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• Silverlight Cream for March 24, 2010 -- #819

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Nokola, Tim Heuer, Christian Schormann, Brad Abrams, David Kelley, Phil Middlemiss, Michael Klucher, Brandon Watson, Kunal Chowdhury, Jacek Ciereszko, and Unni. Shoutouts: Michael Klucher has a short post up For Love of the Game (Development)…, where he's looking for some input from the developer community. Shawn Hargreaves has a link post up of all the Windows Phone MIX10 presentations Chris Cavanagh has a Soft-Body Physics for Windows Phone 7 post up that goes along with one he did 1-1/2 years ago! Jeff Weber posted An Open Letter To Microsoft Regarding The Silverlight Game Development Community Pete Brown posted his MIX10 Recap ... lots of information, and discussion of what he was up to ... I liked the Trivia app Pete... glad to hear that was yours :) I've changed my mind and added a WP7 tag to SilverlightCream. I'll straighten out all the Mobile plus Silverlight links to point at the WP7 tab hopefully tonight. From SilverlightCream.com: EasyPainter Source Pack 3: Adorners, Mouse Cursors and Frames Nokola has been busy with EasyPainter adding in Custom, Extensible Mouse Cursors and Customizable Adorners with extensible adorner frames, and best of all... all with source code! Simulate Geo Location in Silverlight Windows Phone 7 emulator Among the things we don't have in our WP7 emulators is Geo Location... Tim Heuer comes to the rescue with a simulator for it... too cool, Tim! Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part II Christian Schormann is back with Part 2 of his tutorial sequence on the new Path Layout. Really good info and definitely cool presentations of the control. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services Brad Abrams continues his series with a post on exposing OData services. This looks like a great tutorial on the topic... will probably resolve some questions I've been having :) No Silverlight and Preloader Experience(ish) - in 10 seconds... David Kelley exposes the code he uses on his site, designed to be friendly to Silverlight and non-Silverlight users alike. Merged Dictionaries of Style Resources and Blend Phil Middlemiss has a nice article up on Merged Dictionaries and using multiple resource dictionaries that the app chooses, but also be compatible with Prism and Blend while not eating your system resources out of house and home. XNA Game Studio and Windows Phone Emulator Compatibility Michael Klucher has a definitive post up about getting your XNA and system up-to-speed for WP7... a must-read if you've been running any of the other XNA drops. Windows Phone 7 301 Redirect Bug Brandon Watson reports a 301 Redirect bug on WP7 ... see the code and how he got it, then follow along as he explains all the debug paths he took and what the resolution (?) really is :) Silverlight 4: How to use the new Printing API? Kunal Chowdhury has a tutorial up on printing with Silverlight 4 RC... from the project layout to printing and then printing a smaller section... all good Printing problem in Silverlight 4.0 RC - loading images in code behind Jacek Ciereszko also is writing about printing, and in his case he had problems with loading an image dynamically and printing it... plus he provides a solution to the 'blank page' problem. ToolboxExampleAttribute - a new extension point in Blend 4 (and a few other extensibility related changes) Unni has an article up about Expression Blend 4's new ToolboxExampleAttribute which allow you to have multiple examples of the same type resulting in different XAML produced. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone    MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for January 30, 2011 -- #1037

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Ollie Riches, Colin Eberhardt, Andrej Tozon, Arik Poznanski, Deborah Kurata(-2-), Jay Kimble, Yochay Kiriaty, Peter Kuhn, Mike Ormond, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), and Matthias Shapiro. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Missing Chart Legend" Deborah Kurata WP7: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 - Text rendering" Peter Kuhn Shoutouts: Timmy Kokke has a post up discussing What’s new in the Expression Design January 2011 preview? From SilverlightCream.com: WP7Contrib: Thread safe ObservableCollection<T> Ollie Riches, one of the two originators of WP7Contrib, has a post up on the WP7C ObservableCollection... what and why. Windows Phone 7 DeferredLoadContentControl Colin Eberhardt's latest is one we should all take notice of... a content control that defers rendering to provide a better user experience... source code is available as are some good external links Andrej Tozon on Hey weigh! WP7 application SilverlightShow interviews WP7 Dev Andrej Tozon and gets his take on his app, challenges, tips, and the future of WP7. A ProgressBar With Text For Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski demonstrates putting text up on the progress bar to let your users know what you're up to... and it looks great in the screenshots. Charting in a Silverlight Application using MVVM Deborah Kurata is checking out the Charting control this time around... using the charting control from the toolbox in the MVVM app she built in the last post... C# and VB code as always. Missing Chart Legend Deborah Kurata's latest in the world of Charting and MVVM involves using a custom theme and having your chart legend disappear... never fear, she's gonna tell you how to fix that! Silverlight/WP7 tip: Detecting when in VS Design Mode Jay Kimble has a post up that not only resolves a question you may need answered during development (are you in VS design Mode), but it also helps resolve a class of problem that Jay explains. Windows Phone GPS Emulator Yochay Kiriaty points out that while part of the issues of building a GPS-driven app for WP7 is getting your head around the tools, the next hurdle is testing... and that's what he's really discussing... "Windows Phone GPS Emulator" ... if you're playing with the GPS, you'll want this. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 - Text rendering Peter Kuhn's latest tutorial in his XNA series for Silverlight developers is up at SilverlightShow... in this tutorial, Peter discusses text... it's a vastly different game displaying text in XNA as compared to Silverlight ... check it out and see. OData and Windows Phone 7 Mike Ormond starts you off using OData on your WP7 by showing where to download the libraries, and not stopping until he has an app running that reads an OData feed, plus he plans on continuing the quest in future posts. WP7 ProgressOverlay control in depth: features and customization WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple new posts up. The first one is an in-depth look at the ProgressOverlay control in the Codeing4fun Toolkit... pretty cool to be able to put your logo or app logo up. On Testing Windows Phone 7 Applications – Part II: Dealing with the WP7 Application Model WindowsPhoneGeek also has 5 more WP7 testing tips... and these are a little more technical than the first set, and includes some good external links. Topics include: Tombstoning, Usability, Navigation, Capabilities, and Memory consumption. Fun Theme-Friendly Windows Phone Icon Matthias Shapiro explains how to have your WP7 icon change based on the theme your user has chosen... great examples, and XAML included Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it?

  What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it? Agile Modeling is an add-on to existing agile methodologies like Extreme programming (XP) and Rational Unified Process (RUP). Agile Modeling enables developers to develop a customized software development process that actually meets their current development needs and is flexible enough to adjust in the future. According to Scott Ambler, Agile Modeling consists of five core values that enable this methodology to be effective and light weight Agile Modeling Core Values: Communication Simplicity Feedback Courage Humility Communication is a key component to any successful project. Open communication between stakeholder and the development team is essential when developing new applications or maintaining legacy systems. Agile models promote communication amongst software development teams and stakeholders. Furthermore, Agile Models provide a common understanding of an application for members of a software development team allowing them to have a universal common point of reference. The use of simplicity in Agile Models enables the exploration of new ideas and concepts through the use of basic diagrams instead of investing the time in writing tens or hundreds of lines of code. Feedback in regards to application development is essential. Feedback allows a development team to confirm that the development path is on track. Agile Models allow for quick feedback from shareholders because minimal to no technical expertise is required to understand basic models. Courage is important because you need to make important decisions and be able to change direction by either discarding or refactoring your work when some of your decisions prove inadequate, according to Scott Ambler. As a member of a development team, we must admit that we do not know everything even though some of us think we do. This is where humility comes in to play. Everyone is a knowledge expert in their own specific domain. If you need help with your finances then you would consult an accountant. If you have a problem or are in need of help with a topic why would someone not consult with a subject expert? An effective approach is to assume that everyone involved with your project has equal value and therefore should be treated with respect. Agile Model Characteristics: Purposeful Understandable Sufficiently Accurate Sufficiently Consistent Sufficiently Detailed Provide Positive Value Simple as Possible Just Fulfill Basic Requirements According to Scott Ambler, Agile models are the most effective possible because the time that is invested in the model is just enough effort to complete the job. Furthermore, if a model isn’t good enough yet then additional effort can be invested to get more value out of the model. However if a model is good enough, for the current needs, or surpass the current needs, then any additional work done on the model would be a waste. It is important to remember that good enough is in the eye of the beholder, so this can be tough. In order for Agile Models to work effectively Active Stakeholder need to participation in the modeling process. Finally it is also very important to model with others, this allows for additionally input ensuring that all the shareholders needs are reflected in the models. How can Agile Models be incorporated in to our projects? Agile Models can be incorporated in to our project during the requirement gathering and design phases. As requirements are gathered the models should be updated to incorporate the new project details as they are defined and updated. Additionally, the Agile Models created during the requirement phase can be the bases for the models created during the design phase.  It is important to only add to the model when the changes fit within the agile model characteristics and they do not over complicate the design.

