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• Silverlight Cream for March 08, 2011 -- #1056

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Joost van Schaik, Manas Patnaik, Kevin Hoffman, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata, Dhananjay Kumar, Dennis Delimarsky, Samuel Jack, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jfo. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How I let the trees grow" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior" Joost van Schaik Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 from last week posted, plus the ECOContest is ready to be voted on: SilverlightShow for Feb 28 - March 06, 2011 Drew DeVault is a young man involved with the Microsoft Student Insiders. He gave a WP7 presentation at RMTT and has posted his material: Post-Session: Windows Phone 7 @ RMTT Rui Marinho has an app in the ECO Contest called Forest Findr. is based on the BIng Map Control for silverlight and Sql Spatial data, and helps you find Forests and get geolocated pictures and wikipedia information, and has a post up with a bunch of info on it here: Forest Findr. my entry on the SilverlightShow EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior Joost van Schaik has a behavior that makes *anything* draggable and 'flickable' in WP7 ... read the intro, scroll to the bottom to watch the demo, and then grab up the code... cool stuff, Joost! Data Aggregation Using Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4 Manas Patnaik sent me a link to his blog, and it appears he's got lots of Silverlight goodness out there so you'll be hearing more about him. This first post is on the Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4... good discussion, diagrams and code... good job, Manas! WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Advanced UI Kevin Hoffman has part 3 of an ambitious 12-part tutorial series up on WP7 development ... this go-around is concentrating on Advanced UI - Panorama/Pivot controls, DataBinding, ObservableCollections, and Converters... whew! Sterling DB on top of Isolated Storage – 2 Jesse Liberty has part 2 of his Sterling series up... this time setting up the database in App.xaml so it can be used for dealing with tombstoning. Silverlight Charting: Formatting the Tick Marks Deborah Kurata's next chart tutorial is all about showing you how to continue to dress up your charts.. this time by formatting the tick marks... if you don't know what that is... check out the first image in the post. Stored Procedure in WCF Data Service Dhananjay Kumar has a very nice tutorial up on using a stored proc with WCF Data Services... I happen to know someone working on just that at this time. If you have this in mind, here's a step-by-step guide to getting it done. Windows Phone 7 – Episode 5 – Pages Dennis Delimarsky has part 5 of his WP7 tutorial series up and is discussing Pages in this 17 minute video. Unpacking Simon Squared: My mini framework-independent animation library Samuel Jack has not only Open-Sourced the WP7 game he built and blogged about, but he's now explaining some of the structure of the game in posts such as this one about the animation library he wrote that his game is built on. How I let the trees grow Peter Kuhn shares with us the code he used for the tree animation in his ECO Contest entry. There's a lot to learn in this post about performance ... the fully-animated tree has about 20K elements... 5K branches and 20K leaves... check it out. WP7 ToastPrompt in depth WindowsPhoneGeek takes a deep dive into the ToastPrompt control in the Coding4fun Toolkit... everything you need to completely use the control including sample code. Beware the loaded event Jfo talks about another frustration point she had with WP7 development, and that is around the use of the loaded event... read these tips from someone that's been there. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Thoughts on Thoughts on TDD

  Brian Harry wrote a post entitled Thoughts on TDD that I thought I was going to let lie, but I find that I need to write a response. I find myself in agreement with Brian on many points in the post, but I disagree with his conclusion. Not surprisingly, I agree with the things that he likes about TDD. Focusing on the usage rather than the implementation is really important, and this is important whether you use TDD or not. And YAGNI was a big theme in my Seven Deadly Sins of Programming series. Now, on to what he doesnt like. He says that he finds it inefficient to have tests that he has to change every time he refactors. Here is where we part company. If you are having to do a lot of test rewriting (say, more than a couple of minutes work to get back to green) *often* when you are refactoring your code, I submit that either you are testing things that you dont need to test (internal details rather than external implementation), your code perhaps isnt as decoupled as it could be, or maybe you need a visit to refactorers anonymous. I also like to refactor like crazy, but as we all know, the huge downside of refactoring is that we often break things. Important things. Subtle things. Which makes refactoring risky. *Unless* we have a set of tests that have great coverage. And TDD (or Example-based Design, which I prefer as a term) gives those to us. Now, I dont know what sort of coverage Brian gets with the unit tests that he writes, but I do know that for the majority of the developers Ive worked with and I count myself in that bucket the coverage of unit tests written afterwards is considerably inferior to the coverage of unit tests that come from TDD. For me, it all comes down to the answer to the following question: How do you ensure that your code works now and will continue to work in the future? Im willing to put up with a little efficiency on the front side to get that benefit later. Its not the writing of the code thats the expensive part, its everything else that comes after. I dont think that stepping through test cases in the debugger gets you what you want. You can verify what the current behavior is, sure, and do it fairly cheaply, but you dont help the guy in the future who doesnt know what conditions were important if he has to change your code. His second part that he doesnt like backing into an architecture (go read to see what he means). Ive certainly had to work with code that was like this before, and its a nightmare the code that nobody wants to touch. But thats not at all the kind of code that you get with TDD, because if youre doing it right youre doing the write a failing tests, make it pass, refactor approach. Now, you may miss some useful refactorings and generalizations for this, but if you do, you can refactor later because you have the tests that make it safe to do so, and your code tends to be easy to refactor because the same things that make code easy to write unit tests for make it easy to refactor. I also think Brian is missing an important point. We arent all as smart as he is. Im reminded a bit of the lesson of Intentional Programming, Charles Simonyis paradigm for making programming easier. I played around with Intentional Programming when it was young, and came to the conclusion that it was a pretty good thing if you were as smart as Simonyi is, but it was pretty much a disaster if you were an average developer. In this case, TDD gives you a way to work your way into a good, flexible, and functional architecture when you dont have somebody of Brians talents to help you out. And thats a good thing.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Scotland 2010 - DDDSCOT

