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SharePoint 2010 Hosting :: SharePoint 2010 Custom Web Template

- by mbridge

SharePoint 2010 offers some changes and additions to the SharePoint 2007 approach. Site definitions and publishing providers remain largely the same, but site templates created from the SharePoint UI or SharePoint Designer are now saved to a .WSP file, the same solution deployment packaging file format used for deploying custom SharePoint solutions. Site Templates saved to a .WSP solution file can be imported into Visual Studio for additional customization. Introducing the WebTemplate Feature Element The WebTemplate element, introduced in SharePoint 2010, allows site templates to be defined and deployed as a Feature as part of a solution package. A WebTemplate element feature can be used to deploy site templates in either a Farm or Sandbox solution - without modification. If deployed as a Farm feature and solution, site templates will appear in the site collection provisioning page in Central Administration and can be used to provision new site collections, or within a Site Collection to create sub-sites. If deployed as a Site feature and Sandbox solution, site templates will appear within the site collection to support creating a root site or sub-sites. Creating a new WebTemplate Feature in Visual Studio 2010 In addition to supporting the ability to save and import Site Templates created from the SharePoint UI into Visual Studio for customization, it can also be used to create new site templates from scratch. In the following sample we will walk through how to create a new WebTemplate solution based on a customized version of the out-of-box Blank Site. 1. Create a new Empty SharePoint Project in Visual Studio 2010. 2. Add a new Empty Element to the project. we like to create folders for each type of element in our solution, so in our sample, we have created a Web Templates folder, and then added the BLANKENT element. NOTE: The Elements folder MUST share the same name as the WebTemplate name property. 3. Open the empty Elements.xml and add the <WebTemplate /> element block. 4. Copy the default.aspx and ONET.XML files from the STS site definition location at 14\TEMPLATES\Site Templates\STS. We will customize the ONET.XML in the next section. Open the properties for each file and set the Deployment Type to ElementFile. This ensures the files are deployed with the Element when included in a Feature. 5. By default a new feature is added to the solution for you automatically when a new element is added to the solution. Rename and edit the feature as appropriate. Select Farm for the scope to deploy the WebTemplate to the entire farm, or Site for a sandboxed solution. Customize the ONET.XML At this point, you have a working WebTemplate solution that will deploy the identical site to the out-of-box Blank Site, however the ONET.XML supporting the STS site definition contains 3 configurations – essentially 3 separate site templates and can be simplified before customizing. In the following sample, we have trimmed the ONET.XML to the essentials for a single Site Template, and added references to the <SiteFeatures /> and <WebFeatures /> elements to include the SharePoint Standard and Enterprise features. We have left the top-level navigation bar, and the default page module intact, but removed all other extraneous markup.

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Visual Studio 2010 SP1

- by ScottGu

Last week we shipped Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio Express Tools. In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, SP1 includes a number of feature enhancements. This includes improved local help support, IntelliTrace support for 64-bit applications and SharePoint, built-in Silverlight 4 Tooling support in the box, unit testing support when targeting .NET 3.5, a new performance wizard for Silverlight, IIS Express and SQL CE Tooling support for web projects, HTML5 Intellisense for ASP.NET, and more. TFS 2010 SP1 was also released last week, together with a new TFS Project Server Integration Pack and Load Test Feature Pack. Brian Harry has a good blog post about the TFS updates here. VS 2010 SP1 Download Click here to download and install SP1 for all versions of Visual Studio (including express). This installer examines what you have installed on your machine, and only downloads the servicing downloads necessary to update them to SP1. The time it takes to download and update will consequently depend on what all you have installed. Jon Galloway has a good blog post on tips to speed up the SP1 install by uninstalling unused components. Web Platform Installer Bundles In addition to the core VS 2010 SP1 installer, we have also put together two Web Platform Installer (WebPI) bundles that automate installing SP1 together with additional web-specific components: VS 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle The above WebPI bundles automate installing: VS 2010/VWD 2010 SP1 ASP.NET MVC 3 (runtime + tools support) IIS 7.5 Express SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 (runtime + tools support) Web Deployment 2.0 Only the components that are not already installed on your machine will be downloaded when you use the above WebPI bundles. This means that you can run the WebPI bundle at any time (even if you have already installed SP1 or ASP.NET MVC 3) and not have to worry about wasting time downloading/installing these components again. Earlier this year I did two posts that discussed how to use IIS Express and SQL CE with ASP.NET projects in SP1. Read the below posts to learn more about how to use them after you run the above bundles: Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and IIS Express Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and SQL CE for ASP.NET The above feature additions work with any web project type – including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Additional SP1 Notes Two additional notes about VS 2010 SP1: 1) One change we made between RTM and SP1 is that by default Visual Studio now uses software rendering instead of hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP. We made this change because we’ve seen reports of (often inconsistent) performance issues caused by older video drivers. Running in software mode eliminates these and delivers consistent speeds. You can optionally re-enable hardware acceleration with SP1 using Visual Studio’s Tools->Options menu command – we did not remove support for HW acceleration on XP, we simply changed the default setting for it. Jason Zander has written more details on the change and how to re-enable HW acceleration inside VS here. 2) We have discovered an issue where installing SP1 can cause TSQL intellisense within SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 to stop working (typing still works – but intellisense doesn’t show up). The SQL team is investigating this now and I’ll post an update on how to fix this once more details are known. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Four New Java Champions

- by Tori Wieldt

Four luminaries in the Java community have been selected as new Java Champions. The are Agnes Crepet, Lars Vogel, Yara Senger and Martijn Verburg. They were selected for their technical knowledge, leadership, inspiration, and tireless work for the community. Here is how they rock the Java world: Agnes Crepet Agnes Crepet (France) is a passionate technologist with over 11 years of software engineering experience, especially in the Java technologies, as a Developer, Architect, Consultant and Trainer. She has been using Java since 1999, implementing multiple kinds of applications (from 20 days to 10000 men days) for different business fields (banking, retail, and pharmacy). Currently she is a Java EE Architect for a French pharmaceutical company, the homeopathy world leader. She is also the co-founder, with other passionate Java developers, of a software company named Ninja Squad, dedicated to Software Craftsmanship. Agnes is the leader of two Java User Groups (JUG), the Lyon JUG Duchess France and the founder of the Mix-IT Conferenceand theCast-IT Podcast, two projects about Java and Agile Development. She speaks at Java and JUG conferences around the world and regularly writes articles about the Java Ecosystem for the French print Developer magazine Programmez! and for the Duchess Blog. Follow Agnes @agnes_crepet. Lars Vogel Lars Vogel (Germany) is the founder and CEO of the vogella GmbH and works as Java, Eclipse and Android consultant, trainer and book author. He is a regular speaker at international conferences, such as EclipseCon, Devoxx, Droidcon and O'Reilly's Android Open. With more than one million visitors per month, his website vogella.com is one of the central sources for Java, Eclipse and Android programming information. Lars is committer in the Eclipse project and received in 2010 the "Eclipse Top Contributor Award" and 2012 the "Eclipse Top Newcomer Evangelist Award." Follow Lars on Twitter @vogella. Yara Senger Yara Senger (Brazil) has been a tireless Java activist in Brazil for many years. She is President of SouJava and she is an alternate representative of the group on the JCP Executive Committee. Yara has led SouJava in many initiatives, from technical events to social activities. She is co-founder and director of GlobalCode, which trains developers throughout Brazil. Last year, she was recipient of the Duke Choice's Award, for the JHome embedded environment. Yara is also an active speaker, giving presentations in many countries, including JavaOne SF, JavaOne Latin Ameria, JavaOne India, JFokus, and JUGs throughout Brazil. Yara is editor of InfoQ Brasil and also frequently posts at http://blog.globalcode.com.br/search/label/Yara. Follow Yara @YaraSenger. Martijn Verburg Martijn Verburg (UK) is the CTO of jClarity (a Java/JVM performance cloud tooling start-up) and has over 12 years experience as a Java/JVM technology professional and OSS mentor in a variety of organisations from start-ups to large enterprises. He is the co-leader of the London Java Community (~2800 developers) and leads the global effort for the Java User Group "Adopt a JSR" and "Adopt OpenJDK" programmes. These programmes encourage day to day Java developer involvement with OpenJDK, Java standards (JSRs), an important relationship for keeping the Java ecosystem relevant to the 9 million Java developers out there today. As a leading expert on technical team optimisation, his talks and presentations are in high demand by major conferences (JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon) where you'll often find him challenging the industry status quo via his alter ego "The Diabolical Developer." You can read more in the OTN ariticle "Challenging the Diabolical Developer: A Conversation with JavaOne Rock Star Martijn Verburg." Follow Martijn @karianna. The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Java Champions get the opportunity to provide feedback, ideas, and direction that will help Oracle grow the Java Platform. Congratulations to these new Java Champions!

