known types - Page 511 - Developer IT

What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

- by Louis Davidson

If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends. For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine. You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on. Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events. My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do. Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes. On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore. The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses. If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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Testing Workflows – Test-First

- by Timothy Klenke

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-first.aspxThis is the second of two posts on some common strategies for approaching the job of writing tests. The previous post covered test-after workflows where as this will focus on test-first. Each workflow presented is a method of attack for adding tests to a project. The more tools in your tool belt the better. So here is a partial list of some test-first methodologies. Ping Pong Ping Pong is a methodology commonly used in pair programing. One developer will write a new failing test. Then they hand the keyboard to their partner. The partner writes the production code to get the test passing. The partner then writes the next test before passing the keyboard back to the original developer. The reasoning behind this testing methodology is to facilitate pair programming. That is to say that this testing methodology shares all the benefits of pair programming, including ensuring multiple team members are familiar with the code base (i.e. low bus number). Test Blazer Test Blazing, in some respects, is also a pairing strategy. The developers don’t work side by side on the same task at the same time. Instead one developer is dedicated to writing tests at their own desk. They write failing test after failing test, never touching the production code. With these tests they are defining the specification for the system. The developer most familiar with the specifications would be assigned this task. The next day or later in the same day another developer fetches the latest test suite. Their job is to write the production code to get those tests passing. Once all the tests pass they fetch from source control the latest version of the test project to get the newer tests. This methodology has some of the benefits of pair programming, namely lowering the bus number. This can be good way adding an extra developer to a project without slowing it down too much. The production coder isn’t slowed down writing tests. The tests are in another project from the production code, so there shouldn’t be any merge conflicts despite two developers working on the same solution. This methodology is also a good test for the tests. Can another developer figure out what system should do just by reading the tests? This question will be answered as the production coder works there way through the test blazer’s tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a highly disciplined practice that calls for a new test and an new production code to be written every few minutes. There are strict rules for when you should be writing test or production code. You start by writing a failing (red) test, then write the simplest production code possible to get the code working (green), then you clean up the code (refactor). This is known as the red-green-refactor cycle. The goal of TDD isn’t the creation of a suite of tests, however that is an advantageous side effect. The real goal of TDD is to follow a practice that yields a better design. The practice is meant to push the design toward small, decoupled, modularized components. This is generally considered a better design that large, highly coupled ball of mud. TDD accomplishes this through the refactoring cycle. Refactoring is only possible to do safely when tests are in place. In order to use TDD developers must be trained in how to look for and repair code smells in the system. Through repairing these sections of smelly code (i.e. a refactoring) the design of the system emerges. For further information on TDD, I highly recommend the series “Is TDD Dead?”. It discusses its pros and cons and when it is best used. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Whereas TDD focuses on small unit tests that concentrate on a small piece of the system, Acceptance Tests focuses on the larger integrated environment. Acceptance Tests usually correspond to user stories, which come directly from the customer. The unit tests focus on the inputs and outputs of smaller parts of the system, which are too low level to be of interest to the customer. ATDD generally uses the same tools as TDD. However, ATDD uses fewer mocks and test doubles than TDD. ATDD often complements TDD; they aren’t competing methods. A full test suite will usually consist of a large number of unit (created via TDD) tests and a smaller number of acceptance tests. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) BDD is more about audience than workflow. BDD pushes the testing realm out towards the client. Developers, managers and the client all work together to define the tests. Typically different tooling is used for BDD than acceptance and unit testing. This is done because the audience is not just developers. Tools using the Gherkin family of languages allow for test scenarios to be described in an English format. Other tools such as MSpec or FitNesse also strive for highly readable behaviour driven test suites. Because these tests are public facing (viewable by people outside the development team), the terminology usually changes. You can’t get away with the same technobabble you can with unit tests written in a programming language that only developers understand. For starters, they usually aren’t called tests. Usually they’re called “examples”, “behaviours”, “scenarios”, or “specifications”. This may seem like a very subtle difference, but I’ve seen this small terminology change have a huge impact on the acceptance of the process. Many people have a bias that testing is something that comes at the end of a project. When you say we need to define the tests at the start of the project many people will immediately give that a lower priority on the project schedule. But if you say we need to define the specification or behaviour of the system before we can start, you’ll get more cooperation. Keep these test-first and test-after workflows in your tool belt. With them you’ll be able to find new opportunities to apply them.

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ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 – Memory Profiler)

- by ToStringTheory

One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler. Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management… A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past. This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often… In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities… Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see. Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier. For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help. It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler. You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’. This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap. Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot. The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed. I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last. Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc… If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS. When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen. You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step. Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is. I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from. It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control. This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well. This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element. Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences. I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event. As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge. A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks. 3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling. I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do. Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good. their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find. With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel. Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter! Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think! I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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REST to Objects in C#

RESTful interfaces for web services are all the rage for many Web 2.0 sites. If you want to consume these in a very simple fashion, LINQ to XML can do the job pretty easily in C#. If you go searching for help on this, youll find a lot of incomplete solutions and fairly large toolkits and frameworks (guess how I know this) this quick article is meant to be a no fluff just stuff approach to making this work. POCO Objects Lets assume you have a Model that you want to suck data into from a RESTful web service. Ideally this is a Plain Old CLR Object, meaning it isnt infected with any persistence or serialization goop. It might look something like this: public class Entry { public int Id; public int UserId; public DateTime Date; public float Hours; public string Notes; public bool Billable; public override string ToString() { return String.Format("[{0}] User: {1} Date: {2} Hours: {3} Notes: {4} Billable {5}", Id, UserId, Date, Hours, Notes, Billable); } } Not that this isnt a completely trivial object. Lets look at the API for the service. RESTful HTTP Service In this case, its TickSpots API, with the following sample output: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <entries type="array"> <entry> <id type="integer">24</id> <task_id type="integer">14</task_id> <user_id type="integer">3</user_id> <date type="date">2008-03-08</date> <hours type="float">1.00</hours> <notes>Had trouble with tribbles.</notes> <billable>true</billable> # Billable is an attribute inherited from the task <billed>true</billed> # Billed is an attribute to track whether the entry has been invoiced <created_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</created_at> <updated_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</updated_at> # The following attributes are derived and provided for informational purposes: <user_email>[email protected]</user_email> <task_name>Remove converter assembly</task_name> <sum_hours type="float">2.00</sum_hours> <budget type="float">10.00</budget> <project_name>Realign dilithium crystals</project_name> <client_name>Starfleet Command</client_name> </entry> </entries> Im assuming in this case that I dont necessarily care about all of the data fields the service is returning I just need some of them for my applications purposes. Thus, you can see there are more elements in the <entry> XML than I have in my Entry class. Get The XML with C# The next step is to get the XML. The following snippet does the heavy lifting once you pass it the appropriate URL: protected XElement GetResponse(string uri) { var request = WebRequest.Create(uri) as HttpWebRequest; request.UserAgent = ".NET Sample"; request.KeepAlive = false; request.Timeout = 15 * 1000; var response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse; if (request.HaveResponse == true && response != null) { var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()); return XElement.Parse(reader.ReadToEnd()); } throw new Exception("Error fetching data."); } This is adapted from the Yahoo Developer article on Web Service REST calls. Once you have the XML, the last step is to get the data back as your POCO. Use LINQ-To-XML to Deserialize POCOs from XML This is done via the following code: public IEnumerable<Entry> List(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate) { string additionalParameters = String.Format("start_date={0}&end_date={1}", startDate.ToShortDateString(), endDate.ToShortDateString()); string uri = BuildUrl("entries", additionalParameters); XElement elements = GetResponse(uri); var entries = from e in elements.Elements() where e.Name.LocalName == "entry" select new Entry { Id = int.Parse(e.Element("id").Value), UserId = int.Parse(e.Element("user_id").Value), Date = DateTime.Parse(e.Element("date").Value), Hours = float.Parse(e.Element("hours").Value), Notes = e.Element("notes").Value, Billable = bool.Parse(e.Element("billable").Value) }; return entries; } For completeness, heres the BuildUrl method for my TickSpot API wrapper: // Change these to your settings protected const string projectDomain = "DOMAIN.tickspot.com"; private const string authParams = "[email protected]&password=MyTickSpotPassword"; protected string BuildUrl(string apiMethod, string additionalParams) { if (projectDomain.Contains("DOMAIN")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your domain in ProjectRepository.cs."); } if (authParams.Contains("MyTickSpotPassword")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your email and password in ProjectRepository.cs."); } return string.Format("https://{0}/api/{1}?{2}&{3}", projectDomain, apiMethod, authParams, additionalParams); } Thats it! Now go forth and consume XML and map it to classes you actually want to work with. Have fun! 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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Business Case for investing time developing Stubs and BizUnit Tests

- by charlie.mott

I was recently in a position where I had to justify why effort should be spent developing Stubbed Integration Tests for BizTalk solutions. These tests are usually developed using the BizUnit framework. I assumed that most seasoned BizTalk developers would consider this best practice. Even though Microsoft suggest use of BizUnit on MSDN, I've not found a single site listing the justifications for investing time writing stubs and BizUnit tests. Stubs Stubs should be developed to isolate your development team from external dependencies. This is described by Michael Stephenson here. Failing to do this can result in the following problems: In contract-first scenarios, the external system interface will have been defined. But the interface may not have been setup or even developed yet for the BizTalk developers to work with. By the time you open the target location to see the data BizTalk has sent, it may have been swept away. If you are relying on the UI of the target system to see the data BizTalk has sent, what do you do if it fails to arrive? It may take time for the data to be processed or it may be scheduled to be processed later. Learning how to use the source\target systems and investigations into where things go wrong in these systems will slow down the BizTalk development effort. By the time the data is visible in a UI it may have undergone further transformations. In larger development teams working together, do you all use the same source and target instances. How do you know which data was created by whose tests? How do you know which event log error message are whose? Another developer may have “cleaned up” your data. It is harder to write BizUnit tests that clean up the data\logs after each test run. What if your B2B partners' source or target system cannot support the sort of testing you want to do. They may not even have a development or test instance that you can work with. Their single test instance may be used by the SIT\UAT teams. There may be licencing costs of setting up an instances of the external system. The stubs I like to use are generic stubs that can accept\return any message type. Usually I need to create one per protocol. They should be driven by BizUnit steps to: validates the data received; and select a response messages (or error response). Once built, they can be re-used for many integration tests and from project to project. I’m not saying that developers should never test against a real instance. Every so often, you still need to connect to real developer or test instances of the source and target endpoints\services. The interface developers may ask you to send them some data to see if everything still works. Or you might want some messages sent to BizTalk to get confidence that everything still works beyond BizTalk. Tests Automated “Stubbed Integration Tests” are usually built using the BizUnit framework. These facilitate testing of the entire integration process from source stub to target stub. It will ensure that all of the BizTalk components are configured together correctly to meet all the requirements. More fine grained unit testing of individual BizTalk components is still encouraged. But BizUnit provides much the easiest way to test some components types (e.g. Orchestrations). Using BizUnit with the Behaviour Driven Development approach described by Mike Stephenson delivers the following benefits: source: http://biztalkbddsample.codeplex.com – Video 1. Requirements can be easily defined using Given/When/Then Requirements are close to the code so easier to manage as features and scenarios Requirements are defined in domain language The feature files can be used as part of the documentation The documentation is accurate to the build of code and can be published with a release The scenarios are effective to document the scenarios and are not over excessive The scenarios are maintained with the code There’s an abstraction between the intention and implementation of tests making them easier to understand The requirements drive the testing These same tests can also be used to drive load testing as described here. If you don't do this ... If you don't follow the above “Stubbed Integration Tests” approach, the developer will need to manually trigger the tests. This has the following risks: Developers are unlikely to check all the scenarios each time and all the expected conditions each time. After the developer leaves, these manual test steps may be lost. What test scenarios are there? What test messages did they use for each scenario? There is no mechanism to prove adequate test coverage. A test team may attempt to automate integration test scenarios in a test environment through the triggering of tests from a source system UI. If this is a replacement for BizUnit tests, then this carries the following risks: It moves the tests downstream, so problems will be found later in the process. Testers may not check all the expected conditions within the BizTalk infrastructure such as: event logs, suspended messages, etc. These automated tests may also get in the way of manual tests run on these environments.

