features announced by Hotmail are very impressive, I like the way how GMail rapidly brings new features at regular intervals. If Hotmail also keeps innovating with new features at regular intervals, then there are good chances for it’s old users to return home. Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

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• Find a Faster DNS Server with Namebench

  - by Mysticgeek

  One way to speed up your Internet browsing experience is using a faster DNS server. Today we take a look at Namebench, which will compare your current DNS server against others out there, and help you find a faster one. Namebench Download the file and run the executable (link below). Namebench starts up and will include the current DNS server you have configured on your system. In this example we’re behind a router and using the DNS server from the ISP. Include the global DNS providers and the best available regional DNS server, then start the Benchmark. The test starts to run and you’ll see the queries it’s running through. The benchmark takes about 5-10 minutes to complete. After it’s complete you’ll get a report of the results. Based on its findings, it will show you what DNS server is fastest for your system. It also displays different types of graphs so you can get a better feel for the different results. You can export the results to a .csv file as well so you can present the results in Excel. Conclusion This is a free project that is in continuing development, so results might not be perfect, and there may be more features added in the future. If you’re looking for a method to help find a faster DNS server for your system, Namebench is a cool free utility to help you out. If you’re looking for a public DNS server that is customizable and includes filters, you might want to check out our article on helping to protect your kids from questionable content using OpenDNS. You can also check out how to speed up your web browsing with Google Public DNS. Links Download NameBench for Windows, Mac, and Linux from Google Code Learn More About the Project on the Namebench Wiki Page Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Open a Second Console Session on Ubuntu ServerShare Ubuntu Home Directories using SambaSetup OpenSSH Server on Ubuntu LinuxDisable the Annoying “This device can perform faster” Balloon Message in Windows 7Search For Rows With Special Characters in SQL Server 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app

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• Subterranean IL: Custom modifiers

  - by Simon Cooper

  In IL, volatile is an instruction prefix used to set a memory barrier at that instruction. However, in C#, volatile is applied to a field to indicate that all accesses on that field should be prefixed with volatile. As I mentioned in my previous post, this means that the field definition needs to store this information somehow, as such a field could be accessed from another assembly. However, IL does not have a concept of a 'volatile field'. How is this information stored? Attributes The standard way of solving this is to apply a VolatileAttribute or similar to the field; this extra metadata notifies the C# compiler that all loads and stores to that field should use the volatile prefix. However, there is a problem with this approach, namely, the .NET C++ compiler. C++ allows methods to be overloaded using properties, like volatile or const, on the parameters; this is perfectly legal C++: public ref class VolatileMethods { void Method(int *i) {} void Method(volatile int *i) {} } If volatile was specified using a custom attribute, then the VolatileMethods class wouldn't be compilable to IL, as there is nothing to differentiate the two methods from each other. This is where custom modifiers come in. Custom modifiers Custom modifiers are similar to custom attributes, but instead of being applied to an IL element separately to its declaration, they are embedded within the field or parameter's type signature itself. The VolatileMethods class would be compiled to the following IL: .class public VolatileMethods { .method public instance void Method(int32* i) {} .method public instance void Method( int32 modreq( [mscorlib]System.Runtime.CompilerServices.IsVolatile)* i) {} } The modreq([mscorlib]System.Runtime.CompilerServices.IsVolatile) is the custom modifier. This adds a TypeDef or TypeRef token to the signature of the field or parameter, and even though they are mostly ignored by the CLR when it's executing the program, this allows methods and fields to be overloaded in ways that wouldn't be allowed using attributes. Because the modifiers are part of the signature, they need to be fully specified when calling such a method in IL: call instance void Method( int32 modreq([mscorlib]System.Runtime.CompilerServices.IsVolatile)*) There are two ways of applying modifiers; modreq specifies required modifiers (like IsVolatile), and modopt specifies optional modifiers that can be ignored by compilers (like IsLong or IsConst). The type specified as the modifier argument are simple placeholders; if you have a look at the definitions of IsVolatile and IsLong they are completely empty. They exist solely to be referenced by a modifier. Custom modifiers are used extensively by the C++ compiler to specify concepts that aren't expressible in IL, but still need to be taken into account when calling method overloads. C++ and C# That's all very well and good, but how does this affect C#? Well, the C++ compiler uses modreq(IsVolatile) to specify volatility on both method parameters and fields, as it would be slightly odd to have the same concept represented using a modifier or attribute depending on what it was applied to. Once you've compiled your C++ project, it can then be referenced and used from C#, so the C# compiler has to recognise the modreq(IsVolatile) custom modifier applied to fields, and vice versa. So, even though you can't overload fields or parameters with volatile using C#, volatile needs to be expressed using a custom modifier rather than an attribute to guarentee correct interoperability and behaviour with any C++ dlls that happen to come along. Next up: a closer look at attributes, and how certain attributes compile in unexpected ways.

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• Thank you Geeks With Blogs for letting me join your community!

  - by GreeNTUG

  First, a link to the blog I can no longer edit because Office Live blew away my digital identity and so I can no longer log into it (the source of a loooong blog about protecting your digital identity sometime when I have more time and after it has played out to the end) http://greentug.spaces.live.com/ The following are the communities I participate in: Green & Sustainability.  I run a virtual user group on Green and Sustainability as it relates to developers and software architects.  It was located at greentug.groups.live.com, and we will need to find a new digital location for it, because I am locked out of that site as well. BizSpark Tampa Bay:  I run a BizSpark group for Microsoft technologists (meetup.com, search for BizSpark Tampa Bay) and speak at Code Camps about "No Better Time to Start Your Own Tech Business".  The meetup group facilitates a balanced presentation that is respectful to anyone wanting to start their own business, whether part-time or full-time, whether micro (just you), sustainable (grow to 2-25-ish, self-funded), high growth (get venture capital or other funding, grow it, sell it within 5 years, do it again), or hybrid (the new model going forward).  It is an "action" group, with assignments and homework if you want to get the most out of it.   At the end of a year you will either have your business on the path to where you want it to be, or you will know the steps you need to do to get it there. Women in Technology Have been participating in the Women in Technology community since 2008, my main interests in this area are mentoring women in the workplace to have them believe they can become geeks and double their income, and to mentor them with respect to starting and running their own business. Access 2010/SharePoint 2010.  This is a game-changer with respect to the Access community (the ap both devs and IT Pros love to hate, the other a-word that's not a fruit).  I conducted Lunch n Learns and Brunch n Learns around this topic before the Office 2010/SharePoint 2010 launch, and spoke on the topic at SharePoint Saturday Tampa in Nov 2009. Interested in learning more about: Using Silverlight HD Streaming out in the non-technical world (horses and equestrian sport).  Migrating to Access Web Services and VB .Net from VBA (see the Access 2010/SharePoint 2010 interest above) Windows Phone 7!  Exciting opportunities both for Green and Sustainability and for my "day job" of Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS). My day job is Environmental, Health & Safetey (EHS) consulting and software solutions, where that interfaces with the developer world is with respect to opportunities around Green and Sustainability, The SmartGrid and Juval Lowy's EnergyNet, both of which will require a lot of technology and software to make them work, The new Microsoft Partner competency for "Digital Home", and The Y2K kind of deadline around how managing chemicals in ERP systems is changing because of Global Harmonization, which hits the EU with a hard deadline on 11/30/10 (yes, this year), and hits the USA about 15 months later. Hope you enjoy my contributions to the digital geek community, and feel free to email me, [email protected] (the email leftover after my digital identity was blown away), and [email protected] (this one could go away at some future point) Best, Kathy Malone

