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• Get Fanatical About Your Followers

  - by Mike Stiles

  In the fourth of our series of discussions with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we touch on what fans of your brand have come to expect in exchange for their fandom. Spotlight: Around the Oracle Social office, we live for football. So when we think of a true “fan” of a brand, something on the level of a football fan is what comes to mind. But are brands trying to invest fans on that same level? Trip: Yeah, if you’re a football fan, this is definitely your time of year. And if you’ve been to any NFL games recently, especially if you hadn’t been for a few years previously, you may have noticed that from the cup holders to in-stadium Wi-Fi, there’s an increasing emphasis being placed on “fan-focused” accommodations. That’s what they’re known as in the stadium business. Spotlight: How are brands doing in that fan-focused arena? Trip: Remember fan is short for “fanatical.” Brands can definitely learn from the way teams have become fanatical about their fans, or in the social media world, their followers. Many companies consider a segment of their addressable social audience as true fans; I’ve even heard the term “super-fans” used. So just as fans know and can tell you nearly everything about their favorite team, our research shows that there’s a lot value from getting to know your social audience—your followers—at a deeper level. Spotlight: So did your research show there’s a lot to be gained by making fandom a two-way street? Trip: Aberdeen’s new social relationship management research suggests that companies should develop capabilities to better analyze their social audience at a more granular level. Countless “ripped from the headlines” examples, from “United Breaks Guitars” to the most recent British Airways social fiasco we talked about a few weeks ago show how social can magnify the impact of a single customer voice. Spotlight: So how do the companies who are executing social most successfully do that? Trip: Leaders, which are the top-performing companies in Aberdeen’s study, are showing the value of identifying and categorizing your social audience. You should certainly treat every customer as if they have 10,000 followers, because they just might, but you can also proactively engage with high-value customer and high-value influencers. Getting back to the football analogy, it’s like how teams strive to give every guest a great experience, but they really roll out the red carpet for those season ticket and luxury box holders. Spotlight: I’m not allowed in luxury boxes, so you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. But what is the brand equivalent of rolling out the red carpet? Trip: Leaders are nearly three times more likely than Followers to have a process in place that identifies key social influencers for engagement, and more than twice as likely to identify customer advocates for social outreach. This is the kind of knowledge that gives companies the ability to better target social messaging and promotions like we talked about in our last discussion, as well as a basis for understanding how to measure the impact of their social media programs. I’ll give you an example. I hosted an event at one of my favorite restaurants recently. I had mentioned them in a Tweet several weeks before the event, and on the day of the event, they Tweeted out that they were looking forward to seeing me that evening for the event. It’s a small thing, but it had a big impact and I’d certainly go back as a result. Spotlight: So what specifically can brands use and look at to determine where their potential super-fans are? Trip: Social graph analysis, which looks at both the demographic/psychographic trends as well as the behavioral connections, can surface important brand value. Aberdeen’s PR and Brand Management research indicated that top-performing companies are more than three times more likely than Followers to both determine demographic trends through social listening (44% vs. 13%), and to identify meaningful customer segments through social (44% vs. 12%). This kind of brand-level insight can complement and enrich traditional market research. But perhaps even more importantly, it can serve as an early warning system for customer experience failures. @mikestilesPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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• NHibernate: Mapping different dynamic components based on a discriminator

  - by George Mauer

  My domain entities each have a set of "fixed" properties and a set of "dynamic" properties which can be added at runtime. I handle this by using NHibernate's dynamic-component functionality. public class Product { public virtual Guid Id { get; } public virtual string Name { get; set;} public virtual IDictionary DynamicComponents { get; } } Now I have the following situation public class Customer { public virtual Guid Id { get; } public virtual string Type { get; set;} public virtual IDictionary DynamicProperties { get; } } Where a CustomerType is something like "Online" or "InPerson". Furthermore an Online customer has dynamic properties "Name" and "IPAddress" and an InPerson Customer has dynamic properties "Name" and "Salesman". Which customer types are available and the extra properties on them are configured in meta-data which is used to generate hbm files on application start. I could figure out some way to knock this together using an intermediate DTO layer, but is there any support in NHibernate for this scenario? The only difficulty seems to be that all the different "types" of customer map to the same Customer class.

