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  • Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

    - by sathya
    Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics :   Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600  as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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  • Chock-full of Identity Customers at Oracle OpenWorld

    - by Tanu Sood
      Oracle Openworld (OOW) 2012 kicks off this coming Sunday. Oracle OpenWorld is known to bring in Oracle customers, organizations big and small, from all over the world. And, Identity Management is no exception. If you are looking to catch up with Oracle Identity Management customers, hear first-hand about their implementation experiences and discuss industry trends, business drivers, solutions and more at OOW, here are some sessions we recommend you attend: Monday, October 1, 2012 CON9405: Trends in Identity Management 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Moscone West 3003 Subject matter experts from Kaiser Permanente and SuperValu share the stage with Amit Jasuja, Snior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security to discuss how the latest advances in Identity Management are helping customers address emerging requirements for securely enabling cloud, social and mobile environments. CON9492: Simplifying your Identity Management Implementation 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Implementation experts from British Telecom, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC participate in a panel to discuss best practices, key strategies and lessons learned based on their own experiences. Attendees will hear first-hand what they can do to streamline and simplify their identity management implementation framework for a quick return-on-investment and maximum efficiency. CON9444: Modernized and Complete Access Management 4:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 We have come a long way from the days of web single sign-on addressing the core business requirements. Today, as technology and business evolves, organizations are seeking new capabilities like federation, token services, fine grained authorizations, web fraud prevention and strong authentication. This session will explore the emerging requirements for access management, what a complete solution is like, complemented with real-world customer case studies from ETS, Kaiser Permanente and TURKCELL and product demonstrations. Tuesday, October 2, 2012 CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 With more than 5 billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to encourage more and more user self service, business users are now primary end users for identity management installations.  Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? How do you externalize such entitlements to allow dynamic changes without having to touch the application code? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption.  Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience.  This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. Thursday, October 4, 2012 CON9662: Securing Oracle Applications with the Oracle Enterprise Identity Management Platform 2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Oracle Enterprise identity Management solutions are designed to secure access and simplify compliance to Oracle Applications.  Whether you are an EBS customer looking to upgrade from Oracle Single Sign-on or a Fusion Application customer seeking to leverage the Identity instance as an enterprise security platform, this session with Qualcomm and Oracle will help you understand how to get the most out of your investment. And here’s the complete listing of all the Identity Management sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.

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  • Randomly displayed flashing lines, no response to all shortcuts, just power off. [syslog included]

    - by B. Roland
    Hello! I have an old machine, and I want to use for that to learn employees how to use Ubuntu, and to be easyer to switch from Windows. I've been installed 10.04, and updated, but this strange stuff is happend. Graphical installion failed, same strange thing. With alternate workd. Sometimes, when I boot up, a boot message displayed: Keyboard failure..., often diplayed after reboot, and after shutdown, when I haven't plugged off from AC. I replaced the keyboard yet, same failure... If I powered off, and plugged off from AC, no keyboard problems displayed in boot time. Details Configuration: Dell OptiPlex GX60 - in original cover, no changes. 256 MB DDR 166 MHz Intel® Celeron® Processor 2.40 GHz Dell 0C3207 Base Board I know, that is not enough, but I have three other Nec compuers, with nearly similar config, and they works well with 9.10, 10.04, 10.10. Live CDs I've been tried with 10.04 and 10.10, but the problem is displayed too. With 9.10 no strange things displayed, but it froze, during a simple apt-get install. Syslog An error loop is logged here, but I paste the whole startup and error lines. The flashing lines are displayed sometimes immediately after login, but sometimes after 10 minutes, but once occured, that nothing happend. Strange thing is displayed immediately after login: here. An other boot, after some minutes, strange lines, and loop in log appeard: here. The loop should be that: Jan 23 00:20:08 machine_name kernel: [ 46.782212] [drm:i915_gem_entervt_ioctl] *ERROR* Reenabling wedged hardware, good luck Jan 23 00:20:08 machine_name kernel: [ 47.100033] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung Jan 23 00:20:08 machine_name kernel: [ 47.100045] render error detected, EIR: 0x00000000 Jan 23 00:20:08 machine_name kernel: [ 47.101487] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -5 (awaiting 16 at 9) Jan 23 00:20:11 machine_name kernel: [ 49.152020] [drm:i915_gem_idle] *ERROR* hardware wedged Jan 23 00:20:11 machine_name gdm-simple-slave[1245]: WARNING: Unable to load file '/etc/gdm/custom.conf': No such file or directory Jan 23 00:20:11 machine_name acpid: client 1239[0:0] has disconnected Jan 23 00:20:11 machine_name acpid: client connected from 1247[0:0] Jan 23 00:20:11 machine_name acpid: 1 client rule loaded UPDATE Added syslog things: before errors, error loop, the complete shutdown(after the big updates): Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Sucessfully called chroot. Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Sucessfully dropped privileges. Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Sucessfully limited resources. Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Running. Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Watchdog thread running. Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Canary thread running. Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Sucessfully made thread 1337 of process 1337 (n/a) owned by '1001' high priority at nice level -11. Jan 28 20:40:30 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jan 28 20:40:32 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Sucessfully made thread 1345 of process 1337 (n/a) owned by '1001' RT at priority 5. Jan 28 20:40:32 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Supervising 2 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jan 28 20:40:32 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Sucessfully made thread 1349 of process 1337 (n/a) owned by '1001' RT at priority 5. Jan 28 20:40:32 machine_name rtkit-daemon[1339]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jan 28 20:40:37 machine_name pulseaudio[1337]: ratelimit.c: 2 events suppressed Jan 28 20:41:33 machine_name AptDaemon: INFO: Initializing daemon Jan 28 20:41:44 machine_name kernel: [ 167.691563] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions Jan 28 20:47:33 machine_name AptDaemon: INFO: Quiting due to inactivity Jan 28 20:47:33 machine_name AptDaemon: INFO: Shutdown was requested Jan 28 20:59:50 machine_name kernel: [ 1253.840513] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions Jan 28 21:17:02 machine_name CRON[1874]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jan 28 21:17:38 machine_name kernel: [ 2321.553239] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions Jan 28 22:07:44 machine_name kernel: [ 5327.840254] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions Jan 28 22:17:02 machine_name CRON[2665]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jan 28 22:32:38 machine_name sudo: pam_sm_authenticate: Called Jan 28 22:32:38 machine_name sudo: pam_sm_authenticate: username = [some_user] Jan 28 22:32:38 machine_name sudo: pam_sm_authenticate: /home/some_user is already mounted Jan 28 22:57:03 machine_name kernel: [ 8286.641472] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions Jan 28 22:57:24 machine_name sudo: pam_sm_authenticate: Called Jan 28 22:57:24 machine_name sudo: pam_sm_authenticate: username = [some_user] Jan 28 22:57:24 machine_name sudo: pam_sm_authenticate: /home/some_user is already mounted Jan 28 23:07:42 machine_name kernel: [ 8925.272030] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung Jan 28 23:07:42 machine_name kernel: [ 8925.272048] render error detected, EIR: 0x00000000 Jan 28 23:07:42 machine_name kernel: [ 8925.272093] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -5 (awaiting 171453 at 171452) Jan 28 23:07:45 machine_name kernel: [ 8928.868041] [drm:i915_gem_idle] *ERROR* hardware wedged Jan 28 23:08:10 machine_name acpid: client 925[0:0] has disconnected Jan 28 23:08:10 machine_name acpid: client connected from 8127[0:0] Jan 28 23:08:10 machine_name acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jan 28 23:08:11 machine_name kernel: [ 8955.046248] [drm:i915_gem_entervt_ioctl] *ERROR* Reenabling wedged hardware, good luck Jan 28 23:08:12 machine_name kernel: [ 8955.364016] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung Jan 28 23:08:12 machine_name kernel: [ 8955.364027] render error detected, EIR: 0x00000000 Jan 28 23:08:12 machine_name kernel: [ 8955.364407] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -5 (awaiting 171457 at 171452) Jan 28 23:08:14 machine_name kernel: [ 8957.472025] [drm:i915_gem_idle] *ERROR* hardware wedged Jan 28 23:08:14 machine_name acpid: client 8127[0:0] has disconnected Jan 28 23:08:14 machine_name acpid: client connected from 8141[0:0] Jan 28 23:08:14 machine_name acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jan 28 23:08:15 machine_name kernel: [ 8958.671722] [drm:i915_gem_entervt_ioctl] *ERROR* Reenabling wedged hardware, good luck Jan 28 23:08:15 machine_name kernel: [ 8958.988015] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung Jan 28 23:08:15 machine_name kernel: [ 8958.988026] render error detected, EIR: 0x00000000 Jan 28 23:08:15 machine_name kernel: [ 8958.989400] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -5 (awaiting 171459 at 171452) Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: tty4 main process (848) killed by TERM signal Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: tty5 main process (856) killed by TERM signal Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name NetworkManager: nm_signal_handler(): Caught signal 15, shutting down normally. Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: tty2 main process (874) killed by TERM signal Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: tty3 main process (875) killed by TERM signal Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: tty6 main process (877) killed by TERM signal Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: cron main process (890) killed by TERM signal Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: tty1 main process (1146) killed by TERM signal Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name avahi-daemon[644]: Got SIGTERM, quitting. Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name avahi-daemon[644]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 10.238.11.134. Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name acpid: exiting Jan 28 23:08:16 machine_name init: avahi-daemon main process (644) terminated with status 255 Jan 28 23:08:17 machine_name kernel: Kernel logging (proc) stopped. Jan 28 23:09:00 machine_name kernel: imklog 4.2.0, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Jan 28 23:09:00 machine_name rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="4.2.0" x-pid="516" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] (re)start Jan 28 23:09:00 machine_name rsyslogd: rsyslogd's groupid changed to 103 Jan 28 23:09:00 machine_name rsyslogd: rsyslogd's userid changed to 101 Jan 28 23:09:00 machine_name rsyslogd-2039: Could no open output file '/dev/xconsole' [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2039 ] When I hit the On/Off button, the system shuts down normally. May be it a hardware problem, but I don't know... Can you say something useful to solve my problem?

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  • Robotic Arm &ndash; Hardware

