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• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 - Business Intelligence Samples

  - by smisner

  On April 14, 2010, Microsoft Press (blog | twitter) released my latest book, co-authored with Ross Mistry (twitter), as a free ebook download - Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. As the title implies, this ebook is an introduction to the latest SQL Server release. Although you'll find a comprehensive review of the product's features in this book, you will not find the step-by-step details that are typical in my other books. For those readers who are interested in a more interactive learning experience, I have created two samples file for download: IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project Sales Analysis workbook Here's a recap of the business intelligence chapters and the samples I used to generate the screen shots by chapter: Chapter 6: Scalable Data Warehousing covers a new edition of SQL Server, Parallel Data Warehouse. Understandably, Microsoft did not ship me the software and hardware to set up my own Parallel Data Warehouse environment for testing purposes and consequently you won't see any screenshots in this chapter. I received a lot of information and a lot of help from the product team during the development of this chapter to ensure its technical accuracy. Chapter 7: Master Data Services is a new component in SQL Server. After you install Master Data Services (MDS), which is a separate installation from SQL Server although it's found on the same media, you can install sample models to explore (which is what I did to create screenshots for the book). To do this, you deploying packages found at \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\Master Data Services\Samples\Packages. You will first need to use the Configuration Manager (in the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2\Master Data Services program group) to create a database and a Web application for MDS. Then when you launch the application, you'll see a Getting Started page which has a Deploy Sample Data link that you can use to deploy any of the sample packages. Chapter 8: Complex Event Processing is an introduction to another new component, StreamInsight. This topic was way too large to cover in-depth in a single chapter, so I focused on information such as architecture, development models, and an overview of the key sections of code you'll need to develop for your own applications. StreamInsight is an engine that operates on data in-flight and as such has no user interface that I could include in the book as screenshots. The November CTP version of SQL Server 2008 R2 included code samples as part of the installation, but these are not the official samples that will eventually be available in Codeplex. At the time of this writing, the samples are not yet published. Chapter 9: Reporting Services Enhancements provides an overview of all the changes to Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2, and there are many! In previous posts, I shared more details than you'll find in the book about new functions (Lookup, MultiLookup, and LookupSet), properties for page numbering, and the new global variable RenderFormat. I will confess that I didn't use actual data in the book for my discussion on the Lookup functions, but I did create real reports for the blog posts and will upload those separately. For the other screenshots and examples in the book, I have created the IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project for you to download. To preview these reports in Business Intelligence Development Studio, you must have the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database installed, and you must download and install SQL Server 2008 R2. For the map report, you must execute the PopulationData.sql script that I included in the samples file to add a table to the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database. The IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project includes the following files: 01_AggregateOfAggregates.rdl to illustrate the use of embedded aggregate functions 02_RenderFormatAndPaging.rdl to illustrate the use of page break properties (Disabled, ResetPageNumber), the PageName property, and the RenderFormat global variable 03_DataSynchronization.rdl to illustrate the use of the DomainScope property 04_TextboxOrientation.rdl to illustrate the use of the WritingMode property 05_DataBar.rdl 06_Sparklines.rdl 07_Indicators.rdl 08_Map.rdl to illustrate a simple analytical map that uses color to show population counts by state PopulationData.sql to provide the data necessary for the map report Chapter 10: Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot introduces two new components to the Microsoft BI stack, PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint, which you can learn more about at the PowerPivot site. To produce the screenshots for this chapter, I created the Sales Analysis workbook which you can download (although you must have Excel 2010 and the PowerPivot for Excel add-in installed to explore it fully). It's a rather simple workbook because space in the book did not permit a complete exploration of all the wonderful things you can do with PowerPivot. I used a tutorial that was available with the CTP version as a basis for the report so it might look familiar if you've already started learning about PowerPivot. In future posts, I'll continue exploring the new features in greater detail. If there's any special requests, please let me know! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 17, Think Continuations, not Callbacks

  - by Reed

  In traditional asynchronous programming, we’d often use a callback to handle notification of a background task’s completion.  The Task class in the Task Parallel Library introduces a cleaner alternative to the traditional callback: continuation tasks. Asynchronous programming methods typically required callback functions.  For example, MSDN’s Asynchronous Delegates Programming Sample shows a class that factorizes a number.  The original method in the example has the following signature: public static bool Factorize(int number, ref int primefactor1, ref int primefactor2) { //... .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } However, calling this is quite “tricky”, even if we modernize the sample to use lambda expressions via C# 3.0.  Normally, we could call this method like so: int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool answer = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", primeFactor1, primeFactor2, answer); If we want to make this operation run in the background, and report to the console via a callback, things get tricker.  First, we need a delegate definition: public delegate bool AsyncFactorCaller( int number, ref int primefactor1, ref int primefactor2); Then we need to use BeginInvoke to run this method asynchronously: int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; AsyncFactorCaller caller = new AsyncFactorCaller(Factorize); caller.BeginInvoke(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2, result => { int factor1 = 0; int factor2 = 0; bool answer = caller.EndInvoke(ref factor1, ref factor2, result); Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", factor1, factor2, answer); }, null); This works, but is quite difficult to understand from a conceptual standpoint.  To combat this, the framework added the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern, but it isn’t much easier to understand or author. Using .NET 4’s new Task<T> class and a continuation, we can dramatically simplify the implementation of the above code, as well as make it much more understandable.  We do this via the Task.ContinueWith method.  This method will schedule a new Task upon completion of the original task, and provide the original Task (including its Result if it’s a Task<T>) as an argument.  Using Task, we can eliminate the delegate, and rewrite this code like so: var background = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool result = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); return new { Result = result, Factor1 = primeFactor1, Factor2 = primeFactor2 }; }); background.ContinueWith(task => Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", task.Result.Factor1, task.Result.Factor2, task.Result.Result)); This is much simpler to understand, in my opinion.  Here, we’re explicitly asking to start a new task, then continue the task with a resulting task.  In our case, our method used ref parameters (this was from the MSDN Sample), so there is a little bit of extra boiler plate involved, but the code is at least easy to understand. That being said, this isn’t dramatically shorter when compared with our C# 3 port of the MSDN code above.  However, if we were to extend our requirements a bit, we can start to see more advantages to the Task based approach.  For example, supposed we need to report the results in a user interface control instead of reporting it to the Console.  This would be a common operation, but now, we have to think about marshaling our calls back to the user interface.  This is probably going to require calling Control.Invoke or Dispatcher.Invoke within our callback, forcing us to specify a delegate within the delegate.  The maintainability and ease of understanding drops.  However, just as a standard Task can be created with a TaskScheduler that uses the UI synchronization context, so too can we continue a task with a specific context.  There are Task.ContinueWith method overloads which allow you to provide a TaskScheduler.  This means you can schedule the continuation to run on the UI thread, by simply doing: Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool result = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); return new { Result = result, Factor1 = primeFactor1, Factor2 = primeFactor2 }; }).ContinueWith(task => textBox1.Text = string.Format("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", task.Result.Factor1, task.Result.Factor2, task.Result.Result), TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext()); This is far more understandable than the alternative.  By using Task.ContinueWith in conjunction with TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext(), we get a simple way to push any work onto a background thread, and update the user interface on the proper UI thread.  This technique works with Windows Presentation Foundation as well as Windows Forms, with no change in methodology.

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• Clean up after Visual Studio

