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  • Browsing Your ADF Application Module Pooling Params with WLST

    - by Duncan Mills
    In ADF 11g you can of course use Enterprise Manager (EM) to browse and configure the settings used by ADF Business Components  Application Modules, as shown here for one of my sample deployed applications. This screen you can access from the EM homepage by pulling down the Application Deployment menu, and then ADF > Configure ADF Business Components. Then select the profile that you are actually using (Hint: look in the DataBindings.cpx file to work this out - probably the "Local" version unless you've explicitly changed it. )So, from this screen you can change the pooling parameters and the world is good. But what if you don't have EM installed? In that case you can use the WebLogic scripting capabilities to view (and Update) the MBean Properties. Explanation The pooling parameters and many others are handled through Message Driven Beans that are created for the deployed application in the server. In the case of the ADF BC pooling parameters, this MBean will combine the configuration deployed as part of the application, along with any overrides defined as -D environement commands on the JVM startup for the application server instance. Using WLST to Browse the Bean ValuesFor our purposes here I'm doing this interactively, although you can also write a script or write Java to achieve the same thing.Step 0: Before You Start You will need the followingAccess to the console on the machine that is running the serverThe WebLogic Admin username and password (I'll use weblogic/password as my example here - yours will be different)The name of the deployed application (in this example FMWdh_application1)The package path to the bc4j.xcfg file (in this example oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg) This is based on the default path for your model project so it shoudl be fairly easy to work out.The BC configuration your AM is actually running with (look in the DataBindings.cpx for that. In this example DealHelpServiceDeployed is the profile being used..)Step 1: Start the WLST consoleTo start at the beginning, you need to run the WLST command but that needs a little setup:Change to the wlserver_10.3/server/bin directory e.g. under your Fusion Middleware Home[oracle@mymachine] cd /home/oracle/FMW_R1/wlserver_10.3/server/binSet your environment using the setWLSEnv script. e.g. on Oracle Enterprise Linux:[oracle@mymachine bin] source setWLSEnv.shStart the WLST interactive console[oracle@mymachine bin] java weblogic.WLSTInitializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ...Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting ShellType help() for help on available commandswls:/offline> Step 2:Enter the WLST commandsConnect to the server wls:> connect('weblogic','password')Change to the Custom root, this is where the AMPooling MBeans are registered wls:> custom()Change to the b4j MBean directorywls:> cd ('oracle.bc4j.mbean.config')Work out the correct directory for the AM configuration you need. This is the difficult bit, not because it's hard to do, but because the names are long. The structure here is such that every child MBean is displayed at the same level as the parent, so for each deployed application there will be many directories shown. In fact, do an ls() command here and you'll see what I mean. Each application will have one MBean for the app as a whole, and then for each deployed configuration in the .xcfg file you'll see: One for the config entry itself, and then one each for Security, DB Connection and AM Pooling. So if you deploy an app with just one configuration you'll see 5 directories, if it has two configurations in the .xcfg you'll see 9 and so on.The directory you are looking for will contain those bits of information you gathered in Step 0, specifically the Application Name, the configuration you are using and the xcfg name: First of all narrow your list to just those directories returned from the ls() command that begin oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool. These identify the AM pooling MBeans for all the deployed applications. Now look for the correct application name e.g. Application=FMWdh_application1The config setting in that sub-list should already be correct and match what you expect e.g. oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfgFinally look for the correct value for the AppModuleConfigType e.g. oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployedNow you have identified the correct directory name, change to that (keep the name on one line of course - I've had to split it across lines here for clarity:wls:> cd ('oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool,     type=oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType.AMPoolType,    oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg,    Application=FMWdh_application1,    oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployed') Now you can actually view the parameter values with a simple ls() commandwls:> ls()And here's the output in which you can view the realtime values of the various pool settings: -rw- AmpoolConnectionstrategyclass oracle.jbo.common.ampool.DefaultConnectionStrategy -rw- AmpoolDoampooling true -rw- AmpoolDynamicjdbccredentials false -rw- AmpoolInitpoolsize 2 -rw- AmpoolIsuseexclusive true -rw- AmpoolMaxavailablesize 40 -rw- AmpoolMaxinactiveage 600000 -rw- AmpoolMaxpoolsize 4096 -rw- AmpoolMinavailablesize 2 -rw- AmpoolMonitorsleepinterval 600000 -rw- AmpoolResetnontransactionalstate true -rw- AmpoolSessioncookiefactoryclass oracle.jbo.common.ampool.DefaultSessionCookieFactory -rw- AmpoolTimetolive 3600000 -rw- AmpoolWritecookietoclient false -r-- ConfigMBean true -rw- ConnectionPoolManager oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPoolManagerImpl -rw- Doconnectionpooling false -rw- Dofailover false -rw- Initpoolsize 0 -rw- Maxpoolcookieage -1 -rw- Maxpoolsize 4096 -rw- Poolmaxavailablesize 25 -rw- Poolmaxinactiveage 600000 -rw- Poolminavailablesize 5 -rw- Poolmonitorsleepinterval 600000 -rw- Poolrequesttimeout 30000 -rw- Pooltimetolive -1 -r-- ReadOnly false -rw- Recyclethreshold 10 -r-- RestartNeeded false -r-- SystemMBean false -r-- eventProvider true -r-- eventTypes java.lang.String[jmx.attribute.change] -r-- objectName oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool,type=oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType.AMPoolType,oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg,Application=FMWdh_application1,oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployed -rw- poolClassName oracle.jbo.common.ampool.ApplicationPoolImpl Thanks to Brian Fry on the JDeveloper PM Team who did most of the work to put this sequence of steps together with me badgering him over his shoulder.

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  • ISO Files to USB &ndash; The Cheap and Easy Way

    - by RonGarlit
    (DISCLAIMER: Yes there are lots of more elegant ISO software beside the free Microsoft one I’m about to show. But free is free and it has been tested and works for me for making advance bootable USB drives. That is another story. Look up Windows 8 Developer Preview for that one on BING.) For those of use that work with new technology all the time we accumulate a lot of ISO files and have to burn them to CD/DVD’s quite often. But we now have machines without burner in the corporate environment. We have personally Netbooks and light wait highly mobile laptops that do not have DVD burner. USB ports are all the rage and now we have USB 3.0 which is way faster than the 2.0 we are used to. Just looking at the technology, space saving and the cost issues alone is a reason to buy these answer to the DVD’s. So what is special about USB 2.0 and USB 3.0? USB 2 has a maximum speed of 480 Mbps... (That is Megabits per SECOND!!) Now look at the storage that we have with USB thumb drives that are now up to 64 GB in size, cell phone and PDAs that have a lots of internal storage built in well above the 16 Gig range. At the MAX USB 2.0 speed of 480 Mbps a full transfer of data in between devices can take a long time. Time is money right. Every back up a iPhone? Don’t get me started. So at least the engineers have been planning ahead with USB 3.0 which offers a maximum transfer speed of 4.8 Gbps... (That is Giga bits per SECOND!!) That speed is almost 10 times faster than USB 2.0 …. We don’t need to do the math on that one do we? But for now I'm thrilled with USB 2.0 and the fact I can get these little 4 Gig USB drives for $4.00 each at Staples on sale. Well that is a no brainer don’t you think. But what can you do with them to replace that DVD. Simply and cheaply put………. THIS! First let’s get an ISO file like the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate DVD ISO from MSDN to demonstrate with. I develop on several computers so this is a good choice for me. So we downloaded the ISO file and put it in a folder somewhere like this. Next we go download to the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool site and read about the tool. http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool And click this like to get the tool and install it. Once it is installed you go to the Start, Programs menu, Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool folder. And then click the tool to open it up. As you will see it is a sweet, simple tool that was originally designed to put the ISO for Windows 7 which is designed to be bootable on a USB or DVD for us geeks to play with. It is now being used for the Windows 8 Developer Preview by many developers for that for the same purpose it was built for in the past. But for now we will use it to put a NON Bootable ISO on a USB. Hey it does the job and I’m reusing a left over program. Why buy the fancy one or a free trial and clutter up my machine. We will click the BROWSE button and navigate to where we put our ISO file we want to put on the USB drive. Obviously we are going to click NEXT and continue to select a USB Device (you can guess what the DVD button is for). Next we select the USB that we have plugged into one of our laptops USB ports. Then we click the BEGIN COPYING button and the first thing the program does is format our USB drive. Then it starts copying out files out of the ISO and constructing the USB as if it was a DVD. So now that the files are copying to the drive I’m going to warn you. We will error out here. This program was design for bootable ISO’s of which this one is NOT. No problem because what fails it the writing of the bootable data to the drive that isn’t there. No biggie…. Forget the STARTOVER button is even there and click the dialog’s CLOSE button and exit the program. Now go to Windows Explorer and navigate to the USB Device. You can now access everything and even add stuff to the drive. But for me I want to keep this drive for one purpose and that is to install VS2010 on various machines. So the only stuff I’ll add to this is a folder of notes on things on visual studio that I might want to put on other machines I’m installing VS2010 on to. So that is it. Have a nice day! The Ron

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  • ASP.NET MVC: Converting business objects to select list items

