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• Conversation as User Assistance

  - by ultan o'broin

  Applications User Experience members (Erika Web, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Anne Gentle (left) with Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help The Microsoft Development Network Community Center ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes reach out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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• Database users in the Oracle Utilities Application Framework

  - by Anthony Shorten

  I mentioned the product database users fleetingly in the last blog post and they deserve a better mention. This applies to all versions of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. The Oracle Utilities Application Framework uses up to three users initially as part of the base operations of the product. The type of database supported (the framework supports Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server) dictates the number of users used and their permissions. For publishing brevity I will outline what is available for the Oracle database and, in summary, mention where it differs for the other database supported. For Oracle database customers we ship three distinct database users: Administration User (SPLADM or CISADM by default) - This is the database user that actually owns the schema. This user is not used by the product to do any DML (Data Manipulation Language) SQL other than that is necessary for maintenance of the database. This database user performs all the DCL (Data Control Language) and DDL (Data Definition Language) against the database. It is typically reserved for Database Administration use only. Product Read Write User (SPLUSER or CISUSER by default) - This is the database user used by the product itself to execute DML (Data Manipulation Language) statements against the schema owned by the Administration user. This user has the appropriate read and write permission to objects within the schema owned by the Administration user. For databases such as DB2 and SQL Server we may not create this user but use other DCL (Data Control Language) statements and facilities to simulate this user. Product Read User (SPLREAD or CISREAD by default) - This is the database that has read only permission to the schema owned by the Administration user. It is used for reporting or any part of the product or interface that requires read permissions to the database (for example, products that have ConfigLab and Archiving use this user for remote access). For databases such as DB2 and SQL Server we may not create this user but use other DCL (Data Control Language) statements and facilities to simulate this user. You may notice the words by default in the list above. The values supplied with the installer are the default and can be changed to what the site standard or implementation wants to use (as long as they conform to the standards supported by the underlying database). You can even create multiples of each within the same database and pointing to same schema. To manage the permissions for the users, there is a utility provided with the installation (oragensec (Oracle), db2gensec (DB2) or msqlgensec (SQL Server)) that generates the security definitions for the above users. That can be executed a number of times for each schema to give users appropriate permissions. For example, it is possible to define more than one read/write User to access the database. This is a common technique used by implementations to have a different user per access mode (to separate online and batch). In fact you can also allocate additional security (such as resource profiles in Oracle) to limit the impact of specific users at the database. To facilitate users and permissions, in Oracle for example, we create a CISREAD role (read only role) and a CISUSER role (read write role) that can be allocated to the appropriate database user. When the security permissions utility, oragensec in this case, is executed it uses the role to determine the permissions. To give you a case study, my underpowered laptop has multiple installations on it of multiple products but I have one database. I create a different schema for each product and each version (with my own naming convention to help me manage the databases). I create individual users on each schema and run oragensec to maintain the permissions for each appropriately. It works fine as long I have setup the userids appropriately. This means: Creating the users with the appropriate roles. I use the common CISUSER and CISREAD role across versions and across Oracle Utilities Application Framework products. Just remember to associate the CISUSER role with the database user you want to use for read/write operations and the CISREAD role with the user you wish to use for the read only operations. The role is treated as a tag to indicate the oragensec utility which appropriate permissions to assign to the user. The utilities for the other database types essentially do the same, obviously using the technology available within those databases. Run oragensec against the read write user and read only user against the appropriate administration user (I will abbreviate the user to ADM user). This ensures the right permissions are allocated to the right users for the right products. To help me there, I use the same prefix on the user name for the same product. For example, my Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 environment has the administration user set to FW4ADM and the associated FW4USER and FW4READ as the users for the product to use. For my MWM environment I used MWMADM for the administration user and MWMUSER and MWMREAD for my associated users. You get the picture. When I run oragensec (once for each ADM user), I know what other users to associate with it. Remember to rerun oragensec against the users if I run upgrades, service packs or database based single fixes. This assures that the users are in synchronization with the ADM user. As a side note, for those who do not understand the difference between DML, DCL and DDL: DDL (Data Definition Language) - These are SQL statements that define the database schema and the structures within. SQL Statements such as CREATE and DROP are examples of DDL SQL statements. DCL (Data Control Language) - These are the SQL statements that define the database level permissions to DDL maintained objects within the database. SQL Statements such as GRANT and REVOKE are examples of DCL SQL statements. DML (Database Manipulation Language) - These are SQL statements that alter the data within the tables. SQL Statements such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE are examples of DML SQL statements. Hope this has clarified the database user support. Remember in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 we enhanced this by also supporting CLIENT_IDENTIFIER to allow the database to still use the administration user for the main processing but make the database session more traceable.

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• Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 1

  - by rajbk

  The Open Data Protocol, referred to as OData, is a new data-sharing standard that breaks down silos and fosters an interoperative ecosystem for data consumers (clients) and producers (services) that is far more powerful than currently possible. It enables more applications to make sense of a broader set of data, and helps every data service and client add value to the whole ecosystem. WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services), then, was the first Microsoft technology to support the Open Data Protocol in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It provides developers with client libraries for .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, PHP and Java. Microsoft now also supports OData in SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure Storage, Excel 2010 (through PowerPivot), and SharePoint 2010. Many other other applications in the works. * This post walks you through how to create an OData feed, define a shape for the data and pre-filter the data using Visual Studio 2010, WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework. A sample project is attached at the bottom of Part 2 of this post. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Create the Web Application File –› New –› Project, Select “ASP.NET Empty Web Application” Add the Entity Data Model Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” under "Data”. Name the Model “Northwind” and click “Add”.   In the “Choose Model Contents”, select “Generate Model From Database” and click “Next”   Define a connection to your database containing the Northwind database in the next screen. We are going to expose the Products table through our OData feed. Select “Products” in the “Choose your Database Object” screen.   Click “Finish”. We are done creating our Entity Data Model. Save the Northwind.edmx file created. Add the WCF Data Service Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “WCF Data Service” from the list and call the service “DataService” (creative, huh?). Click “Add”.   Enable Access to the Data Service Open the DataService.svc.cs class. The class is well commented and instructs us on the next steps. public class DataService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } Replace the comment that starts with “/* TODO:” with “NorthwindEntities” (the entity container name of the Model we created earlier).  WCF Data Services is initially locked down by default, FTW! No data is exposed without you explicitly setting it. You have explicitly specify which Entity sets you wish to expose and what rights are allowed by using the SetEntitySetAccessRule. The SetServiceOperationAccessRule on the other hand sets rules for a specified operation. Let us define an access rule to expose the Products Entity we created earlier. We use the EnititySetRights.AllRead since we want to give read only access. Our modified code is shown below. public class DataService : DataService<NorthwindEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Products", EntitySetRights.AllRead); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } We are done setting up our ODataFeed! Compile your project. Right click on DataService.svc and select “View in Browser” to see the OData feed. To view the feed in IE, you must make sure that "Feed Reading View" is turned off. You set this under Tools -› Internet Options -› Content tab.   If you navigate to “Products”, you should see the Products feed. Note also that URIs are case sensitive. ie. Products work but products doesn’t.   Filtering our data OData has a set of system query operations you can use to perform common operations against data exposed by the model. For example, to see only Products in CategoryID 2, we can use the following request: /DataService.svc/Products?$filter=CategoryID eq 2 At the time of this writing, supported operations are $orderby, $top, $skip, $filter, $expand, $format†, $select, $inlinecount. Pre-filtering our data using Query Interceptors The Product feed currently returns all Products. We want to change that so that it contains only Products that have not been discontinued. WCF introduces the concept of interceptors which allows us to inject custom validation/policy logic into the request/response pipeline of a WCF data service. We will use a QueryInterceptor to pre-filter the data so that it returns only Products that are not discontinued. To create a QueryInterceptor, write a method that returns an Expression<Func<T, bool>> and mark it with the QueryInterceptor attribute as shown below. [QueryInterceptor("Products")] public Expression<Func<Product, bool>> OnReadProducts() { return o => o.Discontinued == false; } Viewing the feed after compilation will only show products that have not been discontinued. We also confirm this by looking at the WHERE clause in the SQL generated by the entity framework. SELECT [Extent1].[ProductID] AS [ProductID], ... ... [Extent1].[Discontinued] AS [Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [Extent1] WHERE 0 = [Extent1].[Discontinued] Other examples of Query/Change interceptors can be seen here including an example to filter data based on the identity of the authenticated user. We are done pre-filtering our data. In the next part of this post, we will see how to shape our data. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Foot Notes * http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937697.aspx † $format did not work for me. The way to get a Json response is to include the following in the  request header “Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*” when making the request. This is easily done with most JavaScript libraries.

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• I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

  - by George Clingerman

  One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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• Microsoft TypeScript : A Typed Superset of JavaScript

  - by shiju

  JavaScript is gradually becoming a ubiquitous programming language for the web, and the popularity of JavaScript is increasing day by day. Earlier, JavaScript was just a language for browser. But now, we can write JavaScript apps for browser, server and mobile. With the advent of Node.js, you can build scalable, high performance apps on the server with JavaScript. But many developers, especially developers who are working with static type languages, are hating the JavaScript language due to the lack of structuring and the maintainability problems of JavaScript. Microsoft TypeScript is trying to solve some problems of JavaScript when we are building scalable JavaScript apps. Microsoft TypeScript TypeScript is Microsoft's solution for writing scalable JavaScript programs with the help of Static Types, Interfaces, Modules and Classes along with greater tooling support. TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. This would be more productive for developers who are coming from static type languages. You can write scalable JavaScript  apps in TypeScript with more productive and more maintainable manner, and later you can compiles to plain JavaScript which will be run on any browser and any OS. TypeScript will work with browser based JavaScript apps and JavaScript apps that following CommonJS specification. You can use TypeScript for building HTML 5 apps, Node.JS apps, WinRT apps. TypeScript is providing better tooling support with Visual Studio, Sublime Text, Vi, Emacs. Microsoft has open sourced its TypeScript languages on CodePlex at http://typescript.codeplex.com/    Install TypeScript You can install TypeScript compiler as a Node.js package via the NPM or you can install as a Visual Studio 2012 plug-in which will enable you better tooling support within the Visual Studio IDE. Since TypeScript is distributed as a Node.JS package, and it can be installed on other OS such as Linux and MacOS. The following command will install TypeScript compiler via an npm package for node.js npm install –g typescript TypeScript provides a Visual Studio 2012 plug-in as MSI file which will install TypeScript and also provides great tooling support within the Visual Studio, that lets the developers to write TypeScript apps with greater productivity and better maintainability. You can download the Visual Studio plug-in from here Building JavaScript  apps with TypeScript You can write typed version of JavaScript programs with TypeScript and then compiles it to plain JavaScript code. The beauty of the TypeScript is that it is already JavaScript and normal JavaScript programs are valid TypeScript programs, which means that you can write normal  JavaScript code and can use typed version of JavaScript whenever you want. TypeScript files are using extension .ts and this will be compiled using a compiler named tsc. The following is a sample program written in  TypeScript greeter.ts 1: class Greeter { 2: greeting: string; 3: constructor (message: string) { 4: this.greeting = message; 5: } 6: greet() { 7: return "Hello, " + this.greeting; 8: } 9: } 10:   11: var greeter = new Greeter("world"); 12:   13: var button = document.createElement('button') 14: button.innerText = "Say Hello" 15: button.onclick = function() { 16: alert(greeter.greet()) 17: } 18:   19: document.body.appendChild(button) .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The above program is compiling with the TypeScript compiler as shown in the below picture The TypeScript compiler will generate a JavaScript file after compiling the TypeScript program. If your TypeScript programs having any reference to other TypeScript files, it will automatically generate JavaScript files for the each referenced files. The following code block shows the compiled version of plain JavaScript  for the above greeter.ts greeter.js 1: var Greeter = (function () { 2: function Greeter(message) { 3: this.greeting = message; 4: } 5: Greeter.prototype.greet = function () { 6: return "Hello, " + this.greeting; 7: }; 8: return Greeter; 9: })(); 10: var greeter = new Greeter("world"); 11: var button = document.createElement('button'); 12: button.innerText = "Say Hello"; 13: button.onclick = function () { 14: alert(greeter.greet()); 15: }; 16: document.body.appendChild(button); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Tooling Support with Visual Studio TypeScript is providing a plug-in for Visual Studio which will provide an excellent support for writing TypeScript  programs within the Visual Studio. The following screen shot shows the Visual Studio template for TypeScript apps   The following are the few screen shots of Visual Studio IDE for TypeScript apps. Summary TypeScript is Microsoft's solution for writing scalable JavaScript apps which will solve lot of problems involved in larger JavaScript apps. I hope that this solution will attract lot of developers who are really looking for writing maintainable structured code in JavaScript, without losing any productivity. TypeScript lets developers to write JavaScript apps with the help of Static Types, Interfaces, Modules and Classes and also providing better productivity. I am a passionate developer on Node.JS and would definitely try to use TypeScript for building Node.JS apps on the Windows Azure cloud. I am really excited about to writing Node.JS apps by using TypeScript, from my favorite development IDE Visual Studio. You can follow me on twitter at @shijucv

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• usb mouse/keyboard doesn't work with 3.11.0-12-generic kernel

