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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-14

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Duke's Choice Award Nominations Close Friday! | The Java Source The Duke's Choice Awards celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology. Nominate an individual, a group or company who show the best in Java innovation. Nominate at Java.net/dukeschoice. Nominations are open until this Friday, June 15. Whole Lotta Virtualization Goin' On | Rick Ramsey The OTN Garage's Rick Ramsey shares a list of recent Virtualization articles available on OTN, along with a link to a video by The Killer, Mr Jerry Lee Lewis. A Pragmatic Path to Navigating your Infrastructure to the Cloud | The WebLogic Server Blog Ruma Sanyal offers an overview of a recent Oracle webcast featuring Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Andy Butler and Vice President and Gartner Fellow Massimo Pezzini. Migrating C/C++ embedded SQL code | Tom Laszewski Cloud migration expert Tom Laszewski explains the how-to in 5 easy steps. Aetna Dumps Its Siloed Enterprise Architecture for SOA | CIO.com CIO writer Stephanie Overby tells the story of how one major health insurance provider put the "Enterprise" back in Enterprise Architecture. (H/T to Joe McKendrick for this story.) Downloading specific video renditions in WebCenter Content | Kyle Hatlestad How-to from Oracle WebCenter & ADF A-Team blogger Kyle Hatlestad. Eclipse DemoCamp - June 2012 - Redwood Shores, CA Location: Oracle HQ - 10 Twin Dolphin Drive, Redwood Shores, CA (Map) Date and Time: Wednesday, June 13, 2012. From 6pm - 9pm Agenda: The evolution of Java persistence, Doug Clarke, EclipseLink Project Lead, Oracle Integrating BIRT into Applications, Ashwini Verma, Actuate Corporation Leveraging OSGi In The Enterprise, Kamal Muralidharan, Lead Engineer, eBay Developing Rich ADF Applications with Java EE, Greg Stachnick, Oracle NVIDIA® NsightTM Eclipse Edition, Goodwin (Tech lead - Visual tools), Eugene Ostroukhov (Senior engineer – Visual tools) 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Win a FREE Pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco Share your use of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions and how they help your organization drive business innovation. You just might win a free pass to Oracle Openworld 2012 in San Francisco. Deadline for submissions in July 17, 2012. BI Architecture Master Class for Partners – Oracle Architecture Unplugged Date: June 21, 2012 No slides, no fluff. This workshop will be highly interactive and is aimed at Oracle OPN member partners who are IT Architects and BI+W specialists. The focus will be on architectural issues and considerations. DevOps: Evolving to Handle Disruption | JP Morgenthal The subject of DevOps came up this week during an OTN ArchBeat podcast interview with Ron Batra and James Baty on the role of the cloud architect (that program will be available in a few weeks). Morgenthal's article for InfoQ offers a good overview of what DevOps is and how it works. Thought for the Day "Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure." — Edsger Dijkstra Source: softwarequotes.com

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• Get to Know a Candidate (2 of 25): Merlin Miller&ndash;American Third Position Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Meet Merlin Miller of American Third Position Party In addition to being American Third Position Party nominee, Miller is an independent film maker.  He is a graduate of West Point and has commanded two units in the United States Army.  After military service he worked as an industrial engineering manager for Michelin Tire.  He learned about film making by earning an MFA from the University of Southern California. Mr. Miller is on the ballot in: CO, NJ, and TN. In the 2000’s, Miller began taking an increasingly paleoconservative political stance.  He claimed that Hollywood “ surreptitiously seeks to destroy our European-American heritage and our Christian-based traditional values, and replace them with values that debase these traditional values and elevate minorities as paragons of virtue and wisdom....Today’s motion pictures, in concert with other forms of mass media entertainment, are the greatest enemies to the well-being of our progeny and the future of our country.” Miller states that he "doesn't like" interracial marriage; however, he does not support outlawing interracial marriage, either.  Miller has denied being anti-Semitic, instead claiming that he merely opposes "favoritism" granted to Jews in the film industry.  He also opposes illegal immigration and what he refers to as "wide open borders" in the United States. The American Third Position Party (A3P) is a third positionist American political party which promotes white supremacy.  It was officially launched in January 2010 (although in November 2009 it filed papers to get on a ballot in California) partially to channel the right-wing populist resentment engendered by the financial crisis of 2007–2010 and the policies of the Obama administration and defines its principal mission as representing the political interests of white Americans. The party takes a strong stand against immigration and globalization, and strongly supports an anti-interventionist foreign policy. Although the party does not support labor unions, they do strongly support the labor rights of the American working class on a platform of placing American workers first over illegal immigrant workers and banning of overseas corporate relocation of American industry and technology Third Position or Third Alternative refers to a revolutionary nationalist political position that emphasizes its opposition to both communism and capitalism. Advocates of Third Position politics typically present themselves as "beyond left and right", instead claiming to syncretize radical ideas from both ends of the political spectrum Learn more about Merlin Miller and American Third Position Party on Wikipedia.

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• Good Customer Service Example

  - by MightyZot

  Here’s another good customer service example for you! My wife purchased a Galaxy last week and she loves the phone.  She asked me to add it to our AT&T Microcell last night. I purchased the AT&T Microcell a couple of years ago, because cell signal out where I live sucks! Since microcells are managed on the AT&T web site, I went to the site and tried to sign in. Naturally, having not managed that microcell in a couple of years…and much to my chagrin…I discovered that I didn’t know my password OR my user ID. So, I decided to call and see if I could get my account reset that late in the day (we’re talking last night, so it was well after 7pm.) I called the technical support line, touched the appropriate numbers to navigate to microcell support, turned on my speaker phone, and prepared for the long wait. After about 45 seconds I was delighted to hear “Jeffrey” break in and ask what he could help me with. I explained that I have not managed my microcell for some time and had forgotten the user name and password.  “No problem”, he replied, and he asked me for the line I used to register the microcell. After confirming the last four digits of my IMEI number, he asked me for my wife’s number. I gave him my wife’s number and he said, “I’ve taken care of it Mr Pope. Just have her reboot her phone and you should see your microcell.” We rebooted her phone, it connected to the microcell, and voila, she was online! “Is there anything else I can help you with while I’ve got you on the line”, he said. “Nope”, I replied. “Ok, have a great night.” What made this a great customer service experience for me was that “Jeffrey” didn’t stop at giving me my user account and password, which I would probably forget anyway after setting up my wife’s new phone. Instead, he solved the real problem for me – adding my wife’s new phone to my microcell. Great job Jeffrey!

