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• SQL Developer Data Modeler: On Notes, Comments, and Comments in RDBMS

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Ah the beautiful data model. They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words. And then we have our diagrams, how many words are they worth? Our friends from the Human Relations sample schema So our models describe how the data ‘works’ – whether that be at a logical-business level, or a technical-physical level. Developers like to say that their code is self-documenting. These would be very lazy or very bad (or both) developers. Models are the same way, you should document your models with comments and notes! I have 3 basic options: Comments Comments in RDBMS Notes So what’s the difference? Comments You’re describing the entity/table or attribute/column. This information will NOT be published in the database. It will only be available to the model, and hence, folks with access to the model. Table Comments (in the design only!) Comments in RDBMS You’re doing the same thing as above, but your words will be stored IN the data dictionary of the database. Oracle allows you to store comments on the table and column definitions. So your awesome documentation is going to be viewable to anyone with access to the database. RDBMS is an acronym for Relational Database Management System – of which Oracle is one of the first commercial examples If the DDL is produced and ran against a database, these comments WILL be stored in the data dictionary. Notes A place for you to add notes, maybe from a design meeting. Or maybe you’re using this as a to-do or requirements list. Basically it’s for anything that doesn’t literally describe the object at hand – that’s what the comments are for. I totally made these up. Now these are free text fields and you can put whatever you want here. Just make sure you put stuff here that’s worth reading. And it will live on…forever.

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• Weekend With #iPad

  - by andrewbrust

  Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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• F# &ndash; Immutable List vs a Mutable Collection in Arrays

  - by MarkPearl

  Another day gone by looking into F#. Today I thought I would ramble on about lists and arrays in F#. Coming from a C# background I barely ever use arrays now days in my C# code – why you may ask – because I find lists generally handle most of the business scenario’s that I come across. So it has been an interesting experience with me keep bumping into Array’s & Lists in F# and I wondered why the frequency of coming across arrays was so much more in this language than in C#. Take for instance the code I stumbled across today. let rng = new Random() let shuffle (array : 'a array) = let n = array.Length for x in 1..n do let i = n-x let j = rng.Next(i+1) let tmp = array.[i] array.[i] <- array.[j] array.[j] <- tmp array   Quite simply its purpose is to “shuffle” an array of items. So I thought, why does it have the “a’ array'” explicitly declared? What if I changed it to a list? Well… as I was about to find out there are some subtle differences between array’s & lists in F# that do not exist in C#. Namely, mutability. A list in F# is an ordered, immutable series of elements of the same type, while an array is a fixed-size zero based, mutable collection of consecutive data elements that are all of the same type. For me the keyword is immutable vs mutable collection. That’s why I could not simply swap the ‘a array with ‘a list in my function header because then later on in the code the syntax would not be valid where I “swap” item positions. i.e. array.[i] <- array.[j] would be invalid because if it was a list, it would be immutable and so couldn’t change by its very definition.. So where does that leave me? It’s to early days to say. I don’t know what the balance will be in future code – will I typically always use lists or arrays or even have a balance, but time will tell.

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• Site Studio Mobile Example - WCM Reuse

  - by john.brunswick

  Mobile internet usage is growing by leaps and bounds and it is theorized that in the not-to-distant future it will eclipse traditional access via desktop browsers. Mary Meeker, a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of their global technology research team, recently predicted that mobile usage will eclipse desktop usage within the next 5 years in an Events@Google series presentation. In order for organizations to reach their prospects, customers and business partners, they will need to make their content readily available on mobile devices. A few years ago it was fairly challenging to provide a special, separate, site to cater to mobile users using technologies like WML (Wireless Markup Language). Modern mobile browsers have rendered the need for this as irrelevant and now the focus has moved toward providing a browsing experience that works well on small screen sizes and is highly performant. What does all of this mean for Oracle UCM? Taking site content from an existing Site Studio site and targeting it for consumption for mobile devices is a very straightforward process that is aided by a number of native capabilities in the product. The example highlighted in this post takes advantage of dynamic conversion capabilities in Oracle UCM to enable site content to be created and updated via MS Office documents. These documents are then converted to a simple, clean HTML format for consumption in the desktop and mobile browsing experiences. To help better understand how this is possible the example below shows a fictional .COM and its mobile site counterpart that both leverage the same underlying content. The scenario is not complete or production ready, but highlights that a mobile experience may be best delivered by omitting portions of a site that would be present within the version served to desktop clients. If you have browsed CNet (news.com) on a mobile device it becomes quickly apparent that they are serving an optimized version for your mobile device. An iPhone style version can be accessed at http://iphone.cnet.com/. In order to do that they leveraged some work done for the iPhone iUi project developed by Joe Hewitt that provides mobile browsers an experience that is similar to what users may find in a native iPhone application. For our example parts of this framework are used (the CSS) and this approach provides a page that will degrade nicely over a wide range of mobile browsers, since it is comprised of lightweight HTML markup and CSS. The iPhone iUi framework also provides some nice JavaScript to enable animated transitions between pages, but for the widest range of mobile browser compatibility we will only incorporate the CSS and HTML DIV / UL based page markup in our example.

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• FREE Windows Azure evening in London on April 15th including FREE access to Windows Azure

