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• Mini Theater at OTN Lounge During JavaOne

  - by Tori Wieldt

  This year, the Oracle Technology Network Lounge at JavaOne will be in the Hilton Ballroom, right in the center of theJavaOne DEMOgrounds. We'll have Java experts, community members and OTN staff to answer your questions. We've also even created a "Mini Theater" for casual demos from community members and Oracle staff. We are keeping the slots short, there will be no tests afterwards. It's your chance to talk to the experts 1 on 1. See how easy it is to turn on a lightbulb with Java and a violin. Here is the full schedule: Monday, October 1 9:40-9:50am  Learn about the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge 11:20-11:30  Update from the Oracle Academy 11:40-11:50  Caroline Kvitka, @OracleJavaMag, Editor-in-Chief of Java Magazine 12:00-12:20pm  SouJava demonstrates Duke's Choice Award Winner JHome 12:20-12:30pm  Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) Shows What's new in NetBeans 12:40-12:50pm  Learn about the OSN Developer Challenge  2:00-2:10pm  Java.net Robotics  2:30-2:40pm  Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) Java EE and NetBeans Tuesday, October 2 9:40-9:50am  Greenfoot/Kinect demo by Michael Kolling 11:20-11:30  Caroline Kvitka, @OracleJavaMag, Editor-in-Chief of Java Magazine 11:40-11:50  Stephen Chin and Jim Weaver, Top Ten JavaFX Features 12:00-12:10pm  Nokia Student Developer 12:20-12:30pm Arun Gupta, HTML 5 and Java EE 7 1:00-1:10pm Update on the Java Community Process (JCP) 1:20-1:30pm  Update from the Oracle Academy  2:00-2:10pm  Java.net Robotics  2:30-2:40pm  Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) NetBeans Java Editor Wednesday, October 3 9:40-9:50am  Greenfoot/Kinect demo by Michael Kolling 11:00-11:10  Caroline Kvitka, @OracleJavaMag, Editor-in-Chief of Java Magazine 11:20-11:30  Angela Caicedo and Jim Weaver, Leveraging JavaFX and HTML5 12:00-12:10pm  Nokia Student Developer 12:10-12:30pm  SouJava demonstrates Duke's Choice Award Winner JHome  2:00-2:10pm  Stephen Chin and Jim Weaver, JavaFX Deployment with Self-Contained Apps  2:30-2:40pm  Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) NetBeans Platform  2:50-3:00pm  Petr Jiricka, Project Easel Changes to this schedule will be announced on @JavaOneConf.

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• Network Solutions Gold VIP Program

  - by GGBlogger

  Today I received an email advising me “Congratulations! You have been selected for the Network Solutions Gold VIP Program” Now I get a bunch of messages from Network Solutions because a long time ago I chose them as my registrar. I usually just save these to my Outlook Network Solutions folder and move on. This time my wife was in the room and I chuckled and said something about “Network Solutions has made me a Gold VIP member.” She said “So what does that mean?” Prompted by that I scrolled down the page to look at my “perks". Let’s see – Special pricing, 1 year free Web Forwarding, 1 hour of free support… etc etc until I hit “Enrollment in SafeRenew* SafeRenew* simplifies your renewal process. It protects your domain name registrations and corresponding services in the event you forget or are unable to renew on time. I’m thinking “Now ain’t that neat” I don’t use auto renew anyway and never have. Then I continued reading: Beginning June 24th, 2012 your domains* (that’s 10 days away) will automatically renew. To ensure continuation of service, please be certain you have a valid credit card on file. If you do not wish for your services to be automatically renewed, please click here to log into account manager and opt out of the SafeRenew™ service. Whoa Network Solutions is going to start spending my money without so much as a by your leave sir!!! I don’t bloody think so and how truly magnanimous of them I can “click here” to opt out of what I didn’t opt in for. Talk about furious! I still am. Now the kicker is: if my wife hadn’t been curious and if I’d had a working credit card on file I wouldn’t have know this until one of my unwanted domain names auto renewed. Of course I was told “Oh – we’d have refunded your money” to which I say bull. In my view Networks Solutions is guilty of a crime of some sort. They DO NOT have a right to spend my money without asking!!!!! So watch out folks.

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• Oracle Customer Hub - Directions, Roadmap and Customer Success

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

   By Gurinder Bahl With less than a week from OOW 2012, I would like to introduce you all to the core Oracle Customer MDM Strategy sessions. Fragmentation of customer data across disparate systems prohibits companies from achieving a complete and accurate view of their customers. Oracle Customer Hub provide a comprehensive set of services, utilities and applications to create and maintain a trusted master customer system of record across the enterprise. Customer Hub centralizes customer data from disparate systems across your enterprise into a master repository. Existing systems are integrated in real-time or via batch with the Hub, allowing you to leverage legacy platform investments while capitalizing on the benefits of a single customer identity. Don’t miss out on two sessions geared towards Oracle Customer Hub:   1) Attend session CON9747 - Turn Customer Data into an Enterprise Asset with Oracle Fusion Customer Hub Applications at Oracle Open World 2012 on Monday, Oct 1st, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM @ Moscone West – 2008. Manouj Tahiliani, Sr. Director MDM Product Management will provide insight into the vision of Oracle Fusion Customer Hub solutions, and review the roadmap. You will discover how Fusion Customer MDM can help your enterprise improve data quality, create accurate and complete customer information,  manage governance and help create great customer experiences. You will also understand how to leverage data quality capabilities and create a sophisticated customer foundation within Oracle Fusion Applications. You will also hear Danette Patterson, Group Lead, Church Pension Group talk about how Oracle Fusion Customer Hub applications provide a modern, next-generation, multi-domain foundation for managing customer information in a private cloud. 2)  Don't miss session  CON9692 - Customer MDM is key to Strategic Business Success and Customer Experience Management at Oracle Open World 2012 on Wednesday, October 3rd 2012 from 3:30-4:30pm @ Westin San Francisco Metropolitan 1. JP Hurtado, Director, Customer Systems, will provide insight on how RCCL overcame challenges of data quality, guest recognition & centralized customer view to provide consolidated customer view to multiple reservation, CRM, marketing, service, sales, data warehouse and loyalty systems. You will learn how Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), which has over 30 million customer and maintain multiple brands, leveraged Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM) as backbone to customer data management strategy for past 5 years. Gurinder Bahl from MDM Product Management will provide an update on Oracle Customer Hub strategy, what we have achieved since last Open World and our future plans for the Oracle Customer Hub. You will learn about Customer Hub Data Quality capabilities around data analysis, cleansing, matching, address validation as well as reporting and monitoring capabilities. The MDM track at Oracle Open World covers variety of topics related to MDM. In addition to the product management team presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several Customer Panels, and Conference sessions. You can see an overview of MDM sessions here.  Looking forward to see you at Open World, the perfect opportunity to learn about cutting edge Oracle technologies. 

