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• From J2EE to Java EE: what has changed?

  - by Bruno.Borges

  See original @Java_EE tweet on 29 May 2014 Yeap, it has been 8 years since the term J2EE was replaced, and still some people refer to it (mostly recruiters, luckily!). But then comes the question: what has changed besides the name? Our community friend Abhishek Gupta worked on this question and provided an excellent response titled "What's in a name? Java EE? J2EE?". But let me give you a few highlights here so you don't lose yourself with YATO (yet another tab opened): J2EE used to be an infrastructure and resources provider only, requiring developers to depend on external 3rd-party frameworks to then implement application requirements or improve productivity J2EE used to require hundreds of XML lines of codes to define just a dozen of resources like EJBs, MDBs, Servlets, and so on J2EE used to support only EAR (Enterprise Archives) with a bunch of other archives like JARs and WARs just to run a simple Web application And so on, and so on! It was a great technology but still required a lot of work to get something up and running. Remember xDoclet? Remember Struts? The old days of pure Hibernate code? Or when Ajax became a trending topic and we were all implementing it with DWR Servlet? Still, we J2EE developers survived, and learned, and helped evolve the platform to a whole new level of DX (Developer Experience). A new DX for J2EE suggested a new name. One that referred to the platform as the Enterprise Edition of Java, because "Java is why we're here" quoting Bill Shannon. The release of Java EE 5 included so many features that clearly showed developers the platform was going after all those DX gaps. Radical simplification of the persistence model with the introduction of JPA Support of Annotations following the launch of Java SE 5.0 Updated XML APIs with the introduction of StAX Drastic simplification of the EJB component model (with annotations!) Convention over Configuration and Dependency Injection A few bullets you may say but that represented a whole new DX and a vision for upcoming versions. Clearly, the release of Java EE 5 helped drive the future of the platform by reducing the number of XMLs, Java Interfaces, simplified configurations, provided convention-over-configuration, etc! We then saw the release of Java EE 6 with even more great features like Managed Beans, CDI, Bean Validation, improved JSP and Servlets APIs, JASPIC, the posisbility to deploy plain WARs and so many other improvements it is difficult to list in one sentence. And we've gotta give Spring Framework some credit here: thanks to Rod Johnson and team, concepts like Dependency Injection fit perfectly into the Java EE Platform. Clearly, Spring used to be one of the most inspiring frameworks for the Java EE platform, and it is great to see things like Pivotal and Spring supporting JSR 352 Batch API standard! Cooperation to keep improving DX at maximum in the server-side Java landscape.  The master piece result of these previous releases is seen and called today as Java EE 7, which by providing a newly and improved JavaServer Faces release, with new features for Web Development like WebSockets API, improved JAX-RS, and JSON-P, but also including Batch API and so many other great improvements, has increased developer productivity and brought innovation to server-side Java developers. Java EE is not just a new name (which was introduced back in May 2006!) but a new Developer Experience for server-side Java developers. To show you why we are here and where we are going (see the Java EE 8 update), we wanted to share with you a draft of the new Java EE logos that the evangelist team created, to help you spread the word about Java EE. You can get access to these images at the Java EE Platform Facebook Album, or the Google+ Java EE Platform Album whichever is better for you, but don't forget to like and/or +1 those social network profiles :-) A message to all job recruiters: stop using J2EE and start using Java EE if you want to find great Java EE 5, Java EE 6, or Java EE 7 developers To not only save you recruiter valuable characters when tweeting that job opportunity but to also match the correct term, we invite you to replace long terms like "Java/J2EE" or even worse "#Java #J2EE #JEE" or all these awkward combinations with the only acceptable hashtag: #JavaEE. And to prove that Java EE is catching among developers and even recruiters, and that J2EE is past, let me highlight here how are the jobs trends! The image below is from Indeed.com trends page, for the following keywords: J2EE, Java/J2EE, Java/JEE, JEE. As you can see, J2EE is indeed going away, while JEE saw some increase. Perhaps because some people are just lazy to type "Java" but at the same time they are aware that J2EE (the '2') is past. We shall forgive that for a while :-) Another proof that J2EE is going away is by looking at its trending statistics at Google. People have been showing less and less interest in the term J2EE. See the chart below:  Recruiter, if you still need proof that J2EE is past, that Java EE is trending, and that other job recruiters are seeking for Java EE developers, and that the developer community is aware of the new term, perhaps these other charts can show you what term you should be using. See for example the Job Trends for Java EE at Indeed.com and notice where it started... 2006! 8 years ago :-) Last but not least, the Google Trends for Java EE term (including the still wrong but forgivable JavaEE term) shows us that the new term is catching up very well. J2EE is past. Oh, and don't worry about the curves going down. We developers like to be hipsters sometimes and today only AngularJS, NodeJS, BigData are going up. Java EE and other traditional server-side technologies such as Spring, or even from other platforms such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, Grails, are pretty much consolidated and the curves... well, they are consolidated too. So If you are a Java EE developer, drop that J2EE from your résumé, and let recruiters also know that this term is past. Embrace Java EE, and enjoy a new developer experience for server-side Java developers. Java EE on TwitterJava EE on Google+Java EE on Facebook

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• DRY and SRP

  - by Timothy Klenke

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/06/11/dry-and-srp.aspxKent Beck’s XP Simplicity Rules (aka Four Rules of Simple Design) are a prioritized list of rules that when applied to your code generally yield a great design.  As you’ll see from the above link the list has slightly evolved over time.  I find today they are usually listed as: All Tests Pass Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) Express Intent Minimalistic These are prioritized.  If your code doesn’t work (rule 1) then everything else is forfeit.  Go back to rule one and get the code working before worrying about anything else. Over the years the community have debated whether the priority of rules 2 and 3 should be reversed.  Some say a little duplication in the code is OK as long as it helps express intent.  I’ve debated it myself.  This recent post got me thinking about this again, hence this post.   I don’t think it is fair to compare “Expressing Intent” against “DRY”.  This is a comparison of apples to oranges.  “Expressing Intent” is a principal of code quality.  “Repeating Yourself” is a code smell.  A code smell is merely an indicator that there might be something wrong with the code.  It takes further investigation to determine if a violation of an underlying principal of code quality has actually occurred. For example “using nouns for method names”, “using verbs for property names”, or “using Booleans for parameters” are all code smells that indicate that code probably isn’t doing a good job at expressing intent.  They are usually very good indicators.  But what principle is the code smell of Duplication pointing to and how good of an indicator is it? Duplication in the code base is bad for a couple reasons.  If you need to make a change and that needs to be made in a number of locations it is difficult to know if you have caught all of them.  This can lead to bugs if/when one of those locations is overlooked.  By refactoring the code to remove all duplication there will be left with only one place to change, thereby eliminating this problem. With most projects the code becomes the single source of truth for a project.  If a production code base is inconsistent with a five year old requirements or design document the production code that people are currently living with is usually declared as the current reality (or truth).  Requirement or design documents at this age in a project life cycle are usually of little value. Although comparing production code to external documentation is usually straight forward, duplication within the code base muddles this declaration of truth.  When code is duplicated small discrepancies will creep in between the two copies over time.  The question then becomes which copy is correct?  As different factions debate how the software should work, trust in the software and the team behind it erodes. The code smell of Duplication points to a violation of the “Single Source of Truth” principle.  Let me define that as: A stakeholder’s requirement for a software change should never cause more than one class to change. Violation of the Single Source of Truth principle will always result in duplication in the code.  However, the inverse is not always true.  Duplication in the code does not necessarily indicate that there is a violation of the Single Source of Truth principle. To illustrate this, let’s look at a retail system where the system will (1) send a transaction to a bank and (2) print a receipt for the customer.  Although these are two separate features of the system, they are closely related.  The reason for printing the receipt is usually to provide an audit trail back to the bank transaction.  Both features use the same data:  amount charged, account number, transaction date, customer name, retail store name, and etcetera.  Because both features use much of the same data, there is likely to be a lot of duplication between them.  This duplication can be removed by making both features use the same data access layer. Then start coming the divergent requirements.  The receipt stakeholder wants a change so that the account number has the last few digits masked out to protect the customer’s privacy.  That can be solve with a small IF statement whilst still eliminating all duplication in the system.  Then the bank wants to take a picture of the customer as well as capture their signature and/or PIN number for enhanced security.  Then the receipt owner wants to pull data from a completely different system to report the customer’s loyalty program point total. After a while you realize that the two stakeholders have somewhat similar, but ultimately different responsibilities.  They have their own reasons for pulling the data access layer in different directions.  Then it dawns on you, the Single Responsibility Principle: There should never be more than one reason for a class to change. In this example we have two stakeholders giving two separate reasons for the data access class to change.  It is clear violation of the Single Responsibility Principle.  That’s a problem because it can often lead the project owner pitting the two stakeholders against each other in a vein attempt to get them to work out a mutual single source of truth.  But that doesn’t exist.  There are two completely valid truths that the developers need to support.  How is this to be supported and honour the Single Responsibility Principle?  The solution is to duplicate the data access layer and let each stakeholder control their own copy. The Single Source of Truth and Single Responsibility Principles are very closely related.  SST tells you when to remove duplication; SRP tells you when to introduce it.  They may seem to be fighting each other, but really they are not.  The key is to clearly identify the different responsibilities (or sources of truth) over a system.  Sometimes there is a single person with that responsibility, other times there are many.  This can be especially difficult if the same person has dual responsibilities.  They might not even realize they are wearing multiple hats. In my opinion Single Source of Truth should be listed as the second rule of simple design with Express Intent at number three.  Investigation of the DRY code smell should yield to the proper application SST, without violating SRP.  When necessary leave duplication in the system and let the class names express the different people that are responsible for controlling them.  Knowing all the people with responsibilities over a system is the higher priority because you’ll need to know this before you can express it.  Although it may be a code smell when there is duplication in the code, it does not necessarily mean that the coder has chosen to be expressive over DRY or that the code is bad.

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

  - by Chris George

  Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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• Thou shalt not put code on a piedestal - Code is a tool, no more, no less

  - by Ralf Westphal

  “Write great code and everything else becomes easier” is what Paul Pagel believes in. That´s his version of an adage by Brian Marick he cites: “treat code as an end, not just a means.” And he concludes: “My post-Agile world is software craftsmanship.” I wonder, if that´s really the way to go. Will “simply” writing great code lead the software industry into the light? He´s alluding to the philosopher Kant who proposed, a human beings should never be treated as a means, but always as an end. But should we transfer this ethical statement into the world of software? I doubt it.   Reason #1: Human beings are categorially different from code. They are autonomous entities who need to find a way of living happily together. To Kant it seemed this goal could only be reached if nobody (ab)used a human being for his/her purposes. Because using a human being, i.e. treating it as a means, would contradict the fundamental autonomy and freedom of human beings. People should hold up a symmetric view of their relationships: Since nobody wants to be (ab)used, nobody should (ab)use anybody else. If you want to be treated decently, with respect, in accordance with your own free will - which means as an end - then do the same to other people. Code is dead, it´s a product, it´s a tool for people to reach their goals. No company spends any money on code other than to save money or earn money in the long run. Code is not a puppy. Enterprises do not commission software development to just feel good in its company. Code is not a buddy. Code is a slave, if you will. A mechanical slave, a non-tangible robot. Code is a tool, is a tool. And if we start to treat it differently, if we elevate its status unduely… I guess that will contort our relationship in a contraproductive way. Please get me right: Just because something is “just a tool”, “just a product” does not mean we should not be careful while designing, building, using it. Right to the contrary. We should be very careful when writing code – but not for the code´s sake! We should be careful because we respect our customers who are fellow human beings who should be treated as an end. If we are careless, neglectful, ignorant when producing code on their behalf, then we´re using them. Being sloppy means you´re caring more for yourself that for your customer. You´re then treating the customer as a means to fulfill some of your own needs. That´s plain unethical behavior.   Reason #2: The focus should always be on your purpose, not on any tool. But if code is treated as an end, then the focus is on the code. That might sound right, because where else should be your focus as a software developer? But, well, I´d say, your focus should be on delivering value to your customer. Because in the end your customer does not care if you write a single line of code. She just wants her problem to be solved. Solving problems is the purpose of any contractor. Code must be treated just as a means, a tool we know how to handle very well. But if we´re really trying to be craftsmen then we should be conscious about exactly that and act ethically. That means we must never be so focused on our tool as to be unable to suggest better solutions to the problems of our customers than code.   I´m all with Paul when he urges us to “Write great code”. Sure, if you need to write code, then by all means do so. Write the best code you can think of – and then try to improve it. Paul has all the best intentions when he signs Brians “treat code as an end” - but as we all know: “The road to hell is paved with best intentions” ;-) Yes, I can imagine a “hell of code focus”. In fact, I don´t need to imagine it, I´m seeing it quite often. Because code hell is whereever two developers stand together and are so immersed in talking about all sorts of coding tricks, design patterns, code smells, technologies, platforms, tools that they lose sight of the big picture. Talking about TDD or SOLID or refactoring is a sign of consciousness – relative to the “cowboy coders” view of the world. But from yet another point of view TDD, SOLID, and refactoring are just cures for ailments within a system. And I fear, if “Writing great code” is the only focus or the main focus of software development, then we as an industry lose the ability to see that. Focus draws a line around something, it defines a horizon for perceptions and thinking. So if we focus on code our horizon ends where “the land of code” ends. I don´t think that should be our professional attitude.   So what about Software Craftsmanship as the next big thing after Agility? I think Software Craftsmanship has an important message for all software developers and beyond. But to make it the successor of the Agility movement seems to miss a point. Agility never claimed to solve all software development problems, I´d say. So to blame it for having missed out on certain aspects of it is wrong. If I had to summarize Agility in one word I´d say “Value”. Agility put value for the customer back in software development. Focus on delivering value early and often – that´s Agility´s mantra. All else follows from that. And I ask you: Is that obsolete? Is delivering value not hip anymore? No, sure not. That´s our very purpose as software developers. So how can Agility become obsolete and need to be replaced? We need to do away with this “either/or”-thinking. It´s either Agility or Lean or Software Craftsmanship or whatnot. Instead we should start integrating concepts and movements. Think “both/and”. Think Agility plus Software Craftsmanship plus Lean plus whatnot. We don´t neet to tear down anything from a piedestal and replace it with a new idol. Instead we should do away with piedestals and arrange whatever is helpful is a circle. Then we can turn to concepts, movements for whatever they are best. After 10 years of Agility we should be able to identify what it was good at – and keep that. Keep Agility around and add whatever Agility was lacking or never concerned with. Add whatever is at the core of Software Craftsmanship. Add whatever is at the core of Lean etc. But don´t call out the age of Post-Agility. Because it better never will end. Because once we start to lose Agility´s core we´re losing focus of the customer.