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• Hello From South Florida

  - by Sam Abraham

  Fellow Blog Readers: I figured I use my first blog post on GeeksWithBlogs to introduce myself.   I recently relocated from Long Island, NY to South Florida where I joined a local company as Software Engineer specializing in technologies such as C#, ASP.Net 3.5, WCF, Silverlight, SQL Server 2008 and LINQ, to name a few. I am an MCP and MCTS ASP.Net 3.5, looking to get my .Net 4.0 certification soon.   Having been in industry for a few years so far, I figured I would share with you my take on the importance of being involved(at least attending) in local user groups.   I am a firm believer that besides using a certain technology, the best way to expand one’s knowledge is by sharing it with others and being equally open to learn from others just as much as you are willing to share what you know.   In my opinion, an important factor that makes a good developer stand-out is his/her ability to keep abreast with the latest and greatest even in areas outside his/her direct expertise.   Additionally, having spoken to various recruiters, technical user group attendees are always favorably looked upon as genuinely interested in their field and willing to take the initiative to expand their knowledge which offers job candidates good leverage when competing for jobs.   I believe I am very blessed to be in an area with a very strong and vibrant developer community. I found in the local .Net community leadership a genuine interest in constantly extending the opportunity to all developers to get more involved and encouraging those who are willing to take that initiative achieve their goal: Speak in meetings, volunteer at events or write and publish articles/blogs about latest and greatest technologies.   With Vishal Shukla (Site director for the West Palm Beach .Net User Group) traveling overseas, I have been extended the opportunity to come on board as site coordinator for FladotNet's WPB .Net User Group along with Venkata Subramanian, an opportunity which I gratefully accepted.   Being involved in running a .Net User Group will surely help me personally and professionally, but my real hope is to use this opportunity to assist in delivering the ultimate common-goal: spread the word about new .Net Technologies, help everybody get more involved and simply have fun learning new things.   With my introduction out of the way, in the next few days I will be posting some notes on an upcoming talk I will be giving about MVC2 and VS2010 in mid-April.   Environment.Exit(0); --Sam

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• Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Industry Best Practices + Flexibility

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  By Richard Garraputa, VP of Sales & Marketing, brij Richard joined brij in 1996 after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with degrees in Information Systems and Accounting. He directs brij’s overall strategies of both the business development and marketing departments. Companies looking for new ERP systems spend so much time comparing features and functions of software products but too often short change the value of their own processes.  Company managers I meet often claim that they are implementing a new ERP system so they can perform better and faster.  When asked how, the answer is often “by implementing best practices”.  But the term ‘best practices’ is frequently used to mean ‘doing things the way everyone else does them’ rather than a starting point or benchmark to build upon by adding your own value. Of course, implementing standardized processes across an enterprise is an important step in improving operational efficiencies.  But not all companies are alike.  Do you ever tell your customers “We are just like our competition and have no competitive differentiation”?  Probably not.  So why should the implementation of your business processes be just like your competitor’s?  Even within the same industry, companies differentiate themselves by leveraging their unique expertise and approach to business.  These unique aspects—the competitive differentiators that companies use to thrive in a crowded marketplace—can and should be supported by the implementation of business systems like ERP. Modern ERP systems like Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne have a broad and deep functional footprint designed to integrate a company’s core operations.  But how can a company take advantage of this footprint without blowing up their implementation budget?  Some ERP vendors claim to solve this challenge by stating that their systems come pre-configured with ‘best practices’.  Too often what they are really saying is that you will have to abandon your key operational differentiators to fit a vendor’s template for your business—or extend your implementation and postpone the realization of any benefits. Thankfully for midsize companies, there is an alternative to the undesirable options of extended implementation projects or abandoning their competitive differentiators.  Oracle Accelerate Solutions speed the time it takes to implement JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution based on your unique business characteristics, getting your new ERP system up and running faster without forcing your business to fit a cookie-cutter solution. We’ve been a JD Edwards implementation partner since 1986 and we now leverage Oracle Business Accelerators—cloud based rapid implementation tools built and maintained by Oracle. Oracle Business Accelerators deliver the benefits of embedded industry best practices without forcing every customer in to one set of processes like many template or “clone and go” approaches do. You retain the ability to reconfigure your applications—without customization—as your business changes. Wielded by Oracle partners with industry-specific domain expertise, Oracle Accelerate Solution implementations powered by Oracle Business Accelerators help automate the application configuration to fit your business better, faster. For example, on a recent project at a manufacturing company, the project manager told me that Oracle Business Accelerators helped get them to Conference Room Pilot 20% faster than with a traditional approach. Time savings equal cost savings. And if ‘better and faster’ is your goal for your business performance, shouldn’t it be the goal for your ERP implementation as well? Established in 1986, brij has been dedicated solely to helping its customers implement Oracle’s JD Edwards solutions and to maximize the value of those customers’ IT investments. They are a Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork and an Oracle Accelerate Solution provider.