  - by psheriff

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

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

  - by Mark Rackley

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

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• BI&EPM in Focus June 2014

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Applications Webcast Centre – A Library of Discussion and Research for Best Practice: Achieving Reliable Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Talent Analytics and Big Data – Is HR ready for the challenge Enterprise Data – The cost of non-quality Customers Josephine Niemiec from ADP talks about Oracle Hyperion Workforce Planning at Collaborate 2014 (link) Video Chris Nelms from Ameren talks about Oracle BI Spend and Procurement Analytics at Collaborate 2014 (link) Video Leggett & Platt Leverages Oracle Hyperion EPM and Demantra (link) Video Pella Corporation Accelerates Close Cycle by Cutting Time for Financial Consolidation from Three Days to Less Than One Day (link) Secretaría General de Administración de Justicia en España Enhances Citizen Services with Near-Real-Time Business Intelligence Gleaned from 500 Databases  (link) Bellco Credit Union Speeds Budget Development by 30%—Gains Insight into Specific Branch and Financial Product Profitability  (link)  Video QDQ media Speeds up Financial Reporting by 24x, Gains Business Agility, and Integrates Seamlessly into Corporate Accounting System  (link) Westfield Group Maximizes Shopping Mall Revenue, Shortens Year-End Financial Consolidation by 75%  (link)  IL&FS Transportation Networks Shortens Financial Consolidation and Reporting Cycle by Eight Days, Gains In-Depth Insight into Business Performance   (link) Angel Trains Optimizes Rail Operations for Purchasing, Sourcing, and Project Management to Meet Challenges of Evolving Rail Industry  (link) Enterprise Performance Management June 11, at Oracle Utrecht, NL: Morning session: Explore Planning and Budgeting in the Cloud (link) June 12, London: PureApps Presents: Best Practice Financial Consolidation and Reporting Workshop (link) July 3, Koln: Oracle Hyperion Business Analytics Roundtable (link) Blog: What's Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Operational Transfer Pricing Process (link) YouTube Video: Automate Tax Reporting with Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision (link) YouTube Video: Introducing Oracle Hyperion Planning’s Tablet Optimized Interface (link) OracleEPMWebcasts @ YouTube (link) Partner webcasts: Wednesday, 4 June, 5.00 GMT - Case Study:  Lessons Learned from Edgewater Ranzal's Internal Implementation of Oracle Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) - Learn more and register here! Thursday, 5 June, 4.00 GMT - Achieving Accountable Care Using Oracle Technology - Learn more and register here! Tuesday, 17 June, 4.00 GMT - Optimizing Performance for Oracle EPM Systems - Learn more and register here! Oracle University Blog: The Coolest Features Available with Oracle Hyperion 11.1.2.3 – Training from OU to help you to best use them (link) Support: Proactive Support: EPM Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.3.500 Using RMI Service [Blog] Proactive Support: Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service Videos (link) Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) 11.1.2.3.410 Patch Bundle [Doc ID 1670981.1] Hyperion Analytic Provider Services 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667350.1] Hyperion Essbase 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667346.1] Hyperion Essbase Administration Services 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667348.1] Hyperion Essbase Studio 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667329.1] Hyperion Smart View 11.1.2.5.210 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1669427.1] Using HPCM, HSF or DRM Communities (link) Business Intelligence June 12, Birmingham, UK: Oracle Big Data at Work - Use Cases and Architecture (link) June 17, London: Oracle at Cloud & Big Data World Forums (link) June 17, Partner Webcast: Transform your Planning Capabilities with Peloton's CloudAccelerator for Oracle PBCS (link) June 19, London: Oracle at the Whitehall Media Big Data Analytics Conference and Exhibition (link) June 19, London: Partner Event - Agile BI Conference by Peak Indicators [link] June 25, Munich: Oracle Special Day auf der TDWI 2014 Konferenz (link) July 15, London: Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Workshop (link) July 16, London: BI Applications Workshop – Financial Analytics & Procurement Analytics (link) July 17, London: BI Applications Workshop – HR Analytics (link) Milan, Italy: L’Osservatorio Big Data Analytics & Business Intelligence with Politecnico di Milano (link) OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 - Now Available [Blog] What’s New in OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 [Blog] BI Blog: A closer look at Oracle BI Applications 11.1.1.8.1 release (link) Press Release: BI Applications Deliver Greater Insight into Talent and Procurement (link) Support Blog: OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 Upgrade Guide & Documentation (link) YouTube Video: Glenn Hoormann of Ludus talks to us about Oracle Business Intelligence and ERP at Collaborate 2014 (Link) YouTube Video: Performance Architects talks about key BI and Mobile trends, including Endeca at Collaborate 2014 (link) Big Data Blog: 3 Keys for Using Big Data Effectively for Enhanced Customer Experience (link) Big Data Lite Demo VM 3.0 Now Available on OTN BI Blog: Data Relationship Governance - Workflow in a Bottle (link) MDM Blog: Register for Product Data Management Weekly Cloudcasts (link) MDM Blog: Improve your Customer Experience with High Quality Information (link) MDM Blog: Big Data Challenges & Considerations (link) Oracle University: Oracle BI Applications 11g: Implementation using ODI (link) Proactive Support: Monthly Index [Blog] My Oracle Support: Partner Accreditation for Business Analytics Support [Blog] OBIEE 11g Test-to-Production (T2P) / Clone Procedures Guide [Blog] 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010

  - by ScottGu

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

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• SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

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• Integrate Microsoft Translator into your ASP.Net application

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to explain how easily you can integrate the Microsoft translator API to your ASP.Net application. Why we need a translation API? Once you published a website, you are opening a channel to the global audience. So making the web content available only in one language doesn’t cover all your audience. Especially when you are offering products/services it is important to provide contents in multiple languages. Users will be more comfortable when they see the content in their native language. How to achieve this, hiring translators and translate the content to all your user’s languages will cost you lot of money, and it is not a one time job, you need to translate the contents on the go. What is the alternative, we need to look for machine translation. Thankfully there are some translator engines available that gives you API level access, so that automatically you can translate the content and display to the user. Microsoft Translator API is an excellent set of web service APIs that allows developers to use the machine translation technology in their own applications. The Microsoft Translator API is offered through Windows Azure market place. In order to access the data services published in Windows Azure market place, you need to have an account. The registration process is simple, and it is common for all the services offered through the market place. Last year I had written an article about Bing Search API, where I covered the registration process. You can refer the article here. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2012/07/04/integrate-bing-search-api-to-asp-net-application.aspx Once you registered with Windows market place, you will get your APP ID. Now you can visit the Microsoft Translator page and click on the sign up button. http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/microsofttranslator As you can see, there are several options available for you to subscribe. There is a free version available, great. Click on the sign up button under the package that suits you. Clicking on the sign up button will bring the sign up form, where you need to agree on the terms and conditions and go ahead. You need to have a windows live account in order to sign up for any service available in Windows Azure market place. Once you signed up successfully, you will receive the thank you page. You can download the C# class library from here so that the integration can be made without writing much code. The C# file name is TranslatorContainer.cs. At any point of time, you can visit https://datamarket.azure.com/account/datasets to see the applications you are subscribed to. Click on the Use link next to each service will give you the details of the application. You need to not the primary account key and URL of the service to use in your application. Now let us start our ASP.Net project. I have created an empty ASP.Net web application using Visual Studio 2010 and named it Translator Sample, any name could work. By default, the web application in solution explorer looks as follows. Now right click the project and select Add -> Existing Item and then browse to the TranslatorContainer.cs. Now let us create a page where user enter some data and perform the translation. I have added a new web form to the project with name Translate.aspx. I have placed one textbox control for user to type the text to translate, the dropdown list to select the target language, a label to display the translated text and a button to perform the translation. For the dropdown list I have selected some languages supported by Microsoft translator. You can get all the supported languages with their codes from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh456380.aspx The form looks as below in the design surface of Visual Studio. All the class libraries in the windows market place requires reference to System.Data.Services.Client, let us add the reference. You can find the documentation of how to use the downloaded class library from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg312154.aspx Let us evaluate the translatorContainer.cs file. You can refer the code and it is self-explanatory. Note the namespace name used (Microsoft), you need to add the namespace reference to your page. I have added the following event for the translate button. The code is self-explanatory. You are creating an object of TranslatorContainer class by passing the translation service URL. Now you need to set credentials for your Translator container object, which will be your account key. The TranslatorContainer support a method that accept a text input, source language and destination language and returns DataServiceQuery<Translation>. Let us see this working, I just ran the application and entered Good Morning in the Textbox. Selected target language and see the output as follows. It is easy to build great translator applications using Microsoft translator API, and there is a reasonable amount of translation you can perform in your application for free. For enterprises, you can subscribe to the appropriate package and make your application multi-lingual.

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• Did you miss the OFM Summer Camps III? Get access to the b2b & adapters and SOA Governance training material