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JavaOne Session Report: “50 Tips in 50 Minutes for GlassFish Fans”

- by Janice J. Heiss

At JavaOne 2012 on Monday, Oracle’s Engineer Chris Kasso, and Technology Evangelist Arun Gupta, presented a head-spinning session (CON4701) in which they offered 50 tips for GlassFish fans. Kasso and Gupta alternated back and forth with each presenting 10 tips at a time. An audience of about (appropriately) 50 attentive and appreciative developers was on hand in what has to be one of the most information-packed sessions ever at JavaOne!Aside: I experienced one of the quiet joys of JavaOne when, just before the session began, I spotted Java Champion and JavaOne Rock Star Adam Bien sitting nearby – Adam is someone I have been fortunate to know for many years.GlassFish is a freely available, commercially supported Java EE reference implementation. The session prioritized quantity of tips over depth of information and offered tips that are intended for both seasoned and new users, that are meant to increase the range of functional options available to GlassFish users. The focus was on lesser-known dimensions of GlassFish. Attendees were encouraged to pursue tips that contained new information for them. All 50 tips can be accessed here.Below are several examples of more elaborate tips and a final practical tip on how to get in touch with these folks. Tip #1: Using the login Command * To execute a remote command with asadmin you must provide the admin's user name and password.* The login command allows you to store the login credentials to be reused in subsequent commands.* Can be logged into multiple servers (distinguish by host and port). Example: % asadmin --host ouch login Enter admin user name [default: admin]> Enter admin password> Login information relevant to admin user name [admin] for host [ouch] and admin port [4848] stored at [/Users/ckasso/.asadminpass] successfully. Make sure that this file remains protected. Information stored in this file will be used by asadmin commands to manage the associated domain. Command login executed successfully. % asadmin --host ouch list-clusters c1 not running Command list-clusters executed successfully.Tip #4: Using the AS_DEBUG Env Variable* Environment variable to control client side debug output* Exposes: command processing info URL used to access the command: http://localhost:4848/__asadmin/uptime Raw response from the server Example: % export AS_DEBUG=true % asadmin uptime CLASSPATH= ./../glassfish/modules/admin-cli.jar Commands: [uptime] asadmin extension directory: /work/gf-3.1.2/glassfish3/glassfish/lib/asadm ------- RAW RESPONSE --------- Signature-Version: 1.0 message: Up 7 mins 10 secs milliseconds_value: 430194 keys: milliseconds milliseconds_name: milliseconds use-main-children-attribute: false exit-code: SUCCESS ------- RAW RESPONSE ---------Tip #11: Using Password Aliases * Some resources require a password to access (e.g. DB, JMS, etc.).* The resource connector is defined in the domain.xml.Example:Suppose the DB resource you wish to access requires an entry like this in the domain.xml: <property name="password" value="secretp@ssword"/>But company policies do not allow you to store the password in the clear.* Use password aliases to avoid storing the password in the domain.xml* Create a password alias: % asadmin create-password-alias DB_pw_alias Enter the alias password> Enter the alias password again> Command create-password-alias executed successfully.* The password is stored in domain's encrypted keystore.* Now update the password value in the domain.xml: <property name="password" value="${ALIAS=DB_pw_alias}"/>Tip #21: How to Start GlassFish as a Service * Configuring a server to automatically start at boot can be tedious.* Each platform does it differently.* The create-service command makes this easy. Windows: creates a Windows service Linux: /etc/init.d script Solaris: Service Management Facility (SMF) service * Must execute create-service with admin privileges.* Can be used for the DAS or instances* Try it first with the --dry-run option.* There is a (unsupported) _delete-serverExample: # asadmin create-service domain1 The Service was created successfully. Here are the details: Name of the service:application/GlassFish/domain1 Type of the service:Domain Configuration location of the service:/work/gf-3.1.2.2/glassfish3/glassfish/domains Manifest file location on the system:/var/svc/manifest/application/GlassFish/domain1_work_gf-3.1.2.2_glassfish3_glassfish_domains/Domain-service-smf.xml. You have created the service but you need to start it yourself. Here are the most typical Solaris commands of interest: * /usr/bin/svcs -a | grep domain1 // status * /usr/sbin/svcadm enable domain1 // start * /usr/sbin/svcadm disable domain1 // stop * /usr/sbin/svccfg delete domain1 // uninstallTip #34: Posting a Command via REST* Use wget/curl to execute commands on the DAS.Example: Deploying an application % curl -s -S \ -H 'Accept: application/json' -X POST \ -H 'X-Requested-By: anyvalue' \ -F id=@/path/to/application.war \ -F force=true http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application* Use @ before a file name to tell curl to send the file's contents.* The force option tells GlassFish to force the deployment in case the application is already deployed.* Use wget/curl to execute commands on the DAS.Example: Deploying an application % curl -s -S \ -H 'Accept: application/json' -X POST \ -H 'X-Requested-By: anyvalue' \ -F id=@/path/to/application.war \ -F force=true http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application* Use @ before a file name to tell curl to send the file's contents.* The force option tells GlassFish to force the deployment in case the application is already deployed.Tip #46: Upgrading to a Newer Version * Upgrade applications and configuration from an earlier version* Upgrade Tool: Side-by-side upgrade– GUI: asupgrade– CLI: asupgrade --c– What happens ?* Copies older source domain -> target domain directory* asadmin start-domain --upgrade* Update Tool and pkg: In-place upgrade– GUI: updatetool, install all Available Updates– CLI: pkg image-update– Upgrade the domain* asadmin start-domain --upgradeTip #50: How to reach us?* GlassFish Forum: http://www.java.net/forums/glassfish/glassfish* [email protected]* @glassfish* facebook.com/glassfish* youtube.com/GlassFishVideos* blogs.oracle.com/theaquariumArun Gupta acknowledged that their method of presentation was experimental and actively solicited feedback about the session. The best way to reach them is on the GlassFish user forum.In addition, check out Gupta’s new book Java EE 6 Pocket Guide.

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Notes on implementing Visual Studio 2010 Navigate To

