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• When Less is More

  - by aditya.agarkar

  How do you reconcile the fact that while the overall warehouse volume is down you still need more workers in the warehouse to ship all the orders? A WMS customer recently pointed out this seemingly perplexing fact in a customer conference. So what is going on? Didn't we tell you before that for a warehouse the customer is really the "king"? In this case customers are merely responding to a low overall low demand and uncertainty. They do not want to hold down inventory and one of the ways to do that is by decreasing the order size and ordering more frequently. Overall impact to the warehouse? Two words: "More work!!" This is not all. Smaller order sizes also mean challenges from a transportation perspective including a rise in costlier parcel or LTL shipments instead of cheaper TL shipments. Here is a hypothetical scenario where a customer reduces the order size by 10% and increases the order frequency by 10%. As you can see in the following table, the overall volume declines by 1% but the warehouse has to ship roughly 10% more lines. Order Frequency (Line Count)Order Size (Units)Total VolumeChange (%)10010010,000 -110909,900-1% If you want to see how "Less is More" in graphical terms, this is how it appears: Even though the volume is down, there is going to be more work in the warehouse in terms of number of lines shipped. The operators need to pick more discrete orders, pack them into more shipping containers and ship more deliveries. What do you do differently if you are facing this situation?In this case here are some obvious steps to take:Uno: Change your pick methods. If you are used to doing order picks, it needs to go out the door. You need to evaluate batch picking and grouping techniques. Go for cluster picking, go for zone picking, pick and pass...anything that improves your picker productivity. More than anything, cluster picking works like a charm and above all, its simple and very effective. Dos: Are you minimize "touch" points in your pick process? Consider doing one step pick, pack and confirm i.e. pick and pack stuff directly into shipping cartons. Done correctly the container will not require any more "touch" points all the way to the trailer loading. Use cartonization!Tres: Are the being picked from an optimized pick face? Are the items slotted correctly? This needs to be looked into. Consider automated "pull" or "push" replenishment into your pick face and also make sure that high demand items are occupying the golden zones.  Cuatro: Are you tracking labor productivity? If not there needs to be a concerted push for having labor standards in place. Hope you found these ideas useful.

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• How to prevent ‘Select *’ : The elegant way

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  I’ve been doing a lot of work with the “Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Transact-SQL Language Service” recently, see my post here and article here for more details on its use and some uses. An obvious use is to interrogate sql scripts to enforce our coding standards.  In the SQL world a no-brainer is SELECT *,  all apologies must now be given to Jorge Segarra and his post “How To Prevent SELECT * The Evil Way” as this is a blatant rip-off IMO, the only true way to check for this particular evilness is to parse the SQL as if we were SQL Server itself.  The parser mentioned above is ,pretty much, the best tool for doing this.  So without further ado lets have a look at a powershell script that does exactly that : cls #Load the assembly [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser") | Out-Null $ParseOptions = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.ParseOptions $ParseOptions.BatchSeparator = 'GO' #Create the object $Parser = new-object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Scanner($ParseOptions) $SqlArr = Get-Content "C:\scripts\myscript.sql" $Sql = "" foreach($Line in $SqlArr){ $Sql+=$Line $Sql+="`r`n" } $Parser.SetSource($Sql,0) $Token=[Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]::TOKEN_SET $IsEndOfBatch = $false $IsMatched = $false $IsExecAutoParamHelp = $false $Batch = "" $BatchStart =0 $Start=0 $End=0 $State=0 $SelectColumns=@(); $InSelect = $false $InWith = $false; while(($Token = $Parser.GetNext([ref]$State ,[ref]$Start, [ref]$End, [ref]$IsMatched, [ref]$IsExecAutoParamHelp ))-ne [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]::EOF) { $Str = $Sql.Substring($Start,($End-$Start)+1) try{ ($TokenPrs =[Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]$Token) | Out-Null #Write-Host $TokenPrs if($TokenPrs -eq [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]::TOKEN_SELECT){ $InSelect =$true $SelectColumns+="" } if($TokenPrs -eq [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]::TOKEN_FROM){ $InSelect =$false #Write-Host $SelectColumns -BackgroundColor Red foreach($Col in $SelectColumns){ if($Col.EndsWith("*")){ Write-Host "select * is not allowed" exit } } $SelectColumns =@() } }catch{ #$Error $TokenPrs = $null } if($InSelect -and $TokenPrs -ne [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]::TOKEN_SELECT){ if($Str -eq ","){ $SelectColumns+="" }else{ $SelectColumns[$SelectColumns.Length-1]+=$Str } } } OK, im not going to pretend that its the prettiest of powershell scripts,  but if our parsed script file “C:\Scripts\MyScript.SQL” contains SELECT * then “select * is not allowed” will be written to the host.  So, where can this go wrong ?  It cant ,or at least shouldn’t , go wrong, but it is lacking in functionality.  IMO, Select * should be allowed in CTEs, views and Inline table valued functions at least and as it stands they will be reported upon. Anyway, it is a start and is more reliable that other methods.

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• Cutting Paper through Visualization and Collaboration

  - by [email protected]

  It's hard not to hear about "Going Green" these days. Many are working to be more environmentally conscious in their personal lives, and this has extended to the corporate world as well. I know I'm always looking for new ways. Environmental responsibility is important at Oracle too, and we have an entire section of our website dedicated to our solutions around the Eco-Enterprise. You can check it out here: http://www.oracle.com/green/index.html Perhaps the biggest and most obvious challenge in the world of business is the fact that we use so much paper. There are many good reasons why we print today too. For example: Printing off a document, spreadsheet, or CAD design that will be reviewed and marked up while on a plane Having a printout of a facility when a field engineer performs on-site maintenance During a multi-party design review where a number of people will review a drawing in a meeting room, scribbling onto a large scale drawing print to provide their collaborative comments These are just a few potential use cases, and they're valid ones. However, there's a way in which you can turn these paper processes into digital ones. AutoVue allows you to view, mark-up, and collaborate on all the data you would print. Indeed, this is the core of what AutoVue does. So if we take the examples above, we could address each as follows: Allow you to view the document, spreadsheet, or CAD drawing in AutoVue on your laptop. Even if you originally had this data vaulted in some time of system of record (like an ECM solution) and view your data from there, AutoVue allows you to "Work Offline" and take the documents you need to review on your laptop. From there, the many annotation tools in AutoVue will give you what you need to comment upon the documents that you are reviewing. The challenge with the mobile workforce is always access to information. People who perform maintenance and repair operations often are in locations with little to no Internet connectivity. However, technology is coming to these people in the form of laptops, tablet PCs, and other portable devices too. AutoVue can address situations with limited bandwidth through our streaming technology for viewing, meaning that the most up to date information can be pulled up from the central server - without the need for large data transfer. When there is no connectivity at all, the "Work Offline" option will handle this. For a design review session, the Real-Time Collaboration capabilities of AutoVue will let all the participants view the same document in a synchronized view, allowing each person to be able to mark-up the document at the same time. Since this is done in a web-based manner, not only is it not necessary to print the document, but you benefit by reducing the travel needed for these sessions. Not only are trees spared, but jet fuel as well. There are many steps involved with "Going Green", but each step is a necessary one. What we do today will directly influence our future generations, and we're looking to help.