    - by Szymon Kobalczyk
    This is first in series of articles about project I've been building  in my spare time since last Summer. Actually it all began when I was researching a topic of modeling human motion kinematics in order to create gesture recognition library for Kinect. This ties heavily into motion theory of robotic manipulators so I also glanced at some designs of robotic arms. Somehow I stumbled upon this cool looking open source robotic arm: It was featured on Thingiverse and published by user jjshortcut (Jan-Jaap). Since for some time I got hooked on toying with microcontrollers, robots and other electronics, I decided to give it a try and build it myself. In this post I will describe the hardware build of the arm and in later posts I will be writing about the software to control it. Another reason to build the arm myself was the cost factor. Even small commercial robotic arms are quite expensive – products from Lynxmotion and Dagu look great but both cost around USD $300 (actually there is one cheap arm available but it looks more like a toy to me). In comparison this design is quite cheap. It uses seven hobby grade servos and even the cheapest ones should work fine. The structure is build from a set of laser cut parts connected with few metal spacers (15mm and 47mm) and lots of M3 screws. Other than that you’d only need a microcontroller board to drive the servos. So in total it comes a lot cheaper to build it yourself than buy an of the shelf robotic arm. Oh, and if you don’t like this one there are few more robotic arm projects at Thingiverse (including one by oomlout). Laser cut parts Some time ago I’ve build another robot using laser cut parts so I knew the process already. You can grab the design files in both DXF and EPS format from Thingiverse, and there are also 3D models of each part in STL. Actually the design is split into a second project for the mini servo gripper (there is also a standard servo version available but it won’t fit this arm).  I wanted to make some small adjustments, layout, and add measurements to the parts before sending it for cutting. I’ve looked at some free 2D CAD programs, and finally did all this work using QCad 3 Beta with worked great for me (I also tried LibreCAD but it didn’t work that well). All parts are cut from 4 mm thick material. Because I was worried that acrylic is too fragile and might break, I also ordered another set cut from plywood. In the end I build it from plywood because it was easier to glue (I was told acrylic requires a special glue). Btw. I found a great laser cutter service in Kraków and highly recommend it (www.ebbox.com.pl). It cost me only USD $26 for both sets ($16 acrylic + $10 plywood). Metal parts I bought all the M3 screws and nuts at local hardware store. Make sure to look for nylon lock (nyloc) nuts for the gripper because otherwise it unscrews and comes apart quickly. I couldn’t find local store with metal spacers and had to order them online (you’d need 11 x 47mm and 3 x 15mm). I think I paid less than USD $10 for all metal parts. Servos This arm uses five standards size servos to drive the arm itself, and two micro servos are used on the gripper. Author of the project used Modelcraft RS-2 Servo and Modelcraft ES-05 HT Servo. I had two Futaba S3001 servos laying around, and ordered additional TowerPro SG-5010 standard size servos and TowerPro SG90 micro servos. However it turned out that the SG90 won’t fit in the gripper so I had to replace it with a slightly smaller E-Sky EK2-0508 micro servo. Later it also turned out that Futaba servos make some strange noise while working so I swapped one with TowerPro SG-5010 which has higher torque (8kg / cm). I’ve also bought three servo extension cables. All servos cost me USD $45. Assembly The build process is not difficult but you need to think carefully about order of assembling it. You can do the base and upper arm first. Because two servos in the base are close together you need to put first with one piece of lower arm already connected before you put the second servo. Then you connect the upper arm and finally put the second piece of lower arm to hold it together. Gripper and base require some gluing so think it through too. Make sure to look closely at all the photos on Thingiverse (also other people copies) and read additional posts on jjshortcust’s blog: My mini servo grippers and completed robotic arm  Multiply the robotic arm and electronics Here is also Rob’s copy cut from aluminum My assembled arm looks like this – I think it turned out really nice: Servo controller board The last piece of hardware I needed was an electronic board that would take command from PC and drive all seven servos. I could probably use Arduino for this task, and in fact there are several Arduino servo shields available (for example from Adafruit or Renbotics).  However one problem is that most support only up to six servos, and second that their accuracy is limited by Arduino’s timer frequency. So instead I looked for dedicated servo controller and found a series of Maestro boards from Pololu. I picked the Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller. It has many nice features including native USB connection, high resolution pulses (0.25µs) with no jitter, built-in speed and acceleration control, and even scripting capability. Another cool feature is that besides servo control, each channel can be configured as either general input or output. So far I’m using seven channels so I still have five available to connect some sensors (for example distance sensor mounted on gripper might be useful). And last but important factor was that they have SDK in .NET – what more I could wish for! The board itself is very small – half of the size of Tic-Tac box. I picked one for about USD $35 in this store. Perhaps another good alternative would be the Phidgets Advanced Servo 8-Motor – but it is significantly more expensive at USD $87.30. The Maestro Controller Driver and Software package includes Maestro Control Center program with lets you immediately configure the board. For each servo I first figured out their move range and set the min/max limits. I played with setting the speed an acceleration values as well. Big issue for me was that there are two servos that control position of lower arm (shoulder joint), and both have to be moved at the same time. This is where the scripting feature of Pololu board turned out very helpful. I wrote a script that synchronizes position of second servo with first one – so now I only need to move one servo and other will follow automatically. This turned out tricky because I couldn’t find simple offset mapping of the move range for each servo – I had to divide it into several sub-ranges and map each individually. The scripting language is bit assembler-like but gets the job done. And there is even a runtime debugging and stack view available. Altogether I’m very happy with the Pololu Mini Maestro Servo Controller, and with this final piece I completed the build and was able to move my arm from the Meastro Control program.   The total cost of my robotic arm was: $10 laser cut parts $10 metal parts $45 servos $35 servo controller ----------------------- $100 total So here you have all the information about the hardware. In next post I’ll start talking about the software that I wrote in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. Stay tuned!

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  • Creating and maintaining Orchard translations

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    Many volunteers have already stepped up to provide translations for Orchard. There are many challenges to overcome with translating such a project. Orchard is a very modular CMS, so the translation mechanism needs to account for the core as well as first and third party modules and themes. Another issue is that every new version of Orchard or of a module changes some localizable strings and adds new ones as others enter obsolescence. In order to address those problems, I've built a small Orchard module that automates some of the most complex tasks that maintaining a translation implies. In this post, I'll walk you through the operations I had to do to update the French translation for Orchard 1.0. In order to make sure you translate all the first party modules, I would recommend that you start from a full source code enlistment. The reason is that I'll show how you can extract the default en-US translation from any source code enlistment. That enables you to create a translation that is even more up-to-date than what is currently on the site. Alternatively, you could start by downloading the current en-US translation. If you decide to do so, just skip the relevant paragraphs. First, let's install the Orchard Translation Manager. I'm starting from a vanilla clone of the latest in the code repository. After you've setup the site, go into the dashboard and click on Gallery. Locate the Orchard Translation Manager in the list of modules and click "Install". Once the module is installed, you need to enable its one feature by going into Configuration/Features and clicking "Enable" next to Vandelay.TranslationManager. We're done with the setup that we need in order to start our translation work. We'll now switch to the command-line and to our favorite text editor. Open a command-line on the Orchard web site folder. I found the easiest way to do this is to do a SHIFT+right-click on the Orchard.Web folder in Windows Explorer and to click "Open command window here". Type bin\orchard to enter the Orchard command-line environment. If you do a "help commands" you should see four commands in the list that came from the module we just installed: extract default translation, install translation, package translation and sync translation. First, we're going to generate the default translation. Note that it is possible to generate that default translation for a specific list of modules and themes by using the /Extensions: switch, which should facilitate the translation of third party extensions, but in this tutorial we're going to generate it for the whole of the Orchard source code. extract default translation /Output:\temp .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This should have created an Orchard.en-us.po.zip file in the temp directory. Extract that archive into an orchard.po folder under \temp. The next step depends on whether you have an existing translation that you want to update or not. If you do have an existing translation, just extract it into the same \temp\orchard.po directory. That should result in a file structure where you have the default en-US translation alongside your own. If you don't have an existing translation, just continue, the commands will be the same. We are now going to synchronize those translations (or generate the stub for a new one if you didn't start from an existing translation). sync translation /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Culture:fr-FR After this command (where you should of course substitute fr-FR with the culture you're working on), we now have updated files that contain a few useful flags. Open each of the .po files under the culture you are working on (there should be around 36) with your favorite text editor. For all the strings that are still valid in the latest version, nothing changes and you don't need to do anything. For all the strings that disappeared from the default culture, the old translation will still be there but they will be prefixed with the following comment: # Obsolete translation Conveniently, all the obsolete strings will be grouped at the end of the file. You can select all those and delete them. For all the new strings, you will see the following comment: # Untranslated string This is where the hard work begins. You'll need to translate each of those new strings by entering the translation between the quotes in: msgstr "" Don't introduce hard carriage returns in the strings, just stay on one line (your text editor should do some reasonable wrapping so this shouldn't be a big deal). Once you're done with a file, save it. Make sure, and this is very important, that your text editor is saving using the UTF-8 encoding. In Notepad, that setting can be found in the file saving dialog by doing a "Save As" rather than a plain "Save": When all the po files have been edited, you are ready to package the translation for submission (a.k.a. sending e-mail to the localization mailing list). package translation /Culture:fr-FR /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Output:\temp You should now see a Orchard.fr-FR.po.zip file in temp that is ready to be submitted. That is, once you've tested it, which can be done by deploying it into the site: install translation \temp\orchard.fr-fr.po.zip Once this is done you can go into the dashboard under Configuration/Settings and click on "Add or remove supported cultures for the site". Choose your culture and click "Add". You can go back to settings and set the default culture. Save. You may now take a tour of the application and verify that everything works as expected: And that's it really. Creating a translation for Orchard is a matter of a few hours. If you don't see a translation for your culture, please consider creating it.

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  • User Experience Highlights in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools: Direct from Jeff Robbins

    - by mvaughan
    By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience  This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on the user experience (UX) highlights in various Oracle product families. The last posted interview was with Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy on upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite user experience highlights. You’ll see themes around productivity and efficiency, and get an early look at the latest mobile offerings coming through these product lines. Today’s post is on the user experience in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools. To learn more about what’s ahead, attend PeopleSoft or PeopleTools OpenWorld presentations.This interview is with Jeff Robbins, Senior Director, PeopleSoft Development. Jeff Robbins Q: How would you describe the vision you have for the user experience of PeopleSoft?A: Intuitive – Specifically, customers use PeopleSoft to help their employees do their day-to-day work, and the UI (user interface) has been helpful and assistive in that effort. If it’s not obvious what they need to do a task, then the UI isn’t working. So the application needs to make it simple for users to find information they need, complete a task, do all the things they are responsible for, and it really helps when the UI just makes sense. Productive – PeopleSoft is a tool used to support people to do their work, and a lot of users are measured by how much work they’re able to get done per hour, per day, etc. The UI needs to help them be as productive as possible, and can’t make them waste time or energy. The UI needs to reflect the type of work necessary for a task -- if it's data entry, the UI needs to assist the user to get information into the system. For analysts, the UI needs help users assess or analyze information in a particular way. Innovative – The concept of the UI being innovative is something we’ve been working on for years. It’s not just that we want to be seen as innovative, the fact is that companies are asking their employees to do more than they’ve ever asked before. More often companies want to roll out processes as employee or manager self-service, where an employee is responsible to review and maintain their own data. So we’ve had to reinvent, and ask,  “How can we modify the ways an employee interacts with our applications so that they can be more productive and efficient – even with tasks that are entirely unfamiliar?”  Our focus on innovation has forced us to design new ways for users to interact with the entire application.Q: How are the UX features you have delivered so far resonating with customers?  A: Resonating very well. We’re hearing tremendous responses from users, managers, decision-makers -- who are very happy with the improved user experience. Many of the individual features resonate well. Some have really hit home, others are better than they used to be but show us that there’s still room for improvement.A couple innovations really stand out; features that have a significant effect on how users interact with PeopleSoft.First, the deployment of PeopleSoft in a way that’s more like a consumer website with the PeopleSoft Home page and Dashboards.  This new approach is very web-centric, where users feel they’re coming to a website rather than logging into an enterprise application.  There’s lots of information from all around the organization collected in a way that feels very familiar to users. In order to do your job, you can come to this web site rather than having to learn how to log into an application and figure out a complicated menu. Companies can host these really rich web sites for employees that are home pages for accessing critical tasks and information. The UI elements of incorporating search into the whole navigation process is another hit. Rather than having to log in and choose a task from a menu, users come to the web site and begin a task by simply searching for data: themselves, another employee, a customer record, whatever.  The search results include the data along with a set of actions the user might take, completely eliminating the need to hunt through a complicated system menu. Search-centric navigation is really sitting well with customers who are trying to deploy an intuitive set of systems. Q: Are any UX highlights more popular than you expected them to be?  A: We introduced a feature called Pivot Grid in the last release, which is a combination of an interactive grid, like an Excel Pivot Table, along with a dynamic visual chart that automatically graphs the data. I wasn’t certain at first how extensively this would be used. It looked like an innovative tool, but it wasn’t clear how it would be incorporated in business process applications. The fact is that everyone who sees Pivot Grids is thrilled with that kind of interactivity.  It reflects the amount of analytical thinking customers are asking employees to do. Employees can’t just enter data any more. They must interact with it, analyze it, and make decisions. Pivot Grids fit into this way of working. Q: What can you tell us about PeopleSoft’s mobile offerings?A: A lot of customers are finding that mobile is the chief priority in their organization.  They tell us they want their employees to be able to access company information from their mobile devices.  Of course, not everyone has the same requirements, so we’re working to make sure we can help our customers accomplish what they’re trying to do.  We’ve already delivered a number of mobile features.  For instance, PeopleSoft home pages, dashboards and workcenters all work well on an iPad, straight out of the box.  We’ve delivered a number of key functions and tasks for mobile workers – those who are responsible for using a mobile device to manage inventory, for example.  Customers tell us they also need a holistic strategy, one that allows their employees to access nearly every task from a mobile device.  While we don’t expect users to do extensive data entry from their smartphone, it makes sense that they have access to company information and systems while away from their desk.  That’s where our strategy is going now.  We plan to unveil a number of new mobile offerings at OpenWorld.  Some will be available then, some shortly after. Q: What else are you working on now that you think is going to be exciting to customers at Oracle OpenWorld?A: Our next release -- the big thing is PeopleSoft 9.2, and we’ll be talking about the huge amount of work that’s gone into the next versions. A new toolset, 8.53, will be coming, and there’s a lot to talk about there, and the next generation of PeopleSoft 9.2.  We have a ton of new stuff coming.Q: What do you want PeopleSoft customers to know? A: We have been focusing on the user experience in PeopleSoft as a very high priority for the last 4 years, and it’s had interesting effects. One thing is that the application is better, more usable.  We’ve made visible improvements. Another aspect is that in customers’ minds, the PeopleSoft brand is being reinvigorated. Customers invested in PeopleSoft years ago, and then they weren’t sure where PeopleSoft was going.  This investment in the UI and overall user experience keeps PeopleSoft current, innovative and fresh.  Customers  are able to take advantage of a lot of new features, even on the older applications, simply by upgrading their PeopleTools. The interest in that ability has been tremendous. Knowing they have a lot of these features available -- right now, that’s pretty huge. There’s been a tremendous amount of positive response, just on the fact that we’re focusing on the user experience. Editor’s note: For more on PeopleSoft and PeopleTools user experience highlights, visit the Usable Apps web site.To find out more about these enhancements at Openworld, be sure to check out these sessions: GEN8928     General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product RoadmapCON9183     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap CON8932     New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business UserCON9196     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Roadmap: Mobile ApplicationsCON9186     Case Study: Delivering a Groundbreaking User Interface with PeopleSoft PeopleTools

