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• You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development Expert if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes).  It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having to sift through all the resumes of those who think very highly of themselves and their skills only to find those gaping holes in common best practices. I’m much more willing to hire a decent dev who KNOWS they are not an expert than to hire a decent+ dev who THINKS they are an expert.  So… I’ve compiled a small reality check for you SharePoint Devs. and a “red flag” check for those of you wishing to hire a SharePoint developer. If any of these apply to you, you are probably not a SharePoint Development Expert. You are not a SharePoint Development Expert if you manually copy your DLLs Seriously, I don’t care if you write the best code in the world. If you are manually copying files to each web front end you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert. Yes, I realize the admins are generally the ones who do the actual deployments, but if you don’t know how to create solution packages for your admins, you are going to end up doing more damage than good some day. There are TONS of tools out there to help generate deployable solutions for you. You have ZERO excuse. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you can’t tell me the main artifacts of a solution package Directly related to the first one. If you don’t know what the Manifest, DDF, WSP, and Feature files are and how they are used in a solution package, you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. I’m not asking you to be able to write them all from scratch (heck, I can’t even do that), but you MUST know what they are and how to tweak them if necessary. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know what a Content Type or a Site Column is You would be absolutely amazed at how many “Expert” SharePoint Developers have NEVER EVER created a Content Type or Site Column or even know what they are. I mean, why would you ever want to create those when you can just do everything as a custom list or custom field? right???? (that’s sarcasm). You also need to know how to package a Content Type and a Site Column into a deployable package by the way. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you have not created at least one Web Part, Workflow, Timer Job, and Event Handler. If you haven’t written at least one of each, you don’t fully understand what they do or their limitations. Again, I expect NO ONE to be able to write these things blind. I think the last time I wrote an application from scratch without copying and pasting from another project I had done before was back in 1994? Seriously, coding is like a Sour Dough starter, you get it from someone else and keep adding to it. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know how to properly dispose of objects Another biggie with zero excuse for getting it wrong. It is so well known that you must dispose of your SPWeb and SPSite objects that if you aren’t doing it then you are not an expert. Heck, if you utilize “using” when handling SPWeb and SPSite objects and don’t realize that it disposes of those objects for you, then you are not a SharePoint Development expert. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you do not know how to properly elevate privileges Just one of those development basics that any decent SharePoint Developer has got to have down and understand how and why it’s used You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know all of the development options available to SharePoint and when they should be used Okay… so all you hard core .NET SharePoint dev geeks take a moment to listen. You may be the most top not SharePoint .NET developer in the world, but if you are opening Visual Studio to solve every problem in SharePoint, then you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. The SharePoint developer’s tool kit is growing every day with tools like Visual Studio, Data View Web Parts, XSL, jQuery, SPServices, etc. etc… If you don’t have the ability to at least recognize that “hey, you can basically do the same thing here but just dropping in Easy Tabs instead of writing some weird web part” then you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert AND you are doing a huge disservice to your clients and customers. You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development expert if you call yourself an Expert So, truth telling time. I’m not an expert. There, I said it. I feel so much better. Now, I realize the word “expert” has been used with my name before, but I am quick to point out that I KNOW the experts and know that they will help me if I need it, but I’m not an expert in all things SharePoint. The minute you take on that moniker you are setting yourself up for a fall. It’s too big, there’s too much to know, and there’s WAY too much you can do wrong. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you are not involved in the community I expect to get the most flack for this one, but it’s always a huge red flag for me when someone says they are an expert and has ZERO knowledge of the SharePoint community. The SharePoint community is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to be an effective SharePoint developer, admin, architect, power user or whatever the heck you are!! The community keeps you sane, tells you when you are NOT using a best practice, recommends the best practice, and even knows when Microsoft is giving you the wrong information (*gasp* it does happen). If you can’t tell me who you are following on twitter, who's blog you read, what conferences you attend, or name the experts who you monitor to make sure you are not doing something stupid, then you are probably doing something stupid. Again, not asking you to be a speaker, blogger, or the least bit extroverted but you should be at LEAST stalking the experts. So… what’s the point? So… yeah… what’s my point in all this. Well, first of all let me point out that this is by far not a finished list and I could come up with a LOT more specific “deep dive” questions, but these should be high enough level that even non experts can recognize and ask them. If you have some common ones you run into let me know and add them in the comments below. Also, keep in mind I’m not saying you as a developer HAVE to know EVERYTHING, but you DO need to know what you don’t know and proudly and honestly state “I don’t know, but I’ll learn and find out”.  Those of us hiring SharePoint developers and know and have a passion for SharePoint are not looking for that elusive “expert” who knows everything. We are looking for someone who “gets it”, has a similar passion, great attitude, an understanding that they DON’T know everything, and a desire to do it right.  I would bet money that most SharePoint development disasters happen because of “experts” who think they know everything rather than the developer who is cautious and knows he doesn’t. Lastly, I know there’s a raging debate over what a “SharePoint Developer” is (I should know, as I keep bringing it up). So, obviously this blog post is more closely tied to the .NET side of SharePoint development and less towards the client side, middle tier, or whatever you want to call it. So, let’s please not get that argument going here as well…  Thanks

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• What is SharePoint Out of the Box?

  - by Bil Simser

  It’s always fun in the blog-o-sphere and SharePoint bloggers always keep the pot boiling. Bjorn Furuknap recently posted a blog entry titled Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint, quickly followed up by a rebuttal by Marc Anderson on his blog. Okay, now that we have all the players and the stage what’s the big deal? Bjorn started his post saying that you don’t use “out-of-the-box” (OOTB) SharePoint because it makes no sense. I have to disagree with his premise because what he calls OOTB is basically installing SharePoint and admiring it, but not using it. In his post he lays claim that modifying say the OOTB contacts list by removing (or I suppose adding) a column, now puts you in a situation where you’re no longer using the OOTB functionality. Really? Side note. Dear Internet, please stop comparing building software to building houses. Or comparing software architecture to building architecture. Or comparing web sites to making dinner. Are you trying to dumb down something so the general masses understand it? Comparing a technical skill to a construction operation isn’t the way to do this. Last time I checked, most people don’t know how to build houses and last time I checked people reading technical SharePoint blogs are generally technical people that understand the terms you use. Putting metaphors around software development to make it easy to understand is detrimental to the goal. </rant> Okay, where were we? Right, adding columns to lists means you are no longer using the OOTB functionality. Yeah, I still don’t get it. Another statement Bjorn makes is that using the OOTB functionality kills the flexibility SharePoint has in creating exactly what you want. IMHO this really flies in the absolute face of *where* SharePoint *really* shines. For the past year or so I’ve been leaning more and more towards OOTB solutions over custom development for the simple reason that its expensive to maintain systems and code and assets. SharePoint has enabled me to do this simply by providing the tools where I can give users what they need without cracking open up Visual Studio. This might be the fact that my day job is with a regulated company and there’s more scrutiny with spending money on anything new, but frankly that should be the position of any responsible developer, architect, manager, or PM. Do you really want to throw money away because some developer tells you that you need a custom web part when perhaps with some creative thinking or expectation setting with customers you can meet the need with what you already have. The way I read Bjorn’s terminology of “out-of-the-box” is install the software and tell people to go to a website and admire the OOTB system, but don’t change it! For those that know things like WordPress, DotNetNuke, SubText, Drupal or any of those content management/blogging systems, its akin to installing the software and setting up the “Hello World” blog post or page, then staring at it like it’s useful. “Yes, we are using WordPress!”. Then not adding a new post, creating a new category, or adding an About page. Perhaps I’m wrong in my interpretation. This leads us to what is OOTB SharePoint? To many people I’ve talked to the last few hours on twitter, email, etc. it is *not* just installing software but actually using it as it was fit for purpose. What’s the purpose of SharePoint then? It has many purposes, but using the OOTB templates Microsoft has given you the ability to collaborate on projects, author/share/publish documents, create pages, track items/contacts/tasks/etc. in a multi-user web based interface, and so on. Microsoft has pretty clear definitions of these different levels of SharePoint we’re talking about and I think it’s important for everyone to know what they are and what they mean. Personalization and Administration To me, this is the OOTB experience. You install the product and then are able to do things like create new lists, sites, edit and personalize pages, create new views, etc. Basically use the platform services available to you with Windows SharePoint Services (or SharePoint Foundation in 2010) to your full advantage. No code, no special tools needed, and very little user training required. Could you take someone who has never done anything in a website or piece of software and unleash them onto a site? Probably not. However I would argue that anyone who’s configured the Outlook reading layout or applied styles to a Word document probably won’t have too much difficulty in using SharePoint OUT OF THE BOX. Customization Here’s where things might get a bit murky but to me this is where you start looking at HTML/ASPX page code through SharePoint Designer, using jQuery scripts and plugging them into Web Part Pages via a Content Editor Web Part, and generally enhancing the site. The JavaScript debate might kick in here claiming it’s no different than C#, and frankly you can totally screw a site up with jQuery on a CEWP just as easily as you can with a C# delegate control deployed to the server file system. However (again, my blog, my opinion) the customization label comes in when I need to access the server (for example creating a custom theme) or have some kind of net-new element I add to the system that wasn’t there OOTB. It’s not content (like a new list or site), it’s code and does something functional. Development Here’s were the propeller hats come on and we’re talking algorithms and unit tests and compilers oh my. Software is deployed to the server, people are writing solutions after some kind of training (perhaps), there might be some specialized tools they use to craft and deploy the solutions, there’s the possibility of exceptions being thrown, etc. There are a lot of definitions here and just like customization it might get murky (do you let non-developers build solutions using development, i.e. jQuery/C#?). In my experience, it’s much more cost effective keeping solutions under the first two umbrellas than leaping into the third one. Arguably you could say that you can’t build useful solutions without *some* kind of code (even just some simple jQuery). I think you can get a *lot* of value just from using the OOTB experience and I don’t think you’re constraining your users that much. I’m not saying Marc or Bjorn are wrong. Like Obi-Wan stated, they’re both correct “from a certain point of view”. To me, SharePoint Out of the Box makes total sense and should not be dismissed. I just don’t agree with the premise that Bjorn is basing his statements on but that’s just my opinion and his is different and never the twain shall meet.

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• Interview with Lenz Grimmer about MySQL Connect