  - by Plip

  DDD in Scotland was held on the 8th May 2010 in Glasgow and I was there, not as is uaual at these kind of things as an organiser but actually as a speaker and delegate. The weekend started for me back on Thursday with the arrival of Dave Sussman to my place in Lancashire, after a curry and watching the Electon night TV coverage we retired to our respective beds (yes, I know, I hate to shatter the illusion we both sleep in the same bed wearing matching pijamas is something I've shattered now) ready for the drive up to Glasgow the following afternoon. Before heading up to Glasgow we had to pick up Young Mr Hardy from Wigan then we began the four hour drive back in time... Something that struck me on the journey up is just how beautiful Scotland is. The menacing landscapes bordered with fluffy sheep and whirly-ma-gigs are awe inspiring - well worth driving up if you ever get the chance. Anywho we arrived in Glasgow, got settled intot he hotel and went in search of Speakers for pre conference drinks and food. We discovered a gaggle (I believe that's the collective term) of speakers in the Bar and when we reached critical mass headed off to the Speakers Dinner location. During dinner, SOMEONE set my hair on FIRE. That's all I'm going to say on the matter. Whilst I was enjoying my evening there was something nagging at me, I realised that I should really write my session as I was due to give it the following morning. So after a few more drinks I headed back to the hotel and got some well earned sleep (and washed the fire damage out of my hair). Next day, headed off to the conference which was a lovely stroll through Glasgow City Centre. Non of us got mugged, murdered (or set on fire) arriving safely at the venue, which was a bonus.   I was asked to read out the opening Slides for Barry Carr's session which I did dilligently and with such professionalism that I shocked even myself. At which point I reliased in just over an hour I had to give my presentation, so headed back to the speaker room to finish writing it. Wham, bam and it was all over. Session seemed to go well. I was speaking on Exception Driven Development, which isn't so much a technical solution but rather a mindset around how one should treat exceptions and their code. To be honest, I've not been so nervous giving a session for years - something about this topic worried me, I was concerned I was being too abstract in my thinking or that what I was saying was so obvious that everyone would know it, but it seems to have been well recieved which makes me a happy Speaker. Craig Murphy has some brilliant pictures of DDD Scotland 2010. After my session was done I grabbed some lunch and headed back to the hotel and into town to do some shopping (thus my conspicuous omission from the above photo). Later on we headed out to the geek dinner which again was a rum affair followed by a few drinks and a little boogie woogie. All in all a well run, well attended conference, by the community for the community. I tip my hat to the whole team who put on DDD Scotland!       

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• My Experience at Oracle !!! By Ayush Gupta

  - by Nadiya

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Hi! My name is Ayush, a Gratuate from BITS Pilani and now working and living in Bangalore. I joined Oracle in August 2013 as a Senior Consultant (SC) and would like to share my experiences over the first couple of months with you.It has been a wonderful journey so far. The last two months have been very exciting for me. First of all I would like to mention that the training program at Oracle that we went through really prepared us well. It matured us and allowed us to go from developing small applications in college to big enterprise products. Two months of initial training has had a lasting impact for me. I am also really enjoying the knowledge I have gained so far and also learning new things in the form of product training. It's really fun to work here. We are treated like adults and we are responsible for our own workloads.With that I can't keep from mentioning the fun times we as a team have in the form of Young Leadership programme in Hotel Fortune Trinity which included Luxurious buffet lunch too. Wishing it could happen more frequently.  Oracle provides one of the best opportunities to learn various technologies across different platforms. What I like best about working at Oracle is the work life balance. With the option of flexible timings, one can easily enjoy planned evenings with friends or maybe working out at the fitness centre in your building. Be it the birthday celebrations at office or the day long team outing at a resort, It’s all together a different experience. Overall, you get to take full ownership of your project and they give you a free leash on how you design your enhancements/changes.As one of the largest international companies, Oracle is obviously an expert on exploring the potential and possibility of inexperienced new hires. We were taught how to make an outstanding team work in a group training session at the first few weeks. From this experience I realized that perfect cooperation is not about where you come from or what your study background is, everyone can find his or her own role to support the team. Even though I am not that skilled in technology, my background has significantly helped me in learning new technologies in Oracle.My idea and suggestion is: for new joiners, the will to learn is be more important than what you have learnt before. Colleagues here at Oracle are professionals in their field, always friendly and glad to help. So don’t worry, all you need to do is just be confident, and have a nice attitude, Oracle will let you fully display your talent. Come and join us, here you can always find a tailor made role for you! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Graduate Life in Oracle by Ramakrishna Nalabothula