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The Hunger Games for Aspiring IT Professionals

- by Dain C. Hansen

Normal 0 false false false EN-US 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} It seems that no one can escape the buzz around Hunger Games. And who could? Stephen King said it best in his review when he referred to the Collins’ novel as “a violent, jarring speed-rap of a novel that generates nearly constant suspense and may also generate a fair amount of controversy”. So what’s the tie in for IT? Let’s leave the dystopia of District 12 and come back to today’s reality. This is the world of radical IT paradigm shifts that haven’t been seen since Java was introduced in 1995. Everything you learned in school is probably outdated as of Friday. And everything you learned on Friday will probably change when you get to work on Monday. Nevertheless, we’re eager, we’re aspiring, we’re hungry to learn. While the challenges upon us may not rival the venomous bees (or ‘tracker jackers’) seen in this blockbuster, there are certainly obstacles to be found. In preparation, I leave you two pieces of advice - aside from avoiding werewolves… Learn the Cloud If you had asked me what to learn in 1995, I would have said, “Go learn Java”. But now my advice is “Go learn Java and then learn Cloud”. Cloud computing and Java go hand in hand. This is especially true for Oracle’s own Public Cloud which uses Java (via WebLogic 12c) as well as Oracle Database at its core foundation. Understanding the connotations of elasticity, scale, virtualization, and multi-tenancy, (to name just a few) requires a strong foundation in computer science and especially Java to get it right. Without Java, the Cloud is nothing more than a brittle application meagerly deployed on the internet. Get Social and Actively Participate And at all levels. Socializing your ideas internally is dreadfully important. And this means socializing and communicating your good ideas to lines of business, to architects, business analysts, developers, DBAs and Operations. But don’t forget to go external. Stay current by being on the lookout for blogs, tweets, webcasts, papers, podcasts and videos for your technology area. Be not just a subscriber but a participant in these channels as well. Attend industry and vendor sponsored events to learn from the experts – and seek out opportunities to stay connected with those that are smarter than you. You’ll gain more understanding if you participate actively. At the same time you’ll make friends (and allies) and you’ll be glad you did. Tell help you get social and actively participate [while learning the Cloud] here are a couple of pointers for you: See our website on Cloud and Fusion Middleware Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Find us at one of our key events Meanwhile, happy IT hunger games!

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Session Update from IASA 2010

- by [email protected]

Below: Tom Kristensen, senior vice president at Marsh US Consumer, and Roger Soppe, CLU, LUTCF, senior director of insurance strategy, Oracle Insurance. Tom and Roger participated in a panel discussion on policy administration systems this week at IASA 2010. This week was the 82nd Annual IASA Educational Conference & Business Show held in Grapevine, Texas. While attending the conference, I had the pleasure of serving as a panelist in one of many of the outstanding sessions conducted this year. The session - entitled "Achieving Business Agility and Promoting Growth with a Modern Policy Administration System" - included industry experts Steve Forte from OneShield, Mike Sciole of IFG Companies, and Tom Kristensen, senior vice president at Marsh US Consumer. The session was conducted as a panel discussion and focused on how insurers can leverage best practices to mitigate risk while enabling rapid product innovation through a modern policy administration system. The panelists offered insight into business and technical challenges for both Life & Annuity and Property & Casualty carriers. The session had three primary learning objectives: Identifying how replacing a legacy system with a more modern policy administration solution can deliver agility and growth Identifying how processes and system should be re-engineered or replaced in order to improve speed-to-market and product support Uncovering how to leverage best practices to mitigate risk during a migration to a new platform Tom Kristensen, who is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, was able was able to offer a unique perspective as a business process outsourcer (BPO). Marsh US Consumer is currently implementing both the Oracle Insurance Policy Administration solution and the Oracle Revenue Management and Billing platform while at the same time implementing a new BPO customer. Tom offered insight on the need to replace their aging systems and Marsh's ability to drive new products and processes with a modern solution. As a best practice, their current project has empowered their business users to play a major role in both the requirements gathering and configuration phases. Tom stated that working with a modern solution has also enabled his organization to use a more agile implementation methodology and get hands-on experience with the software earlier in the project. He also indicated that Marsh was encouraged by how quickly it will be able to implement new products, which is another major advantage of a modern rules-based system. One of the more interesting issues was raised by an audience member who asked, "With all the vendor solutions available in North American and across Europe, what is going to make some of them more successful than others and help ensure their long term success?" Panelist Mike Sciole, IFG Companies suggested that carriers do their due diligence and follow a structured evaluation process focusing on vendors who demonstrate they have the "cash to invest in long term R&D" and evaluate audited annual statements for verification. Other panelists suggested that the vendor space will continue to evolve and those with a strong strategy focused on the insurance industry and a solid roadmap will likely separate themselves from the rest. The session concluded with the panelists offering advice about not being afraid to evaluate new modern systems. While migrating to a new platform can be challenging and is typically only undertaken every 15+ years by carriers, the ability to rapidly deploy and manage new products, create consistent processes to better service customers, and the ability to manage their business more effectively, transparently and securely are well worth the effort. Roger A.Soppe, CLU, LUTCF, is the Senior Director of Insurance Strategy, Oracle Insurance.

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Odd MVC 4 Beta Razor Designer Issue

- by Rick Strahl

This post is a small cry for help along with an explanation of a problem that is hard to describe on twitter or even a connect bug and written in hopes somebody has seen this before and any ideas on what might cause this. Lots of helpful people had comments on Twitter for me, but they all assumed that the code doesn't run, which is not the case - it's a designer issue. A few days ago I started getting some odd problems in my MVC 4 designer for an app I've been working on for the past 2 weeks. Basically the MVC 4 Razor designer keeps popping me errors, about the call signature to various Html Helper methods being incorrect. It also complains about the ViewBag object and not supporting dynamic requesting to load assemblies into the project. Here's what the designer errors look like: You can see the red error underlines under the ViewBag and an Html Helper I plopped in at the top to demonstrate the behavior. Basically any HtmlHelper I'm accessing is showing the same errors. Note that the code *runs just fine* - it's just the designer that is complaining with Errors. What's odd about this is that *I think* this started only a few days ago and nothing consequential that I can think of has happened to the project or overall installations. These errors aren't critical since the code runs but pretty annoying especially if you're building and have .csHtml files open in Visual Studio mixing these fake errors with real compiler errors. What I've checked Looking at the errors it indeed looks like certain references are missing. I can't make sense of the Html Helpers error, but certainly the ViewBag dynamic error looks like System.Core or Microsoft.CSharp assemblies are missing. Rest assured they are there and the code DOES run just fine at runtime. This is a designer issue only. I went ahead and checked the namespaces that MVC has access to in Razor which lives in the Views folder's web.config file: /Views/web.config For good measure I added <system.web.webPages.razor> <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, <split for layout> Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage"> <namespaces> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" /> <add namespace="System.Linq" /> <add namespace="System.Linq.Expressions" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsBusiness" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsWeb"/> <add namespace="Westwind.Utilities" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web.Mvc" /> </namespaces> </pages> </system.web.webPages.razor> For good measure I added System.Linq and System.Linq.Expression on which some of the Html.xxxxFor() methods rely, but no luck. So, has anybody seen this before? Any ideas on what might be causing these issues only at design time rather, when the final compiled code runs just fine?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Razor MVC Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Top Tier, A-Game Talent - How to Land em'