  - by Keith Larson

  Keith Larson: Thank you for allowing me to do this interview with you.  I have been talking with a few different Oracle ACEs   about the MySQL Connect Conference. I figured the MySQL community might be missing you as well. You have been very busy with Oracle Linux but I know you still have an eye on the MySQL Community. How have things been?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks for including me in this series of interviews, I feel honored! I've read the other interviews, and really liked them. I still try to follow what's going on over in the MySQL community and it's good to see that many of the familiar faces are still around. Over the course of the 9 years that I was involved with MySQL, many colleagues and contacts turned into good friends and we still maintain close relationships.It's been almost 1.5 years ago that I moved into my new role here in the Linux team at Oracle, and I really enjoy working on a Linux distribution again (I worked for SUSE before I joined MySQL AB in 2002). I'm still learning a lot - Linux in the data center has greatly evolved in so many ways and there are a lot of new and exciting technologies to explore. Keith Larson: What were your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to deliver the MySQL Connect conference to the MySQL Community?Lenz Grimmer: I think it's testament to the fact that Oracle deeply cares about MySQL, despite what many skeptics may say. What started as "MySQL Sunday" two years ago has now evolved into a full-blown sub-conference, with 80 sessions at one of the largest corporate IT events in the world. I find this quite telling, not many products at Oracle enjoy this level of exposure! So it certainly makes me feel proud to see how far MySQL has come. Keith Larson: Have you had a chance to look over the sessions? What are your thoughts on them?Lenz Grimmer: I did indeed look at the final schedule.The content committee did a great job with selecting these sessions. I'm glad to see that the content selection was influenced by involving well-known and respected members of the MySQL community. The sessions cover a broad range of topics and technologies, both covering established topics as well as recent developments. Keith Larson: When you get a chance, what sessions do you plan on attending?Lenz Grimmer: I will actually be manning the Oracle booth in the exhibition area on one of these days, so I'm not sure if I'll have a lot of time attending sessions. But if I do, I'd love to see the keynotes and catch some of the sessions that talk about recent developments and new features in MySQL, High Availability and Clustering . Quite a lot has happened and it's hard to keep up with this constant flow of new MySQL releases.In particular, the following sessions caught my attention: MySQL Connect Keynote: The State of the Dolphin Evaluating MySQL High-Availability Alternatives CERN’s MySQL “as a Service” Deployment with Oracle VM: Empowering Users MySQL 5.6 Replication: Taking Scalability and High Availability to the Next Level What’s New in MySQL Server 5.6? MySQL Security: Past and Present MySQL at Twitter: Development and Deployment MySQL Community BOF MySQL Connect Keynote: MySQL Perspectives Keith Larson: So I will ask you just like I have asked the others I have interviewed, any tips that you would give to people for handling the long hours at conferences?Lenz Grimmer: Wear comfortable shoes and make sure to drink a lot! Also prepare a plan of the sessions you would like to attend beforehand and familiarize yourself with the venue, so you can get to the next talk in time without scrambling to find the location. The good thing about piggybacking on such a large conference like Oracle OpenWorld is that you benefit from the whole infrastructure. For example, there is a nice schedule builder that helps you to keep track of your sessions of interest. Other than that, bring enough business cards and talk to people, build up your network among your peers and other MySQL professionals! Keith Larson: What features of the MySQL 5.6 release do you look forward to the most ?Lenz Grimmer: There has been solid progress in so many areas like the InnoDB Storage Engine, the Optimizer, Replication or Performance Schema, it's hard for me to really highlight anything in particular. All in all, MySQL 5.6 sounds like a very promising release. I'm confident it will follow the tradition that Oracle already established with MySQL 5.5, which received a lot of praise even from very critical members of the MySQL community. If I had to name a single feature, I'm particularly and personally happy that the precise GIS functions have finally made it into a GA release - that was long overdue. Keith Larson:  In your opinion what is the best reason for someone to attend this event?Lenz Grimmer: This conference is an excellent opportunity to get in touch with the key people in the MySQL community and ecosystem and to get facts and information from the domain experts and developers that work on MySQL. The broad range of topics should attract people from a variety of roles and relations to MySQL, beginning with Developers and DBAs, to CIOs considering MySQL as a viable solution for their requirements. Keith Larson: You will be attending MySQL Connect and have some Oracle Linux Demos, do you see a growing demand for MySQL on Oracle Linux ?Lenz Grimmer: Yes! Oracle Linux is our recommended Linux distribution and we have a good relationship to the MySQL engineering group. They use Oracle Linux as a base Linux platform for development and QA, so we make sure that MySQL and Oracle Linux are well tested together. Setting up a MySQL server on Oracle Linux can be done very quickly, and many customers recognize the benefits of using them both in combination.Because Oracle Linux is available for free (including free bug fixes and errata), it's an ideal choice for running MySQL in your data center. You can run the same Linux distribution on both your development/staging systems as well as on the production machines, you decide which of these should be covered by a support subscription and at which level of support. This gives you flexibility and provides some really attractive cost-saving opportunities. Keith Larson: Since I am a Linux user and fan, what is on the horizon for  Oracle Linux?Lenz Grimmer: We're working hard on broadening the ecosystem around Oracle Linux, building up partnerships with ISVs and IHVs to certify Oracle Linux as a fully supported platform for their products. We also continue to collaborate closely with the Linux kernel community on various projects, to make sure that Linux scales and performs well on large systems and meets the demands of today's data centers. These improvements and enhancements will then rolled into the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which is the key ingredient that sets Oracle Linux apart from other distributions. We also have a number of ongoing projects which are making good progress, and I'm sure you'll hear more about this at the upcoming OpenWorld conference :) Keith Larson: What is something that more people should be aware of when it comes to Oracle Linux and MySQL ?Lenz Grimmer: Many people assume that Oracle Linux is just tuned for Oracle products, such as the Oracle Database or our Engineered Systems. While it's of course true that we do a lot of testing and optimization for these workloads, Oracle Linux is and will remain a general-purpose Linux distribution that is a very good foundation for setting up a LAMP-Stack, for example. We also provide MySQL RPM packages for Oracle Linux, so you can easily stay up to date if you need something newer than what's included in the stock distribution.One more thing that is really unique to Oracle Linux is Ksplice, which allows you to apply security patches to the running Linux kernel, without having to reboot. This ensures that your MySQL database server keeps up and running and is not affected by any downtime. Keith Larson: What else would you like to add ?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks again for getting in touch with me, I appreciated the opportunity. I'm looking forward to MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld and to meet you and many other people from the MySQL community that I haven't seen for quite some time! Keith Larson:  Thank you Lenz!

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• Keeping track of File System Utilization in Ops Center 12c

  - by S Stelting

  Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c provides significant monitoring capabilities, combined with very flexible incident management. These capabilities even extend to monitoring the file systems associated with Solaris or Linux assets. Depending on your needs you can monitor and manage incidents, or you can fine tune alert monitoring rules to specific file systems. This article will show you how to use Ops Center 12c to Track file system utilization Adjust file system monitoring rules Disable file system rules Create custom monitoring rules If you're interested in this topic, please join us for a WebEx presentation! Date: Thursday, November 8, 2012 Time: 11:00 am, Eastern Standard Time (New York, GMT-05:00) Meeting Number: 598 796 842 Meeting Password: oracle123 To join the online meeting ------------------------------------------------------- 1. Go to https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209833597&UID=1512095432&PW=NOWQ3YjJlMmYy&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D 2. If requested, enter your name and email address. 3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: oracle123 4. Click "Join". To view in other time zones or languages, please click the link: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209833597&UID=1512095432&PW=NOWQ3YjJlMmYy&ORT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D   Monitoring File Systems for OS Assets The Libraries tab provides basic, device-level information about the storage associated with an OS instance. This tab shows you the local file system associated with the instance and any shared storage libraries mounted by Ops Center. More detailed information about file system storage is available under the Analytics tab under the sub-tab named Charts. Here, you can select and display the individual mount points of an OS, and export the utilization data if desired: In this example, the OS instance has a basic root file partition and several NFS directories. Each file system mount point can be independently chosen for display in the Ops Center chart. File Systems and Incident  Reporting Every asset managed by Ops Center has a "monitoring policy", which determines what represents a reportable issue with the asset. The policy is made up of a bunch of monitoring rules, where each rule describes An attribute to monitor The conditions which represent an issue The level or levels of severity for the issue When the conditions are met, Ops Center sends a notification and creates an incident. By default, OS instances have three monitoring rules associated with file systems: File System Reachability: Triggers an incident if a file system is not reachable NAS Library Status: Triggers an incident for a value of "WARNING" or "DEGRADED" for a NAS-based file system File System Used Space Percentage: Triggers an incident when file system utilization grows beyond defined thresholds You can view these rules in the Monitoring tab for an OS: Of course, the default monitoring rules is that they apply to every file system associated with an OS instance. As a result, any issue with NAS accessibility or disk utilization will trigger an incident. This can cause incidents for file systems to be reported multiple times if the same shared storage is used by many assets, as shown in this screen shot: Depending on the level of control you'd like, there are a number of ways to fine tune incident reporting. Note that any changes to an asset's monitoring policy will detach it from the default, creating a new monitoring policy for the asset. If you'd like, you can extract a monitoring policy from an asset, which allows you to save it and apply the customized monitoring profile to other OS assets. Solution #1: Modify the Reporting Thresholds In some cases, you may want to modify the basic conditions for incident reporting in your file system. The changes you make to a default monitoring rule will apply to all of the file systems associated with your operating system. Selecting the File Systems Used Space Percentage entry and clicking the "Edit Alert Monitoring Rule Parameters" button opens a pop-up dialog which allows you to modify the rule. The first screen lets you decide when you will check for file system usage, and how long you will wait before opening an incident in Ops Center. By default, Ops Center monitors continuously and reports disk utilization issues which exist for more than 15 minutes. The second screen lets you define actual threshold values. By default, Ops Center opens a Warning level incident is utilization rises above 80%, and a Critical level incident for utilization above 95% Solution #2: Disable Incident Reporting for File System If you'd rather not report file system incidents, you can disable the monitoring rules altogether. In this case, you can select the monitoring rules and click the "Disable Alert Monitoring Rule(s)" button to open the pop-up confirmation dialog. Like the first solution, this option affects all file system monitoring. It allows you to completely disable incident reporting for NAS library status or file system space consumption. Solution #3: Create New Monitoring Rules for Specific File Systems If you'd like to have the greatest flexibility when monitoring file systems, you can create entirely new rules. Clicking the "Add Alert Monitoring Rule" (the icon with the green plus sign) opens a wizard which allows you to define a new rule.  This rule will be based on a threshold, and will be used to monitor operating system assets. We'd like to add a rule to track disk utilization for a specific file system - the /nfs-guest directory. To do this, we specify the following attribute FileSystemUsages.name=/nfs-guest.usedSpacePercentage The value of name in the attribute allows us to define a specific NFS shared directory or file system... in the case of this OS, we could have chosen any of the values shown in the File Systems Utilization chart at the beginning of this article. usedSpacePercentage lets us define a threshold based on the percentage of total disk space used. There are a number of other values that we could use for threshold-based monitoring of FileSystemUsages, including freeSpace freeSpacePercentage totalSpace usedSpace usedSpacePercentage The final sections of the screen allow us to determine when to monitor for disk usage, and how long to wait after utilization reaches a threshold before creating an incident. The next screen lets us define the threshold values and severity levels for the monitoring rule: If historical data is available, Ops Center will display it in the screen. Clicking the Apply button will create the new monitoring rule and active it in your monitoring policy. If you combine this with one of the previous solutions, you can precisely define which file systems will generate incidents and notifications. For example, this monitoring policy has the default "File System Used Space Percentage" rule disabled, but the new rule reports ONLY on utilization for the /nfs-guest directory. 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• Big Data – Is Big Data Relevant to me? – Big Data Questionnaires – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions of SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I think the series from Pinal is a good one for anyone planning to start on Big Data journey from the basics. In my daily customer interactions this buzz of “Big Data” always comes up, I react generally saying – “Sir, do you really have a ‘Big Data’ problem or do you have a big Data problem?” Generally, there is a silence in the air when I ask this question. Data is everywhere in organizations – be it big data, small data, all data and for few it is bad data which is same as no data :). Wow, don’t discount me as someone who opposes “Big Data”, I am a big supporter as much as I am a critic of the abuse of this term by the people. In this post, I wanted to let my mind flow so that you can also think in the direction I want you to see these concepts. In any case, this is not an exhaustive dump of what is in my mind – but you will surely get the drift how I am going to question Big Data terms from customers!!! Is Big Data Relevant to me? Many of my customers talk to me like blank whiteboard with no idea – “why Big Data”. They want to jump into the bandwagon of technology and they want to decipher insights from their unexplored data a.k.a. unstructured data with structured data. So what are these industry scenario’s that come to mind? Here are some of them: Financials Fraud detection: Banks and Credit cards are monitoring your spending habits on real-time basis. Customer Segmentation: applies in every industry from Banking to Retail to Aviation to Utility and others where they deal with end customer who consume their products and services. Customer Sentiment Analysis: Responding to negative brand perception on social or amplify the positive perception. Sales and Marketing Campaign: Understand the impact and get closer to customer delight. Call Center Analysis: attempt to take unstructured voice recordings and analyze them for content and sentiment. Medical Reduce Re-admissions: How to build a proactive follow-up engagements with patients. Patient Monitoring: How to track Inpatient, Out-Patient, Emergency Visits, Intensive Care Units etc. Preventive Care: Disease identification and Risk stratification is a very crucial business function for medical. Claims fraud detection: There is no precise dollars that one can put here, but this is a big thing for the medical field. Retail Customer Sentiment Analysis, Customer Care Centers, Campaign Management. Supply Chain Analysis: Every sensors and RFID data can be tracked for warehouse space optimization. Location based marketing: Based on where a check-in happens retail stores can be optimize their marketing. Telecom Price optimization and Plans, Finding Customer churn, Customer loyalty programs Call Detail Record (CDR) Analysis, Network optimizations, User Location analysis Customer Behavior Analysis Insurance Fraud Detection & Analysis, Pricing based on customer Sentiment Analysis, Loyalty Management Agents Analysis, Customer Value Management This list can go on to other areas like Utility, Manufacturing, Travel, ITES etc. So as you can see, there are obviously interesting use cases for each of these industry verticals. These are just representative list. Where to start? A lot of times I try to quiz customers on a number of dimensions before starting a Big Data conversation. Are you getting the data you need the way you want it and in a timely manner? Can you get in and analyze the data you need? How quickly is IT to respond to your BI Requests? How easily can you get at the data that you need to run your business/department/project? How are you currently measuring your business? Can you get the data you need to react WITHIN THE QUARTER to impact behaviors to meet your numbers or is it always “rear-view mirror?” How are you measuring: The Brand Customer Sentiment Your Competition Your Pricing Your performance Supply Chain Efficiencies Predictive product / service positioning What are your key challenges of driving collaboration across your global business?  What the challenges in innovation? What challenges are you facing in getting more information out of your data? Note: Garbage-in is Garbage-out. Hold good for all reporting / analytics requirements Big Data POCs? A number of customers get into the realm of setting a small team to work on Big Data – well it is a great start from an understanding point of view, but I tend to ask a number of other questions to such customers. Some of these common questions are: To what degree is your advanced analytics (natural language processing, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics and classification) paired with your Big Data’s efforts? Do you have dedicated resources exploring the possibilities of advanced analytics in Big Data for your business line? Do you plan to employ machine learning technology while doing Advanced Analytics? How is Social Media being monitored in your organization? What is your ability to scale in terms of storage and processing power? Do you have a system in place to sort incoming data in near real time by potential value, data quality, and use frequency? Do you use event-driven architecture to manage incoming data? Do you have specialized data services that can accommodate different formats, security, and the management requirements of multiple data sources? Is your organization currently using or considering in-memory analytics? To what degree are you able to correlate data from your Big Data infrastructure with that from your enterprise data warehouse? Have you extended the role of Data Stewards to include ownership of big data components? Do you prioritize data quality based on the source system (that is Facebook/Twitter data has lower quality thresholds than radio frequency identification (RFID) for a tracking system)? Do your retention policies consider the different legal responsibilities for storing Big Data for a specific amount of time? Do Data Scientists work in close collaboration with Data Stewards to ensure data quality? How is access to attributes of Big Data being given out in the organization? Are roles related to Big Data (Advanced Analyst, Data Scientist) clearly defined? How involved is risk management in the Big Data governance process? Is there a set of documented policies regarding Big Data governance? Is there an enforcement mechanism or approach to ensure that policies are followed? Who is the key sponsor for your Big Data governance program? (The CIO is best) Do you have defined policies surrounding the use of social media data for potential employees and customers, as well as the use of customer Geo-location data? How accessible are complex analytic routines to your user base? What is the level of involvement with outside vendors and third parties in regard to the planning and execution of Big Data projects? What programming technologies are utilized by your data warehouse/BI staff when working with Big Data? These are some of the important questions I ask each customer who is actively evaluating Big Data trends for their organizations. These questions give you a sense of direction where to start, what to use, how to secure, how to analyze and more. Sign off Any Big data is analysis is incomplete without a compelling story. The best way to understand this is to watch Hans Rosling – Gapminder (2:17 to 6:06) videos about the third world myths. Don’t get overwhelmed with the Big Data buzz word, the destination to what your data speaks is important. In this blog post, we did not particularly look at any Big Data technologies. This is a set of questionnaire one needs to keep in mind as they embark their journey of Big Data. I did write some of the basics in my blog: Big Data – Big Hype yet Big Opportunity. Do let me know if these questions make sense?  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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• Listing common SQL Code Smells.