  - by JuergenKress

  We posted the SOA Governance and b2b & adapters training material at our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). We have no plans to post the ACM and Advanced SOA training material. Special thanks to all the trainers who delivered superb workshops. Thanks to all the partners who invested time and utilization plus travel expenses to attend the camp. Special thanks to all the international partners who traveled a long way to sunny Lisbon – including our Mexican friends! The Summer Camp feedback was excellent, everybody answered the question if he would attend a future OFM Summer Camp with YES and the overall feedback is 4,79 out of 5 (best)! For most of the trainings we had a waiting list with additional partners who want to attend. Make sure you use your middleware skills to deliver successful projects. It would be great if you can support your colegues and the community by sharing the lessons learned and best practice. Thanks for great feedback at twitter please continue to send your pictures to our twitter feed @soacommunity #OFMsummercamps or post them at our Facebook page. Here is a selection of some tweets: Walter Montantes ?México presence en #OFMSummerCamp Lisboa 2013 cc @soacommunity @AdquemTI pic.twitter.com/9NEFwsWCAq SOA Community ?thanks for attending the #OFMSummercamp - save trip home ;-) Want to attend a future training register http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity C2B2 Consulting ?Last day at the #OFMSummercamp Oracle SOA Suite Training in Portugal @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/6LZavVlvHc Patrick Sinke ?a FollowFriday for @Oracle_B2B because 19 followers is not enough #FF #OFMSummercamp Patrick Sinke ?Yogesh Sontakke is talking about #SOA #Governance. #OFMSummercamp Nuno Cancelo ?Oracle SOA Governance - Quick Overview #OFMSummerCamp Nuno Cancelo ?Last coffee break. #OFMSummercamp pic.twitter.com/xZi9M5vAWz Scott Haaland Last day of #OFMSummercamp. It's been a great productive week..great students eager to learn. @Oracle_B2B @soacommunity . Patrick Sinke ?singletons are used to retain specific fetching order of files and records in multithread/multi-instance environment. #OFMSummercamp #SOA Patrick Sinke ?SOA's File Adapter is extremely versatile: It writes, reads and converts almost any type of file. #OFMSummercamp pic.twitter.com/XjtJF9Y5SH Patrick Sinke ?Now deep-diving into Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA). Got to do some catching up at home on this subject. #OFMSummercamp #SOA Patrick Sinke ?Today we start with security and OPSS at #OFMSummercamp Advanced #SOA training. Then some #OSB. #OFM #Oracle #whitehorses Remco Cats ?Starting the last day on #OFMSummercamp building ADF Mobile applications with BPM Nuno Cancelo ?While attending #OFMSummerCamp i notice even more the importance of designing software. Any tips in how to become an software architect? Patrick Sinke ?Extensive information on Faullt handling and policies now in Advanced #SOA track. #OFMSummercamp #oraclesoa #middleware #whitehorses C2B2 Consulting ?Geoffroy de Lamalle speaking at the #OFMSummercamp @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/m4oOyzYB2q Patrick Sinke ?Oracle Document editor is a huge tool (6GB), but contains every version and subset of EDI, HL7, etc definitions. Impressive. #OFMSummercamp Patrick Sinke ?Oracle #B2B 11g presentation on #OFMSummercamp by Scott. Unfortunately only 2 hours in SOA advanced class. Very interesting. SOA Community Bon dia #OFMSummercamp - if you are here in sunny Lisbon ;-) you can checkin at http://foursquare.com/ #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/PnmudJgJTZ Nuno Cancelo ?Beautiful day! #OFMSummercamp pic.twitter.com/nwByRM5YE1 Nuno Cancelo ?Relaxing after lunch :-) #OFMSummercamp pic.twitter.com/hOJzebCM5p SOA Community Posted pictures from OFM Summer Camp III at our facebook page - share yours! https://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #OFMSummerCamp #soacommunity Nuno Cancelo ?Coffee break: day3 #OFMSummercamp pic.twitter.com/97n1sAGhx4 Patrick Sinke #OFMSummercamp day 3; SOA Infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/ziivyw3L6q SOA Community ?@soacommunity 28 Aug Bon dia day 3 at #OFMSummercamp in Lisboa. Nial presenting ACM roadmap pic.twitter.com/iN3gTCHSbA SOA Community ?Hands-on time at the b2b & adapters training part of the #OFMSummercamp #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/9BzI7igrX8 SOA Community ?Laptop replacement at #OFMSummercamp - big thanks to Oracle Portugal for the fast help! 10 seconds to cut the cable pic.twitter.com/nwd2Px73pa SOA Community ?Hard work long training until 18.00 now enjoy the beach #ofmsummercamp #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/StogfxJNFH Walter Montantes? Primer día #OFMSummercamp pic.twitter.com/cTNDpzg5pL Miguel Delgadillo ?@walex86 Advanced SOA training by Geoffroy at #OFMSummercamp - full room hard working class pic.twitter.com/2SDz9FVhkh” si le sabes? SOA Community ?Welcome to the #OFMSummercamp in sunny Lisbon ;-) Send us your pictures of the training and city @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/i2ErZaaFbb SOA Community ?Advanced SOA training by Geoffroy at #OFMSummercamp - full room hard working class pic.twitter.com/uKjv0tV2bO Nuno Cancelo #OFMSummercamp afternoon break:) pic.twitter.com/pUaBvt2NIj Impressions of the event are posted at our facebook page. If you missed Lisbon, make sure you attend one of our Additional Middleware Trainings in Europe: We currently run 3 different training roadshows for Business Process Management & ADF & WebLogic across Europe make sure you sing-up for them: ADF & ADF Mobile or Business Process Management Suite or WebLogic Suite. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: b2b,training,education,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Back Up to Tape the Way You Shop For Groceries

  - by rickramsey

  Imagine if this was how you shopped for groceries: From the end of the aisle sprint to the point where you reach the ketchup. Pull a bottle from the shelf and yell at the top of your lungs, “Got it!” Sprint back to the end of the aisle. Start again and sprint down the same aisle to the mustard, pull a bottle from the shelf and again yell for the whole store to hear, “Got it!” Sprint back to the end of the aisle. Repeat this procedure for every item you need in the aisle. Proceed to the next aisle and follow the same steps for the list of items you need from that aisle. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Not only is it horribly inefficient, it’s exhausting and can lead to wear out failures on your grocery cart, or worse, yourself. This is essentially how NetApp and some other applications write NDMP backups to tape. In the analogy, the ketchup and mustard are the files to be written, yelling “Got it!” is the equivalent of a sync mark at the end of a file, and the sprint back to the end of an aisle is the process most commonly called a “backhitch” where the drive has to back up on a tape to start writing again. Writing to tape in this way results in very slow tape drive performance and imposes unnecessary wear on the tape drive and the media, especially when writing small files. The good news is not all tape drives behave this way when writing small files. Unlike midrange LTO drives, Oracle’s StorageTek T10000D tape drive is designed to handle this scenario efficiently. The difference between the two drive types is that the T10000D drive gives you the ability to write files in a NetApp NDMP backup environment the way you would normally shop for groceries. With grocery shopping, you essentially stream through aisles picking up items as you go, and then after checking out, yell, “Got it!”, though you might do that last step silently. With the T10000D, it has a feature called the Tape Application Accelerator, which prevents the drive from having to stop after each file is written to notify NetApp or another application that the write was successful. When enabled in the T10000D tape drive, Tape Application Accelerator causes the tape drive to respond to tape mark and file sync commands differently than when disabled: A tape mark received by the tape drive is treated as a buffered tape mark. A file sync received by the tape drive is treated as a no op command. Since buffered tape marks and no op commands do not cause the tape drive to empty the contents of its buffer to tape and backhitch, the data is written to tape in significantly less time. Oracle has emulated NetApp environments with a number of different file sizes and found the following when comparing the T10000D with the Tape Application Accelerator enabled versus LTO6 tape drives. Notice how the T10000D is not only monumentally faster, but also remarkably consistent? In addition, the writing of the 50 GB of files is done without a single backhitch. The LTO6 drive, meanwhile, will perform as many as 3,800 backhitches! At the end of writing the entire set of files, the T10000D tape drive reports back to the application, in this case NetApp, that the write was successful via a tape mark. So if the Tape Application Accelerator dramatically improves performance and reliability, why wouldn’t you always have it enabled? The reason is because tape drive buffers are meant to be just temporary data repositories so in the event of a power loss, there could be data loss in certain environments for the files that resided in the buffer. Fortunately, we do have best practices depending on your environment to avoid this from happening. I highly recommend reading Maximizing Tape Performance with StorageTek T10000 Tape Drives (pdf) to decide which best practice is right for you. The white paper also digs deeper into the benefits of the Tape Application Accelerator. The white paper is free, and after downloading it you can decide for yourself whether you want to yell “Got it!” out loud or just silently to yourself. Customer Advisory Panel One final link: Oracle has started up a Customer Advisory Panel program to collect feedback from customers on their current experiences with Oracle products, as well as desires for future product development. If you would like to participate in the program, go to this link at oracle.com. photo taken on Idaho's Sacajewea Historic Biway by Rick Ramsey - Brian Zents Follow OTN on Blog | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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• Weekend With #iPad

  - by andrewbrust

  Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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• ORA-4030 Troubleshooting

  - by [email protected]