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  • 15 Kasim 2012 Oracle Day

    - by TUFEKCIOGLU,FATIH
       15.Kasim'da Harbiye Istanbul Kongre Merkezi'nde düzenlenecek Oracle Day'e ait etkinlik bilgileri : Oracle Day etkinlik bilgileri için tiklayiniz    En Son Teknolojiden Faydalanin: Inovasyona ve Rekabete Zaman Birakin 15 Kasim 2012 Bulut Bilisim, Mobilite, Sosyal Medya ve Büyük Veri, bildigimiz dünyayi yeniden tanimliyor. Bu teknolojileri kurumuna ilk getirenlerden biri olun; daha hizli yeni ürün ve hizmet gelistirme, müsteri deneyimini iyilestirme ve yeni inovatif is modellerini hayata geçirme firsati yakalayarak rekabetteki konumunuzu güçlendirin. Oracle ve is ortaklari bu noktada size, teknolojik yenilikleri kurumunuza uyarlamanizda yardim ederken, sizin de piyasadaki degisimlerden rakiplerinizden önce avantaj elde etmenizi saglar. Oracle'in, birlikte çalismak için tasarlanmis olan yazilim ve donanimlarda en yeni teknolojileri kullanarak, bilgi teknolojilerini nasil sadelestirdigini ögrenmek için Oracle Day'de bize katilin. Oracle Day'de: Oracle'in Bulut Bilisim, Büyük Veri, Sosyal Medya, is uygulamalari çözümleri hakkinda bilgi edinme, Basarili is dönüsümleri hakkinda örnek basari hikayelerini dinleme, Sizinle ayni zorluklari tecrübe eden sektör çalisanlariyla biraraya gelme, Oracle uzmanlari ve is ortaklari ile tanisma ve yeni ürün tanitimlarini izleme, Oracle OpenWorld'den en yeni ürün bilgilerini edinme firsatini kaçirmayin... Saygilarimizla, Oracle Türkiye Hemen Kaydolun! Platin Sponsor Istanbul Kongre Merkezi Taskisla Caddesi Harbiye 34367 Istanbul / Türkiye 15 Kasim 2012, Persembe 08:30 - 18:30 LCV: [email protected] oracle.com/oracleday Bizi takip edin: #oracleday   Oracle Is Ortagi Müsteri Basari Hikayesi TROUG Sunum Ingilizce'dir  Günün Ajandasi 08:45-09:30 Kayit 09:30-10:00 Hos Geldiniz Filiz Dogan, Genel Müdür, Oracle Türkiye 10:00-10:30 Navigating Complexity by Simplifying I.T. Andrew Mendelsohn, Kidemli Baskan Yardimcisi, Oracle Veritabani Sunucu Teknolojileri, Oracle           10:30-11:00 Dönüsümsel Bulut Yolculugu Ilker Kuruöz, CIO, Turkcell 11:00-11:20 Yeni Dönemde Veri Merkezlerinin Olmazsa Olmazlari Yalim Eristiren, Genel Müdür Yardimcisi, Intel 11:20-11:30 Slimfit Feyza Narli, Is Çözümleri Direktörü, Innova 11:30-12:00 Java ile Inovasyon Cuma Yigit, Teknik Mimar, Etiya Yusuf Tok, Java Grup Yöneticisi, OBSS Ersun Engel, Satis Müdürü, Oracle 12:00-12:10  Kahve Molasi       1. SALON 2. SALON 3. SALON 4. SALON 5. SALON 6. SALON 7. SALON 8. SALON 9. SALON 10. SALON   Müsteri Deneyimi: Çalisaninizi Yetkinlestirin. Markanizi Güçlendirin. Is Süreçlerinde Degisim Daha Fazla Veri, Daha Hizli Sonuç: Isinizi Analitik Çözümlerle Güçlendirin Peki Ama Nasil? Bulut Uygulayicilari için Çözüm Haritasi Is Uygulamalarinizda Inovasyonun Gücünü Kullanin Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezi ile BT'nin Gücünü Ortaya Çikartin Oracle & Is Ortaklari Çözümleri - Basari Hikayeleri I Oracle & Is Ortaklari Çözümleri - Basari Hikayeleri II Oracle Finansal Hizmetler - Core Banking and Analytical Solutions Oracle User Group (TROUG) 12:10-12:40 Müsteri Deneyimi: Çalisaninizi Yetkinlestirin. Markanizi Güçlendirin. Tekfen Ceyhan Çelik Fabrikasi Maliyet Yönetimi ve Üretim Takibi Daha Fazla Veriyle, Daha Hizli Hareket: Yaraticiligi Aksiyonla Güçlendirme Architect Your Cloud: A Blueprint for Cloud Builders Technology Strategies that Drive Business Excellence: Get Social. Be Mobile. Run Cloud. Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezi ile BT'nin Gücünü Ortaya Çikartin Innovate with Oracle - Virtual Banking and Self Service Channels What's Next for Oracle Database?   Oracle Innova Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle 12:40-13:40 Ögle Yemegi 13:40-14:10 Uygulamalariniz Artik Bulutta 21. Yüzyilda Finans: Potansiyeli Kullanin - Sonuçlara Ulasin! "Düsünce Hizinda" Intel Islemcili Oracle Büyük Veri ve Is Analitigi Çözümleri Deniz Seviyesinden Bulutlara I CRM'inizi Sosyallestirin: Telaura Sosyal CRM Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezinde Trend: Sadelik Abone Bilgi Yönetim Sistemi (ABYS) Yüksek Oracle Veri Tabani Performansi - Oracle Veri Tabani Oracle Veri Depolama Sistemi ile Entegre Oldugunda Sigortacilikta Finansal Transformasyon ve Entegre Veri Ambari Çözümleri SQL/PLSQL Yeni Özellikler   Oracle Oracle Intel Oracle Etiya Oracle Inspirit Oracle Oraturk TROUG 14:10-14:20  Kahve Molasi 14:20-14:50 Satis ve Pazarlamada Sosyal Mecralar Müsteri Basari Hikayeleri Paneli: Degisim Yolculugu ve Sonuçlari Tukas'in Analitik Yolculugu Deniz Seviyesinden Bulutlara II Loupe: IP Tabanli Servisler için Proaktif Izleme Veri Merkezinizdeki Riskleri Ortadan Kaldirin Oracle iAS to WebLogic Migrasyonu Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance - Turkcell Deneyimleri Analytical Transformation - Risk and Finance Together to Address the Regulatory Changes Today and Tomorrow Veri Madenciligi Veritabaninda Yapilir: Uygulamalariyla Oracle R Enterprise ve Oracle Data Mining Opsiyonu   Oracle Akbank, Teknosa, Dogus Holding, Ceynak Gtech Oracle Netas Oracle OBSS Turkcell&Gantek Oracle TROUG 14:50-15:00  Kahve Molasi 15:00-15:30 Yetenek Yönetiminde Entegre Çözümler: Taleo ile Ise Alim Artik Daha Kolay Müsteri Basari Hikayeleri Paneli: Degisim Yolculugu ve Sonuçlari Büyük Veri & Exalytics - Exadata'nin Gelecek Rotasi - Bütünlesik (Engineered) Sistemler'de Ücretsiz Platin Hizmetleri Aksigorta Oracle ATS (Application Testing Suite) ile Uygulamalarini Nasil Test Ediyor? Üstün Performans ve Esneklik ile Servis Seviyenizi Arttirin Akilli Belediyecilik Uygulamalarinda Oracle BPM ile Süreç Yönetimi Teyp ile Uçtan Uca Yedekleme Çözümleri Connecting with Customers to Enhance Revenue Generation: Unleashing the Power of an Enterprise Revenue Management and Billing Solution Günümüzün Uygulama Mimarisi Sorunlari ve Çözüm Önerileri   Oracle Akbank, Teknosa, Dogus Holding, Ceynak Oracle Oracle Aksigorta Oracle Sampas Remivac Oracle TROUG 15:30-15:40  Kahve Molasi 15:40-16:10 JD Edwards Yeni Sürüm ile Satis Agi Yönetimi Oracle Policy Automation ile Türkçe Merkezi Is Kurallari Yönetimi Oracle BI ile Kurumsal Karne Çözümleri Turkcell Süperbulut ile Yazilim Artik Hizmetinizde Bütünlesik (Engineered) Sistemler Artik SAP Müsterilerinde de Fark Yaratiyor Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezi Olusturma: Denenmis ve Ispatlanmis Yöntemler Türk Telekom SOA Projesi Basari Hikayesi Yapi Kredi Sigorta Uygulamalarinda Son Kullanici Deneyimini Nasil Izliyor? 2013 NFC Trendleri Karagöz ile Hacivat Veri Tabaninda   TupperWare & Akademi Danismanlik Oracle Oracle Turkcell Oracle Oracle Türk Telekom Yapi Kredi Sigorta Smartsoft TROUG 16:10-16:20  Kahve Molasi 16:20-16:50 Tutarli, Tekil Veriye Yolculuk: Oracle Ana Veri Yönetimi Turkcell/Superonline'da Varlik Yönetimi Her Tür Verinin Endeca ile Rahat Analizi Bulut Bilisim'de Güvenlik Nasil Saglanir? Rekabette Kazanmak: GoldenGate ile Dogru Kararlari Rakiplerinizden Önce Verin. Veri Merkeziniz için Bulut Altyapi Stratejileri Oracle Orkestrasi: Çok Sesli Yönetime Kulak Verin Lojistik Zekasi / Horoz Lojistik Basari Hikayesi Bütünlesik Sistemler (Engineered Systems) ile Yüksek Performansli Java Uygulamalari International Growth - Helping the Banks Standardize Overseas Operations Oracle Big Data   Oracle Turkcell Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Kora & Horoz Lojistik Oracle Oracle TROUG 16:50-18:30  Kokteyl     Eger bir kamu kurumunun/kurulusunun çalisani veya görevlisi iseniz, bu etkinlige iliskin önemli etik kurallara iliskin bilgi için lütfen buraya tiklayiniz Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Bize Ulasin | Yasal Uyarilar | Gizlilik Beyani

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 09, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 09, 2010New ProjectsArtificial Spy: ASPX, C#, XML, This is big project for creation application for: People Search. People connection. Background check. Crime Prevention. Socia...Chef Framework: CHEF: CSS, HTML, Events, & Functions. Is a collection of libraries to help build concerns separated websites.Crabit Full File Manger: File manager SystemEPiMVC - EPiServer CMS with ASP.NET MVC: A framework for using EPiServer CMS with ASP.NET MVC.Fimyid IX: all My projects In ONE!Hosting Folder Sizes: When you run a hosting environment with the ability to upload files, and you're charging per gigabyte per month, you need quick statistics about di...Let's Up: A tool that breaks you every 50 minutes to protect your health.MediaXenter: MediaXenterMSClub BY: Microsoft community web-site projectOrbisArca: Windows Mobile gameSpatial Gateway: A common and standardized way of accessing spatial data stored in different datastores. This also includes functionality for replication across dif...Squiggle - A Free open source Lan Messenger: Squiggle is a free lan messenger that does not require a server. Just download and run it and you're ready to talk to everyone on your lan. Squi...Video Downloader: Video Downloader makes it easier for developers to generate download links for videos from You-Tube. You'll no longer have to search through source...ViewModelSupport: This is not an MVVM framework. It is just the base class I use to reduce the friction when writing ViewModels. Making it public to share my ideas.WPF CCTV Surveillance Control with IP Cameras.: Integracion de Video IP en WPF. IP Camera. WPF dinamic Control and Events in Video System. Surveillance system. CCTV system. .NetNew Releases.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library: Release 2010.07: Added some extension methods for ICollection<T> and IList<T> for demonstrating the differences between both interfaces: - ICollection<T>.AddRangeU...bitly.net: bitly.dll: This is a .net DLL that works with the on-line URL shortening service bit.ly Compiled using .net 4.0 but the source code should run with version 2 ...Crabit Full File Manger: Crabit V1.0: Firts file manager system previewCSharp Intellisense: V1.9: this is a major release that was focus on bug fix, tooltip support and styling.Fimyid IX: fimyid ix 1.0: New Liscence!Gherkin editor: Beta: Added support for i18n (all languages supported by Gherkin/Cucumber are suported). Removed auto-completion of statements like As a user and followi...Grunty OS: GruntyOSAlphaSC: Grunty os sourceHKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201005081830): New features: Users can post new message or reply to a message. Special thanks for help from members 劉佳偉 (ID: 179892) and Maize. (ID: 142974). Bu...iLove SharePoint: Lookup Field with Picker 2010: Just forget the fuc**** dropdowns! Requirements: SharePoint Foundation 2010 Features * Single- and multi-Selection Mode * Search in pick...LazyNet: LazyNet Beta 2: Refresh Network Bug fixed.LazyNet: LazyNEt_Beta3: Beta 3 Release, Better Network RefreshingLazyNet: LazyNetBeta3_SRC: Refresh NetworkLet's Up: 1.0 (Build 100509): This is the first versionLive Distributed Objects: Windows Installer r48444 (2010-05-08): current development snapshotMDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.12.58576: Fixed presenting Hotfile's captcha. Fixed FilesTube searching. Fixed determining Rapidshare postpone period. Fixed minor bugs.NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.7: This release includes source code, executable binaries and example materials.SharpDevelop: SharpDevelop 3.2: Release notes: http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/t/11165.aspxSilverlight SDK for Bing: Silverlight SDK for Bing 1.4: Build for Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 Issues Addressed10337 10342 10367 10804 10805 10806 10807 DownloadsSilverlight SDK For B...sqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.252.0 (alpha): This release corrects a critical bug in Persistence.GameProvider.GetNextKingId. We strongly recommend you to upgrade to this version.Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.5.1: Added many features to Amazon Web Services Shell (AwsSh) Improved scalable table reader for SimpleDB multi-valued attributes Added more functio...TechEdOneNoter: TechEdOneNoter verison 2010.5.9.2010: TechEdOneNoter is a utility to create OneNote Pages based on sessions selected in the TechEd North America 2010 Session Builder. This is the first...Video Downloader: Version 1.0: Version 1.0 See Home Page for usage and more information. Please remember changes at You-Tube can prevent this software from working.Visual Studio - Lua Language Support: May 8th Update: Release NotesThis release adds collapsible functions and tables. What's new:Collapsible functions and tables Using latest version of Irony Maj...WPF CCTV Surveillance Control with IP Cameras.: Hungry Foxx CCTV Preview: Este release, corresponde a una muestra del programa completo. La idea es poder contar con una solucion para los integradores de sistemas CCTV o d...XsltDb - DotNetNuke XSLT module: 01.01.08: Bugs fixed: 17204 17203 Many new features, but undocumented yet. I'm going to update docs in a week or two, but...Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETPHPExcelMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrThe Information Literacy Education Learning Environment (ILE)AJAX Control FrameworkCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightMirror Testing SystemjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices - UnityBlogEngine.NETTweetSharp

