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  • Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; Ants Profiler

    - by Alois Kraus
    I just downloaded ANTS Profiler 7.4 to check how fast it is and how deep I can analyze the startup of Visual Studio 2012. The Pro version which is useful does cost 445€ which is ok. To measure a complex system I decided to simply profile VS2012 (Update 1) on my older Intel 6600 2,4GHz with 3 GB RAM and a 32 bit Windows 7. Ants Profiler is really easy to use. So lets try it out. The Ants Profiler does want to start the profiled application by its own which seems to be rather common. I did choose Method Level timing of all managed methods. In the configuration menu I did want to get all call stacks to get full details. Once this is configured you are ready to go.   After that you can select the Method Grid to view Wall Clock Time in ms. I hate percentages which are on by default because I do want to look where absolute time is spent and not something else.   From the Method Grid I can drill down to see where time is spent in a nice and I can look at the decompiled methods where the time is spent. This does really look nice. But did you see the size of the scroll bar in the method grid? Although I wanted all call stacks I do get only about 4 pages of methods to drill down. From the scroll bar count I would guess that the profiler does show me about 150 methods for the complete VS startup. This is nonsense. I will never find a bottleneck in VS when I am presented only a fraction of the methods that were actually executed. I have also tried in the configuration window to also profile the extremely trivial functions but there was no noticeable difference. It seems that the Ants Profiler does filter away way too many details to be useful for bigger systems. If you want to optimize a CPU bound operation inside NUnit then Ants Profiler is with its line level timings a very nice tool to work with. But for bigger stuff it is certainly not usable. I also do not like that I must start the profiled application from the profiler UI. This makes it hard to profile processes which are started by some other process. Next: JetBrains dotTrace

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  • TechEd 2010 Important Events

    If youll be attending TechEd in New Orleans in a couple of weeks, make sure the following are all on your calendar:   Party with Palermo TechEd 2010 Edition Sunday 6 June 2010 7:30-930pm Central Time RSVP and see who else is coming here.  The party takes place from 730pm to 930pm Central (Local) Time,  and includes a full meal, free swag, and prizes.  The event is being held at Jimmy Buffetts Margaritaville located at 1104 Decatur Street.   Developer Practices Session: DPR304 FAIL: Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices Monday 7 June 2010 4:30pm-545pm Central Time Room 276 Come to my session and hear about what NOT to do on your software project.  Hear my own and others war stories and lessons learned.  Youll laugh, youll cry, youll realize youre a much better developer than a lot of folks out there.  Heres the official description: Everybody likes to talk about best practices, tips, and tricks, but often it is by analyzing failures that we learn from our own and others' mistakes. In this session, Steve describes various anti-patterns and worst practices in software development that he has encountered in his own experience or learned about from other experts in the field, along with advice on recognizing and avoiding them. View DPR304 in TechEd Session Catalog >> Exhibition Hall Reception Monday 7 June 2010 545pm-9pm Immediately following my session, come meet the shows exhibitors, win prizes, and enjoy plenty of food and drink.  Always a good time.   Party: Geekfest Tuesday 8 June 8pm-11pm Central Time, Pat OBriens Lets face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career but its not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet. You need to have fun. Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist) We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat OBriens for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk. You must have wristband to get in. Tuesday, June 8th from 8pm 11pm Pat OBriens New Orleans 624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130 Closing Party at Mardi Gras World Thursday 10 June 730pm-10pm Central Time Join us for the Closing Party and enjoy great food, beverages, and the excitement of New Orleans at Mardi Gras World. The colors, the lights, the music, the joie de vivreits all here.  Learn more >> Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Handling bugs, quirks, or annoyances in vendor-supplied headers

    - by supercat
    If the header file supplied by a vendor of something with whom one's code must interact is deficient in some way, in what cases is it better to: Work around the header's deficiencies in the main code Copy the header file to the local project and fix it Fix the header file in the spot where it's stored as a vendor-supplied tool Fix the header file in the central spot, but also make a local copy and try to always have the two match Do something else As an example, the header file supplied by ST Micro for the STM320LF series contains the lines: typedef struct { __IO uint32_t MODER; __IO uint16_t OTYPER; uint16_t RESERVED0; .... __IO uint16_t BSRRL; /* BSRR register is split to 2 * 16-bit fields BSRRL */ __IO uint16_t BSRRH; /* BSRR register is split to 2 * 16-bit fields BSRRH */ .... } GPIO_TypeDef; In the hardware, and in the hardware documentation, BSRR is described as a single 32-bit register. About 98% of the time one wants to write to BSRR, one will only be interested in writing the upper half or the lower half; it is thus convenient to be able to use BSSRH and BSSRL as a means of writing half the register. On the other hand, there are occasions when it is necessary that the entire 32-bit register be written as a single atomic operation. The "optimal" way to write it (setting aside white-spacing issues) would be: typedef struct { __IO uint32_t MODER; __IO uint16_t OTYPER; uint16_t RESERVED0; .... union // Allow BSRR access as 32-bit register or two 16-bit registers { __IO uint32_t BSRR; // 32-bit BSSR register as a whole struct { __IO uint16_t BSRRL, BSRRH; };// Two 16-bit parts }; .... } GPIO_TypeDef; If the struct were defined that way, code could use BSRR when necessary to write all 32 bits, or BSRRH/BSRRL when writing 16 bits. Given that the header isn't that way, would better practice be to use the header as-is, but apply an icky typecast in the main code writing what would be idiomatically written as thePort->BSRR = 0x12345678; as *((uint32_t)&(thePort->BSSRH)) = 0x12345678;, or would be be better to use a patched header file? If the latter, where should the patched file me stored and how should it be managed?

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  • My architecture has a problem with views that required information from different objects. How can I solve this?

