Search Results

Search found 1135 results on 46 pages for 'paid'.

Page 42/46 | < Previous Page | 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46  | Next Page >

• HDFC Bank's Journey to Oracle Private Database Cloud

  - by Nilesh Agrawal

  One of the key takeaways from a recent post by Sushil Kumar is the importance of business initiative that drives the transformational journey from legacy IT to enterprise private cloud. The journey that leads to a agile, self-service and efficient infrastructure with reduced complexity and enables IT to deliver services more closely aligned with business requirements. Nilanjay Bhattacharjee, AVP, IT of HDFC Bank presented a real-world case study based on one such initiative in his Oracle OpenWorld session titled "HDFC BANK Journey into Oracle Database Cloud with EM 12c DBaaS". The case study highlighted in this session is from HDFC Bank’s Lending Business Segment, which comprises roughly 50% of Bank’s top line. Bank’s Lending Business is always under pressure to launch “New Schemes” to compete and stay ahead in this segment and IT has to keep up with this challenging business requirement. Lending related applications are highly dynamic and go through constant changes and every single and minor change in each related application is required to be thoroughly UAT tested certified before they are certified for production rollout. This leads to a constant pressure in IT for rapid provisioning of UAT databases on an ongoing basis to enable faster time to market. Nilanjay joined Sushil Kumar, VP, Product Strategy, Oracle, during the Enterprise Manager general session at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Let's watch what Nilanjay had to say about their recent Database cloud deployment. “Agility” in launching new business schemes became the key business driver for private database cloud adoption in the Bank. Nilanjay spent an hour discussing it during his session. Let's look at why Database-as-a-Service(DBaaS) model was need of the hour in this case  - Average 3 days to provision UAT Database for Loan Management Application Silo’ed UAT environment with Average 30% utilization Compliance requirement consume UAT testing resources DBA activities leads to $$ paid to SI for provisioning databases manually Overhead in managing configuration drift between production and test environments Rollout impact/delay on new business initiatives The private database cloud implementation progressed through 4 fundamental phases - Standardization, Consolidation, Automation, Optimization of UAT infrastructure. Project scoping was carried out and end users and stakeholders were engaged early on right from planning phase and including all phases of implementation. Standardization and Consolidation phase involved multiple iterations of planning to first standardize on infrastructure, db versions, patch levels, configuration, IT processes etc and with database level consolidation project onto Exadata platform. It was also decided to have existing AIX UAT DB landscape covered and EM 12c DBaaS solution being platform agnostic supported this model well. Automation and Optimization phase provided the necessary Agility, Self-Service and efficiency and this was made possible via EM 12c DBaaS. EM 12c DBaaS Self-Service/SSA Portal was setup with required zones, quotas, service templates, charge plan defined. There were 2 zones implemented - Exadata zone  primarily for UAT and benchmark testing for databases running on Exadata platform and second zone was for AIX setup to cover other databases those running on AIX. Metering and Chargeback/Showback capabilities provided business and IT the framework for cloud optimization and also visibility into cloud usage. More details on UAT cloud implementation, related building blocks and EM 12c DBaaS solution are covered in Nilanjay's OpenWorld session here. Some of the key Benefits achieved from UAT cloud initiative are - New business initiatives can be easily launched due to rapid provisioning of UAT Databases [ ~3 hours ] Drastically cut down $$ on SI for DBA Activities due to Self-Service Effective usage of infrastructure leading to  better ROI Empowering  consumers to provision database using Self-Service Control on project schedule with DB end date aligned to project plan submitted during provisioning Databases provisioned through Self-Service are monitored in EM and auto configured for Alerts and KPI Regulatory requirement of database does not impact existing project in queue This table below shows typical list of activities and tasks involved when a end user requests for a UAT database. EM 12c DBaaS solution helped reduce UAT database provisioning time from roughly 3 days down to 3 hours and this timing also includes provisioning time for database with production scale data (ranging from 250 G to 2 TB of data) - And it's not just about time to provision,  this initiative has enabled an agile, efficient and transparent UAT environment where end users are empowered with real control of cloud resources and IT's role is shifted as enabler of strategic services instead of being administrator of all user requests. The strong collaboration between IT and business community right from planning to implementation to go-live has played the key role in achieving this common goal of enterprise private cloud. Finally, real cloud is here and this cloud is accompanied with rain (business benefits) as well ! For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

  Read the article

• Oracle apresenta resultados do ano

  - by pfolgado

  A Oracle acabou de apresentar os resultados do 4º trimestre e do ano fiscal FY11. Os resultados mais relevantes são: Receitas de Vendas cresceram 33%, atingindo um total de 35,6 mil milhões de dólares Vendas de Novas licenças cresceram 23% Receitas de Hardware de 4,4 mil milhões de dólares Resultados operacionais cresceram 39% Resultados por acção de cresceram 38% para 1,67 dólares “In Q4, we achieved a 19% new software license growth rate with almost no help from acquisitions,” said Oracle President and CFO, Safra Catz. “This strong organic growth combined with continuously improving operational efficiencies enabled us to deliver a 48% operating margin in the quarter. As our results reflect, we clearly exceeded even our own high expectations for Sun’s business.” “In addition to record setting software sales, our Exadata and Exalogic systems also made a strong contribution to our growth in Q4,” said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. “Today there are more than 1,000 Exadata machines installed worldwide. Our goal is to triple that number in FY12.” “In FY11 Oracle’s database business experienced its fastest growth in a decade,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Over the past few years we added features to the Oracle database for both cloud computing and in-memory databases that led to increased database sales this past year. Lately we’ve been focused on the big business opportunity presented by Big Data.” Oracle Reports Q4 GAAP EPS Up 34% To 62 Cents; Q4 NON-GAAP EPS Up 25% To 75 Cents Q4 Software New License Sales Up 19%, Q4 Total Revenue Up 13% Oracle today announced fiscal 2011 Q4 GAAP total revenues were up 13% to $10.8 billion, while non-GAAP total revenues were up 12% to $10.8 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP new software license revenues were up 19% to $3.7 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP software license updates and product support revenues were up 15% to $4.0 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP hardware systems products revenues were down 6% to $1.2 billion. GAAP operating income was up 32% to $4.4 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 40%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 19% to $5.2 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 48%. GAAP net income was up 36% to $3.2 billion, while non-GAAP net income was up 27% to $3.9 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $0.62, up 34% compared to last year while non-GAAP earnings per share were up 25% to $0.75. GAAP operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $11.2 billion. For fiscal year 2011, GAAP total revenues were up 33% to $35.6 billion, while non-GAAP total revenues were up 33% to $35.9 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP new software license revenues were up 23% to $9.2 billion. GAAP software license updates and product support revenues were up 13% to $14.8 billion, while non-GAAP software license updates and product support revenues were up 13% to $14.9 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP hardware systems products revenues were $4.4 billion. GAAP operating income was up 33% to $12.0 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 34%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 27% to $15.9 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 44%. GAAP net income was up 39% to $8.5 billion, while non-GAAP net income was up 34% to $11.4 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $1.67, up 38% compared to last year while non-GAAP earnings per share were up 33% to $2.22. “In Q4, we achieved a 19% new software license growth rate with almost no help from acquisitions,” said Oracle President and CFO, Safra Catz. “This strong organic growth combined with continuously improving operational efficiencies enabled us to deliver a 48% operating margin in the quarter. As our results reflect, we clearly exceeded even our own high expectations for Sun’s business.” “In addition to record setting software sales, our Exadata and Exalogic systems also made a strong contribution to our growth in Q4,” said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. “Today there are more than 1,000 Exadata machines installed worldwide. Our goal is to triple that number in FY12.” “In FY11 Oracle’s database business experienced its fastest growth in a decade,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Over the past few years we added features to the Oracle database for both cloud computing and in-memory databases that led to increased database sales this past year. Lately we’ve been focused on the big business opportunity presented by Big Data.” In addition, Oracle also announced that its Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.06 per share of outstanding common stock. This dividend will be paid to stockholders of record as of the close of business on July 13, 2011, with a payment date of August 3, 2011.