- by cyberycon

One of the many neat functions added to Visual Studio in VS 2010 was the Navigate To feature. You can find it by clicking Edit, Navigate To, or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl, (yes, that's control plus the comma key). This pops up the Navigate To dialog that looks like this: As you type, Navigate To starts searching through a number of different search providers for your term. The entries in the list change as you type, with most providers doing some kind of fuzzy or at least substring matching. If you have C#, C++ or Visual Basic projects in your solution, all symbols defined in those projects are searched. There's also a file search provider, which displays all matching filenames from projects in the current solution as well. And, if you have a Visual Studio package of your own, you can implement a provider too. Micro Focus (where I work) provide the Visual COBOL language inside Visual Studio (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ef9bc810-c133-4581-9429-b01420a9ea40 ), and we wanted to provide this functionality too. This post provides some notes on the things I discovered mainly through trial and error, but also with some kind help from devs inside Microsoft. The expectation of Navigate To is that it searches across the whole solution, not just the current project. So in our case, we wanted to search for all COBOL symbols inside all of our Visual COBOL projects inside the solution. So first of all, here's the Microsoft documentation on Navigate To: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee844862.aspx . It's the reference information on the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.NavigateTo.Interfaces Namespace, and it lists all the interfaces you will need to implement to create your own Navigate To provider. Navigate To uses Visual Studio's latest mechanism for integrating external functionality and services, Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). MEF components don't require any registration with COM or any other registry entries to be found by Visual Studio. Visual Studio looks in several well-known locations for manifest files (extension.vsixmanifest). It then uses reflection to scan for MEF attributes on classes in the assembly to determine which functionality the assembly provides. MEF itself is actually part of the .NET framework, and you can learn more about it here: http://mef.codeplex.com/. To get started with Visual Studio and MEF you could do worse than look at some of the editor examples on the VSX page http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vsx . I've also written a small application to help with switching between development and production MEF assemblies, which you can find on Codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/MEF_Switch.aspx. The Navigate To interfaces Back to Navigate To, and summarizing the MSDN reference documentation, you need to implement the following interfaces: INavigateToItemProviderFactoryThis is Visual Studio's entry point to your Navigate To implementation, and you must decorate your implementation with the following MEF export attribute: [Export(typeof(INavigateToItemProviderFactory))] INavigateToItemProvider Your INavigateToItemProviderFactory needs to return your implementation of INavigateToItemProvider. This class implements StartSearch() and StopSearch(). StartSearch() is the guts of your provider, and we'll come back to it in a minute. This object also needs to implement IDisposeable(). INavigateToItemDisplayFactory Your INavigateToItemProvider hands back NavigateToItems to the NavigateTo framework. But to give you good control over what appears in the NavigateTo dialog box, these items will be handed back to your INavigateToItemDisplayFactory, which must create objects implementing INavigateToItemDisplay INavigateToItemDisplay Each of these objects represents one result in the Navigate To dialog box. As well as providing the description and name of the item, this object also has a NavigateTo() method that should be capable of displaying the item in an editor when invoked. Carrying out the search The lifecycle of your INavigateToItemProvider is the same as that of the Navigate To dialog. This dialog is modal, which makes your implementation a little easier because you know that the user can't be changing things in editors and the IDE while this dialog is up. But the Navigate To dialog DOES NOT run on the main UI thread of the IDE – so you need to be aware of that if you want to interact with editors or other parts of the IDE UI. When the user invokes the Navigate To dialog, your INavigateToItemProvider gets sent a TryCreateNavigateToItemProvider() message. Instantiate your INavigateToItemProvider and hand this back. The sequence diagram below shows what happens next. Your INavigateToItemProvider will get called with StartSearch(), and passed an INavigateToCallback. StartSearch() is an asynchronous request – you must return from this method as soon as possible, and conduct your search on a separate thread. For each match to the search term, instantiate a NavigateToItem object and send it to INavigateToCallback.AddItem(). But as the user types in the Search Terms field, NavigateTo will invoke your StartSearch() method repeatedly with the changing search term. When you receive the next StartSearch() message, you have to abandon your current search, and start a new one. You can't rely on receiving a StopSearch() message every time. Finally, when the Navigate To dialog box is closed by the user, you will get a Dispose() message – that's your cue to abandon any uncompleted searches, and dispose any resources you might be using as part of your search. While you conduct your search invoke INavigateToCallback.ReportProgress() occasionally to provide feedback about how close you are to completing the search. There does not appear to be any particular requirement to how often you invoke ReportProgress(), and you report your progress as the ratio of two integers. In my implementation I report progress in terms of the number of symbols I've searched over the total number of symbols in my dictionary, and send a progress report every 16 symbols. Displaying the Results The Navigate to framework invokes INavigateToItemDisplayProvider.CreateItemDisplay() once for each result you passed to the INavigateToCallback. CreateItemDisplay() is passed the NavigateToItem you handed to the callback, and must return an INavigateToItemDisplay object. NavigateToItem is a sealed class which has a few properties, including the name of the symbol. It also has a Tag property, of type object. This enables you to stash away all the information you will need to create your INavigateToItemDisplay, which must implement an INavigateTo() method to display a symbol in an editor IDE when the user double-clicks an entry in the Navigate To dialog box. Since the tag is of type object, it is up to you, the implementor, to decide what kind of object you store in here, and how it enables the retrieval of other information which is not included in the NavigateToItem properties. Some of the INavigateToItemDisplay properties are self-explanatory, but a couple of them are less obvious: Additional informationThe string you return here is displayed inside brackets on the same line as the Name property. In English locales, Visual Studio includes the preposition "of". If you look at the first line in the Navigate To screenshot at the top of this article, Book_WebRole.Default is the additional information for textBookAuthor, and is the namespace qualified type name the symbol appears in. For procedural COBOL code we display the Program Id as the additional information DescriptionItemsYou can use this property to return any textual description you want about the item currently selected. You return a collection of DescriptionItem objects, each of which has a category and description collection of DescriptionRun objects. A DescriptionRun enables you to specify some text, and optional formatting, so you have some control over the appearance of the displayed text. The DescriptionItems property is displayed at the bottom of the Navigate To dialog box, with the Categories on the left and the Descriptions on the right. The Visual COBOL implementation uses it to display more information about the location of an item, making it easier for the user to know disambiguate duplicate names (something there can be a lot of in large COBOL applications). Summary I hope this article is useful for anyone implementing Navigate To. It is a fantastic navigation feature that Microsoft have added to Visual Studio, but at the moment there still don't seem to be any examples on how to implement it, and the reference information on MSDN is a little brief for anyone attempting an implementation.

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Solving the context menu problem with drag and drop in trees

- by Frank Nimphius

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-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The following drag-and-drop problem has been reported on OTN: An ADF Faces tree component is configured with a af:collectionDropTarget tag to handle drop events. The same tree component also has a context menu defined that is shown when users select the tree with the right mouse button. The problem now was - and I could reproduce this - that the context menu stopped working after the first time the tree handled a drop event. The drag and drop use case is to associate employees from a table to a department in the tree using drag and drop. The drop handler code in the managed bean looked up the tree node that received the drop event to determine the department ID to assign to the employee. For this code similar to the one shown below was used List dropRowKey = (List) dropEvent.getDropSite(); //if no dropsite then drop area was not a data area if(dropRowKey == null){ return DnDAction.NONE; } tree.setRowKey(dropRowKey); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding dropNode = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding) tree.getRowData(); 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-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 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-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} So what happens in this code? The drop event contains the dropSite reference, which is the row key of the tree node that received the drop event. The code then sets the key to the tree in a call to getRowDate() returns the node information for the drop target (the department). This however causes the tree state to go out of synch with its model (ADF tree binding), which is known to cause issues. In this use case the issue caused by this is that the context menu no longer shows up. To fix the problem, the code needs to be changes to read the current row key from the key, then perform the drop operation and at the end set the origin (or model) row key back //memorize current row key Object currentRowKey = tree.getRowKey(); List dropRowKey = (List) dropEvent.getDropSite(); //if no dropsite then drop area was not a data area if(dropRowKey == null){ return DnDAction.NONE; } tree.setRowKey(dropRowKey); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding dropNode = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding) tree.getRowData(); ... do your stuff here .... //set current row key back tree.setRowKey(currentRowKey); AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addPartialTarget(tree); Node the code line that sets the row key back to its original value.

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Application Composer: Exposing Your Customizations in BI Analytics and Reporting

- by Richard Bingham

Introduction This article explains in simple terms how to ensure the customizations and extensions you have made to your Fusion Applications are available for use in reporting and analytics. It also includes four embedded demo videos from our YouTube channel (if they don't appear check the browser address bar for a blocking shield icon). If you are new to Business Intelligence consider first reviewing our getting started article, and you can read more about the topic of custom subject areas in the documentation book Extending Sales. There are essentially four sections to this post. First we look at how custom fields added to standard objects are made available for reporting. Secondly we look at creating custom subject areas on the standard objects. Next we consider reporting on custom objects, starting with simple standalone objects, then child custom objects, and finally custom objects with relationships. Finally this article reviews how flexfields are exposed for reporting. Whilst this article applies to both Cloud/SaaS and on-premises deployments, if you are an on-premises developer then you can also use the BI Administration Tool to customize your BI metadata repository (the RPD) and create new subject areas. Whilst this is not covered here you can read more in Chapter 8 of the Extensibility Guide for Developers. Custom Fields on Standard Objects If you add a custom field to your standard object then it's likely you'll want to include it in your reports. This is very simple, since all new fields are instantly available in the "[objectName] Extension" folder in existing subject areas. The following two minute video demonstrates this. Custom Subject Areas for Standard Objects You can create your own subject areas for use in analytics and reporting via Application Composer. An example use-case could be to simplify the seeded subject areas, since they sometimes contain complex data fields and internal values that could confuse business users. One thing to note is that you cannot create subject areas in a sandbox, as it is not supported by BI, so once your custom object is tested and complete you'll need to publish the sandbox before moving forwards. The subject area creation processes is essentially two-fold. Once the request is submitted the ADF artifacts are generated, then secondly the related metadata is sent to the BI presentation server API's to make the updates there. One thing to note is that this second step may take up to ten minutes to complete. Once finished the status of the custom subject area request should show as 'OK' and it is then ready for use. Within the creation processes wizard-like steps there are three concepts worth highlighting: Date Flattening - this feature permits the roll up of reports at various date levels, such as data by week, month, quarter, or year. You simply check the box to enable it for that date field. Measures - these are your own functions that you can build into the custom subject area. They are related to the field data type and include min-max for dates, and sum(), avg(), and count() for numeric fields. Implicit Facts - used to make the BI metadata join between your object fields and the calculated measure fields. The advice is to choose the most frequently used measure to ensure consistency. This video shows a simple example, where a simplified subject area is created for the customer 'Contact' standard object, picking just a few fields upon which users can then create reports. Custom Objects Custom subject areas support three types of custom objects. First is a simple standalone custom object and for which the same process mentioned above applies. The next is a custom child object created on a standard object parent, and finally a custom object that is related to a parent object - usually through a dynamic choice list. Whilst the steps in each of these last two are mostly the same, there are differences in the way you choose the objects and their fields. This is illustrated in the videos below.The first video shows the process for creating a custom subject area for a simple standalone custom object. This second video demonstrates how to create custom subject areas for custom objects that are of parent:child type, as well as those those with dynamic-choice-list relationships. <span id="XinhaEditingPostion"></span> Flexfields Dynamic and Extensible Flexfields satisfy a similar requirement as custom fields (for Application Composer), with flexfields common across the Fusion Financials, Supply Chain and Procurement, and HCM applications. The basic principle is when you enable and configure your flexfields, in the edit page under each segment region (for both global and context segments) there is a BI Enabled check box. Once this is checked and you've completed your configuration, you run the Scheduled Process job named 'Import Oracle Fusion Data Extensions for Transactional Business Intelligence' to generate and migrate the related BI artifacts and data. This applies for dynamic, key, and extensible flexfields. Of course there is more to consider in terms of how you wish your flexfields to be implemented and exposed in your reports, and details are given in Chapter 4 of the Extending Applications guide.