  - by Eric Nelson

  [Did I overdo the use of FREE in the title? :-)] April 12th to 16th is Microsoft Tech Days – 5 days of sessions on Visual Studio 2010 through to Windows 7 Phone Series. Many of these days are now full (Tip - Thursday still has room if rich client applications is your thing) but the good news is the development community in the UK has pulled together an awesome series of “fringe events” during April in London and elsewhere in the UK. There are sessions on Silverlight, SQL Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint 2010 and … the Windows Azure Platform. The UK AzureNET user group is planning to put on a great evening and AzureNET will be giving away hundreds of free subscriptions to the Windows Azure Platform during the evening. The subscription includes up to 20 Windows Azure Compute nodes and 3 SQL Azure databases for you to play with over the 2 weeks following the event. This is a great opportunity to really explore the Windows Azure Platform in detail – without a credit card! Register now! (and you might also want to join the UK Fans of Azure Community while I have your attention) FYI The Thursday day time event includes an introduction to Windows Azure session delivered by my colleague David – which would be an ideal session to attend if you are new to Azure and want to get the most out of the evening session. 7:00pm: See the difference: How Windows Azure helped build a new way of giving Simon Evans and James Broome (@broomej) They will cover the business context for Azure and then go into patterns used and lessons learnt from the project....as well as showing off the app of course! 8:00pm: UK AzureNET update 8:15pm: NoSQL databases or: How I learned to love the hash table Mark Rendle (@markrendle) In this session Mark will look at how Azure Table Service works and how to use it. We’ll look briefly at the high-level Data Services SDK, talk about its limitations, and then quickly move on to the REST API and how to use it to improve performance and reduce costs. We’ll make-up some pretend real-world problems and solve them in new and interesting ways. We’ll denormalise data (for fun and profit). We’ll talk about how certain social networking sites can deal with huge volumes of data so quickly, and why it sometimes goes wrong. Check out the complete list of fringe events which covers the UK fairly well:

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• C# 4.0: Covariance And Contravariance In Generics

  - by Paulo Morgado

  C# 4.0 (and .NET 4.0) introduced covariance and contravariance to generic interfaces and delegates. But what is this variance thing? According to Wikipedia, in multilinear algebra and tensor analysis, covariance and contravariance describe how the quantitative description of certain geometrical or physical entities changes when passing from one coordinate system to another.(*) But what does this have to do with C# or .NET? In type theory, a the type T is greater (>) than type S if S is a subtype (derives from) T, which means that there is a quantitative description for types in a type hierarchy. So, how does covariance and contravariance apply to C# (and .NET) generic types? In C# (and .NET), variance applies to generic type parameters and not to the resulting generic type. A generic type parameter is: covariant if the ordering of the generic types follows the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. contravariant if the ordering of the generic types is reversed from the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. invariant if neither of the above apply. If this definition is applied to arrays, we can see that arrays have always been covariant because this is valid code: object[] objectArray = new string[] { "string 1", "string 2" }; objectArray[0] = "string 3"; objectArray[1] = new object(); However, when we try to run this code, the second assignment will throw an ArrayTypeMismatchException. Although the compiler was fooled into thinking this was valid code because an object is being assigned to an element of an array of object, at run time, there is always a type check to guarantee that the runtime type of the definition of the elements of the array is greater or equal to the instance being assigned to the element. In the above example, because the runtime type of the array is array of string, the first assignment of array elements is valid because string = string and the second is invalid because string = object. This leads to the conclusion that, although arrays have always been covariant, they are not safely covariant – code that compiles is not guaranteed to run without errors. In C#, the way to define that a generic type parameter as covariant is using the out generic modifier: public interface IEnumerable<out T> { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> { T Current { get; } bool MoveNext(); } Notice the convenient use the pre-existing out keyword. Besides the benefit of not having to remember a new hypothetic covariant keyword, out is easier to remember because it defines that the generic type parameter can only appear in output positions — read-only properties and method return values. In a similar way, the way to define a type parameter as contravariant is using the in generic modifier: public interface IComparer<in T> { int Compare(T x, T y); } Once again, the use of the pre-existing in keyword makes it easier to remember that the generic type parameter can only be used in input positions — write-only properties and method non ref and non out parameters. Because covariance and contravariance apply only to the generic type parameters, a generic type definition can have both covariant and contravariant generic type parameters in its definition: public delegate TResult Func<in T, out TResult>(T arg); A generic type parameter that is not marked covariant (out) or contravariant (in) is invariant. All the types in the .NET Framework where variance could be applied to its generic type parameters have been modified to take advantage of this new feature. In summary, the rules for variance in C# (and .NET) are: Variance in type parameters are restricted to generic interface and generic delegate types. A generic interface or generic delegate type can have both covariant and contravariant type parameters. Variance applies only to reference types; if you specify a value type for a variant type parameter, that type parameter is invariant for the resulting constructed type. Variance does not apply to delegate combination. That is, given two delegates of types Action<Derived> and Action<Base>, you cannot combine the second delegate with the first although the result would be type safe. Variance allows the second delegate to be assigned to a variable of type Action<Derived>, but delegates can combine only if their types match exactly. If you want to learn more about variance in C# (and .NET), you can always read: Covariance and Contravariance in Generics — MSDN Library Exact rules for variance validity — Eric Lippert Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Afterward: Effective Events — Chris Burrows Note: Because variance is a feature of .NET 4.0 and not only of C# 4.0, all this also applies to Visual Basic 10.

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• Integrating Code Metrics in TFS 2010 Build