  - by x-yuri

  I can't use my usb keyboard/mouse after upgrade from raring to saucy. The keyboard works in grub menu and if I boot with the previous kernel version (3.8.0-31-generic). My new kernel version is 3.11.0-12-generic. I've got Mad Catz R.A.T.7 wired USB mouse, Canyon CNL-MBMSO02 wired usb mouse and Logitech diNovo Edge wireless keyboard, connected to computer through Logitech Unifying Receiver. Using PS/2 keyboard I've managed to get some information. dmesg says: [ 0.166273] ACPI: bus type USB registered [ 0.166273] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs [ 0.166273] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub [ 0.166273] usbcore: registered new device driver usb ... [ 3.534226] ehci_hcd: USB 2.0 'Enhanced' Host Controller (EHCI) Driver [ 3.534228] ehci-pci: EHCI PCI platform driver [ 3.534291] ehci-pci 0000:00:1a.7: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.534299] ehci-pci 0000:00:1a.7: EHCI Host Controller [ 3.534304] ehci-pci 0000:00:1a.7: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1 [ 3.534315] ehci-pci 0000:00:1a.7: debug port 1 [ 3.538218] ehci-pci 0000:00:1a.7: cache line size of 64 is not supported [ 3.538231] ehci-pci 0000:00:1a.7: irq 18, io mem 0xd3325400 [ 3.548017] ehci-pci 0000:00:1a.7: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00 [ 3.548042] usb usb1: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0002 [ 3.548045] usb usb1: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.548048] usb usb1: Product: EHCI Host Controller [ 3.548050] usb usb1: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic ehci_hcd [ 3.548053] usb usb1: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1a.7 [ 3.548155] hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.548159] hub 1-0:1.0: 6 ports detected [ 3.548311] ehci-pci 0000:00:1d.7: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.548319] ehci-pci 0000:00:1d.7: EHCI Host Controller [ 3.548323] ehci-pci 0000:00:1d.7: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2 [ 3.548333] ehci-pci 0000:00:1d.7: debug port 1 [ 3.552228] ehci-pci 0000:00:1d.7: cache line size of 64 is not supported [ 3.552239] ehci-pci 0000:00:1d.7: irq 23, io mem 0xd3325000 [ 3.564014] ehci-pci 0000:00:1d.7: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00 [ 3.564044] usb usb2: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0002 [ 3.564047] usb usb2: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.564050] usb usb2: Product: EHCI Host Controller [ 3.564052] usb usb2: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic ehci_hcd [ 3.564056] usb usb2: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1d.7 [ 3.564163] hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.564167] hub 2-0:1.0: 6 ports detected [ 3.564274] ehci-platform: EHCI generic platform driver [ 3.564280] ohci_hcd: USB 1.1 'Open' Host Controller (OHCI) Driver [ 3.564281] ohci-platform: OHCI generic platform driver [ 3.564287] uhci_hcd: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver [ 3.564345] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.564347] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.564352] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3 [ 3.564378] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: irq 16, io base 0x0000f0c0 [ 3.564402] usb usb3: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0001 [ 3.564404] usb usb3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.564406] usb usb3: Product: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.564408] usb usb3: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic uhci_hcd [ 3.564410] usb usb3: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1a.0 [ 3.564478] hub 3-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.564482] hub 3-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 3.564589] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.564592] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.564597] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 4 [ 3.564623] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: irq 21, io base 0x0000f0a0 [ 3.564647] usb usb4: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0001 [ 3.564649] usb usb4: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.564651] usb usb4: Product: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.564653] usb usb4: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic uhci_hcd [ 3.564654] usb usb4: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1a.1 [ 3.564727] hub 4-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.564730] hub 4-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 3.564834] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.564837] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.564843] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 5 [ 3.564863] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: irq 18, io base 0x0000f080 [ 3.564885] usb usb5: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0001 [ 3.564887] usb usb5: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.564889] usb usb5: Product: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.564891] usb usb5: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic uhci_hcd [ 3.564892] usb usb5: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1a.2 [ 3.564962] hub 5-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.564966] hub 5-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 3.565073] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.565076] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.565081] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 6 [ 3.565101] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: irq 23, io base 0x0000f060 [ 3.565124] usb usb6: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0001 [ 3.565127] usb usb6: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.565128] usb usb6: Product: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.565130] usb usb6: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic uhci_hcd [ 3.565132] usb usb6: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1d.0 [ 3.565195] hub 6-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.565198] hub 6-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 3.565303] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.565306] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.565310] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 7 [ 3.565329] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: irq 19, io base 0x0000f040 [ 3.565352] usb usb7: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0001 [ 3.565354] usb usb7: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.565356] usb usb7: Product: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.565358] usb usb7: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic uhci_hcd [ 3.565359] usb usb7: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1d.1 [ 3.565424] hub 7-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.565427] hub 7-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 3.565534] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: setting latency timer to 64 [ 3.565537] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.565541] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 8 [ 3.565560] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: irq 18, io base 0x0000f020 [ 3.565584] usb usb8: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0001 [ 3.565587] usb usb8: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 [ 3.565588] usb usb8: Product: UHCI Host Controller [ 3.565590] usb usb8: Manufacturer: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic uhci_hcd [ 3.565592] usb usb8: SerialNumber: 0000:00:1d.2 [ 3.565658] hub 8-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 3.565661] hub 8-0:1.0: 2 ports detected ... [ 4.120014] usb 2-3: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-pci ... [ 4.468908] usb 2-3: New USB device found, idVendor=046d, idProduct=0825 [ 4.468912] usb 2-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=2 [ 4.468914] usb 2-3: SerialNumber: AF582E10 ... [ 5.284019] usb 5-2: new full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd [ 5.465903] usb 5-2: New USB device found, idVendor=046d, idProduct=0b04 [ 5.465908] usb 5-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 [ 5.465911] usb 5-2: Product: Logitech BT Mini-Receiver [ 5.465914] usb 5-2: Manufacturer: Logitech [ 5.468948] hub 5-2:1.0: USB hub found [ 5.470898] hub 5-2:1.0: 3 ports detected [ 5.476096] Switched to clocksource tsc [ 5.712099] usb 7-2: new full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd [ 5.896366] usb 7-2: New USB device found, idVendor=046d, idProduct=c52b [ 5.896370] usb 7-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 [ 5.896372] usb 7-2: Product: USB Receiver [ 5.896374] usb 7-2: Manufacturer: Logitech [ 6.140016] usb 8-1: new full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd [ 6.324597] usb 8-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0738, idProduct=1708 [ 6.324603] usb 8-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 [ 6.324605] usb 8-1: Product: Mad Catz R.A.T.7 Mouse [ 6.324608] usb 8-1: Manufacturer: Mad Catz [ 6.564012] usb 8-2: new low-speed USB device number 3 using uhci_hcd [ 6.746602] usb 8-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1d57, idProduct=0010 [ 6.746608] usb 8-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 [ 6.746610] usb 8-2: Product: usb mouse with wheel [ 6.746613] usb 8-2: Manufacturer: HID-Compliant Mouse [ 7.337898] usb 5-2.2: new full-speed USB device number 3 using uhci_hcd [ 7.490902] usb 5-2.2: New USB device found, idVendor=046d, idProduct=c713 [ 7.490907] usb 5-2.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [ 7.490910] usb 5-2.2: Product: Logitech BT Mini-Receiver [ 7.490913] usb 5-2.2: Manufacturer: Logitech [ 7.490915] usb 5-2.2: SerialNumber: 001F203BD6A7 [ 7.569898] usb 5-2.3: new full-speed USB device number 4 using uhci_hcd [ 7.722901] usb 5-2.3: New USB device found, idVendor=046d, idProduct=c714 [ 7.722906] usb 5-2.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [ 7.722909] usb 5-2.3: Product: Logitech BT Mini-Receiver [ 7.722911] usb 5-2.3: Manufacturer: Logitech [ 7.722913] usb 5-2.3: SerialNumber: 001F203BD6A7 lsusb (more output): Bus 002 Device 002: ID 046d:0825 Logitech, Inc. Webcam C270 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 008 Device 003: ID 1d57:0010 Xenta Bus 008 Device 002: ID 0738:1708 Mad Catz, Inc. Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 002: ID 046d:c52b Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 005 Device 004: ID 046d:c714 Logitech, Inc. diNovo Edge Keyboard Bus 005 Device 003: ID 046d:c713 Logitech, Inc. Bus 005 Device 002: ID 046d:0b04 Logitech, Inc. Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub More background. Before that I had a problem with logging in to GNOME. During which I upgraded all the packages at one point (apt-get upgrade) and it stopped booting at all (it didn't get to login screen). Then I fixed PATH issue and now I've got this usb-not-working issue. I tried reinstalling kernel, to no effect. Is there anything else I can do to fix or diagnose the problem?

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• Bye Bye Year of the Dragon, Hello BPM

  - by Ajay Khanna

  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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} As 2012 fades and we usher in a New Year, let’s look back at some of the hottest BPM trends and those we’ll be seeing more of in the coming months. BPM is as much about people as it is about technology. As people adopt new ways of engagement, new channels of communications and new devices to interact , the changes are reflected in BPM practices. As Social and Mobile have become an integral part of our personal and professional lives, we’ll see tighter integration of social and mobile with BPM, and more use cases emerging for smarter process management in 2013. And with products and services becoming less differentiated, organizations will strive to differentiate on Customer Experience. Concepts like Pace Layered Architecture and Dynamic Case Management will provide more flexibility and agility to IT groups and knowledge workers. Take a look at some of these capabilities we showcased (see video) at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Some of these trends that will continue to gain momentum in 2013: Social networks and social media have provided a new way for businesses to engage with customers. A prospect is likely to reach out to their social network before making any purchase. Companies are increasingly engaging with customers in social networks to influence their purchasing decisions, as well as listening to customers via tools like sentiment analysis to see what customers think about a particular product or process. These insights are valuable as companies look to improve their processes. Inside organizations, workers are using social tools to engage with each other to design new products and processes. Social collaboration tools are being used to resolve issues where an employee needs consultation to reach a decision. Oracle BPM Suite includes social interaction as an integral part of its process design and work management to empower today’s business users. Ubiquitous smart mobile devices are trending as a tool of choice for many workers. Many companies are adopting the policy of “Bring Your Own Device,” and the device of choice is a tablet. Devices like smart phones and tablets not only provide mobility to workers and customers, but they also provide additional important information – the context. By integrating the mobile context (location, photos, and preferences) into your processes, organizations can make much more informed decisions, as well as offer more personalized service to customers. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, you can easily create user interfaces for mobile devices and also capture location data for process execution. Customer experience was at the forefront of trending topics in 2012. Organizations are trying to understand their customers better and offer them more personalized and differentiated services. Customer experience is paramount when companies design sales and support processes. Companies are looking to BPM to consistently and efficiently orchestrate customer facing processes across disparate systems, departments and channels of communication. Oracle BPM Suite provides just the right capabilities for organizations to design and deliver an excellent customer experience. Pace Layered Architecture strategy is gaining traction as a way to maximize agility and minimize disruption in organizations. It provides a framework to manage the evolution of your information system when different pieces of it are changing at different rates and need to be updated independent of one another. Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle BPM Suite are designed with this in mind. The database layer, integration layer, application layer, and process layer should not be required to change at the same time. Most of the business changes to policy or process can be done at the process layer without disrupting the whole infrastructure. By understanding the type of change needed at a particular level, organizations can become much more agile and efficient. Adaptive Case Management proposes more flexibility to manage processes or cases that do not follow a structured process flow. In such situations, the knowledge worker managing the case needs to evaluate what step should occur next because the sequence of steps can’t be predetermined. Another characteristic is that it requires much more collaboration than straight-through process. As simple processes become automated, and customers adopt more and more self-service, cases that reach the case workers are much more complex and need more investigation. Oracle BPM suite includes comprehensive adaptive case management capability to manage such unstructured and complex processes. Smart BPM or making your BPM intelligent has been the holy grail for BPM practitioners who imagined that one day BPM would become one with Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing, making it much more responsive and helpful in organizational decision making. In 2013, organizations will begin to deploy these intelligent BPM solutions. Oracle offers an integrated solution that brings together the powerful functionality of BI, BAM, event processing, and Real Time Decisions to help organizations create smart process based solutions. In order to help customers reach their BPM goals faster and remove risks associated with BPM initiatives, Oracle has introduced Oracle Process Accelerators, pre-built best practices applications built on Oracle BPM Suite that are fully production grade and ready to deploy. These are exiting times for BPM practitioners and there is so much to look forward to in 2013. We wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year 2013. Happy BPMing!