  QUICKLINK: Note 399497.1 FAQ ORA-4030 Note 1088087.1 : ORA-4030 Diagnostic Tools [Video]   Have you observed an ORA-0430 error reported in your alert log? ORA-4030 errors are raised when memory or resources are requested from the Operating System and the Operating System is unable to provide the memory or resources.   The arguments included with the ORA-4030 are often important to narrowing down the problem. For more specifics on the ORA-4030 error and scenarios that lead to this problem, see Note 399497.1 FAQ ORA-4030.   Looking for the best way to diagnose? There are several available diagnostic tools (error tracing, 11g Diagnosibility, OCM, Process Memory Guides, RDA, OSW, diagnostic scripts) that collectively can prove powerful for identifying the cause of the ORA-4030.    Error Tracing   The ORA-4030 error usually occurs on the client workstation and for this reason, a trace file and alert log entry may not have been generated on the server side.  It may be necessary to add additional tracing events to get initial diagnostics on the problem. To setup tracing to trap the ORA-4030, on the server use the following in SQLPlus: alter system set events '4030 trace name heapdump level 536870917;name errorstack level 3';Once the error reoccurs with the event set, you can turn off  tracing using the following command in SQLPlus:alter system set events '4030 trace name context off; name context off';NOTE:   See more diagnostics information to collect in Note 399497.1  11g DiagnosibilityStarting with Oracle Database 11g Release 1, the Diagnosability infrastructure was introduced which places traces and core files into a location controlled by the DIAGNOSTIC_DEST initialization parameter when an incident, such as an ORA-4030 occurs.  For earlier versions, the trace file will be written to either USER_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a user process) or BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a background process like PMON or SMON). The trace file may contain vital information about what led to the error condition.    Note 443529.1 11g Quick Steps to Package and Send Critical Error Diagnostic Informationto Support[Video]  Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) works with My Oracle Support to enable proactive support capability that helps you organize, collect and manage your Oracle configurations. Oracle Configuration Manager Quick Start Guide Note 548815.1: My Oracle Support Configuration Management FAQ Note 250434.1: BULLETIN: Learn More About My Oracle Support Configuration Manager    General Process Memory Guides   An ORA-4030 indicates a limit has been reached with respect to the Oracle process private memory allocation.    Each Operating System will handle memory allocations with Oracle slightly differently. Solaris     Note 163763.1Linux       Note 341782.1IBM AIX   Notes 166491.1 and 123754.1HP           Note 166490.1Windows Note 225349.1, Note 373602.1, Note 231159.1, Note 269495.1, Note 762031.1Generic    Note 169706.1   RDAThe RDA report will show more detailed information about the database and Server Configuration. Note 414966.1 RDA Documentation Index Download RDA -- refer to Note 314422.1 Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) 4 - Getting Started OS Watcher (OSW)This tool is designed to gather Operating System side statistics to compare with the findings from the database.  This is a key tool in cases where memory usage is higher than expected on the server while not experiencing ORA-4030 errors currently. Reference more details on setup and usage in Note 301137.1 OS Watcher User Guide Diagnostic Scripts   Refer to Note 1088087.1 : ORA-4030 Diagnostic Tools [Video] Common Causes/Solutions The ORA-4030 can occur for a variety of reasons.  Some common causes are:   * OS Memory limit reached such as physical memory and/or swap/virtual paging.   For instance, IBM AIX can experience ORA-4030 issues related to swap scenarios.  See Note 740603.1 10.2.0.4 not using large pages on AIX for more on that problem. Also reference Note 188149.1 for pointers on 10g and stack size issues.* OS limits reached (kernel or user shell limits) that limit overall, user level or process level memory * OS limit on PGA memory size due to SGA attach address           Reference: Note 1028623.6 SOLARIS How to Relocate the SGA* Oracle internal limit on functionality like PL/SQL varrays or bulk collections. ORA-4030 errors will include arguments like "pl/sql vc2" "pmucalm coll" "pmuccst: adt/re".  See Coding Pointers for pointers on application design to get around these issues* Application design causing limits to be reached* Bug - space leaks, heap leaks   ***For reference to the content in this blog, refer to Note.1088267.1 Master Note for Diagnosing ORA-4030

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• Monitoring ASP.NET Application

  - by imran_ku07

      Introduction:          There are times when you may need to monitor your ASP.NET application's CPU and memory consumption, so that you can fine-tune your ASP.NET application(whether Web Form, MVC or WebMatrix). Also, sometimes you may need to see all the exceptions(and their details) of your application raising, whether they are handled or not. If you are creating an ASP.NET application in .NET Framework 4.0, then you can easily monitor your application's CPU or memory consumption and see how many exceptions your application raising. In this article I will show you how you can do this.       Description:           With .NET Framework 4.0, you can turn on the monitoring of CPU and memory consumption by setting AppDomain.MonitoringEnabled property to true. Also, in .NET Framework 4.0, you can register a callback method to AppDomain.FirstChanceException event to monitor the exceptions being thrown within your application's AppDomain. Turning on the monitoring and registering a callback method will add some additional overhead to your application, which will hurt your application performance. So it is better to turn on these features only if you have following properties in web.config file,   <add key="AppDomainMonitoringEnabled" value="true"/> <add key="FirstChanceExceptionMonitoringEnabled" value="true"/>             In case if you wonder what does FirstChanceException mean. It simply means the first notification of an exception raised by your application. Even CLR invokes this notification before the catch block that handles the exception. Now just update global.asax.cs file as,   string _item = "__RequestExceptionKey"; protected void Application_Start() { SetupMonitoring(); } private void SetupMonitoring() { bool appDomainMonitoringEnabled, firstChanceExceptionMonitoringEnabled; bool.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AppDomainMonitoringEnabled"], out appDomainMonitoringEnabled); bool.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["FirstChanceExceptionMonitoringEnabled"], out firstChanceExceptionMonitoringEnabled); if (appDomainMonitoringEnabled) { AppDomain.MonitoringIsEnabled = true; } if (firstChanceExceptionMonitoringEnabled) { AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FirstChanceException += (object source, FirstChanceExceptionEventArgs e) => { if (HttpContext.Current == null)// If no context available, ignore it return; if (HttpContext.Current.Items[_item] == null) HttpContext.Current.Items[_item] = new RequestException { Exceptions = new List<Exception>() }; (HttpContext.Current.Items[_item] as RequestException).Exceptions.Add(e.Exception); }; } } protected void Application_EndRequest() { if (Context.Items[_item] != null) { //Only add the request if atleast one exception is raised var reqExc = Context.Items[_item] as RequestException; reqExc.Url = Request.Url.AbsoluteUri; Application.Lock(); if (Application["AllExc"] == null) Application["AllExc"] = new List<RequestException>(); (Application["AllExc"] as List<RequestException>).Add(reqExc); Application.UnLock(); } }               Now browse to Monitoring.cshtml file, you will see the following screen,                            The above screen shows you the total bytes allocated, total bytes in use and CPU usage of your application. The above screen also shows you all the exceptions raised by your application which is very helpful for you. I have uploaded a sample project on github at here. You can find Monitoring.cshtml file on this sample project. You can use this approach in ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET WebForm and WebMatrix application.       Summary:          This is very important for administrators/developers to manage and administer their web application after deploying to production server. This article will help administrators/developers to see the memory and CPU usage of their web application. This will also help administrators/developers to see all the exceptions your application is throwing whether they are swallowed or not. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.   SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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• Verizon Wireless Supports its Mission-Critical Employee Portal with MySQL

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Verizon Wireless, the #1 mobile carrier in the United States, operates the nation’s largest 3G and 4G LTE network, with the most subscribers (109 millions) and the highest revenue ($70.2 Billion in 2011). Verizon Wireless built the first wide-area wireless broadband network and delivered the first wireless consumer 3G multimedia service in the US, and offers global voice and data services in more than 200 destinations around the world. To support 4.2 million daily wireless transactions and 493,000 calls and emails transactions produced by 94.2 million retail customers, Verizon Wireless employs over 78,000 employees with area headquarters across the United States. The Business Challenge Seeing the stupendous rise in social media, video streaming, live broadcasting…etc which redefined the scope of technology, Verizon Wireless, as a technology savvy company, wanted to provide a platform to its employees where they could network socially, view and host microsites, stream live videos, blog and provide the latest news. The IT team at Verizon Wireless had abundant experience with various technology platforms to support the huge number of applications in the company. However, open-source products weren’t yet widely used in the organization and the team had the ambition to adopt such technologies and see if the architecture could meet Verizon Wireless’ rigid requirements. After evaluating a few solutions, the IT team decided to use the LAMP stack for Vzweb, its mission-critical, 24x7 employee portal, with Drupal as the front end and MySQL on Linux as the backend, and for a few other internal websites also on MySQL. The MySQL Solution Verizon Wireless started to support its employee portal, Vzweb, its online streaming website, Vztube, and internal wiki pages, Vzwiki, with MySQL 5.1 in 2010. Vzweb is the main internal communication channel for Verizon Wireless, while Vztube hosts important company-wide webcasts regularly for executive-level announcements, so both channels have to be live and accessible all the time for its 78,000 employees across the United States. However during the initial deployment of the MySQL based Intranet, the application experienced performance issues. High connection spikes occurred causing slow user response time, and the IT team applied workarounds to continue the service. A number of key performance indexes (KPI) for the infrastructure were identified and the operational framework redesigned to support a more robust website and conform to the 99.985% uptime SLA (Service-Level Agreement). The MySQL DBA team made a series of upgrades in MySQL: Step 1: Moved from MyISAM to InnoDB storage engine in 2010 Step 2: Upgraded to the latest MySQL 5.1.54 release in 2010 Step 3: Upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5 in 2011, and leveraging MySQL Thread Pool as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition to scale better After making those changes, the team saw a much better response time during high concurrency use cases, and achieved an amazing performance improvement of 1400%! In January 2011, Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, announced the iPhone launch during the opening keynote at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and that presentation was streamed live to its 78,000 employees. The event was broadcasted flawlessly with MySQL as the database. Later in 2011, Hurricane Irene attacked the East Coast of United States and caused major life and financial damages. During the hurricane, the team directed more traffic to its west coast data center to avoid potential infrastructure damage in the East Coast. Such transition was executed smoothly and even though the geographical distance became longer for the East Coast users, there was no impact in the performance of Vzweb and Vztube, and the SLA goal was achieved. “MySQL is the key component of Verizon Wireless’ mission-critical employee portal application,” said Shivinder Singh, senior DBA at Verizon Wireless. “We achieved 1400% performance improvement by moving from the MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB, upgrading to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5, and using the MySQL Thread Pool to support high concurrent user connections. MySQL has become part of our IT infrastructure, on which potentially more future applications will be built.” To learn more about MySQL Enterprise Edition, Get our Product Guide.