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• Oracle Database Upcoming Event dates to know

  - by mandy.ho

  February may be a short month, but it's not short of exciting Oracle events. From information packed "Real Performance Days" to participation in one of the biggest IT Security events - look out for Oracle Database and let us know if you are there with us! Feb 13-18, 2011 - Las Vegas, NV TDWI World Conference Series Join Oracle in highlighting Exadata x2-2 and x2-8, along with Oracle Business Intelligence, Enterprise Performance management and Data Warehousing solutions. Oracle will be presenting a workshop - Oracle Data Integration: Best-of-Breed Solutions for the Enterprise Wednesday, February 16, 2011 7p.m - 9p.m Glen Goodrich, Director of Product Management Christophe Dupupet, Director of Product Management, Data Integration http://events.tdwi.org/events/las-vegas-world-conference-2011/sessions/session-list.aspx Feb 14-17, 2011 - Barcelona, Spain Mobile World Congress MWC is an event where Oracle showcases the near complete breadth and depth of value that our Communications Industry strategy and Hardware and Software Solutions can deliver. Oracle supports Communications Service Providers today and delivers platforms and flexibility primed for the future. Oracle will have a two story Pavilion, along with an Oracle Java and Embedded Solutions Center - App Planet. The Exhibition times are Monday, 14th February 09.00 - 19.00 Tuesday, 15th February 09.00 - 19.00 Wednesday, 16th February 09.00 - 19.00 Thursday, 17th February 09.00 - 16.00 Have questions? Meet with Oracle Sales representatives at the Oracle Café. Open every day from 9am to 17:00pm. http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=109912&src=6973382&src=6973382&Act=4 Feb 14-18, 2011 - San Francisco, CA RSA Conference As the world's most complete, open, integrated business software and hardware systems provider, Oracle can uniquely safeguard your information throughout its entire lifecycle. Learn more by attending these sessions: Cloud Computing: A Brave New World for Security and Privacy (CLD-201) Wednesday, February 16 at 8:30 a.m. Databases Under Attack - Securing Heterogeneous Database Infrastructures (DAS-301) Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 8:30 a.m. Seven Steps to Protecting Databases (DAS-402) Friday, February 18 at 10:10 a.m. RSA Conference Attendees will also have the opportunity to meet with Oracle Security Solution experts, see live product demos and more by visiting booth # 1559. Hours: Monday, February 14, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m., Tuesday, February 15, 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. - 6:00p.m., Wednesday, February 16, 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m., and Thursday, February 17, 11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=127657&src=6967733&src=6967733&Act=12 Feb 21-25, 2011 - Various Locations IOUG Presents - A Day of Real World Performance with Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth and Graham Wood These Oracle experts will debate, discuss and delineate the best practices for designing hardware architectures, deploying Oracle databases, and developing applications that deliver the fastest possible performance for your business.Topics are covered in a conversational format - with all three chiming in where appropriate. Each presenter has their own screen projector to demonstrate their individual points to the participants. Customers will have the opportunity to get their specific performance/tuning questions answered and learn how to balance all the different environmental requirements for their applications to improve performance. Register today for the following dates and locations • February 21 in San Diego, CA • February 22 in Los Angeles, CA • February 23 in Seattle, WA • February 25 in Phoenix, AZ http://www.ioug.org/tabid/194/Default.aspx Feb 8-24 - Various Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit This series of full-day events with cloud experts, sharing real-world best practices, reference architectures and more continues during the month of February. Attend the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit to learn how to: • Build a state-of-the-art cloud architecture • Leverage your existing IT investments • Optimize your IT management processes Whether you are considering a move to cloud computing or have already adopted a cloud model, this event offers you the insights you need to take full advantage of cloud computing. Check below to see if the event is coming to a city near you. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/events/cloud-events-214342.html

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• Stop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in Chrome

  - by The Geek

  If you’ve actually used the internet before, you’ve probably come across a page with an auto-playing YouTube clip, and chances are good it was a rather annoying one. Here’s how to stop them from starting automatically in Chrome. We’ve already told you how to stop them from automatically playing if you’re a Firefox user (best answer: use Flashblock!), but now it’s time for Chrome users to get their turn. Use the Stop Autoplay for YouTube Extension The great thing about this extension is that it stops the video from playing, but it allows it to continue buffering, so when you do feel like playing the video, it’ll already be downloaded—really useful for people with slower internet connections. There’s no UI or anything fancy, just head to the extension page and click the Install button. If you want to get rid of it later, use the Tools –> Extensions menu (or you can type chrome://extensions/ into your address bar), and then click the Uninstall link for that add-on.   Download Stop Autoplay for YouTube [Google Chrome Extensions] Using FlashBlock for Chrome If you really wanted to, you could just disable Flash across the board using FlashBlock for Chrome. Once you’ve installed the extension, you won’t see any Flash elements anywhere, and you’ll have to move your mouse over them and click to enable them each time. When I installed the extension the first time, I noticed that YouTube was already in the allow list. I’m not sure if that’s the default setting or not, but you can use the icon in the address bar, or the Options from the Extensions panel to get to the settings page, and from there you can remove anything from the White List that you wouldn’t want. Another nice feature about Flash Block is that it can also block Silverlight, or you could simply uninstall or remove unnecessary Chrome plug-ins. Download FlashBlock for Chrome Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in FirefoxDisable YouTube Comments while using ChromeApologies About An Awful Audio AdvertisementImprove YouTube Video Viewing in Google ChromeWatch YouTube Videos in Cinema Style in Firefox 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites

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• To Serve Man?

  - by Dave Convery

  Since the announcement of Windows 8 and its 'Metro' interface, the .NET community has wondered if the skills they've spent so long developing might be swept aside,in favour of HTML5 and JavaScript. Mercifully, that only seems to be true of SilverLight (as Simon Cooper points out), but it did leave me thinking how easy it is to impose a technology upon people without directly serving their needs. Case in point: QR codes. Once, probably, benign in purpose, they seem to have become a marketer's tool for determining when someone has engaged with an advert in the real world, with the same certainty as is possible online. Nobody really wants to use QR codes - it's far too much hassle. But advertisers want that data - they want to know that someone actually read their billboard / poster / cereal box, and so this flawed technology is suddenly everywhere, providing little to no value to the people who are actually meant to use it. What about 3D cinema? Profits from the film industry have been steadily increasing throughout the period that digital piracy and mass sharing has been possible, yet the industry cinema chains have forced 3D films upon a broadly uninterested audience, as a way of providing more purpose to going to a cinema, rather than watching it at home. Despite advances in digital projection, 3D cinema is scarcely more immersive to us than were William Castle's hoary old tricks of skeletons on wires and buzzing chairs were to our grandparents. iTunes - originally just a piece of software that catalogued and ripped music for you, but which is now multi-purpose bloatware; a massive, system-hogging behemoth. If it was being built for the people that used it, it would have been split into three or more separate pieces of software long ago. But as bloatware, it serves Apple primarily rather than us, stuffed with Music, Video, Various stores and phone / iPad management all bolted into one. Why? It's because, that way, you're more likely to bump into something you want to buy. You can't even buy a new laptop without finding that a significant chunk of your hard drive has been sold to 'select partners' - advertisers, suppliers of virus-busting software, and endless bloatware-flogging pop-ups that make using a new laptop without reformatting the hard drive like stepping back in time. The product you want is not the one you paid for. This is without even looking at services like Facebook and Klout, who provide a notional service with the intention of slurping up as much data about you as possible (in Klout's case, whether you create an account with them or not). What technologies do you find annoying or intrusive, and who benefits from keeping them around?