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• BizTalk Business Rules Engine - Repeating Elements Question

  - by Andrew Cripps

  Hello I'm trying to create what I think should be a relatively simple business rule to operate over repeating elements in an XML schema. Consider the following XML snippet (this is simplified with namespaces removed, for readability): <Root> <AllAccounts> <Account id="1" currentPayment="10.00" arrearsAmount="25.00"> <AllCustomers> <Customer id="20" primary="true" canSelfServe="false" /> <Customer id="21" primary="false" canSelfServe="false" /> </AllCustomers> </Account> <Account id="2" currentPayment="10.00" arrearsAmount="15.00"> <AllCustomers> <Customer id="30" primary="true" canSelfServe="false" /> <Customer id="31" primary="false" canSelfServe="false" /> </AllCustomers> </AllAccounts> </Root> What I want to do is to have two rules: Set /Root/AllAccounts/Account[x]/AllCustomers/Customer[primary='true']/canSelfServe = true IF arrearsAmount < currentPayment Set /Root/AllAccounts/Account[x]/AllCustoemrs/Customer[primary='true']/canSelfServer = false IF arrearsAmount = currentPayment Where [x] is 0...number of /Root/AllAccounts/Account records present in the XML. I've tried two simple rules for this, and each rule seems to fire x * x times, where x is the number of Account records in the XML. I only want each rule to fire once for each Account record. Any help greatly appreciated! Thanks Andrew

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• Reusing service proxies

  - by Hadi Eskandari

  I have a set of webservices that I connect to using Silverlight Client. I use proxies generated by "Add service reference" or SLSVCUTIL.exe tool to connect to this service. So far, I have only used one single service. Now I want to use another service on the same server. The problem is that, first service generated set of proxy classes for me, and second service will reuse the same set of classes (plus extra services/classes), e.g. CustomerService.SaveCustomer(Customer customer); OrderService.CheckCustomerLevel(Customer customer); The problem is when I add reference to the second service, I can not reuse the same namespace for the second one (VS error), and when I use a different namespace, the generated classes, although are essentially the same, reside in different namespace, hence different and I end up with two Customer classes in two different namespaces. Anyway around this? I just neeed to have two set of services, reusing the Customer class. I have already tried "reuse types in assembly / all assemblies" check mark when generating proxy classes, but it seems to have no effect. any help is greatly appreciated.

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• Why isn't my WPF Datagrid showing data?

  - by Edward Tanguay

  This walkthrough says you can create a WPF datagrid in one line but doesn't give a full example. So I created an example using a generic list and connected it to the WPF datagrid, but it doesn't show any data. What do I need to change on the code below to get it to show data in the datagrid? ANSWER: This code works now: XAML: <Window x:Class="TestDatagrid345.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:toolkit="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wpf/2008/toolkit" xmlns:local="clr-namespace:TestDatagrid345" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300" Loaded="Window_Loaded"> <StackPanel> <toolkit:DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding}"/> </StackPanel> </Window> Code Behind: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Windows; namespace TestDatagrid345 { public partial class Window1 : Window { private List<Customer> _customers = new List<Customer>(); public List<Customer> Customers { get { return _customers; }} public Window1() { InitializeComponent(); } private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { DataContext = Customers; Customers.Add(new Customer { FirstName = "Tom", LastName = "Jones" }); Customers.Add(new Customer { FirstName = "Joe", LastName = "Thompson" }); Customers.Add(new Customer { FirstName = "Jill", LastName = "Smith" }); } } }

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• In a bidirectional JPA OneToMany/ManyToOne association, what is meant by "the inverse side of the as

  - by Bytecode Ninja

  In these examples on TopLink JPA Annotation Reference: Example 1-59 @OneToMany - Customer Class With Generics @Entity public class Customer implements Serializable { ... @OneToMany(cascade=ALL, mappedBy="customer") public Set<Order> getOrders() { return orders; } ... } Example 1-60 @ManyToOne - Order Class With Generics @Entity public class Order implements Serializable { ... @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name="CUST_ID", nullable=false) public Customer getCustomer() { return customer; } ... } It seams to me that the Customer entity is the owner of the association. However, in the explanation for the mappedBy attribute in the same document, it is written that: if the relationship is bidirectional, then set the mappedBy element on the inverse (non-owning) side of the association to the name of the field or property that owns the relationship as Example 1-60 shows. However, if I am not wrong, looks like in the example the mappedBy is actually specified on the owning side of the association, rather than the non-owning side. So my question is basically: In a bidirectional (one-to-many/many-to-one) association, which of the entities is the owner? How can we designate the One side as the owner? How can we designate the Many side as the owner? What is meant by "the inverse side of the association"? How can we designate the One side as the inverse? How can we designate the Many side as the inverse? Thanks in advance.

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• Distributed Message Ordering

  - by sbanwart

  I have an architectural question on handling message ordering. For purposes of this question, the transport is irrelevant, so I'm not going to specify one. Say we have three systems, a website, a CRM and an ERP. For this example, the ERP will be the "master" system in terms of data ownership. The website and the CRM can both send a new customer message to the ERP system. The ERP system then adds a customer and publishes the customer with the newly assigned account number so that the website and CRM can add the account number to their local customer records. This is a pretty straight forward process. Next we move on to placing orders. The account number is required in order for the CRM or website to place an order with the ERP system. However the CRM will permit the user to place an order even if the customer lacks an account number. (For this example assume we can't modify the CRM behavior) This creates the possibility that a user could create a new customer, and place an order before the account number gets updated in the CRM. What is the best way to handle this scenario? Would it be best to send the order message sans account number and let it go to an error queue? Would it be better to have the CRM endpoint hold the message and wait until the account number is updated in the CRM? Maybe something completely different that I haven't thought of? Thanks in advance for any help.

