Search Results

Search found 1544 results on 62 pages for 'wood brian'.

Page 58/62 | < Previous Page | 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62  | Next Page >

  • How to code a 'Next in Results' within search results in PHP

    - by thebluefox
    Right, bit of a head scratcher, although I've got a feeling there's an obvious answer and I'm just not seeing the wood for the trees. Baiscally, using Solr as a search engine for my site, bringing back 15 results per page. When you click on a result, you get a detail page, that has a "Next in Results" link on it, which obviously forwards you on to the next result. Whats the best way of doing this? I've come up with a few solutions but they're either too inpractical or just don't work. I could store all the ids in a session array, then grab the one after the current one and put that in the link. But with possibly hundreds/thousands of results, the memory that array would need, and the performance hit of dealing with it isn't practical. I could take the same approach and put it into the db, but I'll still have to deal with a potentially huge array when I grab them out of the db. Or; I could do the search again, only returning the id's, and grab the one after the one we're currently looking at. I think this could be the best option? Although it does seem kind of messy, namely because of when I have to select the id thats on a different 'page' (ie the 16th, 31st etc result). Unless I pass through where it was in the results, and select from there, but that still doesn't seem like the right way to do it. I'm really sorry if this is just complete nonsense, any help is massively appreciated as always, Cheers guys!

    Read the article

  • What are possible/good ways to prototype iPhone applications?

    - by Ted Johnson
    This is intentionally left broad. If you wanted to show users what iPhone/mobile applications could to for them. The more interactive the better, but it must be quick to build as you can't code up every idea. Let us assume real-time games are out of scope. Throw out ideas or state which approach would be best. Here are some of my ideas, what are yours? Hack a app that loads mostly web or image content, but has hyperlinks to get around in. This would mean static data. Build screens which look great but can only be navigated in a story board type fashion. Load the web version or equivalent on the iPhone and say: now image the buttons and navigation is better. A paper based prototype. Flash or video walk through running on the phone. String existing iPhone apps and web pages together with minimal glue just to convey the idea. Can anyone share prototyping methods for other mobile devices? Ex: The palm prototype was just a block of wood and note pad that was carried around.

    Read the article

  • Unable to Get a Correct Time when I am Calling serverTime using jquery.countdown.js + Asp.net ?

    - by user312891
    When i am calling the below function I unable to get a correct Answer. Both var Shortly and newTime having same time one coming from the client site other sync with server. http://keith-wood.name/countdown.html I am waiting from your response. Thanks $(function() { var shortly = new Date('April 9, 2010 20:38:10'); var newTime = new Date('April 9, 2010 20:38:10'); //for loop divid /// $('#defaultCountdown').countdown({ until: shortly, onExpiry: liftOff, onTick: watchCountdown, serverSync: serverTime }); $('#div1').countdown({ until: newTime }); }); function serverTime() { var time = null; $.ajax({ type: "POST", //Page Name (in which the method should be called) and method name url: "Default.aspx/GetTime", // If you want to pass parameter or data to server side function you can try line contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", dataType: "json", data: "{}", async: false, //else If you don't want to pass any value to server side function leave the data to blank line below //data: "{}", success: function(msg) { //Got the response from server and render to the client time = new Date(msg.d); alert(time); }, error: function(msg) { time = new Date(); alert('1'); } }); return time; }

    Read the article

  • How to understand existing projects

    - by John
    Hi. I am a trainee developer and have been writing .NET applications for about a year now. Most of the work I have done has involved building new applications (mainly web apps) from scratch and I have been given more or less full control over the software design. This has been a great experience however, as a trainee developer my confidence about whether the approaches I have taken are the best is minimal. Ideally I would love to collaborate with more experienced developers (I find this the best was I learn) however in the company I work for developers tend to work in isolation (a great shame for me). Recently I decided that a good way to learn more about how experienced developers approach their design might be to explore some open source projects. I found myself a little overwhelmed by the projects I looked at. With my level of experience it was hard to understand the body of code I faced. My question is slight fuzzy one. How do developers approach the task of understanding a new medium to large scale project. I found myself pouring over lots of code and struggling to see the wood for the trees. At any one time I felt that I could understand a small portion of the system but not see how its all fits together. Do others get this same feeling? If so what approaches do you take to understanding the project? Do you have any other advice about how to learn design best practices? Any advice will be very much appreciated. Thank you.

    Read the article

  • AxCMS.net 10 with Microsoft Silverlight 4 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

    - by Axinom
    Axinom, European WCM vendor, today announced the next version of its WCM solution AxCMS.net 10, which streamlines the processes involved in creating, managing and distributing corporate content on the internet. The new solution helps reducing ongoing costs for managing and distributing to large audiences, while at the same time drastically reducing time-to-market and one-time setup costs. http://www.AxCMS.net Axinom’s WCM portfolio, based on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Silverlight 4, allows enterprises to increase process efficiency, reduce operating costs and more effectively manage delivery of rich media assets on the Web and mobile devices. Axinom solutions are widely used by major European online brands in IT, telco, retail, media and entertainment industries such as Siemens, American Express, Microsoft Corp., ZDF, Pro7Sat1 Media, and Deutsche Post. Brand New User Interface built with Silverlight 4By using Silverlight 4, Axinom’s team created a new user interface for AxCMS.net 10 that is optimized for improved usability and speed. WYSIWYG mode, integrated image editor, extended list views, and detail views of objects allow a substantial acceleration of typical editor tasks. Axinom’s team worked with Silverlight Rough Cut Editor for video management and Silverlight Analytics Framework for extended reporting to complete the wide range of capabilities included in the new release. “Axinom’s release of AxCMS.net 10 enables developers to take advantage of the latest features in Silverlight 4,” said Brian Goldfarb, director of the developer platform group at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is excited about the opportunity this creates for Web developers to streamline the creating, managing and distributing of online corporate content using AxCMS.net 10 and Silverlight.” Rapid Web Development with Visual Studio 2010AxCMS.net 10 is extended by additional products that enable developers to get productive quickly and help solve typical customer scenarios. AxCMS.net template projects come with documented source code that help kick-start projects and learn best practices in all aspects of Web application development. AxCMS.net overcomes many hard-to-solve technical obstacles in an out-of-the-box manner by providing a set of ready-to-use vertical solutions such as corporate Web site, Web shop, Web campaign management, email marketing, multi-channel distribution, management of rich Internet applications, and Web business intelligence. Extended Multi-Site ManagementAxCMS.net has been supporting the management of an unlimited number of Web sites for a long time. The new version 10 of AxCMS.net will further improve multi-site management and provide features to editors and developers that will simplify and accelerate multi-site and multi-language management. Extended publication workflow will take into account additional dependencies of dynamic objects, pages, and documents. “The customer requests evolved from static html pages to dynamic Web applications content with the emergence of rich media assets seamlessly combined across many channels including Web, mobile and IPTV. With the.NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4, we’re on the fast track to making the three screen strategy a reality for our customers,” said Damir Tomicic, CEO of Axinom Group. “Our customers enjoy substantial competitive advantages of using latest Microsoft technologies. We have a long-standing, relationship with Microsoft and are committed to continued development using Microsoft tools and technologies to deliver innovative Web solutions in the future.”  