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• I have Oracle SQL Developer Installed, Now What?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re here because you downloaded a copy of Oracle SQL Developer and now you need help connecting to a database, then you’re in the right place. I’ll show you what you need to get up and going so you can finish your homework, teach yourself Oracle database, or get ready for that job interview. You’ll need about 30 minutes to set everything up…and about 5 years to become proficient with Oracle Oracle Database come with SQL Developer but SQL Developer doesn’t include a database If you install Oracle database, it includes a copy of SQL Developer. If you’re running that copy of SQL Developer, please take a second to upgrade now, as it is WAY out of date. But I’m here to talk to the folks that have downloaded SQL Developer and want to know what to do next. You’ve got it running. You see this ‘Connection’ dialog, and… Where am I connecting to, and who as? You NEED a database Installing SQL Developer does not give you a database. So you’re going to need to install Oracle and create a database, or connect to a database that is already up and running somewhere. Basically you need to know the following: where is this database, what’s it called, and what port is the listener running on? The Default Connection properties in SQL Developer These default settings CAN work, but ONLY if you have installed Oracle Database Express Edition (XE). Localhost is a network alias for 127.0.0.1 which is an IP address that maps to the ‘local’ machine, or the machine you are reading this blog post on. The listener is a service that runs on the server and handles connections for the databases on that machine. You can run a database without a listener and you can run a listener without a database, but you can’t connect to a database on a different server unless both that database and listener are up and running. Each listener ‘listens’ on one or more ports, you need to know the port number for each connection. The default port is 1521, but 1522 is often pretty common. I know all of this sounds very complicated Oracle is a very sophisticated piece of software. It’s not analogous to downloading a mobile phone app and and using it 10 seconds later. It’s not like installing Office/Access either – it requires services, environment setup, kernel tweaks, etc. However. Normally an administrator will setup and install Oracle, create the database, and configure the listener for everyone else to use. They’ll often also setup the connection details for everyone via a ‘TNSNAMES.ORA’ file. This file contains a list of database connection details for folks to browse – kind of like an Oracle database phoneboook. If someone has given you a TNSNAMES.ORA file, or setup your machine to have access to a TNSNAMES file, then you can just switch to the ‘TNS’ connection type, and use the dropdown to select the database you want to connect to. Then you don’t have to worry about the server names, database names, and the port numbers. ORCL – that sounds promising! ORCL is the default SID when creating a new database with the Database Creation Assistant (DBCA). It’s just me, and I need help! No administrator, no database, no nothing. What do you do? You have a few options: Buy a copy of Oracle and download, install, and create a database Download and install XE (FREE!) Download, import, and run our Developer Days Hands-on-Lab (FREE!) If you’re a student (or anyone else) with little to no experience with Oracle, then I recommend the third option. Oracle Technology Network Developer Day: Hands-on Database Application Development Lab The OTN lab runs on a A Virtual Box image which contains: 11gR2 Enterprise Edition copy of Oracle a database and listener running for you to connect to lots of demo data for you to play with SQL Developer installed and ready to connect Some browser based labs you can step through to learn Oracle You download the image, you download and install Virtual Box (also FREE!), then you IMPORT the image you previously downloaded. You then ‘Start’ the image. It will boot a copy of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), start your database, and all that jazz. You can then start up and run SQL Developer inside the image OR you can connect to the database running on the image using the copy of SQL Developer you installed on your host machine. Setup Port Forwarding to Make It Easy to Connect From Your Host When you start the image, it will be assigned an IP address. Depending on what network adapter you select in the image preferences, you may get something that can get out to the internet from your image, something your host machine can see and connect to, or something that kind of just lives out there in a vacuum. You want to avoid the ‘vacuum’ option – unless you’re OK with running SQL Developer inside the Linux image. Open the Virtual Box image properties and go to the Networking options. We’re going to setup port forwarding. This will tell your machine that anything that happens on port 1521 (the default Oracle Listener port), should just go to the image’s port 1521. So I can connect to ‘localhost’ and it will magically get transferred to the image that is running. Oracle Virtual Box Port Forwarding 1521 listener database Now You Just Need a Username and Password The default passwords on this image are all ‘oracle’ – so you can connect as SYS, HR, or whatever – just use ‘oracle’ as the password. The Linux passowrds are all ‘oracle’ too, so you can login as ‘root’ or as ‘oracle’ in the Linux desktop. Connect! Connect as HR to your Oracle database running on the OTN Developer Days Virtual Box image If you’re connecting to someone else’s database, you need to ask the person that manages that environment to create for you an account. Don’t try to ‘guess’ or ‘figure out’ what the username and password is. Introduce yourself, explain your situation, and ask kindly for access. This is your first test – can you connect? I know it’s hard to get started with Oracle. There are however many things we offer to make this easier. You’ll need to do a bit of RTM first though. Once you know what’s required, you will be much more likely to succeed. Of course, if you need help, you know where to find me

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• SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP Arrived

  - by Shaun

  It’s about 3 months later when I registered the SQL Azure Reporting CTP on the Microsoft Connect after TechED 2010 China. Today when I checked my mailbox I found that the SQL Azure team had just accepted my request and sent the activation code over to me. So let’s have a look on the new SQL Azure Reporting.   Concept The SQL Azure Reporting provides cloud-based reporting as a service, built on SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Azure technologies. Cloud-based reporting solutions such as SQL Azure Reporting provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and reduced management overhead for report servers; and secure access, viewing, and management of reports. By using the SQL Azure Reporting service, we can do: Embed the Visual Studio Report Viewer ADO.NET Ajax control or Windows Form control to view the reports deployed on SQL Azure Reporting Service in our web or desktop application. Leverage the SQL Azure Reporting SOAP API to manage and retrieve the report content from any kinds of application. Use the SQL Azure Reporting Service Portal to navigate and view the reports deployed on the cloud. Since the SQL Azure Reporting was built based on the SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Service, we can use any tools we are familiar with, such as the SQL Server Integration Studio, Visual Studio Report Viewer. The SQL Azure Reporting Service runs as a remote SQL Server Reporting Service just on the cloud rather than on a server besides us.   Establish a New SQL Azure Reporting Let’s move to the windows azure deveploer portal and click the Reporting item from the left side navigation bar. If you don’t have the activation code you can click the Sign Up button to send a requirement to the Microsoft Connect. Since I already recieved the received code mail I clicked the Provision button. Then after agree the terms of the service I will select the subscription for where my SQL Azure Reporting CTP should be provisioned. In this case I selected my free Windows Azure Pass subscription. Then the final step, paste the activation code and enter the password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. The user name of the SQL Azure Reporting will be generated by SQL Azure automatically. After a while the new SQL Azure Reporting Server will be shown on our developer portal. The Reporting Service URL and the user name will be shown as well. We can reset the password from the toolbar button.   Deploy Report to SQL Azure Reporting If you are familiar with SQL Server Reporting Service you will find this part will be very similar with what you know and what you did before. Firstly we open the SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio and create a new Report Server Project. Then we will create a shared data source where the report data will be retrieved from. This data source can be SQL Azure but we can use local SQL Server or other database if it opens the port up. In this case we use a SQL Azure database located in the same data center of our reporting service. In the Credentials tab page we entered the user name and password to this SQL Azure database. The SQL Azure Reporting CTP only available at the North US Data Center now so that the related SQL Server and hosted service might be better to select the same data center to avoid the external data transfer fee. Then we create a very simple report, just retrieve all records from a table named Members and have a table in the report to list them. In the data source selection step we choose the shared data source we created before, then enter the T-SQL to select all records from the Member table, then put all fields into the table columns. The report will be like this as following In order to deploy the report onto the SQL Azure Reporting Service we need to update the project property. Right click the project node from the solution explorer and select the property item. In the Target Server URL item we will specify the reporting server URL of our SQL Azure Reporting. We can go back to the developer portal and select the reporting node from the left side, then copy the Web Service URL and paste here. But notice that we need to append “/reportserver” after pasted. Then just click the Deploy menu item in the context menu of the project, the Visual Studio will compile the report and then upload to the reporting service accordingly. In this step we will be prompted to input the user name and password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. We can get the user name from the developer portal, just next to the Web Service URL in the SQL Azure Reporting page. And the password is the one we specified when created the reporting service. After about one minute the report will be deployed succeed.   View the Report in Browser SQL Azure Reporting allows us to view the reports which deployed on the cloud from a standard browser. We copied the Web Service URL from the reporting service main page and appended “/reportserver” in HTTPS protocol then we will have the SQL Azure Reporting Service login page. After entered the user name and password of the SQL Azure Reporting Service we can see the directories and reports listed. Click the report will launch the Report Viewer to render the report.   View Report in a Web Role with the Report Viewer The ASP.NET and Windows Form Report Viewer works well with the SQL Azure Reporting Service as well. We can create a ASP.NET Web Role and added the Report Viewer control in the default page. What we need to change to the report viewer are Change the Processing Mode to Remote. Specify the Report Server URL under the Server Remote category to the URL of the SQL Azure Reporting Web Service URL with “/reportserver” appended. Specify the Report Path to the report which we want to display. The report name should NOT include the extension name. For example my report was in the SqlAzureReportingTest project and named MemberList.rdl then the report path should be /SqlAzureReportingTest/MemberList. And the next one is to specify the SQL Azure Reporting Credentials. We can use the following class to wrap the report server credential. 1: private class ReportServerCredentials : IReportServerCredentials 2: { 3: private string _userName; 4: private string _password; 5: private string _domain; 6:  7: public ReportServerCredentials(string userName, string password, string domain) 8: { 9: _userName = userName; 10: _password = password; 11: _domain = domain; 12: } 13:  14: public WindowsIdentity ImpersonationUser 15: { 16: get 17: { 18: return null; 19: } 20: } 21:  22: public ICredentials NetworkCredentials 23: { 24: get 25: { 26: return null; 27: } 28: } 29:  30: public bool GetFormsCredentials(out Cookie authCookie, out string user, out string password, out string authority) 31: { 32: authCookie = null; 33: user = _userName; 34: password = _password; 35: authority = _domain; 36: return true; 37: } 38: } And then in the Page_Load method, pass it to the report viewer. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: ReportViewer1.ServerReport.ReportServerCredentials = new ReportServerCredentials( 4: "<user name>", 5: "<password>", 6: "<sql azure reporting web service url>"); 7: } Finally deploy it to Windows Azure and enjoy the report.   Summary In this post I introduced the SQL Azure Reporting CTP which had just available. Likes other features in Windows Azure, the SQL Azure Reporting is very similar with the SQL Server Reporting. As you can see in this post we can use the existing and familiar tools to build and deploy the reports and display them on a website. But the SQL Azure Reporting is just in the CTP stage which means It is free. There’s no support for it. Only available at the North US Data Center. You can get more information about the SQL Azure Reporting CTP from the links following SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP at MSDN SQL Azure Reporting Samples at TechNet Wiki You can download the solutions and the projects used in this post here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Replacing jQuery.live() with jQuery.on()

  - by Rick Strahl

  jQuery 1.9 and 1.10 have introduced a host of changes, but for the most part these changes are mostly transparent to existing application usage of jQuery. After spending some time last week with a few of my projects and going through them with a specific eye for jQuery failures I found that for the most part there wasn't a big issue. The vast majority of code continues to run just fine with either 1.9 or 1.10 (which are supposed to be in sync but with 1.10 removing support for legacy Internet Explorer pre-9.0 versions). However, one particular change in the new versions has caused me quite a bit of update trouble, is the removal of the jQuery.live() function. This is my own fault I suppose - .live() has been deprecated for a while, but with 1.9 and later it was finally removed altogether from jQuery. In the past I had quite a bit of jQuery code that used .live() and it's one of the things that's holding back my upgrade process, although I'm slowly cleaning up my code and switching to the .on() function as the replacement. jQuery.live() jQuery.live() was introduced a long time ago to simplify handling events on matched elements that exist currently on the document and those that are are added in the future and also match the selector. jQuery uses event bubbling, special event binding, plus some magic using meta data attached to a parent level element to check and see if the original target event element matches the selected selected elements (for more info see Elijah Manor's comment below). An Example Assume a list of items like the following in HTML for example and further assume that the items in this list can be appended to at a later point. In this app there's a smallish initial list that loads to start, and as the user scrolls towards the end of the initial small list more items are loaded dynamically and added to the list.<div id="PostItemContainer" class="scrollbox"> <div class="postitem" data-id="4z6qhomm"> <div class="post-icon"></div> <div class="postitemheader"><a href="show/4z6qhomm" target="Content">1999 Buick Century For Sale!</a></div> <div class="postitemprice rightalign">$ 3,500 O.B.O.</div> <div class="smalltext leftalign">Jun. 07 @ 1:06am</div> <div class="post-byline">- Vehicles - Automobiles</div> </div> <div class="postitem" data-id="2jtvuu17"> <div class="postitemheader"><a href="show/2jtvuu17" target="Content">Toyota VAN 1987</a></div> <div class="postitemprice rightalign">$950</div> <div class="smalltext leftalign">Jun. 07 @ 12:29am</div> <div class="post-byline">- Vehicles - Automobiles</div> </div> … </div> With the jQuery.live() function you could easily select elements and hook up a click handler like this:$(".postitem").live("click", function() {...}); Simple and perfectly readable. The behavior of the .live handler generally was the same as the corresponding simple event handlers like .click(), except that you have to explicitly name the event instead of using one of the methods. Re-writing with jQuery.on() With .live() removed in 1.9 and later we have to re-write .live() code above with an alternative. The jQuery documentation points you at the .on() or .delegate() functions to update your code. jQuery.on() is a more generic event handler function, and it's what jQuery uses internally to map the high level event functions like .click(),.change() etc. that jQuery exposes. Using jQuery.on() however is not a one to one replacement of the .live() function. While .on() can handle events directly and use the same syntax as .live() did, you'll find if you simply switch out .live() with .on() that events on not-yet existing elements will not fire. IOW, the key feature of .live() is not working. You can use .on() to get the desired effect however, but you have to change the syntax to explicitly handle the event you're interested in on the container and then provide a filter selector to specify which elements you are actually interested in for handling the event for. Sounds more complicated than it is and it's easier to see with an example. For the list above hooking .postitem clicks, using jQuery.on() looks like this:$("#PostItemContainer").on("click", ".postitem", function() {...}); You specify a container that can handle the .click event and then provide a filter selector to find the child elements that trigger the  the actual event. So here #PostItemContainer contains many .postitems, whose click events I want to handle. Any container will do including document, but I tend to use the container closest to the elements I actually want to handle the events on to minimize the event bubbling that occurs to capture the event. With this code I get the same behavior as with .live() and now as new .postitem elements are added the click events are always available. Sweet. Here's the full event signature for the .on() function: .on( events [, selector ] [, data ], handler(eventObject) ) Note that the selector is optional - if you omit it you essentially create a simple event handler that handles the event directly on the selected object. The filter/child selector required if you want life-like - uh, .live() like behavior to happen. While it's a bit more verbose than what .live() did, .on() provides the same functionality by being more explicit on what your parent container for trapping events is. .on() is good Practice even for ordinary static Element Lists As a side note, it's a good practice to use jQuery.on() or jQuery.delegate() for events in most cases anyway, using this 'container event trapping' syntax. That's because rather than requiring lots of event handlers on each of the child elements (.postitem in the sample above), there's just one event handler on the container, and only when clicked does jQuery drill down to find the matching filter element and tries to match it to the originating element. In the early days of jQuery I used manually build handlers that did this and manually drilled from the event object into the originalTarget to determine if it's a matching element. With later versions of jQuery the various event functions in jQuery essentially provide this functionality out of the box with functions like .on() and .delegate(). All of this is nothing new, but I thought I'd write this up because I have on a few occasions forgotten what exactly was needed to replace the many .live() function calls that litter my code - especially older code. This will be a nice reminder next time I have a memory blank on this topic. And maybe along the way I've helped one or two of you as well to clean up your .live() code…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in jQuery   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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• Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

  - by Robert May

  For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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• Building services with the .NET framework Cont’d

