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• Knowing your user is key--Part 1: Motivation

  - by erikanollwebb

  I was thinking where the best place to start in this blog would be and finally came back to a theme that I think is pretty critical--successful gamification in the enterprise comes down to knowing your user.  Lots of folks will say that gamification is about understanding that everyone is a gamer.  But at least in my org, that argument won't play for a lot of people.  Pun intentional.  It's not that I don't see the attraction to the idea--really, very few people play no games at all.  If they don't play video games, they might play solitaire on their computer.  They may play card games, or some type of sport.  Mario Herger has some great facts on how much game playing there is going on at his Enterprise-Gamification.com website. But at the end of the day, I can't sell that into my organization well.  We are Oracle.  We make big, serious software designed run your whole business.  We don't make Angry Birds out of your financial reporting tools.  So I stick with the argument that works better.  Gamification techniques are really just good principals of user experience packaged a little differently.  Feedback?  We already know feedback is important when using software.  Progress indicators?  Got that too.  Game mechanics may package things in a more explicit way but it's not really "new".  To know how to use game mechanics, and what a user experience team is important for, is totally understanding who our users are and what they are motivated by. For several years, I taught college psychology courses, including Motivation.  Motivation is generally broken down into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  There's intrinsic, which comes from within the individual.  And there's extrinsic, which comes from outside the individual.  Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from just a general sense of pleasure in the doing of something.  For example, I like to cook.  I like to cook a lot.  The kind of cooking I think is just fun makes other people--people who don't like to cook--cringe.  Like the cake I made this week--the star-spangled rhapsody from The Cake Bible: two layers of meringue, two layers of genoise flavored with a raspberry eau de vie syrup, whipped cream with berries and a mousseline buttercream, also flavored with raspberry liqueur and topped with fresh raspberries and blueberries. I love cooking--I ask for cooking tools for my birthday and Christmas, I take classes like sushi making and knife skills for fun.  I like reading about you can make an emulsion of egg yolks, melted butter and lemon, cook slowly and transform them into a sauce hollandaise (my use of all the egg yolks that didn't go into the aforementioned cake).  And while it's nice when people like what I cook, I don't do it for that.  I do it because I think it's fun.  My former boss, Ultan Ó Broin, loves to fish in the sea off the coast of Ireland.  Not because he gets prizes for it, or awards, but because it's fun.  To quote a note he sent me today when I asked if having been recently ill kept him from the beginning of mackerel season, he told me he had already been out and said "I can fish when on a deathbed" (read more of Ultan's work, see his blogs on User Assistance and Translation.). That's not the kind of intensity you get about something you don't like to do.  I'm sure you can think of something you do just because you like it. So how does that relate to gamification?  Gamification in the enterprise space is about uncovering the game within work.  Gamification is about tapping into things people already find motivating.  But to do that, you need to know what that user is motivated by. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those areas where over-the-top gamification seems to work (not to plug a competitor in this space, but you can search on what Bunchball* has done with a company just a little north of us on 101 for the CRM crowd).  Sales people are naturally competitive and thrive on that plus recognition of their sales work.  You can use lots of game mechanics like leaderboards and challenges and scorecards with this type of user and they love it.  Show my whole org I'm leading in sales for the quarter?  Bring it on!  However, take the average accountant and show how much general ledger activity they have done in the last week and expose it to their whole org on a leaderboard and I think you'd see a lot of people looking for a new job.  Why?  Because in general, accountants aren't extraverts who thrive on competition in their work.  That doesn't mean there aren't game mechanics that would work for them, but they won't be the same game mechanics that work for sales people.  It's a different type of user and they are motivated by different things. To break this up, I'll stop here and post now.  I'll pick this thread up in the next post. Thoughts? Questions? *Disclosure: To my knowledge, Oracle has no relationship with Bunchball at this point in time.

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• C# Open Source software that is useful for learning Design Patterns

  - by Fathom Savvy

  In college I took a class in Expert Systems. The language the book taught (CLIPS) was esoteric - Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Fourth Edition. I remember having a tough time with it. So, after almost failing the class, I needed to create the most awesome Expert System for my final presentation. I chose to create an expert system that would calculate risk analysis for a person's retirement portfolio. In short, the system would provide the services normally performed by one's financial adviser. In other words, based on personality, age, state of the macro economy, and other factors, should one's portfolio be conservative, moderate, or aggressive? In the appendix of the book (or on the CD-ROM), there was this in-depth example program for something unrelated to my presentation. Over my break, I read and re-read every line of that program until I understood it to the letter. Even though it was unrelated, I learned more than I ever could by reading all of the chapters. My presentation turned out to be pretty damn good and I received praises from my professor and classmates. So, the moral of the story is..., by understanding other people's code, you can gain greater insight into a language/paradigm than by reading canonical examples. Still, to this day, I am having trouble with everyday design patterns such as the Factory Pattern. I would like to know if anyone could recommend open source software that would help me understand the Gang of Four design patterns, at the very least. I have read the books, but I'm having trouble writing code for the concepts in the real world. Perhaps, by studying code used in today's real world applications, it might just "click". I realize a piece of software may only implement one kind of design pattern. But, if the pattern is an implementation you think is good for learning, and you know what pattern to look for within the source, I'm hoping you can tell me about it. For example, the System.Linq.Expressions namespace has a good example of the Visitor Pattern. The client calls Expression.Accept(new ExpressionVisitor()), which calls ExpressionVisitor (VisitExtension), which calls back to Expression (VisitChildren), which then calls Expression (Accept) again - wooah, kinda convoluted. The point to note here is that VisitChildren is a virtual method. Both Expression and those classes derived from Expression can implement the VisitChildren method any way they want. This means that one type of Expression can run code that is completely different from another type of derived Expression, even though the ExpressionVisitor class is the same in the Accept method. (As a side note Expression.Accept is also virtual). In the end, the code provides a real world example that you won't get in any book because it's kinda confusing. To summarize, If you know of any open source software that uses a design pattern implementation you were impressed by, please list it here. I'm sure it will help many others besides just me. public class VisitorPatternTest { public void Main() { Expression normalExpr = new Expression(); normalExpr.Accept(new ExpressionVisitor()); Expression binExpr = new BinaryExpression(); binExpr.Accept(new ExpressionVisitor()); } } public class Expression { protected internal virtual Expression Accept(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { return visitor.VisitExtension(this); } protected internal virtual Expression VisitChildren(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { if (!this.CanReduce) { throw Error.MustBeReducible(); } return visitor.Visit(this.ReduceAndCheck()); } public virtual Expression Visit(Expression node) { if (node != null) { return node.Accept(this); } return null; } public Expression ReduceAndCheck() { if (!this.CanReduce) { throw Error.MustBeReducible(); } Expression expression = this.Reduce(); if ((expression == null) || (expression == this)) { throw Error.MustReduceToDifferent(); } if (!TypeUtils.AreReferenceAssignable(this.Type, expression.Type)) { throw Error.ReducedNotCompatible(); } return expression; } } public class BinaryExpression : Expression { protected internal override Expression Accept(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { return visitor.VisitBinary(this); } protected internal override Expression VisitChildren(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { return CreateDummyExpression(); } protected internal Expression CreateDummyExpression() { Expression dummy = new Expression(); return dummy; } } public class ExpressionVisitor { public virtual Expression Visit(Expression node) { if (node != null) { return node.Accept(this); } return null; } protected internal virtual Expression VisitExtension(Expression node) { return node.VisitChildren(this); } protected internal virtual Expression VisitBinary(BinaryExpression node) { return ValidateBinary(node, node.Update(this.Visit(node.Left), this.VisitAndConvert<LambdaExpression>(node.Conversion, "VisitBinary"), this.Visit(node.Right))); } }

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• Ubuntu server random hangups.

