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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 30, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 30, 2013Popular ReleasesSuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6 stable: Changes included in this release: Process level isolation SuperSocket ServerManager (include server and client) Connect to client from server side initiatively Client certificate validation New configuration attributes "textEncoding", "defaultCulture", and "storeLocation" (certificate node) Many bug fixes http://docs.supersocket.net/v1-6/en-US/New-Features-and-Breaking-ChangesBarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.1: Check Version History for more information about this release.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V53 (LiveConnect): This is the first release which can be used with the new LiveConnect authentication. Small bugfix: The article URL is now at the end of the article...Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit 2.1: v 2.1 Added the 'Should' class instead of the 'Validate' class. The 'Validate' class is now obsolete. Added 'Toolkit.Annotations' to support the Mugen MVVM Toolkit ReSharper plugin. Updated JetBrains annotations within the project. Added the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultActivationPolicy' property to represent the default activation policy. Removed the 'GetSettings' method from the 'ViewModelBase' class. Instead of it, the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultViewModelSettings' property is used. Updated...NAudio: NAudio 1.7: full release notes available at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/naudio-17-release-notes.htmlHandJS: Hand.js v1.1.3: New configuration: HANDJS.doNotProcessCSS to disable CSS scanning.Layered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.1.0 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX (Please install Oct 4, 2012 version) Microsoft® System CLR Types for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 6.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This release only works on Visual Studio 2012. Known Issue If you choose the Database project, the solution unfolding time will be slow....DirectX Tool Kit: October 2013: October 28, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM Added DGSLEffect, DGSLEffectFactory, VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTexture, and VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTextureSkinning Model loading and effect factories support loading skinned models MakeSpriteFont now has a smooth vs. sharp antialiasing option: /sharp Model loading from CMOs now handles UV transforms for texture coordinates A number of small fixes for EffectFactory Minor code and project cleanup ...WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.8 binaries: Fixed issue with auto filter select all checkbox was getting checked automatically after reopening the filter.ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.0beta1: +2013-10-28 v4.0 beta1 +?????Collapsed???????????????。 -????：window/group_panel.aspx??，???????，???????，?????????。 +??????SelectedNodeIDArray???????????????。 -????：tree/checkbox/tree_checkall.aspx??，?????，?????，????????????。 -??TimerPicker???????（????、????ing）。 -??????????????????????（???）。 -?????????????，??type=text/css（??~`）。 -MsgTarget???MessageTarget，???None。 -FormOffsetRight?????20px??5px。 -?Web.config?PageManager??FormLabelAlign???。 -ToolbarPosition??Left/Right。 -??Web.conf...CODE Framework: 4.0.31028.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.VidCoder: 1.5.10 Beta: Broke out all the encoder-specific passthrough options into their own dropdown. This should make what they do a bit more clear and clean up the codec list a bit. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5855.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v14: ImportantThis release has a separate download for Visual Studio 2010. The first link is for VS 2012 and later. Version History Changed in v14 Improved performance when scrolling and editing Fixed potential crash when Resharper is installed Fixed highlight of guides split around pragmas in C++/C# Restored VS 2010 support as a separate download Changed in v13 Added page width guide lines Added guide highlighting options Fixed guides appearing over collapsed blocks Fixed guides not...ASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.5.3 (mvc5): version 3.5.3 - support for mvc5 version 3.5.2 - fix for setting single value to multivalue controls - datepicker min max date offset fix - html encoding for keys fix - enable Column.ClientFormatFunc to be a function call that will return a function version 3.5.1 ========================== - fixed html attributes rendering - fixed loading animation rendering - css improvements version 3.5 ========================== - autosize for all popups ( can be turned off by calling in js...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.585b: IMDB plot scraping Fixed. New* Movie - Rename Folder using Movie Set, option to move ignored articles to end of Movie Set, only for folder renaming. Fixed* Media Companion - Fixed if using profiles, config files would blown up in size due to some settings duplicating. * Ignore Article of An was cutting of last character of movie title. * If Rescraping title, sort title changed depending on 'Move article to end of Sort Title' setting. * Movie - If changing Poster source order, list would beco...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.4: Release 1.11.4 =========== = Compatibility = =========== Updated to add the new tiles/walls in 1.2.1PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.0.7: This is a bug fix release, containing some important fixes! Fixed issue where Session 0 was not detected correctly, resulting in issues when attempting to display a UI when none was allowed Fixed Installation Prompt and Installation Restart Prompt appearing when deploy mode was non-interactive or silent Fixed issue where defer prompt is displayed after force closing multiple applications Fixed issue executing blocked app execution dialog from UNC path (executed instead from local tempo...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.7: 2013.10.24 Ver5.9.7 (1)FTP???????、２?????????????shift-jis????????????? (2)????HTTP????、???????POST??????????????????CtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.1.0.34322 Alpha 4: This experimental release of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer includes the following significant features: Oculus Rift support. Stereoscopic 3D display support. Based on Firestorm viewer 4.4.2 codebase. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-1-0-34322-alpha-4 Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or sup...