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• Where is my app.config for SSIS?

  Sometimes when working with SSIS you need to add or change settings in the .NET application configuration file, which can be a bit confusing when you are building a SSIS package not an application. First of all lets review a couple of examples where you may need to do this. You are using referencing an assembly in a Script Task that uses Enterprise Library (aka EntLib), so you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings, perhaps for the logging application block. You are using using Enterprise Library in a custom task or component, and again you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings. You are using a web service with Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 and hosting the proxy in SSIS, in an assembly used by your package, and need to add the configuration sections and settings. You need to change behaviours of the .NET framework which can be influenced by a configuration file, such as the System.Net.Mail default SMTP settings. Perhaps you wish to configure System.Net and the httpWebRequest header for parsing unsafe header (useUnsafeHeaderParsing), which will change the way the HTTP Connection manager behaves. You are consuming a WCF service and wish to specify the endpoint in configuration. There are no doubt plenty more examples but each of these requires us to identify the correct configuration file and and make the relevant changes. There are actually several configuration files, each used by a different execution host depending on how you are working with the SSIS package. The folders we need to look in will actually vary depending on the version of SQL Server as well as the processor architecture, but most are all what we can call the Binn folder. The SQL Server 2005 Binn folder is at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\, compared to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ for SQL Server 2008. If you are on a 64-bit machine then you will see C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for the 32-bit executables and C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for 64-bit, so be sure to check all relevant locations. Of course SQL Server 2008 may have a C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ on a 64-bit machine too. To recap, the version of SQL Server determines if you look in the 90 or 100 sub-folder under SQL Server in Program Files (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\nn\) . If you are running a 64-bit operating system then you will have two instances program files, C:\Program Files (x86)\ for 32-bit and  C:\Program Files\ for 64-bit. You may wish to check both depending on what you are doing, but this is covered more under each section below. There are a total of five specific configuration files that you may need to change, each one is detailed below: DTExec.exe.config DTExec.exe is the standalone command line tool used for executing SSIS packages, and therefore it is an execution host with an app.config file. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTExec.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. DtsDebugHost.exe.config DtsDebugHost.exe is the execution host used by Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio when executing a package from the designer in debug mode, which is the default behaviour. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DtsDebugHost.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. This may surprise some people as Visual Studio is only 32-bit, but thankfully the debugger supports both. This can be set in the project properties, see the Run64BitRuntime property (true or false) in the Debugging pane of the Project Properties. dtshost.exe.config dtshost.exe is the execution host used by what I think of as the built-in features of SQL Server such as SQL Server Agent e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\dtshost.exe.config This file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders devenv.exe.config Something slightly different is devenv.exe which is Visual Studio. This configuration file may also need changing if you need a feature at design-time such as in a Task Editor or Connection Manager editor. Visual Studio 2005 for SQL Server 2005  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio 2008 for SQL Server 2008  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio is only available for 32-bit so on a 64-bit machine you will have to look in C:\Program Files (x86)\ only. DTExecUI.exe.config The DTExec UI tool can also have a configuration file and these cab be found under the Tools folders for SQL Sever as shown below. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe A configuration file may not exist, but if you can find the matching executable you know you are in the right place so can go ahead and add a new file yourself. In summary we have covered the assembly configuration files for all of the standard methods of building and running a SSIS package, but obviously if you are working programmatically you will need to make the relevant modifications to your program’s app.config as well.

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• How To Switch Back to Outlook 2007 After the 2010 Beta Ends

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you switching back to Outlook 2007 after trying out Office 2010 beta?  Here’s how you can restore your Outlook data and keep everything working fine after the switch. Whenever you install a newer version of Outlook, it will convert your profile and data files to the latest format.  This makes them work the best in the newer version of Outlook, but may cause problems if you decide to revert to an older version.  If you installed Outlook 2010 beta, it automatically imported and converted your profile from Outlook 2007.  When the beta expires, you will either have to reinstall Office 2007 or purchase a copy of Office 2010. If you choose to reinstall Office 2007, you may notice an error message each time you open Outlook. Outlook will still work fine and all of your data will be saved, but this error message can get annoying.  Here’s how you can create a new profile, import all of your old data, and get rid of this error message. Banish the Error Message with a New Profile To get rid of this error message, we need to create a new Outlook profile.  First, make sure your Outlook data files are backed up.  Your messages, contacts, calendar, and more are stored in a .pst file in your appdata folder.  Enter the following in the address bar of an Explorer window to open your Outlook data folder, and replace username with your user name: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook Copy the Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) files that contain your data. Its name is usually your email address, though it may have a different name.  If in doubt, select all of the Outlook Personal Folders files, copy them, and save them in another safe place (such as your Documents folder). Now, let’s remove your old profile.  Open Control Panel, and select Mail.  In Windows Vista or 7, simply enter “Mail” in the search box and select the first entry. Click the “Show Profiles…” button. Now, select your Outlook profile, and click Remove.  This will not delete your data files, but will remove them from Outlook. Press Yes to confirm that you wish to remove this profile. Open Outlook, and you will be asked to create a new profile.  Enter a name for your new profile, and press Ok. Now enter your email account information to setup Outlook as normal. Outlook will attempt to automatically configure your account settings.  This usually works for accounts with popular email systems, but if it fails to find your information you can enter it manually.  Press finish when everything’s done. Outlook will now go ahead and download messages from your email account.  In our test, we used a Gmail account that still had all of our old messages online.  Those files are backed up in our old Outlook data files, so we can save time and not download them.  Click the Send/Receive button on the bottom of the window, and select “Cancel Send/Receive”. Restore Your Old Outlook Data Let’s add our old Outlook file back to Outlook 2007.  Exit Outlook, and then go back to Control Panel, and select Mail as above.  This time, click the Data Files button. Click the Add button on the top left. Select “Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)”, and click Ok. Now, select your old Outlook data file.  It should be in the folder that opens by default; if not, browse to the backup copy we saved earlier, and select it. Press Ok at the next dialog to accept the default settings. Now, select the data file we just imported, and click “Set as Default”. Now, all of your old messages, appointments, contacts, and everything else will be right in Outlook ready for you.  Click Ok, and then open Outlook to see the change. All of the data that was in Outlook 2010 is now ready to use in Outlook 2007.  You won’t have to wait to re-download all of your emails from the server since everything’s still here ready to be used.  And when you open Outlook, you won’t see any error messages, either! Conclusion Migrating your Outlook profile back to Outlook 2007 is fairly easy, and with these steps, you can avoid seeing an error message every time you open Outlook.  With all your data in tact, you’re ready to get back to work instead of getting frustrated with Outlook.  Many of us use webmail and keep all of our messages in the cloud, but even on broadband connections it can take a long time to download several gigabytes of emails. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Opening Attachments in Outlook 2007 by KeyboardQuickly Create Appointments from Tasks with Outlook 2007’s To-Do BarFix For Outlook 2007 Constantly Asking for Password on VistaPin Microsoft Outlook to the Desktop BackgroundOur Look at the LinkedIn Social Connector for Outlook TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook

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• Where is my app.config for SSIS?

  Sometimes when working with SSIS you need to add or change settings in the .NET application configuration file, which can be a bit confusing when you are building a SSIS package not an application. First of all lets review a couple of examples where you may need to do this. You are using referencing an assembly in a Script Task that uses Enterprise Library (aka EntLib), so you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings, perhaps for the logging application block. You are using using Enterprise Library in a custom task or component, and again you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings. You are using a web service with Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 and hosting the proxy in SSIS, in an assembly used by your package, and need to add the configuration sections and settings. You need to change behaviours of the .NET framework which can be influenced by a configuration file, such as the System.Net.Mail default SMTP settings. Perhaps you wish to configure System.Net and the httpWebRequest header for parsing unsafe header (useUnsafeHeaderParsing), which will change the way the HTTP Connection manager behaves. You are consuming a WCF service and wish to specify the endpoint in configuration. There are no doubt plenty more examples but each of these requires us to identify the correct configuration file and and make the relevant changes. There are actually several configuration files, each used by a different execution host depending on how you are working with the SSIS package. The folders we need to look in will actually vary depending on the version of SQL Server as well as the processor architecture, but most are all what we can call the Binn folder. The SQL Server 2005 Binn folder is at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\, compared to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ for SQL Server 2008. If you are on a 64-bit machine then you will see C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for the 32-bit executables and C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for 64-bit, so be sure to check all relevant locations. Of course SQL Server 2008 may have a C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ on a 64-bit machine too. To recap, the version of SQL Server determines if you look in the 90 or 100 sub-folder under SQL Server in Program Files (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\nn\) . If you are running a 64-bit operating system then you will have two instances program files, C:\Program Files (x86)\ for 32-bit and  C:\Program Files\ for 64-bit. You may wish to check both depending on what you are doing, but this is covered more under each section below. There are a total of five specific configuration files that you may need to change, each one is detailed below: DTExec.exe.config DTExec.exe is the standalone command line tool used for executing SSIS packages, and therefore it is an execution host with an app.config file. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTExec.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. DtsDebugHost.exe.config DtsDebugHost.exe is the execution host used by Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio when executing a package from the designer in debug mode, which is the default behaviour. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DtsDebugHost.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. This may surprise some people as Visual Studio is only 32-bit, but thankfully the debugger supports both. This can be set in the project properties, see the Run64BitRuntime property (true or false) in the Debugging pane of the Project Properties. dtshost.exe.config dtshost.exe is the execution host used by what I think of as the built-in features of SQL Server such as SQL Server Agent e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\dtshost.exe.config This file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders devenv.exe.config Something slightly different is devenv.exe which is Visual Studio. This configuration file may also need changing if you need a feature at design-time such as in a Task Editor or Connection Manager editor. Visual Studio 2005 for SQL Server 2005  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio 2008 for SQL Server 2008  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio is only available for 32-bit so on a 64-bit machine you will have to look in C:\Program Files (x86)\ only. DTExecUI.exe.config The DTExec UI tool can also have a configuration file and these cab be found under the Tools folders for SQL Sever as shown below. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe A configuration file may not exist, but if you can find the matching executable you know you are in the right place so can go ahead and add a new file yourself. In summary we have covered the assembly configuration files for all of the standard methods of building and running a SSIS package, but obviously if you are working programmatically you will need to make the relevant modifications to your program’s app.config as well.