  - by Allan Rwakatungu

  In my previous blog I wrote an introductory post on services and how you can build services using the .NET frameworks Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) In this post I will show how to develop a real world application using WCF The problem During the last meeting we realized developers in Uganda are not so cool – they don’t use twitter so may not get the latest news and updates from the technology world. We also noticed they mostly use kabiriti phones (jokes). With their kabiriti phones they are unable to access the twitter web client or alternative twitter mobile clients like tweetdeck , twirl or tweetie. However, the kabiriti phones support SMS (Yeeeeeeei). So what we going to do to make these developers cool and keep them updated is by enabling them to receive tweets via SMS. We shall also enable them to develop their own applications that can extend this functionality Analysis Thanks to services and open API’s solving our problem is going to be easy.  1. To get tweets we can use the twitter service for FREE 2. To send SMS we shall use www.clickatell.com/ as they can send SMS to any country in the world. Besides we could not find any local service that offers API's for sending SMS :(. 3. To enable developers to integrate with our application so that they can extend it and build even cooler applications we use WCF. In addittion , because connectivity might be an issue we decided to use WCF because if has a inbuilt queing features. We also choose WCF because this is a post about .NET and WCF :). The Code Accessing the tweets To consume twitters REST API we shall use the WCF REST starter kit. Like it name indicates , the REST starter kit is a set of .NET framework classes that enable developers to create and access REST style services ( like the twitter service). 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Http; using System.Net; using System.Xml.Linq;   namespace UG.Demo {     public class TwitterService     {         public IList<TwitterStatus> SomeMethodName()         {             //Connect to the twitter service (HttpClient is part of the REST startkit classes)             HttpClient cl = new HttpClient("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml");             //Supply your basic authentication credentials             cl.TransportSettings.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("ourusername", "ourpassword");             //issue an http             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl.Get();             //ensure we got reponse 200             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();             //use XLinq to parse the REST XML             var statuses = from r in resp.Content.ReadAsXElement().Descendants("status")                            select new TwitterStatus                            {                                User = r.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value,                                Status = r.Element("text").Value                            };             return statuses.ToList();         }     }     public class TwitterStatus     {         public string User { get; set; }         public string Status { get; set; }     } }  Sending SMS 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} public class SMSService     {         public void Send(string phone, string message)         {                         HttpClient cl1 = new HttpClient();              //the clickatell XML format for sending SMS             string xml = String.Format("<clickAPI><sendMsg><api_id>3239621</api_id><user>ourusername</user><password>ourpassword</password><to>{0}</to><text>{1}</text></sendMsg></clickAPI>",phone,message);             //Post form data             HttpUrlEncodedForm form = new HttpUrlEncodedForm();             form.Add("data", xml);             System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;             string uri = @"http://api.clickatell.com/xml/xml";             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl1.Post(uri, form.CreateHttpContent());             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();         }     }

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• Fan running continously on HP Pavillion G6 notebook with 12.04.1 LTS, help please?

  - by Ankit

  Fan is running continously on my HP Pavillion G6 notebook with 12.04.1 LTS. My system specifications are:- Ram: 6Gb Graphics Card:- 1 GB (AMD Raedon 64XX). HDD: 540 GB. Please find a list of ACPI errors logs from dmesg as follows:- buffer@ankit:~$ dmesg | grep ACPI -i [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000009cebf000 - 000000009cfbf000 (ACPI NVS) [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000009cfbf000 - 000000009cfff000 (ACPI data) [ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP 00000000000fe020 00024 (v02 HPQOEM) [ 0.000000] ACPI: XSDT 000000009cffe120 00084 (v01 HPQOEM SLIC-MPC 00000001 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP 000000009cffc000 000F4 (v04 HPQOEM SLIC-MPC 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: DSDT 000000009cfec000 0C132 (v01 HP 1670 00000000 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: FACS 000000009cf6c000 00040 [ 0.000000] ACPI: ASF! 000000009cffd000 000A5 (v32 HP 1670 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: HPET 000000009cffb000 00038 (v01 HP 1670 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC 000000009cffa000 0008C (v02 HP 1670 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: MCFG 000000009cff9000 0003C (v01 HP 1670 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: SLIC 000000009cfeb000 00176 (v01 HPQOEM SLIC-MPC 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: SSDT 000000009cfea000 00D52 (v01 HP 1670 00001000 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: BOOT 000000009cfe8000 00028 (v01 HP 1670 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: ASPT 000000009cfe5000 00034 (v07 HP 1670 00000001 MSFT 01000013) [ 0.000000] ACPI: SSDT 000000009cfe4000 00780 (v01 HP 1670 00003000 INTL 20100121) [ 0.000000] ACPI: SSDT 000000009cfe3000 00996 (v01 HP 1670 00003000 INTL 20100121) [ 0.000000] ACPI: SSDT 000000009cfdd000 0219F (v01 HP 1670 00001000 INTL 20100121) [ 0.000000] ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000 [ 0.000000] ACPI: PM-Timer IO Port: 0x408 [ 0.000000] ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000 [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x01] enabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x02] enabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x04] lapic_id[0x03] enabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x05] lapic_id[0x00] disabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x06] lapic_id[0x00] disabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x07] lapic_id[0x00] disabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x08] lapic_id[0x00] disabled) [ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x00] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0]) [ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl) [ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 9 global_irq 9 high level) [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ0 used by override. [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ2 used by override. [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ9 used by override. [ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information [ 0.000000] ACPI: HPET id: 0x8086a201 base: 0xfed00000 [ 0.005902] ACPI: Core revision 20110623 [ 0.536006] PM: Registering ACPI NVS region at 9cebf000 (1048576 bytes) [ 0.538423] ACPI FADT declares the system doesn't support PCIe ASPM, so disable it [ 0.538429] ACPI: bus type pci registered [ 0.656088] ACPI: Added _OSI(Module Device) [ 0.656094] ACPI: Added _OSI(Processor Device) [ 0.656098] ACPI: Added _OSI(3.0 _SCP Extensions) [ 0.656103] ACPI: Added _OSI(Processor Aggregator Device) [ 0.660335] ACPI: EC: Look up EC in DSDT [ 0.664416] ACPI: Executed 1 blocks of module-level executable AML code [ 0.728303] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored [ 0.729536] ACPI: SSDT 000000009ce70798 00727 (v01 PmRef Cpu0Cst 00003001 INTL 20100121) [ 0.730622] ACPI: Dynamic OEM Table Load: [ 0.730630] ACPI: SSDT (null) 00727 (v01 PmRef Cpu0Cst 00003001 INTL 20100121) [ 0.760829] ACPI: SSDT 000000009ce71a98 00303 (v01 PmRef ApIst 00003000 INTL 20100121) [ 0.761992] ACPI: Dynamic OEM Table Load: [ 0.761998] ACPI: SSDT (null) 00303 (v01 PmRef ApIst 00003000 INTL 20100121) [ 0.792451] ACPI: SSDT 000000009ce6fd98 00119 (v01 PmRef ApCst 00003000 INTL 20100121) [ 0.793521] ACPI: Dynamic OEM Table Load: [ 0.793528] ACPI: SSDT (null) 00119 (v01 PmRef ApCst 00003000 INTL 20100121) [ 0.872981] ACPI: Interpreter enabled [ 0.872992] ACPI: (supports S0 S3 S4 S5) [ 0.873064] ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing [ 0.882723] ACPI: EC: GPE = 0x16, I/O: command/status = 0x66, data = 0x62 [ 0.883072] ACPI: No dock devices found. [ 0.883084] PCI: Using host bridge windows from ACPI; if necessary, use "pci=nocrs" and report a bug [ 0.883882] ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (domain 0000 [bus 00-fe]) [ 0.924187] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT] [ 0.924509] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.RP01._PRT] [ 0.924581] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.RP02._PRT] [ 0.924659] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.RP03._PRT] [ 0.924758] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.PEG0._PRT] [ 0.924973] pci0000:00: Requesting ACPI _OSC control (0x1d) [ 0.925064] pci0000:00: ACPI _OSC request failed (AE_ERROR), returned control mask: 0x1d [ 0.925069] ACPI _OSC control for PCIe not granted, disabling ASPM [ 0.930212] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 10 *11 12 14 15) [ 0.930327] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 10 *11 12 14 15) [ 0.930436] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 10 *11 12 14 15) [ 0.930547] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 *10 11 12 14 15) [ 0.930655] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKE] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 10 11 12 14 15) *0, disabled. [ 0.930764] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKF] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 10 11 12 14 15) *0, disabled. [ 0.930873] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 10 *11 12 14 15) [ 0.930979] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKH] (IRQs 1 3 4 5 6 10 11 12 14 15) *0, disabled. [ 0.932142] PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing [ 0.967119] pnp: PnP ACPI init [ 0.967151] ACPI: bus type pnp registered [ 0.968356] pnp 00:00: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0a08 PNP0a03 (active) [ 0.968516] pnp 00:01: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0200 (active) [ 0.968586] pnp 00:02: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs INT0800 (active) [ 0.968818] pnp 00:03: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0103 (active) [ 0.968915] pnp 00:04: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c04 (active) [ 0.969206] system 00:05: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) [ 0.969293] pnp 00:06: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0b00 (active) [ 0.969418] pnp 00:07: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0303 (active) [ 0.969528] pnp 00:08: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs SYN1e3f SYN1e00 SYN0002 PNP0f13 (active) [ 0.969969] system 00:09: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) [ 0.970574] system 00:0a: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c01 (active) [ 0.970617] pnp: PnP ACPI: found 11 devices [ 0.970622] ACPI: ACPI bus type pnp unregistered [ 1.138064] ACPI: Deprecated procfs I/F for AC is loaded, please retry with CONFIG_ACPI_PROCFS_POWER cleared [ 1.138331] ACPI: AC Adapter [ACAD] (off-line) [ 1.139068] ACPI: Lid Switch [LID0] [ 1.139176] ACPI: Power Button [PWRB] [ 1.139286] ACPI: Power Button [PWRF] [ 1.144637] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ01] (0 C) [ 1.144677] ACPI: Deprecated procfs I/F for battery is loaded, please retry with CONFIG_ACPI_PROCFS_POWER cleared [ 1.144693] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT0] (battery present) [ 1.206926] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT0] (battery present) [ 13.176993] acpi device:1a: registered as cooling_device4 [ 13.179931] acpi device:1b: registered as cooling_device5 [ 13.180221] ACPI: Video Device [VGA] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) [ 13.219589] acpi device:20: registered as cooling_device6 [ 13.220851] ACPI: Video Device [GFX0] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) [ 1649.915134] i8042 aux 00:08: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 1649.915147] i8042 kbd 00:07: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 1650.931028] r8169 0000:03:00.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 1650.954743] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 1650.978733] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 1651.010950] ACPI: Preparing to enter system sleep state S3 [ 1652.251505] ACPI: Low-level resume complete [ 1652.360953] ACPI: Waking up from system sleep state S3 [ 1652.427581] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 1652.435579] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 1652.437887] r8169 0000:03:00.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 1652.506660] i8042 kbd 00:07: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 1661.238234] ACPI Error: No handler for Region [CMS0] (ffff8801d5035558) [SystemCMOS] (20110623/evregion-373) [ 1661.238253] ACPI Error: Region SystemCMOS (ID=5) has no handler (20110623/exfldio-292) [ 1661.238268] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.EC0_._Q33] (Node ffff8801d5054de8), AE_NOT_EXIST (20110623/psparse-536) [ 3151.784288] i8042 aux 00:08: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 3151.784301] i8042 kbd 00:07: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 3152.797676] r8169 0000:03:00.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 3152.821379] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 3152.845367] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [ 3152.877600] ACPI: Preparing to enter system sleep state S3 [ 3154.313213] ACPI: Low-level resume complete [ 3154.422297] ACPI: Waking up from system sleep state S3 [ 3154.489692] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 3154.497667] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 3154.505947] r8169 0000:03:00.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 3154.568985] i8042 kbd 00:07: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [ 3162.745149] ACPI Error: No handler for Region [CMS0] (ffff8801d5035558) [SystemCMOS] (20110623/evregion-373) [ 3162.745168] ACPI Error: Region SystemCMOS (ID=5) has no handler (20110623/exfldio-292) [ 3162.745183] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.EC0_._Q33] (Node ffff8801d5054de8), AE_NOT_EXIST (20110623/psparse-536) [ 6775.723501] ACPI Error: No handler for Region [CMS0] (ffff8801d5035558) [SystemCMOS] (20110623/evregion-373) [ 6775.723519] ACPI Error: Region SystemCMOS (ID=5) has no handler (20110623/exfldio-292) [ 6775.723535] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.EC0_._Q33] (Node ffff8801d5054de8), AE_NOT_EXIST (20110623/psparse-536) [10388.004760] ACPI Error: No handler for Region [CMS0] (ffff8801d5035558) [SystemCMOS] (20110623/evregion-373) [10388.004778] ACPI Error: Region SystemCMOS (ID=5) has no handler (20110623/exfldio-292) [10388.004801] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.EC0_._Q33] (Node ffff8801d5054de8), AE_NOT_EXIST (20110623/psparse-536) [10723.591930] i8042 aux 00:08: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [10723.591942] i8042 kbd 00:07: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [10724.607624] r8169 0000:03:00.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [10724.631349] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [10724.655339] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI [10724.687572] ACPI: Preparing to enter system sleep state S3 [10726.123176] ACPI: Low-level resume complete [10726.232181] ACPI: Waking up from system sleep state S3 [10726.303653] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [10726.311648] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [10726.315734] r8169 0000:03:00.0: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [10726.379287] i8042 kbd 00:07: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI [10734.393523] ACPI Error: No handler for Region [CMS0] (ffff8801d5035558) [SystemCMOS] (20110623/evregion-373) [10734.393542] ACPI Error: Region SystemCMOS (ID=5) has no handler (20110623/exfldio-292) [10734.393557] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.EC0_._Q33] (Node ffff8801d5054de8), AE_NOT_EXIST (20110623/ps Continuous sound from the fan is very annoying, any help would highly appreciated.