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• Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion

  Communication with your environment is an essential part of everyone's life. And it doesn't matter whether you are actually living in a rural area in the middle of nowhere, within the pulsating heart of a big city, or in my case on a wonderful island in the Indian Ocean. The ability to exchange your thoughts, your experience and your worries with another person helps you to get different points of view and new ideas on how to resolve an issue you might be confronted with. Benefits of community work What happens to be common sense in your daily life, also applies to your work environment. Working in IT, or ICT as it is called in Mauritius, requires a lot of reading and learning. Not only during your lectures at the university but with your colleagues in a project assignment and hopefully with 'unknown' pals in the universe of online communities. At least I can say that I learned quite a lot from other developers code, their responses in various forums, their numerous blog articles, and while attending local user group meetings. When I started to work as a professional software developer (or engineer some may say) years ago I immediately checked the existence of communities on the programming language, the database technology and other vital information on software development in general. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to find. My employer had a subscription of the monthly magazines and newsletters of a national organisation which also run the biggest forum in that area. Getting in touch with other developers and reading their common problems but also solutions was a huge benefit to my growth. Image courtesy of Michael Kappel (CC BY-NC 2.0) Active participation and regular contribution to this community gave me some nice advantages, too. Within three years I was listed as a conference speaker at the annual developer's conference and provided several sessions on different topics during consecutive years. Back in 2004, I took over the responsibility and management of the monthly meetings of a regional user group, and organised it for more than two years. Furthermore, I was invited to the newly-founded community program of Microsoft Germany (Community Leader/Insider Program - CLIP). My website on Active FoxPro Pages was nominated in the second batch of online communities. Due to my community work and providing advice to others, I had the honour to be awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Visual Developer for Visual FoxPro in the years 2006 and 2007. It was a great experience to meet with other like-minded people and I'm really grateful for that. Just in case, more details are listed in my Curriculum Vitae. But this all changed when I moved to Mauritius... Cyber island Mauritius? During the first months in Mauritius I was way too busy to think about community activities at all. First of all, there was the new company that had to be set up, the new staff had to be trained and of course the communication work-flows and so on with the project managers back in Germany had to be sorted out, too. Second, I had to get a grip of my private matters like getting the basics for my new household or exploring the neighbourhood, and last but not least I needed a break from the hectic and intensive work prior to my departure. As soon as the sea literally calmed down, I started to have conversations with my colleagues about communities and user groups. Sadly, it turned out that there were none, or at least no one was aware of any at that time. Oh oh, what did I do? Anyway, having this kind of background and very positive experience with off-line and on-line activities I decided for myself that some day I'm going to found a community in Mauritius for all kind of IT/ICT-related fields. The main focus might be on software development but not on a certain technology or methodology. It was clear to me that it should be an open infrastructure and anyone is welcome to join, to experience, to share and to contribute if they would like to. That was the idea at that time... Ok, fast-forward to recent events. At the end of October 2012 I was invited to an event called Open Days organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands together with other local partners and resellers. There I got in touch with local Technical Evangelist Arnaud Meslier and we had a good conversation on communities during the breaks. Eventually, I left a good impression on him, as we are having chats on Facebook or Skype irregularly. Well, seeing that my personal and professional surroundings have been settled and running smooth, having that great exchange and contact with Microsoft IOI (again), and being really eager to re-animate my intentions from 2007, I recently founded a new community: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community - #MSCC It took me a while to settle down with the name but it was obvious that the community should not be attached to one single technology, like ie. .NET user group, Oracle developers, or Joomla friends (these are fictitious names). There are several other reasons why I came up with 'Craftsmanship' as the core topic of this community. The expression of 'engineering' didn't feel right with the fields covered. Software development in all kind of facets is a craft, and therefore demands a lot of practice but also guidance from more experienced developers. It also includes the process of designing, modelling and drafting the ideas. Has to deal with various types of tests and test methodologies, and of course should be focused on flexible and agile ways of acting. In order to meet and to excel a customer's request for a solution. Next, I was looking for an easy way to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments. Using all kind of social media platforms like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc. I was never really confident about their features of event handling. More by chance I stumbled upon Meetup.com and in combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I am looking forward to advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there will be a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians!

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• Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

  - by theo.spears

  Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

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• JSP Precompilation for ADF Applications

  - by Duncan Mills

  A question that comes up from time to time, particularly in relation to build automation, is how to best pre-compile the .jspx and .jsff files in an ADF application. Thus ensuring that the app is ready to run as soon as it's installed into WebLogic. In the normal run of things, the first poor soul to hit a page pays the price and has to wait a little whilst the JSP is compiled into a servlet. Everyone else subsequently gets a free lunch. So it's a reasonable thing to want to do... Let Me List the Ways So forth to Google (other search engines are available)... which lead me to a fairly old article on WLDJ - Removing Performance Bottlenecks Through JSP Precompilation. Technololgy wise, it's somewhat out of date, but the one good point that it made is that it's really not very useful to try and use the precompile option in the weblogic.xml file. That's a really good observation - particularly if you're trying to integrate a pre-compile step into a Hudson Continuous Integration process. That same article mentioned an alternative approach for programmatic pre-compilation using weblogic.jspc. This seemed like a much more useful approach for a CI environment. However, weblogic.jspc is now obsoleted by weblogic.appc so we'll use that instead.  Thanks to Steve for the pointer there. And So To APPC APPC has documentation - always a great place to start, and supports usage both from Ant via the wlappc task and from the command line using the weblogic.appc command. In my testing I took the latter approach. Usage, as the documentation will show you, is superficially pretty simple.  The nice thing here, is that you can pass an existing EAR file (generated of course using OJDeploy) and that EAR will be updated in place with the freshly compiled servlet classes created from the JSPs. Appc takes care of all the unpacking, compiling and re-packing of the EAR for you. Neat.  So we're done right...? Not quite. The Devil is in the Detail  OK so I'm being overly dramatic but it's not all plain sailing, so here's a short guide to using weblogic.appc to compile a simple ADF application without pain.  Information You'll Need The following is based on the assumption that you have a stand-alone WLS install with the Application Development  Runtime installed and a suitable ADF enabled domain created. This could of course all be run off of a JDeveloper install as well 1. Your Weblogic home directory. Everything you need is relative to this so make a note.  In my case it's c:\builds\wls_ps4. 2. Next deploy your EAR as normal and have a peek inside it using your favourite zip management tool. First of all look at the weblogic-application.xml inside the EAR /META-INF directory. Have a look for any library references. Something like this: <library-ref>    <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name> </library-ref>   Make a note of the library ref (adf.oracle.domain in this case) , you'll need that in a second. 3. Next open the nested WAR file within the EAR and then have a peek inside the weblogic.xml file in the /WEB-INF directory. Again  make a note of the library references. 4. Now start the WebLogic as per normal and run the WebLogic console app (e.g. http://localhost:7001/console). In the Domain Structure navigator, select Deployments. 5. For each of the libraries you noted down drill into the library definition and make a note of the .war, .ear or .jar that defines the library. For example, in my case adf.oracle.domain maps to "C:\ builds\ WLS_PS4\ oracle_common\ modules\ oracle. adf. model_11. 1. 1\ adf. oracle. domain. ear". Note the extra spaces that are salted throughout this string as it is displayed in the console - just to make it annoying, you'll have to strip these out. 6. Finally you'll need the location of the adfsharebean.jar. We need to pass this on the classpath for APPC so that the ADFConfigLifeCycleCallBack listener can be found. In a more complex app of your own you may need additional classpath entries as well.  Now we're ready to go, and it's a simple matter of applying the information we have gathered into the relevant command line arguments for the utility A Simple CMD File to Run APPC  Here's the stub .cmd file I'm using on Windows to run this. @echo offREM Stub weblogic.appc Runner setlocal set WLS_HOME=C:\builds\WLS_PS4 set ADF_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\oracle_common\modulesset COMMON_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\common\deployable-libraries set ADF_WEBAPP=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.view_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.webapp.war set ADF_DOMAIN=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.model_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.ear set JSTL=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jstl-1.2.war set JSF=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jsf-1.2.war set ADF_SHARE=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.share_11.1.1\adfsharembean.jar REM Set up the WebLogic Environment so appc can be found call %WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd CLS REM Now compile away!java weblogic.appc -verbose -library %ADF_WEBAPP%,%ADF_DOMAIN%,%JSTL%,%JSF% -classpath %ADF_SHARE% %1 endlocal Running the above on a target ADF .ear  file will zip through and create all of the relevant compiled classes inside your nested .war file in the \WEB-INF\classes\jsp_servlet\ directory (but don't take my word for it, run it and take a look!) And So... In the immortal words of  the Pet Shop Boys, Was It Worth It? Well, here's where you'll have to do your own testing. In  my case here, with a simple ADF application, pre-compilation shaved an non-scientific "3 Elephants" off of the initial page load time for the first access of each page. That's a pretty significant payback for such a simple step to add into your CI process, so why not give it a go.