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• Expression Studio 4 - without SketchFlow&hellip;

  - by mbcrump

  is kinda like an explosion with no “Ka-Boom”… I was excited to hear the news yesterday at Microsoft Teched that Expression Studio 4 had officially launched. MSDN subscribers could log in and download the full release. So, I logged into my MSDN account and started downloading Expression Studio 4 Premium thinking that I was only minutes away from trying out SketchFlow 4. To my dismay, I launched Blend 4 and noticed it did not say SketchFlow on the splash screen. So, I went to New Project and the template was not available. After some digging around on the net, I learned my premium MSDN subscription did not include SketchFlow and I would need to purchase the Ultimate Edition. Below is a excerpt directly from Microsoft: Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Ultimate? A: Expression Studio 4 Ultimate is comprised of 4 products, Expression Web 4, Microsoft Expression Blend® 4 + SketchFlow, Expression Encoder 4 Pro and Expression Design 4. Expression Blend 4 includes SketchFlow in Expression Studio 4 Ultimate product only. Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Premium? A: Expression Studio 4 Premium is comprised of 4 products, Expression Web 4, Microsoft Expression Blend 4, Expression Encoder 4 and Expression Design 4. Expression Studio 4 Premium is not available for retail purchase. Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Web Professional? A: Expression Studio 4 Web Professional is comprised of 3 products, Expression Web 4, Expression Encoder 4 and Expression Design 4. As you can see, we got screwed on this deal and plenty of people are complaining: Kiran Says: 6.07.2010 at 5:07 PM No SketchFlow for Expression Studio 4 Premium? What a bumper for Microsoft Partners!! Martin Says: 6.07.2010 at 6:18 PM Why does Expression Professional Subscription not include upgrades and new releases of Expression Studio. Good question hey. I bought my subscription 5 days ago thinking I would get what i purchased but no Expression upgrades or new releases for me, what a waste of money. I think I am not the only long term user of this software that feels disgruntled. Sorry john just had to tell someone. shaggygi Says: 6.07.2010 at 7:31 PM SketchFlow NOT included in Studio 4? WTF! I repeat.... WT...Freaking.... F! This is totally unacceptable. My development team purchased VS 2010 Premium w/ MSDN with the impression by Adam Kinney, Scott Guthrie, etc. that this would be included in the Premium package or some sort of free upgrade. I understand this is a Marketing thing, but come on! I believe, at very least, this should have been explained in detail before this release. John Papa... as a rep to give feedback to the team... Please please and please.... tell powers-at-be to fix this problem. Sorry for the rant. Besides this issue, I believe it is a very good product:) Thanks Vaclav Elias Says: 6.08.2010 at 4:30 AM Well, I am also not happy that SketchFlow is only for the chosen ones :-) It is very nice product. Actually, kind of foundation for web development so they could really support any MSDN subscribers.. :-( I am hoping that Microsoft will make this right for all of us with MSDN premier subscriptions. In the meantime,  you can check out the 5 day training series available here.

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• Home Energy Management & Automation with Windows Phone 7

  A number of people at Clarity are personally interested in home energy conservation and home automation. We feel that a mobile device is a great fit for bringing this idea to fruition. While this project is merely a concept and not directly associated with Microsofts Hohm web service, it provides a great model for communicating the concept. I wanted to take the idea a step further and combine saving energy in your home with the ability to track water usage and control your home devices. I designed an application that focuses on total home control and not just energy usage. Application Overview By monitoring home consumption in real time and with yearly projections users can pinpoint vampire devices, times of high or low consumption, and wasteful patterns of energy use. Energy usage meters indicate total current consumption as well as individual device consumption. Users can then use the information to take action, make adjustments, and change their consumption behaviors. The app can be used to automate certain systems like lighting, temperature, or alarms. Other features can be turned on an off at the touch of a toggle switch on your phone, away from home. Forget to turn off the TV or shut the garage door? No problem, you can do it from your phone. Through settings you can enable and disable features of the phone that apply to your home making it a completely customized and convenient experience. To be clear, this equates to more security, big environmental impact, and even bigger savings.   Design and User Interface  Since this panorama application is designed for win phone 7 devices, it complies with the UI Design and Interaction Guide for wp7. I developed the frame and page hierarchy from existing examples. The interface takes advantage of the interactive nature of touch screens with slider controls, pivot control views, and toggle switches to turn on and off devices (not shown in mockup). I followed recommendations for text based elements and adapted the tile notifications to display the most recent user activity. For example, the mockup indicates upon launching the app that the last thing you did was program the thermostat. This model is great for quick launching common user actions. One last design feature to point out is the technical reasons for supplying both light and dark themes for the app. Since this application is targeting energy consumption it only makes sense to consider the effect of the apps background color or image on the phones energy use. When displaying darker colors like black the OLED display may use less power, extending battery life. Other Considerations For now I left out options of wind and solar powered energy options because they are not available to everyone. Renewable energy sources and new technologies associated with them are definitely ideas to keep in mind for a next iteration. Another idea to explore for such an application would be to include a savings model similar to mint.com. In addition to general energy-saving recommendations the application could recommend customized ways to save based on your current utility providers and available options in your area. If your television or refrigerator is guilty of sucking a lot of energy then you may see recommendations for energy star products that could save you even more money! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Silverlight Cream for March 21, 2010 -- #816

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, John Papa(-2-, -3-, -4-), Jonas Follesø, David Anson, Scott Guthrie, Andrej Tozon, Bill Reiss(-2-), Pete Blois, and Lee. Shoutouts: Frank LaVigne has a Mix10 Session Downloader for us all to use... thanks Frank! Read what Ward Bell has to say about MVVM, Josh Smith’s Way ... it's all good. Robby Ingebretsen posts on his 10 Favorite Open Source Fonts You Can Embed in WPF or Silverlight Mike Harsh posted Slides and Demos from my MIX10 Session . The download link at Drop.io is down for maintenance until Sunday evening, March 21. From SilverlightCream.com: Blend 4: TreeView SelectedItemChanged using MVVM Michael Washington has a post up about doing SelectedItemChanged on a TreeView with MVVM, oh and he's starting out in Blend 4... Silverlight TV 14: Developing for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight John Papa hit Silverlight TV pretty hard at the beginning of MIX10. This first one is with Mike Harsh talking about WP7. (Hi Mike ... wondered where you'd run off to!), and you can go to the shoutout section to get Mike's session material from MIX as well. Silverlight TV 15: Announcing Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10 In this next Silverlight TV(15), John Papa and Adam Kinney discuss Silverlight 4RC ... thank goodness it's out, we can all let go of the breath we've been holding in :) Silverlight TV 16: Tim Heuer and Jesse Liberty Talk about Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10 Silverlight TV 16 has John Papa sharing the spotlight with Jesse Liberty and Tim Heuer ... geez... can you find 3 more kowledgable Silverlight folks to listen to? No? then go listen to this :) Silverlight TV 17: Build a Twitter Client for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight The latest Silverlight TV has John Papa bringing Mike Harsh back to produce a Twitter Client for WP7. Simulating multitouch on the Windows Phone 7 Emulator Jonas Follesø has a great post up about simulating multi-touch on WP7 using multiple mice ... yeah, you read that right :) Using IValueConverter to create a grouped list of items simply and flexibly David Anson demonstrates grouping items in a ListBox using IValueConverter. I think I can pretty well guarantee I would NOT have thought of doing this.. :) Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight In the MIX10 first-day keynote, Scott Guthrie did File->New Project and built a WP7 Twitter app. He has that up as a tutorial with all sorts of external links including one to the keynote itself. Named and optional parameters in Silverlight 4 Andrej Tozon delves into the optional parameters that are now available to Silverlight developers... pretty cool stuff. Space Rocks game step 4: Inheriting from Sprite Bill Reiss continues with his game development series with this one on inheriting from the Sprite class and centering objects Space Rocks game step 5: Rotating the ship Bill Reiss's episode 5 is on rotating the ship you setup in episode 4. Don't worry about the transforms, Bill gives it all to us :) Labyrinth Sample for Windows Phone Wow... check out the sample Pete Blois did for the Phone... Silverlight coolness :) PathListBox in SL4 – firstlook Lee has a post up on the PathListBox. I think this is going to catch on quick... it's just too cool not to! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Book Reviews: Art of Community and Eyetracking Web Usability