  - by Phil Factor

  Once you’ve done a number of SQL Code-reviews, you’ll know those signs in the code that all might not be well. These ’Code Smells’ are coding styles that don’t directly cause a bug, but are indicators that all is not well with the code. . Kent Beck and Massimo Arnoldi seem to have coined the phrase in the "OnceAndOnlyOnce" page of www.C2.com, where Kent also said that code "wants to be simple". Bad Smells in Code was an essay by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler, published as Chapter 3 of the book ‘Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code’ (ISBN 978-0201485677) Although there are generic code-smells, SQL has its own particular coding habits that will alert the programmer to the need to re-factor what has been written. See Exploring Smelly Code   and Code Deodorants for Code Smells by Nick Harrison for a grounding in Code Smells in C# I’ve always been tempted by the idea of automating a preliminary code-review for SQL. It would be so useful to trawl through code and pick up the various problems, much like the classic ‘Lint’ did for C, and how the Code Metrics plug-in for .NET Reflector by Jonathan 'Peli' de Halleux is used for finding Code Smells in .NET code. The problem is that few of the standard procedural code smells are relevant to SQL, and we need an agreed list of code smells. Merrilll Aldrich made a grand start last year in his blog Top 10 T-SQL Code Smells.However, I'd like to make a start by discovering if there is a general opinion amongst Database developers what the most important SQL Smells are. One can be a bit defensive about code smells. I will cheerfully write very long stored procedures, even though they are frowned on. I’ll use dynamic SQL occasionally. You can only use them as an aid for your own judgment and it is fine to ‘sign them off’ as being appropriate in particular circumstances. Also, whole classes of ‘code smells’ may be irrelevant for a particular database. The use of proprietary SQL, for example, is only a ‘code smell’ if there is a chance that the database will have to be ported to another RDBMS. The use of dynamic SQL is a risk only with certain security models. As the saying goes,  a CodeSmell is a hint of possible bad practice to a pragmatist, but a sure sign of bad practice to a purist. Plamen Ratchev’s wonderful article Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes lists some of these ‘code smells’ along with out-and-out mistakes, but there are more. The use of nested transactions, for example, isn’t entirely incorrect, even though the database engine ignores all but the outermost: but it does flag up the possibility that the programmer thinks that nested transactions are supported. If anything requires some sort of general agreement, the definition of code smells is one. I’m therefore going to make this Blog ‘dynamic, in that, if anyone twitters a suggestion with a #SQLCodeSmells tag (or sends me a twitter) I’ll update the list here. If you add a comment to the blog with a suggestion of what should be added or removed, I’ll do my best to oblige. In other words, I’ll try to keep this blog up to date. The name against each 'smell' is the name of the person who Twittered me, commented about or who has written about the 'smell'. it does not imply that they were the first ever to think of the smell! Use of deprecated syntax such as *= (Dave Howard) Denormalisation that requires the shredding of the contents of columns. (Merrill Aldrich) Contrived interfaces Use of deprecated datatypes such as TEXT/NTEXT (Dave Howard) Datatype mis-matches in predicates that rely on implicit conversion.(Plamen Ratchev) Using Correlated subqueries instead of a join   (Dave_Levy/ Plamen Ratchev) The use of Hints in queries, especially NOLOCK (Dave Howard /Mike Reigler) Few or No comments. Use of functions in a WHERE clause. (Anil Das) Overuse of scalar UDFs (Dave Howard, Plamen Ratchev) Excessive ‘overloading’ of routines. The use of Exec xp_cmdShell (Merrill Aldrich) Excessive use of brackets. (Dave Levy) Lack of the use of a semicolon to terminate statements Use of non-SARGable functions on indexed columns in predicates (Plamen Ratchev) Duplicated code, or strikingly similar code. Misuse of SELECT * (Plamen Ratchev) Overuse of Cursors (Everyone. Special mention to Dave Levy & Adrian Hills) Overuse of CLR routines when not necessary (Sam Stange) Same column name in different tables with different datatypes. (Ian Stirk) Use of ‘broken’ functions such as ‘ISNUMERIC’ without additional checks. Excessive use of the WHILE loop (Merrill Aldrich) INSERT ... EXEC (Merrill Aldrich) The use of stored procedures where a view is sufficient (Merrill Aldrich) Not using two-part object names (Merrill Aldrich) Using INSERT INTO without specifying the columns and their order (Merrill Aldrich) Full outer joins even when they are not needed. (Plamen Ratchev) Huge stored procedures (hundreds/thousands of lines). Stored procedures that can produce different columns, or order of columns in their results, depending on the inputs. Code that is never used. Complex and nested conditionals WHILE (not done) loops without an error exit. Variable name same as the Datatype Vague identifiers. Storing complex data  or list in a character map, bitmap or XML field User procedures with sp_ prefix (Aaron Bertrand)Views that reference views that reference views that reference views (Aaron Bertrand) Inappropriate use of sql_variant (Neil Hambly) Errors with identity scope using SCOPE_IDENTITY @@IDENTITY or IDENT_CURRENT (Neil Hambly, Aaron Bertrand) Schemas that involve multiple dated copies of the same table instead of partitions (Matt Whitfield-Atlantis UK) Scalar UDFs that do data lookups (poor man's join) (Matt Whitfield-Atlantis UK) Code that allows SQL Injection (Mladen Prajdic) Tables without clustered indexes (Matt Whitfield-Atlantis UK) Use of "SELECT DISTINCT" to mask a join problem (Nick Harrison) Multiple stored procedures with nearly identical implementation. (Nick Harrison) Excessive column aliasing may point to a problem or it could be a mapping implementation. (Nick Harrison) Joining "too many" tables in a query. (Nick Harrison) Stored procedure returning more than one record set. (Nick Harrison) A NOT LIKE condition (Nick Harrison) excessive "OR" conditions. (Nick Harrison) User procedures with sp_ prefix (Aaron Bertrand) Views that reference views that reference views that reference views (Aaron Bertrand) sp_OACreate or anything related to it (Bill Fellows) Prefixing names with tbl_, vw_, fn_, and usp_ ('tibbling') (Jeremiah Peschka) Aliases that go a,b,c,d,e... (Dave Levy/Diane McNurlan) Overweight Queries (e.g. 4 inner joins, 8 left joins, 4 derived tables, 10 subqueries, 8 clustered GUIDs, 2 UDFs, 6 case statements = 1 query) (Robert L Davis) Order by 3,2 (Dave Levy) MultiStatement Table functions which are then filtered 'Sel * from Udf() where Udf.Col = Something' (Dave Ballantyne) running a SQL 2008 system in SQL 2000 compatibility mode(John Stafford)

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• Using the new CSS Analyzer in JavaFX Scene Builder

  - by Jerome Cambon

  As you know, JavaFX provides from the API many properties that you can set to customize or make your components to behave as you want. For instance, for a Button, you can set its font, or its max size.Using Scene Builder, these properties can be explored and modified using the inspector. However, JavaFX also provides many other properties to have a fine grained customization of your components : the css properties. These properties are typically set from a css stylesheet. For instance, you can set a background image on a Button, change the Button corners, etc... Using Scene Builder, until now, you could set a css property using the inspector Style and Stylesheet editors. But you had to go to the JavaFX css documentation to know the css properties that can be applied to a given component. Hopefully, Scene Builder 1.1 added recently a very interesting new feature : the CSS Analyzer.It allows you to explore all the css properties available for a JavaFX component, and helps you to build your css rules. A very simple example : make a Button rounded Let’s take a very simple example:you would like to customize your Buttons to make them rounded. First, enable the CSS Analyzer, using the ‘View->Show CSS Analyzer’ menu. Grow the main window, and the CSS Analyzer to get more room: Then, drop a Button from the Library to the ContentView: the CSS Analyzer is now showing the Button css properties: As you can see, there is a ‘-fx-background-radius’ css property that allow to define the radius of the background (note that you can get the associated css documentation by clicking on the property name). You can then experiment this by setting the Button style property from the inspector: As you can see in the css doc, one can set the same radius for the 4 corners by a simple number. Once the style value is applied, the Button is now rounded, as expected.Look at the CSS Analyzer: the ‘-fx-background-radius’ property has now 2 entries: the default one, and the one we just entered from the Style property. The new value “win”: it overrides the default one, and become the actual value (to highlight this, the cell background becomes blue). Now, you will certainly prefer to apply this new style to all the Buttons of your FXML document, and have a css rule for this.To do this, save you document first, and create a css file in the same directory than the new document.Create an empty css file (e.g. test.css), and attach it the the root AnchorPane, by first selecting the AnchorPane, then using the Stylesheets editor from the inspector: Add the corresponding css rule to your new test.css file, from your preferred editor (Netbeans for me ;-) and save it. .button { -fx-background-radius: 10px;} Now, select your Button and have a look at the CSS Analyzer. As you can see, the Button is inheriting the css rule (since the Button is a child of the AnchorPane), and still have its inline Style. The Inline style “win”, since it has precedence on the stylesheet. The CSS Analyzer columns are displayed by precedence order.Note the small right-arrow icons, that allow to jump to the source of the value (either test.css, or the inspector in this case).Of course, unless you want to set a specific background radius for this particular Button, you can remove the inline Style from the inspector. Changing the color of a TitledPane arrow In some cases, it can be useful to be able to select the inner element you want to style directly from the Content View . Drop a TitledPane to the Content View. Then select from the CSS Analyzer the CSS cursor (the other cursor on the left allow you to come back to ‘standard’ selection), that will allow to select an inner element: height: 62px;" align="LEFT" border="0"> … and select the TitledPane arrow, that will get a yellow background: … and the Styleable Path is updated: To define a new css rule, you can first copy the Styleable path : .. then paste it in your test.css file. Then, add an entry to set the -fx-background-color to red. You should have something like: .titled-pane:expanded .title .arrow-button .arrow { -fx-background-color : red;} As soon as the test.css is saved, the change is taken into account in Scene Builder. You can also use the Styleable Path to discover all the inner elements of TitledPane, by clicking on the arrow icon: More details You can see the CSS Analyzer in action (and many other features) from the Java One BOF: BOF4279 - In-Depth Layout and Styling with the JavaFX Scene Builder presented by my colleague Jean-Francois Denise. On the right hand, click on the Media link to go to the video (streaming) of the presa. The Scene Builder support of CSS starts at 9:20 The CSS Analyzer presentation starts at 12:50

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• Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

  - by Lewis Benge

  One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

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• Configure Oracle SOA JMSAdatper to Work with WLS JMS Topics

