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• SQLAuthority News – SQLPASS Nov 8-11, 2010-Seattle – An Alternative Look at Experience

  - by pinaldave

  I recently attended most prestigious SQL Server event SQLPASS between Nov 8-11, 2010 at Seattle. I have only one expression for the event - Best Summit Ever This year the summit was at its best. Instead of writing about my usual routine or the event, I am going to write about the interesting things I did and how I felt about it! Best Summit Ever Trip to Seattle! This was my second trip to Seattle this year and the journey is always long. Here is the travel stats on how long it takes to get to Seattle: 24 hours official air time 36 hours total travel time (connection waits and airport commute) Every time I travel to USA I gain a day and when I travel back to home, I lose a day. However, the total traveling time is around 3 days. The journey is long and very exhausting. However, it is all worth it when you’re attending an event like SQLPASS. Here are few things I carry when I travel for a long journey: Dry Snack packs – I like to have some good Indian Dry Snacks along with me in my backpack so I can have my own snack when I want Amazon Kindle – Loaded with 80+ books A physical book – This is usually a very easy to read book I do not watch movies on the plane and usually spend my time reading something quick and easy. If I can go to sleep, I go for it. I prefer to not to spend time in conversation with the guy sitting next to me because usually I end up listening to their biography, which I cannot blog about. Sheraton Seattle SQLPASS In any case, I love to go to Seattle as the city is great and has everything a brilliant metropolis has to offer. The new Light Train is extremely convenient, and I can take it directly from the airport to the city center. My hotel, the Sheraton, was only few meters (in the USA people count in blocks – 3 blocks) away from the train station. This time I saved USD 40 each round trip due to the Light Train. Sessions I attended! Well, I really wanted to attend most of the sessions but there was great dilemma of which ones to choose. There were many, many sessions to be attended and at any given time there was more than one good session being presented. I had decided to attend sessions in area performance tuning and I attended quite a few sessions this year, compared to what I was able to do last year. Here are few names of the speakers whose sessions I attended (please note, following great speakers are not listed in any order. I loved them and I enjoyed their sessions): Conor Cunningham Rushabh Mehta Buck Woody Brent Ozar Jonathan Kehayias Chris Leonard Bob Ward Grant Fritchey I had great fun attending their sessions. The sessions were meaningful and enlightening. It is hard to rate any session but I have found that the insights learned in Conor Cunningham’s sessions are the highlight of the PASS Summit. Rushabh Mehta at Keynote SQLPASS   Bucky Woody and Brent Ozar I always like the sessions where the speaker is much closer to the audience and has real world experience. I think speakers who have worked in the real world deliver the best content and most useful information. Sessions I did not like! Indeed there were few sessions I did not like it and I am not going to name them here. However, there were strong reasons I did not like their sessions, and here is why: Sessions were all theory and had no real world connections. All technical questions ended with confusing answers (lots of “I will get back to you on it,” “it depends,” “let us take this offline” and many more…) “I am God” kind of attitude in the speakers For example, I attended a session of one very well known speaker who is a specialist for one particular area. I was bit late for the session and was surprised to see that in a room that could hold 350 people there were only 30 attendees. After sitting there for 15 minutes, I realized why lots of people left. Very soon I found I preferred to stare out the window instead of listening to that particular speaker. One on One Talk! Many times people ask me what I really like about PASS. I always say the experience of meeting SQL legends and spending time with them one on one and LEARNING! Here is the quick list of the people I met during this event and spent more than 30 minutes with each of them talking about various subjects: Pinal Dave and Brad Shulz Pinal Dave and Rushabh Mehta Michael Coles and Pinal Dave Rushabh Mehta – It is always pleasure to meet with him. He is a man with lots of energy and a passion for community. He recently told me that he really wanted to turn PASS into resource for learning for every SQL Server Developer and Administrator in the world. I had great in-depth discussion regarding how a single person can contribute to a community. Michael Coles – I consider him my best friend. It is always fun to meet him. He is funny and very knowledgeable. I think there are very few people who are as expert as he is in encryption and spatial databases. Worth meeting him every single time. Glenn Berry – A real friend of everybody. He is very a simple person and very true to his heart. I think there is not a single person in whole community who does not like him. He is a friends of all and everybody likes him very much. I once again had time to sit with him and learn so much from him. As he is known as Dr. DMV, I can be his nurse in the area of DMV. Brad Schulz – I always wanted to meet him but never got chance until today. I had great time meeting him in person and we have spent considerable amount of time together discussing various T-SQL tricks and tips. I do not know where he comes up with all the different ideas but I enjoy reading his blog and sharing his wisdom with me. Jonathan Kehayias – He is drill sergeant in US army. If you get the impression that he is a giant with very strong personality – you are wrong. He is very kind and soft spoken DBA with strong performance tuning skills. I asked him how he has kept his two jobs separate and I got very good answer – just work hard and have passion for what you do. I attended his sessions and his presentation style is very unique.  I feel like he is speaking in a language I understand. Louis Davidson – I had never had a chance to sit with him and talk about technology before. He has so much wisdom and he is very kind. During the dinner, I had talked with him for long time and without hesitation he started to draw a schema for me on the menu. It was a wonderful experience to learn from a master at the dinner table. He explained to me the real and practical differences between third normal form and forth normal form. Honestly I did not know earlier, but now I do. Erland Sommarskog – This man needs no introduction, he is very well known and very clear in conveying his ideas. I learned a lot from him during the course of year. Every time I meet him, I learn something new and this time was no exception. Joe Webb – Joey is all about community and people, we had interesting conversation about community, MVP and how one can be helpful to community without losing passion for long time. It is always pleasant to talk to him and of course, I had fun time. Ross Mistry – I call him my brother many times because he indeed looks like my cousin. He provided me lots of insight of how one can write book and how he keeps his books simple to appeal to all the readers. A wonderful person and great friend. Ola Hallgren - I did not know he was coming to the summit. I had great time meeting him and had a wonderful conversation with him regarding his scripts and future community activities. Blythe Morrow – She used to be integrated part of SQL Server Community and PASS HQ. It was wonderful to meet her again and re-connect. She is wonderful person and I had a great time talking to her. Solid Quality Mentors – It is difficult to decide who to mention here. Instead of writing all the names, I am going to include a photo of our meeting. I had great fun meeting various members of our global branches. This year I was sitting with my Spanish speaking friends and had great fun as Javier Loria from Solid Quality translated lots of things for me. Party, Party and Parties Every evening there were various parties. I did attend almost all of them. Every party had different theme but the goal of all the parties the same – networking. Here are the few parties where I had lots of fun: Dell Reception Party Exhibitor Party Solid Quality Fun Party Red Gate Friends Party MVP Dinner Microsoft Party MVP Dinner Quest Party Gameworks PASS Party Volunteer Party at Garage Solid Quality Mentors (10 Members out of 120) They were all great networking opportunities and lots of fun. I really had great time meeting people at the various parties. There were few people everywhere – well, I will say I am among them – who hopped parties. NDA – Not Decided Agenda During the event there were few meetings marked “NDA.” Someone asked me “why are these things NDA?”  My response was simple: because they are not sure themselves. NDA stands for Not Decided Agenda. Toys, Giveaways and Luggage I admit, I was like child in Gameworks and was playing to win soft toys. I was doing it for my daughter. I must thank all of the people who gave me their cards to try my luck. I won 4 soft-toys for my daughter and it was fun. Also, thanks to Angel who did a final toy swap with me to get the desired toy for my daughter. I also collected ducks from Idera, as my daughter really loves them. Solid Quality Booth Each of the exhibitors was giving away something and I got so much stuff that my luggage got quite a bit bigger when I returned. Best Exhibitor Idera had SQLDoctor (a real magician and fun guy) to promote their new tool SQLDoctor. I really had a great time participating in the magic myself. At one point, the magician made my watch disappear.  I have seen better magic before, but this time it caught me unexpectedly and I was taken by surprise. I won many ducks again. The Common Question I heard the following common questions: I have seen you somewhere – who are you? – I am Pinal Dave. I did not know that Pinal is your first name and Dave is your last name, how do you pronounce your last name again? – Da-way How old are you? – I am as old as I can be. Are you an Indian because you look like one? – I did not answer this one. Where are you from? This question was usually asked after looking at my badge which says India. So did you really fly from India? – Yes, because I have seasickness so I do not prefer the sea journey. How long was the journey? – 24/36/12 (air travel time/total travel time/time zone difference) Why do you write on SQLAuthority.com? – Because I want to. I remember your daughter looks like you. – Is this even a question? Of course, she is daddy’s little girl. There were so many other questions, I will have to write another blog post about it. SQLPASS Again, Best Summit Ever! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQLPASS

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• Tellago is still hiring….