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• Mobile HCM: It’s not the future, it is right now

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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;} A guest post by Steve Boese, Director Product Strategy, Oracle I’ll bet you reached for your iPhone or Android or BlackBerry and took a quick look at email or Facebook or last night’s text messages before you even got out of bed this morning. Come on, admit it, it’s ok, you are among friends here. See, feel better now? But seriously, the incredible growth and near-ubiquity of increasingly powerful, capable, and for many of us, essential in our daily lives mobile devices has profoundly changed the way we communicate, consume information, socialize, and more and more, conduct business and get our work done. And if you doubt that profound change has happened, just think for a moment about the last time you misplaced your iPhone.  The shivers, the cold sweats, the panic... We have all been there. And indeed your personal experiences with mobile technology echoes throughout the world - here are a few data points to consider: Market research firm IDC estimates 1.8 billion mobile phones will be shipped in 2012. A recent Pew study reports 46% of Americans own a smartphone of some kind. And finally in the USA, ownership of tablets like the iPad has doubled from 10% to 19% in the last year. So truly for the Human Resources leader, the question is no longer, ‘Should HR explore ways to exploit mobile devices and their always-on nature to better support and empower the modern workforce?’, but rather ‘How can HR best take advantage of smartphone and tablet capability to provide information, enable transactions, and enhance decision making?’. Because even though moving HCM applications to mobile devices seems inherently logical given today’s fast-moving and mobile workforces, and its promise to deliver incredible value to the organization, HR leaders also have to consider many factors before devising their Mobile HCM strategy and embarking on mobile HR technology projects. Here are just some of the important considerations for HR leaders as you build your strategies and evaluate mobile HCM solutions: Does your organization provide mobile devices to the workforce today, and if so, will the current set of deployed devices have the necessary capability and ecosystems to support your mobile HCM initiatives? Will you allow workers to use or bring their own mobile devices, (commonly abbreviated as ‘BYOD’), and if so are your IT and Security organizations in agreement and capable of supporting that strategy? Do you know which workers need access to mobile HCM applications? Often mobile HCM capability flows down in an organization, with executives and other ‘road-warrior’ types having the most immediate needs, followed by field sales staff, project managers, and even potential job candidates. But just as an organization will have to spend time understanding ‘who’ should have access to mobile HCM technology, the ‘what’ of the way the solutions should be deployed to these groups will also vary. What works and makes sense for the executive, (company-wide dashboards and analytics on an iPad), might not be as relevant for a retail store manager, (employee schedules, location-level sales and inventory data, transaction approvals, etc.). With Oracle Fusion HCM, we are taking an approach to mobile HR that encompasses not just the mobile solution needs for the various types of worker, but also incorporates the fundamental attributes of great mobile applications - the ability to support end-to-end transactions, apps that respond with lightning-fast speed, with functions that are embedded in a worker’s daily activities, and features that can be mashed-up easily with other business areas like Finance and CRM. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Oracle Fusion HCM team, delivering mobile experiences that truly enhance, enable, and empower the mobile workforce, and deliver on the design mantras of the best-in-class consumer applications, continues to shape and drive design decisions. Mobile is no longer the future, it is right now, and the cutting-edge HR leader of today will need to consider how mobile fits her HCM technology strategy from here on out. You can learn more about our ideas and plans for Oracle Fusion HCM mobile solutions at https://fusiontap.oracle.com/.

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• Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts

  - by jkauffman

  From a consumption point of view, tech blogging is a great resource for one-off articles on niche subjects. If you spend any time reading tech blogs, you may find yourself running into several common, useless types of posts tech bloggers slip into. Some of these lame posts may just be natural due to common nerd psychology, and some others are probably due to lame, lemming-like laziness. I’m sure I’ll do my fair share of fitting the mold, but I quickly get bored when I happen upon posts that hit these patterns without any real purpose or personal touches. 1. The Content Regurgitation Posts This is a common pattern fueled by the starving pan-handlers in the web traffic economy. These are posts that are terse opinions or addendums to an existing post. I commonly see these involve huge block quotes from the linked article which almost always produces over 50% of the post itself. I’ve accidentally gone to these posts when I’m knowingly only interested in the source material. Web links can degrade as well, so if the source link is broken, then, well, I’m pretty steamed. I see this occur with simple opinions on technologies, Stack Overflow solutions, or various tech news like posts from Microsoft. It’s not uncommon to go to the linked article and see the author announce that he “added a blog post” as a response or summary of the topic. This is just rude, but those who do it are probably aware of this. It’s a matter of winning that sweet, juicy web traffic. I doubt this leeching is fooling anybody these days. I would like to rally human dignity and urge people to avoid these types of posts, and just leave a comment on the source material. 2. The “Sorry I Haven’t Posted In A While” Posts This one is far too common. You’ll most likely see this quote somewhere in the body of the offending post: I have been really busy. If the poster is especially guilt-ridden, you’ll see a few volleys of excuses. Here are some common reasons I’ve seen, which I’ll list from least to most painfully awkward. Out of town Vague allusions to personal health problems (these typically includes phrases like “sick”, “treatment'”, and “all better now!”) “Personal issues” (which I usually read as "divorce”) Graphic or specific personal health problems (maximum awkwardness potential is achieved if you see links to charity fund websites) I can’t help but to try over-analyzing why this occurs. Personally, I see this an an amalgamation of three plain factors: Life happens Us nerds are duty-driven, and driven to guilt at personal inefficiencies Tech blogs can become personal journals I don’t think we can do much about the first two, but on the third I think we could certainly contain our urges. I’m a pretty boring guy and, whether or I like it or not, I have an unspoken duty to protect the world from hearing about my unremarkable existence. Nobody cares what kind of sandwich I’m eating. Similarly, if I disappear for a while, it’s unlikely that anybody who happens upon my blog would care why. Rest assured, if I stop posting for a while due to a vasectomy, you will be the first to know. 3. The “At A Conference”, or “Conference Review” Posts I don’t know if I’m like everyone else on this one, but I have never been successfully interested in these posts. It even sounds like a good idea: if I can’t make it to a particular conference (like the KCDC this year), wouldn’t I be interested in a concentrated summary of events? Apparently, no! Within this realm, I’ve never read a post by a blogger that held my interest. What really baffles is is that, for whatever reason, I am genuinely engaged and interested when talking to someone in person regarding the same topic. I have noticed the same phenomenon when hearing about others’ vacations. If someone sends me an email about their vacation, I gloss over it and forget about it quickly. In contrast, if I’m speaking to that individual in person about their vacation, I’m actually interested. I’m unsure why the written medium eradicates the intrigue. I was raised by a roaming pack of friendly wild video games, so that may be a factor. 4. The “Top X Number of Y’s That Z” Posts I’ve seen this one crop up a lot more in the past few of years. Here are some fabricated examples: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Code Top 7 Good Habits Programmers Learn From Experience The 8 Things to Consider When Giving Estimates Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts These are attention-grabbing headlines, and I’d assume they rack up hits. In fact, I enjoy a good number of these. But, I’ve been drawn to articles like this just to find an endless list of identically formatted posts on the blog’s archive sidebar. Often times these posts have overlapping topics, too. These types of posts give the impression that the author has given thought to prioritize and organize the points as a result of a comprehensive consideration of a particular topic. Did the author really weigh all the possibilities when identifying the “Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Patterns”? Unfortunately, probably not. What a tool. To reiterate, I still enjoy the format, but I feel it is abused. Nowadays, I’m pretty skeptical when approaching posts in this format. If these trends continue, my brain will filter these blog posts out just as effectively as it ignores the encroaching “do xxx with this one trick” advertisements. Conclusion To active blog readers, I hope my guide has served you precious time in being able to identify lame blog posts at a glance. Save time and energy by skipping over the chaff of the internet! And if you author a blog, perhaps my insight will help you to avoid the occasional urge to produce these needless filler posts.

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• SanjayP&rsquo;s venture after Microsoft involves no Microsoft

  - by eddraper

  When I was at Microsoft, I always found Sanjay Parthasarathy to be a bright and passionate leader.  While he was a bit disconnected at times with what was really going on out in the trenches, I always thought he was true believer in what we in Developer Platform and Evangelism (DPE) were doing.  He got it.  He had started DPE and kicked a lot of doors down up in Redmond to make it happen.  Back in the early 2000s, battles over platform choices at large customers was trench warfare… bayonets and hand grenades at the P-Code level.  This model was not at all suited to Microsoft’s org structure at the time.  While there were plenty of people fully able to have competitive conversations around Windows Server, or AD, or Exchange, or the desktop, there weren’t many that could have deep technical conversations around Java vs .NET and the platform “stack” as a cohesive, unified unit of value.  This task fell to DPE. Sanjay ended up leaving Microsoft a number of months before me in 2009 and I remember thinking these exact words: “holy shit, SanjayP left Microsoft.”  When SanjayP left DPE years before that,  Sheila Gulati had stepped into his shoes and I thought we where starting to miss a beat.  Sheila had built an amazing business at Microsoft India, but I don’t recall being inspired by her as a leader.  SanjayP’s talks felt like the opening scene of “Patton” with George C. Scott pacing in front of the American flag.  Sheila was a voice on a con-call.  When she moved on in 2007, Walid Abu-Hadba was given the reigns.  Personally, I don’t ever recall even seeing his face.  I think I might recall hearing his voice on some con-calls, but for all intents and purposes he was invisible to me.  Perhaps this was the beginning of my carelessness around seeking “visibility.” Fast forward to Build 2011.  First off, we have no PDC – we have Build.  Microsoft had made an 11 year investment by this time in building an organization to make its technology relevant to developers.  One would think such an org would be in the driver’s seat of such an event, but we see Windows product group people on the podiums.  Watching, I could see the messaging unfold… but no story.  It was like the old days.  Demos and PowerPoints by team members building the tech, and in many cases VPs.  The ensuing confusion is almost legendary now.  Windows 8 was, and is, a pretty big deal… but who is telling the story – not just features and benefits, but the story around how it all fits together. Having been out of Microsoft for two years now, and looking in, I can only conclude that the “DPE of old” has at best been emasculated, and at worst been completely marginalized by internal politics, or perhaps the eternal march of the corporate entropy generator that resides at all large companies.  I don’t think this is a good thing for anyone. And now, back to Sanjay who is the father of Microsoft DPE… I noticed that he has moved back to India and is doing start-up work.  His current company Indix looks to be doing some interesting things with “big data” and here’s their stack: Nary a trace of anything Microsoft.  What could account for this?  I wonder….  Better availability of labor and expertise in India for this stack?  Donno, but even in India, leet R and Hadoop skills have to be hard to find. Technical superiority?  This, I sincerely doubt. This stack, with SanjayP’s name as CEO leaves me with an unsettling feeling.  If he did believe, he no longer does.  One doesn’t place bets with real money on things they don’t believe in.  Perhaps he never did believe, and was a corporate creature seeking to find a niche for himself after which he manipulated me and others.  Or perhaps… anger… be it passive aggression or an outright “in your face F*** you” to his former masters. I guess in the end, only he knows the true reason… But I have my theory...