  Read the article

• Red Gate in the Community

  - by Nick Harrison

  Much has been said recently about Red Gate's community involvement and commitment to the DotNet community. Much of this has been unduly negative. Before you start throwing stones and spewing obscenities, consider some additional facts: Red Gate's software is actually very good. I have worked on many projects where Red Gate's software was instrumental in finishing successfully. Red Gate is VERY good to the community. I have spoken at many user groups and code camps where Red Gate has been a sponsor. Red Gate consistently offers up money to pay for the venue or food, and they will often give away licenses as door prizes. There are many such community events that would not take place without Red Gate's support. All I have ever seen them ask for is to have their products mentioned or be listed as a sponsor. They don't insist on anyone following a specific script. They don't monitor how their products are showcased. They let their products speak for themselves. Red Gate sponsors the Simple Talk web site. I publish there regularly. Red Gate has never exerted editorial pressure on me. No one has ever told me we can't publish this unless you mention Red Gate products. No one has ever said, you need to say nice things about Red Gate products in order to be published. They have told me, "you need to make this less academic, so you don't alienate too many readers. "You need to actually write an introduction so people will know what you are talking about". "You need to write this so that someone who isn't a reflection nut will follow what you are trying to say." In short, they have been good editors worried about the quality of the content and what the readers are likely to be interested in. For me personally, Red Gate and Simple Talk have both been excellent to work with. As for the developer outrage… I am a little embarrassed by so much of the response that I am seeing. So much of the complaints remind me of little children whining "but you promised" Semantics aside. A promise is just a promise. It's not like they "pinky sweared". Sadly no amount name calling or "double dog daring" will change the economics of the situation. Red Gate is not a multibillion dollar corporation. They are a mid size company doing the best they can. Without a doubt, their pockets are not as deep as Microsoft's. I honestly believe that they did try to make the "freemium" model work. Sadly it did not. I have no doubt that they intended for it to work and that they tried to make it work. I also have no doubt that they labored over making this decision. This could not have been an easy decision to make. Many people are gleefully proclaiming a massive backlash against Red Gate swearing off their wonderful products and promising to bash them at every opportunity from now on. This is childish behavior that does not represent professionals. This type of behavior is more in line with bullies in the school yard than professionals in a professional community. Now for my own prediction… This back lash against Red Gate is not likely to last very long. We will all realize that we still need their products. We may look around for alternatives, but realize that they really do have the best in class for every product that they produce, and that they really are not exorbitantly priced. We will see them sponsoring Code Camps and User Groups and be reminded, "hey this isn't such a bad company". On the other hand, software shops like Red Gate, will remember this back lash and give a second thought to supporting open source projects. They will worry about getting involved when an individual wants to turn over control for a product that they developed but can no longer support alone. Who wants to run the risk of not being able to follow through on their best intentions. In the end we may all suffer, even the toddlers among us throwing the temper tantrum, "BUT YOU PROMISED!" Disclaimer Before anyone asks or jumps to conclusions, I do not get paid by Red Gate to say any of this. I have often written about their products, and I have long thought that they are a wonderful company with amazing products. If they ever open an office in the SE United States, I will be one of the first to apply.

  Read the article

• Deciding On Features For Open Source

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. It already works that way at work. I don’t want to come home from work and work on things that others decide for me unless they are paying me for those features. So how do I decide on features for our open source projects? I think there are at least three paths to feature selection and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Feature Selection IS the Set of Features For the Domain Your product, in whatever domain it is in, needs to have the basic set of features that make it answer the needs of that domain. That is different for every product, but if you take for example a build tool, at the very least it needs to be able to compile source. And these basic needed features are not always objective either. Two people could completely disagree what makes for a required feature to meet a domain need for a product. Even one person may disagree with himself/herself about what features are needed based on different timeframes. So that leads us down to subjective. Feature Selection IS An Answer To Competition Some features go in because the competition adds a feature that may draw others away from your product offering. With OSS, there are all free alternatives, so if your competition adds a killer feature and you don’t, there isn’t much other than learning (how to use the other product) to move your customers off to the competition. If you want to keep your customers, you need to be ready to answer the questions of adding the features your competition has added.  Sometimes it’s about adding a feature that your competition charges for, but you add it for free. That draws people to the free alternative – so sometimes that adds a motivation to select a feature. Sometimes it’s because you want those features in your product, either to learn how you can answer the question of how to do something and/or because you have a need for that feature and you want it in your product. That also leads us down the road to subjective. Feature Selection IS Subjective I decide on features based on what I want to see in the product I am working on. Things I am interested in or have the biggest need for usually get picked first, with things that do not interest me either coming later or not at all. Most people get interested in an area of OSS because it solves a need for them and/or they find it interesting. If one of these two things is not happening and they are not being paid, it’s likely that person will move on to something else they find interesting or just stop OSS altogether. OSS feature selection is just that – subjective. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be opinionated and it wouldn’t have a personality about it. Most people like certain OSS because they like where the product is going or the personalities behind the product. For me, I want my products to be easy to use and solve an important problem. If it takes you more than 5-10 minutes to learn how to use my product, I know you are probably going somewhere else. So I pick features that make the product easy to use and learn, and those are not always the simplest features to work on. I work for conventions and make the product opinionated, because I think that is what makes using a product easier, if it already works with little setup. And I like to provide the ability for power users to get in and change the conventions to suit their needs. So those are required features for me above and beyond the domain features. I like to think I do a pretty good job at this. Usually when I present on something I’ve created, I like seeing people’s eyes light up when they see how simple it is to set up a powerful product like UppercuT. Patches And/Or Donations But remember before you say I’m a bad person or won’t use my product, I’ll always accept patches or I might like the feature that you suggest. If you like using the products I provide and they solve a problem for you the two biggest compliments you can provide are either a patch or a donation.  If you think the product is great, but if it could do this one other thing, it would be awesome(!), then consider contacting me and providing a patch, or consider contacting me with a donation and a request to put the feature in. And alternatively, if it’s a big feature, you could hire me to work on the product to make it even better. What If There Are Multiple Committers? In the question of multiple committers, I choose that someone always makes the ultimate decision to select whether a feature should be part of a product or not. But for other OSS project maybe this is not the case. If there is not an ultimate decision maker, then there is the possibility of either adding every feature suggested or having a deadlock on two conflicting features.   So let me pose this question. If you work on Open Source, how do you decide on what features to put in your open source projects? How do you decide what doesn’t belong? What do you do when there are conflicting features?

  Read the article

• User-Defined Customer Events & their impact (FA Type Profile)

  - by Rajesh Sharma

  CC&B automatically creates field activities when a specific Customer Event takes place. This depends on the way you have setup your Field Activity Type Profiles, the templates within, and associated SP Condition(s) on the template. CC&B uses the service point type, its state and referenced customer event to determine which field activity type to generate.   Customer events available in the base product include: Cut for Non-payment (CNP) Disconnect Warning (DIWA) Reconnect for Payment (REPY) Reread (RERD) Stop Service (STOP) Start Service (STRT) Start/Stop (STSP)   Note the Field values/codes defined for each event.   CC&B comes with a flexibility to define new set of customer events. These can be defined in the Look Up - CUST_EVT_FLG. Values from the Look Up are used on the Field Activity Type Profile Template page.     So what's the use of having user-defined Customer Events? And how will the system detect such events in order to create field activity(s)?   Well, system can only detect such events when you reference a user-defined customer event on a Severance Event Type for an event type Create Field Activities.     This way you can create additional field activities of a specific field activity type for user-defined customer events.   One of our customers adopted this feature and created a user-defined customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment for Water Services. This event was then linked on a Field Activity Type Profile and referenced on a Severance Event - CUT FOR NON PAY-W. The associated Severance Process was configured to trigger a reconnection process if it was cancelled (done by defining a Post Cancel Algorithm). Whenever this Severance Event was executed, a specific type of Field Activity was generated for disconnection purposes. The Field Activity type was determined by the system from the Field Activity Type Profile referenced for the SP Type, SP's state and the referenced user-defined customer event. All was working well until the time when they realized that in spite of the Severance Process getting cancelled (when a payment was made); the Post Cancel Algorithm was not executed to start a Reconnection Severance Process for the purpose of generating a reconnection field activity and reconnecting the service.   Basically, the Post Cancel algorithm (if specified on a Severance Process Template) is triggered when a Severance Process gets cancelled because a credit transaction has affected/relieved a Service Agreement's debt.   So what exactly was happening? Now we come to actual question as to what is the impact in having a user-defined customer event.   System defined/base customer events are hard-coded across the entire system. There is an impact even if you remove any customer event entry from the Look Up. User-defined customer events are not recognized by the system anywhere else except in the severance process, as described above.   There are few programs which have routines to first validate the completion of disconnection field activities, which were raised as a result of customer event CNP - Cut for Non-payment in order to perform other associated actions. One such program is the Post Cancel Algorithm, referenced on a Severance Process Template, generally used to reconnect services which were disconnected from other Severance Event, specifically CNP - Cut for Non-Payment. Post cancel algorithm provided by the product - SEV POST CAN does the following (below is the algorithm's description):   This algorithm is called after a severance process has been cancelled (typically because the debt was paid and the SA is no longer eligible to be on the severance process). It checks to see if the process has a completed 'disconnect' event and, if so, starts a reconnect process using the Reconnect Severance Process Template defined in the parameter.    Notice the underlined text. This algorithm implicitly checks for Field Activities having completed status, which were generated from Severance Events as a result of CNP - Cut for Non-payment customer event.   Now if we look back to the customer's issue, we can relate that the Post Cancel algorithm was triggered, but was not able to find any 'Completed' CNP - Cut for Non-payment related field activity. And hence was not able to start a reconnection severance process. This was because a field activity was generated and completed for a customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment of Water Services instead.   To conclude, if you introduce new customer events that extend or simulate base customer events, the ones that are included in the base product, ensure that there is no other impact either direct or indirect to other business functions that the application has to offer.  