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• nhibernate fluent repository pattern insert problem

  - by voam

  I am trying to use Fluent NHibernate and the repository pattern. I would like my business layer to not be knowledgeable of the data persistence layer. Ideally I would pass in an initialized domain object to the insert method of the repository and all would be well. Where I run into problems is if the object being passed in has a child object. For example say I want to insert an a new order for a customer, and the customer is a property of the order object. I would like to do something like this: Customer c = new Customer; c.CustomerId = 1; Order o = new Order; o.Customer = c; repository.InsertOrder(o); The problem is that using NHiberate the CustomerId field is only privately settable so I can not set it directly like this. so what I have ended up doing is have my repository have an interface of Order InsertOrder(int customerId) where all the foreign keys get passed in as parameters. Somehow this just doesn't seem right. The other approach was to use the NHibernate session variable to load a customer object in my business model and then have the order passed in to the repository but this defeats my persistence ignorance ideal. Should I throw this persistence ignorance out the window or am I missing something here? Thanks

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• How to return all records and whether a related record exists?

  - by David Glenn

  Using Entity Framework 4 CTP5 I have a basic model and a basic DbContext that works public class Customer { public int CustomerId { get; set; } public int Name { get; set; } //... public ICollection<Address> Addresses { get; set; } public bool HasAddress { get { return Addresses.Count > 0; } } } public class Address { public int AddressId { get; set; } public string StreetLine1 { get; set; } //.... public Customer Customer { get; set; } } How can I query my DbContext to return all customers and whether they have an address? A customer can have multiple addresses and I don't want to return all the addresses for each customer when I am only interested in whether they have an address or not. I use context.Customers.Include(c => c.Addresses) but that returns all addresses for each customer

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• Is there a better way to write this LINQ query?

  - by Raj Aththanayake

  Hi Is there a better simplified way to write this query. My logic is if collection contains customer ids and countrycodes, do the query ordey by customer id ascending. If there are no contain id in CustIDs then do the order by customer name. Is there a better way to write this query? I'm not really familiar with complex lambdas. var custIdResult = (from Customer c in CustomerCollection where (c.CustomerID.ToLower().Contains(param.ToLower()) && (countryCodeFilters.Any(item => item.Equals(c.CountryCode))) ) select c).ToList(); if (custIdResult.Count > 0) { return from Customer c in custIdResult where ( c.CustomerName.ToLower().Contains(param.ToLower()) && countryCodeFilters.Any(item => item.Equals(c.CountryCode))) orderby c.CustomerID ascending select c; } else { return from Customer c in CustomerCollection where (c.CustomerName.ToLower().Contains(param.ToLower()) && countryCodeFilters.Any(item => item.Equals(c.CountryCode))) orderby c.CustomerName descending select c; }

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• Databinding expression for retrieving value of related collection using LINQ

  - by joshb

  I have a GridView that is bound to a LINQDataSource control that is returning a collection of customers. Within my DataGrid I need to display the home phone number of a customer, if they have one. The phone numbers of a customer are stored in a separate table with a foreign key pointing to the customer table. The following binding expression gets me the first phone number for a customer: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="LastName" SortExpression="LastName"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label ID="PhoneLabel" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("Phones[0].PhoneNumber") %>'></asp:Label> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> I need to figure out how to get the home phone number specifically (filter based on phone type) and handle the scenario where the customer does not have a home phone in the database. Right now it's throwing an out of range exception if the customer does not have any phone numbers. I've tried using the Where operator with a lambda expression to filter the phone type but it doesn't work: <%# Eval("Phones.Where(p => p.PhoneTypeId == 2).PhoneNumber") %> Solutions or links to any good articles on the subject would be much appreciated.

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• Beginner MVC question - Correct approach to render out a List and details?