    - by Oscar
    I am building an architecture like this: These are my SW layers ______________ | | | Views | |______________| ______________ | | |Business Logic| |______________| ______________ | | | Repository | |______________| My views are going to generate my HTML to be sent to the user Business logic is where all the business logics are Repository is a layer to access the DB My idea is that the repository uses entities (that are basically the representation of the tables, in order to perform DB queries. The layers communicate between themselves using Business Objects, that are objects that represent the real-world-object itself. They can contain business rules and methods. The views build/use DTOs, they are basically objects that have the information required to be shown on the screen. They expect also this kind of object on actions and, before calling the business logic, they create BO. First question: what is your overall feeling about this architecture? I've used similar architecture for some projects and I always got this problem: If my view has this list to show : Student1, age, course, Date Enrolled, Already paid? It has information from different BO. How do you think one should build the structure? These were the alternatives I could think of: The view layer could call the methods to get the student, then the course it studies, then the payment information. This would cause a lot of DB accesses and my view would have the knowledge about how to act to generate this information. This just seems wrong for me. I could have an "adapter object", that has the required information (a class that would have a properties Student, Course and Payment). But I would required one adapter object for each similar case, this may get very bad for big projects. I still don't like them. Would you have ideas? How would you change the architecture to avoid this kind of problems? @Rory: I read the CQRS and I don't think this suits my needs. As taken from a link references in your link Before describing the details of CQRS we need to understand the two main driving forces behind it: collaboration and staleness That means: many different actors using the same object (collaboration) and once data has been shown to a user, that same data may have been changed by another actor – it is stale (staleness). My problem is that I want to show to the user information from different BO, so I would need to receive them from the service layer. How can my service layer assemble and deliver this information? Edit to @AndrewM: Yes, you understood it correctly, the original idea was to have the view layer to build the BOs, but you have a very nice point about the creation of the BO inside the business layers. Assuming I follow your advice and move the creation logic inside the business layer, my business layer interface would contain the DTOs, for instance public void foo(MyDTO object) But as far as I understand, the DTO is tightly coupled to each view, so it would not be reusable by a second view. In order to use it, the second view would need to build a specific DTO from a specific view or I would have to duplicate the code in the business layer. Is this correct or am I missing something?

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  • Block-level deduplicating filesystem

    - by James Haigh
    I'm looking for a deduplicating copy-on-write filesystem solution for general user data such as /home and backups of it. It should use online/inline/synchronous deduplication at the block-level using secure hashing (for negligible chance of collisions) such as SHA256 or TTH. Duplicate blocks need not even touch the disk. The idea is that I should be able to just copy /home/<user> to an external HDD with the same such filesystem to do a backup. Simple. No messing around with incremental backups where corruption to any of the snapshots will nearly always break all later snapshots, and no need to use a specific tool to delete or 'checkout' a snapshot. Everything should simply be done from the file browser without worry. Can you imagine how easy this would be? I'd never have to think twice about backing-up again! I don't mind a performance hit, reliability is the main concern. Although, with specific implementations of cp, mv and scp, and a file browser plugin, these operations would be very fast, especially when there is a lot of duplication as they would only need to transfer the absent blocks. Accidentally using conventional copy tools that do not integrate with the FS would merely take longer, waste some bandwidth when copying remotely and waste some CPU, as the duplicate data would be re-read, re-transferred and re-hashed (although nothing would be re-written), but would absolutely not corrupt anything. (Some filesharing software may also be able to benefit by integrating with the FS.) So what's the best way of doing this? I've looked at some options: lessfs - Looks unmaintained. Any good? [Opendedup/SDFS][3] - Java? Could I use this on Android?! What does [SDFS][4] stand for? [Btrfs][5] - Some patches floating around on mailing list archives, but no real support. [ZFS][6] - Hopefully they'll one day relicense under a true Free/Opensource GPL-compatible licence. Also, 2 years ago I had a go at an attempt in Python using Fuse at the file-level to be used over the top of a typical solid FS such as EXT4, but I found Fuse for Python underdocumented and didn't manage to implement all of the system calls. My first post here, so I can't post more than 2 links until I get over 10 rep: [3]: http://www.opendedup.org/ [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SDFS&action=edit&redlink=1 [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Features [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux

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  • From Co-op to fulltime help with salary negotation [closed]

    - by Peter
    Hey I'm a coop student that worked at a particular medium size printing company for 8 months. I had a good time it was lax, sometimes insufficiently challenging but none the less I learned a whole lot. I stuck with them for another 5 months (including this month) at the same rate I was paid then, doing testing work, tool development, taking care of emergencies when the lead developers were away, and other smaller projects and now bigger projects and problem handling (bad printer output etc.). I know their website inside out (ecommerce), and I know their printing software inside out and have made many changes to them both without a hitch. I have also done a lot of refactoring of the existing code base which as far as Im concerned, I believe am the only one to do those sorts of restructuring even though there is constant talk about it. I guess the unit testing paid off and lets me see the value in modularity if even a tad more. Never the less I have faith in my skill and the restructuring I did turned out better than I had imagined . Now the problem is that I finish school next month and so I asked for a full time spot the month after. They have been expanding and have hired a new guy a few months after my coop spot, and just now they hired a new guy to deal with the CRM application. The lead developer who wrote all of the software had left 5 months ago so it was up to all of us to learn what he had done over 4 years (including db, networking). So now I'm afraid that if I assert myself for a salary similar to the other guys, which I believe I am certainly on par with, that I would be seen as ingrateful. It's hard to flip a switch and say, hey double my pay, although when I'm working with their bread and butter (printers) and writing new features, refactoring the whole application for extensibility. I love it regardless of pay. I also feel maybe I'm replaceeble, although nobody knows the website better than myself and the lead web dev (not by a long shot), and nobody knows the printer software/drivers better than myself. I just thought they would have brought up a raise earlier on, and now it feels like they don't value my work. I'm also tired of worrying about it. I think my question is, well what do I do next?

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  • Is there a usage count for packages or programs?