  Read the article

• My Codemash 2011 Retrospective

  - by Greg Malcolm

  I just got back from Codemash yesterday, and still on an adrenaline buzz. Here's my take on this years encounter: The Awesome Nearly everybody in one place Codemash is the ultimate place to catch up with community friends. This is my 3rd year visiting and I've got to know a great number of very cool people through various conferences, Give Camps and other community events. I'm finding more and more that Codemash is the best place to catch up with everybody regardless of technology interest or location. Of course I always make a whole bunch more friends while I'm there! Yay! Open Spaced I found the open spaces didn't work so well last year. This year things went a lot smoother and the topics were engaging and fresh. While I miss Alan Steven's approach of running it like an agile project, it was very cool to see that it evolving. Laptops were often cracked open, not just once but frequently! For example: Jasmine - Paired on a javascript kata using the Jasmine javascript test runner J - Sat in on a J demo from local J enthusiast, Tracy Harms Watir - More pairing, this time using Ruby with the watir-webdriver through cucumber. I'd mostly forgotten that Cucumber runs just fine without Rails. It made a change to do without. The other spaces were engaging too, but I think that's enough for that topic. Javascript Shenanigans I've already mentioned that I attended a Jasmine kata session. Jasmine is close to my heart right now every since I discovered it while on the hunt for a decent Javascript testing framework for a javascript koans project earlier this year. Well, it also got covered in the Java Precompiler and Pillar's vendor session, which was great to see. Node.js was also a reoccurring theme. Node.js in a nutshell? It's an extremely scalable Event based I/O server which runs on Javascript. I'd already encountered through a Startup Weekend project and have been noticing increasing interest of late. After encountering more node.js driven excitement from my peers at codemash I absolutely had to attend the open space on it. At least 20 people turned up and by the end we had some answers, a whole ton of new questions and an impromptu user group in the form of a twitter channel (#nodemash). I have no idea where this is going to go or how big it is going to become, but if it can cross the chasm into the enterprise it could become huge... Scala Koans I'm a bit of a Koans addict, and I really need more exposure to functional languages so I gave the Scala Koans precompiler a try. Great fun! I'm really glad I attended because I found I had a whole ton of questions. Currently the koans are available here, and the answers are here. Opportunities While we're on the subject can we change the subject now? Hai Gregory, You really need to keep the drinking for later in the day. I mean seriously, you're 34 and you still do this every single time! Sure, you made it to Chad Fowler keynote ok, but you looking a rather pale weren't you? Also might have been nice to attend 'Netflicks in the Cloud' instead of 'Sleeping It Off For People Who Should Know Better'. Kthxbye PS: Stop talking to yourself Not that I entirely regret it, I've had some of my greatest insights through late night drunken conversations at the CodeMash bar. Just might be nice to reign it in a little and get something out of the next morning too. Diversity This is something that is in the back of my mind because of conversations at Codemash as well as throughout the year; I'm realizing more and more how discouraging the IT profession is for women. I notice in the community there has been a lot of attention paid to stamping out harrasment, which is good, but there also seems to be a massive PR issue. I really don't have any solutions, but I figure it can't hurt to pay more attention to whats going on... And in Other News I now have a picture of Chad Fowler giving me more cowbell! Sadly I managed to lose the cowbell later on. Hopefully it's gone to a Better Place. The Womack Family Band joined in with the musicians jam this year. There's my cowbell again! Why must you hide from me? I also finally went in the water for the first time in all the I've been coming to codemash. Why did I wait so long?!?

  Read the article

• Limitations of User-Defined Customer Events (FA Type Profile)

  - by Rajesh Sharma

  CC&B automatically creates field activities when a specific Customer Event takes place. This depends on the way you have setup your Field Activity Type Profiles, the templates within, and associated SP Condition(s) on the template. CC&B uses the service point type, its state and referenced customer event to determine which field activity type to generate.   Customer events available in the base product include: Cut for Non-payment (CNP) Disconnect Warning (DIWA) Reconnect for Payment (REPY) Reread (RERD) Stop Service (STOP) Start Service (STRT) Start/Stop (STSP)   Note the Field values/codes defined for each event.   CC&B comes with a flexibility to define new set of customer events. These can be defined in the Look Up - CUST_EVT_FLG. Values from the Look Up are used on the Field Activity Type Profile Template page.     So what's the use of having user-defined Customer Events? And how will the system detect such events in order to create field activity(s)?   Well, system can only detect such events when you reference a user-defined customer event on a Severance Event Type for an event type Create Field Activities.     This way you can create additional field activities of a specific field activity type for user-defined customer events.   One of our customers adopted this feature and created a user-defined customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment for Water Services. This event was then linked on a Field Activity Type Profile and referenced on a Severance Event - CUT FOR NON PAY-W. The associated Severance Process was configured to trigger a reconnection process if it was cancelled (done by defining a Post Cancel Algorithm). Whenever this Severance Event was executed, a specific type of Field Activity was generated for disconnection purposes. The Field Activity type was determined by the system from the Field Activity Type Profile referenced for the SP Type, SP's state and the referenced user-defined customer event. All was working well until the time when they realized that in spite of the Severance Process getting cancelled (when a payment was made); the Post Cancel Algorithm was not executed to start a Reconnection Severance Process for the purpose of generating a reconnection field activity and reconnecting the service.   Basically, the Post Cancel algorithm (if specified on a Severance Process Template) is triggered when a Severance Process gets cancelled because a credit transaction has affected/relieved a Service Agreement's debt.   So what exactly was happening? Now we come to actual question as to what are limitations in having user-defined customer event.   System defined/base customer events are hard-coded across the entire system. There is an impact even if you remove any customer event entry from the Look Up. User-defined customer events are not recognized by the system anywhere else except in the severance process, as described above.   There are few programs which have routines to first validate the completion of disconnection field activities, which were raised as a result of customer event CNP - Cut for Non-payment in order to perform other associated actions. One such program is the Post Cancel Algorithm, referenced on a Severance Process Template, generally used to reconnect services which were disconnected from other Severance Event, specifically CNP - Cut for Non-Payment. Post cancel algorithm provided by the product - SEV POST CAN does the following (below is the algorithm's description):   This algorithm is called after a severance process has been cancelled (typically because the debt was paid and the SA is no longer eligible to be on the severance process). It checks to see if the process has a completed 'disconnect' event and, if so, starts a reconnect process using the Reconnect Severance Process Template defined in the parameter.    Notice the underlined text. This algorithm implicitly checks for Field Activities having completed status, which were generated from Severance Events as a result of CNP - Cut for Non-payment customer event.   Now if we look back to the customer's issue, we can relate that the Post Cancel algorithm was triggered, but was not able to find any 'Completed' CNP - Cut for Non-payment related field activity. And hence was not able to start a reconnection severance process. This was because a field activity was generated and completed for a customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment of Water Services instead.   To conclude, if you introduce new customer events, you should be aware that you don't extend or simulate base customer events, the ones that are included in the base product, as they are further used to provide/validate additional business functions.  

  Read the article

• Seven Random Thoughts on JavaOne

  - by HecklerMark

  As most people reading this blog may know, last week was JavaOne. There are a lot of summary/recap articles popping up now, and while I didn't want to just "add to pile", I did want to share a few observations. Disclaimer: I am an Oracle employee, but most of these observations are either externally verifiable or based upon a collection of opinions from Oracle and non-Oracle attendees alike. Anyway, here are a few take-aways: The Java ecosystem is alive and well, with a breadth and depth that is impossible to adequately describe in a short post...or a long post, for that matter. If there is any one area within the Java language or JVM that you would like to - or need to - know more about, it's well-represented at J1. While there are several IDEs that are used to great effect by the developer community, NetBeans is on a roll. I lost count how many sessions mentioned or used NetBeans, but it was by far the dominant IDE in use at J1. As a recent re-convert to NetBeans, I wasn't surprised others liked it so well, only how many. OpenJDK, OpenJFX, etc. Many developers were understandably concerned with the change of sponsorship/leadership when Java creator and longtime steward Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle. The read I got from attendees regarding Oracle's stewardship was almost universally positive, and the push for "openness" is deep and wide within the current Java environs. Few would probably have imagined it to be this good, this soon. Someone observed that "Larry (Ellison) is competitive, and he wants to be the best...so if he wants to have a community, it will be the best community on the planet." Like any company, Oracle is bound to make missteps, but leadership seems to be striking an excellent balance between embracing open efforts and innovating in competitive paid offerings. JavaFX (2.x) isn't perfect or comprehensive, but a great many people (myself included) see great potential, are developing for it, and are really excited about where it is and where it may be headed. This is another part of the Java ecosystem that has impressive depth for being so new (JavaFX 1.x aside). If you haven't kicked the tires yet, give it a try! You'll be surprised at how capable and versatile it is, and you'll probably catch yourself smiling while coding again.  :-) JavaEE is everywhere. Not exactly a newsflash, but there is a lot of buzz around EE still/again/anew. Sessions ranged from updated component specs/technologies to Websockets/HTML5, from frameworks to profiles and application servers. Programming "server-side" Java isn't confined to the server (as you no doubt realize), and if you still consider JavaEE a cumbersome beast, you clearly haven't been using the last couple of versions. Download GlassFish or the WebLogic Zip distro (or another JavaEE 6 implementation) and treat yourself. JavaOne is not inexpensive, but to paraphrase an old saying, "If you think that's expensive, you should try ignorance." :-) I suppose it's possible to attend J1 and learn nothing, but you'd have to really work at it! Attending even a single session is bound to expand your horizons and make you approach your code, your problem domain, differently...even if it's a session about something you already know quite well. The various presenters offer vastly different perspectives and challenge you to re-think your own approach(es). And finally, if you think the scheduled sessions are great - and make no mistake, most are clearly outstanding - wait until you see what you pick up from what I like to call the "hallway sessions". Between the presentations, people freely mingle in the hallways, go to lunch and dinner together, and talk. And talk. And talk. Ideas flow freely, sparking other ideas and the "crowdsourcing" of knowledge in a way that is hard to imagine outside of a conference of this magnitude. Consider this the "GO" part of a "BOGO" (Buy One, Get One) offer: you buy the ticket to the "structured" part of JavaOne and get the hallway sessions at no additional charge. They're really that good. If you weren't able to make it to JavaOne this year, you can still watch/listen to the sessions online by visiting the JavaOne course catalog and clicking the media link(s) in the right column - another demonstration of Oracle's commitment to the Java community. But make plans to be there next year to get the full benefit! You'll be glad you did. All the best,Mark P.S. - I didn't mention several other exciting developments in areas like the embedded space and the "internet of things" (M2M), robotics, optimization, and the cloud (among others), but I think you get the idea. JavaOne == brainExpansion;  Hope to see you there next year!