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• Experiences with learning Chinese

  - by Greg Low

  I've had a few friends asking me about learning Chinese and what I've found works and doesn't work. I was answering a question on a mailing list today and I thought I should post this info where it might be useful to many. The question that was initially asked was whether Rosetta Stone was useful but I've provided much more info on learning the language here. I’ve used Rosetta Stone with Chinese but it’s really hard to know whether to recommend it or not. Rosetta Stone works the same way in all languages. They show you photos and then let you both see and hear the target language and get you to work out what they’re talking about. The thinking is that that’s how children learn. However, at first, I found it very frustrating. I’d be staring at photos trying to work out what they were really trying to get at. Sometimes it’s far from obvious. I could not have survived without Google Translate open at the same time. The other weird thing is that the photos are from a mixture of countries. While that’s good in a way, it also means that they are endlessly showing pictures of something that would never happen in the target language and culture. For any language, constant interaction with a speaker of the target language is needed. Rosetta Stone has a “Studio” option. That’s the best part of the program. In my case, it lets me connect around twice a week to a live online class from Beijing. Classes usually have the teacher plus two to four students. You get some Studio access with the initial packages but need to purchase it for ongoing use. I find it very inexpensive. It seems to work out to about $70 (AUD/USD) for six months. That’s a real bargain. The other downside to Rosetta Stone is that they tend to teach very formal language, but as with other languages, that’s not how the locals speak. It might have been correct at one point but no-one actually says that. As an example, Rosetta Stone teach Gonggòng qìche (pronounced roughly like “gong gong chee chure” for bus. Most of my friends from areas like Taiwan would just say Gongche. Google Translate says Zongxiàn (pronounced somewhat like “dzong sheean”) instead. Mind you, the Rosetta Stone option isn't really as bad as "omnibus"; it's more like saying "public bus". If you say the option they provide, people would understand you. I also listen to ChinesePod in the car. They also have SpanishPod. Each podcast is about five minutes of spoken conversation. It is very good for providing current language. Another resource I use is local Meetup groups. Most cities have these and for a variety of languages. It’s way less structured (just standard conversation) but good for getting interaction. The obvious challenge for Asian languages is reading/writing. The input editors for Chinese that are part of Windows are excellent. Many of my Chinese friends speak fluently but cannot read or write. I was determined to learn to do both. For writing, I’m talking about on a computer, not with a pen. (Mind you, I can barely write English with a pen nowadays). When using Rosetta Stone, you can choose to have the Chinese words displayed in pinyin (Wo xihuan xuéxí zhongguó) or in Chinese characters (???????) or both. This year, I’ve been forcing myself to just use the Chinese characters. I use a pinyin input editor in Windows though, as it’s very fast.  (The character recognition input in the iPad is also amazing). Notice from the example that I provided above that the pronunciation of the pinyin isn’t that obvious to us at first either.  Since changing to only using characters, I find I can now read many more Chinese characters fluently. It’s a major challenge though. I can read about 300 now and yet you need around 2,500 to be able to read a newspaper fairly well. Tones are a major issue for some Asian languages. Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone) and there is a major difference in meaning between two words that are spelled the same in pinyin but with different tones. For example, Ma (3rd tone?) is a horse, Ma (1st tone?) is like “mom”, and ma (neutral tone?) is a question mark and so on. Clearly you don’t want to mix these up. As in English, they also have words that do sound the same but mean different things in different contexts. What’s interesting is that even though we see two words that differ only by tone as very similar, to a native speaker, if you say the right words with the wrong tone, you might as well have said a completely different word. My wife’s dialect of Chinese has eight tones. It’s much worse. The reason I’m so keen to learn to read/write Chinese is that even though the different dialects are pronounced so differently that speakers of one dialect often cannot understand another dialect, the writing is generally the same. The only difference is that many years ago, the Chinese government created a simplified set of characters for some of the most commonly used ones. Older Chinese and most Cantonese speakers often struggle with the simplified characters. This is the simplified form of “three apples”: ????   This is the traditional form of the same words: ????  Note that two of the characters are the same but the middle two are quite different. For most languages, the best thing is to watch current movies in the target language but to watch them with the target language as subtitles, not your native language. You want to know what they actually said, not what it roughly means (which is what the English subtitle would give you). The difficulty with Asian languages like Chinese is that you have the added challenge of understanding the subtitles when they are written in the target language. I wish there were Mandarin Chinese movies with pinyin subtitles. For learning to read characters, I also recommend HanCard on the iPad. It is targeted at the HSK language proficiency levels. (I’m intending to take the first HSK exam as soon as I’m ready). Hope that info helps someone get started.  

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• I see no LOBs!

  - by Paul White

  Is it possible to see LOB (large object) logical reads from STATISTICS IO output on a table with no LOB columns? I was asked this question today by someone who had spent a good fraction of their afternoon trying to work out why this was occurring – even going so far as to re-run DBCC CHECKDB to see if any corruption had taken place.  The table in question wasn’t particularly pretty – it had grown somewhat organically over time, with new columns being added every so often as the need arose.  Nevertheless, it remained a simple structure with no LOB columns – no TEXT or IMAGE, no XML, no MAX types – nothing aside from ordinary INT, MONEY, VARCHAR, and DATETIME types.  To add to the air of mystery, not every query that ran against the table would report LOB logical reads – just sometimes – but when it did, the query often took much longer to execute. Ok, enough of the pre-amble.  I can’t reproduce the exact structure here, but the following script creates a table that will serve to demonstrate the effect: IF OBJECT_ID(N'dbo.Test', N'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE dbo.Test GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Test ( row_id NUMERIC IDENTITY NOT NULL,   col01 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col02 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col03 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col04 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col05 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col06 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col07 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col08 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col09 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col10 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Test row_id] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (row_id) ) ; The next script loads the ten variable-length character columns with one-character strings in the first row, two-character strings in the second row, and so on down to the 450th row: WITH Numbers AS ( -- Generates numbers 1 - 450 inclusive SELECT TOP (450) n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2, master.sys.columns C3 ORDER BY n ASC ) INSERT dbo.Test WITH (TABLOCKX) SELECT REPLICATE(N'A', N.n), REPLICATE(N'B', N.n), REPLICATE(N'C', N.n), REPLICATE(N'D', N.n), REPLICATE(N'E', N.n), REPLICATE(N'F', N.n), REPLICATE(N'G', N.n), REPLICATE(N'H', N.n), REPLICATE(N'I', N.n), REPLICATE(N'J', N.n) FROM Numbers AS N ORDER BY N.n ASC ; Once those two scripts have run, the table contains 450 rows and 10 columns of data like this: Most of the time, when we query data from this table, we don’t see any LOB logical reads, for example: -- Find the maximum length of the data in -- column 5 for a range of rows SELECT result = MAX(DATALENGTH(T.col05)) FROM dbo.Test AS T WHERE row_id BETWEEN 50 AND 100 ; But with a different query… -- Read all the data in column 1 SELECT result = MAX(DATALENGTH(T.col01)) FROM dbo.Test AS T ; …suddenly we have 49 LOB logical reads, as well as the ‘normal’ logical reads we would expect. The Explanation If we had tried to create this table in SQL Server 2000, we would have received a warning message to say that future INSERT or UPDATE operations on the table might fail if the resulting row exceeded the in-row storage limit of 8060 bytes.  If we needed to store more data than would fit in an 8060 byte row (including internal overhead) we had to use a LOB column – TEXT, NTEXT, or IMAGE.  These special data types store the large data values in a separate structure, with just a small pointer left in the original row. Row Overflow SQL Server 2005 introduced a feature called row overflow, which allows one or more variable-length columns in a row to move to off-row storage if the data in a particular row would otherwise exceed 8060 bytes.  You no longer receive a warning when creating (or altering) a table that might need more than 8060 bytes of in-row storage; if SQL Server finds that it can no longer fit a variable-length column in a particular row, it will silently move one or more of these columns off the row into a separate allocation unit. Only variable-length columns can be moved in this way (for example the (N)VARCHAR, VARBINARY, and SQL_VARIANT types).  Fixed-length columns (like INTEGER and DATETIME for example) never move into ‘row overflow’ storage.  The decision to move a column off-row is done on a row-by-row basis – so data in a particular column might be stored in-row for some table records, and off-row for others. In general, if SQL Server finds that it needs to move a column into row-overflow storage, it moves the largest variable-length column record for that row.  Note that in the case of an UPDATE statement that results in the 8060 byte limit being exceeded, it might not be the column that grew that is moved! Sneaky LOBs Anyway, that’s all very interesting but I don’t want to get too carried away with the intricacies of row-overflow storage internals.  The point is that it is now possible to define a table with non-LOB columns that will silently exceed the old row-size limit and result in ordinary variable-length columns being moved to off-row storage.  Adding new columns to a table, expanding an existing column definition, or simply storing more data in a column than you used to – all these things can result in one or more variable-length columns being moved off the row. Note that row-overflow storage is logically quite different from old-style LOB and new-style MAX data type storage – individual variable-length columns are still limited to 8000 bytes each – you can just have more of them now.  Having said that, the physical mechanisms involved are very similar to full LOB storage – a column moved to row-overflow leaves a 24-byte pointer record in the row, and the ‘separate storage’ I have been talking about is structured very similarly to both old-style LOBs and new-style MAX types.  The disadvantages are also the same: when SQL Server needs a row-overflow column value it needs to follow the in-row pointer a navigate another chain of pages, just like retrieving a traditional LOB. And Finally… In the example script presented above, the rows with row_id values from 402 to 450 inclusive all exceed the total in-row storage limit of 8060 bytes.  A SELECT that references a column in one of those rows that has moved to off-row storage will incur one or more lob logical reads as the storage engine locates the data.  The results on your system might vary slightly depending on your settings, of course; but in my tests only column 1 in rows 402-450 moved off-row.  You might like to play around with the script – updating columns, changing data type lengths, and so on – to see the effect on lob logical reads and which columns get moved when.  You might even see row-overflow columns moving back in-row if they are updated to be smaller (hint: reduce the size of a column entry by at least 1000 bytes if you hope to see this). Be aware that SQL Server will not warn you when it moves ‘ordinary’ variable-length columns into overflow storage, and it can have dramatic effects on performance.  It makes more sense than ever to choose column data types sensibly.  If you make every column a VARCHAR(8000) or NVARCHAR(4000), and someone stores data that results in a row needing more than 8060 bytes, SQL Server might turn some of your column data into pseudo-LOBs – all without saying a word. Finally, some people make a distinction between ordinary LOBs (those that can hold up to 2GB of data) and the LOB-like structures created by row-overflow (where columns are still limited to 8000 bytes) by referring to row-overflow LOBs as SLOBs.  I find that quite appealing, but the ‘S’ stands for ‘small’, which makes expanding the whole acronym a little daft-sounding…small large objects anyone? © Paul White 2011 email: [email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• It was a figure of speech!

  - by Ratman21

  Yesterday I posted the following as attention getter / advertisement (as well as my feelings). In the groups, (I am in) on the social networking site, LinkedIn and boy did I get responses.    I am fighting mad about (a figure of speech, really) not having a job! Look just because I am over 55 and have gray hair. It does not mean, my brain is dead or I can no longer trouble shoot a router or circuit or LAN issue. Or that I can do “IT” work at all. And I could prove this if; some one would give me at job. Come on try me for 90 days at min. wage. I know you will end up keeping me (hope fully at normal pay) around. Is any one hearing me…come on take up the challenge!     This was the responses I got.   I hear you. We just need to retrain and get our skills up to speed is all. That is what I am doing. I have not given up. Just got to stay on top of the game. Experience is on our side if we have the credentials and we are reasonable about our salaries this should not be an issue.   Already on it, going back to school and have got three certifications (CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+. I am now studying for my CISCO CCNA certification. As to my salary, I am willing to work at very reasonable rate.   You need to re-brand yourself like a product, market and sell yourself. You need to smarten up, look and feel a million dollars, re-energize yourself, regain your confidents. Either start your own business, or re-write your CV so it stands out from the rest, get the template off the internet. Contact every recruitment agent in your town, state, country and overseas, and on the web. Apply to every job you think you could do, you may not get it but you will make a contact for your network, which may lead to a job at the end of the tunnel. Get in touch with everyone you know from past jobs. Do charity work. I maintain the IT Network, stage electrical and the Telecom equipment in my church,   Again already on it. I have email the world is seems with my resume and cover letters. So far, I have rewritten or had it rewrote, my resume and cover letters; over seven times so far. Re-energize? I never lost my energy level or my self-confidents in my work (now if could get some HR personal to see the same). I also volunteer at my church, I created and maintain the church web sit.   I share your frustration. Sucks being over 50 and looking for work. Please don't sell yourself short at min wage because the employer will think that’s your worth. Keep trying!!   I never stop trying and min wage is only for 90 days. If some one takes up the challenge. Some post asked if I am keeping up technology.   Do you keep up with the latest technology and can speak the language fluidly?   Yep to that and as to speaking it also a yep! I am a geek you know. I heard from others over the 50 year mark and younger too.   I'm with you! I keep getting told that I don't have enough experience because I just recently completed a Masters level course in Microsoft SQL Server, which gave me a project-intensive equivalent of between 2 and 3 years of experience. On top of that training, I have 19 years as an applications programmer and database administrator. I can normalize rings around experienced DBAs and churn out effective code with the best of them. But my 19 years is worthless as far as most recruiters and HR people are concerned because it is not the specific experience for which they're looking. HR AND RECRUITERS TAKE NOTE: Experience, whatever the language, translates across platforms and technology! By the way, I'm also over 55 and still have "got it"!   I never lost it and I also can work rings round younger techs.   I'm 52 and female and seem to be having the same issues. I have over 10 years experience in tech support (with a BS in CIS) and can't get hired either.   Ow, I only have an AS in computer science along with my certifications.   Keep the faith, I have been unemployed since August of 2008. I agree with you...I am willing to return to the beginning of my retail career and work myself back through the ranks, if someone will look past the grey and realize the knowledge I would bring to the table.   I also would like some one to look past the gray.   Interesting approach, volunteering to work for minimum wage for 90 days. I'm in the same situation as you, being 55 & balding w/white hair, so I know where you're coming from. I've been out of work now for a year. I'm in Michigan, where the unemployment rate is estimated to be 15% (the worst in the nation) & even though I've got 30+ years of IT experience ranging from mainframe to PC desktop support, it's difficult to even get a face-to-face interview. I had one prospective employer tell me flat out that I "didn't have the energy required for this position". Mostly I never get any feedback. All I can say is good luck & try to remain optimistic.   He said WHAT! Yes remaining optimistic is key. Along with faith in God. Then there was this (for lack of better word) jerk.   Give it up already. You were too old to work in high tech 10 years ago. Scratch that, 20 years ago! Try selling hot dogs in front of Fry's Electronics. At least you would get a chance to eat lunch with your previous colleagues....   You know funny thing on this person is that I checked out his profile. He is older than I am.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.Active Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...BI System Monitor: v2.1: Data Audits report and supporting SQL, and SSIS package Environment Overview report enhancements, improving the appearance, addition of data audit finding indicators Note: SQL 2012 version coming soon.Hidden Capture (HC): Hidden Capture 1.1: Hidden Capture 1.1 by Mohsen E.Dawatgar http://Hidden-Capture.blogfa.comExt Spec: Ext Spec 0.2.1: Refined examples and improved distribution options.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.04: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.04 Don't forget to backup your installation before upgrade. Changes in 06.00.04 Fix: Sql Scripts for 6.003 missed object qualifiers within stored procedures Fix: added missing resource "cmdCancel.Text" in form.ascx.resx Changes in 06.00.03 Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext Changes in 06.00.02 The scripts are now compatible with SQL Azure, tested in a ne...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.New ProjectsAny-Service: AnyService is a .net 4.0 Windows service shell. It hosts any windows application in non-gui mode to run as a service.BabyCloudDrives - the multi cloud drive desktop's application: wpf ????BLACK ORANGE: Download The HPAD TEXT EDITOR and use it Wisely.. CodePlex New Release Checker: CodePlex New Release Checker is a small library that makes it easy to add, "New Version Available!" functionality to your CodePlex project.Collect: ????????！CSVManager: CSV??CSV?????，????CSV??，??????Exam Project: My Exam Project. Computer Vision, C and OpenCV-FTP: Hey guys thanks for checking out my ftp!Haushaltsbuch: 1ModMaker.Lua: ModMaker.Lua is an open source .NET library that parses and executes Lua code.MyJabbr: MyJabbr netduinoscope: Design shield and software to use netduino as oscilloscopeNetSurveillance Web Application: Net Surveillance Web ApplicationNiconicoApiHelper: ????API?????????OStega: A simple library for encrypt text into an bmp or png image.OURORM: ormTFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit: The TFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit is a set of tools that integrate with TFS 2010 to help manage configuration and deployment to various remote environments.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: A step-by-step guide for building Team Foundation Server 2012 environments that include SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 and more!WinRT LineChart: An attempt at creating an usable LineChart for everyone to use in his/her own Windows 8 Apps