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• Why would more CPU cores on virtual machine slow compile times?

  - by Sid

  [edit#2] If anyone from VMWare can hit me up with a copy of VMWare Fusion, I'd be more than happy to do the same as a VirtualBox vs VMWare comparison. Somehow I suspect the VMWare hypervisor will be better tuned for hyperthreading (see my answer too) I'm seeing something curious. As I increase the number of cores on my Windows 7 x64 virtual machine, the overall compile time increases instead of decreasing. Compiling is usually very well suited for parallel processing as in the middle part (post dependency mapping) you can simply call a compiler instance on each of your .c/.cpp/.cs/whatever file to build partial objects for the linker to take over. So I would have imagined that compiling would actually scale very well with # of cores. But what I'm seeing is: 8 cores: 1.89 sec 4 cores: 1.33 sec 2 cores: 1.24 sec 1 core: 1.15 sec Is this simply a design artifact due to a particular vendor's hypervisor implementation (type2:virtualbox in my case) or something more pervasive across more VMs to make hypervisor implementations more simpler? With so many factors, I seem to be able to make arguments both for and against this behavior - so if someone knows more about this than me, I'd be curious to read your answer. Thanks Sid [edit:addressing comments] @MartinBeckett: Cold compiles were discarded. @MonsterTruck: Couldn't find an opensource project to compile directly. Would be great but can't screwup my dev env right now. @Mr Lister, @philosodad: Have 8 hw threads, using VirtualBox, so should be 1:1 mapping without emulation @Thorbjorn: I have 6.5GB for the VM and a smallish VS2012 project - it's quite unlikely that I'm swapping in/out trashing the page file. @All: If someone can point to an open source VS2010/VS2012 project, that might be a better community reference than my (proprietary) VS2012 project. Orchard and DNN seem to need environment tweaking to compile in VS2012. I really would like to see if someone with VMWare Fusion also sees this (for VMWare vs VirtualBox compartmentalization) Test details: Hardware: Macbook Pro Retina CPU : Core i7 @ 2.3Ghz (quad core, hyper threaded = 8 cores in windows task manager) Memory : 16 GB Disk : 256GB SSD Host OS: Mac OS X 10.8 VM type: VirtualBox 4.1.18 (type 2 hypervisor) Guest OS: Windows 7 x64 SP1 Compiler: VS2012 compiling a solution with 3 C# Azure projects Compile times measure by VS2012 plugin called 'VSCommands' All tests run 5 times, first 2 runs discarded, last 3 averaged

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• No wireless connection using a conceptronic c54i (RT2561/RT61 rev B)

  - by jrosell

  Detected but not working. New install on ubuntu 11.10 using coneptronic C54Ri. As documentation says it uses Ralink drivers.... Any ideas why my wireless does not work? $ lspci -nn | grep -i 'ralink' 01:05.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1e:90:e5:af:13 inet addr:192.168.0.197 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::21e:90ff:fee5:af13/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:28361 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:16858 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:39812172 (39.8 MB) TX bytes:1633405 (1.6 MB) Interrupt:43 Base address:0xc000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:80 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:80 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:6608 (6.6 KB) TX bytes:6608 (6.6 KB) iwconfig wlan0 wlan0 IEEE 802.11abg ESSIDff/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff Power Managementff lsmod | grep rt rt61pci 27493 0 crc_itu_t 12627 1 rt61pci rt2x00pci 14202 1 rt61pci rt2x00lib 48114 2 rt61pci,rt2x00pci mac80211 272785 2 rt2x00pci,rt2x00lib cfg80211 172392 2 rt2x00lib,mac80211 eeprom_93cx6 12653 1 rt61pci parport_pc 32114 1 parport 40930 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp lsmod | grep rt [ 2497.816989] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.827112] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.837430] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.847528] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.847632] phy0 -> rt61pci_wait_bbp_ready: Error - BBP register access faile d, aborting. [ 2497.847637] phy0 -> rt61pci_set_device_state: Error - Device failed to enter state 4 (-5). sudo lshw -C network *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface product: RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g vendor: Ralink corp. physical id: 5 bus info: pci@0000:01:05.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 00 serial: fa:b8:14:58:62:35 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt61pci driverversion=3.0.0-12-generic firmware=0.8 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:16 memory:fdef8000-fdefffff iwlist scan lo Interface doesn't support scanning. eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. wlan0 Failed to read scan data : Network is down uname -mr 3.0.0-12-generic i686 Edit 1 $ rfkill list all 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no On reboot, sudo lshw -C network returns network is ok. Hovever, WPA keeps on asking the wireless key

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• Is return-type-(only)-polymorphism in Haskell a good thing?

