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  • Unexpected behaviour with glFramebufferTexture1D

    - by Roshan
    I am using render to texture concept with glFramebufferTexture1D. I am drawing a cube on non-default FBO with all the vertices as -1,1 (maximum) in X Y Z direction. Now i am setting viewport to X while rendering on non default FBO. My background is blue with white color of cube. For default FBO, i have created 1-D texture and attached this texture to above FBO with color attachment. I am setting width of texture equal to width*height of above FBO view-port. Now, when i render this texture to on another cube, i can see continuous white color on start or end of each face of the cube. That means part of the face is white and rest is blue. I am not sure whether this behavior is correct or not. I expect all the texels should be white as i am using -1 and 1 coordinates for cube rendered on non-default FBO. code: #define WIDTH 3 #define HEIGHT 3 GLfloat vertices8[]={ 1.0f,1.0f,1.0f, -1.0f,1.0f,1.0f, -1.0f,-1.0f,1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f,1.0f,//face 1 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f,1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f,1.0f,-1.0f,//face 2 1.0f,1.0f,1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f,1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f,1.0f,-1.0f,//face 3 -1.0f,1.0f,1.0f, -1.0f,1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f,-1.0f,1.0f,//face 4 1.0f,1.0f,1.0f, 1.0f,1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f,1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f,1.0f,1.0f,//face 5 -1.0f,-1.0f,1.0f, -1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f,1.0f//face 6 }; GLfloat vertices[]= { 0.5f,0.5f,0.5f, -0.5f,0.5f,0.5f, -0.5f,-0.5f,0.5f, 0.5f,-0.5f,0.5f,//face 1 0.5f,-0.5f,-0.5f, -0.5f,-0.5f,-0.5f, -0.5f,0.5f,-0.5f, 0.5f,0.5f,-0.5f,//face 2 0.5f,0.5f,0.5f, 0.5f,-0.5f,0.5f, 0.5f,-0.5f,-0.5f, 0.5f,0.5f,-0.5f,//face 3 -0.5f,0.5f,0.5f, -0.5f,0.5f,-0.5f, -0.5f,-0.5f,-0.5f, -0.5f,-0.5f,0.5f,//face 4 0.5f,0.5f,0.5f, 0.5f,0.5f,-0.5f, -0.5f,0.5f,-0.5f, -0.5f,0.5f,0.5f,//face 5 -0.5f,-0.5f,0.5f, -0.5f,-0.5f,-0.5f, 0.5f,-0.5f,-0.5f, 0.5f,-0.5f,0.5f//face 6 }; GLuint indices[] = { 0, 2, 1, 0, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 14, 12, 14, 13, 16, 17, 18, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 22, 20, 22, 21 }; GLfloat texcoord[] = { 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0 }; glGenTextures(1, &id1); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_1D, id1); glGenFramebuffers(1, &Fboid); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_1D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_1D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_1D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexImage1D(GL_TEXTURE_1D, 0, GL_RGBA, WIDTH*HEIGHT , 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE,0); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, Fboid); glFramebufferTexture1D(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER,GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0,GL_TEXTURE_1D,id1,0); draw_cube(); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); draw(); } draw_cube() { glViewport(0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT); glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.5f, 1.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); glEnableVertexAttribArray(glGetAttribLocation(temp.psId,"position")); glVertexAttribPointer(glGetAttribLocation(temp.psId,"position"), 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0,vertices8); glDrawArrays (GL_TRIANGLE_FAN, 0, 24); } draw() { glClearColor(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glClearDepth(1.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glEnableVertexAttribArray(glGetAttribLocation(shader_data.psId,"tk_position")); glVertexAttribPointer(glGetAttribLocation(shader_data.psId,"tk_position"), 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0,vertices); nResult = GL_ERROR_CHECK((GL_NO_ERROR, "glVertexAttribPointer(position, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0,vertices);")); glEnableVertexAttribArray(glGetAttribLocation(shader_data.psId,"inputtexcoord")); glVertexAttribPointer(glGetAttribLocation(shader_data.psId,"inputtexcoord"), 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0,texcoord); glBindTexture(*target11, id1); glDrawElements ( GL_TRIANGLES, 36,GL_UNSIGNED_INT, indices ); when i change WIDTH=HEIGHT=2, and call a glreadpixels with height, width equal to 4 in draw_cube() i can see first 2 pixels with white color, next two with blue(glclearcolor), next two white and then blue and so on.. Now when i change width parameter in glTeximage1D to 16 then ideally i should see alternate patches of white and blue right? But its not the case here. why so?

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  • Professional Development – Difference Between Bio, CV and Resume

    - by Pinal Dave
    Applying for work can be very stressful – you want to put your best foot forward, and it can be very hard to sell yourself to a potential employer while highlighting your best characteristics and answering questions.  On top of that, some jobs require different application materials – a biography (or bio), a curriculum vitae (or CV), or a resume.  These things seem so interchangeable, so what is the difference? Let’s start with the one most of us have heard of – the resume.  A resume is a summary of your job and education history.  If you have ever applied for a job, you will have used a resume.  The ability to write a good resume that highlights your best characteristics and emphasizes your qualifications for a specific job is a skill that will take you a long way in the world.  For such an essential skill, unfortunately it is one that many people struggle with. RESUME So let’s discuss what makes a great resume.  First, make sure that your name and contact information are at the top, in large print (slightly larger font than the rest of the text, size 14 or 16 if the rest is size 12, for example).  You need to make sure that if you catch the recruiter’s attention and they know how to get a hold of you. As for qualifications, be quick and to the point.  Make your job title and the company the headline, and include your skills, accomplishments, and qualifications as bullet points.  Use good action verbs, like “finished,” “arranged,” “solved,” and “completed.”  Include hard numbers – don’t just say you “changed the filing system,” say that you “revolutionized the storage of over 250 files in less than five days.”  Doesn’t that sentence sound much more powerful? Curriculum Vitae (CV) Now let’s talk about curriculum vitae, or “CVs”.  A CV is more like an expanded resume.  The same rules are still true: put your name front and center, keep your contact info up to date, and summarize your skills with bullet points.  However, CVs are often required in more technical fields – like science, engineering, and computer science.  This means that you need to really highlight your education and technical skills. Difference between Resume and CV Resumes are expected to be one or two pages long – CVs can be as many pages as necessary.  If you are one of those people lucky enough to feel limited by the size constraint of resumes, a CV is for you!  On a CV you can expand on your projects, highlight really exciting accomplishments, and include more educational experience – including GPA and test scores from the GRE or MCAT (as applicable).  You can also include awards, associations, teaching and research experience, and certifications.  A CV is a place to really expand on all your experience and how great you will be in this particular position. Biography (Bio) Chances are, you already know what a bio is, and you have even read a few of them.  Think about the one or two paragraphs that every author includes in the back flap of a book.  Think about the sentences under a blogger’s photo on every “About Me” page.  That is a bio.  It is a way to quickly highlight your life experiences.  It is essentially the way you would introduce yourself at a party. Where a bio is required for a job, chances are they won’t want to know about where you were born and how many pets you have, though.  This is a way to summarize your entire job history in quick-to-read format – and sometimes during a job hunt, being able to get to the point and grab the recruiter’s interest is the best way to get your foot in the door.  Think of a bio as your entire resume put into words. Most bios have a standard format.  In paragraph one, talk about your most recent position and accomplishments there, specifically how they relate to the job you are applying for.  If you have teaching or research experience, training experience, certifications, or management experience, talk about them in paragraph two.  Paragraph three and four are for highlighting publications, education, certifications, associations, etc.  To wrap up your bio, provide your contact info and availability (dates and times). Where to use What? For most positions, you will know exactly what kind of application to use, because the job announcement will state what materials are needed – resume, CV, bio, cover letter, skill set, etc.  If there is any confusion, choose whatever the industry standard is (CV for technical fields, resume for everything else) or choose which of your documents is the strongest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, Professional Development, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Auto-Configuring SSIS Packages

    - by Davide Mauri
    SSIS Package Configurations are very useful to make packages flexible so that you can change objects properties at run-time and thus make the package configurable without having to open and edit it. In a complex scenario where you have dozen of packages (even in in the smallest BI project I worked on I had 50 packages), each package may have its own configuration needs. This means that each time you have to run the package you have to pass the correct Package Configuration. I usually use XML configuration files and I also force everyone that works with me to make sure that an object that is used in several packages has the same name in all package where it is used, in order to simplify configurations usage. Connection Managers are a good example of one of those objects. For example, all the packages that needs to access to the Data Warehouse database must have a Connection Manager named DWH. Basically we define a set of “global” objects so that we can have a configuration file for them, so that it can be used by all packages. If a package as some specific configuration needs, we create a specific – or “local” – XML configuration file or we set the value that needs to be configured at runtime using DTLoggedExec’s Package Parameters: http://dtloggedexec.davidemauri.it/Package%20Parameters.ashx Now, how we can improve this even more? I’d like to have a package that, when it’s run, automatically goes “somewhere” and search for global or local configuration, loads it and applies it to itself. That’s the basic idea of Auto-Configuring Packages. The “somewhere” is a SQL Server table, defined in this way In this table you’ll put the values that you want to be used at runtime by your package: The ConfigurationFilter column specify to which package that configuration line has to be applied. A package will use that line only if the value specified in the ConfigurationFilter column is equal to its name. In the above sample. only the package named “simple-package” will use the line number two. There is an exception here: the $$Global value indicate a configuration row that has to be applied to any package. With this simple behavior it’s possible to replicate the “global” and the “local” configuration approach I’ve described before. The ConfigurationValue contains the value you want to be applied at runtime and the PackagePath contains the object to which that value will be applied. The ConfiguredValueType column defined the data type of the value and the Checksum column is contains a calculated value that is simply the hash value of ConfigurationFilter plus PackagePath so that it can be used as a Primary Key to guarantee uniqueness of configuration rows. As you may have noticed the table is very similar to the table originally used by SSIS in order to put DTS Configuration into SQL Server tables: SQL Server SSIS Configuration Type: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141682.aspx Now, how it works? It’s very easy: you just have to call DTLoggedExec with the /AC option: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /AC:"localhost;ssis_auto_configuration;ssiscfg.configuration" the AC option expects a string with the following format: <database_server>;<database_name>;<table_name>; only Windows Authentication is supported. When DTLoggedExec finds an Auto-Configuration request, it injects a new connection manager in the loaded package. The injected connection manager is named $$DTLoggedExec_AutoConfigure and is used by the two SQL Server DTS Configuration ($$DTLoggedExec_Global and $$DTLoggedExec_Local) also injected by DTLoggedExec, used to load “local” and “global” configuration. Now, you may start to wonder why this approach cannot be used without having all this stuff going around, but just passing to a package always two XML DTS Configuration files, (to have to “local” and the “global” configurations) doing something like this: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /CONF:”global.dtsConfig” /CONF:”mypackage.dtsConfig” The problem is that this approach doesn’t work if you have, in one of the two configuration file, a value that has to be applied to an object that doesn’t exists in the loaded package. This situation will raise an error that will halt package execution. To solve this problem, you may want to create a configuration file for each package. Unfortunately this will make deployment and management harder, since you’ll have to deal with a great number of configuration files. The Auto-Configuration approach solve all these problems at once! We’re using it in a project where we have hundreds of packages and I can tell you that deployment of packages and their configuration for the pre-production and production environment has never been so easy! To use the Auto-Configuration option you have to download the latest DTLoggedExec release: http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/62218 Feedback, as usual, are very welcome!