    - by DigiMortal
    Some of our business classes are used to fill dropdown boxes or select lists. And often you have some base class for all your business classes. In this posting I will show you how to use base business class to write extension method that converts collection of business objects to ASP.NET MVC select list items without writing a lot of code. BusinessBase, BaseEntity and other base classes I prefer to have some base class for all my business classes so I can easily use them regardless of their type in contexts I need. NB! Some guys say that it is good idea to have base class for all your business classes and they also suggest you to have mappings done same way in database. Other guys say that it is good to have base class but you don’t have to have one master table in database that contains identities of all your business objects. It is up to you how and what you prefer to do but whatever you do – think and analyze first, please. :) To keep things maximally simple I will use very primitive base class in this example. This class has only Id property and that’s it. public class BaseEntity {     public virtual long Id { get; set; } } Now we have Id in base class and we have one more question to solve – how to better visualize our business objects? To users ID is not enough, they want something more informative. We can define some abstract property that all classes must implement. But there is also another option we can use – overriding ToString() method in our business classes. public class Product : BaseEntity {     public virtual string SKU { get; set; }     public virtual string Name { get; set; }       public override string ToString()     {         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Name))             return base.ToString();           return Name;     } } Although you can add more functionality and properties to your base class we are at point where we have what we needed: identity and human readable presentation of business objects. Writing list items converter Now we can write method that creates list items for us. public static class BaseEntityExtensions {            public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems<T>         (this IList<T> baseEntities) where T : BaseEntity     {         return ToSelectListItems((IEnumerator<BaseEntity>)                    baseEntities.GetEnumerator());     }       public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems         (this IEnumerator<BaseEntity> baseEntities)     {         var items = new HashSet<SelectListItem>();           while (baseEntities.MoveNext())         {             var item = new SelectListItem();             var entity = baseEntities.Current;               item.Value = entity.Id.ToString();             item.Text = entity.ToString();               items.Add(item);         }           return items;     } } You can see here to overloads of same method. One works with List<T> and the other with IEnumerator<BaseEntity>. Although mostly my repositories return IList<T> when querying data there are always situations where I can use more abstract types and interfaces. Using extension methods in code In your code you can use ToSelectListItems() extension methods like shown on following code fragment. ... var model = new MyFormModel(); model.Statuses = _myRepository.ListStatuses().ToSelectListItems(); ... You can call this method on all your business classes that extend your base entity. Wanna have some fun with this code? Write overload for extension method that accepts selected item ID.

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  • Download Microsoft MSDN Magazine PDF Issues For Offline Reading

    - by Kavitha
    MSDN Magazine is a must read for every Microsoft developer. It provides in-depth analysis and excellent guides on all the latest Microsoft development tools and technologies. Every month one can grab this magazine on the stands or read it online for free. What if you want to read the magazine offline on your PC or mobile devices? Just grab a PDF version of the magazine and read it whenever you want. The PDF version of MSDN magazines are very handy for travellers who don’t get access to internet always. In this post we are going to provide you links to download PDF version, source code and online version of every month MSDN Magazine issue starting from 2010. Bookmark this post and keep checking it monthly to get access to MSDN Magazine links. December 2010 Issue    Download PDF(not yet available)    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online        November 2010 Issue    Download PDF (not yet available)    Read Magazine Online    Download Source Code       October 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online        September 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       August 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       July 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       June 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       May 2010 Issue      Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       April 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Read Magazine Online    Download Source Code       March 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       February 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       January 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online This article titled,Download Microsoft MSDN Magazine PDF Issues For Offline Reading, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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  • Clean up after Visual Studio

    - by psheriff
    As programmer’s we know that if we create a temporary file during the running of our application we need to make sure it is removed when the application or process is complete. We do this, but why can’t Microsoft do it? Visual Studio leaves tons of temporary files all over your hard drive. This is why, over time, your computer loses hard disk space. This blog post will show you some of the most common places where these files are left and which ones you can safely delete..NET Left OversVisual Studio is a great development environment for creating applications quickly. However, it will leave a lot of miscellaneous files all over your hard drive. There are a few locations on your hard drive that you should be checking to see if there are left-over folders or files that you can delete. I have attempted to gather as much data as I can about the various versions of .NET and operating systems. Of course, your mileage may vary on the folders and files I list here. In fact, this problem is so prevalent that PDSA has created a Computer Cleaner specifically for the Visual Studio developer.  Instructions for downloading our PDSA Developer Utilities (of which Computer Cleaner is one) are at the end of this blog entry.Each version of Visual Studio will create “temporary” files in different folders. The problem is that the files created are not always “temporary”. Most of the time these files do not get cleaned up like they should. Let’s look at some of the folders that you should periodically review and delete files within these folders.Temporary ASP.NET FilesAs you create and run ASP.NET applications from Visual Studio temporary files are placed into the <sysdrive>:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework[64]\<vernum>\Temporary ASP.NET Files folder. The folders and files under this folder can be removed with no harm to your development computer. Do not remove the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder itself, just the folders underneath this folder. If you use IIS for ASP.NET development, you may need to run the iisreset.exe utility from the command prompt prior to deleting any files/folder under this folder. IIS will sometimes keep files in use in this folder and iisreset will release the locks so the files/folders can be deleted.Website CacheThis folder is similar to the ASP.NET Temporary Files folder in that it contains files from ASP.NET applications run from Visual Studio. This folder is located in each users local settings folder. The location will be a little different on each operating system. For example on Windows Vista/Windows 7, the folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. If you are running Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. Check these locations periodically and delete all files and folders under this directory.Visual Studio BackupThis backup folder is used by Visual Studio to store temporary files while you develop in Visual Studio. This folder never gets cleaned out, so you should periodically delete all files and folders under this directory. On Windows XP, this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\My Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\Backup Files. On Windows Vista/Windows 7 this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\.Assembly CacheNo, this is not the global assembly cache (GAC). It appears that this cache is only created when doing WPF or Silverlight development with Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010. This folder is located in <sysdrive>:\ Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\assembly\dl3 on Windows Vista/Windows 7. On Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly. If you have not done any WPF or Silverlight development, you may not find this particular folder on your machine.Project AssembliesThis is yet another folder where Visual Studio stores temporary files. You will find a folder for each project you have opened and worked on. This folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies on Windows XP. On Microsoft Vista/Windows 7 you will find this folder at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies.Remember not all of these folders will appear on your particular machine. Which ones do show up will depend on what version of Visual Studio you are using, whether or not you are doing desktop or web development, and the operating system you are using.SummaryTaking the time to periodically clean up after Visual Studio will aid in keeping your computer running quickly and increase the space on your hard drive. Another place to make sure you are cleaning up is your TEMP folder. Check your OS settings for the location of your particular TEMP folder and be sure to delete any files in here that are not in use. I routinely clean up the files and folders described in this blog post and I find that I actually eliminate errors in Visual Studio and I increase my hard disk space.NEW! PDSA has just published a “pre-release” of our PDSA Developer Utilities at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities that contains a Computer Cleaner utility which will clean up the above-mentioned folders, as well as a lot of other miscellaneous folders that get Visual Studio build-up. You can download a free trial at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities. If you wish to purchase our utilities through the month of November, 2011 you can use the RSVP code: DUNOV11 to get them for only $39. This is $40 off the regular price.NOTE: You can download this article and many samples like the one shown in this blog entry at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips and Tricks”, then “Developer Machine Clean Up” from the drop down list.Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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  • Juniper Strategy, LLC is hiring SharePoint Developers&hellip;

    - by Mark Rackley
    Isn’t everybody these days? It seems as though there are definitely more jobs than qualified devs these days, but yes, we are looking for a few good devs to help round out our burgeoning SharePoint team. Juniper Strategy is located in the DC area, however we will consider remote devs for the right fit. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a bright company that truly “gets it” when it comes to SharePoint, Project Management, and Information Assurance. We need like-minded people who “get it”, enjoy it, and who are looking for more than just a job. We have government and commercial opportunities as well as our own internal product that has a bright future of its own. Our immediate needs are for SharePoint .NET developers, but feel free to submit your resume for us to keep on file as it looks as though we’ll need several people in the coming months. Please email us your resume and salary requirements to [email protected] Below are our official job postings. Thanks for stopping by, we look forward to  hearing from you. Senior SharePoint .NET Developer Senior developer will focus on design and coding of custom, end-to-end business process solutions within the SharePoint framework. Senior developer with the ability to serve as a senior developer/mentor and manage day-to-day development tasks. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. For selected development path, prepare technical specification and build the solution. Assist project manager with defining development task schedule and level-of-effort. Lead technical solution deployment. Job Requirements Minimum of 7 years experience in agile development, with at least 3 years of SharePoint-related development experience (SPS, SharePoint 2007/2010, WSS2-4). Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Experience with using multiple data sources/repositories for database CRUD activities, including relational databases, SAP, Oracle e-Business. Experience with designing and deploying performance-based solutions in SharePoint for business processes that involve a very large number of records. Experience designing dynamic dashboards and mashups with data from multiple sources (internal to SharePoint as well as from external sources). Experience designing custom forms to facilitate user data entry, both with and without leveraging Forms Services. Experience building custom web part solutions. Experience with designing custom solutions for processing underlying business logic requirements including, but not limited to, SQL stored procedures, C#/ASP.Net workflows/event handlers (including timer jobs) to support multi-tiered decision trees and associated computations. Ability to create complex solution packages for deployment (e.g., feature-stapled site definitions). Must have impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal. Seeking a "tinkerer"; proactive with a thirst for knowledge (and a sense of humor). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. Applicants must pass a skills assessment test. MCP/MCTS or comparable certification preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable SharePoint Project Lead Define project task schedule, work breakdown structure and level-of-effort. Serve as principal liaison to the customer to manage deliverables and expectations. Day-to-day project and team management, including preparation and maintenance of project plans, budgets, and status reports. Prepare technical briefings and presentation decks, provide briefs to C-level stakeholders. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. The SharePoint Project Lead will be working with SharePoint architects and system owners to perform requirements/gap analysis and develop the underlying functional specifications. Once we have functional specifications as close to "final" as possible, the Project Lead will be responsible for preparation of the associated technical specification/development blueprint, along with assistance in preparing IV&V/test plan materials with support from other team members. This person will also be responsible for day-to-day management of "developers", but is also expected to engage in development directly as needed.  Job Requirements Minimum 8 years of technology project management across the software development life-cycle, with a minimum of 3 years of project management relating specifically to SharePoint (SPS 2003, SharePoint2007/2010) and/or Project Server. Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Ability to interact and collaborate effectively with team members and stakeholders of different skill sets, personalities and needs. General "development" skill set required is a fundamental understanding of MOSS 2007 Enterprise, SP1/SP2, from the top-level of skinning to the core of the SharePoint object model. Impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal, and a sense of humor are required. The projects will require being at a client site at least 50% of the time in Washington DC (NW DC) and Maryland (near Suitland). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. PMP certification, PgMP preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable

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  • SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

    What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!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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  • Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT

    - by barry.perkins
    When the age of computing started, technology was new, exciting, full of potential and had a long way to grow. Vendor architectures were proprietary, and limited in function at first, growing in capability and complexity over time. There were few if any "standards", let alone "open standards" and the concepts of "open systems", and "open architectures" were far in the future. Companies employed intelligent, talented and creative people to implement the best possible solutions for their company. At first, those solutions were "unique" to each company. As time progressed, standards emerged, companies shared knowledge, business capability supplied by technology grew, and companies continued to expand their use of technology. Taking advantage of change required companies to struggle through periodic "revolutionary" change cycles, struggling through costly changes that were fraught with risk, resulted in solutions with an increasingly shorter half-life, and frequently required altering existing business processes and retraining employees and partner businesses. The pace of technological invention and implementation grew at an ever increasing rate, making the "revolutionary" approach based upon "proprietary" or "closed" architectures or technologies no longer viable. Concurrent with the advancement of technology, the rate of change in business increased, leading us to the incredibly fast paced, highly charged, and competitive global economy that we have today, where the most successful companies are companies that are good at implementing, leveraging and exploiting change. Fast forward to today, a world where dramatic changes in business and technology happen continually, a world where "evolutionary" change is crucial. Companies can no longer afford to build "unique IT", nor can they afford regular intervals of "revolutionary" change, with the associated costs and risks. Human ingenuity was once again up to the task, turning technology into a platform supporting business through evolutionary change, by employing "open": open standards; open systems; open architectures; and open solutions. Employing "open", enables companies to implement systems based upon technology, capability and standards that will evolve over time, providing a solid platform upon which a company can drive business needs, requirements, functions, and processes down into the technology, rather than exposing technology to the business, allowing companies to focus on providing "unique business value" rather than "unique IT". The big question! Does moving from "older" technology that no longer meets the needs of today's business, to new "open" technology require yet another "revolutionary change"? A "revolutionary" change with a short half-life, camouflaging reality with great marketing? The answer is "perhaps". With the endless options available to choose from, it is entirely possible to implement a solution that may work well today, but in 5 years time will become yet another albatross for the company to bear. Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution. There is no such thing as a "1 size fits all" IT solution for business. If all companies implemented business solutions based upon technology that required, or forced the same business processes across all businesses in an industry, it would be extremely difficult to show competitive advantage through "unique business value". It would be equally difficult to "evolve" to meet or exceed business needs and keep up with today's rapid pace of change. How does one ensure that they do not jump from one trap directly into another? Or to put it positively, there are solutions available today that can address these challenges and issues. How does one ensure that the buying decision of today will serve the business well for years into the future? Intelligent & Informed decisions - "buying right" In a previous blog entry, we discussed the value of linking tactical to strategic The key is driving the focus to what is best for your business, handling today's tactical issues while also aligning with a roadmap/strategy that is tightly aligned with your strategic business objectives. When considering the plethora of possible options that provide various approaches to solving today's complex business problems, it is extremely important to ensure that vendors supplying those options, focus on what is best for your business, supplying sufficient information, providing adequate answers to questions, addressing challenges, issues, concerns and objections honestly and openly, and focus on supplying solutions that are tailored for, and deliver the most business value possible for your business. Here are a few questions to consider relative to the proposed options that should help ensure that today's solution doesn't become tomorrow's problem. Do the proposed solutions: Solve the problem(s) you are trying to address? Provide a solid foundation upon which to grow/enhance your business? Provide tactical gains that align with and enable your strategic business goals/objectives? Provide an infrastructure that can be leveraged with subsequent projects? Solve problems for the business overall, the lines of business, or just IT? Simplify your current environment Provide the basis for business: Efficiency Agility Clarity governance, risk, compliance real time business visibility and trend analysis Does your IT staff have the knowledge/experience to successfully manage the proposed systems once they are deployed in production? Done well, you will be presented with options tailored to your business, that enable you to drive the "unique business value" necessary to help your business stand out from others, creating a distinct competitive advantage, delivering what your customers need, when they need it, so you can attract new customers, new business, and grow top line revenue, all at a cost that provides a strong Return on Investment/Return on Assets. The net result is growth with managed cost providing significantly improved profit margin and shareholder value.

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  • JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010

    - by ScottGu
    This is the twentieth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s blog post covers some of the nice improvements coming with JavaScript intellisense with VS 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.  You’ll find with VS 2010 that JavaScript Intellisense loads much faster for large script files and with large libraries, and that it now provides statement completion support for more advanced scenarios compared to previous versions of Visual Studio. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Improved JavaScript Intellisense Providing Intellisense for a dynamic language like JavaScript is more involved than doing so with a statically typed language like VB or C#.  Correctly inferring the shape and structure of variables, methods, etc is pretty much impossible without pseudo-executing the actual code itself – since JavaScript as a language is flexible enough to dynamically modify and morph these things at runtime.  VS 2010’s JavaScript code editor now has the smarts to perform this type of pseudo-code execution as you type – which is how its intellisense completion is kept accurate and complete.  Below is a simple walkthrough that shows off how rich and flexible it is with the final release. Scenario 1: Basic Type Inference When you declare a variable in JavaScript you do not have to declare its type.  Instead, the type of the variable is based on the value assigned to it.  Because VS 2010 pseudo-executes the code within the editor, it can dynamically infer the type of a variable, and provide the appropriate code intellisense based on the value assigned to a variable. For example, notice below how VS 2010 provides statement completion for a string (because we assigned a string to the “foo” variable): If we later assign a numeric value to “foo” the statement completion (after this assignment) automatically changes to provide intellisense for a number: Scenario 2: Intellisense When Manipulating Browser Objects It is pretty common with JavaScript to manipulate the DOM of a page, as well as work against browser objects available on the client.  Previous versions of Visual Studio would provide JavaScript statement completion against the standard browser objects – but didn’t provide much help with more advanced scenarios (like creating dynamic variables and methods).  VS 2010’s pseudo-execution of code within the editor now allows us to provide rich intellisense for a much broader set of scenarios. For example, below we are using the browser’s window object to create a global variable named “bar”.  Notice how we can now get intellisense (with correct type inference for a string) with VS 2010 when we later try and use it: When we assign the “bar” variable as a number (instead of as a string) the VS 2010 intellisense engine correctly infers its type and modifies statement completion appropriately to be that of a number instead: Scenario 3: Showing Off Because VS 2010 is psudo-executing code within the editor, it is able to handle a bunch of scenarios (both practical and wacky) that you throw at it – and is still able to provide accurate type inference and intellisense. For example, below we are using a for-loop and the browser’s window object to dynamically create and name multiple dynamic variables (bar1, bar2, bar3…bar9).  Notice how the editor’s intellisense engine identifies and provides statement completion for them: Because variables added via the browser’s window object are also global variables – they also now show up in the global variable intellisense drop-down as well: Better yet – type inference is still fully supported.  So if we assign a string to a dynamically named variable we will get type inference for a string.  If we assign a number we’ll get type inference for a number.  Just for fun (and to show off!) we could adjust our for-loop to assign a string for even numbered variables (bar2, bar4, bar6, etc) and assign a number for odd numbered variables (bar1, bar3, bar5, etc): Notice above how we get statement completion for a string for the “bar2” variable.  Notice below how for “bar1” we get statement completion for a number:   This isn’t just a cool pet trick While the above example is a bit contrived, the approach of dynamically creating variables, methods and event handlers on the fly is pretty common with many Javascript libraries.  Many of the more popular libraries use these techniques to keep the size of script library downloads as small as possible.  VS 2010’s support for parsing and pseudo-executing libraries that use these techniques ensures that you get better code Intellisense out of the box when programming against them. Summary Visual Studio 2010 (and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express) now provide much richer JavaScript intellisense support.  This support works with pretty much all popular JavaScript libraries.  It should help provide a much better development experience when coding client-side JavaScript and enabling AJAX scenarios within your ASP.NET applications. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. You can read my previous blog post on VS 2008’s JavaScript Intellisense to learn more about our previous JavaScript intellisense (and some of the scenarios it supported).  VS 2010 obviously supports all of the scenarios previously enabled with VS 2008.