  - by david.talamelli

  Preparation for the BIG interview: I prepared in both technical and logical aspects to face the Oracle Interview. I had to cover almost all main areas in technical and many types of problems in logical areas. We attended mock- interviews and written tests at our college, browsed websites and communities. Having started with such a rigorous preparation before Oracle visited the college; it was possible for me to make it into the list of final selection. I put in a big effort to reach this position and I am very happy to achieve this. Why I chose Oracle: Oracle is one of the best technology providers and has a large customer base. I think it is not an easy job to offer services to that many customers. So, the company needs young and dynamic people and I wanted to be one among them. This gave me spirit and led me to walk into Oracle. I am working on different technologies and learning something new in the field. Having many customers is challenging Oracle and my work is challenging me. I am confident enough that customers to both me and Oracle will never lose their faith. Learning at Oracle: The style of learning is good and never resembles a classroom session in a college. It is always fun to learn here. There is no exam to track the performance. There is enough time until we completely learn it. There is no concept of stiff competition. Peers help through KT (Knowledge Transfers) and there are good resources in the Oracle to learn. People are always there to direct you to those. There are lots of opportunities for Web learning too! My Work Area: My team gives me a great opportunity to offer service to the entire product. There were no situations when I got tense with my work or targets and deliverables. I work with a Global Team and my manager is based in the UK. I have a lot of freedom and flexibility. I use the work from home option in case of any disturbances in the city or due to personal problems. I have a weekly meeting with my manager and use Instant Messenger for status updates. My manager plans very well to give me enough time to complete tasks. I have good coordination from the team towards our deadlines. My work has also brought me close to many people across various technology and product teams. I am glad to make many friends across Oracle. I am enjoying my time and work here. I cover all the major activities in the team. I am thankful to everyone from the Development and Quality Assurance Team to have high confidence in me by assigning such big responsibilities. Primary tasks are maintaining the environments that are very unstable at times. This really requires big time and effort to trace the root causes. I am working and still learning on all these areas. The happiest thing is I got chances to travel to USA & UK for training and for supporting a few customer demo projects. I have got to explore more across two countries and got sponsored to visit the places around due to Oracle's policies. I am very much thankful for these what I have from Oracle and for the cooperation there from other colleagues. Fun at Work: Oracle has a club from Employees to conduct games and events. I had an opportunity to participate in competitions, tournaments inside Oracle and Inter-Corporate for all games. I thank Oracle for providing me all these opportunities and I would like to extend my thanks to Senior Management for their confidence in me. I thank Oracle HR Recruiting Team too for selecting me into Oracle and giving me this opportunity to share my experience and feelings. Ramakrishna Nalabothula

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• Working for free?

  - by Jonny

  I came across this article Work for Free that got me thinking. The goal of every employer is to gain more value from workers than the firm pays out in wages; otherwise, there is no growth, no advance, and no advantage for the employer. Conversely, the goal of every employee should be to contribute more to the firm than he or she receives in wages, and thereby provide a solid rationale for receiving raises and advancement in the firm. I don't need to tell you that the refusenik didn't last long in this job. In contrast, here is a story from last week. My phone rang. It was the employment division of a major university. The man on the phone was inquiring about the performance of a person who did some site work on Mises.org last year. I was able to tell him about a remarkable young man who swung into action during a crisis, and how he worked three 19-hour days, three days in a row, how he learned new software with diligence, how he kept his cool, how he navigated his way with grace and expertise amidst some 80 different third-party plug-ins and databases, how he saw his way around the inevitable problems, how he assumed responsibility for the results, and much more. What I didn't tell the interviewer was that this person did all this without asking for any payment. Did that fact influence my report on his performance? I'm not entirely sure, but the interviewer probably sensed in my voice my sense of awe toward what this person had done for the Mises Institute. The interviewer told me that he had written down 15 different questions to ask me but that I had answered them all already in the course of my monologue, and that he was thrilled to hear all these specifics. The person was offered the job. He had done a very wise thing; he had earned a devotee for life. The harder the economic times, the more employers need to know what they are getting when they hire someone. The job applications pour in by the buckets, all padded with degrees and made to look as impressive as possible. It's all just paper. What matters today is what a person can do for a firm. The resume becomes pro forma but not decisive under these conditions. But for a former boss or manager to rave about you to a potential employer? That's worth everything. What do you think? Has anyone here worked for free? If so, has it benefited you in any way? Why should(nt) you work for free (presuming you have the money from other means to keep you going)? Can you share your experience? Me, I am taking a year out of college and haven't gotten a degree yet so that's probably why most of my job applications are getting ignored. So im thinking about working for free for the experience?

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• Cloud hosted CI for .NET projects

  - by Scott Dorman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2014/06/02/cloud-hosted-ci-for-.net-projects.aspxContinuous integration (CI) is important. If you don’t have it set up…you should. There are a lot of different options available for hosting your own CI server, but they all require you to maintain your own infrastructure. If you’re a business, that generally isn’t a problem. However, if you have some open source projects hosted, for example on GitHub, there haven’t really been any options. That has changed with the latest release of AppVeyor, which bills itself as “Continuous integration for busy developers.” What’s different about AppVeyor is that it’s a hosted solution. Why is that important? By being a hosted solution, it means that I don’t have to maintain my own infrastructure for a build server. How does that help if you’re hosting an open source project? AppVeyor has a really competitive pricing plan. For an unlimited amount of public repositories, it’s free. That gives you a cloud hosted CI system for all of your GitHub projects for the cost of some time to set them up, which actually isn’t hard to do at all. I have several open source projects (hosted at https://github.com/scottdorman), so I signed up using my GitHub credentials. AppVeyor fully supported my two-factor authentication with GitHub, so I never once had to enter my password for GitHub into AppVeyor. Once it was done, I authorized GitHub and it instantly found all of the repositories I have (both the ones I created and the ones I cloned from elsewhere). You can even add “build badges” to your markdown files in GitHub, so anyone who visits your project can see the status of the lasted build. Out of the box, you can simply select a repository, add the build project, click New Build and wait for the build to complete. You now have a complete CI server running for your project. The best part of this, besides the fact that it “just worked” with almost zero configuration is that you can configure it through a web-based interface which is very streamlined, clean and easy to use or you can use a appveyor.yml file. This means that you can define your CI build process (including any scripts that might need to be run, etc.) in a standard file format (the YAML format) and store it in your repository. The benefits to that are huge. The file becomes a versioned artifact in your source control system, so it can be branched, merged, and is completely transparent to anyone working on the project. By the way, AppVeyor isn’t limited to just GitHub. It currently supports GitHub, BitBucket, Visual Studio Online, and Kiln. I did have a few issues getting one of my projects to build, but the same day I posted the problem to the support forum a fix was deployed, and I had a functioning CI build about 5 minutes after that. Since then, I’ve provided some additional feature requests and had a few other questions, all of which have seen responses within a 24-hour period. I have to say that it’s easily been one of the best customer support experiences I’ve seen in a long time. AppVeyor is still young, so it doesn’t yet have full feature parity with some of the older (more established) CI systems available,  but it’s getting better all the time and I have no doubt that it will quickly catch up to those other CI systems and then pass them. The bottom line, if you’re looking for a good cloud-hosted CI system for your .NET-based projects, look at AppVeyor.