    - by math
    Motivation: I want to remove applications I do not use to speed up my package processing tasks like dist upgrades, regular updates, but also for saving disk space and other reasons. I know this is a complex topic so first I will ask my question and second I will give some answers I already found out. Question: How do I find out which package I did not used at all? For example I always use the VLC so I could remove totem package. (Which I could have been used some day, yes.) Of course package dependencies could force me to have programs installed which I will never use. Notes: Find the packages which consume much space via synaptic: Select "Status" in lower left, select "Installed" in upper left, sort column on "size" in upper right. Then you can decide which big packages you really need. Use aptitude autoremove Use ubuntu-tweak's Janitor for removing old kernel packages, old configs, apt-cache entries, etc. Manually search for applications for a given task that you usually solve with your standard app. E.g. Movie player, Music player, Office program, Browser etc. (BTW: this is what I want to be helped with my question) When removing packages I always favour "apt-get purge" over "aptitude remove --purge" as aptitude often will also remove essential packages due to package dependencies. E.g. when removing "evolution" (as I use thunderbird) aptitude wants to remove also "ubuntu-desktop" and 756 other packages as well, while apt-get just removes evolution and its helping pacakges like evolution-common. Ubuntu lense gives me most recent used applications which are candidates for keeping :) Employ deborphan as I read in this related answer: How do I clean up my harddrive? I should certainly keep essential packages: Keep only essential packages This question is pretty much a duplicate of How to see what installed packages I have never used for cleaning purposes but covering only few aspects. However one answer suggests to use a program called unusedpkg but the link seems down. There is also a program called Kleen http://code.google.com/p/kleen/ but it won't compile in 11.10. However I hacked it to compile but the results are unusable, as for example the g++ package was marked as not used for 203, but actually I used it seconds ago for compiling Kleen itself ;) So don't use this tool. On http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPackageInformation I read the the package popularity-contest will produce log files with usage statistics. Unfortunately I didn't enabled the popularity contest so I can't find this log file.

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  • Learning by doing (and programming by trial and error)

    - by AlexBottoni
    How do you learn a new platform/toolkit while producing working code and keeping your codebase clean? When I know what I can do with the underlying platform and toolkit, I usually do this: I create a new branch (with GIT, in my case) I write a few unit tests (with JUnit, for example) I write my code until it passes my tests So far, so good. The problem is that very often I do not know what I can do with the toolkit because it is brand new to me. I work as a consulant so I cannot have my preferred language/platform/toolkit. I have to cope with whatever the customer uses for the task at hand. Most often, I have to deal (often in a hurry) with a large toolkit that I know very little so I'm forced to "learn by doing" (actually, programming by "trial and error") and this makes me anxious. Please note that, at some point in the learning process, usually I already have: read one or more five-stars books followed one or more web tutorials (writing working code a line at a time) created a couple of small experimental projects with my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA, at the moment. I use Eclipse, Netbeans and others, as well.) Despite all my efforts, at this point usually I can just have a coarse understanding of the platform/toolkit I have to use. I cannot yet grasp each and every detail. This means that each and every new feature that involves some data preparation and some non-trivial algorithm is a pain to implement and requires a lot of trial-and-error. Unfortunately, working by trial-and-error is neither safe nor easy. Actually, this is the phase that makes me most anxious: experimenting with a new toolkit while producing working code and keeping my codebase clean. Usually, at this stage I cannot use the Eclipse Scrapbook because the code I have to write is already too large and complex for this small tool. In the same way, I cannot use any more an indipendent small project for my experiments because I need to try the new code in place. I can just write my code in place and rely on GIT for a safe bail-out. This makes me anxious because this kind of intertwined, half-ripe code can rapidly become incredibly hard to manage. How do you face this phase of the development process? How do you learn-by-doing without making a mess of your codebase? Any tips&tricks, best practice or something like that?

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  • Problem Solving vs. Solution Finding

    - by ryanabr
    By enlarge, most developers fall into these two camps I will try to explain what I mean by way of example. A manager gives the developer a task that is communicated like this: “Figure out why control A is not loading on this form”. Now, right there it could be argued that the manager should probably have given better direction and said something more like: “Control A is not loading on the Form, fix it”. They might sound like the same thing to most people, but the first statement will have the developer problem solving the reason why it is failing. The second statement should have the developer looking for the solution to make it work, not focus on why it is broken. In the end, they might be the same thing, but I usually see the first approach take way longer than the second approach. The Problem Solver: The problem solver’s approach to fixing something that is broken is likely to take the error or behavior that is being observed and start to research it using a tool like Google, or any other search engine. 7/10 times this will yield results for the most common of issues. The challenge is in the other 30% of issues that will take the problem solver down the rabbit hole and cause them not to surface for days on end while every avenue is explored for the cause of the problem. In the end, they will probably find the cause of the issue and resolve it, but the cost can be days, or weeks of work. The Solution Finder: The solution finder’s approach to a problem will begin the same way the Problem Solver’s approach will. The difference comes in the more difficult cases. Rather than stick to the pure “This has to work so I am going to work with it until it does” approach, the Solution Finder will look for other ways to get the requirements satisfied that may or may not be using the original approach. For example. there are two area of an application of externally equivalent features, meaning that from a user’s perspective, the behavior is the same. So, say that for whatever reason, area A is now not working, but area B is working. The Problem Solver will dig in to see why area A is broken, where the Solution Finder will investigate to see what is the difference between the two areas and solve the problem by potentially working around it. The other notable difference between the two types of developers described is what point they reach before they re-emerge from their task. The problem solver will likely emerge with a triumphant “I have found the problem” where as the Solution Finder will emerge with the more useful “I have the solution”. Conclusion At the end of the day, users are what drives features in software development. With out users there is no need for software. In todays world of software development with so many tools to use, and generally tight schedules I believe that a work around to a problem that takes 8 hours vs. the more pure solution to the problem that takes 40 hours is a more fruitful approach.