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• BAM design pointers

  - by Kavitha Srinivasan

  In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discovered that some BAM best practices are not quite well known as I had always assumed ! There is a doc bug out to formally incorporate those learnings but here are a few notes..  EMS-DO parity When using EMS (Enterprise Message Source) as a BAM feed, the best practice is to use one EMS to write to one Data Object. There is a possibility of collisions and duplicates when multiple EMS write to the same row of a DO at the same time. This customer had 17 EMS writing to one DO at the same time. Every sensor in their BPEL process writes to one topic but the Topic was read by 1 EMS corresponding to one sensor. They then used XSL within BAM to transform the payload into the BAM DO format. And hence for a given BPEL instance, 17 sensors fired, populated 1 JMS topic, was consumed by 17 EMS which in turn wrote to 1 DataObject.(You can image what would happen for later versions of the application that needs to send more information to BAM !).  We modified their design to use one Master XSL based on sensorname for all sensors relating to a DO- say Data Object 'Orders' and were able to thus reduce the 17 EMS to 1 with a master XSL. For those of you wondering about how squeaky clean this design is, you are right ! This is indeed not squeaky clean and that brings us to yet another 'inferred' best practice. (I try very hard not to state the obvious in my blogs with the hope that everytime I blog, it is very useful but this one is an exception.) Transformations and Calculations It is optimal to do transformations within an engine like BPEL. Not only does this provide modelling ease with a nice GUI XSL mapper in JDeveloper, the XSL engine in BPEL is quite efficient at runtime as well. And so, doing XSL transformations in BAM is not quite prudent.  The same is true for any non-trivial calculations as well. It is best to do all transformations,calcuations and sanitize the data in a BPEL or like layer and then send this to BAM (via JMS, WS etc.) This then delegates simply the function of report rendering and mechanics of real-time reporting to the Oracle BAM reporting tool which it is most suited to do. All nulls are not created equal Here is yet another possibly known fact but reiterated here. For an EMS with an Upsert operation: a) If Empty tags or tags with no value are sent like <Tag1/> or <Tag1></Tag1>, the DO will be overwritten with --null-- b) If Empty tags are suppressed ie not generated at all, the corresponding DO field will NOT be overwritten. The field will have whatever value existed previously.  For an EMS with an Insert operation, both tags with an empty value and no tags result in –null-- being written to the DO. Hope this helps .. Happy 4th!

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• The Jack LaLanne School of Sysadmins

  - by rickramsey

  Two of my childhood heroes were Tarzan and Jack LaLanne. Tarzan was an obvious choice: what boy wouldn't want to spend his days bungee jumping through the jungle with his own pack of gorillas? Jack Lalanne had a disturbing habit of wearing stretch pants, but he was so damn fit for an old guy that you couldn't help but be impressed. Especially back then, when nobody knew what a dumb bell was, much less Cross-Fit. Here's what he did to celebrate his 70th birthday. Sooner or later we all face a choice in our careers: surrender to the life of a has-been like Bruce Sprinsteen's baseball player or become an unstoppable sysadmin like Jack Lalanne. If you'd rather keep on fighting like Jack, give these resources a look. Brian Bream's blog provides specific suggestions for keeping your skills up to date. The video interviews describe the types of technologies that are challenging what you used to know. Blog: The Old School Sysadmin - A Dying Breed? by Brian Bream "The sysadmin role has been far too dependent on performing repetitive tasks and working in a reactionary mode ... the sysadmin must grow a much larger skill set to be successful. Don’t grow vertically in one technology, grow horizontally amongst many technologies." Just one of the suggestions Brian Bream provides in this excellent blog post. Video: Freeing the Sysadmin From Repetitive Tasks Interview with Marshall Choy Marshall Choy, Director of Optimized Solutions at Oracle was once a sysadmin. And a Solaris engineer. He explains what optimized solutions are, how they are developed and tested, how they handle patching, and how these vertically integrated systems impact the job and duties of a sysadmin. Video: The Oracle Database Appliance Interview with Bob Thome Bob Thome, Senior Director of Product Management, explains what makes the Database Appliance simple, reliable, and affordable, and how it could change the economies and processes of the data center. Video: Why Pinellas County Chose Oracle Exalytics Interview with Gautham Gautham (pronounced like Batman's Gotham) recently led an effort to refresh the Pinellas County hardware systems. He'll explain what they were looking for, why they chose Oracle Exalytics, how they became convinced it was the right decision, and how it changed the way they managed their data center. Video: DTrace for System Administrators Interview with Brendan Gregg This video interview will give you an idea of some of the value-add tasks you can perform when you are freed from the reactive mode that Brian Bream describes in his blog. Brendan Gregg describes the best ways for sysadmins to tune deployed applications to get more performance out of them in their particular computing environment photograph of Ford Mustang GT 500 taken at Gateway Museum copyright by Rick Ramsey -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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• Is hiring a "chief intern" a good idea?