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Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain – Part 3

- by sxkumar

I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation such as cloud will increase agility and efficiency of an organization if process re-engineering is part of the plan. I have also stressed on the key enterprise requirements such as “broad and deep solutions, “running your mission critical applications” and “automated and integrated set of capabilities”. Let me walk you through some key cloud attributes such as “elasticity” and “self-service” and what they mean for an enterprise class cloud. I will also talk about how we at Oracle have taken a very enterprise centric view to developing cloud solutions and how our products have been specifically engineered to address enterprise cloud needs. Cloud Elasticity and Enterprise Applications Requirements Easy and quick scalability for a short-period of time is the signature of cloud based solutions. It is this elasticity that allows you to dynamically redistribute your resources according to business priorities, helps increase your overall resource utilization, and reduces operational costs by allowing you to get the most out of your existing investment. Most public clouds are offering a instant provisioning mechanism of compute power (CPU, RAM, Disk), customer pay for the instance-hours(and bandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peak times and removing them when they are no longer needed. This type of “just-in-time” serving of compute resources is well known for mid-tiers “state less” servers such as web application servers and web servers that just need another machine to start and run on it but what does it really mean for an enterprise application and its underlying data? Most enterprise applications are not as quite as “state less” and justifiably so. As such, how do you take advantage of cloud elasticity and make it relevant for your enterprise apps? This is where Cloud meets Grid Computing. At Oracle, we have invested enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating enterprise grid solutions. All our technology products offer built-in elasticity via clustering and dynamic scaling. With products like Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, WebLogic Clustering, and Coherence In-Memory Grid, we allow all your enterprise applications to benefit from Cloud elasticity –both vertically and horizontally - without requiring any application changes. A number of technology vendors take a rather simplistic route of starting up additional or removing unneeded VM as the "Cloud Scale-Out" solution. While this may work for stateless mid-tier servers where load balancers can handle the addition and remove of instances transparently but following a similar approach for the database tier - often called as "database sharding" - requires significant application modification and typically does not work with off the shelf packaged applications. Technologies like Oracle Database Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, etc. on the other hand bring the benefits of incremental scalability and on-demand elasticity to ANY application by providing a simplified abstraction layers where the application does not need deal with data spread over multiple database instances. Rather they just talk to a single database and the database software takes care of aggregating resources across multiple hardware components. It is the technologies like these that truly make a cloud solution relevant for enterprises. For customers who are looking for a next generation hardware consolidation platform, our engineered systems (e.g. Exadata, Exalogic) not only provide incredible amount of performance and capacity, they also reduce the data center complexity and simplify operations. Assemble, Deploy and Manage Enterprise Applications for Cloud Products like Oracle Virtual assembly builder (OVAB) resolve the complex problem of bringing the cloud speed to complex multi-tier applications. With assemblies, you can not only provision all components of a multi-tier application and wire them together by push of a button, other aspects of application lifecycle, such as real-time application testing, scale-up/scale-down, performance and availability monitoring, etc., are also automated using Oracle Enterprise Manager. An essential criteria for an enterprise cloud to succeed is the ability to ensure business service levels especially when business users have either full visibility on the usage cost with a “show back” or a “charge back”. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, we have created the most comprehensive cloud management solution in the industry that is capable of managing business service levels “applications-to-disk” in a enterprise private cloud – all from a single console. It is the only cloud management platform in the industry that allows you to deliver infrastructure, platform and application cloud services out of the box. Moreover, it offers integrated and complete lifecycle management of the cloud - including planning and set up, service delivery, operations management, metering and chargeback, etc . Sounds unbelievable? Well, just watch this space for more details on how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is the nerve center of Oracle Cloud! Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry. And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies. Summary But the intent of this blog post isn't to dwell on how great our solutions are (these are just some examples to illustrate how we at Oracle have approached this problem space). Rather it is to help you ask the right questions before you embark on your cloud journey. So to summarize, here are the key takeaways. It is critical that you are clear on why you are building the cloud. Successful organizations keep business benefits as the first and foremost cloud objective. On the other hand, those who approach this purely as a technology project are more likely to fail. Think about where you want to be in 3-5 years before you get started. Your long terms objectives should determine what your first step ought to be. As obvious as it may seem, more people than not make the first move without knowing where they are headed. Don’t make the mistake of equating cloud to virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Spinning a VM on-demand will give some short term relief to your IT staff but is unlikely to solve your larger business problems. As such, even if IaaS is your first step towards a more comprehensive cloud, plan the roadmap around those higher level services before you begin. And ask your vendors on how they are going to be your partners in this journey. Capabilities like self-service access and chargeback/showback are absolutely critical if you really expect your cloud to be transformational. Your business won't see the full benefits of the cloud until it empowers them with same kind of control and transparency that they are used to while using a public cloud service. Evaluate the benefits of integration, as opposed to blindly following the best-of-breed strategy. Integration is a huge challenge and more so in a cloud environment. There are enormous costs associated with stitching a solution out of disparate components and even more in maintaining it. Hope you found these ideas helpful. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.

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Windows Phone 8 Announcement

- by Tim Murphy

As if the Surface announcement on Monday wasn’t exciting enough, today Microsoft announce that Windows Phone 8 will be coming this fall. That itself is great news, but the features coming were like confetti flying in all different directions. Given this speed I couldn’t capture every feature they covered. A summary of what I did capture is listed below starting with their eight main features. Common Core The first thing that they covered is that Windows Phone 8 will share a core OS with Windows 8. It will also run natively on multiple cores. They mentioned that they have run it on up to 64 cores to this point. The phones as you might expect will at least start as dual core. If you remember there were metrics saying that Windows Phone 7 performed operations faster on a single core than other platforms did with dual cores. The metrics they showed here indicate that Windows Phone 8 runs faster on comparable dual core hardware than other platforms. New Screen Resolutions Screen resolution has never been an issue for me, but it has been a criticism of Windows Phone 7 in the media. Windows Phone 8 will supports three screen resolutions: WVGA 800 x 480, WXGA 1280 x 768, and 720 1280x720. Hopefully this makes pixel counters a little happier. MicroSD Support This was one of my pet peeves when I got my Samsung Focus. With Windows Phone 8 the operating system will support adding MicroSD cards after initial setup. Of course this is dependent on the hardware company on implementing it, but I think we have seen that even feature phone manufacturers have not had a problem supporting this in the past. NFC NFC has been an anticipated feature for some time. What Microsoft showed today included the fact that they didn’t just want it to be for the phone. There is cross platform NFC functionality between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. The demos , while possibly a bit fanciful, showed would could be achieved even in a retail environment. We are getting closer and closer to a Minority Report world with these technologies. Wallet Windows Phone 8 isn’t the first platform to have a wallet concept. What they have done to differentiate themselves is to make it sot that it is not dependent on a SIM type chip like other platforms. They have also expanded the concept beyond just banks to other types of credits such as airline miles. Nokia Mapping People have been envious of the Lumia phones having the Nokia mapping software. Now all Windows Phone 8 devices will use NavTeq data and will have the capability to run in an offline fashion. This is a major step forward from the Bing “touch for the next turn” maps. IT Administration The lack of features for enterprise administration and deployment was a complaint even before the Windows Phone 7 was released. With the Windows Phone 8 release such features as Bitlocker and Secure boot will be baked into the OS. We will also have the ability to privately sign and distribute applications. Changing Start Screen Joe Belfiore made a big deal about this aspect of the new release. Users will have more color themes available to them and the live tiles will be highly customizable. You will have the ability to resize and organize the tiles in a more dynamic way. This allows for less important tiles or ones with less information to be made smaller. And There Is More So what other tidbits came out of the presentation? Later this summer the API for WP8 will be available. There will be developer events coming to a city near you. Another announcement of interest to developers is the ability to write applications at a native code level. This is a boon for game developers and those who need highly efficient applications. As a topper on the cake there was mention of in app payment. On the consumer side we also found out that all updates will be available over the air. Along with this came the fact that Microsoft will support all devices with updates for at least 18 month and you will be able to subscribe for early updates. Update coming for Windows Phone 7.5 customers to WP7.8. The main enhancement will be the new live tile features. The big bonus is that the update will bypass the carriers. I would assume though that you will be brought up to date with all previous patches that your carrier may not have released. There is so much more, but that is enough for one post. Needless to say, EXCITING! del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 8,WP8,Windows Phone 7,WP7,Announcements,Microsoft

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Context is Everything

- by Angus Graham

Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Context is Everything How many times have you have you asked a question only to hear an answer like “Well, it depends. What exactly are you trying to do?”. There are times that raw information can’t tell us what we need to know without putting it in a larger context. Let's take a real world example. If I'm a maintenance planner trying to figure out which assets should be replaced during my next maintenance window, I'm going to go to my Asset Management System. I can get it to spit out a list of assets that have failed several times over the last year. But what are these assets connected to? Is there any safety consequences to shutting off this pipeline to do the work? Is some other work that's planned going to conflict with replacing this asset? Several of these questions can't be answered by simply spitting out a list of asset IDs. The maintenance planner will have to reference a diagram of the plant to answer several of these questions. This is precisely the idea behind Augmented Business Visualization. An Augmented Business Visualization (ABV) solution is one where your structured data (enterprise application data) and your unstructured data (documents, contracts, floor plans, designs, etc.) come together to allow you to make better decisions. Essentially we're showing your business data into its context. AutoVue allows you to create ABV solutions by integrating your enterprise application with AutoVue’s hotspot framework. Hotspots can be defined for your document. Users can click these hotspots to trigger actions in your enterprise app. Similarly, the enterprise app can highlight the hotspots in your document based on its business data, creating a visual dashboard of your business data in the context of your document. ABV is not new. We introduced the hotspot framework in AutoVue 20.1 with text hotspots. Any text in a PDF or 2D CAD drawing could be turned into a hotspot. In 20.2 we have enhanced this to include 2 new types of hotspots: 3D and regional hotspots. 3D hotspots allow you to turn 3D parts into hotspots. Hotspots can be defined based on the attributes of the part, so you can create hotspots based on part numbers, material, date of delivery, etc. Regional hotspots allow an administrator to define rectangular regions on any PDF, image, or 2D CAD drawing. This is perfect for cases where the document you’re using either doesn’t have text in it (a JPG or TIFF for example) or if you want to define hotspots that don’t correspond to the text in the document. There are lots of possible uses for AutoVue hotspots. A great demonstration of how our hotspot capabilities can help add context to enterprise data in the Energy sector can be found in the following AutoVue movies: Maintenance Planning in the Energy Sector - Watch it Now Capital Construction Project Management in the Energy Sector - Watch it Now Commissioning and Handover Process for the Energy Sector - Watch it Now

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SharePoint logging to a list