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• Workarounds for supporting MVVM in the Silverlight TreeView Control

  - by cibrax

  MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) is the pattern that you will typically choose for building testable user interfaces either in WPF or Silverlight. This pattern basically relies on the data binding support in those two technologies for mapping an existing model class (the view model) to the different parts of the UI or view. Unfortunately, MVVM was not threated as first citizen for some of controls released out of the box in the Silverlight runtime or the Silverlight toolkit. That means that using data binding for implementing MVVM is not always something trivial and usually requires some customization in the existing controls. In ran into different problems myself trying to fully support data binding in controls like the tree view or the context menu or things like drag & drop.  For that reason, I decided to write this post to show how the tree view control or the tree view items can be customized to support data binding in many of its properties. In first place, you will typically use a tree view for showing hierarchical data so the view model somehow must reflect that hierarchy. An easy way to implement hierarchy in a model is to use a base item element like this one, public abstract class TreeItemModel { public abstract IEnumerable<TreeItemModel> Children; } You can later derive your concrete model classes from that base class. For example, public class CustomerModel { public string FullName { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } public IEnumerable<OrderModel> Orders { get; set; } }   public class CustomerTreeItemModel : TreeItemModel { public CustomerTreeItemModel(CustomerModel customer) { }   public override IEnumerable<TreeItemModel> Children { get { // Return orders } } } The Children property in the CustomerTreeItem model implementation can return for instance an ObservableCollection<TreeItemModel> with the orders, so the tree view will automatically subscribe to all the changes in the collection. You can bind this model to the tree view control in the UI by using a Hierarchical data template. <e:TreeView x:Name="TreeView" ItemsSource="{Binding Customers}"> <e:TreeView.ItemTemplate> <sdk:HierarchicalDataTemplate ItemsSource="{Binding Children}"> <!-- TEMPLATE --> </sdk:HierarchicalDataTemplate> </e:TreeView.ItemTemplate> </e:TreeView> An interesting behavior with the Children property and the Hierarchical data template is that the Children property is only invoked before the expansion, so you can use lazy load at this point (The tree view control will not expand the whole tree in the first expansion). The problem with using MVVM in this control is that you can not bind properties in model with specific properties of the TreeView item such as IsSelected or IsExpanded. Here is where you need to customize the existing tree view control to support data binding in tree items. public class CustomTreeView : TreeView { public CustomTreeView() { }   protected override DependencyObject GetContainerForItemOverride() { CustomTreeViewItem tvi = new CustomTreeViewItem(); Binding expandedBinding = new Binding("IsExpanded"); expandedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsExpandedProperty, expandedBinding); Binding selectedBinding = new Binding("IsSelected"); selectedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsSelectedProperty, selectedBinding); return tvi; } }   public class CustomTreeViewItem : TreeViewItem { public CustomTreeViewItem() { }   protected override DependencyObject GetContainerForItemOverride() { CustomTreeViewItem tvi = new CustomTreeViewItem(); Binding expandedBinding = new Binding("IsExpanded"); expandedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsExpandedProperty, expandedBinding); Binding selectedBinding = new Binding("IsSelected"); selectedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsSelectedProperty, selectedBinding); return tvi; } } You basically need to derive the TreeView and TreeViewItem controls to manually add a binding for the properties you need. In the example above, I am adding a binding for the “IsExpanded” and “IsSelected” properties in the items. The model for the tree items now needs to be extended to support those properties as well, public abstract class TreeItemModel : INotifyPropertyChanged { bool isExpanded = false; bool isSelected = false;   public abstract IEnumerable<TreeItemModel> Children { get; }   public bool IsExpanded { get { return isExpanded; } set { isExpanded = value; if (PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("IsExpanded")); } }   public bool IsSelected { get { return isSelected; } set { isSelected = value; if (PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("IsSelected")); } }   public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; } However, as soon as you use this custom tree view control, you lose all the automatic styles from the built-in toolkit themes because they are tied to the control type (TreeView in this case).  The only ugly workaround I found so far for this problem is to copy the styles from the Toolkit source code and reuse them in the application.

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• Task-It Webinar - Source Code

  Last week I presented a webinar called "Building a real-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4". For those that didn't get to see the webinar, you can view it here: Building a read-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4 Since the webinar I've received several requests asking if I could post the source code for the simple application I showed demonstrating some of the techniques used in the development of Task-It, such as MVVM, Commands and Internationalization. This source code is now available for downloadhere. After downloading the source: Extract it to the location of your choice on your hard-drive Open the solution Right-click ModuleProject.Web and selecte 'Set as StartUp Project'. Right-click ProjectTestPage.aspx and selected 'Set as Start Page' Create a database in SQL Server called WebinarProject. Navigate to the Database folder under the WebinarProject directory and run the .sql script against your WebinarProject database. The last two steps are necessary only for the Tasks page to work properly (using WCF RIA Services). Now some notes about each page: Code-behind This is not the way I recommend coding a line-of-business application in Silverlight, but simply wanted to show how the code-behind approach would look. Command This page introduces MVVM and Commands. You'll notice in the XAML that the Command property of theRadMenuItem and the Button are both bound to a SaveCommand. That comes from the view model. If you look in the code- behind of the user control you'll see that an instance of a CommandViewModel is instantiated and set as the DataContext of the UserControl.There is also a listener for the view model's SaveCompleted event. When this is fired, it tells the view (UserControl) to display the MessageBox. Internationalization This sample is similar to the previous one, but instead of using hard-coded strings in the UI, the strings are obtained via binding toview model properties. The view model gets the strings from the .resx files (Strings.resx or Strings.de.resx) under Assets/Resources. If you uncomment the call to ShowGerman() in App.xaml.cs's Application_Startup method and re-run the application, you will see the UI in German. Note that this code, which sets the CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture on the current thread to "de" (German) is for testing purposes only. RadWindow Once again, very similar to the previous example.The difference is that we are now using a RadWindow to display the 'Saved' message instead of a MessageBox. The advantage here is that we do not have to hold on to a reference to the view model in our code behind so that we can get the 'Saved' message from it. The RadWindow's DataContext is now also bound to the view model, so within its XAML we can bind directly to properties in the view model. Much nicer, and cleaner. One other thing I introduced in this example is the use of spacer Rectangles. Rather than setting a width and/or height on the rectangles for spacing, I am now referencing a style in my ResourceDictionary called StandardSpacerStyle. I like doing this better than using margins or padding because now I have a reusable way to create space between elements, the Rectangle does not show (because I have not set its Fill color), and I can change my spacing throughout the user interface in one place if I'd like. Tasks This page is quite a bit different than the other four. It is a very simple, stripped-down version of the Tasks page in the Task-It application. The Tasks.xaml UserControl has a ContentControl, and the Content of that control is set based on whether we are looking at the list of tasks or editing a task. So it displays one of two child UserControls, which are called List and Details. List has the RadGridView, Details has the form. In the code-behind of the Tasks UserControl I am once again setting its DataContext to a view model class. The nice thing is, whichever child UserControl is being displayed (List or Details) inherits its DataContext from its parent control (Tasks), so I do not have to explicitly set it. The List UserControl simply displays a RadGridView whose ItemsSource is bound to a property in the view model called Tasks, and its SelectedItem property is bound to a property in the view model called SelectedItem. The SelectedItem binding must be TwoWay so that the view is notified when the SelectedItem changes in the view model, and the view model is notified when something changes in the view (like when a user changes the Name and/or DueDate in the form). You'll also notice that the form's TextBox and RadDatePicker are also TwoWay bound to the SelectedItem property in the view model. You can experiment with the binding by removing TwoWay and see how changes in the form do not show up in the RadGridView. So here we have an example of two different views (List and Details) that are both bound to the same view model...and actually, so is the Tasks UserControl, so it is really three views. WCF RIA Services By the way, I am using WCF RIA Services to retrieve data for the RadGridView and save the data when the user clicks the Save button in the form. I created a really simple ADO.NET Entity Data Model in WebinarProject.Web called DataModel.edmx. I also created a simple Domain Data Service called DataService that has methods for retrieving data, inserting, updating and deleting. However I am only using the retrieval and update methods in this sample. Note that I do not currently have any validation in place on the form, as I wanted to keep the sample as simple as possible. Wrap up Technically, I should move the calls to WCF RIA Services out of the view model and put them into a separate layer, but this works for now, and that is a topic for another day! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Hylton

  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. 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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• UserAppDataPath in WPF

