job definition - Page 405

Is your team is a high-performing team?

As a child I can remember looking out of the car window as my father drove along the Interstate in Florida while seeing prisoners wearing bright orange jump suits and prison guards keeping a watchful eye on them. The prisoners were taking part in a prison road gang. These road gangs were formed to help the state maintain the state highway infrastructure. The prisoner’s primary responsibilities are to pick up trash and debris from the roadway. This is a prime example of a work group or working group used by most prison systems in the United States. Work groups or working groups can be defined as a collection of individuals or entities working together to achieve a specific goal or accomplish a specific set of tasks. Typically these groups are only established for a short period of time and are dissolved once the desired outcome has been achieved. More often than not group members usually feel as though they are expendable to the group and some even dread that they are even in the group. "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable." (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993) So how do you determine that a team is a high-performing team? This can be determined by three base line criteria that include: consistently high quality output, the promotion of personal growth and well being of all team members, and most importantly the ability to learn and grow as a unit. Initially, a team can successfully create high-performing output without meeting all three criteria, however this will erode over time because team members will feel detached from the group or that they are not growing then the quality of the output will decline. High performing teams are similar to work groups because they both utilize a collection of individuals or entities to accomplish tasks. What distinguish a high-performing team from a work group are its characteristics. High-performing teams contain five core characteristics. These characteristics are what separate a group from a team. The five characteristics of a high-performing team include: Purpose, Performance Measures, People with Tasks and Relationship Skills, Process, and Preparation and Practice. A high-performing team is much more than a work group, and typically has a life cycle that can vary from team to team. The standard team lifecycle consists of five states and is comparable to a human life cycle. The five states of a high-performing team lifecycle include: Formulating, Storming, Normalizing, Performing, and Adjourning. The Formulating State of a team is first realized when the team members are first defined and roles are assigned to all members. This initial stage is very important because it can set the tone for the team and can ultimately determine its success or failure. In addition, this stage requires the team to have a strong leader because team members are normally unclear about specific roles, specific obstacles and goals that my lay ahead of them. Finally, this stage is where most team members initially meet one another prior to working as a team unless the team members already know each other. The Storming State normally arrives directly after the formulation of a new team because there are still a lot of unknowns amongst the newly formed assembly. As a general rule most of the parties involved in the team are still getting used to the workload, pace of work, deadlines and the validity of various tasks that need to be performed by the group. In this state everything is questioned because there are so many unknowns. Items commonly questioned include the credentials of others on the team, the actual validity of a project, and the leadership abilities of the team leader. This can be exemplified by looking at the interactions between animals when they first meet. If we look at a scenario where two people are walking directly toward each other with their dogs. The dogs will automatically enter the Storming State because they do not know the other dog. Typically in this situation, they attempt to define which is more dominating via play or fighting depending on how the dogs interact with each other. Once dominance has been defined and accepted by both dogs then they will either want to play or leave depending on how the dogs interacted and other environmental variables. Once the Storming State has been realized then the Normalizing State takes over. This state is entered by a team once all the questions of the Storming State have been answered and the team has been tested by a few tasks or projects. Typically, participants in the team are filled with energy, and comradery, and a strong alliance with team goals and objectives. A high school football team is a perfect example of the Normalizing State when they start their season. The player positions have been assigned, the depth chart has been filled and everyone is focused on winning each game. All of the players encourage and expect each other to perform at the best of their abilities and are united by competition from other teams. The Performing State is achieved by a team when its history, working habits, and culture solidify the team as one working unit. In this state team members can anticipate specific behaviors, attitudes, reactions, and challenges are seen as opportunities and not problems. Additionally, each team member knows their role in the team’s success, and the roles of others. This is the most productive state of a group and is where all the time invested working together really pays off. If you look at an Olympic figure skating team skate you can easily see how the time spent working together benefits their performance. They skate as one unit even though it is comprised of two skaters. Each skater has their routine completely memorized as well as their partners. This allows them to anticipate each other’s moves on the ice makes their skating look effortless. The final state of a team is the Adjourning State. This state is where accomplishments by the team and each individual team member are recognized. Additionally, this state also allows for reflection of the interactions between team members, work accomplished and challenges that were faced. Finally, the team celebrates the challenges they have faced and overcome as a unit. Currently in the workplace teams are divided into two different types: Co-located and Distributed Teams. Co-located teams defined as the traditional group of people working together in an office, according to Andy Singleton of Assembla. This traditional type of a team has dominated business in the past due to inadequate technology, which forced workers to primarily interact with one another via face to face meetings. Team meetings are primarily lead by the person with the highest status in the company. Having personally, participated in meetings of this type, usually a select few of the team members dominate the flow of communication which reduces the input of others in group discussions. Since discussions are dominated by a select few individuals the discussions and group discussion are skewed in favor of the individuals who communicate the most in meetings. In addition, Team members might not give their full opinions on a topic of discussion in part not to offend or create controversy amongst the team and can alter decision made in meetings towards those of the opinions of the dominating team members. Distributed teams are by definition spread across an area or subdivided into separate sections. That is exactly what distributed teams when compared to a more traditional team. It is common place for distributed teams to have team members across town, in the next state, across the country and even with the advances in technology over the last 20 year across the world. These teams allow for more diversity compared to the other type of teams because they allow for more flexibility regarding location. A team could consist of a 30 year old male Italian project manager from New York, a 50 year old female Hispanic from California and a collection of programmers from India because technology allows them to communicate as if they were standing next to one another. In addition, distributed team members consult with more team members prior to making decisions compared to traditional teams, and take longer to come to decisions due to the changes in time zones and cultural events. However, team members feel more empowered to speak out when they do not agree with the team and to notify others of potential issues regarding the work that the team is doing. Virtual teams which are a subset of the distributed team type is changing organizational strategies due to the fact that a team can now in essence be working 24 hrs a day because of utilizing employees in various time zones and locations. A primary example of this is with customer services departments, a company can have multiple call centers spread across multiple time zones allowing them to appear to be open 24 hours a day while all a employees work from 9AM to 5 PM every day. Virtual teams also allow human resources departments to go after the best talent for the company regardless of where the potential employee works because they will be a part of a virtual team all that is need is the proper technology to be setup to allow everyone to communicate. In addition to allowing employees to work from home, the company can save space and resources by not having to provide a desk for every team member. In fact, those team members that randomly come into the office can actually share one desk amongst multiple people. This is definitely a cost cutting plus given the current state of the economy. One thing that can turn a team into a high-performing team is leadership. High-performing team leaders need to focus on investing in ongoing personal development, provide team members with direction, structure, and resources needed to accomplish their work, make the right interventions at the right time, and help the team manage boundaries between the team and various external parties involved in the teams work. A team leader needs to invest in ongoing personal development in order to effectively manage their team. People have said that attitude is everything; this is very true about leaders and leadership. A team takes on the attitudes and behaviors of its leaders. This can potentially harm the team and the team’s output. Leaders must concentrate on self-awareness, and understanding their team’s group dynamics to fully understand how to lead them. In addition, always learning new leadership techniques from other effective leaders is also very beneficial. Providing team members with direction, structure, and resources that they need to accomplish their work collectively sounds easy, but it is not. Leaders need to be able to effectively communicate with their team on how their work helps the company reach for its organizational vision. Conversely, the leader needs to allow his team to work autonomously within specific guidelines to turn the company’s vision into a reality. This being said the team must be appropriately staffed according to the size of the team’s tasks and their complexity. These tasks should be clear, and be meaningful to the company’s objectives and allow for feedback to be exchanged with the leader and the team member and the leader and upper management. Now if the team is properly staffed, and has a clear and full understanding of what is to be done; the company also must supply the workers with the proper tools to achieve the tasks that they are asked to do. No one should be asked to dig a hole without being given a shovel. Finally, leaders must reward their team members for accomplishments that they achieve. Awards could range from just a simple congratulatory email, a party to close the completion of a large project, or other monetary rewards. Managing boundaries is very important for team leaders because it can alter attitudes of team members and can add undue stress to the team which will force them to loose focus on the tasks at hand for the group. Team leaders should promote communication between team members so that burdens are shared amongst the team and solutions can be derived from hearing the opinions of multiple sources. This also reinforces team camaraderie and working as a unit. Team leaders must manage the type and timing of interventions as to not create an even bigger mess within the team. Poorly timed interventions can really deflate team members and make them question themselves. This could really increase further and undue interventions by the team leader. Typically, the best time for interventions is when the team is just starting to form so that all unproductive behaviors are removed from the team and that it can retain focus on its agenda. If an intervention is effectively executed the team will feel energized about the work that they are doing, promote communication and interaction amongst the group and improve moral overall. High-performing teams are very import to organizations because they consistently produce high quality output and develop a collective purpose for their work. This drive to succeed allows team members to utilize specific talents allowing for growth in these areas. In addition, these team members usually take on a sense of ownership with their projects and feel that the other team members are irreplaceable. References: http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/3127/Three-ways-to-organize-your-team-co-located-outsourced-or-global.aspx Katzenbach, J.R. & Smith, D.K. (1993). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business School.

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Import Data from Excel sheet to DB Table through OAF page

- by PRajkumar

1. Create a New Workspace and Project File > New > General > Workspace Configured for Oracle Applications File Name – PrajkumarImportxlsDemo Automatically a new OA Project will also be created Project Name -- ImportxlsDemo Default Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.importxlsdemo 2. Add JAR file jxl-2.6.3.jar to Apache Library Download jxl-2.6.3.jar from following link – http://www.findjar.com/jar/net.sourceforge.jexcelapi/jars/jxl-2.6.jar.html Steps to add jxl.jar file in Local Machine Right Click on ImportxlsDemo > Project Properties > Libraries > Add jar/Directory and browse to directory where jxl-2.6.3.jar has been downloaded and select the JAR file Steps to add jxl.jar file at EBS middle tier On your EBS middile tier copy jxl.jar at $FND_TOP/java/3rdparty/standalone Add $FND_TOP/java/3rdparty/standalone\jxl.jar to custom classpath in Jser.properties file which is at $IAS_ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Jserv/etc wrapper.classpath=/U01/oracle/dev/devappl/fnd/11.5.0/java/3rdparty/stdalone/jxl.jar Bounce Apache Server 3. Create a New Application Module (AM) Right Click on ImportxlsDemo > New > ADF Business Components > Application Module Name -- ImportxlsAM Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.importxlsdemo.server Check Application Module Class: ImportxlsAMImpl Generate JavaFile(s) 4. Create Test Table in which we will insert data from excel CREATE TABLE xx_import_excel_data_demo ( -- -------------------- -- Data Columns -- -------------------- column1 VARCHAR2(100), column2 VARCHAR2(100), column3 VARCHAR2(100), column4 VARCHAR2(100), column5 VARCHAR2(100), -- -------------------- -- Who Columns -- -------------------- last_update_date DATE NOT NULL, last_updated_by NUMBER NOT NULL, creation_date DATE NOT NULL, created_by NUMBER NOT NULL, last_update_login NUMBER ); 5. Create a New Entity Object (EO) Right click on ImportxlsDemo > New > ADF Business Components > Entity Object Name – ImportxlsEO Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.importxlsdemo.schema.server Database Objects -- XX_IMPORT_EXCEL_DATA_DEMO Note – By default ROWID will be the primary key if we will not make any column to be primary key Check the Accessors, Create Method, Validation Method and Remove Method 6. Create a New View Object (VO) Right click on ImportxlsDemo > New > ADF Business Components > View Object Name -- ImportxlsVO Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.importxlsdemo.server In Step2 in Entity Page select ImportxlsEO and shuttle it to selected list In Step3 in Attributes Window select all columns and shuttle them to selected list In Java page Uncheck Generate Java file for View Object Class: ImportxlsVOImpl Select Generate Java File for View Row Class: ImportxlsVORowImpl -> Generate Java File -> Accessors 7. Add Your View Object to Root UI Application Module Right click on ImportxlsAM > Edit ImportxlsAM > Data Model > Select ImportxlsVO and shuttle to Data Model list 8. Create a New Page Right click on ImportxlsDemo > New > Web Tier > OA Components > Page Name -- ImportxlsPG Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.importxlsdemo.webui 9. Select the ImportxlsPG and go to the strcuture pane where a default region has been created 10. Select region1 and set the following properties: Attribute Property ID PageLayoutRN AM Definition prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.importxlsdemo.server.ImportxlsAM Window Title Import Data From Excel through OAF Page Demo Window Title Import Data From Excel through OAF Page Demo 11. Create messageComponentLayout Region Under Page Layout Region Right click PageLayoutRN > New > Region Attribute Property ID MainRN Item Style messageComponentLayout 12. Create a New Item messageFileUpload Bean under MainRN Right click on MainRN > New > messageFileUpload Set Following Properties for New Item -- Attribute Property ID MessageFileUpload Item Style messageFileUpload 13. Create a New Item Submit Button Bean under MainRN Right click on MainRN > New > messageLayout Set Following Properties for messageLayout -- Attribute Property ID ButtonLayout Right Click on ButtonLayout > New > Item Attribute Property ID Go Item Style submitButton Attribute Set /oracle/apps/fnd/attributesets/Buttons/Go 14. Create Controller for page ImportxlsPG Right Click on PageLayoutRN > Set New Controller Package Name: prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.importxlsdemo.webui Class Name: ImportxlsCO Write Following Code in ImportxlsCO in processFormRequest import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OAApplicationModule; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OAException; import java.io.Serializable; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.webui.OAControllerImpl; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.webui.OAPageContext; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.webui.beans.OAWebBean; import oracle.cabo.ui.data.DataObject; import oracle.jbo.domain.BlobDomain; public void processFormRequest(OAPageContext pageContext, OAWebBean webBean) { super.processFormRequest(pageContext, webBean); if (pageContext.getParameter("Go") != null) { DataObject fileUploadData = (DataObject)pageContext.getNamedDataObject("MessageFileUpload"); String fileName = null; try { fileName = (String)fileUploadData.selectValue(null, "UPLOAD_FILE_NAME"); } catch(NullPointerException ex) { throw new OAException("Please Select a File to Upload", OAException.ERROR); } BlobDomain uploadedByteStream = (BlobDomain)fileUploadData.selectValue(null, fileName); try { OAApplicationModule oaapplicationmodule = pageContext.getRootApplicationModule(); Serializable aserializable2[] = {uploadedByteStream}; Class aclass2[] = {BlobDomain.class }; oaapplicationmodule.invokeMethod("ReadExcel", aserializable2,aclass2); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new OAException(ex.toString(), OAException.ERROR); } } } Write Following Code in ImportxlsAMImpl.java import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStream; import jxl.Cell; import jxl.CellType; import jxl.Sheet; import jxl.Workbook; import jxl.read.biff.BiffException; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.server.OAApplicationModuleImpl; import oracle.jbo.Row; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OAViewObject; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.server.OAViewObjectImpl; import oracle.jbo.domain.BlobDomain; public void createRecord(String[] excel_data) { OAViewObject vo = (OAViewObject)getImportxlsVO1(); if (!vo.isPreparedForExecution()) { vo.executeQuery(); } Row row = vo.createRow(); try { for (int i=0; i < excel_data.length; i++) { row.setAttribute("Column" +(i+1) ,excel_data[i]); } } catch(Exception e) { System.out.println(e.getMessage()); } vo.insertRow(row); getTransaction().commit(); } public void ReadExcel(BlobDomain fileData) throws IOException { String[] excel_data = new String[5]; InputStream inputWorkbook = fileData.getInputStream(); Workbook w; try { w = Workbook.getWorkbook(inputWorkbook); // Get the first sheet Sheet sheet = w.getSheet(0); for (int i = 0; i < sheet.getRows(); i++) { for (int j = 0; j < sheet.getColumns(); j++) { Cell cell = sheet.getCell(j, i); CellType type = cell.getType(); if (cell.getType() == CellType.LABEL) { System.out.println("I got a label " + cell.getContents()); excel_data[j] = cell.getContents(); } if (cell.getType() == CellType.NUMBER) { System.out.println("I got a number " + cell.getContents()); excel_data[j] = cell.getContents(); } } createRecord(excel_data); } } catch (BiffException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } 15. Congratulation you have successfully finished. Run Your page and Test Your Work Consider Excel PRAJ_TEST.xls with following data -- Lets Try to import this data into DB Table --

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Sending Messages to SignalR Hubs from the Outside

- by Ricardo Peres

Introduction You are by now probably familiarized with SignalR, Microsoft’s API for real-time web functionality. This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest products Microsoft has released in recent time. Usually, people login to a site and enter some page which is connected to a SignalR hub. Then they can send and receive messages – not just text messages, mind you – to other users in the same hub. Also, the server can also take the initiative to send messages to all or a specified subset of users on its own, this is known as server push. The normal flow is pretty straightforward, Microsoft has done a great job with the API, it’s clean and quite simple to use. And for the latter – the server taking the initiative – it’s also quite simple, just involves a little more work. The Problem The API for sending messages can be achieved from inside a hub – an instance of the Hub class – which is something that we don’t have if we are the server and we want to send a message to some user or group of users: the Hub instance is only instantiated in response to a client message. The Solution It is possible to acquire a hub’s context from outside of an actual Hub instance, by calling GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<T>(). This API allows us to: Broadcast messages to all connected clients (possibly excluding some); Send messages to a specific client; Send messages to a group of clients. So, we have groups and clients, each is identified by a string. Client strings are called connection ids and group names are free-form, given by us. The problem with client strings is, we do not know how these map to actual users. One way to achieve this mapping is by overriding the Hub’s OnConnected and OnDisconnected methods and managing the association there. Here’s an example: 1: public class MyHub : Hub 2: { 3: private static readonly IDictionary<String, ISet<String>> users = new ConcurrentDictionary<String, ISet<String>>(); 4: 5: public static IEnumerable<String> GetUserConnections(String username) 6: { 7: ISet<String> connections; 8: 9: users.TryGetValue(username, out connections); 10: 11: return (connections ?? Enumerable.Empty<String>()); 12: } 13: 14: private static void AddUser(String username, String connectionId) 15: { 16: ISet<String> connections; 17: 18: if (users.TryGetValue(username, out connections) == false) 19: { 20: connections = users[username] = new HashSet<String>(); 21: } 22: 23: connections.Add(connectionId); 24: } 25: 26: private static void RemoveUser(String username, String connectionId) 27: { 28: users[username].Remove(connectionId); 29: } 30: 31: public override Task OnConnected() 32: { 33: AddUser(this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name, this.Context.ConnectionId); 34: return (base.OnConnected()); 35: } 36: 37: public override Task OnDisconnected() 38: { 39: RemoveUser(this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name, this.Context.ConnectionId); 40: return (base.OnDisconnected()); 41: } 42: } As you can see, I am using a static field to store the mapping between a user and its possibly many connections – for example, multiple open browser tabs or even multiple browsers accessing the same page with the same login credentials. The user identity, as is normal in .NET, is obtained from the IPrincipal which in SignalR hubs case is stored in Context.Request.User. Of course, this property will only have a meaningful value if we enforce authentication. Another way to go is by creating a group for each user that connects: 1: public class MyHub : Hub 2: { 3: public override Task OnConnected() 4: { 5: this.Groups.Add(this.Context.ConnectionId, this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name); 6: return (base.OnConnected()); 7: } 8: 9: public override Task OnDisconnected() 10: { 11: this.Groups.Remove(this.Context.ConnectionId, this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name); 12: return (base.OnDisconnected()); 13: } 14: } In this case, we will have a one-to-one equivalence between users and groups. All connections belonging to the same user will fall in the same group. So, if we want to send messages to a user from outside an instance of the Hub class, we can do something like this, for the first option – user mappings stored in a static field: 1: public void SendUserMessage(String username, String message) 2: { 3: var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<MyHub>(); 4: 5: foreach (String connectionId in HelloHub.GetUserConnections(username)) 6: { 7: context.Clients.Client(connectionId).sendUserMessage(message); 8: } 9: } And for using groups, its even simpler: 1: public void SendUserMessage(String username, String message) 2: { 3: var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<MyHub>(); 4: 5: context.Clients.Group(username).sendUserMessage(message); 6: } Using groups has the advantage that the IHubContext interface returned from GetHubContext has direct support for groups, no need to send messages to individual connections. Of course, you can wrap both mapping options in a common API, perhaps exposed through IoC. One example of its interface might be: 1: public interface IUserToConnectionMappingService 2: { 3: //associate and dissociate connections to users 4: 5: void AddUserConnection(String username, String connectionId); 6: 7: void RemoveUserConnection(String username, String connectionId); 8: } SignalR has built-in dependency resolution, by means of the static GlobalHost.DependencyResolver property: 1: //for using groups (in the Global class) 2: GlobalHost.DependencyResolver.Register(typeof(IUserToConnectionMappingService), () => new GroupsMappingService()); 3: 4: //for using a static field (in the Global class) 5: GlobalHost.DependencyResolver.Register(typeof(IUserToConnectionMappingService), () => new StaticMappingService()); 6: 7: //retrieving the current service (in the Hub class) 8: var mapping = GlobalHost.DependencyResolver.Resolve<IUserToConnectionMappingService>(); Now all you have to do is implement GroupsMappingService and StaticMappingService with the code I shown here and change SendUserMessage method to rely in the dependency resolver for the actual implementation. Stay tuned for more SignalR posts!