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  • Your Next IT Job

    - by BuckWoody
    Some data professionals have worked (and plan to work) in the same place for a long time. In organizations large and small, the turnover rate just isn’t that high. This has not been my experience. About every 3-5 years I’ve changed either roles or companies. That might be due to the IT environment or my personality (or a mix of the two), but the point is that I’ve had many roles and worked for many companies large and small throughout my 27+ years in IT. At one point this might have been a detriment – a prospective employer looks at the resume and says “it seems you’ve moved around quite a bit.” But I haven’t found that to be the case all the time –in fact, in some cases the variety of jobs I’ve held has been an asset because I’ve seen what works (and doesn’t) in other environments, which can save time and money. So if you’re in the first camp – great! Stay where you are, and continue doing the work you love. but if you’re in the second, then this post might be useful. If you are planning on making a change, or perhaps you’ve hit a wall at your current location, you might start looking around for a better paying job – and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all try to make our lives better, and for some that involves more money. Money, however, isn’t always the primary motivator. I’ve gone to another job that doesn’t have as many benefits or has the same salary as the current job I’m working to gain more experience, get a better work/life balance and so on. It’s a mix of factors that only you know about. So I thought I would lay out a few advantages and disadvantages in the shops I’ve worked at. This post isn’t aimed at a single employer, but represents a mix of what I’ve experienced, and of course the opinions here are my own. You will most certainly have a different take – if so, please post a response! I also won’t mention a specific industry – I’ve worked everywhere from medical firms, legal offices, retail, billing centers, manufacturing, government, even to NASA. I’m focusing here mostly on size and composition. And I’m making some very broad generalizations here – I am fully aware that a small company might have great benefits and a large company might allow a lot of role flexibility.  your mileage may vary – and again, post those comments! Small Company To me a “small company” means around 100 people or less – sometimes a lot less. These can be really fun, frustrating places to to work. Advantages: a great deal of flexibility, a wide range of roles (often at the same time), a large degree of responsibility, immediate feedback, close relationships with co-workers, work directly with your customer. Disadvantages: Too much responsibility, little work/life balance, immature political structure, few (if any) benefits. If the business is family-owned, they can easily violate work/life boundaries. Medium Size company In my experience the next size company I would work for involves from a few hundred people to around five thousand. Advantages: Good mobility – fairly easy to get promoted, acceptable benefits, more defined responsibilities, better work/life balance, balanced load for expertise, but still the organizational structure is fairly simple to understand. Disadvantages: Pay is not always highest, rapid changes in structure as the organization grows, transient workforce. You may not be given the opportunity to work with another technology if someone already “owns” it. Politics are painful at this level as people try to learn how to do it. Large Company When you get into the tens of thousands of folks employed around the world, you’re in a large company. Advantages: Lots of room to move around – sometimes you can work (as I have) multiple jobs through the years and yet stay at the same company, building time for benefits, very defined roles, trained managers (yes, I know some of them are still awful – trust me – I DO know that), higher-end benefits, long careers possible, discounts at retailers and other “soft” benefits, prestige. For some, a higher level of politics (done professionally) is a good thing. Disadvantages: You could become another faceless name in the crowd, might not allow a great deal of flexibility,  large organizational changes might take away any control you have of your career. I’ve also seen large layoffs happen, and good people get let go while “dead weight” is retained. For some, a higher level of politics is distasteful. So what are your experiences? Share with the group! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Agile Development Requires Agile Support

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly.  The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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  • Defining Your Online Segmentation and Targeting Strategy

    - by Christie Flanagan
    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;} A lot of times, companies will put online segmentation and targeting on the back burner because they don’t know where to start. Often, I’ve heard web managers say that their segments aren’t well understood yet, so they can’t really deliver personalized online experiences that are meaningful. This lack of complete understanding means that they don't really bother to try. But, I don’t think you necessarily need to have an elaborate segmentation and targeting strategy already in place to start delivering a more relevant online customer experience. Sometimes it helps to think of how segmentation and targeting might solve some of the challenges your sites visitors are currently experiencing on your web presence, rather than doing nothing and waiting until a fully baked segmentation strategy lands in your inbox.  For example, perhaps you have a broad and varied service offering that makes it difficult for site visitors to easily find the solutions that are most relevant for them.  How can segmentation and targeting help solve this problem?  Or maybe it’s like the airline I described in Monday’s post where the special deals featured on the home page are only relevant to site visitors from a couple of cities.  Couldn’t segmentation and targeting help them to highlight offers on their home page that are relevant to a larger share of their site visitors? Your early segmentation and targeting efforts do not need to be complicated.  There are simple ways to start delivering a more relevant online customer experience, even if you’re dealing with anonymous site visitors.  These include targeting content to site visitors based on: Referral: Deliver targeted content to your site visitors that is based on where they came from or the search term they used to find your site Behavior:  Deliver content to your site visitors that is related or similar to content they’ve clicked on already Location:  Deliver content your site visitors that is most relevant for their geographic location (this would solve that pesky airline home page problem described above) So as you can see, there really are some very simple ways in which you can start improving your online customer experience using very basic segmentation and targeting methods.  One thing to keep in mind as you start to define you segmentation and targeting strategy is that there are many different types of attributes or combinations of attributes upon which you can base your segmentation and targeting strategy.  In addition to referral, behavior and location, other attributes that you should consider are: Profile Information:  What profile information do you know about this customer already?  Perhaps they provided some information on their interests and preferences when they first registered with your site. Time:  What time is it and how does that impact what my site visitors are looking for or trying to do? Demographics: What are my site visitors’ ages, incomes or ethnicities? Which attributes you select to include in your segmentation strategy will depend on your unique business needs and objectives.  Attributes such as behavior or referral may not be the most important targeting criteria depending on your situation. For example, if you’re a newspaper you might know that certain visitors are sports fans based on their profile information.  You can create a segment for sports fans and target sports related content to that segment of your readership online.  Or perhaps, a reader is browsing stories that are related to politics; you can use that visitor’s behavior to assign him or her to a segment for those interested in politics. From there you can recommend more stories to that visitor based on their interest in politics. For an airline, the visitor’s location may be a more important attribute. By detecting the visitor’s location, you can assign them to an appropriate segment and then target special flights and offers to them based on their likely departure airport. As you can see, there are many practical ways that you can start improving the experience your customers receive on your web presence using fairly basic segmentation and targeting techniques. If you want to learn more about segmentation and targeting using Oracle’s web experience management solution, check out this helpful video that demonstrates these powerful capabilities in Oracle WebCenter Sites. ***** On Demand Webcast Featuring Brian Solis of Altimeter Group Trends such as the mobile web, social media, gamification and real-time are changing customer behavior and expectations. In this new environment, many businesses will struggle. Some will fall by the wayside, while others learn to adapt and thrive. Watch this on demand webcast with Altimeter Group digital analyst and author, Brian Solis, and discover what your organization needs to know about how to compete in the new era of Digital Darwinism. View now.

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  • Financial Management: Why Move to the Cloud?

    - by Kathryn Perry
    A guest post by Terrance Wampler, Vice President, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle I’ve spent my career designing and developing financial management systems, most of it at Oracle. Every single day I either meet with our customers or talk to them on the phone. The time is usually spent discussing various business challenges facing CFOs and Controllers, who are running Oracle’s Financials. Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about cloud computing and whether it makes sense for finance to go to the cloud. Here are some pros and cons that might help you make that decision. Let’s start with the benefits of cloud solutions. The first is savings. With cloud services, you pay only for those commodities that you use. That makes you feel like you're getting better value for your money. Plus, you can preserve your cash for your core business and you can get a better matching of expenses and revenues. So, at the top of the list is lower total cost of ownership. The second point has to do with optimization. With cloud services, you’ll need less IT infrastructure so you can optimize your IT resources for better-value, higher-end projects. This also leads to greater financial visibility, where there's a clear cost for the set of services or features replaced by cloud services. And, the last benefit is what I call acceleration. You can save money by speeding up the initialization and deployment of the project. You don't have to deal with IT infrastructure and you can start implementing right away. We did a quick survey of about 70 CFOs at the CFO Summit last month in New York City. We asked them why they were looking at cloud services, and not necessarily just for financials. The No. 1 response was perceived lower cost of ownership. But of course there are risks to consider. The first thing most people think about in the cloud is security and ownership of data. So, will your data really be safe? Can you meet your own privacy policy requirements? Do you really want your private financial data exposed? Do you trust the provider? Is what you see really your data? Do you own it or is it managed by someone else? Security is a big concern that comes with an emotional component. The next thing in the risk category is reliability. Is the provider proven? You’re taking what you have control over – for example, standards and policies and internal service level agreements – away from your IT department and giving it to someone else. Will you still be able to adapt to shifts in your business? Will the provider be able to grow with your business effectively? Reliability means having a provider that can give you the service infrastructure that you need. And then there’s performance, which has two components in terms of risk. Going forward, will the provider be able to scale the infrastructure or service level if you have new employees or new businesses? And second, will the price you negotiate and the rate you lock in cover additional costs and rising service fees? Another piece is cost. What happens if you don't get the service level you want? What if you end the service? What happens, if after a few years, you send the service out for bid and change service? Can you move your data? Can you move the applications? Do the integrations work? These are cost components people don’t always take into account. And, the final piece is the business case. The perception is that you can get started really quickly with cloud. It has a perceived lower cost of total ownership and it feels cool because it's cloud. But do you have a good business case for moving to the cloud? Your total cost of ownership is over three years; then you’ll renew it, so your TCO is six years. Have you compared that to other internal services that you’re offering? You might already have product that you can run this new business or division on. In that same survey at the CFO Summit, the execs thought the biggest perceived risks were security of data, ability to move data back, and the ability to create a business case to actually justify the risks. So that’s the list of pros and cons. Not to leave you hanging, I will do another post on how to balance these pros and cons and make the right decision for your business.