  - by fizzer

  I'm trying to set up a page where I display a list of items and the details of the selected item. I have it working but wonder whether I have followed the correct approach. I'll use customers as an example I have set the aspx page to inherit from an IEnumerable of Customers. This seems to be the standard approach to display the list of items. For the Details I have added a Customer user control which inherits from customer. I think i'm on the right track so far but I was a bit confused as to where I should store the id of the customer whose details I intend to display. I wanted to make the id optional in the controller action so that the page could be hit using "/customers" or "customers/1" so I made the arg optional and stored the id in the ViewData like this: public ActionResult Customers(string id = "0") { Models.DBContext db = new Models.DBContext(); var cList = db.Customers.OrderByDescending(c => c.CustomerNumber); if (id == "0") { ViewData["CustomerNumber"] = cList.First().CustomerNumber.ToString(); } else { ViewData["CustomerNumber"] = id; } return View("Customers", cList); } I then rendered the User control using RenderPartial in the front end: <%var CustomerList = from x in Model where x.CustomerNumber == Convert.ToInt32(ViewData["CustomerNumber"]) select x; Customer c = (Customer)CustomerList.First(); %> <% Html.RenderPartial("Customer",c); %> Then I just have an actionLink on each listed item: <%: Html.ActionLink("Select", "Customers", new { id = item.CustomerNumber })% It all seems to work but as MVC is new to me I would just be interested in others thoughts on whether this is a good approach?

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• Call stored proc using xml output from a table

  - by user263097

  Under a tight deadline and I know I can figure this out eventually but I don't have much time to do it on my own. I have a table that has columns for customer id and account number among many other additional columns. There could be many accounts for a single customer (Many rows with the same customer id but different account number). For each customer in the table I need to call a stored procedure and pass data from my table as xml in the following format. Notice that the xml is for all of the customers accounts. <Accounts> <Account> <AccountNumber>12345</AccountNumber> <AccountStatus>Open</AccountStatus> </Account> <Account> <AccountNumber>54321</AccountNumber> <AccountStatus>Closed</AccountStatus> </Account> </Accounts> So I guess I need help with 2 things. First, how to get the data in this xml format. I assuming I'll use some variation of FOR XML. The other thing is how do I group by customer id and then call a sproc for each customer id?

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• data ownership and performance

  - by Ami

  We're designing a new application and we ran into some architectural question when thinking about data ownership. we broke down the system into components, for example Customer and Order. each of this component/module is responsible for a specific business domain, i.e. Customer deals with CRUD of customers and business process centered around customers (Register a n new customer, block customer account, etc.). each module is the owner of a set of database tables, and only that module may access them. if another module needs data that is owned by another module, it retrieves it by requesting it from that module. so far so good, the question is how to deal with scenarios such as a report that needs to show all the customers and for each customer all his orders? in such a case we need to get all the customers from the Customer module, iterate over them and for each one get all the data from the Order module. performance won't be good...obviously it would be much better to have a stored proc join customers table and orders table, but that would also mean direct access to the data that is owned by another module, creating coupling and dependencies that we wish to avoid. this is a simplified example, we're dealing with an enterprise application with a lot of business entities and relationships, and my goal is to keep it clean and as loosely coupled as possible. I foresee in the future many changes to the data scheme, and possibly splitting the system into several completely separate systems. I wish to have a design that would allow this to be done in a relatively easy way. Thanks!

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• Please help!! Is there a better way to write this LINQ query

  - by Raj Aththanayake

  Hi Is there a better simplified way to write this query. My logic is if collection contains customer ids and countrycodes, do the query ordey by customer id ascending. If there are no contain id in CustIDs then do the order by customer name. Is there a better way to write this query? I'm not really familiar with complex lambdas. var custIdResult = (from Customer c in CustomerCollection where (c.CustomerID.ToLower().Contains(param.ToLower()) && (countryCodeFilters.Any(item => item.Equals(c.CountryCode))) ) select c).ToList(); if (custIdResult.Count > 0) { return from Customer c in custIdResult ( c.CustomerName.ToLower().Contains(param.ToLower()) && countryCodeFilters.Any(item => item.Equals(c.CountryCode)) ) orderby c.CustomerID ascending select c; } else { return from Customer c in CustomerCollection where ( c.CustomerName.ToLower().Contains(param.ToLower()) && countryCodeFilters.Any(item => item.Equals(c.CountryCode)) ) orderby c.CustomerName descending select c; }

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• Action on each method's return value

  - by RobGlynn

  What I'd like to do is take some action using the value returned by every method in a class. So for instance, if I have a class Order which has a method public Customer GetCustomer() { Customer CustomerInstance = // get customer return CustomerInstance; } Let's say I want to log the creation of these - Log(CustomerInstance); My options (AFAIK) are: Call Log() in each of these methods before returning the object. I'm not a fan of this because it gets unwieldy if used on a lot of classes with a lot of methods. It also is not an intrinsic part of the method's purpose. Use composition or inheritance to layer the log callon the Order class similar to: public Customer GetCustomer() { Customer CustomerInstance = this.originalCustomer.GetCustomer(); Log(CustomerInstance); return CustomerInstance; } I don't think this buys me anything over #1. Create extension methods on each of the returned types: Customer CustomerInstance = Order.GetCustomer().Log(); which has just as many downsides. I'm looking to do this for every (or almost every) object returned, automatically if possible, without having to write double the amount of code. I feel like I'm either trying to bend the language into doing something it's not supposed to, or failing to recognize some language feature that would enable this. Possible solutions would be greatly appreciated.