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SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 1 of 2

- by pinaldave

This is first part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen is also a Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, PMP, and also speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development. Stephen is also a board member of the Scrum Alliance. Startups – Everybodies Dream Start-up companies are an important topic right now – everyone wants to start their own business. It is also important to remember that all companies were a start up at one point – from your corner store to the giants like Microsoft and Apple. Research proves that not every start-up succeeds, in fact, most will fail before their first year. There are many reasons for this, and this could be due to the fact that there are many stages to a start-up company, and stumbling at any of these stages can lead to failure. It is important to understand what makes a start-up company succeed at all its hurdles to become successful. It is even important to define success. For most start-ups this would mean becoming their own independently functioning company or to be bought out for a hefty profit by a larger company. The idea of making a hefty profit by living your dream is extremely important, and you can even think of start-ups as the new craze. That’s why studying them is so important – they are very popular, but things have changed a lot since their inception. Starting the Startups Beginning a start-up company used to be difficult, but now facilities and information is widely available, and it is much easier. But that means it is much easier to fail, also. Previously to start your own company, everything was planned and organized, resources were ensured and backed up before beginning; even the idea of starting your own business was a big thing. Now anybody can do it, and the steps are simple and outlines everywhere – you can get online software and easily outsource , cloud source, or crowdsource a lot of your material. But without the type of planning previously required, things can often go badly. New Products – New Ideas – New World There are so many fantastic new products, but they don’t reach success all the time. I find start-up companies very interesting, and whenever I meet someone who is interested in the subject or already starting their own company, I always ask what they are doing, their plans, goals, market, etc. I am sorry to say that in most cases, they cannot answer my questions. It is true that many fantastic ideas fail because of bad decisions. These bad decisions were not made intentionally, but people were simply unaware of what they should be doing. This will always lead to failure. But I am happy to say that all these issues can be gone because Pluralsight is now offering a course all about start-ups by Stephen Forte. Stephen is a start up leader. He has successfully started many companies and most are still going strong, or have gone on to even bigger and better things. Beginning Course on Startup I have always thought start-ups are a fascinating subject, and decided to take his course, but it is three hours long. This would be hard to fit into my busy work day all at once, so I decided to do half of his course before my daughter wakes up, and the other half after she goes to sleep. The course is divided into six modules, so this would be easy to do. I began the first chapter early in the morning, at 5 am. Stephen jumped right into the middle of the subject in the very first module – designing your business plan. The first question you will have to answer to yourself, to others, and to investors is: What is your product and when will we be able to see it? So a very important concept is a “minimal viable product.” This means setting goals for yourself and your product. We all have large dreams, but your minimal viable product doesn’t have to be your final vision at the very first. For example: Apple is a giant company, but it is still evolving. Steve Jobs didn’t envision the iPhone 6 at the very beginning. He had to start at the first iPhone and do his market research, and the idea evolved into the technology you see now. So for yourself, you should decide a beginning and stop point. Do your market research. Determine who you want to reach, what audience you want for your product. You can have a great idea that simply will not work in the market, do need, bottlenecks, lack of resources, or competition. There is a lot of research that needs to be done before you even write a business plan, and Stephen covers it in the very first chapter. The Team – Unique Key to Success After jumping right into the subject in the very first module, I wondered what Stephen could have in store for me for the rest of the course. Chapter number two is building a team. Having a team is important regardless of what your startup is. You can be a true visionary with endless ideas and energy, but one person can still not do everything. It is important to decide from the very beginning if you will have cofounders, team leaders, and how many employees you’ll need. Even more important, you’ll need to decide what kind of team you want – what personalities, skills, and type of energy you want each of your employees to bring. Do you want to have an A+ team with a B- idea, or do you have a B- idea that needs an A+ team to sell it? Stephen asks all the hard questions! I was especially impressed by his insight on developing. You have to decide if you need developers, how many, and what their skills should be. I found this insight extremely useful for everyday usage, not just for start-up companies. I would apply this kind of information in management at any position. An amazing team will build an amazing product – and that doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up company or a small team working for a much larger business. Customer Development – The Ultimate Obective Chapter three was about customer development. According to Stephen, there are four different steps to develop a customer base. The first question to ask yourself is if you are envisioning a large customer base buying a few products each, or a small, dedicated base that buys a lot of your product – quantity vs. Quality. He also discusses how to earn, retain, and get more customers. He also says that each customer should be placed in a different role – some will be like investors, who regularly spend with you and invest their money in your business. It is then your job to take that investment and turn it into a better product in the future. You need to deal with their money properly – think of it is as theirs as investors, not yours as profit. At the end of this module I felt that only Stephen could provide this kind of insight, and then he listed all the resources he took his information from. I have never seen a group of people so passionate about their customers. It was indeed a long day for me. In tomorrow’s part 2 we will discuss rest of the three module and also will see a quick video of the Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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I have Oracle SQL Developer Installed, Now What?

- by thatjeffsmith

If you’re here because you downloaded a copy of Oracle SQL Developer and now you need help connecting to a database, then you’re in the right place. I’ll show you what you need to get up and going so you can finish your homework, teach yourself Oracle database, or get ready for that job interview. You’ll need about 30 minutes to set everything up…and about 5 years to become proficient with Oracle Oracle Database come with SQL Developer but SQL Developer doesn’t include a database If you install Oracle database, it includes a copy of SQL Developer. If you’re running that copy of SQL Developer, please take a second to upgrade now, as it is WAY out of date. But I’m here to talk to the folks that have downloaded SQL Developer and want to know what to do next. You’ve got it running. You see this ‘Connection’ dialog, and… Where am I connecting to, and who as? You NEED a database Installing SQL Developer does not give you a database. So you’re going to need to install Oracle and create a database, or connect to a database that is already up and running somewhere. Basically you need to know the following: where is this database, what’s it called, and what port is the listener running on? The Default Connection properties in SQL Developer These default settings CAN work, but ONLY if you have installed Oracle Database Express Edition (XE). Localhost is a network alias for 127.0.0.1 which is an IP address that maps to the ‘local’ machine, or the machine you are reading this blog post on. The listener is a service that runs on the server and handles connections for the databases on that machine. You can run a database without a listener and you can run a listener without a database, but you can’t connect to a database on a different server unless both that database and listener are up and running. Each listener ‘listens’ on one or more ports, you need to know the port number for each connection. The default port is 1521, but 1522 is often pretty common. I know all of this sounds very complicated Oracle is a very sophisticated piece of software. It’s not analogous to downloading a mobile phone app and and using it 10 seconds later. It’s not like installing Office/Access either – it requires services, environment setup, kernel tweaks, etc. However. Normally an administrator will setup and install Oracle, create the database, and configure the listener for everyone else to use. They’ll often also setup the connection details for everyone via a ‘TNSNAMES.ORA’ file. This file contains a list of database connection details for folks to browse – kind of like an Oracle database phoneboook. If someone has given you a TNSNAMES.ORA file, or setup your machine to have access to a TNSNAMES file, then you can just switch to the ‘TNS’ connection type, and use the dropdown to select the database you want to connect to. Then you don’t have to worry about the server names, database names, and the port numbers. ORCL – that sounds promising! ORCL is the default SID when creating a new database with the Database Creation Assistant (DBCA). It’s just me, and I need help! No administrator, no database, no nothing. What do you do? You have a few options: Buy a copy of Oracle and download, install, and create a database Download and install XE (FREE!) Download, import, and run our Developer Days Hands-on-Lab (FREE!) If you’re a student (or anyone else) with little to no experience with Oracle, then I recommend the third option. Oracle Technology Network Developer Day: Hands-on Database Application Development Lab The OTN lab runs on a A Virtual Box image which contains: 11gR2 Enterprise Edition copy of Oracle a database and listener running for you to connect to lots of demo data for you to play with SQL Developer installed and ready to connect Some browser based labs you can step through to learn Oracle You download the image, you download and install Virtual Box (also FREE!), then you IMPORT the image you previously downloaded. You then ‘Start’ the image. It will boot a copy of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), start your database, and all that jazz. You can then start up and run SQL Developer inside the image OR you can connect to the database running on the image using the copy of SQL Developer you installed on your host machine. Setup Port Forwarding to Make It Easy to Connect From Your Host When you start the image, it will be assigned an IP address. Depending on what network adapter you select in the image preferences, you may get something that can get out to the internet from your image, something your host machine can see and connect to, or something that kind of just lives out there in a vacuum. You want to avoid the ‘vacuum’ option – unless you’re OK with running SQL Developer inside the Linux image. Open the Virtual Box image properties and go to the Networking options. We’re going to setup port forwarding. This will tell your machine that anything that happens on port 1521 (the default Oracle Listener port), should just go to the image’s port 1521. So I can connect to ‘localhost’ and it will magically get transferred to the image that is running. Oracle Virtual Box Port Forwarding 1521 listener database Now You Just Need a Username and Password The default passwords on this image are all ‘oracle’ – so you can connect as SYS, HR, or whatever – just use ‘oracle’ as the password. The Linux passowrds are all ‘oracle’ too, so you can login as ‘root’ or as ‘oracle’ in the Linux desktop. Connect! Connect as HR to your Oracle database running on the OTN Developer Days Virtual Box image If you’re connecting to someone else’s database, you need to ask the person that manages that environment to create for you an account. Don’t try to ‘guess’ or ‘figure out’ what the username and password is. Introduce yourself, explain your situation, and ask kindly for access. This is your first test – can you connect? I know it’s hard to get started with Oracle. There are however many things we offer to make this easier. You’ll need to do a bit of RTM first though. Once you know what’s required, you will be much more likely to succeed. Of course, if you need help, you know where to find me

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ODI 12c - Parallel Table Load

- by David Allan

In this post we will look at the ODI 12c capability of parallel table load from the aspect of the mapping developer and the knowledge module developer - two quite different viewpoints. This is about parallel table loading which isn't to be confused with loading multiple targets per se. It supports the ability for ODI mappings to be executed concurrently especially if there is an overlap of the datastores that they access, so any temporary resources created may be uniquely constructed by ODI. Temporary objects can be anything basically - common examples are staging tables, indexes, views, directories - anything in the ETL to help the data integration flow do its job. In ODI 11g users found a few workarounds (such as changing the technology prefixes - see here) to build unique temporary names but it was more of a challenge in error cases. ODI 12c mappings by default operate exactly as they did in ODI 11g with respect to these temporary names (this is also true for upgraded interfaces and scenarios) but can be configured to support the uniqueness capabilities. We will look at this feature from two aspects; that of a mapping developer and that of a developer (of procedures or KMs). 1. Firstly as a Mapping Developer..... 1.1 Control when uniqueness is enabled A new property is available to set unique name generation on/off. When unique names have been enabled for a mapping, all temporary names used by the collection and integration objects will be generated using unique names. This property is presented as a check-box in the Property Inspector for a deployment specification. 1.2 Handle cleanup after successful execution Provided that all temporary objects that are created have a corresponding drop statement then all of the temporary objects should be removed during a successful execution. This should be the case with the KMs developed by Oracle. 1.3 Handle cleanup after unsuccessful execution If an execution failed in ODI 11g then temporary tables would have been left around and cleaned up in the subsequent run. In ODI 12c, KM tasks can now have a cleanup-type task which is executed even after a failure in the main tasks. These cleanup tasks will be executed even on failure if the property 'Remove Temporary Objects on Error' is set. If the agent was to crash and not be able to execute this task, then there is an ODI tool (OdiRemoveTemporaryObjects here) you can invoke to cleanup the tables - it supports date ranges and the like. That's all there is to it from the aspect of the mapping developer it's much, much simpler and straightforward. You can now execute the same mapping concurrently or execute many mappings using the same resource concurrently without worrying about conflict. 2. Secondly as a Procedure or KM Developer..... In the ODI Operator the executed code shows the actual name that is generated - you can also see the runtime code prior to execution (introduced in 11.1.1.7), for example below in the code type I selected 'Pre-executed Code' this lets you see the code about to be processed and you can also see the executed code (which is the default view). References to the collection (C$) and integration (I$) names will be automatically made unique by using the odiRef APIs - these objects will have unique names whenever concurrency has been enabled for a particular mapping deployment specification. It's also possible to use name uniqueness functions in procedures and your own KMs. 2.1 New uniqueness tags You can also make your own temporary objects have unique names by explicitly including either %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG in the name passed to calls to the odiRef APIs. Such names would always include the unique tag regardless of the concurrency setting. To illustrate, let's look at the getObjectName() method. At <% expansion time, this API will append %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG to the object name for collection and integration tables. The name parameter passed to this API may contain %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. This API always generates to the <? version of getObjectName() At execution time this API will replace the unique tag macros with a string that is unique to the current execution scope. The returned name will conform to the name-length restriction for the target technology, and its pattern for the unique tag. Any necessary truncation will be performed against the initial name for the object and any other fixed text that may have been specified. Examples are:- <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "%COL_PRFEMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG", "D")?> SCOTT.C$_EABH7QI1BR1EQI3M76PG9SIMBQQ <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "EMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "D")?> SCOTT.EMPAO96Q2JEKO0FTHQP77TMSAIOSR_ Methods which have this kind of support include getFrom, getTableName, getTable, getObjectShortName and getTemporaryIndex. There are APIs for retrieving this tag info also, the getInfo API has been extended with the following properties (the UNIQUE* properties can also be used in ODI procedures); UNIQUE_STEP_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current step scope, e.g. 5rvmd8hOIy7OU2o1FhsF61 Note that this will be a different value for each loop-iteration when the step is in a loop. UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current session scope, e.g. 6N38vXLrgjwUwT5MseHHY9 IS_CONCURRENT - Returns info about the current mapping, will return 0 or 1 (only in % phase) GUID_SRC_SET - Returns the UUID for the current source set/execution unit (only in % phase) The getPop API has been extended with the IS_CONCURRENT property which returns info about an mapping, will return 0 or 1. 2.2 Additional APIs Some new APIs are provided including getFormattedName which will allow KM developers to construct a name from fixed-text or ODI symbols that can be optionally truncate to a max length and use a specific encoding for the unique tag. It has syntax getFormattedName(String pName[, String pTechnologyCode]) This API is available at both the % and the ? phase. The format string can contain the ODI prefixes that are available for getObjectName(), e.g. %INT_PRF, %COL_PRF, %ERR_PRF, %IDX_PRF alongwith %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. The latter tags will be expanded into a unique string according to the specified technology. Calls to this API within the same execution context are guaranteed to return the same unique name provided that the same parameters are passed to the call. e.g. <%=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")%> <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")?> C$_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB_AE <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG.log", "FILE")?> C2_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB.log 2.3 Name length generation As part of name generation, the length of the generated name will be compared with the maximum length for the target technology and truncation may need to be applied. When a unique tag is included in the generated string it is important that uniqueness is not compromised by truncation of the unique tag. When a unique tag is NOT part of the generated name, the name will be truncated by removing characters from the end - this is the existing 11g algorithm. When a unique tag is included, the algorithm will first truncate the <postfix> and if necessary the <prefix>. It is recommended that users will ensure there is sufficient uniqueness in the <prefix> section to ensure uniqueness of the final resultant name. SUMMARY To summarize, ODI 12c make it much simpler to utilize mappings in concurrent cases and provides APIs for helping developing any procedures or custom knowledge modules in such a way they can be used in highly concurrent, parallel scenarios.

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[GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 4: Windows Firewall: Your System’s Best Defense

- by Ciprian Rusen

If you have your computer connected to a network, or directly to your Internet connection, then having a firewall is an absolute necessity. In this lesson we will discuss the Windows Firewall – one of the best security features available in Windows! The Windows Firewall made its debut in Windows XP. Prior to that, Windows system needed to rely on third-party solutions or dedicated hardware to protect them from network-based attacks. Over the years, Microsoft has done a great job with it and it is one of the best firewalls you will ever find for Windows operating systems. Seriously, it is so good that some commercial vendors have decided to piggyback on it! Let’s talk about what you will learn in this lesson. First, you will learn about what the Windows Firewall is, what it does, and how it works. Afterward, you will start to get your hands dirty and edit the list of apps, programs, and features that are allowed to communicate through the Windows Firewall depending on the type of network you are connected to. Moving on from there, you will learn how to add new apps or programs to the list of allowed items and how to remove the apps and programs that you want to block. Last but not least, you will learn how to enable or disable the Windows Firewall, for only one type of networks or for all network connections. By the end of this lesson, you should know enough about the Windows Firewall to use and manage it effectively. What is the Windows Firewall? Windows Firewall is an important security application that’s built into Windows. One of its roles is to block unauthorized access to your computer. The second role is to permit authorized data communications to and from your computer. Windows Firewall does these things with the help of rules and exceptions that are applied both to inbound and outbound traffic. They are applied depending on the type of network you are connected to and the location you have set for it in Windows, when connecting to the network. Based on your choice, the Windows Firewall automatically adjusts the rules and exceptions applied to that network. This makes the Windows Firewall a product that’s silent and easy to use. It bothers you only when it doesn’t have any rules and exceptions for what you are trying to do or what the programs running on your computer are trying to do. If you need a refresher on the concept of network locations, we recommend you to read our How-To Geek School class on Windows Networking. Another benefit of the Windows Firewall is that it is so tightly and nicely integrated into Windows and all its networking features, that some commercial vendors decided to piggyback onto it and use it in their security products. For example, products from companies like Trend Micro or F-Secure no longer provide their proprietary firewall modules but use the Windows Firewall instead. Except for a few wording differences, the Windows Firewall works the same in Windows 7 and Windows 8.x. The only notable difference is that in Windows 8.x you will see the word “app” being used instead of “program”. Where to Find the Windows Firewall By default, the Windows Firewall is turned on and you don’t need to do anything special in order for it work. You will see it displaying some prompts once in a while but they show up so rarely that you might forget that is even working. If you want to access it and configure the way it works, go to the Control Panel, then go to “System and Security” and select “Windows Firewall”. Now you will see the Windows Firewall window where you can get a quick glimpse on whether it is turned on and the type of network you are connected to: private networks or public network. For the network type that you are connected to, you will see additional information like: The state of the Windows Firewall How the Windows Firewall deals with incoming connections The active network When the Windows Firewall will notify you You can easily expand the other section and view the default settings that apply when connecting to networks of that type. If you have installed a third-party security application that also includes a firewall module, chances are that the Windows Firewall has been disabled, in order to avoid performance issues and conflicts between the two security products. If that is the case for your computer or device, you won’t be able to view any information in the Windows Firewall window and you won’t be able to configure the way it works. Instead, you will see a warning that says: “These settings are being managed by vendor application – Application Name”. In the screenshot below you can see an example of how this looks. How to Allow Desktop Applications Through the Windows Firewall Windows Firewall has a very comprehensive set of rules and most Windows programs that you install add their own exceptions to the Windows Firewall so that they receive network and Internet access. This means that you will see prompts from the Windows Firewall on occasion, generally when you install programs that do not add their own exceptions to the Windows Firewall’s list. In a Windows Firewall prompt, you are asked to select the network locations to which you allow access for that program: private networks or public networks. By default, Windows Firewall selects the checkbox that’s appropriate for the network you are currently using. You can decide to allow access for both types of network locations or just to one of them. To apply your setting press “Allow access”. If you want to block network access for that program, press “Cancel” and the program will be set as blocked for both network locations. At this step you should note that only administrators can set exceptions in the Windows Firewall. If you are using a standard account without administrator permissions, the programs that do not comply with the Windows Firewall rules and exceptions are automatically blocked, without any prompts being shown. You should note that in Windows 8.x you will never see any Windows Firewall prompts related to apps from the Windows Store. They are automatically given access to the network and the Internet based on the assumption that you are aware of the permissions they require based on the information displayed by the Windows Store. Windows Firewall rules and exceptions are automatically created for each app that you install from the Windows Store. However, you can easily block access to the network and the Internet for any app, using the instructions in the next section. How to Customize the Rules for Allowed Apps Windows Firewall allows any user with an administrator account to change the list of rules and exceptions applied for apps and desktop programs. In order to do this, first start the Windows Firewall. On the column on the left, click or tap “Allow an app or feature through Windows Firewall” (in Windows 8.x) or “Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall” (in Windows 7). Now you see the list of apps and programs that are allowed to communicate through the Windows Firewall. At this point, the list is grayed out and you can only view which apps, features, and programs have rules that are enabled in the Windows Firewall.

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South Florida Code Camp 2010 – VI – 2010-02-27

- by Dave Noderer

Catching up after our sixth code camp here in the Ft Lauderdale, FL area. Website at: http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp. For the 5th time, DeVry University hosted the event which makes everything else really easy! Statistics from 2010 South Florida Code Camp: 848 registered (we use Microsoft Group Events) ~ 600 attended (516 took name badges) 64 speakers (including speaker idol) 72 sessions 12 parallel tracks Food 400 waters 600 sodas 900 cups of coffee (it was cold!) 200 pounds of ice 200 pizza's 10 large salad trays 900 mouse pads Photos on facebook Dave Noderer: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=190812&id=693530361 Joe Healy: http://www.facebook.com/devfish?ref=mf#!/album.php?aid=202787&id=720054950 Will Strohl:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2045553&id=1046966128&ref=mf Veronica Gonzalez: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=150954&id=672439484 Florida Speaker Idol One of the sessions at code camp was the South Florida Regional speaker idol competition. After user group level competitions there are five competitors. I acted as MC and score keeper while Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell, John Dunagan and Shervin Shakibi were judges. This statewide competition is being run by Roy Lawsen in Lakeland and the winner, Jeff Truman from Naples will move on to the state finals to be held at the Orlando Code Camp on 3/27/2010: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/. Each speaker has 10 minutes. The participants were: Alex Koval Jeff Truman Jared Nielsen Chris Catto Venkat Narayanasamy They all did a great job and I’m working with each to make sure they don’t stop there and start speaking at meetings. Thanks to everyone involved! Volunteers As always events like this don’t happen without a lot of help! The key people were: Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell – DeVry For the months leading up to the event, Ed collects all of the swag, books, etc and stores them. He holds meeting with various DeVry departments to coordinate the day, he works with the students in the days before code camp to stuff bags, print signs, arrange tables and visit BJ’s for our supplies (I go and pay but have a small car!). And of course the day of the event he is there at 5:30 am!! We took two SUV’s to BJ’s, i was really worried that the 36 cases of water were going to break his rear axle! He also helps with the students and works very hard before and after the event. Rainer Haberman – Speakers and Volunteer of the Year Rainer has helped over the past couple of years but this time he took full control of arranging the tracks. I did some preliminary work solicitation speakers but he took over all communications after that. We have tried various organizations around speakers, chair per track, central team but having someone paying attention to the details is definitely the way to go! This was the first year I did not have to jump in at the last minute and re-arrange everything. There were lots of kudo’s from the speakers too saying they felt it was more organized than they have experienced in the past from any code camp. Thanks Rainer! Ray Alamonte – Book Swap We saw the idea of a book swap from the Alabama Code Camp and thought we would give it a try. Ray jumped in and took control. The idea was to get people to bring their old technical books to swap or for others to buy. You got a ticket for each book you brought that you could then turn in to buy another book. If you did not have a ticket you could buy a book for $1. Net proceeds were $153 which I rounded up and donated to the Red Cross. There is plenty going on in Haiti and Chile! I don’t think we really got a count of how many books came in. I many cases the books barely hit the table before being picked up again. At the end we were left with a dozen books which we donated to the DeVry library. A great success we will definitely do again! Jace Weiss / Ratchelen Hut – Coffee and Snacks Wow, this was an eye opener. In past years a few of us would struggle to give some attention to coffee, snacks, etc. But it was always tenuous and always ended up running out of coffee. In the past we have tried buying Dunkin Donuts coffee, renting urns, borrowing urns, etc. This year I actually purchased 2 – 100 cup Westbend commercial brewers plus a couple of small urns (30 and 60 cup we used for decaf). We got them both started early (although i forgot to push the on button on one!) and primed it with 10 boxes of Joe from Dunkin. then Jace and Rachelen took over.. once a batch was brewed they would refill the boxes, keep the area clean and at one point were filling cups. We never ran out of coffee and served a few hundred more than last year. We did look but next year I’ll get a large insulated (like gatorade) dispensing container. It all went very smoothly and having help focused on that one area was a big win. Thanks Jace and Rachelen! Ken & Shirley Golding / Roberta Barbosa – Registration Ken & Shirley showed up and took over registration. This year we printed small name tags for everyone registered which was great because it is much easier to remember someone’s name when they are labeled! In any case it went the smoothest it has ever gone. All three were actively pulling people through the registration, answering questions, directing them to bags and information very quickly. I did not see that there was too big a line at any time. Thanks!! Scott Katarincic / Vishal Shukla – Website For the 3rd?? year in a row, Scott was in charge of the website starting in August or September when I start on code camp. He handles all the requests, makes changes to the site and admin. I think two years ago he wrote all the backend administration and tunes it and the website a bit but things are pretty stable. The only thing I do is put up the sponsors. It is a big pressure off of me!! Thanks Scott! Vishal jumped into the web end this year and created a new Silverlight agenda page to replace the old ajax page. We will continue to enhance this but it is definitely a good step forward! Thanks! Alex Funkhouser – T-shirts/Mouse pads/tables/sponsors Alex helps in many areas. He helps me bring in sponsors and handles all the logistics for t-shirts, sponsor tables and this year the mouse pads. He is also a key person to help promote the event as well not to mention the after after party which I did not attend and don’t want to know much about! Students There were a number of student volunteers but don’t have all of their names. But thanks to them, they stuffed bags, patrolled pizza and helped with moving things around. Sponsors We had a bunch of great sponsors which allowed us to feed people and give a way a lot of great swag. Our major sponsors of DeVry, Microsoft (both DPE and UGSS), Infragistics, Telerik, SQL Share (End to End, SQL Saturdays), and Interclick are very much appreciated. The other sponsors Applied Innovations (also supply code camp hosting), Ultimate Software (a great local SW company), Linxter (reliable cloud messaging we are lucky to have here!), Mediascend (a media startup), SoftwareFX (another local SW company we are happy to have back participating in CC), CozyRoc (if you do SSIS, check them out), Arrow Design (local DNN and Silverlight experts),Boxes and Arrows (a local SW consulting company) and Robert Half. One thing we did this year besides a t-shirt was a mouse pad. I like it because it will be around for a long time on many desks. After much investigation and years of using mouse pad’s I’ve determined that the 1/8” fabric top is the best and that is what we got! So now I get a break for a few months before starting again!