  - by Jakob Ehn

  The build process template and custom activity described in this post is available here: http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/CodeMetricsSample.zip Running code metrics has been available since VS 2008, but only from inside the IDE. Yesterday Microsoft finally releases a Visual Studio Code Metrics Power Tool 10.0, a command line tool that lets you run code metrics on your applications.  This means that it is now possible to perform code metrics analysis on the build server as part of your nightly/QA builds (for example). In this post I will show how you can run the metrics command line tool, and also a custom activity that reads the output and appends the results to the build log, and also fails he build if the metric values exceeds certain (configurable) treshold values. The code metrics tool analyzes all the methods in the assemblies, measuring cyclomatic complexity, class coupling, depth of inheritance and lines of code. Then it calculates a Maintainability Index from these values that is a measure f how maintanable this method is, between 0 (worst) and 100 (best). For information on hwo this value is calculated, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codeanalysis/archive/2007/11/20/maintainability-index-range-and-meaning.aspx. After this it aggregates the information and present it at the class, namespace and module level as well. Running Metrics.exe in a build definition Running the actual tool is easy, just use a InvokeProcess activity last in the Compile the Project sequence, reference the metrics.exe file and pass the correct arguments and you will end up with a result XML file in the drop directory. Here is how it is done in the attached build process template: In the above sequence I first assign the path to the code metrics result file ([BinariesDirectory]\result.xml) to a variable called MetricsResultFile, which is then sent to the InvokeProcess activity in the Arguments property. Here are the arguments for the InvokeProcess activity: Note that we tell metrics.exe to analyze all assemblies located in the Binaries folder. You might want to do some more intelligent filtering here, you probably don’t want to analyze all 3rd party assemblies for example. Note also the path to the metrics.exe, this is the default location when you install the Code Metrics power tool. You must of course install the power tool on all build servers. Using the standard output logging (in the Handle Standard Output/Handle Error Output sections), we get the following output when running the build: Integrating Code Metrics into the build Having the results available next to the build result is nice, but we want to have results integrated in the build result itself, and also to affect the outcome of the build. The point of having QA builds that measure, for example, code metrics is to make it very clear how the code being built measures up to the standards of the project/company. Just having a XML file available in the drop location will not cause the developers to improve their code, but a (partially) failing build will! To do this, we need to write a custom activity that parses the metrics result file, logs it to the build log and fails the build if the values frfom the metrics is below/above some predefined treshold values. The custom activity performs the following steps Parses the XML. I’m using Linq 2 XSD for this, since the XML schema for the result file is available, it is vey easy to generate code that lets you query the structure using standard Linq operators. Runs through the metric result hierarchy and logs the metrics for each level and also verifies maintainability index and the cyclomatic complexity with the treshold values. The treshold values are defined in the build process template are are sent in as arguments to the custom activity If the treshold values are exceeded, the activity either fails or partially fails the current build. For more information about the structure of the code metrics result file, read Cameron Skinner's post about it. It is very simpe and easy to understand. I won’t go through the code of the custom activity here, since there is nothing special about it and it is available for download so you can look at it and play with it yourself. The treshold values for Maintainability Index and Cyclomatic Complexity is defined in the build process template, and can be modified per build definition: I have taken the default value for these settings from my colleague Terje Sandström post on Code Metrics - suggestions for approriate limits. You’ll notice that this is quite an improvement compared to using code metrics inside the IDE, where Red/Yellow/Green limits are fixed (and the default values are somewaht strange, see Terjes post for a discussion on this) This is the first version of the code metrics integration with TFS 2010 Build, I will proabably enhance the functionality and the logging (the “tree view” structure in the log becomes quite hard to read) soon. I will also consider adding it to the Community TFS Build Extensions site when it becomes a bit more mature. Another obvious improvement is to extend the data warehouse of TFS and push the metric results back to the warehouse and make it visible in the reports.

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• User Group Meeting Summary - April 2010

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Thanks to everyone who could make it to what turned out to be an excellent SBUG event.  First some thanks to:  Speakers: Anthony Ross and Elton Stoneman Host: The various people at Hitachi who helped to organise and arrange the venue.   Session 1 - Getting up and running with Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus In this session Anthony discussed some considerations for using Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus from a real-world project which Hitachi have been working on with EasyJet.  Anthony also walked through a simplified demo of the concepts which applied on the project.   In addition to the slides and demo it was also very interesting to discuss with the guys involved on this project to hear about their real experiences developing with the Azure Service Bus and some of the limitations they have had to work around in Windows Mobiles ability to interact with the service bus.   On the back of this session we will look to do some further activities around this topic and the guys offered to share their wish list of features for both Windows Mobile and Windows Azure which we will look to share for user group discussion.   Another interesting point was the cost aspects of using the ISB which were very low.   Session 2 - The Enterprise Cache In the second session Elton used a few slides which are based around one of his customer scenario's where they are looking into the concept of an Enterprise Cache within the organisation.  Elton discusses this concept and also a codeplex project he is putting together which allows you to take advantage of a cache with various providers such as Memcached, AppFabric Caching and Ncache.   Following the presentation it was interesting to hear peoples thoughts on various aspects such as the enterprise cache versus an out of process application cache.  Also there was interesting discussion around how people would like to search the cache in the future.   We will again look to put together some follow-up activity on this   Meeting Summary Following the meeting all slide decks are saved in the skydrive location where we keep content from all meetings: http://cid-40015ea59a1307c8.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/SBUG/SBUG%20Meetings/2010%20April   Remember that the details of all previous events are on the following page. http://uksoabpm.org/Events.aspx   Competition We had three copies of the Windows Identity Foundation Patterns and Practices book that were raffles on the night, it would be great to hear any feedback on the book from those who won it.   Recording The user group meeting was recorded and we will look to make this available online sometime soon.   UG Business The following things were discussed as general UG topics:   We will change the name of the user group to the UK Connected Systems User Group to we are more inline with other user groups who cover similar topics and we believe this will help us to attract more members.  The content or focus of the user group is not expected to change.   The next meeting is 26th May and can be registered at the following link: http://sbugmay2010.eventbrite.com/

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• Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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• NoSQL is not about object databases

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  NoSQL as a movement is an interesting beast. I kinda like that it’s negatively defined (I happen to belong myself to at least one other such a-community). It’s not in its roots about proposing one specific new silver bullet to kill an old problem. it’s about challenging the consensus. Actually, blindly and systematically replacing relational databases with object databases would just replace one set of issues with another. No, the point is to recognize that relational databases are not a universal answer -although they have been used as one for so long- and recognize instead that there’s a whole spectrum of data storage solutions out there. Why is it so hard to recognize, by the way? You are already using some of those other data storage solutions every day. Let me cite a few: The file system Active Directory XML / JSON documents The Web e-mail Logs Excel files EXIF blobs in your photos Relational databases And yes, object databases It’s just a fact of modern life. Notice by the way that most of the data that you use every day is unstructured and thus mostly unsuitable for relational storage. It really is more a matter of recognizing it: you are already doing NoSQL. So what happens when for any reason you need to simultaneously query two or more of these heterogeneous data stores? Well, you build an index of sorts combining them, and that’s what you query instead. Of course, there’s not much distance to travel from that to realizing that querying is better done when completely separated from storage. So why am I writing about this today? Well, that’s something I’ve been giving lots of thought, on and off, over the last ten years. When I built my first CMS all that time ago, one of the main problems my customers were facing was to manage and make sense of the mountain of unstructured data that was constituting most of their business. The central entity of that system was the file system because we were dealing with lots of Word documents, PDFs, OCR’d articles, photos and static web pages. We could have stored all that in SQL Server. It would have worked. Ew. I’m so glad we didn’t. Today, I’m working on Orchard (another CMS ;). It’s a pretty young project but already one of the questions we get the most is how to integrate existing data. One of the ideas I’ll be trying hard to sell to the rest of the team in the next few months is to completely split the querying from the storage. Not only does this provide great opportunities for performance optimizations, it gives you homogeneous access to heterogeneous and existing data sources. For free.