    Read the article

  • links for 2010-04-28

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Guido Schmutz: Oracle BPM11g available! Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz shares his impressions after attending a hands-on workshop conducted by Masons of SOA member Clemens Utschig-Utschig. (tags: oracle otn oracleace bpm soa soasuite) Elena Zannoni : 2010 Collaboration Summit Impressions Elena Zannoni has collected her thoughts on #C10 and shares them in this great blog post. (tags: oracle otn linux architecture collaborate2010) Hajo Normann: BPMN 2.0 in Oracle BPM Suite: The future of BPM starts now "The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends." -- Oracle ACE Director and Masons of SOA member Hajo Normann (tags: oracle otn oracleace bpm soa sca) Brain Dirking: AIIM Best Practice Awards to Two Oracle Customers Brian Dirking's great write-up of the AIIM Awards Banquet, at which the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Charles Town Police Department were among the winners of the 2010 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Awards. (tags: oracle otn aiim bpm ecm enterprise2.0) Mark Wilcox: Upcoming Directory Services Live Webcast - Improve Time-to-Market and Reduce Cost with Oracle Directory Services Live Webcast: Improve Time-to-Market and Reduce Cost with Oracle Directory Services Event Date: Thursday, May 27, 2010 Event Time: 10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time / 1:00 Eastern Standard Time (tags: oracle otn webcast security identitymanagement) Celine Beck: Introducing AutoVue Document Print Service Celine Beck offers a detailed overview of Oracle AutoVue. (tags: oracle otn enatarch visualization printing) Vikas Jain: What's new in OWSM 11gR1 PS2 (11.1.1.3.0) ? Vikas Jain shares links to resources relevant to the recently releases patch set for Oracle Web Services Manager 11gR1. (tags: oracle otn soa webservices oswm) @theovanarem: Oracle SOA Suite 11g Release 1 Patch Set 2 Theo Van Arem shares links to several resources relevant to the release of the latest patch set for Oracle SOA Suite 11g. (tags: oracle otn soa soasuite middleware) @vambenepe: Analyzing the VMforce announcement "The new thing is that force.com now supports an additional runtime, in addition to Apex. That new runtime uses the Java language, with the constraint that it is used via the Spring framework. Which is familiar territory to many developers. That’s it." -- William Vambenepe (tags: oracle otn cloud paas)

    Read the article

  • Survey Probes the Project Management Concerns of Financial Services Executives

    - by Melissa Centurio Lopes
    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: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;} Do you wonder what are the top reasons why large projects in the financial industry fail to meet budgets, schedules, and other key performance criteria? Being able to answer this question can provide important insight and value of good project management practices for your organization. According to 400 senior executives who participated in a new survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Oracle, unrealistic project goals is the main reason for roadblocks to success Other common stumbling blocks are poor alignment between project and organizational goals, inadequate human resources, lack of strong leadership, and unwillingness among team members to point out problems. This survey sample also had a lot to say about the impact of regulatory compliance on the overall portfolio management process. Thirty-nine percent acknowledged that regulations enabled efficient functioning of their businesses. But a similar number said that regulations often require more financial resources than were originally allocated to bring projects in on time. Regulations were seen by 35 percent of the executives as roadblocks to their ability to invest in the organization’s growth and success. These revelations among others are discussed in depth in a new on-demand Webcast titled “Too Good to Fail: Developing Project Management Expertise in Financial Services” now available from Oracle. The Webcast features Brian Gardner, editor of the Economist Intelligence Unit, who presents these findings from this survey along with Guy Barlow, director of industry strategy for Oracle Primavera. Together, they analyze what the numbers mean for project and program managers and the financial services industry. Register today to watch the on-demand Webcast and get a full rundown and analysis of the survey results. Take the Economist Intelligence Unit benchmarking survey and see how your views compare with those of other financial services industry executives in ensuring project success.  Read more in the October Edition of the quarterly Information InDepth EPPM Newsletter

    Read the article

  • Working with Visual Studio Web Development Server and IE6 in XP Mode on Windows 7

    - by Igor Milovanovic
    (Brian Reiter from  thoughtful computing has described this setup in this StackOverflow thread. The credit for the idea is entirely his, I have just extended it with some step by step descriptions and added some links and screenhots.)   If you are forced  to still support Internet Explorer 6, you can setup following combination on your machine to make the development for it less painful. A common problem if you are developing on Windows 7 is that you can’t install IE6 on your machine. (Not that you want that anyway). So you will probably end up working locally with IE8 and FF, and test your IE6 compatibility on a separate machine. This can get quite annoying, because you will have to maintain two different development environments, not have all the tools available, etc.   You can help yourself by installing IE6 in a Windows 7 XP Mode, which is basically just an Windows XP running in a virtual machine.   [1] Windows XP Mode installation   After you have installed and configured your XP mode (remember the security settings like Windows Update and antivirus software), you can add the shortcut to the IE6 in the virtual machine to the “all users” start menu. This shortcut will be replicated to your windows 7 XP mode start menu, and you will be able to seamlessly start your IE 6 as a normal window on your Windows 7 desktop.   [2] Configure IE6 for the Windows 7 installation   If you configure your XP – Mode to use (Shared Networking)  NAT, you can now use IE6 to browse the sites in the internet. (add proxy settings to IE6 if necessary)                       The problem now is that you can’t connect to the webdev server which is running on your local machine. This is because web development server is crippled to allow only local connections for security reasons.   In order to trick webdev in believing that the requests are coming from local machine itself you can use a light weight proxy like privoxy on your host (windows 7) machine and configure the IE6 running in the virtual host.   The first step is to make the host machine (running windows 7) reachable from the virtual machine (running XP). In order to do that, you can install the loopback adapter, and configure it to use an IP which is routable from the virtual machine. In example screenshot (192.168.1.66).   [3] How to install loopback adapter in Windows 7   After installation you can assign a static IP which is routable from the virtual machine (in example 192.168.1.66)                     The next step is to configure privoxy to listen on that IP address (using some not used port, in example, the default port 8118)   Change following line in config.txt:   # #      Suppose you are running Privoxy on an IPv6-capable machine and #      you want it to listen on the IPv6 address of the loopback device: # #        listen-address [::1]:8118 # # listen-address  192.168.1.66:8118   The last step is to configure the IE6 to use Privoxy which is running on your Windows 7 host machine as proxy for all addresses (including localhost)                             And now you can use your Windows7 XP Mode IE6 to connect to your Visual Studio’s webdev web server.                         [4] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/683151/connect-remotely-to-webdev-webserver-exe