- by GeekAgilistMercenary

Recently the question came up from a close friend of mine, "will my PhD help me attain a higher income in the north west?" I had to tell him, that it might get him a little more, but it won't get him in the top income brackets for the occupation. Another time, a few days later, someone else asked this too. Then again, I see a job posting that requires a Bachelors Degree and some other nonsense. The job posting even states they want "A-Game" talent. I am almost shocked at how poorly part of this industry doesn't realize how unimportant a degree is to getting real top tier, a-game talent. (and yes, I get a little riled up about this matter) You Can't Make Good Software Developers. No college out there is going to train someone to be in the top 10%, and absolutely not to be in the top 5% of skill levels. Colleges can NOT do this. It is up to the individual, and the individual alone. If top tier talent seems to come from a college, one should check their premise and look at the motivations the individuals have to go to that school. There is most likely a reason that top tier talent appears to be made there. The college however, can only guide or assist, but I repeat that "top tier talent is a very individualistic endeavor". Some might say, well a group is needed, support is needed, this and that are needed. True, an individual needs a support system and a college can provide that, but it generally ends there. The support group helps, provides a sounding wall, and provides correlation to good ideas for the a-game top tier geek. But again, the endeavor is the individuals desire. top tier talent is a very individualistic endeavor - Me Hiring Top Tier, A-Game Talent There are a few things when trying to hire this level of game player. The first thing is to not require a degree of any sort. Sure, it looks good, but it won't dictate anything other than the individual was able to go through the regimented steps of college. List the skills and ideas that you would like to find in an individual. Think of two people meeting for the first time, what do you want to know about the other individual. Team fit is absolutely fundamental for top tier talent. That support group that I mentioned above, top tier talent works best with a solid group of players. Keep your technology up to date, moving forward, and don't bore your top talent if you manage to get it. If the company slows down, they will leave. The more valuable they find out they are, the lower tolerance they'll have for this. For managers, directors, and leaders in an organization this is THE challenge for them. Provide opportunities not just for advancement, but ways for them to advance their knowledge such as training, a book budget, or other means. Even if some software they want to use isn't used ton the project, get it for them (within reason of course ? couple $100 or even a few $1000 for a good software license to MSDN, Tellerik, or other suite of software is ideal). Don't push them to, and don't let them overwork themselves into burnout. This, as a leader in an organization is easy to do if one finds themselves actually hiring top talent. Because top talent just provides results and more results. But they are human, they will break, don't be the cause of that or you'll lose your talent. For now, that is it from me on this topic, back to the revenue, code, projects, and pushing forward. For the original entry, check out my personal blog with other juicy tech tidbits, rants, raves, and the like. Agilist Mercenary

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Podcast Show Notes: Collaborate 10 Wrap-Up - Part 1

- by Bob Rhubart

OK, I know last week I promised you a program featuring Oracle ACE Directors Mike van Alst (IT-Eye) and Jordan Braunstein (TUSC) and The Definitive Guide to SOA: Oracle Service Bus author Jeff Davies. But things happen. In this case, what happened was Collaborate 10 in Las Vegas. Prior to the event I asked Oracle ACE Director and OAUG board member Floyd Teter to see if he could round up a couple of people at the event for an impromtu interview over Skype (I was here in Cleveland) to get their impressions of the event. Listen to Part 1 Floyd, armed with his brand new iPad, went above and beyond the call of duty. At the appointed hour, which turned out to be about hour after the close of Collaborate 10, Floyd had gathered nine other people to join him in a meeting room somewhere in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Here’s the entire roster: Floyd Teter - Project Manager at Jet Propulsion Lab, OAUG Board Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Mark Rittman - EMEA Technical Director and Co-Founder, Rittman Mead, ODTUG Board Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Chet Justice - OBI Consultant at BI Wizards Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Elke Phelps - Oracle Applications DBA at Humana, OAUG SIG Chair Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Book | Oracle ACE Profile Paul Jackson - Oracle Applications DBA at Humana Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Book Srini Chavali - Enterprise Database & Tools Leader at Cummins, Inc Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix Dave Ferguson – President, Oracle Applications Users Group LinkedIn | OAUG Profile John King - Owner, King Training Resources Website | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix Gavyn Whyte - Project Portfolio Manager at iFactory Consulting Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix John Nicholson - Channels & Alliances at Greenlight Technologies Website | LinkedIn Big thanks to Floyd for assembling the panelists and handling the on-scene MC/hosting duties. Listen to Part 1 On a technical note, this discussion was conducted over Skype, using Floyd’s iPad, placed in the middle of the table. During the call the audio was fantastic – the iPad did a remarkable job. Sadly, the Technology Gods were not smiling on me that day. The audio set-up that I tested successfully before the call failed to deliver when we first connected – I could hear the folks in Vegas, but they couldn’t hear me. A frantic, last-minute adjustment appeared to have fixed that problem, and the audio in my headphones from both sides of the conversation was loud and clear. It wasn’t until I listened to the playback that I realized that something was wrong. So the audio for Vegas side of the discussion has about the same fidelity as a cell phone. It’s listenable, but disappointing when compared to what it sounded like during the discussion. Still, this was a one shot deal, and the roster of panelists and the resulting conversation was too good and too much fun to scrap just because of an unfortunate technical glitch. Part 2 of this Collaborate 10 Wrap-Up will run next week. After that, it’s back on track with the previously scheduled program. So stay tuned: RSS del.icio.us Tags: oracle,otn,collborate 10,c10,oracle ace program,archbeat,arch2arch,oaug,odtug,las vegas Technorati Tags: oracle,otn,collborate 10,c10,oracle ace program,archbeat,arch2arch,oaug,odtug,las vegas

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Failure Sucks, But Does It Have To?

- by steve.diamond

Hey Folks--It's "elephant in the room" time. Imagine a representative from a CRM VENDOR discussing CRM FAILURES. Well. I recently saw this blog post from Michael Krigsman on "six ways CRM projects go wrong." Now, I know this may come off defensive, but my comments apply to ALL CRM vendors, not just Oracle. As I perused the list, I couldn't find any failures related to technology. They all seemed related to people or process. Now, this isn't about finger pointing, or impugning customers. I love customers! And when they fail, WE fail. Although I sit in the cheap seats, i.e., I haven't funded any multi-million dollar CRM initiatives lately, I kept wondering how to convert the perception of failure as something that ends and is never to be mentioned again (see Michael's reason #4), to something that one learns from and builds upon. So to continue my tradition of speaking in platitudes, let me propose the following three tenets: 1) Try and get ahead of your failures while they're very very small. 2) Immediately assess what you can learn from those failures. 3) With more than 15 years of CRM deployments, seek out those vendors that have a track record both in learning from "misses" and in supporting MANY THOUSANDS of CRM successes at companies of all types and sizes. Now let me digress briefly with an unpleasant (for me, anyway) analogy. I really don't like flying. Call it 'fear of dying' or 'fear of no control.' Whatever! I've spoken with quite a few commercial pilots over the years, and they reassure me that there are multiple failures on most every flight. We as passengers just don't know about them. Most of them are too miniscule to make a difference, and most of them are "caught" before they become LARGER failures. It's typically the mid-sized to colossal failures we hear about, and a significant percentage of those are due to human error. What's the point? I'd propose that organizations consider the topic of FAILURE in five grades. On one end, FAILURE Grade 1 is a minor/miniscule failure. On the other end, FAILURE Grade 5 is a colossal failure A Grade 1 CRM FAILURE could be that a particular interim milestone was missed. Why? What can we learn from that? How can we prevent that from happening as we proceed through the project? Individual organizations will need to define their own Grade 2 and Grade 3 failures. The opportunity is to keep those Grade 3 failures from escalating any further. Because honestly, a GRADE 5 failure may not be recoverable. It could result in a project being pulled, countless amounts of hours and dollars lost, and jobs lost. We don't want to go there. In closing, I want to thank Michael for opening my eyes up to the world of "color," versus thinking of failure as both "black and white" and a dead end road that organizations can't learn from and avoid discussing like the plague.

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Creating and using VM Groups in VirtualBox

- by Fat Bloke

With VirtualBox 4.2 we introduced the Groups feature which allows you to organize and manage your guest virtual machines collectively, rather than individually. Groups are quite a powerful concept and there are a few nice features you may not have discovered yet, so here's a bit more information about groups, and how they can be used.... Creating a group Groups are just ad hoc collections of virtual machines and there are several ways of creating a group: In the VirtualBox Manager GUI: Drag one VM onto another to create a group of those 2 VMs. You can then drag and drop more VMs into that group; Select multiple VMs (using Ctrl or Shift and click) then select the menu: Machine...Group; or press Cmd+U (Mac), or Ctrl+U(Windows); or right-click the multiple selection and choose Group, like this: From the command line: Group membership is an attribute of the vm so you can modify the vm to belong in a group. For example, to put the vm "Ubuntu" into the group "TestGroup" run this command: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "/TestGroup" Deleting a Group Groups can be deleted by removing a group attribute from all the VMs that constitute that group. To do this via the command-line the syntax is: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "" In the VirtualBox Manager, this is more easily done by right-clicking on a group header and selecting "Ungroup", like this: Multiple Groups Now that we understand that Groups are just attributes of VMs, it can be seen that VMs can exist in multiple groups, for example, doing this: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "/TestGroup","/ProjectX","/ProjectY" Results in: Or via the VirtualBox Manager, you can drag VMs while pressing the Alt key (Mac) or Ctrl (other platforms). Nested Groups Just like you can drag VMs around in the VirtualBox Manager, you can also drag whole groups around. And dropping a group within a group creates a nested group. Via the command-line, nested groups are specified using a path-like syntax, like this: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "/TestGroup/Linux" ...which creates a sub-group and puts the VM in it. Navigating Groups In the VirtualBox Manager, Groups can be collapsed and expanded by clicking on the carat to the left in the Group Header. But you can also Enter and Leave groups too, either by using the right-arrow/left-arrow keys, or by clicking on the carat on the right hand side of the Group Header, like this: . ..leading to a view of just the Group contents. You can Leave or return to the parent in the same way. Don't worry if you are imprecise with your clicking, you can use a double click on the entire right half of the Group Header to Enter a group, and the left half to Leave a group. Double-clicking on the left half when you're at the top will roll-up or collapse the group. Group Operations The real power of Groups is not simply in arranging them prettily in the Manager. Rather it is about performing collective operations on them, once you have grouped them appropriately. For example, let's say that you are working on a project (Project X) where you have a solution stack of: Database VM, Middleware/App VM, and a couple of client VMs which you use to test your app. With VM Groups you can start the whole stack with one operation. Select the Group Header, and choose Start: The full list of operations that may be performed on Groups are: Start Starts from any state (boot or resume) Start VMs in headless mode (hold Shift while starting) Pause Reset Close Save state Send Shutdown signal Poweroff Discard saved state Show in filesystem Sort Conclusion Hopefully we've shown that the introduction of VM Groups not only makes Oracle VM VirtualBox pretty, but pretty powerful too. - FB