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• XSLT Type Checking

  - by mo

  Hi Folks Is it possible to check an elements ComplexType? i have this (simplified): complexType Record complexType Customer extension of Record complexType Person extension of Record <xsl:template match="/"> <records> <xsl:apply-templates /> </records> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="!!! TYPECHECK FOR RECORD !!!" name="Record"> <record><xsl:value-of select="." /></record> </xsl:template> is it possible to check elementstype incl. inheritence? i dont know the elements name only that they are a subtype of Record. schema 1: complexType name="Customer" extension base="Record" element name="customers" element name="customer" type="Customer" schema 2: complexType name="Person" extension base="Record" element name="persons" element name="person" type="Person" schema ?: complexType name="UnknownType" extension base="Record" element name="unknowns" element name="unknown" type="UnknownType" xml 1: <customers> <customer /> <customer /> </customers> xml 2: <persons> <person /> <person /> </persons> xml ?: <?s> <? /> <? /> </?s> the xml input ist custom so i have to match by the type (i think)

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• MVC data binding

  - by user441521

  I'm using MVC but I've read that MVVM is sort of about data binding and having pure markup in your views that data bind back to the backend via the data-* attributes. I've looked at knockout but it looks pretty low level and I feel like I can make a library that does this and is much easier to use where basically you only need to call 1 javascript function that will data bind your entire page because of the data-* attributes you assign to html elements. The benefits of this (that I see) is that your view is 100% decoupled from your back-end so that a given view never has to be changed if your back-end changes (ie for asp.net people no more razor in your view that makes your view specific to MS). My question would be, I know there is knockout out there but are there any others that provide this data binding functionality for MVC type applications? I don't want to recreate something that may already exist but I want to make something "better" and easier to use than knockout. To give an example of what I mean here is all the code one would need to get data binding in my library. This isn't final but just showing the idea that all you have to do is call 1 javascript function and set some data-* attribute values and everything ties together. Is this worth seeing through? <script> $(function () { // this is all you have to call to make databinding for POST or GET to work DataBind(); }); </script> <form id="addCustomer" data-bind="Customer" data-controller="Home" data-action="CreateCustomer"> Name: <input type="text" data-bind="Name" data-bind-type="text" /> Birthday: <input type="text" data-bind="Birthday" data-bind-type="text" /> Address: <input type="text" data-bind="Address" data-bind-type="text" /> <input type="submit" value="Save" id="btnSave" /> </form> ================================================= // controller action [HttpPost] public string CreateCustomer(Customer customer) { if(customer.Name == "Rick") return "success"; return "failure"; } // model public class Customer { public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Birthday { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } }

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• Finance: Friends, not foes!

  - by red@work

  After reading Phil's blog post about his experiences of working on reception, I thought I would let everyone in on one of the other customer facing roles at Red Gate... When you think of a Credit Control team, most might imagine money-hungry (and often impolite) people, who will do nothing short of hunting people down until they pay up. Well, as with so many things, not at Red Gate! Here we do things a little bit differently.   Since joining the Licensing, Invoicing and Credit Control team at Red Gate (affectionately nicknamed LICC!), I have found it fantastic to work with people who know that often the best way to get what you want is by being friendly, reasonable and as helpful as possible. The best bit about this is that, because everyone is in a good mood, we have a great working atmosphere! We are definitely a very happy team. We laugh a lot, even when dealing with the serious matter of playing table football after lunch. The most obvious part of my job is bringing in money. There are few things quite as satisfying as receiving a big payment or one that you've been chasing for a long time. That being said, it's just as nice to encounter the companies that surprise you with a payment bang on time after little or no chasing. It's always a pleasure to find these people who are generous and easy to work with, and so they always make me smile, too. As I'm in one of the few customer facing roles here, I get to experience firsthand just how much Red Gate customers love our software and are equally impressed with our customer service. We regularly get replies from people thanking us for our help in resolving a problem or just to simply say that they think we're great. Or, as is often the case, that we 'rock and are awesome'! When those are the kinds of emails you have to deal with for most of the day, I would challenge anyone to be unhappy! The best thing about my work is that, much like Phil and his counterparts on reception, I get to talk to people from all over the world, and experience their unique (and occasionally unusual) personality traits. I deal predominantly with customers in the US, so I'll be speaking to someone from a high flying multi-national in New York one minute, and then the next phone call will be to a small office on the outskirts of Alabama. This level of customer involvement has led to a lot of interesting anecdotes and plenty of in-jokes to keep us amused! Obviously there are customers who are infuriating, like those who simply tell us that they will pay "one day", and that we should stop chasing them. Then there are the people who say that they ordered the tools because they really like them, but they just can't afford to actually pay for them at the moment. Thankfully these situations are relatively few and far between, and for every one customer that makes you want to scream, there are far, far more that make you smile!