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Phil Factor

  Around twenty-five years ago, I was trying to solve the problem of recruiting suitable developers for a large business. I visited the local University (it was a Technical College then). My mission was to remind them that we were a large, local employer of technical people and to suggest that, as they were in the business of educating young people for a career in IT, we should work together. I anticipated a harmonious chat where we could suggest to them the idea of mentioning our name to some of their graduates. It didn’t go well. The academic staff displayed a degree of revulsion towards the whole topic of IT in the world of commerce that surprised me; tweed met charcoal-grey, trainers met black shoes. However, their antipathy to commerce was something we could have worked around, since few of their graduates were destined for a career as university lecturers. They asked me what sort of language skills we needed. I tried ducking the invidious task of naming computer languages, since I wanted recruits who were quick to adapt and learn, with a broad understanding of IT, including development methodologies, technologies, and data. However, they pressed the point and I ended up saying that we needed good working knowledge of C and BASIC, though FORTRAN and COBOL were, at the time, still useful. There was a ghastly silence. It was as if I’d recommended the beliefs and practices of the Bogomils of Bulgaria to a gathering of Cardinals. They stared at me severely, like owls, until the head of department broke the silence, informing me in clipped tones that they taught only Modula 2. Now, I wouldn’t blame you if at this point you hurriedly had to look up ‘Modula 2′ on Wikipedia. Based largely on Pascal, it was a specialist language for embedded systems, but I’ve never ever come across it in a commercial business application. Nevertheless, it was an excellent teaching language since it taught modules, scope control, multiprogramming and the advantages of encapsulating a set of related subprograms and data structures. As long as the course also taught how to transfer these skills to other, more useful languages, it was not necessarily a problem. I said as much, but they gleefully retorted that the biggest local employer, a defense contractor specializing in Radar and military technology, used nothing but Modula 2. “Why teach any other programming language when they will be using Modula 2 for all their working lives?” said a complacent lecturer. On hearing this, I made my excuses and left. There could be no meeting of minds. They were providing training in a specific computer language, not an education in IT. Twenty years later, I once more worked nearby and regularly passed the long-deserted ‘brownfield’ site of the erstwhile largest local employer; the end of the cold war had led to lean times for defense contractors. A digger was about to clear the rubble of the long demolished factory along with the accompanying growth of buddleia and thistles, in order to lay the infrastructure for ‘affordable housing’. Modula 2 was a distant memory. Either those employees had short working lives or they’d retrained in other languages. The University, by contrast, was thriving, but I wondered if their erstwhile graduates had ever cursed the narrow specialization of their training in IT, as they struggled with the unexpected variety of their subsequent careers.

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• PASS Summit 2013 Review

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.  Many of the new folks that I met at the Summit this year, upon hearing that I was from Seattle, commented that I must have been disappointed to have to travel to the Summit this year after 5 years in a row in Seattle.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  I cheered loudly when I first heard that the 2013 Summit would be outside Seattle.  I have many fond memories of trips to Orlando, Florida and Grapevine, Texas for past Summits (missed out on Denver, unfortunately).  And there is a funny dynamic that takes place when the conference is local.  If you do as I have done the last several years and saved my company money by not getting a hotel, but rather just commuting from home, then both family and coworkers tend to act like you’re just on a normal schedule.  For example, I have a young family, and my wife and kids really wanted to still see me come home “after work”, but there are a whole lot of after-hours activities, social events, and great food to be enjoyed at the Summit each year.  Even more so if you really capitalize on the opportunities to meet face-to-face with people you either met at previous summits or have spoken to or heard of, from Twitter, blogs, and forums.  Then there is also the lovely commuting in Seattle traffic from neighboring cities rather than the convenience of just walking across the street from your hotel.  So I’m just saying, there are really nice aspects of having the conference 2500 miles away. Beyond that, the training was fantastic as usual.  The SQL Server community has many outstanding presenters and experts with deep knowledge of the tools who are extremely willing to share all of that with anyone who wants to listen.  The opening video with PASS President Bill Graziano in a NASCAR race turned dream sequence was very well done, and the keynotes, as usual, were great.  This year I was particularly impressed with how well attended were the Professional Development sessions.  Not too many years ago, those were very sparsely attended, but this year, the two that I attended were standing-room only, and these were not tiny rooms.  I would say this is a testament to both the maturity of the attendees realizing how important these topics are to career success, as well as to the ever-increasing skills of the presenters and the program committee for selecting speakers and topics that resonated with people.  If, as is usually the case, you were not able to get to every session that you wanted to because there were just too darn many good ones, I encourage you to get the recordings. Overall, it was a great time as these events always are.  It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones, and the people of Charlotte did an awesome job hosting the event and letting their hospitality shine (extra kudos to SQLSentry for all they did with the shuttle, maps, and other event sponsorships).  We’re back in Seattle next year (it is a release year, after all) but I would say that with the success of this year’s event, I strongly encourage the Board and PASS HQ to firmly reestablish the location rotation schedule.  I’ll even go so far as to suggest standardizing on an alternating Seattle – Charlotte schedule, or something like that. If you missed the Summit this year, start saving now, and register early, so you can join us!