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  • New Features in ASP.NET Web API 2 - Part I

    - by dwahlin
    I’m a big fan of ASP.NET Web API. It provides a quick yet powerful way to build RESTful HTTP services that can easily be consumed by a variety of clients. While it’s simple to get started using, it has a wealth of features such as filters, formatters, and message handlers that can be used to extend it when needed. In this post I’m going to provide a quick walk-through of some of the key new features in version 2. I’ll focus on some two of my favorite features that are related to routing and HTTP responses and cover additional features in a future post.   Attribute Routing Routing has been a core feature of Web API since it’s initial release and something that’s built into new Web API projects out-of-the-box. However, there are a few scenarios where defining routes can be challenging such as nested routes (more on that in a moment) and any situation where a lot of custom routes have to be defined. For this example, let’s assume that you’d like to define the following nested route:   /customers/1/orders   This type of route would select a customer with an Id of 1 and then return all of their orders. Defining this type of route in the standard WebApiConfig class is certainly possible, but it isn’t the easiest thing to do for people who don’t understand routing well. Here’s an example of how the route shown above could be defined:   public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "CustomerOrdersApiGet", routeTemplate: "api/customers/{custID}/orders", defaults: new { custID = 0, controller = "Customers", action = "Orders" } ); config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonpFormatter()); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   With attribute based routing, defining these types of nested routes is greatly simplified. To get started you first need to make a call to the new MapHttpAttributeRoutes() method in the standard WebApiConfig class (or a custom class that you may have created that defines your routes) as shown next:   public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { // Allow for attribute based routes config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes(); config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); } } Once attribute based routes are configured, you can apply the Route attribute to one or more controller actions. Here’s an example:   [HttpGet] [Route("customers/{custId:int}/orders")] public List<Order> Orders(int custId) { var orders = _Repository.GetOrders(custId); if (orders == null) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound)); } return orders; }   This example maps the custId route parameter to the custId parameter in the Orders() method and also ensures that the route parameter is typed as an integer. The Orders() method can be called using the following route: /customers/2/orders   While this is extremely easy to use and gets the job done, it doesn’t include the default “api” string on the front of the route that you might be used to seeing. You could add “api” in front of the route and make it “api/customers/{custId:int}/orders” but then you’d have to repeat that across other attribute-based routes as well. To simply this type of task you can add the RoutePrefix attribute above the controller class as shown next so that “api” (or whatever the custom starting point of your route is) is applied to all attribute routes: [RoutePrefix("api")] public class CustomersController : ApiController { [HttpGet] [Route("customers/{custId:int}/orders")] public List<Order> Orders(int custId) { var orders = _Repository.GetOrders(custId); if (orders == null) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound)); } return orders; } }   There’s much more that you can do with attribute-based routing in ASP.NET. Check out the following post by Mike Wasson for more details.   Returning Responses with IHttpActionResult The first version of Web API provided a way to return custom HttpResponseMessage objects which were pretty easy to use overall. However, Web API 2 now wraps some of the functionality available in version 1 to simplify the process even more. A new interface named IHttpActionResult (similar to ActionResult in ASP.NET MVC) has been introduced which can be used as the return type for Web API controller actions. To return a custom response you can use new helper methods exposed through ApiController such as: Ok NotFound Exception Unauthorized BadRequest Conflict Redirect InvalidModelState Here’s an example of how IHttpActionResult and the helper methods can be used to cleanup code. This is the typical way to return a custom HTTP response in version 1:   public HttpResponseMessage Delete(int id) { var status = _Repository.DeleteCustomer(id); if (status) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); } else { throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); } } With version 2 we can replace HttpResponseMessage with IHttpActionResult and simplify the code quite a bit:   public IHttpActionResult Delete(int id) { var status = _Repository.DeleteCustomer(id); if (status) { //return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); return Ok(); } else { //throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); return NotFound(); } } You can also cleanup post (insert) operations as well using the helper methods. Here’s a version 1 post action:   public HttpResponseMessage Post([FromBody]Customer cust) { var newCust = _Repository.InsertCustomer(cust); if (newCust != null) { var msg = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Created); msg.Headers.Location = new Uri(Request.RequestUri + newCust.ID.ToString()); return msg; } else { throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.Conflict); } } This is what the code looks like in version 2:   public IHttpActionResult Post([FromBody]Customer cust) { var newCust = _Repository.InsertCustomer(cust); if (newCust != null) { return Created<Customer>(Request.RequestUri + newCust.ID.ToString(), newCust); } else { return Conflict(); } } More details on IHttpActionResult and the different helper methods provided by the ApiController base class can be found here. Conclusion Although there are several additional features available in Web API 2 that I could cover (CORS support for example), this post focused on two of my favorites features. If you have .NET 4.5.1 available then I definitely recommend checking the new features out. Additional articles that cover features in ASP.NET Web API 2 can be found here.

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  • Feedback on IE9 developer tool

    - by anirudha
    if you already love IE9 this post really not for you. but still you need something more this post for you and want to know about IE9 why not use product guide they give you IE9 product guide well i already put the bad experience into many post here but a little practice more to show what IE9 actually is or what they show. well i believe that their is no one on MSDN can sure that IE9 is another thing for developer to struggle with. because they never thing about the thing they make. the thinking they have that we product windows who are best so everything we do are best and best. come to the point i means Web browsing we can divide them in two parts 1. someone who are developer and use browser mainly for development , debugging and testing what they produced and make better software. 2. user who are not know things more technically but use the web as their passion. so as a developer what developer want. are IE9 is really for developer now make a comparison. commonly every developer have a twitter account to follow the link of someone else to learn and read the best article on web and share to all follower of themselves. chrome and Firefox have many utilities for that but IE still have nothing. social networking is a good way to communicate with others. in IE their is no plug-in to make experience better as firefox and chrome have a list of plug-in to use browser with more comfort. their are a huge list of plug-in on Firefox and chrome is available for making experience better. but IE9 still have no plug-in for that. if you see http://ieaddons.com/ you still see that they are joking yeah white joke who believe on them. they still have no plug-in. are they fool or making other fool. on 2011 whenever Firefox and chrome claim many thing on the plug-in IE9 still have no plug-in. not for developer not for everyone else. yeah a list of useless stuff you can see their. IE9 developer tool maybe better if they copycat the firebug as they copycat Google’s search result for Bing. well it’ not sure but Google claim that. but what is in IE9 developer tool so great that MSDN developer talking about. i found nothing in IE9 developer tool still feel frustrated their is a big trouble to edit css. means you never can change the css without going to CSS tab. but i thing great many thing they make better their but they still produce not better option in IE9 developer tool. as a comparison firebug is great we all know but chrome is a good option if someone want to try their hands on new things. in firebug their is a list of plugin inside firebug available also to make task easier. like firepicker in firebug make colorpicking easier. firebug autocomplete make console script writing better and yslow show you the performance step you need to take for making site better. IE9 still have no plugin or that. IE9 maybe useful stuff whenever the interface they thing to make better. the problem with MSFT these days that they want to ship next version of every softare in WPF. yeah they make live 2011 in wpf. many of user go for someone else or downgrade their 2011 live. the problem they have that they never want to spent the time on learning to use a software again. IE9 not have the serius problem like live have but still IE9 is not so great as chrome. like in chrome their is smooth tabbing. IE9 ditto copycat the things for tabbing. but a little step more in IE have a problem that IE9 tab slip whenever you want to use them. in chrome never slip the tab without user want. well as user someone also want to paint their browser in the style they want or like. in firefox the sollution called personas or themes. same in chrome the things called themes but in IE they still believe that their is no need for them. means use same themes everytime no customization in 2011 yeah great joke. well i read a post [written in 2008] of developer who still claim that they never used Firefox because they have a license for visual studio and some other software and have IE in their system. i not what they want to show. means they always want or thing to show that firefox and chrome is pity and IE is great as all do. but what’s true we all know. when MSFT release IE9 RC they show the ads with comparison of IE9 RC with chrome6 but why not today with chrome 11 developer version. the many things on IE testdrive now work perfect on chrome. well what’s performance matter when a silly browser never give a better experience. yeah performance have matter in useful software. anyone can prove many things whenever they produce a featureless software. well IE9 is looking great in blogger’s post on many kind of website where developer not independently write. actually they are mentally forced to write for IE9 better and show blah blah even blah is very small as they show. i am not believe on some blogger when they write in a style who are easily known that the post in favor of IE9. if you thing of mine then i am not want to hide myself i am one of the lover of open source so i love Firefox and chrome both. but i am not wrong you find yourself that what is difference between IE9 and Firefox and chrome. so don’t believe on someone who are not mentally independent because most of them are write about IE9 because they want to show them better they are forced themselves to show IE9 as a tool and chrome and firefox as pity. well read everything but never believe on everyone without any confident of them. they actually all want to show the things they have as i have with chrome and firefox is better then IE9. so my feedback on IE9 is :- without any plugin , customization or many thing i described in the post make no sense of use of IE9. i still fall in love of firefox and chrome they both give a better support and things to make experience better on the web. so conclusion is that i not forced you to other not IE9. you need to use the tool who save your time. means if your IE9 save your time you should use them because time was more subjective then others. so use the software who save the time as i save my time in chrome and in firefox. i still found nothing inIE9 who save time of mine.