    Read the article

  • JCP.Next - Early Adopters of JCP 2.8

    - by Heather VanCura
    JCP.Next is a series of three JSRs (JSR 348, JSR 355 and JSR 358), to be defined through the JCP process itself, with the JCP Executive Committee serving as the Expert Group. The proposed JSRs will modify the JCP's processes  - the Process Document and Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA) and will apply to all new JSRs for all Java platforms.   The first - JCP.next.1, or more formally JSR 348, Towards a new version of the Java Community Process - was completed and put into effect in October 2011 as JCP 2.8. This focused on a small number of simple but important changes to make our process more transparent and to enable broader participation. We're already seeing the benefits of these changes as new and existing JSRs adopt the new requirements. The second - JSR 355, Executive Committee Merge, is also Final. You can read the JCP 2.9 Process Document .  As part of the JSR 355 Final Release, the JCP Executive Committee published revisions to the JCP Process Document (version 2.9) and the EC Standing Rules (version 2.2).  The changes went into effect following the 2012 EC Elections in November. The third JSR 358, A major revision of the Java Community Process was submitted in June 2012.  This JSR will modify the Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA) as well as the Process Document, and will tackle a large number of complex issues, many of them postponed from JSR 348. For these reasons, the JCP EC (acting as the Expert Group for this JSR), expects to spend a considerable amount of time working on. The JSPA is defined by the JCP as "a one-year, renewable agreement between the Member and Oracle. The success of the Java community depends upon an open and transparent JCP program.  JSR 358, A major revision of the Java Community Process, is now in process and can be followed on java.net. The following JSRs and Spec Leads were the early adopters of JCP 2.8, who voluntarily migrated their JSRs from JCP 2.x to JCP 2.8 or above.  More candidates for 2012 JCP Star Spec Leads! JSR 236, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (Anthony Lai/Oracle), migrated April 2012 JSR 308, Annotations on Java Types (Michael Ernst, Alex Buckley/Oracle), migrated September 2012 JSR 335, Lambda Expressions for the Java Programming Language (Brian Goetz/Oracle), migrated October 2012 JSR 337, Java SE 8 Release Contents (Mark Reinhold/Oracle) – EG Formation, migrated September 2012 JSR 338, Java Persistence 2.1 (Linda DeMichiel/Oracle), migrated January 2012 JSR 339, JAX-RS 2.0: The Java API for RESTful Web Services (Santiago Pericas-Geertsen, Marek Potociar/Oracle), migrated July 2012 JSR 340, Java Servlet 3.1 Specification (Shing Wai Chan, Rajiv Mordani/Oracle), migrated August 2012 JSR 341, Expression Language 3.0 (Kin-man Chung/Oracle), migrated August 2012 JSR 343, Java Message Service 2.0 (Nigel Deakin/Oracle), migrated March 2012 JSR 344, JavaServer Faces 2.2 (Ed Burns/Oracle), migrated September 2012 JSR 345, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.2 (Marina Vatkina/Oracle), migrated February 2012 JSR 346, Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE 1.1 (Pete Muir/RedHat) – migrated December 2011

    Read the article

  • Today's Links (6/20/2011)

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Why your security sucks | Eric Knorr A conversation with InfoWorld security expert Roger Grimes reveals why the latest burst of attacks is just business as usual. JDev 11g R2 - ADF BC Dependency Diagram Feature | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovkis continues his exploration of JDeveloper 11g R2. Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror | Charles Newark-French "Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption," says Newark-French. "This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms." Vivek Kundra, a public servant who gets stuff done | Craig Newmark Craigslist founder Craig Newmark bids farewell to the nation's first CIO. Weblogic, QBrowser and topics | Eric Elzinga Elzinga says: "Besides using the Weblogic Console to add subscribers to our topics we can also use QBrowser to browse queues and topics on your Weblogic Server." Java EE talks at JAX Conf | Arun Gupta Arun Gupta shares links to several Java EE presentations taking place at this week's Jax Conference in San Jose, CA. Development gotchas and silver bullets | Andy Mulholland Mulholland explains why "Software development has to change to fit with new business practices!" Oracle is Proud Sponsor of Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011 | Troy Kitch Oracle will have a very strong presence at this year’s Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011 in Washington D.C., June 20-23. Database Web Service using Toplink DB Provider | Vishal Jain "With JDeveloper 11gR2 you can now create database based web services using JAX-WS Provider," says Jain. Sample Chapter: A Fusion Applications Technical Overview An excerpt from "Managing Oracle Fusion Applications" by Richard Bingham, published by Oracle Press, May 2011. White Paper: Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure This paper provides recommendations and best practices for optimizing virtualization infrastructures when deploying the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure. White paper: Oracle Optimized Solution for Lifecycle Content Management Authors Donna Harland and Nick Klosk illustrate how Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite and Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager work Oracle’s Sun hardware. Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011 Time: 4:30pm - 8:15pm ET - Note that Parking at 475 Sansome Closes at 8:30pm Location: Oracle Office,475 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA Google Map Speakers: Chris Akker, Solutions Engineer, F5 Paul Cleary, Application Architect, Oracle Alexey Ragozin, Independent Consultant Brian Oliver, Oracle