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SharePoint – The Most Important Feature

- by Bil Simser

Watching twitter and doing a search for SharePoint and you see a lot (almost one every few minutes) of tweets about the top 10 new features in SharePoint. What answer do you get when you ask the question, “What’s the most important feature in SharePoint?”. Chances are the answer will vary. Some will say it’s the collaboration aspect, others might say it’s the new ribbon interface, multi-item editing, external content types, faceted search, large list support, document versioning, Silverlight, etc. The list goes on. However I think most people might be missing the most important feature that’s sitting right under their noses all this time. The most important feature of SharePoint? It’s called User Empowerment. Huh? What? Is that something I find in the Site Actions menu? Nope. It’s something that’s always been there in SharePoint, you just need to get the word out and support it. How many times have you had a team ask you for a team site (assuming you had SharePoint up and running). Or to create them a contact list. Or how long have you employed that guy in the corner who’s been copying and pasting content from Corporate Communications into the web from a Word document. Let’s stop the insanity. It doesn’t have to be this way. SharePoint’s strongest feature isn’t anything you can find in the Site Settings screen or Central Admin. It’s all about empowering your users and letting them take control of their content. After all, SharePoint really is a bunch of tools to allow users to collaborate on content isn’t it? So why are you stepping in as IT and helping the user every moment along the way. It’s like having to ask users to fill out a help desk ticket or call up the Windows team to create a folder on their desktop or rearrange their Start menu. This isn’t something IT should be spending their time doing nor is it something the users should be burdened with having to wait until their friendly neighborhood tech-guy (or gal) shows up to help them sort the icons on their desktop. SharePoint IS all about empowerment. Site owners can create whatever lists and libraries they need for their team, and if the template isn’t there they can always turn to my friend and yours, the Custom List. From that can spew forth approval tracking systems, new hire checklists, and server inventory. You’re only limited by your imagination and needs. Users should be able to create new sites as they need. Want a blog to let everyone know what your team is up to? Go create one, here’s how. What’s a blog you ask? Here’s what it is and why you would use one. SharePoint is the shift in the balance of power and you need, and an IT group, let go of certain responsibilities and let your users run with the tools. A power user who knows how to create sites and what features are available to them can help a team go from the forming stage to the storming stage overnight. Again, this all hinges on you as an IT organization and what you can and empower your users with as far as features go. Running with tools is great if you know how to use them, running with scissors not recommended unless you enjoy trips to the hospital. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility so don’t go out on Monday and send out a memo to the organization saying “This Bil guy says you peeps can do anything so here it is, knock yourself out” (for one, they’ll have *no* idea who this Bil guy is). This advice comes with the task of getting your users ready for empowerment. Whether it’s through some kind of internal training sessions, in-house documentation; videos; blog posts; on how to accomplish things in SharePoint, or full blown one-on-one sit downs with teams or individuals to help them through their problems. The work is up to you. Helping them along also should be part of your governance (you do have one don’t you?). Just because you have InfoPath client deployed with your Office suite, doesn’t mean users should just start publishing forms all over your SharePoint farm. There should be some governance behind that in what you’ll support and what is possible. The other caveat to all this is that SharePoint is not everything for everyone. It can’t cook you breakfast and impregnate your cat or solve world hunger. It also isn’t suited for every IT solution out there. It’s a horrible source control system (even though some people try to use it as such) and really can’t do financials worth a darn. Again, governance is key here and part of that governance and your responsibility in setting up and unleashing SharePoint into your organization is to provide users guidance on what should be in SharePoint and (more importantly) what should not be in SharePoint. There are boundaries you have to set where you don’t want your end users going as they might be treading into trouble. Again, this is up to you to set these constraints and help users understand why these pylons are there. If someone understands why they can’t do something they might have a better understanding and respect for those that put them there in the first place. Of course you’ll always have the power-users who want to go skiing down dead mans curve so this doesn’t work for everyone, but you can catch the majority of the newbs who don’t wander aimlessly off the beaten path. At the end of the day when all things are going swimmingly your end users should be empowered to solve the needs they have on a day to day basis and not having to keep bugging the IT department to help them create a view to show only approved documents. I wouldn’t go as far as business users building out full blown solutions and handing the keys to SharePoint Designer or (worse) Visual Studio to power-users might not be a path you want to go down but you also don’t have to lock up the SharePoint system in a tight box where users can’t use what’s there. So stop focusing on the shiny things in SharePoint and maybe consider making a shift to what’s really important. Making your day job easier and letting users get the most our of your technology investment.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Generate C# code for you to call non-public classes in DLLs very easily.Artefact Animator: Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF.cacheroo: Cacheroo is a social networking community that will make it easier for people who love geocaching to get connected.Data Processing Toolkit: An utility app to collected data from different sources (i.e. bugzilla bug reports) in a structured way. We are currently setting up the site. Mo...eXternal SQL Bridge (PHP): The eXternal SQL Bridge (XSB) allows you to bridge two websites together in a secure manner through pre-shared keys. XSB is resilient against repla...'G' - Language to Define Gestures for Touch Based Applications: A cross plat form multi-touch application framework with a language to define gestures. The application is build on Silverlight 4.0 and the languag...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: Web implementation of "looking glass" like services (ping, traceroute) as HTTP modules for Internet Information Services.Interop Router: This project establishes a communication framework and job dispatcher for a mixed operating system cluster environment.L2 Commander: L2Commander makes it easier for both new and old l2j users to manage your server.You no longer have to waste time on finding the files you need and...MediaHelper: A utility to help clean up empty/unwanted files and folders in your filesystem.mhinze: matt hinze stuffOneMan: Focus on Silverlight and WCF technology.Rss Photo Frame Android Widget: RSS Photo Frame Android Widget permits showing pictures from any RSS feed on your Android device's desktopSingle Web Session: Web Tool Kits Current project provide developer with different tools that help to enhance web site performance, security, and other common functio...Work Item Visualization: Use DGML to visualize and analyze your TFS Work Items. Included is the ability to perform basic risk/impact analysis. It helps answer the question,...New Releases[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Wrapper Coder (beta): Click "<Click Me To Open Assembly File>", WrapperCoder will load the assembly and referenced assembly. Check the non-public classes that you want...APS - Automatic Print Screen: APS 1.0: APS automatizes the tasks of paste the image in Paint and save it after print screen or alt+print screen. Choose directory, name and file extension...BTP Tools: e-Sword generator build 20100321: 1. Modify the indent after subtitle. 2. Add 2 spaces after subtitle.Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library: Combres 2.0: Changes since last version (1.2) Support ignore Combres pipeline in debug mode - see issue #6088 Debug mode generates comment helping identify in...Desafio Office 2010 Brasil: DesafioOutlook: Controlando um robo com o Outlook 2010dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.4: Adding Platform Invocation Services Support, full Managed Pointer Support, Charset,Dllimport,Callconv setting for P/Invoke, MarshalAs for parametersFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.2.0: Version 1.3.2.0 Add open folder button to IGI Search Form Fixes to Fact Location processing - IGIName renamed to RegionID Fix if Region ID not fou...Fasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection API: Fasterflect 2.0: We are pleased to release version 2.0 of Fasterflect, which contains a lot of additions and improvements from the previous version. Please refer t...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: 1.0: Initial public release.Informant: Informant (Desktop) v0.1: This release allows users to send sms messages to 1-Many Groups or 1-Many contacts. It is a very basic release of the application. No styling has b...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - MPE1 Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.L2 Commander: Source Code Link: Where to find our source.ModularCMS: ModularCMS 1.2: Minor bug fixes.NMTools: NMTools-v40b0-20100321-0: The most noticeable aspect of this release is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLI...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 1.5.3: Log loading performance enhanced. Search text box now has auto complete feature.Single Web Session: Single Web Session: !Single Web Session! <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.WebSessionModule, SingleWebSession"/> </httpModules>Sprite Sheet Packer: 2.1 Release: Made a few crucial fixes from 2.0: - Fixed error with paths having spaces. - Fixed error with UI not unlocking. - Fixed NullReferenceException on ...uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.1 (.NET 4.0 RC): Updated Releasev1.1 Adds the primary ability to setup and configure the application through a setup wizard. The setup wizard will continue to evol...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30321.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS ChessMania: VS ChessMania V2 March Beta: Second Beta Release with move correction and making application more safe for user. New features will be added soon.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.9.00: Whats New Added New Toolbar Plugin (By Kent Safransk) 'MediaEmbed' to Include Embed Media from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Media Embed Plugin Added New ...WeatherBar: WeatherBar 1.0 [No Installation]: Extract the ZIP archive and run WeatherBar.exe. Current release contains some bugs that will be fixed in the next version. Check the Issue Tracker...Work Item Visualization: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the Work Item Visualization tool. There are no known issues when it comes to the visualization aspects of the tool b...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.10: Version: 1.0.0.10 (Milestone 10): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requi...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.2: What's Newadds AutoAppend feature adds a new provider: UrlHistoryDataProvider sample application is updated to reflect the new things Bug Fixe...ZoomBarPlus: V2 (Beta): - Fixed bug: if the active window changed while you were in the middle of a single tap delay, long tap delay, or swipe-repeat, it would continue re...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSavvy DateTimeRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 01, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 01, 2010Popular ReleasesUltimateJB: UltimateJB 2.02 PL3 KAKAROTO + CE-X-3.41 EvilSperm: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La Version CEX341 pour pouvoir jouer avec des jeux demandant le firmware 3.50 ( certain ne fonctionne tous simplement pas ). - Pour l'instant le CEX341 n'est disponible qu'avec les PS3 en firmwares 3.41 !!! - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 3.30 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB CEX341 => Spoof le Firmware 3.41 en 3.50 ( facilite l'utilisation de certain jeux avec openManage...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.2 Beta2: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ContentRoot property) - Added properties AccessKey, AccessKeyModifier, AccessKeyElemen...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.1.1: 2.1.1This release adds in the changes for 4.03a. To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Switched Searing Flames bac...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...Microsoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...Sense/Net Enterprise Portal & ECMS: SenseNet 6.0.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.1 Community Edition This half year we have been working quite fiercely to bring you the long-awaited release of Sense/Net 6.0. Download this Community Edition to see what we have been up to. These months we have worked on getting the WebCMS capabilities of Sense/Net 6.0 up to par. New features include: New, powerful page and portlet editing experience. HTML and CSS cleanup, new, powerful site skinning system. Upgraded, lightning-fast indexing and query via Lucene. Limita...Minecraft GPS: Minecraft GPS 1.1.1: New Features Compass! New style. Set opacity on main window to allow overlay of Minecraft. Open World in any folder. Fixes Fixed style so listbox won't grow the window size. Fixed open file dialog issue on non-vista kernel machines.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-28-2001: This release introduces some exciting improvements. Support for big raster, both in display and changing the scheme. Faster raster scheme creation for all rasters. Caching of the "sample" values so once obtained the raster symbolizer dialog loads faster. Reprojection supported for raster and image classes. Affine transform fully supported for images and rasters, so skewed images are now possible. Projection uses better checks when loading unprojected layers. GDAL raster support f...SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket(60438): It is the first release of SuperWebSocket. Because it is base on SuperSocket, most features of SuperSocket are supported in SuperWebSocket. The source code include a LiveChat demo.MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.25.7002: Fixed updater Fixed FileServe Fixed LetItBitCropper: 1.9.4: Mostly fixes for issues with a few feature requests. Fixed Issues 2730 & 3638 & 14467 11044 11447 11448 11449 14665 Implemented Features 6123 11581PFC: PFC for PB 11.5: This is just a migration from the 11.0 code. No changes have been made yet (and they are needed) for it to work properly with 11.5.PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5: This release does not add any new feature for pdf manipulation, but enables automatic updates checking, so it is reccomended to install it in order to stay updated with next releases. Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0...BCLExtensions: BCL Extensions v1.0: The files associated with v1.0 of the BCL Extensions library.XamlQuery/WPF - The Write Less, Do More, WPF Library: XamlQuery-WPF v1.2 (Runtime, Source): This is the first release of popular XamlQuery library for WPF. XamlQuery has already gained recognition among Silverlight developers.Math.NET Numerics: Beta 1: First beta of Math.NET Numerics. Only contains the managed linear algebra provider. Beta 2 will include the native linear algebra providers along with better documentation and examples.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-11-25: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.8.5 Beta: - WBFS repair (default) options fixed - Transfer to image fixed - Settings ui widget names fixed - Some little bug fixes You need to reset the settings! Delete WiiBaFu's config file or registry entries on windows: Linux: ~/.config/WiiBaFu/wiibafu.conf Windows: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WiiBaFu\wiibafu Mac OS X: ~/Library/Preferences/com.wiibafu.wiibafu.plist Caution: This is a BETA version! Errors, crashes and data loss not impossible! Use in test environments only, not on productive syste...Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.3: Added process count and world size calculation progress to the status bar. Added View->'Status Bar' menu item to show/hide the status bar. Status bar is automatically shown when loading a world. Added a prompt, when loading a world, to use or clear cached images.Sexy Select: sexy select v0.4: Changes in v0.4 Added method : elements. This returns all the option elements that are currently added to the select list Added method : selectOption. This method accepts two values, the element to be modified and the selected state. (true/false)New ProjectsAbstract SQL: ADO.NET Sql classes wrapper; provides a clean fluent interface library that allows you to write very concise code and avoid the repetitiveness of ADO.NET. It can be used in all types of applications, even supports CLR stored procedures. It is written in C# 2.0.AI: The Artificial Intelligence program built on F#.Another .NET wrapper for the MailChimp API: A .NET wrapper for the MailChimp API 1.3 written in F# by DK.App-V Tool Suite: A collection of tools for Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V). These tools were developed at Sinclair Community College in the process of setting up and then supporting its App-V implementation.b2b: Project-01tBham.CmuCam: A library and GUI front-end for the CMUcam series of cameras for use by .NET-based applications, the GUI can also run standalone.BizTalk Deployment Tool: Yet another BizTalk Deployment Tool to make it easier for BizTalk deployment that needs to support orchestration versioning, multiple environments. Features includes but not limited to: GAC Verification, Receive Locations and Send Ports management, Orchestration States managementCertificate Request (PKCS#10) Generator: A .NET application that can create PKCS#10 Certificate Requests, either by generating a new key or reusing a preexisting one. Minimum requirement : Windows Vista and above. .NET 2.0.Cloud Billing: Cloud billing proposal.Currency Converter: Coding4Fun Windows Phone 7 Currency ConverterDiffLib: A diff implementation class library for .NET 3.5 written in C#.expression Blend 4.0 Comment Uncomment Xaml Code Extension: BlendShortCuts Extension makes it easier for blend users to comment and uncomment xaml code. you'll no longer have to insert tag  just press ALt+C and ALT+U it's developed in c# (.Net framework 4.0, microsoft expression library)Game Studio: Game Studio is an Integrated Development Environment “IDE” that helps game developers in designing their games. The software generates code for the mesh, models, pictures and sounds. It has a form designer, code editor and a special framework for the “Game Studio”.Gridify for ASP.NET MVC: Easy solution for grids on top of ASP.NET MVC Make grids from your data tables in a really lightweight manner! How lightweight? Well, exactly TWO line changes. You don't have to add new action parameters or anything. Really simple!In-House Inventory System: a normal inventory management system, normal use case and normal function.In-House Money Saver: just for school project, it may not be useful, however, it is my first project using Microsoft technology.ITICup2009: Programs used in ITICup 2009.libobs++: Implementation of a signal/slot system, created exclusively for developers that uses Visual Studio's 2010 IDE/Compiler. The classes are templated, and really easy to learn. The callbacks are fast, and type-safe.Longan ERP: Open Source Business Solutions.Lucienne - WebScripting Assignment: Lucienne - WebScripting AssignmentMercurial.Net: .NET wrapper class library for the Mercurial Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) - (http://mercurial.selenic.com/), written in C# 3.0 for the .NET 3.5 Client Profile runtime.Mini C++ UI Framework: Mini C++ UI Framework for my work.MinuRaamu: MeieRaamuMobile Device Browser File: The Mobile Browser Definition File contains definitions for individual mobile devices and browsers. At run time, ASP.NET uses the information in the request header to determine what type of device/browser has made the request.NKinect: .NET 4.0 (C++/CLI) based open source implementation of Microsoft Kinect. Currently supports CodeLaboratories NUI SDK, but will be brought to OpenKinect/libfreenect when a Windows version is stable.Oblivion Cell - Oblivion mmo project: We are working on creating a mmorpg mod/Addon for Oblivion using C# and hooking to the accual game with obse and a few other mods. We also use Cell Framework for our base server system.Optional: Optional is a library to create options and commands from command-line arguments. It uses Convention over Configuration to get out of your way. Attributes can be used to set properties which differ from the convention.Paypal adaptive payments using .NET (C#): This is a C# project to help you interface with the PayPal adaptive payments API. https://www.x.com/community/ppx/adaptive_payments. POS bd: Dynamic POS. this project is being devoloped on focused to local market only. the initial project is projected for a single company whose main business is selling lighting-bulb instruments.PowerEvents for Windows PowerShell: A Microsoft Windows PowerShell module to assist with managing permanent WMI event consumer registrations. You can use this module to register for, and respond to, system-level events available to WMI.PPL Daily Report Helper: Daily Reporting Helper Tool for Phoenix Propulsion LabsRandom Passwd Generator: This is a simple program developed in C# that generates random passwords of the specified length with the specified characters to be used. It's in beta version.SharePoint MUI Manager: The SharePoint MUI Manager allows you to translate user-specified text, such as the Title and Description of the site, throught the web interface. There is no need to download, edit and upload a RESX file. Sqlite Client for Windows Phone: Sqlite client for Windows Phone 7 . Supports transactionsTouchToolkit: A toolkit to simplify the multi-touch application development and testing complexities. It currently supports WPF and Silverlight.TSI4: Proyecto para facultad de ingenieríaVS2010 Debugger Visualizers Contrib: This project is for hosting user-contributed debugger visualizers for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.Windows Shell Framework: Windows Shell Framework is a managed wrappers for a subset of the windows shell. This Project is for of .NET Shell Namespace Extension FrameworkWork in Progress: Work in progressWPFtest: A simpel test project for experimenting with WPF.YingYangXonix: YingYangXonixZeroUnit.net: The zero dependency, zero friction, sugar free Unit Testing framework for .Net.ZXing barcode for Windows Phone: Barcode support for Windows Phone 7 using ZXing

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ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF

- by oazabir

ParallelWork is an open source free helper class that lets you run multiple work in parallel threads, get success, failure and progress update on the WPF UI thread, wait for work to complete, abort all work (in case of shutdown), queue work to run after certain time, chain parallel work one after another. It’s more convenient than using .NET’s BackgroundWorker because you don’t have to declare one component per work, nor do you need to declare event handlers to receive notification and carry additional data through private variables. You can safely pass objects produced from different thread to the success callback. Moreover, you can wait for work to complete before you do certain operation and you can abort all parallel work while they are in-flight. If you are building highly responsive WPF UI where you have to carry out multiple job in parallel yet want full control over those parallel jobs completion and cancellation, then the ParallelWork library is the right solution for you. I am using the ParallelWork library in my PlantUmlEditor project, which is a free open source UML editor built on WPF. You can see some realistic use of the ParallelWork library there. Moreover, the test project comes with 400 lines of Behavior Driven Development flavored tests, that confirms it really does what it says it does. The source code of the library is part of the “Utilities” project in PlantUmlEditor source code hosted at Google Code. The library comes in two flavors, one is the ParallelWork static class, which has a collection of static methods that you can call. Another is the Start class, which is a fluent wrapper over the ParallelWork class to make it more readable and aesthetically pleasing code. ParallelWork allows you to start work immediately on separate thread or you can queue a work to start after some duration. You can start an immediate work in a new thread using the following methods: void StartNow(Action doWork, Action onComplete) void StartNow(Action doWork, Action onComplete, Action<Exception> failed) For example, ParallelWork.StartNow(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }, () => { workEndedAt = DateTime.Now; }); Or you can use the fluent way Start.Work: Start.Work(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }) .OnComplete(() => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }) .Run(); Besides simple execution of work on a parallel thread, you can have the parallel thread produce some object and then pass it to the success callback by using these overloads: void StartNow<T>(Func<T> doWork, Action<T> onComplete) void StartNow<T>(Func<T> doWork, Action<T> onComplete, Action<Exception> fail) For example, ParallelWork.StartNow<Dictionary<string, string>>( () => { test = new Dictionary<string,string>(); test.Add("test", "test"); return test; }, (result) => { Assert.True(result.ContainsKey("test")); }); Or, the fluent way: Start<Dictionary<string, string>>.Work(() => { test = new Dictionary<string, string>(); test.Add("test", "test"); return test; }) .OnComplete((result) => { Assert.True(result.ContainsKey("test")); }) .Run(); You can also start a work to happen after some time using these methods: DispatcherTimer StartAfter(Action onComplete, TimeSpan duration) DispatcherTimer StartAfter(Action doWork,Action onComplete,TimeSpan duration) You can use this to perform some timed operation on the UI thread, as well as perform some operation in separate thread after some time. ParallelWork.StartAfter( () => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }, () => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }, waitDuration); Or, the fluent way: Start.Work(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }) .OnComplete(() => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }) .RunAfter(waitDuration); There are several overloads of these functions to have a exception callback for handling exceptions or get progress update from background thread while work is in progress. For example, I use it in my PlantUmlEditor to perform background update of the application. // Check if there's a newer version of the app Start<bool>.Work(() => { return UpdateChecker.HasUpdate(Settings.Default.DownloadUrl); }) .OnComplete((hasUpdate) => { if (hasUpdate) { if (MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), "There's a newer version available. Do you want to download and install?", "New version available", MessageBoxButton.YesNo, MessageBoxImage.Information) == MessageBoxResult.Yes) { ParallelWork.StartNow(() => { var tempPath = System.IO.Path.Combine( Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData), Settings.Default.SetupExeName); UpdateChecker.DownloadLatestUpdate(Settings.Default.DownloadUrl, tempPath); }, () => { }, (x) => { MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), "Download failed. When you run next time, it will try downloading again.", "Download failed", MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Warning); }); } } }) .OnException((x) => { MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), x.Message, "Download failed", MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Exclamation); }); The above code shows you how to get exception callbacks on the UI thread so that you can take necessary actions on the UI. Moreover, it shows how you can chain two parallel works to happen one after another. Sometimes you want to do some parallel work when user does some activity on the UI. For example, you might want to save file in an editor while user is typing every 10 second. In such case, you need to make sure you don’t start another parallel work every 10 seconds while a work is already queued. You need to make sure you start a new work only when there’s no other background work going on. Here’s how you can do it: private void ContentEditor_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!ParallelWork.IsAnyWorkRunning()) { ParallelWork.StartAfter(SaveAndRefreshDiagram, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10)); } } If you want to shutdown your application and want to make sure no parallel work is going on, then you can call the StopAll() method. ParallelWork.StopAll(); If you want to wait for parallel works to complete without a timeout, then you can call the WaitForAllWork(TimeSpan timeout). It will block the current thread until the all parallel work completes or the timeout period elapses. result = ParallelWork.WaitForAllWork(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); The result is true, if all parallel work completed. If it’s false, then the timeout period elapsed and all parallel work did not complete. For details how this library is built and how it works, please read the following codeproject article: ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/parallelwork.aspx If you like the article, please vote for me.