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• The Kids Are Alright. With Facebook and SMS. But Not Twitter

  - by ultan o'broin

  I delivered a lecture to business and technology freshmen (late teens, I reckon) in Trinity College Dublin recently. I spoke about user experience in enterprise applications, trends that UX pros need to be aware of such as social media, community support, mobile and tablet platforms and a bunch of nuances around those areas (data and device security, privacy, reputation, branding, and so on). It was all fairly high level stuff given the audience, and I included lots of colorful screenshots. Irish-related examples helped to get the message across. During the lecture I did a quick poll. “How many students here use Twitter?” Answer: None. “How many use Facebook?” All (pretty much). So what do these guys like to use instead of Twitter? Easy - text messaging (or SMS if you like). They all had phones. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised about Twitter, but it’s always great to have research validated by some guerilla UX research on the street. There’s already quite a bit of research about teen uptake (or lack) of Twitter, telling us young adults don’t tweet. Twitter is seen as something for er, older people. Affordable devices and data plans that allow students to text really quickly are also popular (BlackBerry, for example). Younger people just luuurve to text each other. A lot.  Facebook versus Twitter for younger folks? Well, we know the story. No contest. I would love to engage more with students like these. I’ll plan for it. It will also be interesting to see if Twitter becomes more important to them over time. There were a few other interesting observations about the lack of uptake of Foursquare, Gowalla and mobile apps like that. I  don’t think there’s a huge uptake in these kind of apps in Ireland anyway, but maybe students have different priorities anyway?   I’ll return to that another day. Technorati Tags: Gowalla,FourSquare,Twitter,UX,user experience,user assistance,Trinity College Dublin

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• Analysing and measuring the performance of a .NET application (survey results)

  - by Laila

  Back in December last year, I asked myself: could it be that .NET developers think that you need three days and a PhD to do performance profiling on their code? What if developers are shunning profilers because they perceive them as too complex to use? If so, then what method do they use to measure and analyse the performance of their .NET applications? Do they even care about performance? So, a few weeks ago, I decided to get a 1-minute survey up and running in the hopes that some good, hard data would clear the matter up once and for all. I posted the survey on Simple Talk and got help from a few people to promote it. The survey consisted of 3 simple questions: Amazingly, 533 developers took the time to respond - which means I had enough data to get representative results! So before I go any further, I would like to thank all of you who contributed, because I now have some pretty good answers to the troubling questions I was asking myself. To thank you properly, I thought I would share some of the results with you. First of all, application performance is indeed important to most of you. In fact, performance is an intrinsic part of the development cycle for a good 40% of you, which is much higher than I had anticipated, I have to admit. (I know, "Have a little faith Laila!") When asked what tool you use to measure and analyse application performance, I found that nearly half of the respondents use logging statements, a third use performance counters, and 70% of respondents use a profiler of some sort (a 3rd party performance profilers, the CLR profiler or the Visual Studio profiler). The importance attributed to logging statements did surprise me a little. I am still not sure why somebody would go to the trouble of manually instrumenting code in order to measure its performance, instead of just using a profiler. I personally find the process of annotating code, calculating times from log files, and relating it all back to your source terrifyingly laborious. Not to mention that you then need to remember to turn it all off later! Even when you have logging in place throughout all your code anyway, you still have a fair amount of potentially error-prone calculation to sift through the results; in addition, you'll only get method-level rather than line-level timings, and you won't get timings from any framework or library methods you don't have source for. To top it all, we all know that bottlenecks are rarely where you would expect them to be, so you could be wasting time looking for a performance problem in the wrong place. On the other hand, profilers do all the work for you: they automatically collect the CPU and wall-clock timings, and present the results from method timing all the way down to individual lines of code. Maybe I'm missing a trick. I would love to know about the types of scenarios where you actively prefer to use logging statements. Finally, while a third of the respondents didn't have a strong opinion about code performance profilers, those who had an opinion thought that they were mainly complex to use and time consuming. Three respondents in particular summarised this perfectly: "sometimes, they are rather complex to use, adding an additional time-sink to the process of trying to resolve the existing problem". "they are simple to use, but the results are hard to understand" "Complex to find the more advanced things, easy to find some low hanging fruit". These results confirmed my suspicions: Profilers are seen to be designed for more advanced users who can use them effectively and make sense of the results. I found yet more interesting information when I started comparing samples of "developers for whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle", with those "to whom performance is only looked at in times of crisis", and "developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works". See the three graphs below. Sample of developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle: Sample of developers to whom performance is important only in times of crisis: Sample of developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works: As you can see, there is a strong correlation between the usage of a profiler and the importance attributed to performance: indeed, the more important performance is to a development team, the more likely they are to use a profiler. In addition, developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle have a higher tendency to use a much wider range of methods for performance measurement and analysis. And, unsurprisingly, the less important performance is, the less varied the methods of measurement are. So all in all, to come back to my random questions: .NET developers do care about performance. Those who care the most use a wider range of performance measurement methods than those who care less. But overall, logging statements, performance counters and third party performance profilers are the performance measurement methods of choice for most developers. Finally, although most of you find code profilers complex to use, those of you who care the most about performance tend to use profilers more than those of you to whom performance is not so important.