- by Norgean

I recently worked in an environment with several servers. Locating the correct SharePoint log file for error messages, or development trace calls, is cumbersome. And once the solution hit the cloud, it got even worse, as we had no access to the log files at all. Obviously we are not the only ones with this problem, and the current trend seems to be to log to a list. This had become an off-hour project, so rather than do the sensible thing and find a ready-made solution, I decided to do it the hard way. So! Fire up Visual Studio, create yet another empty SharePoint solution, and start to think of some requirements. Easy on/offI want to be able to turn list-logging on and off.Easy loggingFor me, this means being able to use string.Format.Easy filteringLet's have the possibility to add some filtering columns; category and severity, where severity can be "verbose", "warning" or "error". Easy on/off Well, that's easy. Create a new web feature. Add an event receiver, and create the list on activation of the feature. Tear the list down on de-activation. I chose not to create a new content type; I did not feel that it would give me anything extra. I based the list on the generic list - I think a better choice would have been the announcement type. Approximately: public void CreateLog(SPWeb web) { var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListName); if (list == null) { var listGuid = web.Lists.Add(LogListName, "Logging for the masses", SPListTemplateType.GenericList); list = web.Lists[listGuid]; list.Title = LogListTitle; list.Update(); list.Fields.Add(Category, SPFieldType.Text, false); var stringColl = new StringCollection(); stringColl.AddRange(new[]{Error, Information, Verbose}); list.Fields.Add(Severity, SPFieldType.Choice, true, false, stringColl); ModifyDefaultView(list); } }Should be self explanatory, but: only create the list if it does not already exist (d'oh). Best practice: create it with a Url-friendly name, and, if necessary, give it a better title. ...because otherwise you'll have to look for a list with a name like "Simple_x0020_Log". I've added a couple of fields; a field for category, and a 'severity'. Both to make it easier to find relevant log messages. Notice that I don't have to call list.Update() after adding the fields - this would cause a nasty error (something along the lines of "List locked by another user"). The function for deleting the log is exactly as onerous as you'd expect: public void DeleteLog(SPWeb web) { var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle); if (list != null) { list.Delete(); } } So! "All" that remains is to log. Also known as adding items to a list. Lots of different methods with different signatures end up calling the same function. For example, LogVerbose(web, message) calls LogVerbose(web, null, message) which again calls another method which calls: private static void Log(SPWeb web, string category, string severity, string textformat, params object[] texts) { if (web != null) { var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle); if (list != null) { var item = list.AddItem(); // NOTE! NOT list.Items.Add… just don't, mkay? var text = string.Format(textformat, texts); if (text.Length > 255) // because the title field only holds so many chars. Sigh. text = text.Substring(0, 254); item[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = text; item[Degree] = severity; item[Category] = category; item.Update(); } } // omitted: Also log to SharePoint log. } By adding a params parameter I can call it as if I was doing a Console.WriteLine: LogVerbose(web, "demo", "{0} {1}{2}", "hello", "world", '!'); Ok, that was a silly example, a better one might be: LogError(web, LogCategory, "Exception caught when updating {0}. exception: {1}", listItem.Title, ex); For performance reasons I use list.AddItem rather than list.Items.Add. For completeness' sake, let us include the "ModifyDefaultView" function that I deliberately skipped earlier. private void ModifyDefaultView(SPList list) { // Add fields to default view var defaultView = list.DefaultView; var exists = defaultView.ViewFields.Cast<string>().Any(field => String.CompareOrdinal(field, Severity) == 0); if (!exists) { var field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Severity); if (field != null) defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field); field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Category); if (field != null) defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field); defaultView.Update(); var sortDoc = new XmlDocument(); sortDoc.LoadXml(string.Format("<Query>{0}</Query>", defaultView.Query)); var orderBy = (XmlElement) sortDoc.SelectSingleNode("//OrderBy"); if (orderBy != null && sortDoc.DocumentElement != null) sortDoc.DocumentElement.RemoveChild(orderBy); orderBy = sortDoc.CreateElement("OrderBy"); sortDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(orderBy); field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Modified]; var fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef"); fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName); fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE"); orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef); fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef"); field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.ID]; fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName); fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE"); orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef); defaultView.Query = sortDoc.DocumentElement.InnerXml; //defaultView.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='FALSE' /><FieldRef Name='ID' Ascending='FALSE' /></OrderBy>"; defaultView.Update(); } } First two lines are easy - see if the default view includes the "Severity" column. If it does - quit; our job here is done.Adding "severity" and "Category" to the view is not exactly rocket science. But then? Then we build the sort order query. Through XML. The lines are numerous, but boring. All to achieve the CAML query which is commented out. The major benefit of using the dom to build XML, is that you may get compile time errors for spelling mistakes. I say 'may', because although the compiler will not let you forget to close a tag, it will cheerfully let you spell "Name" as "Naem". Whichever you prefer, at the end of the day the view will sort by modified date and ID, both descending. I added the ID as there may be several items with the same time stamp. So! Simple logging to a list, with sensible a view, and with normal functionality for creating your own filterings. I should probably have added some more views in code, ready filtered for "only errors", "errors and warnings" etc. And it would be nice to block verbose logging completely, but I'm not happy with the alternatives. (yetanotherfeature or an admin page seem like overkill - perhaps just removing it as one of the choices, and not log if it isn't there?) Before you comment - yes, try-catches have been removed for clarity. There is nothing worse than having a logging function that breaks your site!

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UK OUG Conference Highlights and Insights

- by Richard Bingham

As per my preemptive post, this was the first time the annual conference organized by the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) was split into two events, one for Oracle Applications and another in December for Oracle Technology. Apps13, as it was branded, was hailed as a success, with over 1000 registered attendees and three days of sessions, exhibition, round-tables and many other types of content. As this poster on their stand illustrates, the UKOUG is a strong community with popular participants from both big and small Oracle partners and customers. The venue was a more intimate setting than previous years also, allowing everyone to casually bump into those they hoped to. It gave a real feeling of an Apps Community. The main themes over the days where CRM and Customer Experience, HCM, and FIN/SCM. This allowed people to attend just one focused day if they wanted. In addition the Apps Transformation stream ran across all three days, offering insights, advice, and details on the newer product solutions like Fusion Applications. Here are some of the key take-aways I got from the conference, specific to my role in Fusion Applications Developer Relations: User Experience continues to be a significant reason for adopting some of the newer application products available, with immediately obvious gains in user productivity and satisfaction reported by customers. Also this doesn't stop with the baked-in UX either, with their Design Patterns proving popular and indeed currently being extended to including things like extending on ADF mobile and customizing the Simplified UI. More on this to come from us soon. The executive sessions emphasized the "it's a journey" phrase, illustrating that modern business applications are powered by technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data and these can be harnessed to help propel your organization forward. Indeed the emphasis is away from the traditional vendor prescribed linear applications road map, and towards plotting a course based on business priorities supported by a broad range of integrated solutions. To help with this several conference sessions demoed the new "Applications Navigator" tool, developed in partnership with OUG members, which offers a visual framework to help organizations plan their Oracle Applications investments around business and technology imperatives. Initial reaction was positive, especially as customers do not need to decipher Oracle's huge product catalog and embeds the best blend of proven and integrated applications solutions. We'll share more on this when it is generally available. Several sessions focused around explanations and interpretation of Oracle OpenWorld 2013, helping highlight the key Oracle Applications messages and directions. With a relative small percentage of conference attendees also at OpenWorld (from a show of hands) this was a popular way to distill the information available down into specific items of interest for the community. Please note the original OpenWorld 2013 content is still available for download but will not remain available forever (via the Oracle website OpenWorld Content Catalog > pick a session > see the PDF download). With the release of E-Business Suite 12.2 the move to develop and deploy on the Fusion Middleware stack becomes a reality for many Oracle Applications customers. This coupled with recent E-Business Suite features such as the Integrated SOA Gateway and the E-Business Suite SDK for Java, illustrates how the gap between the technologies and techniques involved in extending E-Business Suite and Fusion Applications is quickly narrowing. We'll see this merging continue to evolve going forwards. Getting started with Oracle Cloud Applications is actually easier than many customers expected, with a broad selection of both large and medium sized organizations explaining how they added new features to their existing Oracle Applications portfolios. New functionality available from Fusion HCM and CX are popular extensions that do not have to disrupt those core business services. Coexistence is the buzzword here, and the available integration is also simpler than many expected, commonly involving an initial setup data load, then regularly incremental synchronizations, often without a need for real-time constant communication between systems. With much of this pre-built already the implementation process is also quite rapid. With most people dressed in suits, we wanted to get the conversations going without the traditional english reserve, so we decided to make ourselves a bit more obvious, as the photo below shows. This seemed to be quite successful and helped those interested identify and approach us. Keep a look out for similar again. In fact if you're in the UK there is an "Apps Transformation Day" planned by the UKOUG for the 19th March 2014, with more details to follow. Again something we'll be sure to participate in. I am hoping to attend the next half of the UKOUG annual conference, Tech13, that focuses more on Oracle technology and where there is more likely to be larger attendance of those interested in the lower-level aspects of applications customization and development. If you're going, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

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Indexed Drawing in OpenGL not working

- by user2050846

I am trying to render 2 types of primitives- - points ( a Point Cloud ) - triangles ( a Mesh ) I am rendering points simply without any index arrays and they are getting rendered fine. To render the meshes I am using indexed drawing with the face list array having the indices of the vertices to be rendered as Triangles. Vertices and their corresponding vertex colors are stored in their corresponding buffers. But the indexed drawing command do not draw anything. The code is as follows- Main Display Function: void display() { simple->enable(); simple->bindUniform("MV",modelview); simple->bindUniform("P", projection); // rendering Point Cloud glBindVertexArray(vao); // Vertex buffer Point Cloud glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,vertexbuffer); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); // Color Buffer point Cloud glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,colorbuffer); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(1,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); // Render Colored Point Cloud //glDrawArrays(GL_POINTS,0,model->vertexCount); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); // ---------------- END---------------------// //// Floor Rendering glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,fl); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); glVertexAttribPointer(1,4,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,(void *)48); glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS,0,4); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); // -----------------END---------------------// //Rendering the Meshes //////////// PART OF CODE THAT IS NOT DRAWING ANYTHING //////////////////// glBindVertexArray(vid); for(int i=0;i<NUM_MESHES;i++) { glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,mVertex[i]); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); glVertexAttribPointer(1,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,(void *)(meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3))); //glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES,0,meshes[i]->vertexCount); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,mFace[i]); //cout<<gluErrorString(glGetError()); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES,meshes[i]->faceCount*3,GL_FLOAT,(void *)0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); } glUseProgram(0); glutSwapBuffers(); glutPostRedisplay(); } Point Cloud Buffer Allocation Initialization: void initGLPointCloud() { glGenBuffers(1,&vertexbuffer); glGenBuffers(1,&colorbuffer); glGenBuffers(1,&fl); //Populates the position buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,vertexbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, model->vertexCount * sizeof (glm::vec3), &model->positions[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); //Populates the color buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, colorbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, model->vertexCount * sizeof (glm::vec3), &model->colors[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); model->FreeMemory(); // To free the not needed memory, as the data has been already // copied on graphic card, and wont be used again. glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); } Meshes Buffer Initialization: void initGLMeshes(int i) { glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,mVertex[i]); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3)*2,NULL,GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),&meshes[i]->positions[0]); glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),&meshes[i]->colors[0]); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,mFace[i]); glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->faceCount*sizeof(glm::vec3), &meshes[i]->faces[0],GL_STATIC_DRAW); meshes[i]->FreeMemory(); //glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); } Initialize the Rendering, load and create shader and calls the mesh and PCD initializers. void initRender() { simple= new GLSLShader("shaders/simple.vert","shaders/simple.frag"); //Point Cloud //Sets up VAO glGenVertexArrays(1, &vao); glBindVertexArray(vao); initGLPointCloud(); //floorData glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, fl); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(floorData), &floorData[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); glBindVertexArray(0); //Meshes for(int i=0;i<NUM_MESHES;i++) { if(i==0) // SET up the new vertex array state for indexed Drawing { glGenVertexArrays(1, &vid); glBindVertexArray(vid); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mVertex); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mColor); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mFace); } initGLMeshes(i); } glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } Any help would be much appreciated, I have been breaking my head on this problem since 3 days, and still it is unsolved.