  - by fip

  The WebLogic JMS Topic are typically running in a WLS cluster. So as your SOA composites that receive these Topic messages. In some situation, the two clusters are the same while in others they are sepearate. The composites in SOA cluster are subscribers to the JMS Topic in WebLogic cluster. As nature of JMS Topic is meant to distribute the same copy of messages to all its subscribers, two questions arise immediately when it comes to load balancing the JMS Topic messages against the SOA composites: How to assure all of the SOA cluster members receive different messages instead of the same (duplicate) messages, even though the SOA cluster members are all subscribers to the Topic? How to make sure the messages are evenly distributed (load balanced) to SOA cluster members? Here we will walk through how to configure the JMS Topic, the JmsAdapter connection factory, as well as the composite so that the JMS Topic messages will be evenly distributed to same composite running off different SOA cluster nodes without causing duplication. 2. The typical configuration In this typical configuration, we achieve the load balancing of JMS Topic messages to JmsAdapters by configuring a partitioned distributed topic along with sharable subscriptions. You can reference the documentation for explanation of PDT. And this blog posting does a very good job to visually explain how this combination of configurations would message load balancing among clients of JMS Topics. Our job is to apply this configuration in the context of SOA JMS Adapters. To do so would involve the following steps: Step A. Configure JMS Topic to be UDD and PDT, at the WebLogic cluster that house the JMS Topic Step B. Configure JCA Connection Factory with proper ServerProperties at the SOA cluster Step C. Reference the JCA Connection Factory and define a durable subscriber name, at composite's JmsAdapter (or the *.jca file) Here are more details of each step: Step A. Configure JMS Topic to be UDD and PDT, You do this at the WebLogic cluster that house the JMS Topic. You can follow the instructions at Administration Console Online Help to create a Uniform Distributed Topic. If you use WebLogic Console, then at the same administration screen you can specify "Distribution Type" to be "Uniform", and the Forwarding policy to "Partitioned", which would make the JMS Topic Uniform Distributed Destination and a Partitioned Distributed Topic, respectively Step B: Configure ServerProperties of JCA Connection Factory You do this step at the SOA cluster. This step is to make the JmsAdapter that connect to the JMS Topic through this JCA Connection Factory as a certain type of "client". When you configure the JCA Connection Factory for the JmsAdapter, you define the list of properties in FactoryProperties field, in a semi colon separated list: ClientID=myClient;ClientIDPolicy=UNRESTRICTED;SubscriptionSharingPolicy=SHARABLE;TopicMessageDistributionAll=false You can refer to Chapter 8.4.10 Accessing Distributed Destinations (Queues and Topics) on the WebLogic Server JMS of the Adapter User Guide for the meaning of these properties. Please note: Except for ClientID, other properties such as the ClientIDPolicy=UNRESTRICTED, SubscriptionSharingPolicy=SHARABLE and TopicMessageDistributionAll=false are all default settings for the JmsAdapter's connection factory. Therefore you do NOT have to explicitly specify them explicitly. All you need to do is the specify the ClientID. The ClientID is different from the subscriber ID that we are to discuss in the later steps. To make it simple, you just need to remember you need to specify the client ID and make it unique per connection factory. Here is the example setting: Step C. Reference the JCA Connection Factory and define a durable subscriber name, at composite's JmsAdapter (or the *.jca file) In the following example, the value 'MySubscriberID-1' was given as the value of property 'DurableSubscriber': <adapter-config name="subscribe" adapter="JMS Adapter" wsdlLocation="subscribe.wsdl" xmlns="http://platform.integration.oracle/blocks/adapter/fw/metadata"> <connection-factory location="eis/wls/MyTestUDDTopic" UIJmsProvider="WLSJMS" UIConnectionName="ateam-hq24b"/> <endpoint-activation portType="Consume_Message_ptt" operation="Consume_Message"> <activation-spec className="oracle.tip.adapter.jms.inbound.JmsConsumeActivationSpec"> <property name="DurableSubscriber" value="MySubscriberID-1"/> <property name="PayloadType" value="TextMessage"/> <property name="UseMessageListener" value="false"/> <property name="DestinationName" value="jms/MyTestUDDTopic"/> </activation-spec> </endpoint-activation> </adapter-config> You can set the durable subscriber name either at composite's JmsAdapter wizard,or by directly editing the JmsAdapter's *.jca file within the Composite project. 2.The "atypical" configurations: For some systems, there may be restrictions that do not allow the afore mentioned "typical" configurations be applied. For examples, some deployments may be required to configure the JMS Topic to be Replicated Distributed Topic rather than Partition Distributed Topic. We would like to discuss those scenarios here: Configuration A: The JMS Topic is NOT PDT In this case, you need to define the message selector 'NOT JMS_WL_DDForwarded' in the adapter's *.jca file, to filter out those "replicated" messages. Configuration B. The ClientIDPolicy=RESTRICTED In this case, you need separate factories for different composites. More accurately, you need separate factories for different *.jca file of JmsAdapter. References: Managing Durable Subscription WebLogic JMS Partitioned Distributed Topics and Shared Subscriptions JMS Troubleshooting: Configuring JMS Message Logging: Advanced Programming with Distributed Destinations Using the JMS Destination Availability Helper API

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• Upgrading VSIX extensions from VS2012 to VS2013

  - by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/27/upgrading-vsix-extensions-from-vs2012-to-vs2013.aspx  As consumers of your Visual Studio extensions start to move over to VS 2013, you will have to upgrade the Visual Studio extensions you build for Visual Studio 2012 to Visual Studio 2013 and republish to the Visual Studio extension gallery. Failing which, it will not be possible for your consumers to install and use your extensions on Visual Studio 2013.   Objective In this blog post, I’ll show you how simple it is to upgrade your Visual Studio 2012 extension to Visual Studio 2013. There aren’t any reported breaking changes between VS 2012 SDK and VS 2013 SDK, the upgrade usually involves, rebuilding the extension against VS 2013 SDK and updating the vsix manifest file.              Walkthrough Download the Visual Studio 2013 SDK - You will need to download the Visual Studio 2013 SDK in order to open up the Visual Studio extension project in Visual Studio 2013. The SDK can be downloaded from here. Install the SDK before you proceed.                2. Once the VS 2013 SDK has been installed, open up your package project. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll open up the Avanade Extension – Software Inventory in Visual Studio 2013. You will notice that Visual Studio doesn’t load the project but let’s you know that the project needs to be Migrated.                  3. Right click the project and choose the option ‘Reload Project’ from the Context Menu.                  4. Choosing the Reload Project option brings up an upgrade window, telling you that the upgrade is a one way only upgrade i.e. the project will be changed to work with Visual Studio 2013 and you will not be able to open the project up in Visual Studio 2012. My recommendation would be to create a Visual Studio 2013 branch and upgrading the project in that branch only, so if you need to go back to Visual Studio 2012 project at some point, you have a handy reference in a separate branch.             5. Upon clicking Ok, the project is updated. See below, the following changes are made at the time of upgrade,           - The runtime version is updated in the Resources.Designer.cs file                      - The Minimum version of Visual Studio in the package project file is changed from 11.0 to 12.0                    6. Reference VS 2013 dll’s rather than VS 2012 dll’s. So reference Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll and Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Controls.dll from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0 and C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v4.5. If you have any other API references, then change the references to point to VS 2013 instead of VS 2012.                          7. Rebuild your solution to ensure there are no breaking changes. Success!                8. Update VSIX Manifest file (the file source.extnsion.vsixmanifest contains the meta data for your VSIX).          - Update the Install Targets from 11.0 to 12.0. This basically enforces that the extension can be installed on Visual Studio 2013 version of Visual Studio.                         - Update the Dependencies from Visual Studio MPF 11.0 to Visual Studio MPF 12.0              9. Rebuild the solution and open up the bin folder for the Package project and look for the file *.vsix file [Microsoft Visual Studio Extension].         - This is basically the installer for your extension.                 - Double click the installer to launch the installer wizard. Viola! You can see the package installation wizard opens up and gives you the option to install the extension for Visual Studio 2013.                    - Click Install to Continue                    - Note – If you run into the exception “23/06/2013 10:42:18 - Install Error : Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExtensionManager.InstallByMsiException: The InstalledByMSI element in extension Avanade Extensions cannot be 'true' when installing an extension through the Extensions and Updates Installer.  The element can only be 'true' when an MSI lays down the extension manifest file.” Ensure you have the option “This VSIX is installed by Windows Installer” unchecked in the Install Targets tab.        10. Verifying that the extension has installed correctly.           - Open Extension Manager and verify that the installed extension shows up in the extension manager “list of installed VSIX”.                      11. First Look at the updated Extension                         - The links have now been moved to the context menu, so to see the navigation links, you’ll have to right click on the icon and select the option from the context menu.                                        Note – The Avanade Extension being used in the demo has been developed by Utkarsh and Tarun. The Software Inventory Extension for Visual Studio 2012…  allows you to see the list of Software installed on the hosted build server right from with in Visual Studio,  the extension also allows you to export this list to excel. More details on how this has been implemented can be found here.   I hope you found this useful. In case you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out on Visual Studio extensibility MSDN forums or via Microsoft Visual Studio feedback forum. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• Customize the Five Windows Folder Templates

  - by Mark Virtue

  Are you’re particular about the way Windows Explorer presents each folder’s contents? Here we show you how to take advantage of Explorer’s built-in templates, which cuts down the time it takes to do customizations. Note: The techniques in this article apply to Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. When opening a folder for the first time in Windows Explorer, we are presented with a standard default view of the files and folders in that folder. It may be that the items are presented are perfectly fine, but on the other hand, we may want to customize the view.  The aspects of it that we can customize are the following: The display type (list view, details, tiles, thumbnails, etc) Which columns are displayed, and in which order The widths of the visible columns The order in which the files and folders are sorted Any file groupings Thankfully, Windows offers us a shortcut.  A particular folder’s settings can be used as a “template” for other, similar folders.  In fact, we can store up to five separate sets of folder presentation configurations.  Once we save the settings for a particular template, that template can then be applied to other folders. Customize Your First Folder We’ll start by setting up the first of our templates – the default one.  Once we create this template and apply it, the vast majority of the folders in our file system will change to match it, so it’s important that we set it up very carefully.  The first step in creating and applying the template is to customize one folder with the settings that all the rest will have. Choose a folder that is typical of the folders that you wish to have this default template.  Select it in Windows Explorer.  To ensure that it is a suitable candidate, right-click the folder name and select Properties, then go to the Customize tab.  Ensure that this folder is marked as General Items.  If it is not, either choose a different folder or select General Items from the list. Click OK.  Now we’re ready to customize our first folder. Changing the way one single folder is presented is straightforward.  We start with the folder’s display type.  Click the Change your view button in the top-right corner of every Explorer window. Each time you click the button, the folder’s view cycles to the next view type.  Alternatively you can click the little down-arrow next to the button to see all the display types at once, and select the one you want. Click the view you want, or drag the slider next to the one you want. If you have chosen Details, then the next thing you may wish to change is which columns are displayed, and the order of these.  To choose which columns are displayed, simply right-click on any column heading.  A list of the columns currently being display appears. Simply uncheck a column if you don’t want it displayed, and check the columns that you want displayed.  If you want some information displayed about your files that is not listed here, then click the More… button for a full list of file attributes. There’s a lot of them! To change the order of the columns that are currently being displayed, simply click on a column heading and drag it to where you think it should be.  To change the width of a column, click the line that represents the right-hand edge of the column and drag it left or right. To sort by a column, click once on that column.  To reverse the sort-order, click that same column again. To change the groupings of the files in the folder, right-click in a blank area of the folder, select Group by, and select the appropriate column. Apply This Default Template to All Similar Folders Once you have the folder exactly the way you want it, we now use this folder as our default template for most of the folders in our file system.  To do this, ensure that you are still in the folder you just customized, and then, from the Organize menu in Explorer, click on Folder and search options. Then select the View tab and click the Apply to Folders button. After you’ve clicked OK, visit some of the other folders in your file system.  You should see that most have taken on these new settings. What we’ve just done, in effect, is we have customized the General Items template.  This is one of five templates that Windows Explorer uses to display folder contents.  The five templates are called (in Windows 7): General Items Documents Pictures Music Videos When a folder is opened, Windows Explorer examines the contents to see if it can automatically determine which folder template to use to display the folder contents.  If it is not obvious that the folder contents falls into any of the last four templates, then Windows Explorer chooses the General Items template.  That’s why most of the folders in your file system are shown using the General Items template. Changing the Other Four Templates If you want to adjust the other four templates, the process is very similar to what we’ve just done.  If you wanted to change the “Music” template, for example, the steps would be as follows: Select a folder that contains music items Apply the existing Music template to the folder (even if it doesn’t look like you want it to) Customize the folder to your personal preferences Apply the new template to all “Music” folders A fifth step would be:  When you open a folder that contains music items but is not automatically displayed using the Music template, you manually select the Music template for that folder. First, select a folder that contains music items.  It will probably be displayed using the existing Music template: Next, ensure that it is using the Music template.  If it’s not, then manually select the Music template. Next, customize the folder to suit your personal preferences (here we’ve added a couple of columns, and sorted by Artist). Now we can set this view to be our Music template.  Choose Organize, then the View tab, and click the Apply to Folders button. Note: The only folders that will inherit these settings are the ones that are currently (or will soon be) using the Music template. Now, if you have any folder that contains music items, and you want it to inherit all of these settings, then right-click the folder name, choose Properties, and select that this folder should use the Music template.  You can also cehck the box entitled Also apply this template to all subfolders if you want to save yourself even more time with all the sub-folders. Conclusion It’s neat to be able to set up templates for your folder views like this.  It’s a shame that Microsoft didn’t take the concept just a little further and allow you to create as many templates as you want. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuFix for New Contact Group Button Not Displaying in VistaWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Make Your Last Minute Holiday Cards with Microsoft Word 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 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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• EM12c Release 4: New EMCLI Verbs