  - by ultan o'broin

  Holidays time offers a chance to catch up on some user experience and user assistance related material. So, two short book reviews (which I considered using my new Tumblr blog for. More about that another time) coming up. The Art of Community by Jono Bacon Excellent starting point for anyone wanting to get going in the community software (FLOSS, for example) space or understand how to set up, manage, and leverage the collective intelligence of communities for whatever ends. The book is a little too long in my opinion, and of course, usage of what Jono is recommending needs to be nuanced and adapted for enterprise applications space (hardly surprising there is a lot about Ubuntu, Lug Radio, and so on given Jono's interests). Shame there wasn't more information on international, non-English community considerations too. Still, some great ideas and insight into setting up and managing communities that I will leverage (watch out for the results on this blog, later in 2011). One section, on collaborative writing really jumped out. It reinforced the whole idea that to successful community initiatives are based on instigators knowing what makes the community tick in the first place. How about this for insight into user profiles for people who write community user assistance (OK then, "doc") and what tools they might use (in this case, we're talking about Jokosher): "Most people who write documentation for open source software projects would fall into the category of power user. They are technology enthusiasts who are not interested in the super-technical avenues of programming, but want to help out. Many of these people have good writing skills and a good knowledge of using the software, so the documentation fit is natural. With Jokosher we wanted to acknowledge this profile of user. As such, instead of focussing on complex text processing tools, we encouraged our documentation contributors to use a wiki." The book is available for free here, and well as being available from usual sources. Eyetracking Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Prentice Another fine book by established experts. I have some field experience of eyetracking studies myself --in the user assistance for enterprise applications space--though Jakob and Kara concentrate on websites for their research here. I would caution how much about websites transfers easily to the applications space, especially enterprise applications, as claimed in the book too. However, Jakob and Kara do make the case very well that understanding design goals (for example, productivity improvement in the case of applications) and the context of the software use is critical. Executing a study using eyetracking technology requires that you know what you want to test, can set up realistic tasks for testing by representative testers, and then analyze the results. Be precise, as lots of data will be generated (I think the authors underplay the effort in analyzing data too). What I found disappointing was the lack of emphasis on eyetracking as only part of the usability solution. It's really for fine-tuning designs in my opinion, and should be used after other design reviews. I also wasn't that crazy about the level of disengagement between the qualitative and quantitative side of this kind of testing that the book indicated. I think it is useful to have testers verbalize their thoughts and for test engineers to prompt, intervene, or guide as necessary. More on cultural or international aspects to usability testing might have been included too (websites are available to everyone). To conclude, I enjoyed the book, took on board some key takeaways about methodologies and found the recommendations sensible and easy to follow (for example about Forms layouts). Applying enterprise applications requirements such as those relating to user profiles, design goals, and overall context of use in conjunction with what's in this book would be the way to go here. It also made me think of how interesting it would be to compare eyetracking findings between website and enterprise applications usage.

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• The dislikes of TDD

  - by andrewstopford

  I enjoy debates about TDD and Brian Harrys blog post is no exception. Brian sounds out what he likes and dislikes about TDD and it's the dislikes I'll focus on. The idea of having unit tests that cover virtually every line of code that I’ve written that I have to refactor every time I refactor my code makes me shudder.  Doing this way makes me take nearly twice as long as it would otherwise take and I don’t feel like I get sufficient benefits from it. Refactoring your tests to match your refactored code sounds like the tests are suffering. Too many hard dependencies with no SOLID concerns are a sure fire reason you would do this. Maybe at the start of a TDD cycle you would need to do this as your design evolves and you remove these dependencies but this should quickly be resolved as you refactor. If you find your self still doing it then stop and look back at your design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of unit tests.  I just prefer to write them after the code has stopped shaking a bit.  In fact most of my early testing is “manual”.  Either I write a small UI on top of my service that allows me to plug in values and try it or write some quick API tests that I throw away as soon as I have validated them. The problem with this is that a UI can make assumptions on your code that then just unit test around and very quickly the design becomes bad and you technical debt sweeps in. If you want to blackbox test your code with a UI then do so after your TDD cycles not before. This is probably by biggest issue with a literal TDD interpretation.  TDD says you never write a line of code without a failing test to show you need it.  I find it leads developers down a dangerous path.  Without any help from a methodology, I have met way too many developers in my life that “back into a solution”.  By this, I mean they write something, it mostly works and they discover a new requirement so they tack it on, and another and another and when they are done, they’ve got a monstrosity of special cases each designed to handle one specific scenario.  There’s way more code than there should be and it’s way too complicated to understand. I believe in finding general solutions to problems from which all the special cases naturally derive rather than building a solution of special cases.  In my mind, to do this, you have to start by conceptualizing and coding the framework of the general algorithm.  For me, that’s a relatively monolithic exercise. TDD is an development pratice not a methodology, the danger is that the solution becomes a mass of different things that violate DRY. TDD won't solve these problems, only good communication and practices like pairing will help. Above all else an assumption that TDD replaces a methodology is a mistake, combine it with what ever works for your team\business but only good communication will help. A good naming scheme\structure for folders, files and tests can help you and your team isolate what tests are for what.

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• OWB 11gR2 - Find and Search Metadata in Designer

  - by David Allan

  Here are some tools and techniques for finding objects, specifically in the design repository. There are ways of navigating and collating objects that are useful for day to day development and build-time usage - this includes features out of the box and utilities constructed on top. There are a variety of techniques to navigate and find objects in the repository, the first 3 are out of the box, the 4th is an expert utility. Navigating by the tree, grouping by project and module - ok if you are aware of the exact module/folder that objects reside in. The structure panel is a useful way of finding parts of an object, especially when large rather than using the canvas. In large scale projects it helps to have accelerators (either find or collections below). Advanced find to search by name - 11gR2 included a find capability specifically for large scale projects. There were improvements in both the tree search and the object editors (including highlighting in mapping for example). So you can now do regular expression based search and quickly navigate to objects within a repository. Collections - logically organize your objects into virtual folders by shortcutting the actual objects. This is useful for a range of things since all the OWB services operate on collections too (export/import, validation, deployment). See the post here for new collection functionality in 11gR2. Reports for searching by type, updated on, updated by etc. Useful for activities such as periodic incremental actions (deploy all mappings changed in the past week). The report style view is useful since I can quickly see who changed what and when. You can see all the audit details for objects within each objects property inspector, but its useful to just get all objects changed today or example, all objects changed since my last build etc. This utility combines both UI extensions via experts and the public views on the repository. In the figure to the right you see the contextual option 'Object Search' which invokes the utility, you can see I have quite a number of modules within my project. Figure out all the potential objects which have been changed is not simple. The utility is an expert which provides this kind of search capability. The utility provides a report of the objects in the design repository which satisfy some filter criteria. The type of criteria includes; objects updated in the last n days optionally filter the objects updated by user filter the user by project and by type (table/mappings etc.) The search dialog appears with these options, you can multi-select the object types, so for example you can select TABLE and MAPPING. Its also possible to search across projects if need be. If you have multiple users using the repository you can define the OWB user name in the 'Updated by' property to restrict the report to just that user also. Finally there is a search name that will be used for some of the options such as building a collection - this name is used for the collection to be built. In the example I have done, I've just searched my project for all process flows and mappings that users have updated in the last 7 days. The results of the query are returned in a table containing the object names, types, full path and audit details. The columns are sort-able, you can sort the results by name, type, path etc. One of the cool things here, is that you can then perform operations on these objects - such as edit them, export single selection or entire results to MDL, create a collection from the results (now you have a saved set of references in the repository, you could do deploy/export etc.), create a deployment script from the results...or even add in your own ideas! You see from this that you can do bulk operations on sets of objects based on search results. So for example selecting the 'Build Collection' option creates a collection with all of the objects from my search, you can subsequently deploy/generate/maintain this collection of objects. Under the hood of the expert if just basic OMB commands from the product and the use of the public views on the design repository. You can see how easy it is to build up macro-like capabilities that will help you do day-to-day as well as build like tasks on sets of objects.

