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• Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2010 -- #1008

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight" Chris Klug WP7: "Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter" Jaime Rodriguez Training: "Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1 Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring. Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1 Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture. 4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text. 5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch. Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it. Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked... The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend. Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution. Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment. Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF #twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7) Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out... Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev) Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above. Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code. UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that? Details on the Push Notification app limits Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Launch Webcast Q&A: Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g - The Platform for the Modern User Experience

  - by howard.beader(at)oracle.com

  Did you have a chance to watch the Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Launch Webcast yet? Andy MacMillan presented some great information on the webcast and answered quite a few of your questions in the Q&A session as well. For your reading pleasure we have captured a number of the questions and answers and they are summarized below: Question: Can you tell me what should our Portal strategy be for integrating and extending our Oracle enterprise applications? Answer: We recommend that you look at this in two steps, the first would be to ensure that you have a good understanding of our common user experience architecture. Internally our product teams at Oracle are already investing in this quite heavily today for Fusion Applications and this is driving natural convergence from a UX strategy standpoint. The second step would be to look at how best to componentize the back office applications so that the business users across your organization can take advantage of these -- don't make it just about putting a new skin on top of what you already have from an application standpoint, instead look at how best to embed the social computing capabilities as part of the solution for your business users. Question: We are currently using the BEA WebLogic Portal now, should we stay on WLP or should we be looking at moving to WebCenter or when should we move to WebCenter? Answer: Our strategy has been called "Continue & Converge", this theme means that you can continue to use WebLogic or Plumtree portals until your organization is ready to move to WebCenter and in the mean time you can continue to deploy what you need to in your organization of WLP or WCI Portals with the full support of Oracle. In addition WebCenter Services can be leveraged for social computing to complement what you are already doing today and enable your organization to take advantage of some of the latest and greatest social computing capabilities. We have migration scripts and conversion capabilities available as well as programs where Oracle can help you evaluate your options to decide how best to move forward. WebCenter provides the best of the best capabilities and will enable you to take advantage of new capabilities that may not exist in your current portal today. In the end though it's up to you as a customer as to when you want to make the transition to Oracle WebCenter Suite. Question: Can you tell me how is Oracle leveraging WebCenter internally and for its Application and Middleware product UX strategies? Answer: Internally, Oracle is leveraging WebCenter for our employees and thus far we are seeing significant updates with our users taking advantage of the business activity streams, team spaces and collaboration capabilities. From a product strategy standpoint, our product teams are taking advantage of the common user experience architecture and leveraging WebCenter to provide social and collaborative capabilities to the Oracle Applications and providing new types of composite applications with what is coming with Fusion Applications. WebCenter also provides a common user experience across all the products in the Oracle Fusion Middleware family as well. Question: Our organization is currently using SharePoint, but we are also an Oracle Applications customer, how should we be thinking about WebCenter as we move forward? Answer: Great question. Typically, we are seeing organizations using SharePoint for its core use cases of small team collaboration and file server replacement. WebCenter can connect to SharePoint as a content source to feed into WebCenter quite easily and it leverages the robust Oracle ECM product under WebCenter as well. In addition, SharePoint team sites can be connected to WebCenter utilizing our SharePoint connector. With Oracle WebCenter though, we are really targeting business users and enterprise applications, thus affecting positive change on the processes that drive the business to improve productivity across your organization. Question: Are organizations today using WebCenter as a Web platform for externally facing public websites? Answer: Yes, we are seeing a convergence around web content management and portal types of websites with customers converting them from just broadcasting content to making it a much richer personalized experience and also exposing back-office applications as well. Web Content Management capabilities are already embedded in WebCenter so that organizations can take advantage now of the benefits a personalized web experience provides for your customers. This is simply a short summary of a few of the questions addressed on the webcast, please tune in now to learn more about Oracle WebCenter, the user experience platform for the enterprise and the web! The Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Launch Webcast can be found here

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• The Evolution Of C#

  - by Paulo Morgado

  The first release of C# (C# 1.0) was all about building a new language for managed code that appealed, mostly, to C++ and Java programmers. The second release (C# 2.0) was mostly about adding what wasn’t time to built into the 1.0 release. The main feature for this release was Generics. The third release (C# 3.0) was all about reducing the impedance mismatch between general purpose programming languages and databases. To achieve this goal, several functional programming features were added to the language and LINQ was born. Going forward, new trends are showing up in the industry and modern programming languages need to be more: Declarative With imperative languages, although having the eye on the what, programs need to focus on the how. This leads to over specification of the solution to the problem in hand, making next to impossible to the execution engine to be smart about the execution of the program and optimize it to run it more efficiently (given the hardware available, for example). Declarative languages, on the other hand, focus only on the what and leave the how to the execution engine. LINQ made C# more declarative by using higher level constructs like orderby and group by that give the execution engine a much better chance of optimizing the execution (by parallelizing it, for example). Concurrent Concurrency is hard and needs to be thought about and it’s very hard to shoehorn it into a programming language. Parallel.For (from the parallel extensions) looks like a parallel for because enough expressiveness has been built into C# 3.0 to allow this without having to commit to specific language syntax. Dynamic There was been lots of debate on which ones are the better programming languages: static or dynamic. The fact is that both have good qualities and users of both types of languages want to have it all. All these trends require a paradigm switch. C# is, in many ways, already a multi-paradigm language. It’s still very object oriented (class oriented as some might say) but it can be argued that C# 3.0 has become a functional programming language because it has all the cornerstones of what a functional programming language needs. Moving forward, will have even more. Besides the influence of these trends, there was a decision of co-evolution of the C# and Visual Basic programming languages. Since its inception, there was been some effort to position C# and Visual Basic against each other and to try to explain what should be done with each language or what kind of programmers use one or the other. Each language should be chosen based on the past experience and familiarity of the developer/team/project/company and not by particular features. In the past, every time a feature was added to one language, the users of the other wanted that feature too. Going forward, when a feature is added to one language, the other will work hard to add the same feature. This doesn’t mean that XML literals will be added to C# (because almost the same can be achieved with LINQ To XML), but Visual Basic will have auto-implemented properties. Most of these features require or are built on top of features of the .NET Framework and, the focus for C# 4.0 was on dynamic programming. Not just dynamic types but being able to talk with anything that isn’t a .NET class. Also introduced in C# 4.0 is co-variance and contra-variance for generic interfaces and delegates. Stay tuned for more on the new C# 4.0 features.

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• Scid Chess Program Compiling issue