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• Mobile Deals: the Consumer Wants You in Their Pocket

  - by Mike Stiles

  Mobile deals offer something we talk about a lot in social marketing, relevant content. If a consumer is already predisposed to liking your product and gets a timely deal for it that’s easy and convenient to use, not only do you score on the marketing side, it clearly generates some of that precious ROI that’s being demanded of social. First, a quick gut-check on the public’s adoption of mobile. Nielsen figures have 55.5% of US mobile owners using smartphones. If young people are indeed the future, you can count on the move to mobile exploding exponentially. Teens are the fastest growing segment of smartphone users, and 58% of them have one. But the largest demographic of smartphone users is 25-34 at 74%. That tells you a focus on mobile will yield great results now, and even better results straight ahead. So we can tell both from statistics and from all the faces around you that are buried in their smartphones this is where consumers are. But are they looking at you? Do you have a valid reason why they should? Everybody likes a good deal. BIA/Kelsey says US consumers will spend $3.6 billion this year for daily deals (the Groupons and LivingSocials of the world), up 87% from 2011. The report goes on to say over 26% of small businesses are either "very likely" or "extremely likely" to offer up a deal in the next 6 months. Retail Gazette reports 58% of consumers shop with coupons, a 40% increase in 4 years. When you consider that a deal can be the impetus for a real-world transaction, a first-time visit to a store, an online purchase, entry into a loyalty program, a social referral, a new fan or follower, etc., that 26% figure shows us there’s a lot of opportunity being left on the table by brands. The existing and emerging technologies behind mobile devices make the benefits of offering deals listed above possible. Take how mobile payment systems are being tied into deal delivery and loyalty programs. If it’s really easy to use a coupon or deal, it’ll get used. If it’s complicated, it’ll be passed over as “not worth it.” When you can pay with your mobile via technologies that connects store and user, you get the deal, you get the loyalty credit, you pay, and your receipt is uploaded, all in one easy swipe. Nothing to keep track of, nothing to lose or forget about. And the store “knows” you, so future offers will be based on your tastes. Consider the endgame. A customer who’s a fan of your belt buckle store’s Facebook Page is in one of your physical retail locations. They pull up your app, because they’ve gotten used to a loyalty deal being offered when they go to your store. Voila. A 10% discount active for the next 30 minutes. Maybe the app also surfaces social references to your brand made by friends so they can check out a buckle someone’s raving about. If they aren’t a fan of your Page or don’t have your app, perhaps they’ve opted into location-based deal services so you can still get them that 10% deal while they’re in the store. Or maybe they’ve walked in with a pre-purchased Groupon or Living Social voucher. They pay with one swipe, and you’ve learned about their buying preferences, credited their loyalty account and can encourage them to share a pic of their new buckle on social. Happy customer. Happy belt buckle company. All because the brand was willing to use the tech that’s available to meet consumers where they are, incentivize them, and show them how much they’re valued through rewards.

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• What Counts for a DBA: Skill

  - by drsql

  “Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a change in dietary habits), my skill level was never going to rise to a level where I could make any money at the sport that involved something other than selling tennis balls at a sporting goods store. My game may have improved with all that practice but I had too many bad practices to overcome. Practice by itself merely reinforces what we know and what we can figure out naturally. The truth is actually closer to the expression used by Vince Lombardi: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” So how do you get to become skilled as a DBA if practice alone isn’t sufficient? Hit the Internet and start searching for SQL training and you can find 100 different sites. There are also hundreds of blogs, magazines, books, conferences both onsite and virtual. But then how do you know who is good? Unfortunately often the worst guide can be to find out the experience level of the writer. Some of the best DBAs are frighteningly young, and some got their start back when databases were stored on stacks of paper with little holes in it. As a programmer, is it really so hard to understand normalization? Set based theory? Query optimization? Indexing and performance tuning? The biggest barrier often is previous knowledge, particularly programming skills cultivated before you get started with SQL. In the world of technology, it is pretty rare that a fresh programmer will gravitate to database programming. Database programming is very unsexy work, because without a UI all you have are a bunch of text strings that you could never impress anyone with. Newbies spend most of their time building UIs or apps with procedural code in C# or VB scoring obvious interesting wins. Making matters worse is that SQL programming requires mastery of a much different toolset than most any mainstream programming skill. Instead of controlling everything yourself, most of the really difficult work is done by the internals of the engine (written by other non-relational programmers…we just can’t get away from them.) So is there a golden road to achieving a high skill level? Sadly, with tennis, I am pretty sure I’ll never discover it. However, with programming it seems to boil down to practice in applying the appropriate techniques for whatever type of programming you are doing. Can a C# programmer build a great database? As long as they don’t treat SQL like C#, absolutely. Same goes for a DBA writing C# code. None of this stuff is rocket science, as long as you learn to understand that different types of programming require different skill sets and you as a programmer must recognize the difference between one of the procedural languages and SQL and treat them differently. Skill comes from practicing doing things the right way and making “right” a habit.