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• Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2010 -- #1008

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight" Chris Klug WP7: "Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter" Jaime Rodriguez Training: "Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1 Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring. Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1 Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture. 4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text. 5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch. Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it. Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked... The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend. Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution. Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment. Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF #twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7) Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out... Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev) Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above. Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code. UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that? Details on the Push Notification app limits Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Oracle Fusion Procurement Designed for User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience Oracle Fusion Procurement Design Goals In Oracle Fusion Procurement, we set out to create a streamlined user experience based on the way users do their jobs. Oracle has spent hundreds of hours with customers to get to the heart of what users need to do their jobs. By designing a procurement application around user needs, Oracle has crafted a user experience that puts the tools that people need at their fingertips. In Oracle Fusion Procurement, the user experience is designed to provide the user with information that will drive navigation rather than requiring the user to find information. One of our design goals for Oracle Fusion Procurement was to reduce the number of screens and clicks that a user must go through to complete frequently performed tasks. The requisition process in Oracle Fusion Procurement (Figure 1) illustrates how we have streamlined workflows. Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement brings together billing metrics, descriptions of the order, justification for the order, a breakdown of the components of the order, and the amount—all in one place. Previous generations of procurement software required the user to navigate to several different pages to gather all of this information. With Oracle Fusion, everything is presented on one page. The result is that users can complete their tasks in less time. The focus is on completing the work, not finding the work. Figure 1. Creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement is a consumer-like shopping experience. Will Oracle Fusion Procurement Increase Productivity? To answer this question, Oracle sought to model how two experts working head to head—one in an existing enterprise application and another in Oracle Fusion Procurement—would perform the same task. We compared Oracle Fusion designs to corresponding existing applications using the keystroke-level modeling (KLM) method. This method is based on years of research at universities such as Carnegie Mellon and research labs like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The KLM method breaks tasks into a sequence of operations and uses standardized models to evaluate all of the physical and cognitive actions that a person must take to complete a task: what a user would have to click, how long each click would take (not only the physical action of the click or typing of a letter, but also how long someone would have to think about the page when taking the action), and user interface changes that result from the click. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time is calculated. Task times from the model enable researchers to predict end-user productivity. For the study, we focused on modeling procurement business process task flows that were considered business or mission critical: high-frequency tasks and high-value tasks. The designs evaluated encompassed tasks that are currently performed by employees, professional buyers, suppliers, and sourcing professionals in advanced procurement applications. For each of these flows, we created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task, conducted task walk-throughs in both the Oracle Fusion design and the existing application, analyzed and documented the steps and actions required to complete each task, and applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate overall task completion times. The Results The KLM method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Procurement designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 13 percent to 38 percent, with an overall productivity gain of 22.5 percent. These performance gains can be attributed to a reduction in the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. For example, creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Procurement takes a user through only two screens, while ordering the same item in a previous version requires six screens to complete the task. Modeling user productivity has resulted not only in advances in Oracle Fusion applications, but also in advances in other areas. We leveraged lessons learned from the KLM studies to establish products like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). New user experience features in EBS 12.1.3, such as navigational improvements to the main menu, a Google-type search using auto-suggest, embedded analytics, and an in-context list of values tool help to reduce clicks and improve efficiency. For more information about KLM, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.

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• Silverlight Cream for March 31, 2010 -- #826

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Radenko Zec, Andrej Tozon, Bobby Diaz, Brad Abrams, Wolf Schmidt, Colin Eberhardt, Anand Iyer, Matthias Shapiro, Jaime Rodriguez, Bill Reiss, and Lee. Shoutouts: Cigdem has a post up about here MIX10 Interviewing experiences: MIX10 SilverlightShow Interviews Ian T. Lackey has his material up from his talk Silverlight SEO at the St. Louis .Net Users Group Not Silverlight but definitely WP7 cool, Michael Klucher reports that there are New Windows Phone Samples on Creators Club Online Tim Heuer posted a survey: What tools are the minimum to get started in Silverlight? From SilverlightCream.com: A RoleManager to apply roles declaratively to user interface Andrea Boschin also has a new post at SilverlightShow discussing the use of a RoleManager in WCF RIA Services to apply user roles to elements of the UI... good stuff, Andrea. Virtualization in Silverlight 4 RC Radenko Zec has a post out at SilverlightShow where he explains UI and Data Virtualization then gives some examples of their use in Silverlight 4RC, and some issues as well. MS Word Mail Merge with Silverlight 4 COM Automation Andrej Tozon has a post up at SilverlightShow that I missed in the rush of MIX10. He's doing MailMerge with COM automation and Silverlight 4... actually prett cool stuff and all the source! KISS and Tell - MVVM and the ViewModelLocator Bobby Diaz is blogging about a very popular subject right now: ViewModelLocator. He's not showing production code, but it's a thought... check it out. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Validating Data I'm running behind, but Brad Abrams' next post in his series is about validating data in the business application. He also discusses setting up shared code validation. A One-stop Shopping XAML Namespace for Silverlight Client SDK Controls Wolf Schmidt at the Silverlight SDK has a post up highlighting the SL4 XAML namespace prefix. He starts with SL3 then demonstrates the feature's use in SL4. Binding a Silverlight 3 DataGrid to dynamic data via IDictionary (Updated) Colin Eberhardt has an update to his previous article of the same title. This one is a bug fix on an upgrade to SL3 and also an expansion of the previous post. Demo Apps from MIX10 on Windows Phone 7 Anand Iyer posted links to all the WP7 demos used at MIX10 and at least in the case of FourSquare, the source is on CodePlex. XAML Files for Location Visualizations in Silverlight and WPF Matthias Shapiro has graciously provided XAML for us for Silverlight and WPF for a bunch of different US maps... too cool, now we don't have to be asking 'where did you get that map?'... thanks Matthias! Theming in Windows Phone Jaime Rodriguez has a post up that deep-dives theming in general and demonstrates using it on WP7... end-user configurations and developer stuff. Space Rocks game step 7: Moving the ship It appears that in the heat of battle (blogging) I said Bill Reiss' Space Rocks game he's building is for WP7... obviously it's not, but it's a game folks... :) THis is Episode 7 and he's moving the ship now. SL4(RC) RichTextBox and Access Violation Lee has some code that looks like it should work for a RichTextBox in SL4RC, and it's throwing an error... see if you have a solution for him... or is it a bug? Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQL SERVER – Identity Fields – Contest Win Joes 2 Pros Combo (USD 198) – Day 2 of 5

  - by pinaldave

  August 2011 we ran a contest where every day we give away one book for an entire month. The contest had extreme success. Lots of people participated and lots of give away. I have received lots of questions if we are doing something similar this month. Absolutely, instead of running a contest a month long we are doing something more interesting. We are giving away USD 198 worth gift every day for this week. We are giving away Joes 2 Pros 5 Volumes (BOOK) SQL 2008 Development Certification Training Kit every day. One copy in India and One in USA. Total 2 of the giveaway (worth USD 198). All the gifts are sponsored from the Koenig Training Solution and Joes 2 Pros. The books are available here Amazon | Flipkart | Indiaplaza How to Win: Read the Question Read the Hints Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India residents only) 2 Winners will be randomly selected announced on August 20th. Question of the Day: Which of the following statement is incorrect? a) Identity value can be negative. b) Identity value can have negative interval. c) Identity value can be of datatype VARCHAR d) Identity value can have increment interval larger than 1 Query Hints: BIG HINT POST A simple way to determine if a table contains an identity field is to use the SSMS Object Explorer Design Interface. Navigate to the table, then right-click it and choose Design from the pop-up window. When your design tab opens, select the first field in the table to view its list of properties in the lower pane of the tab (In this case the field is ProductID). Look to see if the Identity Specification property in the lower pane is set to either yes or no. SQL Server will allow you to utilize IDENTITY_INSERT with just one table at a time. After you’ve completed the needed work, it’s very important to reset the IDENTITY_INSERT back to OFF. Additional Hints: I have previously discussed various concepts from SQL Server Joes 2 Pros Volume 2. SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Output Clause in Simple Examples SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Ranking Functions – Advanced NTILE in Detail SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Ranking Functions – RANK( ), DENSE_RANK( ), and ROW_NUMBER( ) SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Advanced Aggregates with the Over Clause SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Aggregates with the Over Clause SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Overriding Identity Fields – Tricks and Tips of Identity Fields SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Many to Many Relationships Next Step: Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India) Bonus Winner Leave a comment with your favorite article from the “additional hints” section and you may be eligible for surprise gift. There is no country restriction for this Bonus Contest. Do mention why you liked it any particular blog post and I will announce the winner of the same along with the main contest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Gamify your Web