  - by dainichi

  One thing that I've never quite come to terms with in Haskell is how you can have polymorphic constants and functions whose return type cannot be determined by their input type, like class Foo a where foo::Int -> a Some of the reasons that I do not like this: Referential transparency: "In Haskell, given the same input, a function will always return the same output", but is that really true? read "3" return 3 when used in an Int context, but throws an error when used in a, say, (Int,Int) context. Yes, you can argue that read is also taking a type parameter, but the implicitness of the type parameter makes it lose some of its beauty in my opinion. Monomorphism restriction: One of the most annoying things about Haskell. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole reason for the MR is that computation that looks shared might not be because the type parameter is implicit. Type defaulting: Again one of the most annoying things about Haskell. Happens e.g. if you pass the result of functions polymorphic in their output to functions polymorphic in their input. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but this would not be necessary without functions whose return type cannot be determined by their input type (and polymorphic constants). So my question is (running the risk of being stamped as a "discussion quesion"): Would it be possible to create a Haskell-like language where the type checker disallows these kinds of definitions? If so, what would be the benefits/disadvantages of that restriction? I can see some immediate problems: If, say, 2 only had the type Integer, 2/3 wouldn't type check anymore with the current definition of /. But in this case, I think type classes with functional dependencies could come to the rescue (yes, I know that this is an extension). Furthermore, I think it is a lot more intuitive to have functions that can take different input types, than to have functions that are restricted in their input types, but we just pass polymorphic values to them. The typing of values like [] and Nothing seems to me like a tougher nut to crack. I haven't thought of a good way to handle them. I doubt I am the first person to have had thoughts like these. Does anybody have links to good discussions about this Haskell design decision and the pros/cons of it?

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• Microsoft Access: computer freezes when user tries to update record

  - by CarlF

  A colleague and I have developed an Access 2003 database which is used throughout our department. Currently about four dozen people do data entry using one of two very similar forms. If 47 of us use them, they work perfectly. If Mr. 48 clicks the "Save" button, Windows XP freezes and a hard reset is needed. The problem has to be on his specific computer (Dell latitude D630) and not in the code because this problem only affects him. Complicating the matter: I don't work for IS, and this project is not supported by IS. If I'm going to get our tech support to fix the problem I had better be able to explain exactly what to do and how to do it, because they aren't going to invest any resources. I don't even have admin rights on the computer (and neither does its regular user). I've asked him to bring his laptop the next time he visits my building. (Just to make matters worse, he doesn't usually work in the same location as me or the other developer.) Any suggestions on debugging the problem? My first try will be to uninstall and reinstall Office, which I can do using corporate utilities without being admin. Note: yes, those are old versions of Office and Windows. We expect to upgrade later this year.

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• Implications of Multiple JobTracker nodes in a Hadoop cluster?

  - by Jim Dennis

  I get the impression that one can, potentially, have multiple JobTracker nodes configured to share the same set of MR (TaskTracker) nodes. I know that, conventionally, all the nodes in a Hadoop cluster should have the same set of configuration files (conventionally under /etc/hadoop/conf/ --- at least for the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop (CDH). Can we define multiple Job Trackers in mapred-site.xml? Something like: <configuration> <property> <name>mapred.job.tracker</name> <value>jt01.mydomain.not:8021</value> </property> <property> <name>mapred.job.tracker</name> <value>jt02.mydomain.not:8021</value> </property> ... </configuration> Or is there some other allowed syntax for this? What are the implications of doing this. Does each JobTracker get information about the load on each TaskTracker node. In other words can the two JobTracker co-ordinated their scheduling across the TT nodes only based on the gossip information from the TTs or would they need to talk to one another? Is this documented anywhere?

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• Is there an simple but good To Do Manager app for the Mac?

  - by Another Registered User

  Every morning I think about what I am going to do today. So I take a paper and start to write things like: [ ] Call Mr. XYZ [ ] Answer Support E-Mails [ ] Reduce website header height by 20 px [ ] Create new navigation bar icons And every time I'm done with something, I paint a checkmark in this square. On paper. It would be fun to have something like this as an application. But I don't want a heavy project management tool or integration with email. It should be like download, install, use without fat configuration and steep learning curve. usually I don't schedule my to do's, I just write down every day what I want to accomplish today. For my experience it doesn't make sense to plan what to do next week, because next week everything looks totally different. Would be cool if such a simple utility exists. At the moment I try just using textEdit and deleting rows which are done. With a nice interface, this would be much more fun.

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• T-SQL in Chicago – the LobsterPot teams with DataEducation

  - by Rob Farley

  In May, I’ll be in the US. I have board meetings for PASS at the SQLRally event in Dallas, and then I’m going to be spending a bit of time in Chicago. The big news is that while I’m in Chicago (May 14-16), I’m going to teach my “Advanced T-SQL Querying and Reporting: Building Effectiveness” course. This is a course that I’ve been teaching since the 2005 days, and have modified over time for 2008 and 2012. It’s very much my most popular course, and I love teaching it. Let me tell you why. For years, I wrote queries and thought I was good at it. I was a developer. I’d written a lot of C (and other, more fun languages like Prolog and Lisp) at university, and then got into the ‘real world’ and coded in VB, PL/SQL, and so on through to C#, and saw SQL (whichever database system it was) as just a way of getting the data back. I could write a query to return just about whatever data I wanted, and that was good. I was better at it than the people around me, and that helped. (It didn’t help my progression into management, then it just became a frustration, but for the most part, it was good to know that I was good at this particular thing.) But then I discovered the other side of querying – the execution plan. I started to learn about the translation from what I’d written into the plan, and this impacted my query-writing significantly. I look back at the queries I wrote before I understood this, and shudder. I wrote queries that were correct, but often a long way from effective. I’d done query tuning, but had largely done it without considering the plan, just inferring what indexes would help. This is not a performance-tuning course. It’s focused on the T-SQL that you read and write. But performance is a significant and recurring theme. Effective T-SQL has to be about performance – it’s the biggest way that a query becomes effective. There are other aspects too though – such as using constructs better. For example – I can write code that modifies data nicely, but if I haven’t learned about the MERGE statement and the way that it can impact things, I’m missing a few tricks. If you’re going to do this course, a good place to be is the situation I was in a few years before I wrote this course. You’re probably comfortable with writing T-SQL queries. You know how to make a SELECT statement do what you need it to, but feel there has to be a better way. You can write JOINs easily, and understand how to use LEFT JOIN to make sure you don’t filter out rows from the first table, but you’re coding blind. The first module I cover is on Query Execution. Take a look at the Course Outline at Data Education’s website. The first part of the first module is on the components of a SELECT statement (where I make you think harder about GROUP BY than you probably have before), but then we jump straight into Execution Plans. Some stuff on indexes is in there too, as is simplification and SARGability. Some of this is stuff that you may have heard me present on at conferences, but here you have me for three days straight. I’m sure you can imagine that we revisit these topics throughout the rest of the course as well, and you’d be right. In the second and third modules we look at a bunch of other aspects, including some of the T-SQL constructs that lots of people don’t know, and various other things that can help your T-SQL be, well, more effective. I’ve had quite a lot of people do this course and be itching to get back to work even on the first day. That’s not a comment about the jokes I tell, but because people want to look at the queries they run. LobsterPot Solutions is thrilled to be partnering with Data Education to bring this training to Chicago. Visit their website to register for the course. @rob_farley