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• PHP OCI8 and Oracle 11g DRCP Connection Pooling in Pictures

  - by christopher.jones

  Here is a screen shot from a PHP OCI8 connection pooling demo that I like to run. It graphically shows how little database host memory is needed when using DRCP connection pooling with Oracle Database 11g. Migrating to DRCP can be as simple as starting the pool and changing the connection string in your PHP application. The script that generated the data for this graph was a simple "Parts" query application being run under various simulated user loads. I was running the database on a small Oracle Linux server with just 2G of memory. I used PHP OCI8 1.4. Apache is in pre-fork mode, as needed for PHP. Each graph has time on the horizontal access in arbitrary 'tick' time units. Click the image to see it full sized. Pooled connections Beginning with the top left graph, At tick time 65 I used Apache's 'ab' tool to start 100 concurrent 'users' running the application. These users connected to the database using DRCP: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl:pooled'); A second hundred DRCP users were added to the system at tick 80 and a final hundred users added at tick 100. At about tick 110 I stopped the test and restarted Apache. This closed all the connections. The bottom left graph shows the number of statements being executed by the database per second, with some spikes for background database activity and some variability for this small test. Each extra batch of users adds another 'step' of load to the system. Looking at the top right Server Process graph shows the database server processes doing the query work for each web user. As user load is added, the DRCP server pool increases (in green). The pool is initially at its default size 4 and quickly ramps up to about (I'm guessing) 35. At tick time 100 the pool increases to my configured maximum of 40 processes. Those 40 processes are doing the query work for all 300 web users. When I stopped the test at tick 110, the pooled processes remained open waiting for more users to connect. If I had left the test quiet for the DRCP 'inactivity_timeout' period (300 seconds by default), the pool would have shrunk back to 4 processes. Looking at the bottom right, you can see the amount of memory being consumed by the database. During the initial quiet period about 500M of memory was in use. The absolute number is just an indication of my particular DB configuration. As the number of pooled processes increases, each process needs more memory. You can see the shape of the memory graph echoes the Server Process graph above it. Each of the 300 web users will also need a few kilobytes but this is almost too small to see on the graph. Non-pooled connections Compare the DRCP case with using 'dedicated server' processes. At tick 140 I started 100 web users who did not use pooled connections: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl'); This connection string change is the only difference between the two tests. At ticks 155 and 165 I started two more batches of 100 simulated users each. At about tick 195 I stopped the user load but left Apache running. Apache then gradually returned to its quiescent state, killing idle httpd processes and producing the downward slope at the right of the graphs as the persistent database connection in each Apache process was closed. The Executions per Second graph on the bottom left shows the same step increases as for the earlier DRCP case. The database is handling this load. But look at the number of Server processes on the top right graph. There is now a one-to-one correspondence between Apache/PHP processes and DB server processes. Each PHP processes has one DB server processes dedicated to it. Hence the term 'dedicated server'. The memory required on the database is proportional to all those database server processes started. Almost all my system's memory was consumed. I doubt it would have coped with any more user load. Summary Oracle Database 11g DRCP connection pooling significantly reduces database host memory requirements allow more system memory to be allocated for the SGA and allowing the system to scale to handled thousands of concurrent PHP users. Even for small systems, using DRCP allows more web users to be active. More information about PHP and DRCP can be found in the PHP Scalability and High Availability chapter of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual.

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• SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

  What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!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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• To ref or not to ref

  - by nmarun

  So the question is what is the point of passing a reference type along with the ref keyword? I have an Employee class as below: 1: public class Employee 2: { 3: public string FirstName { get; set; } 4: public string LastName { get; set; } 5:  6: public override string ToString() 7: { 8: return string.Format("{0}-{1}", FirstName, LastName); 9: } 10: } In my calling class, I say: 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee.FirstName = "Smith"; 18: employee.LastName = "Doe"; 19: } 20: }   After having a look at the code, you’ll probably say, Well, an instance of a class gets passed as a reference, so any changes to the instance inside the CallSomeMethod, actually modifies the original object. Hence the output will be ‘John-Doe’ on the first call and ‘Smith-Doe’ on the second. And you’re right: So the question is what’s the use of passing this Employee parameter as a ref? 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(ref employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee.FirstName = "Smith"; 18: employee.LastName = "Doe"; 19: } 20: } The output is still the same: Ok, so is there really a need to pass a reference type using the ref keyword? I’ll remove the ‘ref’ keyword and make one more change to the CallSomeMethod method. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee = new Employee 18: { 19: FirstName = "Smith", 20: LastName = "John" 21: }; 22: } 23: } In line 17 you’ll see I’ve ‘new’d up the incoming Employee parameter and then set its properties to new values. The output tells me that the original instance of the Employee class does not change. Huh? But an instance of a class gets passed by reference, so why did the values not change on the original instance or how do I keep the two instances in-sync all the times? Aah, now here’s the answer. In order to keep the objects in sync, you pass them using the ‘ref’ keyword. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(ref employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee = new Employee 18: { 19: FirstName = "Smith", 20: LastName = "John" 21: }; 22: } 23: } Viola! Now, to prove it beyond doubt, I said, let me try with another reference type: string. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: string name = "abc"; 6: Console.WriteLine(name); 7: CallSomeMethod(ref name); 8: Console.WriteLine(name); 9: } 10:  11: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref string name) 12: { 13: name = "def"; 14: } 15: } The output was as expected, first ‘abc’ and then ‘def’ - proves the 'ref' keyword works here as well. Now, what if I remove the ‘ref’ keyword? The output should still be the same as the above right, since string is a reference type? 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: string name = "abc"; 6: Console.WriteLine(name); 7: CallSomeMethod(name); 8: Console.WriteLine(name); 9: } 10:  11: private static void CallSomeMethod(string name) 12: { 13: name = "def"; 14: } 15: } Wrong, the output shows ‘abc’ printed twice. Wait a minute… now how could this be? This is because string is an immutable type. This means that any time you modify an instance of string, new memory address is allocated to the instance. The effect is similar to ‘new’ing up the Employee instance inside the CallSomeMethod in the absence of the ‘ref’ keyword. Verdict: ref key came to the rescue and saved the planet… again!

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• How to Increase the VMWare Boot Screen Delay

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  If you’ve wanted to try out a bootable CD or USB flash drive in a virtual machine environment, you’ve probably noticed that VMWare’s offerings make it difficult to change the boot device. We’ll show you how to change these options. You can do this either for one boot, or permanently for a particular virtual machine. Even experienced users of VMWare Player or Workstation may not recognize the screen above – it’s the virtual machine’s BIOS, which in most cases flashes by in the blink of an eye. If you want to boot up the virtual machine with a CD or USB key instead of the hard drive, then you’ll need more than an eye’s-blink to press Escape and bring up the Boot Menu. Fortunately, there is a way to introduce a boot delay that isn’t exposed in VMWare’s graphical interface – you have to edit the virtual machine’s settings file (a .vmx file) manually. Editing the Virtual Machine’s .vmx Find the .vmx file that contains the settings for your virtual machine. You chose a location for this when you created the virtual machine – in Windows, the default location is a folder called My Virtual Machines in your My Documents folder. In VMWare Workstation, the location of the .vmx file is listed on the virtual machine’s tab. If in doubt, search your hard drive for .vmx files. If you don’t want to use Windows default search, an awesome utility that locates files instantly is Everything. Open the .vmx file with any text editor. Somewhere in this file, enter in the following line… save the file, then close out of the text editor: bios.bootdelay = 20000 This will introduce a 20 second delay when the virtual machine loads up, giving you plenty of time to press the Escape button and access the boot menu. The number in this line is just a value in milliseconds, so for a five second boot delay, enter 5000, and so on. Change Boot Options Temporarily Now, when you boot up your virtual machine, you’ll have plenty of time to enter one of the keystrokes listed at the bottom of the BIOS screen on boot-up. Press Escape to bring up the Boot Menu. This allows you to select a different device to boot from – like a CD drive. Your selection will be forgotten the next time you boot up this virtual machine. Change Boot Options Permanently When the BIOS screen comes up, press F2 to enter the BIOS Setup menu. Switch to the Boot tab, and change the ordering of the items by pressing the “+” key to move items up on the list, and the “-” key to move items down the list. We’ve switched the order so that the CD-ROM Drive boots first. Once you make this change permanent, you may want to re-edit the .vmx file to remove the boot delay. Boot from a USB Flash Drive One thing that is noticeably missing from the list of boot options is a USB device. VMWare’s BIOS just does not allow this, but we can get around that limitation using the PLoP Boot Manager that we’ve previously written about. And as a bonus, since everything is virtual anyway, there’s no need to actually burn PLoP to a CD. Open the settings for the virtual machine you want to boot with a USB drive. Click on Add… at the bottom of the settings screen, and select CD/DVD Drive. Click Next. Click the Use ISO Image radio button, and click Next. Browse to find plpbt.iso or plpbtnoemul.iso from the PLoP zip file. Ensure that Connect at power on is checked, and then click Finish. Click OK on the main Virtual Machine Settings page. Now, if you use the steps above to boot using that CD/DVD drive, PLoP will load, allowing you to boot from a USB drive! Conclusion We’re big fans of VMWare Player and Workstation, as they let us try out a ton of geeky things without worrying about harming our systems. By introducing a boot delay, we can add bootable CDs and USB drives to the list of geeky things we can try out. Download PLoP Boot Manager Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Switch to Console Mode for Ubuntu VMware GuestHack: Turn Off Debug Mode in VMWare Workstation 6 BetaStart Your Computer More Quickly by Delaying the Startup of a Service in VistaEnable Hidden BootScreen in Windows VistaEnable Copy and Paste from Ubuntu VMware Guest TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

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• Weekend reading: Microsoft/Oracle and SkyDrive based code-editor