  - by dukeofgaming

  I'm starting an internship program for our software department and I was wondering about creating a position ("chief intern", intern supervisor, or whatever one should call it) with the following responsibilities: Train interns Coach interns Manage projects and tasks for interns Supervise intern's work in terms of rhythm and quality Act as a liaison between the main team's needs and interns performance/aspirations Evaluate and facilitate intern's progress when they want to grab a higher-level domain-specific task (at this point, a main dev team member can do mentoring) Get freely involved in the main team's software development tasks so that he himself can grow, and have full mentorship from the main dev team. I'm thinking that an apprentice-level engineer (below Jr., or Jr.; but being a graduate and working full-time) can handle this for a while (he will be trained by the main dev team first), until one of two things happen: He/she decides to move on to the main dev team by recommending an appropriate replacement (or me finding another one as a new hire) Keep leading the interns while still being able to grow to Jr. Eng., Eng., Sr. Eng I know the notion of a "chief intern" is common within the medical world, but I don't really know about that in the software world (I was a freelancer for most of my university years). A side-intention to this is also that, if this ends up being a higher rotation position (organically) because the intern supervisor wants to join the main dev team, this could help interns that aspire this position emerge as leaders. My main intention for this, though, is removing distractions from the main team but without making the interns suffer the lack of attention, which could lead to boredom and little intern retention. Is this "chief intern" idea common (or good at least)?, are there any obvious risks to it that I might not be seeing? Edit: I have a draft plan for the kind of work the interns would be doing: Are R&D mini-projects a good activity for interns? Edit #2: My intention is not keeping them isolated, but having someone focus on giving attention to them when we cannot. Edit #3: I'm now convince it is a good idea, but I will take the organic approach to hiring someone in such position: do it myself until I cannot. This way I'll know better what to expect from a person I hire for this role in the future, as well as what works and what doesn't with interns.

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• Inside Red Gate - Ricky Leeks

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, one of our profilers has a problem. Red Gate produces two .NET profilers - ANTS Performance Profiler (APP) and ANTS Memory Profiler (AMP). Both products help .NET developers solve problems they are virtually guaranteed to encounter at some point in their careers - slow code, and high memory usage, respectively. Everyone understands slow code - the symptoms are very obvious (an operation takes 2 hours when it should take 10 seconds), you know when you've solved it (the same operation now takes 15 seconds), and everyone understands how you can use a profiler like APP to help solve your particular problem. High memory usage is a much more subtle and misunderstood concept. How can .NET have memory leaks? The garbage collector, and how the CLR uses and frees memory, is one of the most misunderstood concepts in .NET. There's hundreds of blog posts out there covering various aspects of the GC and .NET memory, some of them helpful, some of them confusing, and some of them are just plain wrong. There's a lot of misconceptions out there. And, if you have got an application that uses far too much memory, it can be hard to wade through all the contradictory information available to even get an idea as to what's going on, let alone trying to solve it. That's where a memory profiler, like AMP, comes into play. Unfortunately, that's not the end of the issue. .NET memory management is a large, complicated, and misunderstood problem. Even armed with a profiler, you need to understand what .NET is doing with your objects, how it processes them, and how it frees them, to be able to use the profiler effectively to solve your particular problem. And that's what's wrong with AMP - even with all the thought, designs, UX sessions, and research we've put into AMP itself, some users simply don't have the knowledge required to be able to understand what AMP is telling them about how their application uses memory, and so they have problems understanding & solving their memory problem. Ricky Leeks This is where Ricky Leeks comes in. Created by one of the many...colourful...people in Red Gate, he headlines and promotes several tutorials, pages, and articles all with information on how .NET memory management actually works, with the goal to help educate developers on .NET memory management. And educating us all on how far you can push various vegetable-based puns. This, in turn, not only helps them understand and solve any memory issues they may be having, but helps them proactively code against such memory issues in their existing code. Ricky's latest outing is an interview on .NET Rocks, providing information on the Top 5 .NET Memory Management Gotchas, along with information on a free ebook on .NET Memory Management. Don't worry, there's loads more vegetable-based jokes where those came from...

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• Monogame/SharpDX - Shader parameters missing

  - by Layoric

  I am currently working on a simple game that I am building in Windows 8 using MonoGame (develop3d). I am using some shader code from a tutorial (made by Charles Humphrey) and having an issue populating a 'texture' parameter as it appears to be missing. Edit I have also tried 'Texture2D' and using it with a register(t0), still no luck I'm not well versed writing shaders, so this might be caused by a more obvious problem. I have debugged through MonoGame's Content processor to see how this shader is being parsed, all the non 'texture' parameters are there and look to be loading correctly. Edit This seems to go back to D3D compiler. Shader code below: #include "PPVertexShader.fxh" float2 lightScreenPosition; float4x4 matVP; float2 halfPixel; float SunSize; texture flare; sampler2D Scene: register(s0){ AddressU = Clamp; AddressV = Clamp; }; sampler Flare = sampler_state { Texture = (flare); AddressU = CLAMP; AddressV = CLAMP; }; float4 LightSourceMaskPS(float2 texCoord : TEXCOORD0 ) : COLOR0 { texCoord -= halfPixel; // Get the scene float4 col = 0; // Find the suns position in the world and map it to the screen space. float2 coord; float size = SunSize / 1; float2 center = lightScreenPosition; coord = .5 - (texCoord - center) / size * .5; col += (pow(tex2D(Flare,coord),2) * 1) * 2; return col * tex2D(Scene,texCoord); } technique LightSourceMask { pass p0 { VertexShader = compile vs_4_0 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_4_0 LightSourceMaskPS(); } } I've removed default values as they are currently not support in MonoGame and also changed ps and vs to v4 instead of 2. Could this be causing the issue? As I debug through 'DXConstantBufferData' constructor (from within the MonoGameContentProcessing project) I find that the 'flare' parameter does not exist. All others seem to be getting created fine. Any help would be appreciated. Update 1 I have discovered that SharpDX D3D compiler is what seems to be ignoring this parameter (perhaps by design?). The ConstantBufferDescription.VariableCount seems to be not counting the texture variable. Update 2 SharpDX function 'GetConstantBuffer(int index)' returns the parameters (minus textures) which is making is impossible to set values to these variables within the shader. Any one know if this is normal for DX11 / Shader Model 4.0? Or am I missing something else?

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• JavaScript Sucks.