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C# in Depth, Third Edition by Jon Skeet, Manning Publications Co. Book Review

- by Compudicted

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/10/24/c-in-depth-third-edition-by-jon-skeet-manning-publications.aspx I started reading this ebook on September 28, 2013, the same day it was sent my way by Manning Publications Co. for review while it still being fresh off the press. So 1st thing – thanks to Manning for this opportunity and a free copy of this must have on every C# developer’s desk book! Several hours ago I finished reading this book (well, except a for a large portion of its quite lengthy appendix). I jumped writing this review right away while still being full of emotions and impressions from reading it thoroughly and running code examples. Before I go any further I would like say that I used to program on various platforms using various languages starting with the Mainframe and ending on Windows, and I gradually shifted toward dealing with databases more than anything, however it happened with me to program in C# 1 a lot when it was first released and then some C# 2 with a big leap in between to C# 5. So my perception and experience reading this book may differ from yours. Also what I want to tell is somewhat funny that back then, knowing some Java and seeing C# 1 released, initially made me drawing a parallel that it is a copycat language, how wrong was I… Interestingly, Jon programs in Java full time, but how little it was mentioned in the book! So more on the book: Be informed, this is not a typical “Recipes”, “Cookbook” or any set of ready solutions, it is rather targeting mature, advanced developers who do not only know how to use a number of features, but are willing to understand how the language is operating “under the hood”. I must state immediately, at the same time I am glad the author did not go into the murky depths of the MSIL, so this is a very welcome decision on covering a modern language as C# for me, thank you Jon! Frankly, not all was that rosy regarding the tone and structure of the book, especially the the first half or so filled me with several negative and positive emotions overpowering each other. To expand more on that, some statements in the book appeared to be bias to me, or filled with pre-justice, it started to look like it had some PR-sole in it, but thankfully this was all gone toward the end of the 1st third of the book. Specifically, the mention on the C# language popularity, Java is the #1 language as per https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language (many other sources put C at the top which I highly doubt), also many interesting functional languages as Clojure and Groovy appeared and gained huge traction which run on top of Java/JVM whereas C# does not enjoy such a situation. If we want to discuss the popularity in general and say how fast a developer can find a new job that pays well it would be indeed the very Java, C++ or PHP, never C#. Or that phrase on language preference as a personal issue? We choose where to work or we are chosen because of a technology used at a given software shop, not vice versa. The book though it technically very accurate with valid code, concise examples, but I wish the author would give more concrete, real-life examples on where each feature should be used, not how. Another point to realize before you get the book is that it is almost a live book which started to be written when even C# 3 wasn’t around so a lot of ground is covered (nearly half of the book) on the pre-C# 3 feature releases so if you already have a solid background in the previous releases and do not plan to upgrade, perhaps half of the book can be skipped, otherwise this book is surely highly recommended. Alas, for me it was a hard read, most of it. It was not boring (well, only may be two times), it was just hard to grasp some concepts, but do not get me wrong, it did made me pause, on several occasions, and made me read and re-read a page or two. At times I even wondered if I have any IQ at all (LOL). Be prepared to read A LOT on generics, not that they are widely used in the field (I happen to work as a consultant and went thru a lot of code at many places) I can tell my impression is the developers today in best case program using examples found at OpenStack.com. Also unlike the Java world where having the most recent version is nearly mandated by the OSS most companies on the Microsoft platform almost never tempted to upgrade the .Net version very soon and very often. As a side note, I was glad to see code recently that included a nullable variable (myvariable? notation) and this made me smile, besides, I recommended that person this book to expand her knowledge. The good things about this book is that Jon maintains an active forum, prepared code snippets and even a small program (Snippy) that is happy to run the sample code saving you from writing any plumbing code. A tad now on the C# language itself – it sure enjoyed a wonderful road toward perfection and a very high adoption, especially for ASP development. But to me all the recent features that made this statically typed language more dynamic look strange. Don’t we have F#? Which supposed to be the dynamic language? Why do we need to have a hybrid language? Now the developers live their lives in dualism of the static and dynamic variables! And LINQ to SQL, it is covered in depth, but wasn’t it supposed to be dropped? Also it seems that very little is being added, and at a slower pace, e.g. Roslyn will come in late 2014 perhaps, and will be probably the only main feature. Again, it is quite hard to read this book as various chapters, C# versions mentioned every so often only if I only could remember what was covered exactly where! So the fact it has so many jumps/links back and forth I recommend the ebook format to make the navigations easier to perform and I do recommend using software that allows bookmarking, also make sure you have access to plenty of coffee and pizza (hey, you probably know this joke – who a programmer is) ! In terms of closing, if you stuck at C# 1 or 2 level, it is time to embrace the power of C# 5! Finally, to compliment Manning, this book unlike from any other publisher so far, was the only one as well readable (put it formatted) on my tablet as in Adobe Reader on a laptop.

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When is a SQL function not a function?

- by Rob Farley

Should SQL Server even have functions? (Oh yeah – this is a T-SQL Tuesday post, hosted this month by Brad Schulz) Functions serve an important part of programming, in almost any language. A function is a piece of code that is designed to return something, as opposed to a piece of code which isn’t designed to return anything (which is known as a procedure). SQL Server is no different. You can call stored procedures, even from within other stored procedures, and you can call functions and use these in other queries. Stored procedures might query something, and therefore ‘return data’, but a function in SQL is considered to have the type of the thing returned, and can be used accordingly in queries. Consider the internal GETDATE() function. SELECT GETDATE(), SomeDatetimeColumn FROM dbo.SomeTable; There’s no logical difference between the field that is being returned by the function and the field that’s being returned by the table column. Both are the datetime field – if you didn’t have inside knowledge, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which was which. And so as developers, we find ourselves wanting to create functions that return all kinds of things – functions which look up values based on codes, functions which do string manipulation, and so on. But it’s rubbish. Ok, it’s not all rubbish, but it mostly is. And this isn’t even considering the SARGability impact. It’s far more significant than that. (When I say the SARGability aspect, I mean “because you’re unlikely to have an index on the result of some function that’s applied to a column, so try to invert the function and query the column in an unchanged manner”) I’m going to consider the three main types of user-defined functions in SQL Server: Scalar Inline Table-Valued Multi-statement Table-Valued I could also look at user-defined CLR functions, including aggregate functions, but not today. I figure that most people don’t tend to get around to doing CLR functions, and I’m going to focus on the T-SQL-based user-defined functions. Most people split these types of function up into two types. So do I. Except that most people pick them based on ‘scalar or table-valued’. I’d rather go with ‘inline or not’. If it’s not inline, it’s rubbish. It really is. Let’s start by considering the two kinds of table-valued function, and compare them. These functions are going to return the sales for a particular salesperson in a particular year, from the AdventureWorks database. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS TABLE AS RETURN ( SELECT e.LoginID as EmployeeLogin, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ) ; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_multi(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS @results TABLE ( EmployeeLogin nvarchar(512), OrderDate datetime, SalesOrderID int ) AS BEGIN INSERT @results (EmployeeLogin, OrderDate, SalesOrderID) SELECT e.LoginID, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ; RETURN END ; GO You’ll notice that I’m being nice and responsible with the use of the DATEADD function, so that I have SARGability on the OrderDate filter. Regular readers will be hoping I’ll show what’s going on in the execution plans here. Here I’ve run two SELECT * queries with the “Show Actual Execution Plan” option turned on. Notice that the ‘Query cost’ of the multi-statement version is just 2% of the ‘Batch cost’. But also notice there’s trickery going on. And it’s nothing to do with that extra index that I have on the OrderDate column. Trickery. Look at it – clearly, the first plan is showing us what’s going on inside the function, but the second one isn’t. The second one is blindly running the function, and then scanning the results. There’s a Sequence operator which is calling the TVF operator, and then calling a Table Scan to get the results of that function for the SELECT operator. But surely it still has to do all the work that the first one is doing... To see what’s actually going on, let’s look at the Estimated plan. Now, we see the same plans (almost) that we saw in the Actuals, but we have an extra one – the one that was used for the TVF. Here’s where we see the inner workings of it. You’ll probably recognise the right-hand side of the TVF’s plan as looking very similar to the first plan – but it’s now being called by a stack of other operators, including an INSERT statement to be able to populate the table variable that the multi-statement TVF requires. And the cost of the TVF is 57% of the batch! But it gets worse. Let’s consider what happens if we don’t need all the columns. We’ll leave out the EmployeeLogin column. Here, we see that the inline function call has been simplified down. It doesn’t need the Employee table. The join is redundant and has been eliminated from the plan, making it even cheaper. But the multi-statement plan runs the whole thing as before, only removing the extra column when the Table Scan is performed. A multi-statement function is a lot more powerful than an inline one. An inline function can only be the result of a single sub-query. It’s essentially the same as a parameterised view, because views demonstrate this same behaviour of extracting the definition of the view and using it in the outer query. A multi-statement function is clearly more powerful because it can contain far more complex logic. But a multi-statement function isn’t really a function at all. It’s a stored procedure. It’s wrapped up like a function, but behaves like a stored procedure. It would be completely unreasonable to expect that a stored procedure could be simplified down to recognise that not all the columns might be needed, but yet this is part of the pain associated with this procedural function situation. The biggest clue that a multi-statement function is more like a stored procedure than a function is the “BEGIN” and “END” statements that surround the code. If you try to create a multi-statement function without these statements, you’ll get an error – they are very much required. When I used to present on this kind of thing, I even used to call it “The Dangers of BEGIN and END”, and yes, I’ve written about this type of thing before in a similarly-named post over at my old blog. Now how about scalar functions... Suppose we wanted a scalar function to return the count of these. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_scalar(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS int AS BEGIN RETURN ( SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ); END ; GO Notice the evil words? They’re required. Try to remove them, you just get an error. That’s right – any scalar function is procedural, despite the fact that you wrap up a sub-query inside that RETURN statement. It’s as ugly as anything. Hopefully this will change in future versions. Let’s have a look at how this is reflected in an execution plan. Here’s a query, its Actual plan, and its Estimated plan: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, dbo.FetchSales_scalar(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; We see here that the cost of the scalar function is about twice that of the outer query. Nicely, the query optimizer has worked out that it doesn’t need the Employee table, but that’s a bit of a red herring here. There’s actually something way more significant going on. If I look at the properties of that UDF operator, it tells me that the Estimated Subtree Cost is 0.337999. If I just run the query SELECT dbo.FetchSales_scalar(281,2003); we see that the UDF cost is still unchanged. You see, this 0.0337999 is the cost of running the scalar function ONCE. But when we ran that query with the CROSS JOIN in it, we returned quite a few rows. 68 in fact. Could’ve been a lot more, if we’d had more salespeople or more years. And so we come to the biggest problem. This procedure (I don’t want to call it a function) is getting called 68 times – each one between twice as expensive as the outer query. And because it’s calling it in a separate context, there is even more overhead that I haven’t considered here. The cheek of it, to say that the Compute Scalar operator here costs 0%! I know a number of IT projects that could’ve used that kind of costing method, but that’s another story that I’m not going to go into here. Let’s look at a better way. Suppose our scalar function had been implemented as an inline one. Then it could have been expanded out like a sub-query. It could’ve run something like this: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = p.SalesPersonID AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,y.year-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,y.year-2000+1,'20000101') ) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; Don’t worry too much about the Scan of the SalesOrderHeader underneath a Nested Loop. If you remember from plenty of other posts on the matter, execution plans don’t push the data through. That Scan only runs once. The Index Spool sucks the data out of it and populates a structure that is used to feed the Stream Aggregate. The Index Spool operator gets called 68 times, but the Scan only once (the Number of Executions property demonstrates this). Here, the Query Optimizer has a full picture of what’s being asked, and can make the appropriate decision about how it accesses the data. It can simplify it down properly. To get this kind of behaviour from a function, we need it to be inline. But without inline scalar functions, we need to make our function be table-valued. Luckily, that’s ok. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline2(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS table AS RETURN (SELECT COUNT(*) as NumSales FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ); GO But we can’t use this as a scalar. Instead, we need to use it with the APPLY operator. SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, n.NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID OUTER APPLY dbo.FetchSales_inline2(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS n; And now, we get the plan that we want for this query. All we’ve done is tell the function that it’s returning a table instead of a single value, and removed the BEGIN and END statements. We’ve had to name the column being returned, but what we’ve gained is an actual inline simplifiable function. And if we wanted it to return multiple columns, it could do that too. I really consider this function to be superior to the scalar function in every way. It does need to be handled differently in the outer query, but in many ways it’s a more elegant method there too. The function calls can be put amongst the FROM clause, where they can then be used in the WHERE or GROUP BY clauses without fear of calling the function multiple times (another horrible side effect of functions). So please. If you see BEGIN and END in a function, remember it’s not really a function, it’s a procedure. And then fix it. @rob_farley

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You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development Expert if…

- by Mark Rackley

So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes). It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having to sift through all the resumes of those who think very highly of themselves and their skills only to find those gaping holes in common best practices. I’m much more willing to hire a decent dev who KNOWS they are not an expert than to hire a decent+ dev who THINKS they are an expert. So… I’ve compiled a small reality check for you SharePoint Devs. and a “red flag” check for those of you wishing to hire a SharePoint developer. If any of these apply to you, you are probably not a SharePoint Development Expert. You are not a SharePoint Development Expert if you manually copy your DLLs Seriously, I don’t care if you write the best code in the world. If you are manually copying files to each web front end you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert. Yes, I realize the admins are generally the ones who do the actual deployments, but if you don’t know how to create solution packages for your admins, you are going to end up doing more damage than good some day. There are TONS of tools out there to help generate deployable solutions for you. You have ZERO excuse. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you can’t tell me the main artifacts of a solution package Directly related to the first one. If you don’t know what the Manifest, DDF, WSP, and Feature files are and how they are used in a solution package, you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. I’m not asking you to be able to write them all from scratch (heck, I can’t even do that), but you MUST know what they are and how to tweak them if necessary. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know what a Content Type or a Site Column is You would be absolutely amazed at how many “Expert” SharePoint Developers have NEVER EVER created a Content Type or Site Column or even know what they are. I mean, why would you ever want to create those when you can just do everything as a custom list or custom field? right???? (that’s sarcasm). You also need to know how to package a Content Type and a Site Column into a deployable package by the way. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you have not created at least one Web Part, Workflow, Timer Job, and Event Handler. If you haven’t written at least one of each, you don’t fully understand what they do or their limitations. Again, I expect NO ONE to be able to write these things blind. I think the last time I wrote an application from scratch without copying and pasting from another project I had done before was back in 1994? Seriously, coding is like a Sour Dough starter, you get it from someone else and keep adding to it. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know how to properly dispose of objects Another biggie with zero excuse for getting it wrong. It is so well known that you must dispose of your SPWeb and SPSite objects that if you aren’t doing it then you are not an expert. Heck, if you utilize “using” when handling SPWeb and SPSite objects and don’t realize that it disposes of those objects for you, then you are not a SharePoint Development expert. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you do not know how to properly elevate privileges Just one of those development basics that any decent SharePoint Developer has got to have down and understand how and why it’s used You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know all of the development options available to SharePoint and when they should be used Okay… so all you hard core .NET SharePoint dev geeks take a moment to listen. You may be the most top not SharePoint .NET developer in the world, but if you are opening Visual Studio to solve every problem in SharePoint, then you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. The SharePoint developer’s tool kit is growing every day with tools like Visual Studio, Data View Web Parts, XSL, jQuery, SPServices, etc. etc… If you don’t have the ability to at least recognize that “hey, you can basically do the same thing here but just dropping in Easy Tabs instead of writing some weird web part” then you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert AND you are doing a huge disservice to your clients and customers. You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development expert if you call yourself an Expert So, truth telling time. I’m not an expert. There, I said it. I feel so much better. Now, I realize the word “expert” has been used with my name before, but I am quick to point out that I KNOW the experts and know that they will help me if I need it, but I’m not an expert in all things SharePoint. The minute you take on that moniker you are setting yourself up for a fall. It’s too big, there’s too much to know, and there’s WAY too much you can do wrong. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you are not involved in the community I expect to get the most flack for this one, but it’s always a huge red flag for me when someone says they are an expert and has ZERO knowledge of the SharePoint community. The SharePoint community is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to be an effective SharePoint developer, admin, architect, power user or whatever the heck you are!! The community keeps you sane, tells you when you are NOT using a best practice, recommends the best practice, and even knows when Microsoft is giving you the wrong information (*gasp* it does happen). If you can’t tell me who you are following on twitter, who's blog you read, what conferences you attend, or name the experts who you monitor to make sure you are not doing something stupid, then you are probably doing something stupid. Again, not asking you to be a speaker, blogger, or the least bit extroverted but you should be at LEAST stalking the experts. So… what’s the point? So… yeah… what’s my point in all this. Well, first of all let me point out that this is by far not a finished list and I could come up with a LOT more specific “deep dive” questions, but these should be high enough level that even non experts can recognize and ask them. If you have some common ones you run into let me know and add them in the comments below. Also, keep in mind I’m not saying you as a developer HAVE to know EVERYTHING, but you DO need to know what you don’t know and proudly and honestly state “I don’t know, but I’ll learn and find out”. Those of us hiring SharePoint developers and know and have a passion for SharePoint are not looking for that elusive “expert” who knows everything. We are looking for someone who “gets it”, has a similar passion, great attitude, an understanding that they DON’T know everything, and a desire to do it right. I would bet money that most SharePoint development disasters happen because of “experts” who think they know everything rather than the developer who is cautious and knows he doesn’t. Lastly, I know there’s a raging debate over what a “SharePoint Developer” is (I should know, as I keep bringing it up). So, obviously this blog post is more closely tied to the .NET side of SharePoint development and less towards the client side, middle tier, or whatever you want to call it. So, let’s please not get that argument going here as well… Thanks

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B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… but a little different – Oracle Commerce named Leader in Forrester B2B Commerce Wave

- by Katrina Gosek

We weren’t surprised to see Oracle Commerce positioned as a Leader in Forrester’s first Commerce Wave focused on B2B, released earlier this month. The reports validates much of what we’ve heard from our largest customers – the world’s largest distribution, manufacturing and high-tech customers who sell billions of dollars of goods and services to other businesses through their Web channels. More importantly, the report confirms something very important: B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… but a little different. B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… Clearly, B2C experiences have set expectations for B2B. Every B2B buyer is a consumer at home and brings the same expectations to a website selling electronic components, aftermarket parts, or MRO products. Forrester calls these rich consumer-based capabilities that help B2B customers do their jobs “table stakes”: search & navigation, promotions, cross-channel commerce and mobile: “Whether they are just beginning to sell online or are in the late stages of launching a next-generation site, B2B eCommerce operations today must: offer a customer experience standard comparable to what leading b2c sites now offer; address the growing influence that mobile devices are having in the workplace; make a qualitative and quantitative business case that drives sustained investment.” Just five years ago, many of our B2B customers’ online business comprised only 5-10% of their total revenue. Today, when we speak to those same brands, we hear about double and triple digit growth in their online channels. Many have seen the percentage of the business they perform in their web channels cross the 30-50% threshold. You can hear first-hand from several Oracle Commerce B2B customers about the success they are seeing, and what they’re trying to accomplish (Carolina Biological, Premier Farnell, DeliXL, Elsevier). This momentum is likely the reason Forrester broke out the separate B2B Commerce Wave from the B2C Wave. In fact, B2B is becoming the larger force in commerce, expected to collect twice the online dollars of B2C this year ($559 billion). But a little different… Despite the similarities, there is a key and very important difference between B2C and B2B. Unlike a consumer shopping for shoes, a business shopper buying from a distributor or manufacturer is coming to the Web channel as a part of their job. So in addition to a rich, consumer-like experience this shopper expects, these B2B buyers need quoting tools and complex pricing capabilities, like eProcurement, bulk order entry, and other self-service tools such as account, contract and organization management. Forrester also is emphasizing three additional “back-end” tools and capabilities their clients say they need to drive growth in their B2B online channels: i) product information management (PIM), which provides a single system of record for large part lists and product catalogs; ii) web content management (WCM), needed to manage large volumes of unstructured marketing information, and iii) order management systems (OMS), which manage and orchestrate the complex B2B order life cycle from quote through approval, submission to manufacturing, distribution and delivery. We would like to expand on each of these 3 areas: As Forrester highlights, back-end PIM is definitely needed by B2B Commerce providers. Most B2B companies have made significant investments in enterprise-grade PIMs, given the importance of product data management for aggregation and syndication of content, product attribution, analytics, and handling of complex workflows. While in principle it may sound appealing to have a PIM as part of a commerce offering (especially for SMBs who have to do more with less), our customers have typically found that PIM in a commerce platform is largely redundant with what they already have in-place, and is not fully-featured or robust enough to handle the complexity of the product data sets that B2B distributors and manufacturers usually handle. To meet the PIM needs for commerce, Oracle offers enterprise PIM (Product Hub/Fusion PIM) and a robust enterprise data quality product (EDQP) integrated with the Oracle Commerce solution. These are key differentiators of our offering and these capabilities are becoming even more tightly integrated with Oracle Commerce over time. For Commerce, what customers really need is a robust product catalog and content management system for enabling business users to further enrich and ready catalog and content data to be presented and sold online. This has been a significant area of investment in the Oracle Commerce platform , which continue to get stronger. We see this combination of capabilities as best meeting the needs of our customers for a commerce platform without adding a largely redundant, less functional PIM in the commerce front-end. On the topic of web content management, we were pleased to see Forrester recognize Oracle’s unique functional capabilities in this area and the “unique opportunity in the market to lead the convergence of commerce and content management with the amalgamation of Oracle Commerce with WebCenter Sites (formally FatWire).” Strong content management capabilities are critical for distributors and manufacturers who are frequently serving an engineering audience coming to their websites to conduct product research in search of technical data sheets, drawings, videos and more. The convergence of content, commerce, and experience is critical for B2B brands selling online. Regarding order management, Forrester notes that many businesses use their existing back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage order life cycles. We hear the same from most of our B2B customers, as they already have an ERP system—if not several of them—and are not interested in yet another one. So what do we take away from the Wave results? Forrester notes that the Oracle Commerce Platform “has always had strong B2B commerce capabilities and Oracle has an exhaustive list of B2B customers using the solution.” What makes us excited about developing leading B2B solutions are the close relationships with our customers and the clear opportunity in the market – which we’ll address in an exciting new release in the coming months. Oracle has one of the world’s largest B2B customer bases, providing leading solutions across key business-to-business functions – from marketing, sales automation, and service to master data management, and ERP. To learn more about Oracle’s Commerce product vision and strategy, visit our website and check out these other B2B Commerce Resources: - 2013 B2B Commerce Trends Report - B2B Commerce Whitepaper: Consumerization, Complexity, Change - B2B Commerce Webcast: What Industry Trend Setters Do Right - Internet Retailer, Web Drives Sales for B2B Companies - Internet Retailer, The Web Means Business: B2B Companies Beef Up Their Websites, borrowing from b2c retailers and breaking new ground - Internet Retailer, B2B e-Commerce is poised for growth ----------THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND MAY NOT BE INCORPORATED INTO A CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT

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Big Data’s Killer App…

- by jean-pierre.dijcks

Recently Keith spent some time talking about the cloud on this blog and I will spare you my thoughts on the whole thing. What I do want to write down is something about the Big Data movement and what I think is the killer app for Big Data... Where is this coming from, ok, I confess... I spent 3 days in cloud land at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara and it was quite a lot of fun. One of the nice things at Cloud Connect was that there was a track dedicated to Big Data, which prompted me to some extend to write this post. What is Big Data anyways? The most valuable point made in the Big Data track was that Big Data in itself is not very cool. Doing something with Big Data is what makes all of this cool and interesting to a business user! The other good insight I got was that a lot of people think Big Data means a single gigantic monolithic system holding gazillions of bytes or documents or log files. Well turns out that most people in the Big Data track are talking about a lot of collections of smaller data sets. So rather than thinking "big = monolithic" you should be thinking "big = many data sets". This is more than just theoretical, it is actually relevant when thinking about big data and how to process it. It is important because it means that the platform that stores data will most likely consist out of multiple solutions. You may be storing logs on something like HDFS, you may store your customer information in Oracle and you may store distilled clickstream information in some distilled form in MySQL. The big question you will need to solve is not what lives where, but how to get it all together and get some value out of all that data. NoSQL and MapReduce Nope, sorry, this is not the killer app... and no I'm not saying this because my business card says Oracle and I'm therefore biased. I think language is important, but as with storage I think pragmatic is better. In other words, some questions can be answered with SQL very efficiently, others can be answered with PERL or TCL others with MR. History should teach us that anyone trying to solve a problem will use any and all tools around. For example, most data warehouses (Big Data 1.0?) get a lot of data in flat files. Everyone then runs a bunch of shell scripts to massage or verify those files and then shoves those files into the database. We've even built shell script support into external tables to allow for this. I think the Big Data projects will do the same. Some people will use MapReduce, although I would argue that things like Cascading are more interesting, some people will use Java. Some data is stored on HDFS making Cascading the way to go, some data is stored in Oracle and SQL does do a good job there. As with storage and with history, be pragmatic and use what fits and neither NoSQL nor MR will be the one and only. Also, a language, while important, does in itself not deliver business value. So while cool it is not a killer app... Vertical Behavioral Analytics This is the killer app! And you are now thinking: "what does that mean?" Let's decompose that heading. First of all, analytics. I would think you had guessed by now that this is really what I'm after, and of course you are right. But not just analytics, which has a very large scope and means many things to many people. I'm not just after Business Intelligence (analytics 1.0?) or data mining (analytics 2.0?) but I'm after something more interesting that you can only do after collecting large volumes of specific data. That all important data is about behavior. What do my customers do? More importantly why do they behave like that? If you can figure that out, you can tailor web sites, stores, products etc. to that behavior and figure out how to be successful. Today's behavior that is somewhat easily tracked is web site clicks, search patterns and all of those things that a web site or web server tracks. that is where the Big Data lives and where these patters are now emerging. Other examples however are emerging, and one of the examples used at the conference was about prediction churn for a telco based on the social network its members are a part of. That social network is not about LinkedIn or Facebook, but about who calls whom. I call you a lot, you switch provider, and I might/will switch too. And that just naturally brings me to the next word, vertical. Vertical in this context means per industry, e.g. communications or retail or government or any other vertical. The reason for being more specific than just behavioral analytics is that each industry has its own data sources, has its own quirky logic and has its own demands and priorities. Of course, the methods and some of the software will be common and some will have both retail and service industry analytics in place (your corner coffee store for example). But the gist of it all is that analytics that can predict customer behavior for a specific focused group of people in a specific industry is what makes Big Data interesting. Building a Vertical Behavioral Analysis System Well, that is going to be interesting. I have not seen much going on in that space and if I had to have some criticism on the cloud connect conference it would be the lack of concrete user cases on big data. The telco example, while a step into the vertical behavioral part is not really on big data. It used a sample of data from the customers' data warehouse. One thing I do think, and this is where I think parts of the NoSQL stuff come from, is that we will be doing this analysis where the data is. Over the past 10 years we at Oracle have called this in-database analytics. I guess we were (too) early? Now the entire market is going there including companies like SAS. In-place btw does not mean "no data movement at all", what it means that you will do this on data's permanent home. For SAS that is kind of the current problem. Most of the inputs live in a data warehouse. So why move it into SAS and back? That all worked with 1 TB data warehouses, but when we are looking at 100TB to 500 TB of distilled data... Comments? As it is still early days with these systems, I'm very interested in seeing reactions and thoughts to some of these thoughts...

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What is SharePoint Out of the Box?

- by Bil Simser

It’s always fun in the blog-o-sphere and SharePoint bloggers always keep the pot boiling. Bjorn Furuknap recently posted a blog entry titled Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint, quickly followed up by a rebuttal by Marc Anderson on his blog. Okay, now that we have all the players and the stage what’s the big deal? Bjorn started his post saying that you don’t use “out-of-the-box” (OOTB) SharePoint because it makes no sense. I have to disagree with his premise because what he calls OOTB is basically installing SharePoint and admiring it, but not using it. In his post he lays claim that modifying say the OOTB contacts list by removing (or I suppose adding) a column, now puts you in a situation where you’re no longer using the OOTB functionality. Really? Side note. Dear Internet, please stop comparing building software to building houses. Or comparing software architecture to building architecture. Or comparing web sites to making dinner. Are you trying to dumb down something so the general masses understand it? Comparing a technical skill to a construction operation isn’t the way to do this. Last time I checked, most people don’t know how to build houses and last time I checked people reading technical SharePoint blogs are generally technical people that understand the terms you use. Putting metaphors around software development to make it easy to understand is detrimental to the goal. </rant> Okay, where were we? Right, adding columns to lists means you are no longer using the OOTB functionality. Yeah, I still don’t get it. Another statement Bjorn makes is that using the OOTB functionality kills the flexibility SharePoint has in creating exactly what you want. IMHO this really flies in the absolute face of *where* SharePoint *really* shines. For the past year or so I’ve been leaning more and more towards OOTB solutions over custom development for the simple reason that its expensive to maintain systems and code and assets. SharePoint has enabled me to do this simply by providing the tools where I can give users what they need without cracking open up Visual Studio. This might be the fact that my day job is with a regulated company and there’s more scrutiny with spending money on anything new, but frankly that should be the position of any responsible developer, architect, manager, or PM. Do you really want to throw money away because some developer tells you that you need a custom web part when perhaps with some creative thinking or expectation setting with customers you can meet the need with what you already have. The way I read Bjorn’s terminology of “out-of-the-box” is install the software and tell people to go to a website and admire the OOTB system, but don’t change it! For those that know things like WordPress, DotNetNuke, SubText, Drupal or any of those content management/blogging systems, its akin to installing the software and setting up the “Hello World” blog post or page, then staring at it like it’s useful. “Yes, we are using WordPress!”. Then not adding a new post, creating a new category, or adding an About page. Perhaps I’m wrong in my interpretation. This leads us to what is OOTB SharePoint? To many people I’ve talked to the last few hours on twitter, email, etc. it is *not* just installing software but actually using it as it was fit for purpose. What’s the purpose of SharePoint then? It has many purposes, but using the OOTB templates Microsoft has given you the ability to collaborate on projects, author/share/publish documents, create pages, track items/contacts/tasks/etc. in a multi-user web based interface, and so on. Microsoft has pretty clear definitions of these different levels of SharePoint we’re talking about and I think it’s important for everyone to know what they are and what they mean. Personalization and Administration To me, this is the OOTB experience. You install the product and then are able to do things like create new lists, sites, edit and personalize pages, create new views, etc. Basically use the platform services available to you with Windows SharePoint Services (or SharePoint Foundation in 2010) to your full advantage. No code, no special tools needed, and very little user training required. Could you take someone who has never done anything in a website or piece of software and unleash them onto a site? Probably not. However I would argue that anyone who’s configured the Outlook reading layout or applied styles to a Word document probably won’t have too much difficulty in using SharePoint OUT OF THE BOX. Customization Here’s where things might get a bit murky but to me this is where you start looking at HTML/ASPX page code through SharePoint Designer, using jQuery scripts and plugging them into Web Part Pages via a Content Editor Web Part, and generally enhancing the site. The JavaScript debate might kick in here claiming it’s no different than C#, and frankly you can totally screw a site up with jQuery on a CEWP just as easily as you can with a C# delegate control deployed to the server file system. However (again, my blog, my opinion) the customization label comes in when I need to access the server (for example creating a custom theme) or have some kind of net-new element I add to the system that wasn’t there OOTB. It’s not content (like a new list or site), it’s code and does something functional. Development Here’s were the propeller hats come on and we’re talking algorithms and unit tests and compilers oh my. Software is deployed to the server, people are writing solutions after some kind of training (perhaps), there might be some specialized tools they use to craft and deploy the solutions, there’s the possibility of exceptions being thrown, etc. There are a lot of definitions here and just like customization it might get murky (do you let non-developers build solutions using development, i.e. jQuery/C#?). In my experience, it’s much more cost effective keeping solutions under the first two umbrellas than leaping into the third one. Arguably you could say that you can’t build useful solutions without *some* kind of code (even just some simple jQuery). I think you can get a *lot* of value just from using the OOTB experience and I don’t think you’re constraining your users that much. I’m not saying Marc or Bjorn are wrong. Like Obi-Wan stated, they’re both correct “from a certain point of view”. To me, SharePoint Out of the Box makes total sense and should not be dismissed. I just don’t agree with the premise that Bjorn is basing his statements on but that’s just my opinion and his is different and never the twain shall meet.

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Community Conversation

- by ultan o'broin

Applications User Experience members (Erika Webb, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison (left) with Anne Gentle at the User Assistance Europe Conference In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: * Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help * The Microsoft Development Network Community Center * ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. * Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches * The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes are reaching out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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Interview with Lenz Grimmer about MySQL Connect

- by Keith Larson

Keith Larson: Thank you for allowing me to do this interview with you. I have been talking with a few different Oracle ACEs about the MySQL Connect Conference. I figured the MySQL community might be missing you as well. You have been very busy with Oracle Linux but I know you still have an eye on the MySQL Community. How have things been?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks for including me in this series of interviews, I feel honored! I've read the other interviews, and really liked them. I still try to follow what's going on over in the MySQL community and it's good to see that many of the familiar faces are still around. Over the course of the 9 years that I was involved with MySQL, many colleagues and contacts turned into good friends and we still maintain close relationships.It's been almost 1.5 years ago that I moved into my new role here in the Linux team at Oracle, and I really enjoy working on a Linux distribution again (I worked for SUSE before I joined MySQL AB in 2002). I'm still learning a lot - Linux in the data center has greatly evolved in so many ways and there are a lot of new and exciting technologies to explore. Keith Larson: What were your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to deliver the MySQL Connect conference to the MySQL Community?Lenz Grimmer: I think it's testament to the fact that Oracle deeply cares about MySQL, despite what many skeptics may say. What started as "MySQL Sunday" two years ago has now evolved into a full-blown sub-conference, with 80 sessions at one of the largest corporate IT events in the world. I find this quite telling, not many products at Oracle enjoy this level of exposure! So it certainly makes me feel proud to see how far MySQL has come. Keith Larson: Have you had a chance to look over the sessions? What are your thoughts on them?Lenz Grimmer: I did indeed look at the final schedule.The content committee did a great job with selecting these sessions. I'm glad to see that the content selection was influenced by involving well-known and respected members of the MySQL community. The sessions cover a broad range of topics and technologies, both covering established topics as well as recent developments. Keith Larson: When you get a chance, what sessions do you plan on attending?Lenz Grimmer: I will actually be manning the Oracle booth in the exhibition area on one of these days, so I'm not sure if I'll have a lot of time attending sessions. But if I do, I'd love to see the keynotes and catch some of the sessions that talk about recent developments and new features in MySQL, High Availability and Clustering . Quite a lot has happened and it's hard to keep up with this constant flow of new MySQL releases.In particular, the following sessions caught my attention: MySQL Connect Keynote: The State of the Dolphin Evaluating MySQL High-Availability Alternatives CERN’s MySQL “as a Service” Deployment with Oracle VM: Empowering Users MySQL 5.6 Replication: Taking Scalability and High Availability to the Next Level What’s New in MySQL Server 5.6? MySQL Security: Past and Present MySQL at Twitter: Development and Deployment MySQL Community BOF MySQL Connect Keynote: MySQL Perspectives Keith Larson: So I will ask you just like I have asked the others I have interviewed, any tips that you would give to people for handling the long hours at conferences?Lenz Grimmer: Wear comfortable shoes and make sure to drink a lot! Also prepare a plan of the sessions you would like to attend beforehand and familiarize yourself with the venue, so you can get to the next talk in time without scrambling to find the location. The good thing about piggybacking on such a large conference like Oracle OpenWorld is that you benefit from the whole infrastructure. For example, there is a nice schedule builder that helps you to keep track of your sessions of interest. Other than that, bring enough business cards and talk to people, build up your network among your peers and other MySQL professionals! Keith Larson: What features of the MySQL 5.6 release do you look forward to the most ?Lenz Grimmer: There has been solid progress in so many areas like the InnoDB Storage Engine, the Optimizer, Replication or Performance Schema, it's hard for me to really highlight anything in particular. All in all, MySQL 5.6 sounds like a very promising release. I'm confident it will follow the tradition that Oracle already established with MySQL 5.5, which received a lot of praise even from very critical members of the MySQL community. If I had to name a single feature, I'm particularly and personally happy that the precise GIS functions have finally made it into a GA release - that was long overdue. Keith Larson: In your opinion what is the best reason for someone to attend this event?Lenz Grimmer: This conference is an excellent opportunity to get in touch with the key people in the MySQL community and ecosystem and to get facts and information from the domain experts and developers that work on MySQL. The broad range of topics should attract people from a variety of roles and relations to MySQL, beginning with Developers and DBAs, to CIOs considering MySQL as a viable solution for their requirements. Keith Larson: You will be attending MySQL Connect and have some Oracle Linux Demos, do you see a growing demand for MySQL on Oracle Linux ?Lenz Grimmer: Yes! Oracle Linux is our recommended Linux distribution and we have a good relationship to the MySQL engineering group. They use Oracle Linux as a base Linux platform for development and QA, so we make sure that MySQL and Oracle Linux are well tested together. Setting up a MySQL server on Oracle Linux can be done very quickly, and many customers recognize the benefits of using them both in combination.Because Oracle Linux is available for free (including free bug fixes and errata), it's an ideal choice for running MySQL in your data center. You can run the same Linux distribution on both your development/staging systems as well as on the production machines, you decide which of these should be covered by a support subscription and at which level of support. This gives you flexibility and provides some really attractive cost-saving opportunities. Keith Larson: Since I am a Linux user and fan, what is on the horizon for Oracle Linux?Lenz Grimmer: We're working hard on broadening the ecosystem around Oracle Linux, building up partnerships with ISVs and IHVs to certify Oracle Linux as a fully supported platform for their products. We also continue to collaborate closely with the Linux kernel community on various projects, to make sure that Linux scales and performs well on large systems and meets the demands of today's data centers. These improvements and enhancements will then rolled into the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which is the key ingredient that sets Oracle Linux apart from other distributions. We also have a number of ongoing projects which are making good progress, and I'm sure you'll hear more about this at the upcoming OpenWorld conference :) Keith Larson: What is something that more people should be aware of when it comes to Oracle Linux and MySQL ?Lenz Grimmer: Many people assume that Oracle Linux is just tuned for Oracle products, such as the Oracle Database or our Engineered Systems. While it's of course true that we do a lot of testing and optimization for these workloads, Oracle Linux is and will remain a general-purpose Linux distribution that is a very good foundation for setting up a LAMP-Stack, for example. We also provide MySQL RPM packages for Oracle Linux, so you can easily stay up to date if you need something newer than what's included in the stock distribution.One more thing that is really unique to Oracle Linux is Ksplice, which allows you to apply security patches to the running Linux kernel, without having to reboot. This ensures that your MySQL database server keeps up and running and is not affected by any downtime. Keith Larson: What else would you like to add ?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks again for getting in touch with me, I appreciated the opportunity. I'm looking forward to MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld and to meet you and many other people from the MySQL community that I haven't seen for quite some time! Keith Larson: Thank you Lenz!

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Silverlight Recruiting Application Part 6 - Adding an Interview Scheduling Module/View