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BizTalk 2009 - Architecture Decisions

- by StuartBrierley

In the first step towards implementing a BizTalk 2009 environment, from development through to live, I put forward a proposal that detailed the options available, as well as the costs and benefits associated with these options, to allow an informed discusion to take place with the business drivers and budget holders of the project. This ultimately lead to a decision being made to implement an initial BizTalk Server 2009 environment using the Standard Edition of the product. It is my hope that in the long term, as projects require it and allow, we will be looking to implement my ideal recommendation of a multi-server enterprise level environment, but given the differences in cost and the likely initial work load for the environment this was not something that I could fully recommend at this time. However, it must be noted that this decision was made in full awareness of the limits of the standard edition, and the business drivers of this project were made fully aware of the risks associated with running without the failover capabilities of the enterprise edition. When considering the creation of this new BizTalk Server 2009 environment, I have also recommended the creation of the following pre-production environments: Usage Environment Development Development of solutions; Unit testing against technical specifications; Initial load testing; Testing of deployment packages; Visual Studio; BizTalk; SQL; Client PCs/Laptops; Server environment similar to Live implementation; Test Testing of Solutions against business and technical requirements; BizTalk; SQL; Server environment similar to Live implementation; Pseudo-Live As Live environment to allow testing against Live implementation; Acts as back-up hardware in case of failure of Live environment; BizTalk; SQL; Server environment identical to Live implementation; The creation of these differing environments allows for the separation of the various stages of the development cycle. The development environment is for use when actively developing a solution, it is a potentially volatile environment whose state at any given time can not be guaranteed. It allows developers to carry out initial tests in an environment that is similar to the live environment and also provides an area for the testing of deployment packages prior to any release to the test environment. The test environment is intended to be a semi-volatile environment that is similar to the live environment. It will change periodically through the development of a solution (or solutions) but should be otherwise stable. It allows for the continued testing of a solution against requirements without the worry that the environment is being actively changed by any ongoing development. This separation of development and test is crucial in ensuring the quality and control of the tested solution. The pseudo-live environment should be considered to be an almost static environment. It should mimic the live environment and can act as back up hardware in the case of live failure. This environment acts as an area to allow for “as live” testing, where the performance and behaviour of the live solutions can be replicated. There should be relatively few changes to this environment, with software releases limited to “release candidate” level releases prior to going live. Whereas the pseudo-live environment should always mimic the live environment, to save on costs the development and test servers could be implemented on lower specification hardware. Consideration can also be given to the use of a virtual server environment to further reduce hardware costs in the development and test environments, indeed this virtual approach can also be extended to pseudo-live and live assuming the underlying technology is in place. Although there is no requirement for the development and test server environments to be identical to live, the overriding architecture implemented should be the same as in live and an understanding must be gained of the performance differences to be expected across the different environments.

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Windows Azure Use Case: New Development

- by BuckWoody

This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Computing platforms evolve over time. Originally computers were directed by hardware wiring - that, the “code” was the path of the wiring that directed an electrical signal from one component to another, or in some cases a physical switch controlled the path. From there software was developed, first in a very low machine language, then when compilers were created, computer languages could more closely mimic written statements. These language statements can be compiled into the lower-level machine language still used by computers today. Microprocessors replaced logic circuits, sometimes with fewer instructions (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, RISC) and sometimes with more instructions (Complex Instruction Set Computing, CISC). The reason this history is important is that along each technology advancement, computer code has adapted. Writing software for a RISC architecture is significantly different than developing for a CISC architecture. And moving to a Distributed Architecture like Windows Azure also has specific implementation details that our code must follow. But why make a change? As I’ve described, we need to make the change to our code to follow advances in technology. There’s no point in change for its own sake, but as a new paradigm offers benefits to our users, it’s important for us to leverage those benefits where it makes sense. That’s most often done in new development projects. It’s a far simpler task to take a new project and adapt it to Windows Azure than to try and retrofit older code designed in a previous computing environment. We can still use the same coding languages (.NET, Java, C++) to write code for Windows Azure, but we need to think about the architecture of that code on a new project so that it runs in the most efficient, cost-effective way in a Distributed Architecture. As we receive new requests from the organization for new projects, a distributed architecture paradigm belongs in the decision matrix for the platform target. Implementation: When you are designing new applications for Windows Azure (or any distributed architecture) there are many important details to consider. But at the risk of over-simplification, there are three main concepts to learn and architect within the new code: Stateless Programming - Stateless program is a prime concept within distributed architectures. Rather than each server owning the complete processing cycle, the information from an operation that needs to be retained (the “state”) should be persisted to another location c(like storage) common to all machines involved in the process. An interesting learning process for Stateless Programming (although not unique to this language type) is to learn Functional Programming. Server-Side Processing - Along with developing using a Stateless Design, the closer you can locate the code processing to the data, the less expensive and faster the code will run. When you control the network layer, this is less important, since you can send vast amounts of data between the server and client, allowing the client to perform processing. In a distributed architecture, you don’t always own the network, so it’s performance is unpredictable. Also, you may not be able to control the platform the user is on (such as a smartphone, PC or tablet), so it’s imperative to deliver only results and graphical elements where possible. Token-Based Authentication - Also called “Claims-Based Authorization”, this code practice means instead of allowing a user to log on once and then running code in that context, a more granular level of security is used. A “token” or “claim”, often represented as a Certificate, is sent along for a series or even one request. In other words, every call to the code is authenticated against the token, rather than allowing a user free reign within the code call. While this is more work initially, it can bring a greater level of security, and it is far more resilient to disconnections. Resources: See the references of “Nondistributed Deployment” and “Distributed Deployment” at the top of this article for more information with graphics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx Stack Overflow has a good thread on functional programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/844536/advantages-of-stateless-programming Another good discussion on Stack Overflow on server-side processing is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3064018/client-side-or-server-side-processing Claims Based Authorization is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335707.aspx

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IIS Logfile Visualization with XNA

- by BobPalmer

In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers. And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean. After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?' This of course would not do. So I talked to my friends and our network admin about an option to show something more eye catching and visual, with which we could catch at a glance a feel for what was up with our site. He initially pointed me out to a video showing GLTail and Chipmunk done in Ruby. Realizing this was both awesome, and that I needed an excuse to do something in XNA, I decided to knock out a proof of concept for something very similar, but with a few tweaks. Here's a link to a video of the current prototype: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_PWZbtH2I Essentially this app opens up a log file (even an active one) and begins pulling out the lines of text. (Here's a good Code Project link that covers how to do tail reading from an active text file: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/tail.aspx). As new data is added, a bubble is generated in the application - a GET statement comes from the left, and a POST from the right. I then run it through a series of expression checkers, and based on the kind of statement and the pattern, a bubble of an appropriate color is generated. For example, if I get a 500, a huge red bubble pops out. Others are based on the part of the system the page is from - i.e. green bubbles are from our claims management subsystem, and blue bubbles are from the pages our scheduling staff use to schedule patients. Others include the purple bubbles for security and login, and yellow bubbles for some miscellaneous pages. The little grey bubbles represent things like images, JS, CSS, etc - and their small size makes them work like grease to keep the larger page bubbles moving. The app is also smart enough that if it is starting to bog down with handling the physics and interactions, it will suspend new bubbles until enough have dropped off that performance can resume (you can see this slight stuttering in the sample video). The net result is that anyone will be able to look up on the wall monitor, and instantly get a quick feel for how things are going on the floor. Website slow? You can get a feel for both volume and utilized modules with one glance. Website crashing? Look for a wall of giant red bubbles. No activity at all? Maybe the site is down. Now couple this with utilization within a farm, and cross referenced with a second app showing the same kind of data from your SQL database... As for the app itself, it's a windows XNA project with the code in C#. The physics are handled by the Farseer physicis eingine for XNA (http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics) which is just pure goodness. The samples are great, and I had the app up and working in two evenings (half of that was fine tuning, and the other was me coding with a kid in my lap). My next steps include wiring this to SQL (I have some ideas...), and adding a nice configuration module. For example, you could use polygons, etc to tie to your regex - or more entertaining things like having a little human ragdoll to represent a user login. Once that's wrapped up and I have a chance to complete some hardening, I will be releasing the whole thing into the wild as opensource. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions! -Bob