  - by Matt Watson

  JavaScript Sucks. Yes, I said it. Microsoft's announcement of TypeScript got me thinking today. Is this a step in the right direction? It sounds like it fixes a lot of problems with JavaScript development. But is it really just duct tape and super glue for a programming model that needs to be replaced?I have had a love hate relationship with JavaScript, like most developers who would prefer avoiding client side code. I started doing web development over 10 years ago and I have done some pretty cool stuff with JavaScript. It has came a long ways and is the universal standard these days for client side scripting in the web browser. Over the years the browsers have become much faster at processing JavaScript. Now people are even trying to use it on the server side via node.js. OK, so why do I think JavaScript sucks?Well first off, as an enterprise web application developer, I don't like any scripting or dynamic languages. I like code that compiles for lots of obvious reasons. It is messy to code with and lacks all kinds of modern programming features. We spend a lot of time trying to hack it to do things it was never really designed for.Ever try to use different jQuery based plugins that require conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks.How about trying to figure out how to make 20 javascript include files load quicker as one request? Yeah that sucks too.Performance? Let me just point to the old Facebook mobile app made with JS & HTML5. It sucked. Enough said.How about unit testing JavaScript? I've never tried it, but it sure sounds like fun.My biggest problem with JavaScript is code security. If I make some awesome product, there is no way to protect my code. How can we expect game makers to write apps in 100% JavaScript and HTML5 if they can't protect their intellectual property?There are compiling tools like Closure, unit test frameworks, minify, coffee script, TypeScript and a bunch of other tools. But to me, they all try to make up for the weaknesses and problems with JavaScript. JavaScript is a mess and we spend a lot of time trying to work around all of it's problems. It is possible to program in Silverlight, Java or Flash and run that in the browser instead of JavaScript, but they all have their own problems and lack universal mobile support. I believe Microsoft's new TypeScript is a step forward for JavaScript, but I think we need to start planning to go a whole different direction. We need a new universal client side programming model, because JavaScript sucks.

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• Architecture strategies for a complex competition scoring system

  - by mikewassmer

  Competition description: There are about 10 teams competing against each other over a 6-week period. Each team's total score (out of a 1000 total available points) is based on the total of its scores in about 25,000 different scoring elements. Most scoring elements are worth a small fraction of a point and there will about 10 X 25,000 = 250,000 total raw input data points. The points for some scoring elements are awarded at frequent regular time intervals during the competition. The points for other scoring elements are awarded at either irregular time intervals or at just one moment in time. There are about 20 different types of scoring elements. Each of the 20 types of scoring elements has a different set of inputs, a different algorithm for calculating the earned score from the raw inputs, and a different number of total available points. The simplest algorithms require one input and one simple calculation. The most complex algorithms consist of hundreds or thousands of raw inputs and a more complicated calculation. Some types of raw inputs are automatically generated. Other types of raw inputs are manually entered. All raw inputs are subject to possible manual retroactive adjustments by competition officials. Primary requirements: The scoring system UI for competitors and other competition followers will show current and historical total team scores, team standings, team scores by scoring element, raw input data (at several levels of aggregation, e.g. daily, weekly, etc.), and other metrics. There will be charts, tables, and other widgets for displaying historical raw data inputs and scores. There will be a quasi-real-time dashboard that will show current scores and raw data inputs. Aggregate scores should be updated/refreshed whenever new raw data inputs arrive or existing raw data inputs are adjusted. There will be a "scorekeeper UI" for manually entering new inputs, manually adjusting existing inputs, and manually adjusting calculated scores. Decisions: Should the scoring calculations be performed on the database layer (T-SQL/SQL Server, in my case) or on the application layer (C#/ASP.NET MVC, in my case)? What are some recommended approaches for calculating updated total team scores whenever new raw inputs arrives? Calculating each of the teams' total scores from scratch every time a new input arrives will probably slow the system to a crawl. I've considered some kind of "diff" approach, but that approach may pose problems for ad-hoc queries and some aggegates. I'm trying draw some sports analogies, but it's tough because most games consist of no more than 20 or 30 scoring elements per game (I'm thinking of a high-scoring baseball game; football and soccer have fewer scoring events per game). Perhaps a financial balance sheet analogy makes more sense because financial "bottom line" calcs may be calculated from 250,000 or more transactions. Should I be making heavy use of caching for this application? Are there any obvious approaches or similar case studies that I may be overlooking?

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• PASS 13 Dispatches: moving to the cloud

  - by Tony Davis

  PASS Summit 13, Day 1 keynote by Quentin Clarke and we're hearing about “redefiniing mission critical in the cloud”. With a move to the Windows Azure cloud comes the promise of capacity on demand, automatic HA, backups, patching and so on, as well as passing responsibility to MS for managing hardware, upgrades and so on. However, for many databases and applications the best route to the cloud is not necessarily obvious. For most, the path of least resistance is IaaS – SQL Server in a Azure VM. It removes the hardware burden but you still have to manage your databases and implementing HA for SQL Server is your responsibility. Also, scaling up comes at quite a cost – the biggest VM (8 CPU cores, 56 GB RAM, 16 1TB drives with 500 IOPS each) weighs in at over over $4500 per month. With PaaS, in the form of Windows SQL Database, you get a “3-copies replica set” so HA comes out-of the box, and removes the majority of the administration burden, but you are moving your database into a very different environment. For a start, it's a shared environment, with other customers using the same compute nodes in the cluster, and potentially even sharing the same database (multi-tenancy). Unless you pay for SQL DB Premium edition, the resources available for your workload will depends on how nicely others “play” in the shared environment. You'll potentially need to do a lot of tuning, and application rewriting to avoid throttling issues, optimising application-database communication to deal with increased latency between the two, and so on. You'll need aggressive application caching. You'll also need retry logic and to deal with (expected) node failure and the need to reconnect. In Tuesday's PASS Summit pre-con from the SQLCAT team, they spent a lot of time covering some of the telemetric techniques (collect into Azure storage the necessary monitoring data) to perform capacity planning, work out the hotspots and bottlenecks in your cloud applications. Tools like WAD (Windows Azure Diagnostics), performance counters SQL Database DMVs, and others, will be essential. Of course, to truly exploit the vast horizontal scaling that is available from the existence of thousands of compute nodes, you'll also need to need to consider how to “shard” your data so Azure can move it between nodes at will. Finding the right path to the Cloud isn't easy, but it's coming. I spoke to people one year ago who saw no real benefit in trying to move their infrastructure and databases to the cloud, but now at their company, it's the conversation that won't go away. Tony.  