  Read the article

• How many developers before continuous integration becomes effective for us?

  - by Carnotaurus

  There is an overhead associated with continuous integration, e.g., set up, re-training, awareness activities, stoppage to fix "bugs" that turn out to be data issues, enforced separation of concerns programming styles, etc. At what point does continuous integration pay for itself? EDIT: These were my findings The set-up was CruiseControl.Net with Nant, reading from VSS or TFS. Here are a few reasons for failure, which have nothing to do with the setup: Cost of investigation: The time spent investigating whether a red light is due a genuine logical inconsistency in the code, data quality, or another source such as an infrastructure problem (e.g., a network issue, a timeout reading from source control, third party server is down, etc., etc.) Political costs over infrastructure: I considered performing an "infrastructure" check for each method in the test run. I had no solution to the timeout except to replace the build server. Red tape got in the way and there was no server replacement. Cost of fixing unit tests: A red light due to a data quality issue could be an indicator of a badly written unit test. So, data dependent unit tests were re-written to reduce the likelihood of a red light due to bad data. In many cases, necessary data was inserted into the test environment to be able to accurately run its unit tests. It makes sense to say that by making the data more robust then the test becomes more robust if it is dependent on this data. Of course, this worked well! Cost of coverage, i.e., writing unit tests for already existing code: There was the problem of unit test coverage. There were thousands of methods that had no unit tests. So, a sizeable amount of man days would be needed to create those. As this would be too difficult to provide a business case, it was decided that unit tests would be used for any new public method going forward. Those that did not have a unit test were termed 'potentially infra red'. An intestesting point here is that static methods were a moot point in how it would be possible to uniquely determine how a specific static method had failed. Cost of bespoke releases: Nant scripts only go so far. They are not that useful for, say, CMS dependent builds for EPiServer, CMS, or any UI oriented database deployment. These are the types of issues that occured on the build server for hourly test runs and overnight QA builds. I entertain that these to be unnecessary as a build master can perform these tasks manually at the time of release, esp., with a one man band and a small build. So, single step builds have not justified use of CI in my experience. What about the more complex, multistep builds? These can be a pain to build, especially without a Nant script. So, even having created one, these were no more successful. The costs of fixing the red light issues outweighed the benefits. Eventually, developers lost interest and questioned the validity of the red light. Having given it a fair try, I believe that CI is expensive and there is a lot of working around the edges instead of just getting the job done. It's more cost effective to employ experienced developers who do not make a mess of large projects than introduce and maintain an alarm system. This is the case even if those developers leave. It doesn't matter if a good developer leaves because processes that he follows would ensure that he writes requirement specs, design specs, sticks to the coding guidelines, and comments his code so that it is readable. All this is reviewed. If this is not happening then his team leader is not doing his job, which should be picked up by his manager and so on. For CI to work, it is not enough to just write unit tests, attempt to maintain full coverage, and ensure a working infrastructure for sizable systems. The bottom line: One might question whether fixing as many bugs before release is even desirable from a business prespective. CI involves a lot of work to capture a handful of bugs that the customer could identify in UAT or the company could get paid for fixing as part of a client service agreement when the warranty period expires anyway.

  Read the article

• How customers view and interact with a company

  The Harvard Business Review article written by Rayport and Jaworski is aptly titled “Best Face Forward” because it sheds light on how customers view and interact with a company. In the past most business interaction between customers was performed in a face to face meeting where one party would present an item for sale and then the other would decide whether to purchase the item. In addition, if there was a problem with a purchased item then they would bring the item back to the person who sold the item for resolution. One of my earliest examples of witnessing this was when I was around 6 or 7 years old and I was allowed to spend the summer in Tennessee with my Grandparents. My Grandfather had just written a book about the local history of his town and was selling them to his friends and local bookstores. I still remember he offered to pay me a small commission for every book I helped him sell because I was carrying the books around for him. Every sale he made was face to face with his customers which allowed him to share his excitement for the book with everyone. In today’s modern world there is less and less human interaction as the use of computers and other technologies allow us to communicate within seconds even though both parties may be across the globe or just next door. That being said, customers view a company through multiple access points called faces that represent the ability to interact without actually seeing a human face. As a software engineer this is a good and a bad thing because direct human interaction and technology based interaction have both good and bad attributes based on the customer. How organizations coordinate business and IT functions, to provide quality service varies based on each individual business and the goals and directives put in place by its management. According to Rayport and Jaworski, the type of interaction used through a particular access point may lend itself to be people-dominate, machine-dominate, or a combination of both. The method by which a company communicates information through an access point is a strategic choice that relates costs and customer outcomes. To simplify this, the choice is based on what can give the customer the best experience interacting with the company when the cost of the interaction is also a factor. I personally see examples of this every day at work. The company website is machine-dominate with people updating and maintaining information, our groups department is people dominate because most of the customer interaction is done at the customers location and is backed up by machine based data sources, and our sales/member service department is a hybrid because employees work in tandem with machines in order for them to assist customers with signing up or any other issue they may have. The positive and negative aspects of human and machine interfaces are a key aspect in deciding which interface to use when allowing customers to access a company or a combination of the two. Rayport and Jaworski also used MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson preliminary catalog of human and machine strengths. He stated that humans outperform machines in judgment, pattern recognition, exception processing, insight, and creativity. I have found this to be true based on the example of how sales and member service reps at my company handle a multitude of questions and various situations with a lot of unknown variables. A machine interface could never effectively be able to handle these scenarios because there are too many variables to consider and would not have the built-in logic to process each customer’s claims and needs. In addition, he also stated that machines outperform humans in collecting, storing, transmitting and routine processing. An example of this would be my employer’s website. Customers can simply go online and purchase a product without even talking to a sales or member services representative. The information is then stored in a database so that the customer can always go back and review there order, and access their selected services. A human, no matter how smart they are would never be able to keep track of hundreds of thousands of customers let alone know what they purchased or how much they paid. In today’s technology driven economy every company must offer their customers multiple methods of accessibly in order to survive. The more of an opportunity a company has to create a positive experience for their customers, in my opinion, they more likely the customer will return to that company again. I have noticed this with my personal shopping habits and experiences. References Rayport, J., & Jaworski, B. (2004). Best Face Forward. Harvard Business Review, 82(12), 47-58. Retrieved from Business Source Complete database.