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• How can I best manage making open source code releases from my company's confidential research code?

  - by DeveloperDon

  My company (let's call them Acme Technology) has a library of approximately one thousand source files that originally came from its Acme Labs research group, incubated in a development group for a couple years, and has more recently been provided to a handful of customers under non-disclosure. Acme is getting ready to release perhaps 75% of the code to the open source community. The other 25% would be released later, but for now, is either not ready for customer use or contains code related to future innovations they need to keep out of the hands of competitors. The code is presently formatted with #ifdefs that permit the same code base to work with the pre-production platforms that will be available to university researchers and a much wider range of commercial customers once it goes to open source, while at the same time being available for experimentation and prototyping and forward compatibility testing with the future platform. Keeping a single code base is considered essential for the economics (and sanity) of my group who would have a tough time maintaining two copies in parallel. Files in our current base look something like this: > // Copyright 2012 (C) Acme Technology, All Rights Reserved. > // Very large, often varied and restrictive copyright license in English and French, > // sometimes also embedded in make files and shell scripts with varied > // comment styles. > > > ... Usual header stuff... > > void initTechnologyLibrary() { > nuiInterface(on); > #ifdef UNDER_RESEARCH > holographicVisualization(on); > #endif > } And we would like to convert them to something like: > // GPL Copyright (C) Acme Technology Labs 2012, Some rights reserved. > // Acme appreciates your interest in its technology, please contact [email protected] > // for technical support, and www.acme.com/emergingTech for updates and RSS feed. > > ... Usual header stuff... > > void initTechnologyLibrary() { > nuiInterface(on); > } Is there a tool, parse library, or popular script that can replace the copyright and strip out not just #ifdefs, but variations like #if defined(UNDER_RESEARCH), etc.? The code is presently in Git and would likely be hosted somewhere that uses Git. Would there be a way to safely link repositories together so we can efficiently reintegrate our improvements with the open source versions? Advice about other pitfalls is welcome.

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• What do you think of the EntLib 5.0 configuration tool?

  Hello again! Its been a while, I know. Ive been busy over the last few months with several projects, some of them software related, and one of them human my son Jesse was born on 26 February 2010. Fun times! Meanwhile, back in Redmond, the p&p team has been busy working on Enterprise Library 5.0 see Grigoris announcement for details on the beta. Theres a ton of new stuff in this release, but theres one big new feature that hasnt received a lot of attention that Im keen to hear your perspectives on. The change is the biggest overhaul to the configuration tool since Enterprise Library was launched. If you havent yet grabbed the EntLib 5.0 beta, heres a before and after shot of the config tool: Enterprise Library 4.1 config tool Enterprise Library 5.0 (beta 1) config tool The tool has been rebuilt from the ground up in response to some feedback and usability studies from the previous version of the tool. But is this a step in the right direction? Id love to hear what you think. If youve downloaded EntLib 5.0 and tried out the tool, please share your thoughts on: First impressions. Is the tool easy to understand? Easy to find what youre looking for? Easy to read existing configuration? Pretty? Ease of use for real life tasks. Rather than make up your own tasks, here are a few sample scenarios you might want to try: Configure the data access block with a SQL Server connection called Audit that points to a database called Audit on a server called DB Configure the logging block so that any log entries in the Audit category are written to both the Event Log and the Audit database (see above) Configure the validation block with a ruleset called Email Address that uses an appropriate regular expression for e-mail addresses Configure the policy injection block such that any calls to classes in the MyCompany.Security namespace are logged before and after the call using the Audit category (see above) Comparison with the old config tool. What do you like better in the new tool? What did you like better in the old tool? How do you rate your level of expertise using the old tool? Keep in mind that I no longer work in the p&p team, so I cant say how any of this feedback will be used (although Im sure the team is listening!). However since Ive invested so much time in Enterprise Library, both in leading the team and using the product on real projects Im very interested to hear what you all think of the tools new direction.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• A Generic Boolean Value Converter

  - by codingbloke

  On fairly regular intervals a question on Stackoverflow like this one:  Silverlight Bind to inverse of boolean property value appears.  The same answers also regularly appear.  They all involve an implementation of IValueConverter and basically include the same boilerplate code. The required output type sometimes varies, other examples that have passed by are Boolean to Brush and Boolean to String conversions.  Yet the code remains pretty much the same.  There is therefore a good case to create a generic Boolean to value converter to contain this common code and then just specialise it for use in Xaml. Here is the basic converter:- BoolToValueConverter using System; using System.Windows.Data; namespace SilverlightApplication1 {     public class BoolToValueConverter<T> : IValueConverter     {         public T FalseValue { get; set; }         public T TrueValue { get; set; }         public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)         {             if (value == null)                 return FalseValue;             else                 return (bool)value ? TrueValue : FalseValue;         }         public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)         {             return value.Equals(TrueValue);         }     } } With this generic converter in place it easy to create a set of converters for various types.  For example here are all the converters mentioned so far:- Value Converters using System; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Media; namespace SilverlightApplication1 {     public class BoolToStringConverter : BoolToValueConverter<String> { }     public class BoolToBrushConverter : BoolToValueConverter<Brush> { }     public class BoolToVisibilityConverter : BoolToValueConverter<Visibility> { }     public class BoolToObjectConverter : BoolToValueConverter<Object> { } } With the specialised converters created they can be specified in a Resources property on a user control like this:- <local:BoolToBrushConverter x:Key="Highlighter" FalseValue="Transparent" TrueValue="Yellow" /> <local:BoolToStringConverter x:Key="CYesNo" FalseValue="No" TrueValue="Yes" /> <local:BoolToVisibilityConverter x:Key="InverseVisibility" TrueValue="Collapsed" FalseValue="Visible" />

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• User Produtivity Kit - Powerful Packages (Part 1)

  - by [email protected]