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• Appropriate response when client empowered with CMS destroys content to his own will

  - by dukeofgaming

  So, I just recently closed a website project that pretty much was The Oatmeals' Design Hell, but with content. The client loved the site at the beginning but started getting other people involved and mercilessly bombarding us with their opinions. We served a carefully thought content strategy (which the client approved) and extremely curated copywriting that took us four months after at least 5 requirement changes (new content, new objectives for the business, changed offerings, new mindfaps, etc.) that required us to rewrite the content about 3 times. The client never gave timely feedback even though we kept the process open for him and his people to see (content being developed transparently in Google Docs). Near the end of the project he still wanted to make changes but wanted us to finish already (there are not enough words in the world to even try to make sense of this). So I explained to him the obvious implications of the never-ending requirement changes and advised him to take the time to gather his thoughts with his own team and see the new content introduced as a new content maintenance project. He happily accepted, but on the day of training/delivery things went very wrong and we have no idea why. The client didn't even allow the site to be out for a week with the content we developed for him and quickly replaced us with a Joomla savvy intern so that he completely destroy the content with shallow, unstructured, tasteless and plain wordsmithing (and I'm not even being visceral). Worst insult of all, he revoked our access from his server and the deployed CMS not even having passed 10 minutes of being given his administrator account (we realized the day after that he did it in our own office, the nerve!). Everybody involved in the team is enraged and insulted. I never want to see this happen again. So, to try to make sense of this situation and avoid it in the future with new clients I have two concrete questions: Is there even an appropriate course of action with a client like this?, or is he just not worth the trouble of analyzing (blindly hoping this never repeats again). In the exercise to try and blame ourselves instead of the client and take this as a lesson of... something, how should we set expectations for new clients about the working terms, process and final product so that they are discouraged from mauling the content to their own contempt once they get the codes to the nukes (access to the CMS)?

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• How do you keep code with continuations/callbacks readable?

  - by Heinzi

  Summary: Are there some well-established best-practice patterns that I can follow to keep my code readable in spite of using asynchronous code and callbacks? I'm using a JavaScript library that does a lot of stuff asynchronously and heavily relies on callbacks. It seems that writing a simple "load A, load B, ..." method becomes quite complicated and hard to follow using this pattern. Let me give a (contrived) example. Let's say I want to load a bunch of images (asynchronously) from a remote web server. In C#/async, I'd write something like this: disableStartButton(); foreach (myData in myRepository) { var result = await LoadImageAsync("http://my/server/GetImage?" + myData.Id); if (result.Success) { myData.Image = result.Data; } else { write("error loading Image " + myData.Id); return; } } write("success"); enableStartButton(); The code layout follows the "flow of events": First, the start button is disabled, then the images are loaded (await ensures that the UI stays responsive) and then the start button is enabled again. In JavaScript, using callbacks, I came up with this: disableStartButton(); var count = myRepository.length; function loadImage(i) { if (i >= count) { write("success"); enableStartButton(); return; } myData = myRepository[i]; LoadImageAsync("http://my/server/GetImage?" + myData.Id, function(success, data) { if (success) { myData.Image = data; } else { write("error loading image " + myData.Id); return; } loadImage(i+1); } ); } loadImage(0); I think the drawbacks are obvious: I had to rework the loop into a recursive call, the code that's supposed to be executed in the end is somewhere in the middle of the function, the code starting the download (loadImage(0)) is at the very bottom, and it's generally much harder to read and follow. It's ugly and I don't like it. I'm sure that I'm not the first one to encounter this problem, so my question is: Are there some well-established best-practice patterns that I can follow to keep my code readable in spite of using asynchronous code and callbacks?

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• Getting from a user-story to code while using TDD (scrum)

  - by Ittai

  I'm getting into scrum and TDD and I think I have some confusion which I'd like to get your feedback about. Let's assume I have a user-story in my backlog, in order for me to start developing it as part of TDD I need to have requirements, right so far? Is it true to say that the product manager and the QA should be responsible for taking the user-story and breaking it down to acceptance tests? I think the above is true since the acceptance tests need to be formal, so they can be used as tests, but also human readable so that the product can approve they are the requirements, right? Is it also true that I later take these acceptance tests and use them as my requirements, i.e. they are a set of use-cases which I implement (through TDD)? I hope I'm not making too much of a mess but that's the current flow I have in mind right now. Update I think my initial intentions were unclear so I'll try to rephrase. I want to know more details about the scrum flow of turning a user-story into code while using TDD. The starting point is obvious, a user surfaces a need (or the user's representative as the product) which is a short 1-2 lines description in the known format and that is added to the product backlog. When there is a spring planning meeting user-stories are taken from the backlog and assigned to developers. In order for a developer to write code they need requirements (especially in TDD since the requirements are what the tests are derived from). When, by whom and to which format are the requirements compiled? What I had in mind was that the product and QA define the requirements via acceptance tests (I'm thinking of automatic using FitNesse or the sort but that's not the core I think) which help to serve 2 purposes at the same time: They define "Done" properly. They give a developer something to derive tests from. I wasn't sure when these were written (before the sprint they're picked then that might be a waste since additional information will arrive or the story won't be picked, during the iteration then the developer might get stuck waiting for them...)

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• How to Name Linked Servers

  - by Bill Graziano

  I did another SQL Server migration over the weekend that dealt with linked servers.  I’ve seen all kinds of odd naming schemes and there are a few I like and a few I suggest you avoid. Don’t name your linked server for its IP address.  At some point whatever is on the other end of that IP address will move.  You’ll probably need to point your linked server to a new IP address but not change the name of the linked server.  And then you’ve completely lost any context around this.  Bonus points if a new SQL Server eventually ends up at the old IP address further adding confusion when you’re trying to troubleshoot. Don’t name your linked server based on its instance name.  This one is less obvious.  It sounds nice to have a linked server named [VSRV1\SQLTRAN01].  You know what it is and it’s easy to use.  It’s less nice when you’ve got 200 stored procedures that all reference this linked server but the database they reference has moved to a new instance.  Now when you query this you’re actually querying a different instance. (Please note: I’m not saying it’s a good idea to have 200 stored procedures that all reference a linked server.  I’m just saying it’s not all that uncommon.) Consider naming your linked server something that you can easily search on.  See my note above.  You can also get around this by always enclosing the name in brackets.  That is harder to enforce unless you use some odd characters in it. Consider naming your linked server based on the function.  For example, I’ve had some luck having a linked server named [DW] that points to our data warehouse server.  That server can change names or physically move and all I need to do is update the linked server to point to the new destination.  The descriptive name of the linked server is still accurate.  No code needs to change and people still know what it is just by looking at it. Consider naming your linked server for the database.  I’m still thinking through this one.  It may mean you have multiple linked servers that point to the same instance.  I’ve found that database names rarely change.  It also makes it easier to move individual databases to new servers. Consider pointing your linked servers to DNS entries and not IP addresses.  I’ve done this for reporting databases and had some success.  Especially for read-only snapshots that can get created on the main database or on the mirror.  What issues have you had with linked server names?  What has worked for you?  Where are the holes in my approach?