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  • Simultaneously calling multiple methods on a WCF service from silverlight

    - by ola karlsson
    A while back I had to debug some performance issues in an existing Silverlight app, as the problem / solution was a bit obscure and finding info about it was quite tricky, I thought I’d share, maybe it can help the next person with this problem. The App On start, the app would do a number of calls to different methods on a WCF service, this to populate the UI with the necessary data. Recently one of those services had been changed and was now taking quite a bit longer than it used to. This was resulting in quite a long loading time for the whole UI, which was set up so it wouldn’t let the user interact with anything, until all the service calls had finished. First I broke out the longer running service call from the others, then removed the constraint that it had to be loaded for the UI in general to become responsive. I also added a loading indicator just on that area of the UI, thinking that the main UI would load while this particular section could keep loading independently. The Problem However this is where things started to get a bit strange. I found that even after these changes, the main UI wouldn’t activate until the long running call returned. So now, I did what I should have done to start with, I got Fiddler out and had a look at what was really happening. What I found was that, once the call to the long running service method was placed, all subsequent call were waiting for that one to return before executing. Not having really worked with WCF previously or knowing much about it in general, I was stumped… I knew of the issues where Silverlight is restricted by the browsers networking features in regards to number of simultaneous connections etc. However that just didn’t seem to be the issue here, you can clearly see in Fiddler that there’s numerous calls, but they’re just not returning. I thought of the problem maybe being in the WCF service, but the calls were really not that complicated and surely the service should be able to handle a lot more than what I was throwing at it! So I did what every developer does in this type of scenario, I hit the search engines. I did a whole bunch of searching on things like “multiple simultaneous WCF calls from Silverlight” and “Calling long running WCF services from Silverlight” etc. etc. This however, pretty much got me nowhere, I found a whole heap of resources on how to do WCF calls from Silverlight but most of them were very basic and of no use what so ever. The fog is clearing It wasn’t until I came across the term “ WCF blocking calls” and started incorporating that in my searches I started to get somewhere. Those searches quite quickly brought me to the following thread in the Silverlight forum “Long-running WCF call blocking subsequent calls” which discussed the exact problem I was facing and the best part, one of the guys there had the solution! The short answer is in the forum post and the guys answering, has also done a more extensive blog post about it called “Silverlight, WCF, and ASP.Net Configuration Gotchas” which covers it very well.  So come on what’s the solution?! I heard you ask, unless you’ve already gone to the links and looked it up ;) The Solution Well, it turns out that the issue is founded in a mix of Silverlight, Asp.Net and WCF, basically if you’re doing multiple calls to a single WCF web-service and you have Asp.Net session state enabled, the calls will be executed sequentially by the service, hence any long running calls will block subsequent ones. So why is Asp.Net session state effecting us, we’re working in Silverlight, right? We'll as mentioned earlier, by default Silverlight uses the browsers networking stack when doing service calls, hence to the WCF service, the call looks like it might as well be coming from a normal Asp.Net. To get around this, we look to a feature introduced in Silverlight 3, namely the Client HTTP Stack. The Client HTTP Stack to the rescue By using the following syntax (for example in our App.xaml.cs, Application_Startup method) WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp); we can set our Silverlight application to use the Client HTTP Stack, which incidentally solves our problem! By using Silverlights own networking stack, rather than that of the browser, we get around the Asp.Net - WCF session state issue. The above code specifies that all calls to addresses starting with “http://” should go through the client stack, this can actually be set more granular and you can specify it to be used only for certain domains etc. Summary The actual solution is well covered in the forum and blog posts I link to above. This post is more about sharing my experience, hopefully helping to spread the word about this and maybe make it a bit easier for the next poor guy with this issue to find the solution. Until next time, Ola

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  • An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration

    - by Brian Schroer
    Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law of Demeter: Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler” is the popular paraphrase, but what he actually said was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”, an overly complicated quote which is an obvious violation of Einstein’s Razor. (You can tell by looking at a picture of Einstein that the dude was hardly an expert on razors or other grooming apparati.) Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. - O'Toole's Corollary: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Morris’s Corollary: “…including Common Lisp”) Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Issawi’s Omelet Analogy: One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. Jackson’s Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. Kaner’s Caveat: A program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program. Liskov Substitution Principle (paraphrased): Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it Mason’s Maxim: Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do. Nils-Peter Nelson’s Nil I/O Rule: The fastest I/O is no I/O.    Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Quentin Tarantino’s Pie Principle: “…you want to go home have a drink and go and eat pie and talk about it.” (OK, he was talking about movies, not software, but I couldn’t find a “Q” quote about software. And wouldn’t it be cool to write a program so great that the users want to eat pie and talk about it?) Raymond’s Rule: Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.  Sowa's Law of Standards: Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. Turing’s Tenet: We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers.  Udi Dahan’s Race Condition Rule: If you think you have a race condition, you don’t understand the domain well enough. These rules didn’t exist in the age of paper, there is no reason for them to exist in the age of computers. When you have race conditions, go back to the business and find out actual rules. Van Vleck’s Kvetching: We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer -- and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. Wheeler’s Law: All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Wheeler also said “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”. The Wrong Road Rule of Mr. X (anonymous): No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back. Yourdon’s Rule of Two Feet: If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Zawinski is also responsible for “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.” He once commented about X Windows widget toolkits: “Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.”

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  • Big Data – What is Big Data – 3 Vs of Big Data – Volume, Velocity and Variety – Day 2 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    Data is forever. Think about it – it is indeed true. Are you using any application as it is which was built 10 years ago? Are you using any piece of hardware which was built 10 years ago? The answer is most certainly No. However, if I ask you – are you using any data which were captured 50 years ago, the answer is most certainly Yes. For example, look at the history of our nation. I am from India and we have documented history which goes back as over 1000s of year. Well, just look at our birthday data – atleast we are using it till today. Data never gets old and it is going to stay there forever.  Application which interprets and analysis data got changed but the data remained in its purest format in most cases. As organizations have grown the data associated with them also grew exponentially and today there are lots of complexity to their data. Most of the big organizations have data in multiple applications and in different formats. The data is also spread out so much that it is hard to categorize with a single algorithm or logic. The mobile revolution which we are experimenting right now has completely changed how we capture the data and build intelligent systems.  Big organizations are indeed facing challenges to keep all the data on a platform which give them a  single consistent view of their data. This unique challenge to make sense of all the data coming in from different sources and deriving the useful actionable information out of is the revolution Big Data world is facing. Defining Big Data The 3Vs that define Big Data are Variety, Velocity and Volume. Volume We currently see the exponential growth in the data storage as the data is now more than text data. We can find data in the format of videos, musics and large images on our social media channels. It is very common to have Terabytes and Petabytes of the storage system for enterprises. As the database grows the applications and architecture built to support the data needs to be reevaluated quite often. Sometimes the same data is re-evaluated with multiple angles and even though the original data is the same the new found intelligence creates explosion of the data. The big volume indeed represents Big Data. Velocity The data growth and social media explosion have changed how we look at the data. There was a time when we used to believe that data of yesterday is recent. The matter of the fact newspapers is still following that logic. However, news channels and radios have changed how fast we receive the news. Today, people reply on social media to update them with the latest happening. On social media sometimes a few seconds old messages (a tweet, status updates etc.) is not something interests users. They often discard old messages and pay attention to recent updates. The data movement is now almost real time and the update window has reduced to fractions of the seconds. This high velocity data represent Big Data. Variety Data can be stored in multiple format. For example database, excel, csv, access or for the matter of the fact, it can be stored in a simple text file. Sometimes the data is not even in the traditional format as we assume, it may be in the form of video, SMS, pdf or something we might have not thought about it. It is the need of the organization to arrange it and make it meaningful. It will be easy to do so if we have data in the same format, however it is not the case most of the time. The real world have data in many different formats and that is the challenge we need to overcome with the Big Data. This variety of the data represent  represent Big Data. Big Data in Simple Words Big Data is not just about lots of data, it is actually a concept providing an opportunity to find new insight into your existing data as well guidelines to capture and analysis your future data. It makes any business more agile and robust so it can adapt and overcome business challenges. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer discuss Evolution of Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • The Year 2010, The Year of Change

    As I look back on the year of 2010, I could have never predicted the wonderful changes that have occurred for my wife and me. The beginning of this year started out as the 9th year that we lived in South Florida, and my fourth year working for DentalPlans.com as a software engineer/network admin. About 3 months in to the year I was given an excellent opportunity to work for MovieTickets.com in the software engineering department. This opportunity allowed me to gain experience with jQuery due to one of my projects was to reengineering MovieTickets.com existing Marketing Panel System. About 3 months after working at MovieTickets.com, my wife and I were offered an opportunity of a life time. I was offered a Job in a large background\information security company located in Nashville, TN as software engineer II.  I must note that after living in South Florida for 9 years, my wife and I really had a strong distaste for the South Florida life style and the general attitude/culture of the area. Even though we shared a strong dislike for the area in which we lived I must admit that it was a tough decision to leave MovieTickets.com because I was really doing well and I made some great new friends like Chris Catto, and Tyson Nero.  In fact, they introduced me to Local Microsoft User Groups, and software development podcast like DotNetRocks.com and Hanselminutes.com.  In addition, we also went to my first Microsoft launch down in Miami for Visual Studios 2010. I must admit it was a cool experience.  I truly hope to keep in touch with them to see how their careers grow, and I know they will. I must admit I was nervous and excited to start the next chapter in our live as I started up the 26 foot U-Haul truck and got on the road for Nashville from Boca Raton. I knew that the change was going to lead to new adventures and new opportunities that I could never imagine.  As we pulled in to the long driveway of our rental house, we knew that this was the right place for my wife and I. Natalie, my wife had actually come up to Nashville and within one week of my job offer had set up a nice rental home for us to restart our lives in TN.  I must admit that the wonderful southern hospitality took a bit to get use to due to the type of people we were used to dealing with on a regular basis. Our first 2 months seemed like we were living a dream because of our new area and the wonderful people we live around. So far my new job is going really well and I really like the people on my team and department. In fact after 6 months I am now in charge of all application builds for our new deployment process. I am also leading up a push for setting up of continuous integration within our new build process.  In addition to starting my new job, I was also offered a position as an adjust instructor at ITT Tech teaching course like VB.net, Java Script, Ajax, and database development. So far I have really like teaching at the college level.  Information technology has really been great for my life so I am really glad to be able to give back. That is actually why I started DotNetBlocks. This site allows me to document things I have learned as I work with technology, and allows others to borrow from my experiences.  I hope that this site can help others as others have helped me get where I am. Finally, I am glade to report that I only have 4 classes left for my master’s degree at Capella University. I am proud to announce that I am still on track to graduate with 3.91 GPA.  This last class was really a test because I had a crazy idea that I could work full time as a software engineer, teach two college courses as a first time teacher and also take an advanced masters class in application architecture. I have no idea how I actually survived, but I am really surprised how well I actually did. I was invited back to reach again at ITT Tech, and I passed my masters class with an “A”.  I have decided to take this next term off from my master’s program so that I do not get burned out.  Also, so that my new current employer will pay for more of my education, tuition reimbursement is an awesome benefit. This was my year 2010, how was yours?