  User Productivity Kit provides the ability to create a variety of content types including robust topics on system process and web pages with formatted text and graphics. There are times when you want to enhance content with media types not naively created by User Productivity Kit, media types such as video, custom animations, forms, and more. One method of doing this is to maintain these media files on a web server - separate from the User Productivity Kit player content and link to the files using absolute URLs such as http://myserver/overview.html. While this will get you going, you won't benefit from the content management capabilities of the UPK Developer. Features such as check-in / check-out, history, document properties, folder permissions and more are not available to this external content. Further, if you ever need to move that content to a server with a different name or domain, you'd need to update all your links. UPK version 3.1 introduced a new document type - the package. A package is a group of folders and files that you manage in the Developer library as a single document. These package documents work in the same manner as any other document in the library and you can use all of the collaborative content development features you see with other document types. Packages can be used for anything from single Word documents, PDF files, and graphics to more intricate sets of inter-related files commonly seen with HTML files and their graphics, style sheets, and JavaScript files. The structure of the files and folders within a package will always be preserved so this means that any relative links between files in the package will work. For example, an HTML file containing an image tag with a relative link to a graphic elsewhere in the same package will continue to function properly both when viewed in the Developer and when published to outputs such as the UPK Player. Once you start to use packages, you'll soon discover that there is a lot of existing content that can be re-purposed by placing it into UPK packages. Packages are easily created by selecting File...New...Package. Files can be added in a number of ways including the "Add Files" button, copy & paste from Windows Explorer, and drag & drop. To use one of the files in the package, just create a link to the file in the package you want to target. This is supported throughout the Developer in places such as section & topic concepts, frame links and hyperlinks in web pages. A little more challenging is determining how to structure packages in your library. As I mentioned earlier, a package can contain anything from a single file to dozens of files and folders. So what should you do? You could create a package for each file. You could create one package for all your files. But which one is right? Well, there's not a right and wrong answer to this question. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. The right decision will be influenced by the package files themselves, the structure of the content in the library, the size and working style of the development team, how content is shared between different outlines and more. The first consideration can be assessed the quickest. If the content to be placed in the package is composed of multiple files and those files reference each other, they should be in the same package. There are loads of examples of this type of content. HTML files with graphics and style sheets, HTML files with embedded Flash movies, and Word documents saved as HTML are all examples where the content is composed of multiple files and the files reference each other in some way. Content like this should always be placed in a singe package such that these relative links between the files are preserved and play properly in the UPK Player. In upcoming posts, I'll explain additional considerations.

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• Resolve SRs Faster Using RDA - Find the Right Profile

  - by Daniel Mortimer

  Introduction Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) is an excellent command-line data collection tool that can aid troubleshooting / problem solving. The tool covers the majority of Oracle's vast product range, and its data collection capability is comprehensive. RDA collects data about the operating system and environment, including environment variable, kernel settings network o/s performance o/s patches and much more the Oracle Products installed, including patches logs and debug metrics configuration and much more In effect, RDA can obtain a snapshot of an Oracle Product and its environment. Oracle Support encourages the use of RDA because it greatly reduces service request resolution time by minimizing the number of requests from Oracle Support for more information. RDA is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible; it does not modify systems in any way. It collects useful data for Oracle Support only and a security filter is provided if required. Find and Use the Right RDA Profile One problem of any tool / utility, which covers a large range of products, is knowing how to target it against only the products you wish to troubleshoot. RDA does not have a GUI. Nor does RDA have an intelligent mechanism for detecting and automatically collecting data only for those Oracle products installed. Instead, you have to tell RDA what to do. There is a mind boggling large number of RDA data collection modules which you can configure RDA to use. It is easier, however, to setup RDA to use a "Profile". A profile consists of a list of data collection modules and predefined settings. As such profiles can be used to diagnose a problem with a particular product or combination of products. How to run RDA with a profile? ( <rda> represents the command you selected to run RDA (for example, rda.pl, rda.cmd, rda.sh, and perl rda.pl).) 1. Use the embedded spreadsheet to find the RDA profile which is appropriate for your problem / chosen Oracle Fusion Middleware products. 2. Use the following command to perform the setup <rda> -S -p <profile_name>  3. Run the data collection <rda> Run the data collection. If you want to perform setup and run in one go, then use a command such as the following: <rda> -vnSCRP -p <profile name> For more information, refer to: Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) 4 - Profile Manual Pages [ID 391983.1] Additional Hints / Tips: 1. Be careful! Profile names are case sensitive.2. When profiles are not used, RDA considers all existing modules by default. For example, if you have downloaded RDA for the first time and run the command <rda> -S you will see prompts for every RDA collection module many of which will be of no interest to you. Also, you may, in your haste to work through all the questions, forget to say "Yes" to the collection of data that is pertinent to your particular problem or product. Profiles avoid such tedium and help ensure the right data is collected at the first time of asking.

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• Is Oracle Policy Automation a Fit for My Agency? I'll bet it is.

  - by jeffrey.waterman

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Recently, I stumbled upon a new(-ish) whitepaper now posted on the Oracle Technology Network around Oracle Policy Automation (OPA). This paper is certain to become a must read for any customer interested in rules automation. What is OPA?  If you are not sitting in your favorite Greek restaurant waiting for that order of Saganaki to appear, OPA is Oracle’s solution for automated streamlining, standardizing, and the maintenance of policy. It is a specialized rules platform that simplifies the automation of rules and policies, putting the analysis in the hands of the analysts, not the IT organization. In other words, OPA allows the organization to be more efficient by eliminating (or at a minimum, reducing the engagement of) the middle man from the process. The whitepaper I mention above is titled, “Is Oracle Policy Automation a Good Fit for My Business?”. This short document walks the reader through use cases and advice for the reader to consider when deciding if OPA is right for their agency. The paper outlines many different scenarios, different uses of OPA in production today and, where OPA may not be a good fit. Many of the use case examples revolve around end user questionnaires or analyst research. What is often overlooked is OPA’s ability to act as a rules engine behind the scenes. That is, take inputs from one source (e.g., personnel data), process that data in OPA and send the output (e.g., pay data with benefits deductions) to a second source. The rules have been automated, no necessary human intervention to perform analysis. A few of my customers have used the embedded OPA solution to improve transaction processing and reduce the time spent analyzing exceptions. I suggest any reader whose organization is reliant on or deals with high complexity, volume or volatility in rules that are based on documentation – or which need to be documented – take a look at Oracle Policy Automation. You can find the white paper on Oracle Technology Network. You can find the white paper in the Oracle Policy Automation of the OTN. You can find more information around OPA on oracle.com. Finally, you can send me a question any time at [email protected] Thank you for reading. If you have any topics around Oracle Applications in the Federal or Public Sector industries you would like to see addressed in this blog, please leave suggestions in the comments section and I will do my best to address in a future post.