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• Back-sliding into Unmanaged Code

  - by Laila

  It is difficult to write about Microsoft's ambivalence to .NET without mentioning clichés about dog food.  In case you've been away a long time, you'll remember that Microsoft surprised everyone with the speed and energy with which it introduced and evangelised the .NET Framework for managed code. There was good reason for this. Once it became obvious to all that it had sleepwalked into third place as a provider of development languages, behind Borland and Sun, it reacted quickly to attract the best talent in the industry to produce a windows version of the Java runtime, with Bounds-checking, Automatic Garbage collection, structures exception handling and common data types. To develop applications for this managed runtime, it produced several excellent languages, and more are being provided. The only thing Microsoft ever got wrong was to give it a stupid name. The logical step for Microsoft would be to base the entire operating system on the .NET framework, and to re-engineer its own applications. In 2002, Bill Gates, then Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect said about their plans for .NET, "This is a long-term approach. These things don't happen overnight." Now, eight years later, we're still waiting for signs of the 'long-term approach'. Microsoft's vision of an entirely managed operating system has subsided since the Vista fiasco, but stays alive yet dormant as Midori, still being developed by Microsoft Research. This is an Internet-centric fork of the singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Midori is predicated on the prevalence of connected systems, with provisions for distributed concurrency where application components exist 'in the cloud', and supports a programming model that can tolerate cancellation, intermittent connectivity and latency. It features an entirely new security model that sandboxes applications for increased security. So have Microsoft converted its existing applications to the .NET framework? It seems not. What Windows applications can run on Mono? Very few, it seems. We all thought that .NET spelt the end of DLL Hell and the need for COM interop, but it looks as if Bill Gates' idea of 'not overnight' might stretch to a decade or more. The Operating System has shown only minimal signs of migrating to .NET. Even where the use of .NET has come to dominate, when used for server applications with IIS, IIS itself is still entirely developed in unmanaged code. This is an irritation to Microsoft's greatest supporters who committed themselves fully to the NET framework, only to find parts of the Ambivalent Microsoft Empire quietly backsliding into unmanaged code and the awful C++. It is a strategic mistake that the invigorated Apple didn't make with the Mac OS X Architecture. Cheers, Laila

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• Projected Results: Sound project management practices, combined with a complete technology platform, have an immediate and lasting impact on an organization’s bottom line.

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Article By: Alan Joch, is a business and technology writer who specializes in enterprise applications, cloud computing, mobile computing, and the Web. It’s no secret that complex, large-scale projects need close management controls to ensure that they’re delivered on time and on budget. But now there’s growing evidence that failing to meet these goals can have far-reaching consequences, not only for the reputations and value of individual organizations but also for the tenure of their top executives. Government watchdogs forced one large contractor to suspend a multibillion-dollar defense program—and delay payment receipts—until a better management system was launched to more accurately track spending, project milestones, and other fundamental metrics. Significant delays in the opening of the £4.3 billion Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport impaired an airline’s operations and contributed to a drop in its share prices. These real-world examples are noteworthy because of the huge financial risks they created. They’re also far from being isolated cases. Research by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that only 11 percent of companies claimed they delivered expected ROI on major capital projects 90 percent of the time or more. In addition, 12 percent of respondents said they achieved planned ROI less than half the time. According to Phil Thornton, lead consultant at the analyst firm Clarity Economics, the numbers demonstrate obvious challenges related to managing risks, accurately predicting ROI, and consistently delivering bottom-line growth for major capital investments “Portfolio management is a path to improve your organization’s competitive advantage. It helps make sure your organization is investing in the right things and not spending its time on things that are not delivering the intended results for the firm.” Read the full article here

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• AJAX event, prevents other page actions

  - by cobaltduck

  Here's a fairly average scenario, using JSF as an example, but this same concept I have observed in ASP.NET, Apache Wicket, and other frameworks with ajax capabilities. <h:inputText id="text1" value="#{myBacker.myBean.myStringVar}" styleClass="goodCSS"> <f:ajax event="change" listener="#{myBacker.text1ChangeEventMethod}" update="someOtherField" /> </h:inputText> <h:selectBooleanCheckbox id="check1" value="#{myBacker.myBean.myBoolVar}" /> Let's suppose that the 'text1ChangeEventListener' is essential to 'someOtherField' and perhaps toggles its disabled attribute, or changes its available options, based on the value of 'myStringVar.' The particulars aren't important, let's just accept that for some reason we need an ajax call when the 'text1' value is changed. So Jane User is working her way down the form. She arrives at the 'text1' field and types some value. The cursor focus is still in the text field, as she moves her mouse to the 'check1' box and clicks. It appears to her that nothing has happened. She clicks again, and this time the checkbox highlights and the icon indicating a selection appears in the box. Jane has to do several entries in the form today, and sees this happen every time, and it becomes very frustrating for her. Likewise, Jeff Admin is also perusing this form, and begins to type in 'text1.' He then realizes he doesn't really want to enter this data, and so moves his mouse to the "cancel" button elsewhere on the page, and clicks. Nothing seems to happen. Jeff clicks again, and after confirming he really does want to cancel, is returned to the home page. Jeff scratches his head. The problem is simply that the first thing the system does after 'text1' looses focus is run the listener and perform the ajax operation. It may only take a fraction of a second, but still, you can click other buttons all you want, but until that ajax has finished, everything else is ignored. I've spent the morning searching and reading, and it seems no one else has even noticed this. I could find not one article, blog, past question here or at SO, or anyting that addresses this obvious and glaring deficiency in ajax. So first of all, am I truly alone in thinking this is a big problem? Second, does anyone have a solution?

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• Finance: Friends, not foes!