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  • Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Over the years, I endured enough delayed flights, air turbulence and misadventures in airport security clearance to watch my expectations for the air travel experience fall to abysmally low levels. The extent of my loyalty to any one carrier had more to do with the proximity of the airport parking garage to their particular gate than to any effort on the airline’s part to actually earn and retain my business. That all changed one day when I found myself at the airport hoping to catch a return flight home a few hours earlier than expected, using an airline I had flown with for the first time just that week.  When you travel regularly for business, being able to catch a return flight home that’s even an hour or two earlier than originally scheduled is a big deal. It can mean the difference between having a normal evening with your family and having to sneak in like a cat burglar after everyone is fast asleep. And so I found myself on this particular day hoping to catch an earlier flight home. I approached the gate agent and was told that I could go on standby for their next flight out. Then I asked how much it was going to cost to change the flight, knowing full well that I wouldn’t get reimbursed by my company for any change fees. “Oh, there’s no charge to fly on standby,” the gate agent told me. I made a funny look. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This airline was going to let my fly on standby, at no additional charge, even though I was a new customer with no status or points. It had been years since I’d seen an airline pass up a short term revenue generating opportunity in favor of a long term loyalty generating one.  At that moment, this particular airline gained my loyal business. Since then, this airline has had the opportunity to learn a lot about me. They know where I live, where I fly from, where I usually fly to, and where I like to sit on the plane. In general, I’ve found their customer service to be quite good whether at the airport, via call center and even through social channels. They email me occasionally, and when they do, they demonstrate that they know me by promoting deals for flights from where I live to places that I’d be interested in visiting. And that’s part of why I’m always so puzzled when I visit their website.Does this company with the great service, customer friendly policies, and clean planes demonstrate that they know me at all when I visit their website? The answer is no. Even when I log in using my loyalty program credentials, it’s pretty obvious that they’re presenting the same old home page and same old offers to every single one of their site visitors. I mean, those promotional offers that they’re featuring so prominently  -- they’re for flights that originate thousands of miles from where I live! There’s no way I’d ever book one of those flights and I’m sure I’m not the only one of their customers to feel that way.My reason for recounting this story is not to pick on the one customer experience flaw I've noticed with this particular airline, in fact, they do so many things right that I’ll continue to fly with them. But I did want to illustrate just how glaringly obvious it is to customers today when a touch point they have with a brand is impersonal, unconnected and out of sync. As someone who’s spent a number of years in the web experience management and online marketing space, it particularly peeves me when that out of sync touch point is a brand’s website, perhaps because I know how important it is to make a customer’s online experience relevant and how many powerful tools are available for making a relevant experience a reality. The fact is, delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable or particularly effective in today’s world. Today’s savvy customers expect you to know who they are and to understand their preferences, behavior and relationship with your brand. Not only do they expect you to know about them, but they also expect you to demonstrate this knowledge across all of their touch points with your brand in a consistent and compelling fashion, whether it be on your traditional website, your mobile web presence or through various social channels.Delivering the kind of personalized online experiences that customers want can have tremendous business benefits. This is not just about generating feelings of goodwill and higher customer satisfaction ratings either. More relevant and personalized online experiences boost the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives and the statistics prove this out. Personalized web experiences can help increase online conversion rates by 70% -- that’s a huge number.1  And more than three quarters of consumers indicate that they’ve made additional online purchases based on personalized product recommendations.2Now if only this airline would get on board with delivering a more personalized online customer experience. I’d certainly be happier and more likely to spring for one of their promotional offers. And by targeting relevant offers on their home page to appropriate segments of their site visitors, I bet they’d be happier and generating additional revenue too. 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}  ***** If you're interested in hearing more perspectives on the benefits of demonstrating that you know your customers by delivering a more personalized experience, check out this white paper on creating a successful and meaningful customer experience on the web.  Also catch the video below on the business value of CX in attracting new customers featuring Oracle's VP of Customer Experience Strategy, Brian Curran. 1 Search Engine Watch 2 Marketing Charts

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  • Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

    - by Michael Hylton
    12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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  • Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

    - by Michael Snow
    12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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  • SQL SERVER – 3 Online SQL Courses at Pluralsight and Free Learning Resources

    - by pinaldave
    Usain Bolt is an inspiration for all. He broke his own record multiple times because he wanted to do better! Read more about him on wikipedia. He is great and indeed fastest man on the planet. Usain Bolt – World’s Fastest Man “Can you teach me SQL Server Performance Tuning?” This is one of the most popular questions which I receive all the time. The answer is YES. I would love to do performance tuning training for anyone, anywhere.  It is my favorite thing to do, and it is my favorite thing to train others in.  If possible, I would love to do training 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  To me, it doesn’t feel like a job. Of course, as much as I would love to do performance tuning 24/7/365, obviously I am just one human being and can only be in one place t one time.  It is also very difficult to train more than one person at a time, and it is difficult to train two or more people at a time, especially when the two people are at different levels.  I am also limited by geography.  I live in India, and adjust to my own time zone.  Trying to teach a live course from India to someone whose time zone is 12 or more hours off of mine is very difficult.  If I am trying to teach at 2 am, I am sure I am not at my best! There was only one solution to scale – Online Trainings. I have built 3 different courses on SQL Server Performance Tuning with Pluralsight. Now I have no problem – I am 100% scalable and available 24/7 and 365. You can make me say the same things again and again till you find it right. I am in your mobile, PC as well as on XBOX. This is why I am such a big fan of online courses.  I have recorded many performance tuning classes and you can easily access them online, at your own time.  And don’t think that just because these aren’t live classes you won’t be able to get any feedback from me.  I encourage all my viewers to go ahead and ask me questions by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever way you can get a hold of me. Here are details of three of my courses with Pluralsight. I suggest you go over the description of the course. As an author of the course, I have few FREE codes for watching the free courses. Please leave a comment with your valid email address, I will send a few of them to random winners. SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning  SQL Server performance tuning is an art to master – for developers and DBAs alike. This course takes a systematic approach to planning, analyzing, debugging and troubleshooting common query-related performance problems. This includes an introduction to understanding execution plans inside SQL Server. In this almost four hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 10:22 Execution Plan Basics 45:59 Essential Indexing Techniques 20:19 Query Design for Performance 50:16 Performance Tuning Tools 01:15:14 Tips and Tricks 25:53 Checklist: Performance Tuning 07:13 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics This course teaches you how to master the art of performance tuning SQL Server by better understanding indexes. In this almost two hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 02:03 Fundamentals of Indexing 22:21 Practical Indexing Implementation Techniques 37:25 Index Maintenance 16:33 Introduction to ColumnstoreIndex 08:06 Indexing Practical Performance Tips and Tricks 24:56 Checklist : Index and Performance 07:29 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Questions and Answers This course is designed to help you better understand how to use SQL Server effectively. The course presents many of the common misconceptions about SQL Server, and then carefully debunks those misconceptions with clear explanations and short but compelling demos, showing you how SQL Server really works. In this almost 2 hours and 15 minutes course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 00:54 Retrieving IDENTITY value using @@IDENTITY 08:38 Concepts Related to Identity Values 04:15 Difference between WHERE and HAVING 05:52 Order in WHERE clause 07:29 Concepts Around Temporary Tables and Table Variables 09:03 Are stored procedures pre-compiled? 05:09 UNIQUE INDEX and NULLs problem 06:40 DELETE VS TRUNCATE 06:07 Locks and Duration of Transactions 15:11 Nested Transaction and Rollback 09:16 Understanding Date/Time Datatypes 07:40 Differences between VARCHAR and NVARCHAR datatypes 06:38 Precedence of DENY and GRANT security permissions 05:29 Identify Blocking Process 06:37 NULLS usage with Dynamic SQL 08:03 Appendix Tips and Tricks with Tools 20:44 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL in Sixty Seconds You will have to login and to get subscribed to the courses to view them. Here are my free video learning resources SQL in Sixty Seconds. These are 60 second video which I have built on various subjects related to SQL Server. Do let me know what you think about them? Here are three of my latest videos: Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 Copy Column Headers from Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #027 Effect of Collation on Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #026 You can watch and learn at your own pace.  Then you can easily ask me any questions you have.  E-mail is easiest, but for really tough questions I’m willing to talk on Skype, Gtalk, or even Facebook chat.  Please do watch and then talk with me, I am always available on the internet! Here is the video of the world’s fastest man.Usain St. Leo Bolt inspires us that we all do better than best. We can go the next level of our own record. We all can improve if we have a will and dedication.  Watch the video from 5:00 mark. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology, Video

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  • How I do VCS

    - by Wes McClure
    After years of dabbling with different version control systems and techniques, I wanted to share some of what I like and dislike in a few blog posts.  To start this out, I want to talk about how I use VCS in a team environment.  These come in a series of tips or best practices that I try to follow.  Note: This list is subject to change in the future. Always use some form of version control for all aspects of software development. Development is an evolution.  Looking back at where we were is an invaluable asset in that process.  This includes data schemas and documentation. Reverting / reapplying changes is absolutely critical for efficient development. The tools I use: Code: Hg (preferred), SVN Database: TSqlMigrations Documents: Sometimes in code repository, also SharePoint with versioning Always tag a commit (changeset) with comments This is a quick way to describe to someone else (or your future self) what the changeset entails. Be brief but courteous. One or two sentences about the task, not the actual changes. Use precommit hooks or setup the central repository to reject changes without comments. Link changesets to documentation If your project management system integrates with version control, or has a way to externally reference stories, tasks etc then leave a reference in the commit.  This helps locate more information about the commit and/or related changesets. It’s best to have a precommit hook or system that requires this information, otherwise it’s easy to forget. Ability to work offline is required, including commits and history Yes this requires a DVCS locally but doesn’t require the central repository to be a DVCS.  I prefer to use either Git or Hg but if it isn’t possible to migrate the central repository, it’s still possible for a developer to push / pull changes to that repository from a local Hg or Git repository. Never lock resources (files) in a central repository… Rude! We have merge tools for a reason, merging sucked a long time ago, it doesn’t anymore… stop locking files! This is unproductive, rude and annoying to other team members. Always review everything in your commit. Never ever commit a set of files without reviewing the changes in each. Never add a file without asking yourself, deep down inside, does this belong? If you leave to make changes during a review, start the review over when you come back.  Never assume you didn’t touch a file, double check. This is another reason why you want to avoid large, infrequent commits. Requirements for tools Quickly show pending changes for the entire repository. Default action for a resource with pending changes is a diff. Pluggable diff & merge tool Produce a unified diff or a diff of all changes.  This is helpful to bulk review changes instead of opening each file. The central repository is not your own personal dump yard.  Breaking this rule is a sure fire way to get the F bomb dropped in front of your name, multiple times. If you turn on Visual Studio’s commit on closing studio option, I will personally break your fingers. By the way, the person(s) in charge of this feature should be fired and never be allowed near programming, ever again. Commit (integrate) to the central repository / branch frequently I try to do this before leaving each day, especially without a DVCS.  One never knows when they might need to work from remote the following day. Never commit commented out code If it isn’t needed anymore, delete it! If you aren’t sure if it might be useful in the future, delete it! This is why we have history. If you don’t know why it’s commented out, figure it out and then either uncomment it or delete it. Don’t commit build artifacts, user preferences and temporary files. Build artifacts do not belong in VCS, everything in them is present in the code. (ie: bin\*, obj\*, *.dll, *.exe) User preferences are your settings, stop overriding my preferences files! (ie: *.suo and *.user files) Most tools allow you to ignore certain files and Hg/Git allow you to version this as an ignore file.  Set this up as a first step when creating a new repository! Be polite when merging unresolved conflicts. Count to 10, cuss, grab a stress ball and realize it’s not a big deal.  Actually, it’s an opportunity to let you know that someone else is working in the same area and you might want to communicate with them. Following the other rules, especially committing frequently, will reduce the likelihood of this. Suck it up, we all have to deal with this unintended consequence at times.  Just be careful and GET FAMILIAR with your merge tool.  It’s really not as scary as you think.  I personally prefer KDiff3 as its merging capabilities rock. Don’t blindly merge and then blindly commit your changes, this is rude and unprofessional.  Make sure you understand why the conflict occurred and which parts of the code you want to keep.  Apply scrutiny when you commit a manual merge: review the diff! Make sure you test the changes (build and run automated tests) Become intimate with your version control system and the tools you use with it. Avoid trial and error as much as is possible, sit down and test the tool out, read some tutorials etc.  Create test repositories and walk through common scenarios. Find the most efficient way to do your work.  These tools will be used repetitively, so inefficiencies will add up. Sometimes this involves a mix of tools, both GUI and CLI. I like a combination of both Tortoise Hg and hg cli to get the job efficiently. Always tag releases Create a way to find a given release, whether this be in comments or an explicit tag / branch.  This should be readily discoverable. Create release branches to patch bugs and then merge the changes back to other development branch(es). If using feature branches, strive for periodic integrations. Feature branches often cause forked code that becomes irreconcilable.  Strive to re-integrate somewhat frequently with the branch this code will ultimately be merged into.  This will avoid merge conflicts in the future. Feature branches are best when they are mutually exclusive of active development in other branches. Use and abuse local commits , at least one per task in a story. This builds a trail of changes in your local repository that can be pushed to a central repository when the story is complete. Never commit a broken build or failing tests to the central repository. It’s ok for a local commit to break the build and/or tests.  In fact, I encourage this if it helps group the changes more logically.  This is one of the main reasons I got excited about DVCS, when I wanted more than one changeset for a set of pending changes but some files could be grouped into both changesets (like solution file / project file changes). If you have more than a dozen outstanding changed resources, there should probably be more than one commit involved. Exceptions when maintaining code bases that require shotgun surgery, in this case, it’s a design smell :) Don’t version sensitive information Especially usernames / passwords   There is one area I haven’t found a solution I like yet: versioning 3rd party libraries and/or code.  I really dislike keeping any assemblies in the repository, but seems to be a common practice for external libraries.  Please feel free to share your ideas about this below.    -Wes

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  • How do I set up MVP for a Winforms solution?