  - by gsusx

  Tellago 's SOA practice is rapidly growing and we are still hiring. In that sense, we are looking to for Connected Systems (WCF, BizTalk, WF) experts who are passionate about building game changing solutions with the latest Microsoft technologies. You will be working alongside technology gurus like DonXml , Pablo Cibraro or Dwight Goins . If you are interested and not afraid of working with a bunch of crazy people ;)please drop me a line at jesus dot rodriguez at tellago dot com. Hope to hear from...(read more)

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• IIS 7&rsquo;s Sneaky Secret to Get COM-InterOp to Run

  - by David Hoerster

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/DavidHoerster/archive/2013/06/17/iis-7rsquos-sneaky-secret-to-get-com-interop-to-run.aspxIf you’re like me, you don’t really do a lot with COM components these days.  For me, I’ve been ‘lucky’ to stay in the managed world for the past 6 or 7 years. Until last week. I’m running a project to upgrade a web interface to an older COM-based application.  The old web interface is all classic ASP and lots of tables, in-line styles and a bunch of other late 90’s and early 2000’s goodies.  So in addition to updating the UI to be more modern looking and responsive, I decided to give the server side an update, too.  So I built some COM-InterOp DLL’s (easily through VS2012’s Add Reference feature…nothing new here) and built a test console line app to make sure the COM DLL’s were actually built according to the COM spec.  There’s a document management system that I’m thinking of whose COM DLLs were not proper COM DLLs and crashed and burned every time .NET tried to call them through a COM-InterOp layer. Anyway, my test app worked like a champ and I felt confident that I could build a nice façade around the COM DLL’s and wrap some functionality internally and only expose to my users/clients what they really needed. So I did this, built some tests and also built a test web app to make sure everything worked great.  It did.  It ran fine in IIS Express via Visual Studio 2012, and the timings were very close to the pure Classic ASP calls, so there wasn’t much overhead involved going through the COM-InterOp layer. You know where this is going, don’t you? So I deployed my test app to a DEV server running IIS 7.5.  When I went to my first test page that called the COM-InterOp layer, I got this pretty message: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {81C08CAE-1453-11D4-BEBC-00500457076D} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). It worked as a console app and while running under IIS Express, so it must be permissions, right?  I gave every account I could think of all sorts of COM+ rights and nothing, nada, zilch! Then I came across this question on Experts Exchange, and at the bottom of the page, someone mentioned that the app pool should be running to allow 32-bit apps to run.  Oh yeah, my machine is 64-bit; these COM DLL’s I’m using are old and are definitely 32-bit.  I didn’t check for that and didn’t even think about that.  But I went ahead and looked at the app pool that my web site was running under and what did I see?  Yep, select your app pool in IIS 7.x, click on Advanced Settings and check for “Enable 32-bit Applications”. I went ahead and set it to True and my test application suddenly worked. Hope this helps somebody out there from pulling out your hair.

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• Chicago SQL Saturday

  - by Johnm

  This past Saturday, April 17, 2010, I journeyed North to the great city of Chicago for some SQL Server fun, learning and fellowship. The Chicago edition of this grassroots phenomenon was the 31st scheduled SQL Saturday since the program's birth in late 2007. The Chicago SQL Saturday consisted of four tracks with eight sessions each and was a very energetic and fast paced day for the 300+/- SQL Server enthusiasts in attendance. The speaker line up included national notables such as Kevin Kline, Brent Ozar, and Brad McGehee. My hometown of Indianapolis was well represented in the speaker line up with Arie Jones, Aaron King and Derek Comingore. The day began with a very humorous keynote by Kevin Kline and Brent Ozar who emphasized the importance of community events such as SQL Saturday and the monthly user group meetings. They also brilliantly included the impact that getting involved in the SQL community through social media can have on your professional career. My approach to the day was to try to experience as much of the event as I could, so there were very few sessions that I attended for their full duration. I leaped from session to session like a bumble bee, gleaning bits of nectar from each session. Amid these leaps I took the opportunity to briefly chat with some of the in-the-queue speakers as well as other attendees that wondered the hallways. I especially enjoyed a great discussion with Devin Knight about his plans regarding the upcoming Jacksonville SQL Saturday as well as an interesting SQL interpretation of the Iron Chef, which I think would catch on like wild-fire. There were two sessions that stood out as exceptional. So much so that I could not pull myself away: Kevin Kline presented on "SQL Server Internals and Architecture". This session could have been classified as one that is intended for the beginner. Kevin even personally warned me of such as I entered the room. I am a believer in revisiting the basics regardless of the level of your mastery, so I entered into this session in that spirit. It was a very clear and precise presentation. Masterfully illustrated and demonstrated. Brad McGehee presented on "How and When to Use Indexed Views". This was a topic that I was recently exploring and was considering to for use in an integration project. Brad effectively communicated the complexity of this feature and what is involved to gain their full benefit. It was clear at the conclusion of this session that it was not the right feature for my specific needs. Overall, the event was a great success. The use of volunteers, from an attendee's perspective was masterful. The only recommendation that I would have for the next Chicago SQL Saturday would be to include more time in between sessions to permit some level of networking among the attendees, one-on-one questions for speakers and visits to the sponsor booths. Congratulations to Wendy Pastrick, Ted Krueger, and Aaron Lowe for their efforts and a very successful SQL Saturday!

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• 10 Essential Tools for building ASP.NET Websites

  - by Stephen Walther

  I recently put together a simple public website created with ASP.NET for my company at Superexpert.com. I was surprised by the number of free tools that I ended up using to put together the website. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to create a list of essential tools for building ASP.NET websites. These tools work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Performance Tools After reading Steve Souders two (very excellent) books on front-end website performance High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, I have been super sensitive to front-end website performance. According to Souders’ Performance Golden Rule: “Optimize front-end performance first, that's where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent” You can use the tools below to reduce the size of the images, JavaScript files, and CSS files used by an ASP.NET application. 1. Sprite and Image Optimization Framework CSS sprites were first described in an article written for A List Apart entitled CSS sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. When you use sprites, you combine multiple images used by a website into a single image. Next, you use CSS trickery to display particular sub-images from the combined image in a webpage. The primary advantage of sprites is that they reduce the number of requests required to display a webpage. Requesting a single large image is faster than requesting multiple small images. In general, the more resources – images, JavaScript files, CSS files – that must be moved across the wire, the slower your website. However, most people avoid using sprites because they require a lot of work. You need to combine all of the images and write just the right CSS rules to display the sub-images. The Microsoft Sprite and Image Optimization Framework enables you to avoid all of this work. The framework combines the images for you automatically. Furthermore, the framework includes an ASP.NET Web Forms control and an ASP.NET MVC helper that makes it easy to display the sub-images. You can download the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework from CodePlex at http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/50869. The Sprite and Image Optimization Framework was written by Morgan McClean who worked in the office next to mine at Microsoft. Morgan was a scary smart Intern from Canada and we discussed the Framework while he was building it (I was really excited to learn that he was working on it). Morgan added some great advanced features to this framework. For example, the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework supports something called image inlining. When you use image inlining, the actual image is stored in the CSS file. Here’s an example of what image inlining looks like: .Home_StephenWalther_small-jpg { width:75px; height:100px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEsAAABkCAIAAABB1lpeAAAAB GdBTUEAALGOfPtRkwAAACBjSFJNAACHDwAAjA8AAP1SAACBQAAAfXkAAOmLAAA85QAAGcxzPIV3AAAKL s+zNfREAAAAASUVORK5CYII=) no-repeat 0% 0%; } The actual image (in this case a picture of me that is displayed on the home page of the Superexpert.com website) is stored in the CSS file. If you visit the Superexpert.com website then very few separate images are downloaded. For example, all of the images with a red border in the screenshot below take advantage of CSS sprites: Unfortunately, there are some significant Gotchas that you need to be aware of when using the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework. There are workarounds for these Gotchas. I plan to write about these Gotchas and workarounds in a future blog entry. 2. Microsoft Ajax Minifier Whenever possible you should combine, minify, compress, and cache with a far future header all of your JavaScript and CSS files. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier makes it easy to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Don’t confuse minification and compression. You need to do both. According to Souders, you can reduce the size of a JavaScript file by an additional 20% (on average) by minifying a JavaScript file after you compress the file. When you minify a JavaScript or CSS file, you use various tricks to reduce the size of the file before you compress the file. For example, you can minify a JavaScript file by replacing long JavaScript variables names with short variables names and removing unnecessary white space and comments. You can minify a CSS file by doing such things as replacing long color names such as #ffffff with shorter equivalents such as #fff. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Microsoft employee Ron Logan. Internally, this tool was being used by several large Microsoft websites. We also used the tool heavily on the ASP.NET team. I convinced Ron to publish the tool on CodePlex so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it. You can download the tool from the ASP.NET Ajax website and read documentation for the tool here. I created the installer for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. When creating the installer, I also created a Visual Studio build task to make it easy to minify all of your JavaScript and CSS files whenever you do a build within Visual Studio automatically. Read the Ajax Minifier Quick Start to learn how to configure the build task. 3. ySlow The ySlow tool is a free add-on for Firefox created by Yahoo that enables you to test the front-end of your website. For example, here are the current test results for the Superexpert.com website: The Superexpert.com website has an overall score of B (not perfect but not bad). The ySlow tool is not perfect. For example, the Superexpert.com website received a failing grade of F for not using a Content Delivery Network even though the website using the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network for JavaScript files such as jQuery. Uptime After publishing a website live to the world, you want to ensure that the website does not encounter any issues and that it stays live. I use the following tools to monitor the Superexpert.com website now that it is live. 4. ELMAH ELMAH stands for Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET. ELMAH enables you to record any errors that happen at your website so you can review them in the future. You can download ELMAH for free from the ELMAH project website. ELMAH works great with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. You can configure ELMAH to store errors in a number of different stores including XML files, the Event Log, an Access database, a SQL database, an Oracle database, or in computer RAM. You also can configure ELMAH to email error messages to you when they happen. By default, you can access ELMAH by requesting the elmah.axd page from a website with ELMAH installed. Here’s what the elmah page looks like from the Superexpert.com website (this page is password-protected because secret information can be revealed in an error message): If you click on a particular error message, you can view the original Yellow Screen ASP.NET error message (even when the error message was never displayed to the actual user). I installed ELMAH by taking advantage of the new package manager for ASP.NET named NuGet (originally named NuPack). You can read the details about NuGet in the following blog entry by Scott Guthrie. You can download NuGet from CodePlex. 5. Pingdom I use Pingdom to verify that the Superexpert.com website is always up. You can sign up for Pingdom by visiting Pingdom.com. You can use Pingdom to monitor a single website for free. At the Pingdom website, you configure the frequency that your website gets pinged. I verify that the Superexpert.com website is up every 5 minutes. I have the Pingdom service verify that it can retrieve the string “Contact Us” from the website homepage. If your website goes down, you can configure Pingdom so that it sends an email, Twitter, SMS, or iPhone alert. I use the Pingdom iPhone app which looks like this: 6. Host Tracker If your website does go down then you need some way of determining whether it is a problem with your local network or if your website is down for everyone. I use a website named Host-Tracker.com to check how badly a website is down. Here’s what the Host-Tracker website displays for the Superexpert.com website when the website can be successfully pinged from everywhere in the world: Notice that Host-Tracker pinged the Superexpert.com website from 68 locations including Roubaix, France and Scranton, PA. Debugging I mean debugging in the broadest possible sense. I use the following tools when building a website to verify that I have not made a mistake. 7. HTML Spell Checker Why doesn’t Visual Studio have a built-in spell checker? Don’t know – I’ve always found this mysterious. Fortunately, however, a former member of the ASP.NET team wrote a free spell checker that you can use with your ASP.NET pages. I find a spell checker indispensible. It is easy to delude yourself that you are capable of perfect spelling. I’m always super embarrassed when I actually run the spell checking tool and discover all of my spelling mistakes. The fastest way to add the HTML Spell Checker extension to Visual Studio is to select the menu option Tools, Extension Manager within Visual Studio. Click on Online Gallery and search for HTML Spell Checker: 8. IIS SEO Toolkit If people cannot find your website through Google then you should not even bother to create it. Microsoft has a great extension for IIS named the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit that you can use to identify issue with your website that would hurt its page rank. You also can use this tool to quickly create a sitemap for your website that you can submit to Google or Bing. You can even generate the sitemap for an ASP.NET MVC website. Here’s what the report overview for the Superexpert.com website looks like: Notice that the Sueprexpert.com website had plenty of violations. For example, there are 65 cases in which a page has a broken hyperlink. You can drill into these violations to identity the exact page and location where these violations occur. 9. LinqPad If your ASP.NET website accesses a database then you should be using LINQ to Entities with the Entity Framework. Using LINQ involves some magic. LINQ queries written in C# get converted into SQL queries for you. If you are not careful about how you write your LINQ queries, you could unintentionally build a really badly performing website. LinqPad is a free tool that enables you to experiment with your LINQ queries. It even works with Microsoft SQL CE 4 and Azure. You can use LinqPad to execute a LINQ to Entities query and see the results. You also can use it to see the resulting SQL that gets executed against the database: 10. .NET Reflector I use .NET Reflector daily. The .NET Reflector tool enables you to take any assembly and disassemble the assembly into C# or VB.NET code. You can use .NET Reflector to see the “Source Code” of an assembly even when you do not have the actual source code. You can download a free version of .NET Reflector from the Redgate website. I use .NET Reflector primarily to help me understand what code is doing internally. For example, I used .NET Reflector with the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework to better understand how the MVC Image helper works. Here’s part of the disassembled code from the Image helper class: Summary In this blog entry, I’ve discussed several of the tools that I used to create the Superexpert.com website. These are tools that I use to improve the performance, improve the SEO, verify the uptime, or debug the Superexpert.com website. All of the tools discussed in this blog entry are free. Furthermore, all of these tools work with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Let me know if there are any tools that you use daily when building ASP.NET websites.