    Read the article

  • Microsoft MVP Award Nomination

    - by Mark A. Wilson
    I am extremely honored to announce that I have been nominated to receive the Microsoft MVP Award for my contributions in C#! Hold on; I have not won the award yet. But to be nominated is really humbling. Thank you very much! For those of you who may not know, here is a high-level summary of the MVP award: The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program recognizes and thanks outstanding members of technical communities for their community participation and willingness to help others. The program celebrates the most active community members from around the world who provide invaluable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference in technical communities featuring Microsoft products. MVPs are credible, technology experts from around the world who inspire others to learn and grow through active technical community participation. While MVPs come from many backgrounds and a wide range of technical communities, they share a passion for technology and a demonstrated willingness to help others. MVPs do this through the books and articles they author, the Web sites they manage, the blogs they maintain, the user groups they participate in, the chats they host or contribute to, the events and training sessions where they present, as well as through the questions they answer in technical newsgroups or message boards. - Microsoft MVP Award Nomination Email I guess I should start my nomination acceptance speech by profusely thanking Microsoft as well as everyone who nominated me. Unfortunately, I’m not completely certain who those people are. While I could guess (in no particular order: Bill J., Brian H., Glen G., and/or Rob Z.), I would much rather update this post accordingly after I know for certain who to properly thank. I certainly don’t want to leave anyone out! Please Help My next task is to provide the MVP Award committee with information and descriptions of my contributions during the past 12 months. For someone who has difficulty remembering what they did just last week, trying to remember something that I did 12 months ago is going to be a real challenge. (Yes, I should do a better job blogging about my activities. I’m just so busy!) Since this is an award about community, I invite and encourage you to participate. Please leave a comment below or send me an email. Help jog my memory by listing anything and everything that you can think of that would apply and/or be important to include in my reply back to the committee. I welcome advice on what to say and how to say it from previous award winners. Again, I greatly appreciate the nomination and welcome any assistance you can provide. Thanks for visiting and till next time, Mark A. Wilson      Mark's Geekswithblogs Blog Enterprise Developers Guild Technorati Tags: Community,Way Off Topic

    Read the article

  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for November 1, 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Hurricane Sandy Edition Power outages in the Cleveland area made it impossible to publish posts on Tuesday and Wednesday. In my neighborhood most are still without power. The sound of howling winds that dominated on Monday and Tuesday has been replaced by the sound of of portable generators. My internet connection was restored only after AT&T U-Verse crewmen hooked up a portable generator to power the relay station up the street. Bear in mind that Cleveland is 500 miles from the Atlantic coast. Mobile Development Platform Strategy Chart: ADF Mobile, WebCenter Sites, Portal, Content and Social "Unlike desktop web focused efforts, the world of mobile has undergone change at a feverish pace," says social enterprise expert John Brunswick. His extensive post charts various resources that will help you keep up. ADF Essentials - The Bare Necessities | Floyd Teter The experiment is over... And now Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter shares his impressions after spending some time with Oracle ADF Essentials, the free version of Oracle ADF. Expanding the Oracle Enterprise Repository with functional documentation Capgemini middleware specialist Marc Kuijpers shares information on how Oracle Enterprise Repository can be configured "to contain functional assets, i.e. functional designs, use cases and a logical data model" to aid in SOA governance efforts. A review of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook | RedStack "More so than any other single piece of content that I have seen on the topic, it provides the information that a SOA administrator needs to know in order to successfully configure, manage, monitor, troubleshoot and backup an Oracle SOA environment." So says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team solution architect Mark Nelson of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook, by Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek. Eating our own dog food – Oracle’s internal deployment of Oracle IDM Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Brian Eidelman recommends the recent podcast on Oracle’s internal deployment of Oracle OAM and OID. "This was a big project that involved migrating a bunch of critical, high volume applications to leverage OAM and OID," says Eidelman. "So I suggest you tune in to see and hear more about how we deploy our own software." Thought for the Day "Anyone who says they're not afraid at the time of a hurricane is either a fool or a liar, or a little bit of both." — Anderson Cooper Source: BrainyQuote

    Read the article

  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for July 3, 2013

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Industrial SOA Chapter 5: Enterprise Service Bus Enterprise Service Bus, the fifth and latest addition to the Industrial SOA article series, answers some of the most important questions surrounding the use of an ESB. Industrial SOA Chapter 4: SOA Maturity The fourth article in the Industrial SOA series, SOA Maturity offers "an exploration of the fundamentals of applying a factory approach to modern service-oriented software development." Using the Exalytics Summary Advisor and Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.4 | Mark Rittman Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's post revisits "the use of the Summary Advisor, with my BI Apps installation bumped-up to version 7.9.6.4, and the Exalytics environment patched up to 11.1.1.6.9, the latest patch release we’ve applied to that environment." Part 1 - 12c Database and WLS - Overview | Steve Felts Steve Felts shares a handy table that "maps the Oracle 12c Database features supported with various combinations of currently available WLS releases, 11g and 12c Drivers, and 11g and 12c Databases." Developers WebCast: Deploy Highly-Available Custom Services on Your Data Grid Products - July 11 Oracle Coherence Sr. Architect Brian Oliver hosts this free July 11 webcast for developers to show you how to "create and deploy customized, highly-available services for your data grid, and how real-time data processing will allow you to provide unmatched end-user experiences." A checklist for OIM go live | Daniel Gralewski FMW A-Team solution architect Daniel Gralewski's list is intended to complement Oracle Identity Manager. His post "provides tips on a few topics that are not part of the documentation." How Many ODI Master Repositories Should We Have? | Christophe Dupupet FMW solution architect Christophe Dupupet provides a simple along with best practices for the architecture of ODI repositories in a corporate environment. Distinguish EA from enterprise wide solution architecture | John Wu My buddy Tony Meyer, who did a great presentation recently at the Cleveland-area Enterprise Architect / Solution Architect Meet-up, recommends this Toolbox article by John Wu. YouTube: Oracle Fusion Applications Developer Tips If you work with Fusion Applications you'll want to check out the tips and tricks for building extensions, customizations, and integrations now available on the new Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer Relations YouTube channel. The CX Factor: Wooing and wowing customers in the digital age "There was a time when 'customer experience' was limited to what happened to you when you walked into a store, restaurant, or other place of business or when you called a business on the telephone. But that was back when you could still smoke on airplanes." Thought for the Day "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.' " — Dave Barry (Born July 3, 1947) Source: brainyquote.com

    Read the article

  • Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group Next Meeting July 21, 2011

    - by csoto
    Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011 Time: 4:30pm - 8:15pm ET (note that Parking at 475 Sansome Closes at 8:30pm) Where: Oracle Office, 475 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA Google Map We will be providing snacks and beverages. Register! - Registration is required for building security. Presentation Line Up:? 5:10pm - Batch Processing Using Coherence in Oracle Group Policy Administration - Paul Cleary, Oracle Oracle Insurance Policy Administration (OIPA) is a flexible, rules-based policy administration solution that provides full record keeping for all policy lifecycle transactions. One component of OIPA is Cycle processing, which is the batch processing of pending insurance transactions. This presentation introduces OIPA and Cycle processing, describing the unique challenges of processing a high volume of transactions within strict time windows. It then reviews how OIPA uses Oracle Coherence and the Processing Pattern to meet these challenges, describing implementation specifics that highlight the simplicity and robustness of the Processing Pattern. 6:10pm - Secure, Optimize, and Load Balance Coherence with F5 - Chris Akker, F5 F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, helps the world’s largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. Recently, F5 and Oracle partnered to deliver a novel solution that integrates Oracle Coherence 3.7 with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). This session will introduce F5 and how you can leverage BIG-IP LTM to secure, optimize, and load balance application traffic generated from Coherence*Extend clients across any number of servers in a cluster and to hardware-accelerate CPU-intensive SSL encryption. 7:10pm - Using Oracle Coherence to Enable Database Partitioning and DC Level Fault Tolerance - Alexei Ragozin, Independent Consultant and Brian Oliver, Oracle Partitioning is a very powerful technique for scaling database centric applications. One tricky part of partitioned architecture is routing of requests to the right database. The routing layer (routing table) should know the right database instance for each attribute which may be used for routing (e.g. account id, login, email, etc): it should be fast, it should fault tolerant and it should scale. All the above makes Oracle Coherence a natural choice for implementing such routing tables in partitioned architectures. This presentation will cover synchronization of the grid with multiple databases, conflict resolution, cross cluster replication and other aspects related to implementing robust partitioned architecture. Additional Info:?? - Download Past Presentations: The presentations from the previous meetings of the BACSIG are available for download here. Click on the presentation titles to download the PDF files. - Join the Coherence online community on our Oracle Coherence Users Group on LinkedIn. - Contact BACSIG with any comments, questions, presentation proposals and content suggestions.