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• Software and/(x)or Hardware Projects for Pre-School Kids

  - by haylem

  I offered to participate at my kid's pre-school for various activities (yes, I'm crazy like that), and one of them is to help them discover extra-curricular (big word for a pre-school, but by lack of a better one... :)) hobbies, which may or may not relate to a professional activity. At first I thought that it wouldn't be really easy to have pre-schoolers relate to programming or the internal workings of a computer system in general (and I'm more used to teaching middle-school to university-level students), but then I thought there must be a way. So I'm trying to figure out ways to introduce very young kids (3yo) to computer systems in a fun and preferably educational way. Of course, I don't expect them to start smashing the stack for fun and profit right away (or at least not voluntarily, though I could use the occasion for some toddler tests...), but I'm confident there must be ways to get them interested in both: using the systems, becoming curious about understanding what they do, interacting with the systems to modify them. I guess this setting is not really relevant after all, it's pretty much the same as if you were aiming to achieve the same for your own kids at home. Ideas Considering we're talking 3yo pre-schoolers here, and that at this age some kids are already quite confident using a mouse (some even a keyboard, if not for typing, at least to press some buttons they've come to associate with actions) while others have not yet had any interaction with computers of any kind, it needs to be: rather basic, demonstrated and played with in less then 5 or 10 minutes, doable in in groups or alone, scalable and extendable in complexity to accommodate their varying abilities. The obvious options are: basic smallish games to play with, interactive systems like LOGO, Kojo, Squeak and clones (possibly even simpler than that), or thngs like Lego Systems. I guess it can be a thing to reflect on both at the software and the hardware levels: it could be done with a desktop or laptop machine, a tablet, a smartphone (or a crap-phone, for that matter, as long as you can modify it), or even get down to building something from scratch (Raspberry Pi and Arduino being popular options at the moment). I can probably be in the form of games, funny visualizations (which are pretty much games) w/ Prototype, virtual worlds to explore. I also thought on the moment (and I hope this won't offend anyone) that some approaches to teaching pets could work (reward systems, haptic feedback and such things could quickly point a kid in the right direction to understanding how things work, in a similar fashion - I'm not suggesting to shock the kids!). Hmm, Is There an Actual Question in There? What type of systems do you think might be a good fit, both in terms of hardware and software? Do you have seen such systems, or have anything in mind to work on? Are you aware of some research in this domain, with tangible results? Any input is welcome. It's not that I don't see options: there are tons, but I have a harder time pinpointing a more concrete and definite type of project/activity, so I figure some have valuable ideas or existing ones. Note: I am not advocating that every kid should learn to program, be interested in computer systems, or that all of them in a class would even care enough to follow such an introduction with more than a blank stare. I don't buy into the "everybody would benefit from learning to program" thing. Wouldn't hurt, but not necessary in any way. But if I can walk out of there with a few of them having smiled using the thing (or heck, cried because others took them away from them), that'd be good enough. Related Questions I've seen and that seem to complement what I'm looking for, but not exactly for the same age groups or with the same goals: Teaching Programming to Kids Recommendations for teaching kids math concepts & skills for programming?

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• iPhone: How to write plist array of dictionary object

  - by Alessandro

  Hello, I'm a young Italian developer for the iPhone. I have a plist file (named "Frase") with this structure: Root Array - Item 0 Dictionary Frase String Preferito Bool - Item 1 Dictionary Frase String Preferito Bool - Item 2 Dictionary Frase String Preferito Bool - Item 3 Dictionary Frase String Preferito Bool exc. An array that contains many elements dictionary, all the same, consisting of "Frase" (string) and "Preferito" (BOOL). The variable "indirizzo", increase or decrease the click of the button Next or Back. The application interface: http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/357/schermata20100418a20331.png When I click on AddPreferito button, the item "Preferito" must be YES. Subsequently, the array must be updated with the new dictionary.The code: (void)addpreferito:(id)sender { NSString *plistPath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Frase" ofType:@"plist"]; MSMutableArray *frase = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:plistPath]; NSMutableDictionary *dictionary = [frase objectAtIndex:indirizzo]; [dictionary setValue: YES forKey:@"Preferito"]; [frase replaceObjectAtIndex:indirizzo withObject:dictionary]; [frase writeToFile:plistPath atomically:YES]; } Why not work? Thanks Thanks Thanks!

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• Open source Java CMS for Google App Engine?

  - by markvgti

  I am looking for an open source Java CMS (Web CMS, actually) to run on Google App Engine. I have looked at related older questions on this topic (What CMS runs on Google AppEngine?, CMS over Google App Engine, with SEO etc.) but the problem is that they all largely list Python-based CMSes. Plus these questions are pretty old, and since GAE is a fast-moving target, I thought it might be worthwhile to ask again. I want a CMS for creating some websites (for myself and for others), but would rather not start writing one from scratch. A "good" (very subjective, I know) open source WCMS allows me to start using a product, while still being able to add to/extend the product/project. On the one hand I am looking for a somewhat mature product/project, on the other hand it's easier to start contributing to the development cycle of a young product/project (conflicting, I know :-). Here are some features that would be preferable: [X]HTML/XML/CSS based templating Ability to create multiple blogs Galleries Ability to create a "Downloads" section (is this pretty much standard?) Separate management for digital assets (images, PDFs, binary files etc.) Roles like "Administrator", "Editor", "Contributor" etc. (or their equivalents) Ability to move/reorganize pages Export to PDF Reformat content for printing Is the CMS you are about to suggest especially well-suited to publishing an online book? My idea is that while the book may be offered as a downloadable eBook, the latest, most current version will be the one available on the website.

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• LINQ to XML via C#

  - by user70192

  Hello, I'm new to LINQ. I understand it's purpose. But I can't quite figure it out. I have an XML set that looks like the following: <Results> <Result> <ID>1</ID> <Name>John Smith</Name> <EmailAddress>[email protected]</EmailAddress> </Result> <Result> <ID>2</ID> <Name>Bill Young</Name> <EmailAddress>[email protected]</EmailAddress> </Result> </Results> I have loaded this XML into an XDocument as such: string xmlText = GetXML(); XDocument xml = XDocument.Parse(xmlText); Now, I'm trying to get the results into POCO format. In an effort to do this, I'm currently using: var objects = from results in xml.Descendants("Results") select new Results // I'm stuck How do I get a collection of Result elements via LINQ? I'm particularly confused about navigating the XML structure at this point in my code. Thank you!