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problem with network-manager-pptp

- by Riuzaki90

I've a problema with the VPA CAble connection of my university... on the website of the university there's a .sh file that set all the variables of the connection in ETC/PPP/PEERS and another .sh file that call the connection...I'm on ubuntu 11.10 and when I run the setup.sh I have this error: impossible to find network-manager-pptp these are the two file that I had talk about: #!/bin/bash echo "Creazione della connessione in corso attendere........." apt-get update apt-get install pptp-linux network-manager-pptp echo -n "Digitare la propria Username: " read USERNAME echo -n "Digitare la propria Password: " read PASSWORD pptpsetup --create UNICAL_Campus_Access --server 160.97.73.253 --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD echo 'pty "pptp 160.97.73.253 --nolaunchpppd"' >/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'require-mppe-128' >>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'file /etc/ppp/options.pptp'>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'name '$USERNAME''>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'remotename PPTP'>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'ipparam UNICAL_Campus_Access'>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo $USERNAME' PPTP '$PASSWORD' *'>>/etc/ppp/chap-secrets rm /etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '###############################################################################'>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# $Id: options.pptp,v 1.3 2006/03/26 23:11:05 quozl Exp $'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Sample PPTP PPP options file /etc/ppp/options.pptp'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Options used by PPP when a connection is made by a PPTP client.'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# This file can be referred to by an /etc/ppp/peers file for the tunnel.'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Changes are effective on the next connection. See "man pppd".'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# You are expected to change this file to suit your system. As'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# packaged, it requires PPP 2.4.2 or later from http://ppp.samba.org/'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# and the kernel MPPE module available from the CVS repository also on'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# http://ppp.samba.org/, which is packaged for DKMS as kernel_ppp_mppe.'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '###############################################################################'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Lock the port'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'lock'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Authentication'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# We do not need the tunnel server to authenticate itself'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'noauth'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#We won"t do PAP, EAP, CHAP, or MSCHAP, but we will accept MSCHAP-V2'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#(you may need to remove these refusals if the server is not using MPPE)'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-pap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-eap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-chap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-mschap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Compression Turn off compression protocols we know won"t be used'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'nobsdcomp'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'nodeflate'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Encryption'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# (There have been multiple versions of PPP with encryption support,'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# choose with of the following sections you will use. Note that MPPE'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# requires the use of MSCHAP-V2 during authentication)'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# http://ppp.samba.org/ the PPP project version of PPP by Paul Mackarras'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# ppp-2.4.2 or later with MPPE only, kernel module ppp_mppe.o'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#{{{'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Require MPPE 128-bit encryption'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#require-mppe-128'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#}}}'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# http://polbox.com/h/hs001/ fork from PPP project by Jan Dubiec'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#ppp-2.4.2 or later with MPPE and MPPC, kernel module ppp_mppe_mppc.o'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#{{{'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Require MPPE 128-bit encryption'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#mppe required,stateless'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# }}}'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo "setup di 'UNICAL Campus Access' terminato correttamente" echo "per connettersi eseguire lo script 'UNICAL_Campus_Access.sh' " and the second: #!/bin/bash echo "Connessione alla Rete del Centro Residenziale in corso attendere........." modprobe ppp_mppe pppd call UNICAL_Campus_Access sleep 30 tail -n 8 /var/log/messages echo "Connessione Stabilita" echo -n "Per terminare la connessione premere invio (in alternativa eseguire il commando 'killall pppd'):----> " read CONN killall pppd echo "Connessione terminata" I've correctly installed network-manager-pptp to the latest version...help?

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Windows Azure Use Case: New Development

- by BuckWoody

This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Computing platforms evolve over time. Originally computers were directed by hardware wiring - that, the “code” was the path of the wiring that directed an electrical signal from one component to another, or in some cases a physical switch controlled the path. From there software was developed, first in a very low machine language, then when compilers were created, computer languages could more closely mimic written statements. These language statements can be compiled into the lower-level machine language still used by computers today. Microprocessors replaced logic circuits, sometimes with fewer instructions (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, RISC) and sometimes with more instructions (Complex Instruction Set Computing, CISC). The reason this history is important is that along each technology advancement, computer code has adapted. Writing software for a RISC architecture is significantly different than developing for a CISC architecture. And moving to a Distributed Architecture like Windows Azure also has specific implementation details that our code must follow. But why make a change? As I’ve described, we need to make the change to our code to follow advances in technology. There’s no point in change for its own sake, but as a new paradigm offers benefits to our users, it’s important for us to leverage those benefits where it makes sense. That’s most often done in new development projects. It’s a far simpler task to take a new project and adapt it to Windows Azure than to try and retrofit older code designed in a previous computing environment. We can still use the same coding languages (.NET, Java, C++) to write code for Windows Azure, but we need to think about the architecture of that code on a new project so that it runs in the most efficient, cost-effective way in a Distributed Architecture. As we receive new requests from the organization for new projects, a distributed architecture paradigm belongs in the decision matrix for the platform target. Implementation: When you are designing new applications for Windows Azure (or any distributed architecture) there are many important details to consider. But at the risk of over-simplification, there are three main concepts to learn and architect within the new code: Stateless Programming - Stateless program is a prime concept within distributed architectures. Rather than each server owning the complete processing cycle, the information from an operation that needs to be retained (the “state”) should be persisted to another location c(like storage) common to all machines involved in the process. An interesting learning process for Stateless Programming (although not unique to this language type) is to learn Functional Programming. Server-Side Processing - Along with developing using a Stateless Design, the closer you can locate the code processing to the data, the less expensive and faster the code will run. When you control the network layer, this is less important, since you can send vast amounts of data between the server and client, allowing the client to perform processing. In a distributed architecture, you don’t always own the network, so it’s performance is unpredictable. Also, you may not be able to control the platform the user is on (such as a smartphone, PC or tablet), so it’s imperative to deliver only results and graphical elements where possible. Token-Based Authentication - Also called “Claims-Based Authorization”, this code practice means instead of allowing a user to log on once and then running code in that context, a more granular level of security is used. A “token” or “claim”, often represented as a Certificate, is sent along for a series or even one request. In other words, every call to the code is authenticated against the token, rather than allowing a user free reign within the code call. While this is more work initially, it can bring a greater level of security, and it is far more resilient to disconnections. Resources: See the references of “Nondistributed Deployment” and “Distributed Deployment” at the top of this article for more information with graphics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx Stack Overflow has a good thread on functional programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/844536/advantages-of-stateless-programming Another good discussion on Stack Overflow on server-side processing is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3064018/client-side-or-server-side-processing Claims Based Authorization is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335707.aspx

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Part 9: EBS Customizations, how to track

- by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

In the previous blogs we were concentrating on the preparation tasks. We have defined standards, we know about the tools and techniques we will start with. Additionally, we have defined the modification strategy, and how to handle such topics best. Now we are ready to take the requirements! Such requirements coming over in spreadsheets, word files (like GAP documents), or in any other format. As we have to assign some attributes, we start numbering all that and assign a short name to each of these requirements (=CEMLI reference). We may also have already a Functional person assigned, and we might involve someone from the tech team to estimate, and we like to assign a status such as 'planned', 'estimated' etc. All these data are usually kept in spreadsheets, but I would put them into a database (yes, I am from Oracle :). If you don't have any good looking and centralized application already, please give a try with Oracle APEX. It should be up and running in a day and the imported sheets are than manageable concurrently! For one of my clients I have created this CEMLI-DB; in between enriched with a lot of additional functionality, but initially it was just a simple centralized CEMLI tracking application. Why I am pointing out again the centralized method to manage such data? Well, your data quality will dramatically increase, if you let your project members see (also review and update) "your" data. APEX allows you to filter, sort, print, and also export. And if you can spend some time to define proper value lists, everyone will gain from. APEX allows you to work in 'agile' mode, means you can improve your application step by step. Let's say you like to reference a document, or even upload the same, you can do that. Or, you need to classify the CEMLIs by release, just add this release field, same for business area or CEMLI type. One CEMLI record may then look like this: Prepare one or two (online) reports, to be ready to present your "workload" to the project management. Use such extracts also when you work offline (to prioritize etc.). But as soon as you are again connected, feed the data back into the central application. Note: I have combined this application with an additional issue tracker. Here the most important element is the CEMLI reference, which acts as link to any other application (if you are not using APEX also as issue tracker :). Please spend a minute to define such a reference (see blog Part 8: How to name Customizations). Summary: Building the bridge from Gap analyse to the development has to be done in a controlled way. Usually the information is provided differently, but it is suggested to collect all requirements centrally. Oracle APEX is a great solution to enter and maintain such information in a structured, but flexible way. APEX helped me a lot to work with distributed development teams during the complete development cycle.