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• Can anyone recommend a Google SERP tracker?

  - by Haroldo

  I want to track my website's position in Google's search results for around 50 keywords/phrases and I am looking to a nice web service or Windows application to automate this process. Ideally, I want to see pretty Javascript or Flash line graphs for my keywords and their positions. I'm currently free-trialing Raven Tools and Sheer SEO but I am not particularly impressed with either. My budget is up to £25-30/$30-40 per month for a decent rank checker.

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• Oracle CRM Day Barcelona

  - by Oracle Aplicaciones

  Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} El pasado 25 de Noviembre, con la colaboración de Abast, Birchman y Omega CRM, Oracle celebró en Barcelona la 2ª edición del CRM Day, donde presentaron las últimas tendencias europeas de CRM a través del Estudio realizado por IDC. Con su formato de conferencias + coloquios + asesorías individuales, todos los asistentes dispusieron de la posibilidad de compartir experiencias y mejores prácticas con los expertos de oracle así como con el resto de asistentes.

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• Integrating Data Mining into your BI Solution (Presentation)

  I recently gave a live meeting presentation to the UK User Group on Integrating Data Mining into your BI Solution.  In it I talk about and demo ways of using your data mining models inside Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services.  This is the first in a series of presentations I will be doing for the UG as I try to get the word out that Data Mining can be for the masses. You can download my deck and my line meeting recording from here.

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• JMX Based Monitoring - Part Two - JVM Monitoring

  - by Anthony Shorten

  This the second article in the series focussing on the JMX based monitoring capabilities possible with the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. In all versions of the Oracle utilities Application Framework, it is possible to use the basic JMX based monitoring available with the Java Virtual Machine to provide basic statistics ablut the JVM. In Java 5 and above, the JVM automatically allowed local monitoring of the JVM statistics from an approporiate console. When I say local I mean the monitoring tool must be executed from the same machine (and in some cases the same user that is running the JVM) to connect to the JVM directly. If you are using jconsole, for example, then you must have access to a GUI (X-Windows or Windows) to display the jconsole output. This is the easist way of monitoring without doing too much configration but is not always practical. Java offers a remote monitorig capability to allow yo to connect to a remotely executing JVM from a console (like jconsole). To use this facility additional JVM options must be added to the command line that started the JVM. Details of the additional options for the version of the Java you are running is located at the JMX information site. Typically to remotely connect to a running JVM that JVM must be configured with the following categories of options: JMX Port - The JVM must allow connections on a listening port specified on the command line Connection security - The connection to the JVM can be secured. This is recommended as JMX is not just a monitoring protocol it is a managemet protocol. It is possible to change values in a running JVM using JMX and there are NO "Are you sure?" safeguards. For a Oracle Utilities Application Framework based application there are a few guidelines when configuring and using this JMX based remote monitoring of the JVM's: Online JVM - The JVM used to run the online system is embedded within the J2EE Web Application Server. To enable JMX monitoring on this JVM you can either change the startup script that starts the Web Application Server or check whether your J2EE Web Application natively supports JVM statistics collection. Child JVM's (COBOL only) - The Child JVM's should not be monitored using this method as they are recycled regularly by the configuration and therefore statistics collected are of little value. Batch Threadpoools - Batch already has a JMX interface (which will be covered in another article). Additional monitoring can be enabled but the base supported monitoring is sufficient for most needs. If you are an Oracle Utilities Application Framework site, then you can specify the additional options for JMX Java monitoring on the OPTS paramaters supported for each component of the architecture. Just ensure the port numbers used are unique for each JVM running on any machine.

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• So HERE'S how you get into grub2 if there's no boot menu in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

  <b>Click:</b> "I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid from a daily build yet couldn't boot into my fresh new desktop because I needed to add nomodeset to the grub2 boot line and didn't know how to do that because there was no boot screen visible."

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• Who IS Brian Solis?