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• Spell checker software

  - by Naren

  Hello Guys, I have been assigned a task to find a decent spell checker (UK English) preferably the free one for a project that we are doing. I have looked at Google AJAX API for this. The project contains some young person's (kids less than 18 years old) data which shouldn't allow exposing or storing outside the application boundaries. Google logs the data for research purpose that means Google owns the data whatever we send over the wire through Google API. Is this right? I fired an email to Google regarding the privacy of data and storage but they haven't come back. If you have some knowledge regarding this please share with me. At this point our servers might not have access to external entities that means we might not be able to use Web API for this over the wire. But it may change in the future. That means I have to find out some spell checker alternatives that can sit in our environment and do the job or an external APIs. Would you mind share your findings and knowledge in this regard. I would prefer free services but never know if you have some cracking spell checker for a few quid’s then I don't mind recommending to the project board. Technology using ASP.NET 3.5/4.0, MVC, jQuery, SQL Sever 2008 etc Cheers, Naren

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• How to explain to someone that a data structure should not draw itself, explaining separation of con

  - by leeand00

  I have another programmer who I'm trying to explain why it is that a UI component should not also be a data-structure. For instance say that you get a data-structure that contains a record-set from the "database", and you wish to display that record-set in a UI component within your application. According to this programmer (who will remain nameless, he's young and I'm teaching him...), we should subclass the data-structure into a class that will draw the UI component within our application!!!!!! And thus according to this logic, the record-set should manage the drawing of the UI. **Head Desk*** I know that asking a record-set to draw itself is wrong, because, if you wish to render the same data-structure on more than one type of component on your UI, you are going to have a real mess on your hands; you'll need to extend yet another class for each and every UI component that you render from the base-class of your record-set; I am well aware of the "cleanliness" of the of the MVC pattern (and by that what I really mean is you don't confuse your data (the Model) with your UI (the view) or the actions that take place on the data (the Controller more or less...okay not really the API should really handle that...and the Controller should just make as few calls to it as it can, telling it which view to render)) But it's certainly alot cleaner than using data-structures to render UI components! Is there any other advice I could send his way other than the example above? I understand that when you first learn OOP you go through "a stage" where you where just want to extend everything. Followed by a stage when you think that Design Patterns are the solution every single problem...which isn't entirely correct either...thanks Jeff. Is there a way that I can gently nudge this kid in the right direction? Do you have any more examples that might help explain my point to him?

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• How do people know so much about programming?

  - by Luciano

  I see people in this forums with a lot of points, so I assume they know about a lot of different programming stuff. When I was young I knew about basic (commodore) and the turbo pascal (pc). Then in college I learnt about C, memory management, x86 set, loop invariants, graphs, db query optimization, oop, functional, lambda calculus, prolog, concurrency, polymorphism, newton method, simplex, backtracking, dynamic programming, heuristics, np completeness, LR, LALR, neural networks, static & dynamic typing, turing, godel, and more in between. Then in industry I started with Java several years ago and learnt about it, and its variety of frameworks, and also design patterns, architecture patterns, web development, server development, mobile development, tdd, bdd, uml, use cases, bug trackers, process management, people management if you are a tech lead, profiling, security concerns, etc. I started to forget what I learnt in college... And then there is the stuff I don't know yet, like python, .net, perl, JVM stuff like groovy or scala.. Of course Google is a must for rapid documentation access to know if a problem has been solved already and how, and to keep informed about new stuff by blogs and places like this one. It's just too much or I just have a bad memory.. how do you guys manage it?

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• What programming hack from your past are you most ashamed of?

  - by LeopardSkinPillBoxHat

  We've all been there (usually when we are young and inexperienced). Fixing it properly is too difficult, too risky or too time-consuming. So you go down the hack path. Which hack from your past are you most ashamed of, and why? I'm talking about the ones where you would be really embarrassed if someone could attribute the hack to you (quite easily if you are using revision control software). One hack per answer please. Mine was shortly after I started in my first job. I was working on a legacy C system, and there was this strange defect where a screen view failed to update properly under certain circumstances. I wasn't familiar with how to use the debugger at this time, so I added traces into the code to figure out what was going on. Then I realised that the defect didn't occur anymore with the traces in the code. I slowly backed out the traces one-by-one, until I realised that only a single trace was required to make the problem go away. My logic now would tell me that I was dealing with some sort of race-condition or timing related issue that the trace just "hid under the rug". But I checked in the code with the following line, and all was well: printf(""); Which hacks are you ashamed of?

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• Moral fits the story or suggest me a nice moral?

  - by Gobi

  A 25 year old son was sitting beside his old father in a train one day. When the train was about to leave, all the passengers started settling down in their seats. The son was filled with joy and anxiety. He was seated by the window. He put his hand out and felt the breeze and screamed, “ Papa look at all the trees, they are moving behind”. The old father smiled and admired his son’s feelings. Beside the old man, a couple was also travelling and observed this strange behavior. They found something awkward and childish in the behavior of this 25 year old man. All of a sudden, the son shouted again “Papa see! The clouds are moving about; there is a pond down and many cows are drinking it’s water”. It soon started drizzling. Once again, the young man felt exited and said “papa, I can see and feel the rain drops touching my hand”. The couple seeing this and feeling concerned, asked the old man “why don’t you consult a good doctor and treat your son; don’t you find something abnormally different in him ?” The old man replied, “Yes, I have provided the best treatment for my only boy. We are just returning from the hospital. I am happy for today is the day he has received his sense of sight. It’s for the first time my son is seeing and relishing these little wonders which we have been watching and ignoring in our routine life!” The couple had no words to reply and felt sorry for their remarks. Moral of the story: “ “don’t judge a book by its cover”. is this the moral fits the story or provide me some moral for this story :)

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• Do you use an architectural framework for Flex/AIR development?