Between the last post and this one I went ahead and carried the ideas for the Jobs module and view into the Applicants module and view- they're both doing more or less the same thing, except with different objects being at their core. Made for an easy cut-and-paste operation with a few items being switched from one to another. Now that we have the ability to add postings and applicants, wouldn't it be nice if we could schedule an interview? Of course it would! Scheduling Module I think you get the drift from previous posts that these project structures start looking somewhat similar. The interview scheduling module is no different than the rest- it gets a SchedulingModule.cs file at the root that inherits from IModule, and there is a single SchedulerView.xsml and SchedulerViewModel.cs setup for our V+VM. We have one unique concern as we enter into this- RadScheduler deals with AppointmentsSource, not ItemsSource, so there are some special considerations to take into account when planning this module. First, I need something which inherits from AppointmentBase. This is the core of the RadScheduler appointment, and if you are planning to do any form of custom appointment, you'll want it to inherit from this. Then you can add-on functionality as needed. Here is my addition to the mix, the InterviewAppointment: 01.public class InterviewAppointment : AppointmentBase 02.{ 03. private int _applicantID; 04. public int ApplicantID 05. { 06. get { return this._applicantID; } 07. set 08. { 09. if (_applicantID != value) 10. { 11. _applicantID = value; 12. OnPropertyChanged("ApplicantID"); 13. } 14. } 15. } 16. 17. private int _postingID; 18. public int PostingID 19. { 20. get { return _postingID; } 21. set 22. { 23. if (_postingID != value) 24. { 25. _postingID = value; 26. OnPropertyChanged("PostingID"); 27. } 28. } 29. } 30. 31. private string _body; 32. public string Body 33. { 34. get { return _body; } 35. set 36. { 37. if (_body != value) 38. { 39. _body = value; 40. OnPropertyChanged("Body"); 41. } 42. } 43. } 44. 45. private int _interviewID; 46. public int InterviewID 47. { 48. get { return _interviewID; } 49. set 50. { 51. if (_interviewID != value) 52. { 53. _interviewID = value; 54. OnPropertyChanged("InterviewID"); 55. } 56. } 57. } 58. 59. public override IAppointment Copy() 60. { 61. IAppointment appointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 62. appointment.CopyFrom(this); 63. return appointment; 64. } 65. 66. public override void CopyFrom(IAppointment other) 67. { 68. base.CopyFrom(other); 69. var appointment = other as InterviewAppointment; 70. if (appointment != null) 71. { 72. ApplicantID = appointment.ApplicantID; 73. PostingID = appointment.PostingID; 74. Body = appointment.Body; 75. InterviewID = appointment.InterviewID; 76. } 77. } 78.} Nothing too exciting going on here, we just make sure that our custom fields are persisted (specifically set in CopyFrom at the bottom) and notifications are fired- otherwise this ends up exactly like the standard appointment as far as interactions, etc. But if we've got custom appointment items... that also means we need to customize what our appointment dialog window will look like. Customizing the Edit Appointment Dialog This initially sounds a lot more intimidating than it really is. The first step here depends on what you're dealing with for theming, but for ease of everything I went ahead and extracted my templates in Blend for RadScheduler so I could modify it as I pleased. For the faint of heart, the RadScheduler template is a few thousand lines of goodness since there are some very complex things going on in that control. I've gone ahead and trimmed down the template parts I don't need as much as possible, so what is left is all that is relevant to the Edit Appointment Dialog. Here's the resulting Xaml, with line numbers, so I can explain further: 001.<UserControl.Resources> 002.  003. <helpers:DataContextProxy x:Key="DataContextProxy" /> 004. 005. <telerik:Windows7Theme x:Key="Theme" /> 006. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="DialogWindowBackground" 007. Color="White" /> 008. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="CategorySelectorBorderBrush" 009. Color="#FFB1B1B1" /> 010. <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="RadToolBar_InnerBackground" 011. EndPoint="0.5,1" 012. StartPoint="0.5,0"> 013. <GradientStop Color="#FFFDFEFF" 014. Offset="0" /> 015. <GradientStop Color="#FFDDE9F7" 016. Offset="1" /> 017. <GradientStop Color="#FFE6F0FA" 018. Offset="0.5" /> 019. <GradientStop Color="#FFDCE6F4" 020. Offset="0.5" /> 021. </LinearGradientBrush> 022. <Style x:Key="FormElementTextBlockStyle" 023. TargetType="TextBlock"> 024. <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" 025. Value="Right" /> 026. <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" 027. Value="Top" /> 028. <Setter Property="Margin" 029. Value="15, 15, 0, 2" /> 030. </Style> 031. <Style x:Key="FormElementStyle" 032. TargetType="FrameworkElement"> 033. <Setter Property="Margin" 034. Value="10, 10, 0, 2" /> 035. </Style> 036. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="GenericShallowBorderBrush" 037. Color="#FF979994" /> 038. <telerik:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter" /> 039. <telerikScheduler:ImportanceToBooleanConverter x:Key="ImportanceToBooleanConverter" /> 040. <telerikScheduler:NullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="NullToVisibilityConverter" /> 041. <telerikScheduler:InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter" /> 042. <scheduler:ResourcesSeparatorConverter x:Key="ResourcesSeparatorConverter" /> 043. <DataTemplate x:Key="IconDataEditTemplate"> 044. <Image Source="/Telerik.Windows.Controls.Scheduler;component/Themes/Office/Images/cal.png" 045. Margin="3,3,0,0" 046. Width="16" 047. Height="16" /> 048. </DataTemplate> 049. <DataTemplate x:Key="SingleSelectionTemplate"> 050. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 051. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 052. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 053. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 054. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 055. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 056. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 057. MinWidth="84" /> 058. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 059. MinWidth="200" /> 060. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 061. <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 062. Margin="0,13,4,2" 063. Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 064. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" 065. Grid.Column="0" /> 066. <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 067. Width="185" 068. Margin="5,10,20,2" 069. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 070. Grid.Column="1" 071. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 072. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 073. DisplayMemberPath="Resource.DisplayName" 074. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 075. SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedItem, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 076. </Grid> 077. </DataTemplate> 078. <DataTemplate x:Key="MultipleSelectionTemplate"> 079. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 080. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 081. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 082. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 083. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 084. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 085. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 086. MinWidth="84" /> 087. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 088. MinWidth="200" /> 089. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 090. <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 091. Grid.Column="0" 092. Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 093. Margin="0,13,4,2" 094. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 095. <telerikInput:RadComboBox Grid.Column="1" 096. Width="185" 097. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 098. Margin="5,10,20,2" 099. ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 100. SelectedIndex="{Binding SelectedIndex, Mode=TwoWay}" 101. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 102. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 103. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 104. <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 105. <DataTemplate> 106. <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 107. VerticalAlignment="Stretch"> 108. <CheckBox VerticalAlignment="Center" 109. HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" 110. VerticalContentAlignment="Center" 111. IsChecked="{Binding IsChecked, Mode=TwoWay}" 112. Content="{Binding Resource.DisplayName}"> 113. <CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 114. <DataTemplate> 115. <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 116. VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 117. Text="{Binding Content, RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent}}" /> 118. </DataTemplate> 119. </CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 120. </CheckBox> 121. </Grid> 122. </DataTemplate> 123. </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 124. </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 125. </Grid> 126. </DataTemplate> 127. <scheduler:ResourceTypeTemplateSelector x:Key="ItemTemplateSelector" 128. MultipleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource MultipleSelectionTemplate}" 129. SingleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource SingleSelectionTemplate}" /> 130.  131. 132. <ControlTemplate x:Key="EditAppointmentTemplate" 133. TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 134. <StackPanel Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" 135. UseLayoutRounding="True"> 136. <StackPanel Grid.Row="0" 137. Orientation="Horizontal" 138. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 139. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 140. Height="0"> 141.  142. <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 143. Background="#50000000" 144. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 145. VerticalAlignment="Center" 146. Width="2" 147. Height="16"> 148. <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 149. Background="#80FFFFFF" 150. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 151. Width="1" /> 152. </Border> 153. <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 154. Background="#50000000" 155. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 156. VerticalAlignment="Center" 157. Width="2" 158. Height="16"> 159. <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 160. Background="#80FFFFFF" 161. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 162. Width="1" /> 163. </Border> 164. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="ShowAs" 165. VerticalAlignment="Center" 166. Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 167. <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding TimeMarkers}" 168. Width="100" 169. Height="20" 170. VerticalAlignment="Center" 171. Margin="5,0,0,0" 172. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 173. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear" 174. SelectedItem="{Binding TimeMarker,RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent},Mode=TwoWay}" 175. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 176. <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 177. <DataTemplate> 178. <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> 179. <Rectangle Fill="{Binding TimeMarkerBrush}" 180. Margin="2" 181. Width="12" 182. Height="12" /> 183. <TextBlock Text="{Binding TimeMarkerName}" 184. Margin="2" /> 185. </StackPanel> 186. </DataTemplate> 187. </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 188. </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 189. <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="High" 190. BorderThickness="0" 191. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 192. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 193. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 194. IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=High}" 195. Margin="2,2,0,2" 196. Width="23" 197. Height="23" 198. HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 199. ToolTipService.ToolTip="High importance" 200. CommandParameter="High" 201. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 202. <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center"> 203. <Path Stretch="Fill" 204. Height="10" 205. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 206. VerticalAlignment="Top" 207. Width="5.451" 208. Data="M200.39647,58.840393 C200.39337,58.336426 201.14566,57.683922 202.56244,57.684292 C204.06589,57.684685 204.73764,58.357765 204.72783,58.992363 C205.04649,61.795574 203.04713,64.181099 202.47388,66.133446 C201.93753,64.154961 199.9471,61.560352 200.39647,58.840393 z"> 209. <Path.Fill> 210. <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 211. StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 212. <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 213. Offset="0.609" /> 214. <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 215. Offset="0.927" /> 216. </LinearGradientBrush> 217. </Path.Fill> 218. </Path> 219. <Ellipse Height="3" 220. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 221. Margin="0,-1,0,0" 222. VerticalAlignment="Top" 223. Width="3"> 224. <Ellipse.Fill> 225. <RadialGradientBrush> 226. <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 227. Offset="0" /> 228. <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 229. Offset="1" /> 230. </RadialGradientBrush> 231. </Ellipse.Fill> 232. </Ellipse> 233. </StackPanel> 234. </telerik:RadToggleButton> 235. <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="Low" 236. HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 237. BorderThickness="0" 238. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 239. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 240. IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=Low}" 241. Margin="0,2,0,2" 242. Width="23" 243. Height="23" 244. ToolTipService.ToolTip="Low importance" 245. CommandParameter="Low" 246. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 247. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 248. <Path Stretch="Fill" 249. Height="12" 250. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 251. VerticalAlignment="Top" 252. Width="9" 253. Data="M222.40353,60.139881 L226.65768,60.139843 L226.63687,67.240196 L229.15347,67.240196 L224.37816,71.394943 L219.65274,67.240196 L222.37572,67.219345 z" 254. Stroke="#FF0365A7"> 255. <Path.Fill> 256. <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 257. StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 258. <GradientStop Color="#FFBBE4FF" /> 259. <GradientStop Color="#FF024572" 260. Offset="0.836" /> 261. <GradientStop Color="#FF43ADF4" 262. Offset="0.466" /> 263. </LinearGradientBrush> 264. </Path.Fill> 265. </Path> 266. </telerik:RadToggleButton> 267. </StackPanel > 268. <Border DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 269. Background="{Binding Category.CategoryBrush}" 270. Visibility="{Binding Category,Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 271. CornerRadius="3" 272. Height="20" 273. Margin="5,10,5,0"> 274. <TextBlock Text="{Binding Category.DisplayName}" 275. VerticalAlignment="Center" 276. Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 277. </Border> 278. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 279. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 280. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 281. Background="{TemplateBinding Background}"> 282. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 283. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 284. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 285. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 286. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 287. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 288. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 289. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 290. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 291. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 292. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 293. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 294. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 295. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 296. MinWidth="100" /> 297. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 298. MinWidth="200" /> 299. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 300.  301. <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectLabel" 302. Grid.Row="0" 303. Grid.Column="0" 304. Margin="0,15,0,2" 305. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Subject" 306. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 307. <TextBox x:Name="Subject" 308. Grid.Row="0" 309. Grid.Column="1" 310. MinHeight="22" 311. Padding="4 2" 312. Width="340" 313. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 314. Text="{Binding Subject, Mode=TwoWay}" 315. MaxLength="255" 316. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 317. Margin="10,12,20,2" /> 318.  319. <TextBlock x:Name="DescriptionLabel" 320. Grid.Row="1" 321. Grid.Column="0" 322. Margin="0,13,0,2" 323. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Body" 324. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 325. <TextBox x:Name="Body" 326. VerticalAlignment="top" 327. Grid.Row="1" 328. Grid.Column="1" 329. Height="Auto" 330. MaxHeight="82" 331. Width="340" 332. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 333. MinHeight="22" 334. Padding="4 2" 335. TextWrapping="Wrap" 336. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 337. Text="{Binding Body, Mode=TwoWay}" 338. AcceptsReturn="true" 339. Margin="10,10,20,2" 340. HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" 341. VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" /> 342.  343. <TextBlock x:Name="StartDateLabel" 344. Grid.Row="2" 345. Grid.Column="0" 346. Margin="0,13,0,2" 347. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="StartTime" 348. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 349. <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="StartDateTime" 350. Height="22" 351. Grid.Row="2" 352. Grid.Column="1" 353. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 354. Margin="10,10,20,2" 355. Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 356. SelectedDateTime="{Binding Start, Mode=TwoWay}" 357. telerikScheduler:StartEndDatePicker.EndPicker="{Binding ElementName=EndDateTime}" 358. IsTabStop="False" 359. IsEnabled="False" /> 360. <TextBlock x:Name="EndDateLabel" 361. Grid.Row="3" 362. Grid.Column="0" 363. Margin="0,13,0,2" 364. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="EndTime" 365. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 366. <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="EndDateTime" 367. Height="22" 368. Grid.Row="3" 369. Grid.Column="1" 370. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 371. Margin="10,10,20,2" 372. Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 373. IsTabStop="False" 374. IsEnabled="False" 375. SelectedDateTime="{Binding End, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 376.  377. <CheckBox x:Name="AllDayEventCheckbox" 378. IsChecked="{Binding IsAllDayEvent, Mode=TwoWay}" 379. Grid.Row="4" 380. Grid.Column="1" 381. Margin="10,10,20,2" 382. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 383. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 384. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="AllDayEvent"> 385. <telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 386. <telerik:InputBindingCollection> 387. <telerik:MouseBinding Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.ChangeTimePickersVisibility" 388. Gesture="LeftClick" /> 389. </telerik:InputBindingCollection> 390. </telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 391. </CheckBox> 392. <Grid Grid.Row="5" 393. Grid.ColumnSpan="2"> 394. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 395. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 396. MinWidth="100" /> 397. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 398. MinWidth="200" /> 399. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 400. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 401. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 402. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 403. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 404. <TextBlock Text="Applicant" 405. Margin="0,13,0,2" 406. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 407. <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 408. Grid.Column="1" 409. Height="24" 410. VerticalAlignment="Center" 411. ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.ApplicantList}" 412. SelectedValue="{Binding ApplicantID, Mode=TwoWay}" 413. SelectedValuePath="ApplicantID" 414. DisplayMemberPath="FirstName" /> 415. 416. <TextBlock Text="Job" 417. Margin="0,13,0,2" 418. Grid.Row="1" 419. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 420. <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 421. Grid.Column="1" 422. Grid.Row="1" 423. Height="24" 424. VerticalAlignment="Center" 425. ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.JobsList}" 426. SelectedValue="{Binding PostingID, Mode=TwoWay}" 427. SelectedValuePath="PostingID" 428. DisplayMemberPath="JobTitle"/> 429. </Grid> 430.  431. <Grid x:Name="ResourcesLayout" 432. Grid.Row="7" 433. Grid.Column="0" 434. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 435. MaxHeight="130" 436. Margin="20,5,20,0"> 437. <Border Margin="0" 438. BorderThickness="1" 439. BorderBrush="{StaticResource GenericShallowBorderBrush}" 440. Visibility="{Binding ElementName=ResourcesScrollViewer, Path=ComputedVerticalScrollBarVisibility}"></Border> 441. <ScrollViewer x:Name="ResourcesScrollViewer" 442. IsTabStop="false" 443. Grid.Row="6" 444. Grid.Column="0" 445. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 446. Margin="1" 447. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 448. VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto"> 449. <scheduler:ResourcesItemsControl x:Name="PART_Resources" 450. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 451. Padding="0,2,0,5" 452. IsTabStop="false" 453. ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding ResourceTypeModels}" 454. ItemTemplateSelector="{StaticResource ItemTemplateSelector}" /> 455. </ScrollViewer> 456. </Grid> 457. <StackPanel x:Name="FooterControls" 458. Margin="5 10 10 10" 459. Grid.Row="8" 460. Grid.Column="1" 461. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 462. Orientation="Horizontal"> 463. <telerik:RadButton x:Name="OKButton" 464. Margin="5" 465. Padding="10 0" 466. MinWidth="80" 467. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SaveAppointment" 468. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 469. telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Accept" 470. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="SaveAndCloseCommandText"> 471. </telerik:RadButton> 472. <telerik:RadButton x:Name="CancelButton" 473. Margin="5" 474. Padding="10 0" 475. MinWidth="80" 476. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Cancel" 477. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 478. telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Cancel" 479. Command="telerik:WindowCommands.Close"> 480. </telerik:RadButton> 481. </StackPanel> 482. </Grid> 483. <vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 484. <vsm:VisualStateGroup x:Name="RecurrenceRuleState"> 485. <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNull"> 486. <Storyboard> 487. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 488. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 489. Duration="0"> 490. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 491. Value="True" /> 492. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 493. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 494. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 495. Duration="0"> 496. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 497. Value="True" /> 498. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 499. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 500. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 501. Duration="0"> 502. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 503. Value="True" /> 504. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 505. </Storyboard> 506. </vsm:VisualState> 507. <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNotNull"> 508. <Storyboard> 509. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 510. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 511. Duration="0"> 512. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 513. Value="False" /> 514. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 515. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 516. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 517. Duration="0"> 518. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 519. Value="False" /> 520. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 521. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 522. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 523. Duration="0"> 524. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 525. Value="False" /> 526. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 527. </Storyboard> 528. </vsm:VisualState> 529. </vsm:VisualStateGroup> 530. </vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 531. </StackPanel> 532. </ControlTemplate> 533. <DataTemplate x:Key="AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate"> 534. <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" 535. MaxWidth="400"> 536. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Event" 537. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 538. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Appointment" 539. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource InvertedBooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 540. <TextBlock Text=" - " /> 541. <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectTextBlock" 542. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 543. Text="{Binding Appointment.Subject}" /> 544. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Untitled" 545. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 546. </StackPanel> 547. </DataTemplate> 548. <Style x:Key="EditAppointmentStyle" 549. TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 550. <Setter Property="IconTemplate" 551. Value="{StaticResource IconDataEditTemplate}" /> 552. <Setter Property="HeaderTemplate" 553. Value="{StaticResource AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate}" /> 554. <Setter Property="Background" 555. Value="{StaticResource DialogWindowBackground}" /> 556. <Setter Property="Template" 557. Value="{StaticResource EditAppointmentTemplate}" /> 558. </Style> 559.</UserControl.Resources> The first line there is the DataContextProxy I mentioned previously- we use that again to work a bit of magic in this template. Where we start getting into the dialog in question is line 132, but line 407 is where things start getting interesting. The ItemsSource is pointing at a list that exists in my ViewModel (or code-behind, if it is used as a DataContext), the SelectedValue is the item I am actually binding from the applicant (note the TwoWay binding), and SelectedValuePath and DisplayMemberPath ensure the proper applicant is being displayed from the collection. You will also see similar starting on line 420 where I do the same for the Jobs we'll be displaying. Just to wrap-up the Xaml, here's the RadScheduler declaraction that ties this all together and will be the main focus of our view: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02. Grid.Row="1" 03. Grid.Column="1" 04. Width="800" 05. MinWidth="600" 06. Height="500" 07. MinHeight="300" 08. AppointmentsSource="{Binding Interviews}" 09. EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 10. command:AppointmentAddedEventClass.Command="{Binding AddAppointmentCommand}" 11. command:ApptCreatedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptCreatingCommand}" 12. command:ApptEditedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptEditedCommand}" 13. command:ApptDeletedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptDeletedCommand}"> 14.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Now, we get to the ViewModel and what it takes to get that rigged up. And for those of you who remember the jobs post, those command:s in the Xaml are pointing to attached behavior commands that reproduce the respective events. This becomes very handy when we're setting up the code-behind version. ;) ViewModel I've been liking this approach so far, so I'm going to put the entire ViewModel here and then go into the lines of interest. Of course, feel free to ask me questions about anything that isn't clear (by line number, ideally) so I can help out if I have missed anything important: 001.public class SchedulerViewModel : ViewModelBase 002.{ 003. private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator; 004. private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; 005. 006. public RecruitingContext context; 007. 008. private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 009. public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 010. { 011. get { return _interviews; } 012. set 013. { 014. if (_interviews != value) 015. { 016. _interviews = value; 017. NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 018. } 019. } 020. } 021. 022. private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 023. public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 024. { 025. get { return this._jobsList; } 026. set 027. { 028. if (this._jobsList != value) 029. { 030. this._jobsList = value; 031. this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 032. } 033. } 034. } 035. 036. private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 037. public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 038. { 039. get { return _applicantList; } 040. set 041. { 042. if (_applicantList != value) 043. { 044. _applicantList = value; 045. NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 046. } 047. } 048. } 049. 050. public DelegateCommand<object> AddAppointmentCommand { get; set; } 051. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptCreatingCommand { get; set; } 052. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptEditedCommand { get; set; } 053. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptDeletedCommand { get; set; } 054. 055. public SchedulerViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAgg, IRegionManager regionmanager) 056. { 057. // set Unity items 058. this.eventAggregator = eventAgg; 059. this.regionManager = regionmanager; 060. 061. // load our context 062. context = new RecruitingContext(); 063. LoadOperation<Interview> loadOp = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 064. loadOp.Completed += new EventHandler(loadOp_Completed); 065. 066. this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 067. context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 068. 069. this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 070. context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 071. 072. AddAppointmentCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.AddAppt); 073. ApptCreatingCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptCreating); 074. ApptEditedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptEdited); 075. ApptDeletedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptDeleted); 076. 077. } 078. 079. void loadOp_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 080. { 081. LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 082. 083. foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 084. { 085. _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 086. } 087. } 088. 089. #region Appointment Adding 090. 091. public void AddAppt(object obj) 092. { 093. // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 094. InterviewAppointment newInterview = obj as InterviewAppointment; 095. 096. this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 097. this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 098. { 099. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 100. myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 101. myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 102. myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 103. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 104. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 105. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 106. } 107. , null); 108. } 109. 110. public void ApptCreating(object obj) 111. { 112. // handled in the behavior, just a placeholder to ensure it runs :) 113. } 114. 115. #endregion 116. 117. #region Appointment Editing 118. 119. public void ApptEdited(object obj) 120. { 121. Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 122. where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 123. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 124. 125. CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, obj as InterviewAppointment); 126. 127. context.SubmitChanges((s) => { 128. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 129. myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 130. myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 131. myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 132. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 133. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 134. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); } 135. , null); 136. } 137. 138. #endregion 139. 140. #region Appointment Deleting 141. 142. public void ApptDeleted(object obj) 143. { 144. Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 145. where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 146. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 147. 148. context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 149. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 150. { 151. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 152. myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 153. myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 154. myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 155. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 156. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 157. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 158. } 159. , null); 160. } 161. 162. #endregion 163. 164. #region Appointment Helpers :) 165. 166. public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 167. { 168. Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 169. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 170. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 171. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 172. newInterview.End = ia.End; 173. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 174. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 175. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 176. 177. return newInterview; 178. } 179. 180. public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 181. { 182. InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 183. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 184. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 185. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 186. newInterview.End = ia.End; 187. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 188. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 189. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 190. 191. return newInterview; 192. } 193. 194. public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 195. { 196. entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 197. entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 198. entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 199. entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 200. entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 201. entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 202. } 203. 204. #endregion 205.} One thing we're doing here which you won't see in any of the other ViewModels is creating a duplicate collection. I know this is something which will be fixed down the line for using RadScheduler, simplifying this process, but with WCF RIA changing as it does I wanted to ensure functionality would remain consistent as I continued development on this application. So, I do a little bit of duplication, but for the greater good. This all takes place starting on line 79, so for every entity that comes back we add it to the collection that is bound to RadScheduler. Otherwise, the DelegateCommands that you see correspond directly to the events they are named after. In each case, rather than sending over the full event arguments, I just send in the appointment in question (coming through as the object obj in all cases) so I can add (line 91), edit (line 119), and delete appointments (line 142) like normal. This just ensures they get updated back to my database. Also, the one bit of code you won't see is for the Appointment Creating (line 110) event- that is because in the command I've created I simply make the replacement I need to: 1.void element_AppointmentCreating(object sender, AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 2.{ 3. e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 4. base.ExecuteCommand(); 5.} And the ViewModel is none the wiser, the appointments just work as far as it is concerned since as they are created they become InterviewAppointments. End result? I've customized my EditAppointmentDialog as follows: And adding, editing, and deleting appointments works like a charm. I can even 'edit' by moving appointments around RadScheduler, so as they are dropped into a timeslot they perform their full edit routine and things get updated. And then, the Code-Behind Version Perhaps the thing I like the most about doing one then the other is I get to steal 90% or more of the code from the MVVM version. For example, the only real changes to the Code-Behind Xaml file exist in the control declaration, in which I use events instead of attached-behavior-event-commands: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02. Grid.Row="1" 03. Grid.Column="1" 04. Width="800" 05. MinWidth="600" 06. Height="500" 07. MinHeight="300" 08. EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 09. AppointmentAdded="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded" 10. AppointmentCreating="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating" 11. AppointmentEdited="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited" 12. AppointmentDeleted="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted"> 13.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Easy, right? Otherwise, all the same styling in UserControl.Resources was re-used, right down to the DataContextProxy that lets us bind to a collection from our viewmodel (in this case, our code-behind) to use within the DataTemplate. The code conversion gets even easier, as I could literally copy and paste almost everything from the ViewModel to my Code-Behind, just a matter of pasting the right section into the right event. Here's the code-behind as proof: 001.public partial class SchedulingView : UserControl, INotifyPropertyChanged 002.{ 003. public RecruitingContext context; 004. 005. private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 006. public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 007. { 008. get { return this._jobsList; } 009. set 010. { 011. if (this._jobsList != value) 012. { 013. this._jobsList = value; 014. this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 015. } 016. } 017. } 018. 019. private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 020. public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 021. { 022. get { return _applicantList; } 023. set 024. { 025. if (_applicantList != value) 026. { 027. _applicantList = value; 028. NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 029. } 030. } 031. } 032. 033. private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 034. public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 035. { 036. get { return _interviews; } 037. set 038. { 039. if (_interviews != value) 040. { 041. _interviews = value; 042. NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 043. } 044. } 045. } 046. 047. public SchedulingView() 048. { 049. InitializeComponent(); 050. 051. this.DataContext = this; 052. 053. this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(SchedulingView_Loaded); 054. } 055. 056. void SchedulingView_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 057. { 058. this.xJobsScheduler.AppointmentsSource = Interviews; 059. 060. context = new RecruitingContext(); 061. 062. LoadOperation loadop = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 063. loadop.Completed += new EventHandler(loadop_Completed); 064. 065. this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 066. context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 067. 068. this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 069. context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 070. } 071. 072. void loadop_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 073. { 074. LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 075. 076. _interviews.Clear(); 077. 078. foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 079. { 080. _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 081. } 082. } 083. 084. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentAddedEventArgs e) 085. { 086. // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 087. InterviewAppointment newInterview = e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment; 088. 089. this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 090. this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 091. { 092. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 093. myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 094. myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 095. myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 096. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 097. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 098. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 099. context.SubmitChanges(); 100. } 101. , null); 102. } 103. 104. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 105. { 106. e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 107. } 108. 109. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentEditedEventArgs e) 110. { 111. Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 112. where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 113. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 114. 115. CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment); 116. 117. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 118. { 119. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 120. myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 121. myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 122. myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 123. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 124. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 125. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 126. context.SubmitChanges(); 127. } 128. , null); 129. } 130. 131. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentDeletedEventArgs e) 132. { 133. Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 134. where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 135. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 136. 137. context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 138. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 139. { 140. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 141. myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 142. myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 143. myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 144. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 145. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 146. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 147. context.SubmitChanges(); 148. } 149. , null); 150. } 151. 152. #region Appointment Helpers :) 153. 154. public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 155. { 156. Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 157. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 158. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 159. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 160. newInterview.End = ia.End; 161. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 162. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 163. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 164. 165. return newInterview; 166. } 167. 168. public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 169. { 170. InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 171. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 172. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 173. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 174. newInterview.End = ia.End; 175. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 176. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 177. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 178. 179. return newInterview; 180. } 181. 182. public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 183. { 184. entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 185. entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 186. entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 187. entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 188. entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 189. entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 190. } 191. 192. #endregion 193. 194. #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members 195. 196. public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; 197. 198. public void NotifyChanged(string propertyName) 199. { 200. if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyName)) 201. throw new ArgumentException("propertyName"); 202. 203. PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); 204. } 205. 206. #endregion 207.} Nice... right? :) One really important thing to note as well. See on line 51 where I set the DataContext before the Loaded event? This is super important, as if you don't have this set before the usercontrol is loaded, the DataContextProxy has no context to use and your EditAppointmentDialog Job/Applicant dropdowns will be blank and empty. Trust me on this, took a little bit of debugging to figure out that by setting the DataContext post-loaded would only lead to disaster and frustration. Otherwise, the only other real difference is that instead of sending an ActionHistory item through an event to get added to the database and saved, I do those right in the callback from submitting. The Result Again, I only have to post one picture because these bad boys used nearly identical code for both the MVVM and the code-behind views, so our end result is... So what have we learned here today? One, for the most part this MVVM thing is somewhat easy. Yeah, you sometimes have to write a bunch of extra code, but with the help of a few useful snippits you can turn the process into a pretty streamlined little workflow. Heck, this story gets even easier as you can see in this blog post by Michael Washington- specifically run a find on 'InvokeCommandAction' and you'll see the section regarding the command on TreeView in Blend 4. Brilliant! MVVM never looked so sweet! Otherwise, it is business as usual with RadScheduler for Silverlight whichever path you're choosing for your development. Between now and the next post, I'll be cleaning up styles a bit (those RadComboBoxes are a little too close to my labels!) and adding some to the RowDetailsViews for Applicants and Jobs, so you can see all the info for an appointment in the dropdown tab view. Otherwise, we're about ready to call a wrap on this oneDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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SQL SERVER – 5 Tips for Improving Your Data with expressor Studio