  - by jamiet

  A couple of news item caught my eye this weekend that I think are worthy of comment. Microsoft/Oracle partnership to be announced tomorrow (24/06/2013) According to many news site Microsoft and Oracle are about to announce a partnership (Oracle set for major Microsoft, Salesforce, Netsuite partnerships) and they all seem to be assuming that it will be something to do with “the cloud”. I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment, Microsoft are heavily pushing Azure and Oracle seem (to me anyway) to be rather lagging behind in the cloud game. More specifically folks seem to be assuming that Oracle’s forthcoming 12c database release will be offered on Azure. I did a bit of reading about Oracle 12c and one of its key pillars appears to be that it supports multi-tenant topologies and multi-tenancy is a common usage scenario for databases in the cloud. I’m left wondering then, if Microsoft are willing to push a rival’s multi-tenant solution what is happening to its own cloud-based multi-tenant offering – SQL Azure Federations. We haven’t heard anything about federations for what now seems to be a long time and moreover the main Program Manager behind the technology, Cihan Biyikoglu, recently left Microsoft to join Twitter. Furthermore, a Principle Architect for SQL Server, Conor Cunningham, recently presented the opening keynote at SQLBits 11 where he talked about multi-tenant solutions on SQL Azure and not once did he mention federations. All in all I don’t have a warm fuzzy feeling about the future of SQL Azure Federations so I hope that that question gets asked at some point following the Microsoft/Oracle announcement. Text Editor on SkyDrive with coding-specific features Liveside.net got a bit of a scoop this weekend with the news (Exclusive: SkyDrive.com to get web-based text file editing features) that Microsoft’s consumer-facing file storage service is going to get a new feature – a web-based code editor. Here’s Liveside’s screenshot: I’ve long had a passing interest in online code editors, indeed back in December 2009 I wondered out loud on this blog site: I started to wonder when the development tools that we use would also become cloud-based. After all, if we’re using cloud-based services does it not make sense to have cloud-based tools that work with them? I think it does. Project Houston Since then the world has moved on. Cloud 9 IDE (https://c9.io/) have blazed a trail in the fledgling world of online code editors and I have been wondering when Microsoft were going to start playing catch-up. I had no doubt that an online code editor was in Microsoft’s future; its an obvious future direction, why would I want to have to download and install a bloated text editor (which, arguably, is exactly what Visual Studio amounts to) and have to continually update it when I can simply open a web browser and have ready access to all of my code from wherever I am. There are signs that Microsoft is already making moves in this direction, after all the URL for their new offering Team Foundation Service doesn’t mention TFS at all – my own personalised URL for Team Foundation Service is http://jamiet.visualstudio.com – using “Visual Studio” as the domain name for a service that isn’t strictly speaking part of Visual Studio leads me to think that there’s a much bigger play here and that one day http://visualstudio.com will house an online code editor. With that in mind then I find Liveside’s revelation rather intriguing, why would a code editing tool show up in Skydrive? Perhaps SkyDrive is going to get integrated more tightly into TFS, I’m very interested to see where this goes. The larger question playing on my mind though is whether an online code editor from Microsoft will support SQL Server developers. I have opined before (see The SQL developer gap) about the shoddy treatment that SQL Server developers have to experience from Microsoft and I haven’t seen any change in Microsoft’s attitude in the three and a half years since I wrote that post. I’m constantly bewildered by the lack of investment in SQL Server developer productivity compared to the riches that are lavished upon our appdev brethren. When you consider that SQL Server is Microsoft’s third biggest revenue stream it is, frankly, rather insulting. SSDT was a step in the right direction but the hushed noises I hear coming out of Microsoft of late in regard to SSDT don’t bode fantastically well for its future. So, will an online code editor from Microsoft support T-SQL development? I have to assume not given the paucity of investment on us lowly SQL Server developers over the last few years, but I live in hope! Your thoughts in the comments section please. I would be very interested in reading them. @Jamiet

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• A Graduate&rsquo;s Journey at Oracle &ndash; Bhaskar Ghosh From Oracle India

  - by david.talamelli

  I am Bhaskar Ghosh, and I work as an Applications Engineer with Oracle. Well, it was three years ago when my journey with one of the largest software companies started. It was a fine day and a decisive moment, when I was placed in Oracle as a campus recruit from College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University, Chennai! I always thought of looking back, the time that helped me learn beyond my boundaries, think broader and ahead, and grow – technically, professionally and personally. Hmmn! Let me recall the eventful moments once again. My first day as an intern at Oracle started in late 2007. I met one of the Oracle Managers at the Oracle Campus in Hyderabad and on the same day I also met another Oracle employee who was to later to become my first manager. I was charged and thrilled with the environment and the wonderful people around me! I was joined by two other interns, who also had a Masters in Computer Applications. We formed a very friendly group with all the interns and the new hires, and shared our excitement and learning. Myself and one of the other Graduates started working on a very interesting project on Semantic technology. We finally had our names added as co-developers for this very project. This phase of five months was the time and we learnt tremendously and worked very hard, partly because we had to travel back and forth to our colleges to submit reports and present for the Masters in Computer Applications final year project reviews. After completing my MCA, I joined as a full-time employee in 2008. During the next year, we worked on interesting and bleeding edge technologies - OWL, RDF, SPARQL, Visualization, J2EE, Social Web features, Semantic Web technologies, Web Services and many more! We developed cool, rich internet and desktop applications. Little did I know at that time, that this learning would help me tremendously for my the next project in Oracle. The following year saw me being assigned a role in a different project that my other team members were working on for the last two years. It took me two months to understand and get into a flow with this new task. I was fortunate that this phase helped me enhance my inter-personal and communication skills, as much as it helped me grow professionally with better ability to tackle multiple priorities and switch between tasks based on the team’s requirements. I was made the POC for all communications with our team and other product teams. I personally feel that this time enhanced me tremendously in technologies like Oracle Forms, J2EE, and Java and Web Services. The last six months, saw myself becoming an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer member, and continuing my higher education International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. Oracle supports its employees becoming members of professional bodies, and higher studies are supported by management, I think it is tremendously helpful in the professional and technical growth of the employees. Last three months, I have been working on great and useful enhancements to our product. Ah beautiful! All these years, there have been other moments and events of fun that are too worth mentioning. Clubs and groups at Oracle such as Employee Club, Oracle Volunteers, Football Club, etc. have always kept on organizing numerous events and competitions, full of fun and entertainment. I really enjoyed participating, even if it was small, in the intra-Oracle football tourney, Oracle Volunteer Days, OraFora, OraOvations, and a few more. Those ‘Seasons of Sharing’, those ‘Blood Donation camps’, those ‘Diwali and Christmas gifts and events’, those ‘fun events at the annual function called OraOvations’, those ‘books and cycle stalls’, and those so many other things… It only fills my mind with pleasure. The last three years have been very eventful:they have been full of learning and growth, and under the very able and encouraging guidance of my manager. I have got the opportunity to know about and/or interact with many wonderful personalities, and learn from them, here at Oracle. The environment, the people, and the fellow developers have been so friendly, and always ever ready to help, when we were in doubt.. I really love the big office space, and the flexible timings, and the caring people around. I look forward to a beautiful, learning and motivating journey with Oracle.

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• JavaOne pictures and Community Commentary on JCP Awards

  - by heathervc

  We posted some pictures from JCP related events at JavaOne 2012 on the JCP Facebook page today.  The 2012 JCP Program Award winners and some of the nominees responded to the community recognition of their achievements during some of the JCP events last week.     “Our job on the EC is to balance the need of innovation – so we don’t standardize too early, or too late. We try to find that sweet spot that makes innovation and standardization work together, and not against each other.”- Ben Evans, CEO of jClarity and Executive Committee (EC) representative of the London Java Community, 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Winner“SouJava has been evangelizing the Java platform, promoting the Java ecosystem in Brazil, and contributing to JSRs for several years. It’s very gratifying to have our work recognized, on behalf of many developers and Java User Groups around the world. This really is the work of a large group of people, represented by the few that can be here tonight.”- Michael Santos, representative of SouJava, 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Winner "In the last years Credit Suisse has contributed to the development of Java EE specifications through participation in many customer advisory boards, through statements of requirements for extensions to the core Java related products in use, and active participation in JSRs. Winning the JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Award 2012 is very encouraging for our engagement and also demonstrates the level of expertise and commitment to drive the evolution of Java. Victor Grazi is happy and honored to receive this award." - Susanne Cech Previtali, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Credit Suisse, accepting award for 2012 JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Winner "Managing a JSR is difficult. There are so many decisions to be made and so many good and varied opinions, you never really know if you have decided correctly. The key to success is transparency and collaboration. I am truly humbled by receiving this award, there are so many other active JSRs.” Victor added that going forward in the JCP EC, they would like to simplify and open the process of participation – being addressed in the JCP.Next initiative of the JCP EC. "We would also like to encourage the engagement of universities, professors and students – as an important part of the Java community. While innovation is the lifeblood of our community and industry, without strong standards and compatibility requirements, we all end up in a maze of technology where everything is slightly different and doesn’t quite work with everything else." Victo Grazi, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Credit Suisse, 2012 JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Winner“I am very pleased, of course, to accept this award, but the credit really should go to all of those who have participated in the work of the JCP, while pushing for changes in the way it operates.  JCP.Next represents three JSRs. The first two are done, but the final step, JSR 358, is the complicated one, and it will bring in the lawyers. Just to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, it affects licensing, intellectual property, patents, implementations not based on the Reference Implementation (RI), the role of the RI, compatibility policy, possible changes to the Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK), transparency, where do individuals fit in, open source, and more.”- Patrick Curran, JCP Chair, Spec Lead on JCP.Next JSRs (JSR 348, JSR 355 and JSR 358), 2012 JCP Most Significant JSR Winner“I’m especially glad to see the JCP community recognize JCP.Next for its importance. The governance work it represents is KEY to moving the Java platform forward and the success of the technology.”- John Rizzo, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Aplix Corporation, JSR Expert Group Member “I am deeply honored to be nominated. I had the privilege to receive two awards on behalf of Expert Groups and Spec Leads two years ago. But this time, I am nominated personally, which values my own contribution to the JCP, and of course, participation in JSRs and the EC work. I’m a fan of Agile Principles and Values Working. Being an Agile Coach and Consultant, I use it for some of the biggest EC Member companies and projects. It fuels my ability to help the JCP become more agile, lean and transparent as part of the JCP.Next effort.” - Werner Keil, Individual Executive Committee (EC) Member, a 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Nominee, JSR Expert Group Member“The JCP ever has been some kind of institution for me,” Markus said. “If in technical doubt, I go there, look for the specifications of the implementation I work with at the moment and verify what I had observed. Since the beginning of my Java journey more than 12 years back now, I always had a strong relationship with the JCP. Shaping the future of a technology by joining the JCP – giving feedback and contributing to the road ahead through individual JSRs – that brings you to a whole new level.”Calling himself, “the new kid on the block,” he explained that for years he was afraid to join the JCP and contribute. But in reality, “Every single one of the big names I meet from the different Expert Groups is a nice person. People you can actually work with,” he says. “And nobody blames you for things you don't know. As long as you are committed and bring what is worth the most: passion, experiences and the desire to make a difference.” - Markus Eisele, a 2012 JCP Member of the Year Nominee, JSR Expert Group MemberCongratulations again to all of the nominees and winners of the JCP Program Awards.  Next year, we will add another award for the group of JUG members (not an entire JUG) that makes the best contribution to the Adopt-a-JSR program.  Let us know if you have other suggestions or improvements.