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• Watching Green Day and discovering Sitecore, priceless.

  - by jonel

  I’m feeling inspired and I’d like to share a technique we’ve implemented in Sitecore to address a URL mapping from our legacy site that we wanted to carry over to the new beautiful Littelfuse.com. The challenge is to carry over all of our series URLs that have been published in our datasheets, we currently have a lot of series and having to create a manual mapping for those could be really tedious. It has the format of http://www.littelfuse.com/series/series-name.html, for instance, http://www.littelfuse.com/series/flnr.html. It would have been easier if we have our information architecture defined like this but that would have been too easy. I took a solution that is 2-fold. First, I need to create a URL rewrite rule using the IIS URL Rewrite Module 2.0. Secondly, we need to implement a handler that will take care of the actual lookup of the actual series. It will be amazing after we’ve gone over the details. Let’s start with the URL rewrite. Create a new blank rule, you can name it with anything you wish. The key part here to talk about is the Pattern and the Action groups. The Pattern is nothing but regex. Basically, I’m telling it to match the regex I have defined. In the Action group, I am telling it what to do, in this case, rewrite to the redirect.aspx webform. In this implementation, I will be using Rewrite instead of redirect so the URL sticks in the browser. If you opt to use Redirect, then the URL bar will display the new URL our webform will redirect to. Let me explain one small thing, the (\w+) in my Pattern group’s regex, will actually translate to {R:1} in my Action’s group. This is where the magic begins. Now let’s see what our Redirect.aspx contains. Remember our {R:1} above which becomes the query string variable s? This are basic .Net code. The only thing that you will probably ask is the LFSearch class. It’s our own implementation of addressing finding items by using a field search, we supply the fieldname, the value of the field, the template name of the item we are after, and the value of true or false if we want to do an exact search, or not. If eureka, then redirect to that item’s Path (Url). If not, tell the user tough luck, here’s the 404 page as a consolation. Amazing, ain’t it?

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• Attach to Process in Visual Studio

  - by Daniel Moth

  One option for achieving step 1 in the Live Debugging process is attaching to an already running instance of the process that hosts your code, and this is a good place for me to talk about debug engines. You can attach to a process by selecting the "Debug" menu and then the "Attach To Process…" menu in Visual Studio 11 (Ctrl+Alt+P with my keyboard bindings), and you should see something like this screenshot: I am not going to explain this UI, besides being fairly intuitive, there is good documentation on MSDN for the Attach dialog. I do want to focus on the row of controls that starts with the "Attach to:" label and ends with the "Select..." button. Between them is the readonly textbox that indicates the debug engine that will be used for the selected process if you click the "Attach" button. If you haven't encountered that term before, read on MSDN about debug engines. Notice that the "Type" column shows the Code Type(s) that can be detected for the process. Typically each debug engine knows how to debug a specific code type (the two terms tend to be used interchangeably). If you click on a different process in the list with a different code type, the debug engine used will be different. However note that this is the automatic behavior. If you believe you know best, or more typically you want to choose the debug engine for a process using more than one code type, you can do so by clicking the "Select..." button, which should yield a "Select Code Type" dialog like this one: In this dialog you can switch to the debug engine you want to use by checking the box in front of your desired one, then hit "OK", then hit "Attach" to use it. Notice that the dialog suggests that you can select more than one. Not all combinations work (you'll get an error if you select two incompatible debug engines), but some do. Also notice in the list of debug engines one of the new players in Visual Studio 11, the GPU debug engine - I will be covering that on the C++ AMP team blog (and no, it cannot be combined with any others in this release). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Oracle Text query parser

  - by Roger Ford

  Oracle Text provides a rich query syntax which enables powerful text searches.However, this syntax isn't intended for use by inexperienced end-users.  If you provide a simple search box in your application, you probably want users to be able to type "Google-like" searches into the box, and have your application convert that into something that Oracle Text understands.For example if your user types "windows nt networking" then you probably want to convert this into something like"windows ACCUM nt ACCUM networking".  But beware - "NT" is a reserved word, and needs to be escaped.  So let's escape all words:"{windows} ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  That's fine - until you start introducing wild cards. Then you must escape only non-wildcarded searches:"win% ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  There are quite a few other "gotchas" that you might encounter along the way.Then there's the issue of scoring.  Given a query for "oracle text query syntax", it would be nice if we could score a full phrase match higher than a hit where all four words are present but not in a phrase.  And then perhaps lower than that would be a document where three of the four terms are present.  Progressive relaxation helps you with this, but you need to code the "progression" yourself in most cases.To help with this, I've developed a query parser which will take queries in Google-like syntax, and convert them into Oracle Text queries. It's designed to be as flexible as possible, and will generate either simple queries or progressive relaxation queries. The input string will typically just be a string of words, such as "oracle text query syntax" but the grammar does allow for more complex expressions:  word : score will be improved if word exists  +word : word must exist  -word : word CANNOT exist  "phrase words" : words treated as phrase (may be preceded by + or -)  field:(expression) : find expression (which allows +,- and phrase as above) within "field". So for example if I searched for   +"oracle text" query +syntax -ctxcatThen the results would have to contain the phrase "oracle text" and the word syntax. Any documents mentioning ctxcat would be excluded from the results. All the instructions are in the top of the file (see "Downloads" at the bottom of this blog entry).  Please download the file, read the instructions, then try it out by running "parser.pls" in either SQL*Plus or SQL Developer.I am also uploading a test file "test.sql". You can run this and/or modify it to run your own tests or run against your own text index. test.sql is designed to be run from SQL*Plus and may not produce useful output in SQL Developer (or it may, I haven't tried it).I'm putting the code up here for testing and comments. I don't consider it "production ready" at this point, but would welcome feedback.  I'm particularly interested in comments such as "The instructions are unclear - I couldn't figure out how to do XXX" "It didn't work in my environment" (please provide as many details as possible) "We can't use it in our application" (why not?) "It needs to support XXX feature" "It produced an invalid query output when I fed in XXXX" Downloads: parser.pls test.sql

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• Innovation and the Role of Social Media