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ORACLE is WEB 2.0

- by anca.rosu

You never know what to expect in life, where it can take you and what kind of fulfillment it can offer you. It’s just like an amazing lottery with millions of winning tickets. My name is Paula, I am an Online Marketing Specialist at Oracle University and this is my story. Having graduated from a technical profile college, it seemed almost normal to follow the same career path. But I said no. I wanted to try something else, so I took an Advertising Masters Program and I really became in love with this entire industry. Advertising and the new impact of the Internet through social networking is my current fascination. I knew I had to work to incorporate both my skills intro one dream job. I want to believe that I have come to work at Oracle as part of a great plan that life has for me. It’s not the most glamorous job in advertising or in the fashion industry, but it’s everything you need to start investing in your development and to build relationships. A normal day at work begins at 9.30 at our Oracle Office in Bucharest. After a short chit-chat, coffee and some conference calls, marketing gets to work! Some of the members of my team are working besides me but others are based all over Europe. This is extremely useful when coordinating the EMEA Marketing for Oracle University, because this way it’s easier to keep an eye on these various locations. Even though it’s a team play, you need to speak up and make your mark. I am the kind of person that never stands-by and waits to be given directions, I am curious and intuitive. This makes things easier. In Oracle you really need to find your own way and to discover how to organize your time and how to get involved with people. People to people, this is the focus. But everything is up to you and it strongly depends on the type of personality that you have. I try to get involved in various activities, participate in Oracle Days Events, interact and meet all kinds of people. For those who are newly graduates or interns, Oracle has lots of trainings and webcasts you can attend to help you develop your career shape and to understand better the way the business works. You can also be awarded for ideas and setting the trends so that makes it worth it. What I like most about my job is the fact that I can come with ideas and bring them to life. For example Oracle University has a special seminar program called “Celebrity Seminars” where top industry speakers teach 1-day or 2-day condensed seminars. We thought of creating something exclusive and a video was the best idea. So my colleague and I became reporters for a day and interviewed this well-known speaker regarding his seminar. I think this is a good way to market this business. Live footage is a very good marketing tool so we are planning to use the video to target our online audiences via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This can even go in the newsletters that marketing sends regarding the Celebrity Seminars. This is what I meant when I said Oracle is a free spirited organization and you can surely find your place here among us. The best way to describe my job is WEB 2.0. The modern online approach comes to life while we are trying to sell our business. We need to be out there and we are responsible of spreading the buzz regarding our training offerings and our official courseware materials. There are so many new ways to interact with the target audience nowadays and I am so eager to discover the best online techniques! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact [email protected]. You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com Technorati Tags: WEB 2.0,Online Marketing,Oracle University,Bucharest,events,graduates,interns,training,webcast,seminar,newsletters,business,Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn

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Multidimensional Thinking–24 Hours of Pass: Celebrating Women in Technology

- by smisner

It’s Day 1 of #24HOP and it’s been great to participate in this event with so many women from all over the world in one long training-fest. The SQL community has been abuzz on Twitter with running commentary which is fun to watch while listening to the current speaker. If you missed the fun today because you’re busy with all that work you’ve got to do – don’t despair. All sessions are recorded and will be available soon. Keep an eye on the 24 Hours of Pass page for details. And the fun’s not over today. Rather than run 24 hours consecutively, #24HOP is now broken down into 12-hours over two days, so check out the schedule to see if there’s a session that interests you and fits your schedule. I’m pleased to announce that my business colleague Erika Bakse ( Blog | Twitter) will be presenting on Day 2 – her debut presentation for a PASS event. (And I’m also pleased to say she’s my daughter!) Multidimensional Thinking: The Presentation My contribution to this lineup of terrific speakers was Multidimensional Thinking. Here’s the abstract: “Whether you’re developing Analysis Services cubes or creating PowerPivot workbooks, you need to get into a multidimensional frame of mind to produce a model that best enables users to answer their business questions on their own. Many database professionals struggle initially with multidimensional models because the data modeling process is much different than the one they use to produce traditional, third normal form databases. In this session, I’ll introduce you to the terminology of multidimensional modeling and step through the process of translating business requirements into a viable model.” If you watched the presentation and want a copy of the slides, you can download a copy here. And you’re welcome to download the slides even if you didn’t watch the presentation, but they’ll make more sense if you did! Kimball All the Way There’s only so much I can cover in the time allotted, but I hope that I succeeded in my attempt to build a foundation that prepares you for starting out in business intelligence. One of my favorite resources that will get into much more detail about all kinds of scenarios (well beyond the basics!) is The Data Warehouse Toolkit (Second Edition) by Ralph Kimball. Anything from Kimball or the Kimball Group is worth reading. Kimball material might take reading and re-reading a few times before it makes sense. From my own experience, I found that I actually had to just build my first data warehouse using dimensional modeling on faith that I was going the right direction because it just didn’t click with me initially. I’ve had years of practice since then and I can say it does get easier with practice. The most important thing, in my opinion, is that you simply must prototype a lot and solicit user feedback, because ultimately the model needs to make sense to them. They will definitely make sure you get it right! Schema Generation One question came up after the presentation about whether we use SQL Server Management Studio or Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to build the tables for the dimensional model. My answer? It really doesn’t matter how you create the tables. Use whatever method that you’re comfortable with. But just so happens that it IS possible to set up your design in BIDS as part of an Analysis Services project and to have BIDS generate the relational schema for you. I did a Webcast last year called Building a Data Mart with Integration Services that demonstrated how to do this. Yes, the subject was Integration Services, but as part of that presentation, I showed how to leverage Analysis Services to build the tables, and then I showed how to use Integration Services to load those tables. I blogged about this presentation in September 2010 and included downloads of the project that I used. In the blog post, I explained that I missed a step in the demonstration. Oops. Just as an FYI, there were two more Webcasts to finish the story begun with the data – Accelerating Answers with Analysis Services and Delivering Information with Reporting Services. If you want to just cut to the chase and learn how to use Analysis Services to build the tables, you can see the Using the Schema Generation Wizard topic in Books Online.

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Rules and advice for logging?

- by Nick Rosencrantz

In my organization we've put together some rules / guildelines about logging that I would like to know if you can add to or comment. We use Java but you may comment in general about loggin - rules and advice Use the correct logging level ERROR: Something has gone very wrong and need fixing immediately WARNING: The process can continue without fixing. The application should tolerate this level but the warning should always get investigated. INFO: Information that an important process is finished DEBUG. Is only used during development Make sure that you know what you're logging. Avoid that the logging influences the behavior of the application The function of the logging should be to write messages in the log. Log messages should be descriptive, clear, short and concise. There is not much use of a nonsense message when troubleshooting. Put the right properties in log4j Put in that the right method and class is written automatically. Example: Datedfile -web log4j.rootLogger=ERROR, DATEDFILE log4j.logger.org.springframework=INFO log4j.logger.waffle=ERROR log4j.logger.se.prv=INFO log4j.logger.se.prv.common.mvc=INFO log4j.logger.se.prv.omklassning=DEBUG log4j.appender.DATEDFILE=biz.minaret.log4j.DatedFileAppender log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{HH:mm:ss,SSS} %-5p [%C{1}.%M] - %m%n log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Prefix=omklassning. log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Suffix=.log log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Directory=//localhost/WebSphereLog/omklassning/ Log value. Please log values from the application. Log prefix. State which part of the application it is that the logging is written from, preferably with something for the project agreed prefix e.g. PANDORA_DB The amount of text. Be careful so that there is not too much logging text. It can influence the performance of the app. Loggning format: -There are several variants and methods to use with log4j but we would like a uniform use of the following format, when we log at exceptions: logger.error("PANDORA_DB2: Fel vid hämtning av frist i TP210_RAPPORTFRIST", e); In the example above it is assumed that we have set log4j properties so that it automatically write the class and the method. Always use logger and not the following: System.out.println(), System.err.println(), e.printStackTrace() If the web app uses our framework you can get very detailed error information from EJB, if using try-catch in the handler and logging according to the model above: In our project we use this conversion pattern with which method and class names are written out automatically . Here we use two different pattents for console and for datedfileappender: log4j.appender.CONSOLE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d [%t] %-5p %c - %m%n In both the examples above method and class wioll be written out. In the console row number will also be written our. toString() Please have a toString() for every object. EX: @Override public String toString() { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.append(" DwfInformation [ "); sb.append("cc: ").append(cc); sb.append("pn: ").append(pn); sb.append("kc: ").append(kc); sb.append("numberOfPages: ").append(numberOfPages); sb.append("publicationDate: ").append(publicationDate); sb.append("version: ").append(version); sb.append(" ]"); return sb.toString(); } instead of special method which make these outputs public void printAll() { logger.info("inbet: " + getInbetInput()); logger.info("betdat: " + betdat); logger.info("betid: " + betid); logger.info("send: " + send); logger.info("appr: " + appr); logger.info("rereg: " + rereg); logger.info("NY: " + ny); logger.info("CNT: " + cnt); } So is there anything you can add, comment or find questionable with these ways of using the logging? Feel free to answer or comment even if it is not related to Java, Java and log4j is just an implementation of how this is reasoned.