  - by lbochitt

  First of all I would like to point that I'm new to Ubuntu so sorry if what I am asking is ridiculous. I have downloaded Scid 4.4 chess program and I have tried to compile it as it was explained on its website: 1) Initialize git. 2) Create a folder where you want to download and (?) compile the source, then cast: git init on your command line. 3) You're now ready to download the sources recall Fulvio's spell: git clone git://scid.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/scid/scid This should get you the latest Scid source. 4) You're now ready to compile Scid. In principle, all you need to do is: ./configure and then make 5) If you get stuck, you probably need to get developer versions of tcl/tk. This translates into issuing these three commands: sudo apt-get install tcl8.5-dev sudo apt-get install tk8.5-dev sudo apt-get install zlib1g -dev 6) You should now be ready to compile The problem is that when I run ./configure to start compiling the following message appears on Terminal: configure: Makefile configuration program for Scid Tcl/Tk version: 8.5 Your operating system is: Linux 3.8.0-19-generic Location of "tcl.h": /usr/include/tcl8.5 Location of "tk.h": /usr/include/tcl8.5 Location of Tcl 8.5 library: not found Location of Tk 8.5 library: not found Checking if your system already has zlib installed: yes. Using Makefile.conf. Not all settings could be determined! The default Makefile was written. You will need to edit it before you can compile Scid. What should I do? Has anybody faced this problem before? Thanks in advance I have run ls -l /usr/include/tcl8.5/tcl.h here's the result: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 87291 abr 22 10:45 /usr/include/tcl8.5/tcl.h I have also tried what you suggested Could you run git reset --hard HEAD and git clean -d -f to clean up everything using Git? Then run ./configure again. Just a shot in the dark - I've seen some GNU automake stuff still listening to its "cached" version of the results or something. Still no solution. I don't know why it can't recognize the library though it is installed I opened configure to see where the program looked for the library. This is the code: # libraryPath: List of possible locations of Tcl/Tk library. set libraryPath { /usr/lib /usr/lib64 /usr/local/tcl/lib /usr/local/lib /usr/X11R6/lib /opt/tcltk/lib /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu } lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tcl${tclv}" lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tk${tclv}" lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tcl${tclv_nodot}" lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tk${tclv_nodot}" # Try to add tcl_library and auto_path values to libraryPath, # in case the user has a non-standard Tcl/Tk library location: if {[info exists ::tcl_library]} { lappend headerPath \ [file join [file dirname [file dirname $::tcl_library]] include] lappend libraryPath [file dirname $::tcl_library] lappend libraryPath $::tcl_library } if {[info exists ::auto_path]} { foreach name $::auto_path { lappend libraryPath $name } } if {! [info exists var(TCL_INCLUDE)]} { puts -nonewline { Location of "tcl.h": } set opt(tcl_h) [findDir "tcl.h" $headerPath "TCL_VERSION.*$tclv"] if {$opt(tcl_h) == ""} { puts "not found" set success 0 set opt(tcl_h) "$::defaultVar(TCL_INCLUDE)" } else { puts $opt(tcl_h) } } set opt(tcl_lib) "" if {! [info exists var(TCL_LIBRARY)]} { puts -nonewline " Location of Tcl $tclv library: " set opt(tcl_lib) [findDir "libtcl${tclv}.*" $libraryPath] if {$opt(tcl_lib) == ""} { set opt(tcl_lib) [findDir "libtcl${tclv_nodot}.*" $libraryPath] if {$opt(tcl_lib) == ""} { puts "not found" set success 0 set opt(tcl_lib) "$opt(tcl_h)" set opt(tcl_lib_file) "tcl\$(TCL_VERSION)" } else { set opt(tcl_lib_file) "tcl${tclv_nodot}" puts $opt(tcl_lib) } } else { set opt(tcl_lib_file) "tcl\$(TCL_VERSION)" puts $opt(tcl_lib) } } if {! [info exists var(TCL_INCLUDE)]} { set var(TCL_INCLUDE) "-I$opt(tcl_h)" } if {! [info exists var(TCL_LIBRARY)]} { set var(TCL_LIBRARY) "-L$opt(tcl_lib) -l$opt(tcl_lib_file)" } return $success So I guess (And by guess I mean i have no idea how to code) I should write somewhere in here usr/lib/tcl8.5 and usr/lib/tk8.5, am I right?

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• Know Your Audience, And/Or Your Customer

  - by steve.diamond

  Yesterday I gave an internal presentation to about 20 Oracle employees on "messaging," not messaging technology, but embarking on the process of building messages. One of the elements I covered was the importance of really knowing and understanding your audience. As a humorous reference I included two side-by-side photos of Oakland A's fans and Oakland Raiders fans. The Oakland A's fans looked like happy-go-lucky drunk types. The Oakland Raiders fans looked like angry extras from a low budget horror flick. I then asked my presentation attendees what these two groups had in common. Here's what I heard. --They're human (at least I THINK they're human). --They're from Oakland. --They're sports fans. After that, it was anyone's guess. A few days earlier we were putting the finishing touches on a sales presentation for one of our product lines. We had included an upfront "lead in" addressing how the economy is improving, yet that doesn't mean sales executives will have any more resources to add to their teams, invest in technology, etc. This "lead in" included miscellaneous news article headlines and statistics validating the slowly improving economy. When we subjected this presentation to internal review two days ago, this upfront section in particular was scrutinized. "Is the economy really getting better? I (exclamation point) don't think it's really getting better. Haven't you seen the headlines coming out of Greece and Europe?" Then the question TO ME became, "Who will actually be in the audience that sees and hears this presentation? Will s/he be someone like me? Or will s/he be someone like the critic who didn't like our lead-in?" We took the safe route and removed that lead in. After all, why start a "pitch" with a component that is arguably subjective? What if many of our audience members are individuals at organizations still facing a strong headwind? For reasons I won't go into here, it was the right decision to make. The moral of the story: Make sure you really know your audience. Harness the wisdom of the information your organization's CRM systems collect to get that fully informed "customer view." Conduct formal research. Conduct INFORMAL research. Ask lots of questions. Study industries and scenarios that have nothing to do with yours to see "how they do it." Stop strangers in coffee shops and on the street...seriously. Last week I caught up with an old friend from high school who recently retired from a 25 year career with the USMC. He said, "I can learn something from every single person I come into contact with." What a great way of approaching the world. Then, think about and write down what YOU like and dislike as a customer. But also remember that when it comes to your company's products, you are most likely NOT the customer, so don't go overboard in superimposing your own world view. Approaching the study of customers this way adds rhyme, reason and CONTEXT to lengthy blog posts like this one. Know your audience.

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• Am I right about the differences between Floyd-Warshall, Dijkstra's and Bellman-Ford algorithms?

  - by Programming Noob

  I've been studying the three and I'm stating my inferences from them below. Could someone tell me if I have understood them accurately enough or not? Thank you. Dijkstra's algorithm is used only when you have a single source and you want to know the smallest path from one node to another, but fails in cases like this Floyd-Warshall's algorithm is used when any of all the nodes can be a source, so you want the shortest distance to reach any destination node from any source node. This only fails when there are negative cycles (this is the most important one. I mean, this is the one I'm least sure about:) 3.Bellman-Ford is used like Dijkstra's, when there is only one source. This can handle negative weights and its working is the same as Floyd-Warshall's except for one source, right? If you need to have a look, the corresponding algorithms are (courtesy Wikipedia): Bellman-Ford: procedure BellmanFord(list vertices, list edges, vertex source) // This implementation takes in a graph, represented as lists of vertices // and edges, and modifies the vertices so that their distance and // predecessor attributes store the shortest paths. // Step 1: initialize graph for each vertex v in vertices: if v is source then v.distance := 0 else v.distance := infinity v.predecessor := null // Step 2: relax edges repeatedly for i from 1 to size(vertices)-1: for each edge uv in edges: // uv is the edge from u to v u := uv.source v := uv.destination if u.distance + uv.weight < v.distance: v.distance := u.distance + uv.weight v.predecessor := u // Step 3: check for negative-weight cycles for each edge uv in edges: u := uv.source v := uv.destination if u.distance + uv.weight < v.distance: error "Graph contains a negative-weight cycle" Dijkstra: 1 function Dijkstra(Graph, source): 2 for each vertex v in Graph: // Initializations 3 dist[v] := infinity ; // Unknown distance function from 4 // source to v 5 previous[v] := undefined ; // Previous node in optimal path 6 // from source 7 8 dist[source] := 0 ; // Distance from source to source 9 Q := the set of all nodes in Graph ; // All nodes in the graph are 10 // unoptimized - thus are in Q 11 while Q is not empty: // The main loop 12 u := vertex in Q with smallest distance in dist[] ; // Start node in first case 13 if dist[u] = infinity: 14 break ; // all remaining vertices are 15 // inaccessible from source 16 17 remove u from Q ; 18 for each neighbor v of u: // where v has not yet been 19 removed from Q. 20 alt := dist[u] + dist_between(u, v) ; 21 if alt < dist[v]: // Relax (u,v,a) 22 dist[v] := alt ; 23 previous[v] := u ; 24 decrease-key v in Q; // Reorder v in the Queue 25 return dist; Floyd-Warshall: 1 /* Assume a function edgeCost(i,j) which returns the cost of the edge from i to j 2 (infinity if there is none). 3 Also assume that n is the number of vertices and edgeCost(i,i) = 0 4 */ 5 6 int path[][]; 7 /* A 2-dimensional matrix. At each step in the algorithm, path[i][j] is the shortest path 8 from i to j using intermediate vertices (1..k-1). Each path[i][j] is initialized to 9 edgeCost(i,j). 10 */ 11 12 procedure FloydWarshall () 13 for k := 1 to n 14 for i := 1 to n 15 for j := 1 to n 16 path[i][j] = min ( path[i][j], path[i][k]+path[k][j] );

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• Lazy Evaluation &ndash; Why being lazy in F# blows my mind!