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• Microsoft Virtual Academy

  Carpe Diem It's been since a while that I could write an article for this blog but alas, I was (and still am) very busy with customer's work. Which is actually good. So, what is this article going to tell you? Well, in general, just what I already tweeted, that life is constant process of learning - especially as software craftsman. Due to an upcoming new customer project in ASP.NET I had to seize the opportunity to get my head deeper into latest available technologies, like Windows Azure and SQL Azure. I know... cloud computing and so on is not a recent development and already available since quite a while but I never any means to get myself into this since roughly two weeks ago. Microsoft Virtual Academy I can't remember exactly what guided me towards the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA), oh wait... Yes, it was a posting on Facebook from an old CLIP community friend. He posted a shortened URL with #MVA tag that caught my attention. Thanks for that Thomas Kuberek. After the usual sign in or registration via Live ID I was a little bit surprised that Mauritius is not an available country option... Quick mail exchange with the MVA Decan, and yeah, apologies for the missing entry. So, currently I'm learning about Microsoft products and services, and collecting points under "Not Listed Country" until Mauritius is going to be added. Hopefully soon, as MVA honors your effort with different knowledge ranks that are compared to other students with public profiles. I think it's a nice move to add some game and competition factor into the learning game. The tracks and their different modules are mainly references to publicly available material online, namely on either MSDN, TechNet, Channel9, or other Microsoft based sites. The course material therefore also varies in different media and formats, ranging from simple online articles over downloadable documents (.docx or .pdf) to Silverlight / Windows Media streams with download options. Self-assessment and students ranking Each module in a track can be finished by taking part in a self-assessment. Up to now, the assessment I did (and passed) were limited to 10 minutes available time, and consisted of six to seven questions on the module training material. Nothing too serious but it gives you a glimpse idea how Microsoft certification exams are structured. Conclusion Nothing really new but nicely gathered, assembled and presented to the MVA students. At the moment, I wouldn't dare to compare the richness and quality of those courses with professional training offers, like Pluralsight .NET Training, LearnDevNow, VTC, etc. at all, but I think that MVA has potential. Give it a try, and let me know about your opinions.

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• Sprinkle Some Magik on that Java Virtual Machine

  - by Jim Connors

  GE Energy, through its Smallworld subsidiary, has been providing geospatial software solutions to the utility and telco markets for over 20 years.  One of the fundamental building blocks of their technology is a dynamically-typed object oriented programming language called Magik.  Like Java, Magik source code is compiled down to bytecodes that run on a virtual machine -- in this case the Magik Virtual Machine. Throughout the years, GE has invested considerable engineering talent in the support and maintenance of this virtual machine.  At the same time vast energy and resources have been invested in the Java Virtual Machine. The question for GE has been whether to continue to make that investment on its own or to leverage massive effort provided by the Java community? Utilizing the Java Virtual Machine instead of maintaining its own virtual machine would give GE more opportunity to focus on application solutions.   At last count, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of programming languages that have been hosted atop the Java Virtual Machine.  Prior to the release of Java 7, that effort, although certainly possible, was generally less than optimal for languages like Magik because of its dynamic nature.  Java, as a statically typed language had little use for this capability.  In the quest to be a more universal virtual machine, Java 7, via JSR-292, introduced a new bytecode called invokedynamic.  In short, invokedynamic affords a more flexible method call mechanism needed by dynamic languages like Magik. With this new capability GE Energy has succeeded in hosting their Magik environment on top of the Java Virtual Machine.  So you may ask, why would GE wish to do such a thing?  The benefits are many: Competitors to GE Energy claimed that the Magik environment was proprietary.  By utilizing the Java Virtual Machine, that argument gets put to bed.  JVM development is done in open source, where contributions are made world-wide by all types of organizations and individuals. The unprecedented wealth of class libraries and applications written for the Java platform are now opened up to Magik/JVM platform as first class citizens. In addition, the Magik/JVM solution vastly increases the developer pool to include the 9 million Java developers -- the largest developer community on the planet. Applications running on the JVM showed substantial performance gains, in some cases as much as a 5x speed up over the original Magik platform. Legacy Magik applications can still run on the original platform.  They can be seamlessly migrated to run on the JVM by simply recompiling the source code. GE can now leverage the huge Java community.  Undeniably the best virtual machine ever created, hundreds if not thousands of world class developers continually improve, poke, prod and scrutinize all aspects of the Java platform.  As enhancements are made, GE automatically gains access to these. As Magik has little in the way of support for multi-threading, GE will benefit from current and future Java offerings (e.g. lambda expressions) that aim to further facilitate multi-core/multi-threaded application development. As the JVM is available for many more platforms, it broadens the reach of Magik, including the potential to run on a class devices never envisioned just a few short years ago.  For example, Java SE compatible runtime environments are available for popular embedded ARM/Intel/PowerPC configurations that could theoretically host this software too. As compared to other JVM language projects, the Magik integration differs in that it represents a serious commercial entity betting a sizable part of its business on the success of this effort.  Expect to see announcements not only from General Electric, but other organizations as they realize the benefits of utilizing the Java Virtual Machine.

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• The Case for Complimentary Software Copies

  - by GGBlogger

  As the Geriatric Geek you can understand that I’ve been writing and studying for over 60 years. That means that I’ve seen insane changes in the computer software industry. I’ve made the joke that I get a new college education every 6 months or so. Of course that’s an exaggeration but it doesn’t make the feeling go away. I have a long standing and strong relationship with Microsoft so I’m armed with virtually every tool they make. It also means that I have access to tons of training material. But here’s the rub… Last year I started a definitive read of Professional Visual Basic 2008. The purpose was to fill in holes in my understanding of various things. I’m currently on page 1119 of some 1400 pages. During this sojourn I’ve decided that the future is web related which is to say that the future of “thick client” applications running as Windows applications is likely to slowly disappear. To that end I’ve taken a side trip or two into the world of ASP (including XML), Silverlight and cloud development. After carefully avoiding (that’s tongue in cheek) XML for years I finally had to bite the bullet, so to speak, and start learning XML in earnest. The most recent result of that was trail downloads of Altova’s MissionKit 2010 for Software Architects and Liquid Technologies Liquid XML Studio Developer Edition. These are both beautiful products and I want to learn them and write about them. Now comes the rub… While 30 day evaluations are generous in allowing casual users to assess these technologies for purchase they are NOT long enough to allow an author to evaluate, learn and ultimately write about them. Even if I devoted the full 30 days to learning, using and writing about say Altova’s suite I wouldn’t have enough time. Liquid XML may be a little easier to learn (one product as opposed to 8).  Add to that the fact that I frequently get sidetracked to add to my kit and it really blows out. It can be extremely frustrating when I’ve devoted hours to a project and suddenly discover that to complete it I will either need to purchase a license or abandon the project. Since my life blood does not depend on the product I end up abandoning the project and moving on. So to the folks from whom I request complimentary copies… I guarantee that if I convert your product to doing paid development work I will purchase a license to do that but as long as I am using your product to study for the purpose of writing samples, teaching use or otherwise promoting your product to other paying customers I will ask that you give me a license so that I can do that without facing the dread expiration of a 30 day trial.