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

  I have certainly been reading blogs a whole lot more than writing them the last several weeks, and it’s about time I got back to writing.  I have been collecting several topics and references for blog posts…some of which will probably just never get written as the timeliness of the topics fade over time.  Nonetheless, I’m back, and I think it is time to revive my Doing Business Right series, this time coming from the slant of managing a development team rather than the previous angle of being self-employed.  First up: separating Dev, Test, and Prod. A few months ago, Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT) wrote a great post about separating your Dev, Test/UAT, and Prod environments.  This post covers all the important points such as removing Developer access from both PROD and UAT, and the importance of proper deployment (a.k.a. promotion) procedures.  I won’t repeat it all here, go read the original!  But what I do want to address is what I believe to be the #1 excuse people use for not having separate environments:  Money.  I discussed this briefly in my comment on Colin’s post at the time, but let me repeat it here and expand on it a bit. Don’t let the size of your company or the size of its budget dictate whether you do things professionally or not.  I am convinced that most developers and development teams would agree that it is a best practice to have separate environments for development, testing, and production (a.k.a. Live).  So why don’t they?  Because they think that it means separate servers which means more money.  While having separate physical servers for the different environments would be ideal, it is not an absolute requirement in order to make this work.  Here are a few ideas: Use multiple instances of SQL Server and multiple Web Sites with Headers or Ports.  For no additional fees* you can install multiple instances of SQL Server on the same machine.  This gives you a nice separation, allowing you to even use the same database names as will appear in PROD, yet isolating the data and security access.  And in IIS, you can create multiple Web Sites on the same server just by using Host Headers or different port numbers to separate them.  This approach does still pose the risk of non-Prod environments impacting performance on Prod, but when your application is busy enough for that to be a concern, you can probably afford one of the other options. Use desktop PCs instead of servers.  Instead of investing in full server-grade hardware, you can mimic the separate environments on old desktop PCs and at least get functional equivalency, if not performance matching.  The last I checked, Microsoft did not require separate licensing for SQL Server if that installation was used exclusively for dev or test purposes*.  There may be some version or performance differences between this approach and what you have in Prod, but you have isolated test from impacting Prod resources this way. Virtualization.  This is of course one of the hot topics of the day, and I would be remiss if I did not suggest this.  It is quite easy these days to setup virtual machines so that, again, your environments are fairly isolated from one another, and you retain all the security and procedural benefits of having separate environments. So the point is, keep your high professional standards intact.  You don’t need to compromise on using proper procedure just because you work in a small company with a small budget.  Keep doing things the right way! By the way, where I work, our DEV environment is not on a server.  All development is done on the developer’s individual workstation where it can be isolated from other developers’ work for the duration of writing the code, but also where the developers have to reconcile (merge) differences in code under concurrent development.  This usually means that each change is executed multiple times (once per developer to update their environments with the latest changes from others) giving us an extra, informal. test deployment before even going to the Test/UAT server.  It also means that if the network goes down, the developers can continue to hum along because they are not dependent on networked resources.  In fact, they will likely be even more productive because they aren’t being interrupted by email…but that’s another post I need to write. * I am not a lawyer, nor a licensing specialist, but it appeared to be so the last time I checked.  When in doubt, consult an expert on the topic.

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• Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore

  - by sathya

  Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore   I was really excited on attending the day 1 of Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Bangalore. This is the first Teched that am attending. The event was really fun filled with lot of knowledge sharing sessions and lots of goodies and gifts by the partners Initially the Event Started by Murthy's Session. He explained about the Developers relating to the 5 elements of nature (Pancha Boothaas) 1. Fire - Passion 2. Wave (Water) - Catch the right wave which we need to apply. 3. Earth - Connections and lots of opportunities around the world 4. Air -  Its whatever we breathe. Developers.. Without them nothing is possible. they are like the air 5. Sky - Cloud based applications   Next the Keynote and the announcement of Visual Studio by SomaSegar. List of things that he delivered his speech on : 1. Announcement of Visual Studio 2010 2. Announcement of .NET 4.0 3. Announcement of Silverlight later this week 4. What is the current Trend? Microsoft has done a research with many developers across the globe and have got the following feedback from the users. Get Lost (interrupted) - When we do some work and somebody is calling or interrepting by someother way we lose track of what we were doing and we need to do from the start Falling Behind- Technology gets updated  phenomenally over a period of time and developers always have a scenario like they are not in the state of the art technology and they always have a doubt whether they are staying updated. Lack of Collobaration - When a Manager asks a person what the team members have done and some might be done and some might not be and finally all are into a state like we dont know where we are. So they have addressed these 3 points in the VS 2010 by the following features : Get Lost - Some cool features which could overcome this. We have some Graphical interface. which could show what we have done and where we are. Some Zoom features in the code level. Falling Behind - Everything is based on .NET language base. 2010 has been built in such a way that if developers know the native language that's enough for building good applications. Lack of Collobaration - Some Dashboard Features which would show where exactly the project is. And a graphical user interface is shown on clicking which it directly drills down even to the code level. 5. An overview on all new features in VS 2010. 6. Some good demos of new features in VS 2010 by Polita and one more girl. Some of the new features included : 1. Team Explorer 2. Zoom in Code 3. Ribbon Development 4. Development in Single Platform for Windows Phone, XBox, Zune, Azure, Web Based and Windows based applications 5. Sequence Diagram Generation directly from code 6. Dashboards to show project status 7. Javascript and JQuery intellisense 8. Native support for JQuery 9. Packaging feature while deploying. 10. Generation of different versions of web.config like Web.Config.Production, Web.Config.Staging, etc. 11. IntelliTrace - Eliminating the "Not Reproducible" statement. 12. Automated User Interface Testing. At last in the closing of the day we had a great event called Demo Extravaganza, where lot of cool projects that were launched by Microsoft and also the projects that are under research were also shown. I got a lot of info about Bing today. BING really rocks!!! It has the following : 1. Visual Search 2. Product based search. For each product different menu filters were provided to make an advanced search 3. BING Maps was awesome!! It zoomed in to the street level and we can assume that we are the persons who are walking or running on the road and we can see the real objects like buildings moving by our side. 4. PhotoSynth was used in BING to show up all the images taken around the globe in a 3D format. 5. Formula - If we give some formula it automatically gives the value for the variable or derivation of expression Also some info about some kool touch apps which does an authentication and computation of Teched Attendee's Points that they have scored and the sessions attended. One guy won an XBOX in lucky draw as a gift. There were lot of Partner Stalls like Accenture,Intel,Citrix,MicroFocus,Telerik,infragistics,Sapient etc. Some Offers were provided for us like 50% off on Certifications, 1 free Elearning Course, etc. Stay tuned!! Wil update you on other events too..

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• Modifying Service URLs with LINQ to Twitter

  - by Joe Mayo

  It’s funny that two posts so close together speak about flexibility with the LINQ to Twitter provider.  There are certain things you know from experience on when to make software more flexible and when to save time.  This is another one of those times when I got lucky and made the right choice up front. I’m talking about the ability to switch URLs. It only makes sense that Twitter should begin versioning their API as it matures.  In fact, most of the entire API has moved to the v1 URL at “https://api.twitter.com/1/”, except for search and trends.  Recently, Twitter introduced the available and local trends, but hung them off the new v1, and left the rest of the trends API on the old URL. To implement this, I muscled my way into the expression tree during CreateRequestProcessor to figure out which trend I was dealing with; perhaps not elegant, but the code is in the right place and that’s what factories are for.  Anyway, the point is that I wouldn’t have to do this kind of stuff (as much fun as it is), if Twitter would have more consistency. Having went to Chirp last week and seeing the evolution of the API, it looks like my wish is coming true.  …now if they would just get their stuff together on the mess they made with geo-location and places… but again, that’s all transparent if your using LINQ to Twitter because I pulled all of that together in a consistent way so that you don’t have to. Normally, when Twitter makes a change, code breaks and I have to scramble to get the fixes in-place.  This time, in the case of a URL change, the adjustment is easy and no-one has to wait for me.  Essentially, all you need to do is change the URL passed to the TwitterContext constructor.  Here’s an example of instantiating a TwitterContext now: using (var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://search.twitter.com/")) The third parameter constructor is the SearchUrl, which is used for Search and Trend APIs. You probably know what’s coming next; another constructor, but with the SearchUrl parameter set to the new URL as follows: using (var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://api.twitter.com/1/")) One consequence of setting the URL this way is that you set the URL for both Trends and Search.  Since Search is still using the old URL, this is going to break for Search queries. You could always instantiate a special TwitterContext instance for Search queries, with the old URL set. Alternatively, you can use the TwitterContext’s SearchUrl property. Here’s an example: twitterCtx.SearchUrl = "https://api.twitter.com/1/"; var trends = (from trend in twitterCtx.Trends where trend.Type == TrendType.Daily && trend.Date == DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2).Date select trend) .ToList(); Notice how I set the SearchUrl property just-in-time for the query. This allows you to target the URL for each specific query. Whichever way you prefer to configure the URL, it’s your choice. So, now you know how to set the URL to be used for Trend queries and how to prevent whacking your Search queries. I’ll be updating the Trend API to use same URL as all other APIs soon, so the only API left to use the SearchUrl will be Search, but for the short term, it’s Trends and Search. Until I make this change, you’ll have a viable work-around by setting the URL yourself, as explained above. These were the Search and Trend URLs, but you might be curious about the second parameter of the TwitterContext constructor; that’s the URL for all other APIs (the BaseUrl), except for Trend and Search. Similarly, you can use the TwitterContext’s BaseUrl property to set the BaseUrl. Setting the BaseUrl can be useful when communicating with other services. In addition to Twitter changing URLs, the Twitter API has been adopted by other companies, such as Identi.ca, Tumblr, and  WordPress.  This capability lets you use LINQ to Twitter with any of these services.  This is a testament to the success of the Twitter API and it’s popularity. No doubt we’ll have hills and valleys to traverse as the Twitter API matures, but hopefully there will be enough flexibility in LINQ to Twitter to make these changes as transparent as possible for you. @JoeMayo

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• JDK bug migration: components and subcomponents