  - by Michael Snow

  Q: Brian, Welcome to the WebCenter Blog. Can you tell our readers your current role and what career path brought you here? A: I’m proudly serving as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a research based advisory firm in Silicon Valley. My career path, well, let’s just say it’s a long and winding road. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I learned programming at an early age and found myself naturally drawn to all things tech. I started my career as a database programmer at a technology marketing agency in Southern California. When I saw the chance to work with tech companies and help them better market their capabilities to businesses and consumers, I switched focus from programming to marketing and advertising. As technologist, my approach to marketing was different. I didn’t believe in hype, fluff or buzz words. I believed in translating features into benefits and specifications and capabilities into solutions for real world problems and opportunities. In the mid 90’s I experimented with direct to consumer/customer engagement in dedicated technology forums and boards. I quickly realized that the entire approach to do so would need to change. Therefore, I learned and developed new methods for a more social and informed way of engaging people in ways that helped them, marketed the company, and also tied to tangible benefits for the company. This work would lead me to start an agency in 1999 dedicated to interactive marketing. As I continued to experiment with interactive platforms, I developed interesting methods for converting one-to-many forms of media into one-to-one-to-many programs. I ran that company until joining Altimeter Group. Along the way, in the early 2000s, I realized that everything was changing and that there were others like me finding success in what would become a more social form of media. I dedicated a significant amount of my time to sharing everything that I learned in the form of articles, blogs, and eventually books. My mission became to share my experience with anyone who’d listen. It would later become much bigger than marketing, this would lead to a decade of work, that still continues, in business transformation. Then and now, I find myself always assuming the role of a student. Q: As an industry analyst & technology change evangelist, what are you primarily focused on these days? A: As a digital analyst, I study how disruptive technology impacts business. As an aspiring social scientist, I study how technology affects human behavior. I explore both horizons professionally and personally to better understand the future of popular culture and also the opportunities that exist for organizations to improve relationships and experiences with customers and the people that are important to them. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? A: The line between work and life isn’t blurred it’s been overtly crossed and erased. We live in an always on society. The digital lifestyle keeps us connected to one another it keeps us connected all the time. Whether your sending or checking email, trying to catch up, or simply trying to get ahead, people are spending the equivalent of an extra day at work in the time they spend out of work…working. That’s absurd. It’s a matter of survival. It’s also a matter of unintended, subconscious self-causation. We brought this on ourselves and continue to do so. Think about your day. You’re in meetings for the better part of each day. You probably spend evenings and weekends catching up on email and actually doing the work you couldn’t get to during the day. And, your co-workers and executives are doing the same thing. So if you try to slow down, you find yourself at a disadvantage as you’re willfully pulling yourself out of an unfortunate culture of whenever wherever business dynamics. If you’re unresponsive or unreachable, someone within your organization or on your team is accessible. Over time, this could contribute to unfavorable impressions. I choose to steer my life balance in ways that complement one another. But, I don’t pretend to have this figured out by any means. In fact, I find myself swimming upstream like those around me. It’s essentially a competition for relevance and at some point I’ll learn how to earn attention and relevance while redrawing the line between work and life. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? A: The easy answer is that people can keep up with me at briansolis.com. But, I also try to reach people where their attention is focused. Whether it’s Facebook (facebook.com/briansolis), Twitter (@briansolis), Google+ (+briansolis), Youtube (briansolis.tv) or through books and conferences, people can usually find me in a place of their choosing. Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? A: I spent some time with the Oracle team reviewing the idea of Digital Darwinism and how technology and society are evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology Thursday, December 13, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? A: We’re inviting guests to join us online as we dive into the future of business and how the convergence of technology and connected consumerism would ultimately impact how business is done. It’ll be an exciting and revealing conversation that explores just how much everything is changing. We’ll also review the importance of adapting to emergent trends and how to compete for the future. It’s important to recognize that change is not happening to us, it’s happening because of us. We are part of the revolution and therefore we need to help organizations adapt from the inside out. Watch the Entire Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series On-Demand and Stay Tuned for More to Come in 2013!

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• SQL Server Management Data Warehouse - quick tour on setting health monitoring policies

  - by ssqa.net

  Profiler, Perfmon, DMVs & scripts are legendary tools for a DBA to monitor the SQL arena. In line with these tools SQL Server 2008 throws a powerful stream with policy based management (PBM) framework & management data warehouse (MDW) methods, which is a relational database that contains the data that is collected from a server that is a data collection target. This data is used to generate the reports for the System Data collection sets, and can also be used to create custom reports. .....(read more)

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• Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Accidentally deleting a file is a terrible feeling. Not being able to boot into Windows and undelete that file makes that even worse. Fortunately, you can recover deleted files on NTFS hard drives from an Ubuntu Live CD. To show this process, we created four files on the desktop of a Windows XP machine, and then deleted them. We then booted up the same machine with the bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash Drive that we created last week. Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open a terminal by clicking Applications in the top left of the screen, and then selecting Accessories > Terminal. To undelete our files, we first need to identify the hard drive that we want to undelete from. In the terminal window, type in: sudo fdisk –l and press enter. What you’re looking for is a line that ends with HPSF/NTFS (under the heading System). In our case, the device is “/dev/sda1”. This may be slightly different for you, but it will still begin with /dev/. Note this device name. If you have more than one hard drive partition formatted as NTFS, then you may be able to identify the correct partition by the size. If you look at the second line of text in the screenshot above, it reads “Disk /dev/sda: 136.4 GB, …” This means that the hard drive that Ubuntu has named /dev/sda is 136.4 GB large. If your hard drives are of different size, then this information can help you track down the right device name to use. Alternatively, you can just try them all, though this can be time consuming for large hard drives. Now that you know the name Ubuntu has assigned to your hard drive, we’ll scan it to see what files we can uncover. In the terminal window, type: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> and hit enter. In our case, the command is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 The names of files that can recovered show up in the far right column. The percentage in the third column tells us how much of that file can be recovered. Three of the four files that we originally deleted are showing up in this list, even though we shut down the computer right after deleting the four files – so even in ideal cases, your files may not be recoverable. Nevertheless, we have three files that we can recover – two JPGs and an MPG. Note: ntfsundelete is immediately available in the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD. If you are in a different version of Ubuntu, or for some other reason get an error when trying to use ntfsundelete, you can install it by entering “sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs” in a terminal window. To quickly recover the two JPGs, we will use the * wildcard to recover all of the files that end with .jpg. In the terminal window, enter sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –m *.jpg which is, in our case, sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –m *.jpg The two files are recovered from the NTFS hard drive and saved in the current working directory of the terminal. By default, this is the home directory of the current user, though we are working in the Desktop folder. Note that the ntfsundelete program does not make any changes to the original NTFS hard drive. If you want to take those files and put them back in the NTFS hard drive, you will have to move them there after they are undeleted with ntfsundelete. Of course, you can also put them on your flash drive or open Firefox and email them to yourself – the sky’s the limit! We have one more file to undelete – our MPG. Note the first column on the far left. It contains a number, its Inode. Think of this as the file’s unique identifier. Note this number. To undelete a file by its Inode, enter the following in the terminal: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –i <Inode> In our case, this is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –i 14159 This recovers the file, along with an identifier that we don’t really care about. All three of our recoverable files are now recovered. However, Ubuntu lets us know visually that we can’t use these files yet. That’s because the ntfsundelete program saves the files as the “root” user, not the “ubuntu” user. We can verify this by typing the following in our terminal window: ls –l We want these three files to be owned by ubuntu, not root. To do this, enter the following in the terminal window: sudo chown ubuntu <Files> If the current folder has other files in it, you may not want to change their owner to ubuntu. However, in our case, we only have these three files in this folder, so we will use the * wildcard to change the owner of all three files. sudo chown ubuntu * The files now look normal, and we can do whatever we want with them. Hopefully you won’t need to use this tip, but if you do, ntfsundelete is a nice command-line utility. It doesn’t have a fancy GUI like many of the similar Windows programs, but it is a powerful tool that can recover your files quickly. See ntfsundelete’s manual page for more detailed usage information Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDUse Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows ComputerCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayGuide to Using Check Disk in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper

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• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack. Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while. Self-Service BI Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI. This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me: PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.) Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.) One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.) Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.) Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.) This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users. It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations. Collaborative BI I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time. Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people." The Microsoft BI Stack in General A question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years. Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?" Expo Hall I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here. Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions. Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind! Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Caution when stopping and starting an IIS application pool with appcmd

  - by The Official Microsoft IIS Site

  When starting and stopping IIS 7 application pools from command line with appcmd.exe, you should be aware of a behavior that can sometimes lead to unintended circumstances. To explain it, lets first review what happens when you stop an application pool Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more)

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• Super-Charge GIMP’s Image Editing Capabilities with G’MIC [Cross-Platform]

  - by Asian Angel

  Recently we showed you how to enhance GIMP’s image editing power and today we help you super-charge GIMP even more. G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic Image Converter) will add an impressive array of filters and effects to your GIMP installation for image editing goodness. Note: We applied the Contrast Swiss Mask filter to the image shown in the screenshot above to create a nice, warm sunset effect. To add the new PPA open the Ubuntu Software Center, go to the Edit Menu, and select Software Sources. Access the Other Software Tab in the Software Sources Window and add the first of the PPAs shown below (outlined in red). The second PPA will be automatically added to your system. Once you have the new PPAs set up, go back to the Ubuntu Software Center and do a search for “G’MIC”. You will find two listings available and can select either one to add G’MIC to your system (both work equally well). Click on More Info for the listing that you choose and scroll down to where Add-ons are listed. Make sure to select the Add-on listed, click Apply Changes when it appears, and then click Install. We have both shown here for your convenience… When you get ready to use G’MIC to enhance an image, go to the Filters Menu and select G’MIC. A new window will appear where you can select from an impressive array of filters available for your use. Have fun! Command Line Installation For those of you who prefer using the command line for installation use the following commands: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/gimp sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gmic gimp-gmic Links Note: G’MIC is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. G’MIC PPA at Launchpad [via Web Upd8] G’MIC Homepage at Sourceforge *Downloads for all three platforms available here. Bonus The anime wallpaper shown in the screenshots above can be found here: anime sport [DesktopNexus] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions Access and Manage Your Ubuntu One Account in Chrome and Iron Mouse Over YouTube Previews YouTube Videos in Chrome Watch a Machine Get Upgraded from MS-DOS to Windows 7 [Video] Bring the Whole Ubuntu Gang Home to Your Desktop with this Mascots Wallpaper Hack Apart a Highlighter to Create UV-Reactive Flowers [Science] Add a “Textmate Style” Lightweight Text Editor with Dropbox Syncing to Chrome and Iron