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• Defining Social Media Terms

  - by David Dorf

  As I talk about social in the context of retail, I sometimes get tripped up on different terms. I know what I mean, but the audience may have something else in mind. So I decided to see if I could find some well accepted definitions for common terms. While there are definitions on the Internet, I'm not sure they are well accepted. After reviewing several, here's what I came up with: Social Network: a structure of individuals and groups connected together by commonality. That seems pretty straightforward. A group of friends, co-workers, music fans, etc. The key here is that they have something in common that connects them. Social Media: Internet channels that support the collaborative publishing of information by and for social networks. The key here is to differentiate between traditional one-way media, and conversational social media. When its social its two-way, allowing both the publishing and consuming of information. Examples are blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Social Marketing: the use of social media for marketing, public relations, and customer service. Wikipedia actually includes "selling" here but I think that's separate from marketing, as you'll see further down below. Most people look at social media as entertainment, but the marketing angle adds business value. This is where retailers discover and engage customers to build a relationship. Social Merchandising: the integration of social media and product discovery. Whereas marketing is focused more on brand image, customer engagement, and promotions, merchandising is more directly trying to convert browsers into purchases. This includes deciding what customers want, often by asking the social network, and deciding how to position products to the social network. Social Selling: the incorporation of e-commerce into social media. While on a social media site, social selling enables the purchasing of goods/services in the user's context, without leaving the social media channel. If a user clicks on an advertisement and is taken to an e-commerce site, then that's really just web advertising and not social selling. Well, do these terms and definitions make sense? Let me know what you think.

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• Archbeat Link-O-Rama Top 10 Facebook Faves - June 23-29, 2013

  - by Bob Rhubart

  2,947 people now follow OTN ArchBeat on Facebook. Here are the Top 10 items shared on that page for June 23-29, 2013. Podcast Show Notes: DevOps, Cloud, and Role Creep After some confusion (my bad) all three CORRECT parts of this podcast are now available. The panelists for this discussion are all Oracle ACE Directors: Ron Batra, Basheer Khan, and Cary Millsap. SOA Suite 11g Developers Cookbook Published | Antony Reynolds "The book focuses on areas that we felt we had neglected in the Developers Guide, says co-author Antony Reynolds. "There is more about Java integration and OSB, both of which we see a lot of questions about when working with customers." Using Oracle TimesTen With Oracle BI Applications (Part 2) | Peter Scott Peter Scott follows up an earlier post with a look at some of the OBIA structures and a discussion of some of the features of TimesTen. Linux-Containers — Part 1: Overview | Lenz Grimmer OTN Garage blogger Lenz Grimmer kicks off a series and expands your mind with deep detail on Linux Containers Slides from my ODTUG Kscope13 Presentation | Zeeshan Baig Oracle ACE Zeeshan Baig shares the slides from his KScope13 presentation, "Build Your Business Services Using ADF Task Flows." Fun with Enterprise Manager | Rene van Wijk Oracle ACE Rene van Wijk shares some background and some tuning and other tech tips for working with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Using VirtualBox to test drive Windows Blue | The Fat Bloke The Fat Bloke shares a tech tip for those interested in giving Windows Blue a try on Virtual Box. Podcast Show Notes: The Fusion Middleware A-Team and the Chronicles of Architecture In this three-part series Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team members Jennifer Briscoe, Clifford Musante, Mikael Ottosson, and Pardha Reddy talk about the origins and mission of the FMW A-Team and about the great technical content you'll find on the recently launched Oracle A-Team blog. Part one is now available. 5 Best Practices - Laying the Foundation for WebCenter Projects | John Brunswick Oracle WebCenter expert John Brunswick shares best practices that "enable the creation of portal solutions with minimal resource overhead, while offering the greatest flexibility for progressive elaboration." Oracle Magazine - July/Aug 2013 The digital edition of the July/August edition of Oracle Magazine is now available. This issue includes my architect community column, "The CX Factor." which features insight from community members on "why and how CX has become a significant factor in enterprise IT." h

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• Angry Bird Makers: Developers Love iOS Over Android To Make Money

  - by Gopinath

  These days web is buzzing with Apple iOS vs Google Android debates. Recently Fortune predicted that Android is going to explode in 2011 and it will surpass Apple’s iOS market share. Yes Android is set to spread its wings across all the devices – smartphones, TVs, set top boxes, in car entertainment devices, what not. Think of any device that requires operating system, Android can be used. On the other than iOS is only available on very selective Apple devices – iPods, iPhones and iPads. When it comes to the count of devices running on a specific OS, Android will be far ahead of iOS but when you consider a quality of devices and providing an eco system for business to make money iOS seems to be the winner. That is what experts and analysts are saysing. Here is an excerpt from Peter Vesterbacka, maker of the popular Angry Birds game, interview to Tech N Marketing site.  He says Apple will be the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective, they have gotten so many things right. And they know what they are doing and they call the shots. Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time. Device fragmentation not the issue, but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem. So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android. Peter says developer prefer iOS over Android as it’s not very easy to make money on Android market. That’s why they released a free version of Angry Birds game with ads support for Android devices. Free is the way to go with Android. Nobody has been successful selling content on Android. We will offer a way to remove the ads by paying for the app, but we don’t expect that to be a huge revenue stream. You can read full interview here. cc image credit: flickr/johanl This article titled,Angry Bird Makers: Developers Love iOS Over Android To Make Money, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Oracle Releases New Mainframe Re-Hosting in Oracle Tuxedo 11g