  - by Brian Dirking

  A very interesting post by Andy Mulholland of CAP Gemini this week – “The CIO is trapped between the CEO wanting innovation and the CFO needing compliance” – had many interesting points: “A successful move in one area won’t be recognized and rapidly implemented in other areas to multiply the benefits, or worse unsuccessful ideas will get repeated adding to the cost and time wasted. That’s where the need to really address the combination of social networking, collaboration, knowledge management and business information is required.” Without communicating what works and what doesn’t, the innovations of our organization may be lost, and the failures repeated. That makes sense. If you liked Andy Mulholland’s blog post, you need to hear Howard Beader’s presentation at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on innovation and the role of social media. (Howard will be speaking in the Market Leaders Session at 1 PM on Wednesday June 22nd). Some of the thoughts Howard will share include: • Innovation is more than just ideas, it’s getting ideas to market, and removing the obstacles that stand in the way • Innovation is about parallel processing – you can’t remove the obstacles one by one because you will get to market too late • Innovation can be about product innovation, but it can also be about process innovation This brings us to Andy’s second issue he raises: "..the need for integration with, and visibility of, processes to understand exactly how the enterprise functions and delivers on its policies…" Andy goes on to talk about this from the perspective of compliance and the CFO’s concerns. And it’s true: innovation can come both in product innovation, but also internal process innovation. And process innovation can have as much impact as product innovation.  New supply chain models can disrupt an industry overnight. Many people ignore process innovation as a benefit of social business, because it is perceived as a bottom line rather than top line impact. But it can actually impact your top line by changing your entire business model. Oracle WebCenter sits at this crossroads between product innovation and process innovation, enabling you to drive go-to-market innovations through internal social media tools, removing obstacles in parallel, and also providing you deep insight into your processes so you can identify bottlenecks and realize whole new ways of doing business. Learn more about how at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, where Oracle will be in booth #213 showing Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Fusion Applications.

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• BizTalk 2009 - BizTalk Benchmark Wizard: Running a Test

  - by StuartBrierley

  The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard is a ultility that can be used to gain some validation of a BizTalk installation, giving a level of guidance on whether it is performing as might be expected.  It should be used after BizTalk Server has been installed and before any solutions are deployed to the environment.  This will ensure that you are getting consistent and clean results from the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard applies load to the BizTalk Server environment under a choice of specific scenarios. During these scenarios performance counter information is collected and assessed against statistics that are appropriate to the BizTalk Server environment. For details on installing the Benchmark Wizard see my previous post. The BizTalk Benchmarking Wizard provides two simple test scenarios, one for messaging and one for Orchestrations, which can be used to test your BizTalk implementation. Messaging Loadgen generates a new XML message and sends it over NetTCP A WCF-NetTCP Receive Location receives a the xml document from Loadgen. The PassThruReceive pipeline performs no processing and the message is published by the EPM to the MessageBox. The WCF One-Way Send Port, which is the only subscriber to the message, retrieves the message from the MessageBox The PassThruTransmit pipeline provides no additional processing The message is delivered to the back end WCF service by the WCF NetTCP adapter Orchestrations Loadgen generates a new XML message and sends it over NetTCP A WCF-NetTCP Receive Location receives a the xml document from Loadgen. The XMLReceive pipeline performs no processing and the message is published by the EPM to the MessageBox. The message is delivered to a simple Orchestration which consists of a receive location and a send port The WCF One-Way Send Port, which is the only subscriber to the Orchestration message, retrieves the message from the MessageBox The PassThruTransmit pipeline provides no additional processing The message is delivered to the back end WCF service by the WCF NetTCP adapter Below is a quick outline of how to run the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard on a single server, although it should be noted that this is not ideal as this server is then both generating and processing the load.  In order to separate this load out you should run the "Indigo" service on a seperate server. To start the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard click Start > All Programs > BizTalk Benchmark Wizard > BizTalk Benchmark Wizard. On this screen click next, you will then get the following pop up window. Check the server and database names and check the "check prerequsites" check-box before pressing ok.  The wizard will then check that the appropriate test scenarios are installed. You should then choose the test scenario that wish to run (messaging or orchestration) and the architecture that most closely matches your environment. You will then be asked to confirm the host server for each of the host instances. Next you will be presented with the prepare screen.  You will need to start the indigo service before pressing the Test Indigo Service Button. If you are running the indigo service on a separate server you can enter the server name here.  To start the indigo service click Start > All Programs > BizTalk Benchmark Wizard > Start Indigo Service.   While the test is running you will be presented with two speed dial type displays - one for the received messages per second and one for the processed messages per second. The green dial shows the current rate and the red dial shows the overall average rate.  Optionally you can view the CPU usage of the various servers involved in processing the tests. For my development environment I expected low results and this is what I got.  Although looking at the online high scores table and comparing to the quad core system listed, the results are perhaps not really that bad. At some time I may look at what improvements I can make to this score, but if you are interested in that now take a look at Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 3).

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• SQL SERVER – master Database Log File Grew Too Big

  - by pinaldave

  Couple of the days ago, I received following email and I find this email very interesting and I feel like sharing with all of you. Note: Please read the whole email before providing your suggestions. “Hi Pinal, If you can share these details on your blog, it will help many. We understand the value of the master database and we take its regular back up (everyday midnight). Yesterday we noticed that our master database log file has grown very large. This is very first time that we have encountered such an issue. The master database is in simple recovery mode; so we assumed that it will never grow big; however, we now have a big log file. We ran the following command USE [master] GO DBCC SHRINKFILE (N'mastlog' , 0, TRUNCATEONLY) GO We know this command will break the chains of LSN but as per our understanding; it should not matter as we are in simple recovery model.     After running this, the log file becomes very small. Just to be cautious, we took full backup of the master database right away. We totally understand that this is not the normal practice; so if you are going to tell us the same, we are aware of it. However, here is the question for you? What operation in master database would have caused our log file to grow too large? Thanks, [name and company name removed as per request]“ Here was my response to them: “Hi [name removed], It is great that you are aware of all the right steps and method. Taking full backup when you are not sure is always a good practice. Regarding your question what could have caused your master database log to grow larger, let me try to guess what could have happened. Do you have any user table in the master database? If yes, this is not recommended and also NOT a good practice. If have user tables in master database and you are doing any long operation (may be lots of insert, update, delete or rebuilding them), then it can cause this situation. You have made me curious about your scenario; do revert back. Kind Regards, Pinal” Within few minutes I received reply: “That was it Pinal. We had one of the maintenance task log tables created in the master table, which had many long transactions during the night. We moved it to newly created database named ‘maintenance’, and we will keep you updated.” I was very glad to receive the email. I do not suggest that any user table should be created in the master database. It should be left alone from user objects. Now here is the question for you – can you think of any other reason for master log file growth? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Defining Social Media Terms

  - by David Dorf

  As I talk about social in the context of retail, I sometimes get tripped up on different terms. I know what I mean, but the audience may have something else in mind. So I decided to see if I could find some well accepted definitions for common terms. While there are definitions on the Internet, I'm not sure they are well accepted. After reviewing several, here's what I came up with: Social Network: a structure of individuals and groups connected together by commonality. That seems pretty straightforward. A group of friends, co-workers, music fans, etc. The key here is that they have something in common that connects them. Social Media: Internet channels that support the collaborative publishing of information by and for social networks. The key here is to differentiate between traditional one-way media, and conversational social media. When its social its two-way, allowing both the publishing and consuming of information. Examples are blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Social Marketing: the use of social media for marketing, public relations, and customer service. Wikipedia actually includes "selling" here but I think that's separate from marketing, as you'll see further down below. Most people look at social media as entertainment, but the marketing angle adds business value. This is where retailers discover and engage customers to build a relationship. Social Merchandising: the integration of social media and product discovery. Whereas marketing is focused more on brand image, customer engagement, and promotions, merchandising is more directly trying to convert browsers into purchases. This includes deciding what customers want, often by asking the social network, and deciding how to position products to the social network. Social Selling: the incorporation of e-commerce into social media. While on a social media site, social selling enables the purchasing of goods/services in the user's context, without leaving the social media channel. If a user clicks on an advertisement and is taken to an e-commerce site, then that's really just web advertising and not social selling. Well, do these terms and definitions make sense? Let me know what you think.