  - by MarkPearl

  First of all – shout out to Peter Adams – from the feedback I have gotten from him on the last few posts of F# that I have done – my mind has just been expanded. I did a blog post a few days ago about infinite sequences – I didn’t really understand what was going on with it, and I still don’t really get it – but I am getting closer. In Peter’s last comment he made mention of Lazy Evaluation. I am ashamed to say that up till then I had never heard about lazy evaluation – how can evaluation be lazy? I mean, I know about lazy loading and that makes sense… but surely something is either evaluated or not! Well… a bit of reading today and I have been enlightened to a point – if you do know of any good articles explaining lazy evaluation please send them to me. So what is lazy evaluation and why is it useful? Lazy evaluation is a process whereby the system only computes the values needed and “ignores” the computations not needed. I’m going out on a limb here, but with this explanation in hand, imagine the following C# code… public int CalculatedVal() { int Val1 = 0; int Val2 = 0; for (int Count = 0; Count < 1000000; Count++) { Val1++; } return Val2; }   Normally, even though Val1 is never needed, the system would loop 1000000 times and add 1 to the current value of Val1. Imagine if the system realized this and so just skipped this segment of code and instead did the following…. public int CalculatedVal() { int Val1 = 0; return Val2; }   A massive saving in computation and wasted effort. Now I am pretty sure it isn’t as simple as this but I think this is the basic idea. For a more detailed explanation of lazy evaluation in c#, Pedram Rezei has a wonderful post on lazy evaluation and makes some C# comparisons. I am not going to take any thunder from him by repeating everything he said since I think he did such a good job of explaining it himself. What I am interested in though is how in F# do you tell something to have lazy evalution, and how do you know if something will be eager or lazy by looking at it. I found this post was useful. From reading around F# by default uses eager evaluation unless explicitly told to use lazy evaluation. One exception to this is sequences, which are lazy by default. Now reading about lazy evaluation has helped me understand more about F# coding… From my understanding of F# because of its declarative nature, most of the actual code you are declaring properties and rules – very little code is actually saying do this right now - but when it comes to a “do this” code section, it then evaluates and optimizes code and applies the rules. So props to lazy evaluation and its optimizations…

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• Release Management as Orchestra

  - by ericajanine

  I read an excellent, concise article (http://www.buildmeister.com/articles/software_release_management_best_practices) on the basics of release management practices. In the article, it states "Release Management is often likened to the conductor of an orchestra, with the individual changes to be implemented the various instruments within it." I played in music ensembles for years, so this is especially close to my heart as example. I learned most of my discipline from hours and hours of practice at the hand of a very skilled conductor and leader. I also learned that the true magic in symphonic performance is one where everyone involved is focused on one sound, one goal. In turn, that solid focus creates a sound and experience bigger than just mechanics alone accomplish. In symphony, a conductor's true purpose is to make you, a performer, better so the overall sound and end product is better. The big picture (the performance of the composition) is the end-game, and all musicians in the orchestra know without question their part makes up an important but incomplete piece of that performance. A good conductor works with each section (e.g. group) to ensure their individual pieces are solid. Let's restate: The conductor leads and is responsible for ensuring those pieces are solid. While the performers themselves are doing the work, the conductor is the final authority on when the pieces are ready or not. If not, the conductor initiates the efforts to get them ready or makes the decision to scrap their parts altogether for the sake of an overall performance. Let it sink in, because it's clear--It is not the performer's call if they play their part as agreed, it's the conductor's final call to allow it. In comparison, if a software release manager is a conductor, the only way for that manager to be effective is to drive the overarching process and execution of individual pieces of a software development lifecycle. It does not mean the release manager performs each and every piece, it means the release manager has oversight and influence because the end-game is a successful software enhancin a useable environment. It means the release manager, not the developer or development manager, has the final call if something goes into a software release. Of course, this is not a process of autocracy or dictation of absolute rule, it's cooperative effort. But the release manager must have the final authority to make a decision if something is ready to be added to the bigger piece, the overall symphony of software changes being considered for package and release. It also goes without saying a release manager, like a conductor, must have full autonomy and isolation from other software groups. A conductor is the one on the podium waving a little stick at the each section and cueing them for their parts, not yelling from the back of the room while also playing a tuba and taking direction from the horn section. I have personally seen where release managers are relegated to being considered little more than coordinators, red-tapers to "satisfy" the demands of an audit group without being bothered to actually respect all that a release manager gives a group willing to employ them fully. In this dysfunctional scenario, development managers, project managers, business users, and other stakeholders have been given nearly full clearance to demand and push their agendas forward, causing a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario where an inherent conflict will ensue. Depending on the strength, determination for peace, and willingness to overlook a built-in expectation that is wrong, the release manager here must face the crafted conflict head-on and diffuse it as quickly as possible. Then, the release manager must clearly make a case why a change cannot be released without negative impact to all parties involved. If a political agenda is solely driving a software release, there IS no symphony, there is no "software lifecycle". It's just out-of-tune noise. More importantly, there is no real conductor. Sometimes, just wanting to make a beautiful sound is not enough. If you are a release manager, are you freed up enough to move, to conduct the sections of software creation to ensure a solid release performance is possible? If not, it's time to take stock in what your role actually is and see if that is what you truly want to achieve in your position. If you are, then you can successfully build your career and that of the people in your groups to create truly beautiful software (music) together.

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• Anatomy of a serialization killer

  - by Brian Donahue

  As I had mentioned last month, I have been working on a project to create an easy-to-use managed debugger. It's still an internal tool that we use at Red Gate as part of product support to analyze application errors on customer's computers, and as such, should be easy to use and not require installation. Since the project has got rather large and important, I had decided to use SmartAssembly to protect all of my hard work. This was trivial for the most part, but the loading and saving of results was broken by SA after using the obfuscation, rendering the loading and saving of XML results basically useless, although the merging and error reporting was an absolute godsend and definitely worth the price of admission. (Well, I get my Red Gate licenses for free, but you know what I mean!)My initial reaction was to simply exclude the serializable results class and all of its' members from obfuscation, and that was just dandy, but a few weeks on I decided to look into exactly why serialization had broken and change the code to work with SA so I could write any new code to be compatible with SmartAssembly and save me some additional testing and changes to the SA project.In simple terms, SA does all that it can to prevent serialization problems, for instance, it will not obfuscate public members of a DLL and it will exclude any types with the Serializable attribute from obfuscation. This prevents public members and properties from being made private and having the name changed. If the serialization is done inside the executable, however, public members have the access changed to private and are renamed. That was my first problem, because my types were in the executable assembly and implemented ISerializable, but did not have the Serializable attribute set on them!public class RedFlagResults : ISerializable        {        }The second problem caused by the pruning feature. Although RedFlagResults had public members, they were not truly properties, and used the GetObjectData() method of ISerializable to serialize the members. For that reason, SA could not exclude these members from pruning and further broke the serialization. public class RedFlagResults : ISerializable        {                public List<RedFlag.Exception> Exceptions;                 #region ISerializable Members                 public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)                {                                info.AddValue("Exceptions", Exceptions);                }                 #endregionSo to fix this, it was necessary to make Exceptions a proper property by implementing get and set on it. Also, I added the Serializable attribute so that I don't have to exclude the class from obfuscation in the SA project any more. The DoNotPrune attribute means I do not need to exclude the class from pruning.[Serializable, SmartAssembly.Attributes.DoNotPrune]        public class RedFlagResults        {                public List<RedFlag.Exception> Exceptions {get;set;}        }Similarly, the Exception class gets the Serializable and DoNotPrune attributes applied so all of its' properties are excluded from obfuscation.Now my project has some protection from prying eyes by scrambling up the code so it's harder to reverse-engineer, without breaking anything. SmartAssembly has also provided the benefit of merging so that the end-user doesn't need to extract all of the DLL files needed by RedFlag into a directory, and can be run directly from the .zip archive. When an error occurs (hey, I'm only human!), an exception report can be sent to me so I can see what went wrong without having to, er, debug the debugger.

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• Enterprise 2.0 - Connecting People, Processes & Content

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  With recent technological advances, the Internet is changing. When users head to the web, they are no longer just looking for information from a simple text and picture based website. Users want a more interactive experience - they want to participate, to share their views and get the feedback of others. And this is precisely what Web 2.0 technology addresses. Web 2.0 is about web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 technology is everywhere on the Internet and is radically changing the speed and medium in which we interact and communicate. There are thousands of examples in the consumer world of Web 2.0 applications, technologies and solutions at work. You might be familiar with some of them...blogs, wikis (Wikipedia), Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn - these are all examples of Web 2.0. And these technologies are transforming our world into a real-time, participation-oriented, user-driven, content-centric world. With all of these Web 2.0 solutions it's about the user, the consumer and all the content they are generating. It's a world full of online communities where people share and participate. We're not talking about disseminating information top-down , nor is it a bottom-up fight. Everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and share. The more you participate, the more you share, the more valued you are in the community. The web is not just a collection of documents online. It is the social web.  For the active users in the community, staying connected becomes critically important so they can participate at anytime and from anywhere. And because feedback and interaction are so critical, time is of the essence. When everyone is providing immediate responses, you feel the urge to do the same. Hence everything needs to be done right now, together...and collaboratively. With all the content being generated online by users, there is complete information overload out there. (That's a good thing for Google). But...it's no longer just about search. Sometimes you want the information to just come to you. Recommendations and discovery engines will deliver you more applicable results than a non-contextual search. How many of you have heard about a news headline on Facebook as part of your feed before you read the paper or see it on TV? This is how the new generation of workers live their daily lives...and as they enter the workforce, these trends and technologies are showing up in the enterprise too. A lot of the Web 2.0 technologies and solutions in the consumer world are geared for just that....consumers. But the core concepts that put them into the Web 2.0 category can be applied to the enterprise as well. And that is what we mean when we talk about Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 is the use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in the workplace.  It provides a modern user experience by connecting the people, content and business processes inside and outside the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 empowers users to collaborate more effectively, find and share information in the proper content and improves the overall business processes which they participate in. As we head into 2011, is your organization using Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to the fullest? Are you connecting your people, processes and content together to provide a modern user experience?