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  • Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective – Part 3

    - by pinaldave
    Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Congratulations!  You are now a fully trained developer!  You spent hours in a classroom, watching webinars, and reading materials.  You are now more educated and more prepared than ever before.  Now what? Stay or Quit The simple answer is that you now have two options – stay where you are or move on to a new job.  Even though you might now be smarter than you have ever felt before, this can still be a tough decision to make.  You feel extra trained and ready for a promotion or a raise, but you and your employer might not see eye to eye on this issue.  The logical conclusion is to go on a job hunt, but that might not be the most ethical thing to do. Click Image to Enlarge Manager’s Perspective Click Image to Enlarge Try to see the issue from your manager’s perspective.  You feel that you have just spent a lot of time and energy getting trained, and you should be rewarded.  But they have invested their time and energy in you.  They might see the training as a way to help you complete the goals they require from you, or as a way to help you complete tasks that will ultimately end in a reward or promotion. Moral Compass As in most cases, honesty is the best policy.  Be open with your manager about your expectations, and ask them to explain their goals.  When there is open and honest communication, everyone can walk away happy.  If you’re unable to discuss with your manager for one reason or another, just try to keep the company policy in mind and follow your own moral compass.  If all else fails, and your company is unwilling to make allowances for your new value, offer to pay the company back for the training before moving on your way. Whether you stay at your old job or move on to a new one, you are still faced with the question of what you’re going to do with all your new knowledge.  If you feel comfortable, offer to train others around you who are interested in the same subject.  This can look very good on your resume, and if you are working in a team environment it is sure to help you in the long run! What Next? You can even offer to train other trainers at the company – managers, those above you, or even report back to your original trainer about how your education is helping you in the work place.  Obviously this should be completely voluntary on the trainer’s part.  Taking advice from a “newbie” may not be their favorite idea, but it could also show the company that you are open to expanding your horizons and being helpful to everyone around you. Last in Line for Opportunity Click Image to Enlarge At this time, let us address a subject related to training and what to do with it – what if you are always overlooked for training?  This can as thorny a problem as receiving training in the first place.  The best advice is to let your supervisors know that you are always open to training and very interested in certain topics.  If you are consistently passed over, be patient.  Your turn will probably come, but the company as a whole has to focus on other problems at the moment.  If you feel that there are more personal issues at play, be sure to bring this up with your supervisor in a calm and professional manager so that everything can be worked out best for both parties. You, Yourself and Your Future! If all else fails, offer to pay for training yourself.  Perhaps money problems are at the root of being passed over.  Even if there are other reasons, offering to pay your own way shows your dedication and could work out well for you in the long run.  Always remember – in life you have to go out and make your own way, you cannot always sit and wait for things to land in your lap. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • The ugly evolution of running a background operation in the context of an ASP.NET app

    - by Jeff
    If you’re one of the two people who has followed my blog for many years, you know that I’ve been going at POP Forums now for over almost 15 years. Publishing it as an open source app has been a big help because it helps me understand how people want to use it, and having it translated to six languages is pretty sweet. Despite this warm and fuzzy group hug, there has been an ugly hack hiding in there for years. One of the things we find ourselves wanting to do is hide some kind of regular process inside of an ASP.NET application that runs periodically. The motivation for this has always been that a lot of people simply don’t have a choice, because they’re running the app on shared hosting, or don’t otherwise have access to a box that can run some kind of regular background service. In POP Forums, I “solved” this problem years ago by hiding some static timers in an HttpModule. Truthfully, this works well as long as you don’t run multiple instances of the app, which in the cloud world, is always a possibility. With the arrival of WebJobs in Azure, I’m going to solve this problem. This post isn’t about that. The other little hacky problem that I “solved” was spawning a background thread to queue emails to subscribed users of the forum. This evolved quite a bit over the years, starting with a long running page to mail users in real-time, when I had only a few hundred. By the time it got into the thousands, or tens of thousands, I needed a better way. What I did is launched a new thread that read all of the user data in, then wrote a queued email to the database (as in, the entire body of the email, every time), with the properly formatted opt-out link. It was super inefficient, but it worked. Then I moved my biggest site using it, CoasterBuzz, to an Azure Website, and it stopped working. So let’s start with the first stupid thing I was doing. The new thread was simply created with delegate code inline. As best I can tell, Azure Websites are more aggressive about garbage collection, because that thread didn’t queue even one message. When the calling server response went out of scope, so went the magic background thread. Duh, all I had to do was move the thread to a private static variable in the class. That’s the way I was able to keep stuff running from the HttpModule. (And yes, I know this is still prone to failure, particularly if the app recycles. For as infrequently as it’s used, I have not, however, experienced this.) It was still failing, but this time I wasn’t sure why. It would queue a few dozen messages, then die. Running in Azure, I had to turn on the application logging and FTP in to see what was going on. That led me to a helper method I was using as delegate to build the unsubscribe links. The idea here is that I didn’t want yet another config entry to describe the base URL, appended with the right path that would match the routing table. No, I wanted the app to figure it out for you, so I came up with this little thing: public static string FullUrlHelper(this Controller controller, string actionName, string controllerName, object routeValues = null) { var helper = new UrlHelper(controller.Request.RequestContext); var requestUrl = controller.Request.Url; if (requestUrl == null) return String.Empty; var url = requestUrl.Scheme + "://"; url += requestUrl.Host; url += (requestUrl.Port != 80 ? ":" + requestUrl.Port : ""); url += helper.Action(actionName, controllerName, routeValues); return url; } And yes, that should have been done with a string builder. This is useful for sending out the email verification messages, too. As clever as I thought I was with this, I was using a delegate in the admin controller to format these unsubscribe links for tens of thousands of users. I passed that delegate into a service class that did the email work: Func<User, string> unsubscribeLinkGenerator = user => this.FullUrlHelper("Unsubscribe", AccountController.Name, new { id = user.UserID, key = _profileService.GetUnsubscribeHash(user) }); _mailingListService.MailUsers(subject, body, htmlBody, unsubscribeLinkGenerator); Cool, right? Actually, not so much. If you look back at the helper, this delegate then will depend on the controller context to learn the routing and format for the URL. As you might have guessed, those things were turning null after a few dozen formatted links, when the original request to the admin controller went away. That this wasn’t already happening on my dedicated server is surprising, but again, I understand why the Azure environment might be eager to reclaim a thread after servicing the request. It’s already inefficient that I’m building the entire email for every user, but going back to check the routing table for the right link every time isn’t a win either. I put together a little hack to look up one generic URL, and use that as the basis for a string format. If you’re wondering why I didn’t just use the curly braces up front, it’s because they get URL formatted: var baseString = this.FullUrlHelper("Unsubscribe", AccountController.Name, new { id = "--id--", key = "--key--" }); baseString = baseString.Replace("--id--", "{0}").Replace("--key--", "{1}"); Func unsubscribeLinkGenerator = user => String.Format(baseString, user.UserID, _profileService.GetUnsubscribeHash(user)); _mailingListService.MailUsers(subject, body, htmlBody, unsubscribeLinkGenerator); And wouldn’t you know it, the new solution works just fine. It’s still kind of hacky and inefficient, but it will work until this somehow breaks too.

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  • Preview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PC

    - by Matthew Guay
    Want to look over a new book, or buy it immediately in ebook format?  Here’s how you can preview and purchase most new books from your PC the easy way. Most new books, including almost all New York Times Bestsellers, are available in ebook format from Amazon’s Kindle store.  The Kindle store also includes numerous free ebooks, including out-of-print classics and a surprising amount of recent books.  With the free Kindle for PC reader, you can read any of these ebooks without having to purchase a Kindle device. Preview Ebooks Before you Purchase Sometimes, it can be hard to know if you want to purchase a new book without reading some of it first.  With Kindle for PC, however, you can download a sample of any ebook available for free.  The sample usually includes the table of contents, forward or introduction, and often part or all of the first chapter. To get an ebook sample, find the book you want in the Kindle store (link below). Now, under the Try it free box, select the correct computer or device to send the sample to, and click Send Sample now. Amazon will thank you for your order, even though this is only a free preview.  Click the Go to Kindle for PC button to open Kindle and read your ebook preview.   Or, if Kindle is already running, press the Refresh button in the top right corner to check for new ebooks and previews. Kindle will synchronize and download the previews you selected. The most recently downloaded items show up on the top left.  All sample books have a red “Sample” bar on the bottom of their cover, and they also include links to Buy or view more info about it on it’s cover.  Double-click your sample to start reading it. Your ebook sample will usually open at the introduction or beginning of the first chapter, but you can also view the index, cover, and more. When you reach the end of the sample book, you can click a link to buy the book or view more details about it.  Strangely, both of these links currently take you to the ebook’s page on Amazon.com, but perhaps in the future the Buy link will directly let you purchase the book. Or, you can also click Buy Now on a sample book directly from your Kindle library. If you clicked one of these links, you will be returned to the ebook’s page on Amazon.  Choose the PC or Kindle you want the book delivered to, and this time, select Buy Now with 1-Click. Add your payment info if you’re not already setup for 1-Click Shopping, and then you’ll be shown the same Thank you page as before.  Refresh Kindle for PC, and your new ebook will automatically download.  Strangely, the sample ebook is not automatically removed, so you can right-click on the sample and select Delete this Book.  Additionally, your last-read page in the sample is not synced to the purchased book, so you may have to find your place again. Now, enjoy your full ebook! Download Free Books for Kindle The Kindle Store has an amazing amount of free ebooks.  Some free books may only be free for a limited time as a promotion, while others, such as old classics, may always be free.  Either which way, once you download it, you can keep it forever. When you find a free ebook you want, select the Kindle or PC you want to download it to and click “Buy now with 1-Click”.  Notice that this book shows it’s price is $0.00, but the button still says Buy now.  Rest assured, if the book’s price show up as $0.00, you will not be charged anything for downloading it. Your ebook will download as usual after your next refresh.  Note that you can still download the sample first if you want, but since the book is free, just download the whole thing and delete it if you don’t want it. Redownload your Purchased or Free Books If you install Kindle on a new PC or delete a book from your library, you can always re-download it from your Amazon account.  Browse to the Manage your Kindle page on Amazon (link below) sign in with your Amazon account, and scroll down to the list of your purchased content. Select the book you wish to download, then choose the Kindle or PC you want to download it to and press Go. Note: There is a “Delete this title” button right below this.  If you press the Delete button, you will not ever be able to re-download it. Or, you can download the book directly from the Archived Items tab in Kindle on your other PC. And, if you have your Kindle content on multiple computers, your reading will be synced via Whispersync.  You can start reading on your desktop, and then resume where you left off from your laptop. Conclusion With these tips and tricks, it is much easier to preview and purchase new books, find and download free ebooks, and re-download any you’ve deleted from your PC.  Have fun filling up your digital library! Links Manage your Kindle account Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Read Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PCRead Kindle Books On Your Computer with Kindle for PCHow to See Where a TinyUrl Is Really Linking ToEdit Microsoft Word 2007 Documents in Print PreviewWhy Can’t I Turn the Details/Preview Panes On or Off in Windows Vista Explorer? 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides