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No More NCrunch For Me

- by Steve Wilkes

When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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The design of a generic data synchronizer, or, an [object] that does [actions] with the aid of [helpers]

- by acheong87

I'd like to create a generic data-source "synchronizer," where data-source "types" may include MySQL databases, Google Spreadsheets documents, CSV files, among others. I've been trying to figure out how to structure this in terms of classes and interfaces, keeping in mind (what I've read about) composition vs. inheritance and is-a vs. has-a, but each route I go down seems to violate some principle. For simplicity, assume that all data-sources have a header-row-plus-data-rows format. For example, assume that the first rows of Google Spreadsheets documents and CSV files will have column headers, a.k.a. "fields" (to parallel database fields). Also, eventually, I would like to implement this in PHP, but avoiding language-specific discussion would probably be more productive. Here's an overview of what I've tried. Part 1/4: ISyncable class CMySQL implements ISyncable GetFields() // sql query, pdo statement, whatever AddFields() RemFields() ... _dbh class CGoogleSpreadsheets implements ISyncable GetFields() // zend gdata api AddFields() RemFields() ... _spreadsheetKey _worksheetId class CCsvFile implements ISyncable GetFields() // read from buffer AddFields() RemFields() ... _buffer interface ISyncable GetFields() AddFields($field1, $field2, ...) RemFields($field1, $field2, ...) ... CanAddFields() // maybe the spreadsheet is locked for write, or CanRemFields() // maybe no permission to alter a database table ... AddRow() ModRow() RemRow() ... Open() Close() ... First Question: Does it make sense to use an interface, as above? Part 2/4: CSyncer Next, the thing that does the syncing. class CSyncer __construct(ISyncable $A, ISyncable $B) Push() // sync A to B Pull() // sync B to A Sync() // Push() and Pull() only differ in direction; factor. // Sync()'s job is to make sure that the fields on each side // match, to add fields where appropriate and possible, to // account for different column-orderings, etc., and of // course, to add and remove rows as necessary to sync. ... _A _B Second Question: Does it make sense to define such a class, or am I treading dangerously close to the "Kingdom of Nouns"? Part 3/4: CTranslator? ITranslator? Now, here's where I actually get lost, assuming the above is passable. Sometimes, two ISyncables speak different "dialects." For example, believe it or not, Google Spreadsheets (accessed through the Google Data API "list feed") returns column headers lower-cased and stripped of all spaces and symbols! That is, sys_TIMESTAMP is systimestamp, as far as my code can tell. (Yes, I am aware that the "cell feed" does not strip the name so; however cell-by-cell manipulation is too slow for what I'm doing.) One can imagine other hypothetical examples. Perhaps even the data itself can be in different "dialects." But let's take it as given for now, and not argue this if possible. Third Question: How would you implement "translation"? Note: Taking all this as an exercise, I'm more interested in the "idealized" design, rather than the practical one. (God knows that shipped sailed when I began this project.) Part 4/4: Further Thought Here's my train of thought to demonstrate I've thunk, albeit unfruitfully: First, I thought, primitively, "I'll just modify CMySQL::GetFields() to lower-case and strip field names so they're compatible with Google Spreadsheets." But of course, then my class should really be called, CMySQLForGoogleSpreadsheets, and that can't be right. So, the thing which translates must exist outside of an ISyncable implementor. And surely it can't be right to make each translation a method in CSyncer. If it exists outside of both ISyncable and CSyncer, then what is it? (Is it even an "it"?) Is it an abstract class, i.e. abstract CTranslator? Is it an interface, since a translator only does, not has, i.e. interface ITranslator? Does it even require instantiation? e.g. If it's an ITranslator, then should its translation methods be static? (I learned what "late static binding" meant, today.) And, dear God, whatever it is, how should a CSyncer use it? Does it "have" it? Is it, "it"? Who am I? ...am I, "I"? I've attempted to break up the question into sub-questions, but essentially my question is singular: How does one implement an object A that conceptually "links" (has) two objects b1 and b2 that share a common interface B, where certain pairs of b1 and b2 require a helper, e.g. a translator, to be handled by A? Something tells me that I've overcomplicated this design, or violated a principle much higher up. Thank you all very much for your time and any advice you can provide.

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Controlling the Sizing of the af:messages Dialog

- by Duncan Mills

Over the last day or so a small change in behaviour between 11.1.2.n releases of ADF and earlier versions has come to my attention. This has concerned the default sizing of the dialog that the framework automatically generates to handle the display of JSF messages being handled by the <af:messages> component. Unlike a normal popup, you don't have a physical <af:dialog> or <af:window> to set the sizing on in your page definition, so you're at the mercy of what the framework provides. In this case the framework now defines a fixed 250x250 pixel content area dialog for these messages, which can look a bit weird if the message is either very short, or very long. Unfortunately this is not something that you can control through the skin, instead you have to be a little more creative. Here's the solution I've come up with. Unfortunately, I've not found a supportable way to reset the dialog so as to say just size yourself based on your contents, it is actually possible to do this by tweaking the correct DOM objects, but I wanted to start with a mostly supportable solution that only uses the best practice of working through the ADF client side APIs. The Technique The basic approach I've taken is really very simple. The af:messages dialog is just a normal richDialog object, it just happens to be one that is pre-defined for you with a particular known name "msgDlg" (which hopefully won't change). Knowing this, you can call the accepted APIs to control the content width and height of that dialog, as our meerkat friends would say, "simples" 1 The JavaScript For this example I've defined three JavaScript functions. The first does all the hard work and is designed to be called from server side Java or from a page load event to set the default. The second is a utility function used by the first to validate the values you're about to use for height and width. The final function is one that can be called from the page load event to set an initial default sizing if that's all you need to do. Function resizeDefaultMessageDialog() /** * Function that actually resets the default message dialog sizing. * Note that the width and height supplied define the content area * So the actual physical dialog size will be larger to account for * the chrome containing the header / footer etc. * @param docId Faces component id of the document * @param contentWidth - new content width you need * @param contentHeight - new content height */ function resizeDefaultMessageDialog(docId, contentWidth, contentHeight) { // Warning this value may change from release to release var defMDName = "::msgDlg"; //Find the default messages dialog msgDialogComponent = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId(docId + defMDName); // In your version add a check here to ensure we've found the right object! // Check the new width is supplied and is a positive number, if so apply it. if (dimensionIsValid(contentWidth)){ msgDialogComponent.setContentWidth(contentWidth); } // Check the new height is supplied and is a positive number, if so apply it. if (dimensionIsValid(contentHeight)){ msgDialogComponent.setContentHeight(contentHeight); } } Function dimensionIsValid() /** * Simple function to check that sensible numeric values are * being proposed for a dimension * @param sampleDimension * @return booolean */ function dimensionIsValid(sampleDimension){ return (!isNaN(sampleDimension) && sampleDimension > 0); } Function initializeDefaultMessageDialogSize() /** * This function will re-define the default sizing applied by the framework * in 11.1.2.n versions * It is designed to be called with the document onLoad event */ function initializeDefaultMessageDialogSize(loadEvent){ //get the configuration information var documentId = loadEvent.getSource().getProperty('documentId'); var newWidth = loadEvent.getSource().getProperty('defaultMessageDialogContentWidth'); var newHeight = loadEvent.getSource().getProperty('defaultMessageDialogContentHeight'); resizeDefaultMessageDialog(documentId, newWidth, newHeight); } Wiring in the Functions As usual, the first thing we need to do when using JavaScript with ADF is to define an af:resource in the document metaContainer facet <af:document> .... <f:facet name="metaContainer"> <af:resource type="javascript" source="/resources/js/hackMessagedDialog.js"/> </f:facet> </af:document> This makes the script functions available to call. Next if you want to use the option of defining an initial default size for the dialog you use a combination of <af:clientListener> and <af:clientAttribute> tags like this. <af:document title="MyApp" id="doc1"> <af:clientListener method="initializeDefaultMessageDialogSize" type="load"/> <af:clientAttribute name="documentId" value="doc1"/> <af:clientAttribute name="defaultMessageDialogContentWidth" value="400"/> <af:clientAttribute name="defaultMessageDialogContentHeight" value="150"/> ... Just in Time Dialog Sizing So what happens if you have a variety of messages that you might add and in some cases you need a small dialog and an other cases a large one? Well in that case you can re-size these dialogs just before you submit the message. Here's some example Java code: FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); //reset the default dialog size for this message ExtendedRenderKitService service = Service.getRenderKitService(ctx, ExtendedRenderKitService.class); service.addScript(ctx, "resizeDefaultMessageDialog('doc1',100,50);"); FacesMessage msg = new FacesMessage("Short message"); msg.setSeverity(FacesMessage.SEVERITY_ERROR); ctx.addMessage(null, msg); So there you have it. This technique should, at least, allow you to control the dialog sizing just enough to stop really objectionable whitespace or scrollbars. 1 Don't worry if you don't get the reference, lest's just say my kids watch too many adverts.