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• Oracle’s New Approach to Cloud-based Applications User Experiences

  - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team

  By Misha Vaughan It was an exciting Oracle OpenWorld this year for customers and partners, as they got to see what their input into the Oracle user experience research and development process has produced for cloud-delivered applications. The result of all this engagement and listening is a focus on simplicity, mobility, and extensibility. These were the core themes across Oracle OpenWorld sessions, executive roundtables, and analyst briefings given by Jeremy Ashley, Oracle's vice president of user experience. The highlight of every meeting with a customer featured the new simplified UI for Oracle’s cloud applications.    Attendees at some sessions and events also saw a vision of what is coming next in the Oracle user experience, and they gave direct feedback on whether this would help solve their business problems.  What did attendees think of what they saw this year? Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research was part of  an analyst briefing on next-generation user experiences from Oracle. Here’s what she told CRM Buyer in an interview just after the event:  “Many of the improvements are incremental, which is not surprising, as Oracle regularly updates its application,” Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, told CRM Buyer. "Still, there are distinct themes to this latest set of changes. One is usability. Oracle Sales Cloud, for example, is designed to have zero training for onboarding sales reps, which it does," she explained. "It is quite impressive, actually—the intuitive nature of the application and the design work they have done with this goal in mind. The software uses as few buttons and fields as possible," she pointed out. "The sales rep doesn't have to ask, 'what is the next step?' because she can see what it is."  What else did we hear? Oracle OpenWorld is a time when we can take a broader pulse of our customers’ and partners’ concerns. This year we heard some common user experience themes on the following: · A desire to continue to simplify widely used self-service tasks · A need to understand how customers or partners could take some of the UX lessons learned on simplicity and mobility into their own custom areas and projects  · The continuing challenge of needing to support bring-your-own-device and corporate-provided mobile devices to end users · A desire to harmonize user experiences across platforms for specific business-use cases  What does this mean for next year? Well, there were a lot of things we could only show to smaller groups of customers in our Oracle OpenWorld usability labs and HQ lab tours, to partners at our Expo, and to analysts under non-disclosure agreements. But we used these events as a way to get some early feedback about where we are focusing for the year ahead. Attendees gave us a positive response: @bkhan Saw some excellent UX innovations at the expo “@usableapps: Great job @mishavaughan and @vinoskey on #oow13 UX partner expo!” @WarnerTim @usableapps @mishavaughan @vinoskey @ultan Thanks for an interesting afternoon definitely liked the UX tool kits for partners. You can expect Oracle to continue pushing themes of simplicity, mobility, and extensibility even more aggressively in the next year.  If you are interested to find out what really goes on in the UX labs, such as what we are doing with smartphones, tablets, heads-up displays, and the AppsLab robots, feel free to reach out to me for more information: Misha Vaughan or on Twitter: @mishavaughan.

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• Java Resources for Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is a Platform as a Service – a PaaS – that runs code you write. That code doesn’t just mean the languages on the .NET platform – you can run code from multiple languages, including Java. In fact, you can develop for Windows and SQL Azure using not only Visual Studio but the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) as well.  Although not an exhaustive list, here are several links that deal with Java and Windows Azure: Resource Link Windows Azure Java Development Center http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/java/  Java Development Guidance http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh690943(VS.103).aspx  Running a Java Environment on Windows Azure http://blogs.technet.com/b/port25/archive/2010/10/28/running-a-java-environment-on-windows-azure.aspx  Running a Java Environment on Windows Azure http://blogs.technet.com/b/port25/archive/2010/10/28/running-a-java-environment-on-windows-azure.aspx  Run Java with Jetty in Windows Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2010/03/21/run-java-with-jetty-in-windows-azure.aspx  Using the plugin for Eclipse http://blogs.msdn.com/b/craig/archive/2011/03/22/new-plugin-for-eclipse-to-get-java-developers-off-the-ground-with-windows-azure.aspx  Run Java with GlassFish in Windows Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2011/01/17/run-java-with-glassfish-in-windows-azure.aspx  Improving experience for Java developers with Windows  Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2011/02/23/improving-experience-for-java-developers-with-windows-azure.aspx  Java Access to SQL Azure via the JDBC Driver for SQL  Server http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2011/03/29/java-access-to-sql-azure-via-the-jdbc-driver-for-sql-server.aspx  How to Get Started with Java, Tomcat on Windows Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/usisvde/archive/2011/03/04/how-to-get-started-with-java-tomcat-on-windows-azure.aspx  Deploying Java Applications in Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mariok/archive/2011/01/05/deploying-java-applications-in-azure.aspx  Using the Windows Azure Storage Explorer in Eclipse http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2011/01/11/using-the-windows-azure-storage-explorer-in-eclipse.aspx  Windows Azure Tomcat Solution Accelerator http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/winazuretomcat  Deploying a Java application to Windows Azure with  Command-line Ant http://java.interoperabilitybridges.com/articles/deploying-a-java-application-to-windows-azure-with-command-line-ant  Video: Open in the Cloud: Windows Azure and Java http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC10/CS10  AzureRunMe  http://azurerunme.codeplex.com/  Windows Azure SDK for Java http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/projects/windows-azure-sdk-for-java  AppFabric SDK for Java http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/projects/azure-java-sdk-for-net-services  Information Cards for Java http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/projects/information-card-for-java  Apache Stonehenge http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/projects/apache-stonehenge  Channel 9 Case Study on Java and Windows Azure http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Windows-Azure/Gigaspaces/Solution-Provider-Streamlines-Java-Application-Deployment-in-the-Cloud/400000000081   

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• Reflections on Life

  - by MOSSLover

  I haven’t written a blog post in a while.  I understand there is blog neglect going on, but there is a lot going on in my life.  I am trying really hard to embrace the change and roll with everything thrown my way.  I had a really hard year it was not my best and it was not my worst.  I cannot say it was entirely hard, because January 1st I received the MVP Award.  If you know me you know the three things that happened starting in August, but if you really know me it was miserable for a substantial period of time prior to August.  There was some personal life issues I neglected to deal with that came into a headway.  Anyway I’d like to think that as of today I am doing much better.  I finally went to Paris and London.  I found out I love Paris and Nottingham.  I think that London is something I need to visit a few more times.  I would love to go back to the UK and France.  I think I’d love to live overseas someday, but not anytime soon. The past few weeks were like a whirlwind experience.  I felt like I had been sitting around for months just waiting for this trip and the big move.  Maybe it was something I was waiting to do for several years.  I needed a big change.  I needed to get unstuck.  I feel like August, however horrible it was, helped me get to the point where I am somewhere happy.  For at least two years I have been miserable outside of my work (community and otherwise).  I was just downright unhappy.  One of my coworkers said that my tweets were just horrible this past year.  Depressing might I add.  I agree they were incredibly depressing for the past several years.  But things are on an upturn.  I decided a month or so ago that I was going to do all the things I have wanted to do without looking back.  So I dove into this trip and into this move to NYC head first.  I was scared for a bit and I didn’t think it would come through.  Everyone friend-wise and coworker-wise has helped me accomplish this great feat.  I am now a New Yorker and as of January 1st 100% living in the city. Thank you for those who have checked up on me.  Thank you for those who listened to all my problems and continue to do so.  Thank you to everyone who has helped me through this really terrible time.  You guys mean the world to me.  You are my friends.  Some of you I have not met and some of you I barely know.  I have been to a lot of events where people just walked up to me and asked me if I was doing ok.  I will continue to keep moving forward one foot in front of the other.  If I ever get so down again please remind me about this year.  I hope to see you all in the upcoming year as I attend more events.  Have a good night or a good morning or a good afternoon.  I will catch you all later. Technorati Tags: Life,2011,Disaster Year,Happinness