    - by JonWillis
    Question moved from Stackoverflow - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4971048/how-do-i-set-up-mvp-for-a-winforms-solution I have used MVP and MVC in the past, and I prefer MVP as it controls the flow of execution so much better in my opinion. I have created my infrastructure (datastore/repository classes) and use them without issue when hard coding sample data, so now I am moving onto the GUI and preparing my MVP. Section A I have seen MVP using the view as the entry point, that is in the views constructor method it creates the presenter, which in turn creates the model, wiring up events as needed. I have also seen the presenter as the entry point, where a view, model and presenter are created, this presenter is then given a view and model object in its constructor to wire up the events. As in 2, but the model is not passed to the presenter. Instead the model is a static class where methods are called and responses returned directly. Section B In terms of keeping the view and model in sync I have seen. Whenever a value in the view in changed, i.e. TextChanged event in .Net/C#. This fires a DataChangedEvent which is passed through into the model, to keep it in sync at all times. And where the model changes, i.e. a background event it listens to, then the view is updated via the same idea of raising a DataChangedEvent. When a user wants to commit changes a SaveEvent it fires, passing through into the model to make the save. In this case the model mimics the view's data and processes actions. Similar to #b1, however the view does not sync with the model all the time. Instead when the user wants to commit changes, SaveEvent is fired and the presenter grabs the latest details and passes them into the model. in this case the model does not know about the views data until it is required to act upon it, in which case it is passed all the needed details. Section C Displaying of business objects in the view, i.e. a object (MyClass) not primitive data (int, double) The view has property fields for all its data that it will display as domain/business objects. Such as view.Animals exposes a IEnumerable<IAnimal> property, even though the view processes these into Nodes in a TreeView. Then for the selected animal it would expose SelectedAnimal as IAnimal property. The view has no knowledge of domain objects, it exposes property for primitive/framework (.Net/Java) included objects types only. In this instance the presenter will pass an adapter object the domain object, the adapter will then translate a given business object into the controls visible on the view. In this instance the adapter must have access to the actual controls on the view, not just any view so becomes more tightly coupled. Section D Multiple views used to create a single control. i.e. You have a complex view with a simple model like saving objects of different types. You could have a menu system at the side with each click on an item the appropriate controls are shown. You create one huge view, that contains all of the individual controls which are exposed via the views interface. You have several views. You have one view for the menu and a blank panel. This view creates the other views required but does not display them (visible = false), this view also implements the interface for each view it contains (i.e. child views) so it can expose to one presenter. The blank panel is filled with other views (Controls.Add(myview)) and ((myview.visible = true). The events raised in these "child"-views are handled by the parent view which in turn pass the event to the presenter, and visa versa for supplying events back down to child elements. Each view, be it the main parent or smaller child views are each wired into there own presenter and model. You can literately just drop a view control into an existing form and it will have the functionality ready, just needs wiring into a presenter behind the scenes. Section E Should everything have an interface, now based on how the MVP is done in the above examples will affect this answer as they might not be cross-compatible. Everything has an interface, the View, Presenter and Model. Each of these then obviously has a concrete implementation. Even if you only have one concrete view, model and presenter. The View and Model have an interface. This allows the views and models to differ. The presenter creates/is given view and model objects and it just serves to pass messages between them. Only the View has an interface. The Model has static methods and is not created, thus no need for an interface. If you want a different model, the presenter calls a different set of static class methods. Being static the Model has no link to the presenter. Personal thoughts From all the different variations I have presented (most I have probably used in some form) of which I am sure there are more. I prefer A3 as keeping business logic reusable outside just MVP, B2 for less data duplication and less events being fired. C1 for not adding in another class, sure it puts a small amount of non unit testable logic into a view (how a domain object is visualised) but this could be code reviewed, or simply viewed in the application. If the logic was complex I would agree to an adapter class but not in all cases. For section D, i feel D1 creates a view that is too big atleast for a menu example. I have used D2 and D3 before. Problem with D2 is you end up having to write lots of code to route events to and from the presenter to the correct child view, and its not drag/drop compatible, each new control needs more wiring in to support the single presenter. D3 is my prefered choice but adds in yet more classes as presenters and models to deal with the view, even if the view happens to be very simple or has no need to be reused. i think a mixture of D2 and D3 is best based on circumstances. As to section E, I think everything having an interface could be overkill I already do it for domain/business objects and often see no advantage in the "design" by doing so, but it does help in mocking objects in tests. Personally I would see E2 as a classic solution, although have seen E3 used in 2 projects I have worked on previously. Question Am I implementing MVP correctly? Is there a right way of going about it? I've read Martin Fowler's work that has variations, and I remember when I first started doing MVC, I understood the concept, but could not originally work out where is the entry point, everything has its own function but what controls and creates the original set of MVC objects.

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  • Conversion of BizTalk Projects to Use the New WCF-SAP Adaptor

    - by Geordie
    We are in the process of upgrading our BizTalk Environment from BizTalk 2006 R2 to BizTalk 2010. The SAP adaptor in BizTalk 2010 is an all new and more powerful WCF-SAP adaptor. When my colleagues tested out the new adaptor they discovered that the format of the data extracted from SAP was not identical to the old adaptor. This is not a big deal if the structure of the messages from SAP is simple. In this case we were receiving the delivery and invoice iDocs. Both these structures are complex especially the delivery document. Over the past few years I have tweaked the delivery mapping to remove bugs from original mapping. The idea of redoing these maps did not appeal and due to the current work load was not even an option. I opted for a rather crude alternative of pulling in the iDoc in the new typed format and then adding a static map at the start of the orchestration to convert the data to the old schema.  Note WCF-SAP data formats (on the binding tab of the configuration dialog box is the ‘RecieiveIdocFormat’ field): Typed:  Returns a XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML and all fields being represented by XML tags. RFC: Returns an XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML but the iDoc lines in flat file format. String: This returns the iDoc in a format that is closest to the original flat file format but is still wrapped with some top level XML tags. The files also contained some strange characters at the end of each line. I started with the invoice document and it was quite straight forward to add the mapping but this is where my problems started. The orchestrations for these documents are dynamic and so require the identity of the partner to be able to correctly configure the orchestration. The partner identity is in the EDI_DC40 segment of the iDoc. In the old project the RECPRN node of the segment was promoted. The code to set a variable to the partner ID was now failing. After lot of head scratching I discovered the problem was due to the addition of Namespaces to the fields in the EDI_DC40 segment. To overcome this I needed to use an xPath query with a Namespace Manager. This had to be done in custom code. I now tried to repeat the process with the delivery document. Unfortunately when we tried to get sample typed data from SAP an exception was thrown. The adapter "WCF-SAP" raised an error message. Details "Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.XmlReaderGenerationException: The segment or group definition E2EDKA1001 was not found in the IDoc metadata. The UniqueId of the IDoc type is: IDOCTYP/3/DESADV01/ZASNEXT1/640. For Receive operations, the SAP adapter does not support unreleased segments.   Our guess is that when the WCF-SAP adaptor tries to down load the data it retrieves a data schema from SAP. For some reason the schema does not match the data. This may be due to the version of SAP we are running or due to a customization. Either way resolving this problem did not look easy. When doing some research on this problem I found an article showing me how to get the data from SAP using the WCF-SAP adaptor without any XML tags. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adapters/archive/2007/10/05/receiving-idocs-getting-the-raw-idoc-data.aspx Reproduction of Mustansir blog: Since the WCF based SAP Adapter is ... well, WCF based, all data flowing in and out of the adapter is encapsulated within a SOAP message. Which means there are those pesky xml tags all over the place. If you want to receive an Idoc from SAP, you can receive it in "Typed" format (in which case each column in each segment of the idoc appears within its own xml tag), or you can receive it in "String" format (in which case there are just 2 xml tags at the top, the raw xml data in string/flat file format, and the 2 closing xml tags). In "String" format, an incoming idoc (for ORDERS05, containing 5 data records) would look like: <ReceiveIdoc ><idocData>EDI_DC40 8000000000001064985620 E2EDK01005 800000000000106498500000100000001 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000002000000020111000 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000003000000020081000 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000040000000200710 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000050000000200600</idocData></ReceiveIdoc> (I have trimmed part of the control record so that it fits cleanly here on one line). Now, you're only interested in the IDOC data, and don't care much for the XML tags. It isn't that difficult to write your own pipeline component, or even some logic in the orchestration to remove the tags, right? Well, you don't need to write any extra code at all - the WCF Adapter can help you here! During the configuration of your one-way Receive Location using WCF-Custom, navigate to the Messages tab. Under the section "Inbound BizTalk Messge Body", select the "Path" radio button, and: (a) Enter the body path expression as: /*[local-name()='ReceiveIdoc']/*[local-name()='idocData'] (b) Choose "String" for the Node Encoding. What we've done is, used an XPATH to pull out the value of the "idocData" node from the XML. Your Receive Location will now emit text containing only the idoc data. You can at this point, for example, put the Flat File Pipeline component to convert the flat text into a different xml format based on some other schema you already have, and receive your version of the xml formatted message in your orchestration.   This was potentially a much easier solution than adding the static maps to the orchestrations and overcame the issue with ‘Typed’ delivery documents. Not quite so fast… Note: When I followed Mustansir’s blog the characters at the end of each line disappeared. After configuring the adaptor and passing the iDoc data into the original flat file receive pipelines I was receiving exceptions. There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "PAPINETPipelines.DeliveryFlatFileReceive, CustomerIntegration2.PAPINET.Pipelines, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4ca3635fbf092bbb" Source: "Pipeline " Receive Port: "recSAP_Delivery" URI: "D:\CustomerIntegration2\SAP\Delivery\*.xml" Reason: An error occurred when parsing the incoming document: "Unexpected data found while looking for: 'Z2EDPZ7' The current definition being parsed is E2EDP07GRP. The stream offset where the error occured is 8859. The line number where the error occured is 23. The column where the error occured is 0.". Although the new flat file looked the same as the old one there was a differences. In the original file all lines in the document were exactly 1064 character long. In the new file all lines were truncated to the last alphanumeric character. The final piece of the puzzle was to add a custom pipeline component to pad all the lines to 1064 characters. This component was added to the decode node of the custom delivery and invoice flat file disassembler pipelines. Execute method of the custom pipeline component: public IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pc, IBaseMessage inmsg) { //Convert Stream to a string Stream s = null; IBaseMessagePart bodyPart = inmsg.BodyPart;   // NOTE inmsg.BodyPart.Data is implemented only as a setter in the http adapter API and a //getter and setter for the file adapter. Use GetOriginalDataStream to get data instead. if (bodyPart != null) s = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream();   string newMsg = string.Empty; string strLine; try { StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s); strLine = sr.ReadLine(); while (strLine != null) { //Execute padding code if (strLine != null) strLine = strLine.PadRight(1064, ' ') + "\r\n"; newMsg += strLine; strLine = sr.ReadLine(); } sr.Close(); } catch (IOException ex) { throw new Exception("Error occured trying to pad the message to 1064 charactors"); }   //Convert back to stream and set to Data property inmsg.BodyPart.Data = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(newMsg)); ; //reset the position of the stream to zero inmsg.BodyPart.Data.Position = 0; return inmsg; }

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  • Use Autoruns to Manually Clean an Infected PC