- by pinaldave

It’s no secret that bad data leads to bad decisions and poor results. However, how do you prevent dirty data from taking up residency in your data store? Some might argue that it’s the responsibility of the person sending you the data. While that may be true, in practice that will rarely hold up. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you will get the data however they decide to provide it. So now you have bad data. What constitutes bad data? There are quite a few valid answers, for example: Invalid date values Inappropriate characters Wrong data Values that exceed a pre-set threshold While it is certainly possible to write your own scripts and custom SQL to identify and deal with these data anomalies, that effort often takes too long and becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, leveraging an ETL tool like expressor Studio makes the data cleansing process much easier and faster. Below are some tips for leveraging expressor to get your data into tip-top shape. Tip 1: Build reusable data objects with embedded cleansing rules One of the new features in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to define constraints at the metadata level. Using expressor’s concept of Semantic Types, you can define reusable data objects that have embedded logic such as constraints for dealing with dirty data. Once defined, they can be saved as a shared atomic type and then re-applied to other data attributes in other schemas. As you can see in the figure above, I’ve defined a constraint on zip code. I can then save the constraint rules I defined for zip code as a shared atomic type called zip_type for example. The next time I get a different data source with a schema that also contains a zip code field, I can simply apply the shared atomic type (shown below) and the previously defined constraints will be automatically applied. Tip 2: Unlock the power of regular expressions in Semantic Types Another powerful feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the option to use regular expressions as a constraint. A regular expression is used to identify patterns within data. The patterns could be something as simple as a date format or something much more complex such as a street address. For example, I could define that a valid IP address should be made up of 4 numbers, each 0 to 255, and separated by a period. So 192.168.23.123 might be a valid IP address whereas 888.777.0.123 would not be. How can I account for this using regular expressions? A very simple regular expression that would look for any 4 sets of 3 digits separated by a period would be: ^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}$ Alternatively, the following would be the exact check for truly valid IP addresses as we had defined above: ^(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])$ . In expressor, we would enter this regular expression as a constraint like this: Here we select the corrective action to be ‘Escalate’, meaning that the expressor Dataflow operator will decide what to do. Some of the options include rejecting the offending record, skipping it, or aborting the dataflow. Tip 3: Email pattern expressions that might come in handy In the example schema that I am using, there’s a field for email. Email addresses are often entered incorrectly because people are trying to avoid spam. While there are a lot of different ways to define what constitutes a valid email address, a quick search online yields a couple of really useful regular expressions for validating email addresses: This one is short and sweet: \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b (Source: http://www.regular-expressions.info/) This one is more specific about which characters are allowed: ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$ (Source: http://regexlib.com/REDetails.aspx?regexp_id=26 ) Tip 4: Reject “dirty data” for analysis or further processing Yet another feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to reject records based on constraint violations. To capture reject records on input, simply specify Reject Record in the Error Handling setting for the Read File operator. Then attach a Write File operator to the reject port of the Read File operator as such: Next, in the Write File operator, you can configure the expressor operator in a similar way to the Read File. The key difference would be that the schema needs to be derived from the upstream operator as shown below: Once configured, expressor will output rejected records to the file you specified. In addition to the rejected records, expressor also captures some diagnostic information that will be helpful towards identifying why the record was rejected. This makes diagnosing errors much easier! Tip 5: Use a Filter or Transform after the initial cleansing to finish the job Sometimes you may want to predicate the data cleansing on a more complex set of conditions. For example, I may only be interested in processing data containing males over the age of 25 in certain zip codes. Using an expressor Filter operator, you can define the conditional logic which isolates the records of importance away from the others. Alternatively, the expressor Transform operator can be used to alter the input value via a user defined algorithm or transformation. It also supports the use of conditional logic and data can be rejected based on constraint violations. However, the best tip I can leave you with is to not constrain your solution design approach – expressor operators can be combined in many different ways to achieve the desired results. For example, in the expressor Dataflow below, I can post-process the reject data from the Filter which did not meet my pre-defined criteria and, if successful, Funnel it back into the flow so that it gets written to the target table. I continue to be impressed that expressor offers all this functionality as part of their FREE expressor Studio desktop ETL tool, which you can download from here. Their Studio ETL tool is absolutely free and they are very open about saying that if you want to deploy their software on a dedicated Windows Server, you need to purchase their server software, whose pricing is posted on their website. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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LLBLGen Pro feature highlights: automatic element name construction

- by FransBouma

(This post is part of a series of posts about features of the LLBLGen Pro system) One of the things one might take for granted but which has a huge impact on the time spent in an entity modeling environment is the way the system creates names for elements out of the information provided, in short: automatic element name construction. Element names are created in both directions of modeling: database first and model first and the more names the system can create for you without you having to rename them, the better. LLBLGen Pro has a rich, fine grained system for creating element names out of the meta-data available, which I'll describe more in detail below. First the model element related element naming features are highlighted, in the section Automatic model element naming features and after that I'll go more into detail about the relational model element naming features LLBLGen Pro has to offer in the section Automatic relational model element naming features. Automatic model element naming features When working database first, the element names in the model, e.g. entity names, entity field names and so on, are in general determined from the relational model element (e.g. table, table field) they're mapped on, as the model elements are reverse engineered from these relational model elements. It doesn't take rocket science to automatically name an entity Customer if the entity was created after reverse engineering a table named Customer. It gets a little trickier when the entity which was created by reverse engineering a table called TBL_ORDER_LINES has to be named 'OrderLine' automatically. Automatic model element naming also takes into effect with model first development, where some settings are used to provide you with a default name, e.g. in the case of navigator name creation when you create a new relationship. The features below are available to you in the Project Settings. Open Project Settings on a loaded project and navigate to Conventions -> Element Name Construction. Strippers! The above example 'TBL_ORDER_LINES' shows that some parts of the table name might not be needed for name creation, in this case the 'TBL_' prefix. Some 'brilliant' DBAs even add suffixes to table names, fragments you might not want to appear in the entity names. LLBLGen Pro offers you to define both prefix and suffix fragments to strip off of table, view, stored procedure, parameter, table field and view field names. In the example above, the fragment 'TBL_' is a good candidate for such a strip pattern. You can specify more than one pattern for e.g. the table prefix strip pattern, so even a really messy schema can still be used to produce clean names. Underscores Be Gone Another thing you might get rid of are underscores. After all, most naming schemes for entities and their classes use PasCal casing rules and don't allow for underscores to appear. LLBLGen Pro can automatically strip out underscores for you. It's an optional feature, so if you like the underscores, you're not forced to see them go: LLBLGen Pro will leave them alone when ordered to to so. PasCal everywhere... or not, your call LLBLGen Pro can automatically PasCal case names on word breaks. It determines word breaks in a couple of ways: a space marks a word break, an underscore marks a word break and a case difference marks a word break. It will remove spaces in all cases, and based on the underscore removal setting, keep or remove the underscores, and upper-case the first character of a word break fragment, and lower case the rest. Say, we keep the defaults, which is remove underscores and PasCal case always and strip the TBL_ fragment, we get with our example TBL_ORDER_LINES, after stripping TBL_ from the table name two word fragments: ORDER and LINES. The underscores are removed, the first character of each fragment is upper-cased, the rest lower-cased, so this results in OrderLines. Almost there! Pluralization and Singularization In general entity names are singular, like Customer or OrderLine so LLBLGen Pro offers a way to singularize the names. This will convert OrderLines, the result we got after the PasCal casing functionality, into OrderLine, exactly what we're after. Show me the patterns! There are other situations in which you want more flexibility. Say, you have an entity Customer and an entity Order and there's a foreign key constraint defined from the target of Order and the target of Customer. This foreign key constraint results in a 1:n relationship between the entities Customer and Order. A relationship has navigators mapped onto the relationship in both entities the relationship is between. For this particular relationship we'd like to have Customer as navigator in Order and Orders as navigator in Customer, so the relationship becomes Customer.Orders 1:n Order.Customer. To control the naming of these navigators for the various relationship types, LLBLGen Pro defines a set of patterns which allow you, using macros, to define how the auto-created navigator names will look like. For example, if you rather have Customer.OrderCollection, you can do so, by changing the pattern from {$EndEntityName$P} to {$EndEntityName}Collection. The $P directive makes sure the name is pluralized, which is not what you want if you're going for <EntityName>Collection, hence it's removed. When working model first, it's a given you'll create foreign key fields along the way when you define relationships. For example, you've defined two entities: Customer and Order, and they have their fields setup properly. Now you want to define a relationship between them. This will automatically create a foreign key field in the Order entity, which reflects the value of the PK field in Customer. (No worries if you hate the foreign key fields in your classes, on NHibernate and EF these can be hidden in the generated code if you want to). A specific pattern is available for you to direct LLBLGen Pro how to name this foreign key field. For example, if all your entities have Id as PK field, you might want to have a different name than Id as foreign key field. In our Customer - Order example, you might want to have CustomerId instead as foreign key name in Order. The pattern for foreign key fields gives you that freedom. Abbreviations... make sense of OrdNr and friends I already described word breaks in the PasCal casing paragraph, how they're used for the PasCal casing in the constructed name. Word breaks are used for another neat feature LLBLGen Pro has to offer: abbreviation support. Burt, your friendly DBA in the dungeons below the office has a hate-hate relationship with his keyboard: he can't stand it: typing is something he avoids like the plague. This has resulted in tables and fields which have names which are very short, but also very unreadable. Example: our TBL_ORDER_LINES example has a lovely field called ORD_NR. What you would like to see in your fancy new OrderLine entity mapped onto this table is a field called OrderNumber, not a field called OrdNr. What you also like is to not have to rename that field manually. There are better things to do with your time, after all. LLBLGen Pro has you covered. All it takes is to define some abbreviation - full word pairs and during reverse engineering model elements from tables/views, LLBLGen Pro will take care of the rest. For the ORD_NR field, you need two values: ORD as abbreviation and Order as full word, and NR as abbreviation and Number as full word. LLBLGen Pro will now convert every word fragment found with the word breaks which matches an abbreviation to the given full word. They're case sensitive and can be found in the Project Settings: Navigate to Conventions -> Element Name Construction -> Abbreviations. Automatic relational model element naming features Not everyone works database first: it may very well be the case you start from scratch, or have to add additional tables to an existing database. For these situations, it's key you have the flexibility that you can control the created table names and table fields without any work: let the designer create these names based on the entity model you defined and a set of rules. LLBLGen Pro offers several features in this area, which are described in more detail below. These features are found in Project Settings: navigate to Conventions -> Model First Development. Underscores, welcome back! Not every database is case insensitive, and not every organization requires PasCal cased table/field names, some demand all lower or all uppercase names with underscores at word breaks. Say you create an entity model with an entity called OrderLine. You work with Oracle and your organization requires underscores at word breaks: a table created from OrderLine should be called ORDER_LINE. LLBLGen Pro allows you to do that: with a simple checkbox you can order LLBLGen Pro to insert an underscore at each word break for the type of database you're working with: case sensitive or case insensitive. Checking the checkbox Insert underscore at word break case insensitive dbs will let LLBLGen Pro create a table from the entity called Order_Line. Half-way there, as there are still lower case characters there and you need all caps. No worries, see below Casing directives so everyone can sleep well at night For case sensitive databases and case insensitive databases there is one setting for each of them which controls the casing of the name created from a model element (e.g. a table created from an entity definition using the auto-mapping feature). The settings can have the following values: AsProjectElement, AllUpperCase or AllLowerCase. AsProjectElement is the default, and it keeps the casing as-is. In our example, we need to get all upper case characters, so we select AllUpperCase for the setting for case sensitive databases. This will produce the name ORDER_LINE. Sequence naming after a pattern Some databases support sequences, and using model-first development it's key to have sequences, when needed, to be created automatically and if possible using a name which shows where they're used. Say you have an entity Order and you want to have the PK values be created by the database using a sequence. The database you're using supports sequences (e.g. Oracle) and as you want all numeric PK fields to be sequenced, you have enabled this by the setting Auto assign sequences to integer pks. When you're using LLBLGen Pro's auto-map feature, to create new tables and constraints from the model, it will create a new table, ORDER, based on your settings I previously discussed above, with a PK field ID and it also creates a sequence, SEQ_ORDER, which is auto-assigns to the ID field mapping. The name of the sequence is created by using a pattern, defined in the Model First Development setting Sequence pattern, which uses plain text and macros like with the other patterns previously discussed. Grouping and schemas When you start from scratch, and you're working model first, the tables created by LLBLGen Pro will be in a catalog and / or schema created by LLBLGen Pro as well. If you use LLBLGen Pro's grouping feature, which allows you to group entities and other model elements into groups in the project (described in a future blog post), you might want to have that group name reflected in the schema name the targets of the model elements are in. Say you have a model with a group CRM and a group HRM, both with entities unique for these groups, e.g. Employee in HRM, Customer in CRM. When auto-mapping this model to create tables, you might want to have the table created for Employee in the HRM schema but the table created for Customer in the CRM schema. LLBLGen Pro will do just that when you check the setting Set schema name after group name to true (default). This gives you total control over where what is placed in the database from your model. But I want plural table names... and TBL_ prefixes! For now we follow best practices which suggest singular table names and no prefixes/suffixes for names. Of course that won't keep everyone happy, so we're looking into making it possible to have that in a future version. Conclusion LLBLGen Pro offers a variety of options to let the modeling system do as much work for you as possible. Hopefully you enjoyed this little highlight post and that it has given you new insights in the smaller features available to you in LLBLGen Pro, ones you might not have thought off in the first place. Enjoy!

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Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

- by bob.ertl(at)oracle.com

Welcome to Oracle BI Development's BI Foundation blog, focused on helping you get the most value from your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) platform deployments. In my first series of posts, I plan to show developers the concepts and best practices for modeling in the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), the semantic layer of Oracle BI EE. In this segment, I will lay the groundwork for the modeling concepts. First, I will cover the big picture of how the BI Server fits into the system, and how the CEIM controls the query processing. Oracle BI EE Query Cycle The purpose of the Oracle BI Server is to bridge the gap between the presentation services and the data sources. There are typically a variety of data sources in a variety of technologies: relational, normalized transaction systems; relational star-schema data warehouses and marts; multidimensional analytic cubes and financial applications; flat files, Excel files, XML files, and so on. Business datasets can reside in a single type of source, or, most of the time, are spread across various types of sources. Presentation services users are generally business people who need to be able to query that set of sources without any knowledge of technologies, schemas, or how sources are organized in their company. They think of business analysis in terms of measures with specific calculations, hierarchical dimensions for breaking those measures down, and detailed reports of the business transactions themselves. Most of them create queries without knowing it, by picking a dashboard page and some filters. Others create their own analysis by selecting metrics and dimensional attributes, and possibly creating additional calculations. The BI Server bridges that gap from simple business terms to technical physical queries by exposing just the business focused measures and dimensional attributes that business people can use in their analyses and dashboards. After they make their selections and start the analysis, the BI Server plans the best way to query the data sources, writes the optimized sequence of physical queries to those sources, post-processes the results, and presents them to the client as a single result set suitable for tables, pivots and charts. The CEIM is a model that controls the processing of the BI Server. It provides the subject areas that presentation services exposes for business users to select simplified metrics and dimensional attributes for their analysis. It models the mappings to the physical data access, the calculations and logical transformations, and the data access security rules. The CEIM consists of metadata stored in the repository, authored by developers using the Administration Tool client. Presentation services and other query clients create their queries in BI EE's SQL-92 language, called Logical SQL or LSQL. The API simply uses ODBC or JDBC to pass the query to the BI Server. Presentation services writes the LSQL query in terms of the simplified objects presented to the users. The BI Server creates a query plan, and rewrites the LSQL into fully-detailed SQL or other languages suitable for querying the physical sources. For example, the LSQL on the left below was rewritten into the physical SQL for an Oracle 11g database on the right. Logical SQL Physical SQL SELECT "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_0, "D4 Product"."P01 Product" saw_1, "F2 Units"."2-01 Billed Qty (Sum All)" saw_2 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1 WITH SAWITH0 AS ( select T986.Per_Name_Month as c1, T879.Prod_Dsc as c2, sum(T835.Units) as c3, T879.Prod_Key as c4 from Product T879 /* A05 Product */ , Time_Mth T986 /* A08 Time Mth */ , FactsRev T835 /* A11 Revenue (Billed Time Join) */ where ( T835.Prod_Key = T879.Prod_Key and T835.Bill_Mth = T986.Row_Wid) group by T879.Prod_Dsc, T879.Prod_Key, T986.Per_Name_Month ) select SAWITH0.c1 as c1, SAWITH0.c2 as c2, SAWITH0.c3 as c3 from SAWITH0 order by c1, c2 Probably everybody reading this blog can write SQL or MDX. However, the trick in designing the CEIM is that you are modeling a query-generation factory. Rather than hand-crafting individual queries, you model behavior and relationships, thus configuring the BI Server machinery to manufacture millions of different queries in response to random user requests. This mass production requires a different mindset and approach than when you are designing individual SQL statements in tools such as Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly Brio), or Oracle BI Publisher. The Structure of the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM) The CEIM has a unique structure specifically for modeling the relationships and behaviors that fill the gap from logical user requests to physical data source queries and back to the result. The model divides the functionality into three specialized layers, called Presentation, Business Model and Mapping, and Physical, as shown below. Presentation services clients can generally only see the presentation layer, and the objects in the presentation layer are normally the only ones used in the LSQL request. When a request comes into the BI Server from presentation services or another client, the relationships and objects in the model allow the BI Server to select the appropriate data sources, create a query plan, and generate the physical queries. That's the left to right flow in the diagram below. When the results come back from the data source queries, the right to left relationships in the model show how to transform the results and perform any final calculations and functions that could not be pushed down to the databases. Business Model Think of the business model as the heart of the CEIM you are designing. This is where you define the analytic behavior seen by the users, and the superset library of metric and dimension objects available to the user community as a whole. It also provides the baseline business-friendly names and user-readable dictionary. For these reasons, it is often called the "logical" model--it is a virtual database schema that persists no data, but can be queried as if it is a database. The business model always has a dimensional shape (more on this in future posts), and its simple shape and terminology hides the complexity of the source data models. Besides hiding complexity and normalizing terminology, this layer adds most of the analytic value, as well. This is where you define the rich, dimensional behavior of the metrics and complex business calculations, as well as the conformed dimensions and hierarchies. It contributes to the ease of use for business users, since the dimensional metric definitions apply in any context of filters and drill-downs, and the conformed dimensions enable dashboard-wide filters and guided analysis links that bring context along from one page to the next. The conformed dimensions also provide a key to hiding the complexity of many sources, including federation of different databases, behind the simple business model. Note that the expression language in this layer is LSQL, so that any expression can be rewritten into any data source's query language at run time. This is important for federation, where a given logical object can map to several different physical objects in different databases. It is also important to portability of the CEIM to different database brands, which is a key requirement for Oracle's BI Applications products. Your requirements process with your user community will mostly affect the business model. This is where you will define most of the things they specifically ask for, such as metric definitions. For this reason, many of the best-practice methodologies of our consulting partners start with the high-level definition of this layer. Physical Model The physical model connects the business model that meets your users' requirements to the reality of the data sources you have available. In the query factory analogy, think of the physical layer as the bill of materials for generating physical queries. Every schema, table, column, join, cube, hierarchy, etc., that will appear in any physical query manufactured at run time must be modeled here at design time. Each physical data source will have its own physical model, or "database" object in the CEIM. The shape of each physical model matches the shape of its physical source. In other words, if the source is normalized relational, the physical model will mimic that normalized shape. If it is a hypercube, the physical model will have a hypercube shape. If it is a flat file, it will have a denormalized tabular shape. To aid in query optimization, the physical layer also tracks the specifics of the database brand and release. This allows the BI Server to make the most of each physical source's distinct capabilities, writing queries in its syntax, and using its specific functions. This allows the BI Server to push processing work as deep as possible into the physical source, which minimizes data movement and takes full advantage of the database's own optimizer. For most data sources, native APIs are used to further optimize performance and functionality. The value of having a distinct separation between the logical (business) and physical models is encapsulation of the physical characteristics. This encapsulation is another enabler of packaged BI applications and federation. It is also key to hiding the complex shapes and relationships in the physical sources from the end users. Consider a routine drill-down in the business model: physically, it can require a drill-through where the first query is MDX to a multidimensional cube, followed by the drill-down query in SQL to a normalized relational database. The only difference from the user's point of view is that the 2nd query added a more detailed dimension level column - everything else was the same. Mappings Within the Business Model and Mapping Layer, the mappings provide the binding from each logical column and join in the dimensional business model, to each of the objects that can provide its data in the physical layer. When there is more than one option for a physical source, rules in the mappings are applied to the query context to determine which of the data sources should be hit, and how to combine their results if more than one is used. These rules specify aggregate navigation, vertical partitioning (fragmentation), and horizontal partitioning, any of which can be federated across multiple, heterogeneous sources. These mappings are usually the most sophisticated part of the CEIM. Presentation You might think of the presentation layer as a set of very simple relational-like views into the business model. Over ODBC/JDBC, they present a relational catalog consisting of databases, tables and columns. For business users, presentation services interprets these as subject areas, folders and columns, respectively. (Note that in 10g, subject areas were called presentation catalogs in the CEIM. In this blog, I will stick to 11g terminology.) Generally speaking, presentation services and other clients can query only these objects (there are exceptions for certain clients such as BI Publisher and Essbase Studio). The purpose of the presentation layer is to specialize the business model for different categories of users. Based on a user's role, they will be restricted to specific subject areas, tables and columns for security. The breakdown of the model into multiple subject areas organizes the content for users, and subjects superfluous to a particular business role can be hidden from that set of users. Customized names and descriptions can be used to override the business model names for a specific audience. Variables in the object names can be used for localization. For these reasons, you are better off thinking of the tables in the presentation layer as folders than as strict relational tables. The real semantics of tables and how they function is in the business model, and any grouping of columns can be included in any table in the presentation layer. In 11g, an LSQL query can also span multiple presentation subject areas, as long as they map to the same business model. Other Model Objects There are some objects that apply to multiple layers. These include security-related objects, such as application roles, users, data filters, and query limits (governors). There are also variables you can use in parameters and expressions, and initialization blocks for loading their initial values on a static or user session basis. Finally, there are Multi-User Development (MUD) projects for developers to check out units of work, and objects for the marketing feature used by our packaged customer relationship management (CRM) software. The Query Factory At this point, you should have a grasp on the query factory concept. When developing the CEIM model, you are configuring the BI Server to automatically manufacture millions of queries in response to random user requests. You do this by defining the analytic behavior in the business model, mapping that to the physical data sources, and exposing it through the presentation layer's role-based subject areas. While configuring mass production requires a different mindset than when you hand-craft individual SQL or MDX statements, it builds on the modeling and query concepts you already understand. The following posts in this series will walk through the CEIM modeling concepts and best practices in detail. We will initially review dimensional concepts so you can understand the business model, and then present a pattern-based approach to learning the mappings from a variety of physical schema shapes and deployments to the dimensional model. Along the way, we will also present the dimensional calculation template, and learn how to configure the many additivity patterns.