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• Linq To SQL: Behaviour for table field which is NotNull and having Default value or binding

  - by kaushalparik27

  I found this something interesting while wandering over community which I would like to share. The post is whole about: DBML is not considering the table field's "Default value or Binding" setting which is a NotNull. I mean the field which can not be null but having default value set needs to be set IsDbGenerated = true in DBML file explicitly.Consider this situation: There is a simple tblEmployee table with below structure: The fields are simple. EmployeeID is a Primary Key with Identity Specification = True with Identity Seed = 1 to autogenerate numeric value for this field. EmployeeName and their EmailAddress to store in rest of 2 fields. And the last one is "DateAdded" with DateTime datatype which doesn't allow NULL but having Default Value/Binding with "GetDate()". That means if we don't pass any value to this field then SQL will insert current date in "DateAdded" field.So, I start with a new website, add a DBML file and dropped the said table to generate LINQ To SQL context class. Finally, I write a simple code snippet to insert data into the tblEmployee table; BUT, I am not passing any value to "DateAdded" field. Because I am considering SQL Server's "Default Value or Binding (GetDate())" setting to this field and understand that SQL will insert current date to this field.        using (TestDatabaseDataContext context = new TestDatabaseDataContext())        {            tblEmployee tblEmpObjet = new tblEmployee();            tblEmpObjet.EmployeeName = "KaushaL";            tblEmpObjet.EmployeeEmailAddress = "[email protected]";            context.tblEmployees.InsertOnSubmit(tblEmpObjet);            context.SubmitChanges();        }Here comes the twist when application give me below error:  This is something not expecting! From the error it clearly depicts that LINQ is passing NULL value to "DateAdded" Field while according to my understanding it should respect Sql Server's "Default value or Binding" setting for this field. A bit googling and I found very interesting related to this problem.When we set Primary Key to any field with "Identity Specification" Property set to true; DBML set one important property "IsDbGenerated=true" for this field. BUT, when we set "Default Value or Biding" property for some field; we need to explicitly tell the DBML/LINQ to let it know that this field is having default binding at DB side that needs to be respected if I don't pass any value. So, the solution is: You need to explicitly set "IsDbGenerated=true" for such field to tell the LINQ that the field is having default value or binding at Sql Server side so, please don't worry if i don't pass any value for it.You can select the field and set this property from property window in DBML Designer file or write the property in DBML.Designer.cs file directly. I have attached a working example with required table script with this post here. I hope this would be helpful for someone hunting for the same. Happy Discovery!

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• Creating my first F# program in my new &ldquo;Expert F# Book&rdquo;

  - by MarkPearl

  So I have a brief hour or so that I can dedicate today to reading my F# book. It’s a public holiday and my wife’s birthday and I have a ton of assignments for UNISA that I need to complete – but I just had to try something in F#. So I read chapter 1 – pretty much an introduction to the rest of the book – it looks good so far. Then I get to chapter 2, called “Getting Started with F# and .NET”. Great, there is a code sample on the first page of the chapter. So I open up VS2010 and create a new F# console project and type in the code which was meant to analyze a string for duplicate words… #light let wordCount text = let words = Split [' '] text let wordset = Set.ofList words let nWords = words.Length let nDups = words.Length - wordSet.Count (nWords, nDups) let showWordCount text = let nWords,nDups = wordCount text printfn "--> %d words in text" nWords printfn "--> %d duplicate words" nDups   So… bad start - VS does not like the “Split” method. It gives me an error message “The value constructor ‘Split’ is not defined”. It also doesn’t like wordSet.Count telling me that the “namespace or module ‘wordSet’ is not defined”. ??? So a bit of googling and it turns out that there was a bit of shuffling of libraries between the CTP of F# and the Beta 2 of F#. To have access to the Split function you need to download the F# PowerPack and hen reference it in your code… I download and install the powerpack and then add the reference to FSharp.Core and FSharp.PowerPack in my project. Still no luck! Some more googling and I get the suggestions I got were something like this…#r "FSharp.PowerPack.dll";; #r "FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll";; So I add the code above to the top of my Program.fs file and still no joy… I now get an error message saying… Error    1    #r directives may only occur in F# script files (extensions .fsx or .fsscript). Either move this code to a script file, add a '-r' compiler option for this reference or delimit the directive with '#if INTERACTIVE'/'#endif'. So what does that mean? If I put the code straight into the F# interactive it works – but I want to be able to use it in a project. The C# equivalent I would think would be the “Using” keyword. The #r doesn’t seem like it should be in the FSharp code. So I try what the compiler suggests by doing the following…#if INTERACTIVE #r "FSharp.PowerPack.dll";; #r "FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll";; #endif No luck, the Split method is still not recognized. So wait a second, it mentioned something about FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll – I haven’t added this as a reference to my project so I add it and remove the two lines of #r code. Partial success – the Split method is now recognized and not underlined, but wordSet.Count is still not working. I look at my code again and it was a case error – the original wordset was mistyped comapred to the wordSet. Some case correction and the compiler is no longer complaining. So the code now seems to work… listed below…#light let wordCount text = let words = String.split [' '] text let wordSet = Set.ofList words let nWords = words.Length let nDups = words.Length - wordSet.Count (nWords, nDups) let showWordCount text = let nWords,nDups = wordCount text printfn "--> %d words in text" nWords printfn "--> %d duplicate words" nDups  So recap – if I wanted to use the interactive compiler then I need to put the #r code. In my mind this is the equivalent of me adding the the references to my project. If however I want to use the powerpack in a project – I just need to make sure that the correct references are there. I feel like a noob once again!

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• How to Set Up Your Enterprise Social Organization

  - by Mike Stiles

  The rush for business organizations to establish, grow, and adopt social was driven out of necessity and inevitability. The result, however, was a sudden, booming social presence creating touch points with customers, partners and influencers, but without any corporate social organization or structure in place to effectively manage it. Even today, many business leaders remain uncertain as to how to corral this social media thing so that it makes sense for their enterprise. Imagine their panic when they hear one of the most beneficial approaches to corporate use of social involves giving up at least some hierarchical control and empowering employees to publicly engage customers. And beyond that, they should also be empowered, regardless of their corporate status, to engage and collaborate internally, spurring “off the grid” innovation. An HBR blog points out that traditionally, enterprise organizations function from the top down, and employees work end-to-end, structured around business processes. But the social enterprise opens up structures that up to now have not exactly been embraced by turf-protecting executives and managers. The blog asks, “What if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy?” What if indeed? The social enterprise activates internal resources without the usual obsession with position. It is the dawn of mass collaboration. That does not, however, mean this mass collaboration has to lead to uncontrolled chaos. In an extended interview with Oracle, Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Oracle SVP Reggie Bradford paint a complete picture of today’s social enterprise, including internal organizational structures Altimeter Group has seen emerge. One sign of a mature social enterprise is the establishing of a social Center of Excellence (CoE), which serves as a hub for high-level social strategy, training and education, research, measurement and accountability, and vendor selection. This CoE is led by a corporate Social Strategist, most likely from a Marketing or Corporate Communications background. Reporting to them are the Community Managers, the front lines of customer interaction and engagement; business unit liaisons that coordinate the enterprise; and social media campaign/product managers, social analysts, and developers. With content rising as the defining factor for social success, Altimeter also sees a Content Strategist position emerging. Across the enterprise, Altimeter has seen 5 organizational patterns. Watching the video will give you the pros and cons of each. Decentralized - Anyone can do anything at any time on any social channel. Centralized – One central groups controls all social communication for the company. Hub and Spoke – A centralized group, but business units can operate their own social under the hub’s guidance and execution. Most enterprises are using this model. Dandelion – Each business unit develops their own social strategy & staff, has its own ability to deploy, and its own ability to engage under the central policies of the CoE. Honeycomb – Every employee can do social, but as opposed to the decentralized model, it’s coordinated and monitored on one platform. The average enterprise has a whopping 178 social accounts, nearly ¼ of which are usually semi-idle and need to be scrapped. The last thing any C-suite needs is to cope with fragmented technologies, solutions and platforms. It’s neither scalable nor strategic. The prepared, effective social enterprise has a technology partner that can quickly and holistically integrate emerging platforms and technologies, such that whatever internal social command structure you’ve set up can continue efficiently executing strategy without skipping a beat. @mikestiles

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• Editor's Notebook - Social Aura: Insights from the Oracle Social Media Summit