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• Conducting Effective Web Meetings

  - by BuckWoody

  There are several forms of corporate communication. From immediate, rich communications like phones and IM messaging to historical transactions like e-mail, there are a lot of ways to get information to one or more people. From time to time, it's even useful to have a meeting. (This is where a witty picture of a guy sleeping in a meeting goes. I won't bother actually putting one here; you're already envisioning it in your mind) Most meetings are pointless, and a complete waste of time. This is the fault, completely and solely, of the organizer. It's because he or she hasn't thought things through enough to think about alternate forms of information passing. Here's the criteria for a good meeting - whether in-person or over the web: 100% of the content of a meeting should require the participation of 100% of the attendees for 100% of the time It doesn't get any simpler than that. If it doesn't meet that criteria, then don't invite that person to that meeting. If you're just conveying information and no one has the need for immediate interaction with that information (like telling you something that modifies the message), then send an e-mail. If you're a manager, and you need to get status from lots of people, pick up the phone.If you need a quick answer, use IM. I once had a high-level manager that called frequent meetings. His real need was status updates on various processes, so 50 of us would sit in a room while he asked each one of us questions. He believed this larger meeting helped us "cross pollinate ideas". In fact, it was a complete waste of time for most everyone, except in the one or two moments that they interacted with him. So I wrote some code for a Palm Pilot (which was a kind of SmartPhone but with no phone and no real graphics, but this was in the days when we had just discovered fire and the wheel, although the order of those things is still in debate) that took an average of the salaries of the people in the room (I guessed at it) and ran a timer which multiplied the number of people against the salaries. I left that running in plain sight for him, and when he asked about it, I explained how much the meetings were really costing the company. We had far fewer meetings after. Meetings are now web-enabled. I believe that's largely a good thing, since it saves on travel time and allows more people to participate, but I think the rule above still holds. And in fact, there are some other rules that you should follow to have a great meeting - and fewer of them. Be Clear About the Goal This is important in any meeting, but all of us have probably gotten an invite with a web link and an ambiguous title. Then you get to the meeting, and it's a 500-level deep-dive on something everyone expects you to know. This is unfair to the "expert" and to the participants. I always tell people that invite me to a meeting that I will be as detailed as I can - but the more detail they can tell me about the questions, the more detailed I can be in my responses. Granted, there are times when you don't know what you don't know, but the more you can say about the topic the better. There's another point here - and it's that you should have a clearly defined "win" for the meeting. When the meeting is over, and everyone goes back to work, what were you expecting them to do with the information? Have that clearly defined in your head, and in the meeting invite. Understand the Technology There are several web-meeting clients out there. I use them all, since I meet with clients all over the world. They all work differently - so I take a few moments and read up on the different clients and find out how I can use the tools properly. I do this with the technology I use for everything else, and it's important to understand it if the meeting is to be a success. If you're running the meeting, know the tools. I don't care if you like the tools or not, learn them anyway. Don't waste everyone else's time just because you're too bitter/snarky/lazy to spend a few minutes reading. Check your phone or mic. Check your video size. Install (and learn to use)  ZoomIT (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx). Format your slides or screen or output correctly. Learn to use the voting features of the meeting software, and especially it's whiteboard features. Figure out how multiple monitors work. Try a quick meeting with someone to test all this. Do this *before* you invite lots of other people to your meeting.   Use a WebCam I'm not a pretty man. I have a face fit for radio. But after attending a meeting with clients where one Microsoft person used a webcam and another did not, I'm convinced that people pay more attention when a face is involved. There are tons of studies around this, or you can take my word for it, but toss a shirt on over those pajamas and turn the webcam on. Set Up Early Whether you're attending or leading the meeting, don't wait to sign on to the meeting at the time when it starts. I can almost plan that a 10:00 meeting will actually start at 10:10 because the participants/leader is just now installing the web client for the meeting at 10:00. Sign on early, go on mute, and then wait for everyone to arrive. Mute When Not Talking No one wants to hear your screaming offspring / yappy dog / other cubicle conversations / car wind noise (are you driving in a desert storm or something?) while the person leading the meeting is trying to talk. I use the Lync software from Microsoft for my meetings, and I mute everyone by default, and then tell them to un-mute to talk to the group. Share Collateral If you have a PowerPoint deck, mail it out in case you have a tech failure. If you have a document, share it as an attachment to the meeting. Don't make people ask you for the information - that's why you're there to begin with. Even better, send it out early. "But", you say, "then no one will come to the meeting if they have the deck first!" Uhm, then don't have a meeting. Send out the deck and a quick e-mail and let everyone get on with their productive day. Set Actions At the Meeting A meeting should have some sort of outcome (see point one). That means there are actions to take, a follow up, or some deliverable. Otherwise, it's an e-mail. At the meeting, decide who will do what, when things are needed, and so on. And avoid, if at all possible, setting up another meeting, unless absolutely necessary. So there you have it. Whether it's on-premises or on the web, meetings are a necessary evil, and should be treated that way. Like politicians, you should have as few of them as are necessary to keep the roads paved and public libraries open.

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks&ndash;Part 1: Extensions

  - by ToStringTheory

  I don’t know about you, but when it comes to development, I prefer my environment to be as free of clutter as possible.  It may surprise you to know that I have tried ReSharper, and did not like it, for the reason that I stated above.  In my opinion, it had too much clutter.  Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of features that I did like about it (inversion of if blocks, code feedback), but for the most part, I actually felt that it was slowing me down. Introduction Another large factor besides intrusiveness/speed in my choice to dislike ReSharper would probably be that I have become comfortable with my current setup and extensions.  I believe I have a good collection, and am quite happy with what I can accomplish in a short amount of time.  I figured that I would share some of my tips/findings regarding Visual Studio productivity here, and see what you had to say. The first section of things that I would like to cover, are Visual Studio Extensions.  In case you have been living under a rock for the past several years, Extensions are available under the Tools menu in Visual Studio: The extension manager enables integrated access to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery online with access to a few thousand different extensions.  I have tried many extensions, but for reasons of lack reliability, usability, or features, have uninstalled almost all of them.  However, I have come across several that I find I can not do without anymore: NuGet Package Manager (Microsoft) Perspectives (Adam Driscoll) Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft) Web Essentials (Mads Kristensen) Extensions NuGet Package Manager To be honest, I debated on whether or not to put this in here.  Most people seem to have it, however, there was a time when I didn’t, and was always confused when blogs/posts would say to right click and “Add Package Reference…” which with one of the latest updates is now “Manage NuGet Packages”.  So, if you haven’t downloaded the NuGet Package Manager yet, or don’t know what it is, I would highly suggest downloading it now! Features Simply put, the NuGet Package Manager gives you a GUI and command line to access different libraries that have been uploaded to NuGet. Some of its features include: Ability to search NuGet for packages via the GUI, with information in the detail bar on the right. Quick access to see what packages are in a solution, and what packages have updates available, with easy 1-click updating. If you download a package that requires references to work on other NuGet packages, they will be downloaded and referenced automatically. Productivity Tip If you use any type of source control in Visual Studio as well as using NuGet packages, be sure to right-click on the solution and click "Enable NuGet Package Restore". What this does is add a NuGet package to the solution so that it will be checked in along side your solution, as well as automatically grab packages from NuGet on build if needed. This is an extremely simple system to use to manage your package references, instead of having to manually go into TFS and add the Packages folder. Perspectives I can't stand developing with just one monitor. Especially if it comes to debugging. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010, is that all of the panels and windows are floatable, and can dock to other screens. The only bad thing is, I don't use the same toolset with everything that I am doing. By this, I mean that I don't use all of the same windows for debugging a web application, as I do for coding a WPF application. Only thing is, Visual Studio doesn't save the screen positions for all of the undocked windows. So, I got curious one day and decided to check and see if there was an extension to help out. This is where I found Perspectives. Features Perspectives gives you the ability to configure window positions across any or your monitors, and then to save the positions in a profile. Perspectives offers a Panel to manage different presets/favorites, and a toolbar to add to the toolbars at the top of Visual Studio. Ability to 'Favorite' a profile to add it to the perspectives toolbar. Productivity Tip Take the time to setup profiles for each of your scenarios - debugging web/winforms/xaml, coding, maintenance, etc. Try to remember to use the profiles for a few days, and at the end of a week, you may find that your productivity was never better. Productivity Power Tools Ah, the Productivity Power Tools... Quite possibly one of my most used extensions, if not my most used. The tool pack gives you a variety of enhancements ranging from key shortcuts, interface tweaks, and completely new features to Visual Studio 2010. Features I don't want to bore you with all of the features here, so here are my favorite: Quick Find - Unobtrusive search box in upper-right corner of the code window. Great for searching in general, especially in a file. Solution Navigator - The 'Solution Explorer' on steroids. Easy to search for files, see defined members/properties/methods in files, and my favorite feature is the 'set as root' option. Updated 'Add Reference...' Dialog - This is probably my favorite enhancement period... The 'Add Reference...' dialog redone in a manner that resembles the Extension/Package managers. I especially love the ability to search through all of the references. "Ctrl - Click" for Definition - I am still getting used to this as I usually try to use my keyboard for everything, but I love the ability to hold Ctrl and turn property/methods/variables into hyperlinks, that you click on to see their definitions. Great for travelling down a rabbit hole in an application to research problems. While there are other commands/utilities, I find these to be the ones that I lean on the most for the usefulness. Web Essentials If you have do any type of web development in ASP .Net, ASP .Net MVC, even HTML, I highly suggest grabbing the Web Essentials right NOW! This extension alone is great for productivity in web development, and greatly decreases my development time on new features. Features Some of its best features include: CSS Previews - I say 'previews' because of the multiple kinds of previews in CSS that you get font-family, color, background/background-image previews. This is great for just tweaking UI slightly in different ways and seeing how they look in the CSS window at a glance. Live Preview - One word - awesome! This goes well with my multi-monitor setup. I put the site on one monitor in a Live Preview panel, and then as I make changes to CSS/cshtml/aspx/html, the preview window will update with each save/build automatically. For CSS, you can even turn on live-update, so as you are tweaking CSS, the style changes in real time. Great for tweaking colors or font-sizes. Outlining - Small, but I like to be able to collapse regions/declarations that are in the way of new work, or are just distracting. Commenting Shortcuts - I don't know why it wasn't included by default, but it is nice to have the key shortcuts for commenting working in the CSS editor as well. Productivity Tip When working on a site, hit CTRL-ALT-ENTER to launch the Live Preview window. Dock it to another monitor. When you make changes to the document/css, just save and glance at the other monitor. No need to alt tab, then alt tab before continuing editing. Conclusion These extensions are only the most useful and least intrusive - ones that I use every day. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is the extensibility options that it gives developers to utilize. Have an extension that you use that isn't intrusive, but isn't listed here? Please, feel free to comment. I love trying new things, and am always looking for new additions to my toolset of the most useful. Finally, please keep an eye out for Part 2 on key shortcuts in Visual Studio. Also, if you are visiting my site (http://tostringtheory.com || http://geekswithblogs.net/tostringtheory) from an actual browser and not a feed, please let me know what you think of the new styling!