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Required Parameters [SSIS Denali]

- by jamiet

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in its 2005 and 2008 incarnations expects you to set a property values within your package at runtime using Configurations. SSIS developers tend to have rather a lot of issues with SSIS configurations; in this blog post I am going to highlight one of those problems and how it has been alleviated in SQL Server code-named Denali. A configuration is a property path/value pair that exists outside of a package, typically within SQL Server or in a collection of one or more configurations in a file called a .dtsConfig file. Within the package one defines a pointer to a configuration that says to the package “When you execute, go and get a configuration value from this location” and if all goes well the package will fetch that configuration value as it starts to execute and you will see something like the following in your output log: Information: 0x40016041 at Package: The package is attempting to configure from the XML file "C:\Configs\MyConfig.dtsConfig". Unfortunately things DON’T always go well, perhaps the .dtsConfig file is unreachable or the name of the SQL Sever holding the configuration value has been defined incorrectly – any one of a number of things can go wrong. In this circumstance you might see something like the following in your log output instead: Warning: 0x80012014 at Package: The configuration file "C:\Configs\MyConfig.dtsConfig" cannot be found. Check the directory and file name. The problem that I want to draw attention to here though is that your package will ignore the fact it can’t find the configuration and executes anyway. This is really really bad because the package will not be doing what it is supposed to do and worse, if you have not isolated your environments you might not even know about it. Can you imagine a package executing for months and all the while inserting data into the wrong server? Sounds ridiculous but I have absolutely seen this happen and the root cause was that no-one picked up on configuration warnings like the one above. Happily in SSIS code-named Denali this problem has gone away as configurations have been replaced with parameters. Each parameter has a property called ‘Required’: Any parameter with Required=True must have a value passed to it when the package executes. Any attempt to execute the package will result in an error. Here we see that error when attempting to execute using the SSMS UI: and similarly when executing using T-SQL: Error is: Msg 27184, Level 16, State 1, Procedure prepare_execution, Line 112 In order to execute this package, you need to specify values for the required parameters. As you can see, SSIS code-named Denali has mechanisms built-in to prevent the problem I described at the top of this blog post. Specifying a Parameter required means that any packages in that project cannot execute until a value for the parameter has been supplied. This is a very good thing. I am loathe to make recommendations so early in the development cycle but right now I’m thinking that all Project Parameters should have Required=True, certainly any that are used to define external locations should be anyway. @Jamiet

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Welcome to the Oracle Retail International Blog

- by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

Welcome to the first post of the new Oracle Retail International Blog. Retail is an international business and today's successful retailers view themselves in the context of a global market. A niche fashion business in Tokyo will learn marketing strategies from the luxury brands of Milan, an independent grocer in Oslo will source the same global brands as a supermarket in Oklahoma, and every retailer in the world will measure their multi-channel operation against the international e-commerce giant Amazon. Why? Because today's customer is a global customer with unparalleled expectations on choice, price and service. Today's consumers have access to more information on retail than ever before. Technology allows people to shop from their home, their office or from the phone in their pocket, wherever they are and at whatever time suits them. Customers are using the web to search for products and promotions. They are also using the web to develop their voice in commenting on products and services that have delighted or disappointed. In an information rich industry, this customer element creates a new world of data. The best retailers are developing eagle eyes for reading customer activity and turning it into profitable decisions. Ultimately, whether you choose to compete or shop on price, service, product innovation, excellent operations or all of the above - the international world of retail has become an inspiration for all - retailer and consumer alike. Retail as an industry is growing and diversifying at a faster rate than ever before. Yet it is still the customer who picks the winners and the losers on the retail field. Economic circumstances transform the rules, but it is still the customer who dictates the game, the pace, the price, and the perception of the brand. Wise retailers never rest on their laurels. They are always shopping for ideas on how to improve and differentiate the offer at every touch point to meet the customer's needs better than anyone else and to gain each customer's loyalty at a time when loyalty can be cheap. With this blog, I hope that we might provide a hub for discussion around what unifies retail and how technology supports both the retailer and customer experience. Despite the competitive nature of this market, we hope that this will provide an opportunity to share experiences and lessons learnt with a view that knowledge can only help this industry to grow and develop. At Oracle we've been supporting retailers for many years. Many of us have worked within retail organisations all over the world, myself included. With this in mind, I don't feel it is too bold a statement to say that Oracle understands retail. We wouldn't be so heavily integrated in some of the biggest and most well-known names in retail if we didn't. With this blog, we intend to create a community of international retailers that can exchange ideas and experiences, debate collective challenges and drive a better understanding of this continually evolving industry. Events such as the World Retail Congress and NRF's Big Show bring enormous value to the retail industry providing platforms for discussion and learning but they happen once a year. We wanted to create a platform for discussion on a different level and that like retail, is always on. We hope not only to bring commitment to being not only the infrastructure that brings all of their systems together within a retail business, but an infrastructure that supports the industry internationally to grow and flourish through creating a platform for networking, discussion, creativity, vision and strategy. Please feel free to ask questions or comment using the comments functionality. You might also want to visit our other Oracle Retail social media sites: Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/oracleretail YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/oracleretail Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/oracleretailInsight-Driven Retailing Blog - http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/

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Bitmask data insertions in SSDT Post-Deployment scripts

- by jamiet

On my current project we are using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to manage our database schema and one of the tasks we need to do often is insert data into that schema once deployed; the typical method employed to do this is to leverage Post-Deployment scripts and that is exactly what we are doing. Our requirement is a little different though, our data is split up into various buckets that we need to selectively deploy on a case-by-case basis. I was going to use a SQLCMD variable for each bucket (defaulted to some value other than “Yes”) to define whether it should be deployed or not so we could use something like this in our Post-Deployment script: IF ($(DeployBucket1Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN :r .\Bucket1.data.sqlENDIF ($(DeployBucket2Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN :r .\Bucket2.data.sqlENDIF ($(DeployBucket3Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN :r .\Bucket3.data.sqlEND That works fine and is, I’m sure, a very common technique for doing this. It is however slightly ugly because we have to litter our deployment with various SQLCMD variables. My colleague James Rowland-Jones (whom I’m sure many of you know) suggested another technique – bitmasks. I won’t go into detail about how this works (James has already done that at Using a Bitmask - a practical example) but I’ll summarise by saying that you can deploy different combinations of the buckets simply by supplying a different numerical value for a single SQLCMD variable. Each bit of that value’s binary representation signifies whether a particular bucket should be deployed or not. This is better demonstrated using the following simple script (which can be easily leveraged inside your Post-Deployment scripts): /* $(DeployData) is a SQLCMD variable that would, if you were using this in SSDT, be declared in the SQLCMD variables section of your project file. It should contain a numerical value, defaulted to 0. In this example I have declared it using a :setvar statement. Test the affect of different values by changing the :setvar statement accordingly. Examples: :setvar DeployData 1 will deploy bucket 1 :setvar DeployData 2 will deploy bucket 2 :setvar DeployData 3 will deploy buckets 1 & 2 :setvar DeployData 6 will deploy buckets 2 & 3 :setvar DeployData 31 will deploy buckets 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 */ :setvar DeployData 0 DECLARE @bitmask VARBINARY(MAX) = CONVERT(VARBINARY,$(DeployData)); IF (@bitmask & 1 = 1) BEGIN PRINT 'Bucket 1 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 2 = 2) BEGIN PRINT 'Bucket 2 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 4 = 4) BEGIN PRINT 'Bucket 3 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 8 = 8) BEGIN PRINT 'Bucket 4 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 16 = 16) BEGIN PRINT 'Bucket 5 insertions'; END An example of running this using DeployData=6 The binary representation of 6 is 110. The second and third significant bits of that binary number are set to 1 and hence buckets 2 and 3 are “activated”. Hope that makes sense and is useful to some of you! @Jamiet P.S. I used the awesome HTML Copy feature of Visual Studio’s Productivity Power Tools in order to format the T-SQL code above for this blog post.