  - by Jason Williamson

  I'm excited to say that we've released our next generation of Re-hosting in 11g. In fact I'm doing some hands-on labs now for our Systems Integrators in Italy in a couple of weeks and targeting Latin America next month. If you are an SI, or Rehosting firm and are looking to become an Oracle Partner or get a better understanding of Tuxedo and how to use the workbench for rehosting...drop me a line. Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch 11g provides a CICS API emulation and Batch environment that exploits the full range of Oracle Tuxedo's capabilities. Re-hosted applications run in a multi-node, grid environment with centralized production control. Also, enterprise integration of CICS application services benefits from an open and SOA-enabled framework. Key features include: CICS Application Runtime: Can run IBM CICS applications unchanged in an application grid, which enables the distribution of large workloads across multiple processors and nodes. This simplifies CICS administration and can scale to over 100,000 users and over 50,000 transactions per second. 3270 Terminal Server: Protects business users from change through support for tn3270 terminal emulation. Distributed CICS Resource Management: Simplifies deployment and administration by allowing customers to run CICS regions in a distributed configuration. Batch Application Runtime: Provides robust IBM JES-like job management that enables local or remote job submissions. In addition, distributed batch initiators can enable parallelization of jobs and support fail-over, shortening the batch window and helping to meet stringent SLAs. Batch Execution Environment: Helps to run IBM batch unchanged and also supports JCL functionality and all common batch utilities. Oracle Tuxedo Application Rehosting Workbench 11g provides a set of automated migration tools integrated around a central repository. The tools provide high precision which results in very low error rates and the ability to handle large applications. This enables less expensive, low-risk migration projects. Key capabilities include: Workbench Repository and Cataloguer: Ensures integrity of the migrated application assets through full dependency checking. The Cataloguer generates and maintains all relevant meta-data on source and target components. File Migrator: Supports reliable migration of datasets and flat files to an ISAM or Oracle Database 11g. This is done through the automated migration utilities for data unloading, reloading and validation. It also generates logical access functions to shield developers from data repository changes. DB2 Migrator: Similarly, this tool automates the migration of DB2 schema and data to Oracle Database 11g. COBOL Migrator: Supports migration of IBM mainframe COBOL assets (OLTP and Batch) to open systems. Adapts programs for compiler dialects and data access variations. JCL Migrator: Supports migration of IBM JCL jobs to a Tuxedo ART environment, maintaining the flow and characteristics of batch jobs.

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• Vodacom Call Center Management on the NetBeans Platform

  - by Geertjan

  If you live in South Africa, you know about Vodacom. Vodacom is one of the dominant mobile communication companies in South Africa, and beyond, providing voice, messaging, data, and similar mobile services. Inside Vodacom there's an application named Helios, which is a call centre application that had its inception in 2009 and consists of two parts. Firstly, a web-based front-end that allows a call centre agent to service subscribers using a Google-like search on a knowledge base structured as a collection of FAQs. The web-based front-end uses plain-old HTML + CSS + a good helping of JQuery and JQueryUI. This is delivered via JSR-168 portlets running on a cluster of IBM Portal 6 servers. In turn, the portlets communicate via RMI with several back-end EJB's containing the business logic. These EJB's are deployed on a cluster of Weblogic Application Servers, version 10.3.6. The second part is a NetBeans Platform application used for maintaining and constructing the knowledge base, i.e., the back-end of the web-based front-end. Helios is also used for a number of other maintenance functions, such as access permissions, user maintenance, and news bulletins. Below, in the web-based front-end, call centre agents can enter search terms and are presented with a number of FAQs from the knowledge base. Upon selecting a FAQ article, the agent is presented with the article text, the process to guide the subscriber, system checks that display information specific to the subscriber, and links to related applications and articles: Below, you can see that applications are searchable and can be accessed using the same web-based front-end as shown above. And, as can be seen below, knowledge base FAQs are maintained using the Helios Maintenance Application, which is the Vodacom application built on the NetBeans Platform: Several thousand call centre agent user accounts are administered using the Helios Maintenance Application. Below the main FAQ page is shown, together with the About dialog: Vodacom is happy with the back-end NetBeans Platform application. However, the front-end stack runs on quite old technology. Ideally Vodacom would like to migrate the portlets to Oracle Weblogic Portal or Oracle WebCenter, but this hasn't been accomplished yet. Migrating makes sense as the rest of the application server environment consists entirely of Oracle products.

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• SQL SERVER – Monday Morning Puzzle – Query Returns Results Sometimes but Not Always

  - by pinaldave

  The amount of email I receive sometime it is impossible for me to answer every email. Nonetheless I try to answer pretty much every email I receive. However, quite often I receive such questions in email that I have no answer to them because either emails are not complete or they are out of my domain expertise. In recent times I received one email which had only one or two lines but indeed attracted my attention to it. The question was bit vague but it indeed made me think. The answer was not straightforward so I had to keep on writing the answer as I remember it. However, after writing the answer I do not feel satisfied. Let me put this question in front of you and see if we all can come up with a comprehensive answer. Question: I am beginner with SQL Server. I have one query, it sometime returns a result and sometime it does not return me the result. Where should I start looking for a solution and what kind of information I should send to you so you can help me with solving. I have no clue, please guide me. Well, if you read the question, it is indeed incomplete and it does not contain much of the information at all. I decided to help him and here is the answer, which I started to compose. Answer: As there are not much information in the original question, I am not confident what will solve your problem. However, here are the few things which you can try to look at and see if that solves your problem. Check parameter which is passed to the query. Is the parameter changing at various executions? Check connection string – is there some kind of logic around it? Do you have a non-deterministic component in your query logic? (In other words – does your result is based on current date time or any other time based function?) Are you facing time out while running your query? Is there any error in error log? What is the business logic in your query? Do you have all the valid permissions to all the objects used in the query? Are permissions changing or query accessing a different object in various executions? (Add your suggestions here) Meanwhile, have you ever faced this situation? If yes, do share your experience in the comment area. I will send a copy of my book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers to one of the most interesting comment. The winner will be announced by next Monday.  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Cutting Paper through Visualization and Collaboration

  - by [email protected]

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

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• Reset All Internet Explorer 8 Settings to Fix Stability Problems