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  • PASS Summit for SQL Starters

    - by Davide Mauri
    I’ve received a buch of emails from PASS Summit “First Timers” that are also somehow new to SQL Server (for “somehow” I mean people with less than 6 month experience but with some basic knowledge of SQL Server engine) or are catching up from SQL Server 2000. The common question regards the session one should not miss to have a broad view of the entire SQL Server platform have some insight into some specific areas of SQL Server Given that I’m on (semi-)vacantion and that I have more free time (not true, I have to prepare slides & demos for several conferences, PASS Summit  - Building the Agile Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012 - and PASS 24H - Agile Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2012 - among them…but let’s pretend it to be true), I’ve decided to make a post to answer to this common questions. Of course this is my personal point of view and given the fact that the number and quality of session that will be delivered at PASS Summit is so high that is very difficoult to make a choice, fell free to jump into the discussion and leave your feedback or – even better – answer with another post. I’m sure it will be very helpful to all the SQL Server beginners out there. I’ve imposed to myself to choose 6 session at maximum for each Track. Why 6? Because it’s the maximum number of session you can follow in one day, and given that all the session will be on the Summit DVD, they are the answer to the following question: “If I have one day to spend in training, which session I should watch?”. Of course a Summit is not like a Course so a lot of very basics concept of well-established technologies won’t be found here. Analysis Services, Integration Services, MDX are not part of the Summit this time (at least for the basic part of them). Enough with that, let’s start with the session list ideal to have a good Overview of all the SQL Server Platform: Geospatial Data Types in SQL Server 2012 Inside Unstructured Data: SQL Server 2012 FileTable and Semantic Search XQuery and XML in SQL Server: Common Problems and Best Practice Solutions Microsoft's Big Play for Big Data Dashboards: When to Choose Which MSBI Tool Microsoft BI End-User Tools 360° for what concern Database Development, I recommend the following sessions Understanding Transaction Isolation Levels What to Look for in Execution Plans Improve Query Performance by Fixing Bad Parameter Sniffing A Window into Your Data: Using SQL Window Functions Practical Uses and Optimization of New T-SQL Features in SQL Server 2012 Taking MERGE Beyond the Basics For Business Intelligence Information Delivery Analyzing SSAS Data with Excel Building Compelling Power View Reports Managed Self-Service BI PowerPivot 101  SharePoint for Business Intelligence The Best Microsoft BI Tools You've Never Heard Of and for Business Intelligence Architecture & Development BI Power Hour Building a Tabular Model Database Enterprise Information Management: Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS SSIS Design Patterns Storing Columnstore Indexes Hadoop and Its Ecosystem Components in Action Beside the listed sessions, First Timers should also take a look the the page PASS set up for them: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Connect/FirstTimers.aspx See you at PASS Summit!

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  • Moms on Mobile: Are They Way Ahead of You?

    - by Mike Stiles
    You may have no idea how much and how fast moms are embracing mobile. Of all the demographics that can be targeted by marketers, moms have always been at or near the top of the list. And why not? They’re running households, they’re all over town, they’re making buying decisions, and they’re influencing family and friends. They, out of necessity, become masters of efficiency and time management. So when a technology tool, like mobile, comes along that assists with that efficiency and time management, we would obviously expect them to take advantage of it. So if it’s obvious, why are so many big, sophisticated brands left choking on the dust of moms who have zoomed past them in the adoption of mobile, and social on mobile? Let’s break down some hard truths as presented by a Mojiava report: -Moms spend 6.1 hours per day on average on their smartphones – more than magazines, TV or radio. -46% took action after seeing a mobile ad. -51% self-identify as “addicted” to their smartphone. -Households with an income of $25K-$50K have about the same mobile penetration among moms as those with incomes of $50K-$75K. So mobile is regarded as a necessity for middle-class moms. -Even moms without smartphones spend 2.5 hours on average per day on some connected mobile device. -Of moms with such devices, 9.8% have an iPad, 9.5% a Kindle and 5.7% an iPod Touch. -Of tablet-owning moms, 97% bought something using their tablet in the last month. -31% spend over 10 hours per week on their tablet, but less than 2 hours per week on their PCs. -62% of connected moms use shopping apps. -46% want to get info on their mobile while in a store. -Half of connected moms use social on their mobile. And they’re engaged. 81% are brand fans, 86% post updates, and 84% comment. If women and moms are one of your primary targets and you find yourself with no strong social channels where content is driving engagement and relationship-building, with sites not optimized for mobile, or with no tablet or smartphone apps, you have been solidly left behind by your customers and prospects. And their adoption of mobile and social on mobile is only exponentially speeding up, not slowing down. How much sense does it make when your customer is ready to act on your mobile ad, wants to user your iPad app to buy something from you, wants to be your fan on Facebook, wants to get messages and deals from you while they’re in your store…but you’re completely absent? I’ll help you cheat on the test by giving you the answer…no sense at all. Catch up to momma.

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  • Innovation for Retailers

    - by David Dorf
    One of my main objectives for this blog is to point out emerging technologies and how they might apply to the retail industry.  But ideas are just the beginning; retailers either have to rely on vendors or have their own lab to explore these ideas and see which ones work.  (A healthy dose of both is probably the best solution.)  The Nordstrom Innovation Lab is a fine example of dedicating resources to cultivate ideas and test prototypes. The video below, from 2011, is a case study in which the team builds an iPad app that helps customers purchase sunglasses in the store.  Customers take pictures of themselves wearing different sunglasses, then can do side-by-side comparisons. There are a few interesting take-aways from their process.  First, they are working in the store alongside employees and customers.  There's no concept of documenting all the requirements then building the product.  Instead, they work closely with those that will be using the app in order to fully understand what's needed.  When they find an issue, they change the software onsite and try again.  This iterative prototyping ensures their product hits the mark.  Feels like Extreme Programming if you recall that movement. Second, they have time-boxed the project to one week.  Either it works or it doesn't, and either way they've only expended a week's worth of resources.  Innovation always entails failure, and those that succeed are often good at detecting failure quickly then adjusting.  Fail fast and fail often. Third, its not always about technology.  I was impressed they used paper designs to walk through user stories and help understand the needs of the customer.  Pen and paper is the innovator's most powerful tool. Our Retail Applied Research (RAR) team uses some of these concepts in our development process.  (Calling it a process is probably overkill.)  We try to give life to concepts quickly so the rest of organization can help us decide if we're heading the right direction.  It takes many failures before finding a successful product.