  - by psheriff

  In Windows Forms applications you were able to get to your user's roaming profile directory very easily using the Application.UserAppDataPath property. This folder allows you to store information for your program in a custom folder specifically for your program. The format of this directory looks like this: C:\Users\YOUR NAME\AppData\Roaming\COMPANY NAME\APPLICATION NAME\APPLICATION VERSION For example, on my Windows 7 64-bit system, this folder would look like this for a Windows Forms Application: C:\Users\PSheriff\AppData\Roaming\PDSA, Inc.\WindowsFormsApplication1\1.0.0.0 For some reason Microsoft did not expose this property from the Application object of WPF applications. I guess they think that we don't need this property in WPF? Well, sometimes we still do need to get at this folder. You have two choices on how to retrieve this property. Add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use this property directly. Or, you can write your own method to build the same path. If you add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll you will need to use System.Windows.Forms.Application.UserAppDataPath to access this property. Create a GetUserAppDataPath Method in WPF If you want to build this path you can do so with just a few method calls in WPF using Reflection. The code below shows this fairly simple method to retrieve the same folder as shown above. C#using System.Reflection; public string GetUserAppDataPath(){  string path = string.Empty;  Assembly assm;  Type at;  object[] r;   // Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly();  // Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = typeof(AssemblyCompanyAttribute);  // Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, false);  // Get the Company Attribute  AssemblyCompanyAttribute ct =                 ((AssemblyCompanyAttribute)(r[0]));  // Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath(              Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData);  path += @"\" + ct.Company;  path += @"\" + assm.GetName().Version.ToString();   return path;} Visual BasicPublic Function GetUserAppDataPath() As String  Dim path As String = String.Empty  Dim assm As Assembly  Dim at As Type  Dim r As Object()   ' Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly()  ' Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = GetType(AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, False)  ' Get the Company Attribute  Dim ct As AssemblyCompanyAttribute = _                 DirectCast(r(0), AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath( _                 Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData)  path &= "\" & ct.Company  path &= "\" & assm.GetName().Version.ToString()   Return pathEnd Function Summary Getting the User Application Data Path folder in WPF is fairly simple with just a few method calls using Reflection. Of course, there is absolutely no reason you cannot just add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use that Application object. After all, System.Windows.Forms.dll is a part of the .NET Framework and can be used from WPF with no issues at all. NOTE: Visit http://www.pdsa.com/downloads to get more tips and tricks like this one. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• Code Metrics: Number of IL Instructions

  - by DigiMortal

  In my previous posting about code metrics I introduced how to measure LoC (Lines of Code) in .NET applications. Now let’s take a step further and let’s take a look how to measure compiled code. This way we can somehow have a picture about what compiler produces. In this posting I will introduce you code metric called number of IL instructions. NB! Number of IL instructions is not something you can use to measure productivity of your team. If you want to get better idea about the context of this metric and LoC then please read my first posting about LoC. What are IL instructions? When code written in some .NET Framework language is compiled then compiler produces assemblies that contain byte code. These assemblies are executed later by Common Language Runtime (CLR) that is code execution engine of .NET Framework. The byte code is called Intermediate Language (IL) – this is more common language than C# and VB.NET by example. You can use ILDasm tool to convert assemblies to IL assembler so you can read them. As IL instructions are building blocks of all .NET Framework binary code these instructions are smaller and highly general – we don’t want very rich low level language because it executes slower than more general language. For every method or property call in some .NET Framework language corresponds set of IL instructions. There is no 1:1 relationship between line in high level language and line in IL assembler. There are more IL instructions than lines in C# code by example. How much instructions there are? I have no common answer because it really depends on your code. Here you can see some metrics from my current community project that is developed on SharePoint Server 2007. As average I have about 7 IL instructions per line of code. This is not metric you should use, it is just illustrative example so you can see the differences between numbers of lines and IL instructions. Why should I measure the number of IL instructions? Just take a look at chart above. Compiler does something that you cannot see – it compiles your code to IL. This is not intuitive process because you usually cannot say what is exactly the end result. You know it at greater plain but you don’t know it exactly. Therefore we can expect some surprises and that’s why we should measure the number of IL instructions. By example, you may find better solution for some method in your source code. It looks nice, it works nice and everything seems to be okay. But on server under load your fix may be way slower than previous code. Although you minimized the number of lines of code it ended up with increasing the number of IL instructions. How to measure the number of IL instructions? My choice is NDepend because Visual Studio is not able to measure this metric. Steps to make are easy. Open your NDepend project or create new and add all your application assemblies to project (you can also add Visual Studio solution to project). Run project analysis and wait until it is done. You can see over-all stats form global summary window. This is the same window I used to read the LoC and the number of IL instructions metrics for my chart. Meanwhile I made some changes to my code (enabled advanced caching for events and event registrations module) and then I ran code analysis again to get results for this section of this posting. NDepend is also able to tell you exactly what parts of code have problematically much IL instructions. The code quality section of CQL Query Explorer shows you how much problems there are with members in analyzed code. If you click on the line Methods too big (NbILInstructions) you can see all the problematic members of classes in CQL Explorer shown in image on right. In my case if have 10 methods that are too big and two of them have horrible number of IL instructions – just take a look at first two methods in this TOP10. Also note the query box. NDepend has easy and SQL-like query language to query code analysis results. You can modify these queries if you like and also you can define your own ones if default set is not enough for you. What is good result? As you can see from query window then the number of IL instructions per member should have maximally 200 IL instructions. Of course, like always, the less instructions you have, the better performing code you have. I don’t mean here little differences but big ones. By example, take a look at my first method in warnings list. The number of IL instructions it has is huge. And believe me – this method looks awful. Conclusion The number of IL instructions is useful metric when optimizing your code. For analyzing code at general level to find out too long methods you can use the number of LoC metric because it is more intuitive for you and you can therefore handle the situation more easily. Also you can use NDepend as code metrics tool because it has a lot of metrics to offer.

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• FY12 Partner Kickoff – Are you Ready?

  - by user715249

  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:"Times New Roman","serif";} 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Want to know what Oracle has up its sleeve for FY12? Join us on June 28th (or 29th depending on your region) as we kick off the new year and fill you in on our latest plans. This live, interactive session will be hosted by Judson Althoff and he’s bringing some top Oracle executives into the studio with him. Take a peek below as Lydia Smyers, Oracle WW A&C vice president, talks about this upcoming event. 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:"Times New Roman","serif";} 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} As if that weren’t enough, Oracle President Mark Hurd will update you on his focus for partners in FY12 and OPN will be making a special announcement for our ISV partners highlighting some exciting new offerings on how we will go to market together.  But wait, there’s more – you’ll also hear from Oracle product executives and regional sales leaders outlining their priorities for the upcoming year.  Phew – We’re tired just thinking about all of the great content that will be shared on June 28th/29th.  There are a lot of exciting announcements in store for you later this month so tune in for the latest updates! Register now to get your name on ‘the list’, The OPN Communications Team

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• 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards - Part 2

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Moazzam Chaudry Continuing from Friday's blog on 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards, this blog (Part 2) will provide more details around the customers. It was a tremendous honor to be in single room of winners. We only wish we could have had more time to share stories from all the winners.  We received great insight from all the innovative solutions that our customers deploy and would like to share them broadly, so that others can benefit from best practices. There was a customer panel session joined by Ingersoll Rand, Nike and Motability and here is what was discussed: Barry Bonar, Enterprise Architect from Ingersoll Rand shared details around their solution, comprised of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite. This combined solutoin enabled their business transformation to increase decision-making, speed and efficiency, resulting in 40% reduced IT spend, 41X Faster response time and huge cost savings. Ashok Balakrishnan, Architect from Nike shared how they leveraged Oracle Coherence to analyze their digital "footprint" of activities. This helps them compete, collaborate and compare athletic data over time. Lastly, Ashley Doodly, Head of IT from Motability shared details around their solution compromised of Oracle SOA Suite, Service Bus, ADF, Coherence, BO and E-Business Suite. This solution helped Motability achieve 100% ROI within the first few months, performance in seconds vs. 10's of minutes and tremendous improvement in throughput that increased up to 50%.  This year's winners by category are: Oracle Exalogic Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Netshoes ATG on Exalogic: 6X Reduced H/W foot print, 6.2X increased throughput and 3 weeks time to market Claro Part of America Movil, running mission critical Java Application on Exalogic with 35X Faster Java response time, 5X Throughput Underwriters Laboratories Exalogic as an Apps Consolidation platform to power tremendous growth Ingersoll Rand EBS on Exalogic: Up to 40% Reduction in overall IT budget, 3x reduced foot print Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  Mazda Motor Corporation Tuxedo ART Batch runtime environment to migrate their batch apps on new open environment and reduce main frame cost. HOTELBEDS Technology Open Source to WebLogic transformation Globalia Corporation Introduced Oracle Coherence to fully reengineer DTH system and provide multiple business and technical benefits Nike Nike+, digital sports platform, has 8M users and is expecting an 5X increase in users, many of who will carry multiple devices that frequently sync data with the Digital Sport platform Comcast Corporation The solution is expected to increase availability, continuity, performance, and simplify and make the code at the application layer more flexible. Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM Customer Results using Fusion Middleware NTT Docomo Network traffic solution based on Oracle event processing and coherence - massive in scale: 12M users (50M in future) - 800,000 events/sec. Schneider National, Inc. SOA/B2B/ADF/Data Integration to orchestrate key order processes across Siebel, OTM & EBS.  Platform runs 60M trans/day and  50 million composite SOA instances per day across 10G and 11G Amadeus Oracle BPM solution: Business Rules and processes vary across local (80), regional (~10) and corporate approval process. Up to 10 levels of approval. Plans to deploy across 20+ markets Navitar SOA solution integrates a fully non-Oracle legacy application/ERP environment using Oracle’s SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Motability Uses SOA Suite to synchronize data across the systems and to manage the vehicle remarketing process Oracle WebCenter Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  News Limited Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers University of Louisville “Facebook for Medicine”: Oracle Webcenter platform and Oracle BIEE to analyze patient test data and uncover potential health issues. Expecting annualized ROI of 277% China Mobile Jiangsu Company portal (25k users) to drive collaboration & productivity Life Technologies Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments LA Dept. of Water & Power Oracle WebCenter Portal to power ladwp.com on desktop and mobile for 1.6million users Oracle Identity Management Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Education Testing Service Identity Management platform for provisioning & SSO of 6 million GRE, GMAT, TOEFL customers Avea Oracle Identity Manager allowing call center personnel to quickly change Identity Profile to handle varying call loads based on a user self service interface. Decreased Admin Cost by 30% Oracle Data Integration Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Raymond James Near real-time integration for improved systems (throughput & performance) and enhanced operational flexibility in a 24 X 7 environment Wm Morrison Supermarkets Electronic Point of Sale integration handling over 80 million transactions a day in near real time (15 min intervals) Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Development Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Qualcomm Incorporated Solution providing  immediate business value enabling a self-service model necessary for growing the new customer base, an increase in customer satisfaction, reduced “time-to-deliver” Micros Systems, Inc. ADF, SOA Suite, WebCenter  enables services that include managing distribution of hotel rooms availability and rates to channels such as Hotel Web-site, Expedia, etc. Marfin Egnatia Bank A new web 2.0 UI provides a much richer experience through the ADF solution with the end result being one of boosting end-user productivity    Business Analytics (Oracle BI, Oracle EPM, Oracle Exalytics) Customer Results using Fusion Middleware INC Research Self-service customer portal delivering 5–10% of the overall revenue - expected to grow fast with the BI solution Experian Reduction in Time to Complete the Financial Close Process Hologic Inc Solution, saving months of decision-making uncertainty! We look forward to seeing many more innovative nominations. The nominatation process for 2013 begins in April 2013.    Additional Information: Blog: Oracle WebCenter Award Winners Blog: Oracle Identity Management Winners Blog: Oracle Exalogic Winners Blog: SOA, BPM and Data Integration will be will feature award winners in its respective areas this week Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