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  • Source Control and SQL Development &ndash; Part 3

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    In parts one and two of this series, I have been specifically focusing on the latest version of SQL Source Control by Red Gate Software.  But I have been doing source-controlled SQL development for years, long before this product was available, and well before Microsoft came out with Database Projects for Visual Studio.  “So, how does that work?” you may wonder.  Well, let me share some of the details of how we do it where I work… The key to this approach is that everything is done via Transact-SQL script files; either natively written T-SQL, or generated.  My preference is to write all my code by hand, which forces you to become better at your SQL syntax.  But if you really prefer to use the Management Studio GUI to make database changes, you can still do that, and then you use the Generate Scripts feature of the GUI to produce T-SQL scripts afterwards, and store those in your source control system.  You can generate scripts for things like stored procedures and views by right-clicking on the database in the Object Explorer, and Choosing Tasks, Generate Scripts (see figure 1 to the left).  You can also do that for the CREATE scripts for tables, but that does not work when you have a table that is already in production, and you need to make just a simple change, such as adding a new column or index.  In this case, you can use the GUI to make the table changes, and then instead of clicking the Save button, click the Generate Change Script button (). Then, once you have saved the change script, go ahead and execute it on your development database to actually make the change.  I believe that it is important to actually execute the script rather than just click the Save button because this is your first test that your change script is working and you didn’t somehow lose a portion of the change. As you can imagine, all this generating of scripts can get tedious and tempting to skip entirely, so again, I would encourage you to just get in the habit of writing your own Transact-SQL code, and then it is just a matter of remembering to save your work, just like you are in the habit of saving changes to a Word or Excel document before you exit the program. So, now that you have all of these script files, what do you do with them?  Well, we organize ours into folders labeled ChangeScripts, Functions, Views, and StoredProcedures, and those folders are loaded into our source control system.  ChangeScripts contains all of the table and index changes, and anything else that is basically a one-time-only execution.  Of course you want to write your scripts with qualifying logic so that if a script were accidentally run more than once in a database, it would not crash nor corrupt anything; but these scripts are really intended to be run only once in a database. Once you have your initial set of scripts loaded into source control, then making changes, such as altering a stored procedure becomes a simple matter of checking out your CREATE PROCEDURE* script, editing it in SSMS, saving the change, executing the script in order to effect the change in your database, and then checking the script back in to source control.  Of course, this is where the lack of integration for source control systems within SSMS becomes an irritation, because this means that in addition to SSMS, I also have my source control client application running to do the check-out and check-in.  And when you have 800+ procedures like we do, that can be quite tedious to locate the procedure I want to change in source control, check it out, then locate the script file in my working folder, open it in SSMS, do the change, save it, and the go back to source control to check in.  Granted, it is not nearly as burdensome as, say, losing your source code and having to rebuild it from memory, or losing the audit trail that good source control systems provide.  It is worth the effort, and this is how I have been doing development for the last several years. Remember that everything that the SQL Server Management Studio does in modifying your database can also be done in plain Transact-SQL code, and this is what you are storing.  And now I have shown you how you can do it all without spending any extra money.  You already have source control, or can get free, open-source source control systems (almost seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it) and of course Management Studio is free with your SQL Server database engine software. So, whether you spend the money on tools to make it easier, or not, you now have no excuse for not using source control with your SQL development. * In our current model, the scripts for stored procedures and similar database objects are written with an IF EXISTS…DROP… at the top, followed by the CREATE PROCEDURE… section, and that followed by a section that assigns permissions.  This allows me to run the same script regardless of whether the procedure previously existed in the database.  If the script was only an ALTER PROCEDURE, then it would fail the first time that procedure was deployed to a database, unless you wrote other code to stub it if it did not exist.  There are a few different ways you could organize your scripts for deployment, each with its own trade-offs, but I think it is absolutely critical that whichever way you organize things, you ensure that the same script is run throughout the deployment cycle, and do not allow customizations to creep in between TEST and PROD.  If you do, then you have broken the integrity of your deployment process because what you deployed to PROD was not exactly the same as what was tested in TEST, so you effectively have now released untested code into PROD.

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  • Override an IOCTL Handler in PQOAL

    - by Kate Moss' Big Fan
    When porting or creating a BSP to a new platform, we often need to make change to OEMIoControl or HAL IOCTL handler for more specific. Since Microsoft introduced PQOAL in CE 5.0 and more and more BSP today leverages PQOAL to simplify the OAL, we no longer define the OEMIoControl directly. It is somehow analogous to migrate from pure Windows SDK to MFC; people starts to define those MFC handlers and forgot the WinMain and the big message loop. If you ever take a look at the interface between OAL and Kernel, PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\INC\oemglobal.h, the pfnOEMIoctl is still there just as the entry point of Windows Program is WinMain since day one. (For those may argue about pfnOEMIoctl is not OEMIoControl, I will encourage you to dig into PRIVATE\WINCEOS\COREOS\NK\OEMMAIN\oemglobal.c which initialized pfnOEMIoctl to OEMIoControl. The interface is just to split OAL and Kernel which no longer linked to one executable file in CE 6, all of the function signature is still identical) So let's trace into PQOAL to realize how it implements OEMIoControl and how can we override an IOCTL handler we interest. First thing to know is the entry point (just as finding the WinMain in MFC), OEMIoControl is defined in PLATFORM\COMMON\SRC\COMMON\IOCTL\ioctl.c. Basically, it does nothing special but scan a pre-defined IOCTL table, g_oalIoCtlTable, and then execute the handler. (The highlight part) Other than that is just for error handling and the use of critical section to serialize the function. BOOL OEMIoControl(     DWORD code, VOID *pInBuffer, DWORD inSize, VOID *pOutBuffer, DWORD outSize,     DWORD *pOutSize ) {     BOOL rc = FALSE;     UINT32 i; ...     // Search the IOCTL table for the requested code.     for (i = 0; g_oalIoCtlTable[i].pfnHandler != NULL; i++) {         if (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].code == code) break;     }     // Indicate unsupported code     if (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].pfnHandler == NULL) {         NKSetLastError(ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED);         OALMSG(OAL_IOCTL, (             L"OEMIoControl: Unsupported Code 0x%x - device 0x%04x func %d\r\n",             code, code >> 16, (code >> 2)&0x0FFF         ));         goto cleanUp;     }            // Take critical section if required (after postinit & no flag)     if (         g_ioctlState.postInit &&         (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].flags & OAL_IOCTL_FLAG_NOCS) == 0     ) {         // Take critical section                    EnterCriticalSection(&g_ioctlState.cs);     }     // Execute the handler     rc = g_oalIoCtlTable[i].pfnHandler(         code, pInBuffer, inSize, pOutBuffer, outSize, pOutSize     );     // Release critical section if it was taken above     if (         g_ioctlState.postInit &&         (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].flags & OAL_IOCTL_FLAG_NOCS) == 0     ) {         // Release critical section                    LeaveCriticalSection(&g_ioctlState.cs);     } cleanUp:     OALMSG(OAL_IOCTL&&OAL_FUNC, (L"-OEMIoControl(rc = %d)\r\n", rc ));     return rc; }   Where is the g_oalIoCtlTable? It is defined in your BSP. Let's use DeviceEmulator BSP as an example. The PLATFORM\DEVICEEMULATOR\SRC\OAL\OALLIB\ioctl.c defines the table as const OAL_IOCTL_HANDLER g_oalIoCtlTable[] = { #include "ioctl_tab.h" }; And that leads to PLATFORM\DEVICEEMULATOR\SRC\INC\ioctl_tab.h which defined some of IOCTL handler but others are defined in oal_ioctl_tab.h which is under PLATFORM\COMMON\SRC\INC\. Finally, we got the full table body! (Just like tracing MFC, always jumping back and forth). The format of table is very straight forward, IOCTL code, Flags and Handler Function // IOCTL CODE,                          Flags   Handler Function //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ { IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY,                   0,  OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry     }, { IOCTL_HAL_INIT_RTC,                       0,  OALIoCtlHalInitRTC          }, { IOCTL_HAL_REBOOT,                         0,  OALIoCtlHalReboot           }, The PQOAL scans through the table until it find a matched IOCTL code, then invokes the handler function. Since it scans the table from the top which means if we define TWO handler with same IOCTL code, the first one is always invoked with no exception. Now back to the PLATFORM\DEVICEEMULATOR\SRC\INC\ioctl_tab.h, with the following table { IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY,                   0,  OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry     }, ... #include <oal_ioctl_tab.h> Note the IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY handler are defined in both BSP's local ioctl_tab.h and the common oal_ioctl_tab.h, but due to BSP's local handler comes before "#include <oal_ioctl_tab.h>" so we know the OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry always get called. In this example, the DeviceEmulator BSP overrides the IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY handler from OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry to OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry by manipulating the g_oalIoCtlTable table. (In some point of view, it is similar to message map in MFC) Please be aware, when you override an IOCTL handler in PQOAL, you may want to clone the original implementation to your BSP and change to meet your need. It is recommended and save you the redundant works but remember to rename the handler function (Just like the DeviceEmulator it changes the name of OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry to OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry). If you don't change the name, linker may not be happy (due to name conflict) and the more important is by using different handler name, you could always redirect the handler back to original one. (It is like the concept of OOP that calling a function in base class; still not so clear? I am goinf to show you soon!) The OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry setups DeviceEmulator specific registry settings and in the end, if everything goes well, it calls the OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry (PLATFORM\COMMON\SRC\COMMON\IOCTL\reginit.c) to do the rest.     if(fOk) {         fOk = OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry(code, pInpBuffer, inpSize, pOutBuffer,             outSize, pOutSize);     } Now you got the picture, whenever you want to override an IOCTL hadnler that is implemented in PQOAL just Clone the handler function to your BSP as a template. Simple name change for the handler function, and a name change in the IOCTL table header file that maps the IOCTL with the function Implement your IOCTL handler and whenever you need to redirect it back just calling the original handler function. It is the standard way of implementing a custom IOCTL and most Microsoft developers prefer. The mapping of IOCTL routine to IOCTL code is platform specific - you control the header file that does that mapping.

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  • WPF Databinding- Part 2 of 3

    - by Shervin Shakibi
    This is a follow up to my previous post WPF Databinding- Not your fathers databinding Part 1-3 you can download the source code here  http://ssccinc.com/wpfdatabinding.zip Example 04   In this example we demonstrate  the use of default properties and also binding to an instant of an object which is part of a collection bound to its container. this is actually not as complicated as it sounds. First of all, lets take a look at our Employee class notice we have overridden the ToString method, which will return employees First name , last name and employee number in parentheses, public override string ToString()        {            return String.Format("{0} {1} ({2})", FirstName, LastName, EmployeeNumber);        }   in our XAML we have set the itemsource of the list box to just  “Binding” and the Grid that contains it, has its DataContext set to a collection of our Employee objects. DataContext="{StaticResource myEmployeeList}"> ….. <ListBox Name="employeeListBox"  ItemsSource="{Binding }" Grid.Row="0" /> the ToString in the method for each instance will get executed and the following is a result of it. if we did not have a ToString the list box would look  like this: now lets take a look at the grid that will display the details when someone clicks on an Item, the Grid has the following DataContext DataContext="{Binding ElementName=employeeListBox,            Path=SelectedItem}"> Which means its bound to a specific instance of the Employee object. and within the gird we have textboxes that are bound to different Properties of our class. <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=FirstName}" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=LastName}" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=Title}" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=Department}" />   Example 05   This project demonstrates use of the ObservableCollection and INotifyPropertyChanged interface. Lets take a look at Employee.cs first, notice it implements the INotifyPropertyChanged interface now scroll down and notice for each setter there is a call to the OnPropertyChanged method, which basically will will fire up the event notifying to the value of that specific property has been changed. Next EmployeeList.cs notice it is an ObservableCollection . Go ahead and set the start up project to example 05 and then run. Click on Add a new employee and the new employee should appear in the list box.   Example 06   This is a great example of IValueConverter its actuall a two for one deal, like most of my presentation demos I found this by “Binging” ( formerly known as g---ing) unfortunately now I can’t find the original author to give him  the credit he/she deserves. Before we look at the code lets run the app and look at the finished product, put in 0 in Celsius  and you should see Fahrenheit textbox displaying to 32 degrees, I know this is calculating correctly from my elementary school science class , also note the color changed to blue, now put in 100 in Celsius which should give us 212 Fahrenheit but now the color is red indicating it is hot, and finally put in 75 Fahrenheit and you should see 23.88 for Celsius and the color now should be black. Basically IValueConverter allows us different types to be bound, I’m sure you have had problems in the past trying to bind to Date values . First look at FahrenheitToCelciusConverter.cs first notice it implements IValueConverter. IValueConverter has two methods Convert and ConvertBack. In each method we have the code for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius and vice Versa. In our XAML, after we set a reference in our Windows.Resources section. and for txtCelsius we set the path to TxtFahrenheit and the converter to an instance our FahrenheitToCelciusConverter converter. no need to repeat this for TxtFahrenheit since we have a convert and ConvertBack. Text="{Binding  UpdateSourceTrigger=PropertyChanged,            Path=Text,ElementName=txtFahrenheit,            Converter={StaticResource myTemperatureConverter}}" As mentioned earlier this is a twofer Demo, in the second demo, we basically are converting a double datatype to a brush. Lets take a look at TemperatureToColorConverter, notice we in our Covert Method, if the value is less than our cold temperature threshold we return a blue brush and if it is higher than our hot temperature threshold we return a redbrush. since we don’t have to convert a brush to double value in our example the convert back is not being implemented. Take time and go through these three examples and I hope you have a better understanding   of databinding, ObservableCollection  and IValueConverter . Next blog posting we will talk about ValidationRule, DataTemplates and DataTemplate triggers.