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• Preventing Users From Copying Text From and Pasting It Into TextBoxes

  Many websites that support user accounts require users to enter an email address as part of the registration process. This email address is then used as the primary communication channel with the user. For instance, if the user forgets her password a new one can be generated and emailed to the address on file. But what if, when registering, a user enters an incorrect email address? Perhaps the user meant to enter [email protected], but accidentally transposed the first two letters, entering [email protected]. How can such typos be prevented? The only foolproof way to ensure that the user's entered email address is valid is to send them a validation email upon registering that includes a link that, when visited, activates their account. (This technique is discussed in detail in Examining ASP.NET's Membership, Roles, and Profile - Part 11.) The downside to using a validation email is that it adds one more step to the registration process, which will cause some people to bail out on the registration process. A simpler approach to lessening email entry errors is to have the user enter their email address twice, just like how most registration forms prompt users to enter their password twice. In fact, you may have seen registration pages that do just this. However, when I encounter such a registration page I usually avoid entering the email address twice, but instead enter it once and then copy and paste it from the first textbox into the second. This behavior circumvents the purpose of the two textboxes - any typo entered into the first textbox will be copied into the second. Using a bit of JavaScript it is possible to prevent most users from copying text from one textbox and pasting it into another, thereby requiring the user to type their email address into both textboxes. This article shows how to disable cut and paste between textboxes on a web page using the free jQuery library. Read on to learn more! Read More >Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Windows Phone 7 Development Updates &ndash; March 8th 2011

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  Here are the latest update from the Windows Phone 7 Developer Worlds that went live this month. Here are some of the latest numbers: Windows Phone Marketplace currently offers more than 9,000 quality apps and games and enjoys a base of over 32,000 registered developers, delivering an average of 100 new apps every day. There have been over 1 million downloads of the developers tools for Windows Phone 7. Trial version help you sell more Trials result in higher sales by the numbers: Users like trials  - paid apps with trial functionality are downloaded 70 times more than paid apps that don’t Nearly 1 out of 10 trial apps downloaded convert to a purchase and generate 10 times more revenue on average than paid apps that don’t include trial functionality. Trial downloads convert to paid downloads quickly. More than half of trial downloads that convert to a sale do so within the 1st 24 hours of trial download, and mostly within 2 hours of trial download. Microsoft Ad Control is gaining traction By the numbers - ad supported Windows Phone 7 apps are: Roughly ¼ of all registered U.S. WP7 developers have downloaded the free Ad SDK for Silverlight and XNA Of ad funded apps, over 95 percent use the free Microsoft Advertising Ad Control Monthly impressions from our Ad Exchange has continued to grow by double digits – impressions increased by 376 percent since January Ad Control, the first wave of “How Do I” videos are now available on MSDN: Create an Ad in a Windows Phone 7 XNA Game App Register Ad-Enabled Windows Phone 7 Apps Measure Ad Performance of Windows Phone 7 Apps Boarder International App submission for Free Apps through Yalla Apps As of today you can start submitting your free applications in developer markets that are currently not covered by Microsoft. To submit your Free application if you DO NOT belong to one of the Marketplace supported countries, go to: Yalla Apps Marketplace Policy Updates: Free App Marketplace Submission upped to 100 and other news Microsoft has been revisiting a few of our Marketplace policies based on feedback from developers to reduce friction and cost, word for word: 1. We have raised the limit on the number of certifications that can be performed for FREE apps at no cost to the registered developer from five to 100. This was a common request from developers which we are glad to implement after building alternate methods to ensure that users can find and download high quality apps. 2. We have converted policy 5.6 - related to the inclusion of contact information for support - from a mandatory to an optional policy. This is still a strongly recommended best practice, but we recognized and responded to developer feedback that this policy was creating excessive drag on the certification process for developers without commensurate user benefit for all apps. 3. We also understand the desire for clarification with regard to our policy on applications distributed under open source licenses.  The Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (APA) already permits applications under the BSD, MIT, Apache Software License 2.0 and Microsoft Public License.  We plan to update the APA shortly to clarify that we also permit applications under the Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License and other, similar licenses and we continue to explore the possibility of accommodating additional OSS licenses. Enjoy and happy coding! Official Blog Post for reference.

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• Visual WebGui's XAML based programming for web developers

  - by Webgui

  While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk. Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server to AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user productivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives. "When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui , I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT). So I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How” and embraced the Form based approach," said Guy Peled the inventor of Visual WebGui. Although traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. As a result, we now see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM). However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability. The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compilation provide over classic development are mostly the flexibility and a more readable initialize component it offers which is what Gizmox is aspiring to do by replacing the designer initialize component with XAML code. The code in this new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has. This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production. VWG XAML implementation (VWG Sites) will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative. VWG Sites will also be the first server side XAML UI engine which, while giving the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side. Short demo video of VWG Sites markup. There is also a live sample available here.

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• JFall 2012

  - by Geertjan

  JFall 2012 was over far too soon! Seven tracks going on simultaneously in a great location, with many artifacts reminding me of JavaOne, and nice snacks and drinks afterwards. The day started, as such things always do, with a keynote. Thanks to @royvanrijn for the photo below, I didn't take any myself and without a picture this report might have been too dry: What you see above is Steve Chin riding into the keynote hall on his NightHacking bike. The keynote was interesting, I can't be too complimentary about it, since I was part of it myself. Bert Ertman introduced the day and then Steve Chin took over, together with Sharat Chander, Tom Eugelink, Timon Veenstra, and myself. We had a strict choreography for the keynote, one that would ensure a lot of variation and some unexpected surprises, such as Steve being thrown off the stage a few times by Bert because of mentioning JavaOne too many times, rather than the clearly much cooler JFall. Steve talked about JavaOne and the direction Java is headed in, Sharat talked about JavaME and embedded devices, Steve and Tom did a demo involving JavaFX, I did a Project Easel demo, and Timon from Ordina talked about his Duke's Choice Award winning AgroSense project. I think the Project Easel demo (which I repeated later in a screencast for Parleys arranged by Eugene Boogaart) came across well and several people I spoke to especially like the roundtrip/bi-directional work that can be done, from browser to IDE and back again, very simply and intuitively. (In a long conversation on the drive back home afterwards, the scenario of a designer laying out the UI in HTML and then handing the HTML to a developer for back-end work, a developer who would then find it convenient to open the HTML in a browser and quickly navigate from the browser to the resources within the IDE, was discussed and considered to be extremely interesting and worth considering adopting NetBeans for, for no other reason than that.) Later I attended a session by David Delabassee on Java EE 7, Hans Dockter on Gradle, and Sander Mak on cross-build injection attacks. I was sorry to have missed Martijn Verburg's session, which sounded like it was really fantastic, among others, such as Gerrit Grunwald. I did a session too, entitled "Unlocking the Java EE 6 Platform", which was very well attended, pretty much a full room, and the demo went very smoothly. I talked to many people, e.g., a long time with Hans Dockter about how cool Gradle is and how great the Gradle/NetBeans plugin is turning out to be. I also had a long conversation (and did a demo) with Chris Chedgey, from Structure101, after his session, which was incredibly well attended; very interesting how popular modularity is. I met several people for the first time, as well as some colleagues from past places I've worked at. All in all, it was a great conference, unfortunately too short, which was very well attended (clearly over 1000) people, with several international speakers, as well as international attendees such as Mattias Karlsson, Sweden JUG leader. And, unsurprisingly, I came across NetBeans Platform applications again, none of which I had ever heard of before. In each case, "our fat client application" was mentioned in passing, never as a main application, and never in a context where there are plans for the application to be migrated to the web or mobile, simply because doing so makes no business sense at all. Great times at JFall, looking forward to meeting with some of the people I met again soon.