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• eBooks on iPad vs. Kindle: More Debate than Smackdown

  - by andrewbrust

  When the iPad was presented at its San Francisco launch event on January 28th, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time explaining how well the device would serve as an eBook reader. He showed the iBooks reader application and iBookstore and laid down the gauntlet before Amazon and its beloved Kindle device. Almost immediately afterwards, criticism came rushing forth that the iPad could never beat the Kindle for book reading. The curious part of that criticism is that virtually no one offering it had actually used the iPad yet. A few weeks later, on April 3rd, the iPad was released for sale in the United States. I bought one on that day and in the few additional weeks that have elapsed, I’ve given quite a workout to most of its capabilities, including its eBook features. I’ve also spent some time with the Kindle, albeit a first-generation model, to see how it actually compares to the iPad. I had some expectations going in, but I came away with conclusions about each device that were more scenario-based than absolute. I present my findings to you here.   Vital Statistics Let’s start with an inventory of each device’s underlying technology. The iPad has a color, backlit LCD screen and an on-screen keyboard. It has a battery which, on a full charge, lasts anywhere from 6-10 hours. The Kindle offers a monochrome, reflective E Ink display, a physical keyboard and a battery that on my first gen loaner unit can go up to a week between charges (Amazon claims the battery on the Kindle 2 can last up to 2 weeks on a single charge). The Kindle connects to Amazon’s Kindle Store using a 3G modem (the technology and network vary depending on the model) that incurs no airtime service charges whatsoever. The iPad units that are on-sale today work over WiFi only. 3G-equipped models will be on sale shortly and will command a $130 premium over their WiFi-only counterparts. 3G service on the iPad, in the U.S. from AT&T, will be fee-based, with a 250MB plan at $14.99 per month and an unlimited plan at $29.99. No contract is required for 3G service. All these tech specs aside, I think a more useful observation is that the iPad is a multi-purpose Internet-connected entertainment device, while the Kindle is a dedicated reading device. The question is whether those differences in design and intended use create a clear-cut winner for reading electronic publications. Let’s take a look at each device, in isolation, now.   Kindle To me, what’s most innovative about the Kindle is its E Ink display. E Ink really looks like ink on a sheet of paper. It requires no backlight, it’s fully visible in direct sunlight and it causes almost none of the eyestrain that LCD-based computer display technology (like that used on the iPad) does. It’s really versatile in an all-around way. Forgive me if this sounds precious, but reading on it is really a joy. In fact, it’s a genuinely relaxing experience. Through the Kindle Store, Amazon allows users to download books (including audio books), magazines, newspapers and blog feeds. Books and magazines can be purchased either on a single-issue basis or as an annual subscription. Books, of course, are purchased singly. Oddly, blogs are not free, but instead carry a monthly subscription fee, typically $1.99. To me this is ludicrous, but I suppose the free 3G service is partially to blame. Books and magazine issues download quickly. Magazine and blog subscriptions cause new issues or posts to be pushed to your device on an automated basis. Available blogs include 9000-odd feeds that Amazon offers on the Kindle Store; unless I missed something, arbitrary RSS feeds are not supported (though there are third party workarounds to this limitation). The shopping experience is integrated well, has an huge selection, and offers certain graphical perks. For example, magazine and newspaper logos are displayed in menus, and book cover thumbnails appear as well. A simple search mechanism is provided and text entry through the physical keyboard is relatively painless. It’s very easy and straightforward to enter the store, find something you like and start reading it quickly. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s even faster. Given Kindle’s high portability, very reliable battery, instant-on capability and highly integrated content acquisition, it makes reading on whim, and in random spurts of downtime, very attractive. The Kindle’s home screen lists all of your publications, and easily lets you select one, then start reading it. Once opened, publications display in crisp, attractive text that is adjustable in size. “Turning” pages is achieved through buttons dedicated to the task. Notes can be recorded, bookmarks can be saved and pages can be saved as clippings. I am not an avid book reader, and yet I found the Kindle made it really fun, convenient and soothing to read. There’s something about the easy access to the material and the simplicity of the display that makes the Kindle seduce you into chilling out and reading page after page. On the other hand, the Kindle has an awkward navigation interface. While menus are displayed clearly on the screen, the method of selecting menu items is tricky: alongside the right-hand edge of the main display is a thin column that acts as a second display. It has a white background, and a scrollable silver cursor that is moved up or down through the use of the device’s scrollwheel. Picking a menu item on the main display involves scrolling the silver cursor to a position parallel to that menu item and pushing the scrollwheel in. This navigation technique creates a disconnect, literally. You don’t really click on a selection so much as you gesture toward it. I got used to this technique quickly, but I didn’t love it. It definitely created a kind of anxiety in me, making me feel the need to speed through menus and get to my destination document quickly. Once there, I could calm down and relax. Books are great on the Kindle. Magazines and newspapers much less so. I found the rendering of photographs, and even illustrations, to be unacceptably crude. For this reason, I expect that reading textbooks on the Kindle may leave students wanting. I found that the original flow and layout of any publication was sacrificed on the Kindle. In effect, browsing a magazine or newspaper was almost impossible. Reading the text of individual articles was enjoyable, but having to read this way made the whole experience much more “a la carte” than cohesive and thematic between articles. I imagine that for academic journals this is ideal, but for consumer publications it imposes a stripped-down, low-fidelity experience that evokes a sense of deprivation. In general, the Kindle is great for reading text. For just about anything else, especially activity that involves exploratory browsing, meandering and short-attention-span reading, it presents a real barrier to entry and adoption. Avid book readers will enjoy the Kindle (if they’re not already). It’s a great device for losing oneself in a book over long sittings. Multitaskers who are more interested in periodicals, be they online or off, will like it much less, as they will find compromise, and even sacrifice, to be palpable.   iPad The iPad is a very different device from the Kindle. While the Kindle is oriented to pages of text, the iPad orbits around applications and their interfaces. Be it the pinch and zoom experience in the browser, the rich media features that augment content on news and weather sites, or the ability to interact with social networking services like Twitter, the iPad is versatile. While it shares a slate-like form factor with the Kindle, it’s effectively an elegant personal computer. One of its many features is the iBook application and integration of the iBookstore. But it’s a multi-purpose device. That turns out to be good and bad, depending on what you’re reading. The iBookstore is great for browsing. It’s color, rich animation-laden user interface make it possible to shop for books, rather than merely search and acquire them. Unfortunately, its selection is rather sparse at the moment. If you’re looking for a New York Times bestseller, or other popular titles, you should be OK. If you want to read something more specialized, it’s much harder. Unlike the awkward navigation interface of the Kindle, the iPad offers a nearly flawless touch-screen interface that seduces the user into tinkering and kibitzing every bit as much as the Kindle lulls you into a deep, concentrated read. It’s a dynamic and interactive device, whereas the Kindle is static and passive. The iBook reader is slick and fun. Use the iPad in landscape mode and you can read the book in 2-up (left/right 2-page) display; use it in portrait mode and you can read one page at a time. Rather than clicking a hardware button to turn pages, you simply drag and wipe from right-to-left to flip the single or right-hand page. The page actually travels through an animated path as it would in a physical book. The intuitiveness of the interface is uncanny. The reader also accommodates saving of bookmarks, searching of the text, and the ability to highlight a word and look it up in a dictionary. Pages display brightly and clearly. They’re easy to read. But the backlight and the glare made me less comfortable than I was with the Kindle. The knowledge that completely different applications (including the Web and email and Twitter) were just a few taps away made me antsy and very tempted to task-switch. The knowledge that battery life is an issue created subtle discomfort. If the Kindle makes you feel like you’re in a library reading room, then the iPad makes you feel, at best, like you’re under fluorescent lights at a Barnes and Noble or Borders store. If you’re lucky, you’d be on a couch or at a reading table in the store, but you might also be standing up, in the aisles. Clearly, I didn’t find this conducive to focused and sustained reading. But that may have more to do with my own tendency to read periodicals far more than books, and my neurotic . And, truth be known, the book reading experience, when not explicitly compared to Kindle’s, was still pleasant. It is also important to point out that Kindle Store-sourced books can be read on the iPad through a Kindle reader application, from Amazon, specific to the device. This offered a less rich experience than the iBooks reader, but it was completely adequate. Despite the Kindle brand of the reader, however, it offered little in terms of simulating the reading experience on its namesake device. When it comes to periodicals, the iPad wins hands down. Magazines, even if merely scanned images of their print editions, read on the iPad in a way that felt similar to reading hard copy. The full color display, touch navigation and even the ability to render advertisements in their full glory makes the iPad a great way to read through any piece of work that is measured in pages, rather than chapters. There are many ways to get magazines and newspapers onto the iPad, including the Zinio reader, and publication-specific applications like the Wall Street Journal’s and Popular Science’s. The New York Times’ free Editors’ Choice application offers a Times Reader-like interface to a subset of the Gray Lady’s daily content. The completely Web-based but iPad-optimized Times Skimmer site (at www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer) works well too. Even conventional Web sites themselves can be read much like magazines, given the iPad’s ability to zoom in on the text and crop out advertisements on the margins. While the Kindle does have an experimental Web browser, it reminded me a lot of early mobile phone browsers, only in a larger size. For text-heavy sites with simple layout, it works fine. For just about anything else, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth. And given the way magazine articles make me think of things I want to look up online, I think that’s a real liability for the Kindle.   Summing Up What I came to realize is that the Kindle isn’t so much a computer or even an Internet device as it is a printer. While it doesn’t use physical paper, it still renders its content a page at a time, just like a laser printer does, and its output appears strikingly similar. You can read the rendered text, but you can’t interact with it in any way. That’s why the navigation requires a separate cursor display area. And because of the page-oriented rendering behavior, turning pages causes a flash on the display and requires a sometimes long pause before the next page is rendered. The good side of this is that once the page is generated, no battery power is required to display it. That makes for great battery life, optimal viewing under most lighting conditions (as long as there is some light) and low-eyestrain text-centric display of content. The Kindle is highly portable, has an excellent selection in its store and is refreshingly distraction-free. All of this is ideal for reading books. And iPad doesn’t offer any of it. What iPad does offer is versatility, variety, richness and luxury. It’s flush with accoutrements even if it’s low on focused, sustained text display. That makes it inferior to the Kindle for book reading. But that also makes it better than the Kindle for almost everything else. As such, and given that its book reading experience is still decent (even if not superior), I think the iPad will give Kindle a run for its money. True book lovers, and people on a budget, will want the Kindle. People with a robust amount of discretionary income may want both devices. Everyone else who is interested in a slate form factor e-reading device, especially if they also wish to have leisure-friendly Internet access, will likely choose the iPad exclusively. One thing is for sure: iPad has reduced Kindle’s market, and may have shifted its mass market potential to a mere niche play. If Amazon is smart, it will improve its iPad-based Kindle reader app significantly. It can then leverage the iPad channel as a significant market for the Kindle Store. After all, selling the eBooks themselves is what Amazon should care most about.