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Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Scripting Asset Creation

- by The Old Toxophilist

So far in this series we have looked at creating asset within the EMOC BUI but the Exalogic 2.0.1 installation also provide the Iaas cli as an alternative to most of the common functionality available within EMOC. The IaaS cli interface provides access to the functions that are available to a user logged into the BUI with the CloudUser Role. As such not all functionality is available from the command line interface however having said that the IaaS cli provides all the functionality required to create the Assets within a specific Account (Tenure). Because these action are common and repeatable I decided to wrap the functionality within a simple script that takes a simple input file and creates the Asset. Following the Script through will show us the required steps needed to create the various Assets within an Account and hence I will work through the various functions within the script below describing the steps. You will note from the various steps within the script that it is designed to pause between actions allowing the proceeding action to complete. The reason for this is because we could swamp EMOC with a series of actions and may end up with a situation where we are trying to action a Volume attached before the creation of the vServer and Volume have completed. processAssets() This function simply reads through the passed input file identifying what assets need to be created. An example of the input file can be found below. It can be seen that the input file can be used to create Assets in multiple Accounts during a single run. The order of the entries define the functions that need to be actioned as follows: Input Command Iaas Actions Parameters Production:Connect akm-describe-accounts akm-create-access-key iaas-create-key-pair iaas-describe-vnets iaas-describe-vserver-types iaas-describe-server-templates Username Password Production:Create|vServer iaas-run-vserver vServer Name vServer Type Name Template Name Comma separated list of network names which the vServer will connect to. Comma separated list of IPs for the specified networks. Production:Create|Volume iaas-create-volume Volume Name Volume Size Production:Attach|Volume iaas-attach-volumes-to-vserver vServer Name Comma separated list of volume names Production:Disconnect iaas-delete-key-pair akm-delete-access-key None connectToAccount() It can be seen from the connectToAccount function that before we can execute any Asset creation we must first connect to the appropriate account. To do this we will need the ID associated with the Account. This can be found by executing the akm-describe-accounts cli command which will return a list of all Accounts and there IDs. Once we have the Account ID we generate and Access key using the akm-create-access-key command and then a keypair with the iaas-create-key-pair command. At this point we now have all the information we need to access the specific named account. createVServer() This function simply retrieved the information from the input line and then will create the vServer using the iaas-run-vserver cli command. Reading the function you will notice that it takes the various input names for vServer Type, Template and Networks and converts them into the appropriate IDs. The IaaS cli will not work directly with component names and hence all IDs need to be found. createVolume() Function that simply takes the Volume name and Size then executes the iaas-create-volume command to create the volume. attachVolume() Takes the name of the Volume, which we may have just created, and a Volume then identifies the appropriate IDs before assigning the Volume to the vServer with the iaas-attach-volumes-to-vserver. disconnectFromAccount() Once we have finished connecting to the Account we simply remove the key pair with iaas-delete-key-pair and the access key with akm-delete-access-key although it may be useful to keep this if ssh is required and you do not subsequently modify the sshd information to allow unsecured access. By default the key is required for ssh access when a vServer is created from the command-line. CreateAssets.sh 1 export OCCLI=/opt/sun/occli/bin 2 export IAAS_HOME=/opt/oracle/iaas/cli 3 export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/latest 4 export IAAS_BASE_URL=https://127.0.0.1 5 export IAAS_ACCESS_KEY_FILE=iaas_access.key 6 export KEY_FILE=iaas_access.pub 7 #CloudUser used to create vServers & Volumes 8 export IAAS_USER=exaprod 9 export IAAS_PASSWORD_FILE=root.pwd 10 export KEY_NAME=cli.recreate 11 export INPUT_FILE=CreateAssets.in 12 13 export ACCOUNTS_FILE=accounts.out 14 export VOLUMES_FILE=volumes.out 15 export DISTGRPS_FILE=distgrp.out 16 export VNETS_FILE=vnets.out 17 export VSERVER_TYPES_FILE=vstype.out 18 export VSERVER_FILE=vserver.out 19 export VSERVER_TEMPLATES=template.out 20 export KEY_PAIRS=keypairs.out 21 22 PROCESSING_ACCOUNT="" 23 24 function cleanTempFiles() { 25 rm -f $ACCOUNTS_FILE $VOLUMES_FILE $DISTGRPS_FILE $VNETS_FILE $VSERVER_TYPES_FILE $VSERVER_FILE $VSERVER_TEMPLATES $KEY_PAIRS $IAAS_PASSWORD_FILE $KEY_FILE $IAAS_ACCESS_KEY_FILE 26 } 27 28 function connectToAccount() { 29 if [[ "$ACCOUNT" != "$PROCESSING_ACCOUNT" ]] 30 then 31 if [[ "" != "$PROCESSING_ACCOUNT" ]] 32 then 33 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-delete-key-pair --key-name $KEY_NAME --access-key-file $IAAS_ACCESS_KEY_FILE 34 $IAAS_HOME/bin/akm-delete-access-key $AK 35 fi 36 PROCESSING_ACCOUNT=$ACCOUNT 37 IAAS_USER=$ACCOUNT_USER 38 echo "$ACCOUNT_PASSWORD" > $IAAS_PASSWORD_FILE 39 $IAAS_HOME/bin/akm-describe-accounts --sep "|" > $ACCOUNTS_FILE 40 while read line 41 do 42 ACCOUNT_ID=${line%%|*} 43 line=${line#*|} 44 ACCOUNT_NAME=${line%%|*} 45 # echo "Id = $ACCOUNT_ID" 46 # echo "Name = $ACCOUNT_NAME" 47 if [[ "$ACCOUNT_NAME" == "$ACCOUNT" ]] 48 then 49 echo "Found Production Account $line" 50 AK=`$IAAS_HOME/bin/akm-create-access-key --account $ACCOUNT_ID --access-key-file $IAAS_ACCESS_KEY_FILE` 51 KEYPAIR=`$IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-create-key-pair --key-name $KEY_NAME --key-file $KEY_FILE` 52 echo "Connected to $ACCOUNT_NAME" 53 break 54 fi 55 done < $ACCOUNTS_FILE 56 fi 57 } 58 59 function disconnectFromAccount() { 60 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-delete-key-pair --key-name $KEY_NAME --access-key-file $IAAS_ACCESS_KEY_FILE 61 $IAAS_HOME/bin/akm-delete-access-key $AK 62 PROCESSING_ACCOUNT="" 63 } 64 65 function getNetworks() { 66 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-describe-vnets --sep "|" > $VNETS_FILE 67 } 68 69 function getVSTypes() { 70 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-describe-vserver-types --sep "|" > $VSERVER_TYPES_FILE 71 } 72 73 function getTemplates() { 74 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-describe-server-templates --sep "|" > $VSERVER_TEMPLATES 75 } 76 77 function getVolumes() { 78 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-describe-volumes --sep "|" > $VOLUMES_FILE 79 } 80 81 function getVServers() { 82 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-describe-vservers --sep "|" > $VSERVER_FILE 83 } 84 85 function getNetworkId() { 86 while read line 87 do 88 NETWORK_ID=${line%%|*} 89 line=${line#*|} 90 NAME=${line%%|*} 91 if [[ "$NAME" == "$NETWORK_NAME" ]] 92 then 93 break 94 fi 95 done < $VNETS_FILE 96 } 97 98 function getVSTypeId() { 99 while read line 100 do 101 VSTYPE_ID=${line%%|*} 102 line=${line#*|} 103 NAME=${line%%|*} 104 if [[ "$VSTYPE_NAME" == "$NAME" ]] 105 then 106 break 107 fi 108 done < $VSERVER_TYPES_FILE 109 } 110 111 function getTemplateId() { 112 while read line 113 do 114 TEMPLATE_ID=${line%%|*} 115 line=${line#*|} 116 NAME=${line%%|*} 117 if [[ "$TEMPLATE_NAME" == "$NAME" ]] 118 then 119 break 120 fi 121 done < $VSERVER_TEMPLATES 122 } 123 124 function getVolumeId() { 125 while read line 126 do 127 export VOLUME_ID=${line%%|*} 128 line=${line#*|} 129 NAME=${line%%|*} 130 if [[ "$NAME" == "$VOLUME_NAME" ]] 131 then 132 break; 133 fi 134 done < $VOLUMES_FILE 135 } 136 137 function getVServerId() { 138 while read line 139 do 140 VSERVER_ID=${line%%|*} 141 line=${line#*|} 142 NAME=${line%%|*} 143 if [[ "$VSERVER_NAME" == "$NAME" ]] 144 then 145 break; 146 fi 147 done < $VSERVER_FILE 148 } 149 150 function getVServerState() { 151 getVServers 152 while read line 153 do 154 VSERVER_ID=${line%%|*} 155 line=${line#*|} 156 NAME=${line%%|*} 157 line=${line#*|} 158 line=${line#*|} 159 VSERVER_STATE=${line%%|*} 160 if [[ "$VSERVER_NAME" == "$NAME" ]] 161 then 162 break; 163 fi 164 done < $VSERVER_FILE 165 } 166 167 function pauseUntilVServerRunning() { 168 # Wait until the Server is running before creating the next 169 getVServerState 170 while [[ "$VSERVER_STATE" != "RUNNING" ]] 171 do 172 getVServerState 173 echo "$NAME $VSERVER_STATE" 174 if [[ "$VSERVER_STATE" != "RUNNING" ]] 175 then 176 echo "Sleeping......." 177 sleep 60 178 fi 179 if [[ "$VSERVER_STATE" == "FAILED" ]] 180 then 181 echo "Will Delete $NAME in 5 Minutes....." 182 sleep 300 183 deleteVServer 184 echo "Deleted $NAME waiting 5 Minutes....." 185 sleep 300 186 break 187 fi 188 done 189 # Lets pause for a minute or two 190 echo "Just Chilling......" 191 sleep 60 192 echo "Ahhhhh we're getting there......." 193 sleep 60 194 echo "I'm almost at one with the universe......." 195 sleep 60 196 echo "Bong Reality Check !" 197 } 198 199 function deleteVServer() { 200 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-terminate-vservers --force --vserver-ids $VSERVER_ID 201 } 202 203 function createVServer() { 204 VSERVER_NAME=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 205 ASSET_DETAILS=${ASSET_DETAILS#*|} 206 VSTYPE_NAME=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 207 ASSET_DETAILS=${ASSET_DETAILS#*|} 208 TEMPLATE_NAME=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 209 ASSET_DETAILS=${ASSET_DETAILS#*|} 210 NETWORK_NAMES=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 211 ASSET_DETAILS=${ASSET_DETAILS#*|} 212 IP_ADDRESSES=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 213 # Get Ids associated with names 214 getVSTypeId 215 getTemplateId 216 # Convert Network Names to Ids 217 NETWORK_IDS="" 218 while true 219 do 220 NETWORK_NAME=${NETWORK_NAMES%%,*} 221 NETWORK_NAMES=${NETWORK_NAMES#*,} 222 getNetworkId 223 if [[ "$NETWORK_IDS" != "" ]] 224 then 225 NETWORK_IDS="$NETWORK_IDS,$NETWORK_ID" 226 else 227 NETWORK_IDS=$NETWORK_ID 228 fi 229 if [[ "$NETWORK_NAME" == "$NETWORK_NAMES" ]] 230 then 231 break 232 fi 233 done 234 # Create vServer 235 echo "About to execute : $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-run-vserver --name $VSERVER_NAME --key-name $KEY_NAME --vserver-type $VSTYPE_ID --server-template-id $TEMPLATE_ID --vnets $NETWORK_IDS --ip-addresses $IP_ADDRESSES" 236 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-run-vserver --name $VSERVER_NAME --key-name $KEY_NAME --vserver-type $VSTYPE_ID --server-template-id $TEMPLATE_ID --vnets $NETWORK_IDS --ip-addresses $IP_ADDRESSES 237 pauseUntilVServerRunning 238 } 239 240 function createVolume() { 241 VOLUME_NAME=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 242 ASSET_DETAILS=${ASSET_DETAILS#*|} 243 VOLUME_SIZE=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 244 # Create Volume 245 echo "About to execute : $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-create-volume --name $VOLUME_NAME --size $VOLUME_SIZE" 246 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-create-volume --name $VOLUME_NAME --size $VOLUME_SIZE 247 # Lets pause 248 echo "Just Waiting 30 Seconds......" 249 sleep 30 250 } 251 252 function attachVolume() { 253 VSERVER_NAME=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 254 ASSET_DETAILS=${ASSET_DETAILS#*|} 255 VOLUME_NAMES=${ASSET_DETAILS%%|*} 256 # Get vServer Id 257 getVServerId 258 # Convert Volume Names to Ids 259 VOLUME_IDS="" 260 while true 261 do 262 VOLUME_NAME=${VOLUME_NAMES%%,*} 263 VOLUME_NAMES=${VOLUME_NAMES#*,} 264 getVolumeId 265 if [[ "$VOLUME_IDS" != "" ]] 266 then 267 VOLUME_IDS="$VOLUME_IDS,$VOLUME_ID" 268 else 269 VOLUME_IDS=$VOLUME_ID 270 fi 271 if [[ "$VOLUME_NAME" == "$VOLUME_NAMES" ]] 272 then 273 break 274 fi 275 done 276 # Attach Volumes 277 echo "About to execute : $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-attach-volumes-to-vserver --vserver-id $VSERVER_ID --volume-ids $VOLUME_IDS" 278 $IAAS_HOME/bin/iaas-attach-volumes-to-vserver --vserver-id $VSERVER_ID --volume-ids $VOLUME_IDS 279 # Lets pause 280 echo "Just Waiting 30 Seconds......" 281 sleep 30 282 } 283 284 function processAssets() { 285 while read line 286 do 287 ACCOUNT=${line%%:*} 288 line=${line#*:} 289 ACTION=${line%%|*} 290 line=${line#*|} 291 if [[ "$ACTION" == "Connect" ]] 292 then 293 ACCOUNT_USER=${line%%|*} 294 line=${line#*|} 295 ACCOUNT_PASSWORD=${line%%|*} 296 connectToAccount 297 298 ## Account Info 299 getNetworks 300 getVSTypes 301 getTemplates 302 303 continue 304 fi 305 if [[ "$ACTION" == "Create" ]] 306 then 307 ASSET=${line%%|*} 308 line=${line#*|} 309 ASSET_DETAILS=$line 310 if [[ "$ASSET" == "vServer" ]] 311 then 312 createVServer 313 314 continue 315 fi 316 if [[ "$ASSET" == "Volume" ]] 317 then 318 createVolume 319 320 continue 321 fi 322 fi 323 if [[ "$ACTION" == "Attach" ]] 324 then 325 ASSET=${line%%|*} 326 line=${line#*|} 327 ASSET_DETAILS=$line 328 if [[ "$ASSET" == "Volume" ]] 329 then 330 getVolumes 331 getVServers 332 attachVolume 333 334 continue 335 fi 336 fi 337 if [[ "$ACTION" == "Connect" ]] 338 then 339 disconnectFromAccount 340 341 continue 342 fi 343 done < $INPUT_FILE 344 } 345 346 # Should Parameterise this 347 348 while [ $# -gt 0 ] 349 do 350 case "$1" in 351 -a) INPUT_FILE="$2"; shift;; 352 *) echo ""; echo >&2 \ 353 "usage: $0 [-a <Asset Definition File>] (Default is CreateAssets.in)" 354 echo""; exit 1;; 355 *) break;; 356 esac 357 shift 358 done 359 360 361 362 363 processAssets 364 365 echo "**************************************" 366 echo "***** Finished Creating Assets *****" 367 echo "**************************************" 368 CreateAssetsProd.in Production:Connect|exaprod|welcome1 Production:Create|vServer|VS006|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-otd-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.223.13,192.168.0.13,10.117.81.67,172.17.0.14 Production:Create|vServer|VS007|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-otd-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.223.14,192.168.0.14,10.117.81.68,172.17.0.15 Production:Create|vServer|VS008|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-wls-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.225.61,192.168.0.61,10.117.81.61,172.17.0.16 Production:Create|vServer|VS009|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-wls-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.225.62,192.168.0.62,10.117.81.62,172.17.0.17 Production:Create|vServer|VS000|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-wls-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.225.63,192.168.0.63,10.117.81.63,172.17.0.18 Production:Create|vServer|VS001|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-wls-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.225.64,192.168.0.64,10.117.81.64,172.17.0.19 Production:Create|vServer|VS002|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-wls-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.225.65,192.168.0.65,10.117.81.65,172.17.0.20 Production:Create|vServer|VS003|VSTProduction|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-wls-prod,vn-prod-web,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.225.66,192.168.0.66,10.117.81.66,172.17.0.21 Production:Create|Volume|VS006|50 Production:Create|Volume|VS007|50 Production:Create|Volume|VS008|50 Production:Create|Volume|VS009|50 Production:Create|Volume|VS000|50 Production:Create|Volume|VS001|50 Production:Create|Volume|VS002|50 Production:Create|Volume|VS003|50 Production:Attach|Volume|VS006|VS006 Production:Attach|Volume|VS007|VS007 Production:Attach|Volume|VS008|VS008 Production:Attach|Volume|VS009|VS009 Production:Attach|Volume|VS000|VS000 Production:Attach|Volume|VS001|VS001 Production:Attach|Volume|VS002|VS002 Production:Attach|Volume|VS003|VS003 Production:Disconnect Development:Connect|exadev|welcome1 Development:Create|vServer|VS014|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.24,10.117.81.71,172.17.0.24 Development:Create|vServer|VS015|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.25,10.117.81.72,172.17.0.25 Development:Create|vServer|VS016|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.26,10.117.81.73,172.17.0.26 Development:Create|vServer|VS017|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.27,10.117.81.74,172.17.0.27 Development:Create|vServer|VS018|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.28,10.117.81.75,172.17.0.28 Development:Create|vServer|VS019|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.29,10.117.81.76,172.17.0.29 Development:Create|vServer|VS020|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.30,10.117.81.77,172.17.0.30 Development:Create|vServer|VS021|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.31,10.117.81.78,172.17.0.31 Development:Create|vServer|VS022|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.32,10.117.81.79,172.17.0.32 Development:Create|vServer|VS023|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.33,10.117.81.80,172.17.0.33 Development:Create|vServer|VS024|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.34,10.117.81.81,172.17.0.34 Development:Create|vServer|VS025|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.35,10.117.81.82,172.17.0.35 Development:Create|vServer|VS026|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.36,10.117.81.83,172.17.0.36 Development:Create|vServer|VS027|VSTDevelopment|BaseOEL56ServerTemplate|EoIB-development,IPoIB-default,IPoIB-vserver-shared-storage|10.51.224.37,10.117.81.84,172.17.0.37 Development:Create|Volume|VS014|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS015|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS016|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS017|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS018|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS019|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS020|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS021|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS022|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS023|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS024|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS025|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS026|50 Development:Create|Volume|VS027|50 Development:Attach|Volume|VS014|VS014 Development:Attach|Volume|VS015|VS015 Development:Attach|Volume|VS016|VS016 Development:Attach|Volume|VS017|VS017 Development:Attach|Volume|VS018|VS018 Development:Attach|Volume|VS019|VS019 Development:Attach|Volume|VS020|VS020 Development:Attach|Volume|VS021|VS021 Development:Attach|Volume|VS022|VS022 Development:Attach|Volume|VS023|VS023 Development:Attach|Volume|VS024|VS024 Development:Attach|Volume|VS025|VS025 Development:Attach|Volume|VS026|VS026 Development:Attach|Volume|VS027|VS027 Development:Disconnect This entry was originally posted on the The Old Toxophilist Site.

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