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• Book review: Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed

  - by BuckWoody

  I know, I know – what’s a database guy doing reading a book on System Center? Well, I need it from time to time. System Center is actually a collection of about 7 different products that you can use to manage and monitor your software and hardware, from drive space through Microsoft Office, UNIX systems, and yes, SQL Server. It’s that last part I care about the most, and so I’ve dealt with Data Protection Manager and System Center Operations Manager (I call it SCOM) in SQL Server. But I wasn’t familiar with the rest of the suite nor was I as familiar as I needed to be with the “Essentials” release – a separate product that groups together the main features of System Center into a single offering for smaller organizations. These companies usually run with a smaller IT shop, so they sometimes opt for this product to help them monitor everything, including SQL Server. So I picked up “Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed” by Chris Amaris and a cast of others. I don’t normally like to get a technical book by multiple authors – I just find that most of the time it’s quite jarring to switch from author to author, but I think this group did pretty well here.  The first chapter on introducing System Center has helped me talk with others about what the product does, and which pieces fit well together with SQL Server. The writing is well done, and I didn’t find a jump from author to author as I went along. The information is sequential, meaning that they lead you from install to configuration and then use. It’s very much a concepts-and-how-to book, and a big one at that – over 950 pages of learning! It was a pretty quick read, though, since I skipped the installation parts and there are lots of screenshots. While I’m not sure you’d be an expert on the product when you finish reading this book, but I would say you’re more than halfway there. I would say it suits someone that learns through examples the best, since they have a lot of step-by-step examples I do recommend that you take a look if you have to interact with this product, or even if you are a smaller shop and you’re the primary IT resource. The last few chapters deal with System Center Essentials, and honestly it was the best part of the book for me. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• glsl shader to allow color change of skydome ogre3d

  - by Tim

  I'm still very new to all this but learning a lot. I'm putting together an application using Ogre3d as the rendering engine. So far I've got it running, with a simple scene, a day/night cycle system which is working okay. I'm now moving on to looking at changing the color of the skydome material based on the time of day. What I've done so far is to create a struct to hold the ColourValues for the different aspects of the scene. struct todColors { Ogre::ColourValue sky; Ogre::ColourValue ambient; Ogre::ColourValue sun; }; I created an array to store all the colours todColors sceneColours [4]; I populated the array with the colours I want to use for the various times of the day. For instance DayTime (when the sun is high in the sky) sceneColours[2].sky = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].ambient = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].sun = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); I've got code to work out the time of the day using a float currentHours to store the current hour of the day 10.5 = 10:30 am. This updates constantly and updates the sun as required. I am then calculating the appropriate colours for the time of day when relevant using else if( currentHour >= 4 && currentHour < 7) { // Lerp from night to morning Ogre::ColourValue lerp = Ogre::Math::lerp<Ogre::ColourValue, float>(sceneColours[GT_TOD_NIGHT].sky , sceneColours[GT_TOD_MORNING].sky, (currentHour - 4) / (7 - 4)); } My original attempt to get this to work was to dynamically generate a material with the new colour and apply that material to the skydome. This, as you can probably guess... didn't go well. I know it's possible to use shaders where you can pass information such as colour to the shader from the code but I am unsure if there is an existing simple shader to change a colour like this or if I need to create one. What is involved in creating a shader and material definition that would allow me to change the colour of a material without the overheads of dynamically generating materials all the time? EDIT : I've created a glsl vertex and fragment shaders as follows. Vertex uniform vec4 newColor; void main() { gl_FrontColor = newColor; gl_Position = ftransform(); } Fragment void main() { gl_FragColor = gl_Color; } I can pass a colour to it using ShaderDesigner and it seems to work. I now need to investigate how to use it within Ogre as a material. EDIT : I created a material file like this : vertex_program colour_vs_test glsl { source test.vert default_params { param_named newColor float4 0.0 0.0 0.0 1 } } fragment_program colour_fs_glsl glsl { source test.frag } material Test/SkyColor { technique { pass { lighting off fragment_program_ref colour_fs_glsl { } vertex_program_ref colour_vs_test { } } } } In the code I have tried : Ogre::MaterialPtr material = Ogre::MaterialManager::getSingleton().getByName("Test/SkyColor"); Ogre::GpuProgramParametersSharedPtr params = material->getTechnique(0)->getPass(0)->getVertexProgramParameters(); params->setNamedConstant("newcolor", Ogre::Vector4(0.7, 0.5, 0.3, 1)); I've set that as the Skydome material which seems to work initially. I am doing the same with the code that is attempting to lerp between colours, but when I include it there, it all goes black. Seems like there is now a problem with my colour lerping.

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• Are You Afraid of Each Other? Study Shows CMO’s/CIO’s Missing Benefits of Collaboration

  - by Mike Stiles

  Remember that person in school you spent months being too scared to talk to?  Then when you finally did, it led to a wonderful friendship…if not something more. New research from Oracle, Social Media Today and Leader Networks shows marketing and IT need to get over whatever’s holding them back and start reaping the benefits of collaboration. Back in the old days of just a few years ago, marketing could stay on their side of the building, IT could stay on their side of the building, and both could refer to the other as “those guys.” Today, the structure of organizations is shifting from islands to “us,” one integrated body where each part knows what the other parts are doing, and all parts work together in accomplishing job one…a winning customer experience. Ignore that, and you start losing. Give your reluctance to change priority over the benefits of new collaborations, and you start losing. You’re either working together and accelerating forward or getting in the way of each other’s separate agendas and grinding down…much to your competitors’ delight. The study reveals a basic current truth: those who are collaborating in marketing and IT report being more effective, however less than 1/3 report collaborating even “frequently.” In other words, this is obviously a good thing, so we’d better not do it. Smart. The white paper, “Socially Driven Collaboration,” set out to explore how today’s always-changing digital, social and mobile landscape is forcing change across the enterprise, whether it’s welcomed or not. Part of what it found is marketing and IT leaders are not unaware of what’s going on and see their roles evolving. And both know the ability to collaborate more effectively now exists. And of those who are collaborating, over 2/3 say they’re “more effective” professionally because of it. Yet even if you don’t want to take the Oracle study’s word for it, an August 2013 Accenture study of 400 senior marketing and 250 IT executives revealed only 10% think CMO/CIO collaboration is at the right level. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, and not just around people. Collaboration is also being called for across processes and technologies. Business benefits of such collaboration cited in the Oracle study include stronger marketing messages, faster speed-to-market, greater product adoption, faster discovery of product and service shortcomings, and reduction in project costs. Those are the benefits you will cheat yourself out of by keeping “those guys” at arm’s length and continuing to try to function in traditional roles while modern business and the consumer is changing around you. “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” –Stephen Hawking @mikestilesPhoto: istockphoto