    Read the article

  • Don't Miss At Devoxx!!!

    - by Yolande Poirier
    Come by IoT Hack Fest which starts with the session: kickstart your Raspberry Pi and/or Leap Motion project, part II on Tuesday from 9:30am to 12:00pm to learn how to start a project with the Raspberry Pi and Leap Motion. In the afternoon, you can still join a project and create your own project with the help of experts on Raspberry Pi, Leap Motion and other boards.  At the Oracle booth, Java experts will be available  to answer your  questions and demo the new features of the Java Platform, including Java Embedded, JavaFX, Java SE and Java EE. This year, the chess game that was first demoed at JavaOne keynotes last September will be showcased at Devoxx.  Duke is coming to Devoxx this year. You can get your picture taken with Duke on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (Nov. 12-14) from 12:00 to 18:00 Beer bash will be Tuesday from 17:30-19:30 and Wednesday/Thursday from 18:00 to 20:00 at the booth. Oracle is raffling off five Raspberry Pi's and a number of books every day. Make sure to stop by and get your badge scanned to enter the raffle. Raffles are Tuesday at 19:15 and Wednesday/Thursday at 19:45 at the Oracle booth.  The main conference sessions from Oracle Java experts are:  Wednesday 13 November Beyond Beauty: JavaFX, Parallax, Touch, Raspberry Pi, Gyroscopes, and Much More Angela Caicedo, Senior Member, Technical Staff, Oracle Room 7, 12:00–13:00 Lambda: A Peek Under the Hood, Brian Goetz, Software Architect, Oracle Room 8, 12:00–13:00 In Full Flow: Java 8 Lambdas in the Stream, Paul Sandoz, Software Developer, Oracle Room 8, 14:00–15:00 The Modular Java Platform and Project Jigsaw, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, Oracle, Room 8, 15:10–16:10 The Curious Case of JavaScript on the JVM, Attila Szegedi, Principal Member, Technical Staff, Oracle, Room 5, 16:40–17:40 Is It a Car? Is It a Computer? No, It’s a Raspberry Pi JavaFX Informatics System. Simon Ritter, Principal Technology Evangelist, Oracle Room 7, 16:40–17:40 Thursday 14 November Java EE 7: What’s New in the Java EE Platform Linda DeMichiel, Consulting Member, Technical Staff, Oracle, Room 8, 10:50–11:50 Java Microbenchmark Harness: The Lesser of the Two Evils, Aleksey Shipilev, Principal Member, Technical Staff, Oracle. Room 6, 14:00–15:00 Practical Restful Persistence, Shaun Smith, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Room 8, 17:50–18:50 Friday 15 November Avatar.js, Server-Side JavaScript on the Java Platform, Jean-Francois Denise, Software Developer, Oracle Room 8, 11:50–12:50

    Read the article

  • How do I get long command lines to wrap to the next line?

    - by BrianH
    Edit It was my .bashrc file. I've copied the same profile from machine to machine, and I used special characters in my $PS1 that are somehow throwing it off. I'm now sticking with the standard bash variables for my $PS1. Thanks to @ændrük for the tip on the .bashrc! ...End Edit... Something I have noticed in Ubuntu for a long time that has been frustrating to me is when I am typing a command at the command line that gets longer (wider) than the terminal width, instead of wrapping to a new line, it goes back to column 1 on the same line and starts over-writing the beginning of my command line. (It doesn't actually overwrite the actual command, but visually, it is overwriting the text that was displayed). It's hard to explain without seeing it, but let's say my terminal was 20 characters wide (Mine is more like 120 characters - but for the sake of an example), and I want to echo the English alphabet. What I type is this: echo abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz But what my terminal looks like before I hit the key is: pqrstuvwxyzghijklmno When I hit enter, it echos abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz so I know the command was received properly. It just wrapped my typing after the "o" and started over on the same line. What I would expect to happen, if I typed this command in on a terminal that was only 20 characters wide would be this: echo abcdefghijklmno pqrstuvwxyz Background: I am using bash as my shell, and I have this line in my ~/.bashrc: set -o vi to be able to navigate the command line with VI commands. I am currently using Ubuntu 10.10 server, and connecting to the server with Putty. In any other environment I have worked in, if I type a long command line, it will add a new line underneath the line I am working on when my command gets longer than the terminal width and when I keep typing I can see my command on 2 different lines. But for as long as I can remember using Ubuntu, my long commands only occupy 1 line. This also happens when I am going back to previous commands in the history (I hit Esc, then 'K' to go back to previous commands) - when I get to a previous command that was longer than the terminal width, the command line gets mangled and I cannot tell where I am at in the command. The only work-around I have found to see the entire long command is to hit "Esc-V", which opens up the current command in a VI editor. I don't think I have anything odd in my .bashrc file. I commented out the "set -o vi" line, and I still had the problem. I downloaded a fresh copy of Putty and didn't make any changes to the configuration - I just typed in my host name to connect, and I still have the problem, so I don't think it's anything with Putty (unless I need to make some config changes) Has anyone else had this problem, and can anyone think of how to fix it? Thanks in advance! Brian