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  • SQL SERVER – Fundamentals of Columnstore Index

    - by pinaldave
    There are two kind of storage in database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data is relevant or not, column store queries need only to search much lesser number of the columns. This means major increases in search speed and hard drive use. Additionally, the column store indexes are heavily compressed, which translates to even greater memory and faster searches. I am sure this looks very exciting and it does not mean that you convert every single index from row store to column store index. One has to understand the proper places where to use row store or column store indexes. Let us understand in this article what is the difference in Columnstore type of index. Column store indexes are run by Microsoft’s VertiPaq technology. However, all you really need to know is that this method of storing data is columns on a single page is much faster and more efficient. Creating a column store index is very easy, and you don’t have to learn new syntax to create them. You just need to specify the keyword “COLUMNSTORE” and enter the data as you normally would. Keep in mind that once you add a column store to a table, though, you cannot delete, insert or update the data – it is READ ONLY. However, since column store will be mainly used for data warehousing, this should not be a big problem. You can always use partitioning to avoid rebuilding the index. A columnstore index stores each column in a separate set of disk pages, rather than storing multiple rows per page as data traditionally has been stored. The difference between column store and row store approaches is illustrated below: In case of the row store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple rows of the columns spanning across multiple pages. In case of column store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple single columns. This will lead only the columns needed to solve a query will be fetched from disk. Additionally there is good chance that there will be redundant data in a single column which will further help to compress the data, this will have positive effect on buffer hit rate as most of the data will be in memory and due to same it will not need to be retrieved. Let us see small example of how columnstore index improves the performance of the query on a large table. As a first step let us create databaseset which is large enough to show performance impact of columnstore index. The time taken to create sample database may vary on different computer based on the resources. USE AdventureWorks GO -- Create New Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail]( [SalesOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesOrderDetailID] [int] NOT NULL, [CarrierTrackingNumber] [nvarchar](25) NULL, [OrderQty] [smallint] NOT NULL, [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL, [SpecialOfferID] [int] NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] [money] NOT NULL, [UnitPriceDiscount] [money] NOT NULL, [LineTotal] [numeric](38, 6) NOT NULL, [rowguid] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create clustered index CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [CL_MySalesOrderDetail] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] ( [SalesOrderDetailID]) GO -- Create Sample Data Table -- WARNING: This Query may run upto 2-10 minutes based on your systems resources INSERT INTO [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] SELECT S1.* FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail S1 GO 100 Now let us do quick performance test. I have kept STATISTICS IO ON for measuring how much IO following queries take. In my test first I will run query which will use regular index. We will note the IO usage of the query. After that we will create columnstore index and will measure the IO of the same. -- Performance Test -- Comparing Regular Index with ColumnStore Index USE AdventureWorks GO SET STATISTICS IO ON GO -- Select Table with regular Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO -- Table 'MySalesOrderDetail'. Scan count 1, logical reads 342261, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0. -- Create ColumnStore Index CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [MySalesOrderDetail] (UnitPrice, OrderQty, ProductID) GO -- Select Table with Columnstore Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO It is very clear from the results that query is performance extremely fast after creating ColumnStore Index. The amount of the pages it has to read to run query is drastically reduced as the column which are needed in the query are stored in the same page and query does not have to go through every single page to read those columns. If we enable execution plan and compare we can see that column store index performance way better than regular index in this case. Let us clean up the database. -- Cleanup DROP INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GO TRUNCATE TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO DROP TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO In future posts we will see cases where Columnstore index is not appropriate solution as well few other tricks and tips of the columnstore index. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • PASS Summit 2010 Recap

    - by AjarnMark
    Last week I attended my eighth PASS Summit in nine years, and every year it is a fantastic event!  I was fortunate my first year to have a contact (Bill Graziano (blog | Twitter) from SQLTeam) that I was expecting to meet, and who got me started on a good track of making new contacts.  Each year I have made a few more, and renewed friendships from years past.  Many of the attendees agree that the pure networking opportunities are one of the best benefits of attending the Summit.  And there’s a lot of great technical stuff, too, some of the things that stick out for me this year include… Pre-Con Monday: PowerShell with Allen White (blog | Twitter).  This was the first time that I attended a pre-con.  For those not familiar with the concept, the regular sessions for the conference are 75-90 minutes long.  For an extra fee, you can attend a full-day session on a single topic during a pre- or post-conference training day.  I had been meaning for several months to dive in and learn PowerShell, but just never seemed to find (or make) the time for it, so when I saw this was one of the all-day sessions, and I was planning to be there on Monday anyway, I decided to go for it.  And it was well worth it!  I definitely came out of there with a good foundation to build my own PowerShell scripts, plus several sample scripts that he showed which already cover the first four or five things I was planning to do with PowerShell anyway.  This looks like the right tool for me to build an automated version of our software deployment process, which right now contains many repeated steps.  Thanks Allen! Service Broker with Denny Cherry (blog | Twitter).  I remembered reading Denny’s blog post on Using Service Broker instead of Replication, and ever since then I have been thinking about using this to populate a new reporting-focused Data Repository that we will be building in the near future.  When I saw he was doing this session, I thought it would be great to get more information and be able to ask the author questions.  When I brought this idea back to my boss, he really liked it, as we had previously been discussing doing nightly data loads, with an option to manually trigger a mid-day load if up-to-the-minute data was needed for something.  If we go the Service Broker route, we can keep the Repository current in near real-time.  Hooray! DBA Mythbusters with Paul Randal (blog | Twitter).  Even though I read every one of the posts in Paul’s blog series of the same name, I had to go see the legend in person.  It was great, and I still learned something new! How to Conduct Effective Meetings with Joe Webb (blog | Twitter).  I always like to sit in on a session that Joe does.  I met Joe several years ago when both he and Bill Graziano were on the PASS Board of Directors together, and we have kept in touch.  Joe is very well-spoken and has great experience with both SQL Server and business.  And we could certainly use some pointers at my work (probably yours, too) on making our meetings more effective and to run on-time.  Of course, now that I’m the Chapter Leader for the Professional Development virtual chapter, I also had to sit in on this ProfDev session and recruit Joe to do a presentation or two for the chapter next year. Query Optimization with David DeWitt.  Anyone who has seen Dr. David DeWitt present the 3rd keynote at a PASS Summit over the last three years knows what a great time it is to sit and listen to him make some really complicated and advanced topic easy to understand (although it still makes your head hurt).  It still amazes me that the simple two-table join query from pubs that he used in his example can possibly have 22 million possible physical query plans.  Ouch! Exhibit Hall:  This year I spent more serious time in the exhibit hall than any year past.  I have talked my boss into making a significant (for us) investment in monitoring tools next year, and this was a great opportunity to talk with all the big-hitters.  Readers of mine may recall that I fell in love with the SQL Sentry Power Suite several months ago and wrote a blog entry about it just from the trial version.  Well as things turned out, short-term budget priorities shifted, and we weren’t able to make the purchase then.  I have it in the budget for next year, but since I was going to the Summit, my boss wanted me to look at the other options to see if this was really the one that we wanted.  I spent a couple of hours talking with representatives from Red-Gate, Idera, Confio, and Quest about their offerings, and giving them each the same 3 scenarios that I wanted to be able to accomplish based on the questions and issues that arise in our company.  It was interesting to discover the different approaches or “world view” that each vendor takes to the subject of performance monitoring and troubleshooting.  I may write a separate article that goes into this in more depth, but the product that best aligned with our point of view, and met the current needs we have is still the SQL Sentry Power Suite.  I’m not saying that the others are bad or wrong or anything like that, just that the way they tackled the issue did not align as well with our particular needs as does SQL Sentry’s product.  And that was something I learned too, when you go shopping for these products, you really need to know what you want to get from them.  It’s best if you have a few example scenarios from work that you can use to test out how well each tool fits your particular needs. Overall, another GREAT event.  I can’t wait to get the DVDs so I can sit in on a bunch of other sessions that I couldn’t get to because I was in one of the ones above.  And I can hardly wait until next year!