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• SQL SERVER – DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012

  - by pinaldave

  Have you ever faced situation where something does not work and when you try to go and fix it – you like fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this is exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story of yesterday I want to state it candidly that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. One of the my DBA friend who always used my performance tuning script yesterday sent me email asking following question - “Every time I want to retrieve OS related information in SQL Server – I used DMV sys.dm_os_sys_info. I just upgraded my SQL Server edition from 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 RC0 and it suddenly stopped working. Well, this is not the production server so the issue is not big yet but eventually I need to resolve this error. Any suggestion?” The funny thing was original email was very long but it did not talk about what is the exact error beside the query is not working. I think this is the disadvantage of being too friendly on email sometime. Well, never the less, I quickly looked at the DMV on my SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 RC0 version. To my surprise I found out that there were few columns which are renamed in SQL Server 2012 RC0. Usually when people see breaking changes they do not like it but when I see these changes I was happy as new names were meaningful and additionally their new conversion is much more practical and useful. Here are the columns previous names - Previous Column Name New Column Name physical_memory_in_bytes physical_memory_kb bpool_commit_target committed_target_kb bpool_visible visible_target_kb virtual_memory_in_bytes virtual_memory_kb bpool_commited committed_kb If you read it carefully you will notice that new columns now display few results in the KB whereas earlier result was in bytes. When I see the results in bytes I always get confused as I could not guess what exactly it will convert to. I like to see results in kb and I am glad that new columns are now displaying the results in the kb. I sent the details of the new columns to my friend and ask him to check the columns used in application. From my comment he quickly realized why he was facing error and fixed it immediately. Overall – all was well at the end and I learned something new. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DMV, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Identity Fields – Contest Win Joes 2 Pros Combo (USD 198) – Day 2 of 5

  - by pinaldave

  August 2011 we ran a contest where every day we give away one book for an entire month. The contest had extreme success. Lots of people participated and lots of give away. I have received lots of questions if we are doing something similar this month. Absolutely, instead of running a contest a month long we are doing something more interesting. We are giving away USD 198 worth gift every day for this week. We are giving away Joes 2 Pros 5 Volumes (BOOK) SQL 2008 Development Certification Training Kit every day. One copy in India and One in USA. Total 2 of the giveaway (worth USD 198). All the gifts are sponsored from the Koenig Training Solution and Joes 2 Pros. The books are available here Amazon | Flipkart | Indiaplaza How to Win: Read the Question Read the Hints Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India residents only) 2 Winners will be randomly selected announced on August 20th. Question of the Day: Which of the following statement is incorrect? a) Identity value can be negative. b) Identity value can have negative interval. c) Identity value can be of datatype VARCHAR d) Identity value can have increment interval larger than 1 Query Hints: BIG HINT POST A simple way to determine if a table contains an identity field is to use the SSMS Object Explorer Design Interface. Navigate to the table, then right-click it and choose Design from the pop-up window. When your design tab opens, select the first field in the table to view its list of properties in the lower pane of the tab (In this case the field is ProductID). Look to see if the Identity Specification property in the lower pane is set to either yes or no. SQL Server will allow you to utilize IDENTITY_INSERT with just one table at a time. After you’ve completed the needed work, it’s very important to reset the IDENTITY_INSERT back to OFF. Additional Hints: I have previously discussed various concepts from SQL Server Joes 2 Pros Volume 2. SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Output Clause in Simple Examples SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Ranking Functions – Advanced NTILE in Detail SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Ranking Functions – RANK( ), DENSE_RANK( ), and ROW_NUMBER( ) SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Advanced Aggregates with the Over Clause SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Aggregates with the Over Clause SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Overriding Identity Fields – Tricks and Tips of Identity Fields SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Many to Many Relationships Next Step: Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India) Bonus Winner Leave a comment with your favorite article from the “additional hints” section and you may be eligible for surprise gift. There is no country restriction for this Bonus Contest. Do mention why you liked it any particular blog post and I will announce the winner of the same along with the main contest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Not Dead, Just Busy

  - by MOSSLover

  So I didn’t die in a freak smelting accident yet, but I have been dealing with a lot of different things.  I had to take a bit of a break to deal with the cat death issue.  I am not fully recovered, because well it just happened a few months ago.  It kind of sucked.  Plus the apartment feels a lot bigger. Then you have the whole New York Comic Con thing where I had to plan some cosplay costumes.  I have been trying to find time to hang out with friends and have a social life.  That plus I built an entire presentation for iOS development for New York Code Camp.  I am also planning a couple MS Community dinners (namely one a week from Tuesday) plus a give camp.  I am also planning a vacation around SPS UK plus I will be at SPC.  Life is just incredibly hectic and when you factor in dating to the mix it’s gotten insane to the point where some day I just have to go dark.  Hence the lack of blogging.  I am just trying to keep up with everything and everyone without losing myself. If you guys will be at SPC or SPS UK I will be at both places this year.  Stop by the Planet Technologies booth and see me or I’ll be around somewhere.  I am really sorry if I don’t remember you from an event or if you are someone following me on twitter.  I am trying to get better at the mnemonic memory devices, but I think things broke down around the 47th event I attended or spoke at or something to that nature.  If anyone wants to talk to Cathy, Lori, or I about Women in SharePoint definitely find us at the event.  Anyway good night and good luck guys.  I promise to check back at least once before the year ends.  In the meantime twitter stalking is always possible.  Sometimes I even respond back. Technorati Tags: SPC,SPS UK,NYCC,NYC Code Camp,MOSSLover

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• A New Home for E-Business Suite Customer Adoption Information