  - by Christophe Herreman

  Given that Flex is still a relatively young technology, there are already a bunch of architectural frameworks available for Flex/AIR (and Flash) development, the main ones being Cairngorm and PureMVC. The amount of architectural frameworks is remarkable compared to other technologies. I was wondering how many of you use an architectural framework for Flex development. If so, why, or why not if you don't use any? To share my own experience and point of view: I have used Cairngorm (and ARP for Flash development) on a variety of projects and found that at times, we needed to write extra code just to fit into the framework, which obviously didn't feel right. Although I haven't used PureMVC on many occasions, I have the same gut feeling after looking at the examples applications. Architectural frameworks equal religion in some way. Most followers are convinced that their framework is THE framework and are not open or very skeptical when it comes to using other frameworks. (I also find myself hesitant and skeptical to check out new frameworks, but that is mainly because I would rather wait until the hype is over.) In conclusion, I'm thinking that it is better to have a sound knowledge of patterns and practices that you can apply in your application instead of choosing a framework and sticking to it. There is simply no right or wrong and I don't believe that there will ever be a framework that is considered the holy grail.

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• Can I print an HTMLLoader (pdf) in Adobe Air?

  - by Stephano

  I'm using AlivePDF to create a PDF file, then save it to the desktop. I can then use an HTMLLoader to display my lovely PDF file. Now, the print button in Adobe Reader works fine. However, there will be young children using the app, so I'd like to have a big "Print" button right above it. I figured I could just start up a print job and feed it my HTMLLoader. Am I doing something wrong here, cause I can't seem to get any output? note: variable "stuff" below is my HTMLLoader. I also have access to the PDF file if that comes in handy. private function print():void { var myPrintJob:PrintJob=new PrintJob(); var result:Boolean=myPrintJob.start(); if (result && stuff != null) { var rect:Rectangle=new Rectangle(0, 0, 2550, 3300); var opt:PrintJobOptions=new PrintJobOptions(true); myPrintJob.addPage(stuff, rect, opt); myPrintJob.send(); } else { //User does not have printer or user canceled print action } }

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• Can I print an HTMLLoader (pdf) in Adobe Air?

  - by Stephano

  I'm using AlivePDF to create a PDF file, then save it to the desktop. I can then use an HTMLLoader to display my lovely PDF file. Now, the print button in Adobe Reader works fine. However, there will be young children using the app, so I'd like to have a big "Print" button right above it. I figured I could just start up a print job and feed it my HTMLLoader. Am I doing something wrong here, cause I can't seem to get any output? note: variable "stuff" below is my HTMLLoader. I also have access to the PDF file if that comes in handy. private function print():void { var myPrintJob:PrintJob=new PrintJob(); var result:Boolean=myPrintJob.start(); if (result && stuff != null) { var rect:Rectangle=new Rectangle(0, 0, 2550, 3300); var opt:PrintJobOptions=new PrintJobOptions(true); myPrintJob.addPage(stuff, rect, opt); myPrintJob.send(); } else { //User does not have printer or user canceled print action } }

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• Does a CS PhD Help for Software Engineering Career?

  - by SiLent SoNG

  I would like to seek advice on whether or not to take a PhD offer from a good university. My only concern is the PhD will take at least 4 year's commitment. During the period I won't have good monetary income. I am also concerned whether the PhD will help my future career development. My career goal is software engineering only. Some of the PhD info: The PhD is CS related. The research area is Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Nature Language Processing. More specifically, the research topic is Deep Web search. Some of backgrounds: I worked in Oracle for 3 years in database development after obtained a CS degree from some good university. In last year I received an email telling an interesting project from a professor and thereafter I was lured into his research team. The team consists of 4 PhD students; those students have little or no industry experiences and their coding skills are really really bad. By saying bad I mean they do not know some common patterns and they do not know pitfalls of the programming languages as well as idioms for doing things right. I guess a at least 4 year commitment is worth of serious consideration. I am 27 at this moment. If I take the offer, that implies I will be 31+ upon graduation. Wah... becoming.. what to say, no longer young. Hence, here I am seeking advice on whether it is good or not to take the PhD offer, and whether a CS PhD is good for my future career growth as a software engineer? I do not intent to go for academia.

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• What should a self-taught programmer with no degree learn/read?

  - by sjbotha

  I am a self-taught programmer and I do do not have any degrees. I started pretty young and I've got about 7 years of actual programming work experience. I believe I'm a pretty good programmer, but I admit that I have not played much with algorithms or delved into any really low-level aspects of programming such as how compilers work. I have worked with other programmers with and without degrees. Some were good and some not; having a degree didn't seem to make any difference as to which pot they fell into. Since then I've come to realize that it does depend on the school where the degree is obtained. Some people suggest that you really should get a degree; that there are things you'll learn in the process that you won't learn in the real world. Of course there is personal growth and discipline learned from completing a task of that magnitude, but let's just concentrate on the technical knowledge. What would I have been taught in a GOOD CS course that would aid me today and what can I read to fill the gap? I've heard the book "Algorithms" mentioned and I plan on reading that. What other books would you recommend? Edit: Clarification on 'actual work experience': Have worked for 2 small companies on teams with fewer than 5 people. About 2 years experience with Perl, Python, PHP, C, C++. About 5 years experience in Java, Applets, RMI, T-SQL, PL/SQL, VB6. 7 years experience in HTML, Javascript, bash, SQL. Most recently in Java designed and helped build an N-tier Java app with web frontend and RMI.

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