  - by Ebbe

  Hello all. this is my first post to this forum which I found through the superb podcast "It Conversations" from StackOverFlow. I am quite in my role as server administrator for an exhibition center in London. Basically we have a central file and sql server to which roughly 40 stations connects to to upload/download data used/captured by a set of applications. Over the last weeks we have experienced a few random hangups to our applications, and as it always happen to multiple applications simultaneously I do not believe that the applications are the source of the problem. We also monitor the network using Dartware Intermapper which indicates that all switches and stations on the network has been reachable during the downtime. Thus, its all pointing to the server. I have been looking through all log files I can think of and the only thing so far that I have found suspicious is the following lines in the syslog which are from the time of one of the hangups: Feb 6 17:14:27 es named[5582]: client 127.0.0.1#33721: RFC 1918 response from Internet for 150.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa Feb 6 17:14:40 es named[5582]: client 127.0.0.1#32899: RFC 1918 response from Internet for 152.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa Feb 6 17:15:01 es /USR/SBIN/CRON[1956]: (es) CMD (/home/es/apps/es/bin/es_checksum.sh) Feb 6 17:16:06 es /USR/SBIN/CRON[2031]: (es) CMD (/home/es/apps/es/bin/es_checksum.sh) Feb 6 17:21:00 es named[5582]: *** POKED TIMER *** Feb 6 17:21:00 es last message repeated 2 times Feb 6 17:21:07 es named[5582]: client 127.0.0.1#44194: RFC 1918 response from Internet for 143.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa Feb 6 17:21:12 es named[5582]: client 127.0.0.1#59004: RFC 1918 response from Internet for 164.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa I find a few lines of interesting lines here: 1) "RFC 1918 response from Internet for 150.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa". I see this a lot in the syslog. And basically everytime I do a nslookup for any of the computers in the cluster I get a new similar line in the syslog. I understand from google that this has to do with reverse lookup problems. But I do not know how that could effect the systems. Lets say that one of these lines appear every time one of the userstations connects to the server, which may happen several times a second. Could this possible cause a hangup of the entire server? 2) POKED TIMER, I have googled this quite a lot, but not found an explaination that I can relate to. What does this mean? 3) The timestamps, it seems like the entire server has stopped responding for several minutes. Normally there are many printouts to the syslog per minute on this server. Furthermore the CRON job is set to run once every minute. Which according to the log, hasent happened here. OS: Ubuntu 8.04 Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-24-server x86_64 GNU/Linux. Hardware: Dell R710, RAID1, CPU: 2x XEON E5530. 16GB Memory. Average load is very low, and memory should not be a problem. Please let me know if you need any additional information. Best wishes, Ebbe

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• What was scientifically shown to support productivity when organizing/accessing file and folders?

  - by Tom Wijsman

  I have gathered terabytes of data but it has became a habit to store files and folders to the same folder, that folder could be kind of seen as a Inbox where most files (non-installations) enter my system. This way I end up with a big collections of files that are hard to organize properly, I mostly end up making folders that match their file type but then I still have several gigabytes of data per folder which doesn't make it efficient such that I can productively use the folder. I'd rather do a few clicks than having to search through the files, whether that's by some software product or by looking through the folder. Often the file names themselves are not proper so it would be easier to recognize them if there were few in a folder, rather than thousands of them. Scaling in the structure of directory trees in a computer cluster summarizes this problem as following: The processes of storing and retrieving information are rapidly gaining importance in science as well as society as a whole [1, 2, 3, 4]. A considerable effort is being undertaken, firstly to characterize and describe how publicly available information, for example in the world wide web, is actually organized, and secondly, to design efficient methods to access this information. [1] R. M. Shiffrin and K. B¨orner, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 5183 (2004). [2] S. Lawrence, C.L. Giles, Nature 400, 107–109 (1999). [3] R.F.I. Cancho and R.V. Sol, Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. B 268, 2261 (2001). [4] M. Sigman and G. A. Cecchi, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 1742 (2002). It goes further on explaining how the data is usually organized by taking general looks at it, but by looking at the abstract and conclusion it doesn't come with a conclusion or approach which results in a productive organization of a directory hierarchy. So, in essence, this is a problem for which I haven't found a solution yet; and I would love to see a scientific solution to this problem. Upon searching further, I don't seem to find anything useful or free papers that approach this problem so it might be that I'm looking in the wrong place. I've also noted that there are different ways to term this problem, which leads out to different results of papers. Perhaps a paper is out there, but I'm not just using the same terms as that paper uses? They often use more scientific terms. I've once heard a story about an advocate with a laptop which has simply outperformed an advocate with had tons of papers, which shows how proper organization leads to productivity; but that story didn't share details on how the advocate used the laptop or how he had organized his data. But in any case, it was way more useful than how most of us organize our data these days... Advice me how I should organize my data, I'm not looking for suggestions here. I would love to see statistics or scientific measurement approaches that help me confirm that it does help me reach my goal.

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• AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection.  A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract.  I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services.  My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue.  The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make.  Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); }   My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); }   Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor  and work as it should normally.  To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url.  From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters.  I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together.  I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors.  I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me.  I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used.  To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } }   Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation.  I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example.  You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach.  OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); }   Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use.  Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined.  This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/   Cheers for now, Andrew   P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon. 

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• Win a place at a SQL Server Masterclass with Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal

  - by Testas

  The top things YOU need to know about managing SQL Server - in one place, on one day - presented by two of the best SQL Server industry trainers!And you could be there courtesy of UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine! This week the UK SQL Server User Group will provide you with details of how to win a place at this must see seminar   You can also register for the seminar yourself at:www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql More information about the seminar   Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London When: Thursday 17th June 2010 This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will:·         Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour   ·         Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data   ·         Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database ·         Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to changeSessions AbstractsKEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production  Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.  SESSION ONE: SQL Server MythbustersIt's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained. SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted! SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys! SESSION 4: Essential Database MaintenanceIn this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well.    Speaker Biographies     Paul S.Randal  Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.  

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• So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

  - by Edith Mireles-Oracle

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm.  The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8  Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8.  In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business.  Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.”  In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett  (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture.  In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content.  From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs.  When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly  about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.”  I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit.  We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient."  Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas.   We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site.  You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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• Code excavations, wishful invocations, perimeters and domain specific unit test frameworks