  - by darcy

  One subtask of the JDK migration from the legacy bug tracking system to JIRA was reclassifying bugs from a three-level taxonomy in the legacy system, (product, category, subcategory), to a fundamentally two-level scheme in our customized JIRA instance, (component, subcomponent). In the JDK JIRA system, there is technically a third project-level classification, but by design a large majority of JDK-related bugs were migrated into a single "JDK" project. In the end, over 450 legacy subcategories were simplified into about 120 subcomponents in JIRA. The 120 subcomponents are distributed among 17 components. A rule of thumb used was that a subcategory had to have at least 50 bugs in it for it to be retained. Below is a listing the component / subcomponent classification of the JDK JIRA project along with some notes and guidance on which OpenJDK email addresses cover different areas. Eventually, a separate incidents project to host new issues filed at bugs.sun.com will use a slightly simplified version of this scheme. The preponderance of bugs and subcomponents for the JDK are in library-related areas, with components named foo-libs and subcomponents primarily named after packages. While there was an overall condensation of subcomponents in the migration, in some cases long-standing informal divisions in core libraries based on naming conventions in the description were promoted to formal subcomponents. For example, hundreds of bugs in the java.util subcomponent whose descriptions started with "(coll)" were moved into java.util:collections. Likewise, java.lang bugs starting with "(reflect)" and "(proxy)" were moved into java.lang:reflect. client-libs (Predominantly discussed on 2d-dev and awt-dev and swing-dev.) 2d demo java.awt java.awt:i18n java.beans (See beans-dev.) javax.accessibility javax.imageio javax.sound (See sound-dev.) javax.swing core-libs (See core-libs-dev.) java.io java.io:serialization java.lang java.lang.invoke java.lang:class_loading java.lang:reflect java.math java.net java.nio (Discussed on nio-dev.) java.nio.charsets java.rmi java.sql java.sql:bridge java.text java.util java.util.concurrent java.util.jar java.util.logging java.util.regex java.util:collections java.util:i18n javax.annotation.processing javax.lang.model javax.naming (JNDI) javax.script javax.script:javascript javax.sql org.openjdk.jigsaw (See jigsaw-dev.) security-libs (See security-dev.) java.security javax.crypto (JCE: includes SunJCE/MSCAPI/UCRYPTO/ECC) javax.crypto:pkcs11 (JCE: PKCS11 only) javax.net.ssl (JSSE, includes javax.security.cert) javax.security javax.smartcardio javax.xml.crypto org.ietf.jgss org.ietf.jgss:krb5 other-libs corba corba:idl corba:orb corba:rmi-iiop javadb other (When no other subcomponent is more appropriate; use judiciously.) Most of the subcomponents in the xml component are related to jaxp. xml jax-ws jaxb javax.xml.parsers (JAXP) javax.xml.stream (JAXP) javax.xml.transform (JAXP) javax.xml.validation (JAXP) javax.xml.xpath (JAXP) jaxp (JAXP) org.w3c.dom (JAXP) org.xml.sax (JAXP) For OpenJDK, most JVM-related bugs are connected to the HotSpot Java virtual machine. hotspot (See hotspot-dev.) build compiler (See hotspot-compiler-dev.) gc (garbage collection, see hotspot-gc-dev.) jfr (Java Flight Recorder) jni (Java Native Interface) jvmti (JVM Tool Interface) mvm (Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine) runtime (See hotspot-runtime-dev.) svc (Servicability) test core-svc (See serviceability-dev.) debugger java.lang.instrument java.lang.management javax.management tools The full JDK bug database contains entries related to legacy virtual machines that predate HotSpot as well as retired APIs. vm-legacy jit (Sun Exact VM) jit_symantec (Symantec VM, before Exact VM) jvmdi (JVM Debug Interface ) jvmpi (JVM Profiler Interface ) runtime (Exact VM Runtime) Notable command line tools in the $JDK/bin directory have corresponding subcomponents. tools appletviewer apt (See compiler-dev.) hprof jar javac (See compiler-dev.) javadoc(tool) (See compiler-dev.) javah (See compiler-dev.) javap (See compiler-dev.) jconsole launcher updaters (Timezone updaters, etc.) visualvm Some aspects of JDK infrastructure directly affect JDK Hg repositories, but other do not. infrastructure build (See build-dev and build-infra-dev.) licensing (Covers updates to the third party readme, licenses, and similar files.) release_eng (Release engineering) staging (Staging of web pages related to JDK releases.) The specification subcomponent encompasses the formal language and virtual machine specifications. specification language (The Java Language Specification) vm (The Java Virtual Machine Specification) The code for the deploy and install areas is not currently included in OpenJDK. deploy deployment_toolkit plugin webstart install auto_update install servicetags In the JDK, there are a number of cross-cutting concerns whose organization is essentially orthogonal to other areas. Since these areas generally have dedicated teams working on them, it is easier to find bugs of interest if these bugs are grouped first by their cross-cutting component rather than by the affected technology. docs doclet guides hotspot release_notes tools tutorial embedded build hotspot libraries globalization locale-data translation performance hotspot libraries The list of subcomponents will no doubt grow over time, but my inclination is to resist that growth since the addition of each subcomponent makes the system as a whole more complicated and harder to use. When the system gets closer to being externalized, I plan to post more blog entries describing recommended use of various custom fields in the JDK project.

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• Imaging: Paper Paper Everywhere, but None Should be in Sight

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Author: Vikrant Korde, Technical Architect, Aurionpro's Oracle Implementation Services team My wedding photos are stored in several empty shoeboxes. Yes...I got married before digital photography was mainstream...which means I'm old. But my parents are really old. They have shoeboxes filled with vacation photos on slides (I doubt many of you have even seen a home slide projector...and I hope you never do!). Neither me nor my parents should have shoeboxes filled with any form of photographs whatsoever. They should obviously live in the digital world...with no physical versions in sight (other than a few framed on our walls). Businesses grapple with similar challenges. But instead of shoeboxes, they have file cabinets and warehouses jam packed with paper invoices, legal documents, human resource files, material safety data sheets, incident reports, and the list goes on and on. In fact, regulatory and compliance rules govern many industries, requiring that this paperwork is available for any number of years. It's a real challenge...especially trying to find archived documents quickly and many times with no backup. Which brings us to a set of technologies called Image Process Management (or simply Imaging or Image Processing) that are transforming these antiquated, paper-based processes. Oracle's WebCenter Content Imaging solution is a combination of their WebCenter suite, which offers a robust set of content and document management features, and their Business Process Management (BPM) suite, which helps to automate business processes through the definition of workflows and business rules. Overall, the solution provides an enterprise-class platform for end-to-end management of document images within transactional business processes. It's a solution that provides all of the capabilities needed - from document capture and recognition, to imaging and workflow - to effectively transform your ‘shoeboxes’ of files into digitally managed assets that comply with strict industry regulations. The terminology can be quite overwhelming if you're new to the space, so we've provided a summary of the primary components of the solution below, along with a short description of the two paths that can be executed to load images of scanned documents into Oracle's WebCenter suite. WebCenter Imaging (WCI): the electronic document repository that provides security, annotations, and search capabilities, and is the primary user interface for managing work items in the imaging solution SOA & BPM Suites (workflow): provide business process management capabilities, including human tasks, workflow management, service integration, and all other standard SOA features. It's interesting to note that there a number of 'jumpstart' processes available to help accelerate the integration of business applications, such as the accounts payable invoice processing solution for E-Business Suite that facilitates the processing of large volumes of invoices WebCenter Enterprise Capture (WEC): expedites the capture process of paper documents to digital images, offering high volume scanning and importing from email, and allows for flexible indexing options WebCenter Forms Recognition (WFR): automatically recognizes, categorizes, and extracts information from paper documents with greatly reduced human intervention WebCenter Content: the backend content server that provides versioning, security, and content storage There are two paths that can be executed to send data from WebCenter Capture to WebCenter Imaging, both of which are described below: 1. Direct Flow - This is the simplest and quickest way to push an image scanned from WebCenter Enterprise Capture (WEC) to WebCenter Imaging (WCI), using the bare minimum metadata. The WEC activities are defined below: The paper document is scanned (or imported from email). The scanned image is indexed using a predefined indexing profile. The image is committed directly into the process flow 2. WFR (WebCenter Forms Recognition) Flow - This is the more complex process, during which data is extracted from the image using a series of operations including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Classification, Extraction, and Export. This process creates three files (Tiff, XML, and TXT), which are fed to the WCI Input Agent (the high speed import/filing module). The WCI Input Agent directory is a standard ingestion method for adding content to WebCenter Imaging, the process for doing so is described below: WEC commits the batch using the respective commit profile. A TIFF file is created, passing data through the file name by including values separated by "_" (underscores). WFR completes OCR, classification, extraction, export, and pulls the data from the image. In addition to the TIFF file, which contains the document image, an XML file containing the extracted data, and a TXT file containing the metadata that will be filled in WCI, are also created. All three files are exported to WCI's Input agent directory. Based on previously defined "input masks", the WCI Input Agent will pick up the seeding file (often the TXT file). Finally, the TIFF file is pushed in UCM and a unique web-viewable URL is created. Based on the mapping data read from the TXT file, a new record is created in the WCI application.  Although these processes may seem complex, each Oracle component works seamlessly together to achieve a high performing and scalable platform. The solution has been field tested at some of the largest enterprises in the world and has transformed millions and millions of paper-based documents to more easily manageable digital assets. For more information on how an Imaging solution can help your business, please contact [email protected] (for U.S. West inquiries) or [email protected] (for U.S. East inquiries). About the Author: Vikrant is a Technical Architect in Aurionpro's Oracle Implementation Services team, where he delivers WebCenter-based Content and Imaging solutions to Fortune 1000 clients. With more than twelve years of experience designing, developing, and implementing Java-based software solutions, Vikrant was one of the founding members of Aurionpro's WebCenter-based offshore delivery team. He can be reached at [email protected].

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• Must-see sessions at TCUK11

  - by Roger Hart

  Technical Communication UK is probably the best professional conference I've been to. Last year, I spoke there on content strategy, and this year I'll be co-hosting a workshop on embedded user assistance. Obviously, I'd love people to come along to that; but there are some other sessions I'd like to flag up for anybody thinking of attending. Tuesday 20th Sept - workshops This will be my first year at the pre-conference workshop day, and I'm massively glad that our workshop hasn't been scheduled along-side the one I'm really interested in. My picks: It looks like you're embedding user assistance. Would you like help? My colleague Dom and I are presenting this one. It's our paen to Clippy, to the brilliant idea he represented, and the crashing failure he was. Less precociously, we'll be teaching embedded user assistance, Red Gate style. Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data This doesn't need to do anything apart from what it says on the tin in order to be gold dust. But given the speakers, I suspect it will. A data-informed approach is a great asset to technical communications, so I'd recommend this session to anybody event faintly interested. The speakers here have a great track record of giving practical, accessible introductions to big topics. Go along. Wednesday 21st Sept - day one There's no real need to recommend the keynote for a conference, but I will just point out that this year it's Google's Patrick Hofmann. That's cool. You know what else is cool: Focus on the user, the rest follows An intro to modelling customer experience. This is a really exciting area for tech comms, and potentially touches on one of my personal hobby-horses: the convergence of technical communication and marketing. It's all part of delivering customer experience, and knowing what your users need lets you help them, sell to them, and delight them. Content strategy year 1: a tale from the trenches It's often been observed that content strategy is great at banging its own drum, but not so hot on compelling case studies. Here you go, folks. This is the presentation I'm most excited about so far. On a mission to communicate! Skype help their users communicate, but how do they communicate with them? I guess we'll find out. Then there's the stuff that I'm not too excited by, but you might just be. The standards geeks and agile freaks can get together in a presentation on the forthcoming ISO standards for agile authoring. Plus, there's a session on VBA for tech comms. I do have one gripe about day 1. The other big UK tech comms conference, UA Europe, have - I think - netted the more interesting presentation from Ellis Pratt. While I have no doubt that his TCUK case study on producing risk assessments will be useful, I'd far rather go to his talk on game theory for tech comms. Hopefully UA Europe will record it. Thursday 22nd Sept - day two Day two has a couple of slots yet to be confirmed. The rumour is that one of them will be the brilliant "Questions and rants" session from last year. I hope so. It's not ranting, but I'll be going to: RTFMobile: beyond stating the obvious Ultan O'Broin is an engaging speaker with a lot to say, and mobile is one of the most interesting and challenging new areas for tech comms. Even if this weren't a research-based presentation from a company with buckets of technology experience, I'd be going. It is, and you should too. Pattern recognition for technical communicators One of the best things about TCUK is the tendency to include sessions that tackle the theoretical and bring them towards the practical. Kai and Chris delivered cracking and well-received talks last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for us on some of the conceptual underpinning of technical communication. Developing an interactive non-text learning programme Annoyingly, this clashes with Pattern Recognition, so I hope at least one of the streams is recorded again this year. The idea of communicating complex information without words us fascinating and this sounds like a great example of this year's third stream: "anything but text". For the localization and DITA crowds, there's rich pickings on day two, though I'm not sure how many of those sessions I'm interested in. In the 13:00 - 13:40 slot, there's an interesting clash between Linda Urban on re-use and training content, and a piece on minimalism I'm sorely tempted by. That's my pick of #TCUK11. I'll be doing a round-up blog after the event, and probably talking a bit more about it beforehand. I'm also reliably assured that there are still plenty of tickets.