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• Hey, Google: It’s Time to Add Multi-Window Multitasking To Android

  - by Chris Hoffman

  In 2012, Google’s Dianne Hackborn threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market if they moved forward with adding “Cornerstone” multitasking to their custom ROM. Samsung has since created their own multi-window multitasking feature. Dianne Hackborn said this “is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level” so apps wouldn’t break. She was right — Android needs this as a standard feature and it’s time for Google to provide it. Doesn’t Android Have Multitasking? Android originally stood out from Apple’s iOS with its powerful multitasking. Applications can continue running in the background while you’re using another application. This makes Android powerful — you can even have BitTorrent clients downloading files in the background while using another app. Android still kept the design of a single app on screen at a time. This made a lot of sense when Android only ran on smartphones with small screens. Today, Android runs on everything from smaller smartphones all the way up to huge “phablets” like the Galaxy Note. Android has gone beyond phones and runs on 12-inch tablets, convertibles with keyboard docks, laptops, and even Android desktops. Android isn’t just a phone operating system. Samsung’s Multi-Window Isn’t Good Enough Samsung has tried to add value to Android by adding a multi-window feature. When you’re using a high-end phone like the Galaxy Note or Galaxy S, or a Galaxy tablet, you have the ability to run certain apps side-by-side with each other. There are big problems here. This only works on Samsung devices, and only on specific Samsung devices. To add support for this feature in a way that doesn’t break other apps, Samsung’s multi-window feature also only works with specific apps. You can’t just run any app in multi-window view, only the apps on the Multi Window bar Samsung provides. This prevents third-party apps from breaking, which is what Google was worried about with CyanogenMod’s Cornerstone feature. A feature that only works with a handful of apps on specific devices from a single manufacturer isn’t good enough. This feature needs to work on every Android device — or at least ones with suitably large screens and powerful enough internals. It needs to be an Android platform feature so application developers can ensure their apps will work properly with it on every device. Android developers shouldn’t have to add support for each manufacturer’s own multi-window feature if other manufacturers decide to copy Samsung. Floating Apps Are a Dirty Hack Floating apps also enable real multitasking. Remember that Android allows apps to run in the background while you’re using an app in the foreground. These apps can present interfaces that appear floating above the current app — think of it like using “always on top” to make a window always appear over every other app on a desktop operating system. You can install floating apps to browse the web, take notes, chat, and watch videos while using any app. Only apps specifically designed to run as floating apps will work, so you have to seek them out. Floating apps are also awkward to use because they float over the app you’re using, blocking parts of its interface. Microsoft added floating-window support to Skype for Android. You can have a video conversation and the other person’s face will always appear on your screen, even when you leave the Skype app. Microsoft is using more of Android’s multi-window multitasking power than Google is. Custom ROMs and Root-Only Tweaks Aren’t Acceptable Some custom ROMs are adding this feature to Android. Google threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market (now known as Google Play) if they added this feature because it could potentially break third-party apps. Today, other custom ROMs are working on split-screen multitasking. Samsung added their own version to their own devices. You can also get this feature by using a root-only Xposed Framework tweak known as XMultiWindow. If you have root access, you can get multi-window multitasking or any app on your device. This shouldn’t require rooting your device or installing a custom ROM. These third-party solutions often have awkward interfaces and bugs. We need an integrated, supported solution that works the same on every device. Why Multi-Window is Important Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 stands out among tablet operating systems for its powerful multitasking support, allowing you to view several apps side-by-side at the same time. Apple is also reported to be working on adding side-by-side apps to the iPad with iOS 8. On every competitor’s operating system, you’ll be able to view a web page while you write an email, watch a video while you browse the web, or chat with someone while you do anything else. But Android’s still remained frozen in time. Despite all Android’s underlying power — and despite the way Android allows apps to adapt to different screen sizes — Google is resisting adding this feature. Large-screen Android tablets like the Nexus 10 (remember that tablet Google hasn’t updated in over 18 months?) need this feature. So do huge phones, convertibles, laptops, and Android desktops. If tablets are the future of personal computing, we should be able to do more than one thing at a time on our tablets’ big screens. Microsoft, Samsung, and even Apple are realizing this — now it’s Google’s turn. Image Credit: Sergey Galyonkin on Flickr, Karlis Dambrans on Flickr

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #1 - It&acute;s about the money, stupid

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/24/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---1---itacutes-about-the.aspx Software development is an economic endeavor. A customer is only willing to pay for value. What makes a software valuable is required to become a trait of the software. We as software developers thus need to understand and then find a way to implement requirements. Whether or in how far a customer really can know beforehand what´s going to be valuable for him/her in the end is a topic of constant debate. Some aspects of the requirements might be less foggy than others. Sometimes the customer does not know what he/she wants. Sometimes he/she´s certain to want something - but then is not happy when that´s delivered. Nevertheless requirements exist. And developers will only be paid if they deliver value. So we better focus on doing that. Although is might sound trivial I think it´s important to state the corollary: We need to be able to trace anything we do as developers back to some requirement. You decide to use Go as the implementation language? Well, what´s the customer´s requirement this decision is linked to? You decide to use WPF as the GUI technology? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide in favor of a layered architecture? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide to put code in three classes instead of just one? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? You decide to use MongoDB over MySql? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? etc. I´m not saying any of these decisions are wrong. I´m just saying whatever you decide be clear about the requirement that´s driving your decision. You have to be able to answer the question: Why do you think will X deliver more value to the customer than the alternatives? Customers are not interested in romantic ideals of hard working, good willing, quality focused craftsmen. They don´t care how and why you work - as long as what you deliver fulfills their needs. They want to trust you to recognize this as your top priority - and then deliver. That´s all. Fundamental aspects of requirements If you´re like me you´re probably not used to such scrutinization. You want to be trusted as a professional developer - and decide quite a few things following your gut feeling. Or by relying on “established practices”. That´s ok in general and most of the time - but still… I think we should be more conscious about our decisions. Which would make us more responsible, even more professional. But without further guidance it´s hard to reason about many of the myriad decisions we´ve to make over the course of a software project. What I found helpful in this situation is structuring requirements into fundamental aspects. Instead of one large heap of requirements then there are smaller blobs. With them it´s easier to check if a decisions falls in their scope. Sure, every project has it´s very own requirements. But all of them belong to just three different major categories, I think. Any requirement either pertains to functionality, non-functional aspects or sustainability. For short I call those aspects: Functionality, because such requirements describe which transformations a software should offer. For example: A calculator software should be able to add and multiply real numbers. An auction website should enable you to set up an auction anytime or to find auctions to bid for. Quality, because such requirements describe how functionality is supposed to work, e.g. fast or secure. For example: A calculator should be able to calculate the sinus of a value much faster than you could in your head. An auction website should accept bids from millions of users. Security of Investment, because functionality and quality need not just be delivered in any way. It´s important to the customer to get them quickly - and not only today but over the course of several years. This aspect introduces time into the “requrements equation”. Security of Investments (SoI) sure is a non-functional requirement. But I think it´s important to not subsume it under the Quality (Q) aspect. That´s because SoI has quite special properties. For one, SoI for software means something completely different from what it means for hardware. If you buy hardware (a car, a hair blower) you find that a worthwhile investment, if the hardware does not change it´s functionality or quality over time. A car still running smoothly with hardly any rust spots after 10 years of daily usage would be a very secure investment. So for hardware (or material products, if you like) “unchangeability” (in the face of usage) is desirable. With software you want the contrary. Software that cannot be changed is a waste. SoI for software means “changeability”. You want to be sure that the software you buy/order today can be changed, adapted, improved over an unforseeable number of years so as fit changes in its usage environment. But that´s not the only reason why the SoI aspect is special. On top of changeability[1] (or evolvability) comes immeasurability. Evolvability cannot readily be measured by counting something. Whether the changeability is as high as the customer wants it, cannot be determined by looking at metrics like Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity or Afferent Coupling. They may give a hint… but they are far, far from precise. That´s because of the nature of changeability. It´s different from performance or scalability. Also it´s because a customer cannot tell upfront, “how much” evolvability he/she wants. Whether requirements regarding Functionality (F) and Q have been met, a customer can tell you very quickly and very precisely. A calculation is missing, the calculation takes too long, the calculation time degrades with increased load, the calculation is accessible to the wrong users etc. That´s all very or at least comparatively easy to determine. But changeability… That´s a whole different thing. Nevertheless over time the customer will develop a feedling if changeability is good enough or degrading. He/she just has to check the development of the frequency of “WTF”s from developers ;-) F and Q are “timeless” requirement categories. Customers want us to deliver on them now. Just focusing on the now, though, is rarely beneficial in the long run. So SoI adds a counterweight to the requirements picture. Customers want SoI - whether they know it or not, whether they state if explicitly or not. In closing A customer´s requirements are not monolithic. They are not all made the same. Rather they fall into different categories. We as developers need to recognize these categories when confronted with some requirement - and take them into account. Only then can we make true professional decisions, i.e. conscious and responsible ones. I call this fundamental trait of software “changeability” and not “flexibility” to distinguish to whom it´s a concern. “Flexibility” to me means, software as is can easily be adapted to a change in its environment, e.g. by tweaking some config data or adding a library which gets picked up by a plug-in engine. “Flexibiltiy” thus is a matter of some user. “Changeability”, on the other hand, to me means, software can easily be changed in its structure to adapt it to new requirements. That´s a matter of the software developer. ?

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• Cloud MBaaS : The Next Big Thing in Enterprise Mobility

  - by shiju

  In this blog post, I will take a look at Cloud Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) and how we can leverage Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service for building enterprise mobile apps. Today, mobile apps are incredibly significant in both consumer and enterprise space and the demand for the mobile apps is unbelievably increasing in day to day business. An enterprise can’t survive in business without a proper mobility strategy. A better mobility strategy and faster delivery of your mobile apps will give you an extra mileage for your business and IT strategy. So organizations and mobile developers are looking for different strategy for meeting this demand and adopting different development strategy for their mobile apps. Some developers are adopting hybrid mobile app development platforms, for delivering their products for multiple platforms, for fast time-to-market. Others are adopting a Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) such as Kony for their enterprise mobile apps for fast time-to-market and better business integration. The Challenges of Enterprise Mobility The real challenge of enterprise mobile apps, is not about creating the front-end environment or developing front-end for multiple platforms. The most important thing of enterprise mobile apps is to expose your enterprise data to mobile devices where the real pain is your business data might be residing in lot of different systems including legacy systems, ERP systems etc., and these systems will be deployed with lot of security restrictions. Exposing your data from the on-premises servers, is not a easy thing for most of the business organizations. Many organizations are spending too much time for their front-end development strategy, but they are really lacking for building a strategy on their back-end for exposing the business data to mobile apps. So building a REST services layer and mobile back-end services, on the top of legacy systems and existing middleware systems, is the key part of most of the enterprise mobile apps, where multiple mobile platforms can easily consume these REST services and other mobile back-end services for building mobile apps. For some mobile apps, we can’t predict its user base, especially for products where customers can gradually increase at any time. And for today’s mobile apps, faster time-to-market is very critical so that spending too much time for mobile app’s scalability, will not be worth. The real power of Cloud is the agility and on-demand scalability, where we can scale-up and scale-down our applications very easily. It would be great if we could use the power of Cloud to mobile apps. So using Cloud for mobile apps is a natural fit, where we can use Cloud as the storage for mobile apps and hosting mechanism for mobile back-end services, where we can enjoy the full power of Cloud with greater level of on-demand scalability and operational agility. So Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service is great choice for building enterprise mobile apps, where enterprises can enjoy the massive scalability power of their mobile apps, provided by public cloud vendors such as Microsoft Windows Azure. Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) We have discussed the key challenges of enterprise mobile apps and how we can leverage Cloud for hosting mobile backend services. MBaaS is a set of cloud-based, server-side mobile services for multiple mobile platforms and HTML5 platform, which can be used as a backend for your mobile apps with the scalability power of Cloud. The information below provides the key features of a typical MBaaS platform: Cloud based storage for your application data. Automatic REST API services on the application data, for CRUD operations. Native push notification services with massive scalability power. User management services for authenticate users. User authentication via Social accounts such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Scheduler services for periodically sending data to mobile devices. Native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms such as Windows Phone and Windows Store, Android, Apple iOS, and HTML5, for easily accessing the mobile services from mobile apps, with better security.  Typically, a MBaaS platform will provide native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms so that we can easily consume the server-side mobile services. MBaaS based REST APIs can use for integrating to enterprise backend systems. We can use the same mobile services for multiple platform so hat we can reuse the application logic to multiple mobile platforms. Public cloud vendors are building the mobile services on the top of their PaaS offerings. Windows Azure Mobile Services is a great platform for a MBaaS offering that is leveraging Windows Azure Cloud platform’s PaaS capabilities. Hybrid mobile development platform Titanium provides their own MBaaS services. LoopBack is a new MBaaS service provided by Node.js consulting firm StrongLoop, which can be hosted on multiple cloud platforms and also for on-premises servers. The Challenges of MBaaS Solutions If you are building your mobile apps with a new data storage, it will be very easy, since there is not any integration challenges you have to face. But most of the use cases, you have to extract your application data in which stored in on-premises servers which might be under VPNs and firewalls. So exposing these data to your MBaaS solution with a proper security would be a big challenge. The capability of your MBaaS vendor is very important as you have to interact with your legacy systems for many enterprise mobile apps. So you should be very careful about choosing for MBaaS vendor. At the same time, you should have a proper strategy for mobilizing your application data which stored in on-premises legacy systems, where your solution architecture and strategy is more important than platforms and tools.  Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services is an MBaaS offerings from Windows Azure cloud platform. IMHO, Microsoft Windows Azure is the best PaaS platform in the Cloud space. Windows Azure Mobile Services extends the PaaS capabilities of Windows Azure, to mobile devices, which can be used as a cloud backend for your mobile apps, which will provide global availability and reach for your mobile apps. Windows Azure Mobile Services provides storage services, user management with social network integration, push notification services and scheduler services and provides native SDKs for all major mobile platforms and HTML5. In Windows Azure Mobile Services, you can write server-side scripts in Node.js where you can enjoy the full power of Node.js including the use of NPM modules for your server-side scripts. In the previous section, we had discussed some challenges of MBaaS solutions. You can leverage Windows Azure Cloud platform for solving many challenges regarding with enterprise mobility. The entire Windows Azure platform can play a key role for working as the backend for your mobile apps where you can leverage the entire Windows Azure platform for your mobile apps. With Windows Azure, you can easily connect to your on-premises systems which is a key thing for mobile backend solutions. Another key point is that Windows Azure provides better integration with services like Active Directory, which makes Windows Azure as the de facto platform for enterprise mobility, for enterprises, who have been leveraging Microsoft ecosystem for their application and IT infrastructure. Windows Azure Mobile Services  is going to next evolution where you can expect some exciting features in near future. One area, where Windows Azure Mobile Services should definitely need an improvement, is about the default storage mechanism in which currently it is depends on SQL Server. IMHO, developers should be able to choose multiple default storage option when creating a new mobile service instance. Let’s say, there should be a different storage providers such as SQL Server storage provider and Table storage provider where developers should be able to choose their choice of storage provider when creating a new mobile services project. I have been used Windows Azure and Windows Azure Mobile Services as the backend for production apps for mobile, where it performed very well. MBaaS Over MEAP Recently, many larger enterprises has been adopted Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) for their mobile apps. I haven’t worked on any production MEAP solution, but I heard that developers are really struggling with MEAP in different way. The learning curve for a proprietary MEAP platform is very high. I am completely against for using larger proprietary ecosystem for mobile apps. For enterprise mobile apps, I highly recommend to use native iOS/Android/Windows Phone or HTML5  for front-end with a cloud hosted MBaaS solution as the middleware. A MBaaS service can be consumed from multiple mobile apps where REST APIs are using to integrating with enterprise backend systems. Enterprise mobility should start with exposing REST APIs on the enterprise backend systems and these REST APIs can host on Cloud where we can enjoy the power of Cloud for our services. If you are having REST APIs for your enterprise data, then you can easily build mobile frontends for multiple platforms.   You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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• The Partner Perspective from Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - IDC’s Darren Bibby report