  - by RoyOsherove

  One of the talks I did at QCON London was about a subject that I’ve come across fairly recently , when I was building SilverUnit – a “pure” unit test framework for silverlight objects that depend on the silverlight runtime to run. It is the concept of “cogs in the machine” – when your piece of code needs to run inside a host framework or runtime that you have little or no control over for testability related matters. Examples of such cogs and machines can be: your custom control running inside silverlight runtime in the browser your plug-in running inside an IDE your activity running inside a windows workflow your code running inside a java EE bean your code inheriting from a COM+ (enterprise services) component etc.. Not all of these are necessarily testability problems. The main testability problem usually comes when your code actually inherits form something inside the system. For example. one of the biggest problems with testing objects like silverlight controls is the way they depend on the silverlight runtime – they don’t implement some silverlight interface, they don’t just call external static methods against the framework runtime that surrounds them – they actually inherit parts of the framework: they all inherit (in this case) from the silverlight DependencyObject Wrapping it up? An inheritance dependency is uniquely challenging to bring under test, because “classic” methods such as wrapping the object under test with a framework wrapper will not work, and the only way to do manually is to create parallel testable objects that get delegated with all the possible actions from the dependencies.    In silverlight’s case, that would mean creating your own custom logic class that would be called directly from controls that inherit from silverlight, and would be tested independently of these controls. The pro side is that you get the benefit of understanding the “contract” and the “roles” your system plays against your logic, but unfortunately, more often than not, it can be very tedious to create, and may sometimes feel unnecessary or like code duplication. About perimeters A perimeter is that invisible line that your draw around your pieces of logic during a test, that separate the code under test from any dependencies that it uses. Most of the time, a test perimeter around an object will be the list of seams (dependencies that can be replaced such as interfaces, virtual methods etc.) that are actually replaced for that test or for all the tests. Role based perimeters In the case of creating a wrapper around an object – one really creates a “role based” perimeter around the logic that is being tested – that wrapper takes on roles that are required by the code under test, and also communicates with the host system to implement those roles and provide any inputs to the logic under test. in the image below – we have the code we want to test represented as a star. No perimeter is drawn yet (we haven’t wrapped it up in anything yet). in the image below is what happens when you wrap your logic with a role based wrapper – you get a role based perimeter anywhere your code interacts with the system: There’s another way to bring that code under test – using isolation frameworks like typemock, rhino mocks and MOQ (but if your code inherits from the system, Typemock might be the only way to isolate the code from the system interaction.   Ad-Hoc Isolation perimeters the image below shows what I call ad-hoc perimeter that might be vastly different between different tests: This perimeter’s surface is much smaller, because for that specific test, that is all the “change” that is required to the host system behavior.   The third way of isolating the code from the host system is the main “meat” of this post: Subterranean perimeters Subterranean perimeters are Deep rooted perimeters  - “always on” seams that that can lie very deep in the heart of the host system where they are fully invisible even to the test itself, not just to the code under test. Because they lie deep inside a system you can’t control, the only way I’ve found to control them is with runtime (not compile time) interception of method calls on the system. One way to get such abilities is by using Aspect oriented frameworks – for example, in SilverUnit, I’ve used the CThru AOP framework based on Typemock hooks and CLR profilers to intercept such system level method calls and effectively turn them into seams that lie deep down at the heart of the silverlight runtime. the image below depicts an example of what such a perimeter could look like: As you can see, the actual seams can be very far away form the actual code under test, and as you’ll discover, that’s actually a very good thing. Here is only a partial list of examples of such deep rooted seams : disabling the constructor of a base class five levels below the code under test (this.base.base.base.base) faking static methods of a type that’s being called several levels down the stack: method x() calls y() calls z() calls SomeType.StaticMethod()  Replacing an async mechanism with a synchronous one (replacing all timers with your own timer behavior that always Ticks immediately upon calls to “start()” on the same caller thread for example) Replacing event mechanisms with your own event mechanism (to allow “firing” system events) Changing the way the system saves information with your own saving behavior (in silverunit, I replaced all Dependency Property set and get with calls to an in memory value store instead of using the one built into silverlight which threw exceptions without a browser) several questions could jump in: How do you know what to fake? (how do you discover the perimeter?) How do you fake it? Wouldn’t this be problematic  - to fake something you don’t own? it might change in the future How do you discover the perimeter to fake? To discover a perimeter all you have to do is start with a wishful invocation. a wishful invocation is the act of trying to invoke a method (or even just create an instance ) of an object using “regular” test code. You invoke the thing that you’d like to do in a real unit test, to see what happens: Can I even create an instance of this object without getting an exception? Can I invoke this method on that instance without getting an exception? Can I verify that some call into the system happened? You make the invocation, get an exception (because there is a dependency) and look at the stack trace. choose a location in the stack trace and disable it. Then try the invocation again. if you don’t get an exception the perimeter is good for that invocation, so you can move to trying out other methods on that object. in a future post I will show the process using CThru, and how you end up with something close to a domain specific test framework after you’re done creating the perimeter you need.

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• SQL Server Master class winner

  - by Testas

   The winner of the SQL Server MasterClass competition courtesy of the UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine!    Steve Hindmarsh     There is still time to register for the seminar yourself at:  www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql     More information about the seminar     Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London  When: Thursday 17th June 2010  This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will: Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour    Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data    Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to change  Sessions Abstracts  KEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production    Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.   SESSION ONE: SQL Server Mythbusters  It's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained.   SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest  Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted!   SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward   Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys!   SESSION 4: Essential Database Maintenance  In this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well. Speaker Biographies     Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.   Speaker Testimonials  "To call them good trainers is an epic understatement. They know how to deliver technical material in ways that illustrate it well. I had to stop Paul at one point and ask him how long it took to build a particular slide because the animations were so good at conveying a hard-to-describe process." "These are not beginner presenters, and they put an extreme amount of preparation and attention to detail into everything that they do. Completely, utterly professional." "When it comes to the instructors themselves, Kimberly and Paul simply have no equal. Not only are they both ultimate authorities, but they have endless enthusiasm about the material, and spot on delivery. If either ever got tired they never showed it, even after going all day and all week. We witnessed countless demos over the course of the week, some extremely involved, multi-step processes, and I can’t recall one that didn’t go the way it was supposed to." "You might think that with this extreme level of skill comes extreme levels of egotism and lack of patience. Nothing could be further from the truth. ... They simply know how to teach, and are approachable, humble, and patient." "The experience Paul and Kimberly have had with real live customers yields a lot more information and things to watch out for than you'd ever get from documentation alone." “Kimberly, I just wanted to send you an email to let you know how awesome you are! I have applied some of your indexing strategies to our website’s homegrown CMS and we are experiencing a significant performance increase. WOW....amazing tips delivered in an exciting way!  Thanks again” 