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you like to tweak and customize IE with Add-ons and changing settings, sometimes you may have problems with stability. To save time, you can reset all of the IE settings rather than trying to troubleshoot individual areas. Reset IE Settings To reset Internet Explorer Settings, click on Tools then Internet Options. When you reset the settings, you won’t lose personal settings like your homepage, search provider, passwords…etc. The Internet Options screen opens…click on the Advanced tab, then under Reset Internet Explorer settings click on the Reset button. You’ll need to verify that you want to reset all Internet Explorer Settings. If you choose to, you can delete all of your personal settings as well, but it shouldn’t be necessary to fix stability issues. The settings will start to reset, and when it’s finished close out of the message box. For the process to complete you’ll need to restart Internet Explorer. When it restarts you’ll be presented with the Welcome screen where you can go through the setup wizard again. After it’s complete, you should be back in business and can start using IE again. With the new enhancements and features available in Internet Explorer 8, sometimes too much tweaking can cause it to stop working. One area you could start with is troubleshooting IE 8 Add-ons. However, if you don’t want to waste time troubleshooting each potential issue, sometimes it’s just easier to reset things back to how they were originally. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Troubleshooting Internet Explorer on Vista Locking Up or Running SlowlyFix Internet Explorer Not Prompting to Choose Save Location in XPDealing With Windows Vista Explorer Screwing Up Auto-Detection of Folder TypesMysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPClean Up Past Notification Icons in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• Text Trimming in Silverlight 4

  - by dwahlin

  Silverlight 4 has a lot of great features that can be used to build consumer and Line of Business (LOB) applications. Although Webcam support, RichTextBox, MEF, WebBrowser and other new features are pretty exciting, I’m actually enjoying some of the more simple features that have been added such as text trimming, built-in wheel scrolling with ScrollViewer and data binding enhancements such as StringFormat. In this post I’ll give a quick introduction to a simple yet productive feature called text trimming and show how it eliminates a lot of code compared to Silverlight 3. The TextBlock control contains a new property in Silverlight 4 called TextTrimming that can be used to add an ellipsis (…) to text that doesn’t fit into a specific area on the user interface. Before the TextTrimming property was available I used a value converter to trim text which meant passing in a specific number of characters that I wanted to show by using a parameter: public class StringTruncateConverter : IValueConverter { #region IValueConverter Members public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { int maxLength; if (int.TryParse(parameter.ToString(), out maxLength)) { string val = (value == null) ? null : value.ToString(); if (val != null && val.Length > maxLength) { return val.Substring(0, maxLength) + ".."; } } return value; } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } #endregion } To use the StringTruncateConverter I'd define the standard xmlns prefix that referenced the namespace and assembly, add the class into the application’s Resources section and then use the class while data binding as shown next: <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="3" ToolTipService.ToolTip="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectManagers}" Text="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectManagers, Converter={StaticResource StringTruncateConverter},ConverterParameter=16}" Style="{StaticResource SummaryValueStyle}" /> With Silverlight 4 I can define the TextTrimming property directly in XAML or use the new Property window in Visual Studio 2010 to set it to a value of WordEllipsis (the default value is None): <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="4" ToolTipService.ToolTip="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectCoordinators}" Text="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectCoordinators}" TextTrimming="WordEllipsis" Style="{StaticResource SummaryValueStyle}"/> The end result is a nice trimming of the text that doesn’t fit into the target area as shown with the Coordinator and Foremen sections below. My data binding statements are now much smaller and I can eliminate the StringTruncateConverter class completely.   For more information about onsite, online and video training, mentoring and consulting solutions for .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.

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• How do I (tactfully) tell my project manager or lead developer that the project's codebase needs serious work?

  - by Adam Maras

  I just joined a (relatively) small development team that's been working on a project for several months, if not a year. As with most developer joining a project, I spent my first couple of days reviewing the project's codebase. The project (a medium- to large-sized ASP.NET WebForms internal line of business application) is, for lack of a more descriptive term, a disaster. There are three immediately noticeable problems with the coding standards: The standard is very loose. It describes more of what not to do (don't use Hungarian notation, etc..) than what to do. The standard isn't always followed. There are inconsistencies with the code formatting everywhere. The standard doesn't follow Microsoft's style guidelines. In my opinion, there's no value in deviating from the guidelines that were set forth by the developer of the framework and the largest contributor to the language specification. As for point 3, perhaps it bothers me more because I've taken the time to get my MCPD with a focus on web applications (specifically, ASP.NET). I'm also the only Microsoft Certified Professional on the team. Because of what I learned in all of my schooling, self-teaching, and on-the-job learning (including my preparation for the certification exams) I've also spotted several instances in the project's code where things are simply not done in the best way. I've only been on this team for a week, but I see so many issues with their codebase that I imagine I'll be spending more time fighting with what's already written to do things in "their way" than I would if I were working on a project that, for example, followed more widely accepted coding standards, architecture patterns, and best practices. This brings me to my question: Should I (and if so, how do I) propose to my project manager and team lead that the project needs to be majorly renovated? I don't want to walk into their office, waving my MCTS and MCPD certificates around, saying that their project's codebase is crap. But I also don't want to have to stay silent and have to write kludgey code atop their kludgey code, because I actually want to write quality software and I want the end product to be stable and easily maintainable.

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• Oracle Announces Availability of Oracle Exaskeleton with Extreme Scale

  - by J Swaroop

  Re-posting Bruce Tierney's original post - albeit a day late: I reckon this is Oracle's most interesting launch this year. Enjoy! The World’s First Human Scale Body Surface (HSBS) Designed to Toughen Spineless Wimps April 1, 2012 Building on the success of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Exalytics, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Exaskeleton, toughening up spineless wimps across the globe through the introduction of extreme scalability over the human body leveraging a revolutionary new technology called Human Scale Body Surface (HSBS). First Customer Ship (FCS) was received by the little known and mostly unsuccessful superhero Awkwardman. After applying Oracle Exaskeleton with extreme scale, he has since rebranded himself as Aquaman. Said Aquaman, “I used to feel so helpless in my skin…now I feel like…well…a highly scaled Engineered System thanks to Oracle!” Thousand of meek and mild individuals eagerly lined up outside Oracle Corporation’s Redwood Shores office to purchase the new Oracle Exaskeleton, with the hope of finally gaining the spine they never had. Unfortunately for the individuals, a bully was spotted allegedly kicking the sand covering the beaches of Redwood Shores into the still spineless Exaskeleton hopefuls. Supporting Quotes “Industry analysts are inquiring if Oracle Exaskeleton is a radical departure from Oracle’s traditional enterprise focus into new markets”, said Oracle representative Sabrina Twich, “Oracle has extensive expertise in unified backbone solutions for application infrastructures…this is simply a new port to the human body combining our Business Intelligence (BI) and RDBC (Remote Direct Brain Cell) technologies.” “With this release of Oracle Exaskeleton, Oracle has redefined scalability. Software and hardware vendors had it all wrong” said the Director of Oracle Exaskeleton, “Scalability for hardware is like…um…you know…so scale-ful. No, wait…can I say that again? I didn’t get that right…Scalability is hardware-on-demand with public and private…hybrid clouds, no…<long pause>…Scalability for… nevermind, I don’t want to be in this stupid press release anyway” Releases An upcoming Oracle Exaskeleton service pack release will include a new datasheet with an extensive library of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) as well as the introduction of more four-letter acronyms (FLAs) since technologies vendors have used up almost all of the 17,576 TLA permutations (TLAPs). About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. It would be an amazing coincidence if any of this is true in some secret Oracle lab, but I doubt it. Trademarks Really…you’re still reading this? Cool! Aquaman - First Customer Ship (FCS) - Oracle Exaskeleton