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• Translating Your Customizations

  - by Richard Bingham

  This blog post explains the basics of translating the customizations you can make to Fusion Applications products, with the inclusion of information for both composer-based customizations and the generic design-time customizations done via JDeveloper. Introduction Like most Oracle Applications, Fusion Applications installs on-premise with a US-English base language that is, in Release 7, supported by the option to add up to a total of 22 additional language packs (In Oracle Cloud production environments languages are pre-installed already). As such many organizations offer their users the option of working with their local language, and logically that should also apply for any customizations as well. Composer-based UI Customizations Customizations made in Page Composer take into consideration the session LOCALE, as set in the user preferences screen, during all customization work, and stores the customization in the MDS repository accordingly. As such the actual new or changed values used will only apply for the same language under which the customization was made, and text for any other languages requires a separate upload. See the Resource Bundles section below, which incidentally also applies to custom UI changes done in JDeveloper. You may have noticed this when you select the “Select Text Resource” menu option when editing the text on a page. Using this ensures that the resource bundles are used, whereas if you define a static value in Expression Builder it will never be available for translation. Notice in the screenshot below the “What’s New” custom value I have already defined using the ‘Select Text Resource’ feature is internally using the adfBundle groovy function to pull the custom value for my key (RT_S_1) from the ComposerOverrideBundle. Figure 1 – Page Composer showing the override bundle being used. Business Objects Customizing the Business Objects available in the Applications Composer tool for the CRM products, such as adding additional fields, also operates using the session language. Translating these additional values for these fields into other installed languages requires loading additional resource bundles, again as described below. Reports and Analytics Most customizations to Reports and BI Analytics are just essentially reorganizations and visualizations of existing number and text data from the system, and as such will use the appropriate values based on the users session language. Where a translated value or string exists for that session language, it will be used without the need for additional work. Extending through the addition of brand new reports and analytics requires another method of loading the translated strings, as part of what is known as ‘Localizing’ the BI Catalog and Metadata. This time it is via an export/import of XML data through the BI Administrators console, and is described in the OBIEE Admin Guide. Fusion Applications reports based on BI Publisher are already defined in template-per-locale, and in addition provide an extra process for getting the data for translation and reloading. This again uses the standard resource bundle format. Loading a custom report is illustrated in this video from our YouTube channel which shows the screen for both setting the template local and running an export for translation. Fusion Applications Menus Whilst the seeded Navigator and Global Menu values are fully translated when the additional language is installed, if they are customized then the change or new menu item will apply universally, not currently per language. This is set to change in a future release with the new UI Text Editor feature described below. More on Resource Bundles As mentioned above, to provide translations for most of your customizations you need to add values to a resource bundle. This is an industry open standard (OASIS) format XML file with the extension .xliff, and store translated values for the strings used by ADF at run-time. The general process is that these values are exported from the MDS repository, manually edited, and then imported back in again.This needs to be done by an administrator, via either WLST commands or through Enterprise Manager as per the screenshot below. This is detailed out in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. For SaaS environments the Cloud Operations team can assist. Figure 2 – Enterprise Manager’s MDS export used getting resource bundles for manual translation and re-imported on the same screen. All customized strings are stored in an override bundle (xliff file) for each locale, suffixed with the language initials, with English ones being saved to the default. As such each language bundle can be easily identified and updated. Similarly if you used JDeveloper to create your own applications as extensions to Fusion Applications you would use the native support for resource bundles, and add them into the faces-config.xml file for inclusion in your application. An example is this ADF customization video from our YouTube channel. JDeveloper also supports automatic synchronization between your underlying resource bundles and any translatable strings you add – very handy. For more information see chapters on “Using Automatic Resource Bundle Integration in JDeveloper” and “Manually Defining Resource Bundles and Locales” in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework. FND Messages and Look-ups FND Messages, as defined here, are not used for UI labels (they are known as ‘strings’), but are the responses back to users as a result of an action, such as from a page submit. Each ‘message’ is defined and stored in the related database table (FND_MESSAGES_B), with another (FND_MESSAGES_TL) holding any language-specific values. These come seeded with the additional language installs, however if you customize the messages via the “Manage Messages” task in Functional Setup Manager, or add new ones, then currently (in Release 7) you’ll need to repeat it for each language. Figure 3 – An FND Message defined in an English user session. Similarly Look-ups are stored in a translation table (FND_LOOKUP_VALUES_TL) where appropriate, and can be customized by setting the users session language and making the change  in the Setup and Maintenance task entitled “Manage [Standard|Common] Look-ups”. Online Help Yes, in fact all the seeded help is applied as part of each language pack install as part of the post-install provisioning process. If you are editing or adding custom online help then the Create Help screen provides a drop-down of which language your help customization will apply to. This is shown in the video below from our YouTube channel, and obviously you’ll need to it for each language in use. What is Coming for Translations? Currently planned for Release 8 is something called the User Interface (UI) Text Editor. This tool will allow the editing of all the text shown on the pages and forms of Fusion Application. This will provide a search based on a particular term or word, say “Worker”, and will allow it to be adjusted, say to “Employee”, which then updates all the Resource Bundles that contain it. In the case of multi-language environments, it will use the users session language (locale) to know which Resource Bundles to apply the change to. This capability will also support customization sandboxes, to help ensure changes can be tested and approved.  It is also interesting to note that the design currently allows any page-specific customizations done using Page Composer or Application Composer to over-write the global changes done via the UI Text Editor, allowing for special context-sensitive values to still be used. Further Reading and Resources The following short list provides the mains resources for digging into more detail on translation support for both Composer and JDeveloper customization projects. There is a dedicated chapter entitled “Translating Custom Text” in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. This has good examples and steps for many tasks, especially administering resource bundles. Using localization formatting (numbers, dates etc) for design-time changes is well documented in the Fusion Applications Developer Guide. For more guidelines on general design-time globalization, see either the ‘Internationalizing and Localizing Pages’ chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition) or the general Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide. The Oracle Architecture ‘A-Team’ provided a recent post on customizing the user session timeout popup, using design-time changes to resource bundles. It has detailed step-by-step examples which can be a useful illustration.

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• UV Atlas Generation and Seam Removal

  - by P. Avery

  I'm generating light maps for scene mesh objects using DirectX's UV Atlas Tool( D3DXUVAtlasCreate() ). I've succeeded in generating an atlas, however, when I try to render the mesh object using the atlas the seams are visible on the mesh. Below are images of a lightmap generated for a cube. Here is the code I use to generate a uv atlas for a cube: struct sVertexPosNormTex { D3DXVECTOR3 vPos, vNorm; D3DXVECTOR2 vUV; sVertexPosNormTex(){} sVertexPosNormTex( D3DXVECTOR3 v, D3DXVECTOR3 n, D3DXVECTOR2 uv ) { vPos = v; vNorm = n; vUV = uv; } ~sVertexPosNormTex() { } }; // create a light map texture to fill programatically hr = D3DXCreateTexture( pd3dDevice, 128, 128, 1, 0, D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8, D3DPOOL_MANAGED, &pLightmap ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to D3DXCreateTexture( lightmap )", __LINE__, hr ); return hr; } // get the zero level surface from the texture IDirect3DSurface9 *pS = NULL; pLightmap->GetSurfaceLevel( 0, &pS ); // clear surface pd3dDevice->ColorFill( pS, NULL, D3DCOLOR_XRGB( 0, 0, 0 ) ); // load a sample mesh DWORD dwcMaterials = 0; LPD3DXBUFFER pMaterialBuffer = NULL; V_RETURN( D3DXLoadMeshFromX( L"cube3.x", D3DXMESH_MANAGED, pd3dDevice, &pAdjacency, &pMaterialBuffer, NULL, &dwcMaterials, &g_pMesh ) ); // generate adjacency DWORD *pdwAdjacency = new DWORD[ 3 * g_pMesh->GetNumFaces() ]; g_pMesh->GenerateAdjacency( 1e-6f, pdwAdjacency ); // create light map coordinates LPD3DXMESH pMesh = NULL; LPD3DXBUFFER pFacePartitioning = NULL, pVertexRemapArray = NULL; FLOAT resultStretch = 0; UINT numCharts = 0; hr = D3DXUVAtlasCreate( g_pMesh, 0, 0, 128, 128, 3.5f, 0, pdwAdjacency, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 0, &pMesh, &pFacePartitioning, &pVertexRemapArray, &resultStretch, &numCharts ); if( SUCCEEDED( hr ) ) { // release and set mesh SAFE_RELEASE( g_pMesh ); g_pMesh = pMesh; // write mesh to file hr = D3DXSaveMeshToX( L"cube4.x", g_pMesh, 0, ( const D3DXMATERIAL* )pMaterialBuffer->GetBufferPointer(), NULL, dwcMaterials, D3DXF_FILEFORMAT_TEXT ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to D3DXSaveMeshToX() at OnD3D9CreateDevice()", __LINE__, hr ); } // fill the the light map hr = BuildLightmap( pS, g_pMesh ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to BuildLightmap()", __LINE__, hr ); } } else { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to D3DXUVAtlasCreate() at OnD3D9CreateDevice()", __LINE__, hr ); } SAFE_RELEASE( pS ); SAFE_DELETE_ARRAY( pdwAdjacency ); SAFE_RELEASE( pFacePartitioning ); SAFE_RELEASE( pVertexRemapArray ); SAFE_RELEASE( pMaterialBuffer ); Here is code to fill lightmap texture: HRESULT BuildLightmap( IDirect3DSurface9 *pS, LPD3DXMESH pMesh ) { HRESULT hr = S_OK; // validate lightmap texture surface and mesh if( !pS || !pMesh ) return E_POINTER; // lock the mesh vertex buffer sVertexPosNormTex *pV = NULL; pMesh->LockVertexBuffer( D3DLOCK_READONLY, ( void** )&pV ); // lock the mesh index buffer WORD *pI = NULL; pMesh->LockIndexBuffer( D3DLOCK_READONLY, ( void** )&pI ); // get the lightmap texture surface description D3DSURFACE_DESC desc; pS->GetDesc( &desc ); // lock the surface rect to fill with color data D3DLOCKED_RECT rct; hr = pS->LockRect( &rct, NULL, 0 ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "main.cpp:", "Failed to IDirect3DTexture9::LockRect()", __LINE__, hr ); return hr; } // iterate the pixels of the lightmap texture // check each pixel to see if it lies between the uv coordinates of a cube face BYTE *pBuffer = ( BYTE* )rct.pBits; for( UINT y = 0; y < desc.Height; ++y ) { BYTE* pBufferRow = ( BYTE* )pBuffer; for( UINT x = 0; x < desc.Width * 4; x+=4 ) { // determine the pixel's uv coordinate D3DXVECTOR2 p( ( ( float )x / 4.0f ) / ( float )desc.Width + 0.5f / 128.0f, y / ( float )desc.Height + 0.5f / 128.0f ); // for each face of the mesh // check to see if the pixel lies within the face's uv coordinates for( UINT i = 0; i < 3 * pMesh->GetNumFaces(); i +=3 ) { sVertexPosNormTex v[ 3 ]; v[ 0 ] = pV[ pI[ i + 0 ] ]; v[ 1 ] = pV[ pI[ i + 1 ] ]; v[ 2 ] = pV[ pI[ i + 2 ] ]; if( TexcoordIsWithinBounds( v[ 0 ].vUV, v[ 1 ].vUV, v[ 2 ].vUV, p ) ) { // the pixel lies b/t the uv coordinates of a cube face // light contribution functions aren't needed yet //D3DXVECTOR3 vPos = TexcoordToPos( v[ 0 ].vPos, v[ 1 ].vPos, v[ 2 ].vPos, v[ 0 ].vUV, v[ 1 ].vUV, v[ 2 ].vUV, p ); //D3DXVECTOR3 vNormal = v[ 0 ].vNorm; // set the color of this pixel red( for demo ) BYTE ba[] = { 0, 0, 255, 255, }; //ComputeContribution( vPos, vNormal, g_sLight, ba ); // copy the byte array into the light map texture memcpy( ( void* )&pBufferRow[ x ], ( void* )ba, 4 * sizeof( BYTE ) ); } } } // go to next line of the texture pBuffer += rct.Pitch; } // unlock the surface rect pS->UnlockRect(); // unlock mesh vertex and index buffers pMesh->UnlockIndexBuffer(); pMesh->UnlockVertexBuffer(); // write the surface to file hr = D3DXSaveSurfaceToFile( L"LightMap.jpg", D3DXIFF_JPG, pS, NULL, NULL ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) DebugStringDX( "Main.cpp", "Failed to D3DXSaveSurfaceToFile()", __LINE__, hr ); return hr; } bool TexcoordIsWithinBounds( const D3DXVECTOR2 &t0, const D3DXVECTOR2 &t1, const D3DXVECTOR2 &t2, const D3DXVECTOR2 &p ) { // compute vectors D3DXVECTOR2 v0 = t1 - t0, v1 = t2 - t0, v2 = p - t0; float f00 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v0, &v0 ); float f01 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v0, &v1 ); float f02 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v0, &v2 ); float f11 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v1, &v1 ); float f12 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v1, &v2 ); // Compute barycentric coordinates float invDenom = 1 / ( f00 * f11 - f01 * f01 ); float fU = ( f11 * f02 - f01 * f12 ) * invDenom; float fV = ( f00 * f12 - f01 * f02 ) * invDenom; // Check if point is in triangle if( ( fU >= 0 ) && ( fV >= 0 ) && ( fU + fV < 1 ) ) return true; return false; } Screenshot Lightmap I believe the problem comes from the difference between the lightmap uv coordinates and the pixel center coordinates...for example, here are the lightmap uv coordinates( generated by D3DXUVAtlasCreate() ) for a specific face( tri ) within the mesh, keep in mind that I'm using the mesh uv coordinates to write the pixels for the texture: v[ 0 ].uv = D3DXVECTOR2( 0.003581, 0.295631 ); v[ 1 ].uv = D3DXVECTOR2( 0.003581, 0.003581 ); v[ 2 ].uv = D3DXVECTOR2( 0.295631, 0.003581 ); the lightmap texture size is 128 x 128 pixels. The upper-left pixel center coordinates are: float halfPixel = 0.5 / 128 = 0.00390625; D3DXVECTOR2 pixelCenter = D3DXVECTOR2( halfPixel, halfPixel ); will the mapping and sampling of the lightmap texture will require that an offset be taken into account or that the uv coordinates are snapped to the pixel centers..? ...Any ideas on the best way to approach this situation would be appreciated...What are the common practices?