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 06, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 06, 2010New ProjectsActive Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk): Active Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk)Combina: Smart calculator for large combinatorial calculations.Concurrent Cache: ConcurrentCache is a smart output cache library extending OutputCacheProvider. It consists of in memory, cache files and compressed files modes and...Decay: Personal use. For learningFazTalk: FazTalk is a suite of tools and products that are designed to improve collaboration and workflow interactions. FazTalk takes an innovative approach...grouped: A peer to peer text editor, written in C# [update] I wrote this little thing a while back and even forgot about it, I stopped coding for more tha...HitchARide MVC 2 Sample: An MVC 2 sample written as part of the Microsoft 2010 London Web Camp based on the wireframes at http://schematics.earthware.co.uk/hitcharide. Not...Inspiration.Web: Description: A simple (but entertaining) ASP.NET MVC (C#) project to suggest random code names for projects. Intended audience: People who ne...NetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: tinyMCE file plugin with asp.netOil Slick Live Feeds: All live feeds from BP's Remotely Operated VehiclesParticle Lexer: Parser and Tokenizer libraryPdf Form Tool: Pdf Form Tool demonstrates how the iTextSharp library could be used to fill PDF forms. The input data is provided as a csv file. The application ...Planning Poker Windows Mobile 7: This project is a Planning Poker application for Windows Mobile 7 (and later?). RandomRat: RandomRat is a program for generating random sets that meet specific criteriaScience.NET: A scientific library written in managed code. It supports advanced mathematics (algebra system, sequences, statistics, combinatorics...), data stru...Spider Compiler: Spider Compiler parses the input of a spider programming source file and compiles it (with help of csc.exe; the C#-Compiler) to an exe-file. This p...Sununpro: sunun's project for study by team foundation server.TFS Buddy: An application that manipulates your I-Buddy whenever something happens in your Team Foundation ServerValveSoft: ValveSysWiiMote Physics: WiiMote Physics is an application that allows you to retrieve data from your WiiMote or Balance Board and display it in real-time. It has a number...WinGet: WinGet is a download manager for Windows. You can drag links onto the WinGet Widget and it will download a file on the selected folder. It is dev...XProject.NET: A project management and team collaboration platformNew Releases.NET DiscUtils: Version 0.9 Preview: This release is still under development. New features available in this release: Support for accessing short file names stored in WIM files Incr...Active Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk): Active World Dot Net Wrapper (0.0.1.85): Based on AwSdk 85AwSdk UnOfficial Wrapper Howto Use: C# using AwWrapper; VB.Net Import AwWrapperAjaxControlToolkit additional extenders: ZhecheAjaxControls for .NET3.5: Used AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - April 12th 2010 Release Version 40412. Fixed deadlock in long operation canceling Some other fixesAnyCAD: AnyCAD.v1.2.ENU.Install: http://www.anycad.net Parametric Modeling *3D: Sphere, Box, Cylinder, Cone •2D: Line, Rectangle, Arc, Arch, Circle, Spline, Polygon •Feature: Extr...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V29: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Concurrent Cache: 1.0: This is the first release for the ConcurrentCache library.Configuration Section Designer: 2.0.0: This is the first Beta Release for VS 2010 supportDoxygen Browser Addin for VS: Doxygen Browser Addin - v0.1.4 Beta: Support for Visual Studio 2010 improved the logging of errors (Event Logs) Fixed some issues/bugs Hot key for navigation "Control + F1, Contr...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.2: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.2), with new UI changes. Once you have extracted the file, do not delete any files/folders. They are n...HERB.IQ: Beta 0.1 Source code release 5: Beta 0.1 Source code release 5Inspiration.Web: Initial release (deployment package): Initial release (deployment package)NetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: Demo Project: Demo ProjectNetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: NetFileBrowser: NetImageBrowserNLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.06.05.001: Changes since the last build:2010-06-04 23:29:42 Jarek Kowalski Massive update to documentation generator. 2010-05-28 15:41:42 Jarek Kowalski upda...Oil Slick Live Feeds: Oil Slick Live Feeds 0.1: A the first release, with feeds from the MS Skandi, Boa Deep C, Enterprise and Q4000. They are live streams from the ROV's monitoring the damaged...Pcap.Net: Pcap.Net 0.7.0 (46671): Pcap.Net - June 2010 Release Pcap.Net is a .NET wrapper for WinPcap written in C++/CLI and C#. It Features almost all WinPcap features and includes...sqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.289.0 (alpha): API supportTFS Buddy: TFS Buddy First release (Beta 1): This is the first release of the TFS Buddy.Visual Studio DSite: Looping Animation (Visual C++ 2008): A solider firing a bullet that loops and displays an explosion everytime it hits the edge of the form.WiiMote Physics: WiiMote Physics v4.0: v4.0.0.1 Recovered from existing compiled assembly after hard drive failure Now requires .NET 4.0 (it seems to make it run faster) Added new c...WinGet: Alpha 1: First Alpha of WinGet. It includes all the planned features but it contains many bugs. Packaged using 7-Zip and ClickOnce.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)PHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationN2 CMSIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterStyleCopsmark C# LibraryFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and Silverlight

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• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Hylton

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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• Windows Azure Myths

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is part of the Microsoft "stack" - the suite of software and services we offer. Because we have so many products in almost every part of technology, it's hard to know everything about all parts of what we do - even for those of us who work here. So it's no surprise that some folks are not as familiar with Windows and SQL Azure as they are, say Windows Server or XBox. As I chat with folks about a solution for a business or organization need, I put Windows Azure into the mix. I always start off with "What do you already know about Windows Azure?" so that I don't bore folks with information they already have. I some cases they've checked out the product ahead of time and have specific questions, in others they aren't as familiar, and in still others there is a fair amount of mis-information. Sometimes that's because of a marketing failure, sometimes it's hearsay, and somtetimes it's active misinformation. I thought I might lay out a few of these misconceptions. As always - do your fact-checking! Never take anyone's word alone (including mine) as gospel. Make sure you educate yourself on your options. Your company or your clients depend on you to have the right information on IT, so make sure you live up to that. Myth 1: Nobody uses Windows Azure It's true that we don't give out numbers on the amount of clients on Windows and SQL Azure. But lots of folks are here - companies you may have heard of like Boeing, NASA, Fujitsu, The City of London, Nuedesic, and many others. I deal with firms small and large that use Windows Azure for mission-critical applications, sometimes totally on Windows and/or SQL Azure, sometimes in conjunction with an on-premises system, sometimes for only a specific component in Windows Azure like storage. The interesting thing is that many sites you visit have a Windows Azure component, or are running on Windows Azure. They just don't announce it. Just like the other cloud providers, the companies have asked to be completely branded themselves - they don't want you to be aware or care that they are on Windows Azure. Sometimes that's for security, other times it's for different reasons. It's just like the web sites you visit. For the most part, they don't advertise which OS or Web Server they use. It really just shouldn't matter. The point is that they just use what works to solve a given problem. Check out a few public case studies here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/case-studies/ Myth 2: It's only for Microsoft stuff - can't use Open Source This is the one I face the most, and am the most dismayed by. We work just fine with many open source products, including Java, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python, Hadoop, and many other languages and applications. You can quickly deploy a Wordpress, Umbraco and other "kits". We have software development kits (SDK's) for iPhones, iPads, Android, Windows phones and more. We have an SDK to work with FaceBook and other social networks. In short, we play well with others. More on the languages and runtimes we support here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overview/ More on the SDK's here: http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/05/windows-azure-toolkit-for-ios/, http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/08/windows-azure-toolkits-for-devices-now-with-android/, http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com/ Myth 3: Microsoft expects me to switch everything to "the cloud" No, we don't. That would be disasterous, unless the only things you run in your company uses works perfectly in Azure. Use Windows Azure  - or any cloud for that matter - where it works. Whenever I talk to companies, I focus on two things: Something that is broken and needs to be re-architected Something you want to do that is new If something is broken, and you need new tools to scale, extend, add capacity dynamically and so on, then you can consider using Windows or SQL Azure. It can help solve problems that you have, or it may include a component you don't want to write or architect yourself. Sometimes you want to do something new, like extend your company's offerings to mobile phones, to the web, or to a social network. More info on where it works here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Myth 4: I have to write code to use Windows and SQL Azure If Windows Azure is a PaaS - a Platform as a Service - then don't you have to write code to use it? Nope. Windows and SQL Azure are made up of various components. Some of those components allow you to write and deploy code (like Compute) and others don't. We have lots of customers using Windows Azure storage as a backup, to securely share files instead of using DropBox, to distribute videos or code or firmware, and more. Others use our High Performance Computing (HPC) offering to rent a supercomputer when they need one. You can even throw workloads at that using Excel! In addition there are lots of other components in Windows Azure you can use, from the Windows Azure Media Services to others. More here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/saas/ Myth 5: Windows Azure is just another form of "vendor lock-in" Windows Azure uses .NET, OSS languages and standard interfaces for the code. Sure, you're not going to take the code line-for-line and run it on a mainframe, but it's standard code that you write, and can port to something else. And the data is yours - you can bring it back whever you want. It's either in text or binary form, that you have complete control over. There are no licenses - you can "pay as you go", and when you're done, you can leave the service and take all your code, data and IP with you.   So go out there, read up, try it. Use it where it works. And don't believe everything you hear - sometimes the Internet doesn't get it all correct. :)