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• The Evolution of Oracle Direct EMEA by John McGann

  - by user769227

  John is expanding his Dublin based team and is currently recruiting a Director with marketing and sales leadership experience: http://bit.ly/O8PyDF Should you wish to apply, please send your CV to [email protected] Hi, my name is John McGann and I am part of the Oracle Direct management team, based in Dublin.   Today I’m writing from the Oracle London City office, right in the heart of the financial district and up to very recently at the centre of a fantastic Olympic Games. The Olympics saw individuals and teams from across the globe competing to decide who is Citius, Altius, Fortius - “Faster, Higher, Stronger" There are lots of obvious parallels between the competitive world of the Olympics and the Business environments that many of us operate in, but there are also some interesting differences – especially in my area of responsibility within Oracle. We are of course constantly striving to be the best - the best solution on offer for our clients, bringing simplicity to their management, consumption and application of information technology, and the best provider when compared with our many niche competitors.   In Oracle and especially in Oracle Direct, a key aspect of how we achieve this is what sets us apart from the Olympians.  We have long ago eliminated geographic boundaries as a limitation to what we can achieve. We assemble the strongest individuals across multiple countries and bring them together in teams focussed on a single goal. One such team is the Oracle Direct Sales Programs team. In case you don’t know, Oracle Direct EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) is the inside sales division in Oracle and it is where I started my Oracle career.  I remember that my first role involved putting direct mail in envelopes.... things have moved on a bit since then – for me, for Oracle Direct and in how we interact with our customers. Today, the team of over 1000 people is located in the different Oracle Direct offices around Europe – the main ones are Malaga, Berlin, Prague and Dubai plus the headquarters in Dublin. We work in over 20 languages and are in constant contact with current and future Oracle customers, using the latest internet and telephone technologies to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other, our customers and prospects. One of my areas of responsibility within Oracle Direct is the Sales Programs team. This team of 25 people manages the planning and execution of demand generation, leading the process of finding new and incremental revenue within Oracle Direct. The Sales Programs Managers or ‘SPMs’ are embedded within each of the Oracle Direct sales teams, focussed on distinct geographies or product groups. The SPMs are virtual members of the regional sales management teams, and work closely with the sales and marketing teams to define and deliver demand generation activities. The customer contact elements of these activities are executed via the Oracle Direct Sales and Business Development/Lead Generation teams, to deliver the pipeline required to meet our revenue goals. Activities can range from pan-EMEA joint sales and marketing campaigns, to very localised niche campaigns. The campaigns might focus on particular segments of our existing customers, introducing elements of our evolving solution portfolio which customers may not be familiar with. The Sales Programs team also manages ‘Nurture’ activities to ensure that we develop potential business opportunities with contacts and organisations that do not have immediate requirements. Looking ahead, it is really important that we continue to evolve our ability to add value to our clients and reduce the physical limitations of our distance from them through the innovative application of technology. This enables us to enhance the customer buying experience and to enable the Inside Sales teams to manage ever more complex sales cycles from start to finish.  One of my expectations of my team is to actively drive innovation in how we leverage data to better understand our customers, and exploit emerging technologies to better communicate with them.   With the rate of innovation and acquisition within Oracle, we need to ensure that existing and potential customers are aware of all we have to offer that relates to their business goals.   We need to achieve this via a coherent communication and sales strategy to effectively target the right people using the most effective medium. This is another area where the Sales Programs team plays a key role.

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• SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login

  - by pinaldave

  Some questions are very open ended and it is very hard to come up with exact requirements. Here is one question I was asked in recent User Group Meeting. Question: “In recent version of SQL Server we can create user without login. What is the use of it?” Great question indeed. Let me first attempt to answer this question but after reading my answer I need your help. I want you to help him as well with adding more value to it. Answer: Let us visualize a scenario. An application has lots of different operations and many of them are very sensitive operations. The common practice was to do give application specific role which has more permissions and access level. When a regular user login (not system admin), he/she might have very restrictive permissions. The application itself had a user name and password which means applications can directly login into the database and perform the operation. Developers were well aware of the username and password as it was embedded in the application. When developer leaves the organization or when the password was changed, the part of the application had to be changed where the same username and passwords were used. Additionally, developers were able to use the same username and password and login directly to the same application. In earlier version of SQL Server there were application roles. The same is later on replaced by “User without Login”. Now let us recreate the above scenario using this new “User without Login”. In this case, User will have to login using their own credentials into SQL Server. This means that the user who is logged in will have his/her own username and password. Once the login is done in SQL Server, the user will be able to use the application. Now the database should have another User without Login which has all the necessary permissions and rights to execute various operations. Now, Application will be able to execute the script by impersonating “user without login – with more permissions”. Here there is assumed that user login does not have enough permissions and another user (without login) there are more rights. If a user knows how the application is using the database and their various operations, he can switch the context to user without login making him enable for doing further modification. Make sure to explicitly DENY view definition permission on the database. This will make things further difficult for user as he will have to know exact details to get additional permissions. If a user is System Admin all the details which I just mentioned in above three paragraphs does not apply as admin always have access to everything. Additionally, the method describes above is just one of the architecture and if someone is attempting to damage the system, they will still be able to figure out a workaround. You will have to put further auditing and policy based management to prevent such incidents and accidents. I guess this is my answer. I read it multiple times but I still feel that I am missing something. There should be more to this concept than what I have just described. I have merely described one scenario but there will be many more scenarios where this situation will be useful. Now is your turn to help – please leave a comment with the additional suggestion where exactly “User without Login” will be useful as well did I miss anything when I described above scenario. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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