  - by user462779

  Panelists talk social marketing at the Oracle Social Media Summit On November 14, I traveled to Las Vegas for the first-ever Oracle Social Media Summit. The two day event featured an impressive collection of social media luminaries including: David Kirkpatrick (founder and CEO of Techonomy Media and author of The Facebook Effect), John Yi (Head of Marketing Partnerships, Facebook), Matt Dickman (EVP of Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick), and Lyndsay Iorio (Social Media & Communications Manager, NBC Sports Group) among others. It was also a great opportunity to talk shop with some of our new Vitrue and Involver colleagues who have been returning great social media results even before their companies were acquired by Oracle. I was live tweeting the event from @OracleProfit which was great for those who wanted to follow along with the proceedings from the comfort of their office or blackjack table. But I've also found over the years that live tweeting an event is a handy way to take notes: I can sift back through my record of what people said or thoughts I had at the time and organize the Twitter messages into some kind of summary account of the proceedings. I've had nearly a month to reflect on the presentations and conversations at the event and a few key topics have emerged: David Kirkpatrick's comment during the opening presentation really set the stage for the conversations that followed. Especially if you are a marketer or publisher, the idea that you are in a one-way broadcast relationship with your audience is a thing of the past. "Rising above the noise" does not mean reaching for a megaphone, ALL CAPS, or exclamation marks. Hype will not motivate social media denizens to do anything but unfollow and tune you out. But knowing your audience, creating quality content and/or offers for them, treating them with respect, and making an authentic effort to please them: that's what I believe is now necessary. And Kirkpatrick's comment early in the day really made the point. Later in the day, our friends @Vitrue demonstrated this point by elaborating on a comment by Facebook's John Yi. If a social strategy is comprised of nothing more than cutting/pasting the same message into different social media properties, you're missing the opportunity to have an actual conversation. That's not shouting at your audience, but it does feel like an empty gesture. Walter Benjamin, perplexed by auraless Twitter messages Not to get too far afield, but 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a concept that is useful for understanding the dynamics of the empty social media gesture: Aura. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin struggled to understand the difference he percieved between the value of a hand-made art object (a painting, wood cutting, sculpture, etc.) and a photograph. For Benjamin, aura is similar to the "soul" of an artwork--the intangible essence that is created when an artist picks up a tool and puts creative energy and effort into a work. I'll defer to Wikipedia: "He argues that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical" so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He also introduces the idea of the "aura" of a work and its absence in a reproduction." So make sure you put aura into your social interactions. Don't just mechanically reproduce them. Keeping aura in your interactions requires the intervention of an actual human being. That's why @NoahHorton's comment about content curation struck me as incredibly important. Maybe it's just my own prejudice, being in the content curation business myself. And it's not to totally discount machine-aided content management systems, content recommendation engines, and other tech-driven tools for building an exceptional content experience. It's just that without that human interaction--that editor who reviews the analytics and responds to user feedback--interactions over social media feel a bit empty. It is SOCIAL media, right? (We'll leave the conversation about social machines for another day). At the end of the day, experimentation is key. Just like trying to find that right joke to tell at the beginning of your presentation or that good opening like at a cocktail party, social media messages and interactions can take some trial and error. Don't be afraid to try things, tinker with incomplete ideas, abandon things that don't work, and engage in the conversation. And make sure your heart is in it, otherwise your audience can tell. And finally:

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• Combining Scrum, TFS2010 and Email to keep everyone in the loop

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Often you will receive rich information from your Product Owner (Customer) about tasks. That information can be in the form of Word documents, HTML Emails and Pictures, but you generally receive them in the context of an Email. You need to keep these so your Team can refer to it later, and so you can send a “done” when the task has been completed. This preserves the “history” of the task and allows you to keep relevant partied included in any future conversation. At SSW we keep the original email so that we can reply Done and delete the email. But keeping it in your email does not help other members of the team if they complete the task and need to send the “done”. Worse yet, the description field in Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS 2010) does not support HTML and images, nor does the default task template support an “interested parties” or CC field. You can attach this content manually, but it can be time consuming. Figure: Description only supports plain text, and History supports HTML with no images   What should we do? At SSW we always follow the rules, and it just so happened that we have rules to both achieve this, and to make it easier. You should follow the existing Rules to Better Project Management  and attach the email to your task so you can refer to and reply to it later when you close the task: Do you know what Outlook add-ins you need? Describe the work item request in an email Use Outlook Add-in to move the email to a TFS Work Item When replying to an email with “done” you should follow: Do you update Team Companion template, so the email "subject" doesn't change? Do you update Team Companion template, so you can generate a proper "done" mail? Following these simple rules will help your Product Owner understand you better, and allow your team to more effectively collaborate with each other. An added bonus is that as we are keeping the email history in sync with TFS. When you “reply all” to the email all of the interested partied to the Task are also included. This notified those that may have been blocked by your task to keep up to date with its status. This has been published as Do you know to ensure that relevant emails are attached to tasks in our Rules to Better Scrum using TFS. What could we do better? I would like to see this process automated so that we capture the information correctly in the task without the need to use email. This would require a change to the process template in Team Foundation Server to add an “Interested Parties” field. Each reply to the email would need to be automatically processed into a Work Item. This could be done by adding a task identifier as the first item in the “Relates to” email header, and copying in an email address that you watch. This would then parse out the relevant information and add the new message to the history, update the “Interested parties” field and attach the Images. Upon reflection, it may even be possible, but more difficult to do this using ONLY the History field and including some of the header information in there to the build a done email with history. This would not currently deal with email “forks” well, but I think it would be adequate for our needs. It would be nice if we could find time to implement this, but currently it is but a pipe dream. Maybe Microsoft could implement something in the next version of Team Foundation Server, and in the mean time we have a process that works well. Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW Rules,TFS 2010,TFS 2008

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• Book review (Book 6) - Wikinomics

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here. The book I chose for November 2011 was: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott   Why I chose this Book: I’ve heard a lot about this book - was one of the “must read” kind of business books (many of which are very “fluffy”) and supposedly deals with collaborating using technology - so I want to see what it says about collaborative efforts and how I can leverage them. What I learned: I really disliked this book. I’ve never been a fan of the latest “business book”, and sadly that’s what this felt like to me. A “business book” is what I call a work that has a fairly simple concept to get across, and then proceeds to use various made-up terms, analogies and other mechanisms to fill hundreds of pages doing it. This perception is at my own – the book is pretty old, and these things go stale quickly. The author’s general point (at least what I took away from it) was: Open Source is good, proprietary is bad. Collaboration is the hallmark of successful companies. In my mind, you can save yourself the trouble of reading this work if you get these two concepts down. Don’t get me wrong – open source is awesome, and collaboration is a good thing, especially in places where it fits. But it’s not a panacea as the author seems to indicate. For instance, he continuously uses the example of MySpace to show a “2.0” company, which I think means that you can enter text as well as read it on a web page. All well and good. But we all know what happened to MySpace, and of course he missed the point entirely about this new web environment: low barriers to entry often mean low barriers to exit. And the open, collaborative company being the best model – well, I think we all know a certain computer company famous for phones and music that is arguably quite successful, and is probably one of the most closed, non-collaborative (at least with its customers) on the planet. So that sort of takes away that argument. The reality of business is far more complicated. Collaboration is an amazing tool, and should be leveraged heavily. However, at the end of the day, after you do your research you need to pick a strategy and stick with it. Asking thousands of people to assist you in building your product probably will not work well. Open Source is great – but some proprietary products are quite functional as well, have a long track record, are well supported, and will probably be upgraded. Everything has its place, so use what works where it is needed. There is no single answer, sadly. So did I waste my time reading the book? Did I make a bad choice? Not at all! Reading the opinions and thoughts of others is almost always useful, and it’s important to consider opinions other than your own. If nothing else, thinking through the process either convinces you that you are wrong, or helps you understand better why you are right.