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• International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# &amp; Silverlight &ndash; Part 2

  - by MarkPearl

  So the brunt of my my very complex F# code has been done. Now it’s just putting the Silverlight stuff in. The first thing I did was add a new project to my solution. I gave it a name and VS2010 did the rest of the magic in creating the .Web project etc. In this instance because I want to take the MVVM approach and make use of commanding I have decided to make the frontend a Silverlight4 project. I now need move my F# code into a proper Silverlight Library. Warning – when you create the Silverlight Library VS2010 will ask you whether you want it to be based on Silverlight3 or Silverlight4. I originally went for Silverlight4 only to discover when I tried to compile my solution that I was given an error… Error 12 F# runtime for Silverlight version v4.0 is not installed. Please go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177463 to download and install matching.. After asking around I discovered that the Silverlight4 F# runtime is not available yet. No problem, the suggestion was to change the F# Silverlight Library to a Silverlight3 project however when going to the properties of the project file – even though I changed it to Silverlight3, VS2010 did not like it and kept reverting it to a Silverlight4 project. After a few minutes of scratching my head I simply deleted Silverlight4 F# Library project and created a new F# Silverlight Library project in Silverlight3 and VS2010 was happy. Now that the project structure is set up, rest is fairly simple. You need to add the Silverlight Library as a reference to the C# Silverlight Front End. Then setup your views, since I was following the MVVM pattern I made a Views & ViewModel folder and set up the relevant View and ViewModels. The MainPageViewModel file looks as follows using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; namespace IROAFrontEnd.ViewModels { public class MainPageViewModel : ViewModelBase { private string _iroaString; private string _inputCharacters; public string InputCharacters { get { return _inputCharacters; } set { if (_inputCharacters != value) { _inputCharacters = value; OnPropertyChanged("InputCharacters"); } } } public string IROAString { get { return _iroaString; } set { if (_iroaString != value) { _iroaString = value; OnPropertyChanged("IROAString"); } } } public ICommand MySpecialCommand { get { return new MyCommand(this); } } public class MyCommand : ICommand { readonly MainPageViewModel _myViewModel; public MyCommand(MainPageViewModel myViewModel) { _myViewModel = myViewModel; } public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; public bool CanExecute(object parameter) { return true; } public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } } } } One of the features I like in Silverlight4 is the new commanding. You will notice in my I have put the code under the command execute to reference to my F# module. At the moment this could be cleaned up even more, but will suffice for now.. public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } I then needed to set the view up. If we have a look at the MainPageView.xaml the xaml code will look like the following…. Nothing to fancy, but battleship grey for now… take careful note of the binding of the command in the button to MySpecialCommand which was created in the ViewModel. <UserControl x:Class="IROAFrontEnd.Views.MainPageView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Text="{Binding InputCharacters, Mode=TwoWay}"/> <Button Grid.Row="1" Command="{Binding MySpecialCommand}"> <TextBlock Text="Generate"/> </Button> <TextBlock Grid.Row="2" Text="{Binding IROAString}"/> </Grid> </UserControl> Finally in the App.xaml.cs file we need to set the View and link it to the ViewModel. private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { var myView = new MainPageView(); var myViewModel = new MainPageViewModel(); myView.DataContext = myViewModel; this.RootVisual = myView; }   Once this is done – hey presto – it worked. I typed in some “Test Input” and clicked the generate button and the correct Radio Operators Alphabet was generated. And that’s the end of my first very basic F# Silverlight application.

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• The Krewe App Post-Mortem

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/05/23/the-krewe-app-post-mortem.aspxNow that teched has come and gone, I thought I would use this opportunity to do a little post-mortem on The Krewe app. It is one thing to test the app at home. It is a completely different animal to see how it responds in the environment TechEd creates. At a future time, I will list all the things that I would like to change with the app. At this point, I will find some good way to get community feedback. I want to break all this down screen by screen. We'll start with the screen I got right. The first of these is the events calendar. This is the one screen that, to you guys, just worked. However, there was an issue here. When I wrote v1 for last year, I was lazy and placed everything in CST. This caused problems with the achievements, which I will explain later. Furthermore, the event locations were not check-in locations. This created another problem with the achievements. Next, we get to the Twitter page. For what this page does, it works great. For those that don't know, I have an Azure Worker Role that polls Twitter pretty close to the rate limit. I cache these results in my database, and serve them upon request. This gives me great control over the content. I just have to remember to flush past tweets after a period, to save database growth. The next screen is the check-in screen. This screen has been the bane of my existence since I first created the thing. Last year, I used a background task to check people out of locations after they traveled. This year, I removed the background task in favor of a foursquare model. You are checked out after 3 hours or when you check-in to some other location. This seemed to work well, until those pesky achievements came into the mix. Again, more on this later. Next, I want to address the Connect and Connections screens together. I wanted to use some of the capabilities of the phone, and NFC seemed a natural choice. From this, I came up with the gamification aspects of the app. Since we are, fundamentally, a networking organization, I wanted to encourage people to actually network. Users could make and share a profile, similar to a virtual business card. I just had to figure out how to get people to use the feature. Why not just give someone a business card? Thus, the achievements were born. This was such a good idea. It would have been a great idea, if I have come up with it about two months earlier... When I came up with these ideas, I had about 2 weeks to implement them. Version 1 of the app was, basically, a pure consumption app. We provided data and centralized it. With version 2, the app became a much more interactive experience. The API was not ready for this change in such a short period of time. Most of this became apparent when I started implementing the achievements. The achievements based on count and specific person when fairly easy. The problem came with tying them to locations and events. This took some true SQL kung fu. This also showed me the rookie mistake of putting CST, not UTC, in the database. Once I got all of that cleaned up, I had to find a way to get the achievement system to talk to the phone. I knew I needed to be able to dynamically add achievements. I wouldn't know the precise location of some things until I got to Houston. I wanted the server to approve the achievements. This, unfortunately, required a decent data connection. Some achievements required GPS levels of location accuracy in areas of network triangulation. All of this became a huge nightmare. My flagship feature was based on some silly assumptions. Still, I managed to get 31 people to get the first achievement (Make 1 Connection.) Quite a few of those managed to get to the higher levels. Soon, I will post a list of the feature and changes that need to happen to the API. This includes things like proper objects for communication, geo-fencing, and caching. However, that is for another day.