  Read the article

• Use your own domain email and tired of SPAM? SPAMfighter FTW

  - by Dave Campbell

  I wouldn't post this if I hadn't tried it... and I paid for it myself, so don't anybody be thinking I'm reviewing something someone sent me! Long ago and far away I got very tired of local ISPs and 2nd phone lines and took the plunge and got hooked up to cable... yeah I know the 2nd phone line concept may be hard for everyone to understand, but that's how it was in 'the old days'. To avoid having to change email addresses all the time, I decided to buy a domain name, get minimal hosting, and use that for all email into the house. That way if I changed providers, all the email addresses wouldn't have to change. Of course, about a dozen domains later, I have LOTS of pop email addresses and even an exchange address to my client's server... times have changed. What also has changed is the fact that we get SPAM... 'back in the day' when I was a beta tester for the first ISP in Phoenix, someone tried sending an ad to all of us, and what he got in return for his trouble was a bunch of core dumps that locked up his email... if you don't know what a core dump is, ask your grandfather. But in today's world, we're all much more civilized than that, and as with many things, the criminals seem to have much more rights than we do, so we get inundated with email offering all sorts of wild schemes that you'd have to be brain-dead to accept, but yet... if people weren't accepting them, they'd stop sending them. I keep hoping that survival of the smartest would weed out the mental midgets that respond and then the jumk email stop, but that hasn't happened yet anymore than finding high-quality hearing aids at the checkout line of Safeway because of all the dimwits playing music too loud inside their car... but that's another whole topic and I digress. So what's the solution for all the spam? And I mean *all*... on that old personal email address, I am now getting over 150 spam messages a day! Yes I know that's why God invented the delete key, but I took it on as a challenge, and it's a matter of principle... why should I switch email addresses, or convert from [email protected] to something else, or have all my email filtered through some service just because some A-Hole somewhere has a site up trying to phish Ma & Pa Kettle (ask your grandfather about that too) out of their retirement money? Well... I got an email from my cousin the other day while I was writing yet another email rule, and there was a banner on the bottom of his email that said he was protected by SPAMfighter. SPAMfighter huh.... so I took a look at their site, and found yet one more of the supposed tools to help us. But... I read that they're a Microsoft Gold Partner... and that doesn't come lightly... so I took a gamble and here's what I found: I installed it, and had to do a couple things: 1) SPAMfighter stuffed the SPAMfighter folder into my client's exchange address... I deleted it, made a new SPAMfighter folder where I wanted it to go, then in the SPAMfighter Clients settings for Outlook, I told it to put all spam there. 2) It didn't seem to be doing anything. There's a ribbon button that you can select "Block", and I did that, wondering if I was 'training' it, but it wasn't picking up duplicates 3) I sent email to support, and wrote a post on the forum (not to self: reply to that post). By the time the folks from the home office responded, it was the next day, and first up, SPAMfighter knocked down everything that came through when Outlook opend... two thumbs up! I disabled my 'garbage collection' rule from Outlook, and told Outlook not to use the junk folder thinking it was interfering. 4) Day 2 seemed to go about like Day 1... but I hung in there. 5) Day 3 is now a whole new day... I had left Outlook open and hadn't looked at the PC since sometime late yesterday afternoon, and when I looked this morning, *every bit* of spam was in the SPAMfighter folder!! I'm a new paying customer After watching SPAMfighter work this morning, I've purchased a 1-year license, and I now can sit and watch as emails come in and disappear from my inbox into the SPAMfighter folder. No more continual tweaking of the rules. I've got SPAMfighter set to 'Very Hard' filtering... personally I'd rather pull the few real emails out of the SPAMfighter folder than pull spam out of the real folders. Yes this is simply another way of using the delete key, but you know what? ... it feels good :) Here's a screenshot of the stats after just about 48 hours of being onboard: Note that all the ones blocked by me were during Day 1 and 2... I've blocked none today, and everything is blocked. Stay in the 'Light!

  Read the article

• From Pocket to Instapaper

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced-  1. iPad app still didn’t show many of the saved links. 2. ability to rename articles on iPad still wasn’t restored.I’ve posted the message into their forum. They did not show my comment on their forum( I would name it censorship, not moderation), but a few days ago I’ve received an email, recommending “try logging out of the app on your iPad, and back in again.” Their suggestion helped,  but I don’t understand, why it is not posted as a recommendation on their support site.So I decided to try InstAPaper on my iPad, Previously I’ve used it for Kindle. I never considered it before on iPad, because there were no free demo and I was very satisfied with RIL free and then RIL Pro. Currently InstAPaper cost $3, so the price is not an issue.I’ve checked that it has most of features that I am using(e.g. renaming, folders) and I am quite happy with it now. Actually I am using Pocket (or RIL free) for old bookmarks( I have 1000+ stored on my iPad) and for new bookmarks I am using InstAPaper.Having a solid experience with RIL/Pocket I’ve created a list of suggestions to Marco Arment to implement.1. Some pages stored in InstAPaper have removed essential sections of the text. E.g in many blogs comments are not stored in  InstAPaper. Some pages lost almost all of important links (e.g. http://www.lib.rus.ec/a/32416 -sorry, in Russian). RIL/Pocket has 2 modes to store offline- Web view and Article view. Web View includes all links/images of the original page, but it’s very reliable. Article view suppose to strip unrelated information, but often corrupts the content. I prefer to use offline Web view.InstAPaper should also support offline Web view, in case if stripped view removes important part of content.2.  Black full screen Saving on iPad Safari is very annoying. After user pressed a bookmark, the saving has some delay and then for a few seconds prevents from reading the text.Would be better to show as message on the top part(as in Pocket ). I am surprised, that  a full screen popup was  implemented recently as a desired feature. 3.There are no comments allowed on http://blog.instapaper.com/. I would prefer to post some of these notes as comments on http://blog.instapaper.com/ rather than write them in my blog and then send link to Marco.(I found recommendation how to add support of comments on tumblr at http://www.tumblr.com/help, but then realized that Marko was the lead developer ofTumblr.)4. Also there is no support forum. I understand that maintenance of the forum ican be a hassle, but stackexchange fSome time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced- orums can be referred on  http://www.instapaper.com/main/support page, i.e.http://webapps.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper  or http://apple.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper 5. Tags are more convenient than folders. i.e. an ability for the same article to have more than one tag. Also creating of new folders is not supported offline, which is an annoying limitation.6. I would like to have a narrow list - additionally to existing list modes have a subject only list or subject+site list to show more list items on a screen.7. Limit of 500 offline articles sounds quite big, but my RIL list exceeded 1000, so it could be a issue in the future.8. Search button on iPad version is visible, but doesn’t work- it forces to buy Premium subscription. I think, that it’s not correct. If the button in a paid version is visible and enabled, it should  provide  a working functionality, e.g. search in article names only. And leave full-text search for the premium support.9..Copy URL is an important operation and deserves to be in a first level of Action menu, rather than in Share sub-menu.I’ve also have comment re post http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free. Marco Arment  explained, why he doesn’t provide free version of Instapaper.  I believe that he is loosing essential part of his customers. When I decided which of iPad application to choose, I’ve selected RIL, because I was able to play with free version, and I liked it. I didn’t have a chance to compare RIL and InstAPaper on iPad, so I’ve bought  RIL pro. For a user there is no point to pay even $3 , if there are similar free product, that user can try and see, is it suitable for him/her.I’ve also played with Readability. It doesn’t have folders or tags(which is very important for me), but nicely supports full text search

  Read the article

• Where would a spam bot be located?

  - by Tim

  I have a hosted website using a free hosting service, I received an email this afternoon saying that I have been suspended because my account has been compromised. Basically, someone is using my email account to mass send spam. I've changed all the passwords and everything but when my Gmail pulls the emails from the host it's still downloading loads of spam messages that show like this: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [email protected] SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host 198.91.80.251 [198.91.80.251]: 554 5.6.0 id=23634-03 - Rejected by MTA on relaying, from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10030): 554 Error: This email address has lost rights to send email from the system ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------ Return-path: <[email protected]> Received: from keenesystems.com ([66.135.33.211]:2370 helo=server211) by absolut.x10hosting.com with esmtpsa (TLSv1:RC4-MD5:128) (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id 1TGwSW-002hHe-Lc for [email protected]; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:44 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:43 -0500 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 3.9.9 (8.5.3-6) Subject: New staff members wanted at Auction It Online From: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] To: "Nadia Monti" <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <OUTLOOK-IDM-9aed7054-6a3e-e1a4-1d5c-3e73377652a6@server211> Date : 26 September 2012=0ATime : 13:35=0ASender : Dennise Halcomb Head = Office Manager of RJ Auction Drop-Off Int.=0A=0ANice to meet you Nadia M= onti=0A=0ARJ ADO Ltd., a USA based company, offers a significant amount = of goods worldwide for our customers on eBay and other auction venues. = Our company's main target is to provide a suitable and cost-effective se= rvice for any person, company or fundraising company. The main purpose o= f the administrative assistant / sales support representative is to cont= ribute to the sales force and add convenience to our cost-effective serv= ice dedicated to individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. O= ur HR department obtained your resume from one of the various job-orient= ed websites just to offer you this post.=0A=0AWorking Schedule: This is = a part time and home-based offer. You won't need to spend more than 3 ho= urs each day. Your =0Aschedule will be flexible.=0A=0ASalary: At the end= of the trial period (it lasts for 1 month) you will be paid 1,800 EUR. = With the average volume of clients your overall income will raise up to = 3,000 EUR per month. After the trial period is over your base salary wil= l grow up to 2,500 EUR per month, so you will earn 5% commission from th= e transactions completed.=0A=0AWhere?: Italy Wide. As it is a stay at ho= me position all the communication will be carried out via email and via = phone.=0A=0ARequirements: Access to the internet during the workday and = basic microsoft office skills are needed. Basic knowledge of English is = required (most of the contacts will be in English).=0A=0ACosts and Fees:= There are NO costs at any time for our employees. All fees related to t= his position are covered by the RJ ADO Co. Ltd..=0A=0AFurther Hiring Pro= cess: If you are interested in position we offer, please reply to this e= mail and send us the copy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AAfter re= viewing all of the received applications we will reply to successful app= licants only. Then we'll offer to these successful applicants a position= within our firm on a trial period basis for one month beginning from th= e date you sign a trial agreement. During this trial period you will rec= eive full guidance and support. Employees on a one monthly trial period = are evaluated at least one week prior to the end of their trial. During = the trial, your supervisor can recommend termination. At the end of the = trial period, the supervisor can offer continued employment, extension o= f trial period, or termination. After the trial period you may ask for m= ore hours or continue full-time.=0A=0AIf you are interested in this posi= tion, just reply to this email and send any questions you have and the c= opy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AThank You,=0AHR-Manager of RJ = ADO Co. Ltd.=0A=0APermission Settings=0AYou have been referred to RJ Auc= tion Drop-Off If you feel you received this email in error or do not wis= h to receive future messages, please reply to this message with "remove"= in the subject field. We will immediately update our database according= ly. =0AWe apologize for any inconvenience caused.=0A=0ARJ Auction Drop-O= ff Co. Ltd. I'm not aware of how this has happened. I'm not sure how anyone could have got hold of my password. It's a simple wordpress install, at some point recently my host went down and there was a fresh install of wordpress with default admin accounts, I have a feeling it could be something to do with this. My question is, even though I've changed all my passwords it's all still happening, is there annywhere in paticular this script would be stored on my host. I really can't deal with having my hosting account suspended and my email account sending all this spam.