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• &lt;%: %&gt;, HtmlEncode, IHtmlString and MvcHtmlString

  - by Shaun

  One of my colleague and friend, Robin is playing and struggling with the ASP.NET MVC 2 on a project these days while I’m struggling with a annoying client. Since it’s his first time to use ASP.NET MVC he was meetings with a lot of problem and I was very happy to share my experience to him. Yesterday he asked me when he attempted to insert a <br /> element into his page he found that the page was rendered like this which is bad. He found his <br /> was shown as a part of the string rather than creating a new line. After checked a bit in his code I found that it’s because he utilized a new ASP.NET markup supported in .NET 4.0 – “<%: %>”. If you have been using ASP.NET MVC 1 or in .NET 3.5 world it would be very common that using <%= %> to show something on the page from the backend code. But when you do it you must ensure that the string that are going to be displayed should be Html-safe, which means all the Html markups must be encoded. Otherwise this might cause an XSS (cross-site scripting) problem. So that you’d better use the code like this below to display anything on the page. In .NET 4.0 Microsoft introduced a new markup to solve this problem which is <%: %>. It will encode the content automatically so that you will no need to check and verify your code manually for the XSS issue mentioned below. But this also means that it will encode all things, include the Html element you want to be rendered. So I changed his code like this and it worked well. After helped him solved this problem and finished a spreadsheet for my boring project I considered a bit more on the <%: %>. Since it will encode all thing why it renders correctly when we use “<%: Html.TextBox(“name”) %>” to show a text box? As you know the Html.TextBox will render a “<input name="name" id="name" type="text"/>” element on the page. If <%: %> will encode everything it should not display a text box. So I dig into the source code of the MVC and found some comments in the class MvcHtmlString. 1: // In ASP.NET 4, a new syntax <%: %> is being introduced in WebForms pages, where <%: expression %> is equivalent to 2: // <%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(expression) %>. The intent of this is to reduce common causes of XSS vulnerabilities 3: // in WebForms pages (WebForms views in the case of MVC). This involves the addition of an interface 4: // System.Web.IHtmlString and a static method overload System.Web.HttpUtility::HtmlEncode(object). The interface 5: // definition is roughly: 6: // public interface IHtmlString { 7: // string ToHtmlString(); 8: // } 9: // And the HtmlEncode(object) logic is roughly: 10: // - If the input argument is an IHtmlString, return argument.ToHtmlString(), 11: // - Otherwise, return HtmlEncode(Convert.ToString(argument)). 12: // 13: // Unfortunately this has the effect that calling <%: Html.SomeHelper() %> in an MVC application running on .NET 4 14: // will end up encoding output that is already HTML-safe. As a result, we're changing out HTML helpers to return 15: // MvcHtmlString where appropriate. <%= Html.SomeHelper() %> will continue to work in both .NET 3.5 and .NET 4, but 16: // changing the return types to MvcHtmlString has the added benefit that <%: Html.SomeHelper() %> will also work 17: // properly in .NET 4 rather than resulting in a double-encoded output. MVC developers in .NET 4 will then be able 18: // to use the <%: %> syntax almost everywhere instead of having to remember where to use <%= %> and where to use 19: // <%: %>. This should help developers craft more secure web applications by default. 20: // 21: // To create an MvcHtmlString, use the static Create() method instead of calling the protected constructor. The comment said the encoding rule of the <%: %> would be: If the type of the content is IHtmlString it will NOT encode since the IHtmlString indicates that it’s Html-safe. Otherwise it will use HtmlEncode to encode the content. If we check the return type of the Html.TextBox method we will find that it’s MvcHtmlString, which was implemented the IHtmlString interface dynamically. That is the reason why the “<input name="name" id="name" type="text"/>” was not encoded by <%: %>. So if we want to tell ASP.NET MVC, or I should say the ASP.NET runtime that the content is Html-safe and no need, or should not be encoded we can convert the content into IHtmlString. So another resolution would be like this. Also we can create an extension method as well for better developing experience. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6:  7: namespace ShaunXu.Blogs.IHtmlStringIssue 8: { 9: public static class Helpers 10: { 11: public static MvcHtmlString IsHtmlSafe(this string content) 12: { 13: return MvcHtmlString.Create(content); 14: } 15: } 16: } Then the view would be like this. And the page rendered correctly.         Summary In this post I explained a bit about the new markup in .NET 4.0 – <%: %> and its usage. I also explained a bit about how to control the page content, whether it should be encoded or not. We can see the ASP.NET MVC gives us more points to control the web pages.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Agilist, Heal Thyself!

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been meaning to blog about a great experience I had earlier in the year at Prairie Dev Con Calgary.  Myself and Steve Rogalsky did a session that we called “Agilist, Heal Thyself!”.  We used a format that was new to me, but that Steve had seen used at another conference.  What we did was start by asking the audience to give us a list of challenges they had had when adopting agile.  We wrote them all down, then had everybody vote on the most interesting ones.  Then we split into two groups, and each group was assigned one of the agile challenges.  We had 20 minutes to discuss the challenge, and suggest solutions or approaches to improve things.  At the end of the 20 minutes, each of the groups gave a brief summary of their discussion and learning's, then we mixed up the groups and repeated with another 2 challenges. The 2 groups I was part of had some really interesting discussions, and suggestions: Unfinished Stories at the end of Sprints The first agile challenge we tackled, was something that every single Scrum team I have worked with has struggled with.  What happens when you get to the end of a Sprint, and there are some stories that are only partially completed.  The team in question was getting very de-moralized as they felt that every Sprint was a failure as they never had a set of fully completed stories. How do you avoid this? and/or what do you do when it happens? There were 2 pieces of advice that were well received: 1. Try to bring stories to completion before starting new ones.  This is advice I give all my Scrum teams.  If you have a 3-week sprint, what happens all too often is you get to the end of week 2, and a lot of stories are almost done; but almost none are completely done.  This is a Bad Thing.  I encourage the teams I work with to only start a new story as a very last resort.  If you finish your task look at the stories in progress and see if there’s anything you can do to help before moving onto a new story.  In the daily standup, put a focus on seeing what stories got completed yesterday, if a few days go by with none getting completed, be sure this fact is visible to the team and do something about it.  Something I’ve been doing recently is introducing WIP (Work In Progress) limits while using Scrum.  My current team has 2-week sprints, and we usually have about a dozen or stories in a sprint.  We instituted a WIP limit of 4 stories.  If 4 stories have been started but not finished then nobody is allowed to start new stories.  This made it obvious very quickly that our QA tasks were our bottleneck (we have 4 devs, but only 1.5 testers).  The WIP limit forced the developers to start to pickup QA tasks before moving onto the next dev tasks, and we ended our sprints with many more stories completely finished than we did before introducing WIP limits. 2. Rather than using time-boxed sprints, why not just do away with them altogether and go to a continuous flow type approach like KanBan.  Limit WIP to keep things under control, but don’t have a fixed time box at the end of which all tasks are supposed to be done.  This eliminates the problem almost entirely.  At some points in the project (releases) you need to be able to burn down all the half finished stories to get a stable release build, but this probably occurs less often than every sprint, and there are alternative approaches to achieve it using branching strategies rather than forcing your team to try to get to Zero WIP every 2-weeks (e.g. when you are ready for a release, create a new branch for any new stories, but finish all existing stories in the current branch and release it). Trying to Introduce Agile into a team with previous Bad Agile Experiences One of the agile adoption challenges somebody described, was he was in a leadership role on a team he had recently joined – lets call him Dave.  This team was currently very waterfall in their ALM process, but they were about to start on a new green-field project.  Dave wanted to use this new project as an opportunity to do things the “right way”, using an Agile methodology like Scrum, adopting TDD, automated builds, proper branching strategies, etc.  The problem he was facing is everybody else on the team had previously gone through an “Agile Adoption” that was a horrible failure.  Dave blamed this failure on the consultant brought in previously to lead this agile transition, but regardless of the reason, the team had very negative feelings towards agile, and was very resistant to trying it out again.  Dave possibly had the authority to try to force the team to adopt Agile practices, but we all know that doesn’t work very well.  What was Dave to do? Ultimately, the best advice was to question *why* did Dave want to adopt all these various practices. Rather than trying to convince his team that these were the “right way” to run a dev project, and trying to do a Big Bang approach to introducing change.  He would be better served by identifying problems the team currently faces, have a discussion with the team to get everybody to agree that specific problems existed, then have an open discussion about ways to address those problems.  This way Dave could incrementally introduce agile practices, and he doesn’t even need to identify them as “agile” practices if he doesn’t want to.  For example, when we discussed with Dave, he said probably the teams biggest problem was long periods without feedback from users, then finding out too late that the software is not going to meet their needs.  Rather than Dave jumping right to introducing Scrum and all it entails, it would be easier to get buy-in from team if he framed it as a discussion of existing problems, and brainstorming possible solutions.  And possibly most importantly, don’t try to do massive changes all at once with a team that has not bought-into those changes.  Taking an incremental approach has a greater chance of success. I see something similar in my day job all the time too.  Clients who for one reason or another claim to not be fans of agile (or not ready for agile yet).  But then they go on to ask me to help them get shorter feedback cycles, quicker delivery cycles, iterative development processes, etc.  It’s kind of funny at times, sometimes you just need to phrase the suggestions in terms they are using and avoid the word “agile”. PS – I haven’t blogged all that much over the past couple of years, but in an attempt to motivate myself, a few of us have accepted a blogger challenge.  There’s 6 of us who have all put some money into a pool, and the agreement is that we each need to blog at least once every 2-weeks.  The first 2-week period that we miss we’re eliminated.  Last person standing gets the money.  So expect at least one blog post every couple of weeks for the near future (I hope!).  And check out the blogs of the other 5 people in this blogger challenge: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Aaron Kowall: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/caffeinatedgeek Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com (note: site not available yet.  should be shortly or he owes me some money!)