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Below is IDC’s Darren Bibby report on ‘The Partner Perspective from Oracle OpenWorld 2012’. If you missed the 2012 edition, I trust this will give you the willingness to attend next year one! October 26, 2012 I attended my fourth Oracle OpenWorld earlier in October. I always go in with the lens of, "What's in it for partners this year?" Although it's primarily thought of as a customer event - and yes, the bulk of the almost 50,000 attendees are customers - this year's conference was clearly the largest and most important partner event Oracle has ever run. Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Exchange There were more partner attendees than ever, with Oracle citing somewhere around 5000. But the format for partners this year was different. And it was better. Traditionally, Oracle hosts a one-day only Partner Forum on the Sunday before the customer-focused conference begins. This year, the partner content still began on the Sunday, but the worldwide alliances and channels group created an exclusive track throughout the week, just for partners. It featured content specifically targeted towards partners, and was anchored at a nearby hotel. This was a great move for Oracle. The Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) team has been in a tricky position for years in that they have enough partners that they need a landmark event in the year, but perhaps not enough to justify a separate, worldwide, large, partner-only event. Coinciding a four day event with Oracle OpenWorld, where anybody who's anybody in the Oracle world attends anyway, is a good solution. The channels leadership team can build from this success for an even better conference next year. It's expected that they will follow a similar strategy. Cloud Announcements for Partners As for the content, it was primarily about the Cloud. For customers, for VARs, for ISVs, for everyone. There were five key Cloud related announcements for partners at the event: Cloud Builder Specialization. This is one of the first broader Specializations that isn't focused on one unique product. It is a designation for partners that offer design and implementation services for private cloud solutions. As such, it will surely be something that nearly every partner will consider, and many will pursue. New Specializations for Cloud Services. Unlike the broad, almost "strategy-level" Specialization above, there are a group of new product-based "merit badges" for many of the new Cloud offerings. Think about a Specialization for the Cloud version of HCM, for instance. Each of these particular specializations will also have Rapid Start implementation methodologies that allow a partner to offer a fixed scope and fixed price bid to customers. Based on the learnings from Oracle Consulting, this means a partner might be able to deliver Cloud HCM in six weeks for a fixed price. In the end, this means more consistent experiences for Oracle customers. Cloud Resale Program. For those partners who achieve one of these Cloud Specializations, it will mean they can actually resell the subscription-based Cloud product. This is important because it has been somewhat of a rarity in the emerging Cloud channel for partners to be able to "take the paper", take the revenue, do the billing, be first line of support etc. This is an important step for Oracle and one the partners will be happy to see. Cloud Referral Program. For those partners who are not as engaged with these specific Cloud products that the Specializations revolve around, there is a new referral program that provides an incentive to recommend Oracle Cloud products. This one-two punch of referral and resale programs is similar in many ways to other vendors who allow more committed partners to resell, while more casual partners can collect fees. It's the model that seems to work. The key to allow a company to resell a subscription product - something that is inherently delivered directly between the vendor and customer - is trust. Achieving a specialization is a good bar to have to meet. Platform as a Service for ISVs. Leveraging some of the overall announcements made by CEO Larry Ellison around a cloud version of its famous database, Oracle also outlined a new ability for ISVs to build cloud services on its new PaaS offering. Details were less available for this announcement, though it's an expected and fitting play for ISVs comfortable with Oracle technology who can now more easily build out cloud applications. There wasn't much talk of an app store to go along with this, but surely it's in the works. Specializations And "The Gap" Coming back to Specializations, Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) has 4600 partners worldwide that hold 20,000 Specializations. These are impressive numbers just three years into the new OPN framework. The actual number of Specializations has also grown significantly, up to 111 today and soon around 125 or so with the new Cloud designations. Oracle may need to look at grouping some of these and creating higher level, broader designations that partners could achieve by earning several Specializations in that group. At 125 and growing, this is a lot. On the top of the pyramid, Hitachi Ltd. successfully became the eleventh partner to make it to the highly prestigious Diamond level. Partner programs partially exist in order to recognize capable partners. And it's more than abundantly clear that the Diamond level does this. But I think Oracle has a gap. Specializations show capability in a very specific product area, and all sizes of partners can achieve these. The next level at which to show a level of expertise is the Advanced Specialization. However, this is a massive step up from the regular Specialization. The advanced level requires 50 people to have certification in that particular product area. Most other industry programs have similar higher level statuses, but none are even close to that number. Whereas a customer who sees an Oracle partner with an advanced specialization can be very sure of capability, there is a gap in that there are hundreds or even thousands of 20-50 person solution providers who are top notch in their area of expertise. They will never get to Advanced due to numbers alone. These boutique partners don't really have a way of showing off their talents in the current program. Advanced may not need to be so high to really show that a company has deep expertise. Overall it was a very successful Oracle OpenWorld for Oracle partners of all sizes. There was progress made on making it a bigger and more relevant event. And also on catching up and maybe even leading in some cases with cloud opportunities for partners.

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• Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

  - by Roger Hart

  In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Generate C# code for you to call non-public classes in DLLs very easily.Artefact Animator: Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF.cacheroo: Cacheroo is a social networking community that will make it easier for people who love geocaching to get connected.Data Processing Toolkit: An utility app to collected data from different sources (i.e. bugzilla bug reports) in a structured way. We are currently setting up the site. Mo...eXternal SQL Bridge (PHP): The eXternal SQL Bridge (XSB) allows you to bridge two websites together in a secure manner through pre-shared keys. XSB is resilient against repla...'G' - Language to Define Gestures for Touch Based Applications: A cross plat form multi-touch application framework with a language to define gestures. The application is build on Silverlight 4.0 and the languag...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: Web implementation of "looking glass" like services (ping, traceroute) as HTTP modules for Internet Information Services.Interop Router: This project establishes a communication framework and job dispatcher for a mixed operating system cluster environment.L2 Commander: L2Commander makes it easier for both new and old l2j users to manage your server.You no longer have to waste time on finding the files you need and...MediaHelper: A utility to help clean up empty/unwanted files and folders in your filesystem.mhinze: matt hinze stuffOneMan: Focus on Silverlight and WCF technology.Rss Photo Frame Android Widget: RSS Photo Frame Android Widget permits showing pictures from any RSS feed on your Android device's desktopSingle Web Session: Web Tool Kits Current project provide developer with different tools that help to enhance web site performance, security, and other common functio...Work Item Visualization: Use DGML to visualize and analyze your TFS Work Items. Included is the ability to perform basic risk/impact analysis. It helps answer the question,...New Releases[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Wrapper Coder (beta): Click "<Click Me To Open Assembly File>", WrapperCoder will load the assembly and referenced assembly. Check the non-public classes that you want...APS - Automatic Print Screen: APS 1.0: APS automatizes the tasks of paste the image in Paint and save it after print screen or alt+print screen. Choose directory, name and file extension...BTP Tools: e-Sword generator build 20100321: 1. Modify the indent after subtitle. 2. Add 2 spaces after subtitle.Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library: Combres 2.0: Changes since last version (1.2) Support ignore Combres pipeline in debug mode - see issue #6088 Debug mode generates comment helping identify in...Desafio Office 2010 Brasil: DesafioOutlook: Controlando um robo com o Outlook 2010dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.4: Adding Platform Invocation Services Support, full Managed Pointer Support, Charset,Dllimport,Callconv setting for P/Invoke, MarshalAs for parametersFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.2.0: Version 1.3.2.0 Add open folder button to IGI Search Form Fixes to Fact Location processing - IGIName renamed to RegionID Fix if Region ID not fou...Fasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection API: Fasterflect 2.0: We are pleased to release version 2.0 of Fasterflect, which contains a lot of additions and improvements from the previous version. Please refer t...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: 1.0: Initial public release.Informant: Informant (Desktop) v0.1: This release allows users to send sms messages to 1-Many Groups or 1-Many contacts. It is a very basic release of the application. No styling has b...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - MPE1 Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.L2 Commander: Source Code Link: Where to find our source.ModularCMS: ModularCMS 1.2: Minor bug fixes.NMTools: NMTools-v40b0-20100321-0: The most noticeable aspect of this release is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLI...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 1.5.3: Log loading performance enhanced. Search text box now has auto complete feature.Single Web Session: Single Web Session: !Single Web Session! <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.WebSessionModule, SingleWebSession"/> </httpModules>Sprite Sheet Packer: 2.1 Release: Made a few crucial fixes from 2.0: - Fixed error with paths having spaces. - Fixed error with UI not unlocking. - Fixed NullReferenceException on ...uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.1 (.NET 4.0 RC): Updated Releasev1.1 Adds the primary ability to setup and configure the application through a setup wizard. The setup wizard will continue to evol...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30321.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS ChessMania: VS ChessMania V2 March Beta: Second Beta Release with move correction and making application more safe for user. New features will be added soon.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.9.00: Whats New Added New Toolbar Plugin (By Kent Safransk) 'MediaEmbed' to Include Embed Media from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Media Embed Plugin Added New ...WeatherBar: WeatherBar 1.0 [No Installation]: Extract the ZIP archive and run WeatherBar.exe. Current release contains some bugs that will be fixed in the next version. Check the Issue Tracker...Work Item Visualization: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the Work Item Visualization tool. There are no known issues when it comes to the visualization aspects of the tool b...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.10: Version: 1.0.0.10 (Milestone 10): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requi...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.2: What's Newadds AutoAppend feature adds a new provider: UrlHistoryDataProvider sample application is updated to reflect the new things Bug Fixe...ZoomBarPlus: V2 (Beta): - Fixed bug: if the active window changed while you were in the middle of a single tap delay, long tap delay, or swipe-repeat, it would continue re...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSavvy DateTimeRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• SharePoint – The Most Important Feature

  - by Bil Simser

  Watching twitter and doing a search for SharePoint and you see a lot (almost one every few minutes) of tweets about the top 10 new features in SharePoint. What answer do you get when you ask the question, “What’s the most important feature in SharePoint?”. Chances are the answer will vary. Some will say it’s the collaboration aspect, others might say it’s the new ribbon interface, multi-item editing, external content types, faceted search, large list support, document versioning, Silverlight, etc. The list goes on. However I think most people might be missing the most important feature that’s sitting right under their noses all this time. The most important feature of SharePoint? It’s called User Empowerment. Huh? What? Is that something I find in the Site Actions menu? Nope. It’s something that’s always been there in SharePoint, you just need to get the word out and support it. How many times have you had a team ask you for a team site (assuming you had SharePoint up and running). Or to create them a contact list. Or how long have you employed that guy in the corner who’s been copying and pasting content from Corporate Communications into the web from a Word document. Let’s stop the insanity. It doesn’t have to be this way. SharePoint’s strongest feature isn’t anything you can find in the Site Settings screen or Central Admin. It’s all about empowering your users and letting them take control of their content. After all, SharePoint really is a bunch of tools to allow users to collaborate on content isn’t it? So why are you stepping in as IT and helping the user every moment along the way. It’s like having to ask users to fill out a help desk ticket or call up the Windows team to create a folder on their desktop or rearrange their Start menu. This isn’t something IT should be spending their time doing nor is it something the users should be burdened with having to wait until their friendly neighborhood tech-guy (or gal) shows up to help them sort the icons on their desktop. SharePoint IS all about empowerment. Site owners can create whatever lists and libraries they need for their team, and if the template isn’t there they can always turn to my friend and yours, the Custom List. From that can spew forth approval tracking systems, new hire checklists, and server inventory. You’re only limited by your imagination and needs. Users should be able to create new sites as they need. Want a blog to let everyone know what your team is up to? Go create one, here’s how. What’s a blog you ask? Here’s what it is and why you would use one. SharePoint is the shift in the balance of power and you need, and an IT group, let go of certain responsibilities and let your users run with the tools. A power user who knows how to create sites and what features are available to them can help a team go from the forming stage to the storming stage overnight. Again, this all hinges on you as an IT organization and what you can and empower your users with as far as features go. Running with tools is great if you know how to use them, running with scissors not recommended unless you enjoy trips to the hospital. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility so don’t go out on Monday and send out a memo to the organization saying “This Bil guy says you peeps can do anything so here it is, knock yourself out” (for one, they’ll have *no* idea who this Bil guy is). This advice comes with the task of getting your users ready for empowerment. Whether it’s through some kind of internal training sessions, in-house documentation; videos; blog posts; on how to accomplish things in SharePoint, or full blown one-on-one sit downs with teams or individuals to help them through their problems. The work is up to you. Helping them along also should be part of your governance (you do have one don’t you?). Just because you have InfoPath client deployed with your Office suite, doesn’t mean users should just start publishing forms all over your SharePoint farm. There should be some governance behind that in what you’ll support and what is possible. The other caveat to all this is that SharePoint is not everything for everyone. It can’t cook you breakfast and impregnate your cat or solve world hunger. It also isn’t suited for every IT solution out there. It’s a horrible source control system (even though some people try to use it as such) and really can’t do financials worth a darn. Again, governance is key here and part of that governance and your responsibility in setting up and unleashing SharePoint into your organization is to provide users guidance on what should be in SharePoint and (more importantly) what should not be in SharePoint. There are boundaries you have to set where you don’t want your end users going as they might be treading into trouble. Again, this is up to you to set these constraints and help users understand why these pylons are there. If someone understands why they can’t do something they might have a better understanding and respect for those that put them there in the first place. Of course you’ll always have the power-users who want to go skiing down dead mans curve so this doesn’t work for everyone, but you can catch the majority of the newbs who don’t wander aimlessly off the beaten path. At the end of the day when all things are going swimmingly your end users should be empowered to solve the needs they have on a day to day basis and not having to keep bugging the IT department to help them create a view to show only approved documents. I wouldn’t go as far as business users building out full blown solutions and handing the keys to SharePoint Designer or (worse) Visual Studio to power-users might not be a path you want to go down but you also don’t have to lock up the SharePoint system in a tight box where users can’t use what’s there. So stop focusing on the shiny things in SharePoint and maybe consider making a shift to what’s really important. Making your day job easier and letting users get the most our of your technology investment.