  - by linda.fishman.hoyle

  Phew! I made it! A new home with my name. Let's talk about E-Business Suite. So much is going on and more and more customers are upgrading and implementing the latest release. I think I will highlight in this blog entry the most recent press release we issued 2 weeks ago about our Applications Unlimited success but in the release, we name several customers who are live on E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and then have a fabulous quote from a customer who is doing great things with our product.   Here is a link to the press release To make it easy for you, I am pulling out just the E-Business Suite information Oracle E-Business Suite: Oracle® E-Business Suite Release 12.1 provides organizations of all sizes, across all industries and regions, with a global business foundation that helps them reduce costs and increase productivity through a portfolio of rapid value solutions, integrated business processes and industry-focused solutions. The latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite was designed to help organizations make better decisions and be more competitive by providing a global or holistic view of their operations. Abu Dhabi Media Company, Agilysis, C3 Business Solutions, Chicago Public Schools, Datacard Group, Guidance Software, Leviton Manufacturing, McDonald's, MINOR International, Usana Health Sciences, Zamil Plastic Industries Ltd. and Zebra Technologies are just a few of the organizations that have deployed the latest release of the Oracle E-Business Suite to help them make better decisions and be more competitive, while lowering costs and increasing performance. Customer Speaks "Leviton Manufacturing makes a very diverse line of products including electrical devices and data center products that we sell globally. We upgraded to the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 to support our service business with change management, purchasing, accounts payable, and our internal IT help desk," said Bob MacTaggart, CIO of Leviton Manufacturing. "We consolidated seven Web sites that we used to host individually onto iStore. In addition, we run a site, using the Oracle E-Business Suite configurator, pricing and quoting for our sales agents to do configuration work. This site can now generate a complete sales proposal using Oracle functionality; we actually generate CAD drawings - the actual drawings themselves - based on configuration results. It used to take six to eight weeks to generate these drawings and now it's all done online in an hour to two hours by our sales agents themselves, totally self-service. It does everything they need. From our point of view that is a major business success. Not only is it a very cool, innovative application, but it also puts us about two years ahead of our competition."

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• Improving performance of a particle system (OpenGL ES)

  - by Jason

  I'm in the process of implementing a simple particle system for a 2D mobile game (using OpenGL ES 2.0). It's working, but it's pretty slow. I start getting frame rate battering after about 400 particles, which I think is pretty low. Here's a summary of my approach: I start with point sprites (GL_POINTS) rendered in a batch just using a native float buffer (I'm in Java-land on Android, so that translates as a java.nio.FloatBuffer). On GL context init, the following are set: GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); GLES20.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_CULL_FACE); GLES20.glDisable(GLES20.GL_DEPTH_TEST); Each draw frame sets the following: GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_BLEND); GLES20.glBlendFunc(GLES20.GL_ONE, GLES20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); And I bind a single texture: GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureHandle); GLES20.glUniform1i(mUniformTextureHandle, 0); Which is just a simple circle with some blur (and hence some transparency) http://cl.ly/image/0K2V2p2L1H2x Then there are a bunch of glVertexAttribPointer calls: mBuffer.position(position); mGlEs20.glVertexAttribPointer(mAttributeRGBHandle, valsPerRGB, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, stride, mBuffer); ...4 more of these Then I'm drawing: GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mUniformProjectionMatrixHandle, 1, false, Camera.mProjectionMatrix, 0); GLES20.glDrawArrays(GLES20.GL_POINTS, 0, drawCalls); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); My vertex shader does have some computation in it, but given that they're point sprites (with only 2 coordinate values) I'm not sure this is the problem: #ifdef GL_ES // Set the default precision to low. precision lowp float; #endif uniform mat4 u_ProjectionMatrix; attribute vec4 a_Position; attribute float a_PointSize; attribute vec3 a_RGB; attribute float a_Alpha; attribute float a_Burn; varying vec4 v_Color; void main() { vec3 v_FGC = a_RGB * a_Alpha; v_Color = vec4(v_FGC.x, v_FGC.y, v_FGC.z, a_Alpha * (1.0 - a_Burn)); gl_PointSize = a_PointSize; gl_Position = u_ProjectionMatrix * a_Position; } My fragment shader couldn't really be simpler: #ifdef GL_ES // Set the default precision to low. precision lowp float; #endif uniform sampler2D u_Texture; varying vec4 v_Color; void main() { gl_FragColor = texture2D(u_Texture, gl_PointCoord) * v_Color; } That's about it. I had read that transparent pixels in point sprites can cause issues, but surely not at only 400 points? I'm running on a fairly new device (12 month old Galaxy Nexus). My question is less about my approach (although I'm open to suggestion) but more about whether there are any specific OpenGL "no no's" that have leaked into my code. I'm sure there's GL master out there facepalming right now... I'd love to hear any critique.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 05, 2010 -- #831

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Davide Zordan(-2-, -3-), Scott Barnes, Kirupa, Christian Schormann, Tim Heuer, Yavor Georgiev, and Bea Stollnitz. Shoutouts: Yavor Georgiev posted the material for his MIX 2010 talk: what’s new in WCF in Silverlight 4 Erik Mork and crew posted their This Week in Silverlight 4.1.2010 Tim Huckaby and MSDN Bytes interviewed Erik Mork: Silverlight Consulting Life – MSDN Bytes Interview From SilverlightCream.com: Home Loan Application for Windows Phone Rénald Nollet has a WP7 app up, with source, for calculating Home Loan application information. He also discusses some control issues he had with the emulator. Experiments with Multi-touch: A Windows Phone Manipulation sample Davide Zordan has updated the multi-touch project on CodePlex, and added a WP7 sample using multi-touch. Silverlight 4, MEF and MVVM: EventAggregator, ImportingConstructor and Unit Tests Davide Zordan has a second post up on MEF, MVVM, and Prism, oh yeah, and also Unit Testing... the code is available, so take a look at what he's all done with this. Silverlight 4, MEF and MVVM: MEFModules, Dynamic XAP Loading and Navigation Applications Davide Zordan then builds on the previous post and partitions the app into several XAPs put together at runtime with MEF. Silverlight Installation/Preloader Experience - BarnesStyle Scott Barnes talks about the install experience he wanted to get put into place... definitely a good read and lots of information. Changing States using GoToStateAction Kirupa has a quick run-through of Visual States, and then demonstrates using GoToStateAction and a note for a Blend 4 addition. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part IV Christian Schormann has the next tutorial up in his series on Path Layout, and he's explaining Motion Path and Text on a Path. Managing service references and endpoint configurations for Silverlight applications Helping solve a common and much reported problem of managing service references, Tim Heuer details his method of resolving it and additional tips and tricks to boot. Some known WCF issues in Silverlight 4 Yavor Georgiev, a Program Manager for WCF blogged about the issues that they were not able to fix due to scheduling of the release How can I update LabeledPieChart to use the latest toolkit? Bea Stollnitz revisits some of her charting posts to take advantage of the unsealing of toolkit classes in labeling the Chart and PieSeries Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Exam 70-541 - TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development