    - by Mark Virtue
    There are many anti-malware programs out there that will clean your system of nasties, but what happens if you’re not able to use such a program?  Autoruns, from SysInternals (recently acquired by Microsoft), is indispensable when removing malware manually. There are a few reasons why you may need to remove viruses and spyware manually: Perhaps you can’t abide running resource-hungry and invasive anti-malware programs on your PC You might need to clean your mom’s computer (or someone else who doesn’t understand that a big flashing sign on a website that says “Your computer is infected with a virus – click HERE to remove it” is not a message that can necessarily be trusted) The malware is so aggressive that it resists all attempts to automatically remove it, or won’t even allow you to install anti-malware software Part of your geek credo is the belief that anti-spyware utilities are for wimps Autoruns is an invaluable addition to any geek’s software toolkit.  It allows you to track and control all programs (and program components) that start automatically with Windows (or with Internet Explorer).  Virtually all malware is designed to start automatically, so there’s a very strong chance that it can be detected and removed with the help of Autoruns. We have covered how to use Autoruns in an earlier article, which you should read if you need to first familiarize yourself with the program. Autoruns is a standalone utility that does not need to be installed on your computer.  It can be simply downloaded, unzipped and run (link below).  This makes is ideally suited for adding to your portable utility collection on your flash drive. When you start Autoruns for the first time on a computer, you are presented with the license agreement: After agreeing to the terms, the main Autoruns window opens, showing you the complete list of all software that will run when your computer starts, when you log in, or when you open Internet Explorer: To temporarily disable a program from launching, uncheck the box next to it’s entry.  Note:  This does not terminate the program if it is running at the time – it merely prevents it from starting next time.  To permanently prevent a program from launching, delete the entry altogether (use the Delete key, or right-click and choose Delete from the context-menu)).  Note:  This does not remove the program from your computer – to remove it completely you need to uninstall the program (or otherwise delete it from your hard disk). Suspicious Software It can take a fair bit of experience (read “trial and error”) to become adept at identifying what is malware and what is not.  Most of the entries presented in Autoruns are legitimate programs, even if their names are unfamiliar to you.  Here are some tips to help you differentiate the malware from the legitimate software: If an entry is digitally signed by a software publisher (i.e. there’s an entry in the Publisher column) or has a “Description”, then there’s a good chance that it’s legitimate If you recognize the software’s name, then it’s usually okay.  Note that occasionally malware will “impersonate” legitimate software, but adopting a name that’s identical or similar to software you’re familiar with (e.g. “AcrobatLauncher” or “PhotoshopBrowser”).  Also, be aware that many malware programs adopt generic or innocuous-sounding names, such as “Diskfix” or “SearchHelper” (both mentioned below). Malware entries usually appear on the Logon tab of Autoruns (but not always!) If you open up the folder that contains the EXE or DLL file (more on this below), an examine the “last modified” date, the dates are often from the last few days (assuming that your infection is fairly recent) Malware is often located in the C:\Windows folder or the C:\Windows\System32 folder Malware often only has a generic icon (to the left of the name of the entry) If in doubt, right-click the entry and select Search Online… The list below shows two suspicious looking entries:  Diskfix and SearchHelper These entries, highlighted above, are fairly typical of malware infections: They have neither descriptions nor publishers They have generic names The files are located in C:\Windows\System32 They have generic icons The filenames are random strings of characters If you look in the C:\Windows\System32 folder and locate the files, you’ll see that they are some of the most recently modified files in the folder (see below) Double-clicking on the items will take you to their corresponding registry keys: Removing the Malware Once you’ve identified the entries you believe to be suspicious, you now need to decide what you want to do with them.  Your choices include: Temporarily disable the Autorun entry Permanently delete the Autorun entry Locate the running process (using Task Manager or similar) and terminating it Delete the EXE or DLL file from your disk (or at least move it to a folder where it won’t be automatically started) or all of the above, depending upon how certain you are that the program is malware. To see if your changes succeeded, you will need to reboot your machine, and check any or all of the following: Autoruns – to see if the entry has returned Task Manager (or similar) – to see if the program was started again after the reboot Check the behavior that led you to believe that your PC was infected in the first place.  If it’s no longer happening, chances are that your PC is now clean Conclusion This solution isn’t for everyone and is most likely geared to advanced users. Usually using a quality Antivirus application does the trick, but if not Autoruns is a valuable tool in your Anti-Malware kit. Keep in mind that some malware is harder to remove than others.  Sometimes you need several iterations of the steps above, with each iteration requiring you to look more carefully at each Autorun entry.  Sometimes the instant that you remove the Autorun entry, the malware that is running replaces the entry.  When this happens, we need to become more aggressive in our assassination of the malware, including terminating programs (even legitimate programs like Explorer.exe) that are infected with malware DLLs. Shortly we will be publishing an article on how to identify, locate and terminate processes that represent legitimate programs but are running infected DLLs, in order that those DLLs can be deleted from the system. Download Autoruns from SysInternals Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Autoruns Tool to Track Startup Applications and Add-onsHow To Get Detailed Information About Your PCSUPERAntiSpyware Portable is the Must-Have Spyware Removal Tool You NeedQuick Tip: Windows Vista Temp Files DirectoryClear Recent Commands From the Run Dialog in Windows XP 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more Download Microsoft Office Help tab

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  • C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Timeout static class

    - by James Michael Hare
    Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. When I started the “Little Wonders” series, I really wanted to pay homage to parts of the .NET Framework that are often small but can help in big ways.  The item I have to discuss today really is a very small item in the .NET BCL, but once again I feel it can help make the intention of code much clearer and thus is worthy of note. The Problem - Magic numbers aren’t very readable or maintainable In my first Little Wonders Post (Five Little Wonders That Make Code Better) I mention the TimeSpan factory methods which, I feel, really help the readability of constructed TimeSpan instances. Just to quickly recap that discussion, ask yourself what the TimeSpan specified in each case below is 1: // Five minutes? Five Seconds? 2: var fiveWhat1 = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 5); 3: var fiveWhat2 = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 5, 0); 4: var fiveWhat3 = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 5, 0, 0); You’d think they’d all be the same unit of time, right?  After all, most overloads tend to tack additional arguments on the end.  But this is not the case with TimeSpan, where the constructor forms are:     TimeSpan(int hours, int minutes, int seconds);     TimeSpan(int days, int hours, int minutes, int seconds);     TimeSpan(int days, int hours, int minutes, int seconds, int milliseconds); Notice how in the 4 and 5 parameter version we suddenly have the parameter days slipping in front of hours?  This can make reading constructors like those above much harder.  Fortunately, there are TimeSpan factory methods to help make your intention crystal clear: 1: // Ah! Much clearer! 2: var fiveSeconds = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5); These are great because they remove all ambiguity from the reader!  So in short, magic numbers in constructors and methods can be ambiguous, and anything we can do to clean up the intention of the developer will make the code much easier to read and maintain. Timeout – Readable identifiers for infinite timeout values In a similar way to TimeSpan, let’s consider specifying timeouts for some of .NET’s (or our own) many methods that allow you to specify timeout periods. For example, in the TPL Task class, there is a family of Wait() methods that can take TimeSpan or int for timeouts.  Typically, if you want to specify an infinite timeout, you’d just call the version that doesn’t take a timeout parameter at all: 1: myTask.Wait(); // infinite wait But there are versions that take the int or TimeSpan for timeout as well: 1: // Wait for 100 ms 2: myTask.Wait(100); 3:  4: // Wait for 5 seconds 5: myTask.Wait(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5); Now, if we want to specify an infinite timeout to wait on the Task, we could pass –1 (or a TimeSpan set to –1 ms), which what the .NET BCL methods with timeouts use to represent an infinite timeout: 1: // Also infinite timeouts, but harder to read/maintain 2: myTask.Wait(-1); 3: myTask.Wait(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(-1)); However, these are not as readable or maintainable.  If you were writing this code, you might make the mistake of thinking 0 or int.MaxValue was an infinite timeout, and you’d be incorrect.  Also, reading the code above it isn’t as clear that –1 is infinite unless you happen to know that is the specified behavior. To make the code like this easier to read and maintain, there is a static class called Timeout in the System.Threading namespace which contains definition for infinite timeouts specified as both int and TimeSpan forms: Timeout.Infinite An integer constant with a value of –1 Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan A static readonly TimeSpan which represents –1 ms (only available in .NET 4.5+) This makes our calls to Task.Wait() (or any other calls with timeouts) much more clear: 1: // intention to wait indefinitely is quite clear now 2: myTask.Wait(Timeout.Infinite); 3: myTask.Wait(Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan); But wait, you may say, why would we care at all?  Why not use the version of Wait() that takes no arguments?  Good question!  When you’re directly calling the method with an infinite timeout that’s what you’d most likely do, but what if you are just passing along a timeout specified by a caller from higher up?  Or perhaps storing a timeout value from a configuration file, and want to default it to infinite? For example, perhaps you are designing a communications module and want to be able to shutdown gracefully, but if you can’t gracefully finish in a specified amount of time you want to force the connection closed.  You could create a Shutdown() method in your class, and take a TimeSpan or an int for the amount of time to wait for a clean shutdown – perhaps waiting for client to acknowledge – before terminating the connection.  So, assume we had a pub/sub system with a class to broadcast messages: 1: // Some class to broadcast messages to connected clients 2: public class Broadcaster 3: { 4: // ... 5:  6: // Shutdown connection to clients, wait for ack back from clients 7: // until all acks received or timeout, whichever happens first 8: public void Shutdown(int timeout) 9: { 10: // Kick off a task here to send shutdown request to clients and wait 11: // for the task to finish below for the specified time... 12:  13: if (!shutdownTask.Wait(timeout)) 14: { 15: // If Wait() returns false, we timed out and task 16: // did not join in time. 17: } 18: } 19: } We could even add an overload to allow us to use TimeSpan instead of int, to give our callers the flexibility to specify timeouts either way: 1: // overload to allow them to specify Timeout in TimeSpan, would 2: // just call the int version passing in the TotalMilliseconds... 3: public void Shutdown(TimeSpan timeout) 4: { 5: Shutdown(timeout.TotalMilliseconds); 6: } Notice in case of this class, we don’t assume the caller wants infinite timeouts, we choose to rely on them to tell us how long to wait.  So now, if they choose an infinite timeout, they could use the –1, which is more cryptic, or use Timeout class to make the intention clear: 1: // shutdown the broadcaster, waiting until all clients ack back 2: // without timing out. 3: myBroadcaster.Shutdown(Timeout.Infinite); We could even add a default argument using the int parameter version so that specifying no arguments to Shutdown() assumes an infinite timeout: 1: // Modified original Shutdown() method to add a default of 2: // Timeout.Infinite, works because Timeout.Infinite is a compile 3: // time constant. 4: public void Shutdown(int timeout = Timeout.Infinite) 5: { 6: // same code as before 7: } Note that you can’t default the ShutDown(TimeSpan) overload with Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan since it is not a compile-time constant.  The only acceptable default for a TimeSpan parameter would be default(TimeSpan) which is zero milliseconds, which specified no wait, not infinite wait. Summary While Timeout.Infinite and Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan are not earth-shattering classes in terms of functionality, they do give you very handy and readable constant values that you can use in your programs to help increase readability and maintainability when specifying infinite timeouts for various timeouts in the BCL and your own applications. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Timeout,Task

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  • Of C# Iterators and Performance

    - by James Michael Hare
    Some of you reading this will be wondering, "what is an iterator" and think I'm locked in the world of C++.  Nope, I'm talking C# iterators.  No, not enumerators, iterators.   So, for those of you who do not know what iterators are in C#, I will explain it in summary, and for those of you who know what iterators are but are curious of the performance impacts, I will explore that as well.   Iterators have been around for a bit now, and there are still a bunch of people who don't know what they are or what they do.  I don't know how many times at work I've had a code review on my code and have someone ask me, "what's that yield word do?"   Basically, this post came to me as I was writing some extension methods to extend IEnumerable<T> -- I'll post some of the fun ones in a later post.  Since I was filtering the resulting list down, I was using the standard C# iterator concept; but that got me wondering: what are the performance implications of using an iterator versus returning a new enumeration?   So, to begin, let's look at a couple of methods.  This is a new (albeit contrived) method called Every(...).  The goal of this method is to access and enumeration and return every nth item in the enumeration (including the first).  So Every(2) would return items 0, 2, 4, 6, etc.   Now, if you wanted to write this in the traditional way, you may come up with something like this:       public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval)     {         List<T> newList = new List<T>();         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if ((count++ % interval) == 0)             {                 newList.Add(i);             }         }           return newList;     }     So basically this method takes any IEnumerable<T> and returns a new IEnumerable<T> that contains every nth item.  Pretty straight forward.   The problem?  Well, Every<T>(...) will construct a list containing every nth item whether or not you care.  What happens if you were searching this result for a certain item and find that item after five tries?  You would have generated the rest of the list for nothing.   Enter iterators.  This C# construct uses the yield keyword to effectively defer evaluation of the next item until it is asked for.  This can be very handy if the evaluation itself is expensive or if there's a fair chance you'll never want to fully evaluate a list.   We see this all the time in Linq, where many expressions are chained together to do complex processing on a list.  This would be very expensive if each of these expressions evaluated their entire possible result set on call.    Let's look at the same example function, this time using an iterator:       public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval)     {         int count = 0;         foreach (var i in list)         {             if ((count++ % interval) == 0)             {                 yield return i;             }         }     }   Notice it does not create a new return value explicitly, the only evidence of a return is the "yield return" statement.  What this means is that when an item is requested from the enumeration, it will enter this method and evaluate until it either hits a yield return (in which case that item is returned) or until it exits the method or hits a yield break (in which case the iteration ends.   Behind the scenes, this is all done with a class that the CLR creates behind the scenes that keeps track of the state of the iteration, so that every time the next item is asked for, it finds that item and then updates the current position so it knows where to start at next time.   It doesn't seem like a big deal, does it?  But keep in mind the key point here: it only returns items as they are requested. Thus if there's a good chance you will only process a portion of the return list and/or if the evaluation of each item is expensive, an iterator may be of benefit.   This is especially true if you intend your methods to be chainable similar to the way Linq methods can be chained.    For example, perhaps you have a List<int> and you want to take every tenth one until you find one greater than 10.  We could write that as:       List<int> someList = new List<int>();         // fill list here         someList.Every(10).TakeWhile(i => i <= 10);     Now is the difference more apparent?  If we use the first form of Every that makes a copy of the list.  It's going to copy the entire list whether we will need those items or not, that can be costly!    With the iterator version, however, it will only take items from the list until it finds one that is > 10, at which point no further items in the list are evaluated.   So, sounds neat eh?  But what's the cost is what you're probably wondering.  So I ran some tests using the two forms of Every above on lists varying from 5 to 500,000 integers and tried various things.    Now, iteration isn't free.  If you are more likely than not to iterate the entire collection every time, iterator has some very slight overhead:   Copy vs Iterator on 100% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 5 Copy 5 5 5 Iterator 5 50 50 Copy 28 50 50 Iterator 27 500 500 Copy 227 500 500 Iterator 247 5000 5000 Copy 2266 5000 5000 Iterator 2444 50,000 50,000 Copy 24,443 50,000 50,000 Iterator 24,719 500,000 500,000 Copy 250,024 500,000 500,000 Iterator 251,521   Notice that when iterating over the entire produced list, the times for the iterator are a little better for smaller lists, then getting just a slight bit worse for larger lists.  In reality, given the number of items and iterations, the result is near negligible, but just to show that iterators come at a price.  However, it should also be noted that the form of Every that returns a copy will have a left-over collection to garbage collect.   However, if we only partially evaluate less and less through the list, the savings start to show and make it well worth the overhead.  Let's look at what happens if you stop looking after 80% of the list:   Copy vs Iterator on 80% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 4 Copy 5 5 4 Iterator 5 50 40 Copy 27 50 40 Iterator 23 500 400 Copy 215 500 400 Iterator 200 5000 4000 Copy 2099 5000 4000 Iterator 1962 50,000 40,000 Copy 22,385 50,000 40,000 Iterator 19,599 500,000 400,000 Copy 236,427 500,000 400,000 Iterator 196,010       Notice that the iterator form is now operating quite a bit faster.  But the savings really add up if you stop on average at 50% (which most searches would typically do):     Copy vs Iterator on 50% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 2 Copy 5 5 2 Iterator 4 50 25 Copy 25 50 25 Iterator 16 500 250 Copy 188 500 250 Iterator 126 5000 2500 Copy 1854 5000 2500 Iterator 1226 50,000 25,000 Copy 19,839 50,000 25,000 Iterator 12,233 500,000 250,000 Copy 208,667 500,000 250,000 Iterator 122,336   Now we see that if we only expect to go on average 50% into the results, we tend to shave off around 40% of the time.  And this is only for one level deep.  If we are using this in a chain of query expressions it only adds to the savings.   So my recommendation?  If you have a resonable expectation that someone may only want to partially consume your enumerable result, I would always tend to favor an iterator.  The cost if they iterate the whole thing does not add much at all -- and if they consume only partially, you reap some really good performance gains.   Next time I'll discuss some of my favorite extensions I've created to make development life a little easier and maintainability a little better.