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• Windows Azure Myths

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is part of the Microsoft "stack" - the suite of software and services we offer. Because we have so many products in almost every part of technology, it's hard to know everything about all parts of what we do - even for those of us who work here. So it's no surprise that some folks are not as familiar with Windows and SQL Azure as they are, say Windows Server or XBox. As I chat with folks about a solution for a business or organization need, I put Windows Azure into the mix. I always start off with "What do you already know about Windows Azure?" so that I don't bore folks with information they already have. I some cases they've checked out the product ahead of time and have specific questions, in others they aren't as familiar, and in still others there is a fair amount of mis-information. Sometimes that's because of a marketing failure, sometimes it's hearsay, and somtetimes it's active misinformation. I thought I might lay out a few of these misconceptions. As always - do your fact-checking! Never take anyone's word alone (including mine) as gospel. Make sure you educate yourself on your options. Your company or your clients depend on you to have the right information on IT, so make sure you live up to that. Myth 1: Nobody uses Windows Azure It's true that we don't give out numbers on the amount of clients on Windows and SQL Azure. But lots of folks are here - companies you may have heard of like Boeing, NASA, Fujitsu, The City of London, Nuedesic, and many others. I deal with firms small and large that use Windows Azure for mission-critical applications, sometimes totally on Windows and/or SQL Azure, sometimes in conjunction with an on-premises system, sometimes for only a specific component in Windows Azure like storage. The interesting thing is that many sites you visit have a Windows Azure component, or are running on Windows Azure. They just don't announce it. Just like the other cloud providers, the companies have asked to be completely branded themselves - they don't want you to be aware or care that they are on Windows Azure. Sometimes that's for security, other times it's for different reasons. It's just like the web sites you visit. For the most part, they don't advertise which OS or Web Server they use. It really just shouldn't matter. The point is that they just use what works to solve a given problem. Check out a few public case studies here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/case-studies/ Myth 2: It's only for Microsoft stuff - can't use Open Source This is the one I face the most, and am the most dismayed by. We work just fine with many open source products, including Java, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python, Hadoop, and many other languages and applications. You can quickly deploy a Wordpress, Umbraco and other "kits". We have software development kits (SDK's) for iPhones, iPads, Android, Windows phones and more. We have an SDK to work with FaceBook and other social networks. In short, we play well with others. More on the languages and runtimes we support here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overview/ More on the SDK's here: http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/05/windows-azure-toolkit-for-ios/, http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/08/windows-azure-toolkits-for-devices-now-with-android/, http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com/ Myth 3: Microsoft expects me to switch everything to "the cloud" No, we don't. That would be disasterous, unless the only things you run in your company uses works perfectly in Azure. Use Windows Azure  - or any cloud for that matter - where it works. Whenever I talk to companies, I focus on two things: Something that is broken and needs to be re-architected Something you want to do that is new If something is broken, and you need new tools to scale, extend, add capacity dynamically and so on, then you can consider using Windows or SQL Azure. It can help solve problems that you have, or it may include a component you don't want to write or architect yourself. Sometimes you want to do something new, like extend your company's offerings to mobile phones, to the web, or to a social network. More info on where it works here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Myth 4: I have to write code to use Windows and SQL Azure If Windows Azure is a PaaS - a Platform as a Service - then don't you have to write code to use it? Nope. Windows and SQL Azure are made up of various components. Some of those components allow you to write and deploy code (like Compute) and others don't. We have lots of customers using Windows Azure storage as a backup, to securely share files instead of using DropBox, to distribute videos or code or firmware, and more. Others use our High Performance Computing (HPC) offering to rent a supercomputer when they need one. You can even throw workloads at that using Excel! In addition there are lots of other components in Windows Azure you can use, from the Windows Azure Media Services to others. More here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/saas/ Myth 5: Windows Azure is just another form of "vendor lock-in" Windows Azure uses .NET, OSS languages and standard interfaces for the code. Sure, you're not going to take the code line-for-line and run it on a mainframe, but it's standard code that you write, and can port to something else. And the data is yours - you can bring it back whever you want. It's either in text or binary form, that you have complete control over. There are no licenses - you can "pay as you go", and when you're done, you can leave the service and take all your code, data and IP with you.   So go out there, read up, try it. Use it where it works. And don't believe everything you hear - sometimes the Internet doesn't get it all correct. :)