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• Finding the groups of a user in WLS with OPSS

  - by user12587121

  How to find the group memberships for a user from a web application running in Weblogic server ?  This is useful for building up the profile of the user for security purposes for example. WLS as a container offers an identity store service which applications can access to query and manage identities known to the container.  This article for example shows how to recover the groups of the current user, but how can we find the same information for an arbitrary user ? It is the Oracle Platform for Securtiy Services (OPSS) that looks after the identity store in WLS and so it is in the OPSS APIs that we can find the way to recover this information. This is explained in the following documents.  Starting from the FMW 11.1.1.5 book list, with the Security Overview document we can see how WLS uses OPSS: Proceeding to the more detailed Application Security document, we find this list of useful references for security in FMW. We can follow on into the User/Role API javadoc. The Application Security document explains how to ensure that the identity store is configured appropriately to allow the OPSS APIs to work.  We must verify that the jps-config.xml file where the application  is deployed has it's identity store configured--look for the following elements in that file: <serviceProvider type="IDENTITY_STORE" name="idstore.ldap.provider" class="oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.ldap.LdapIdentityStoreProvider">             <description>LDAP-based IdentityStore Provider</description>  </serviceProvider> <serviceInstance name="idstore.ldap" provider="idstore.ldap.provider">             <property name="idstore.config.provider" value="oracle.security.jps.wls.internal.idstore.WlsLdapIdStoreConfigProvider"/>             <property name="CONNECTION_POOL_CLASS" value="oracle.security.idm.providers.stdldap.JNDIPool"/></serviceInstance> <serviceInstanceRef ref="idstore.ldap"/> The document contains a code sample for using the identity store here. Once we have the identity store reference we can recover the user's group memberships using the RoleManager interface:             RoleManager roleManager = idStore.getRoleManager();            SearchResponse grantedRoles = null;            try{                System.out.println("Retrieving granted WLS roles for user " + userPrincipal.getName());                grantedRoles = roleManager.getGrantedRoles(userPrincipal, false);                while( grantedRoles.hasNext()){                      Identity id = grantedRoles.next();                      System.out.println("  disp name=" + id.getDisplayName() +                                  " Name=" + id.getName() +                                  " Principal=" + id.getPrincipal() +                                  "Unique Name=" + id.getUniqueName());                     // Here, we must use WLSGroupImpl() to build the Principal otherwise                     // OES does not recognize it.                      retSubject.getPrincipals().add(new WLSGroupImpl(id.getPrincipal().getName()));                 }            }catch(Exception ex) {                System.out.println("Error getting roles for user " + ex.getMessage());                ex.printStackTrace();            }        }catch(Exception ex) {            System.out.println("OESGateway: Got exception instantiating idstore reference");        } This small JDeveloper project has a simple servlet that executes a request for the user weblogic's roles on executing a get on the default URL.  The full code to recover a user's goups is in the getSubjectWithRoles() method in the project.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012Popular ReleasesWPUtils: WPUtils 1.2: Just fixed an issue related to isolated storage path for ChoosePhotoBehavior. Specifically CreateDirectory method only accepts relative path, but was given a "/photos/" path which would result in exception. Please make sure you have this fix if you are using ChoosePhotoBehavior! NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.TFS Timesheets: TFS Timesheets 2.0: New features: Visual Studio 2012 support Bug fixes: Scaling mode inherited rather than font scalingCRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogFree Aspx Image Gallery: Free Aspx Image Gallery Release V1: This is first basic release of my free aspx image gallery project. It is free to use and modify by the user without any need of providing any credit to me.Simple Microsoft Excel Document Converter (Convert To XLS, XLSX, PDF, XPS): ExcelDocConverter 0.1 Beta: Initial Release Microsoft Excel Documents Converter. Microsoft Excel 1997-2003 (XLS) Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 (XLSX) Portable Document Format (PDF) Microsoft XPS Document (XPS) Difference between NET2.0 and NET3.5 This program uses .NET Framework runtime library to run. Basically, they are no differences. Only the runtime library version is different. For older computers, i.e. Windows XP, might not have .NET Framework 3.5 installed, then use NET2.0 in stead. But, some Windows XP SP2 mig...Office File Properties: Office File Properties 3.3.1: Bug fix. Convert file extension to lowercase before checking.LoBDb.NET: LoBDb.NET 1.0.9: Centido.Core library: 1) SQL Server script bug fix: an error when changing the MaxLength property of an indexed string column or when changing the Precision-Scale properties of a decimal column. LobDb.NET Manager: 1) Changing the Precision, Scale, Default Value, Minimum and Maximum properties of a decimal column now enables the Save button. 2) The MaxLength property of a string column and the Precision+Scale values of a decimal column are now displayed in the column list. 3) Changing the Min...Chaos games: Chaos games: Small app for generating fractals using chaos gamesVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.16: Changelog for 2.2.16 (32bit and 64bit) Now a standalone remote client also available to control the Engine remotely. 1. Added support for remote connections for status and configuration. MCEBuddy now uses port 23332. The remote server name, remote server port and local server port can be updated from the MCEBuddy.conf file BUT the Service or GUI needs to be restarted (i.e. reboot or restart service or restart program) for it to take effect. Refer to documentation for more details http://mce...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource: Version 1.1 Alpha 2: The component uses now the Google API V2.4 including the management API.MVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.1: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. This release uses Entity Framework 5 for data access and Ninject 3 for dependency injection. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.JSLint for Visual Studio 2010: 1.4.0: VS2012 support is alphaBlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 6): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 5 Added separate samples download with .vsix dependencies instead of source dependencies Support for FreeWheel SmartXML ad responses Support for Smooth Streaming SDK DownloaderPlugins Support for VMAP and TTML polling for live scenarios Support for custom smooth streaming byte stream and scheme handlers Support for new play time and position tracking plugin Added IsLiveChanged event Added AdaptivePlugin.MaxBitrate property Add...New ProjectsChaos games: Small app to generating fractals using chaos gamesDocument Digitalization System: This system will allow the users with on one or more PCs to digitalize pdf files and store it or export it to other file formats.ExternalTokenAnalysisOffline: SPUser?UserToken????????????????。FinalProjectSeniorProject: ***Unfinished*** Senior project build GL Ponpes Selamat Kendal: Aplikasi Akuntansi Sekolah Pondok Pesantren Modern Selamat KendalHealth Care Manager: One of keynote planned for the Brazzaville Microsoft event coming soon.Orchard Commerce History with PayPal: Project expands on Nwazet.Commerce module (and is required for this module to work). Adds a purchase history, product role associations, and PayPal.PDF.NET: PWMIS ?????? Ver 4.5 ???? SMS Egypt: This project is intended to make it easy for people to send SMS to their customers using SMS gateways inside and outside Egypt. Strong Caml: Use the familiar CAML syntax, but now do it in strongly-typed, dynamic code. Just follow Visual Studio's IntelliSense, and your CAML query can't go wrong!TrainingFrameWork: TrainingFrameWork

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• Effectiveness and Efficiency

  - by Daniel Moth

  In the professional environment, i.e. at work, I am always seeking personal growth and to be challenged. The result is that my assignments, my work list, my tasks, my goals, my commitments, my [insert whatever word resonates with you] keep growing (in scope and desired impact). Which in turn means I have to keep finding new ways to deliver more value, while not falling into the trap of working more hours. To do that I continuously evaluate both my effectiveness and my efficiency. EFFECTIVENESS The first thing I check is my effectiveness: Am I doing the right things? Am I focusing too much on unimportant things? Am I spending more time doing stuff that is important to my team/org/division/business/company, or am I spending it on stuff that is important to me and that I enjoy doing? Am I valuing activities that maybe I have outgrown and should be delegated to others who are at a stage I have surpassed (in Microsoft speak: is the work I am doing level appropriate or am I still operating at the previous level)? Notice how the answers to those questions change over time and due to certain events, so I have to remind myself to revisit them frequently. Events that force me to re-examine them are: change of role, change of team/org/etc, change of direction of team/org/etc, re-org, new hires on the team that take on some of the work I did, personal promotion, change of manager... and if none of those events has occurred since the last annual review, I ask myself those at each annual review anyway. If you think you are not being effective at work, make a list of the stuff that you do and start tracking where your time goes. In parallel, have a discussion with your manager about where they think your time should go. Ultimately your time is finite and hence it is your most precious investment, don't waste it. If your management doesn't value as highly what you spend your time on, then either convince your management, or stop spending your time on it, or find different management: Lead, Follow, or get out of the way! That's my view on effectiveness. You have to fix that before moving to being efficient, or you may end up being very efficient at stuff that nobody wants you to be doing in the first place. For example, you may be spending your time writing blog posts and becoming better and faster at it all the time. If your manager thinks that is not even part of your job description, you are wasting your time to satisfy your inner desires. Nobody can help you with your effectiveness other than your management chain and your management peers - they are the judges of it. EFFICIENCY The second thing I check is my efficiency: Am I doing things right? For me, doing things right means that I deliver the same quality of work faster [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. The result is that I can achieve more [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. Notice how the efficiency goal is a more portable one. If, by whatever criteria, you think you are the best at [insert your own skill here], this can change at two events: because you have new colleagues (who are potentially better than your older ones), and it can change with a change of manager (who has potentially higher expectations). That's about it. Once you are efficient at something, you carry that with you... All you need to really be doing here is, when taking on new kinds of work that you haven't done before, try a few approaches and devise a system so that you can become efficient at this new activity too... Just keep "collecting" stuff that you are efficient at. If you think you are not being efficient at something, break it down: What are the steps you take to complete that task? How long do you spend on each step? Talk to others about what steps they take, to see if you can optimize some steps away or trade them for better steps, or just learn how to complete a step faster. Have a system for every task you take so that you can have repeatable success. That's my view on efficiency. You have to fix it so that you can free up time to do more. When you plan a route from A to B - all else being equal - you try to get there as fast as possible so why would you not want to do that with your everyday work? For example, imagine you are inefficient at processing email: You spend more time than necessary dealing with email, and you still end up with dropped email threads and with slower response times than others. How can you improve? Talk to someone that you think is good at this, understand their system (e.g. here is my email processing system) and come up with one that works for you. Parting Thoughts Are you considered, by your colleagues and manager, an effective and efficient person at your workplace? If you are, what would you change if you were asked by your management to do the job of two people? Seriously, think about that! Your immediate reaction may be "that is not possible", but it actually is. You just have to re-assess what things that were previously important will now stop being important, by discussing them with your management and reaching agreement on relative priorities. For example, stuff that was previously on your plate may now have to be delegated or dropped. Where you thought you were efficient, maybe now you have to find an even faster path to completion, perhaps keeping in mind that Perfect is the Enemy of “Good Enough”. My personal experience (from both observing others and from my own reflection) is that when folks are struggling to keep up at work it is because of two reasons: They are investing energy in stuff that they enjoy doing which the business regards as having a lower priority than a lot of other things on their plate. They are completing tasks to a level of higher quality than what is required (due to personal pride) missing the big picture which almost always mandates completing three tasks at good enough quality than knocking only one of them out of the park while the other two come in late or not at all. There is a lot of content on the web, so I strongly encourage you to use your favorite search engine to read other views on effectiveness and efficiency (Bing, Google). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Using IIS Logs for Performance Testing with Visual Studio