  - by DigiMortal

  Today I passed Microsoft exam 70-541: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development. This exam gives you MCTS certificate. In this posting I will talk about the exam and also give some suggestions about books to read when preparing for exam. About exam This exam was good one I think. The questions were not hard and also not too easy. Just enough to make sure you really know what you do when working with SharePoint. Or at least to make sure you how things work. After couple of years active SharePoint coding this exam needs no additional preparation. The questions covered very different topics like alerts, features, web parts, site definitions, event receivers, workflows, web services and deployments. There are 59 questions in the exam (this information is available in internet) and you have time a little bit more than two hours. It took me about 40 minutes to get questions answered and reviewed. I strongly suggest you to study the parts of WSS 3.0 you don’t know yet and write some code to find out how to use these things through SharePoint API. Good reading For guys with less experience there are some good books to suggest. Take one or both of these books because there are no official study materials or training kits available for this exam. One of my colleagues who is less experienced than me suggested Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by Ted Pattison and Daniel Larson. He told me that he found this book most useful for him to pass this exam.   When I started with SharePoint Services 3.0 my first book was Developer’s Guide To The Windows SharePoint Services v3 Platform by Todd C. Bleeker. It helped me getting started and later it was my main handbook for some time. Of course, there are many other good books and I suggest you to take what you find. Of course, before buying something I suggest you to discuss with guys who have read the book before. And make sure you mention that you are preparing for exam.   Conclusion If you are experienced SharePoint developer then this exam needs no preparation. Okay, some preparation is always good but if you don’t have time you are still able to pass this exam. If you are not experienced SharePoint developer then study before taking this exam – it is not easy stuff for novices. But if you pass this exam you can proudly say – yes, I know something about SharePoint! :)

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• Silverlight Cream for February 13, 2011 -- #1046

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Joost van Schaik, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Deborah Kurata, David Kelley, Peter Foot, Samuel Jack(-2-), and WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding" Deborah Kurata WP7: "WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button" WindowsPhoneGeek Expression Blend: "Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images" Loek van den Ouweland Shoutouts: Dave Campbell posted a write-up about the project he's on and the use of Sterling: Sterling Object-Oriented Database for ISO 1.0 Released!... Also see Jeremy Likness' post on the 1.0 release: Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM Not necessarily Silverlight, but darn cool, a great control by Sasha Barber: WPF : A Weird 3d based control snoutholder announced new content: Windows Phone 7 QuickStarts Live! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images Loek van den Ouweland has a video tutorial up for creating an ImageButton with a hover state... Expression Blend coolness, and check out the external links he has to their training site. Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements – Emulator vs. Hardware Colin Eberhardt's latest is a popular post comparing performance metrics between the WP7 emulator and a real device. Mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure the overall results are conculsive, and should help the way you view your app as you're building in the emulator. WP7: WebClient vs HttpWebRequest Rudi Grobler's latest is a discussion of WebClient and HttpWebRequest, gives coding examples of each plus discussion of why you may choose one over the other... and pay attention to his comment about mobile providers. A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior Joost van Schaik posted this WP7/Silverlight clipping behavior he developed because all the other solutions were not blendable. Another really useful piece of code from Joost! Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish Mike Taulty has 3 more episodes in his Blend Bits series... first up is on one Styles... explicit, implicit, inheriting... you name it, he's covering it! Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1 MIke Taulty then has the beginning of a series within his Blend Bits series on Templating. This is something you just have to either bite the bullet and go with Blend to do, or consume someone else's work. Mike shows us how to do it ourself by tweaking the visual aspects of a checkbox Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2 In part 2 of the Templating series, Mike Taulty digs deeper into Blend and cracks open the Listbox control to take a bunch of the inner elements out for a spin... fun stuff and great tutorial, Mike! Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding Deborah Kurata has another great MVVM post up... if you don't have your head wrapped around commanding yet, this is a good place to start that process... VB and C# as always. App Development for Windows Phone 7 101 David Kelley goes through the basics of producing a WP7 app both from the Silverlight and XNA side... good info and good external links to get you going. Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone Peter Foot takes a look at the Copy/Paste functionality in WP7 and how to apply it to a TextBlock... which is NOT an out-of-the-box solution. How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator Samuel Jack has a couple posts up this week... first is this clever one on running multiple copies of the emulator at once... too cool for debugging a multi-player game! Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side Samuel Jack's latest is a detailed look at his day 3 adventure of taking his multi-player game to WP7... lots of information and external links... what do you say, give him another day? :) WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple more posts up... first is this "CustomInputPrompt" control based off the InputPrompt from Coding4Fun. Implementing Windows Phone 7 DataTemplateSelector and CustomDataTemplateSelector In his latest post, WindowsPhoneGeek writes a DataTemplateSelector to allow different data templates for different list elements based on the type of the element. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Roll your own free .NET technical conference

  - by Brian Schroer

  If you can’t get to a conference, let the conference come to you! There are a ton of free recorded conference presentations online… Microsoft TechEd Let’s start with the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. Recent TechEds have recorded the majority of presentations and made them available online the next day. Check out presentations from last month’s TechEd North America 2012 or last week’s TechEd Europe 2012. If you start at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd, you can also drill down to presentations from prior years or from other regional TechEds (Australia, New Zealand, etc.) The top presentations from my “View Queue”: Damian Edwards: Microsoft ASP.NET and the Realtime Web (SignalR) Jennifer Smith: Design for Non-Designers Scott Hunter: ASP.NET Roadmap: One ASP.NET – Web Forms, MVC, Web API, and more Daniel Roth: Building HTTP Services with ASP.NET Web API Benjamin Day: Scrum Under a Waterfall NDC The Norwegian Developer Conference site has the most interesting presentations, in my opinion. You can find the videos from the June 2012 conference at that link. The 2011 and 2010 pages have a lot of presentations that are still relevant also. My View Queue Top 5: Shay Friedman: Roslyn... hmmmm... what? Hadi Hariri: Just ‘cause it’s JavaScript, doesn’t give you a license to write rubbish Paul Betts: Introduction to Rx Greg Young: How to get productive in a project in 24 hours Michael Feathers: Deep Design Lessons ØREDEV Travelling on from Norway to Sweden... I don’t know why, but the Scandinavians seem to have this conference thing figured out. ØREDEV happens each November, and you can find videos here and here. My View Queue Top 5: Marc Gravell: Web Performance Triage Robby Ingebretsen: Fonts, Form and Function: A Primer on Digital Typography Jon Skeet: Async 101 Chris Patterson: Hacking Developer Productivity Gary Short: .NET Collections Deep Dive aspConf - The Virtual ASP.NET Conference Formerly known as “mvcConf”, this one’s a little different. It’s a conference that takes place completely on the web. The next one’s happening July 17-18, and it’s not too late to register (It’s free!). Check out the recordings from February 2011 and July 2010. It’s two years old and talks about ASP.NET MVC2, but most of it is still applicable, and Jimmy Bogard’s Put Your Controllers On a Diet presentation is the most useful technical talk I have ever seen. CodeStock Videos from the 2011 edition of this Tennessee conference are available. Presentations from last month’s 2012 conference should be available soon here. I’m looking forward to watching Matt Honeycutt’s Build Your Own Application Framework with ASP.NET MVC 3. UserGroup.tv User Group.tv was founded in January of 2011 by Shawn Weisfeld, with the mission of providing User Group content online for free. You can search by date, group, speaker and category tags. My View Queue Top 5: Sergey Rathon & Ian Henehan: UI Test Automation with Selenium Rob Vettor: The Repository Pattern Latish Seghal: The .NET Ninja’s Toolbelt Amir Rajan: Get Things Done With Dynamic ASP.NET MVC Jeffrey Richter: .NET Nuggets – Houston TechFest Keynote