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  • Get More Value From Your Oracle Premier Support Investment

    - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team
    Untitled Document The Return on Investment in Support Training I’m a typical software user. I’ve been using spreadsheets almost daily for the past 10 years or so. I know how to enter simple formulas, format cells, import files, and I can sort and filter. Sometimes I even use a pivot table. I never attended training. I learnt everything I know on the fly. Sometimes it was intuitive and easy, other times I had to spend minutes and even hours searching for a solution. Yet when I see what some other people can do with their spreadsheets, I know I’m utilizing maybe 15% of the functionality. Pity, one day I really have to sign up for training. Why haven’t I done it yet? Ah, you know, I’m a busy person, I have work to do. And if I need to use a feature that I am unfamiliar with, I’ll spend time on it only when I really need it. Now wait. When I recall how much time I spent trying to figure how things work compared to time I spent doing the productive work, I realize it was not insignificant. I’m unable to sum up all the time I spent ‘learning’ on the fly, but I’m sure it’s been days or even weeks. And after all this time, I’ve mastered 15% of its features. If only I had attended training years ago. That investment would have paid back 10 times! Working with My Oracle Support is no different. Our customers typically use simple search, create service requests, and download patches. They think they know how to use My Oracle Support. And they’re right. They know something but often they’re utilizing only a fragment of My Oracle Support’s potential. For the investment that has been made, using only a small subset of the capabilities offered in My Oracle Support leaves value on the table. There is much more available in My Oracle Support. Dozens of diagnostic tools and proactive health checks will keep verifying your Oracle environments against best practices that Oracle gathers every day thanks to our comprehensive knowledge management process. Automated patch recommendations will help prevent known issues, and upgrade planning and more is included in My Oracle Support. Why are you not utilizing all of these best practices, capabilities and tools? Is it because you don’t have time to invest 2-3 hours of your time to learn about the features? Simply because you think you can learn on the fly like I thought I could? Does learning on the fly how to properly use the Service Request escalation process when you already have critical issue sound like a good idea? My advice is: Invest your time now to learn how My Oracle Support can help you prevent issues on your systems. Learn how to find answers faster and resolve problems more efficiently. Understand how to properly complete a service request. Invest in Support training, offered at no additional cost to Oracle Premier Support customers. It will pay back quicker than you think. It will bring you more value than you think. Discover your advantage with Oracle Premier Support's Proactive Portfolio.

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  • TechEd 2010 Important Events

    If youll be attending TechEd in New Orleans in a couple of weeks, make sure the following are all on your calendar:   Party with Palermo TechEd 2010 Edition Sunday 6 June 2010 7:30-930pm Central Time RSVP and see who else is coming here.  The party takes place from 730pm to 930pm Central (Local) Time,  and includes a full meal, free swag, and prizes.  The event is being held at Jimmy Buffetts Margaritaville located at 1104 Decatur Street.   Developer Practices Session: DPR304 FAIL: Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices Monday 7 June 2010 4:30pm-545pm Central Time Room 276 Come to my session and hear about what NOT to do on your software project.  Hear my own and others war stories and lessons learned.  Youll laugh, youll cry, youll realize youre a much better developer than a lot of folks out there.  Heres the official description: Everybody likes to talk about best practices, tips, and tricks, but often it is by analyzing failures that we learn from our own and others' mistakes. In this session, Steve describes various anti-patterns and worst practices in software development that he has encountered in his own experience or learned about from other experts in the field, along with advice on recognizing and avoiding them. View DPR304 in TechEd Session Catalog >> Exhibition Hall Reception Monday 7 June 2010 545pm-9pm Immediately following my session, come meet the shows exhibitors, win prizes, and enjoy plenty of food and drink.  Always a good time.   Party: Geekfest Tuesday 8 June 8pm-11pm Central Time, Pat OBriens Lets face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career but its not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet. You need to have fun. Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist) We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat OBriens for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk. You must have wristband to get in. Tuesday, June 8th from 8pm 11pm Pat OBriens New Orleans 624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130 Closing Party at Mardi Gras World Thursday 10 June 730pm-10pm Central Time Join us for the Closing Party and enjoy great food, beverages, and the excitement of New Orleans at Mardi Gras World. The colors, the lights, the music, the joie de vivreits all here.  Learn more >> Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Upgrades from Beta or CTP SQL Server Software is NOT Supported

    - by BuckWoody
    As of this writing, SQL Server 2008 R2 has released, and just like every release, I get e-mails and calls from folks with this question: “Can I upgrade from Customer Technical Preview (CTP) x or Beta #x or Release Candidate (RC) to the “Released to Manufacturing” (RTM) version?” No. Right up until the last minute, things are changing in the code – and you want that to happen. Our internal testing runs right up until the second we lock down for release, and we watch the CTP/RC/Beta reports to make sure there are no show-stoppers, and fix what we find. And it’s not just “big” changes you need to worry about – a simple change in one line of code can have a massive effect. I know, I know – you’ve possibly upgraded an RC or CTP to the RTM version and it worked “just fine”. But hear this tale: I’ve dealt with someone who faced this exact situation in SQL Server 2008. They upgraded (which is clearly prohibited in the documentation) from a CTP to the RTM version over a year ago. Everything was working fine. But then…one day they had an issue. Couldn’t fix it themselves, we took a look, days went by, and we finally had to call in the big guns for support. Turns out, the upgrade was the problem. So we had to come up with some elaborate schemes to get the system migrated over while they were in production. This was painful for everyone involved. So the answer is still no. Just don’t do it. There is one caveat to this story – if you are a “TAP” customer (you’ll know if you are), we help you move from the CTP products to RTM, but that’s a special case that we track carefully and send along special instructions and tools to help you along. That level of effort isn’t possible on a large scale, so it’s not just a magic tool that we run to upgrade from CTP to RTM. So again, unless you’re a TAP customer, it’s a no-no. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Unintentional run-in with C# thread concurrency