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  • My Red Gate Experience

    - by Colin Rothwell
    I’m Colin, and I’ve been an intern working with Mike in publishing on Simple-Talk and SQLServerCentral for the past ten weeks. I’ve mostly been working “behind the scenes”, making improvements to the spam filtering, along with various other small tweaks. When I arrived at Red Gate, one of the first things Mike asked me was what I wanted to get out of the internship. It wasn’t a question I’d given a great deal of thought to, but my immediate response was the same as almost anybody: to support my growing family. Well, ok, not quite that, but money was certainly a motivator, along with simply making sure that I didn’t get bored over the summer. Three months is a long time to fill, and many of my friends end up getting bored, or worse, knitting obsessively. With the arrogance which seems fairly common among Cambridge people, I wasn’t expecting to really learn much here! In my mind, the part of the year where I am at Uni is the part where I learn things, whilst Red Gate would be an opportunity to apply what I’d learnt. Thankfully, the opposite is true: I’ve learnt a lot during my time here, and there has been a definite positive impact on the way I write code. The first thing I’ve really learnt is that test-driven development is, in general, a sensible way of working. Before coming, I didn’t really get it: how could you test something you hadn’t yet written? It didn’t make sense! My problem was seeing a test as having to test all the behaviour of a given function. Writing tests which test the bare minimum possible and building them up is a really good way of crystallising the direction the code needs to grow in, and ensures you never attempt to write too much code at time. One really good experience of this was early on in my internship when Mike and I were working on the query used to list active authors: I’d written something which I thought would do the trick, but by starting again using TDD we grew something which revealed that there were several subtle mistakes in the query I’d written. I’ve also been awakened to the value of pair programming. Whilst I could sort of see the point before coming, I also thought that it was impossible that two people would ever get more done at the same computer than if they were working separately. I still think that this is true for projects with pieces that developers can easily work on independently, and with developers who both know the codebase, but I’ve found that pair programming can be really good for learning a code base, and for building up small projects to the point where you can start working on separate components, as well as solving particularly difficult problems. Later on in my internship, for my down tools week project, I was working on adding Python support to Glimpse. Another intern and I we pair programmed the entire project, using ping pong pair programming as much as possible. One bonus that this brought which I wasn’t expecting was that I found myself less prone to distraction: with someone else peering over my shoulder, I didn’t have the ever-present temptation to open gmail, or facebook, or yammer, or twitter, or hacker news, or reddit, and so on, and so forth. I’m quite proud of this project: I think it’s some of the best code I’ve written. I’ve also been really won over to the value of descriptive variables names. In my pre-Red Gate life, as a lone-ranger style cowboy programmer, I’d developed a tendency towards laziness in variable names, sometimes abbreviating or, worse, using acronyms. I’ve swiftly realised that this is a bad idea when working with a team: saving a few key strokes is inevitably not worth it when it comes to reading code again in the future. Longer names also mean you can do away with a majority of comments. I appreciate that if you’ve come up with an O(n*log n) algorithm for something which seemed O(n^2), you probably want to explain how it works, but explaining what a variable name means is a big no no: it’s so very easy to change the behaviour of the code, whilst forgetting about the comments. Whilst at Red Gate, I took the opportunity to attend a code retreat, which really helped me to solidify all the things I’d learnt. To be completely free of any existing code base really lets you focus on best practises and think about how you write code. If you get a chance to go on a similar event, I’d highly recommend it! Cycling to Red Gate, I’ve also become much better at fitting inner tubes: if you’re struggling to get the tube out, or re-fit the tire, letting a bit of air out usually helps. I’ve also become quite a bit better at foosball and will miss having a foosball table! I’d like to finish off by saying thank you to everyone at Red Gate for having me. I’ve really enjoyed working with, and learning from, the team that brings you this web site. If you meet any of them, buy them a drink!

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  • How to build a great relationship with your colleagues

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When you start new job, you worry about your performance, about being able to do what the manager asks you to do, but you also worry about the relations with your colleagues. How will you get along with them? What if they don’t like you? Have you ever felt you’re „the new guy” and your colleagues have already their own way of talking one to each other, their own jokes? It’s a common feeling and can actually become stressful. I am Norbert, Middleware Presales Intern in Hungary and I’ve been working within Oracle for only 1 month. Joining such a big company has been a challenge from many perspectives. One of them was adapting with the environment and getting to know all my colleagues. You know it’s quite difficult to introduce yourself, to try to liaise with them and find some common topics, so I felt very lucky and comfortable when my manager introduced me to all of my colleagues. It was easier to accommodate and we basically we had a starting point for our discussions. We started to talk about what my position means, for how many years they’ve been within Oracle, other Oracle related topics, but also more personal stuff like what they do after work. Having this opportunity of talking with all of them helped me introduce myself in a proper way and actually I told them many things about myself. Networking wasn’t my best skill, but these first days were really helpful from a network point of view. What else can you do to get along with your colleagues? One second thing I consider as being really helpful in networking is asking work-related questions. For instance, when you don’t know how to do something or don’t understand it, asking one of your colleagues will also help you to make a connection with him and you could easily continue the discussion with some other topics which are more personal. It’s a very effective strategy and in a company like Oracle people are very willing to help you with your tasks and perform at a high level. If you see your colleagues going to lunch, you should join them. It will help you become part of their community, finding out what’s new in their lives, you’ll, step-by-step, take part in their conversations and be up to date with the hot topics they talk about. One other opportunity of becoming part of your colleagues’ community are the internal events. Subscribing to the local free time activities mailing list is very useful for finding out information about when they’re going out and have a drink or attending all sorts of events. For instance, this is how I’ve found out about a party within Oracle that most of the employees here attend. It’s a wonderful opportunity for chatting and make a stronger connection to some of them. How important is attending these events? Think about how much time you spend at work. You’d like to enjoy your work and the environment, so getting along with your colleagues is a nice thing to have. I recently attended a corporate party whose purpose was to facilitate the interaction and communication between employees. It was a real success and we had a lot of fun, especially because it was a costume party.  All the fancy dresses and funny clothes we wore made the atmosphere really enjoyable. It was easy to liaise with colleague with whom I had never interacted with before. There was a friendly spirit among us, chatting about personal stuff and about various pleasant things. Working in an international company is not an easy thing because you interact with many people and they have different styles, but all these opportunities of informal interaction are a good way to adapt to the new working environment.

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  • 2D Platformer Collision Handling

    - by defender-zone
    Hello, everyone! I am trying to create a 2D platformer (Mario-type) game and I am some having some issues with handling collisions properly. I am writing this game in C++, using SDL for input, image loading, font loading, etcetera. I am also using OpenGL via the FreeGLUT library in conjunction with SDL to display graphics. My method of collision detection is AABB (Axis-Aligned Bounding Box), which is really all I need to start with. What I need is an easy way to both detect which side the collision occurred on and handle the collisions properly. So, basically, if the player collides with the top of the platform, reposition him to the top; if there is a collision to the sides, reposition the player back to the side of the object; if there is a collision to the bottom, reposition the player under the platform. I have tried many different ways of doing this, such as trying to find the penetration depth and repositioning the player backwards by the penetration depth. Sadly, nothing I've tried seems to work correctly. Player movement ends up being very glitchy and repositions the player when I don't want it to. Part of the reason is probably because I feel like this is something so simple but I'm over-thinking it. If anyone thinks they can help, please take a look at the code below and help me try to improve on this if you can. I would like to refrain from using a library to handle this (as I want to learn on my own) or the something like the SAT (Separating Axis Theorem) if at all possible. Thank you in advance for your help! void world1Level1CollisionDetection() { for(int i; i < blocks; i++) { if (de2dCheckCollision(ball,block[i],0.0f,0.0f)==true) { int up = 0; int left = 0; int right = 0; int down = 0; if(ball.coords[0] < block[i].coords[0] && block[i].coords[0] < ball.coords[2] && ball.coords[2] < block[i].coords[2]) { left = 1; } if(block[i].coords[0] < ball.coords[0] && ball.coords[0] < block[i].coords[2] && block[i].coords[2] < ball.coords[2]) { right = 1; } if(ball.coords[1] < block[i].coords[1] && block[i].coords[1] < ball.coords[3] && ball.coords[3] < block[i].coords[3]) { up = 1; } if(block[i].coords[1] < ball.coords[1] && ball.coords[1] < block[i].coords[3] && block[i].coords[3] < ball.coords[3]) { down = 1; } cout << left << ", " << right << ", " << up << ", " << down << ", " << endl; if (left == 1) { ball.coords[0] = block[i].coords[0] - 16.0f; ball.coords[2] = block[i].coords[0] - 0.0f; } if (right == 1) { ball.coords[0] = block[i].coords[2] + 0.0f; ball.coords[2] = block[i].coords[2] + 16.0f; } if (down == 1) { ball.coords[1] = block[i].coords[3] + 0.0f; ball.coords[3] = block[i].coords[3] + 16.0f; } if (up == 1) { ball.yspeed = 0.0f; ball.gravity = 0.0f; ball.coords[1] = block[i].coords[1] - 16.0f; ball.coords[3] = block[i].coords[1] - 0.0f; } } if (de2dCheckCollision(ball,block[i],0.0f,0.0f)==false) { ball.gravity = -0.5f; } } } To explain what some of this code means: The blocks variable is basically an integer that is storing the amount of blocks, or platforms. I am checking all of the blocks using a for loop, and the number that the loop is currently on is represented by integer i. The coordinate system might seem a little weird, so that's worth explaining. coords[0] represents the x position (left) of the object (where it starts on the x axis). coords[1] represents the y position (top) of the object (where it starts on the y axis). coords[2] represents the width of the object plus coords[0] (right). coords[3] represents the height of the object plus coords[1] (bottom). de2dCheckCollision performs an AABB collision detection. Up is negative y and down is positive y, as it is in most games. Hopefully I have provided enough information for someone to help me successfully. If there is something I left out that might be crucial, let me know and I'll provide the necessary information. Finally, for anyone who can help, providing code would be very helpful and much appreciated. Thank you again for your help!