  - by SubinDaniVarughese

  Here are the new EM CLI verbs in Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 (12.1.0.4). This helps you in writing new scripts or enhancing your existing scripts for further automation. Basic Administration Verbs invoke_ws - Invoke EM web service.ADM Verbs associate_target_to_adm - Associate a target to an application data model. export_adm - Export Application Data Model to a specified .xml file. import_adm - Import Application Data Model from a specified .xml file. list_adms - List the names, target names and application suites of existing Application Data Models verify_adm - Submit an application data model verify job for the target specified.Agent Update Verbs get_agent_update_status -  Show Agent Update Results get_not_updatable_agents - Shows Not Updatable Agents get_updatable_agents - Show Updatable Agents update_agents - Performs Agent Update Prereqs and submits Agent Update JobBI Publisher Reports Verbs grant_bipublisher_roles - Grants access to the BI Publisher catalog and features. revoke_bipublisher_roles - Revokes access to the BI Publisher catalog and features.Blackout Verbs create_rbk - Create a Retro-active blackout.CFW Verbs cancel_cloud_service_requests -  To cancel cloud service requests delete_cloud_service_instances -  To delete cloud service instances delete_cloud_user_objects - To delete cloud user objects. get_cloud_service_instances - To get information about cloud service instances get_cloud_service_requests - To get information about cloud requests get_cloud_user_objects - To get information about cloud user objects.Chargeback Verbs add_chargeback_entity - Adds the given entity to Chargeback. assign_charge_plan - Assign a plan to a chargeback entity. assign_cost_center - Assign a cost center to a chargeback entity. create_charge_entity_type - Create  charge entity type export_charge_plans - Exports charge plans metadata to file export_custom_charge_items -  Exports user defined charge items to a file import_charge_plans - Imports charge plans metadata from given file import_custom_charge_items -  Imports user defined charge items metadata from given file list_charge_plans - Gives a list of charge plans in Chargeback. list_chargeback_entities - Gives a list of all the entities in Chargeback list_chargeback_entity_types - Gives a list of all the entity types that are supported in Chargeback list_cost_centers - Lists the cost centers in Chargeback. remove_chargeback_entity - Removes the given entity from Chargeback. unassign_charge_plan - Un-assign the plan associated to a chargeback entity. unassign_cost_center - Un-assign the cost center associated to a chargeback entity.Configuration/Association History disable_config_history - Disable configuration history computation for a target type. enable_config_history - Enable configuration history computation for a target type. set_config_history_retention_period - Sets the amount of time for which Configuration History is retained.ConfigurationCompare config_compare - Submits the configuration comparison job get_config_templates - Gets all the comparison templates from the repositoryCompliance Verbs fix_compliance_state -  Fix compliance state by removing references in deleted targets.Credential Verbs update_credential_setData Subset Verbs export_subset_definition - Exports specified subset definition as XML file at specified directory path. generate_subset - Generate subset using specified subset definition and target database. import_subset_definition - Import a subset definition from specified XML file. import_subset_dump - Imports dump file into specified target database. list_subset_definitions - Get the list of subset definition, adm and target nameDelete pluggable Database Job Verbs delete_pluggable_database - Delete a pluggable databaseDeployment Procedure Verbs get_runtime_data - Get the runtime data of an executionDiscover and Push to Agents Verbs generate_discovery_input - Generate Discovery Input file for discovering Auto-Discovered Domains refresh_fa - Refresh Fusion Instance run_fa_diagnostics - Run Fusion Applications DiagnosticsFusion Middleware Provisioning Verbs create_fmw_domain_profile - Create a Fusion Middleware Provisioning Profile from a WebLogic Domain create_fmw_home_profile - Create a Fusion Middleware Provisioning Profile from an Oracle Home create_inst_media_profile - Create a Fusion Middleware Provisioning Profile from Installation MediaGold Agent Image Verbs create_gold_agent_image - Creates a gold agent image. decouple_gold_agent_image - Decouples the agent from gold agent image. delete_gold_agent_image - Deletes a gold agent image. get_gold_agent_image_activity_status -  Gets gold agent image activity status. get_gold_agent_image_details - Get the gold agent image details. list_agents_on_gold_image - Lists agents on a gold agent image. list_gold_agent_image_activities - Lists gold agent image activities. list_gold_agent_image_series - Lists gold agent image series. list_gold_agent_images - Lists the available gold agent images. promote_gold_agent_image - Promotes a gold agent image. stage_gold_agent_image - Stages a gold agent image.Incident Rules Verbs add_target_to_rule_set - Add a target to an enterprise rule set. delete_incident_record - Delete one or more open incidents remove_target_from_rule_set - Remove a target from an enterprise rule set. Job Verbs export_jobs - Export job details in to an xml file import_jobs - Import job definitions from an xml file job_input_file - Supply details for a job verb in a property file resume_job - Resume a job or set of jobs suspend_job - Suspend a job or set of jobs Oracle Database as Service Verbs config_db_service_target - Configure DB Service target for OPCPrivilege Delegation Settings Verbs clear_default_privilege_delegation_setting - Clears the default privilege delegation setting for a given list of platforms set_default_privilege_delegation_setting - Sets the default privilege delegation setting for a given list of platforms test_privilege_delegation_setting - Tests a Privilege Delegation Setting on a hostSSA Verbs cleanup_dbaas_requests - Submit cleanup request for failed request create_dbaas_quota - Create Database Quota for a SSA User Role create_service_template - Create a Service Template delete_dbaas_quota - Delete the Database Quota setup for a SSA User Role delete_service_template - Delete a given service template get_dbaas_quota - List the Database Quota setup for all SSA User Roles get_dbaas_request_settings - List the Database Request Settings get_service_template_detail - Get details of a given service template get_service_templates -  Get the list of available service templates rename_service_template -  Rename a given service template update_dbaas_quota - Update the Database Quota for a SSA User Role update_dbaas_request_settings - Update the Database Request Settings update_service_template -  Update a given service template. SavedConfigurations get_saved_configs  - Gets the saved configurations from the repository Server Generated Alert Metric Verbs validate_server_generated_alerts  - Server Generated Alert Metric VerbServices Verbs edit_sl_rule - Edit the service level rule for the specified serviceSiebel Verbs list_siebel_enterprises -  List Siebel enterprises currently monitored in EM list_siebel_servers -  List Siebel servers under a specified siebel enterprise update_siebel- Update a Siebel enterprise or its underlying serversSiteGuard Verbs add_siteguard_aux_hosts -  Associate new auxiliary hosts to the system configure_siteguard_lag -  Configure apply lag and transport lag limit for databases delete_siteguard_aux_host -  Delete auxiliary host associated with a site delete_siteguard_lag -  Erases apply lag or transport lag limit for databases get_siteguard_aux_hosts -  Get all auxiliary hosts associated with a site get_siteguard_health_checks -  Shows schedule of health checks get_siteguard_lag -  Shows apply lag or transport lag limit for databases schedule_siteguard_health_checks -  Schedule health checks for an operation plan stop_siteguard_health_checks -  Stops all future health check execution of an operation plan update_siteguard_lag -  Updates apply lag and transport lag limit for databasesSoftware Library Verbs stage_swlib_entity_files -  Stage files of an entity from Software Library to a host target.Target Data Verbs create_assoc - Creates target associations delete_assoc - Deletes target associations list_allowed_pairs - Lists allowed association types for specified source and destination list_assoc - Lists associations between source and destination targets manage_agent_partnership - Manages partnership between agents. Used for explicitly assigning agent partnershipsTrace Reports generate_ui_trace_report  -  Generate and download UI Page performance report (to identify slow rendering pages)VI EMCLI Verbs add_virtual_platform - Add Oracle Virtual PLatform(s). modify_virtual_platform - Modify Oracle Virtual Platform.To get more details about each verb, execute$ emcli help <verb_name>Example: $ emcli help list_assocNew resources in list verbThese are the new resources in EM CLI list verb :Certificates  WLSCertificateDetails Credential Resource Group  PreferredCredentialsDefaultSystemScope - Preferred credentials (System Scope)   PreferredCredentialsSystemScope - Target preferred credentialPrivilege Delegation Settings  TargetPrivilegeDelegationSettingDetails  - List privilege delegation setting details on a host  TargetPrivilegeDelegationSetting - List privilege delegation settings on a host   PrivilegeDelegationSettings  - Lists all Privilege Delegation Settings   PrivilegeDelegationSettingDetails - Lists details of  Privilege Delegation Settings To get more details about each resource, execute$ emcli list -resource="<resource_name>" -helpExample: $ emcli list -resource="PrivilegeDelegationSettings" -helpDeprecated Verbs:Agent Administration Verbs resecure_agent - Resecure an agentTo get the complete list of verbs, execute:$ emcli help Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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• Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

  - by sathya

  Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics :   Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600  as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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• Record and Play your WebLogic Console Tasks Like a DVR

  - by james.bayer

  Automation using WebLogic Scripting Tool Today on the Oracle internal mailing list for WebLogic Server questions someone asked how to automate the configuration of the thread model for WebLogic Server and they were having trouble with the jython scripting syntax.  I’ve previously written about this feature called Work Managers and the associated constraints.  However, I did not show how to automate the process of configuring this without the console using WebLogic Scripting Tool – the jython scripting automation environment abbreviated as WLST.  I’ve written some very basic introductions to WLST before and there is also an Oracle By Example on the subject, but this is a bit more advanced.  Fear not because there is a really easy-to-use feature of the WLS console that lets you “Record” user actions just like a DVR.  Using these recordings of the web-based console, you can easily create a script even if you are unfamiliar with the WLST syntax and API.  I’m a big fan of both DVR’s and automation as can be evidenced with this old Halloween picture taken during simpler times.  Obviously the Cast Away and The Big Labowski references show some age.  I was a big Tivo fan-boy back in the day and I still think it’s the best DVR. I strongly believe that WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) is an absolutely essential tool for automating administration tasks in anything beyond a development environment.  Even in development environments you can make a case that it makes sense to start the automation for environments downstream.  I promise you that once you start using it for any tasks that you do even semi-regularly, you won’t go back to clicking through the console.  It’s simply so much more efficient and less error-prone to run a script. Let’s say you need to create a Work Manager and MaxThreadsConstraint – the easy way to do it is configure it in the WLS console first while capturing the commands with a recording.  See the images for the simple steps – click to enlarge. Record Console Configurations to a File Review the Recordings and Make Slight Modifications In order to make the recorded .py file directly callable as a stand-alone script I added calls to the connect() and edit() functions at the beginning and calls to disconnect() and exit() at the end – otherwise the main section of the script was provided by the console recording.  Below is the resulting file I saved as d:/temp/wm.py connect('weblogic','welcome1', 't3://localhost:7001') edit() startEdit()   cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server') cmo.createMaxThreadsConstraint('MaxThreadsConstraint-0')   cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server/MaxThreadsConstraints/MaxThreadsConstraint-0') set('Targets',jarray.array([ObjectName('com.bea:Name=examplesServer,Type=Server')], ObjectName)) cmo.setCount(5) cmo.unSet('ConnectionPoolName')   cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server') cmo.createWorkManager('WorkManager-0') cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server/WorkManagers/WorkManager-0') set('Targets',jarray.array([ObjectName('com.bea:Name=examplesServer,Type=Server')], ObjectName))   cmo.setMaxThreadsConstraint(getMBean('/SelfTuning/wl_server/MaxThreadsConstraints/MaxThreadsConstraint-0')) cmo.setIgnoreStuckThreads(false)   activate() disconnect() exit() Run the Script If you want to test it be sure to delete the Work Manager and MaxThreadConstraint that you had previously created in the console.  Do something like the following - set up the environment and tell WLST to execute the script which happens in the first 2 lines, the rest doesn’t require any user input: D:\Oracle\wls11g\wlserver_10.3\samples\domains\wl_server\bin>setDomainEnv.cmd D:\Oracle\wls11g\wlserver_10.3\samples\domains\wl_server>java weblogic.WLST d:\temp\wm.py   Initializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ...   Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell   Type help() for help on available commands   Connecting to t3://localhost:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'examplesServer' that belongs to domain 'wl_server'.   Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead.   Location changed to edit tree. This is a writable tree with DomainMBean as the root. To make changes you will need to start an edit session via startEdit().   For more help, use help(edit)   Starting an edit session ... Started edit session, please be sure to save and activate your changes once you are done. Activating all your changes, this may take a while ... The edit lock associated with this edit session is released once the activation is completed. Activation completed Disconnected from weblogic server: examplesServer     Exiting WebLogic Scripting Tool.   Now if you go back and look in the console the changes have been made and we now have a compete script.  Of course there is a full MBean reference and you can learn the nuances of jython and WLST, but why not the WLS console do most of the work for you!  Happy scripting.