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• Getting developers and support to work together

  - by Matt Watson

  Agile development has ushered in the norm of rapid iterations and change within products. One of the biggest challenges for agile development is educating the rest of the company. At my last company our biggest challenge was trying to continually train 100 employees in our customer support and training departments. It's easy to write release notes and email them to everyone. But for complex software products, release notes are not usually enough detail. You really have to educate your employees on the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN of every item. If you don't do this, you end up with customer service people who know less about your product than your users do. Ever call a company and feel like you know more about their product than their customer service people do? Yeah. I'm talking about that problem.WHO does the change effect?WHAT was the actual change?WHERE do I find the change in the product?WHY was the change made? (It's hard to support something if you don't know why it was done.)WHEN will the change be released?One thing I want to stress is the importance of the WHY something was done. For customer support people to be really good at their job, they need to understand the product and how people use it. Knowing how to enable a feature is one thing. Knowing why someone would want to enable it, is a whole different thing and the difference in good customer service. Another challenge is getting support people to better test and document potential bugs before escalating them to development. Trying to fix bugs without examples is always fun... NOT. They might as well say "The sky is falling, please fix it!"We need to over train the support staff about product changes and continually stress how they document and test potential product bugs. You also have to train the sales staff and the marketing team. Then there is updating sales materials, your website, product documentation and other items there are always out of date. Every product release causes this vicious circle of trying to educate the rest of the company about the changes.Do we need to record a simple video explaining the changes and email it to everyone? Maybe we should  use a simple online training type app to help with this problem. Ultimately the struggle is taking the time to do the training, but it is time well spent. It may save you a lot of time answering questions and fixing bugs later. How do we efficiently transfer key product knowledge from developers and product owners to the rest of the company? How have you solved these issues at your company?

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• It's All In The Cloud

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  People turned out in droves for Steve Miranda's Apps Cloud General Session. Steve, as engaging as ever, covered our Apps strategy in the cloud and reinforced that Oracle has a complete set of cloud services including: •    Human Capital Management•    Talent Management•    Sales and Marketing•    Customer Service and Support•    Financial Management•    Procurement, Sourcing, and Inventory•    Project Portfolio Management•    Governance, Risk, and Compliance... all delivered on top of the Social, Platform, and Common Infrastructure.Steve talked about Fusion being the centerpiece of our Cloud Services. The fact that Fusion is 100 percent standards based is a big, big deal! In addition, our ERP Cloud Service is the most complete cloud service on the market. And email marketing is dead -- social marketing is where the action is. It's also where Oracle is investing heavily from a Sales & Marketing Cloud perspective. Steve covered the strategic acquisitions Oracle has made to enhance our organic Cloud offering. Specifically, Oracle bought RightNow to make our Customer Service and Support Cloud service complete. We also bought Taleo to add Recruiting and Learning capabilities to our Talent Management Cloud. Steve talked about our customers and how they are benefiting from the use of a variety of our Cloud Services. Red Robin is driving lower labor and food costs with Oracle ERP Cloud Service. He used Elizabeth Arden as the profile customer for HCM and Talent Management Service, UBS for HCM and Talent Management Service, and Brocade for Talent Management. All these customers are benefiting from a comprehensive and fully integrated HR platform that aligns compensation with performance and enhances workforce motivation and retention. At the same time, Hitachi Data Systems is using Oracle Taleo Performance Management Cloud to recruit the right competencies, pinpoint areas of improvement, and develop and monitor employee goals to support the global account organization. KLM and Overstock.com are gaining the benefits of Oracle's Customer Service and Support Service from RightNow by better engaging and serving customer needs online and through call centers. And last but not least, Graco and Key Energy are leveraging mobility features and sales forecasting and territory management capabilities within the Oracle Sales and Marketing Service. They expect to gain better visibility to sales information and drive more efficient sales campaigns and empower their sales force with data they need to make sales. Overall, Oracle Apps Cloud Services are enjoying a significant momentum in the marketplace. Steve projected an air of confidence and enthusiasm highlighting Oracle's latest successes with Cloud services.

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• Criteria for selecting timeout value?