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• Adding a Network Loopback Adapter to Windows 8

  - by Greg Low

  I have to say that I continue to be frustrated with finding out how to do things in Windows 8. Here's another one and it's recorded so it might help someone else. I've also documented what I tried so that if anyone from the product group ever reads this, they'll understand how I searched for it and might try to make it easier.I wanted to add a network loopback adapter, to have a fixed IP address to work with when using an "internal" network with Hyper-V. (The fact that I even need to do this is also painful. I don't know why Hyper-V can't make it easy to work with host system folders, etc. as easily as I can with VirtualPC, VirtualBox, etc. but that's a topic for another day).In the end, what I needed was a known IP address on the same network that my guest OS was using, via the internal network (which allows connectivity from the host OS to/from guest OS's).I started by looking in the network adapters areas but there is no "add" functionality there. Realising that this was likely to be another unexpected challenge, I resorted to searching for info on doing this. I found KB article 2777200 entitled "Installing the Microsoft Loopback Adapter in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012". Aha, I thought that's what I'd need. It describes the symptom as "You are trying to install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, but are unable to find it." and that certainly sounded like me. There's a certain irony in documenting that something's hard to find instead of making it easier to find. Anyway, you'd hope that in that article, they'd then provide a step by step example of how to do it, but what they supply is this: The Microsoft Loopback Adapter was renamed in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. The new name is "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter". When using the Add Hardware Wizard to manually add a network adapter, choose Manufacturer "Microsoft" and choose network adapter "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter".The trick with this of course is finding the "Add Hardware Wizard". In Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound, there are options to "Add a device" and for "Device Manager". I tried the "Add a device" wizard (seemed logical to me) but after that wizard tries it's best, it just tells you that there isn't any hardware that it thinks it needs to install. It offers a link for when you can't find what you're looking for, but that leads to a generic help page that tells you how to do things like turning on your printer.In Device Manager, I checked the options in the program menus, and nothing useful was present. I even tried right-clicking "Network adapters", hoping that would lead to an option to add one, also to no avail.So back to the search engine I went, to try to find out where the "Add Hardware Wizard" is. Turns out I was in the right place in Device Manager, but I needed to right-click the computer's name, and choose "Add Legacy Hardware". No doubt that hasn't changed location lately but it's a while since I needed to add one so I'd forgotten. Regardless, I'm left wondering why it couldn't be in the menu as well.Anyway, for a step by step list, you need to do the following:1. From Control Panel, select "Device Manager" under the "Devices and Printers" section of the "Hardware and Sound" tab.2. Right-click the name of the computer at the top of the tree, and choose "Add Legacy Hardware".3. In the "Welcome to the Add Hardware Wizard" window, click Next.4. In the "The wizard can help you install other hardware" window, choose "Install the hardware that I manually select from a list" option and click Next.5. In the "The wizard did not find any new hardware on your computer" window, click Next.6. In the "From the list below, select the type of hardware you are installing" window, select "Network Adapters" from the list, and click Next.7. In the "Select Network Adapter" window, from the Manufacturer list, choose Microsoft, then in the Network Adapter window, choose "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter", then click Next.8. In the "The wizard is ready to install your hardware" window, click Next.9. In the "Completing the Add Hardware Wizard" window, click Finish.Then you need to continue to set the IP address, etc.10. Back in Control Panel, select the "Network and Internet" tab, click "View Network Status and Tasks".11. In the "View your basic network information and set up connections" window, click "Change adapter settings".12. Right-click the new adapter that has been added (find it in the list by checking the device name of "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter"), and click Properties.   

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• Highlights from the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development The Oracle Customer Experience Summit was the first-ever event covering the full breadth of Oracle's CX portfolio -- Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and Service. The purpose of the Summit was to articulate the customer experience imperative and to showcase the suite of Oracle products that can help our customers create the best possible customer experience. This topic has always been a very important one, but now that there are so many alternative companies to do business with and because people have such public ways to voice their displeasure, it's necessary for vendors to have multiple listening posts in place to gauge consumer sentiment. They need to know what is going on in real time and be able to react quickly to turn negative situations into positive ones. Those can then be shared in a social manner to enhance the brand and turn the customer into a repeat customer. The Summit was focused on Oracle's portfolio of products and entirely dedicated to customers who are committed to building great customer experiences within their businesses. Rather than DBAs, the attendees were business people looking to collaborate with other like-minded experts and find out how Oracle can help in terms of technology, best practices, and expertise. The event was at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld. We had eight hundred people attend, which was great for the first year. Next year, there's no doubt in my mind, we can raise that number to 5,000. Alignment and Logic Oracle's Customer Experience portfolio is made up of a combination of acquired and organic products owned by many people who are new to Oracle. We include homegrown Fusion CRM, as well as RightNow, Inquira, OPA, Vitrue, ATG, Endeca, and many others. The attendees knew of the acquisitions, so naturally they wanted to see how the products all fit together and hear the logic behind the portfolio. To tell them about our alignment, we needed to be aligned. To accomplish that, a cross functional team at Oracle agreed on the messaging so that every single Oracle presenter could cover the big picture before going deep into a product or topic. Talking about the full suite of products in one session produced overflow value for other products. And even though this internal coordination was a huge effort, everyone saw the value for our customers and for our long-term cooperation and success. Keynotes, Workshops, and Tents of Innovation We scored by having Seth Godin as our keynote speaker ? always provocative and popular. The opening keynote was a session orchestrated by Mark Hurd, Anthony Lye, and me. Mark set the stage by giving real-world examples of bad customer experiences, Anthony clearly articulated the business imperative for addressing these experiences, and I brought it all to life by taking the audience around the Customer Lifecycle and showing demos and videos, with partners included at each of the stops around the lifecycle. Brian Curran, a VP for RightNow Product Strategy, presented a session that was in high demand called The Economics of Customer Experience. People loved hearing how to build a business case and justify the cost of building a better customer experience. John Kembel, another VP for RightNow Product Strategy, held a workshop that customers raved about. It was based on the journey mapping methodology he created, which is a way to talk to customers about where they want to make improvements to their customers' experiences. He divided the audience into groups led by facilitators. Each person had the opportunity to engage with experts and peers and construct some real takeaways. From left to right: Brian Curran, John Kembel, Seth Godin, and George Kembel The conference hotel was across from Union Square so we used that space to set up Innovation Tents. During the day we served lunch in the tents and partners showed their different innovative ideas. It was very interesting to see all the technologies and advancements. It also gave people a place to mix and mingle and to think about the fringe of where we could all take these ideas. Product Portfolio Plus Thought Leadership Of course there is always room for improvement, but the feedback on the format of the conference was positive. Ninety percent of the sessions had either a partner or a customer teamed with an Oracle presenter. The presentations weren't dry, one-way information dumps, but more interactive. I just followed up with a CEO who attended the conference with his Head of Marketing. He told me that they are using John Kembel's journey mapping methodology across the organization to pull people together. This sort of thought leadership in these highly competitive areas gives Oracle permission to engage around the technology. We have to differentiate ourselves and it's harder to do on the product side because everyone looks the same on paper. But on thought leadership ? we can, and did, take some really big steps. David VapGroup Vice PresidentOracle Applications Product Development

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• More Quick Interview Tips

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  In the last couple of years I have conducted a lot of interviews for application and database developers for my company, and I can tell you that the little things can mean a lot.  Here are a few quick tips to help you make a good first impression. A year ago I gave you my #1 interview tip: Do some basic research!  And a year later, I am still stunned by how few technical people do the most basic of research.  I can only guess that it is because it is so engrained in our psyche that technical competence is everything (see How to Manage Technical Employees for more on this idea) that we forget or ignore the importance of soft skills and the art of the interview.  Or maybe it is because we have heard the stories of the uber-geek who has zero personal skills but still makes a fortune working for Microsoft.  Well, here’s another quick tip:  You’re probably not as good as he is; and a large number of companies actually run small to medium sized teams and can’t really afford to have the social outcast in the group.  In a small team, everyone has to get along well, and that’s an important part of what I’m evaluating during the interview process. My #2 tip is to act alive!  I typically conduct screening interviews by phone before I bring someone in for an in-person.  I don’t care how laid-back you are or if you have a “quiet personality”, when we are talking, ACT like you are happy I called and you are interested in getting the job.  If you sound like you are bored-to-death and that you would be perfectly happy to never work again, I am perfectly happy to help you attain that goal, and I’ll move on to the next candidate. And closely related to #2, perhaps we’ll call it #2.1 is this tip:  When I call you on the phone for the interview, don’t answer your phone by just saying, “Hello”.  You know that the odds are about 999-to-1 that it is me calling for the interview because we have specifically arranged this time slot for the call.  And you can see on the caller ID that it is not one of your buddies calling, so identify yourself.  Don’t make me question whether I dialed the right number.  Answer your phone with a, “Hello, this is ___<your full name preferred, but at least your first name>___.”.  And when I say, “Hi, <your name>, this is Mark from <my company>” it would be really nice to hear you say, “Hi, Mark, I have been expecting your call.”  This sets the perfect tone for our conversation.  I know I have the right person; you are professional enough and interested enough in the job or contract to remember your appointments; and now we can move on to a little intro segment and get on with the reason for our call. As crazy as it sounds, I’ve actually had phone interviews that went like this: <Ring…> You:  “Hello?” Me:  “Hi, this is Mark from _______” You:  “Yeah?” Me:  “Is this <your name>?” You:  “Yeah.” Me:  “I had this time in my calendar for us to talk…were you expecting my call?” You:  “Oh, yeah, sure…” I used to be nice and would try to go ahead with the interview even after this bad start, thinking I was giving the candidate the benefit of the doubt…a second chance…but more often than not it was a struggle and 10 minutes into what was supposed to be a 45-minute call, I’m looking for a way to hang up without being rude myself.  It never worked out.  I never brought that person in for an in-person interview, much less offered them the job or contract.  Who knows, maybe they were some sort of wunderkind that we missed out on.  What I know is that they would never fit in with the rest of the team, and around here that is absolutely critical. So, in conclusion… Act alive!  Identify yourself!  And do at least the very basic of research.