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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

  - by Michael Williamson

  Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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• Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!

  - by mbcrump

  Infragistics recently released their new Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. I saw a couple of samples and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. I first noticed the hospital floor-plan demo shown on their site and started thinking of ways that I could use this in my own organization. I emailed them asking if I could give away the Silverlight Data Visualization controls on my site and they said, Yes! They also wanted to throw in the standard Silverlight Line of Business controls. (combined they are worth about $3000 US). I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization ($3000 Value) Random winner will be announced on January 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) For extra entries simply: Retweet a link to this page using the following URL [ http://mcrump.me/iscfree ]. It does not matter what the tweet says, just as long as the URL is the same. Unlimited tweets, but please don’t go crazy! This URL will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Infragistics because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The Silverlight Line of Business Control page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. The Data Visualization page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. You can install all of that to your local HDD when you are installing it. I am going to walk you through the Silverlight Controls recently released by Infragistics. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the executable. If you downloaded the Complete bundle then you will have the following options to pick from. I like having help documentation and samples on my local HDD in case I do not have access to the internet and want to code. After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. Look for NetAdvantage 10.3 Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. I wanted to highlight a few of the controls that I liked the most: Grid – After using the Infragistics grid you will wonder how you ever survived using the grid supplied by Microsoft standard controls.  This grid was designed to get your application up and running very fast. It’s simple to bind, it handles LARGE DataSets, easy to filter and allows endless possibilities of formatting data. The screenshot below is an example of the grid. For a real-time updating demo click here. SpellChecker- If your users are creating emails or performing any other function that requires Spell Checking then this control is great. Check out the screenshots below: In this first screen, I have a word that is not in the dictionary [DotNet]. The Spell Checker finds the word and allows the user to correct it. What is so great about Infragistics controls is that it only takes a few lines of code to have a full-featured Spell Checker in your application. TagCloud – This is a control that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It allows you to create keywords for popular search terms. This is very similar to TagCloud seen all over the internet.  Below is a screenshot that shows “Facebook” being a very popular item in the cloud. You can link these items to a hyperlink if you wanted. Importing/Exporting from Excel – I work with data a majority of the time. We all know the importance of Excel in our organizations, its used a lot. With Infragistics controls it make importing and exporting data from a Grid into Excel a snap. One of the things that I liked most about this control was the option to choose the Excel format (2003 or 2007). I haven’t seen this feature in other controls. Creating/Saving/Extracting/Uploading Zip Files – This is another control that I haven’t seen many others making. It allows you to basically manipulate a zip file in any way you like. You can even create a password on the zip file. Schedule – The Schedule that Infragistics provides resembles Outlook’s calendar. I think that it’s important for a user to see your app for the first time and immediately be able to start using because they are already familiar with the UI. The Schedule control accomplishes that in my opinion. I have just barely scratched the surface with the Infragistics Silverlight Line of Business controls. To check all of them then click here. A quick thing to note is that this giveaway also comes with the following Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. Below is a screenshot that list all of them:   I wanted to highlight 2 of the controls that I liked the most: xamBarcode– The xamBarcode supports the following Symbologies: Below is an example of the barcode generated by Infragistics controls. This is a high resolution barcode that you will not have to wonder if your scanner can read it. As long as you have ink in your printer your barcode will read it. I used a Symbol barcode reader to test this barcode. xamTreemap– I’ve never seen a way of displaying data like this before, but I like it. You can style this anyway that you like of course and it also comes with an Office 2010 Theme. Thanks to Infragistics for providing the controls to one lucky reader. I hope that you enjoyed this post and good luck to those that entered the contest.  Subscribe to my feed

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• What’s New in Delphi XE6 Regular Expressions

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  There’s not much new in the regular expression support in Delphi XE6. The big change that should be made, upgrading to PCRE 8.30 or later and switching to the pcre16 functions that use UTF-16, still hasn’t been made. XE6 still uses PCRE 7.9 and thus continues to require conversion from the UTF-16 strings that Delphi uses natively to the UTF-8 strings that older versions of PCRE require. Delphi XE6 does fix one important issue that has plagued TRegEx since it was introduced in Delphi XE. Previously, TRegEx could not find zero-length matches. So a regex like (?m)^ that should find a zero-length match at the start of each line would not find any matches at all with TRegEx. The reason for this is that TRegEx uses TPerlRegEx to do the heavy lifting. TPerlRegEx sets its State property to [preNotEmpty] in its constructor, which tells it to skip zero-length matches. This is not a problem with TPerlRegEx because users of this class can change the State property. But TRegEx does not provide a way to change this property. So in Delphi XE5 and prior, TRegEx cannot find zero-length matches. In Delphi XE6 TPerlRegEx’s constructor was changed to initialize State to the empty set. This means TRegEx is now able to find zero-length matches. TRegex.Replace() using the regex (?m)^ now inserts the replacement at the start of each line, as you would expect. If you use TPerlRegEx directly, you’ll need to set State to [preNotEmpty] in your own code if you relied on its behavior to skip zero-length matches. You will need to check existing applications that use TRegEx for regular expressions that incorrectly allow zero-length matches. In XE5 and prior, TRegEx using \d* would match all numbers in a string. In XE6, the same regex still matches all numbers, but also finds a zero-length match at each position in the string. RegexBuddy 4 warns about zero-length matches on the Create panel if you set it to Detailed mode. At the bottom of the regex tree there will be a node saying either “your regular expression may find zero-length matches” or “zero-length matches will be skipped” depending on whether your application allows zero-length matches (XE6 TRegEx) or not (XE–XE5 TRegEx).

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• Metro: Introduction to CSS 3 Grid Layout