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• Engagement: Don’t Forget Your Employees!

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  By Mark Brown, Sr. Director, Oracle WebCenter  This week we want to focus on Employee Engagement, and how it is critical to your business. Today we hear and read a great deal about “Customer Engagement” – and rightly so, it is those customers, whether they be traditional paying customers, citizens, students, club members, or whomever it is that are “paying the bills”.  A more engaged customer is more likely to make it easier to pay those bills by buying more, giving good reviews, or spreading the word of how wonderful their experience was. But what about those who are providing those services, those who design and make those goods; why is it that all too often they are left out of conversations concerning engagement? In fact, it is critical that we consider our employees as customers since they are using internal systems that run your organization the same way customers use external systems. Studies have shown that an organization in which the employees feel “engaged” or better able to make decisions, do their jobs, and are connected to their peers have better return to their stakeholders. (shareholders).  On the surface this seems obvious, happy employees are more productive employees. But it leads to the question – how many of our existing policies, systems and processes are actually reducing that level of engagement? Let’s look at a couple examples. If posting new information that may be of great value to everyone in the larger organization is hard to do because we use an antiquated system, then we’re making it hard to share and increasing the potential for duplicate work. If it is not trivially obvious how to create and publish this post, then chances are very high that I’ll put it on the bottom of my queue. And finally, when critical information is spread across various systems, intranet sites, workgroups and peoples inboxes, then it is very hard to learn and grow from that information.  These may sound trivial, but how often do we push things off not because it is intellectually challenging, we may have the answer at our fingertips, but because it is hard to make that information readily available.  If an engaged employee is a productive employee, then what can we do to increase their level of engagement? We can start by looking for opportunities to provide self-documenting self-service solutions. Our newer employees grew up using simplified web interfaces everyday and they loathe calling a help-desk unless it is the last resort. Sadly, many of our enterprise applications have not kept pace and we all still have processes that are based on sending an email -- like discount approvals, vacation requests, or even offer-letter approvals.   My suggestion is to pick one highly visible, high-impact process where employees are either reticent to execute on the process or openly complain about how cumbersome it is and look at the mechanism for that process. If there are better ways, streamlined steps, better UIs that could be done, then you have a candidate to reconfigure that process and make it more engaging. Looking to better engage your employees? Start here!

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• links for 2011-03-15

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Dr. Frank Munz: Resize AWS EC2 Cloud Instances Dr Munz says: "You cannot dynamically resize a running cloud instance. E.g. there is no API call to ask for 2.2 GHz CPU speed instead of 1.8 GHz or to dynamically add another 3.5 GB of RAM." (tags: oracle cloud amazon ec2) Roddy Rodstein: Oracle VM Manager Architecture and Scalability Rodstein says: "Oracle VM Manager can be installed in an all-in-one configuration using the default Oracle 10g Express Database or in a more traditional two tier architecture with an OC4J web tier and a 10 or 11g database tier." (tags: oracle otn virtualization oraclevm) Mark Nelson: Getting started with Continuous Integration for SOA projects Nelson says: "I am exploring how to use Maven and Hudson to create a continuous integration capability for SOA and BPM projects. This will be the first post of several on this topic, and today we will look at setting up some simple continuous integration for a single SOA project." (tags: oracle maven hudson soa bpm) 5 New Java Champions (The Java Source) Tori Wieldt shares the big news. Congratulations to new Java Champs Jonas Bonér, James Strachan, Rickard Oberg, Régina ten Bruggencate, and Clara Ko. (tags: oracle java) Alert for Forms customers running Oracle Forms 10g (Grant Ronald's Blog) Ronald says: "While you might have been happily running your Forms 10g applications for about 5 years or so now, the end of premier support is creeping up and you need to start planning for a move to Oracle Forms 11g." (tags: oracle oracleforms) Brenda Michelson: Enterprise Architecture Rant #4,892 "I’m increasingly concerned about the macro-direction of our field, as we continue to suffer ivory tower enterprise architecture punditry, rigid frameworks and endless philosophical waxing." - Brenda Michelson (tags: entarch enterprisearchitecture ivorytower) Amitabh Apte: Enterprise Architecture - Different Perspectives "Business does not need Enterprise Architecture," says Apte, "it needs value and outcomes from the EA function." (tags: entarch enterprisearchitecture) First Ever MySQL on Windows Online Forum - March 16, 2011 (Oracle's MySQL Blog) Monica Kumar shares the details. (tags: oracle mysql mswindows) Jeff Davies: Running Multiple WebLogic and OSB Domains "There is a small 'gotcha' if you want to create multiple domains on a devevelopment machine," says Jeff Davies. But don't worry - there's a solution. (tags: oracle soa osb weblogic servicebus) The Arup Nanda Blog: Good Engineering "Engineering is not about being superficially creative," Nanda says, "it's about reliability and trustworthiness." (tags: oracle engineering software technology) Welcome to the SOA & E2.0 Partner Community Forum (SOA Partner Community Blog) (tags: ping.fm)

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