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• A Look Back at 2010 Predictions

  - by David Dorf

  Now is the time of year people make their predictions for next year, but before I start thinking about 2011 it's worth a look back to see how my predictions for 2010 fared. 1. Borders and Blockbuster bite the dust. I would have never predicted a strong brand such as Circuit City could die, but now I know it can happen to anyone. Borders has lost the battle with Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster has lost to Netflix. And just to be sure, Amazon put an extra nail in each coffin. Borders received additional investment from Bennett LeBow to keep it afloat, but the stock is down around $1.25 with no profits in sight. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy back in September. 2. Every retailer finally has a page on Facebook... but very few figure out how to keep fans engaged. Retailer postings become noise, and fans start to unsubscribe. Twitter goes in the same direction. A few standout retailers will figure out how to use social media, and the rest will remain dumbfounded. Most retailers are on the Facebook bandwagon, and their fan bases seem to be increasing thanks to promotions like The Gap's logo redesign, Lowes' black Friday sneak peak, and Walmart's Crowd Savers. There are several examples of f-commerce advancements, including some interesting integrations from Amazon.3. Smartphones consolidate and grow. More and more people will step-up to smartphones, most of which will choose iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones. Other smartphones will vanish, and networks will start to strain. But retailers will finally embrace mobile as the next big channel. Retail marketing departments will build mobile apps without the help of their IT department, and eventually they will get into a bind. Android has been on a tear lately stealing market share from Blackberry. Palm and Microsoft are trending down, and Apple is holding steady. Smartphone sales are up 15% and expected to continue. Retailers understand the importance of mobile, and some innovative applications have been produced this year. 4. Google helps the little guys. Google will push its Favorite Places project to help give exposure to small retailers and restaurants. They will enable small retailers to act like big ones by providing storefronts, detailed product information, and coupons for consumers. Google will find a way to bring augmented reality to the masses. I can't say I've seen much new from Google regarding Favorite Places, but they've continued to push local product search. From the PC or smartphone, consumers can search for products and see which nearby stores have it stock. Oracle Retail even productized an integration to Google to support this effort. I suppose if Google ever buys Groupon then it will bring them even closer to local shopping. Google talked about augmented humanity, but that has nothing to do with augmented reality. 5. Steve Jobs Is Bugs Bunny and Steve Ballmer is Elmer Fudd. (OK, I stole that headline from an InformationWeek article. I couldn't resist.) Both Apple and Microsoft will continue to open new stores, but only Apple will show real growth. POSReady 2009 (formerly WEPOS) will continue to share the POS market with Linux. The iPhone and iPod will continue to capture market share, but there won't be an Apple tablet. There won't be an Apple tablet? What was I thinking? While Apple has well over 300 stores, there are less than 10 Microsoft stores. Initial impressions show that even though Microsoft is locating its store near Apple Stores, they are not converting customers, with shoppers citing a lack of assortment and high prices. 6. Consolidation of e-commerce software providers. Software vendors in the areas of search, reviews, online call-centers, payments, and e-commerce will consolidate, partly driven by the success of m-commerce and SaaS. Amazon will find someone else to buy, and eBay will continue to lose momentum. Consolidation of e-commerce providers continued with IBM acquiring Sterling Commerce and CoreMetrics, and Oracle recently announcing the acquisition of ATG. Amazon grabbed Zappos, Woot, and Diapers.com to continue its dominance of online selling. While eBay's Marketplace growth may have slowed, its PayPal division is doing quite well, fueled in part by demand for mobile payments. 7. Book publishers mirror music labels. Just as the iPod brought digital downloads to the masses, the Kindle and Nook will power the e-book revolution. Books will continue to use DRM for a few more years before following the path of music. Publishers will try to preserve the margins of hardbacks by associating e-book releases with paperbacks. Amazon has done a good job providing e-reader clients for smartphones, PCs, and tablets. Competition from Barnes & Noble has forced Amazon to support book loaning, and both companies are making it easier for people to publish ebooks (with or without DRM). Progress is slow but steady. 8. NFC makes inroads, RFID treads water. Near Field Communications start to appear in mobile phones, and retailers beta test its use for payments and loyalty programs. RFID tag costs come down a bit, but not enough to spur accelerated adoption.Nokia announced plans to offer NFC-enabled phones in 2011, and rumors are swirling about NFC in the upcoming iPhone.  I think NFC is heading in the right direction, and I've heard more interest from retailers about specialized uses for RFID.9. Digital Signage goes the way of augmented reality. People use their camera phones to leave geo-tagged notes all over cities, rating stores and restaurants, and "painting" graffiti. But people get tired of holding their phones in front of their faces, so AR glasses are offered in much the same way bluetooth headsets emerged. Retailers experiement with in-store advertising using AR. Several retailers like Pizza Hut, Benetton, and Target have experimented with AR but its still somewhat of a gimmick used by marketing.  I think this prediction is a year or two too early. 10. JDA flip-flops again. After announcing their embracing of the .Net architecture, then switching to J2EE after the Manugistics acquisition, JDA will finally decide to standardize on Apple's Objective C. Everything will be ported to the iPhone and be available on the AppStore. After all, there's not much left to try. This was, of course, a joke but the sentiment is still valid.  JDA seems more supply-chain focused than retail focused, which is a an outcrop if their i2 acquisition.  Of the 10 predictions, I'm going to say I got 6 somewhat correct.  (Don't you just love grading your own paper?)  Soon I'll post my predictions for 2011 so be on the lookout.  Until then here's one more prediction:  Va Tech beats Stanford in the Orange Bowl -- count on it!

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• Blogging tips for SQL Server professionals

  - by jamiet

  For some time now I have been intending to put some material together relating my blogging experiences since I began blogging in 2004 and that led to me submitting a session for SQLBits recently where I intended to do just that. That didn’t get enough votes to allow me to present however so instead I resolved to write a blog post about it and Simon Sabin’s recent post Blogging – how do you do it? has prompted me to get around to completing it. So, here I present a compendium of tips that I’ve picked up from authoring a fair few blog posts over the past 6 years. Feedburner Feedburner.com is a service that can consume your blog’s default RSS feed and provide another, replacement, feed that has exactly the same content. You can then supply that replacement feed on your blog site for other people to consume in their RSS readers. Why would you want to do this? Well, two reasons actually: It makes your blog portable. If you ever want to move your blog to a different URL you don’t have to tell your subscribers to move to a different feed. The feedburner feed is a pointer to your blog content rather than being a copy of it. Feedburner will collect stats telling you how many people are subscribed to your feed, which RSS readers they use, stuff like that. Here’s a sample screenshot for http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/: It also tells you what your most viewed posts are: Web stats like these are notoriously inaccurate but then again the method of measurement here is not important, what IS important is that it gives you a trustworthy ranking of your blog posts and (in my opinion) knowing which are your most popular posts is more important than knowing exactly how many views each post has had. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Feedburner provides and I recommend every new blogger to try it! Monitor subscribers using Google Reader If for some reason Feedburner is not to your taste or (more likely) you already have an established RSS feed that you do not want to change then Google provide another way in which you can monitor your readership in the shape of their online RSS reader, Google Reader. It provides, for every RSS feed, a collection of stats including the number of Google Reader users that have subscribed to that RSS feed. This is really valuable information and in fact I have been recording this statistic for mine and a number of other blogs for a few years now and as such I can produce the following chart that indicates how readership is trending for those blogs over time: [Good news for my fellow SQLBlog bloggers.] As Stephen Few readily points out, its not the numbers that are important but the trend. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) SEO (or “How do I get my blog to show up in Google”) is a massive area of expertise which I don’t want (and am unable) to cover in much detail here but there are some simple rules of thumb that will help: Tags – If your blog engine offers the ability to add tags to your blog post, use them. Invariably those tags go into the meta section of the page HTML and search engines lap that stuff up. For example, from my recent post Microsoft publish Visual Studio 2010 Database Project Guidance: Title – Search engines take notice of web page titles as well so make them specific and descriptive (e.g. “Configuring dtsConfig connection strings”) rather than esoteric and meaningless in a vain attempt to be humorous (e.g. “Last night a DJ saved my ETL batch”)! Title(2) – Make your title even more search engine friendly by mentioning high level subject areas, not dissimilar to Twitter hashtags. For example, if you look at all of my posts related to SSIS you will notice that nearly all contain the word “SSIS” in the title even if I had to shoehorn it in there by putting it in square brackets or similar. Another tip, if you ARE putting words into your titles in this artificial manner then put them at the end so that they’re not that prominent in search engine results; they’re there for the search engines to consume, not for human beings. Images – Always add titles and alternate text (ALT attribute) to images in your blog post. If you use Windows 7 or Windows Vista then you can use Live Writer (which Simon recommended) makes this easy for you. Headings – If you want to highlight section headings use heading tags (e.g. <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc…) rather than just formatting the text appropriately – again, Live makes this easy. These tags give your blog posts structure that is understood by search engines and RSS readers alike. (I believe it makes them more amenable to CSS as well – though that’s not something I know too much about). If you check the HTML source for the blog post you’re reading right now you’ll be able to scan through and see where I have used heading tags. Microsoft provide a free tool called the SEO Toolkit that will analyse your blog site (for free) and tell you what things you should change to improve SEO. Go read more and download for free at Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Did I mention that it was free? Miscellaneous Tips If you are including code in your blog post then ensure it is formatted correctly. Use SQL Server Central’s T-SQL prettifier for formatting T-SQL code. Use images and videos. Personally speaking there’s nothing I like less when reading a blog than paragraph after paragraph of text. Images make your blog more appealing which means people are more likely to read what you have written. Be original. Don’t plagiarise other people’s content and don’t simply rewrite the contents of Books Online. Every time you publish a blog post tweet a link to it. Include hashtags in your tweet that are more likely to grab people’s attention. That’s probably enough for now - I hope this blog post proves useful to someone out there. If you would appreciate a related session at a forthcoming SQLBits conference then please let me know. This will likely be my last blog post for 2010 so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has commented on, linked to or read any of my blog posts in that time. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting for SQL Server observers with the impending release of SQL Server code-named Denali and I promise I’ll have lots more content on that as the year progresses. Happy New Year. @Jamiet

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• Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• Big Data – Role of Cloud Computing in Big Data – Day 11 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the NewSQL. In this article we will understand the role of Cloud in Big Data Story What is Cloud? Cloud is the biggest buzzword around from last few years. Everyone knows about the Cloud and it is extremely well defined online. In this article we will discuss cloud in the context of the Big Data. Cloud computing is a method of providing a shared computing resources to the application which requires dynamic resources. These resources include applications, computing, storage, networking, development and various deployment platforms. The fundamentals of the cloud computing are that it shares pretty much share all the resources and deliver to end users as a service.  Examples of the Cloud Computing and Big Data are Google and Amazon.com. Both have fantastic Big Data offering with the help of the cloud. We will discuss this later in this blog post. There are two different Cloud Deployment Models: 1) The Public Cloud and 2) The Private Cloud Public Cloud Public Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build by commercial providers (Amazon, Rackspace etc.) creates a highly scalable data center that hides the complex infrastructure from the consumer and provides various services. Private Cloud Private Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build by a single organization where they are managing highly scalable data center internally. Here is the quick comparison between Public Cloud and Private Cloud from Wikipedia:   Public Cloud Private Cloud Initial cost Typically zero Typically high Running cost Unpredictable Unpredictable Customization Impossible Possible Privacy No (Host has access to the data Yes Single sign-on Impossible Possible Scaling up Easy while within defined limits Laborious but no limits Hybrid Cloud Hybrid Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build with the composition of two or more clouds like public and private cloud. Hybrid cloud gives best of the both the world as it combines multiple cloud deployment models together. Cloud and Big Data – Common Characteristics There are many characteristics of the Cloud Architecture and Cloud Computing which are also essentially important for Big Data as well. They highly overlap and at many places it just makes sense to use the power of both the architecture and build a highly scalable framework. Here is the list of all the characteristics of cloud computing important in Big Data Scalability Elasticity Ad-hoc Resource Pooling Low Cost to Setup Infastructure Pay on Use or Pay as you Go Highly Available Leading Big Data Cloud Providers There are many players in Big Data Cloud but we will list a few of the known players in this list. Amazon Amazon is arguably the most popular Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. The history of how Amazon started in this business is very interesting. They started out with a massive infrastructure to support their own business. Gradually they figured out that their own resources are underutilized most of the time. They decided to get the maximum out of the resources they have and hence  they launched their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service in 2006. Their products have evolved a lot recently and now it is one of their primary business besides their retail selling. Amazon also offers Big Data services understand Amazon Web Services. Here is the list of the included services: Amazon Elastic MapReduce – It processes very high volumes of data Amazon DynammoDB – It is fully managed NoSQL (Not Only SQL) database service Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) – A web-scale service designed to store and accommodate any amount of data Amazon High Performance Computing – It provides low-tenancy tuned high performance computing cluster Amazon RedShift – It is petabyte scale data warehousing service Google Though Google is known for Search Engine, we all know that it is much more than that. Google Compute Engine – It offers secure, flexible computing from energy efficient data centers Google Big Query – It allows SQL-like queries to run against large datasets Google Prediction API – It is a cloud based machine learning tool Other Players Besides Amazon and Google we also have other players in the Big Data market as well. Microsoft is also attempting Big Data with the Cloud with Microsoft Azure. Additionally Rackspace and NASA together have initiated OpenStack. The goal of Openstack is to provide a massively scaled, multitenant cloud that can run on any hardware. Thing to Watch The cloud based solutions provides a great integration with the Big Data’s story as well it is very economical to implement as well. However, there are few things one should be very careful when deploying Big Data on cloud solutions. Here is a list of a few things to watch: Data Integrity Initial Cost Recurring Cost Performance Data Access Security Location Compliance Every company have different approaches to Big Data and have different rules and regulations. Based on various factors, one can implement their own custom Big Data solution on a cloud. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various Operational Databases supporting 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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• NET Math Libraries