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  Yesterday Valencia welcomed the Gamification World Congress that I follow virtually through #GWC2012. BBVA, Iberia, Ligeresa, Axe, Wayra, ESADE, GlaxoSmithKline, Macmillan, Gamisfaction, Nomaders, Blaffin were among the companies presenting success stories on gaming. It has been proved that people remember things easily when an emotion is created. The marketing expectations around Gamification techniques have a lot to do with Neuromarketing theories. There are a lot of expectations on internal enterprise Gamification. In the public Web some sectors are taking the lead on following the trend. The Gartner Analyst Brian Burke opened another Gamification recent event in Madrid remembering that “Gamification is mostly about Engagement”, and this can be applied both to customers or employees. Gamification and Banking The experience of the Spanish Financial Group BBVA that just launched BBVA Game was also presented a week ago at the BBVA Innovation Centre during the event “Gamification & Banking: a fad or a serious business?” . One of the objectives of the BBVA Game was to double the name of registered users. “People like the efficiency of the online channel want to keep a one-to-one contact with the brand”-explained Bernardo Crespo. Another interested data coming out the BBVA presentation was that “only 20% of Spanish users –out of the total holders of Bank Accounts in the country- is familiar with the use of a Web Site to consult their bank accounts”, the project aims also to reverse this situation helping people to learn making a heavy use of the Video in the gaming context. In general Banking presenters seem to agree that Gamification techniques are helping to increase the time spent on the Web. Gamification and Health Using Gamification techniques for chronic illness rehabilitation was another topic of the World Congress. Here you can find some ideas and experiences What can games do for the health (In Spanish) I have personally started my own mental-health gaming project at http://www.lumosity.com/ Gamification in the Enterprise I really recommend Reading this excellent post of Ultan ÓBroin my Introduction to Gamification and Applications. Employee´s motivation and learning are experiencing a 360º turn and it looks than some of us will become soon the Dragon of the year instead of the Employee of the Year. Using Web 2.0 Tools for Gamification Projects  What type of tools do we need for a quick-win Gamification project? To certain extend Gamification can be considered an evolution of the participative Web. Badging, avatars, points and awards, leader boards, progress charts, virtual currencies, gifting and giving challenges and quests are common components and elements. The Web is offering new development frameworks to that purpose as this Avatar Framework from Paypal or Badgeville to include in web applications. Besides, tools to create communities around a game are required to comment, share and vote players as well as for an efficient multimedia management. Due to its entirely open architecture, its community features, and its multimedia and imaging solutions is were I see WebCenter as a tool helping brands to success. Link to Sources & Recommended Readings YouTube Video of BBVAGame presentation Where To Apply Gamification In Your Incentive Jim Calhoun Cancer Challenge Ride and Walkh For my Spanish Readers El aburrimiento es el enemigo número uno del éxito

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• Silverlight Cream for February 13, 2011 -- #1046

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Joost van Schaik, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Deborah Kurata, David Kelley, Peter Foot, Samuel Jack(-2-), and WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding" Deborah Kurata WP7: "WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button" WindowsPhoneGeek Expression Blend: "Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images" Loek van den Ouweland Shoutouts: Dave Campbell posted a write-up about the project he's on and the use of Sterling: Sterling Object-Oriented Database for ISO 1.0 Released!... Also see Jeremy Likness' post on the 1.0 release: Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM Not necessarily Silverlight, but darn cool, a great control by Sasha Barber: WPF : A Weird 3d based control snoutholder announced new content: Windows Phone 7 QuickStarts Live! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images Loek van den Ouweland has a video tutorial up for creating an ImageButton with a hover state... Expression Blend coolness, and check out the external links he has to their training site. Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements – Emulator vs. Hardware Colin Eberhardt's latest is a popular post comparing performance metrics between the WP7 emulator and a real device. Mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure the overall results are conculsive, and should help the way you view your app as you're building in the emulator. WP7: WebClient vs HttpWebRequest Rudi Grobler's latest is a discussion of WebClient and HttpWebRequest, gives coding examples of each plus discussion of why you may choose one over the other... and pay attention to his comment about mobile providers. A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior Joost van Schaik posted this WP7/Silverlight clipping behavior he developed because all the other solutions were not blendable. Another really useful piece of code from Joost! Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish Mike Taulty has 3 more episodes in his Blend Bits series... first up is on one Styles... explicit, implicit, inheriting... you name it, he's covering it! Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1 MIke Taulty then has the beginning of a series within his Blend Bits series on Templating. This is something you just have to either bite the bullet and go with Blend to do, or consume someone else's work. Mike shows us how to do it ourself by tweaking the visual aspects of a checkbox Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2 In part 2 of the Templating series, Mike Taulty digs deeper into Blend and cracks open the Listbox control to take a bunch of the inner elements out for a spin... fun stuff and great tutorial, Mike! Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding Deborah Kurata has another great MVVM post up... if you don't have your head wrapped around commanding yet, this is a good place to start that process... VB and C# as always. App Development for Windows Phone 7 101 David Kelley goes through the basics of producing a WP7 app both from the Silverlight and XNA side... good info and good external links to get you going. Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone Peter Foot takes a look at the Copy/Paste functionality in WP7 and how to apply it to a TextBlock... which is NOT an out-of-the-box solution. How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator Samuel Jack has a couple posts up this week... first is this clever one on running multiple copies of the emulator at once... too cool for debugging a multi-player game! Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side Samuel Jack's latest is a detailed look at his day 3 adventure of taking his multi-player game to WP7... lots of information and external links... what do you say, give him another day? :) WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple more posts up... first is this "CustomInputPrompt" control based off the InputPrompt from Coding4Fun. Implementing Windows Phone 7 DataTemplateSelector and CustomDataTemplateSelector In his latest post, WindowsPhoneGeek writes a DataTemplateSelector to allow different data templates for different list elements based on the type of the element. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Knowledge Pathways Designer - Recommended Settings

  - by ted.henson

  The General page of the Options dialog box contains the application preferences for Knowledge Pathways Designer. It is recommended that you leave certain settings as they are, unless you have a specific reason for changing them. The following are a few of the settings on the General page with an explanation of the recommended setting. They are in the order they appear on the page: Allow version 2.0 style links: This option should remain disabled unless you were using content that was created using version 2.0 of Knowledge Pathways and you want the same linking functionality that existed in that version 2.0. This feature enables you to reuse parts of titles that contain no AUs. However, keep in mind that this type of link is not a true link, but a cross between a copy and a link. To create a 2.0 style link, you drag and drop sections between titles. You can only create 2.0 style links to sections that belong to the Title AU. When creating a version 2.0 style link, your mouse pointer will change to indicate a 2.0 link is being created. Confirm deletion of outline items and Confirm deletion of titles: It is recommended that these options remain enabled to avoid deleting something by accident. Display tracking data loss warning when opening a published title: It recommended that this option be enabled so you will receive the warning message when you open the development copy of a title, reminding you of the implications of your changes. ulCopy files when converting a Section to an Assignable Unit: This option should remain enabled unless you have a specific reason for not copying the files. If this is disabled, you will (in effect) lose your content files upon converting because they will not be copied to the new AU directory on the content root. In this case, you would need to use Windows Explorer to copy your files manually. Working with Spelling Options All of the spelling options are enabled by default. Your design team can review these options to determine if you want to make changes, depending upon your specific needs. Understanding Dictionary Options You should leave the dictionary options as they are, unless you have a specific reason for changing them. While you can delete the user (customizable) dictionary, doing so is not recommended. Setting Check In/Check Out Options The ability to check in and check out titles and AUs will impact the efficiency of your design team. Decide what your check in and check out processes are before you start developing titles. The Check In/Check Out page of the Options dialog box contains two options that affect what happens when you open a title using the Open Title dialog box. Both of these options are enabled by default and are described below: Check Out for editing enabled: This option ensures that the Check Out for editing option will be selected when you open the development copy of a title from the Open Title dialog box. If this option is disabled, you must select the Check Out for editing option every time you want to check out a title for editing. Attempt to Check Out for entire branch: When this option is enabled, Designer checks out the selected title and all AUs and sections that are part of that title, provided they are available for check out. If this option is disabled, you will only check out the Title AU and anything that belongs to that Title AU (e.g., sections, questions, etc.), but not other AUs. The Check In/Check Out page of the Options dialog box also contains options that control what happens when you close a title. You can choose one option in the Check In when Closing a Title area. The option selected is a matter of preference and you should determine which option is most appropriate for your design team.