    Read the article

  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 16, 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    X.509 Certificate Revocation Checking Using OCSP protocol with Oracle WebLogic Server 12c | Abhijit Patil Abhijit Patil's article focuses on how to use X.509 Certificate Revocation Checking Functionality with the OCSP protocol to validate in-bound certificates. Although this article focuses on inbound OCSP validation using OCSP, Oracle WebLogic Server 12c also supports outbound OCSP validation. Leveraging Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management for Everyday BI Needs "Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management (OSSM) is built-upon the premise that a scorecard system should not be separate from the BI system, like many comparable tools are today," says author Kevin McGinely. "Instead of a separate application with its own data, its own data definitions, and its own front-end, Oracle made the choice to integrate OSSM directly into OBIEE." Applying BI for personal productivity recognition and gamification | Capgemini Oracle Blog "It is quite obvious that if you want people to participate you need an appealing and intuitive user interface," says Capgemini's Henk Vermeulen in this interesting exploration of gamification in the enterprise. Build and release OSB projects with Maven | Edwin Biemond "With Maven we are able to build and deploy OSB projects," says Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond. "The artifacts generated by Maven called snaphosts and releases can be automatically uploaded to a software repository. These versioned OSB jars can then be downloaded by the OSB Servers and deployed." Biemond shows you how in this detailed technical post. ADF Generator for Dynamic ADF BC and ADF UI | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis' post is an extension of his OOW12 presentation, "Oracle ADF Implementations Around the Globe: Best Practices," and includes the sample application he promised to share. Service-oriented organizations have a head start in the cloud race | ZDNet ZDNet SOA blogger Joe McKendrick offers a snapshot of a recent report Forrester analyst James Staten. Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: X509 Fallback to Form | Debasish BhattacharyaOracle Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Debasish Bhattacharya shares a solution that resulted from brainstorming with colleagues Chris Johnson and Brian Eidelman. "The solution is not very difficult," says Bhattacharya, "though it needs some additional configurations and coding." It's all presented in this detailed post. Agile Architecture | David Sprott "There is ample evidence that Agile Architecture is a primary contributor to business agility, yet we do not have a well understood architecture management system that integrates with Agile methods," observes David Sprott in this extensive post. Thought for the Day "Operating systems are like underwear — nobody really wants to look at them." — Bill Joy Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

    Read the article

  • How do I get long command lines to wrap to the next line?

    - by BrianH
    Edit It was my .bashrc file. I've copied the same profile from machine to machine, and I used special characters in my $PS1 that are somehow throwing it off. I'm now sticking with the standard bash variables for my $PS1. Thanks to @ændrük for the tip on the .bashrc! ...End Edit... Something I have noticed in Ubuntu for a long time that has been frustrating to me is when I am typing a command at the command line that gets longer (wider) than the terminal width, instead of wrapping to a new line, it goes back to column 1 on the same line and starts over-writing the beginning of my command line. (It doesn't actually overwrite the actual command, but visually, it is overwriting the text that was displayed). It's hard to explain without seeing it, but let's say my terminal was 20 characters wide (Mine is more like 120 characters - but for the sake of an example), and I want to echo the English alphabet. What I type is this: echo abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz But what my terminal looks like before I hit the key is: pqrstuvwxyzghijklmno When I hit enter, it echos abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz so I know the command was received properly. It just wrapped my typing after the "o" and started over on the same line. What I would expect to happen, if I typed this command in on a terminal that was only 20 characters wide would be this: echo abcdefghijklmno pqrstuvwxyz Background: I am using bash as my shell, and I have this line in my ~/.bashrc: set -o vi to be able to navigate the command line with VI commands. I am currently using Ubuntu 10.10 server, and connecting to the server with Putty. In any other environment I have worked in, if I type a long command line, it will add a new line underneath the line I am working on when my command gets longer than the terminal width and when I keep typing I can see my command on 2 different lines. But for as long as I can remember using Ubuntu, my long commands only occupy 1 line. This also happens when I am going back to previous commands in the history (I hit Esc, then 'K' to go back to previous commands) - when I get to a previous command that was longer than the terminal width, the command line gets mangled and I cannot tell where I am at in the command. The only work-around I have found to see the entire long command is to hit "Esc-V", which opens up the current command in a VI editor. I don't think I have anything odd in my .bashrc file. I commented out the "set -o vi" line, and I still had the problem. I downloaded a fresh copy of Putty and didn't make any changes to the configuration - I just typed in my host name to connect, and I still have the problem, so I don't think it's anything with Putty (unless I need to make some config changes) Has anyone else had this problem, and can anyone think of how to fix it? Thanks in advance! Brian

    Read the article

  • Who Are the BI Users in Your Neighborhood?

    - by [email protected]
    By Brian Dayton on March 19, 2010 10:52 PM Forrester's Boris Evelson recently wrote a blog titled "Who are the BI Personas?" that I enjoyed for a number of reasons. It's a quick read, easy to grasp and (refreshingly) focuses on the users of technology VS the technology. As Evelson admits, he meant to keep the reference chart at a high-level because there are too many different permutations and additional sub-categories to make such a chart useful. For me, I wouldn't head into the technical permutations but more the contextual use of BI and the issues that users experience. My thoughts brought up more questions than answers such as: Context: - HOW: With the exception of the "Power User" persona--likely some sort of business or operations analyst? - WHEN: Are they using the information to make real-time decisions on the front lines (a customer service manager or shipping/logistics VP) or are they using this information for cumulative analysis and business planning? Or both? - WHERE: What areas of the business are more or less likely to rely on BI across an organization? Human Resources, Operations, Facilities, Finance--- and why are some more prone to use data-driven analysis than others? Issues: - DELAYS & DRAG ON IT?: One of the persona characteristics Evelson calls out is a reliance on IT. Every persona except for the "Power User" has a heavy reliance on IT for support. What business issues or delays does that cause to users? What is the drag on IT resources who could potentially be creating instead of reporting? - HOW MANY CLICKS: If BI is being used within the context of a transaction (sales manager looking for upsell opportunities as an example) is that person getting the information within the context of that action or transaction? Or are they minimizing screens, logging into another application or reporting tool, running queries, etc.? Who are the BI Users in your neighborhood or line of business? Do Evelson's personas resonate--and do the tools that he calls out (he refers to it as "BI Style") resonate with what your personas have or need? Finally, I'm very interested if BI use is viewed as a bolt-on...or an integrated part of your daily enterprise processes?