  - by JoshReuben

  NET Mathematical Libraries   .NET Builder for Matlab The MathWorks Inc. - http://www.mathworks.com/products/netbuilder/ MATLAB Builder NE generates MATLAB based .NET and COM components royalty-free deployment creates the components by encrypting MATLAB functions and generating either a .NET or COM wrapper around them. .NET/Link for Mathematica www.wolfram.com a product that 2-way integrates Mathematica and Microsoft's .NET platform call .NET from Mathematica - use arbitrary .NET types directly from the Mathematica language. use and control the Mathematica kernel from a .NET program. turns Mathematica into a scripting shell to leverage the computational services of Mathematica. write custom front ends for Mathematica or use Mathematica as a computational engine for another program comes with full source code. Leverages MathLink - a Wolfram Research's protocol for sending data and commands back and forth between Mathematica and other programs. .NET/Link abstracts the low-level details of the MathLink C API. Extreme Optimization http://www.extremeoptimization.com/ a collection of general-purpose mathematical and statistical classes built for the.NET framework. It combines a math library, a vector and matrix library, and a statistics library in one package. download the trial of version 4.0 to try it out. Multi-core ready - Full support for Task Parallel Library features including cancellation. Broad base of algorithms covering a wide range of numerical techniques, including: linear algebra (BLAS and LAPACK routines), numerical analysis (integration and differentiation), equation solvers. Mathematics leverages parallelism using .NET 4.0's Task Parallel Library. Basic math: Complex numbers, 'special functions' like Gamma and Bessel functions, numerical differentiation. Solving equations: Solve equations in one variable, or solve systems of linear or nonlinear equations. Curve fitting: Linear and nonlinear curve fitting, cubic splines, polynomials, orthogonal polynomials. Optimization: find the minimum or maximum of a function in one or more variables, linear programming and mixed integer programming. Numerical integration: Compute integrals over finite or infinite intervals, over 2D and higher dimensional regions. Integrate systems of ordinary differential equations (ODE's). Fast Fourier Transforms: 1D and 2D FFT's using managed or fast native code (32 and 64 bit) BigInteger, BigRational, and BigFloat: Perform operations with arbitrary precision. Vector and Matrix Library Real and complex vectors and matrices. Single and double precision for elements. Structured matrix types: including triangular, symmetrical and band matrices. Sparse matrices. Matrix factorizations: LU decomposition, QR decomposition, singular value decomposition, Cholesky decomposition, eigenvalue decomposition. Portability and performance: Calculations can be done in 100% managed code, or in hand-optimized processor-specific native code (32 and 64 bit). Statistics Data manipulation: Sort and filter data, process missing values, remove outliers, etc. Supports .NET data binding. Statistical Models: Simple, multiple, nonlinear, logistic, Poisson regression. Generalized Linear Models. One and two-way ANOVA. Hypothesis Tests: 12 14 hypothesis tests, including the z-test, t-test, F-test, runs test, and more advanced tests, such as the Anderson-Darling test for normality, one and two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, and Levene's test for homogeneity of variances. Multivariate Statistics: K-means cluster analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), multivariate probability distributions. Statistical Distributions: 25 29 continuous and discrete statistical distributions, including uniform, Poisson, normal, lognormal, Weibull and Gumbel (extreme value) distributions. Random numbers: Random variates from any distribution, 4 high-quality random number generators, low discrepancy sequences, shufflers. New in version 4.0 (November, 2010) Support for .NET Framework Version 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 TPL Parallellized – multicore ready sparse linear program solver - can solve problems with more than 1 million variables. Mixed integer linear programming using a branch and bound algorithm. special functions: hypergeometric, Riemann zeta, elliptic integrals, Frensel functions, Dawson's integral. Full set of window functions for FFT's. Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $999  $399  Team License (3 developers) $1999  $799  Department License (8 developers) $3999  $1599  Site License (Unlimited developers in one physical location) $7999  $3199    NMath http://www.centerspace.net .NET math and statistics libraries matrix and vector classes random number generators Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) numerical integration linear programming linear regression curve and surface fitting optimization hypothesis tests analysis of variance (ANOVA) probability distributions principal component analysis cluster analysis built on the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL), which contains highly-optimized, extensively-threaded versions of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) and LAPACK (Linear Algebra PACKage). Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $1295 $388 Team License (5 developers) $5180 $1554   DotNumerics http://www.dotnumerics.com/NumericalLibraries/Default.aspx free DotNumerics is a website dedicated to numerical computing for .NET that includes a C# Numerical Library for .NET containing algorithms for Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Optimization problems. The Linear Algebra library includes CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack, ports from Fortran to C# of LAPACK, BLAS and EISPACK, respectively. Linear Algebra (CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack). Systems of linear equations, eigenvalue problems, least-squares solutions of linear systems and singular value problems. Differential Equations. Initial-value problem for nonstiff and stiff ordinary differential equations ODEs (explicit Runge-Kutta, implicit Runge-Kutta, Gear's BDF and Adams-Moulton). Optimization. Unconstrained and bounded constrained optimization of multivariate functions (L-BFGS-B, Truncated Newton and Simplex methods).   Math.NET Numerics http://numerics.mathdotnet.com/ free an open source numerical library - includes special functions, linear algebra, probability models, random numbers, interpolation, integral transforms. A merger of dnAnalytics with Math.NET Iridium in addition to a purely managed implementation will also support native hardware optimization. constants & special functions complex type support real and complex, dense and sparse linear algebra (with LU, QR, eigenvalues, ... decompositions) non-uniform probability distributions, multivariate distributions, sample generation alternative uniform random number generators descriptive statistics, including order statistics various interpolation methods, including barycentric approaches and splines numerical function integration (quadrature) routines integral transforms, like fourier transform (FFT) with arbitrary lengths support, and hartley spectral-space aware sequence manipulation (signal processing) combinatorics, polynomials, quaternions, basic number theory. parallelized where appropriate, to leverage multi-core and multi-processor systems fully managed or (if available) using native libraries (Intel MKL, ACMS, CUDA, FFTW) provides a native facade for F# developers

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• Tutorial: Criando um Componente para o UCM

  - by Denisd

  Então você já instalou o UCM, seguindo o tutorial: http://blogs.oracle.com/ecmbrasil/2009/05/tutorial_de_instalao_do_ucm.html e também já fez o hands-on: http://blogs.oracle.com/ecmbrasil/2009/10/tutorial_de_ucm.html e agora quer ir além do básico? Quer começar a criar funcionalidades para o UCM? Quer se tornar um desenvolvedor do UCM? Quer criar o Content Server à sua imagem e semelhança?! Pois hoje é o seu dia de sorte! Neste tutorial, iremos aprender a criar um componente para o Content Server. O nosso primeiro componente, embora não seja tão simples, será feito apenas com recursos do Content Server. Em um futuro tutorial, iremos aprender a usar classes java como parte de nossos componentes. Neste tutorial, vamos desenvolver um recurso de Favoritos, aonde os usuários poderão marcar determinados documentos como seus Favoritos, e depois consultar estes documentos em uma lista. Não iremos montar o componente com todas as suas funcionalidades, mas com o que vocês verão aqui, será tranquilo aprimorar este componente, inclusive para ambientes de produção. Componente MyFavorites Algumas características do nosso componente favoritos: - Por motivos de espaço, iremos montar este componente de uma forma “rápida e crua”, ou seja, sem seguir necessariamente as melhores práticas de desenvolvimento de componentes. Para entender melhor a prática de desenvolvimento de componentes, recomendo a leitura do guia Working With Components. - Ele será desenvolvido apenas para português-Brasil. Outros idiomas podem ser adicionados posteriormente. - Ele irá apresentar uma opção “Adicionar aos Favoritos” no menu “Content Actions” (tela Content Information), para que o usuário possa definir este arquivo como um dos seus favoritos. - Ao clicar neste link, o usuário será direcionado à uma tela aonde ele poderá digitar um comentário sobre este favorito, para facilitar a leitura depois. - Os favoritos ficarão salvos em uma tabela de banco de dados que iremos criar como parte do componente - A aba “My Content Server” terá uma opção nova chamada “Meus Favoritos”, que irá trazer uma tela que lista os favoritos, permitindo que o usuário possa deletar os links - Alguns recursos ficarão de fora deste exercício, novamente por motivos de espaço. Mas iremos listar estes recursos ao final, como exercícios complementares. Recursos do nosso Componente O componente Favoritos será desenvolvido com alguns recursos. Vamos conhecer melhor o que são estes recursos e quais são as suas funções: - Query: Uma query é qualquer atividade que eu preciso executar no banco, o famoso CRUD: Criar, Ler, Atualizar, Deletar. Existem diferentes jeitos de chamar a query, dependendo do propósito: Select Query: executa um comando SQL, mas descarta o resultado. Usado apenas para testar se a conexão com o banco está ok. Não será usado no nosso exercício. Execute Query: executa um comando SQL que altera informações do banco. Pode ser um INSERT, UPDATE ou DELETE. Descarta os resultados. Iremos usar Execute Query para criar, alterar e excluir os favoritos. Select Cache Query: executa um comando SQL SELECT e armazena os resultados em um ResultSet. Este ResultSet retorna como resultado do serviço e pode ser manipulado em IDOC, Java ou outras linguagens. Iremos utilizar Select Cache Query para retornar a lista de favoritos de um usuário. - Service: Os serviços são os responsáveis por executar as queries (ou classes java, mas isso é papo para um outro tutorial...). O serviço recebe os parâmetros de entrada, executa a query e retorna o ResultSet (no caso de um SELECT). Os serviços podem ser executados através de templates, páginas IDOC, outras aplicações (através de API), ou diretamente na URL do browser. Neste exercício criaremos serviços para Criar, Editar, Deletar e Listar os favoritos de um usuário. - Template: Os templates são as interfaces gráficas (páginas) que serão apresentadas aos usuários. Por exemplo, antes de executar o serviço que deleta um documento do favoritos, quero que o usuário veja uma tela com o ID do Documento e um botão Confirma, para que ele tenha certeza que está deletando o registro correto. Esta tela pode ser criada como um template. Neste exercício iremos construir templates para os principais serviços, além da página que lista todos os favoritos do usuário e apresenta as ações de editar e deletar. Os templates nada mais são do que páginas HTML com scripts IDOC. A nossa sequência de atividades para o desenvolvimento deste componente será: - Criar a Tabela do banco - Criar o componente usando o Component Wizard - Criar as Queries para inserir, editar, deletar e listar os favoritos - Criar os Serviços que executam estas Queries - Criar os templates, que são as páginas que irão interagir com os usuários - Criar os links, na página de informações do conteúdo e no painel My Content Server Pois bem, vamos começar! Confira este tutorial na íntegra clicando neste link: http://blogs.oracle.com/ecmbrasil/Tutorial_Componente_Banco.pdf   Happy coding!  :-)

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• Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

  - by Rob Farley

  Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

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• Dynamically creating a Generic Type at Runtime

  - by Rick Strahl

  I learned something new today. Not uncommon, but it's a core .NET runtime feature I simply did not know although I know I've run into this issue a few times and worked around it in other ways. Today there was no working around it and a few folks on Twitter pointed me in the right direction. The question I ran into is: How do I create a type instance of a generic type when I have dynamically acquired the type at runtime? Yup it's not something that you do everyday, but when you're writing code that parses objects dynamically at runtime it comes up from time to time. In my case it's in the bowels of a custom JSON parser. After some thought triggered by a comment today I realized it would be fairly easy to implement two-way Dictionary parsing for most concrete dictionary types. I could use a custom Dictionary serialization format that serializes as an array of key/value objects. Basically I can use a custom type (that matches the JSON signature) to hold my parsed dictionary data and then add it to the actual dictionary when parsing is complete. Generic Types at Runtime One issue that came up in the process was how to figure out what type the Dictionary<K,V> generic parameters take. Reflection actually makes it fairly easy to figure out generic types at runtime with code like this: if (arrayType.GetInterface("IDictionary") != null) { if (arrayType.IsGenericType) { var keyType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[0]; var valueType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[1]; … } } The GetArrayType method gets passed a type instance that is the array or array-like object that is rendered in JSON as an array (which includes IList, IDictionary, IDataReader and a few others). In my case the type passed would be something like Dictionary<string, CustomerEntity>. So I know what the parent container class type is. Based on the the container type using it's then possible to use GetGenericTypeArguments() to retrieve all the generic types in sequential order of definition (ie. string, CustomerEntity). That's the easy part. Creating a Generic Type and Providing Generic Parameters at RunTime The next problem is how do I get a concrete type instance for the generic type? I know what the type name and I have a type instance is but it's generic, so how do I get a type reference to keyvaluepair<K,V> that is specific to the keyType and valueType above? Here are a couple of things that come to mind but that don't work (and yes I tried that unsuccessfully first): Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<keyType, valueType>); Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<typeof(keyType), typeof(valueType)>); The problem is that this explicit syntax expects a type literal not some dynamic runtime value, so both of the above won't even compile. I turns out the way to create a generic type at runtime is using a fancy bit of syntax that until today I was completely unaware of: Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<,>).MakeGenericType(keyType, valueType); The key is the type(keyvalue<,>) bit which looks weird at best. It works however and produces a non-generic type reference. You can see the difference between the full generic type and the non-typed (?) generic type in the debugger: The nonGenericType doesn't show any type specialization, while the elementType type shows the string, CustomerEntity (truncated above) in the type name. Once the full type reference exists (elementType) it's then easy to create an instance. In my case the parser parses through the JSON and when it completes parsing the value/object it creates a new keyvalue<T,V> instance. Now that I know the element type that's pretty trivial with: // Objects start out null until we find the opening tag resultObject = Activator.CreateInstance(elementType); Here the result object is picked up by the JSON array parser which creates an instance of the child object (keyvalue<K,V>) and then parses and assigns values from the JSON document using the types  key/value property signature. Internally the parser then takes each individually parsed item and adds it to a list of  List<keyvalue<K,V>> items. Parsing through a Generic type when you only have Runtime Type Information When parsing of the JSON array is done, the List needs to be turned into a defacto Dictionary<K,V>. This should be easy since I know that I'm dealing with an IDictionary, and I know the generic types for the key and value. The problem is again though that this needs to happen at runtime which would mean using several Convert.ChangeType() calls in the code to dynamically cast at runtime. Yuk. In the end I decided the easier and probably only slightly slower way to do this is a to use the dynamic type to collect the items and assign them to avoid all the dynamic casting madness: else if (IsIDictionary) { IDictionary dict = Activator.CreateInstance(arrayType) as IDictionary; foreach (dynamic item in items) { dict.Add(item.key, item.value); } return dict; } This code creates an instance of the generic dictionary type first, then loops through all of my custom keyvalue<K,V> items and assigns them to the actual dictionary. By using Dynamic here I can side step all the explicit type conversions that would be required in the three highlighted areas (not to mention that this nested method doesn't have access to the dictionary item generic types here). Static <- -> Dynamic Dynamic casting in a static language like C# is a bitch to say the least. This is one of the few times when I've cursed static typing and the arcane syntax that's required to coax types into the right format. It works but it's pretty nasty code. If it weren't for dynamic that last bit of code would have been a pretty ugly as well with a bunch of Convert.ChangeType() calls to litter the code. Fortunately this type of type convulsion is rather rare and reserved for system level code. It's not every day that you create a string to object parser after all :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in .NET  CSharp   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• When OneTug Just Isn&rsquo;t Enough&hellip;