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  • Build 2012, some thoughts..

    - by Dennis Vroegop
    I think you probably read my rant about the logistics at Build 2012, as posted here, so I am not going into that anymore. Instead, let’s look at the content. (BTW If you did read that post and want some more info then read Nia Angelina’s post about Build. I have nothing to add to that.) As usual, there were good speakers and some speakers who could benefit from some speaker training. I find it hard to understand why Microsoft allows certain people on stage, people who speak English with such strong accents it’s hard for people, especially from abroad, to understand. Some basic training might be useful for some of them. However, it is nice to see that most speakers are project managers, program managers or even devs on the teams that build the stuff they talk about: there was a lot of knowledge on stage! And that means when you ask questions you get very relevant information. I realize I am not the average audience member here, I am regular speaker myself so I tend to look for other things when I am in a room than most audience members so my opinion might differ from others. All in all the knowledge of the speakers was above average but the presentation skills were most of the times below what I would describe as adequate. But let us look at the contents. Since the official name of the conference is Build Windows 2012 it is not surprising most of the talks were focused on building Windows 8 apps. Next to that, there was a lot of focus on Azure and of course Windows Phone 8 that launched the day before Build started. Most sessions dealt with C# and JavaScript although I did see a tendency to use C++ more. Touch. Well, that was the focus on a lot of sessions, that goes without saying. Microsoft is really betting on Touch these days and being a Touch oriented developer I can only applaud this. The term NUI is getting a bit outdated but the principles behind it certainly aren’t. The sessions did cover quite a lot on how to make your applications easy to use and easy to understand. However, not all is touch nowadays; still the majority of people use keyboard and mouse to interact with their machines (or, as I do, use keyboard, mouse AND touch at the same time). Microsoft understands this and has spend some serious thoughts on this as well. It was all about making your apps run everywhere on all sorts of devices and in all sorts of scenarios. I have seen a couple of sessions focusing on the portable class library and on sharing code between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. You get the feeling Microsoft is enabling us devs to write software that will be ubiquitous. They want your stuff to be all over the place and they do anything they can to help. To achieve that goal they provide us with brilliant SDK’s, great tooling, a very, very good backend in the form of Windows Azure (I was particularly impressed by the Mobility part of Azure) and some fantastic hardware. And speaking of hardware: the partners such as Acer, Lenovo and Dell are making hardware that puts Apple to a shame nowadays. To illustrate: in Bellevue (very close to Redmond where Microsoft HQ is) they have the Microsoft Store located very close to the Apple Store, so it’s easy to compare devices. And I have to say: the Microsoft offerings are much, much more appealing that what the Cupertino guys have to offer. That was very visible by the number of people visiting the stores: even on the day that Apple launched the iPad Mini there were more people in the Microsoft store than in the Apple store. So, the future looks like it’s going to be fun. Great hardware (did I mention the Nokia Lumia 920? No? It’s brilliant), great software (Windows 8 is in a league of its own), the best dev tools (Visual Studio 2012 is still the champion here) and a fantastic backend (Azure.. need I say more?). It’s up to us devs to fill up the stores with applications that matches this. To summarize: it is great to be a Windows developer. PS. Did I mention Surface RT? Man….. People were drooling all over it wherever I went. It is fantastic :-) Technorati Tags: Build,Windows 8,Windows Phone,Lumia,Surface,Microsoft

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  • 3 Trends for SMBs around Social, Mobile, and Sensor

    - by Socially_Aware_Enterprise
    While I often am talking to big companies or discussing enterprise solutions. There are times when individuals ask me about Small or Medium sized business trends.  Interestingly,  the Enterprise Social, Mobile, and Sensor initiatives I regularly discuss are in fact related to even the Mom and Pop storefront. The eco-system of new service players in the Social-Mobile-Sensor space generally emerge developing partnerships with enterprises as they develop and bring economy to scale to their services for the larger market. And of course Oracle has an entire division dedicated for delivering products and support to help emerging companies compete without the need to open an industrial strength credit line.. So here are some trends that we are helping large enterprises to deploy today, but small and medium businesses should be able to take advantage of by the end of this year and starting into 2015. 1) The typical small business is generally "Localized". But the ability to be "Hyper-Localized" will come as location based services become ubiquitous. Many small businesses have one or several storefronts and theirs are typically within a single regional economic footprint. While the internet provides global reach, it will be the businesses that invest in social, mobile and local that will win in the end.  Of course I am a huge SoMoLo evangelist. The SMBs' content and targeting with platforms for Geo-Fencing, Geo-Conquesting and Path-Matching to HHI are all going to be accessible to them, if not for Mobile Apps, then via Mobile messaging in Social Networks that offer it.. Expect to be able to target FaceBook messaging not by city, but by store or mall… This makes being able to be "Hyper-Local" even more important. And with new proximity services coming online more than ever before, SMBs will operate and service customers with pinpoint accuracy right down to where they stand in an aisle. Geo-Conquesting will be huge for small players to place ads when customers pass through competitors regions. Car Dealers are doing this now.. But also of course iBeacons are now very cheap and getting easier to put in retail stores. The ability for sales to happen anywhere in the store via a mobile phone or tablet is huge, as it will give the small shop the flexibility to not have to "Guard the Register" as more or most transactions will be digital. Thus, M-Commerce and T-Commerce will change the job of cashier dramatically.. 2) Intra-Brand Advocacy, the idea now is that rather than just depend on your trusty social media manager and his team, you are going to push more and more individuals with expertise inside the organization to help manage, reach-out, and utilize social channels to manage the incoming questions and answers customers need. While for years CRM was the tool of the enterprise, today CRMs enable this now "Salesforce et al" capability to trickle throughout the company. This gives greater pressure to organize roles, but also flatten out the organization. Internal collaboration around topics and customer needs is going to be the key for SMBs to finally get serious about customer experiences. Their customers are online and in social networks. This includes not just B2C SMBs but also B2B companies as well. Don't believe me? To find the players just use hashtag #SocialSelling and you will see… 3) The Visual Networks will begin to move from Content Aggregators to Content Collaboration platforms, which means Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, & others will begin to move to add more features brands want, first marketing platforms, rather than unique brand partnerships as they do today, but this will open ways for SMBs to engage with clear brand messaging and metrics. Eventually providing more "Collaboration" between Brand and Consumer.. Don't think for a minute Facebook bought Oculus Rift so you could see your timeline in 3-D. The Social Networks I advise customers to invest in are ones that are audio and visual intrinsically. Players from SoundCloud to Pinterest are deploying ways for brands to harness their interactive visual or audio based social networks to sell ad units aka brand messaging. While the Social Media revolution is going on, the emphasis was on the social, today it more and more about the media in social, that enterprises soon small and medium businesses will be connected to. 

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  • JavaOne 2012 Sunday Strategy Keynote

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    At the Sunday Strategy Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Hasan Rizvi, EVP, Middleware and Java Development, stated that the theme for this year's JavaOne is: “Make the future Java”-- meaning that Java continues in its role as the most popular, complete, productive, secure, and innovative development platform. But it also means, he qualified, the process by which we make the future Java -- an open, transparent, collaborative, and community-driven evolution. "Many of you have bet your businesses and your careers on Java, and we have bet our business on Java," he said.Rizvi detailed the three factors they consider critical to the success of Java--technology innovation, community participation, and Oracle's leadership/stewardship. He offered a scorecard in these three realms over the past year--with OS X and Linux ARM support on Java SE, open sourcing of JavaFX by the end of the year, the release of Java Embedded Suite 7.0 middleware platform, and multiple releases on the Java EE side. The JCP process continues, with new JSR activity, and JUGs show a 25% increase in participation since last year. Oracle, meanwhile, continues its commitment to both technology and community development/outreach--with four regional JavaOne conferences last year in various part of the world, as well as the release of Java Magazine, with over 120,000 current subscribers. Georges Saab, VP Development, Java SE, next reviewed features of Java SE 7--the first major revision to the platform under Oracle's stewardship, which has included near-monthly update releases offering hundreds of fixes, performance enhancements, and new features. Saab indicated that developers, ISVs, and hosting providers have all been rapid adopters of the platform. He also noted that Oracle's entire Fusion middleware stack is supported on SE 7. The supported platforms for SE 7 has also increased--from Windows, Linux, and Solaris, to OS X, Linux ARM, and the emerging ARM micro-server market. "In the last year, we've added as many new platforms for Java, as were added in the previous decade," said Saab.Saab also explored the upcoming JDK 8 release--including Project Lambda, Project Nashorn (a modern implementation of JavaScript running on the JVM), and others. He noted that Nashorn functionality had already been used internally in NetBeans 7.3, and announced that they were planning to contribute the implementation to OpenJDK. Nandini Ramani, VP Development, Java Client, ME and Card, discussed the latest news pertaining to JavaFX 2.0--releases on Windows, OS X, and Linux, release of the FX Scene Builder tool, the JavaFX WebView component in NetBeans 7.3, and an OpenJFX project in OpenJDK. Nandini announced, as of Sunday, the availability for download of JavaFX on Linux ARM (developer preview), as well as Scene Builder on Linux. She noted that for next year's JDK 8 release, JavaFX will offer 3D, as well as third-party component integration. Avinder Brar, Senior Software Engineer, Navis, and Dierk König, Canoo Fellow, next took the stage and demonstrated all that JavaFX offers, with a feature-rich, animation-rich, real-time cargo management application that employs Canoo's just open-sourced Dolphin technology.Saab also explored Java SE 9 and beyond--Jigsaw modularity, Penrose Project for interoperability with OSGi, improved multi-tenancy for Java in the cloud, and Project Sumatra. Phil Rogers, HSA Foundation President and AMD Corporate Fellow, explored heterogeneous computing platforms that combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon and shared memory—a hardware technology driven by such advanced functionalities as HD video, face recognition, and cloud workloads. Project Sumatra is an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to such heterogeneous platforms--with hardware and software experts working together to modify the JVM for these advanced applications and platforms.Ramani next discussed the latest with Java in the embedded space--"the Internet of things" and M2M--declaring this to be "the next IT revolution," with Java as the ideal technology for the ecosystem. Last week, Oracle released Java ME Embedded 3.2 (for micro-contollers and low-power devices), and Java Embedded Suite 7.0 (a middleware stack based on Java SE 7). Axel Hansmann, VP Strategy and Marketing, Cinterion, explored his company's use of Java in M2M, and their new release of EHS5, the world's smallest 3G-capable M2M module, running Java ME Embedded. Hansmaan explained that Java offers them the ability to create a "simple to use, scalable, coherent, end-to-end layer" for such diverse edge devices.Marc Brule, Chief Financial Office, Royal Canadian Mint, also explored the fascinating use-case of JavaCard in his country's MintChip e-cash technology--deployable on smartphones, USB device, computer, tablet, or cloud. In parting, Ramani encouraged developers to download the latest releases of Java Embedded, and try them out.Cameron Purdy, VP, Fusion Middleware Development and Java EE, summarized the latest developments and announcements in the Enterprise space--greater developer productivity in Java EE6 (with more on the way in EE 7), portability between platforms, vendors, and even cloud-to-cloud portability. The earliest version of the Java EE 7 SDK is now available for download--in GlassFish 4--with WebSocket support, better JSON support, and more. The final release is scheduled for April of 2013. Nicole Otto, Senior Director, Consumer Digital Technology, Nike, explored her company's Java technology driven enterprise ecosystem for all things sports, including the NikeFuel accelerometer wrist band. Looking beyond Java EE 7, Purdy mentioned NoSQL database functionality for EE 8, the concurrency utilities (possibly in EE 7), some of the Avatar projects in EE 7, some in EE 8, multi-tenancy for the cloud, supporting SaaS applications, and more.Rizvi ended by introducing Dr. Robert Ballard, oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence--part of Oracle's philanthropic relationship with the National Geographic Society to fund K-12 education around ocean science and conservation. Ballard is best known for having discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. He offered a fascinating video and overview of the cutting edge technology used in such deep-sea explorations, noting that in his early days, high-bandwidth exploration meant that you’d go down in a submarine and "stick your face up against the window." Now, it's a remotely operated, technology telepresence--"I think of my Hercules vehicle as my equivalent of a Na'vi. When I go beneath the sea, I actually send my spirit." Using high bandwidth satellite links, such amazing explorations can now occur via smartphone, laptop, or whatever platform. Ballard’s team regularly offers live feeds and programming out to schools and the world, spanning 188 countries--with embedding educators as part of the expeditions. It's technology at its finest, inspiring the next-generation of scientists and explorers!