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – June 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity. Please feel free to send us your news! Lucas Jellema ?Getting started with Java EE 7: The Tutorial http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/7/tutorial/doc/home.htm … Simon Haslam I'm looking forward to starting a "WLS on ODA" proof of concept - some ideas for testing: http://www.veriton.co.uk/roller/fmw/entry/virtualised_oda_proof_of_concept … Frank Munz ?It's not too late - I just submitted two presentations about #OracleWebLogic and #Coherence for the @DOAGeV conference in Nürnberg. Did you? Arun Gupta ?Tyrus 1.0 User Guide: https://tyrus.java.net/documentation/1.0/user-guide.html … #WebSocket #JavaEE7 #GlassFish Arun Gupta #JavaEE7 Launch Webinar Technical Breakout replays on Youtube: http://bit.ly/12uUicT JSON 1.0 , EJB .2, Batch 1.0 more coming! OracleBlogs ?FREE Virtual Developer Day: Java SE, Java EE, Java Emebedded on Jun 19th and 25th http://ow.ly/2xBkwV Markus Eisele #Oracle #JavaSE Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement - June 2013 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/javacpujun2013-1899847.html … #security OracleSupport_WLS ?Simple Custom #JMX MBeans with #WebLogic 12c and #Spring http://pub.vitrue.com/3kEr Oracle Technet Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 - 4pm - Grand Ballroom Salon A/B #qconnewyork WebLogic Community Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g (11.1.1.7) Starter Kit available & Customizable Demos http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BK Oracle Technet #Java EE 7: Moving Java Forward for the Enterprise | @java http://pub.vitrue.com/tHiM OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Forms to ADF Modernization Reference - Convero (AMEC) Project | @AndrejusB http://pub.vitrue.com/lZPR WebLogic Community ?ExaLogic In Memory Applications & Whitepapers Building Large Scale E-Commerce Platforms & Rethink the Entire Application Lifecycle… WebLogic Community ?Coherence YouTube videos http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BG Arun Gupta ?WARNING: Next 2 days are going to be loaded with #JavaEE7 launch related tweets, and offline next week! JDeveloper & ADF Using Contextual Event in Oracle ADF http://dlvr.it/3Vpybr Oracle WebLogic Check out new blog on #hybrid_cloud & why choice is important http://bit.ly/1b1QGhL Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle Forms to ADF Modernization Reference - Convero (AMEC) Project http://fb.me/1M9iWNmAw WebLogic Community WebLogic on Oracle Database Appliance by Frances Zhao http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BE OTNArchBeat ?New: A-Team Chronicles >> A great resource for technical content covering Oracle Fusion Middleware / Fusion Apps http://pub.vitrue.com/qbzS Oracle for Partners ?Take Java To The Edge: Java Virtual Developer Day – June 19 & June 25 http://bit.ly/19fGlSX Adam Bien ?Looking forward to tomorrow's #javaee7 + #angularjs #html5 marriage at #jpoint. See you there: http://www.jpoint.nl/meetingpoint/editie-2013#sessie-1 … shay shmeltzer ?There is a new patch for the #Oracle #ADF Mobile extension - use help->check for updates to get it. Frank Munz ?Not using @OracleWebLogic 12c yet? Australia does! Reviews from my @AUSOUG workshops in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. http://goo.gl/BfVc4 Arun Gupta ?WebSocket, Server-Sent Events, #JavaEE7 sessions accepted at #jaxlondon ... that's gonna be at least third trip to London this year! WebLogic Community SPARC T5-8 Delivers Best Single System SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark running WebLogic 12c http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BC WebLogic Community The Ultimate Java EE Event - 16 Power Workshops mit allen wichtigen Java-EE-Themen http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BY Oracle WebLogic ?@OracleWebLogic 7 Jun New Blog Post: Using try-with-resources with JDBC objects http://ow.ly/2xryb5 JDeveloper & ADF Switching Lists of Values http://dlvr.it/3PbCkw WebLogic Community ?YouTube channel Learning Oracle's ADF http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zA Markus Eisele [GER] RT @heisedc: #Java-Entwicklung in #Oracles Public #Cloud http://heise.de/-1866388/ftw OracleBlogs ?Coherence Incubator & Community Source Code & Release Documentation http://ow.ly/2x2fXK chriscmuir ?New blog post: Migrating ADF Mobile apps from 1.0 to 1.1 https://blogs.oracle.com/onesizedoesntfitall/entry/migrating_adf_mobile_apps_from … JDeveloper & ADF ?ADF JavaScript Partitioning for Performance http://dlvr.it/3Trw15 WebLogic Community WebLogic Server Security Workshop June 27th 2013 Germany http://wp.me/p1LMIb-C7 WebLogic Community Oracle Optimized Solution for WebLogic Server 12c http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BA WebLogic Community Virtualize and Run Your Forms Applications in the Cloud - Now On Demand http://wp.me/p1LMIb-By Lucas Jellema Innteresting presentation on various aspects of end user assistance in Fusion Applications (ADF based): http://www.slideshare.net/uobroin/ouag-ireland-final2012slideshare … Adam Bien ?Summer Of JavaEE Workshops And Gigs: Free Hacking night:11.06.2013, Utrecht JavaEE 7 Meets HTML 5 and AngularJ... http://bit.ly/11XRjt4 WebLogic Community ?Real World ADF Design & Architecture Principles Trainings Germany, Poland & Portugal http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bw Oracle for Partners ?JAVA Virtual Developer Day – June 19 & June 25 - Watch educational content and engage with Oracle experts online https://oracle.6connex.com/portal/java2013/login/?langR=en_US&mcc=OPNNSL … Markus Eisele ?[blog] Java EE 7 is final. Thoughts, Insights and further Pointers. http://dlvr.it/3SrxnB #javaee7 WebLogic Community Oracle takes the top spot for market share in the Application Server Market Segment for 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bu OTNArchBeat ?Oracle ACE Director @LucasJellema is "very pleasantly surprised" with the new ADF Academy. http://pub.vitrue.com/8fad chriscmuir ?Sell out crowd for our ADF architecture course in Munich #adfarch pic.twitter.com/zhNtQJ25JV Markus Eisele ?[blog] New German Article: Java 7 Update 21 Security Improvements http://dlvr.it/3Sc8V9 #java #heise #security Markus Eisele ?[blog] New German Article: Oracle Java Cloud Service http://dlvr.it/3Sc20V #java #heise #OracleCloud OracleSupport_WLS ?Troubleshooting and Tuning with #WebLogic - Developer Webcast now available on #Youtube http://pub.vitrue.com/GSOy Andrejus Baranovskis New ADF Academy - Impressive Concept for ADF eLearning http://fb.me/2kYSMKKR5 OracleSupport_WLS ?Removing a #weblogic domain properly http://pub.vitrue.com/ZndM WebLogic Community WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter May 2013 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bp Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: Troubleshooting tools Part 3- Heap Dumps #Oracle #WebLogic Read the series http://bit.ly/14CQSD2 Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: #WebLogic_Server on #Oracle_Database_Appliance- How to conjure a WebLogic cluster- http://bit.ly/11fciHA Oracle WebLogic ?Check out new cool features in Oracle Traffic Director- http://bit.ly/11fbz9h WebLogic Community Additional new material WebLogic Community April 2013 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zM WebLogic Community New WebLogic references - we want yours http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zK OracleSupport_WLS ?#Weblogic Session Replication jsession ID and F5 http://pub.vitrue.com/dWZp OracleBlogs ?top tweets WebLogic Partner Community May 2013 http://ow.ly/2xc8M5 WebLogic Community Welcome to the Spring edition of Oracle Scene http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zE Andreas Koop ?[blog post] ADF: Static Values View Object does not show any values (solved) http://bit.ly/14RDZ8p OracleBlogs ?ADF Mobile - accessing the SQLite database http://ow.ly/2x85r0 OracleSupport_WLS Youtube channel- Troubleshooting and Tuning with #WebLogic.#JRockit #SOAP #JRF http://pub.vitrue.com/qMxu Arun Gupta Next Java Magazine is all about #JavaEE7...productivity, HTML5, WebSocket, Batch & more. Subscribe http://ow.ly/lkD5D (@Oraclejavamag) Oracle WebLogic How to configure a #WebLogic cluster on #Oracle_Database_Appliance? It’s easy, read how. http://bit.ly/11fciHA Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: How to use Heap Dumps to troubleshooting memory leaks- #Oracle #WebLogic_Server http://bit.ly/14CQSD2 OracleBlogs ?Over 100 Images To Be Added to NetBeans Platform Showcase http://ow.ly/2x7Fvp Lucas Jellema A new release of the ADF EMG Task Flow Tester is now available for both JDeveloper 11 R1 and R2. https://java.net/projects/adf-task-flow-tester/pages/GettingStarted … WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Contracting as a Software Developer in the UK

  - by Frez

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Having had some 15 years’ experience of working as a software contractor, I am often asked by developers who work as permanent employees (permies) about the pros and cons of working as a software consultant through my own limited company and whether the move would be a good one for them. Whilst it is possible to contract using other financial vehicles such as umbrella companies, this article will only consider limited companies as that is what I have experience of using. Contracting or consultancy requires a different mind-set from being a permanent member of staff, and not all developers are capable of this shift in attitude. Whilst you can look forward to an increase in the money you take home, there are real risks and expenses you would not normally be exposed to as a permie. So let us have a look at the pros and cons: Pros: More money There is no doubt that whilst you are working on contracts you will earn significantly more than you would as a permanent employee. Furthermore, working through a limited company is more tax efficient. Less politics You really have no need to involve yourself in office politics. When the end of the day comes you can go home and not think or worry about the power struggles within the company you are contracted to. Your career progression is not tied to the company. Expenses from gross income All your expenses of trading as a business will come out of your company’s gross income, i.e. before tax. This covers travelling expenses provided you have not been at the same client/location for more than two years, internet subscriptions, professional subscriptions, software, hardware, accountancy services and so on. Cons: Work is more transient Contracts typically range from a couple of weeks to a year, although will most likely start at 3 months. However, most contracts are extended either because the project you have been brought in to help with takes longer to deliver than expected, the client decides they can use you on other aspects of the project, or the client decides they would like to use you on other projects. The temporary nature of the work means that you will have down-time between contracts while you secure new opportunities during which time your company will have no income. You may need to attend several interviews before securing a new contract. Accountancy expenses Your company is a separate entity and there are accountancy requirements which, unless you like paperwork, means your company will need to appoint an accountant to prepare your company’s accounts. It may also be worth purchasing some accountancy software, so talk to your accountant about this as they may prefer you to use a particular software package so they can integrate it with their systems. VAT You will need to register your company for VAT. This is tax neutral for you as the VAT you charge your clients you will pass onto the government less any VAT you are reclaiming from expenses, but it is additional paperwork to undertake each quarter. It is worth checking out the Fixed Rate VAT Scheme that is available, particularly after the initial expenses of setting up your company are over. No training Clients take you on based on your skills, not to train you when they will lose that investment at the end of the contract, so understand that it is unlikely you will receive any training funded by a client. However, learning new skills during a contract is possible and you may choose to accept a contract on a lower rate if this is guaranteed as it will help secure future contracts. No financial extras You will have no free pension, life, accident, sickness or medical insurance unless you choose to purchase them yourself. A financial advisor can give you all the necessary advice in this area, and it is worth taking seriously. A year after I started as a consultant I contracted a serious illness, this kept me off work for over two months, my client was very understanding and it could have been much worse, so it is worth considering what your options might be in the case of illness, death and retirement. Agencies Whilst it is possible to work directly for end clients there are pros and cons of working through an agency.  The main advantage is cash flow, you invoice the agency and they typically pay you within a week, whereas working directly for a client could have you waiting up to three months to be paid. The downside of working for agencies, especially in the current difficult times, is that they may go out of business and you then have difficulty getting the money you are owed. Tax investigation It is possible that the Inland Revenue may decide to investigate your company for compliance with tax law. Insurance is available to cover you for this. My personal recommendation would be to join the PCG as this insurance is included as a benefit of membership, Professional Indemnity Some agencies require that you are covered by professional indemnity insurance; this is a cost you would not incur as a permie. Travel Unless you live in an area that has an abundance of opportunities, such as central London, it is likely that you will be travelling further, longer and with more expense than if you were permanently employed at a local company. This not only affects you monetarily, but also your quality of life and the ability to keep fit and healthy. Obtaining finance If you want to secure a mortgage on a property it can be more difficult or expensive, especially if you do not have three years of audited accounts to show a mortgage lender.   Caveat This post is my personal opinion and should not be used as a definitive guide or recommendation to contracting and whether it is suitable for you as an individual, i.e. I accept no responsibility if you decide to take up contracting based on this post and you fare badly for whatever reason.