  - by onefloridacoder

  I stole that from the back of a T-shirt I saw at the Orlando Code Camp 2010.  This was my first code camp and my first time volunteering for an event like this as well.  It was an awesome day.  I cannot begin to count the “aaahh”, “I did-not-know I could do that”, in the crowds and for myself.  I think it was a great day of learning for everyone at all levels.  All of the presenters were different and provided great insights into the topics they were presenting.  Here’s a list of the ones that I attended. KodeFuGuru, “Pirates vs. Ninjas” He touched on many good topics to relax some of the ways we think when we are writing out code, and still looks good, readable, etc.  As he pointed out in all of his examples, we might not always realize everything that’s going on under the covers.  He exposed a bug in his own code, and verbalized the mental gymnastics he went through when he knew there was something wrong with one of his IEnumerable implementations.  For me, it was great to hear that someone else labors over these gut reactions to code quickly snapped together, to the point that we rush to the refactor stage to fix what’s bothering us – and learn.  He has some content on extension methods that was very interesting.  My “that is so cool” moment was when he swapped out AddEntity method on an entity class and used a With extension method instead.  Some of the LINQ scales fell off my eyes at that moment, and I realized my own code could be a lot more powerful (and readable) if incorporate a few of these examples at the appropriate times.  And he cautioned as well… “don’t go crazy with this stuff”, there’s a place and time for everything.  One of his examples demo’d toward the end of the talk is on his sight where he’s chaining methods together, cool stuff. Quotes I liked: “Extension Methods - Extension methods to put features back on the model type, without impacting the type.” “Favor Declarative Code” – Check out the ? and ?? operators if you’re not already using them. “Favor Fluent Code” “Avoid Pirate Ninja Zombies!  If you see one run!” I’m definitely going to be looking at “Extract Projection” when I get into VS2010. BDD 101 – Sean Chambers http://github.com/schambers This guy had a whole host of gremlins against him, final score Sean 5, Gremlins 1.  He ran the code samples from his github repo  in the code github code viewer since the PC they school gave him to use didn’t have VS installed. He did a great job of converting the grammar between BDD and TDD, and how this style of development can be used in integration tests as well as the different types of gated builds on a CI box – he didn’t go into a discussion around CI, but we could infer that it could work. Like when we use WSSF, it does cause a class explosion to happen however the amount of code per class it limit to just covering the concern at hand – no more, no less.  As in “When I as a <Role>, expect {something} to happen, because {}”  This keeps us (the developer) from gold plating our solutions and creating less waste.  He basically keeps the code that prove out the requirement to two lines of code.  Nice. He uses SpecUnit to merge this grammar into his .NET projects and gave an overview on how this ties into writing his own BDD tests.  Some folks were familiar with Given / When / Then as story acceptance criteria and here’s how he mapped it: “Given <Context>  When <Something Happens> Then <I expect...>”  There are a few base classes and overrides in the SpecUnit framework that help with setting up the context for each test which looked very handy. Successfully Running Your Own Coding Business The speaker ran through a list of items that sounded like common sense stuff LLC, banking, separating expenses, etc.  Then moved into role playing with business owners and an ISV.  That was pretty good stuff, it pays to be a good listener all of the time even if your client is sitting on the other side of the phone tearing you head off for you – but that’s all it is, and get used to it its par for the course.  Oh, yeah always answer the phone was one simple thing that you can do to move  your business forward.  But like Cory Foy tweeted this week, “If you owe me a lot of money, don’t have a message that says your away for five weeks skiing in Colorado.”  Lots of food for thought that’s on my list of “todo’s and to-don’ts”. Speaker Idol Next, I had the pleasure of helping Russ Fustino tape this part of Code Camp as my primary volunteer opportunity that day.  You remember Russ, “know the code” from the awesome Russ’ Tool Shed series.  He did a great job orchestrating and capturing the Speaker Idol finals.   So I didn’t actually miss any sessions, but was able to see three back to back in one setting.  The idol finalists gave a 10 minute talk and very deep subjects, but different styles of talks.  No one walked away empty handed for jobs very well done.  Russ has details on his site.  The pictures and  video captured is supposed to be published on Channel 9 at a later date.  It was also a valuable experience to see what makes technical speakers effective in their talks.  I picked up quite a few speaking tips from what I heard from the judges and contestants. Design For Developers – Diane Leeper If you are a great developer, you’re probably a lousy designer.  Diane didn’t come to poke holes in what we think we can do with UI layout and design, but she provided some tools we can use to figure out metaphors for visualizing data.  If you need help with that check out Silverlight Pivot – that’s what she was getting at.  I was first introduced to her at one of John Papa’s talks last year at a Lakeland User Group meeting and she’s very passionate about design.  She was able to discuss different elements of Pivot, while to a developer is just looked cool. I believe she was providing the deck from her talk to folks after her talk, so send her an email if you’re interested.   She says she can talk about design for hours and hours – we all left that session believing her.   Rinse and Repeat Orlando Code Camp 2010 was awesome, and would totally do it again.  There were lots of folks from my shop there, and some that have left my shop to go elsewhere.  So it was a reunion of sorts and a great celebration for the simple fact that its great to be a developer and there’s a community that supports and recognizes it as well.  The sponsors were generous and the organizers were very tired, namely Esteban Garcia and Will Strohl who were responsible for making a lot of this magic happen.  And if you don’t believe me, check out the chatter on Twitter.

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• Using Lazy<T> and abstract wrapper class to lazy-load complex system parameters

  - by DigiMortal

  .NET Framework 4.0 introduced new class called Lazy<T> and I wrote blog post about it: .Net Framework 4.0: Using System.Lazy<T>. One thing is annoying for me – we have to keep lazy loaded value and its value loader as separate things. In this posting I will introduce you my Lazy<T> wrapper for complex to get system parameters that uses template method to keep lazy value loader in parameter class. Problem with original implementation Here’s the sample code that shows you how Lazy<T> is usually used. This is just sample code, don’t focus on the fact that this is dummy console application. class Program {     static void Main(string[] args)     {         var temperature = new Lazy<int>(LoadMinimalTemperature);           Console.WriteLine("Minimal room temperature: " + temperature.Value);         Console.ReadLine();     }       protected static int LoadMinimalTemperature()     {         var returnValue = 0;           // Do complex stuff here           return true;     } } The problem is that our class with many lazy loaded properties will grow messy if it has all value loading code inside it. This code may be complex for more than one parameter and in this case it is better to use separate class for this parameter. Defining base class for parameters As a first step I will define base class for all lazy-loaded parameters. This class is wrapper around Lazy<T> and it also offers one template method that parameter classes have to override to provide loaded data. public abstract class LazyParameter<T> {     private Lazy<T> _lazyParam;       public LazyParameter()     {         _lazyParam = new Lazy<T>(Load);     }       protected abstract T Load();       public T Value     {         get { return _lazyParam.Value; }     } } It is also possible to extend Lazy<T> but I don’t prefer to do it as Lazy<T> has six constructors we have to take care of. Also I don’t like to expose Lazy<T> public interface to users of my parameter classes. Creating parameter class Now it’s time to create our first parameter class. Notice how few stuff we have in this class besides overridden Load() method. public class MinimalRoomTemperature : LazyParameter<int> {     protected override int Load()     {         var returnValue = 0;           // Do complex stuff here           return returnValue;     } } Using parameter class is simple. Here’s my test code. class Program {     static void Main(string[] args)     {         var parameter = new MinimalRoomTemperature();         Console.WriteLine("Minimal room temperature: " + parameter.Value);         Console.ReadLine();     } } Conclusion Lazy<T> is useful class that you usually don’t want to use outside from API-s. I like this class but I don’t like when people are using this class directly in application code. In this posting I showed you how to use Lazy<T> with wrapper class to get complex parameter loading code out from classes that use this parameter. We ended up with generic base class for parameters that you can also use as base for other similar classes (you have to find better name to base class in this case).

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• Feedback on IE9 developer tool

  - by anirudha

  if you already love IE9 this post really not for you. but still you need something more this post for you and want to know about IE9 why not use product guide they give you IE9 product guide well i already put the bad experience into many post here but a little practice more to show what IE9 actually is or what they show. well i believe that their is no one on MSDN can sure that IE9 is another thing for developer to struggle with. because they never thing about the thing they make. the thinking they have that we product windows who are best so everything we do are best and best. come to the point i means Web browsing we can divide them in two parts 1. someone who are developer and use browser mainly for development , debugging and testing what they produced and make better software. 2. user who are not know things more technically but use the web as their passion. so as a developer what developer want. are IE9 is really for developer now make a comparison. commonly every developer have a twitter account to follow the link of someone else to learn and read the best article on web and share to all follower of themselves. chrome and Firefox have many utilities for that but IE still have nothing. social networking is a good way to communicate with others. in IE their is no plug-in to make experience better as firefox and chrome have a list of plug-in to use browser with more comfort. their are a huge list of plug-in on Firefox and chrome is available for making experience better. but IE9 still have no plug-in for that. if you see http://ieaddons.com/ you still see that they are joking yeah white joke who believe on them. they still have no plug-in. are they fool or making other fool. on 2011 whenever Firefox and chrome claim many thing on the plug-in IE9 still have no plug-in. not for developer not for everyone else. yeah a list of useless stuff you can see their. IE9 developer tool maybe better if they copycat the firebug as they copycat Google’s search result for Bing. well it’ not sure but Google claim that. but what is in IE9 developer tool so great that MSDN developer talking about. i found nothing in IE9 developer tool still feel frustrated their is a big trouble to edit css. means you never can change the css without going to CSS tab. but i thing great many thing they make better their but they still produce not better option in IE9 developer tool. as a comparison firebug is great we all know but chrome is a good option if someone want to try their hands on new things. in firebug their is a list of plugin inside firebug available also to make task easier. like firepicker in firebug make colorpicking easier. firebug autocomplete make console script writing better and yslow show you the performance step you need to take for making site better. IE9 still have no plugin or that. IE9 maybe useful stuff whenever the interface they thing to make better. the problem with MSFT these days that they want to ship next version of every softare in WPF. yeah they make live 2011 in wpf. many of user go for someone else or downgrade their 2011 live. the problem they have that they never want to spent the time on learning to use a software again. IE9 not have the serius problem like live have but still IE9 is not so great as chrome. like in chrome their is smooth tabbing. IE9 ditto copycat the things for tabbing. but a little step more in IE have a problem that IE9 tab slip whenever you want to use them. in chrome never slip the tab without user want. well as user someone also want to paint their browser in the style they want or like. in firefox the sollution called personas or themes. same in chrome the things called themes but in IE they still believe that their is no need for them. means use same themes everytime no customization in 2011 yeah great joke. well i read a post [written in 2008] of developer who still claim that they never used Firefox because they have a license for visual studio and some other software and have IE in their system. i not what they want to show. means they always want or thing to show that firefox and chrome is pity and IE is great as all do. but what’s true we all know. when MSFT release IE9 RC they show the ads with comparison of IE9 RC with chrome6 but why not today with chrome 11 developer version. the many things on IE testdrive now work perfect on chrome. well what’s performance matter when a silly browser never give a better experience. yeah performance have matter in useful software. anyone can prove many things whenever they produce a featureless software. well IE9 is looking great in blogger’s post on many kind of website where developer not independently write. actually they are mentally forced to write for IE9 better and show blah blah even blah is very small as they show. i am not believe on some blogger when they write in a style who are easily known that the post in favor of IE9. if you thing of mine then i am not want to hide myself i am one of the lover of open source so i love Firefox and chrome both. but i am not wrong you find yourself that what is difference between IE9 and Firefox and chrome. so don’t believe on someone who are not mentally independent because most of them are write about IE9 because they want to show them better they are forced themselves to show IE9 as a tool and chrome and firefox as pity. well read everything but never believe on everyone without any confident of them. they actually all want to show the things they have as i have with chrome and firefox is better then IE9. so my feedback on IE9 is :- without any plugin , customization or many thing i described in the post make no sense of use of IE9. i still fall in love of firefox and chrome they both give a better support and things to make experience better on the web. so conclusion is that i not forced you to other not IE9. you need to use the tool who save your time. means if your IE9 save your time you should use them because time was more subjective then others. so use the software who save the time as i save my time in chrome and in firefox. i still found nothing inIE9 who save time of mine.

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