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  • Personal search – the future of search

    - by jamiet
    [Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners 2012: ADF & Fusion Development

    - by Dana Singleterry
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards honor customers for their cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. The awards were presented during Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and following winners are for the category of ADF & Fusion Development. Micros – an OPN Platinum partner – has been working closely with Oracle product management teams in applying industry best practices in the development of their solutions. Their current application suite for the hospitality industry was built on Oracle Forms and the Oracle database running on MS Windows. The next generation of this suite is being developed and released in modules that are now based on Oracle FMW (including ADF) 11g technologies and Oracle Database 11g all running on Oracle Linux. The primary driver was that of modernization and hence the reason Oracle ADF was selected to provide a rich UI for business processes that could be served up through traditional methods or through mobile devices globally. SOA Suite & ADF allowed for loosely-coupled services that could evolve with the needs of the business. Micros's application innovations includes the use of business application portlets that have been published from ADF Faces Task Flows generated using WebCenter portlet libraries  & Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) with multi-layered customizations using Oracle WebCenter Composer. PCS (Marfin Egnatia Bank of Greece) – PCS Wealth Management is a WM Software Solution, which captures and automates the WM business processes allowing Service Providers to allocate enough time and effort into Customer Service and Investment Strategies, under Advisory or Execution-Only Services. The Product is built upon the latest Web Technologies and ensures Best Practices covering all functional expectations, meeting local regulatory requirements and discovering successful opportunities for the WM Customers' Portfolios. The new unified Wealth Management system offers an unparalleled User Interface taking full advantage of the user friendly ADF Faces Components to a great extent, all serving Private Banking purposes. The application offers a true Account Officer Cockpit with shallow navigation, one-click access to informed decisions and a perfect customer service. ADF Grids and Pivots, the Data Visualization Components, as well as the Calendar and Map Components are cleverly used to help the user eliminate the usage of Excel, Outlook and other systems. PCS's application is unique in the way it leverages the ADF Faces data visualization components to create a truly attractive and insightful dashboard for their application. PCS Wealth Management Demo Qualcomm – Qualcomm, a $17B per year company, designs and sells semiconductor products for wireless telecommunications, mobile and computing markets. In addition, Qualcomm companies provide various hardware and software products to facilitate the design, development and deployment of phones and the applications that run on them. Qualcomm’s challenge has been to not only develop and deploy new business system functions to keep pace with customer demand, but also to provide a customer collaboration capability that is sufficiently robust, easy to use, and flexible to meet emerging and future needs. Qualcomm has taken successful steps in building and deploying the customer engagement platform Ieveraging various Oracle technologies including Fusion Middleware (ADF, SOA, OBIEE) and their proven ERP foundation of EBS and 11g databases. The new platform delivers a more unified and “seamless” business solution with a consistent, modern “look and feel” all based on standard business processes which facilitate efficient collaboration with Qualcomm and its customers. The look and feel leverages ADF in innovative ways and includes hover over navigation, custom pagination components, and skinning. Qualcomm has exposed a services layer that provides significant functionality including order-to-ship, quote-to-order, customer on-boarding and contract validation. Qualcomm's creative designs leverage Oracle's SOA Suite to integrate with Oracle EBS and desperate applications to provide a rich user interface through the use use of Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components providing a self-service solution to their customers.

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  • jQuery Selector Tester and Cheat Sheet

    - by SGWellens
    I've always appreciated these tools: Expresso and XPath Builder. They make designing regular expressions and XPath selectors almost fun! Did I say fun? I meant less painful. Being able to paste/load text and then interactively play with the search criteria is infinitely better than the code/compile/run/test cycle. It's faster and you get a much better feel for how the expressions work. So, I decided to make my own interactive tool to test jQuery selectors:  jQuery Selector Tester.   Here's a sneak peek: Note: There are some existing tools you may like better: http://www.woods.iki.fi/interactive-jquery-tester.html http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/trysel.asp?filename=trysel_basic&jqsel=p.intro,%23choose My tool is different: It is one page. You can save it and run it locally without a Web Server. It shows the results as a list of iterated objects instead of highlighted html. A cheat sheet is on the same page as the tester which is handy. I couldn't upload an .htm or .html file to this site so I hosted it on my personal site here: jQuery Selector Tester. Design Highlights: To make the interactive search work, I added a hidden div to the page: <!--Hidden div holds DOM elements for jQuery to search--><div id="HiddenDiv" style="display: none"></div> When ready to search, the searchable html text is copied into the hidden div…this renders the DOM tree in the hidden div: // get the html to search, insert it to the hidden divvar Html = $("#TextAreaHTML").val();$("#HiddenDiv").html(Html); When doing a search, I modify the search pattern to look only in the HiddenDiv. To do that, I put a space between the patterns.  The space is the Ancestor operator (see the Cheat Sheet): // modify search string to only search in our// hidden div and do the searchvar SearchString = "#HiddenDiv " + SearchPattern;try{    var $FoundItems = $(SearchString);}   Big Fat Stinking Faux Pas: I was about to publish this article when I made a big mistake: I tested the tool with Mozilla FireFox. It blowed up…it blowed up real good. In the past I’ve only had to target IE so this was quite a revelation. When I started to learn JavaScript, I was disgusted to see all the browser dependent code. Who wants to spend their time testing against different browsers and versions of browsers? Adding a bunch of ‘if-else’ code is a tedious and thankless task. I avoided client code as much as I could. Then jQuery came along and all was good. It was browser independent and freed us from the tedium of worrying about version N of the Acme browser. Right? Wrong! I had used outerHTML to display the selected elements. The problem is Mozilla FireFox doesn’t implement outerHTML. I replaced this: // encode the html markupvar OuterHtml = $('<div/>').text(this.outerHTML).html(); With this: // encode the html markupvar Html = $('<div>').append(this).html();var OuterHtml = $('<div/>').text(Html).html(); Another problem was that Mozilla FireFox doesn’t implement srcElement. I replaced this: var Row = e.srcElement.parentNode;  With this: var Row = e.target.parentNode; Another problem was the indexing. The browsers have different ways of indexing. I replaced this: // this cell has the search pattern  var Cell = Row.childNodes[1];   // put the pattern in the search box and search                    $("#TextSearchPattern").val(Cell.innerText);  With this: // get the correct cell and the text in the cell// place the text in the seach box and serachvar Cell = $(Row).find("TD:nth-child(2)");var CellText = Cell.text();$("#TextSearchPattern").val(CellText);   So much for the myth of browser independence. Was I overly optimistic and gullible? I don’t think so. And when I get my millions from the deposed Nigerian prince I sent money to, you’ll see that having faith is not futile. Notes: My goal was to have a single standalone file. I tried to keep the features and CSS to a minimum–adding only enough to make it useful and visually pleasing. When testing, I often thought there was a problem with the jQuery selector. Invariable it was invalid html code. If your results aren't what you expect, don't assume it's the jQuery selector pattern: The html may be invalid. To help in development and testing, I added a double-click handler to the rows in the Cheat Sheet table. If you double-click a row, the search pattern is put in the search box, a search is performed and the page is scrolled so you can see the results. I left the test html and code in the page. If you are using a CDN (non-local) version of the jQuery libraray, the designer in Visual Studio becomes extremely slow.  That's why there are two version of the library in the header and one is commented out. For reference, here is the jQuery documentation on selectors: http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/ Here is a much more comprehensive list of CSS selectors (which jQuery uses): http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html I hope someone finds this useful. Steve WellensCodeProject

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  • SQL SERVER – CXPACKET – Parallelism – Usual Solution – Wait Type – Day 6 of 28

    - by pinaldave
    CXPACKET has to be most popular one of all wait stats. I have commonly seen this wait stat as one of the top 5 wait stats in most of the systems with more than one CPU. Books On-Line: Occurs when trying to synchronize the query processor exchange iterator. You may consider lowering the degree of parallelism if contention on this wait type becomes a problem. CXPACKET Explanation: When a parallel operation is created for SQL Query, there are multiple threads for a single query. Each query deals with a different set of the data (or rows). Due to some reasons, one or more of the threads lag behind, creating the CXPACKET Wait Stat. There is an organizer/coordinator thread (thread 0), which takes waits for all the threads to complete and gathers result together to present on the client’s side. The organizer thread has to wait for the all the threads to finish before it can move ahead. The Wait by this organizer thread for slow threads to complete is called CXPACKET wait. Note that not all the CXPACKET wait types are bad. You might experience a case when it totally makes sense. There might also be cases when this is unavoidable. If you remove this particular wait type for any query, then that query may run slower because the parallel operations are disabled for the query. Reducing CXPACKET wait: We cannot discuss about reducing the CXPACKET wait without talking about the server workload type. OLTP: On Pure OLTP system, where the transactions are smaller and queries are not long but very quick usually, set the “Maximum Degree of Parallelism” to 1 (one). This way it makes sure that the query never goes for parallelism and does not incur more engine overhead. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'cost threshold for parallelism', N'1' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Data-warehousing / Reporting server: As queries will be running for long time, it is advised to set the “Maximum Degree of Parallelism” to 0 (zero). This way most of the queries will utilize the parallel processor, and long running queries get a boost in their performance due to multiple processors. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'cost threshold for parallelism', N'0' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Mixed System (OLTP & OLAP): Here is the challenge. The right balance has to be found. I have taken a very simple approach. I set the “Maximum Degree of Parallelism” to 2, which means the query still uses parallelism but only on 2 CPUs. However, I keep the “Cost Threshold for Parallelism” very high. This way, not all the queries will qualify for parallelism but only the query with higher cost will go for parallelism. I have found this to work best for a system that has OLTP queries and also where the reporting server is set up. Here, I am setting ‘Cost Threshold for Parallelism’ to 25 values (which is just for illustration); you can choose any value, and you can find it out by experimenting with the system only. In the following script, I am setting the ‘Max Degree of Parallelism’ to 2, which indicates that the query that will have a higher cost (here, more than 25) will qualify for parallel query to run on 2 CPUs. This implies that regardless of the number of CPUs, the query will select any two CPUs to execute itself. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'cost threshold for parallelism', N'25' GO EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max degree of parallelism', N'2' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Additionally a must read comment of Jonathan Kehayias. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and I no way claim it to be accurate. I suggest you all to read the online book for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats over here is generic and it varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on the development server before implementing on the production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: DMV, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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  • Geocaching - World wide treasure hunt