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The purpose of this blog post is to provide you with a quick introduction to the new W3C CSS 3 Grid Layout standard. You can use CSS Grid Layout in Metro style applications written with JavaScript to lay out the content of an HTML page. CSS Grid Layout provides you with all of the benefits of using HTML tables for layout without requiring you to actually use any HTML table elements. Doing Page Layouts without Tables Back in the 1990’s, if you wanted to create a fancy website, then you would use HTML tables for layout. For example, if you wanted to create a standard three-column page layout then you would create an HTML table with three columns like this: <table height="100%"> <tr> <td valign="top" width="300px" bgcolor="red"> Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column </td> <td valign="top" bgcolor="green"> Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column </td> <td valign="top" width="300px" bgcolor="blue"> Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column </td> </tr> </table> When the table above gets rendered out to a browser, you end up with the following three-column layout: The width of the left and right columns is fixed – the width of the middle column expands or contracts depending on the width of the browser. Sometime around the year 2005, everyone decided that using tables for layout was a bad idea. Instead of using tables for layout — it was collectively decided by the spirit of the Web — you should use Cascading Style Sheets instead. Why is using HTML tables for layout bad? Using tables for layout breaks the semantics of the TABLE element. A TABLE element should be used only for displaying tabular information such as train schedules or moon phases. Using tables for layout is bad for accessibility (The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 is explicit about this) and using tables for layout is bad for separating content from layout (see http://CSSZenGarden.com). Post 2005, anyone who used HTML tables for layout were encouraged to hold their heads down in shame. That’s all well and good, but the problem with using CSS for layout is that it can be more difficult to work with CSS than HTML tables. For example, to achieve a standard three-column layout, you either need to use absolute positioning or floats. Here’s a three-column layout with floats: <style type="text/css"> #container { min-width: 800px; } #leftColumn { float: left; width: 300px; height: 100%; background-color:red; } #middleColumn { background-color:green; height: 100%; } #rightColumn { float: right; width: 300px; height: 100%; background-color:blue; } </style> <div id="container"> <div id="rightColumn"> Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column </div> <div id="leftColumn"> Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column </div> <div id="middleColumn"> Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column </div> </div> The page above contains four DIV elements: a container DIV which contains a leftColumn, middleColumn, and rightColumn DIV. The leftColumn DIV element is floated to the left and the rightColumn DIV element is floated to the right. Notice that the rightColumn DIV appears in the page before the middleColumn DIV – this unintuitive ordering is necessary to get the floats to work correctly (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/533607/css-three-column-layout-problem). The page above (almost) works with the most recent versions of most browsers. For example, you get the correct three-column layout in both Firefox and Chrome: And the layout mostly works with Internet Explorer 9 except for the fact that for some strange reason the min-width doesn’t work so when you shrink the width of your browser, you can get the following unwanted layout: Notice how the middle column (the green column) bleeds to the left and right. People have solved these issues with more complicated CSS. For example, see: http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/holy-grail-no-quirks-mode.htm But, at this point, no one could argue that using CSS is easier or more intuitive than tables. It takes work to get a layout with CSS and we know that we could achieve the same layout more easily using HTML tables. Using CSS Grid Layout CSS Grid Layout is a new W3C standard which provides you with all of the benefits of using HTML tables for layout without the disadvantage of using an HTML TABLE element. In other words, CSS Grid Layout enables you to perform table layouts using pure Cascading Style Sheets. The CSS Grid Layout standard is still in a “Working Draft” state (it is not finalized) and it is located here: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/ The CSS Grid Layout standard is only supported by Internet Explorer 10 and there are no signs that any browser other than Internet Explorer will support this standard in the near future. This means that it is only practical to take advantage of CSS Grid Layout when building Metro style applications with JavaScript. Here’s how you can create a standard three-column layout using a CSS Grid Layout: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style type="text/css"> html, body, #container { height: 100%; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; } #container { display: -ms-grid; -ms-grid-columns: 300px auto 300px; -ms-grid-rows: 100%; } #leftColumn { -ms-grid-column: 1; background-color:red; } #middleColumn { -ms-grid-column: 2; background-color:green; } #rightColumn { -ms-grid-column: 3; background-color:blue; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="container"> <div id="leftColumn"> Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column </div> <div id="middleColumn"> Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column </div> <div id="rightColumn"> Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column </div> </div> </body> </html> When the page above is rendered in Internet Explorer 10, you get a standard three-column layout: The page above contains four DIV elements: a container DIV which contains a leftColumn DIV, middleColumn DIV, and rightColumn DIV. The container DIV is set to Grid display mode with the following CSS rule: #container { display: -ms-grid; -ms-grid-columns: 300px auto 300px; -ms-grid-rows: 100%; } The display property is set to the value “-ms-grid”. This property causes the container DIV to lay out its child elements in a grid. (Notice that you use “-ms-grid” instead of “grid”. The “-ms-“ prefix is used because the CSS Grid Layout standard is still preliminary. This implementation only works with IE10 and it might change before the final release.) The grid columns and rows are defined with the “-ms-grid-columns” and “-ms-grid-rows” properties. The style rule above creates a grid with three columns and one row. The left and right columns are fixed sized at 300 pixels. The middle column sizes automatically depending on the remaining space available. The leftColumn, middleColumn, and rightColumn DIVs are positioned within the container grid element with the following CSS rules: #leftColumn { -ms-grid-column: 1; background-color:red; } #middleColumn { -ms-grid-column: 2; background-color:green; } #rightColumn { -ms-grid-column: 3; background-color:blue; } The “-ms-grid-column” property is used to specify the column associated with the element selected by the style sheet selector. The leftColumn DIV is positioned in the first grid column, the middleColumn DIV is positioned in the second grid column, and the rightColumn DIV is positioned in the third grid column. I find using CSS Grid Layout to be just as intuitive as using an HTML table for layout. You define your columns and rows and then you position different elements within these columns and rows. Very straightforward. Creating Multiple Columns and Rows In the previous section, we created a super simple three-column layout. This layout contained only a single row. In this section, let’s create a slightly more complicated layout which contains more than one row: The following page contains a header row, a content row, and a footer row. The content row contains three columns: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style type="text/css"> html, body, #container { height: 100%; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; } #container { display: -ms-grid; -ms-grid-columns: 300px auto 300px; -ms-grid-rows: 100px 1fr 100px; } #header { -ms-grid-column: 1; -ms-grid-column-span: 3; -ms-grid-row: 1; background-color: yellow; } #leftColumn { -ms-grid-column: 1; -ms-grid-row: 2; background-color:red; } #middleColumn { -ms-grid-column: 2; -ms-grid-row: 2; background-color:green; } #rightColumn { -ms-grid-column: 3; -ms-grid-row: 2; background-color:blue; } #footer { -ms-grid-column: 1; -ms-grid-column-span: 3; -ms-grid-row: 3; background-color: orange; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="container"> <div id="header"> Header, Header, Header </div> <div id="leftColumn"> Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column, Left Column </div> <div id="middleColumn"> Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column, Middle Column </div> <div id="rightColumn"> Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column, Right Column </div> <div id="footer"> Footer, Footer, Footer </div> </div> </body> </html> In the page above, the grid layout is created with the following rule which creates a grid with three rows and three columns: #container { display: -ms-grid; -ms-grid-columns: 300px auto 300px; -ms-grid-rows: 100px 1fr 100px; } The header is created with the following rule: #header { -ms-grid-column: 1; -ms-grid-column-span: 3; -ms-grid-row: 1; background-color: yellow; } The header is positioned in column 1 and row 1. Furthermore, notice that the “-ms-grid-column-span” property is used to span the header across three columns. CSS Grid Layout and Fractional Units When you use CSS Grid Layout, you can take advantage of fractional units. Fractional units provide you with an easy way of dividing up remaining space in a page. Imagine, for example, that you want to create a three-column page layout. You want the size of the first column to be fixed at 200 pixels and you want to divide the remaining space among the remaining three columns. The width of the second column is equal to the combined width of the third and fourth columns. The following CSS rule creates four columns with the desired widths: #container { display: -ms-grid; -ms-grid-columns: 200px 2fr 1fr 1fr; -ms-grid-rows: 1fr; } The fr unit represents a fraction. The grid above contains four columns. The second column is two times the size (2fr) of the third (1fr) and fourth (1fr) columns. When you use the fractional unit, the remaining space is divided up using fractional amounts. Notice that the single row is set to a height of 1fr. The single grid row gobbles up the entire vertical space. Here’s the entire HTML page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style type="text/css"> html, body, #container { height: 100%; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; } #container { display: -ms-grid; -ms-grid-columns: 200px 2fr 1fr 1fr; -ms-grid-rows: 1fr; } #firstColumn { -ms-grid-column: 1; background-color:red; } #secondColumn { -ms-grid-column: 2; background-color:green; } #thirdColumn { -ms-grid-column: 3; background-color:blue; } #fourthColumn { -ms-grid-column: 4; background-color:orange; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="container"> <div id="firstColumn"> First Column, First Column, First Column </div> <div id="secondColumn"> Second Column, Second Column, Second Column </div> <div id="thirdColumn"> Third Column, Third Column, Third Column </div> <div id="fourthColumn"> Fourth Column, Fourth Column, Fourth Column </div> </div> </body> </html>   Summary There is more in the CSS 3 Grid Layout standard than discussed in this blog post. My goal was to describe the basics. If you want to learn more than you can read through the entire standard at http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/ In this blog post, I described some of the difficulties that you might encounter when attempting to replace HTML tables with Cascading Style Sheets when laying out a web page. I explained how you can take advantage of the CSS 3 Grid Layout standard to avoid these problems when building Metro style applications using JavaScript. CSS 3 Grid Layout provides you with all of the benefits of using HTML tables for laying out a page without requiring you to use HTML table elements.