    Read the article

  • So Much Happening at Devoxx

    - by Tori Wieldt
    Devoxx, the premier Java conference in Europe, has been sold out for a while. The organizers (thanks Stephan and crew!) cap the attendance to make sure all attendees have a great experience, and that speaks volumes about their priorities. The speakers, hackathons, labs, and networking are all first class. The Oracle Technology Network will be there, and if you were smart/lucky enough to get a ticket, come find us and join the fun: IoT Hack Fest Build fun and creative Internet of Things (IoT) applications with Java Embedded, Raspberry Pi and Leap Motion on the University Days (Monday and Tuesday). Learn from top experts Yara & Vinicius Senger and Geert Bevin at two Raspberry Pi & Leap Motion hands-on labs and hacking sessions. Bring your computer. Training and equipment will be provided. Devoxx will also host an Internet of Things shop in the exhibition floor where attendees can purchase Arduino, Raspberry PI and Robot starter kits. Bring your IoT wish list! Video Interviews Yolande Poirier and I will be interviewing members of the Java Community in the back of the Expo hall on Wednesday and Thursday. Videos are posted on Parleys and YouTube/Java. We have a few slots left, so contact me (you can DM @Java) if you want to share your insights or cool new tip or trick with the rest of the developer community. (No commercials, no fluff. Keep it techie and keep it real.)  Oracle Keynote Wednesday morning Mark Reinhold, Chief Java Platform Architect, and Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect will provide an update on Java 8 and beyond. Oracle Booth Drop by the Oracle booth to see old and new friends.  We'll have Java in Action demos and the experts to explain them and answer your questions. We are raffling off Raspberry Pi's each day, so be sure to get your badged scanned. We'll have beer in the booth each evening. Look for @Java in her lab coat.  See you at Devoxx! 

    Read the article

  • Nginx Proxying to Multiple IP Addresses for CMS' Website Preview

    - by Matthew Borgman
    First-time poster, so bear with me. I'm relatively new to Nginx, but have managed to figure out what I've needed... until now. Nginx v1.0.15 is proxying to PHP-FPM v.5.3.10, which is listening at http://127.0.0.1:9000. [Knock on wood] everything has been running smoothly in terms of hosting our CMS and many websites. Now, we've developed our CMS and configured Nginx such that each supported website has a preview URL (e.g. http://[WebsiteID].ourcms.com/) where the site can be, you guessed it, previewed in those situations where DNS doesn't yet resolve to our server, etc. Specifically, we use Nginx's Map module (http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpMapModule) and a regular expression in the server_name of the CMS' server{ } block to 1) lookup a website's primary domain name from its preview URL and then 2) forward the request to the "matched" primary domain. The corresponding Nginx configuration: map $host $h { 123.ourcms.com www.example1.com; 456.ourcms.com www.example2.com; 789.ourcms.com www.example3.com; } and server { listen [OurCMSIPAddress]:80; listen [OurCMSIPAddress]:443 ssl; root /var/www/ourcms.com; server_name ~^(.*)\.ourcms\.com$; ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/conf.d/ourcms.com.chained.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/conf.d/ourcms.com.key; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1/; proxy_set_header Host $h; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } } (Note: I do realize that the regex in the server_name should be "tighter" for security reasons and match only the format of the website ID (i.e. a UUID in our case).) This configuration works for 99% of our sites... except those that have a dedicated IP address for an installed SSL certificate. A "502 Bad Gateway" is returned for these and I'm unsure as to why. This is how I think the current configuration works for any requests that match the regex (e.g. http://123.ourcms.com/): Nginx looks up the website's primary domain from the mapping, and as a result of the proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1 directive, passes the request back to Nginx itself, which since the proxied request has a hostname corresponding to the website's primary domain name, via the proxy_set_header Host $h directive, Nginx handles the request as if it was as direct request for that hostname. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this understanding. Should I be proxying to those website's dedicated IP addresses? I tried this, but it didn't seem to work? Is there a setting in the Proxy module that I'm missing? Thanks for the help. MB

    Read the article

  • Off The Beaten Path—Three Things Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful For

    - by Christine Randle
    By: Jim Lein, Senior Director, Oracle Accelerate Last Sunday I went on a walkabout.  That’s when I just step out the door of my Colorado home and hike through the mountains for hours with no predetermined destination. I favor “social trails”, the unmapped routes pioneered by both animal and human explorers.  These tracks  are usually more challenging than established, marked routes and you can’t be 100% sure of where you’re going to end up. But I’ve found the rewards to be much greater. For awhile, I pondered on how—depending upon your perspective—the current economic situation worldwide could be viewed as either a classic “the glass is half empty” or a “the glass is half full” scenario. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow and so I’m continually amazed and fascinated by the success stories our customers relate to me.  Oracle’s successful midsize companies are growing via innovation, agility, and opportunity. For them, the glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Innovation The sun angling through the pine trees reminded me of a conversation with a European customer a year ago May.  You might not recognize the name but, chances are, your local evening weather report relies on this company’s weather observation, monitoring and measurement products.  For decades, the company was recognized in its industry for product innovation, but its recent rapid growth comes from tailoring end to end product and service solutions based on the needs of distinctly different customer groups across industrial, public sector, and defense sectors.  Hours after that phone call I was walking my dog in a local park and came upon a small white plastic box sprouting short antennas and dangling by a nylon cord from a tree branch.  I cut it down. The name of that customer’s company was stamped on the housing. “It’s a radiosonde from a high altitude weather balloon,” he told me the next day. “Keep it as a souvenir.”  It sits on my fireplace mantle and elicits many questions from guests. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Agility In July, I had another interesting discussion with the CFO of an Asia-Pacific company which owns and operates a large portfolio of leisure assets. They are best known for their epic outdoor theme parks. However, their primary growth today is coming from a chain of indoor amusement centers in the USA where billiards, bowling, and laser tag take the place of roller coasters, kiddy rides, and wave pools. With mountains and rivers right out my front door, I’m not much for theme parks, but I’ll take a spirited game of laser tag any day.  This company has grown dramatically since first implementing Oracle ERP more than a decade ago. Their profitable expansion into a completely foreign market is derived from the ability to replicate proven and efficient best business practices across diverse operating environments.  They recently went live on Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Taleo. Their CFO explained to me how, with thousands of employees in three countries, Fusion HCM and Taleo would enable them to remain incredibly agile by acting on trends linking individual employee performance to their management, establishing and maintaining those best practices. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Opportunity I have three GPS apps on my iPhone. I use them mainly to keep track of my stats—distance, time, and vertical gain. However, every once in awhile I need to find the most efficient route back home before dark from my current location (notice I didn’t use the word “lost”). In August I listened in on an interview with the CFO of another European company that designs and delivers telematics solutions—the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics—for managing the mobile workforce. These solutions enable customers to achieve evolutionary step-changes in their performance and service delivery. Forgive the overused metaphor, but this is route optimization on steroids.  The company’s executive team saw an opportunity in this emerging market and went “all in”. Consequently, they are being rewarded with tremendous growth results and market domination by providing the ability for their clients to collect and analyze performance information related to fuel consumption, service workforce safety, and asset productivity. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for health, family, friends, and a career with an innovative company that helps companies leverage top tier software to drive and manage growth. And I’m thankful to have learned the lesson that good things happen when you get off the beaten path—both when hiking and when forging new routes through a complex world economy. Halfway through my walkabout on Sunday, after scrambling up a long stretch of scree-covered hill, I crested a ridge with an obstructed view of 14,265 ft Mt Evans just a few miles to the west.  There, nowhere near a house or a trail, someone had placed a wooden lounge chair. Its wood was worn and faded but it was sturdy. I had lunch and a cold drink in my pack. Opportunity knocked and I seized it. Happy Thanksgiving.  