  - by stijn

  Situation: a piece of software reads frames of data from a file in a seperate thread and puts it on a queue, emptied by another thread. That second thread periodically checks on the queue and fails rather gracefully, by showing an error message stating the read timed out, if no data is available within a certain amount of time. Initially this timeout was set to 200mSec. There was no real reasoning behind that constant though, but it worked fine. We measured on a couple of machines and for large data frames, larger than what would be used by customers, a read took like 20mSec whith no other load on the machine. However one customer now gets timeout errors now and then (on the second try all is fine, probably the file is in cache or the virus scanner leaves it alone). The programmers are like 'well, yeah, but that customer's machine is full of cruft, virus scanners, tons of unneeded background processes etc'. Of course the customer is like 'hey this should just work, shouldn't it'? While the programers have a point, since the software is heavy enough to validate the need for a dedicated machine, that does not make the customer happy. Increasing the timeout to 2 seconds, for example, solves the problem. But I'd like to make a proper decision now instead of just randomly pick some magic constant that is probably ok in 99% of cases. What criteria should be used for that? We could just pick a large number, but that feels wrong. (and then we end up with a program that has the horrible bahaviour of hanging when trying to read from a disconnected drive for instance, whereas we'd rather make it show an error right away). Or we could make the timeout value a user setting, but then we need to ducument it clearly and even then not all customers are tech savy enough to really understand what it does. Or we could try and wait until another customer reports timeouts and increase the value again. And again. Until we find something ok for 99.99% of the cases.. Any good practice for this type of situation?

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• Asp.Net MVC - Rob Conery's LazyList - Count() or Count

  - by Adam

  I'm trying to create an html table for order logs for customers. A customer is defined as (I've left out a lot of stuff): public class Customer { public LazyList<Order> Orders { get; set; } } The LazyList is set when fetching a Customer: public Customer GetCustomer(int custID) { Customer c = ... c.Orders = new LazyList<Order>(_repository.GetOrders().ByOrderID(custID)); return c; } The order log model: public class OrderLogTableModel { public OrderLogTableModel(LazyList<Order> orders) { Orders = orders; Page = 0; PageSize = 25; } public LazyList<Order> Orders { get; set; } public int Page { get; set; } public int PageSize { get; set; } } and I pass in the customer.Orders after loading a customer. Now the log i'm trying to make, looks something like: <table> <tbody> <% int rowCount = ViewData.Model.Orders.Count(); int innerRows = rowCount - (ViewData.Model.Page * ViewData.Model.PageSize); foreach (Order order in ViewData.Model.Orders.OrderByDescending(x => x.StartDateTime) .Take(innerRows).OrderBy(x => x.StartDateTime) .Take(ViewData.Model.PageSize)) { %> <tr> <td> <%= order.ID %> </td> </tr> <% } %> </tbody> </table> Which works fine. But the problem is evaluating ViewData.Model.Orders.Count() literally takes about 10 minutes. I've tried with the ViewData.Model.Orders.Count property instead, and the results are the same - takes forever. I've also tried calling _repository.GetOrders().ByCustomerID(custID).Count() directly from the view and that executes perfectly within a few ms. Can anybody see any reason why using the LazyList to get a simple count would take so long? It seems like its trying to iterate through the list when getting a simple count.

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• Juju stuck in "pending" state when using LXC