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• Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

  - by Lori Lalonde

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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• Dynamic DataGrid columns in WPF DataGrid based on the underlying set of data (and their type)

  - by StatsMan

  Hello everyone, I've got kind of a conceptual question. I am in the process of wrapping some statistics classes I wrote into WPF. For that I have two DataGrid(-Views, currently in WinForms). In one DataGrid each row represents a column in the other. There I can set-up different variables (as in mathematical/statistical variables) with fields like "Header", "DataType", "ValidationBehaviour", "DisplayType". There I can also set-up how it should be displayed. Some Columns can automatically be set to ComboBoxColumns, some TextBoxColumns, and so on and so forth. So, now once I've set-up these Columns I can go to the other grid and enter my data. I may, for instance, have generated (in grid 1) one Column called "Annual Gross Salary" with input of numerical values. Another Column called "Education" with "0=NoEducation", "1=College Level", "3=Universitary" etc. These labels are displayed as text in the combobox and my statistics engine behind then selects the respective value (0-3) for calculations (i.e. ordinal, nominal variables). Sooo. In WinForms I could basically generate all the columns by hand in code and then add my data in the respective cells/rows. Now in WPF I thought that must be easy to realise. However, yesterday I got started with ICustomPropertyDescriptor which (maybe I was too thick) didn't give me the results I was looking for. Basically, I just need to be able to dynamically generate columns (and rows) with different Layout, Controls (ComboBox, simple Input, DateTimes) based on the data that I have. But I don't really know how to go about it? So here in summary: DataGrid 1 Purpose is to display columns that have been specified in DataGrid 2 In rows, the user can add any kind of data in the rows below the columns that is allowed as to the columns specifications DataGrid 2 Each row in this grid represents a column in DataGrid 1 Contains fields like Name/Header, DataType, Validation Behaviour, Default Value, Data Formatting, etc. Also contains a function to be able to set-up how it should be displayed. The user can select from, for instance, ComboBoxColumn (and also add the available options), DateTime, normal TextBox, CheckBox etc. After finishing adding a row it will automatically appear as a new column in DataGrid 1 I'd appreciate any kind of pointer into the right direction. Thanks very, very much in advance! :)

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• Asp.net hosting equivalent of Dreamhost (pricing, features and support)

  - by Cherian

  Disclaimer: I have browsed http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/asp.net+hosting and didn’t find anything quite similar in value to Dreamhost. One of the biggest impediments IMHO for developing web applications on asp.net is the cost of deployment. I am not talking about building sites like Stackoverflow.com or plentyoffish.com. This is about sites that are bigger than brochureware and smaller than ones that require dedicated servers. Let me give you an example. xmec.org is an asp.net site I maintain for my college alumni. On an average it’s slated to hit around 1000-1100 views per day. At present it’s hosted on godaddy. The service is so damn pathetic; I am using it only because of the lack of options. The site doesn’t scale (no, it’s not the code) and the web control panels are extremely slow. The money I pay doesn’t justify the service or the performance. Every deployment push is a visit to the infuriating web control panel to set the permissions and the root directories. Had I developed it in python, this would have been deployed on Dreamhost.com with $10/year hosting fees (they have offers running all throughout) 50 GB space 5 MySQL Databases Shell / FTP Users POP / SMTP Access Unlimited Domains hosting Unlimited Sub domains hosting Unlimited Domains Forwarded/Mirrored Custom DNS (These are the only ones I could think of. More at the feature page) With a dream host shell, I even have a svn checked-out version of wordpress for my blog. Now, that’s control! To my question: Is there any asp.net (preferably .net 3.5. Dreamhost keeps on updating versions every fortnight) hosting company providing remotely similar feature-sets and pricing like Dreamhost. My requirements are: Less than $15-25/ year Typical WISP minus PHP .net 3.5 SP1 Full Trust mode(I can live with medium trust, if not for the IL emitting libraries) Isolated Application Pool 5 – 10 MySQL db’s Unlimited domain hosting MsSql 2005 or 2008 FTP support At Least 5 GB space SMTP IIS 7 Log files Accessibility Moderately good control panel Scripting, shell support Nominal bandwidth Another case in point: Recently I’ve been contemplating building a tool-website to find duplicates and weird characters in my Google contacts and fix them. With asp.net, the best part is that I can do this with LINQ to XML in less than 100 lines of code. What’s bad is the hosting part. I don’t think I stand to make any money out of this and therefore can’t afford to host it on GoGrid or DiscountAsp.net. Godaddy is not an option either. If I do this in python, I can push to this my existing $10 Dreamhost account with another domain pointed. No extra cost. Svn exported with scripts (capability) to change the connection string! Looking at the problem holistically, I think I represent a large breed of programmers playing it cheap and experimenting different things on a regular basis, one of which will become the next twitter/digg.

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• Hidden Features of PHP?

  - by George Mauer

  EDIT: This didn't really start as a hidden features of PHP topic, but thats what it ended up as, so go nuts. I know this sounds like a point-whoring question but let me explain where I'm coming from. Out of college I got a job at a PHP shop. I worked there for a year and a half and thought that I had learned all there was to learn about programming. Then I got a job as a one-man internal development shop at a sizable corporation where all the work was in C#. In my commitment to the position I started reading a ton of blogs and books and quickly realized how wrong I was to think I knew everything. I learned about unit testing, dependency injection and decorator patterns, the design principle of loose coupling, the composition over inheritance debate, and so on and on and on - I am still very much absorbing it all. Needless to say my programming style has changed entirely in the last year. Now I find myself picking up a php project doing some coding for a friend's start-up and I feel completely constrained as opposed to programming in C#. It really bothers me that all variables at a class scope have to be referred to by appending '$this-' . It annoys me that none of the IDEs that I've tried have very good intellisense and that my SimpleTest unit tests methods have to start with the word 'test'. It drives me crazy that dynamic typing keeps me from specifying implicitly which parameter type a method expects, and that you have to write a switch statement to do method overloads. I can't stand that you can't have nested namespaces and have to use the :: operator to call the base class's constructor. Now I have no intention of starting a PHP vs C# debate, rather what I mean to say is that I'm sure there are some PHP features that I either don't know about or know about yet fail to use properly. I am set in my C# universe and having trouble seeing outside the glass bowl. So I'm asking, what are your favorite features of PHP? What are things you can do in it that you can't or are more difficult in the .Net languages?

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• Would someone mind giving suggestions for this new assembly language?