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• Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v5.0) is Released

  - by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

  Ever wanted to have a simple jQuery menu bound with ASP.NET web site map file? Ever wanted to have cool css design stuffs implemented on your ASP.NET data bound controls? Ever wanted to let Visual Studio generate logical layers for you, which can be easily tested, customized and bound with ASP.NET data controls? If your answers with respect to above questions are ‘yes’, then you will probably happy to try out latest release (v5.0) of Employee Starter Kit, which is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, the current release illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 Web Form Data Controls, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context. Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source ASP.NET project template that is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. This project template is titled as “Employee Info Starter Kit”, which was initially hosted on Microsoft Code Gallery and been downloaded 1, 50,000+ of copies afterword.  The latest version of this starter kit is hosted in Codeplex. Release Highlights User End Functional Specification The user end functionalities of this starter kit are pretty simple and straight forward that are focused in to perform CRUD operation on employee records as described below. Creating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Architectural Overview Simple 3 layer architecture (presentation, business logic and data access layer) ASP.NET web form based user interface Built-in code generators for logical layers, implemented in Visual Studio default template engine (T4) Built-in Entity Framework entities as business entities (aka: data containers) Data Mapper design pattern based Data Access Layer, implemented in C# and Entity Framework Domain Model design pattern based Business Logic Layer, implemented in C# Object Model for Cross Cutting Concerns (such as validation, logging, exception management) Minimum System Requirements Visual Studio 2010 (Web Developer Express Edition) or higher Sql Server 2005 (Express Edition) or higher Technology Utilized Programming Languages/Scripts Browser side: JavaScript Web server side: C# Code Generation Template: T-4 Template Frameworks .NET Framework 4.0 JavaScript Framework: jQuery 1.5.1 CSS Framework: 960 grid system .NET Framework Components .NET Entity Framework .NET Optional/Named Parameters (new in .net 4.0) .NET Tuple (new in .net 4.0) .NET Extension Method .NET Lambda Expressions .NET Anonymous Type .NET Query Expressions .NET Automatically Implemented Properties .NET LINQ .NET Partial Classes and Methods .NET Generic Type .NET Nullable Type ASP.NET Meta Description and Keyword Support (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Routing (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Grid View (CSS support for sorting - (new in .net 4.0)) ASP.NET Repeater ASP.NET Form View ASP.NET Login View ASP.NET Site Map Path ASP.NET Skin ASP.NET Theme ASP.NET Master Page ASP.NET Object Data Source ASP.NET Role Based Security Getting Started Guide To see Employee Info Starter Kit in action is pretty easy! Download the latest version. Extract the file. From the extracted folder click the C# project file (Eisk.Web.csproj) to open it in Visual Studio 2010 Hit Ctrl+F5! The current release (v5.0) of Employee Info Starter Kit is properly packaged, fully documented and well tested. If you want to learn more about it in details, just check the following links: Release Home Page Installation Walkthrough Hand on Coding Walkthrough Technical Reference Enjoy!

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• SQLUG Events - London/Edinburgh/Cardiff/Reading - Masterclass, NoSQL, TSQL Gotcha's, Replication, BI

  - by tonyrogerson

  We have acquired two additional tickets to attend the SQL Server Master Class with Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp next Thurs (17th June), for a chance to win these coveted tickets email us ([email protected]) before 9pm this Sunday with the subject "MasterClass" - people previously entered need not worry - your still in with a chance. The winners will be announced Monday morning.As ever plenty going on physically, we've got dates for a stack of events in Manchester and Leeds, I'm looking at Birmingham if anybody has ideas? We are growing our online community with the Cuppa Corner section, to participate online remember to use the #sqlfaq twitter tag; for those wanting to get more involved in presenting and fancy trying it out we are always after people to do 1 - 5 minute SQL nuggets or Cuppa Corners (short presentations) at any of these User Group events - just email us [email protected] removing from this email list? Then just reply with remove please on the subject line.Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal Master Class - Thurs, 17th June - LondonREGISTER NOW AND GET A SECOND REGISTRATION FREE*The top things YOU need to know about managing SQL Server - in one place, on one day - presented by two of the best SQL Server industry trainers!This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance.The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will:>> Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour >> Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data >> Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database >> Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, LondonWhen: Thursday 17th June 2010*REGISTER TODAY AT www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql on the registration form simply quote discount code: BOGOF for both yourself and your colleague and you will save 50% off each registration – that’s a 249 GBP saving! This offer is limited, book early to avoid disappointment.Wed, 23 JunREADINGEvening Meeting, More info and registerIntroduction to NoSQL (Not Only SQL) - Gavin Payne; T-SQL Gotcha's and how to avoid them - Ashwani Roy; Introduction to Recency Frequency - Tony Rogerson; Reporting Services - Tim LeungThu, 24 JunCARDIFFEvening Meeting, More info and registerAlex Whittles of Purple Frog Systems talks about Data warehouse design case studies, Other BI related session TBC Mon, 28 JunEDINBURGHEvening Meeting, More info and registerReplication (Components, Adminstration, Performance and Troubleshooting) - Neil Hambly Server Upgrades (Notes and Best practice from the field) - Satya Jayanty Wed, 14 JulLONDONEvening Meeting, More info and registerMeeting is being sponsored by DBSophic (http://www.dbsophic.com/download), database optimisation software. Physical Join Operators in SQL Server - Ami LevinWorkload Tuning - Ami LevinSQL Server and Disk IO (File Groups/Files, SSD's, Fusion-IO, In-RAM DB's, Fragmentation) - Tony RogersonComplex Event Processing - Allan MitchellMany thanks,Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVPUK SQL Server User Grouphttp://sqlserverfaq.com"

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• Motorola Droid App Recommendations

  - by Brian Jackett

  Just as a disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and I’m not getting paid or compensated for anything.     Ok, so I’m one of the crazy few who went out and bought a Droid the week it was released a few months back.  The Motorola Droid was a MAJOR upgrade in phone capabilities for me as my previous phone had no GPS, no web access, limited apps, etc.  I now use my Droid for so much of my life from work to personal to community based events.  Since I’ve been using my Droid for awhile, a number of friends (@toddklindt, @spmcdonough, @jfroushiii, and many more) who later got a Droid asked me which apps I recommended.  While there are a few sites on the web listing out useful Android apps, here’s my quick list (with a few updates since first put together.) Note: * denotes a highly recommended app     Android App Recommendations for Motorola Droid (Updated after 2.1 update) RemoteDroid – install a thin client on another computer and Droid becomes mouse pad / keyboard, control computer remotely PdaNet – free version allows tethering (only to HTTP, no HTTPS) without paying extra monthly charge.  A paid version allows HTTPS access. SportsTap – keep track of about a dozen sports, favorite teams, etc *Movies – setup favorite theaters, find movie times, buy tickets, etc WeatherBug elite – paid app, but gives weather alerts, 4 day forecast, etc.  Free version also exists.  (Update: Android 2.1 offers free weather app, but I still prefer WeatherBug.) *Advanced Task Killer – manually free up memory and kill apps not needed Google Voice – have to have a Google Voice account to really use, but allows visual voice mail, sending calls to specific phones, and too many other things to list AndroZip – access your phone memory like a file system Twidroid – best Twitter client I’ve found so far, but personal preference varies.  I’m using free version and suits me just fine. Skype (beta) – I only use this to send chat messages, not sure how/if phone calls works on this. (Update: Skype Mobile app just released, but uninstalled after few days as it kept launching in background and using up memory when not wanted.) *NewsRob – RSS reader syncs to Google Reader.  I use this multiple times a day, excellent app. (Update: this app does ask for your Google username and password, so security minded folks be cautioned.) ConnectBot – don’t use often myself, but allows SSH into remote computer.  Great if you have a need for remote manage server. Speed Test – same as the online website, allows finding upload/download speeds. WiFinder – store wifi preferences and find wifi spots in area. TagReader – simple Microsoft Tag Reader, works great. *Google Listen – audible podcast catcher that allows putting items into a queue, sync with Google Reader RSS, etc. I personally love this app which has now replaced the iPod I used to use in my car, but have heard mixed reviews from others. Robo Defense – (paid app) tower defense game but with RPG elements to upgrade towers over lifetime playing. I’ve never played FieldRunners but I’m told very similar in offering. Nice distraction when in airport or have some time to burn. Phit Droid 3rd Edition – drag and drop block shapes into a rectangle box, simple game to pass the time with literally 1000s of levels. Note this game has been updated dozens of times with numerous editions so unsure exactly which are still on the market. Google Sky Map – impress your friends by holding Droid up to sky and viewing constellations using Droid screen. wootCheck Lite – check up on daily offerings on Woot.com and affiliated wine, sellout, shirt, and kids sites.   Side notes: I’ve seen that Glympse and TripIt have recently come out with Android apps.  I’ve installed but haven’t gotten to use either yet, but I hear good things.  Will try out on 2 upcoming trips in May and update with impressions.         -Frog Out   Image linked from http://images.tolmol.com/images/grpimages/200910191814100_motorola-droid.gif