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• SQLAuthority News – A Conversation with an Old Friend – Sri Sridharan

  - by pinaldave

  Sri Sridharan is my old friend and we often talk on GTalk. The subject varies from Life in India/USA, movies, musics, and of course SQL. We have our differences when we talk about food or movie but we always agree when we talk about SQL. Yesterday while chatting with him we talked about SQLPASS and the conversation lasted for a long time. Here is the conversation between us on GTalk. I have removed a few of the personal talks and formatted into paragraphs as GTalk often shows stuff out of formatting. Pinal: Sri, Congrats on running for the PASS BoD again. You were so close last year. What made you decide to run again this year? Sri: Thank you Pinal for your leadership in the PASS India Community and all the things you do out there. After coming so close last year, there was no doubt in my mind that I will run again. I was truly humbled by the support I got from the community. Growing up in India for over 25 years, you are brought up in a very competitive part of the world. Right from the pressure of staying in the top of the class from kindergarten to your graduation, the relentless push from your parents about studying and getting good grades (and nothing else matters), you land up essentially living in a pressure cooker. To survive that relentless pressure, you need to have a thick skin, ability to stand up for who you really are , what you want to accomplish and in the process stay true those values. I am striving for a greater cause, to make PASS an organization that can help people with their SQL Server careers, to make PASS relevant to its chapter members, to make PASS an organization that every SQL professional in the world wants to be connected with. Just because I did not get elected or appointed last year does not mean that these causes are not worth fighting. Giving up upon failing the first time is simply not in me. If I did that, what message would I send to those who voted for me? What message would I send to my kids? Pinal: As someone who has such strong roots in India, what can the Indian PASS Community expect from you? Sri: First of all, I think fostering a regional leadership is something PASS must encourage as part of its global growth plan. For PASS global being able to understand all the issues in a region of the world and make sound decisions will be a tough thing to do on a continuous basis. I expect people like you, chapter leaders, regional mentors, MVPs of the region start playing a bigger role in shaping the next generation of PASS. That is something I said in my campaign and I still stand by it. I would like to see growth in the number of chapters in India. The current count does not truly represent the full potential of that region. I was pretty thrilled to see the Bangalore SQLSaturday happen early this year. I would like to see more of SQLSaturday events, at least in the major metro cities. I know the issues in India are very different from the rest of the world. So the formula needs to be tweaked a little for it to work better in India. Once the SQLSaturday model is vetted out, maybe there could be enough justification to have SQLRally India. PASS needs to have a premier SQL event in that region. Going to USA or Europe for that matter is incredibly hard due to VISA issues etc. So this could be a case of where PASS comes closer to where the community is. Pinal: What portfolio would take on if you are elected to the PASS Board? Sri: There are some very strong folks on the PASS Board today. The President discusses the portfolios with the group and makes the final call on the portfolios. I am also a fan of having a team associated with the portfolios. In that case, one person is the primary for a portfolio but secondary on a couple of other portfolios. This way people on the board have a direct vested interest in a few portfolios. Personally, I know I would these portfolios good justice – Chapters, Global Growth and Events (SQLSat, SQLRally). I would try to see if we can get a director to focus on Volunteers.  To me that is very critical for growth in the international regions. Pinal: This is an interesting conversation with you Sri. I know you so long time but this is indeed inspiring to many. India is a big country and we appreciate your thoughts. Sri: Thank you very much for taking time to chat with me today. Cheers. There are pretty strong candidates for SQLPASS Board of Elections this year. I know all of them in person and honestly it is going to be extremely difficult to not to vote for anybody. I am indeed in a crunch right now how to pick one over another. Though the choice is difficult, I encourage you to vote for them. I am extremely confident that the new board of directors will all have the same goal – Better SQL Server Community. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, DBA, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Working with packed dates in SSIS

  - by Jim Giercyk

  One of the challenges recently thrown my way was to read an EBCDIC flat file, decode packed dates, and insert the dates into a SQL table.  For those unfamiliar with packed data, it is a way to store data at the nibble level (half a byte), and was often used by mainframe programmers to conserve storage space.  In the case of my input file, the dates were 2 bytes long and  represented the number of days that have past since 01/01/1950.  My first thought was, in the words of Scooby, Hmmmmph?  But, I love a good challenge, so I dove in. Reading in the flat file was rather simple.  The only difference between reading an EBCDIC and an ASCII file is the Code Page option in the connection manager.  In my case, I needed to use Code Page 1140 for EBCDIC (I could have also used Code Page 37).       Once the code page is set correctly, SSIS can understand what it is reading and it will convert the output to the default code page, 1252.  However, packed data is either unreadable or produces non-alphabetic characters, as we can see in the preview window.   Column 1 is actually the packed date, columns 0 and 2 are the values in the rest of the file.  We are only interested in Column 1, which is a 2 byte field representing a packed date.  We know that 2 bytes of packed data can be stored in 1 byte of character data, so we are working with 4 packed digits in 2 character bytes.  If you are confused, stay tuned….this will make sense in a minute.   Right-click on your Flat File Source shape and select “Show Advanced Editor”. Here is where the magic begins. By changing the properties of the output columns, we can access the packed digits from each byte. By default, the Output Column data type is DT_STR. Since we want to look at the bytes individually and not the entire string, change the data type to DT_BYTES. Next, and most important, set UseBinaryFormat to TRUE. This will write the HEX VALUES of the output string instead of writing the character values.  Now we are getting somewhere! Next, you will need to use a Data Conversion shape in your Data Flow to transform the 2 position byte stream to a 4 position Unicode string containing the packed data.  You need the string to be 4 bytes long because it will contain the 4 packed digits.  Here is what that should look like in the Data Conversion shape: Direct the output of your data flow to a test table or file to see the results.  In my case, I created a test table.  The results looked like this:     Hold on a second!  That doesn't look like a date at all.  No, of course not.  It is a hex number which represents the days which have passed between 01/01/1950 and the date.  We have to convert the Hex value to a decimal value, and use the DATEADD function to get a date value.  Luckily, I have created a function to convert Hex to Decimal:   -- ============================================= -- Author:        Jim Giercyk -- Create date: March, 2012 -- Description:    Converts a Hex string to a decimal value -- ============================================= CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ftn_HexToDec] (     @hexValue NVARCHAR(6) ) RETURNS DECIMAL AS BEGIN     -- Declare the return variable here DECLARE @decValue DECIMAL IF @hexValue LIKE '0x%' SET @hexValue = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,3,4) DECLARE @decTab TABLE ( decPos1 VARCHAR(2), decPos2 VARCHAR(2), decPos3 VARCHAR(2), decPos4 VARCHAR(2) ) DECLARE @pos1 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,1,1) DECLARE @pos2 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,2,1) DECLARE @pos3 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,3,1) DECLARE @pos4 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,4,1) INSERT @decTab VALUES (CASE               WHEN @pos1 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos1 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos1 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos1 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos1 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos1 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos1              END, CASE               WHEN @pos2 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos2 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos2 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos2 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos2 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos2 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos2              END, CASE               WHEN @pos3 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos3 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos3 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos3 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos3 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos3 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos3              END, CASE               WHEN @pos4 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos4 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos4 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos4 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos4 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos4 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos4              END) SET @decValue = (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos4 FROM @decTab)))         +                 (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos3 FROM @decTab))*16)      +                 (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos2 FROM @decTab))*(16*16)) +                 (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos1 FROM @decTab))*(16*16*16))     RETURN @decValue END GO     Making use of the function, I found the decimal conversion, added that number of days to 01/01/1950 and FINALLY arrived at my “unpacked relative date”.  Here is the query I used to retrieve the formatted date, and the result set which was returned: SELECT [packedDate] AS 'Hex Value',        dbo.ftn_HexToDec([packedDate]) AS 'Decimal Value',        CONVERT(DATE,DATEADD(day,dbo.ftn_HexToDec([packedDate]),'01/01/1950'),101) AS 'Relative String Date'   FROM [dbo].[Output Table]         This technique can be used any time you need to retrieve the hex value of a character string in SSIS.  The date example may be a bit difficult to understand at first, but with SSIS becoming the preferred tool for enterprise level integration for many companies, there is no doubt that developers will encounter these types of requirements with regularity in the future. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

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• Agile Executives

  - by Robert May

  Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However, not all executives understand Scrum and how to get the information from development teams that use Scrum. I think that these executives need a support system for managing Agile teams. Historical Software Management When Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, I doubt he realized the impact he’d have on Management through the ages. Historically, management was about managing the process of building things. The people were just cogs in that process. Like all cogs, they were replaceable. Unfortunately, most of the software industry followed this same style of management. Many of today’s senior managers learned how to manage companies before software was a significant influence on how the company did business. Software development is a very creative process, but too many managers have treated it like an assembly line. Idea’s go in, working software comes out, and we just have to figure out how to make sure that the ideas going in are perfect, then the software will be perfect. Lean Manufacturing In the manufacturing industry, Lean manufacturing has revolutionized Henry Ford’s assembly line. Derived from the Toyota process, Lean places emphasis on always providing value for the customer. Anything the customer wouldn’t be willing to pay for is wasteful. Agile is based on similar principles. We’re building software for people, and anything that isn’t useful to them doesn’t add value. Waterfall development would have teams build reams and reams of documentation about how the software should work. Agile development dispenses with this work because excessive documentation doesn’t add value. Instead, teams focus on building documentation only when it truly adds value to the customer. Many other Agile principals are similar. Playing Catch-up Just like in the manufacturing industry, many managers in the software industry have yet to understand the value of the principles of Lean and Agile. They think they can wrap the uncertainties of software development up in a nice little package and then just execute, usually followed by failure. They spend a great deal of time and money trying to exactly predict the future. That expenditure of time and money doesn’t add value to the customer. Managers that understand that Agile know that there is a better way. They will instead focus on the priorities of the near term in detail, and leave the future to take care of itself. They have very detailed two week plans with less detailed quarterly plans. These plans are guided by a general corporate strategy that doesn’t focus on the exact implementation details. These managers also think in smaller features rather than large functionality. This adds a great deal of value to customers, since the features that matter most are the ones that the team focuses on in the near term and then are able to deliver to the customers that are paying for them. Agile managers also realize that stale software is very costly. They know that keeping the technology in their software current is much less expensive and risky than large rewrites that occur infrequently and schedule time in each release for refactoring of the existing software. Agile Executives Even though Agile is a better way, I’ve still seen failures using the Agile process. While some of these failures can be attributed to the team, most of them are caused by managers, not the team. Managers fail to understand what Agile is, how it works, and how to get the information that they need to make good business decisions. I think this is a shame. I’m very pleased that Veracity understands this problem and is trying to do something about it. Veracity is a key sponsor of Agile Executives. In fact, Galen is this year’s acting president for Agile Executives. The purpose of Agile Executives is to help managers better manage Agile teams and see better success. Agile Executives is trying to build a community of executives that range from managers interested in Agile to managers that have successfully adopted Agile. Together, these managers can form a community of support and ideas that will help make Agile teams more successful. Helping Your Team You can help too! Talk with your manager and get them involved in Agile Executives. Help Veracity build the community. If your manager understands Agile better, he’ll understand how to help his teams, which will result in software that adds more value for customers. If you have any questions about how you can be involved, please let me know. Technorati Tags: Agile,Agile Executives

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