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• Autoscaling in a modern world&hellip;. last chapter

  - by Steve Loethen

  As we all know as coders, things like logging are never important.  Our code will work right the first time.  So, you can understand my surprise when the first time I deployed the autoscaling worker role to the actual Azure fabric, it did not scale.  I mean, it worked on my machine.  How dare the datacenter argue with that.  So, how did I track down the problem?  (turns out, it was not so much code as lack of the right certificate)  When I ran it local in the developer fabric, I was able to see a wealth of information.  Lots of periodic status info every time the autoscalar came around to check on my rules and decide to act or not.  But that information was not making it to Azure storage.  The diagnostics were not being transferred to where I could easily see and use them to track down why things were not being cooperative.  After a bit of digging, I discover the problem.  You need to add a bit of extra configuration code to get the correct information stored for you.  I added the following to my app.config: Code Snippet <system.diagnostics>     <sources>         <source name="Autoscaling General"switchName="SourceSwitch"           switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" >         <listeners>           <add name="AzureDiag" />             <remove name="Default"/>         </listeners>       </source>         <source name="Autoscaling Updates"switchName="SourceSwitch"           switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" >         <listeners>           <add name="AzureDiag" />             <remove name="Default"/>         </listeners>       </source>     </sources>     <switches>       <add name="SourceSwitch"           value="Verbose, Information, Warning, Error, Critical" />     </switches>     <sharedListeners>       <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiag"/>     </sharedListeners>     <trace>       <listeners>         <add             type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiagnostics">           <filter type="" />         </add>       </listeners>     </trace>   </system.diagnostics> Suddenly all the rich tracing info I needed was filling up my storage account.  After a few cycles of trying to attempting to scale, I identified the cert problem, uploaded a correct certificate, and away it went.  I hope this was helpful.

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• LibGDX Box2D Body and Sprite AND DebugRenderer out of sync

  - by Free Lancer

  I am having a couple issues with Box2D bodies. I have a GameObject holding a Sprite and Body. I use a ShapeRenderer to draw an outline of the Body's and Sprite's bounding boxes. I also added a Box2DDebugRenderer to make sure everything's lining up properly. My problem is the Sprite and Body at first overlap perfectly, but as I turn the Body moves a bit off the sprite then comes back when the Car is facing either North or South. Here's an image of what I mean: (Not sure what that line is, first time to show up) BLUE is the Body, RED is the Sprite, PURPLE is the Box2DDebugRenderer. Also, you probably noticed a purple square in the top right corner. Well that's the Car drawn by the Box2D Debug Renderer. I thought it might be the camera but I've been playing with the Cameras for hours and nothing seems to work. All give me weird results. Here's my code: Screen: public void show() { // --------------------- SETUP ALL THE CAMERA STUFF ------------------------------ // battleStage = new Stage( 720, 480, false ); // Setup the camera. In Box2D we operate on a meter scale, pixels won't do it. So we use // an Orthographic camera with a Viewport of 24 meters in width and 16 meters in height. battleStage.setCamera( new OrthographicCamera( CAM_METER_WIDTH, CAM_METER_HEIGHT ) ); battleStage.getCamera().position.set( CAM_METER_WIDTH / 2, CAM_METER_HEIGHT / 2, 0 ); // The Box2D Debug Renderer will handle rendering all physics objects for debugging debugger = new Box2DDebugRenderer( true, true, true, true ); //debugCam = new OrthographicCamera( CAM_METER_WIDTH, CAM_METER_HEIGHT ); } public void render(float delta) { // Update the Physics World, use 1/45 for something around 45 Frames/Second for mobile devices physicsWorld.step( 1/45.0f, 8, 3 ); // 1/45 for devices // Set the Camera matrices and clear the screen Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); battleStage.getCamera().update(); // Draw game objects here battleStage.act(delta); battleStage.draw(); // Again update the Camera matrices and call the debug renderer debugCam.update(); debugger.render( physicsWorld, debugCam.combined); // Vehicle handles its own interaction with the HUD // update all Actors movements in the game Stage hudStage.act( delta ); // Draw each Actor onto the Scene at their new positions hudStage.draw(); } Car: (extends Actor) public Car( Texture texture, float posX, float posY, World world ) { super( "Car" ); mSprite = new Sprite( texture ); mSprite.setSize( WIDTH * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO, HEIGHT * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO ); mSprite.setOrigin( mSprite.getWidth()/2, mSprite.getHeight()/2); // set the origin to be at the center of the body mSprite.setPosition( posX * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO, posY * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO ); // place the car in the center of the game map FixtureDef carFixtureDef = new FixtureDef(); mBody = Physics.createBoxBody( BodyType.DynamicBody, carFixtureDef, mSprite ); } public void draw() { mSprite.setPosition( mBody.getPosition().x * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO, mBody.getPosition().y * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO ); mSprite.setRotation( MathUtils.radiansToDegrees * mBody.getAngle() ); // draw the sprite mSprite.draw( batch ); } Physics: (Create the Body) public static Body createBoxBody( final BodyType pBodyType, final FixtureDef pFixtureDef, Sprite pSprite ) { float pRotation = 0; float pWidth = pSprite.getWidth(); float pHeight = pSprite.getHeight(); final BodyDef boxBodyDef = new BodyDef(); boxBodyDef.type = pBodyType; boxBodyDef.position.x = pSprite.getX() / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; boxBodyDef.position.y = pSprite.getY() / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; // Temporary Box shape of the Body final PolygonShape boxPoly = new PolygonShape(); final float halfWidth = pWidth * 0.5f / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; final float halfHeight = pHeight * 0.5f / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; boxPoly.setAsBox( halfWidth, halfHeight ); // set the anchor point to be the center of the sprite pFixtureDef.shape = boxPoly; final Body boxBody = BattleScreen.getPhysicsWorld().createBody(boxBodyDef); boxBody.createFixture(pFixtureDef); } Sorry for all the code and long description but it's hard to pin down what exactly might be causing the problem.

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• How to Set Up Your Enterprise Social Organization?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  By Mike Stiles on Dec 04, 2012 The rush for business organizations to establish, grow, and adopt social was driven out of necessity and inevitability. The result, however, was a sudden, booming social presence creating touch points with customers, partners and influencers, but without any corporate social organization or structure in place to effectively manage it. Even today, many business leaders remain uncertain as to how to corral this social media thing so that it makes sense for their enterprise. Imagine their panic when they hear one of the most beneficial approaches to corporate use of social involves giving up at least some hierarchical control and empowering employees to publicly engage customers. And beyond that, they should also be empowered, regardless of their corporate status, to engage and collaborate internally, spurring “off the grid” innovation. An HBR blog points out that traditionally, enterprise organizations function from the top down, and employees work end-to-end, structured around business processes. But the social enterprise opens up structures that up to now have not exactly been embraced by turf-protecting executives and managers. The blog asks, “What if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy?” What if indeed? The social enterprise activates internal resources without the usual obsession with position. It is the dawn of mass collaboration. That does not, however, mean this mass collaboration has to lead to uncontrolled chaos. In an extended interview with Oracle, Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Oracle SVP Reggie Bradford paint a complete picture of today’s social enterprise, including internal organizational structures Altimeter Group has seen emerge. One sign of a mature social enterprise is the establishing of a social Center of Excellence (CoE), which serves as a hub for high-level social strategy, training and education, research, measurement and accountability, and vendor selection. This CoE is led by a corporate Social Strategist, most likely from a Marketing or Corporate Communications background. Reporting to them are the Community Managers, the front lines of customer interaction and engagement; business unit liaisons that coordinate the enterprise; and social media campaign/product managers, social analysts, and developers. With content rising as the defining factor for social success, Altimeter also sees a Content Strategist position emerging. Across the enterprise, Altimeter has seen 5 organizational patterns. Watching the video will give you the pros and cons of each. Decentralized - Anyone can do anything at any time on any social channel. Centralized – One central groups controls all social communication for the company. Hub and Spoke – A centralized group, but business units can operate their own social under the hub’s guidance and execution. Most enterprises are using this model. Dandelion – Each business unit develops their own social strategy & staff, has its own ability to deploy, and its own ability to engage under the central policies of the CoE. Honeycomb – Every employee can do social, but as opposed to the decentralized model, it’s coordinated and monitored on one platform. The average enterprise has a whopping 178 social accounts, nearly ¼ of which are usually semi-idle and need to be scrapped. The last thing any C-suite needs is to cope with fragmented technologies, solutions and platforms. It’s neither scalable nor strategic. The prepared, effective social enterprise has a technology partner that can quickly and holistically integrate emerging platforms and technologies, such that whatever internal social command structure you’ve set up can continue efficiently executing strategy without skipping a beat. @mikestiles

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• Silabs cp2102 driver problem