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  • Phones, Nokia, Microsoft and More

    - by Bill Evjen
    The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan that took it to the next level and now all TVs are from somewhere else other than the USA. Really there are two camps for the phones – the Cool Kids and other kids that no one wants to hang out with anymore. When it comes to cool – for some reason, the phone is an important part of that factor. Everyone wants to show their phone and its configuration (apps installed, etc) to their friends as a sign of (1) “I have money” and (2) I have smarts/tastes/style/etc when it comes to my applications that are on my phone. For those that don’t know – the Cool Kids include: Apple – this is quite obvious as everything Apple produces is in the cool camp. Just having an Apple product on your person means you can dance. Google – this is one of the more interesting releases as they have created something called Android (which in it’s own right is a major brand in itself). Microsoft – you might be saying “Really, Microsoft is cool?”. I would argue that they are indeed cool as it is now associated with XBOX 360, Kinect, and Windows 7. Gone are the days of Bob and that silly paperclip. Well – that’s it. There is nobody else I would stick in that camp. The other kids that weren’t picked for that dodgeball team include: Nokia Motorola Palm Blackberry and many many more The sad part of all this is that no matter what this second camp does now, it won’t be able to get out of this bucket easily. They will always be associated as yesterday’s technology and that association will drive the sales of the phone purchasers of the world. For those in that group, the only possible way out is to get invited to the cool club by one of the cool club members in the hope that their coolness somehow rubs off. To me, this is the move that Nokia is making. They are at this point where they have realized that they don’t have the full scope of the required end to end solution to make this all work. They have the plants to build the phones and the reach of the retailers that sell what they have. What they are missing is the proper operating system for the new world of multi-touch form factor phones. Even the companies that come up with some sort of new operating system for this type of new device, they are still associated with the yesterday and lack the developer community behind them to be the real wave of adoption that this market needs. Think about that – this is a major different between Nokia/Blackberry when you compare it to the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. These three powerhouses having a very large and strong development community that will eagerly take on new initiatives using the skillsets that they have already cultivated over the years of already working with the company. This then results in a plethora of applications that are then placed on an app store of some kind. The developer gets a cut and then Apple/Google/Microsoft then get their cut. It is definitely a win-win. None of the other phone companies and wannabies can provide the same results. What Microsoft was missing was the major phone manufactures coming on board to create and push forward with the phones that are required to start the wave. This is where Nokia can come in and help Microsoft. They have the ability to promote the Windows Phone operating system on a new wave of phones. This does mean that Nokia will sell phones, but they lose out on the application store that they might have been thinking about making some money on as well as controlling the end to end solution. What is interesting is in questioning to oneself if Microsoft will purchase Nokia. It really depends upon how they want to compete and with whom Microsoft views as the major competitor. For instance, they can purchase Nokia and have their own hardware company and distribution network for phones – thereby taking on a model that is quite similar to Apple. On the other hand, they could just leave it up to the phone hardware companies such as Nokia and others to build and promote phones in a model that is similar to Google. Both ways have pluses and minuses. If they own the phone manufacturer, they really can put some thought into the design and technical specifications of the phone that is really designed to exactly how they want it. Microsoft has shown that they have this ability – especially with the XBOX initiative they have done over the years. Think about how good and powerful they have moved forward with XBOX – and I am not talking about just copying what others are doing, but coming up with leapfrog products that are steps ahead of everyone else. Though, if they didn’t do it themselves, they could then leave it up to the phone manufacturers to drive each other to build better and better phones that run the Microsoft OS – competition drives better products. We have seen this with the Android line of phones that are out there on the market. I have read a lot about Nokia investors really upset about the new Microsoft relationship – but really, this is a great thing. I for one am a fan of this relationship (I am also a Nokia stock holder btw). This will mean better days for Nokia.

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  • ASP.NET: Using pickup directory for outgoing e-mails

    - by DigiMortal
    Sending e-mails out from web applications is very common task. When we are working on or test our systems with real e-mail addresses we don’t want recipients to receive e-mails (specially if we are using some subset of real data9. In this posting I will show you how to make ASP.NET SMTP client to write e-mails to disc instead of sending them out. SMTP settings for web application I have seen many times the code where all SMTP information is kept in app settings just to read them in code and give to SMTP client. It is not necessary because we can define all these settings under system.web => mailsettings node. If you are using web.config to keep SMTP settings then all you have to do in your code is just to create SmtpClient with empty constructor. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); Empty constructor means that all settings are read from web.config file. What is pickup directory? If you want drastically raise e-mail throughput of your SMTP server then it is not very wise plan to communicate with it using SMTP protocol. it adds only additional overhead to your network and SMTP server. Okay, clients make connections, send messages out and it is also overhead we can avoid. If clients write their e-mails to some folder that SMTP server can access then SMTP server has e-mail forwarding as only resource-eager task to do. File operations are way faster than communication over SMTP protocol. The directory where clients write their e-mails as files is called pickup directory. By example, Exchange server has support for pickup directories. And as there are applications with a lot of users who want e-mail notifications then .NET SMTP client supports writing e-mails to pickup directory instead of sending them out. How to configure ASP.NET SMTP to use pickup directory? Let’s say, it is more than easy. It is very easy. This is all you need. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">       <specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="c:\temp\maildrop\"/>     </smtp>   </mailSettings> </system.net> Now make sure you don’t miss come points: Pickup directory must physically exist because it is not created automatically. IIS (or Cassini) must have write permissions to pickup directory. Go through your code and look for hardcoded SMTP settings. Also take a look at all places in your code where you send out e-mails that there are not some custom settings used for SMTP! Also don’t forget that your mails will be written now to pickup directory and they are not sent out to recipients anymore. Advanced scenario: configuring SMTP client in code In some advanced scenarios you may need to support multiple SMTP servers. If configuration is dynamic or it is not kept in web.config you need to initialize your SmtpClient in code. This is all you need to do. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); smtpClient.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.SpecifiedPickupDirectory; smtpClient.PickupDirectoryLocation = pickupFolder; Easy, isn’t it? i like when advanced scenarios end up with simple and elegant solutions but not with rocket science. Note for IIS SMTP service SMTP service of IIS is also able to use pickup directory. If you have set up IIS with SMTP service you can configure your ASP.NET application to use IIS pickup folder. In this case you have to use the following setting for delivery method. SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis You can set this setting also in web.config file. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="PickupDirectoryFromIis" />   </mailSettings> </system.net> Conclusion Who was still using different methods to avoid sending e-mails out in development or testing environment can now remove all the bad code from application and live on mail settings of ASP.NET. It is easy to configure and you have less code to support e-mails when you use built-in e-mail features wisely.

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  • The Customer Experience Imperative: A Game Changer for Brands

    - by Jeri Kelley
    By Anthony Lye, SVP, Cloud Applications Strategy, Oracle We know that customer experience has emerged as a primary differentiator for businesses today.  I’ve talked a lot about the new age of the empowered consumer. At Oracle we’ve spent a lot of time developing technologies and practices that our customers can implement to greatly improve their customer experience strategies. Of course I’m biased, but I think that we have created a portfolio of the best solutions on the planet to help organizations deal with the challenges of providing great customer experiences. We’ve done this because we started to witness some trends over the last few years. As the average person began to utilize social and mobile technologies more frequently and products commoditized, customer experience truly remained the only sustainable differentiator for businesses.In fact, we have seen that customer experience is often driving the success or the failure of a product or a brand. And as end customers have become more vocal about their experiences with companies on social and mobile channels, they now have the power to decide which brands will win and which brands will lose. To address this customer experience imperative, I believe that business today must do three things really well:Connect with your customers. You have to connect with customers whenever, wherever and however they want. Organizations must provide a great experience on their existing channels— the call center, the brick and mortar store, the field sales organizations, the websites and social properties. Businesses must also be great at managing and delivering journeys on these channels, while quickly adapting to embrace the new channels that emerge. You have to understand mobile. You have to understand social. You have to understand kiosks. These are all new routes to market, new channels where your customers may or may not show up. You have to interact with them where they are. You have to present information in a way that's meaningful to them. As well as providing what we would call a multichannel experience. We have to recognize that customers may start their experience on one channel, but end it on a different channel. It’s important that an organization’s technology solutions enable, not just a multichannel strategy, but a strategy that can power new channels and create customer journeys that cross these channels.Get to know your customers. Next, companies need to get to know the customer as intimately as the customer will allow. Today most customer interactions are anonymous, but it’s important for brands to know which customers drive value. Customers want to provide feedback. They want to share their opinions, but they want to know that those opinions are being heard and acted upon. For this to occur, we need to know much more about the customer and then reward them for their loyalty and for their advocacy.Enable connections. The last thing is to enable people to connect or transact with your brand. We've got to make it really, really simple for customers to do business with us. We can't make them repeat the steps; we can't make them tell us their identity for the fifth time as they move between organizations. These silos can no longer sustain or deliver a good customer experience. It's extremely important that companies be where customers want them to be—that we create profitable journeys for us and for them.Organizations have to make sure that there is a single source of truth that defines the customer. We have to make sure that the technology applications that we rely on understand not just the dimensions of multichannel, but of cross-channel too. We have to enable social at the very core of the overall architecture. We have to use historical analytics, real-time decisioning as well as predictive analytics to help personalize and drive an experience. And these are all technologies that IT needs, that IT is familiar with, but needs to enable for the line of business that in turn can enable for the end customer.  This means that we've got to make our solutions available to the customers in the cloud.In this new age of the empowered consumer, businesses have to focus on delivery mechanisms that reduce the overall TCO, while driving a rapid rate of innovation and a more rapid rate of deployment. At the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld, I’ll discuss these issues and more. I hope that you can join us for what promises to be an unforgettable experience.