  Read the article

• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast

  - by Jeff

  (Repost from my personal blog.) This is another post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch soon. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love" If anything generally good for the craft has come out of the rise of ASP.NET MVC, it's that people are more likely to use dependency injection, and loosely couple the pieces parts of their applications. A lot of the emphasis on coding this way has been to facilitate unit testing, and that's awesome. Unit testing makes me feel a lot less like a hack, and a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Dependency injection is pretty straight forward. It says, "Given an instance of this class, I need instances of other classes, defined not by their concrete implementations, but their interfaces." Probably the first place a developer exercises this in when having a class talk to some kind of data repository. For a very simple example, pretend the FooService has to get some Foo. It looks like this: public class FooService {    public FooService(IFooRepository fooRepo)    {       _fooRepo = fooRepo;    }    private readonly IFooRepository _fooRepo;    public Foo GetMeFoo()    {       return _fooRepo.FooFromDatabase();    } } When we need the FooService, we ask the dependency container to get it for us. It says, "You'll need an IFooRepository in that, so let me see what that's mapped to, and put it in there for you." Why is this good for you? It's good because your FooService doesn't know or care about how you get some foo. You can stub out what the methods and properties on a fake IFooRepository might return, and test just the FooService. I don't want to get too far into unit testing, but it's the most commonly cited reason to use DI containers in MVC. What I wanted to mention is how there's another benefit in a project like mine, where I have to glue together a bunch of stuff. For example, when I have someone sign up for a new account on CoasterBuzz, I'm actually using POP Forums' new account mailer, which composes a bunch of text that includes a link to verify your account. The thing is, I want to use custom text and some other logic that's specific to CoasterBuzz. To accomplish this, I make a new class that inherits from the forum's NewAccountMailer, and override some stuff. Easy enough. Then I use Ninject, the DI container I'm using, to unbind the forum's implementation, and substitute my own. Ninject uses something called a NinjectModule to bind interfaces to concrete implementations. The forum has its own module, and then the CoasterBuzz module is loaded second. The CB module has two lines of code to swap out the mailer implementation: Unbind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>(); Bind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>().To<CbNewAccountMailer>(); Piece of cake! Now, when code asks the DI container for an INewAccountMailer, it gets my custom implementation instead. This is a lot easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. I could do some copy-paste, but then I'm not using well-tested code from the forum. I could write stuff from scratch, but then I'm throwing away a bunch of logic I've already written (in this case, stuff around e-mail, e-mail settings, mail delivery failures). There are other places where the DI container comes in handy. For example, CoasterBuzz does a number of custom things with user profiles, and special content for paid members. It uses the forum as the core piece to managing users, so I can ask the container to get me instances of classes that do user lookups, for example, and have zero care about how the forum handles database calls, configuration, etc. What a great world to live in, compared to ten years ago. Sure, the primary interest in DI is around the "separation of concerns" and facilitating unit testing, but as your library grows and you use more open source, it starts to be the glue that pulls everything together.

  Read the article

• To refund or not to refund this client?

  - by Mahalia Samuels

  I'd really appreciate your advice on an ongoing project. I presented my client with a proposal and design samples which he approved, and he paid in full instead of the 50% upfront deposit as I'd given him a generous discount. He was then slow in furnishing me with some of the content, but once we did, he expected the website to be finished immediately which was not possible. Because he needed it done urgently, we agreed to try to get it done about 10 working days after the content was provided, but the developer who was helping me let me down. The next week, I completed the website myself and uploaded it to the server on a Friday afternoon. He then calls and texts me on following Sunday while I'm at church to say it's not online (there was probably a problem with his browser). The next morning, I received an email from him demanding a full refund within two days because he couldn't see the website (even though it was live, and I tested it on multiple browsers, a different computer and my phone), and he called me shouting at me because he couldn't access it. Finally when he was able to access it, he was unhappy with a certain detail regarding the slideshow which I began fixing and which was done the next day. He then referred me to another website and said he wanted it to look similar but not identical to it in terms of the layout. He also now wanted to add more features which were not in the original design. I got a designer to work on a new design which I sent to him for review, which if approved would be completed by 15 October, and he approved it last Thursday. He then called me yesterday to say that he wanted to change the design - he only approved it out of impatience. He now wants the website to be more similar to the other website he referred me to and he wants it done before the 15th! Then, he says to me that other people have done websites for him in three days - website's he's complained to me about for lacking dimension because they were just premium themes, whereas we'd designed and coded from scratch. I'm thinking of finishing the website but refunding him in full (or at least the refundable 50%) less domain registration and other non-refundable amounts, just to avoid further escalation of this matter and having him call me next week and say he wants to change it again. These are the applicable terms and conditions as laid out in the agreement: Total amount due for this project is Amount A. Client shall pay Consultant a deposit of Amount B (50% of total amount due for project) in advance before any work commences on the Project. The balance is due within 7 working days of completion of project. Deposit is non-refundable. Should client opt to host elsewhere, applicable transferral fee of Amount C will apply. Estimated project completion time frame is 14 to 30 days from the date Client furnishes Consultant with Brief and all other required media and data, provided that Client has made payment to secure the project. Consultant will make every effort to meet agreed upon due dates. The Client should be aware that failure to submit required information or materials, or last minute changes and excessive changes may cause subsequent delays. Client delays could result in significant delays in delivery of finished work. Major changes in client input or direction or brief will be charged at normal rates. Any work the Client wishes Consultant to create, which is not specified in the attached Proposal will be considered an additional service. Client agrees to pay Consultant for any additional expenses or additional services not included in the attached quotation and proposal if requested by the Client. Web design credit in the name of the Consultant, and link to Consultant’s website shall be placed on the footer of the final Website. Either party may terminate this Agreement by giving 7 days written notice to the other of such termination. In the event that Work is postponed or terminated at the request of the Client, Consultant shall have the right to bill pro rata at full rates for work completed through the date of that request, while reserving all rights under this Agreement. If additional payment is due, this shall be payable within seven days of the Client's written notification to stop work. In the event of termination, the Client shall also pay any expenses incurred by Consultant and the Consultant shall own all rights to the Work. Advice please?

  Read the article

• Solaris 11.1 changes building of code past the point of __NORETURN

  - by alanc

  While Solaris 11.1 was under development, we started seeing some errors in the builds of the upstream X.Org git master sources, such as: "Display.c", line 65: Function has no return statement : x_io_error_handler "hostx.c", line 341: Function has no return statement : x_io_error_handler from functions that were defined to match a specific callback definition that declared them as returning an int if they did return, but these were calling exit() instead of returning so hadn't listed a return value. These had been generating warnings for years which we'd been ignoring, but X.Org has made enough progress in cleaning up code for compiler warnings and static analysis issues lately, that the community turned up the default error levels, including the gcc flag -Werror=return-type and the equivalent Solaris Studio cc flags -v -errwarn=E_FUNC_HAS_NO_RETURN_STMT, so now these became errors that stopped the build. Yet on Solaris, gcc built this code fine, while Studio errored out. Investigation showed this was due to the Solaris headers, which during Solaris 10 development added a number of annotations to the headers when gcc was being used for the amd64 kernel bringup before the Studio amd64 port was ready. Since Studio did not support the inline form of these annotations at the time, but instead used #pragma for them, the definitions were only present for gcc. To resolve this, I fixed both sides of the problem, so that it would work for building new X.Org sources on older Solaris releases or with older Studio compilers, as well as fixing the general problem before it broke more software building on Solaris. To the X.Org sources, I added the traditional Studio #pragma does_not_return to recognize that functions like exit() don't ever return, in patches such as this Xserver patch. Adding a dummy return statement was ruled out as that introduced unreachable code errors from compilers and analyzers that correctly realized you couldn't reach that code after a return statement. And on the Solaris 11.1 side, I updated the annotation definitions in <sys/ccompile.h> to enable for Studio 12.0 and later compilers the annotations already existing in a number of system headers for functions like exit() and abort(). If you look in that file you'll see the annotations we currently use, though the forms there haven't gone through review to become a Committed interface, so may change in the future. Actually getting this integrated into Solaris though took a bit more work than just editing one header file. Our ELF binary build comparison tool, wsdiff, actually showed a large number of differences in the resulting binaries due to the compiler using this information for branch prediction, code path analysis, and other possible optimizations, so after comparing enough of the disassembly output to be comfortable with the changes, we also made sure to get this in early enough in the release cycle so that it would get plenty of test exposure before the release. It also required updating quite a bit of code to avoid introducing new lint or compiler warnings or errors, and people building applications on top of Solaris 11.1 and later may need to make similar changes if they want to keep their build logs similarly clean. Previously, if you had a function that was declared with a non-void return type, lint and cc would warn if you didn't return a value, even if you called a function like exit() or panic() that ended execution. For instance: #include <stdlib.h> int callback(int status) { if (status == 0) return status; exit(status); } would previously require a never executed return 0; after the exit() to avoid lint warning "function falls off bottom without returning value". Now the compiler & lint will both issue "statement not reached" warnings for a return 0; after the final exit(), allowing (or in some cases, requiring) it to be removed. However, if there is no return statement anywhere in the function, lint will warn that you've declared a function returning a value that never does so, suggesting you can declare it as void. Unfortunately, if your function signature is required to match a certain form, such as in a callback, you not be able to do so, and will need to add a /* LINTED */ to the end of the function. If you need your code to build on both a newer and an older release, then you will either need to #ifdef these unreachable statements, or, to keep your sources common across releases, add to your sources the corresponding #pragma recognized by both current and older compiler versions, such as: #pragma does_not_return(exit) #pragma does_not_return(panic) Hopefully this little extra work is paid for by the compilers & code analyzers being able to better understand your code paths, giving you better optimizations and more accurate errors & warning messages.