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• 45 minutes to talk about C# [closed]

  - by Philip

  I have the opportunity to give a 45 minute talk on C# in the theory of programming languages class I'm taking. The college teaches Java almost exclusively, so that's what all the students are most familiar with. (There's a little C, assembly, Prolog and LISP as well.) I decide what to talk about. It seems to me the best approach is to focus on a few of the big, obvious differences between C# and Java. I don't intend it to be a recommendation to use C# -- there are reasons to use each, mostly because of their ecosystems. So I want to focus on C# as a language. I don't want to go too fast and end up listing a whole bunch of features without showing their usefulness. My current plan is this: Functions as first class objects. This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest differences between C# and Java. The professor briefly mentioned this notion and showed a LISP example, but many of the students have probably never used it. I can show real world examples where it's made my code more readable. Lambda expressions as concise syntax for anonymous functions. Obviously with examples to show how this is useful. The real hit-home examples will be at the end when it's combined with the rest. I don't see an advantage to first showing the old delegate syntax and then replacing it with lambdas -- most of us won't have ever seen delegates anyway so it would just be confusing. The yield keyword and how it's different from returning an array. I have the impression that a lot of C# developers aren't familiar with how to use this. It will likely be very foreign to Java developers. I have some examples from my own work where it was really useful, such as iterating over a tree traversal, or iterating over neighbors in a graph where the neighbors aren't stored in memory. In both cases, doing it in Java would likely mean returning a complete list -- with yield I can stop iterating if I find what I want early on, without using memory for superfluous lists or arrays. Extension methods as a way to write implementation on interfaces. We'll all be familiar with how interfaces don't allow method implementation, and how this leads to code duplication. I'll show a specific example of this and how the extension method can solve the problem. Demonstrate how the above can be combined by implementing some simple Linq methods and using them. Where, Select, First, maybe more depending on how much time is left. Ideas on which ones might 'hit home' the best? There are other things I could talk about such as generics, value types, properties and more. I haven't yet though of good ways to incorporate these. In the case of generics and value types, the advantages might not be obvious or as relevant. Properties are obviously useful, particularly since we're taught strict JavaBeans here, but I don't know if I could integrate it with the "path to Linq" discussion above without it feeling tacked on. So I'm looking for thoughts on how to talk about C#, and what to talk about. Even minor details. I'm sure there are more experienced C# developers than me here who have good insight about what's really important in the language, and what would miss the point.

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• Advice for last year college graduates

  - by Tomh

  Hey guys, I know there are many "advice" questions around this site. But I wanted to to narrow mine down to last year college students, in my case my last year as Master student in computer science. So far is a list of things I've done during my time in college (which I can recommend others to do aswell): Code a lot I've written several hobby projects, had part time jobs, entered the Imagine cup from Microsoft, took programming extensive courses and did freelance gigs. Read a lot I've bought most top books from the recommended book topics here, to be honest I have not read them all. learn different languages I've tried several languages including Haskell, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Prolog, C#, PHP, JS, AS3 and possibly some more I forgot. Tried to start a blog Joel recommends to learn how to write, I tried starting a couple of blogs to improve upon this, I gave up on all instances after writing about three posts. It was just not my thing... Have a portfolio of launched projects/programs I'm busy with this, have a couple of finished, working projects I worked on to show to people. So this is my last year. Is there anything else you can recommend a last year college student to do before hitting the job market? Personally I'm tempted to spend my time on the following: Practice algorithm design Learn and memorize the usage of the low level API's of your favorite language Polish your portfolio Why? Because those first two will make sure you pass the majority of the interviews, here in Holland (I could be wrong). I rather not spend my time on those first two points, but I have to be realistic and thats just my experience on what kind of questions you'll get when you apply. The third point is my hope that I won't have to answer questions about the amount of standard types in c# for example if they can see I get projects done and launched. But I'm still graduating, so I don't know anything :), and many of you might be hiring grads on a recent base and could tell me and other interested people what you wish that the recent grads you interviewed would have done before they applied.

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• Which knowledge base/rule-based inference engine to choose for real time Runway incursion prevention

  - by Piligrim

  Hello, we are designing a project that would listen to dialog between airport controllers and pilots to prevent runway incursions (eg. one airplane is taking off while other is crossing the runway). Our professor wants us to use Jena for knowledge base (or anything else but it should be some sort of rule-based engine). Inference is not the main thing in Jena and there's not much documentation and examples of this. So we need an engine that would get messages from pilots as input and output possible risks of incursion or any other error in message protocol. It should be easy to write rules, and should be easy to provide engine with real time data. I image it something like this: A pilot sends a message that he lands on some runway, the system remembers that the runway is busy and no one should cross it If someone is given an instruction to cross this runway, the engine should fire a rule that something is wrong When the pilot sends a message that he left the runway and goes to the gate, the system clears the runway and lets other planes to use it. So is Jena, or prolog or any other rules engine suitable for this? I mean it is suitable, but do we really need to use it? I asked the prof. if we could just keep state of the runway and use some simple checks based on messages we receive and he said that it is not scalable and we need the knowledge base. Can someone give me any advise on which approach to use for this system? If you recommend k.b., then which one should we use? The project is written in java. Thank you.