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Key Windows Phone Development Concepts

- by Tim Murphy

As I am doing more development in and out of the enterprise arena for Windows Phone I decide I would study for the 70-599 test. I generally take certification tests as a way to force me to dig deeper into a technology. Between the development and studying I decided it would be good to put a post together of key development features in Windows Phone 7 environment. Contrary to popular belief the launch of Windows Phone 8 will not obsolete Windows Phone 7 development. With the launch of 7.8 coming shortly and people who will remain on 7.X for the foreseeable future there are still consumers needing these apps so don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. PhoneApplicationService This is a class that every Windows Phone developer needs to become familiar with. When it comes to application state this is your go to repository. It also contains events that help with management of your application’s lifecycle. You can access it like the following code sample. 1: PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["ValidUser"] = userResult; DeviceNetworkInformation This class allows you to determine the connectivity of the device and be notified when something changes with that connectivity. If you are making web service calls you will want to check here before firing off. I have found that this class doesn’t actually work very well for determining if you have internet access. You are better of using the following code where IsConnectedToInternet is an App level property. private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e){ // Validate user access if (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None) { IsConnectedToInternet = true; } else { IsConnectedToInternet = false; } NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged += new NetworkAddressChangedEventHandler(NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged);}void NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged(object sender, EventArgs e){ IsConnectedToInternet = (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None);} Push Notification Push notification allows your application to receive notifications in a way that reduces the application’s power needs. This MSDN article is a good place to get the basics of push notification, but you can see the essential concept in the diagram below. There are three types of push notification: toast, Tile and raw. The first two work regardless of the state of the application where as raw messages are discarded if your application is not running. Live Tiles Live tiles are one of the main differentiators of the Windows Phone platform. They allow users to find information at a glance from their start screen without navigating into individual apps. Knowing how to implement them can be a great boost to the attractiveness of your application. The simplest step-by-step explanation for creating live tiles is here. Local Database While your application really only has Isolated Storage as a data store there are some ways of giving you database functionality to develop against. There are a number of open source ORM style solutions. Probably the best and most native way I have found is to use LINQ to SQL. It does take a significant amount of setup, but the ease of use once it is configured is worth the cost. Rather than repeat the full concepts here I will point you to a post that I wrote previously. Tasks (Bing, Email) Leveraging built in features of the Windows Phone platform is an easy way to add functionality that would be expensive to develop on your own. The classes that you need to make yourself familiar with are BingMapsDirectionsTask and EmailComposeTask. This will allow your application to supply directions and give the user an email path to relay information to friends and associates. Event model Because of the ability for users to switch quickly to switch to other apps or the home screen is just one reason why knowing the Windows Phone event model is important. You need to be able to save data so that if a user gets a phone call they can come back to exactly where they were in your application. This means that you will need to handle such events as Launching, Activated, Deactivated and Closing at an application level. You will probably also want to get familiar with the OnNavigatedTo and OnNavigatedFrom events at the page level. These will give you an opportunity to save data as a user navigates through your app. Summary This is just a small portion of the concepts that you will use while building Windows Phone apps, but these are some of the most critical. With the launch of Windows Phone 8 this list will probably expand. Take the time to investigate these topics further and try them out in your apps. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 7,Windows Phone,WP7,Software Development,70-599

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How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painfull

- by Mr Happy

I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painfull. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genious since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use an DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an indepth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

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Access Control Service: Handling Errors

- by Your DisplayName here!

Another common problem with external authentication is how to deal with sign in errors. In active federation like WS-Trust there are well defined SOAP faults to communicate problem to a client. But with web applications, the error information is typically generated and displayed on the external sign in page. The relying party does not know about the error, nor can it help the user in any way. The Access Control Service allows to post sign in errors to a specified page. You setup this page in the relying party registration. That means that whenever an error occurs in ACS, the error information gets packaged up as a JSON string and posted to the page specified. This way you get structued error information back into you application so you can display a friendlier error message or log the error. I added error page support to my ACS2 sample, which can be downloaded here. How to turn the JSON error into CLR types The JSON schema is reasonably simple, the following class turns the JSON into an object: [DataContract] public class AcsErrorResponse { [DataMember(Name = "context", Order = 1)] public string Context { get; set; } [DataMember(Name = "httpReturnCode", Order = 2)] public string HttpReturnCode { get; set; } [DataMember(Name = "identityProvider", Order = 3)] public string IdentityProvider { get; set; } [DataMember(Name = "timeStamp", Order = 4)] public string TimeStamp { get; set; } [DataMember(Name = "traceId", Order = 5)] public string TraceId { get; set; } [DataMember(Name = "errors", Order = 6)] public List<AcsError> Errors { get; set; } public static AcsErrorResponse Read(string json) { var serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer( typeof(AcsErrorResponse)); var response = serializer.ReadObject( new MemoryStream(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json))) as AcsErrorResponse; if (response != null) { return response; } else { throw new ArgumentException("json"); } } } [DataContract] public class AcsError { [DataMember(Name = "errorCode", Order = 1)] public string Code { get; set; } [DataMember(Name = "errorMessage", Order = 2)] public string Message { get; set; } } Retrieving the error information You then need to provide a page that takes the POST and deserializes the information. My sample simply fills a view that shows all information. But that’s for diagnostic/sample purposes only. You shouldn’t show the real errors to your end users. public class SignInErrorController : Controller { [HttpPost] public ActionResult Index() { var errorDetails = Request.Form["ErrorDetails"]; var response = AcsErrorResponse.Read(errorDetails); return View("SignInError", response); } } Also keep in mind that the error page is an anonymous page and that you are taking external input. So all the usual input validation applies.

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Data Source Security Part 1

- by Steve Felts

I’ve written a couple of articles on how to store data source security credentials using the Oracle wallet. I plan to write a few articles on the various types of security available to WebLogic Server (WLS) data sources. There are more options than you might think! There have been several enhancements in this area in WLS 10.3.6. There are a couple of more enhancements planned for release WLS 12.1.2 that I will include here for completeness. This isn’t intended as a teaser. If you call your Oracle support person, you can get them now as minor patches to WLS 10.3.6. The current security documentation is scattered in a few places, has a few incorrect statements, and is missing a few topics. It also seems that the knowledge of how to apply some of these features isn’t written down. The goal of these articles is to talk about WLS data source security in a unified way and to introduce some approaches to using the available features. Introduction to WebLogic Data Source Security Options By default, you define a single database user and password for a data source. You can store it in the data source descriptor or make use of the Oracle wallet. This is a very simple and efficient approach to security. All of the connections in the connection pool are owned by this user and there is no special processing when a connection is given out. That is, it’s a homogeneous connection pool and any request can get any connection from a security perspective (there are other aspects like affinity). Regardless of the end user of the application, all connections in the pool use the same security credentials to access the DBMS. No additional information is needed when you get a connection because it’s all available from the data source descriptor (or wallet). java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(); Note: You can enter the password as a name-value pair in the Properties field (this not permitted for production environments) or you can enter it in the Password field of the data source descriptor. The value in the Password field overrides any password value defined in the Properties passed to the JDBC Driver when creating physical database connections. It is recommended that you use the Password attribute in place of the password property in the properties string because the Password value is encrypted in the configuration file (stored as the password-encrypted attribute in the jdbc-driver-params tag in the module file) and is hidden in the administration console. The Properties and Password fields are located on the administration console Data Source creation wizard or Data Source Configuration tab. The JDBC API can also be used to programmatically specify a database user name and password as in the following. java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(“user”, “password”); According to the JDBC specification, it’s supposed to take a database user and associated password but different vendors implement this differently. WLS, by default, treats this as an application server user and password. The pair is authenticated to see if it’s a valid user and that user is used for WLS security permission checks. By default, the user is then mapped to a database user and password using the data source credential mapper, so this API sort of follows the specification but database credentials are one-step removed from the application code. More details and the rationale are described later. While the default approach is simple, it does mean that only one database user is doing all of the work. You can’t figure out who actually did the update and you can’t restrict SQL operations by who is running the operation, at least at the database level. Any type of per-user logic will need to be in the application code instead of having the database do it. There are various WLS data source features that can be configured to provide some per-user information about the operations to the database. WebLogic Data Source Security Options This table describes the features available for WebLogic data sources to configure database security credentials and a brief description. It also captures information about the compatibility of these features with one another. Feature Description Can be used with Can’t be used with User authentication (default) Default getConnection(user, password) behavior – validate the input and use the user/password in the descriptor. Set client identifier Proxy Session, Identity pooling, Use database credentials Use database credentials Instead of using the credential mapper, use the supplied user and password directly. Set client identifier, Proxy session, Identity pooling User authentication, Multi Data Source Set Client Identifier Set a client identifier property associated with the connection (Oracle and DB2 only). Everything Proxy Session Set a light-weight proxy user associated with the connection (Oracle-only). Set client identifier, Use database credentials Identity pooling, User authentication Identity pooling Heterogeneous pool of connections owned by specified users. Set client identifier, Use database credentials Proxy session, User authentication, Labeling, Multi-datasource, Active GridLink Note that all of these features are available with both XA and non-XA drivers. Currently, the Proxy Session and Use Database Credentials options are on the Oracle tab of the Data Source Configuration tab of the administration console (even though the Use Database Credentials feature is not just for Oracle databases – oops). The rest of the features are on the Identity tab of the Data Source Configuration tab in the administration console (plan on seeing them all in one place in the future). The subsequent articles will describe these features in more detail. Keep referring back to this table to see the big picture.

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What Counts for A DBA: Observant

- by drsql

When walking up to the building where I work, I can see CCTV cameras placed here and there for monitoring access to the building. We are required to wear authorization badges which could be checked at any time. Do we have enemies? Of course! No one is 100% safe; even if your life is a fairy tale, there is always a witch with an apple waiting to snack you into a thousand years of slumber (or at least so I recollect from elementary school.) Even Little Bo Peep had to keep a wary lookout. We nerdy types (or maybe it was just me?) generally learned on the school playground to keep an eye open for unprovoked attack from simpler, but more muscular souls, and take steps to avoid messy confrontations well in advance. After we’d apprehensively negotiated adulthood with varying degrees of success, these skills of watching for danger, and avoiding it, translated quite well to the technical careers so many of us were destined for. And nowhere else is this talent for watching out for irrational malevolence so appropriate as in a career as a production DBA. It isn’t always active malevolence that the DBA needs to watch out for, but the even scarier quirks of common humanity. A large number of the issues that occur in the enterprise happen just randomly or even just one time ever in a spurious manner, like in the case where a person decided to download the entire MSDN library of software, cross join every non-indexed billion row table together, and simultaneously stream the HD feed of 5 different sporting events, making the network access slow while the corporate online sales just started. The decent DBA team, like the going, gets tough under such circumstances. They spring into action, checking all of the sources of active information, observes the issue is no longer happening now, figures that either it wasn’t the database’s fault and that the reboot of the whatever device on the network fixed the problem. This sort of reactive support is good, and will be the initial reaction of even excellent DBAs, but it is not the end of the story if you really want to know what happened and avoid getting called again when it isn’t even your fault. When fires start raging within the corporate software forest, the DBA’s instinct is to actively find a way to douse the flames and get back to having no one in the company have any idea who they are. Even better for them is to find a way of killing a potential problem while the fires are small, long before they can be classified as raging. The observant DBA will have already been monitoring the server environment for months in advance. Most troubles, such as disk space and security intrusions, can be predicted and dealt with by alerting systems, whereas other trouble can come out of the blue and requires a skill of observing ongoing conditions and noticing inexplicable changes that could signal an emerging problem. You can’t automate the DBA, because the bankable skill of a DBA is in detecting the early signs of unexpected problems, and working out how to deal with them before anyone else notices them. To achieve this, the DBA will check the situation as it is currently happening, and in many cases is likely to have been the person who submitted the problem to the level 1 support person in the first place, just to let the support team know of impending issues (always well received, I tell you what!). Database and host computer settings, configurations, and even critical data might be profiled and captured for later comparisons. He’ll use Monitoring tools, built-in, commercial (Not to be too crassly commercial or anything, but there is one such tool is SQL Monitor) and lots of homebrew monitoring tools to monitor for problems and changes in the server environment. You will know that you have it right when a support call comes in and you can look at your monitoring tools and quickly respond that “response time is well within the normal range, the query that supports the failing interface works perfectly and has actually only been called 67% as often as normal, so I am more than willing to help diagnose the problem, but it isn’t the database server’s fault and is probably a client or networking slowdown causing the interface to be used less frequently than normal.” And that is the best thing for any DBA to observe…

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Is it feasible and useful to auto-generate some code of unit tests?