    - by geekrutherford
    For the first time today we began conducting load testing on a ASP.NET application already in production. Obviously you would normally want to load test prior to releasing to a production environment, but that isn't the point here.   We ran a test which simulated 5 users hitting the application doing the same actions simultaneously. The first few pages visited seemed fine and then things just hung for a while before the test failed. While the test was running I was viewing the performance counters on the server noting that the CPU was consistently pegged at 100% until the testing tool gave up.   Fortunately the application logs all exceptions including those unhandled to the database (thanks to log4net). I checked the log and low and behold the error was:   System.ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added. (The rest of the stack trace intentionally omitted)   Since the code was running with debug on the line number where the exception occured was also provided. I began inspecting the code and almost immediately it hit me, the section of code responsible for the exception is trying to initialize a static class. My next question was how is this code being hit multiple times when I have a rudimentary check already in place to prevent this kind of thing (i.e. a check on a public variable of the static class before entering the initializing routine). The answer...the check fails because the value is not set before other threads have already made it through.   Not being one who consistently works with threading I wasn't quite sure how to handle this problem. Fortunately a co-worker recalled having to lock a section of code in the past but couldn't recall exactly how. After a quick search on Google the solution is as follows:   Object objLock = new Object(); lock(objLock) { //logic requiring lock }   The lock statement takes an object and tells the .NET runtime that the current thread has exclusive access while the code within brackets is executing. Once the code completes, the lock is released for another thread to utilize.   In my case, I only need to execute the inner code once to initialize my static class. So within the brackets I have a check on a public variable to prevent it from being initialized again.

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  • Capture a Query Executed By An Application Or User Against a SQL Server Database in Less Than a Minute

    - by Compudicted
    At times a Database Administrator, or even a developer is required to wear a spy’s hat. This necessity oftentimes is dictated by a need to take a glimpse into a black-box application for reasons varying from a performance issue to an unauthorized access to data or resources, or as in my most recent case, a closed source custom application that was abandoned by a deserted contractor without source code. It may not be news or unknown to most IT people that SQL Server has always provided means of back-door access to everything connecting to its database. This indispensible tool is SQL Server Profiler. This “gem” is always quietly sitting in the Start – Programs – SQL Server <product version> – Performance Tools folder (yes, it is for performance analysis mostly, but not limited to) ready to help you! So, to the action, let’s start it up. Once ready click on the File – New Trace button, or using Ctrl-N with your keyboard. The standard connection dialog you have seen in SSMS comes up where you connect the standard way: One side note here, you will be able to connect only if your account belongs to the sysadmin or alter trace fixed server role. Upon a successful connection you must be able to see this initial dialog: At this stage I will give a hint: you will have a wide variety of predefined templates: But to shorten your time to results you would need to opt for using the TSQL_Grouped template. Now you need to set it up. In some cases, you will know the principal’s login name (account) that needs to be monitored in advance, and in some (like in mine), you will not. But it is VERY helpful to monitor just a particular account to minimize the amount of results returned. So if you know it you can already go to the Event Section tab, then click the Column Filters button which would bring a dialog below where you key in the account being monitored without any mask (or whildcard):  If you do not know the principal name then you will need to poke around and look around for things like a config file where (typically!) the connection string is fully exposed. That was the case in my situation, an application had an app.config (XML) file with the connection string in it not encrypted: This made my endeavor very easy. So after I entered the account to monitor I clicked on Run button and also started my black-box application. Voilà, in a under a minute of time I had the SQL statement captured:

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  • Access to Salesforce.com Data Through Tableau Desktop

    - by dataintegration
    This article will explain how to connect to any of the RSSBus OData Connectors with Tableau's business intelligence tool. While the example uses the Salesforce Connector, the same process can be followed for any of the OData Connectors. Step 1: Download and install both the Salesforce Connector from RSSBus and Tableau Desktop from Tableau. Step 2: Next you will want to configure the Salesforce Connector to connect with your Salesforce.com account. If you browse to the Help tab in the Salesforce Connector application, there is a link to the Getting Started Guide which will walk you through setting up the Salesforce Connector. Step 3: Once you have successfully configured the Salesforce Connector application, you will want to open Tableau and select the Connect to data option at the top left of the window. Step 4: Here you will click on the option labeled OData under the section labeled On a server. Step 5: A new pop up will appear. The box under Step 1 of the pop-up must contain the OData URL of the Salesforce Connector table. You can find this by clicking on the Settings tab of the Salesforce Connector. Once you have found the OData entry URL, you will need to append the table name that you want Tableau to connect with to the OData entry URL. In this example, we will connect to the Account table. Thus, the URL we enter will be: http://localhost:8181/sfconnector/data/conn/odata.rsc/Account. You will also need to add authentication options in this step. To do this, select the Use a Username and Password option in Step 2 of the pop-up and enter the Username and Password of the user who has access to the Salesforce Connector. When you are done, click the Connect button in Step 3 of the pop-up. Step 6: When the connection to the Salesforce Connector is successful, give the connection a name and click the OK button. Step 7: The table columns will be listed on the left side under the Dimensions section of the workspace. Step 8: To view your Salesforce.com data, you can right click under the table name in the Data section at the top left of the dashboard and select the View Data option. Your Saleforce.com data will appear in Tableau.

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  • 3 Monitors, Ubuntu 12.04, Gnome 3, 2 nvidia cards, WITH xrandr or xinerama?

    - by Josh
    Ok. I have been banging my head against the wall for over a week now trying to get 3 monitors to work. I have: 1 - Nvidia 8600 GT 512MB PCIEx16 1 - Nvidia GT 240 1GB PCIEx16 They are not running in SLI (obviously). I have tried to use everything from tutorials to a few templates, all the way up to nvidia-settings, etc etc etc.. From what I hear, Xinerama doesnt like gnome 3 because of the compositing, although I have read a lot about using Xrandr instead, and getting the compositing working, but alas, I cannot. It always either crashes X and I have to replace the xorg.conf with my backup, or it defaults to the gnome-classic desktop, and on top of that, when it does default, it keeps adding more and more panels. Basically, I want to be able to use all 3 monitors (yes, just like in windows) to drag and drop from different windows. I have xorg-edit, but I am still not too sure on how to set this up? Is there any way to: A Get compositing working with 3 monitors, 2 nvidia cards, xinerama, and gnome 3? or BUse twinview with 3 monitors (I have heard it can be done by manually editing xorg.conf) or CSet up Xrandr to draw all 3 monitors with compositing. or DUse separate X for each monitor, and be able to use gnome with compositing, as well as drag between all 3 or EANYTHING. lol. I just want this to work. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. BTW, I am running an ubuntu mini install with gnome. Everything works great but this. I can run it fine with 2 monitors and compositing, but not with 3. Also, what is the best GUI tool for editing xorg.conf? Im not finding anything that is up to date at all, and also is understandable by humans. haha. Im actually an engineer by trade, and have been working with computers a LONG time, but this xorg.conf stuff is really confusing the crap out of me. lol Thanks!