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• How do people know so much about programming?

  - by Luciano

  I see people in this forums with a lot of points, so I assume they know about a lot of different programming stuff. When I was young I knew about basic (commodore) and the turbo pascal (pc). Then in college I learnt about C, memory management, x86 set, loop invariants, graphs, db query optimization, oop, functional, lambda calculus, prolog, concurrency, polymorphism, newton method, simplex, backtracking, dynamic programming, heuristics, np completeness, LR, LALR, neural networks, static & dynamic typing, turing, godel, and more in between. Then in industry I started with Java several years ago and learnt about it, and its variety of frameworks, and also design patterns, architecture patterns, web development, server development, mobile development, tdd, bdd, uml, use cases, bug trackers, process management, people management if you are a tech lead, profiling, security concerns, etc. I started to forget what I learnt in college... And then there is the stuff I don't know yet, like python, .net, perl, JVM stuff like groovy or scala.. Of course Google is a must for rapid documentation access to know if a problem has been solved already and how, and to keep informed about new stuff by blogs and places like this one. It's just too much or I just have a bad memory.. how do you guys manage it?

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• Writing XML in different character encodings with Java

  - by Roman Myers

  I am attempting to write an XML library file that can be read again into my program. The file writer code is as follows: XMLBuilder builder = new XMLBuilder(); Document doc = builder.build(bookList); DOMImplementation impl = doc.getImplementation(); DOMImplementationLS implLS = (DOMImplementationLS) impl.getFeature("LS", "3.0"); LSSerializer ser = implLS.createLSSerializer(); String out = ser.writeToString(doc); //System.out.println(out); try{ FileWriter fstream = new FileWriter(location); BufferedWriter outwrite = new BufferedWriter(fstream); outwrite.write(out); outwrite.close(); }catch (Exception e){ } The above code does write an xml document. However, in the XML header, it is an attribute that the file is encoded in UTF-16. when i read in the file, i get the error: "content not allowed in prolog" this error does not occur when the encoding attribute is manually changed to UTF-8. I am trying to get the above code to write an XML document encoded in UTF-8, or successfully parse a UTF-16 file. the code for parsing in is DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder loader = factory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document document = loader.parse(filename); the last line returns the error.

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• How do I include the proper XML / HTML definitions in a file generated by XSL?

  - by Colen

  As I understand it, you need to include the following code at the top of your HTML files to make sure they're parsed properly: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> ... I'm generating an html file by transforming an XML file using an XSL file. This is going to be done using the MSXML tool, which produces a standard HTML file as output. If I just do this: <xsl:template match="/"> <html> ... Everything is fine. But if I do this: <xsl:template match="/"> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> ... I get the error XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity in Firefox, or Cannot have a DOCTYPE declaration outside of a prolog. in IE. Presumably this is because the parser is finding two How do I make the browser a) understand that I am using proper strict HTML, and b) make sure those declarations are put into the HTML output file that MSXML generates?

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• Using WIndows PowerShell 1.0 or 2.0 to evaluate performance of executable files.

  - by Andry

  Hello! I am writing a simple script on Windows PowerShell in order to evaluate performance of executable files. The important hypothesisi is the following: I have an executable file, it can be an application written in any possible language (.net and not, Viual-Prolog, C++, C, everything that can be compiled as an .exe file). I want to profile it getting execution times. I did this: Function Time-It { Param ([string]$ProgramPath, [string]$Arguments) $Watch = New-Object System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch $NsecPerTick = (1000 * 1000 * 1000) / [System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::Frequency Write-Output "Stopwatch created! NSecPerTick = $NsecPerTick" $Watch.Start() # Starts the timer [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($ProgramPath, $Arguments) $Watch.Stop() # Stops the timer # Collectiong timings $Ticks = $Watch.ElapsedTicks $NSecs = $Watch.ElapsedTicks * $NsecPerTick Write-Output "Program executed: time is: $Nsecs ns ($Ticks ticks)" } This function uses stopwatch. Well, the functoin accepts a program path, the stopwatch is started, the program run and the stopwatch then stopped. Problem: the System.Diagnostics.Process.Start is asynchronous and the next instruction (watch stopped) is not executed when the application finishes. A new process is created... I need to stop the timer once the program ends. I thought about the Process class, thicking it held some info regarding the execution times... not lucky... How to solve this?

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• Want to add a functional language to my toolchest. Haskell or Erlang?

  - by sean.johnson

  I've been an OO/procedural guy my whole career except in school where I did a lot of logic programming (Prolog). I work on an amazing variety of projects (freelancer) and so I don't want the tools I know and understand to hold me back from using the right tool for the job. I've decided I should know a functional programming language. I've narrowed the field to Haskell and Erlang. What are the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, and major trade offs of Haskell and Erlang? How do I decide in a rational way, which is the better path? This is a big time investment, so I'd like to chose wisely. Is there a good case to be made for something else entirely? F#, Scala Ocaml? (BTW, I'm normally a Ruby/C/Obj.C guy, so I'm not terribly impressed or dependent on the JVM as a runtime. It's completely neutral to me. It's a fine runtime, I don't hold it for or against a language. I don't use Microsoft products though, so a .NET runtime would be a negative.)

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• Uniquely identify files/folders in NTFS, even after move/rename

  - by Felix Dombek

  I haven't found a backup (synchronization) program which does what I want so I'm thinking about writing my own. What I have now does the following: It goes through the data in the source and for every file which has its archive bit set OR does not exist in the destination, copies it to the destination, overwriting a possibly existing file. When done, it checks for all files in the destination if it exists in the source, and if it doesn't, deletes it. The problem is that if I move or rename a large folder, it first gets copied to the destination even though it is in principle already there, just has a different path. Then the folder which was already there is deleted afterwards. Apart from the unnecessary copying, I frequently run into space problems because my backup drive isn't large enough to hold the original data twice. Is there a way to programmatically identify such moved/renamed files or folders, i.e. by NTFS ID or physical location on media or something else? Are there solutions to this problem? I do not care about the programming language, but hints for doing this with Python, C++, C#, Java or Prolog are appreciated.