  - by red@work

  After reading Phil's blog post about his experiences of working on reception, I thought I would let everyone in on one of the other customer facing roles at Red Gate... When you think of a Credit Control team, most might imagine money-hungry (and often impolite) people, who will do nothing short of hunting people down until they pay up. Well, as with so many things, not at Red Gate! Here we do things a little bit differently.   Since joining the Licensing, Invoicing and Credit Control team at Red Gate (affectionately nicknamed LICC!), I have found it fantastic to work with people who know that often the best way to get what you want is by being friendly, reasonable and as helpful as possible. The best bit about this is that, because everyone is in a good mood, we have a great working atmosphere! We are definitely a very happy team. We laugh a lot, even when dealing with the serious matter of playing table football after lunch. The most obvious part of my job is bringing in money. There are few things quite as satisfying as receiving a big payment or one that you've been chasing for a long time. That being said, it's just as nice to encounter the companies that surprise you with a payment bang on time after little or no chasing. It's always a pleasure to find these people who are generous and easy to work with, and so they always make me smile, too. As I'm in one of the few customer facing roles here, I get to experience firsthand just how much Red Gate customers love our software and are equally impressed with our customer service. We regularly get replies from people thanking us for our help in resolving a problem or just to simply say that they think we're great. Or, as is often the case, that we 'rock and are awesome'! When those are the kinds of emails you have to deal with for most of the day, I would challenge anyone to be unhappy! The best thing about my work is that, much like Phil and his counterparts on reception, I get to talk to people from all over the world, and experience their unique (and occasionally unusual) personality traits. I deal predominantly with customers in the US, so I'll be speaking to someone from a high flying multi-national in New York one minute, and then the next phone call will be to a small office on the outskirts of Alabama. This level of customer involvement has led to a lot of interesting anecdotes and plenty of in-jokes to keep us amused! Obviously there are customers who are infuriating, like those who simply tell us that they will pay "one day", and that we should stop chasing them. Then there are the people who say that they ordered the tools because they really like them, but they just can't afford to actually pay for them at the moment. Thankfully these situations are relatively few and far between, and for every one customer that makes you want to scream, there are far, far more that make you smile!

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• SSIS Expression Editor & Tester

  Published today on CodePlex is the SSIS Expression Editor & Tester project. If you want to try it just pop over to CodePlex and download it. About five years ago I developed my own expression editor control. It first got used in our custom tasks as the MS editor didn’t become available until SQL 2005 SP1, but even then it had some handy features I preferred. For example resizable panes so that if your expression result was more than two lines you could see them all. It also meant I could change the functions available in the tree view, the most obvious use being to add some handy snippets and samples that I used a lot. This quickly developed into a small expression testing tool. I’d develop complex expressions using my editor and then copy it back into the package itself. I have been meaning to make the tool available for some time and finally made the effort, the code is checked-in and the signed downloads are published on CodePlex. There are two flavours, SQL 2005 or 2008, and just a simple zip file to download and extract. The tool doesn’t need installing, and is completely portable. It does need SSIS to be installed on the local machine though. Each zip file contains two files: ExpressionTester.exe – The tool itself, run this. ExpressionEditor.dll – The reusable editor control. A while ago the gentlemen behind BIDS Helper noticed the editor on a task and asked about using it. This became incorporated into their variable window extensions feature. To try and help them and anyone else that wants to use the editor control, it is available as a single assembly that you can reference yourself, and of course all the source code is on CodePlex too. Just add a reference to the ExpressionEditor.dll assembly and you should be up and running in no time. There is a sample project Package Test in the source code which shows how to use the editor control form in it’s simplest form, or if you want to host control directly then the tester tool is a perfect example.

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• What are the alternatives to "overriding a method" when using composition instead of inheritance?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  If we should favor composition over inheritance, the data part of it is clear, at least for me. What I don't have a clear solution to is how overwriting methods, or simply implementing them if they are defined in a pure virtual form, should be implemented. An obvious way is to wrap the instance representing the base-class into the instance representing the sub-class. But the major downsides of this are that if you have say 10 methods, and you want to override a single one, you still have to delegate every other methods anyway. And if there were several layers of inheritance, you have now several layers of wrapping, which becomes less and less efficient. Also, this only solve the problem of the object "client"; when another object calls the top wrapper, things happen like in inheritance. But when a method of the deepest instance, the base class, calls it's own methods that have been wrapped and modified, the wrapping has no effect: the call is performed by it's own method, instead of by the highest wrapper. One extreme alternative that would solve those problems would be to have one instance per method. You only wrap methods that you want to overwrite, so there is no pointless delegation. But now you end up with an incredible amount of classes and object instance, which will have a negative effect on memory usage, and this will require a lot more coding too. So, are there alternatives (preferably alternatives that can be used in Java), that: Do not result in many levels of pointless delegation without any changes. Make sure that not only the client of an object, but also all the code of the object itself, is aware of which implementation of method should be called. Does not result in an explosion of classes and instances. Ideally puts the extra memory overhead that is required at the "class"/"particular composition" level (static if you will), rather than having every object pay the memory overhead of composition. My feeling tells me that the instance representing the base class should be at the "top" of the stack/layers so it receives calls directly, and can process them directly too if they are not overwritten. But I don't know how to do it that way.

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• Please help me give this principle a name

  - by Brent Arias

  As a designer, I like providing interfaces that cater to a power/simplicity balance. For example, I think the LINQ designers followed that principle because they offered both dot-notation and query-notation. The first is more powerful, but the second is easier to read and follow. If you disagree with my assessment of LINQ, please try to see my point anyway; LINQ was just an example, my post is not about LINQ. I call this principle "dial-able power". But I'd like to know what other people call it. Certainly some will say "KISS" is the common term. But I see KISS as a superset, or a "consumerism" practice. Using LINQ as my example again, in my view, a team of programmers who always try to use query notation over dot-notation are practicing KISS. Thus the LINQ designers practiced "dial-able power", whereas the LINQ consumers practice KISS. The two make beautiful music together. I'll give another example. Imagine a C# logging tool that has two signatures allowing two uses: void Write(string message); void Write(Func<string> messageCallback); The purpose of the two signatures is to fulfill these needs: //Every-day "simple" usage, nothing special. myLogger.Write("Something Happened" + error.ToString() ); //This is performance critical, do not call ToString() if logging is //disabled. myLogger.Write( () => { "Something Happened" + error.ToString() }); Having these overloads represents "dial-able power," because the consumer has the choice of a simple interface or a powerful interface. A KISS-loving consumer will use the simpler signature most of the time, and will allow the "busy" looking signature when the power is needed. This also helps self-documentation, because usage of the powerful signature tells the reader that the code is performance critical. If the logger had only the powerful signature, then there would be no "dial-able power." So this comes full-circle. I'm happy to keep my own "dial-able power" coinage if none yet exists, but I can't help think I'm missing an obvious designation for this practice. p.s. Another example that is related, but is not the same as "dial-able power", is Scott Meyer's principle "make interfaces easy to use correctly, and hard to use incorrectly."