- by skiwi

Earlier today I have come up with an idea, based upon a particular real use case, which I would want to have checked for feasability and usefulness. This question will feature a fair chunk of Java code, but can be applied to all languages running inside a VM, and maybe even outside. While there is real code, it uses nothing language-specific, so please read it mostly as pseudo code. The idea Make unit testing less cumbersome by adding in some ways to autogenerate code based on human interaction with the codebase. I understand this goes against the principle of TDD, but I don't think anyone ever proved that doing TDD is better over first creating code and then immediatly therafter the tests. This may even be adapted to be fit into TDD, but that is not my current goal. To show how it is intended to be used, I'll copy one of my classes here, for which I need to make unit tests. public class PutMonsterOnFieldAction implements PlayerAction { private final int handCardIndex; private final int fieldMonsterIndex; public PutMonsterOnFieldAction(final int handCardIndex, final int fieldMonsterIndex) { this.handCardIndex = Arguments.requirePositiveOrZero(handCardIndex, "handCardIndex"); this.fieldMonsterIndex = Arguments.requirePositiveOrZero(fieldMonsterIndex, "fieldCardIndex"); } @Override public boolean isActionAllowed(final Player player) { Objects.requireNonNull(player, "player"); Hand hand = player.getHand(); Field field = player.getField(); if (handCardIndex >= hand.getCapacity()) { return false; } if (fieldMonsterIndex >= field.getMonsterCapacity()) { return false; } if (field.hasMonster(fieldMonsterIndex)) { return false; } if (!(hand.get(handCardIndex) instanceof MonsterCard)) { return false; } return true; } @Override public void performAction(final Player player) { Objects.requireNonNull(player); if (!isActionAllowed(player)) { throw new PlayerActionNotAllowedException(); } Hand hand = player.getHand(); Field field = player.getField(); field.setMonster(fieldMonsterIndex, (MonsterCard)hand.play(handCardIndex)); } } We can observe the need for the following tests: Constructor test with valid input Constructor test with invalid inputs isActionAllowed test with valid input isActionAllowed test with invalid inputs performAction test with valid input performAction test with invalid inputs My idea mainly focuses on the isActionAllowed test with invalid inputs. Writing these tests is not fun, you need to ensure a number of conditions and you check whether it really returns false, this can be extended to performAction, where an exception needs to be thrown in that case. The goal of my idea is to generate those tests, by indicating (through GUI of IDE hopefully) that you want to generate tests based on a specific branch. The implementation by example User clicks on "Generate code for branch if (handCardIndex >= hand.getCapacity())". Now the tool needs to find a case where that holds. (I haven't added the relevant code as that may clutter the post ultimately) To invalidate the branch, the tool needs to find a handCardIndex and hand.getCapacity() such that the condition >= holds. It needs to construct a Player with a Hand that has a capacity of at least 1. It notices that the capacity private int of Hand needs to be at least 1. It searches for ways to set it to 1. Fortunately it finds a constructor that takes the capacity as an argument. It uses 1 for this. Some more work needs to be done to succesfully construct a Player instance, involving the creation of objects that have constraints that can be seen by inspecting the source code. It has found the hand with the least capacity possible and is able to construct it. Now to invalidate the test it will need to set handCardIndex = 1. It constructs the test and asserts it to be false (the returned value of the branch) What does the tool need to work? In order to function properly, it will need the ability to scan through all source code (including JDK code) to figure out all constraints. Optionally this could be done through the javadoc, but that is not always used to indicate all constraints. It could also do some trial and error, but it pretty much stops if you cannot attach source code to compiled classes. Then it needs some basic knowledge of what the primitive types are, including arrays. And it needs to be able to construct some form of "modification trees". The tool knows that it needs to change a certain variable to a different value in order to get the correct testcase. Hence it will need to list all possible ways to change it, without using reflection obviously. What this tool will not replace is the need to create tailored unit tests that tests all kinds of conditions when a certain method actually works. It is purely to be used to test methods when they invalidate constraints. My questions: Is creating such a tool feasible? Would it ever work, or are there some obvious problems? Would such a tool be useful? Is it even useful to automatically generate these testcases at all? Could it be extended to do even more useful things? Does, by chance, such a project already exist and would I be reinventing the wheel? If not proven useful, but still possible to make such thing, I will still consider it for fun. If it's considered useful, then I might make an open source project for it depending on the time. For people searching more background information about the used Player and Hand classes in my example, please refer to this repository. At the time of writing the PutMonsterOnFieldAction has not been uploaded to the repo yet, but this will be done once I'm done with the unit tests.

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?RAC????????????

- by Allen Gao

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UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:????; 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-font-kerning:1.0pt;} ????????????????????????????????????????,??????????????Oracle RAC?????????????????????????????,???????????????????,??????RAC???????????,????????????????????????????????????,????3???RAC????????????? ????????MOS ??"Top 11 Things to do NOW to Stabilize your RAC Cluster Environment”(DOC ID 1344678.1)???,???,??????3???????????,?????????????????????????????,???,?????????????????,??,??????????????,??????????????????????,?????????????,??????????????????????,???????RAC DBA???? ??????? (PSU)??,?????????PSU? ???????????,???????Oracle???????????(PSU)???PSU?????????????????,??PSU???????????????????PSU????????,???????????????PSU,????????6????????????????????BUG????,??????????,?????????????????????,???9???,???RAC???(Cluster)BUG,??7%??BUG??????,??????????BUG??????????????????????PSU??????RAC???,PSU????????: PSU?????Grid Infrastructure(GI)home,???????????RDBMS home???????,??GI home????PSU,?????home?????,??????????GI????????????,??????,??RDBMS PSU,GI PSU??????????GI home??????PSU,???????RDBMS??PSU? RAC????PSU????rolling????? –?????????GI? RDBMS?????????????????,??PSU???????,???????????????? ???????????PSU,????????????,?????????PSU????,???RAC?????????????PSU???,???????????????????? ??PSU?????, ??????MOS??: NOTE 854428.1 Intro to Patch Set Updates (PSU) NOTE 1082394.1 11.2.0.X Grid Infrastructure PSU Known Issues NOTE 756671.1 Oracle Recommended Patches -- Oracle Database NOTE 161549.1 Oracle Database, Networking and Grid Agent Patches for Microsoft Platforms NOTE 810394.1 RAC and Oracle Clusterware Best Practices and Starter Kit 11gR2???????,?Diagwait???13? ?2012?,??45%????????11gR2???????,????diagwait?13????RAC???????????,????diagwait??????????????,????????????????, diagwait??RAC?????????????: ?????,??????OPROCD?????1??0.5?????,????,??OPROCD??? 1.5????,?????????diagwait????13??OPROCD??????????10?( diagwait - CSS????[???3?]),????????OPROCD???????????????'?'?????????????,1.5??????????????????OPROCD?????????????11?(1?????+10????)? ?????/???????,??diagwait,??????????????????????,??,????????????? ?11g?2?(11.2.0.1?????)??,?????????????,???????,??????????????????,????????????????,?????????????????????diagwait????????,????????????????????,????????Oracle?????(OCR),?????????OCR???????????,?????????diagwai?????????????????: # $CLUSTERWARE_HOME\bin\crsctl get css diagwait ????DIAGWAIT???,??????MOS??: NOTE 567730.1 Changes in Oracle Clusterware on Linux with the 10.2.0.4 Patchset NOTE 559365.1 Using Diagwait as a diagnostic to get more information for diagnosing Oracle Clusterware Node evictions NOTE 810394.1 RAC and Oracle Clusterware Best Practices and Starter Kit ??OS Watcher Black Box(OSWbb) ? Cluster Health Monitor(CHM) ????????OS??????????????,??,??????OS Watcher Black Box(OSWbb)(??OS Watcher)?Cluster Health Monitor(CHM)????????OS???,??DBA????????????????????????????,?????????????,??????????,?????????????????????????OS????????,????????????,???????????????????? OSWbb?????????,??????,????OS??????????????,????OS??????OSWbb???????: ?????,??30??????????OS?????????????(??5??)????????????????????,?1???5????????????????????????30????????,Oracle???????????????OS?????????????,Oracle??????OSWbb?20???????? OSWbb?????????????????Oracle???????????????????OS????,??,?????????????????????????Oracle???????,?????????????,????????????????? ???11.2.0.3??,??????(HP-UX??)?,Oracle GI?????????,Cluster Health Monitor (CHM)?CHM??????,?????OSW????,??,???????OSW????,?????????? Oracle??????????????????OSWbb?/?CHM,?????????,????????????????????,??????????OSWbb,???????????RAC??,??????????????????(???NOTE 580513.1“How To Start OS Watcher Black Box Every System Boot”??????)? ??OSWbb?CHM?????, ??????MOS??: NOTE 301137.1 OS Watcher Black Box User Guide NOTE 1328466.1 Cluster Health Monitor (CHM) FAQ NOTE 810394.1 RAC and Oracle Clusterware Best Practices and Starter Kit ?? ?????????RAC/ Oracle?????????????3???????????3?,?????RAC??????,?????????????????,?????MOS??: NOTE 1344678.1 Top 11 Things to do NOW to Stabilize your RAC Cluster Environment ????,???MOS-RAC/Scalability community??,?Oracle???????????,????RAC/ Oracle?????

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