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• SQL SERVER – SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008

  - by pinaldave

  Note: Please read the complete post before taking any actions. This blog post would discuss SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File. The script mentioned in the email received from reader contains the following questionable code: “Hi Pinal, If you could remember, I and my manager met you at TechEd in Bangalore. We just upgraded to SQL Server 2008. One of our jobs failed as it was using the following code. The error was: Msg 155, Level 15, State 1, Line 1 ‘TRUNCATE_ONLY’ is not a recognized BACKUP option. The code was: DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) BACKUP LOG TestDB WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) GO I have modified that code to subsequent code and it works fine. But, are there other suggestions you have at the moment? USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE WITH NO_WAIT DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDbLog, 1) ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY FULL WITH NO_WAIT GO Configuration of our server and system is as follows: [Removed not relevant data]“ An email like this that suddenly pops out in early morning is alarming email. Because I am a dead, busy mind, so I had only one min to reply. I wrote down quickly the following note. (As I said, it was a single-minute email so it is not completely accurate). Here is that quick email shared with all of you. “Hi Mr. DBA [removed the name] Thanks for your email. I suggest you stop this practice. There are many issues included here, but I would list two major issues: 1) From the setting database to simple recovery, shrinking the file and once again setting in full recovery, you are in fact losing your valuable log data and will be not able to restore point in time. Not only that, you will also not able to use subsequent log files. 2) Shrinking file or database adds fragmentation. There are a lot of things you can do. First, start taking proper log backup using following command instead of truncating them and losing them frequently. BACKUP LOG [TestDb] TO  DISK = N'C:\Backup\TestDb.bak' GO Remove the code of SHRINKING the file. If you are taking proper log backups, your log file usually (again usually, special cases are excluded) do not grow very big. There are so many things to add here, but you can call me on my [phone number]. Before you call me, I suggest for accuracy you read Paul Randel‘s two posts here and here and Brent Ozar‘s Post here. Kind Regards, Pinal Dave” I guess this post is very much clear to you. Please leave your comments here. As mentioned, this is a very huge subject; I have just touched a tip of the ice-berg and have tried to point to authentic knowledge. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• A basic T4 template for generating Model Metadata in ASP.NET MVC2

  - by rajbk

  I have been learning about T4 templates recently by looking at the awesome ADO.NET POCO entity generator. By using the POCO entity generator template as a base, I created a T4 template which generates metadata classes for a given Entity Data Model. This speeds coding by reducing the amount of typing required when creating view specific model and its metadata. To use this template, Download the template provided at the bottom. Set two values in the template file. The first one should point to the EDM you wish to generate metadata for. The second is used to suffix the namespace and classes that get generated. string inputFile = @"Northwind.edmx"; string suffix = "AutoMetadata"; Add the template to your MVC 2 Visual Studio 2010 project. Once you add it, a number of classes will get added to your project based on the number of entities you have.    One of these classes is shown below. Note that the DisplayName, Required and StringLength attributes have been added by the t4 template. //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------   using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;   namespace NorthwindSales.ModelsAutoMetadata { public partial class CustomerAutoMetadata { [DisplayName("Customer ID")] [Required] [StringLength(5)] public string CustomerID { get; set; } [DisplayName("Company Name")] [Required] [StringLength(40)] public string CompanyName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Name")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Title")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactTitle { get; set; } [DisplayName("Address")] [StringLength(60)] public string Address { get; set; } [DisplayName("City")] [StringLength(15)] public string City { get; set; } [DisplayName("Region")] [StringLength(15)] public string Region { get; set; } [DisplayName("Postal Code")] [StringLength(10)] public string PostalCode { get; set; } [DisplayName("Country")] [StringLength(15)] public string Country { get; set; } [DisplayName("Phone")] [StringLength(24)] public string Phone { get; set; } [DisplayName("Fax")] [StringLength(24)] public string Fax { get; set; } } } The gen’d class can be used from your project by creating a partial class with the entity name and setting the MetadataType attribute.namespace MyProject.Models{ [MetadataType(typeof(CustomerAutoMetadata))] public partial class Customer { }} You can also copy the code in the metadata class generated and create your own ViewModel class. Note that the template is super basic  and does not take into account complex properties. I have tested it with the Northwind database. This is a work in progress. Feel free to modify the template to suite your requirements. Standard disclaimer follows: Use At Your Own Risk, Works on my machine running VS 2010 RTM/ASP.NET MVC 2 AutoMetaData.zip Mr. Incredible: Of course I have a secret identity. I don't know a single superhero who doesn't. Who wants the pressure of being super all the time?