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• Developing an Implementation Plan with Iterations by Russ Pitts

  - by user535886

  Developing an Implementation Plan with Iterations by Russ Pitts  Ok, so you have come to grips with understanding that applying the iterative concept, as defined by OUM is simply breaking up the project effort you have estimated for each phase into one or more six week calendar duration blocks of work. Idea being the business user(s) or key recipient(s) of work product(s) being developed never go longer than six weeks without having some sort of review or prototyping of the work results for an iteration…”think-a-little”, “do-a-little”, and “show-a-little” in a six week or less timeframe…ideally the business user(s) or key recipients(s) are involved throughout. You also understand the OUM concept that you only plan for that which you have knowledge of. The concept further defined, a project plan initially is developed at a high-level, and becomes more detailed as project knowledge grows. Agreeing to this concept means you also have to admit to the fallacy that one can plan with precision beyond six weeks into a project…Anything beyond six weeks is a best guess in most cases when dealing with software implementation projects. Project planning, as defined by OUM begins with the Implementation Plan view, which is a very high-level perspective of the effort estimated for each of the five OUM phases, as well as the number of iterations within each phase. You might wonder how can you predict the number of iterations for each phase at this early point in the project. Remember project planning is not an exact science, and initially is high-level and abstract in nature, and then becomes more detailed and precise as the project proceeds. So where do you start in defining iterations for each phase for a project? The following are three easy steps to initially define the number of iterations for each phase: Step 1 => Start with identifying the known factors… …Prior to starting a project you should know: · The agreed upon time-period for an iteration (e.g 6 weeks, or 4 weeks, or…) within a phase (recommend keeping iteration time-period consistent within a phase, if not for the entire project) · The number of resources available for the project · The number of total number of man-day (effort) you have estimated for each of the five OUM phases of the project · The number of work days for a week Step 2 => Calculate the man-days of effort required for an iteration within a phase… Lets assume for the sake of this example there are 10 project resources, and you have estimated 2,536 man-days of work effort which will need to occur for the elaboration phase of the project. Let’s also assume a week for this project is defined as 5 business days, and that each iteration in the elaboration phase will last a calendar duration of 6 weeks. A simple calculation is performed to calculate the daily burn rate for a single iteration, which produces a result of… ((Number of resources * days per week) * duration of iteration) = Number of days required per iteration ((10 resources * 5 days/week) * 6 weeks) = 300 man days of effort required per iteration Step 3 => Calculate the number of iterations that can occur within a phase Next calculate the number of iterations that can occur for the amount of man-days of effort estimated for the phase being considered… (number of man-days of effort estimated / number of man-days required per iteration) = # of iterations for phase (2,536 man-days of estimated effort for phase / 300 man days of effort required per iteration) = 8.45 iterations, which should be rounded to a whole number such as 9 iterations* *Note - It is important to note this is an approximate calculation, not an exact science. This particular example is a simple one, which assumes all resources are utilized throughout the phase, including tech resources, etc. (rounding down or up to a whole number based on project factor considerations). It is also best in many cases to round up to higher number, as this provides some calendar scheduling contingency.

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• SQL SERVER – Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance – TechEd 2012 India

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 is just around the corner and I will be presenting there on two different session. SQL Server Performance Tuning is a very challenging subject that requires expertise in Database Administration and Database Development. I always have enjoyed talking about SQL Server Performance tuning subject. Just like doctors I like to call my every attempt to improve the performance of SQL Server queries and database server as a practice too. I have been working with SQL Server for more than 8 years and I believe that many of the performance tuning concept I have mastered. However, performance tuning is not a simple subject. However there are occasions when I feel stumped, there are occasional when I am not sure what should be the next step. When I face situation where I cannot figure things out easily, it makes me most happy because I clearly see this as a learning opportunity. I have been presenting in TechEd India for last three years. This is my fourth time opportunity to present a technical session on SQL Server. Just like every other year, I decided to present something different, something which I have spend years of learning. This time, I am going to present about parallel processes. It is widely believed that more the CPU will improve performance of the server. It is true in many cases. However, there are cases when limiting the CPU usages have improved overall health of the server. I will be presenting on the subject of Parallel Processes and its effects. I have spent more than a year working on this subject only. After working on various queries on multi-CPU systems I have personally learned few things. In coming TechEd session, I am going to share my experience with parallel processes and performance tuning. Session Details Title: Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance (Add to Calendar) Abstract: “More CPU More Performance” – A  very common understanding is that usage of multiple CPUs can improve the performance of the query. To get maximum performance out of any query – one has to master various aspects of the parallel processes. In this deep dive session, we will explore this complex subject with a very simple interactive demo. An attendee will walk away with proper understanding of CX_PACKET wait types, MAXDOP, parallelism threshold and various other concepts. Date and Time: March 23, 2012, 12:15 to 13:15 Location: Hotel Lalit Ashok - Kumara Krupa High Grounds, Bengaluru – 560001, Karnataka, India. Add to Calendar Please submit your questions in the comments area and I will be for sure discussing them during my session. If I pick your question to discuss during my session, here is your gift I commit right now – SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Book. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• Forced Learning

  - by Ben Griswold

  If you ask me, it can be a little intimidating to stand in front of a group and walkthrough anything remotely technical. Even if you know “Technical Thingy #52” inside and out, public speaking can be unsettling.  And if you don’t have your stuff together, well, it can be downright horrifying. With that said, if given the choice, I still like to schedule myself to present on unfamiliar topics. Over the past few months, I’ve talked about Aspect-Oriented Programming, Functional Programming, Lean Software Development and Kanban Systems, Domain-Driven Design and Behavior Driven Development.  What do these topics have in common? You guessed it: I was truly interested in them. I had only a superficial understanding of each. Huh?  Why in the world would I ever want to to put myself in that intimidating situation? Actually, I rarely want to put myself into that situation but I often do as I like the results.  There’s nothing remotely clever going on here.  All I’m doing is putting myself into a compromising situation knowing that I’ll likely work myself out of it by learning the topic prior to the presentation.  I’m simply time-boxing myself to learn something new while knowing there are negative repercussions if I fall short. So, I end up doing tons of research and I learn bunches to ensure I have my head firmly wrap around the material before my talk. I’m not saying I become an expert overnight (or over a couple of weeks) but I’ll definitely know enough to be confident and comfortable and I’ll know more than enough to ensure the audience will learn a thing or two from me. It’s forced learning and though it might sound a little scary to some, it works for me. Now I could very easily rename this post to something like Fear Is My Motivator because, in a sense, fear of failure and embarrassment is what’s driving my learning. However, I’m the guy signing up for the presentation and since the entire process is self-imposed I’m not sure Fear deserves too much credit.  Anyway…

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