  Read the article

• ASP.NET FormView: "Object of type 'System.Int32' cannot be converted to type 'System.String"

  - by Vinzcent

  Hey I have a problem with my FromView. I would like to show some data from a Database Table in my FormView. But some data is from the tupe Int32, while this data should be in a TextBox, a string. How do you convert these Int32's. FormView and my ObjectDataSource <asp:FormView ID="fvDetailOrder" runat="server"> <ItemTemplate> Aantal:<br /> <asp:Label CssClass="txtBox" ID="Label15" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("COUNT") %>' /><br /> Prijs:<br /> <asp:Label CssClass="txtBox" ID="Label16" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("PRICE") %>' /><br /> Korting:<br /> <asp:Label CssClass="txtBox" ID="Label17" runat="server" Text='' /><br /> Totaal:<br /> <asp:Label CssClass="txtBox" ID="Label18" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("AMOUNT") %>' /><br /> Betaald:<br /> <asp:Label CssClass="txtBox" ID="Label19" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("PAID") %>' /><br /> Datum betaling:<br /> <asp:Label CssClass="txtBox" ID="Label20" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("PDATE") %>' /><br /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:FormView> <asp:ObjectDataSource ID="objdsOrderID" runat="server" OnSelecting="objdsOrderID_Selecting" SelectMethod="getOrdersByID" TypeName="DAL.OrdersDAL"> <SelectParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="id" Type="Int32" /> </SelectParameters> </asp:ObjectDataSource> My Code behind protected void gvOrdersAdmin_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { fvDetailOrder.DataSource = objdsOrderID; fvDetailOrder.DataBind(); // <-- HERE I GET THE ERROR } protected void objdsOrderID_Selecting(object sender, ObjectDataSourceSelectingEventArgs e) { e.InputParameters["id"] = gvOrdersAdmin.DataKeys[gvOrdersAdmin.SelectedRow.RowIndex].Values[0]; ; } My Data Acces Layer public static DataTable getOrdersByID(string id) { string sql = "SELECT 'AUTHOR' = tblAuthors.FIRSTNAME + ' ' + tblAuthors.LASTNAME, tblBooks.*, tblGenres.*, tblLanguages.*, tblOrders.* FROM tblAuthors INNER JOIN tblBooks ON tblAuthors.AUTHOR_ID = tblBooks.AUTHOR_ID INNER JOIN tblGenres ON tblBooks.GENRE_ID = tblGenres.GENRE_ID INNER JOIN tblLanguages ON tblBooks.LANG_ID = tblLanguages.LANG_ID INNER JOIN tblOrders ON tblBooks.BOOK_ID = tblOrders.BOOK_ID" + " WHERE tblOrders.ID = @id;"; SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(sql, GetConnectionString()); da.SelectCommand.Parameters["id"].Value = id; DataSet ds = new DataSet(); da.Fill(ds, "Orders"); return ds.Tables["Orders"]; } Thanks a lot, Vincent

  Read the article

• How do I reward my developers for the little things they get right?

  - by Nat

  I am in a tech lead role and my developers get stuff right most of the time. How do I communicate to them thier value to me? (I.e. they have value because I do not have to go through and point out mistakes which means I do not have to watch them like a hawk which frees me to do more useful things). In summary For doing the mundane well on a day to day basis, it is good to recognise the developers effort verbally to them. An honest thankyou that mentions the specific behaviour and its positive repercussions to you personally will be well received, adjust the language to suite each individual. (Note that other developers within earshot may also respond to this by increasing their efforts in this specific activity.) Other things that should be done regularly are: Team drinks In many cultures this is an entirely worthy way of giving the team some time to socialise and relax. Be sure that you do not exclude people who do not drink or are not keen on pub culture. Shared meals are another option. Formal written (email) acknowledgment and praise to senior managers of the teams efforts and successes. (Note that acknowledging individuals alone may damage team spirit) Work the hours you expect your team to do. If they absolutely must work late for a deadline, be there in support Go to bat for the team. Refuse to let them be forced to work long periods of overtime without compensation. Protect them from level politics and stress. Give your team the best equipment you can afford. Good tools show respect and improve productivity. Small or large team rewards where appropriate can consist of many interesting activities/ items. If it allows the team to get together in a fun and even lightly competitive manner it will work (foosball table, go-karting, darts board, video game console etc). Don’t forget to listen to what the team wants, each team will have different ideas. Ensure they are getting a fair deal financially from the company. While different people may have different expectations of their pay, someone being paid unfairly will rot morale for the entire team

  Read the article

• Translating itunes affiliate rss via xslt

  - by jd

  I can't get this working for the life of me. Here is a snippet of the xml I get from an RSS feed from itunes affiliate. I want top print the values within tags but I cannot for some reason: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <feed xmlns:im="http://itunes.apple.com/rss" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="en"> <id>http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/toppaidapplications/sf=143441/limit=100/genre=6014/xml</id><title>iTunes Store: Top Paid Applications</title><updated>2010-03-24T15:36:42-07:00</updated><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTop?id=25180&amp;popId=30"/><link rel="self" href="http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/toppaidapplications/sf=143441/limit=100/genre=6014/xml"/><icon>http://phobos.apple.com/favicon.ico</icon><author><name>iTunes Store</name><uri>http://www.apple.com/itunes/</uri></author><rights>Copyright 2008 Apple Inc.</rights> <entry> <updated>date</updated> <id>someID</id> <title>a</title> <im:name>b</im:name> </entry> <entry> <updated>date2/updated> <id>someID2</id> <title>a2</title> <im:name>b2</im:name> </entry> </feed> If I try <xsl:apply-templates match="entry"/> it spits out the entire contents of file. If I use <xsl:call-template name="entry"> it will show only one entry and I have to use <xsl:value-of select="//*[local-name(.)='name']"/> to get name but that's a hack. I've used xslt before for xml without namespaces and xml that has proper parent child relationships but not like this RSS feed. Notice entry is not wrapped in entries or anything. Any help is appreciated. I want to use xslt because I want to alter the itunes link to go through my affiliate account - so something automated wouldn't work for me.

  Read the article

• How to make freelance clients understand the costs of developing and maintaining mature products?

  - by John

  I have a freelance web application project where the client requests new features every two weeks or so. I am unable to anticipate the requirements of upcoming features. So when the client requests a new feature, one of several things may happen: I implement the feature with ease because it is compatible with the existing platform I implement the feature with difficulty because I have to rewrite a significant portion of the platform's foundation Client withdraws request because it costs too much to implement against existing platform At the beginning of the project, for about six months, all feature requests fell under category 1) because the system was small and agile. But for the past six months, most feature implementation fell under category 2). The system is mature, forcing me to refactor and test everytime I want to add new modules. Additionally, I find myself breaking things that use to work, and fixing it (I don't get paid for this). The client is starting to express frustration at the time and cost for me to implement new features. To them, many of the feature requests are of the same scale as the features they requested six months ago. For example, a client would ask, "If it took you 1 week to build a ticketing system last year, why does it take you 1 month to build an event registration system today? An event registration system is much simpler than a ticketing system. It should only take you 1 week!" Because of this scenario, I fear feature requests will soon land in category 3). In fact, I'm already eating a lot of the cost myself because I volunteer many hours to support the project. The client is often shocked when I tell him honestly the time it takes to do something. The client always compares my estimates against the early months of a project. I don't think they're prepared for what it really costs to develop, maintain and support a mature web application. When working on a salary for a full time company, managers were more receptive of my estimates and even encouraged me to pad my numbers to prepare for the unexpected. Is there a way to condition my clients to think the same way? Can anyone offer advice on how I can continue to work on this web project without eating too much of the cost myself? Additional info - I've only been freelancing full time for 1 year. I don't yet have the high end clients, but I'm slowly getting there. I'm getting better quality clients as time goes by.