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  • How can I create a flexible system for tiling a 2D RPG map?

    - by CptSupermrkt
    Using libgdx here. I've just finished learning some of the basics of creating a 2D environment and using an OrthographicCamera to view it. The tutorials I went through, however, hardcoded their tiled map in, and none made mention of how to do it any other way. By tiled map, I mean like Final Fantasy 1, where the world map is a grid of squares, each with a different texture. So for example, I've got a 6 tile x 6 tile map, using the following code: Array<Tile> tiles = new Array<Tile>(); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(0,5), TileType.FOREST)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(1,5), TileType.FOREST)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(2,5), TileType.FOREST)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(3,5), TileType.GRASS)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(4,5), TileType.STONE)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(5,5), TileType.STONE)); //... x5 more times. Given the random nature of the environment, for loops don't really help as I have to start and finish a loop before I was able to do enough to make it worth setting up the loop. I can see how a loop might be helpful for like tiling an ocean or something, but not in the above case. The above code DOES get me my final desired output, however, if I were to decide I wanted to move a piece or swap two pieces out, oh boy, what a nightmare, even with just a 6x6 test piece, much less a 1000x1000 world map. There must be a better way of doing this. Someone on some post somewhere (can't find it now, of course) said to check out MapEditor. Looks legit. The question is, if that is the answer, how can I make something in MapEditor and have the output map plug in to a variable in my code? I need the tiles as objects in my code, because for example, I determine whether or not a tile is can be passed through or collided with based on my TileTyle enum variable. Are there alternative/language "native" (i.e. not using an outside tool) methods to doing this?

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  • Cannot install "ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver" (SystemError)

    - by Fisherman John
    I have just installed a fresh copy of 12.04.1 64bit. I formatted my PC completely and enabled updates during the installation. After the installation was complete, I went on updating my software. However, when I wanted to install the additional drivers using the Additional Drivers tool (namely "ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver"), it gave me this error: SystemError: E:Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. The same error shows up if I try installing the post-release updates driver. Installing the drivers from the terminal results in this output: XXXXXX:~$ sudo apt-get install fglrx [sudo] password for XXXXX: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: fglrx : Depends: lib32gcc1 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libc6-i386 but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages." I get this using "sudo apt-get update": http://pastebin.com/AWAtDXjY But "sudo apt-get install fglrx" still get me this error: http://pastebin.com/RYM55bVN & "sudo apt-get -f install fglrx" gives me this error: http://pastebin.com/xxekajvP Any help would be greatly appreciated. (Please note that I'm new to Linux, coming directly from Windows. I have tried Ubuntu twice or so before, but it was not for a long period of time. The drivers got installed smoothly the few times I've tried Ubuntu, but post-release updates never worked for me.) [I am going to work now, so I can only answer from my phone. Can't really test any new solutions you may give me until ~10 hours from now on. Maybe more.] @stonedsquirrel When I try to run that command, I get this error: "XXXXXX:~$ sudo apt-get install fglrx [sudo] password for XXXXX: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: fglrx : Depends: lib32gcc1 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libc6-i386 but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages." ie. I get the same error. ( I am Fisherman John, dunno how to login & thereby respond to your comment again _ )

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  • WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter September 2012

    - by JuergenKress
    Dear WebLogic partner community member Happy Birthday to our WebLogic partner Community! We launched the community a year ago, it is growing fast with almost 1,000 members and with a significant impact in our business. The WebLogic partner revenue grew significant last fiscal year. I would like to thank you for your contribution. It is indeed a great opportunity for your WebLogic service revenue, like consulting, implementation or training. There will be thousands of opportunities at our joint customer base, like iAs to WebLogic migration, J2EE platform consolidation or private clouds. We will continue to highlight these opportunities in our newsletter and offer you campaign kits. Please feel free to let us know if you are interested. I would also recommend you to give us your feedback in our WebLogic Partner Community Survey 2012! Your feedback is very important for us. We continue to offer free WebLogic 12c Bootcamps across Europe. Please make sure you register asap for your local training! In addition to this we plan to offer Exalogic 2.01 Bootcamp. If you are interested to attend it then please add your details to our wiki. Our ExaLogic kit is updated with ExaLogic 2.01 ppt & training & Installation check-list & tips & Web tier roadmap. In case you want to learn more about ExaLogic, please visit Qualogy virtual demo center. We have not only released the latest version of Tuxedo 12c but Andrejus also made a Performance Audit Tool - Runtime Diagnosis for ADF Applications which is available now. We uploaded the latest WebLogic 12c and Glassfish ppt presentation for your customer meetings to the WebLogic Community Workspace (WebLogic Community membership required). Are you ready and prepared for Oracle Open World 2012? Make sure you read our tips and enjoy the conference! WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference is a wonderful online overview. Make sure you do not miss it! If you want to try WebLogic why not in the Oracle Cloud - Java Cloud Service. Our Java Guru Adam Bien published a new book Real World Java EE Patterns. If you use Java on your machine, Please make sure that you update your Java SE. Jürgen Kress Oracle WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/WebLogicnewsSeptember2012 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the WebLogic Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic Community newsletter,newsletter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Is multiple domain names and links from same IP causing poor search engine rankings?