    Read the article

  • Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

    Read the article

  • Stand-Up Desk 2012 Update

    - by BuckWoody
    One of the more popular topics here on my technical blog doesn't have to do with technology, per-se - it's about the choice I made to go to a stand-up desk work environment. If you're interested in the history of those, check here: Stand-Up Desk Part One Stand-Up Desk Part Two I have made some changes and I was asked to post those here.Yes, I'm still standing - I think the experiment has worked well, so I'm continuing to work this way. I've become so used to it that I notice when I sit for a long time. If I'm flying, or driving a long way, or have long meetings, I take breaks to stand up and move around. That being said, I don't stand as much as I did. I started out by standing the entire day - which did not end well. As you can read in my second post, I found that sitting down for a few minutes each hour worked out much better. And over time I would say that I now stand about 70-80% of the day, depending on the day. Some days I don't even notice I'm standing, so I don't sit as often. Other days I find that I really tire quickly - so I sit more often. But in both cases, I stand more than I sit. In the first post you can read about how I used a simple coffee-table from Ikea to elevate my desktop to the right height. I then adjusted the height where I stand by using a small plastic square and some carpet. Over time I found this did not work as well as I'd like. The primary reason is that the front of these are at the same depth - so my knees would hit the desk or table when I sat down. Also, the desk was at a certain height, and I had to adjust, rather than the other way around.  Also, I like a lot of surface area on top of a desk - almost more of a table. Routing cables and wiring was a pain, and of course moving it was out of the question.   So I've changed what I use. I found a perfect solution for what I was looking for - industrial wire shelving: I bought one, built only half of it (for the right height I wanted) and arranged the shelves the way I wanted. I then got a 5'x4' piece of wood from Lowes, and mounted it to where the top was balanced, but had an over-hang  I could get my knees under easily.My wife sewed a piece of fake-leather for the top. This arrangement provides the following benefits: Very strong Rolls easily, wheels can lock to prevent rolling Long, wide shelves Wire-frame allows me to route any kind of wiring and other things all over the desk I plugged in my UPS and ran it's longer power-cable to the wall outlet. I then ran the router's LAN connection along that wire, and covered both with a large insulation sleeve. I then plugged in everything to the UPS, and routed all the wiring. I can now roll the desk almost anywhere in the room so that I can record, look out the window, get closer to or farther away from the door and more. I put a few boxes on the shelves as "drawers" and tidied that part up. Even my printer fits on a shelf. Laser-dog not included - some assembly required In the second post you can read about the bar-stool I purchased from Target for the desk. I cheaped-out on this one, and it proved to be a bad choice. Because I had to raise it so high, and was constantly sitting on it and then standing up, the gas-cylinder in it just gave out. So it became a very short stool that I ended up getting rid of. In the end, this one from Ikea proved to be a better choice: And so this arrangement is working out perfectly. I'm finding myself VERY productive this way. I hope these posts help you if you decide to try working at a stand-up desk. Although I was skeptical at first, I've found it to be a very healthy, easy way to code, design and especially present over a web-cam. It's natural to stand to speak when you're presenting, and it feels more energetic than sitting down to talk to others.

    Read the article

  • Hidden Features of C#?

    - by Serhat Özgel
    This came to my mind after I learned the following from this question: where T : struct We, C# developers, all know the basics of C#. I mean declarations, conditionals, loops, operators, etc. Some of us even mastered the stuff like Generics, anonymous types, lambdas, linq, ... But what are the most hidden features or tricks of C# that even C# fans, addicts, experts barely know? Here are the revealed features so far: Keywords yield by Michael Stum var by Michael Stum using() statement by kokos readonly by kokos as by Mike Stone as / is by Ed Swangren as / is (improved) by Rocketpants default by deathofrats global:: by pzycoman using() blocks by AlexCuse volatile by Jakub Šturc extern alias by Jakub Šturc Attributes DefaultValueAttribute by Michael Stum ObsoleteAttribute by DannySmurf DebuggerDisplayAttribute by Stu DebuggerBrowsable and DebuggerStepThrough by bdukes ThreadStaticAttribute by marxidad FlagsAttribute by Martin Clarke ConditionalAttribute by AndrewBurns Syntax ?? operator by kokos number flaggings by Nick Berardi where T:new by Lars Mæhlum implicit generics by Keith one-parameter lambdas by Keith auto properties by Keith namespace aliases by Keith verbatim string literals with @ by Patrick enum values by lfoust @variablenames by marxidad event operators by marxidad format string brackets by Portman property accessor accessibility modifiers by xanadont ternary operator (?:) by JasonS checked and unchecked operators by Binoj Antony implicit and explicit operators by Flory Language Features Nullable types by Brad Barker Currying by Brian Leahy anonymous types by Keith __makeref __reftype __refvalue by Judah Himango object initializers by lomaxx format strings by David in Dakota Extension Methods by marxidad partial methods by Jon Erickson preprocessor directives by John Asbeck DEBUG pre-processor directive by Robert Durgin operator overloading by SefBkn type inferrence by chakrit boolean operators taken to next level by Rob Gough pass value-type variable as interface without boxing by Roman Boiko programmatically determine declared variable type by Roman Boiko Static Constructors by Chris Easier-on-the-eyes / condensed ORM-mapping using LINQ by roosteronacid Visual Studio Features select block of text in editor by Himadri snippets by DannySmurf Framework TransactionScope by KiwiBastard DependantTransaction by KiwiBastard Nullable<T> by IainMH Mutex by Diago System.IO.Path by ageektrapped WeakReference by Juan Manuel Methods and Properties String.IsNullOrEmpty() method by KiwiBastard List.ForEach() method by KiwiBastard BeginInvoke(), EndInvoke() methods by Will Dean Nullable<T>.HasValue and Nullable<T>.Value properties by Rismo GetValueOrDefault method by John Sheehan Tips & Tricks nice method for event handlers by Andreas H.R. Nilsson uppercase comparisons by John access anonymous types without reflection by dp a quick way to lazily instantiate collection properties by Will JavaScript-like anonymous inline-functions by roosteronacid Other netmodules by kokos LINQBridge by Duncan Smart Parallel Extensions by Joel Coehoorn

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62  | Next Page >