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• MVVM Light V4 preview 2 (BL0015) #mvvmlight

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Over the past few weeks, I have worked hard on a few new features for MVVM Light V4. Here is a second early preview (consider this pre-alpha if you wish). The features are unit-tested, but I am now looking for feedback and there might be bugs! Bug correction: Messenger.CleanupList is now thread safe This was an annoying bug that is now corrected: In some circumstances, an exception could be thrown when the Messenger’s recipients list was cleaned up (i.e. the “dead” instances were removed). The method is called now and then and the exception was thrown apparently at random. In fact it was really a multi-threading issue, which is now corrected. Bug correction: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers prevents EventToCommand to work This is a particularly annoying regression bug that was introduced in BL0014. In order to allow MVVM Light to work in XBAPs too, I added the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute to the assemblies. However, we just found out that this causes issues when using EventToCommand. In order to allow EventToCommand to continue working, I reverted to the previous state by removing the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute for now. I will work with my friends at Microsoft to try and find a solution. Stay tuned. Bug correction: XML documentation file is now generated in Release configuration The XML documentation file was not generated for the Release configuration. This was a simple flag in the project file that I had forgotten to set. This is corrected now. Applying EventToCommand to non-FrameworkElements This feature has been requested in order to be able to execute a command when a Storyboard is completed. I implemented this, but unfortunately found out that EventToCommand can only be added to Storyboards in Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, but not in WPF or in Windows Phone 7. This obviously limits the usefulness of this change, but I decided to publish it anyway, because it is pretty damn useful in Silverlight… Why not in WPF? In WPF, Storyboards added to a resource dictionary are frozen. This is a feature of WPF which allows to optimize certain objects for performance: By freezing them, it is a contract where we say “this object will not be modified anymore, so do your perf optimization on them without worrying too much”. Unfortunately, adding a Trigger (such as EventTrigger) to an object in resources does not work if this object is frozen… and unfortunately, there is no way to tell WPF not to freeze the Storyboard in the resources… so there is no way around that (at least none I can see. In Silverlight, objects are not frozen, so an EventTrigger can be added without problems. Why not in WP7? In Windows Phone 7, there is a totally different issue: Adding a Trigger can only be done to a FrameworkElement, which Storyboard is not. Here I think that we might see a change in a future version of the framework, so maybe this small trick will work in the future. Workaround? Since you cannot use the EventToCommand on a Storyboard in WPF and in WP7, the workaround is pretty obvious: Handle the Completed event in the code behind, and call the Command from there on the ViewModel. This object can be obtained by casting the DataContext to the ViewModel type. This means that the View needs to know about the ViewModel, but I never had issues with that anyway. New class: NotifyPropertyChanged Sometimes when you implement a model object (for example Customer), you would like to have it implement INotifyPropertyChanged, but without having all the frills of a ViewModelBase. A new class named NotifyPropertyChanged allows you to do that. This class is a simple implementation of INotifyPropertyChaned (with all the overloads of RaisePropertyChanged that were implemented in BL0014). In fact, ViewModelBase inherits NotifyPropertyChanged. ViewModelBase does not implement IDisposable anymore The IDisposable interface and the Dispose method had been marked obsolete in the ViewModelBase class already in V3. Now they have been removed. Note: By this, I do not mean that IDisposable is a bad interface, or that it shouldn’t be used on viewmodels. In the contrary, I know that this interface is very useful in certain circumstances. However, I think that having it by default on every instance of ViewModelBase was sending a wrong message. This interface has a strong meaning in .NET: After Dispose has been executed, the instance should not be used anymore, and should be ready for garbage collection. What I really wanted to have on ViewModelBase was rather a simple cleanup method, something that can be executed now and then during runtime. This is fulfilled by the ICleanup interface and its Cleanup method. If your ViewModels need IDisposable, you can still use it! You will just have to implement the interface on the class itself, because it is not available on ViewModelBase anymore. What’s next? I have a couple exciting new features implemented already but that need more testing before they go live… Just stay tuned and by MIX11 (12-14 April 2011), we should see at least a major addition to MVVM Light Toolkit, as well as another smaller feature which is pretty cool nonetheless More about this later! Happy Coding Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• WebLogic 12.1.2 launch webcast on-demand & WebLogic Community feedback

  - by JuergenKress

  You missed the WebLogic & Coherence & JDeveloper 12.1.2 launch Webcast? Watch it on-demand: View On-Demand Version Read the Q&A from this Webcast Special thanks for Frank Munz and Simon Haslams our WebLogic Community experts on the phone!Thanks for the community for the great twitter feedback send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity WebLogic Community Join the #WebLogic Partner Community for the latest WebLogic 12.1.2 details and upcoming trainings http://www.WeblogicCommunity.com #OracleCAF Oracle WebLogic ?Unified update, patch, install process is a key component in reducing Ops cost in #WebLogic 12c #OracleCAF WebLogic Community Demo time #WebLogic cluster creation in seconds #OracleCAF by @mike_lehmann & Will Lyons #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/gyb8YqnKco Oracle WebLogic ?Dynamic server clusters to scale apps - coming up in #WebLogic 12c launch. #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/lBmE Oracle WebLogic ?Key feature of #WebLogic 12.1.2 release: @Oracle Database 12c integration. #OracleCAF #OracleDB OTNArchBeat ?Many tech posts on #weblogic available on #oracleace Rene van Wijk's blog. #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/O9Cn Frank Munz ?Correct me if I am wrong, but this could be the first WebLogic 12.1.2 training ever: http://www.ausoug.org.au/insync13/insync13-frank-munz.html … Cloud Foundation ?.#WebLogic 12.1.2 deep dive starts NOW during #OracleCAF launch. #Coherence up next in a few minutes. http://pub.vitrue.com/HPHM Maciej Gruszka ?Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiCoO_QGBsU&feature=c4-overview&list=UUrEIV9YO17leE9aJWamKEPw … at #WebLogic channel with @dave_cabelus about Elastic JMS Oracle WebLogic ?Pick up the new book by @frankmunz on WLS 12c http://amzn.to/1ceppgZ #WebLogic #OracleCAF OTNArchBeat ?@OTNArchBeat 31 Jul @frankmunz 's #WebLogic YouTube channel >> watch and learn #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/B4IM WebLogic Community ?@frankmunz WebLogic expert build elastic clouds with #WebLogic http://www.munzandmore.com/blog #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/UK5UKjXUVl OTNArchBeat @frankmunz 's blog, covering #weblog #cloud and more #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/N8ST OTNArchBeat ?oracladmin: @simon_haslam 's Oracle Fusion Middleware blog #OracleCAF #oracleace http://pub.vitrue.com/cwGx Yuri Grinshteyn ?Coherence uses WLS tooling, including deployment, and can be part of the WLS cluster. Well done there. #OracleCAF Maciej Gruszka ?#Coherence 12.1.2 auto updates data grid on changes inside DB thru #GoldenGate HotCache - another cool feature of #OracleCAF Oracle WebLogic ?From #OracleCAF launch: Tight integration tween WLS, #Coherence and #OracleDB. Dynamic clusters, OSS support & more http://pub.vitrue.com/3NL9 OTNArchBeat ?25 recent no-fluff technical articles on Oracle WebLogic #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/FEG5 Maciej Gruszka ?@dave_cabelus Elastic JMS is my favourite capability of #WebLogic 12.1.2 WebLogic Community ?Dynamic WebLogic Clustering COOL - what is Wour favorite 12.1.2 feature? #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/T8lvDMJ1U0 WebLogic Community ?What is the coolest #WebLogic 12.1.2 feature? Let us know @wlscommunity http://weblogiccommunity.com/2013/07/30/launch-webcast-weblogic-coherence-jdeveloper-adf-12-1-2-00-july-31st-2013/ … #WebLogicCommunity Simon Haslam ?I'm speaking(!) on the panel session with @frankmunz & Matt Rosen on the CAF/WebLogic 12.1.2 launch: 6pm UK today https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=651242&partnerref=CAF_Launch_OCOM_07312013&sourcepage=register … Markus Eisele ?#WebLogic 12.1.2 - an Important New Release for Middleware Admins http://bit.ly/1cmtqhX by @simon_haslam OracleEnterpriseMgr ?The JVM diagnostics features of #EM12c are now shown in a demo by @hawkinsg1 at the #OracleCAF launch http://bit.ly/caflaunch Shaun Smith ?Curious about the new #Coherence 12.1.2 GoldenGate HotCache feature? I explain all on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0TIG3hgbg0&feature=share&list=PLxqhEJ4CA3JtQwuPS8Qmd88lGX-gsIbHV … #OracleCAF Maciej Gruszka ?Try for Yourself -- Download the products Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/fusion-middleware/downloads/index.html … Oracle Coherence 12c: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/coherence/downloads/index.htm … WebLogic Community ?What is Your favorite feature in #WebLogic 12.1.2 ? cool stuff! #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity http://WeblogicCommunity.com pic.twitter.com/xjR05tiaQj We encourage you to learn more about all the products by reviewing the following resources: Try for Yourself -- Download the products Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2 Oracle Coherence 12c Enterprise Manager Developer Tools WebLogic Community blog Learn more Read the Oracle WebLogic Business Whitepaper Read the Oracle Coherence Business Whitepaper Read the Oracle WebLogic and Oracle Database Integration Whitepaper Get Training from Oracle University Check out the Oracle WebLogic YouTube Channel Check out the Oracle Coherence YouTube Channel WebLogic Partner Community Registration The Webcast is available on-demand Watch Webcast Now WebLogic 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: Weblogic 12.1.2,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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