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• Preserving Permalinks

  - by Daniel Moth

  One of the things that gets me on a rant is websites that break permalinks. If you have posted something somewhere and there is a public URL pointing to it, that URL should never ever return a 404. You are breaking all websites that ever linked to you and you are breaking all search engine links to your content (that others will try and follow). It is a pet peeve of mine. So when I had to move my blog, obviously I would preserve the root URL (www.danielmoth.com/Blog/), but I also wanted to preserve every URL my blog has generated over the years. To be clear, our focus here is on the URL formatting, not the content migration which I'll talk about in my next post. In this post, I'll describe my solution first and then what it solves. 1. The IIS7 Rewrite Module and web.config There are a few ways you can map an old URL to a new one (so when requests to the old URL come in, they get redirected to the new one). The new blog engine I use (dasBlog) has built-in functionality to do that (Scott refers to it here). Instead, the way I chose to address the issue was to use the IIS7 rewrite module. The IIS7 rewrite module allows redirecting URLs based on pattern matching, regular expressions and, of course, hardcoded full URLs for things that don't fall into any pattern. You can configure it visually from IIS Manager using a handy dialog that allows testing patterns against input URLs. Here is what mine looked like after configuring a few rules: To learn more about this technology check out this video, the reference page and this overview blog post; all 3 pages have a collection of related resources at the bottom worth checking out too. All the visual configuration ends up in a web.config file at the root folder of your website. If you are on a shared hosting service, probably the only way you can use the Rewrite Module is by directly editing the web.config file. Next, I'll describe the URLs I had to map and how that manifested itself in the web.config file. What I did was create the rules locally using the GUI, and then took the generated web.config file and uploaded it to my live site. You can view my web.config here. 2. Monthly Archives Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004_07_01_mothblog_archive.html dasBlog: /Blog/default,month,2004-07.aspx In my web.config file, the rule that deals with this is the one named "monthlyarchive_redirect". 3. Categories Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/labels/Personal.html dasBlog: /Blog/CategoryView,category,Personal.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "category_redirect". 4. Posts Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004/07/hello-world.html dasBlog: /Blog/Hello-World.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "post_redirect". Note: The decision is taken to use dasBlog URLs that do not include the date info (see the description of my Appearance settings). If we included the date info then it would have to include the day part, which blogger did not generate. This makes it impossible to redirect correctly and to have a single permalink for blog posts moving forward. An implication of this decision, is that no two blog posts can have the same title. The tool I will describe in my next post (inelegantly) deals with duplicates, but not with triplicates or higher. 5. Unhandled by a generic rule Unfortunately, the two blog engines use different rules for generating URLs for blog posts. Most of the time the conversion is as simple as the example of the previous section where a post titled "Hello World" generates a URL with the words separated by a hyphen. Some times that is not the case, for example: /Blog/2006/05/medc-wrap-up.html /Blog/MEDC-Wrapup.aspx or /Blog/2005/01/best-of-moth-2004.html /Blog/Best-Of-The-Moth-2004.aspx or /Blog/2004/11/more-windows-mobile-2005-details.html /Blog/More-Windows-Mobile-2005-Details-Emerge.aspx In short, blogger does not add words to the title beyond ~39 characters, it drops some words from the title generation (e.g. a, an, on, the), and it preserve hyphens that appear in the title. For this reason, we need to detect these and explicitly list them for redirects (no regular expression can help here because the full set of rules is not listed anywhere). In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "Redirect rule1 for FullRedirects" combined with the rewriteMap named "StaticRedirects". Note: The tool I describe in my next post will detect all the URLs that need to be explicitly redirected and will list them in a file ready for you to copy them to your web.config rewriteMap. 6. C# code doing the same as the web.config I wrote some naive code that does the same thing as the web.config: given a string it will return a new string converted according to the 3 rules above. It does not take into account the 4th case where an explicit hard-coded conversion is needed (the tool I present in the next post does take that into account). static string REGEX_post_redirect = "[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([0-9a-z-]+).html"; static string REGEX_category_redirect = "labels/([_0-9a-z-% ]+).html"; static string REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect = "([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2})_[0-9]{2}_mothblog_archive.html"; static string Redirect(string oldUrl) { GroupCollection g; if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_post_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat(g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_category_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat("CategoryView,category,", g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect, 3, out g)) return string.Concat("default,month,", g[1].Value, "-", g[2], ".aspx"); return string.Empty; } static bool RunRegExOnIt(string toRegEx, string pattern, int groupCount, out GroupCollection g) { if (pattern.Length == 0) { g = null; return false; } g = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled).Match(toRegEx).Groups; return (g.Count == groupCount); } Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• C# in Depth, Third Edition by Jon Skeet, Manning Publications Co. Book Review

  - by Compudicted

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/10/24/c-in-depth-third-edition-by-jon-skeet-manning-publications.aspx I started reading this ebook on September 28, 2013, the same day it was sent my way by Manning Publications Co. for review while it still being fresh off the press. So 1st thing – thanks to Manning for this opportunity and a free copy of this must have on every C# developer’s desk book! Several hours ago I finished reading this book (well, except a for a large portion of its quite lengthy appendix). I jumped writing this review right away while still being full of emotions and impressions from reading it thoroughly and running code examples. Before I go any further I would like say that I used to program on various platforms using various languages starting with the Mainframe and ending on Windows, and I gradually shifted toward dealing with databases more than anything, however it happened with me to program in C# 1 a lot when it was first released and then some C# 2 with a big leap in between to C# 5. So my perception and experience reading this book may differ from yours. Also what I want to tell is somewhat funny that back then, knowing some Java and seeing C# 1 released, initially made me drawing a parallel that it is a copycat language, how wrong was I… Interestingly, Jon programs in Java full time, but how little it was mentioned in the book! So more on the book: Be informed, this is not a typical “Recipes”, “Cookbook” or any set of ready solutions, it is rather targeting mature, advanced developers who do not only know how to use a number of features, but are willing to understand how the language is operating “under the hood”. I must state immediately, at the same time I am glad the author did not go into the murky depths of the MSIL, so this is a very welcome decision on covering a modern language as C# for me, thank you Jon! Frankly, not all was that rosy regarding the tone and structure of the book, especially the the first half or so filled me with several negative and positive emotions overpowering each other. To expand more on that, some statements in the book appeared to be bias to me, or filled with pre-justice, it started to look like it had some PR-sole in it, but thankfully this was all gone toward the end of the 1st third of the book. Specifically, the mention on the C# language popularity, Java is the #1 language as per https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language (many other sources put C at the top which I highly doubt), also many interesting functional languages as Clojure and Groovy appeared and gained huge traction which run on top of Java/JVM whereas C# does not enjoy such a situation. If we want to discuss the popularity in general and say how fast a developer can find a new job that pays well it would be indeed the very Java, C++ or PHP, never C#. Or that phrase on language preference as a personal issue? We choose where to work or we are chosen because of a technology used at a given software shop, not vice versa. The book though it technically very accurate with valid code, concise examples, but I wish the author would give more concrete, real-life examples on where each feature should be used, not how. Another point to realize before you get the book is that it is almost a live book which started to be written when even C# 3 wasn’t around so a lot of ground is covered (nearly half of the book) on the pre-C# 3 feature releases so if you already have a solid background in the previous releases and do not plan to upgrade, perhaps half of the book can be skipped, otherwise this book is surely highly recommended. Alas, for me it was a hard read, most of it. It was not boring (well, only may be two times), it was just hard to grasp some concepts, but do not get me wrong, it did made me pause, on several occasions, and made me read and re-read a page or two. At times I even wondered if I have any IQ at all (LOL). Be prepared to read A LOT on generics, not that they are widely used in the field (I happen to work as a consultant and went thru a lot of code at many places) I can tell my impression is the developers today in best case program using examples found at OpenStack.com. Also unlike the Java world where having the most recent version is nearly mandated by the OSS most companies on the Microsoft platform almost never tempted to upgrade the .Net version very soon and very often. As a side note, I was glad to see code recently that included a nullable variable (myvariable? notation) and this made me smile, besides, I recommended that person this book to expand her knowledge. The good things about this book is that Jon maintains an active forum, prepared code snippets and even a small program (Snippy) that is happy to run the sample code saving you from writing any plumbing code. A tad now on the C# language itself – it sure enjoyed a wonderful road toward perfection and a very high adoption, especially for ASP development. But to me all the recent features that made this statically typed language more dynamic look strange. Don’t we have F#? Which supposed to be the dynamic language? Why do we need to have a hybrid language? Now the developers live their lives in dualism of the static and dynamic variables! And LINQ to SQL, it is covered in depth, but wasn’t it supposed to be dropped? Also it seems that very little is being added, and at a slower pace, e.g. Roslyn will come in late 2014 perhaps, and will be probably the only main feature. Again, it is quite hard to read this book as various chapters, C# versions mentioned every so often only if I only could remember what was covered exactly where! So the fact it has so many jumps/links back and forth I recommend the ebook format to make the navigations easier to perform and I do recommend using software that allows bookmarking, also make sure you have access to plenty of coffee and pizza (hey, you probably know this joke – who a programmer is) ! In terms of closing, if you stuck at C# 1 or 2 level, it is time to embrace the power of C# 5! Finally, to compliment Manning, this book unlike from any other publisher so far, was the only one as well readable (put it formatted) on my tablet as in Adobe Reader on a laptop.

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• Cloud Based Load Testing Using TF Service &amp; VS 2013

  - by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/30/cloud-based-load-testing-using-tf-service-amp-vs-2013.aspx One of the new features announced as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Preview is ‘Cloud Based Load Testing’. In this blog post I’ll walk you through, What is Cloud Based Load Testing? How have I been using this feature? – Success story! Where can you find more resources on this feature? What is Cloud Based Load Testing? It goes without saying that performance testing your application not only gives you the confidence that the application will work under heavy levels of stress but also gives you the ability to test how scalable the architecture of your application is. It is important to know how much is too much for your application! Working with various clients in the industry I have realized that the biggest barriers in Load Testing & Performance Testing adoption are, High infrastructure and administration cost that comes with this phase of testing Time taken to procure & set up the test infrastructure Finding use for this infrastructure investment after completion of testing Is cloud the answer? 100% Visual Studio Compatible Scalable and Realistic Start testing in < 2 minutes Intuitive Pay only for what you need Use existing on premise tests on cloud There are a lot of vendors out there offering Cloud Based Load Testing, to name a few, Load Storm Soasta Blaze Meter Blitz And others… The question you may want to ask is, why should you go with Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test offering. If you are a Microsoft shop or already have investments in Microsoft technologies, you’ll see great benefit in the natural integration this offers with existing Microsoft products such as Visual Studio and Windows Azure. For example, your existing Web tests authored in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 will run on the cloud without requiring any modifications what so ever. Microsoft’s cloud test rig also supports API based testing, for example, if you are building a WPF application which consumes WCF services, you can write unit tests to invoke the WCF service, these tests can be run on the cloud test rig and loaded with ‘N’ concurrent users for performance testing. If you have your assets already hosted in the Azure and possibly in the same data centre as the Cloud test rig, your Azure app will not incur a usage cost because of the generated traffic since the traffic is coming from the same data centre. The licensing or pricing information on Microsoft’s cloud based Load test service is yet to be announced, but I would expect this to be priced attractively to match the market competition.   The only additional configuration required for running load tests on Microsoft Cloud based Load Tests service is to select the Test run location as Run tests using Visual Studio Team Foundation Service, How have I been using Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test Service? I have been part of the Microsoft Cloud Based Load Test Service advisory council for the last 7 months. This gave the opportunity to see the product shape up from concept to working solution. I was also the first person outside of Microsoft to try this offering out. This gave me the opportunity to test real world application at various clients using the Microsoft Load Test Service and provide real world feedback to the Microsoft product team. One of the most recent systems I tested using the Load Test Service has been an insurance quote generation engine. This insurance quote generation engine is,   hosted in Windows Azure expected to get quote requests from across the globe expected to handle 5 Million quote requests in a day (not clear how this load will be distributed across the day) There was no way, I could simulate such kind of load from on premise without standing up additional hardware. But Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test service allowed me to test my key performance testing scenarios, i.e. Simulate expected Load, Endurance Testing, Threshold Testing and Testing for Latency. Simulating expected load: approach to devising a load pattern My approach to devising a load test pattern has been to run the test scenario with 1 user to figure out the response time. Then work out how many users are required to reach the target load. So, for example, to invoke 1 quote from the quote engine software takes 0.5 seconds. Now if you do the math,   1 quote request by 1 user = 0.5 seconds   quotes generated by 1 user in 24 hour = 1 * (((2 * 60) * 60) * 24) = 172,800   quotes generated by 30 users in 24 hours = 172,800 * 30 =  5,184,000 This was a very simple example, if your application requires more concurrent users to test scenario’s such as caching, etc then you can devise your own load pattern, some examples of load test patterns can be found here.  Endurance Testing To test for endurance, I loaded the quote generation engine with an expected fixed user load and ran the test for very long duration such as over 48 hours and observed the affect of the long running test on the Azure infrastructure. Currently Microsoft Load Test service does not support metrics from the machine under test. I used Azure diagnostics to begin with, but later started using Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to capture the metrics of the machine under test. Threshold Testing To figure out how much user load the application could cope with before falling on its belly, I opted to step load the quote generation engine by incrementing user load with different variations of incremental user load per minute till the application crashed out and forced an IIS reset. Testing for Latency Currently the Microsoft Load Test service does not support generating geographically distributed load, I however, deployed the insurance quote generation engine in different Azure data centres and ran the same set of performance tests to measure for latency. Because I could compare load test results from different runs by exporting the results to excel (this feature is provided out of the box right from Visual Studio 2010) I could see the different in response times. More resources on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test Service A few important links to get you started, Download Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview Getting started guide for load testing using Team Foundation Service Troubleshooting guide for FAQs and known issues Team Foundation Service forum for questions and support Detailed demo and presentation (link to Tech-Ed session recording) Detailed demo and presentation (link to Build session recording) There a few limits on the usage of Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service that you can read about here. If you have any feedback on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service, feel free to share it with the product team via the Visual Studio User Voice forum. I hope you found this useful. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad