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• Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev)

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  When you design for Windows Phone 7 (or for any touch device, for that matter, and most especially small screens), you need to be very careful to give enough surface to your users’ fingers. It is easy to miss a touch on such small screens, and that can be horrifyingly frustrating. This is especially true when people are on the move, and trying to hit the control while walking and holding their device in one hand, or when the device is mounted in a car and vibrating with the engine. In my experience, a touch surface should be ideally minimum 60x60 pixels to be easy to activate on the Windows Phone 7 screen (which is, as we know, 800 pixels x 480 pixels). Ideally, I try to make my touch surfaces 80x80 pixels minimum. This causes a few design challenges of course. Using transparent backgrounds However, one thing is helping us tremendously: some surfaces can be made transparent, and yet react to touch. The secret is the following: If you have a panel that has a Null background (i.e. the Background is not set at all), then the empty surface does not react to touch. If however the Background is set to the Transparent color (or any color where the Alpha channel is set to 0), then it will react to touch. Setting a transparent background is easy. For example: <Grid Background="#00000000"> </Grid> or <Grid Background="Transparent"> </Grid> In C#: var grid = new Grid { Background = new SolidColorBrush( Colors.Transparent) }; Using negative margins Having a transparent background reactive to touch is a good start, but in addition, you must make sure that the surface is big enough for my clumsy fingers. One way to achieve that is to increase the transparent, touch-reactive surface, and reposition the element using negative margins. For example, consider the following UI. I changed the transparent background of the HyperlinkButton to Red, in order to visualize the touch surface. In this figure, the Settings HyperlinkButton is 105 pixels x 31 pixels. This is wide enough, but really small in height and easy to miss. To improve this, we can use negative margins, for instance: <HyperlinkButton Content="Settings" HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Height="60" Margin="0,0,0,-15" /> Notice the usage of negative bottom margin to bring the HyperlinkButton back at the bottom of the main Grid’s first row, where it belongs. And the result is: Notice how the touch surface is much bigger than before. This makes the HyperlinkButton easier to reach, and improves the user experience. With the background set back to normal, the UI looks exactly the same, as it should: In summary: Remember to maximize the touch surface for your controls. Plan your design in consequence by reserving enough room around each control to allow their hit surface to be expanded as shown in this article. Do not cram too many controls in one page. If REALLY needed, use an additional page (or even better: use a Pivot control with multiple pivot items) for the controls that don’t fit on the first one. This should ensure a smoother user experience and improved touch behavior. Happy coding! Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Silverlight Cream for March 08, 2011 -- #1056

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Joost van Schaik, Manas Patnaik, Kevin Hoffman, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata, Dhananjay Kumar, Dennis Delimarsky, Samuel Jack, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jfo. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How I let the trees grow" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior" Joost van Schaik Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 from last week posted, plus the ECOContest is ready to be voted on: SilverlightShow for Feb 28 - March 06, 2011 Drew DeVault is a young man involved with the Microsoft Student Insiders. He gave a WP7 presentation at RMTT and has posted his material: Post-Session: Windows Phone 7 @ RMTT Rui Marinho has an app in the ECO Contest called Forest Findr. is based on the BIng Map Control for silverlight and Sql Spatial data, and helps you find Forests and get geolocated pictures and wikipedia information, and has a post up with a bunch of info on it here: Forest Findr. my entry on the SilverlightShow EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior Joost van Schaik has a behavior that makes *anything* draggable and 'flickable' in WP7 ... read the intro, scroll to the bottom to watch the demo, and then grab up the code... cool stuff, Joost! Data Aggregation Using Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4 Manas Patnaik sent me a link to his blog, and it appears he's got lots of Silverlight goodness out there so you'll be hearing more about him. This first post is on the Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4... good discussion, diagrams and code... good job, Manas! WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Advanced UI Kevin Hoffman has part 3 of an ambitious 12-part tutorial series up on WP7 development ... this go-around is concentrating on Advanced UI - Panorama/Pivot controls, DataBinding, ObservableCollections, and Converters... whew! Sterling DB on top of Isolated Storage – 2 Jesse Liberty has part 2 of his Sterling series up... this time setting up the database in App.xaml so it can be used for dealing with tombstoning. Silverlight Charting: Formatting the Tick Marks Deborah Kurata's next chart tutorial is all about showing you how to continue to dress up your charts.. this time by formatting the tick marks... if you don't know what that is... check out the first image in the post. Stored Procedure in WCF Data Service Dhananjay Kumar has a very nice tutorial up on using a stored proc with WCF Data Services... I happen to know someone working on just that at this time. If you have this in mind, here's a step-by-step guide to getting it done. Windows Phone 7 – Episode 5 – Pages Dennis Delimarsky has part 5 of his WP7 tutorial series up and is discussing Pages in this 17 minute video. Unpacking Simon Squared: My mini framework-independent animation library Samuel Jack has not only Open-Sourced the WP7 game he built and blogged about, but he's now explaining some of the structure of the game in posts such as this one about the animation library he wrote that his game is built on. How I let the trees grow Peter Kuhn shares with us the code he used for the tree animation in his ECO Contest entry. There's a lot to learn in this post about performance ... the fully-animated tree has about 20K elements... 5K branches and 20K leaves... check it out. WP7 ToastPrompt in depth WindowsPhoneGeek takes a deep dive into the ToastPrompt control in the Coding4fun Toolkit... everything you need to completely use the control including sample code. Beware the loaded event Jfo talks about another frustration point she had with WP7 development, and that is around the use of the loaded event... read these tips from someone that's been there. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Partner outreach on the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience begins

  - by mvaughan

  by Misha Vaughan, Architect, Applications User Experience I have been asked the question repeatedly since about December of last year: “What is the Applications User Experience group doing about partner outreach?”  My answer, at the time, was: “We are thinking about it.”  My colleagues and I were really thinking about the content or tools that the Applications UX group should be developing. What would be valuable to our partners? What will actually help grow their applications business, and fits within the applications user experience charter?In the video above, you’ll hear Jeremy Ashley, vice president of the Applications User Experience team, talk about two fundamental initiatives that our group is working on now that speaks straight to partners.  Special thanks to Joel Borellis, Kelley Greenly, and Steve Hoodmaker for helping to make this video happen so flawlessly. Steve was responsible for pulling together a day of Oracle Fusion Applications-oriented content, including David Bowin, Director, Fusion Applications Strategy, on some of the basic benefits of Oracle Fusion Applications.  Joel Borellis, Group Vice President, Partner Enablement, and David Bowin in the Oracle Studios.Nigel King, Vice President Applications Functional Architecture, was also on the list, talking about co-existence opportunities with Oracle Fusion Applications.Me and Nigel King, just before his interview with Joel. Fusion Applications User Experience 101: Basic education  Oracle has invested an enormous amount of intellectual and developmental effort in the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. Find out more about that at the Oracle Partner Network Fusion Learning Center (Oracle ID required). What you’ll learn will help you uncover how, exactly, Oracle made Fusion General Ledger “sexy,” and that’s a direct quote from Oracle Ace Director Debra Lilley, of Fujitsu. In addition, select Applications User Experience staff members, as well as our own Fusion User Experience Advocates,  can provide a briefing to our partners on Oracle’s investment in the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. Looking forward: Taking the best of the Fusion Applications UX to your customersBeyond a basic orientation to one of the key differentiators for Oracle Fusion Applications, we are also working on partner-oriented training.A question we are often getting right now is: “How do I help customers build applications that look like Fusion?” We also hear: “How do I help customers build applications that take advantage of the next-generation design work done in Fusion?”Our answer to this is training and a tool – our user experience design patterns – these are a set of user experience best-practices. Design patterns are re-usable, usability-tested, user experience components that make creating Fusion Applications-like experiences straightforward.  It means partners can leverage Oracle’s investment, but also gain an advantage by not wasting time solving a problem we’ve already solved. Their developers can focus on helping customers tackle the harder development challenges. Ultan O’Broin, an Apps UX team member,  and I are working with Kevin Li and Chris Venezia of the Oracle Platform Technology Services team, as well as Grant Ronald in Oracle ADF, to bring you some of the best “how-to” UX training, customized for your local area. Our first workshop will be in EMEA. Stay tuned for an assessment and feedback from the event.