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• Error while running bash script that moves files

  - by K.K Patel

  I am new to bash scripting and want to create bash script that moves some days old files between source and destination as per days defined in script. When I run this script I get error line 16: syntax error near unexpected token `do' #!/bin/bash echo "Enter Your Source Directory" read soure echo "Enter Your Destination Directory" read destination echo "Enter Days" read days do find $soure -mtime +$days mv $soure $destination {} \; echo "Files $days old moved from $soure to $destination" done please help me to create this script.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 02, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 02, 2010New ProjectsBackupCleaner.Net: A C#.Net-based tool for automatically removing old backups selectively. It can be used when you already make daily backups on disk, and want to cle...C# Dotnetnuke Module development Template for Visual Studio 2010: C# DNN Module Development template for Visual Studio 2010 Get a head-start on DNN Module development. Whether you're a pro or just starting with D...Christoc's DotNetNuke C# Module Development Template: A quick and easy to use C# Module development template for DotNetNuke 5, Visual Studio 2008.Client per la digitalizzazione di documenti integrato con DotNetNuke: Questo applicativo in ambiente windows 32bit consente di digitalizzare documenti con piu scanner contemporaneamente, processare OCR in 17 Lingue (p...ContainerOne - C# application server: An application server completely written in c# (.net 4.0).Drop7 Silverlight: It's a clone of the original Drop7 written in Silverlight (C#). Echo.Net: Echo.Net is an embedded task manager for web and windows apps. It allows for simple management of background tasks at specific times. It's develope...energy: Smartgrid Demand Response ImplementationGenerate Twitter Message for Live Writer: This is a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that generates a twitter message with your blog post name and a TinyUrl link to the blog post. It will d...HomingCMS.Net: A lightweight cms.Information Système & Shell à distance: Un web service qui permet d'avoir des informations sur le système et de lancer de commande (terminal) à distance.Javascript And Jquery: gqq's javascript and jquery examplesMemory++: "Tweak the memory to speed up your computer" Memory ++ is basically an application that will speed up your computer ensuring comfort in their norma...Microformat Parsers for .NET: Microformat's Parsers for .NET helps you to collect information you run into on the web, that is stored by means of microformats. It's written in C...MoneyManager: Trying to make Personal Finances management System for my needs. Microsoft stopped to support MSMoney - it makes me so sad, so I wanna to make my ...Open source software for running a financial markets trading business: The core conceptual model will support running a business in the financial markets, for example running a trading exchange business.Ovik: Open Video Converter with simple and intuitive interface for converting video files to the open formats.Oxygen Smil Player: The <project name> is a open a-smil player implementation that is meaned to be connected to a Digital Signage CMS like Oxygen media platform ( www....Protect The Carrot: Protect The Carrot is a small fastpaced XNA game. You are a farmer whose single carrot is under attack by ravenous rabbits. You have to shoot the r...Race Day Commander: The core project is designed to support coaches of "long distance" or "endurance" sporting events coach their athletes during a race. The idea bein...Raygun Diplomacy: Raygun Diplomacy is an action shooter sandbox game set in a futuristic world. It will use procedural generation for the world, weapons, and vehicle...Resx-Translator-Bot: Resx-Translator-Bot uses Google Tanslate to automatically translate the .resx-files in your .NET and ASP.NET applications.Sistema de Expedición del Permiso Único de Siembra: Sistema de Expedición del Permiso Único de Siembra.SiteOA: 一个基于asp.net mvc2的OAStraighce: This is a low-featured, cyclic (log files reside in appname\1.txt to at mose 31.txt), thread-safe and non-blocking TraceListener with some extensio...Touch Mice: Touch Mice turns multiple mice on a computer into individual touch devices. This allows you to create multi-touch applications using the new touch...TStringValidator: A project helper to validate strings. Use this class to hold your regex strings for use with any project's string validation.Ultimate Dotnetnuke Skin Object: Ultimate Skin Object is a Dotnetnuke 5.4.2+ extension that will allow you to easily change your skins doc type, remove unneeded css files, inject e...Ventosus: Ventosus is an upcoming partially text-based game. No further information is available at this time.vit: vit based on asp.net mvcW7 Auto Playlist Generator: Purpose: This application is designed to create W7MC playlist automatically whenever you want. You can select if you want the playlist sorted Alpha...W7 Video Playlist Creator: Purpose: This program allows you to quickly create wvx video play list for Windows Media Center. This functionality is not included in WMC and is u...New ReleasesBCryptTool: BCryptTool v0.2.1: The Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 is needed to run this program.BFBC2 PRoCon: PRoCon 0.5.2.0: Notes available on phogue.netC# Dotnetnuke Module development Template for Visual Studio 2010: DNNModule 1.0: This is the initial release of DNNModule as was available for download from http://www.subodh.com/Projects/DNNModule In this release: Contains one...Client per la digitalizzazione di documenti integrato con DotNetNuke: Versione 3.0.1: Versione 3.0.1CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.4 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 3.5 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars,...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V20: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V21: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...DirectQ: Release 1.8.4: Significant bug fixes and improvments over 1.8.3c; there may be some bugs that I haven't caught here as development became a little disjointed towa...DotNetNuke 5 Thai Language Pack: 1.0.1: Fixed Installation Problem. Version 1.0 -> 1.0.1 Type : Character encoding. Change : ().dnn description file to "ไทย (ไทย)".dnnEcho.Net: Echo.Net 1.0: Initial release of Echo.Net.Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.018: ShapeMaker, Program Window, Timer, and many threading errors fixedExtend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.019: Added Rectangles to shapemaker, and the bubble quizGenerate Twitter Message for Live Writer: Final Source Code Plus Binaries: Compete C# source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 4.5: Map and map events are only functional. New state, persistence and event implementation in progress. Javascript classes are implemented as MS AJAX ...Industrial Dashboard: ID 3.1: -Added new widget IndustrialSlickGrid. -Added example with IndustrialChart.LongBar: LongBar 2.1 Build 310: - Library: Double-clicking on tile will install it - Feedback: Now you can type your e-mail and comment for errorMavention: Mavention Insert Lorem ipsum: A Sandbox Solution for SharePoint 2010 that allows you to easily insert Lorem ipsum text into RTE. More information and screenshots available @ htt...Memory++: Memory ++: Tweak the memory to speed up your computer Memory is basically an application that will speed up your computer ensuring comfort in their normal ac...MyVocabulary: Version 2.0: Improvements over version 1.0: Several bug fixes New shortcuts added to increase usability A new section for testing verbs was addednopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.: nopCommerce 1.60: You can also install nopCommerce using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Simply click the button below: nopCommerce To see the full list of f...Nuntio Content: Nuntio Content 4.2.1: Patch release that fixes a couple of minor issues with version numbers and priority settings for role content. The release one package for DNN 4 an...Ovik: Ovik v0.0.1 (Preview Release): This is a very early preview release of Ovik. It contains only the pure processes of selecting files and launching a conversion process. Preview r...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.3c Production: This is a patch release for 26477. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page. DonationsDonate via PayPal. If you want to, we can also a...PowerShell Admin Modules: PAM 0.2: Version 0.2 contains the PAMShare module with Get-Share Get-ShareAccessMask Get-ShareSecurity New-Share Remove-Share Set-Share and the PAMath modu...Professional MRDS: RDS 2008 R3 Release: This is an updated version of the code to work with RDS 2008 R3 (version 2.2.76.0). IMPORTANT NOTE These samples are supplied as a ZIP file. Unzip...Protect The Carrot: First release: We provide two ways to install the game. The first is PTC 1.0.0.0 Zip which contains a Click-Once installer (the DVD type since codeplex does not...PST File Format SDK: PST File Format SDK v0.2.0: Updated version of pstsdk with several bug fixes, including: Improved compiler support (several changes, including two patches from hub) Fixed Do...Race Day Commander: Race Day Commander v1: First release. The exact code that was written on the day in 6 hours.Resx-Translator-Bot: Release 1.0: Initial releaseSalient.StackApps: JavaScript API Wrapper beta 2: This is the first draft of the generated JS wrapper. Added basic test coverage for each route that can also serve as basic usage examples. More i...SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Scripts & Utilities: PSSP2010 Utils 0.2: Added Install-SPIFilter script cmdlet More information can be found at http://www.ravichaganti.com/blog/?p=1439SharePoint Tools from China Community: ECB菜单控制器: ECB菜单控制器Shopping Cart .NET: 1.5: Shopping Cart .NET 1.5 has received an upgrade to .NET 4.0 along with SQL Server 2005/8. There is a new AJAX Based inventory system that helps you ...sMODfix: sMODfix v1.0b: Added: provisional support for ecm_v54 Added: provisional support for gfx_v88SNCFT Gadget: SNCFT gadget v1: cette version est la version 1 de ma gadgetSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3: Change logChanges for Visual Studio 2010Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in a website project Changed Snippet Explorer search to u...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9b: + Fixed: structure of resources + Changed: some labels in GUISoftware Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+05: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+05SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.2.3 Beta: Release 2.2 re-implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 9 modules with 133 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scri...StackOverflow.Net: Preview Beta: Goes with the Stack Apps API version 0.8Ultimate Dotnetnuke Skin Object: Ultimate Skin Object V1.00.00: Ultimate Skin Object is a Dotnetnuke 5.4.2+ extension that will allow you to easily change your skins doc type, remove unneeded css files, inject e...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30601.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVelocity Shop: JUNE 2010: Source code aligned to .NET Framework 4.0, ASP.NET 4.0 and Windows Server AppFabric Caching RC.ViperWorks Ignition: ViperWorks_5.0.1005.31: ViperWorks Ignition Source, version 5.0.1005.31.Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory: Session Recordings: This release contains the "raw" and undedited session recordings and slides delivered by the team. 2010-06-01 Create package and add two session r...W7 Auto Playlist Generator: Source Code plus Binaries: Compete C# and WinForm source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.W7 Video Playlist Creator: Source Code plus Binaries: Compete C# and WPF source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationBlogEngine.NETIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterMirror Testing SystemRawrCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightPHPExcelCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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• SQLBits 8 – Conor’s back

  - by simonsabin

  I recently announced the awesome line up for SQLBits 8 in which I mentioned Conor Cunningham . Yes we have Conor coming back. Conor is the most popular SQLBits speaker ever. Conor Cunningham is a Principal Software Architect at Microsoft on the SQL Server Query Processor Team.  He's worked on database technologies for Microsoft for over 10 years and is holds numerous patents related to Query Optimization and Query Processing.  Conor is the author of a number of peer-reviewed articles...(read more)

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