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• Markus Zirn, "Big Data with CEP and SOA" @ SOA, Cloud &amp; Service Technology Symposium 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  ORACLE PROMOTIONAL DISCOUNT FOR EXCLUSIVE ORACLE DISCOUNT, ENTER PROMO CODE: DJMXZ370 Early-Bird Registration is Now Open with Special Pricing! Register before July 1, 2012 to qualify for discounts. Visit the Registration page for details. The International SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium is a yearly event that features the top experts and authors from around the world, providing a series of keynotes, talks, demonstrations, and panels, as well as training and certification workshops - all dedicated to empowering IT professionals to realize modern service technologies and practices in the real world. Click here for a two-page printable conference overview (PDF). Big Data with CEP and SOA - September 25, 2012 - 14:15 Speaker: Markus Zirn, Oracle and Baz Kuthi, Avocent The "Big Data" trend is driving new kinds of IT projects that process machine-generated data. Such projects store and mine using Hadoop/ Map Reduce, but they also analyze streaming data via event-driven patterns, which can be called "Fast Data" complementary to "Big Data". This session highlights how "Big Data" and "Fast Data" design patterns can be combined with SOA design principles into modern, event-driven architectures. We will describe specific architectures that combines CEP, Distributed Caching, Event-driven Network, SOA Composites, Application Development Framework, as well as Hadoop. Architecture patterns include pre-processing and filtering event streams as close as possible to the event source, in memory master data for event pattern matching, event-driven user interfaces as well as distributed event processing. Focus is on how "Fast Data" requirements are elegantly integrated into a traditional SOA architecture. Markus Zirn is Vice President of Product Management covering Oracle SOA Suite, SOA Governance, Application Integration Architecture, BPM, BPM Solutions, Complex Event Processing and UPK, an end user learning solution. He is the author of “The BPEL Cookbook” (rated best book on Services Oriented Architecture in 2007) as well as “Fusion Middleware Patterns”. Previously, he was a management consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton’s High Tech practice in Duesseldorf as well as San Francisco and Vice President of Product Marketing at QUIQ. Mr. Zirn holds a Masters of Electrical Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe and is an alumnus of the Tripartite program, a joint European degree from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, the University of Southampton, UK, and ESIEE, France. KEYNOTES & SPEAKERS More than 80 international subject matter experts will be speaking at the Symposium. Below are confirmed keynotes and speakers so far. Over 50% of the agenda has not yet been finalized. Many more speakers to come. View the partial program calendars on the Conference Agenda page. CONFERENCE THEMES & TRACKS Cloud Computing Architecture & Patterns New SOA & Service-Orientation Practices & Models Emerging Service Technology Innovation Service Modeling & Analysis Techniques Service Infrastructure & Virtualization Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture Business Planning for Cloud Computing Projects Real World Case Studies Semantic Web Technologies (with & without the Cloud) Governance Frameworks for SOA and/or Cloud Computing Projects Service Engineering & Service Programming Techniques Interactive Services & the Human Factor New REST & Web Services Tools & Techniques Oracle Specialized SOA & BPM Partners Oracle Specialized partners have proven their skills by certifications and customer references. To find a local Specialized partner please visit http://solutions.oracle.com SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Markus Zirn,SOA Symposium,Thomas Erl,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Prepping the Raspberry Pi for Java Excellence (part 1)

  - by HecklerMark

  I've only recently been able to begin working seriously with my first Raspberry Pi, received months ago but hastily shelved in preparation for JavaOne. The Raspberry Pi and other diminutive computing platforms offer a glimpse of the potential of what is often referred to as the embedded space, the "Internet of Things" (IoT), or Machine to Machine (M2M) computing. I have a few different configurations I want to use for multiple Raspberry Pis, but for each of them, I'll need to perform the following common steps to prepare them for their various tasks: Load an OS onto an SD card Get the Pi connected to the network Load a JDK I've been very happy to see good friend and JFXtras teammate Gerrit Grunwald document how to do these things on his blog (link to article here - check it out!), but I ran into some issues configuring wi-fi that caused me some needless grief. Not knowing if any of the pitfalls were caused by my slightly-older version of the Pi and not being able to find anything specific online to help me get past it, I kept chipping away at it until I broke through. The purpose of this post is to (hopefully) help someone else recognize the same issues if/when they encounter them and work past them quickly. There is a great resource page here that covers several ways to get the OS on an SD card, but here is what I did (on a Mac): Plug SD card into reader on/in Mac Format it (FAT32) Unmount it (diskutil unmountDisk diskn, where n is the disk number representing the SD card) Transfer the disk image for Debian to the SD card (dd if=2012-08-08-wheezy-armel.img of=/dev/diskn bs=1m) Eject the card from the Mac (diskutil eject diskn) There are other ways, but this is fairly quick and painless, especially after you do it several times. Yes, I had to do that dance repeatedly (minus formatting) due to the wi-fi issues, as it kept killing the ability of the Pi to boot. You should be able to dramatically reduce the number of OS loads you do, though, if you do a few things with regard to your wi-fi. Firstly, I strongly recommend you purchase the Edimax EW-7811Un wi-fi adapter. This adapter/chipset has been proven with the Raspberry Pi, it's tiny, and it's cheap. Avoid unnecessary aggravation and buy this one! Secondly, visit this page for a script and instructions regarding how to configure your new wi-fi adapter with your Pi. Here is the rub, though: there is a missing step. At least for my combination of Pi version, OS version, and uncanny gift of timing and luck there was. :-) Here is the sequence of steps I used to make the magic happen: Plug your newly-minted SD card (with OS) into your Pi and connect a network cable (for internet connectivity) Boot your Pi. On the first boot, do the following things: Opt to have it use all space on the SD card (will require a reboot eventually) Disable overscan Set your timezone Enable the ssh server Update raspi-config Reboot your Pi. This will reconfigure the SD to use all space (see above). After you log in (UID: pi, password: raspberry), upgrade your OS. This was the missing step for me that put a merciful end to the repeated SD card re-imaging and made the wi-fi configuration trivial. To do so, just type sudo apt-get upgrade and give it several minutes to complete. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and congratulate yourself on the time you've just saved.  ;-) With the OS upgrade finished, now you can follow Mr. Engman's directions (to the letter, please see link above), download his script, and let it work its magic. One aside: I plugged the little power-sipping Edimax directly into the Pi and it worked perfectly. No powered hub needed, at least in my configuration. To recap, that OS upgrade (at least at this point, with this combination of OS/drivers/Pi version) is absolutely essential for a smooth experience. Miss that step, and you're in for hours of "fun". Save yourself! I'll pick up next time with more of the Java side of the RasPi configuration, but as they say, you have to cross the moat to get into the castle. Hopefully, this will help you do just that. Until next time! All the best, Mark 

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• Copy TFS Build Definitions between Projects and Collections