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• How to Use Sparklines in Excel 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  One of the cool features of Excel 2010 is the addition of Sparklines. A Sparkline is basically a little chart displayed in a cell representing your selected data set that allows you to quickly and easily spot trends at a glance. Inserting Sparklines on your Spreadsheet You will find the Sparklines group located on the Insert tab.   Select the cell or cells where you wish to display your Sparklines. Select the type of Sparkline you’d like to add to your spreadsheet. You’ll notice there are three types of Sparklines, Line, Column, and Win/Loss. We’ll select Line for our example. A Create Sparklines pops up and will prompt you to enter a Data Range you are using to create the Sparklines. You’ll notice that the location range (the range where the Sparklines will appear) is already filled in. You can type in the data range manually, or click and drag with your mouse across to select the data range. This will auto-fill the data range for you. Click OK when you are finished.   You will see your Sparklines appear in the desired cells.   Customizing Sparklines Select the one of more of the Sparklines to reveal the Design tab. You can display certain value points like high and low points, negative points, and first and last points by selecting the corresponding options from the Show group. You can also mark all value points by selecting  Markers. Select your desired Sparklines and click one of the included styles from the Style group on the Design tab. Click the down arrow on the lower right corner of the box to display additional pre-defined styles…   or select Sparkline Color or Marker Color options to fully customize your Sparklines. The Axis options allow additional options such as Date Axis Type, Plotting Data Left to Right, and displaying an axis point to represent the zero line in your data with Show Axis. Column Sparklines Column Sparklines display your data in individual columns as opposed to the Line view we’ve been using for our examples. Win/Loss Sparklines Win/Loss shows a basic positive or negative representation of your data set.   You can easily switch between different Sparkline types by simply selecting the current cells (individually or the entire group), and then clicking the desired type on the Design tab. For those that may be more visually oriented, Sparklines can be a wonderful addition to any spreadsheet. Are you just getting started with Office 2010? Check out some of our other great Excel posts such as how to copy worksheets, print only selected areas of a spreadsheet, and how to share data with Excel in Office 2010. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Convert a Row to a Column in Excel the Easy WayShare Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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• Silverlight Cream for May 27, 2010 -- #871

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Max Paulousky, Jeff Wilcox, David Anson, René Schulte, Xianzhong Zhu, Jeff Handley, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, and Marlon Grech. Shoutouts: SilverLaw has a great demo at the Expression Gallery, and we're all going to look forward to the blog post explaining it: Flexible Surface Effect SilverLaw> has another use for the above in this text morphing Effect: Morphing Text Effect Matthias Shapiro contributed a chapter for a book on Visualization and it's available as a free download: Free Chapter From Beautiful Visualization Andy Beaulieu has a demo up as almost a spoiler for a future Coding4Fun app... and how cool is this: Shuffleboard: A Windows Phone 7 Sample Game From SilverlightCream.com: Separating Content and Presentation with the ContentControl Phil Middlemiss' latest is out on SilverlightShow and is all about the ContentControl and separating layout and content ... demo project source included Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Silverlight Applications. Part 1 Max Paulousky has part one of a long series he's starting on a demo project to explain a bunch of MEF, MVVM, and WCF RIA concepts. This first one contains the overview and also discusses SEO. There is a link to the app and material in the post if you read Russian :) Updated Silverlight Unit Test Framework bits for Windows Phone and Silverlight 3 Jeff Wilcox has available updated Unit Test bits for Silverlight 3 -- read that as WP7... read the rest of the information on his post. Easily animate orientation changes for any Windows Phone application with this handy source code David Anson has some code up that you're going to want if you're programming WP7 ... just watch the video ... you'll be downloading the code just like I did :) SilverShader – Introduction to Silverlight and WPF Pixel Shaders René Schulte has a post up at Coding4Fun about PixelShaders... how to write them and an application that uses them... this is a great long tutorial... a must read. Developing Freecell Game Using Silverlight 3 Part 2 Xianzhong Zhu has part 2 of his FreeCell game development posted ... lots of detailed descriptions and code, plus all the code of course! Async Validation with RIA Services Jeff Handley has a post up that is sort of a follow-on to a year-old post on async validation with RIA services and DataForm and how it's all much easier now in SL4. Learning Blend with .toolbox (Silverlight TV #29) John Papa and Arturo Toledo discuss .toolbox in Silverlight TV #29 -- have you made yourself an avatar yet? ... well go get on-board with this great learning tool! Silverlight Out of Browser Dynamic Modules in Offline Mode OOB isn't difficult, dynamic modules can become a bit more, but what if you're OOB... ok what if you're OOB and offline? ... Jeremy Likness has a possible solution for this with an OfflineCatalog. MEFedMVVM v1.0 Explained Marlon Grech has a great into to MEFedMVVM in this post. If you're trying to get your head around MEF and MVVM in either WPF or Silverlight, here's a good starting point. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• maintaining a growing, diverse codebase with continuous integration

  - by Nate

  I am in need of some help with philosophy and design of a continuous integration setup. Our current CI setup uses buildbot. When I started out designing it, I inherited (well, not strictly, as I was involved in its design a year earlier) a bespoke CI builder that was tailored to run the entire build at once, overnight. After a while, we decided that this was insufficient, and started exploring different CI frameworks, eventually choosing buildbot. One of my goals in transitioning to buildbot (besides getting to enjoy all the whiz-bang extras) was to overcome some of the inadequacies of our bespoke nightly builder. Humor me for a moment, and let me explain what I have inherited. The codebase for my company is almost 150 unique c++ Windows applications, each of which has dependencies on one or more of a dozen internal libraries (and many on 3rd party libraries as well). Some of these libraries are interdependent, and have depending applications that (while they have nothing to do with each other) have to be built with the same build of that library. Half of these applications and libraries are considered "legacy" and unportable, and must be built with several distinct configurations of the IBM compiler (for which I have written unique subclasses of Compile), and the other half are built with visual studio. The code for each compiler is stored in two separate Visual SourceSafe repositories (which I am simply handling using a bunch of ShellCommands, as there is no support for VSS). Our original nightly builder simply took down the source for everything, and built stuff in a certain order. There was no way to build only a single application, or pick a revision, or to group things. It would launched virtual machines to build a number of the applications. It wasn't very robust, it wasn't distributable. It wasn't terribly extensible. I wanted to be able to overcame all of these limitations in buildbot. The way I did this originally was to create entries for each of the applications we wanted to build (all 150ish of them), then create triggered schedulers that could build various applications as groups, and then subsume those groups under an overall nightly build scheduler. These could run on dedicated slaves (no more virtual machine chicanery), and if I wanted I could simply add new slaves. Now, if we want to do a full build out of schedule, it's one click, but we can also build just one application should we so desire. There are four weaknesses of this approach, however. One is our source tree's complex web of dependencies. In order to simplify config maintenace, all builders are generated from a large dictionary. The dependencies are retrieved and built in a not-terribly robust fashion (namely, keying off of certain things in my build-target dictionary). The second is that each build has between 15 and 21 build steps, which is hard to browse and look at in the web interface, and since there are around 150 columns, takes forever to load (think from 30 seconds to multiple minutes). Thirdly, we no longer have autodiscovery of build targets (although, as much as one of my coworkers harps on me about this, I don't see what it got us in the first place). Finally, aformentioned coworker likes to constantly bring up the fact that we can no longer perform a full build on our local machine (though I never saw what that got us, either, considering that it took three times as long as the distributed build; I think he is just paranoically phobic of ever breaking the build). Now, moving to new development, we are starting to use g++ and subversion (not porting the old repository, mind you - just for the new stuff). Also, we are starting to do more unit testing ("more" might give the wrong picture... it's more like any), and integration testing (using python). I'm having a hard time figuring out how to fit these into my existing configuration. So, where have I gone wrong philosophically here? How can I best proceed forward (with buildbot - it's the only piece of the puzzle I have license to work on) so that my configuration is actually maintainable? How do I address some of my design's weaknesses? What really works in terms of CI strategies for large, (possibly over-)complex codebases?

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