  - by Maiko Rocha

  One of my WebCenter Portal customers was asking about adaptive design with ADF/WebCenter Portal and how they could go about creating an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application. They were looking not only for the out-of-the-box support for mobile Safari which is certified against PS5+ (11.1.1.6) for ADF/WebCenter - but also to create a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad. Seems like they wanted something in the lines of Yahoo! Mail provides for the iPad - so the example I will use is shamelessly inspired by Y! Mail's iPad UI.  But first, let's quickly understand how can we bake in some adaptive goodness into ADF Faces. First thing we need to understand is, yes, there are a couple of constraints that we will need to work around, namely, the use or layout managers and skins. Please also keep in mind that I'm not and I don't pretend to be a web designer, much less an UX specialist, so feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter in the comments section. Now, back to the limitations. Layout Managers ADF Faces layout managers create an abstraction on top of the generated HTML code for a page so a developer doesn't need to be worried about how to size and dimension the UI layout (eg, af:panelStretchLayout). Although layout managers are very helpful, in this specific situation we will need to know a little bit more of how the final HTML is being rendered so we can apply the CSS class accordingly and create transition containers where the media queries will be applied - now, if you're using 11gR2 (11.1.2.2.3) there's the new component af:panelGridLayout (here and here) that will greatly improve creating responsive templates and pages because it is based on the grid/fluid systems and will generate straight out to DIVs on your final page. For now, I'm limited to PS5 and the af:panelStretchLayout component as a starting point because that's the release my customer is on. Skins You won't be able to use media queries, or use anything with "@" notation on the skin CSS file - the skin pre-processor will remove all extraneous "@" from the CSS file. The solution is to split your CSS in two separate files: a skin CSS file and plain CSS where you will add the media queries. The issue here is that you won't be able to use media queries for any faces components. We can, though, still apply the media queries for the components like af:panelGroupLayout and af:panelBorderLayout through their styleClass property to enable these components to be responsive to to the iPad orientation, by changing its dimensions, font sizes, hide/show areas, etc. Difference between responsive and adaptive design The best definition of adaptive vs responsive web design I could find is this: “Responsive web design,” as coined by Ethan Marcotte, means “fluid grids, fluid images/media & media queries.” “Adaptive web design,” as I use it, is about creating interfaces that adapt to the user’s capabilities (in terms of both form and function). To me, “adaptive web design” is just another term for “progressive enhancement” of which responsive web design can (an often should) be an integral part, but is a more holistic approach to web design in that it also takes into account varying levels of markup, CSS, JavaScript and assistive technology support. Responsive/adapative web design is much more than slapping an HTML template with CSS around your content or application. The content and application themselves are part of your web design - in other words, a responsive template is just an afterthought if it is not originating from a responsive design the involves the whole web application/s. Tips on responsive / adapative design with ADF/WebCenter Some of the tips listed below were already mentioned in multiple blog posts about ADF layout and skinning, but it is still worth remembering: a simple guideline for ADF/WebCenter apps would be to first create a high-level group of devices, for example: smartphones, tablets,  and desktop. For each of these large groups, create the basic structure to provide responsiveness: a page template, a skin, and an external CSS: pagetemplate_smartphone.jspx, smartphone_skin.css, smartphone-responsive.css pagetemplate_tablet.jspx, tablet_skin.css, tablet-responsive.css pagetemplate_desktop.jspx, desktop_skin.css, desktop-responsive.css These three assets can be changed on the fly through an user-agent check on the server side, delivering the right UI to the right device. Within each of the assets, you can make fine adjustments for each subgroup of devices with media queries - for example, smart phones with different screen dimensions and pixel density. Having these three groups and the corresponding assets per group seem to be a good compromise between trying to put everything on a single set of assets - specially considering the constraints above - and going to the other side of the spectrum to create assets per discrete device (iPhone4, iPhone5, Nexus, S3, etc.). Keep in mind that these are my rules and are not in any shape or form a best practice - this is how it fits best for the scenarios I've been working with. If you need to use HTML tags on your page, surround them with af:group to protect the DOM structure For stretchable/fluid layouts: Use non-stretching containers: panelGroupLayout, panelBorderLayout, … panelBorderLayout can be used to approximate HTML table component To avoid multiple scroll bars, do not nest scrolling PanelGroupLayout components. Consider layout="vertical" For stretchable/fluid layouts: Most stretchable ADF components also work in flowing context with dimensionsFrom="auto" To stretch a component horizontally, use styleClass="AFStretchWidth" instead of  "width:100%" Skinning Don't use CSS3 @media, @import, animations, etc. on skin css files. They will be removed. CSS3 properties within a class (box-shadow, transition, etc.) work just fine. Consider resetting some skin classes to better control their rendering: body {color: inherit;font: inherit;} af|document {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|commandLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|goLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|inputText::content {font: inherit;} Specific meta tags and CSS properties: Use  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0"/> to avoid zooming (if you want) Use -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch to enable native momentum scrolling within overflown areas (here) Use text-rendering: optmizeLegibility to improve readability. (here) User text-overflow: ellipsis to gracefully crop overflown text. (here) The meta-tags are included in each and every page in the metaContainer facet of af:document tag. You can also use a javascript to inject the meta-tags from the template. For the purpose of the example, I wanted to use as few workarounds as possible.   The iPad template and sample application This sample application has been built as a WebCenter Portal application, but you will also be able to reuse the template and techniques on your vanilla ADF application. Keep in mind that I'm neither a designer nor a CSS specialist, so please don't bash me too much on the messy CSS file you'll find on the application.  I've extended the provided PreferencesBean class that comes with WebCenter Portal and added code to dinamically change the template and skin on the fly.   This is the sample application in landscape orientation: This is the sample application in portrait orientation - the left side menu hides automatically based on a CSS media query: Another screenshot with a skinned popup opened: This is a sample application for you to play with - ideally you shouldn't use it as a starting point. On the left side bar you will find links rendered from a WebCenter Portal navigation model - the link triggers a full request through an af:goLink, while the light blue PPR button triggers a PPR navigation. The dark blue toolbar buttons at the top don't have any function,while the Approve and Reject buttons show a skinned popup. The search box of course doesn't have any behavior attahed to it either. There's a known issue right now with some PPR calls that are randomly generating a 403 error redirecting to the login page - I didn't have time to investigate if this is iOS6 specific or not - if you have any insights please let me know your findings. You can download the sample here.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET Wiki Control: This ASP.NET user control allows you to embed a very useful wiki directly into your already existing ASP.NET website taking advantage of the popula...BabyLog: Log baby daily activity.buddyHome: buddyHome is a project that can make your home smarter. as good as your buddy. Cloud Community: Cloud Community makes it easier for organizations to have a simple to use community platform. Our mission is to create an easy to use community pl...Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0: Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0 allows Microsoft CRM 4.0 customers and partners to monitor and analyze customers’ interaction from their...Console Highlighter: Hightlights Microsoft Windows Command prompt (cmd.exe) by outputting ANSI VT100 Control sequences to color the output. These sequences are not hand...Cornell Store: This is IN NO WAY officially affiliated or related to the Cornell University store. Instead, this is a project that I am doing for a class. Ther...DevUtilities: This project is for creating some utility tools, and they will be useful during the development.DotNetNuke® Skin Maple: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by DyNNamite.co.uk. The package includes 4 color variations and sev...HRNet: HRNetIIS Web Site Monitoring: A software for monitor a particular web site on IIS, even if its IP is sharing between different web site.Iowa Code Camp: The source code for the Iowa Code Camp website.Leonidas: Leonidas is a virtual tutorLunch 'n Learn: The Lunch 'n Learn web application is an open source ASP.NET MVC application that allows you to setup lunch 'n learn presentations for your team, c...MNT Cryptography: A very simple cryptography classMooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: mvc2linq2sql is a databinder for ASP.NET MVC that make able developer to clean bind object from HTML FORMS to Linq entities. Even 1 to N relations ...MoqBot: MoqBot is an auto mocking library for Moq and Ninject.mtExperience1: hoiMvcPager: MvcPager is a free paging component for ASP.NET MVC web application, it exposes a series of extension methods for using in ASP.NET MVC applications...OCal: OCal is based on object calisthenics to identify code smellsPex Custom Arithmetic Solver: Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver contains a collection of meta-heuristic search algorithms. The goal is to improve Pex's code coverage for code involvi...SetControls: Расширеные контролы для ASP.NET приложений. Полная информация ближе к релизу...shadowrage1597: CTC 195 Game Design classSharePoint Team-Mailer: A SharePoint 2007 solution that defines a generic CustomList for sending e-mails to SharePoint Groups.Sql Share: SQL Share is a collaboration tool used within the science to allow database engineers to work tightly with domain scientists.TechCalendar: Tech Events Calendar ASP.NET project.ZLYScript: A very simple script language compiler.New ReleasesALGLIB: ALGLIB 2.4.0: New ALGLIB release contains: improved versions of several linear algebra algorithms: QR decomposition, matrix inversion, condition number estimatio...AmiBroker Plug-Ins with C#: AmiBroker Plug-Ins v0.0.2: Source codes and a binaryAppFabric Caching UI Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Beta 2 UI Admin Tool: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Test On:Win 7 (64x)Autodocs - WCF REST Automatic API Documentation Generator: Autodocs.ServiceModel.Web: This archive contains the reference DLL, instructions and license.Compact Plugs & Compact Injection: Compact Injection and Compact Plugs 1.1 Beta: First release of Compact Plugs (CP). The solution includes a simple example project of CP, called "TestCompactPlugs1". Also some fixes where made ...Console Highlighter: Console Highlighter 0.9 (preview release): Preliminary release.Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.3: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.3). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. The last one was ...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.2: Family Tree Analyzer Version 1.0.2 This early beta version implements loading a gedcom file and displaying some basic reports. These reports inclu...FRC1103 - FRC Dashboard viewer: 2010 Documentation v0.1: This is my current version of the control system documentation for 2010. It isn't complete, but it has the information required for a custom dashbo...jQuery.cssLess: jQuery.cssLess 0.5 (Even less release): NEW - support for nested special CSS classes (like :hover) MAIN RELEASE This release, code "Even less", is the one that will interpret cssLess wit...MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL DataBinder: I didn't try this... I just took it off from my project. Please, tell me any problem implementing in your own development and I'll be pleased to h...MvcPager: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0Mytrip.Mvc: Mytrip 1.0 preview 1: Article Manager Blog Manager L2S Membership(.NET Framework 3.5) EF Membership(.NET Framework 4) User Manager File Manager Localization Captcha ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.117: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version adds ...Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver: PexCustomArithmeticSolver: This is the alpha release containing the Alternating Variable Method and Evolution Strategies to try and solve constraints over floating point vari...Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.44877: What is new in this release? Major performance increase in animations (up to 50 fps from 2 fps) by replacing DropShadow effect with png bitmaps; ...sELedit: sELedit v1.0b: + Added support for empty strings / wstrings + Fixed: critical bug in configuration files (list 53)sPWadmin: pwAdmin v0.9_nightly: + Fixed: XML editor can now open and save character templates + Added: PWI item name database + Added: Plugin SupportTechCalendar: Events Calendar v.1.0: Initial release.The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Beta 2: Beta 2.0 Some fixes from Beta 1, and a couple small enhancements. Intensive testing continues, and I will continue to update the code at least ever...ThreadSafe.Caching: 2010.03.10.1: Updates to the scavanging behaviour since last release. Scavenging will now occur every 30 seconds by default and all objects in the cache will be ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30310.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Email Sender (C++): The same Email Sender program that I but made in visual c plus plus 2008 instead of visual basic 2008.Web Forms MVP: Web Forms MVP CTP7: The release can be considered stable, and is in use behind several high traffic, public websites. It has been marked as a CTP release as it is not ...White Tiger: 0.0.3.1: Now you can load or create files with whatever root element you want *check f or sets file permisionsMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NET Ajax LibraryMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsN2 CMSFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight

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