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How to store a shmup level?

- by pek

I am developing a 2D shmup (i.e. Aero Fighters) and I was wondering what are the various ways to store a level. Assuming that enemies are defined in their own xml file, how would you define when an enemy spawns in the level? Would it be based on time? Updates? Distance? Currently I do this based on "level time" (the amount of time the level is running - pausing doesn't update the time). Here is an example (the serialization was done by XNA): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <XnaContent xmlns:level="pekalicious.xanor.XanorContentShared.content.level"> <Asset Type="level:Level"> <Enemies> <Enemy> <EnemyType>data/enemies/smallenemy</EnemyType> <SpawnTime>PT0S</SpawnTime> <NumberOfSpawns>60</NumberOfSpawns> <SpawnOffset>PT0.2S</SpawnOffset> </Enemy> <Enemy> <EnemyType>data/enemies/secondenemy</EnemyType> <SpawnTime>PT0S</SpawnTime> <NumberOfSpawns>10</NumberOfSpawns> <SpawnOffset>PT0.5S</SpawnOffset> </Enemy> <Enemy> <EnemyType>data/enemies/secondenemy</EnemyType> <SpawnTime>PT20S</SpawnTime> <NumberOfSpawns>10</NumberOfSpawns> <SpawnOffset>PT0.5S</SpawnOffset> </Enemy> <Enemy> <EnemyType>data/enemies/boss1</EnemyType> <SpawnTime>PT30S</SpawnTime> <NumberOfSpawns>1</NumberOfSpawns> <SpawnOffset>PT0S</SpawnOffset> </Enemy> </Enemies> </Asset> </XnaContent> Each Enemy element is basically a wave of specific enemy types. The type is defined in EnemyType while SpawnTime is the "level time" this wave should appear. NumberOfSpawns and SpawnOffset is the number of enemies that will show up and the time it takes between each spawn respectively. This could be a good idea or there could be better ones out there. I'm not sure. I would like to see some opinions and ideas. I have two problems with this: spawning an enemy correctly and creating a level editor. The level editor thing is an entirely different problem (which I will probably post in the future :P). As for spawning correctly, the problem lies in the fact that I have a variable update time and so I need to make sure I don't miss an enemy spawn because the spawn offset is too small, or because the update took a little more time. I kinda fixed it for the most part, but it seems to me that the problem is with how I store the level. So, any ideas? Comments? Thank you in advance.

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Silverlight Cream for May 27, 2010 -- #871

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Max Paulousky, Jeff Wilcox, David Anson, René Schulte, Xianzhong Zhu, Jeff Handley, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, and Marlon Grech. Shoutouts: SilverLaw has a great demo at the Expression Gallery, and we're all going to look forward to the blog post explaining it: Flexible Surface Effect SilverLaw> has another use for the above in this text morphing Effect: Morphing Text Effect Matthias Shapiro contributed a chapter for a book on Visualization and it's available as a free download: Free Chapter From Beautiful Visualization Andy Beaulieu has a demo up as almost a spoiler for a future Coding4Fun app... and how cool is this: Shuffleboard: A Windows Phone 7 Sample Game From SilverlightCream.com: Separating Content and Presentation with the ContentControl Phil Middlemiss' latest is out on SilverlightShow and is all about the ContentControl and separating layout and content ... demo project source included Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Silverlight Applications. Part 1 Max Paulousky has part one of a long series he's starting on a demo project to explain a bunch of MEF, MVVM, and WCF RIA concepts. This first one contains the overview and also discusses SEO. There is a link to the app and material in the post if you read Russian :) Updated Silverlight Unit Test Framework bits for Windows Phone and Silverlight 3 Jeff Wilcox has available updated Unit Test bits for Silverlight 3 -- read that as WP7... read the rest of the information on his post. Easily animate orientation changes for any Windows Phone application with this handy source code David Anson has some code up that you're going to want if you're programming WP7 ... just watch the video ... you'll be downloading the code just like I did :) SilverShader – Introduction to Silverlight and WPF Pixel Shaders René Schulte has a post up at Coding4Fun about PixelShaders... how to write them and an application that uses them... this is a great long tutorial... a must read. Developing Freecell Game Using Silverlight 3 Part 2 Xianzhong Zhu has part 2 of his FreeCell game development posted ... lots of detailed descriptions and code, plus all the code of course! Async Validation with RIA Services Jeff Handley has a post up that is sort of a follow-on to a year-old post on async validation with RIA services and DataForm and how it's all much easier now in SL4. Learning Blend with .toolbox (Silverlight TV #29) John Papa and Arturo Toledo discuss .toolbox in Silverlight TV #29 -- have you made yourself an avatar yet? ... well go get on-board with this great learning tool! Silverlight Out of Browser Dynamic Modules in Offline Mode OOB isn't difficult, dynamic modules can become a bit more, but what if you're OOB... ok what if you're OOB and offline? ... Jeremy Likness has a possible solution for this with an OfflineCatalog. MEFedMVVM v1.0 Explained Marlon Grech has a great into to MEFedMVVM in this post. If you're trying to get your head around MEF and MVVM in either WPF or Silverlight, here's a good starting point. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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NetBeans PHP Community Council

- by Tomas Mysik

Hi all, today we would like to inform all of you that now you have a chance to improve NetBeans via NetBeans PHP Community Council. The author of this activity is Timur Poperecinii and he would like to tell you a few words about it. Hello passionate technical people, First of all let me introduce myself: my name is Timur, I’m a developer from Moldova (that little country between Romania and Ukraine), I develop mostly in .NET and JQuery, but I love to learn more, not being an expert I am familiar with Java (Struts2, Play), PHP (Symfony2), Ruby (Rails), Sencha Touch 2 and other technologies. I was “introduced” in PHP recently by a client of mine who requested to make the work specifically in PHP. Let me tell you a little story about my experience with open source and IDEs: when I was studying in university in 2007 I think, I did a simple little application in PHP and thought “Damn, if only there was a good IDE for PHP so I could relax and no having to remember all the function names”, then when I searched on internet pretty much everyone was using Vim or Emacs on Linux, but it had no autocomplete anyway, just syntax highlighting. I remember using some tool like Notepad++ I think. Nowadays everything changed, we have highlighting and autocomplete for about all standard things in PHP in many IDEs. I use NetBeans for PHP, and I really am happy with the experience I have there with standard PHP code, but for frameworks I still think there is lots of room for improvements. For example we have some Symfony 2 and Twig support. But I’d love to see more of that coming, for example I’m a big fan of file templates, where the main goal is to not waste time on writing over and over again something that can be generated, and it counts even more when you don’t have a lot of autocomplete. So what I thought, “Hey I know Java a little, and NetBeans has plugins, so may be it worth trying to do a file templates plugin”, and so I did, you can find details about my Unified Udevi Symfony2 Plugin for NetBeans 7.2 on my blog. It wasn’t hard, and it even was fun! Give back to open source Now think a little, NetBeans is an open source project and PHP support is just a part of it, so the resources are pretty limited in this area. But we as a community that uses this product, want to have the best possible experience with PHP and frameworks(!!!). So why don’t we GIVE BACK TO OPENSOURCE ? Imagine an IDE that can do all the things you wanted + it is free. Now how far is NetBeans from that point? I guess not so far – you might miss a little niche thing that you use on a daily basis, but then the question appears why don’t you make it happen on your own? NetBeans PHP Community Council What I proposed is to create a NetBeans PHP Community Council that will be formed of people willing to change something, willing to create plugins for their own needs and for the needs of the community, test the plugins created by them too, and basically evolve NetBeans in direction they want to reach. I already talked with the NetBeans PHP team. They are only happy to help this Council, with technical advises, opening some APIs we might need to have access to, and other things. One important thing to mention is that this Council is a Community project, so though we’ll have direct discussions with NetBeans PHP Dev team, NetBeans is not the leading force here, it is the community. You can see more details about the goals and structure I proposed at NetBeans PHP Community Council wiki page. We use this mail list: [email protected] for discussions and topics related to the Council. How can I join To join the NetBeans PHP Community Council please send an email to [email protected] with the subject of the mail starting with [Council New Member]. You can subscribe to this mail list here:http://netbeans.org/projects/php/lists. in your mail please indicate your location, age and experience both in Java and PHP. I need these data to assign you to a team. A response will be send to you with your next assignment and some people to contact. I really hope that you’ll make a step forward and try to make your everyday use of NetBeans even more fun.

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