  - by Andre

  So I'm trying to get started with Juju, and tried to do this locally using LXC. I followed the instructions here: How do I configure juju for local usage? Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work for me. status shows the following: $ juju status machines: 0: agent-state: running dns-name: localhost instance-id: local instance-state: running services: mysql: charm: cs:precise/mysql-1 relations: db: - wordpress units: mysql/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 public-address: null wordpress: charm: cs:precise/wordpress-0 exposed: true relations: db: - mysql units: wordpress/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 open-ports: [] public-address: null 2012-05-10 14:09:38,155 INFO 'status' command finished successfully As you can see the agent-state is 'pending' and there is no public address where I'm able to access the newly created site. Am I missing something here? UPDATE: Tried destroying the environment an doing everything again (multiple times). This is the output for debug-log: ~$ juju debug-log 2012-05-11 08:50:23,790 INFO Enabling distributed debug log. 2012-05-11 08:50:23,806 INFO Tailing logs - Ctrl-C to stop. 2012-05-11 08:50:42,338 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Units changed old:set([]) new:set(['mysql/0']) 2012-05-11 08:50:42,339 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Starting service unit: mysql/0 ... 2012-05-11 08:50:42,459 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Downloading charm cs:precise/mysql-1 to /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local/charms 2012-05-11 08:50:42,620 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Using <juju.machine.unit.UnitContainerDeployment object at 0x9c54b6c> for mysql/0 in /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local 2012-05-11 08:50:42,648 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting service unit mysql/0... 2012-05-11 08:50:42,649 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Creating master container... 2012-05-11 08:54:33,992 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Created master container andre-local-0-template 2012-05-11 08:54:33,993 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Creating container mysql-0... 2012-05-11 08:56:18,760 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Container created for mysql/0 2012-05-11 08:56:19,466 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Charm extracted into container 2012-05-11 08:56:19,569 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting container... 2012-05-11 08:56:22,707 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started container for mysql/0 2012-05-11 08:56:22,707 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started service unit mysql/0 2012-05-11 08:56:23,012 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Units changed old:set(['mysql/0']) new:set(['wordpress/0', 'mysql/0']) 2012-05-11 08:56:23,039 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Starting service unit: wordpress/0 ... 2012-05-11 08:56:23,154 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Downloading charm cs:precise/wordpress-0 to /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local/charms 2012-05-11 08:56:23,396 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Using <juju.machine.unit.UnitContainerDeployment object at 0x9c519cc> for wordpress/0 in /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local 2012-05-11 08:56:23,620 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting service unit wordpress/0... 2012-05-11 08:56:23,621 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Creating container wordpress-0... 2012-05-11 08:58:24,739 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Container created for wordpress/0 2012-05-11 08:58:25,163 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Charm extracted into container 2012-05-11 08:58:25,397 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting container... 2012-05-11 08:58:27,982 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started container for wordpress/0 2012-05-11 08:58:27,983 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started service unit wordpress/0 This is the result for the status command (with verbose flag): ~$ juju -v status 2012-05-11 08:51:53,464 DEBUG Initializing juju status runtime 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@658: Client environment:zookeeper.version=zookeeper C client 3.3.5 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@662: Client environment:host.name=andre-ufo 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@669: Client environment:os.name=Linux 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@670: Client environment:os.arch=3.2.0-24-generic-pae 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@671: Client environment:os.version=#37-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 25 10:47:59 UTC 2012 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@679: Client environment:user.name=andre 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@687: Client environment:user.home=/home/andre 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@699: Client environment:user.dir=/home/andre 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@zookeeper_init@727: Initiating client connection, host=192.168.122.1:41779 sessionTimeout=10000 watcher=0xb7780620 sessionId=0 sessionPasswd=<null> context=0x9242ee8 flags=0 2012-05-11 08:51:53,627:4030(0xb6b90b40):ZOO_INFO@check_events@1585: initiated connection to server [192.168.122.1:41779] 2012-05-11 08:51:53,649:4030(0xb6b90b40):ZOO_INFO@check_events@1632: session establishment complete on server [192.168.122.1:41779], sessionId=0x1373ae057d90007, negotiated timeout=10000 2012-05-11 08:51:53,651 DEBUG Environment is initialized. machines: 0: agent-state: running dns-name: localhost instance-id: local instance-state: running services: mysql: charm: cs:precise/mysql-1 relations: db: - wordpress units: mysql/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 public-address: null wordpress: charm: cs:precise/wordpress-0 relations: db: - mysql units: wordpress/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 public-address: null

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• ASP.NET MVC: How can I explain an invalid type violation to an end-user with Html.ValidationSummary?

  - by Terminal Frost

  Serious n00b warning here; please take mercy! So I finished the Nerd Dinner MVC Tutorial and I'm now in the process of converting a VB.NET application to ASP.NET MVC using the Nerd Dinner program as a sort of rough template. I am using the "IsValid / GetRuleViolations()" pattern to identify invalid user input or values that violate business rules. I am using LINQ to SQL and am taking advantage of the "OnValidate()" hook that allows me to run the validation and throw an application exception upon trying to save changes to the database via the CustomerRepository class. Anyway, everything works well, except that by the time the form values reach my validation method invalid types have already been converted to a default or existing value. (I have a "StreetNumber" property that is an integer, though I imagine this would be a problem for DateTime or any other non-strings as well.) Now, I am guessing that the UpdateModel() method throws an exception and then alters the value because the Html.ValidationMessage is displayed next to the StreetNumber field but my validation method never sees the original input. There are two problems with this: While the Html.ValidationMessage does signal that something is wrong, there is no corresponding entry in the Html.ValidationSummary. If I could even get the exception message to show up there indicating an invalid cast or something that would be better than nothing. My validation method which resides in my Customer partial class never sees the original user input so I do not know if the problem is a missing entry or an invalid type. I can't figure out how I can keep my validation logic nice and neat in one place and still get access to the form values. I could of course write some logic in the View that processes the user input, however that seems like the exact opposite of what I should be doing with MVC. Do I need a new validation pattern or is there some way to pass the original form values to my model class for processing? CustomerController Code // POST: /Customers/Edit/[id] [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] public ActionResult Edit(int id, FormCollection formValues) { Customer customer = customerRepository.GetCustomer(id); try { UpdateModel(customer); customerRepository.Save(); return RedirectToAction("Details", new { id = customer.AccountID }); } catch { foreach (var issue in customer.GetRuleViolations()) ModelState.AddModelError(issue.PropertyName, issue.ErrorMessage); } return View(customer); }

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