  - by Tarun Arora

  In this blog post I’ll show you how you can play back the IIS Logs in Visual Studio to automatically generate the web performance tests. You can also download the sample solution I am demo-ing in the blog post. Introduction Performance testing is as important for new websites as it is for evolving websites. If you already have your website running in production you could mine the information available in IIS logs to analyse the dense zones (most used pages) and performance test those pages rather than wasting time testing & tuning the least used pages in your application. What are IIS Logs To help with server use and analysis, IIS is integrated with several types of log files. These log file formats provide information on a range of websites and specific statistics, including Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, user information and site visits as well as dates, times and queries. If you are using IIS 7 and above you will find the log files in the following directory C:\Interpub\Logs\ Walkthrough 1. Download and Install Log Parser from the Microsoft download Centre. You should see the LogParser.dll in the install folder, the default install location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2. LogParser.dll gives us a library to query the iis log files programmatically. By the way if you haven’t used Log Parser in the past, it is a is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. More details… 2. Create a new test project in Visual Studio. Let’s call it IISLogsToWebPerfTestDemo.   3.  Delete the UnitTest1.cs class that gets created by default. Right click the solution and add a project of type class library, name it, IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine. Delete the default class Program.cs that gets created with the project. 4. Under the IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine project add a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.WebTestFramework – c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies\Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.WebTestFramework.dll LogParser also called MSUtil - c:\users\tarora\documents\visual studio 2010\Projects\IisLogsToWebPerfTest\IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine\obj\Debug\Interop.MSUtil.dll 5. Right click IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine project and add a new classes – IISLogReader.cs The IISLogReader class queries the iis logs using the log parser. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using MSUtil; using LogQuery = MSUtil.LogQueryClassClass; using IISLogInputFormat = MSUtil.COMIISW3CInputContextClassClass; using LogRecordSet = MSUtil.ILogRecordset; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting; using System.Diagnostics; namespace IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine { // By making use of log parser it is possible to query the iis log using select queries public class IISLogReader { private string _iisLogPath; public IISLogReader(string iisLogPath) { _iisLogPath = iisLogPath; } public IEnumerable<WebTestRequest> GetRequests() { LogQuery logQuery = new LogQuery(); IISLogInputFormat iisInputFormat = new IISLogInputFormat(); // currently these columns give us suffient information to construct the web test requests string query = @"SELECT s-ip, s-port, cs-method, cs-uri-stem, cs-uri-query FROM " + _iisLogPath; LogRecordSet recordSet = logQuery.Execute(query, iisInputFormat); // Apply a bit of transformation while (!recordSet.atEnd()) { ILogRecord record = recordSet.getRecord(); if (record.getValueEx("cs-method").ToString() == "GET") { string server = record.getValueEx("s-ip").ToString(); string path = record.getValueEx("cs-uri-stem").ToString(); string querystring = record.getValueEx("cs-uri-query").ToString(); StringBuilder urlBuilder = new StringBuilder(); urlBuilder.Append("http://"); urlBuilder.Append(server); urlBuilder.Append(path); if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(querystring)) { urlBuilder.Append("?"); urlBuilder.Append(querystring); } // You could make substitutions by introducing parameterized web tests. WebTestRequest request = new WebTestRequest(urlBuilder.ToString()); Debug.WriteLine(request.UrlWithQueryString); yield return request; } recordSet.moveNext(); } Console.WriteLine(" That's it! Closing the reader"); recordSet.close(); } } }   6. Connect the dots by adding the project reference ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine’ to ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTest’. Right click the ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTest’ project and add a new class ‘WebTest1Coded.cs’ The WebTest1Coded.cs inherits from the WebTest class. By overriding the GetRequestMethod we can inject the log files to the IISLogReader class which uses Log parser to query the log file and extract the web requests to generate the web test request which is yielded back for play back when the test is run. namespace IisLogsToWebPerfTest { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.Rules; using IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine; // This class is a coded web performance test implementation, that simply passes // the path of the iis logs to the IisLogReader class which does the heavy // lifting of reading the contents of the log file and converting them to tests. // You could have multiple such classes that inherit from WebTest and implement // GetRequestEnumerator Method and pass differnt log files for different tests. public class WebTest1Coded : WebTest { public WebTest1Coded() { this.PreAuthenticate = true; } public override IEnumerator<WebTestRequest> GetRequestEnumerator() { // substitute the highlighted path with the path of the iis log file IISLogReader reader = new IISLogReader(@"C:\Demo\iisLog1.log"); foreach (WebTestRequest request in reader.GetRequests()) { yield return request; } } } }   7. Its time to fire the test off and see the iis log playback as a web performance test. From the Test menu choose Test View Window you should be able to see the WebTest1Coded test show up. Highlight the test and press Run selection (you can also debug the test in case you face any failures during test execution). 8. Optionally you can create a Load Test by keeping ‘WebTest1Coded’ as the base test. Conclusion You have just helped your testing team, you now have become the coolest developer in your organization! Jokes apart, log parser and web performance test together allow you to save a lot of time by not having to worry about what to test or even worrying about how to record the test. If you haven’t already, download the solution from here. You can take this to the next level by using LogParser to extract the log files as part of an end of day batch to a database. See the usage trends by user this solution over a longer term and have your tests consume the web requests now stored in the database to generate the web performance tests. If you like the post, don’t forget to share … Keep RocKiNg!

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• Benefits of Behavior Driven Development

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/07/26/benefits-of-behavior-driven-development.aspxContinuing my previous article on BDD, I wanted to point out some benefits of BDD and since BDD is an extension of Test Driven Development (TDD), you get those as well. I’ll add another article on some possible downsides of this approach. There are many articles about the benefits of TDD and they apply to BDD. I’ve pointed out some here and copied some of the main points for each article, but there are many more including the book The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove. http://geekswithblogs.net/leesblog/archive/2008/04/30/the-benefits-of-test-driven-development.aspx (Lee Brandt) Stability Accountability Design Ability Separated Concerns Progress Indicator http://tddftw.com/benefits-of-tdd/ Help maintainers understand the intention behind the code Bring validation and proper data handling concerns to the forefront. Writing the tests first is fun. Better APIs come from writing testable code. TDD will make you a better developer. http://www.slideshare.net/dhelper/benefit-from-unit-testing-in-the-real-world (from Typemock). Take a look at the slides, especially the extra time required for TDD (slide 10) and the next one of the bugs avoided using TDD (slide 11). Less bugs (slide 11) about testing and development (13) Increase confidence in code (14) Fearlessly change your code (14) Document Requirements (14) also see http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2013/06/01/roc-rocks.aspx Discover usability issues early (14) All these points and articles are great and there are many more. The following are my additions to the benefits of BDD from using it in real projects for my company. July 2013 on MSDN - Behavior-Driven Design with SpecFlow Scott Allen did a very informative TDD and MVC module, but to me he is doing BDDCompile and Execute Requirements in Microsoft .NET ~ Video from TechEd 2012 Communication I was working through a complicated task that the decision tree kept growing. After writing out the Given, When, Then of the scenario, I was able tell QA what I had worked through for their initial test cases. They were able to add from there. It is also useful to use this language with other developers, managers, or clients to help make informed decisions on if it meets the requirements or if it can simplified to save time (money). Thinking through solutions, before starting to code This was the biggest benefit to me. I like to jump into coding to figure out the problem. Many times I don't understand my path well enough and have to do some parts over. A past supervisor told me several times during reviews that I need to get better at seeing "the forest for the trees". When I sit down and write out the behavior that I need to implement, I force myself to think things out further and catch scenarios before they get to QA. A co-worker that is new to BDD and we’ve been using it in our new project for the last 6 months, said “It really clarifies things”. It took him awhile to understand it all, but now he’s seeing the value of this approach (yes there are some downsides, but that is a different issue). Developers’ Confidence This is huge for me. With tests in place, my confidence grows that I won’t break code that I’m not directly changing. In the past, I’ve worked on projects with out tests and we would frequently find regression bugs (or worse the users would find them). That isn’t fun. We don’t catch all problems with the tests, but when QA catches one, I can write a test to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s also good for Releasing code, telling your manager that it’s good to go. As time goes on and the code gets older, how confident are you that checking in code won’t break something somewhere else? Merging code - pre release confidence If you’re merging code a lot, it’s nice to have the tests to help ensure you didn’t merge incorrectly. Interrupted work I had a task that I started and planned out, then was interrupted for a month because of different priorities. When I started it up again, and un-shelved my changes, I had the BDD specs and it helped me remember what I had figured out and what was left to do. It would have much more difficult without the specs and tests. Testing and verifying complicated scenarios Sometimes in the UI there are scenarios that get tricky, because there are a lot of steps involved (click here to open the dialog, enter the information, make sure it’s valid, when I click cancel it should do {x}, when I click ok it should close and do {y}, then do this, etc….). With BDD I can avoid some of the mouse clicking define the scenarios and have them re-run quickly, without using a mouse. UI testing is still needed, but this helps a bunch. The same can be true for tricky server logic. Documentation of Assumptions and Specifications The BDD spec tests (Jasmine or SpecFlow or other tool) also work as documentation and show what the original developer was trying to accomplish. It’s not a different Word document, so developers will keep this up to date, instead of letting it become obsolete. What happens if you leave the project (consulting, new job, etc) with no specs or at the least good comments in the code? Sometimes I think of a new scenario, so I add a failing spec and continue in the same stream of thought (don’t forget it because it was on a piece of paper or in a notepad). Then later I can come back and handle it and have it documented. Jasmine tests and JavaScript –> help deal with the non-typed system I like JavaScript, but I also dislike working with JavaScript. I miss C# telling me if a property doesn’t actually exist at build time. I like the idea of TypeScript and hope to use it more in the future. I also use KnockoutJs, which has observables that need to be called with ending (), since the observable is a function. It’s hard to remember when to use () or not and the Jasmine specs/tests help ensure the correct usage.   This should give you an idea of the benefits that I see in using the BDD approach. I’m sure there are more. It talks a lot of practice, investment and experimentation to figure out how to approach this and to get comfortable with it. I agree with Scott Allen in the video I linked above “Remember that TDD can take some practice. So if you're not doing test-driven design right now? You can start and practice and get better. And you'll reach a point where you'll never want to get back.”

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• How to begin? Windows 8 Development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I convinced you in my last post to do some Win8 development. You want a piece of that cake, or whatever your reasons may be. Good! Welcome to the club! Now let me ask you a question: what are you going to write? Ah. That’s the big one, isn’t it? What indeed? If you have been creating applications for computers before you’re in for quite a shock. The way people perceive apps on a tablet is quite different from what we know as applications. There’s a reason we call them apps instead of applications! Yes, technically they are applications but we don’t call them apps only because it sounds cool. The abbreviated form of the word applications itself is a pointer. Apps are small. Apps are focused. Apps are more lightweight. Apps do one thing but they do that one thing extremely good. In the ‘old’ days we wrote huge systems. We build ecosystems of services, screens, databases and more to create a system that provides value for the user. Think about it: what application do you use most at work? Can you in one sentence describe what it is, or what it does and yet still distinctively describe its purpose? I doubt you can. Let’s have a look at Outlouk. We all know it and we all love or hate it. But what is it? A mail program? No, there’s so much more there: calendar, contacts, RSS feeds and so on. Some call it a ‘collaboration’  application but that’s not really true as well. After all, why should a collaboration application give me my schedule for the day? I think the best way to describe Outlook is “client for Exchange”  although that isn’t accurate either. Anyway: Outlook is a great application but it’s not an ‘app’ and therefor not very suitable for WinRT. Ok. Disclaimer here: yes, you can write big applications for WinRT. Some will. But that’s not what 99.9% of the developers will do. So I am stating here that big applications are not meant for WinRT. If 0.01% of the developers think that this is nonsense then they are welcome to go ahead but for the majority here this is not what we’re talking about. So: Apps are small, lightweight and good at what they do but only at that. If you’re a Phone developer you already know that: Phone apps on any platform fit the description I have above. If you’ve ever worked in a large cooperation before you might have seen one of these before: the Mission Statement. It’s supposed to be a oneliner that sums up what the company is supposed to do. Funny enough: although this doesn’t work for large companies it does work for defining your app. A mission statement for an app describes what it does. If it doesn’t fit in the mission statement then your app is going to get to big and will fail. A statement like this should be in the following style “<your app name> is the best app to <describe single task>” Fill in the blanks, write it and go! Mmm.. not really. There are some things there we need to think about. But the statement is a very, very important one. If you cannot fit your app in that line you’re preparing to fail. Your app will become to big, its purpose will be unclear and it will be hard to use. People won’t download it and those who do will give it a bad rating therefor preventing that huge success you’ve been dreaming about. Stick to the statement! Ok, let’s give it a try: “PlanesAreCool” is the best app to do planespotting in the field. You might have seen these people along runways of airports: taking photographs of airplanes and noting down their numbers and arrival- and departure times. We are going to help them out with our great app! If you look at the statement, can you guess what it does? I bet you can. If you find out it isn’t clear enough of if it’s too broad, refine it. This is probably the most important step in the development of your app so give it enough time! So. We’ve got the statement. Print it out, stick it to the wall and look at it. What does it tell you? If you see this, what do you think the app does? Write that down. Sit down with some friends and talk about it. What do they expect from an app like this? Write that down as well. Brainstorm. Make a list of features. This is mine: Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. Now, I must make it clear that I am not a planespotter nor do I know what one does. So if the above list makes no sense, I apologize. There is a lesson: write apps for stuff you know about…. First of all, let’s look at our statement and then go through the list of features. Remove everything that has nothing to do with that statement! If you end up with an empty list, try again with both steps. Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. That's better. The things I removed could be pretty useful to a plane spotter and could be fun to write. But do they match the statement? I said that the app is for spotting in the field, so “look up airfields” doesn’t belong there: I know where I am so why look it up? And the same goes for inviting friends or looking up the weather conditions for tomorrow. I am at the airfield right now, looking through my binoculars at the planes. I know the weather now and I don’t care about tomorrow. If you feel the items you’ve crossed out are valuable, then why not write another app? One that says “SpotNoter” is the best app for preparing a day of spotting with my friends. That’s a different app! Remember: Win8 apps are small and very good at doing ONE thing, and one thing only! If you have made that list, it’s time to prepare the navigation of your app. The navigation is how users see your app and how they use it. We’ll do that next time!

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