  Read the article

• Choosing a distributed shared memory solution

  - by mindas

  I have a task to build a prototype for a massively scalable distributed shared memory (DSM) app. The prototype would only serve as a proof-of-concept, but I want to spend my time most effectively by picking the components which would be used in the real solution later on. The aim of this solution is to take data input from an external source, churn it and make the result available for a number of frontends. Those "frontends" would just take the data from the cache and serve it without extra processing. The amount of frontend hits on this data can literally be millions per second. The data itself is very volatile; it can (and does) change quite rapidly. However the frontends should see "old" data until the newest has been processed and cached. The processing and writing is done by a single (redundant) node while other nodes only read the data. In other words: no read-through behaviour. I was looking into solutions like memcached however this particular one doesn't fulfil all our requirements which are listed below: The solution must at least have Java client API which is reasonably well maintained as the rest of app is written in Java and we are seasoned Java developers; The solution must be totally elastic: it should be possible to add new nodes without restarting other nodes in the cluster; The solution must be able to handle failover. Yes, I realize this means some overhead, but the overall served data size isn't big (1G max) so this shouldn't be a problem. By "failover" I mean seamless execution without hardcoding/changing server IP address(es) like in memcached clients when a node goes down; Ideally it should be possible to specify the degree of data overlapping (e.g. how many copies of the same data should be stored in the DSM cluster); There is no need to permanently store all the data but there might be a need of post-processing of some of the data (e.g. serialization to the DB). Price. Obviously we prefer free/open source but we're happy to pay a reasonable amount if a solution is worth it. In any way, paid 24hr/day support contract is a must. The whole thing has to be hosted in our data centers so SaaS offerings like Amazon SimpleDB are out of scope. We would only consider this if no other options would be available. Ideally the solution would be strictly consistent (as in CAP); however, eventual consistence can be considered as an option. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

  Read the article

• Why do some questions get closed for no reason? [closed]

  - by IVlad

  Recently there was a question asking about generating all subsets of a set using a stack and a queue, which was closed (and now deleted it seems) as not a real question for no good reason, since it didn't fit into any of these conditions: It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. No, it was clear what was being asked. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. Not ambiguous, not vague, not incomplete, definitely not rhetorical and could easily be answered if one knew the solution. Now, the exact same thing has happened with this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2791982/a-shortest-path-problem-with-superheroes-and-intergalactic-journeys/2793746#2793746 I am interested in hearing a logical argument for why that question is either ambiguous, vague, incomplete, rhetorical or cannot reasonably be answered in its current form. It seems that (the same bunch of) people like to close questions that they think are homework questions, especially when they think people want to be served the solution on a platter, which is also not the case: Any suggestions or ideas of how this problem might be solved would be most welcomed. Most of the time the people asking these questions are very reasonable and appreciate even the most vague idea, yet their question is closed. Let's go further and assume that it IS a homework problem. So what? When I registered here I didn't see any rule that said not to post homework problems, nor do I see such a rule now. What is wrong with posting homework problems that makes people hunt them down with a passion to close them without even reading the entire question body? This site is full of questions asked by people who get paid to know the things they are asking, yet their questions are considered fine. How is solving someone's homework problem worse? In some places (like where I live), computer science is a mandatory high school subject, and not everyone is interested in it. How is helping at least those people worse than doing someone's JOB? Not answering homework questions is fine and it's everyone's choice, but I consider closing them to be an act of power abuse, selfishness, and an insult to the fellow community members who are also interested in a solution or want feedback on their proposed solution. So my questions are: - Why do questions like the above get closed for reasons that do not apply? Why do you close them? Why don't you? - Why doesn't a vote to reopen a question reopen it automatically? Needing 5 votes for a reopen takes too long, and it's not fair because one reopen vote basically cancels out a close vote, making it 4 close votes (or 5 to 1, which is the same as only 4 people wanting to close the question), which isn't enough to close the question. I think a question should only be closed when CloseVotes - ReopenVotes >= 5. I'm hoping this will stay up, but I realize it probably won't. In either case, I think this is worth saying and discussing, since it IS community-related.

  Read the article

• html transparent background

  - by amarsh-anand

  I want to create a webpage with transparent background, a table and some text. I have seen posts related to this, but due to my lack of familiarity with css, I somehow cant get my code to work. I just want a transparent background, while this code is making everything transparent. Can someone kindly help. <html> <head><style type="text/css"> div.transbg {background-color:#4a6c9b; opacity:0.6;} </style></head> <div class="transbg"> <body><Center><font color="#FFFFFF"> <b>Toll Charges</b> <table bgcolor="#000000" cellspacing=3> <tr> <td bgcolor="#009900"><font color="#FFFFFF" align="left"> &nbsp; &nbsp;Class 2 inc Private&nbsp;</font></td> <td bgcolor="#009900"><font color="#FFFFFF" align="right"> &nbsp;A$ 4.95 &nbsp;</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#009900"><font color="#FFFFFF" align="left"> &nbsp; &nbsp;Class 2 inc Commercial&nbsp;</font></td> <td bgcolor="#009900"><font color="#FFFFFF" align="right"> &nbsp;A$ 13.95 &nbsp;</font></td> </tr> </table> <br> Toll has to be paid within 48 hrs of passage, else an additional A$ 13.95 of administration charges would be added </font></Center> </div> </body> </html>

  Read the article

• how to refactor user-permission system?

  - by John

  Sorry for lengthy question. I can't tell if this should be a programming question or a project management question. Any advice will help. I inherited a reasonably large web project (1 year old) from a solo freelancer who architected it then abandoned it. The project was a mess, but I cleaned up what I could, and now the system is more maintainable. I need suggestions on how to extend the user-permission system. As it is now, the database has a t_user table with the column t_user.membership_type. Currently, there are 4 membership types with the following properties: 3 of the membership types are almost functionally the same, except for the different monthly fees each must pay 1 of the membership type is a "fake-user" type which has limited access ( different business logic also applies) With regards to the fake-user type, if you look in the system's business logic files, you will see a lot of hard-coded IF statements that do something like if (fake-user) { // do something } else { // a paid member of type 1,2 or 3 // proceed normally } My client asked me to add 3 more membership types to the system, each of them with unique features to be implemented this month, and substantive "to-be-determined" features next month. My first reaction is that I need to refactor the user-permission system. But it concerns me that I don't have enough information on the "to-be-determined" membership type features for next month. Refactoring the user-permission system will take a substantive amount of time. I don't want to refactor something and throw it out the following month. I get substantive feature requests on a monthly basis that come out of the blue. There is no project road map. I've asked my client to provide me with a roadmap of what they intend to do with the new membership types, but their answer is along the lines of "We just want to do [feature here] this month. We'll think of something new next month." So questions that come to mind are: 1) Is it dangerous for me to refactor the user permission system not knowing what membership type features exist beyond a month from now? 2) Should I refactor the user permission system regardless? Or just continue adding IF statements as needed in all my controller files? Or can you recommend a different approach to user permission systems? Maybe role-based ? 3) Should this project have a road map? For a 1 year old project like mine, how far into the future should this roadmap project? 4) Any general advice on the best way to add 3 new membership types?

  Read the article

• Primary language - C++/Qt, C#, Java?

  - by Airjoe

  I'm looking for some input, but let me start with a bit of background (for tl;dr skip to end). I'm an IT major with a concentration in networking. While I'm not a CS major nor do I want to program as a vocation, I do consider myself a programmer and do pretty well with the concepts involved. I've been programming since about 6th grade, started out with a proprietary game creation language that made my transition into C++ at college pretty easy. I like to make programs for myself and friends, and have been paid to program for local businesses. A bit about that- I wrote some programs for a couple local businesses in my senior year in high school. I wrote management systems for local shops (inventory, phone/pos orders, timeclock, customer info, and more stuff I can't remember). It definitely turned out to be over my head, as I had never had any formal programming education. It was a great learning experience, but damn was it crappy code. Oh yeah, by the way, it was all vb6. So, I've used vb6 pretty extensively, I've used c++ in my classes (intro to programming up to algorithms), used Java a little bit in another class (had to write a ping client program, pretty easy) and used Java for some simple Project Euler problems to help learn syntax and such when writing the program for the class. I've also used C# a bit for my own simple personal projects (simple programs, one which would just generate an HTTP request on a list of websites and notify if one responded unexpectedly or not at all, and another which just held a list of things to do and periodically reminded me to do them), things I would've written in vb6 a year or two ago. I've just started using Qt C++ for some undergrad research I'm working on. Now I've had some formal education, I [think I] understand organization in programming a lot better (I didn't even use classes in my vb6 programs where I really should have), how it's important to structure code, split into functions where appropriate, document properly, efficiency both in memory and speed, dynamic and modular programming etc. I was looking for some input on which language to pick up as my "primary". As I'm not a "real programmer", it will be mostly hobby projects, but will include some 'real' projects I'm sure. From my perspective: QtC++ and Java are cross platform, which is cool. Java and C# run in a virtual machine, but I'm not sure if that's a big deal (something extra to distribute, possibly a bit slower? I think Qt would require additional distributables too, right?). I don't really know too much more than this, so I appreciate any help, thanks! TL;DR Am an avocational programmer looking for a language, want quick and straight forward development, liked vb6, will be working with database driven GUI apps- should I go with QtC++, Java, C#, or perhaps something else?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46  | Next Page >