    - by John
    I have an ecommerce website which is not doing so well in Google. I am trying to improve this of course, and am looking at some possibilities for why it isn't doing well. The website has four domain names, all of which have been indexed by Google. A few months ago I applied 301 redirects to any requests for two of the domain names so now it is down to two domain names (one is a .net, the other is a .com.au, the others were .net.au and .com). I prefer to use my main domain name (the .com.au), but one of the names has been around for a long time and has more inbound links. According to a PageRank tool, both are PR2. It is a Classic ASP site and up until recently had a lot of querystring parameters. In the last week or so I added URL rewriting so there is now no parameters for most pages. I don't do 301 redirects from the old URLs but instead I add the META canonical tag indicating the preferred new URL. At the same time I redesigned the site and improved title tags, META descriptions, and H tags but it hasn't been long enough yet for Google to index many of these yet. I also looked at what pages Google has indexed and strangely it has some strange pages in the index, there are a lot of pages which are actual keyword searches (more a bunch of random letters than an actual word). What I mean is that it is as if they had typed in something to search for in my search box - there are no links to pages like this and the only way of getting this is to type something in to the search box). So I added a META robots tag with noindex,nofollow anytime that I render pages like this. Years ago I set up a fake price comparison site which lists all my products and links back to my site. It has a different keyword rich domain name but is on the same server and same IP address. It's a completely different layout but does have the same product categories and product descriptions (although I have stripped formatting out of them so they are not identical except in text). I also have a few blog sites which again are on the same server/IP and all have advertising for the website. My questions are: What should I do with the multiple domains, just use one, or continue with two or more? Should I add 301 redirects, not just the META canonical tag? Any idea about Google indexing my search results page, and did I do the right thing with the META robots tag? Is the fake price comparison site likely to be causing problems? Are all the links to the site from other domain names but the same IP address likely to be causing problems? Thanks for any help. Sorry for so many questions in one.

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  • Understanding When Social Interactions Should Be Resolved in Another Channel

    - by Christina McKeon
    Guest Blogger: Aphrodite Brinsmead, Senior Analyst at Ovum Agents need to respond to customers’ social comments and questions quickly and in the right tone. But more importantly, they need to offer resolutions. Customers care most about how long it takes to find information rather than which channel they are using. They choose to use social media because they are comfortable with the channel and it offers a convenient way to communicate. Ideally agents will resolve questions within social media, but they need guidance as to how and when to escalate interactions to a more private channel. First, businesses should assess the way in which customers are using social media to communicate with them and categorize posts into groups: complaints, feedback, technical queries or more general support questions. They should then consider the types of interactions that can easily be handled within social media and those that need to be followed up in another channel. This will be very dependent on the industry. Examples of queries that can be resolved in social media include Shipping pricing and timeframes Outage updates and resolution plans Flight status information Product stock check Technical support videos or forum posts Availability of facilities Both customers and agents need to be educated about the types of questions they can expect to resolve within social media. As the channel matures as a customer service tool, it needs to have value other than just as a forum for complaints. Social customer service agents need the power to start a web chat or phone call Any questions where customers need to divulge personal details in order to get a resolution will need to be addressed in a private channel: a private social message, web chat, email or phone call. Customers should never disclose their date of birth, social security, credit card number, or healthcare records in a public forum. Flight issues, changes to a booking, billing queries or account updates will all need to be completed via a private interaction. Agents responding to questions on social media need the ability to start a web chat or phone call with the customer. The customer doesn’t want to have to repeat their question and the agent should be empowered to connect customer records and access account or billing information. These agents will need to be trained across different channels and should be able to view all customer communications in one application. They also need to follow up questions that began on a public forum in the initial channel to make it clear that the issue was addressed. In order to make this possible, social media needs to be integrated as part of a broader customer service strategy. Irrespective of how many channels are used to complete an interaction, businesses should prioritize customer satisfaction and issue resolution. They need a clear strategy and trained agents that can handle and respond to social interactions. Follow me on Twitter @diteb. 

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  • High-Powered Sites for low Cost

    - by HighAltitudeCoder
    Ahh, I am experiencing the intimidation of my very first post - visible by the whole world. Ok, here goes.   This first post is nothing exceptional.  It is simply a recommendation based (fittingly, I suppose) upon the job search you may be gearing up for.  I find myself in this very situation right now.  And, I will take my own recommendation after posting this entry. Job-Seekers: To the left you will notice two links under "Recommended Learning".  I have found these links to be invaluable when it comes to re-tooling, re-familiarizing, or otherwise resharping my skills when looking for that next job. Often, you will find job-postings with the text, usually posted after a laborious list of qualifications indicating the company's desire to hire candidates who know what they are doing: "...Looking for a candidate who can hit the ground running...".  The interesting thing about this post to me is I've encountered many individuals who, after speaking and working with them for some time, I've realized are perfectly capable of hitting the ground running - and FAST.  But what if they speed off in the wrong direction? The next time you spearhead a major task in your job, ask yourself: Am I headed in the wrong direction?  There are many ways to do this.  In fact, I've found in this new field there are more tempting ways to steer your project in the wrong direction than there are good ones.  I don't want to suggest that every one of my posts will fall into the "right direction" category, however I do think a healthy dose of introspection of the pros and cons will always be beneficial before you set off. That said, allow me to expound on the previously mentioned links. These web sites are invaluable.  They demonstrate the capabilities of existing as well as new and upcoming tools available in several IDE's.  I've viewed many tutorials in LearnVisualStudio.NET, and only one or two so far in TrainingSpot, however I've been delighted in their simplicity and straightforward approach to proper usage of the particular tool or concept being discussed.  They have not (so far in my experience) demonstrated ways in which to use the tools that become cumbersome, impractical, or error-prone. Each website has step-by-step videos that can be paused, replayed, and most importantly, they are done in real time.  As the author is typing, the viewer gets to experience the coding experience from a first-person perspective, including syntax errors, unexpected behaviors, IDE setup idiosyncracies, everything.  A subtle value I've gained from these videos is that a certain degree of confusion and introspection is normal when working with new tools and exploring new paths.  They (as well as your own experience) are not to be feared, but enjoyed.  I highly recommend them. Good work, guys!

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