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  • Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

    - by Roger Hart
    Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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

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

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  • C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

    - by James Michael Hare
    So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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  • Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM by Brian Mozinski (Accenture)

    - by Greg Jensen
    Today, technical requirements for IAM are evolving rapidly, and the bar is continuously raised for high performance IAM solutions as organizations look to roll out high volume use cases on the back of legacy systems.  Existing solutions were often designed and architected to support offline transactions and manual processes, and the business owners today demand globally scalable infrastructure to support the growth their business cases are expected to deliver. To help IAM practitioners address these challenges and make their organizations and themselves more successful, this series we will outline the: • Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM The explosive growth in expectations for IAM infrastructure, and the business cases they support to gain investment in new security programs. • "Necessity is the mother of invention": Technical solutions developed in the field Well proven tricks of the trade, used by IAM guru’s to maximize your solution while addressing the requirements of global organizations. • The Art & Science of Performance Tuning of Oracle IAM 11gR2 Real world examples of performance tuning with Oracle IAM • No Where to go but up: Extending the benefits of accelerated IAM Anything is possible, compelling new solutions organizations are unlocking with accelerated Oracle IAM Let’s get started … by talking about the changing dynamics driving these discussions. Big Companies are getting bigger everyday, and increasingly organizations operate across state lines, multiple times zones, and in many countries or continents at the same time.  No longer is midnight to 6am a safe time to take down the system for upgrades, to run recon’s and import or update user accounts and attributes.  Further IT organizations are operating as shared services with SLA’s similar to telephone carrier levels expected by their “clients”.  Workers are moved in and out of roles on a weekly, daily, or even hourly rate and IAM is expected to support those rapid changes.  End users registering for services during business hours in Singapore are expected their access to be green-lighted in custom apps hosted in Portugal within the hour.  Many of the expectations of asynchronous systems and batched updates are not adequate and the number and types of users is growing. When organizations acted more like independent teams at functional or geographic levels it was manageable to have processes that relied on a handful of people who knew how to make things work …. Knew how to get you access to the key systems to get your job done.  Today everyone is expected to do more with less, the finance administrator previously supporting their local Atlanta sales office might now be asked to help close the books for the Johannesburg team, and access certification process once completed monthly by Joan on the 3rd floor is now done by a shared pool of resources in Sao Paulo.   Fragmented processes that rely on institutional knowledge to get access to systems and get work done quickly break down in these scenarios.  Highly robust processes that have automated workflows for connected or disconnected systems give organizations the dynamic flexibility to share work across these lines and cut costs or increase productivity. As the IT industry computing paradigms continue to change with the passing of time, and as mature or proven approaches become clear, it is normal for organizations to adjust accordingly. Businesses must manage identity in an increasingly hybrid world in which legacy on-premises IAM infrastructures are extended or replaced to support more and more interconnected and interdependent services to a wider range of users. The old legacy IAM implementation models we had relied on to manage identities no longer apply. End users expect to self-request access to services from their tablet, get supervisor approval over mobile devices and email, and launch the application even if is hosted on the cloud, or run by a partner, vendor, or service provider. While user expectations are higher, they are also simpler … logging into custom desktop apps to request approvals, or going through email or paper based processes for certification is unacceptable.  Users expect security to operate within the paradigm of the application … i.e. feel like the application they are using. Citizen and customer facing applications have evolved from every where, with custom applications, 3rd party tools, and merging in from acquired entities or 3rd party OEM’s resold to expand your portfolio of services.  These all have their own user stores, authentication models, user lifecycles, session management, etc.  Often the designers/developers are no longer accessible and the documentation is limited.  Bringing together underlying directories to scale for growth, and improve user experience is critical for revenue … but also for operations. Job functions are more dynamic.... take the Olympics for example.  Endless organizations from corporations broadcasting, endorsing, or marketing through the event … to non-profit athletic foundations and public/government entities for athletes and public safety, all operate simultaneously on the world stage.  Each organization needs to spin up short-term teams, often dealing with proprietary information from hot ads to racing strategies or security plans.  IAM is expected to enable team’s to spin up, enable new applications, protect privacy, and secure critical infrastructure.  Then it needs to be disabled just as quickly as users go back to their previous responsibilities. On a more technical level … Optimized system directory; tuning guidelines and parameters are needed by businesses today. Business’s need to be making the right choices (virtual directories) and considerations via choosing the correct architectural patterns (virtual, direct, replicated, and tuning), challenge is that business need to assess and chose the correct architectural patters (centralized, virtualized, and distributed) Today's Business organizations have very complex heterogeneous enterprises that contain diverse and multifaceted information. With today's ever changing global landscape, the strategic end goal in challenging times for business is business agility. The business of identity management requires enterprise's to be more agile and more responsive than ever before. The continued proliferation of networking devices (PC, tablet, PDA's, notebooks, etc.) has caused the number of devices and users to be granted access to these devices to grow exponentially. Business needs to deploy an IAM system that can account for the demands for authentication and authorizations to these devices. Increased innovation is forcing business and organizations to centralize their identity management services. Access management needs to handle traditional web based access as well as handle new innovations around mobile, as well as address insufficient governance processes which can lead to rouge identity accounts, which can then become a source of vulnerabilities within a business’s identity platform. Risk based decisions are providing challenges to business, for an adaptive risk model to make proper access decisions via standard Web single sign on for internal and external customers,. Organizations have to move beyond simple login and passwords to address trusted relationship questions such as: Is this a trusted customer, client, or citizen? Is this a trusted employee, vendor, or partner? Is this a trusted device? Without a solid technological foundation, organizational performance, collaboration, constituent services, or any other organizational processes will languish. A Single server location presents not only network concerns for distributed user base, but identity challenges. The network risks are centered on latency of the long trip that the traffic has to take. Other risks are a performance around availability and if the single identity server is lost, all access is lost. As you can see, there are many reasons why performance tuning IAM will have a substantial impact on the success of your organization.  In our next installment in the series we roll up our sleeves and get into detailed tuning techniques used everyday by thought leaders in the field implementing Oracle Identity & Access Management Solutions.

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  • My Code Kata–A Solution Kata

    - by Glav
    There are many developers and coders out there who like to do code Kata’s to keep their coding ability up to scratch and to practice their skills. I think it is a good idea. While I like the concept, I find them dead boring and of minimal purpose. Yes, they serve to hone your skills but that’s about it. They are often quite abstract, in that they usually focus on a small problem set requiring specific solutions. It is fair enough as that is how they are designed but again, I find them quite boring. What I personally like to do is go for something a little larger and a little more fun. It takes a little more time and is not as easily executed as a kata though, but it services the same purposes from a practice perspective and allows me to continue to solve some problems that are not directly part of the initial goal. This means I can cover a broader learning range and have a bit more fun. If I am lucky, sometimes they even end up being useful tools. With that in mind, I thought I’d share my current ‘kata’. It is not really a code kata as it is too big. I prefer to think of it as a ‘solution kata’. The code is on bitbucket here. What I wanted to do was create a kind of simplistic virtual world where I can create a player, or a class, stuff it into the world, and see if it survives, and can navigate its way to the exit. Requirements were pretty simple: Must be able to define a map to describe the world using simple X,Y co-ordinates. Z co-ordinates as well if you feel like getting clever. Should have the concept of entrances, exists, solid blocks, and potentially other materials (again if you want to get clever). A coder should be able to easily write a class which will act as an inhabitant of the world. An inhabitant will receive stimulus from the world in the form of surrounding environment and be able to make a decision on action which it passes back to the ‘world’ for processing. At a minimum, an inhabitant will have sight and speed characteristics which determine how far they can ‘see’ in the world, and how fast they can move. Coders who write a really bad ‘inhabitant’ should not adversely affect the rest of world. Should allow multiple inhabitants in the world. So that was the solution I set out to act as a practice solution and a little bit of fun. It had some interesting problems to solve and I figured, if it turned out ok, I could potentially use this as a ‘developer test’ for interviews. Ask a potential coder to write a class for an inhabitant. Show the coder the map they will navigate, but also mention that we will use their code to navigate a map they have not yet seen and a little more complex. I have been playing with solution for a short time now and have it working in basic concepts. Below is a screen shot using a very basic console visualiser that shows the map, boundaries, blocks, entrance, exit and players/inhabitants. The yellow asterisks ‘*’ are the players, green ‘O’ the entrance, purple ‘^’ the exit, maroon/browny ‘#’ are solid blocks. The players can move around at different speeds, knock into each others, and make directional movement decisions based on what they see and who is around them. It has been quite fun to write and it is also quite fun to develop different players to inject into the world. The code below shows a really simple implementation of an inhabitant that can work out what to do based on stimulus from the world. It is pretty simple and just tries to move in some direction if there is nothing blocking the path. public class TestPlayer:LivingEntity { public TestPlayer() { Name = "Beta Boy"; LifeKey = Guid.NewGuid(); } public override ActionResult DecideActionToPerform(EcoDev.Core.Common.Actions.ActionContext actionContext) { try { var action = new MovementAction(); // move forward if we can if (actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Forward; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Left; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Back; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Right; return action; } } return action; } catch (Exception ex) { World.WriteDebugInformation("Player: "+ Name, string.Format("Player Generated exception: {0}",ex.Message)); throw ex; } } private bool CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(MapBlock block) { if (block == null || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowEntry || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowExit || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowPotentialEntry) { return true; } return false; } } It is simple and it seems to work well. The world implementation itself decides the stimulus context that is passed to he inhabitant to make an action decision. All movement is carried out on separate threads and timed appropriately to be as fair as possible and to cater for additional skills such as speed, and eventually maybe stamina, strength, with actions like fighting. It is pretty fun to make up random maps and see how your inhabitant does. You can download the code from here. Along the way I have played with parallel extensions to make the compute intensive stuff spread across all cores, had to heavily factor in visibility of methods and properties so design of classes was paramount, work out movement algorithms that play fairly in the world and properly favour the players with higher abilities, as well as a host of other issues. So that is my ‘solution kata’. If I keep going with it, I may develop a web interface for it where people can upload assemblies and watch their player within a web browser visualiser and maybe even a map designer. What do you do to keep the fires burning?

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