  - by Zxy

  I downloaded appropriate driver from its own site, unzipped it and then tried to install it. But: root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads# tar xvf cp210x-3.1.0.tar.gz cp210x-3.1.0/ cp210x-3.1.0/COPYING cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/ cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x-3.1.0.spec cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/.rpmmacros cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/configure cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.c cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.h cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.c cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.h cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/installmod cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile24 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile26 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros24 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros26 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Rules.make cp210x-3.1.0/INSTALL cp210x-3.1.0/makerpm cp210x-3.1.0/PACKAGE-LIST cp210x-3.1.0/README cp210x-3.1.0/RELEASE-NOTES cp210x-3.1.0/REPORTING-BUGS cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/ cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/brp-java-repack-jars cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/brp-python-bytecompile cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/check-rpaths cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/check-rpaths-worker root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads# cd cp210x-3.1.0 root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0# ls COPYING cp210x-3.1.0.spec makerpm README REPORTING-BUGS cp210x INSTALL PACKAGE-LIST RELEASE-NOTES rpm root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0# run ./makerpm No command 'run' found, did you mean: Command 'zrun' from package 'moreutils' (universe) Command 'runq' from package 'exim4-daemon-heavy' (main) Command 'runq' from package 'exim4-daemon-light' (main) Command 'runq' from package 'sendmail-bin' (universe) Command 'grun' from package 'grun' (universe) Command 'qrun' from package 'torque-client' (universe) Command 'qrun' from package 'torque-client-x11' (universe) Command 'lrun' from package 'lustre-utils' (universe) Command 'rn' from package 'trn' (multiverse) Command 'rn' from package 'trn4' (multiverse) Command 'rup' from package 'rstat-client' (universe) Command 'srun' from package 'slurm-llnl' (universe) run: command not found root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0# sudo ./makerpm + uname -r + kernel_release=3.2.0-25-generic-pae + pwd + current_dir=/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0 + export current_dir + uname -r + KVER=3.2.0-25-generic-pae + echo 3.2.0-25-generic-pae + awk -F . -- { print $1 } + KVER1=3 + echo 3.2.0-25-generic-pae + awk -F . -- { print $2 } + KVER2=2 + sed -e s/3\.2\.//g + echo 3.2.0-25-generic-pae + KVER3=0-25-generic-pae + [ -f /root/.rpmmacros ] + echo 2 2 + [ 2 == 4 ] ./makerpm: 25: [: 2: unexpected operator + echo 0-25-generic-pae 0-25-generic-pae + [ 0-25-generic-pae -gt 15 ] ./makerpm: 29: [: Illegal number: 0-25-generic-pae + cp /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros24 /root/.rpmmacros + d=/var/tmp/silabs + [ ! -d /var/tmp/silabs ] + mkdir /var/tmp/silabs + cd /var/tmp/silabs + r=/var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild + o=cp210x-3.1.0 + s=/var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SOURCES + spec=cp210x-3.1.0.spec + rm -rf /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild + mkdir rpmbuild + mkdir rpmbuild/SOURCES + mkdir rpmbuild/SRPMS + mkdir rpmbuild/SPECS + mkdir rpmbuild/BUILD + mkdir rpmbuild/RPMS + cd /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SOURCES + rm -rf cp210x-3.1.0 + mkdir cp210x-3.1.0 + cp -r /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile24 /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile26 /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x- 3.1.0/cp210x/Rules.make /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/configure /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.c /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x- 3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.h /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.c /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.h /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x- 3.1.0/cp210x/installmod /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros24 /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros26 cp210x-3.1.0 + echo 2 2 + [ 2 == 4 ] ./makerpm: 64: [: 2: unexpected operator + echo 0-25-generic-pae 0-25-generic-pae + [ 0-25-generic-pae -gt 15 ] ./makerpm: 68: [: Illegal number: 0-25-generic-pae + cp /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/.rpmmacros24 cp210x-3.1.0/.rpmmacros cp: cannot stat `/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/.rpmmacros24': No such file or directory + MyCopy=0 + rm -f cp210x-3.1.0.tar + rm -f cp210x-3.1.0.tar.gz + tar -cf cp210x-3.1.0.tar cp210x-3.1.0 + gzip cp210x-3.1.0.tar + cp /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x-3.1.0.spec /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SPECS + rpmbuild -ba /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SPECS/cp210x-3.1.0.spec ./makerpm: 121: ./makerpm: rpmbuild: not found + [ -f /root/.rpmmacros.cp210x ] How may I solve my problem? Thanks

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• IIS Logfile Visualization with XNA

  - by BobPalmer

  In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers.  And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean.    After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?'   This of course would not do.  So I talked to my friends and our network admin about an option to show something more eye catching and visual, with which we could catch at a glance a feel for what was up with our site.    He initially pointed me out to a video showing GLTail and Chipmunk done in Ruby.  Realizing this was both awesome, and that I needed an excuse to do something in XNA, I decided to knock out a proof of concept for something very similar, but with a few tweaks.   Here's a link to a video of the current prototype:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_PWZbtH2I   Essentially this app opens up a log file (even an active one) and begins pulling out the lines of text.  (Here's a good Code Project link that covers how to do tail reading from an active text file: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/tail.aspx).   As new data is added, a bubble is generated in the application - a GET statement comes from the left, and a POST from the right.  I then run it through a series of expression checkers, and based on the kind of statement and the pattern, a bubble of an appropriate color is generated.   For example, if I get a 500, a huge red bubble pops out.  Others are based on the part of the system the page is from - i.e. green bubbles are from our claims management subsystem, and blue bubbles are from the pages our scheduling staff use to schedule patients.  Others include the purple bubbles for security and login, and yellow bubbles for some miscellaneous pages.   The little grey bubbles represent things like images, JS, CSS, etc - and their small size makes them work like grease to keep the larger page bubbles moving.   The app is also smart enough that if it is starting to bog down with handling the physics and interactions, it will suspend new bubbles until enough have dropped off that performance can resume (you can see this slight stuttering in the sample video).   The net result is that anyone will be able to look up on the wall monitor, and instantly get a quick feel for how things are going on the floor.  Website slow?  You can get a feel for both volume and utilized modules with one glance.  Website crashing?  Look for a wall of giant red bubbles.  No activity at all?  Maybe the site is down.  Now couple this with utilization within a farm, and cross referenced with a second app showing the same kind of data from your SQL database...   As for the app itself, it's a windows XNA project with the code in C#.   The physics are handled by the Farseer physicis eingine for XNA (http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics) which is just pure goodness.  The samples are great, and I had the app up and working in two evenings (half of that was fine tuning, and the other was me coding with a kid in my lap).   My next steps include wiring this to SQL (I have some ideas...), and adding a nice configuration module.  For example, you could use polygons, etc to tie to your regex - or more entertaining things like having a little human ragdoll to represent a user login.     Once that's wrapped up and I have a chance to complete some hardening, I will be releasing the whole thing into the wild as opensource.     Feel free to ping me if you have any questions! -Bob

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• Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter

  - by mbcrump

  So Silverlight Firestarter is over and your sitting on your couch thinking… what now? Well its time to So how exactly can you pimp the Silverlight Firestarter? Well read below and you will find out: 1) Pimp the videos: First we are going to use a program named Juice to download all of the Silverlight Firestarter videos. Go ahead and point your browser to http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/ and download the application. It works on Mac, Linux and PC. After it is downloaded you are going to want to add an RSS feed by clicking the button highlighted below. At this point you are going to want to add the following URL inside the textbox and hit Save: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Silverlight-Firestarter/RSS This RSS feed includes all the Silverlight Firestarter Labs and Presentations located below. The Future of Silverlight Data Binding Strategies with Silverlight and WP7 Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns with Silverlight and WP7 Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Select all the videos and click the Download button located below (has blue arrow): Once all the videos are downloaded you will have about 4.64GB of Silverlight fun. You can now move these videos to your MediaServer and watch them with whatever device you want. Put it on an iPad, iPhone.. emm wait I mean WP7 or WMC7.  2) Pimp the Training Material – Download the offline installer for the labs here. This will give you almost a gig of free training materials. Here is the topics covered: Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 You will notice that it install Firestarter to the default of C:\Firestarter. So you will have to navigate to that folder and double click on Default.htm to get started. Now if you followed part one of the pimping guide then you will already have all the videos on your pc. You will notice that once you go into the lab you will get a Lab Document and Source at the bottom of the article. Now instead of opening the Source Folder in a web browser you can just copy the folder C:\Firestarter\Labs into your Visual Studio 2010 Project Folder. This will save a lot of time later.   3) Pimp my Silverlight 5 Knowledge – Always keep reading as much as possible and remember that the Silverlight 5 Beta should come Q1 of 2011 and the final release at the end of 2011. Here are 5 great blog post on Silverlight 5. Scott Gu’s Blog Mary Jo’s Article on Silverlight 5 The Future of Silverlight (Official) Kunal Chowdhury Blog Tim Heuer’s Blog Thats all that I got for now. Have fun with all the new Silverlight content.  Subscribe to my feed

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