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• Tips on ensuring Model Quality

  - by [email protected]

  Given enough data that represents well the domain and models that reflect exactly the decision being optimized, models usually provide good predictions that ensure lift. Nevertheless, sometimes the modeling situation is less than ideal. In this blog entry we explore the problems found in a few such situations and how to avoid them.1 - The Model does not reflect the problem you are trying to solveFor example, you may be trying to solve the problem: "What product should I recommend to this customer" but your model learns on the problem: "Given that a customer has acquired our products, what is the likelihood for each product". In this case the model you built may be too far of a proxy for the problem you are really trying to solve. What you could do in this case is try to build a model based on the result from recommendations of products to customers. If there is not enough data from actual recommendations, you could use a hybrid approach in which you would use the [bad] proxy model until the recommendation model converges.2 - Data is not predictive enoughIf the inputs are not correlated with the output then the models may be unable to provide good predictions. For example, if the input is the phase of the moon and the weather and the output is what car did the customer buy, there may be no correlations found. In this case you should see a low quality model.The solution in this case is to include more relevant inputs.3 - Not enough cases seenIf the data learned does not include enough cases, at least 200 positive examples for each output, then the quality of recommendations may be low. The obvious solution is to include more data records. If this is not possible, then it may be possible to build a model based on the characteristics of the output choices rather than the choices themselves. For example, instead of using products as output, use the product category, price and brand name, and then combine these models.4 - Output leaking into input giving the false impression of good quality modelsIf the input data in the training includes values that have changed or are available only because the output happened, then you will find some strong correlations between the input and the output, but these strong correlations do not reflect the data that you will have available at decision (prediction) time. For example, if you are building a model to predict whether a web site visitor will succeed in registering, and the input includes the variable DaysSinceRegistration, and you learn when this variable has already been set, you will probably see a big correlation between having a Zero (or one) in this variable and the fact that registration was successful.The solution is to remove these variables from the input or make sure they reflect the value as of the time of decision and not after the result is known. 

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• Say goodbye to System.Reflection.Emit (any dynamic proxy generation) in WinRT

  - by mbrit

  tl;dr - Forget any form of dynamic code emitting in Metro-style. It's not going to happen.Over the past week or so I've been trying to get Moq (the popular open source TDD mocking framework) to work on WinRT. Irritatingly, the day before Release Preview was released it was actually working on Consumer Preview. However in Release Preview (RP) the System.Reflection.Emit namespace is gone. Forget any form of dynamic code generation and/or MSIL injection.This kills off any project based on the popular Castle Project Dynamic Proxy component, of which Moq is one example. You can at this point in time not perform any form of mocking using dynamic injection in your Metro-style unit testing endeavours.So let me take you through my journey on this, so that other's don't have to...The headline fact is that you cannot load any assembly that you create at runtime. WinRT supports one Assembly.Load method, and that takes the name of an assembly. That has to be placed within the deployment folder of your app. You cannot give it a filename, or stream. The methods are there, but private. Try to invoke them using Reflection and you'll be met with a caspol exception.You can, in theory, use Rotor to replace SRE. It's all there, but again, you can't load anything you create.You can't write to your deployment folder from within your Metro-style app. But, can you use another service on the machine to move a file that you create into the deployment folder and load it? Not really.The networking stack in Metro-style is intentionally "damaged" to prevent socket communication from Metro-style to any end-point on the local machine. (It just times out.) This militates against an approach where your Metro-style app can signal a properly installed service on the machine to create proxies on its behalf. If you wanted to do this, you'd have to route the calls through a C&C server somewhere. The reason why Microsoft has done this is obvious - taking out SRE know means they don't have to do it in an emergency later. The collateral damage in removing SRE is that you can't do mocking in test mode, but you also can't do any form of injection in production mode. There are plenty of reasons why enterprise apps might want to do this last point particularly. At CP, the assumption was that their inspection tools would prevent SRE being used as a malware vector - it now seems they are less confident about that. (For clarity, the risk here is in allowing a nefarious program to download instructions from a C&C server and make up executable code on the fly to run, getting around the marketplace restrictions.)So, two things:- System.Reflection.Emit is gone in Metro-style/WinRT. Get over it - dynamic, on-the-fly code generation is not going to to happen.- I've more or less got a version of Moq working in Metro-style. This is based on the idea of "baking" the dynamic proxies before you use them. You can find more information here: https://github.com/mbrit/moqrt

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• Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - All you need in one title

  It took me a while to work through the 800+ pages of this title. And yes, I really mean working not reading... Since the release of Windows 8 it should be obvious to any Windows software developer that there are new ways to develop, deploy and market applications for a broader audience. Interestingly, Microsoft started to narrow the technological gap between the various platforms - desktop, web, smartphone and XBox - and development of modern apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript couldn't be easier. Kraig covers all facets of modern Windows 8 apps from the basic building blocks and project templates in Visual Studio 2012 over to the thoughtful use of specific APIs to finally proper deployment in the App Store and potential monetization. The organisation of the book is lied out like step by step instructions or a tutorial. Kraig literally takes the reader by the hand and explains in detail in his examples about the reasons, the pros, and the cons of a certain way of implementation. Thanks to cross-references to other chapters he leaves the choice to the reader to dig deeper right now or to catch up at some time later. Personally, I have to admit that I really enjoyed the relaxed writing style. App development is not dust-dry rocket science and it should be joyful to learn about new technologies. And thanks to the richness of the various chapters and samples you could easily adapt and transfer the knowledge gained in this title to other platforms like Windows Phone 8. And last but not least: The ebook is freely available at Amazon, Microsoft Press and O'Reilly. Don't think about it, just get the book. Now. Update: I already mentioned this title in other blog entries which are related to Microsoft certification. Feel free to read on and to discover more online resources: Learning content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5 More content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5 O'Reilly offers free webcasts on their site, too. And in case that you would like to know more about Kraig's book and his experience with various development teams, please checkout this one: Zero to App in Two Weeks: Programming Windows 8 Apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The recording should be available soon.

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