  - by Jakob Ehn

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2014/06/05/copy-tfs-build-definitions-between-projects-and-collections.aspxThe last couple of years it has become apparent that using multiple team projects in TFS is generally a bad idea. There are of course exceptions to this, but there are a lot ot things that becomes much easier to do when you put all of your projects and team in the same team project. Fellow ALM MVP Martin Hinshelwood has blogged about this several times, as well as other people in the community. In particular, using the backlog and portfolio management tools makes much more sense when everything is located in the same team project. Consolidating multiple team projects into one is not that easy unfortunately, it involves migrating source code, work items, reports etc.  Another thing that also need to be migrated is build definitions. It is possible to clone build definitions within the same team project using the TFS power tools. The Community TFS Build Manager also lets you clone build definitions to other team projects. But there is no tool that allows you to clone/copy a build definition to another collection. So, I whipped up a simple console application that let you do this. The tool can be downloaded from https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=EE034C9F620CD58D!8162&authkey=!ACTr56v1QVowzuE&ithint=file%2c.zip   Using CopyTFSBuildDefinitions You use the tool like this: CopyTFSBuildDefinitions  SourceCollectionUrl  SourceTeamProject  BuildDefinitionName  DestinationCollectionUrl  DestinationTeamProject [NewDefinitionName] Arguments SourceCollectionUrl The URL to the TFS collection that contains the team project with the build definition that you want to copy SourceTeamProject The name of the team project that contains the build definition BuildDefinitionName Name of the build definition DestinationCollectionUrl The URL to the TFS collection that contains the team project that you want to copy your build definition to DestinationTeamProject The name of the team project in the destination collection NewDefinitionName (Optional) Use this to override the name of the new build definition. If you don’t specify this, the name will the same as the original one Example: CopyTFSBuildDefinitions  https://jakob.visualstudio.com DemoProject  WebApplication.CI https://anotheraccount.visualstudio.com     Notes Since we are (potentially) create a build definition in a new collection, there is no guarantee that the various paths that are defined in the build definition exist in the new collection. For example, a build definition refers to server paths in TFVC or repos + branches in TFGit. It also refers to build controllers that definitely don’t exist in the new collection. So there will be some cleanup to do after you copy your build definitions. You can fix some of these using the Community TFS Build Manager, for example it is very easy to apply the correct build controller to a set of build definitions The problem stated above also applies to build process templates. However, the tool tries to find a build process template in the new team project with the same file name as the one that existed in the old team project. If it finds one, it will be used for the new build definition. Otherwise is will use the default build template If you want to run the tool for many build definitions, you can use this SQL scripts, compliments of Mr. Scrum/ALM MVP Richard Hundhausen to generate the necessary commands: USE Tfs_Collection GO SELECT 'CopyTFSBuildDefinitions.exe http://SERVER:8080/tfs/collection "' + P.ProjectName + '" "' + REPLACE(BD.DefinitionName,'\','') + '" http://NEWSERVER:8080/tfs/COLLECTION TEAMPROJECT'   FROM tbl_Project P        INNER JOIN tbl_BuildGroup BG on BG.TeamProject = P.ProjectUri        INNER JOIN tbl_BuildDefinition BD on BD.GroupId = BG.GroupId   ORDER BY P.ProjectName, BD.DefinitionName   Hope that helps, let me know if you have any problems with the tool or if you find it useful

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• MIXing it Up a Bit

  - by andrewbrust

  Another March, another MIX.  For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate.  In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products.  On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation, given by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last month.  And today, Mr. Belfiore reprised his showmanship for the MIX 2010 audience.  Joe showed us the ins and outs of WP7 and, in a breakout session, even gave us a sneak peek of Office (specifically, Excel) on WP7.  We didn’t get to see that one month ago in Barcelona, nor did get to see email messages opened for reading, which we saw today. But beyond a tour of the phone itself, impressive though that is, we got to see apps running on it.  Those apps included Associated Press news, Seesmic (a major Twitter client) and Foursquare (a social media darling).  All three ran, ran well, and looked markedly different and better from their corresponding versions on iPhone and Android.  And the games we saw looked even better. To me though, the best demos involved the creation of WP7 apps, using Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  These demos were so effective because they showed important apps being built in very few steps, and by Microsoft executives to boot.  Scott Guthrie showed us how to build a Twitter API app in Visual Strudio.   Jon Harris showed us how to build a photo management and viewer application in Expression Blend, using virtually no code.  Demos of apps built from scratch to F5 without the benefit of a teacher, could be challenging.  But they went off fine, without a hitch and without a ton of opaque, generated code.  Everything written, be it C# or XAML, was easily understood, and the results were impressive. That means lots of developers can do this, and I think it means a lot will.  What I’ve seen, thus far, of iPhone and Android development looks very tedious by comparison.  Development for those platforms involve a collection of tools that integrate only to a point.  Dev work for WP7 involves use of Visual Studio, Silverlight and the same debugging experience .NET developers already know.  This was very exciting for me. All the demos harkened back to days of building apps for with Visual Basic…design the front-end, put in code-behind and then hit F5.  And that makes sense, because the phone platform, and the PC of the early 90s are both, essentially, client OS machines.  The Web was minimal and the “device” was everything. Same is true of this phone.  It’s a client app contraption that fits in your pocket. And if the platforms are comparable, hopefully so too will be the draw of ease-of-development.   WP7 has the potential to make mobile developers want to switch over, and to convince enterprise developers to get into the phone scene.  Will this propel the new phone platform to new heights, and restore Microsoft’s competiveness in the mobile arena? I hope so.  I think so.  And if Microsoft uses developers to build themselves a victory, that would be beneficial and would show that Microsoft has learned from its failures, as well as its successes.  Today I saw a few beautiful apps.  Tomorrow I hope I see a slew of others; maybe not as polished, but plentiful, attractive and stable.  That would be a victory for Microsoft, and for developers.  And it would show everyone else that developers are the kingmakers.  They need cheap, efficient dev tools and lots of respect.  Microsoft has always been the company to provide that.  Hopefully, with WP7, they will return to that persona and see how very timeless it is.

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