    I'm not quite sure how I came across this topic but actually I find it absolutely interesting, challenging and most of all a great fun for the family and friends. The interesting part is for sure that you can follow other peoples treasures and their preferred locations where a cache might be hidden. Of course, it wont be easy to find a cache after all. Sometimes there are even 'mystery caches' which have either riddles, further instructions or little brain games for you in order to find the actual cache - that's the challenge. And last but not least, those caches are hidden outdoor. A great experience to explore nature either on your own, or your family especially with children, or as a treasure hunting pack with a couple of friends. What is geocaching? It's a high-tech outdoor treasure hunting game that's a great way to explore the world with friends, family or on your own. Participants use GPS-enabled devices to locate hidden containers called geocaches. There are over one million geocaches hidden around the world today, waiting for you to find them. Visit Geocaching.com to search for geocaches near you.(Source: Referral Email of geocaching.com) Checkout the Geocaching 101 for further details and information. They also provide a video channel on YouTube. Which equipment do I need? Any GPS-enabled device is sufficient to go onto the hunt. I'm going to start our geocaching experience equipped with my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Additionally, I installed a geocaching.com client called c:geo that hopefully assists me soon. Combined with a map app like Google Maps and a nice Compass app you should be fully equipped and ready to go. I guess, that even a car navigation system is perfect for that task. Later on, with more experience and demand for technology (or precision) it might be interesting to opt-in for a pure GPS device, like a Garmin or any other brand on the market. {loadposition content_adsense} What is a geocache and what does it contain? In its simplest form, a cache always contains a logbook or logsheet for you to log your find. Larger caches may contain a logbook and any number of items. These items turn the adventure into a true treasure hunt. You never know what the cache owner or visitors to the cache may have left for you to enjoy. Remember, if you take something, leave something of equal or greater value in return. It is recommended that items in a cache be individually packaged in a clear, zipped plastic bag to protect them from the elements. Finding your first geocache Well, first you have to have interest to pick up the challenge. Then you have to check out the Geocache directory on geocaching.com. They have recommendations for beginner's caches but you are free to choose any. Actually, we have a Mystery Cache very close to our base, and I guess that we are going for that one on our first trip. Anyway, there is a very informative guide on the website which should answer all your questions about starting your new outdoor adventure. For sure, it's going to be rewarding. Team up with friends and family Especially as a beginner there might be misunderstandings in handling the GPS coordinates, the compass, or the map, and even finding the container at the documented position isn't easy in the first place. Luckily, there are logbook reports online from other hunters, and most of the time there are even 'spoiler' images available. But also bear in mind, that a geocache might have been removed or is lost due to unconscious people or whatever other reasons. Don't be disappointed in case that you can't find anything... There be nothing anymore. A general recommendation in this case would be to replace the missing container with a new one, and give feedback to the original owner about the state of that particular location. After all, it's about fun and active participation in a world-wide community. Geocaches in Mauritius? Yes, there are currently about 45 geocaches spread all over the island, and even a single in Rodriguez - that's gonna be a tough one. Hopefully, we will get increasing numbers as Geocaching.com allows, no better, even encourages you to hide new containers at your locations of choice. I think this is going to be real fun for us during the upcoming weeks and months. Especially, when we are travelling to other countries and transfer so-called trackable items between geocaches. On my first impression, Geocaching.com seems to be very mature, open and community-oriented. There are literally hundreds of thousands geocache 'hunters' all over the world. And usually finding a container remote from your home is very rewarding. I'll keep you updated in these matters during the next months to come...

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  • Simple-Talk development: a quick history lesson

    - by Michael Williamson
    Up until a few months ago, Simple-Talk ran on a pure .NET stack, with IIS as the web server and SQL Server as the database. Unfortunately, the platform for the site hadn’t quite gotten the love and attention it deserved. On the one hand, in the words of our esteemed editor Tony “I’d consider the current platform to be a “success”; it cost $10K, has lasted for 6 years, was finished, end to end in 6 months, and although we moan about it has got us quite a long way.” On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that it needed some serious work. Among other issues, we had authors that wouldn’t blog because our current blogging platform, Community Server, was too painful for them to use. Forgetting about Simple-Talk for a moment, if you ask somebody what blogging platform they’d choose, the odds are they’d say WordPress. Regardless of its technical merits, it’s probably the most popular blogging platform, and it certainly seemed easier to use than Community Server. The issue was that WordPress is normally hosted on a Linux stack running PHP, Apache and MySQL — quite a difference from our Microsoft technology stack. We certainly didn’t want to rewrite the entire site — we just wanted a better blogging platform, with the rest of the existing, legacy site left as is. At a very high level, Simple-Talk’s technical design was originally very straightforward: when your browser sends an HTTP request to Simple-Talk, IIS (the web server) takes the request, does some work, and sends back a response. In order to keep the legacy site running, except with WordPress running the blogs, a different design is called for. We now use nginx as a reverse-proxy, which can then delegate requests to the appropriate application: So, when your browser sends a request to Simple-Talk, nginx takes that request and checks which part of the site you’re trying to access. Most of the time, it just passes the request along to IIS, which can then respond in much the same way it always has. However, if your request is for the blogs, then nginx delegates the request to WordPress. Unfortunately, as simple as that diagram looks, it hides an awful lot of complexity. In particular, the legacy site running on IIS was made up of four .NET applications. I’ve already mentioned one of these applications, Community Server, which handled the old blogs as well as managing membership and the forums. We have a couple of other applications to manage both our newsletters and our articles, and our own custom application to do some of the rendering on the site, such as the front page and the articles. When I say that it was made up of four .NET applications, this might conjure up an image in your mind of how they fit together: You might imagine four .NET applications, each with their own database, communicating over well-defined APIs. Sadly, reality was a little disappointing: We had four .NET applications that all ran on the same database. Worse still, there were many queries that happily joined across tables from multiple applications, meaning that each application was heavily dependent on the exact data schema that each other application used. Add to this that many of the queries were at least dozens of lines long, and practically identical to other queries except in a few key spots, and we can see that attempting to replace one component of the system would be more than a little tricky. However, the problems with the old system do give us a good place to start thinking about desirable qualities from any changes to the platform. Specifically: Maintainability — the tight coupling between each .NET application made it difficult to update any one application without also having to make changes elsewhere Replaceability — the tight coupling also meant that replacing one component wouldn’t be straightforward, especially if it wasn’t on a similar Microsoft stack. We’d like to be able to replace different parts without having to modify the existing codebase extensively Reusability — we’d like to be able to combine the different pieces of the system in different ways for different sites Repeatable deployments — rather than having to deploy the site manually with a long list of instructions, we should be able to deploy the entire site with a single command, allowing you to create a new instance of the site easily whether on production, staging servers, test servers or your own local machine Testability — if we can deploy the site with a single command, and each part of the site is no longer dependent on the specifics of how every other part of the site works, we can begin to run automated tests against the site, and against individual parts, both to prevent regressions and to do a little test-driven development In the next part, I’ll describe the high-level architecture we now have that hopefully brings us a little closer to these five traits.

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  • GitHub Integration in Windows Azure Web Site

    - by Shaun
    Microsoft had just announced an update for Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). There are four major features added in WAWS which are free scaling mode, GitHub integration, custom domain and multi branches. Since I ‘m working in Node.js and I would like to have my code in GitHub and deployed automatically to my Windows Azure Web Site once I sync my code, this feature is a big good news to me.   It’s very simple to establish the GitHub integration in WAWS. First we need a clean WAWS. In its dashboard page click “Set up Git publishing”. Currently WAWS doesn’t support to change the publish setting. So if you have an existing WAWS which published by TFS or local Git then you have to create a new WAWS and set the Git publishing. Then in the deployment page we can see now WAWS supports three Git publishing modes: - Push my local files to Windows Azure: In this mode we will create a new Git repository on local machine and commit, publish our code to Windows Azure through Git command or some GUI. - Deploy from my GitHub project: In this mode we will have a Git repository created on GitHub. Once we publish our code to GitHub Windows Azure will download the code and trigger a new deployment. - Deploy from my CodePlex project: Similar as the previous one but our code would be in CodePlex repository.   Now let’s back to GitHub and create a new publish repository. Currently WAWS GitHub integration only support for public repositories. The private repositories support will be available in several weeks. We can manage our repositories in GitHub website. But as a windows geek I prefer the GUI tool. So I opened the GitHub for Windows, login with my GitHub account and select the “github” category, click the “add” button to create a new repository on GitHub. You can download the GitHub for Windows here. I specified the repository name, description, local repository, do not check the “Keep this code private”. After few seconds it will create a new repository on GitHub and associate it to my local machine in that folder. We can find this new repository in GitHub website. And in GitHub for Windows we can also find the local repository by selecting the “local” category.   Next, we need to associate this repository with our WAWS. Back to windows developer portal, open the “Deploy from my GitHub project” in the deployment page and click the “Authorize Windows Azure” link. It will bring up a new windows on GitHub which let me allow the Windows Azure application can access your repositories. After we clicked “Allow”, windows azure will retrieve all my GitHub public repositories and let me select which one I want to integrate to this WAWS. I selected the one I had just created in GitHub for Windows. So that’s all. We had completed the GitHub integration configuration. Now let’s have a try. In GitHub for Windows, right click on this local repository and click “open in explorer”. Then I added a simple HTML file. 1: <html> 2: <head> 3: </head> 4: <body> 5: <h1> 6: I came from GitHub, WOW! 7: </h1> 8: </body> 9: </html> Save it and back to GitHub for Windows, commit this change and publish. This will upload our changes to GitHub, and Windows Azure will detect this update and trigger a new deployment. If we went back to azure developer portal we can find the new deployment. And our commit message will be shown as the deployment description as well. And here is the page deployed to WAWS.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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