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  • Coping with infrastructure upgrades

    - by Fatherjack
    A common topic for questions on SQL Server forums is how to plan and implement upgrades to SQL Server. Moving from old to new hardware or moving from one version of SQL Server to another. There are other circumstances where upgrades of other systems affect SQL Server DBAs. For example, where I work at the moment there is an Microsoft Exchange (email) server upgrade in progress. It it being handled by a different team so I’m not wholly sure on the details but we are in a situation where there are currently 2 Exchange email servers – the old one and the new one. Users mail boxes are being transferred in a planned process but as we approach the old server being turned off we have to also make sure that our SQL Servers get updated to use the new SMTP server for all of the SQL Agent notifications, SSIS packages etc. My servers have a number of profiles so that various jobs can send emails on behalf of various departments and different systems. This means there are lots of places that the old server name needs to be replaced by the new one. Anyone who has set up DBMail and enjoyed the click-tastic odyssey of screens to create Profiles and Accounts and so on and so forth ought to seek some professional help in my opinion. It’s a nightmare of back and forth settings changes and it stinks. I wasn’t looking forward to heading into this mess of a UI and changing the old Exchange server name for the new one on all my SQL Instances for all of the accounts I have set up. So I did what any Englishmen with a shed would do, I decided to take it apart and see if I can fix it another way. I took a guess that we are going to be working in MSDB and Books OnLine was remarkably helpful and amongst a lot of information told me about a couple of procedures that can be used to interrogate DBMail settings. USE [msdb] -- It's where all the good stuff is kept GO EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_profile_sp; EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_account_sp; Both of these procedures take optional parameters with the same name – ID and Name. If you provide an ID or a name then the results you get back are for that specific Profile or Account. Otherwise you get details of all Profiles and Accounts on the server you are connected to. As you can see (click for a bigger image), the Account has the SMTP server information in the servername column. We want to change that value to NewSMTP.Contoso.com. Now it appears that the procedure we are looking at gets it’s data from the sysmail_account and sysmail_server tables, you can get the results the stored procedure provides if you run the code below. SELECT [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] FROM dbo.sysmail_account AS sa; SELECT [account_id] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [credential_id] , [use_default_credentials] , [enable_ssl] , [flags] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] , [timeout] FROM dbo.sysmail_server AS sms Now, we have no real idea how these tables are linked and whether making an update direct to one or other of them is going to do what we want or whether it will entirely cripple our ability to send email from SQL Server so we wont touch those tables with any UPDATE TSQL. So, back to Books OnLine then and we find sysmail_update_account_sp. It’s exactly what we need. The examples in BOL take the form (as below) of having every parameter explicitly defined. Not wanting to totally obliterate the existing values by not passing values in all of the parameters I set to writing some code to gather the existing data from the tables and re-write the SMTP server name and then execute the resulting TSQL. IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#sysmailprofiles') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #sysmailprofiles GO CREATE TABLE #sysmailprofiles ( account_id INT , [name] VARCHAR(50) , [description] VARCHAR(500) , email_address VARCHAR(500) , display_name VARCHAR(500) , replyto_address VARCHAR(500) , servertype VARCHAR(10) , servername VARCHAR(100) , port INT , username VARCHAR(100) , use_default_credentials VARCHAR(1) , ENABLE_ssl VARCHAR(1) ) INSERT [#sysmailprofiles] ( [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [use_default_credentials] , [ENABLE_ssl] ) EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_help_account_sp] DECLARE @TSQL NVARCHAR(1000) SELECT TOP 1 @TSQL = 'EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_update_account_sp] @account_id = ' + CAST([s].[account_id] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @account_name = ''' + [s].[name] + '''' + ', @email_address = N''' + [s].[email_address] + '''' + ', @display_name = N''' + [s].[display_name] + '''' + ', @replyto_address = N''' + s.replyto_address + '''' + ', @description = N''' + [s].[description] + '''' + ', @mailserver_name = ''NEWSMTP.contoso.com''' + +', @mailserver_type = ' + [s].[servertype] + ', @port = ' + CAST([s].[port] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @username = ' + COALESCE([s].[username], '''''') + ', @use_default_credentials =' + CAST(s.[use_default_credentials] AS VARCHAR(1)) + ', @enable_ssl =' + [s].[ENABLE_ssl] FROM [#sysmailprofiles] AS s WHERE [s].[servername] = 'SMTP.Contoso.com' SELECT @tsql EXEC [sys].[sp_executesql] @tsql This worked well for me and testing the email function EXEC dbo.sp_send_dbmail afterwards showed that the settings were indeed using our new Exchange server. It was only later in writing this blog that I tried running the sysmail_update_account_sp procedure with only the SMTP server name parameter value specified. Despite what Books OnLine might intimate, you can do this and only the values for parameters specified get changed. If a parameter is not specified in the execution of the procedure then the values remain unchanged. This renders most of the above script unnecessary as I could have simply specified the account_id that I want to amend and the new value for the parameter I want to update. EXEC sysmail_update_account_sp @account_id = 1, @mailserver_name = 'NEWSMTP.Contoso.com' This wasn’t going to be the main reason for this post, it was meant to describe how to capture values from a stored procedure and use them in dynamic TSQL but instead we are here and (re)learning the fact that Books Online is a little flawed in places. It is a fantastic resource for anyone working with SQL Server but the reader must adopt an enquiring frame of mind and use a little curiosity to try simple variations on examples to fully understand the code you are working with. I think the author(s) of this part of Books OnLine missed an opportunity to include a third example that had fewer than all parameters specified to give a lead to this method existing.

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  • .NET Security Part 4

    - by Simon Cooper
    Finally, in this series, I am going to cover some of the security issues that can trip you up when using sandboxed appdomains. DISCLAIMER: I am not a security expert, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you actually are writing security-critical code, then get a proper security audit of your code by a professional. The examples below are just illustrations of the sort of things that can go wrong. 1. AppDomainSetup.ApplicationBase The most obvious one is the issue covered in the MSDN documentation on creating a sandbox, in step 3 – the sandboxed appdomain has the same ApplicationBase as the controlling appdomain. So let’s explore what happens when they are the same, and an exception is thrown. In the sandboxed assembly, Sandboxed.dll (IPlugin is an interface in a partially-trusted assembly, with a single MethodToDoThings on it): public class UntrustedPlugin : MarshalByRefObject, IPlugin { // implements IPlugin.MethodToDoThings() public void MethodToDoThings() { throw new EvilException(); } } [Serializable] internal class EvilException : Exception { public override string ToString() { // show we have read access to C:\Windows // read the first 5 directories Console.WriteLine("Pwned! Mwuahahah!"); foreach (var d in Directory.EnumerateDirectories(@"C:\Windows").Take(5)) { Console.WriteLine(d.FullName); } return base.ToString(); } } And in the controlling assembly: // what can possibly go wrong? AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase } // only grant permissions to execute // and to read the application base, nothing else PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.pathDiscovery, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain("Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms); // execute UntrustedPlugin in the sandbox // don't crash the application if the sandbox throws an exception IPlugin o = (IPlugin)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap("Sandboxed.dll", "UntrustedPlugin"); try { o.MethodToDoThings() } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine(e.ToString()); } And the result? Oops. We’ve allowed a class that should be sandboxed to execute code with fully-trusted permissions! How did this happen? Well, the key is the exact meaning of the ApplicationBase property: The application base directory is where the assembly manager begins probing for assemblies. When EvilException is thrown, it propagates from the sandboxed appdomain into the controlling assembly’s appdomain (as it’s marked as Serializable). When the exception is deserialized, the CLR finds and loads the sandboxed dll into the fully-trusted appdomain. Since the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory contains the sandboxed assembly, the CLR finds and loads the assembly into a full-trust appdomain, and the evil code is executed. So the problem isn’t exactly that the sandboxed appdomain’s ApplicationBase is the same as the controlling appdomain’s, it’s that the sandboxed dll was in such a place that the controlling appdomain could find it as part of the standard assembly resolution mechanism. The sandbox then forced the assembly to load in the controlling appdomain by throwing a serializable exception that propagated outside the sandbox. The easiest fix for this is to keep the sandbox ApplicationBase well away from the ApplicationBase of the controlling appdomain, and don’t allow the sandbox permissions to access the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory. If you do this, then the sandboxed assembly can’t be accidentally loaded into the fully-trusted appdomain, and the code can’t be executed. If the plugin does try to induce the controlling appdomain to load an assembly it shouldn’t, a SerializationException will be thrown when it tries to load the assembly to deserialize the exception, and no damage will be done. 2. Loading the sandboxed dll into the application appdomain As an extension of the previous point, you shouldn’t directly reference types or methods in the sandboxed dll from your application code. That loads the assembly into the fully-trusted appdomain, and from there code in the assembly could be executed. Instead, pull out methods you want the sandboxed dll to have into an interface or class in a partially-trusted assembly you control, and execute methods via that instead (similar to the example above with the IPlugin interface). If you need to have a look at the assembly before executing it in the sandbox, either examine the assembly using reflection from within the sandbox, or load the assembly into the Reflection-only context in the application’s appdomain. The code in assemblies in the reflection-only context can’t be executed, it can only be reflected upon, thus protecting your appdomain from malicious code. 3. Incorrectly asserting permissions You should only assert permissions when you are absolutely sure they’re safe. For example, this method allows a caller read-access to any file they call this method with, including your documents, any network shares, the C:\Windows directory, etc: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static string GetFileText(string filePath) { new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, filePath).Assert(); return File.ReadAllText(filePath); } Be careful when asserting permissions, and ensure you’re not providing a loophole sandboxed dlls can use to gain access to things they shouldn’t be able to. Conclusion Hopefully, that’s given you an idea of some of the ways it’s possible to get past the .NET security system. As I said before, this post is not exhaustive, and you certainly shouldn’t base any security-critical applications on the contents of this blog post. What this series should help with is understanding the possibilities of the security system, and what all the security attributes and classes mean and what they are used for, if you were to use the security system in the future.

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  • Which of these algorithms is best for my goal?