  - by Noctis Skytower

  Greetings! Last semester in college, my teacher in the Computer Languages class taught us the esoteric language named Whitespace. In the interest of learning the language better with a very busy schedule (midterms), I wrote an interpreter and assembler in Python. An assembly language was designed to facilitate writing programs easily, and a sample program was written with the given assembly mnemonics. Now that it is summer, a new project has begun with the objective being to rewrite the interpreter and assembler for Whitespace 0.3, with further developments coming afterwards. Since there is so much extra time than before to work on its design, you are presented here with an outline that provides a revised set of mnemonics for the assembly language. This post is marked as a wiki for their discussion. Have you ever had any experience with assembly languages in the past? Were there some instructions that you thought should have been renamed to something different? Did you find yourself thinking outside the box and with a different paradigm than in which the mnemonics were named? If you can answer yes to any of those questions, you are most welcome here. Subjective answers are appreciated! hold N Push the number onto the stack copy Duplicate the top item on the stack copy N Copy the nth item on the stack (given by the argument) onto the top of the stack swap Swap the top two items on the stack drop Discard the top item on the stack drop N Slide n items off the stack, keeping the top item add Addition sub Subtraction mul Multiplication div Integer Division mod Modulo save Store load Retrieve L: Mark a location in the program call L Call a subroutine goto L Jump unconditionally to a label if=0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is zero if<0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is negative return End a subroutine and transfer control back to the caller exit End the program print chr Output the character at the top of the stack print int Output the number at the top of the stack input chr Read a character and place it in the location given by the top of the stack input int Read a number and place it in the location given by the top of the stack Question: How would you redesign, rewrite, or rename the previous mnemonics and for what reasons?

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• Opinion on "loop invariants", and are these frequently used in the industry?

  - by Michael Aaron Safyan

  I was thinking back to my freshman year at college (five years ago) when I took an exam to place-out of intro-level computer science. There was a question about loop invariants, and I was wondering if loop invariants are really necessary in this case or if the question was simply a bad example... the question was to write an iterative definition for a factorial function, and then to prove that the function was correct. The code that I provided for the factorial function was as follows: public static int factorial(int x) { if ( x < 0 ){ throw new IllegalArgumentException("Parameter must be = 0"); }else if ( x == 0 ){ return 1; }else{ int result = 1; for ( int i = 1; i <= x; i++ ){ result*=i; } return result; } } My own proof of correctness was a proof by cases, and in each I asserted that it was correct by definition (x! is undefined for negative values, 0! is 1, and x! is 1*2*3...*x for a positive value of x). The professor wanted me to prove the loop using a loop invariant; however, my argument was that it was correct "by definition", because the definition of "x!" for a positive integer x is "the product of the integers from 1... x", and the for-loop in the else clause is simply a literal translation of this definition. Is a loop invariant really needed as a proof of correctness in this case? How complicated must a loop be before a loop invariant (and proper initialization and termination conditions) become necessary for a proof of correctness? Additionally, I was wondering... how often are such formal proofs used in the industry? I have found that about half of my courses are very theoretical and proof-heavy and about half are very implementation and coding-heavy, without any formal or theoretical material. How much do these overlap in practice? If you do use proofs in the industry, when do you apply them (always, only if it's complicated, rarely, never)?

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• SQL efficiency argument, add a column or solvable by query?

  - by theTurk

  I am a recent college graduate and a new hire for software development. Things have been a little slow lately so I was given a db task. My db skills are limited to pet projects with Rails and Django. So, I was a little surprised with my latest task. I have been asked by my manager to subclass Person with a 'Parent' table and add a reference to their custodian in the Person table. This is to facilitate going from Parent to Form when the custodian, not the Parent, is the FormContact. Here is a simplified, mock structure of a sql-db I am working with. I would have drawn the relationship tables if I had access to Visio. We have a table 'Person' and we have a table 'Form'. There is a table, 'FormContact', that relates a Person to a Form, not all Persons are related to a Form. There is a relationship table for Person to Person relationships (Employer, Parent, etc.) I've asked, "Why this couldn't be handled by a query?" Response, Inefficient. (Really!?!) So, I ask, "Why not have a reference to the Form? That would be more efficient since you wouldn't be querying the FormContacts table with the reference from child/custodian." Response, this would essentially make the Parent is a FormContact. (Fair enough.) I went ahead an wrote a query to get from non-FormContact Parent to Form, and tested on the production server. The response time was instantaneous. *SOME_VALUE* is the Parent's fk ID. SELECT FormID FROM FormContact WHERE FormContact.ContactID IN (SELECT SourceContactID FROM ContactRelationship WHERE (ContactRelationship.RelatedContactID = *SOME_VALUE*) AND (ContactRelationship.Relationship = 'Parent')); If I am right, "This is an unnecessary change." What should I do, defend my position or should I concede to the managers request? If I am wrong. What is my error? Is there a better solution than the manager's?

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• Is there a path of least resistance that a newcomer to graphics-technology-adoption can take at this point in the .NET graphics world?

  - by Rao

  For the past 5 months or so, I've spent time learning C# using Andrew Troelsen's book and getting familiar with stuff in the .NET 4 stack... bits of ADO.NET, EF4 and a pinch of WCF to taste. I'm really interested in graphics development (not for games though), which is why I chose to go the .NET route when I decided choose from either Java or .NET to learn... since I heard about WPF and saw some sexy screenshots and all. I'm even almost done with the 4 WPF chapters in Troelsen's book. Now, all of a sudden I saw some post on a forum about how "WPF was dead" in the face of something called Silverlight. I searched more and saw all the confusion going on at present... even stuff like "Silverlight is dead too!" wrt HTML5. From what I gather, we are in a delicate period of time that will eventually decide which technology will stabilize, right? Even so, as someone new moving into UI & graphics development via .NET, I wish I could get some guidance from people more experienced people. Maybe I'm reading too much? Maybe I have missed some pieces of information? Maybe a path exists that minimizes tears of blood? In any case, here is a sample vomiting of my thoughts on which I'd appreciate some clarification or assurance or spanking: My present interest lies in desktop development. But on graduating from college, I wish to market myself as a .NET developer. The industry seems to be drooling for web stuff. Can Silverlight do both equally well? (I see on searches that SL works "out of browser"). I have two fair-sized hobby projects planned that will have hawt UIs with lots of drag n drop, sliding animations etc. These are intended to be desktop apps that will use reflection, database stuff using EF4, networking over LAN, reading-writing of files... does this affect which graphics technology can be used? At some laaaater point, if I become interested in doing a bit of 3D stuff in .NET, will that affect which technologies can be used? Or what if I look up to the heavens, stick out my middle finger, and do something crazy like go learn HTML5 even though my knowledge of it can be encapsulated in 2 sentences? Sorry I seem confused so much, I just want to know if there's a path of least resistance that a newcomer to graphics-technology-adoption can take at this point in the graphics world.

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• Objective-C: Loop through NSDictionary to create seperate NSArray's

  - by Nic Hubbard

  I have a large NSDictionary structure that I need to loop through and create seperate NSArray's. Here is the structure: ( { id = { text = ""; }; sub = { text = " , "; }; text = ""; "thumb_url" = { text = ""; }; title = { text = "2010-2011"; }; type = { text = "title"; }; }, { id = { text = "76773"; }; sub = { text = "December 13, 2010"; }; text = ""; "thumb_url" = { text = "http://www.puc.edu/__data/assets/image/0004/76774/varieties/thumb.jpg"; }; title = { text = "College Days - Fall 2010"; }; type = { text = "gallery"; }; }, { id = { text = ""; }; sub = { text = ""; }; text = ""; "thumb_url" = { text = ""; }; title = { text = "2009-2010"; }; type = { text = "title"; }; }, { id = { text = "76302"; }; sub = { text = "December 3, 2010"; }; text = ""; "thumb_url" = { text = "http://www.puc.edu/__data/assets/image/0019/76303/varieties/thumb.jpg"; }; title = { text = "Christmas Colloquy"; }; type = { text = "gallery"; }; } ) Each section has a type key, which I need to check. When it finds the "title" key, I need to add those to an array. Then the next sections that would use the "gallery" key needs to be in its own array until it finds another "title" key. Then the "gallery" keys after that into their own array. I am using this a UITableView section titles and content. So, the NSDictionary above should have one NSArray *titles; array, and two other arrays each containing the galleries that came after the title. I have tried using a for loop but I just can't seem to get it right. And ideas would be appreciated.

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