    - by JonathonG
    I have created a program that restricts the mouse to a certain region based on a black/white bitmap. The program is 100% functional as-is, but uses an inaccurate, albeit fast, algorithm for repositioning the mouse when it strays outside the area. Currently, when the mouse moves outside the area, basically what happens is this: A line is drawn between a pre-defined static point inside the region and the mouse's new position. The point where that line intersects the edge of the allowed area is found. The mouse is moved to that point. This works, but only works perfectly for a perfect circle with the pre-defined point set in the exact center. Unfortunately, this will never be the case. The application will be used with a variety of rectangles and irregular, amorphous shapes. On such shapes, the point where the line drawn intersects the edge will usually not be the closest point on the shape to the mouse. I need to create a new algorithm that finds the closest point to the mouse's new position on the edge of the allowed area. I have several ideas about this, but I am not sure of their validity, in that they may have far too much overhead. While I am not asking for code, it might help to know that I am using Objective C / Cocoa, developing for OS X, as I feel the language being used might affect the efficiency of potential methods. My ideas are: Using a bit of trigonometry to project lines would work, but that would require some kind of intense algorithm to test every point on every line until it found the edge of the region... That seems too resource intensive since there could be something like 200 lines that would have each have to have as many as 200 pixels checked for black/white.... Using something like an A* pathing algorithm to find the shortest path to a black pixel; however, A* seems resource intensive, even though I could probably restrict it to only checking roughly in one direction. It also seems like it will take more time and effort than I have available to spend on this small portion of the much larger project I am working on, correct me if I am wrong and it would not be a significant amount of code (100 lines or around there). Mapping the border of the region before the application begins running the event tap loop. I think I could accomplish this by using my current line-based algorithm to find an edge point and then initiating an algorithm that checks all 8 pixels around that pixel, finds the next border pixel in one direction, and continues to do this until it comes back to the starting pixel. I could then store that data in an array to be used for the entire duration of the program, and have the mouse re-positioning method check the array for the closest pixel on the border to the mouse target position. That last method would presumably execute it's initial border mapping fairly quickly. (It would only have to map between 2,000 and 8,000 pixels, which means 8,000 to 64,000 checked, and I could even permanently store the data to make launching faster.) However, I am uncertain as to how much overhead it would take to scan through that array for the shortest distance for every single mouse move event... I suppose there could be a shortcut to restrict the number of elements in the array that will be checked to a variable number starting with the intersecting point on the line (from my original algorithm), and raise/lower that number to experiment with the overhead/accuracy tradeoff. Please let me know if I am over thinking this and there is an easier way that will work just fine, or which of these methods would be able to execute something like 30 times per second to keep mouse movement smooth, or if you have a better/faster method. I've posted relevant parts of my code below for reference, and included an example of what the area might look like. (I check for color value against a loaded bitmap that is black/white.) // // This part of my code runs every single time the mouse moves. // CGPoint point = CGEventGetLocation(event); float tX = point.x; float tY = point.y; if( is_in_area(tX,tY, mouse_mask)){ // target is inside O.K. area, do nothing }else{ CGPoint target; //point inside restricted region: float iX = 600; // inside x float iY = 500; // inside y // delta to midpoint between iX,iY and tX,tY float dX; float dY; float accuracy = .5; //accuracy to loop until reached do { dX = (tX-iX)/2; dY = (tY-iY)/2; if(is_in_area((tX-dX),(tY-dY),mouse_mask)){ iX += dX; iY += dY; } else { tX -= dX; tY -= dY; } } while (abs(dX)>accuracy || abs(dY)>accuracy); target = CGPointMake(roundf(tX), roundf(tY)); CGDisplayMoveCursorToPoint(CGMainDisplayID(),target); } Here is "is_in_area(int x, int y)" : bool is_in_area(NSInteger x, NSInteger y, NSBitmapImageRep *mouse_mask){ NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; NSUInteger pixel[4]; [mouse_mask getPixel:pixel atX:x y:y]; if(pixel[0]!= 0){ [pool release]; return false; } [pool release]; return true; }

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  • Gamification at OOW

    - by erikanollwebb
    Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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  • Windows in StreamInsight: Hopping vs. Snapshot

    - by Roman Schindlauer
    Three weeks ago, we explained the basic concept of windows in StreamInsight: defining sets of events that serve as arguments for set-based operations, like aggregations. Today, we want to discuss the so-called Hopping Windows and compare them with Snapshot Windows. We will compare these two, because they can serve similar purposes with different behaviors; we will discuss the remaining window type, Count Windows, another time. Hopping (and its syntactic-sugar-sister Tumbling) windows are probably the most straightforward windowing concept in StreamInsight. A hopping window is defined by its length, and the offset from one window to the next. They are aligned with some absolute point on the timeline (which can also be given as a parameter to the window) and create sets of events. The diagram below shows an example of a hopping window with length of 1h and hop size (the offset) of 15 minutes, hence creating overlapping windows:   Two aspects in this diagram are important: Since this window is overlapping, an event can fall into more than one windows. If an (interval) event spans a window boundary, its lifetime will be clipped to the window, before it is passed to the set-based operation. That’s the default and currently only available window input policy. (This should only concern you if you are using a time-sensitive user-defined aggregate or operator.) The set-based operation will be applied to each of these sets, yielding a result. This result is: A single scalar value in case of built-in or user-defined aggregates. A subset of the input payloads, in case of the TopK operator. Arbitrary events, when using a user-defined operator. The timestamps of the result are almost always the ones of the windows. Only the user-defined  operator can create new events with timestamps. (However, even these event lifetimes are subject to the window’s output policy, which is currently always to clip to the window end.) Let’s assume we were calculating the sum over some payload field: var result = from window in source.HoppingWindow( TimeSpan.FromHours(1), TimeSpan.FromMinutes(15), HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd) select new { avg = window.Avg(e => e.Value) }; Now each window is reflected by one result event:   As you can see, the window definition defines the output frequency. No matter how many or few events we got from the input, this hopping window will produce one result every 15 minutes – except for those windows that do not contain any events at all, because StreamInsight window operations are empty-preserving (more about that another time). The “forced” output for every window can become a performance issue if you have a real-time query with many events in a wide group & apply – let me explain: imagine you have a lot of events that you group by and then aggregate within each group – classical streaming pattern. The hopping window produces a result in each group at exactly the same point in time for all groups, since the window boundaries are aligned with the timeline, not with the event timestamps. This means that the query output will become very bursty, delivering the results of all the groups at the same point in time. This becomes especially obvious if the events are long-lasting, spanning multiple windows each, so that the produced result events do not change their value very often. In such a case, a snapshot window can remedy. Snapshot windows are more difficult to explain than hopping windows: they represent those periods in time, when no event changes occur. In other words, if you mark all event start and and times on your timeline, then you are looking at all snapshot window boundaries:   If your events are never overlapping, the snapshot window will not make much sense. It is commonly used together with timestamp modification, which make it a very powerful tool. Or as Allan Mitchell expressed in in a recent tweet: “I used to look at SnapshotWindow() with disdain. Now she is my mistress, the one I turn to in times of trouble and need”. Let’s look at a simple example: I want to compute the average of some value in my events over the last minute. I don’t want this output be produced at fixed intervals, but at soon as it changes (that’s the true event-driven spirit!). The snapshot window will include all currently active event at each point in time, hence we need to extend our original events’ lifetimes into the future: Applying the Snapshot window on these events, it will appear to be “looking back into the past”: If you look at the result produced in this diagram, you can easily prove that, at each point in time, the current event value represents the average of all original input event within the last minute. Here is the LINQ representation of that query, applying the lifetime extension before the snapshot window: var result = from window in source .AlterEventDuration(e => TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1)) .SnapshotWindow(SnapshotWindowOutputPolicy.Clip) select new { avg = window.Avg(e => e.Value) }; With more complex modifications of the event lifetimes you can achieve many more query patterns. For instance “running totals” by keeping the event start times, but snapping their end times to some fixed time, like the end of the day. Each snapshot then “sees” all events that have happened in the respective time period so far. Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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  • Microsoft Forcing Dev/Partners Hands on Win 8 Through Certification

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    I remember 2.5 years ago when Microsoft dropped a bomb on the Microsoft Partner community: all Gold competencies would require .NET 4 based premiere certifications (MCPD). Problem was, this gave a window of about 6 months for partners to update their employees’ certifications. At the place I was working, I put together an aggressive plan and we were able to attain the certs needed. Microsoft is always open that the certification requirements will change as the industry changes. .NET 1.0 certifications are useless here in 2012, and rightfully so they’ve been retired for a long time now. But now we’re seeing a new tactic by Microsoft – shifting gears away from certifications that speak to what industry needs and more to the Windows 8 agenda. Consider that currently the premiere development certification is the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, which comes in three flavours – Web, Windows, and Azure. All require WCF and Data Access exams, as well as one that deals with the associated base technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms/WPF, Azure), and one that ties all three together in a solution-based exam. For Microsoft-based organizations, these skills aren’t just valid but necessary in building Microsoft applications. But the MCPD is being replaced with our old friend Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD). So far, Microsoft has only released two types of MCSD – Web and Windows Store Apps. Windows Store Apps?! In a push to move developers to create WinRT-based applications, desktop development is now considered a second-class citizen in the eyes of Redmond. Also interesting are the language options for the exams: HTML5 and C#. Sorry VB folks, its time to embrace curly braces whether they be JavaScript or C#. Consider too the skills being assessed for the Windows Store Apps: Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcsd-windows-store-apps.aspx Nov 21/2012 If you look at the skills being tested in each exam, you’ll find that skills like WCF and Data Access are downplayed compared to things like integrating Charms, facilitating Search, programming for the microphone and camera – all very Windows 8 focussed items. Where this becomes maddening is that Microsoft is still pushing Windows 7 with enterprise clients. According to a ZDNet article, Microsoft wants to see Windows 7 on 70% of enterprise desktops by mid 2013. Assuming they somehow meet that (its a pretty lofty goal), there’s years of traditional desktop-based development that will still be required at some level. For those thinking they’ll just write and stick with the MCPD certification, note that most exams that go towards that certification will be retired at the end of July 2013! (Read the small print). And while details haven’t been finalized, its a safe bet that MCPD certifications eventually won’t count towards Gold-level competencies in the Microsoft Partner program. What this means for Microsoft Partners and Developers is that certification for desktop development is going to be limited to Windows Store Apps unless Microsoft re-introduces a traditional desktop (WPF) based MCSD cert. Web Application Development – It’s Not All Bad There’s big changes on the web side of certification, but I actually see these changes as being for the good! Check out the new exam requirements for MCSD – Web Applications: Get your MCSD: Web Applications certification *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-mcsd-web-applications.aspx Nov 21, 2012 We now *start* with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3! Now I’m sure that these will be slanted towards web development in IE, and I can hear designers everywhere bemoaning the CSS/IE combination. Still, I applaud Microsoft for adopting HTML5 as the go-to web technology and requiring certified developers to prove they have skills in the basics of web dev. The fact that the second exam clearly states “MVC Web Applications” shows that Web Forms is truly legacy and deprecated. That’s not to say there aren’t those out there that are still supporting or (for whatever reason) doing new dev with Web Forms, but this move by Microsoft is telling the community they better get on the MVC bandwagon if they want to stay current. Fantastic! And of course Azure needs to be here as well, and this is where the Microsoft agenda fits in. It’s no secret that there’s been a huge push in getting developers on to Azure. I don’t see this as being a bad thing either, as cloud computing (whether Azure, private, or 3rd party) is a necessary skill for developers to have here in 2012. The cynic in me realizes that the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS push wouldn’t be as prominent though if not for the Windows 8 Store App play, where HTML5 is a first class citizen (and an available language for the MCSD Windows Store App cert). In this case, the desktop developers loss is the web developers gain. Get Ready for Changes In addition to the changes in certifications, the Microsoft Partner competencies are going through changes as well. Web and Software Development are being merged into a single competency, meaning that licenses you would have received from having both as Gold are reduced. Other competencies are either being removed or changed, as are the exam requirements. In the same way that we’re seeing faster release cycles from Microsoft, so too will we see the Microsoft Partner Program and MS Certifications evolve faster than ever before. Many of us got caught in the last wave of changes, but this time we can see the wave coming – and it looks pretty big!

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