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 32 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) This release has been tested with Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, using TortoiseSVN 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8. It should also still work with Visual Studio 2005, but I couldn't find anyone to test it in VS2005. Build 32 (beta) changelogNew: Added Visual Studio 2013 support New: Added Visual Studio 2012 support New: Added SVN 1.8 support New: Added 'Ch...New Projects.NET Bio Structure: .NET Bio Structure is an extension of .NET Bio, an open source library of common bioinformatics functions..NET Micro Framework Tiny File System: Tiny File System provides a lightweight file system that can be overlaid on external memory peripherals such as Flash memory or anything you write a driver for.AccOct2013 Liquidaciones MVC3 EF: Proyecto en MVC3 con Razor y Entity Framework para la liquidacion de sueldos.AccOct2013 Tienda MVC3 EF: Ejemplo entity framework con layouts en mvc3 con razor para visual studio 2010AsterNET-Project Templates: A project to help create a set of Visual Studio templates, published via the Visual Studio Gallery to help developers get started even quicker using AsterNET.Clothing: Clothing ERP.ePub Factory PCL: Generates ePub packages (i.e. eBooks).eztvReader: Simple desktop application to read latest RSS torrent feed with magnet links.Formula Calculation Toolkit: Simple calculator for formulas.Gadgeteer.Interfaces.Samples: Project with sample projects for the Gadgeteer. Attempt at creating composable and testable samples, for this a dependency on GadgeteerInterface.codeplex.comGerente EBD: Projeto em WPF e SQLite para controle de frequência na Escola Bíblica Dominical.Google Contacts: With this project you can get your google contacts. Remember you need Application-specific password from here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1173270?hINdT j2me Framework: This project is a lightweight Framework for Nokia s40 and Asha platform. Here you'll find a lot of classes that will help you and turn your life more easy ;-)KDG's Simple Messaging App (C#): Simple messaging application.LegendsNeverDie: ITs a Projekt who can every join and help me, but the first step i make it alone :DLibros VBOnline: Libreria Online para clientesMapAround: .NET tools for developing web and desktop mapping applicationsMSSQL Compressed Backup: SQL Server Compressed Backup is a command line utility for backing up and restoring SQL Server 2005+ with compression(zip,bzip2,gzip,lz4) and encryption(AES).netext: Debugger Extension (WinDbg) to enaeble SQL-like queries for .NET managed heapPagina Ajedrez: Pagina diseñada para el juego de partidas y torneos de Ajedrez.Pescar2013Shop-MarianaMatias: Pagina estilo Garbarinoplungerjs: Framework javascript não obstrusivoProMotion: Mirror for https://github.com/clearsightstudio/ProMotion.ProyectoImagenes: Jugar con imagenesRawb: High performance, simple, composable web UI controls (grid, scrollbar, splitters, etc.) for use with Knockout.Sea Dragon AJAX Viewer Web Part: This project provides a SharePoint 2010 Web Part that allows you to surface a Deep Zoom image anywhere within a SharePoint Site Collection.SimpleMapper: Maps objects in Dot Net: A mapper tool developed in C# that helps mapping object of same type and different. Also maps Proxy objects to POCO classes.Sparta Game Framework: Sparta is a framework with a focus on game development on Windows Phone. Currently we're supporting 2D games.????????: ????????

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• Clean Code Development & Flexible work environment - MSCC 26.10.2013

  Finally, some spare time to summarize my impressions and experiences of the recent meetup of Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. I already posted my comment on the event and on our social media networks: Professional - It's getting better with our meetups and I really appreciated that 'seniors' and 'juniors' were present today. Despite running a little bit out of time it was really great to see more students coming to the gathering. This time we changed location for our Saturday meetup and it worked out very well. A big thank you to Ebene Accelerator, namely Mrs Poonum, for the ability to use their meeting rooms for our community get-together. Already some weeks ago I had a very pleasant conversation with her about the MSCC aims, 'mission' and how we organise things. Additionally, I think that an environment like the Ebene Accelerator is a good choice as it acts as an incubator for young developers and start-ups. Reactions from other craftsmen Before I put my thoughts about our recent meeting down, I'd like to mention and cross-link to some of the other craftsmen that were present: "MSCC meet up is a massive knowledge gaining strategies for students, future entrepreneurs, or for geeks all around. Knowledge sharing becomes a fun. For those who have not been able to made it do subscribe on our MSCC meet up group at meetup.com." -- Nitin on Learning is fun with #MSCC #Ebene Accelerator "We then talked about the IT industry in Mauritius, salary issues in various field like system administration, software development etc. We analysed the reasons why people tend to hop from one company to another. That was a fun debate." -- Ish on MSCC meetup - Gang of Geeks "Flexible Learning Environment was quite interesting since these lines struck cords : "You're not a secretary....9 to 5 shouldn't suit you"....This allowed reflection...deep reflection....especially regarding the local mindset...which should be changed in a way which would promote creativity rather than choking it till death..." -- Yannick on 2nd MSCC Monthly Meet-up And others on Facebook... ;-) Visual impressions are available on our Meetup event page. More first time attendees We great pleasure I noticed that we have once again more first time visitors. A quick overlook showed that we had a majority of UoM students in first, second or last year. Some of them are already participating in the UoM Computer Club or are nominated as members of the Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) programme. Personally, I really appreciate the fact that the MSCC is able to gather such a broad audience. And as I wrote initially, the MSCC is technology-agnostic; we want IT people from any segment of this business. Of course, students which are about to delve into the 'real world' of working are highly welcome, and I hope that they might get one or other glimpse of experience or advice from employees. Sticking to the schedule? No, not really... And honestly, it was a good choice to go a little bit of the beaten tracks. I mean, yes we have a 'rough' agenda of topics that we would like to talk about or having a presentation about. But we keep it 'agile'. Due to the high number of new faces, we initiated another quick round of introductions and I gave a really brief overview of the MSCC. Next, we started to reflect on the Clean Code Developer (CCD) - Red Grade which we introduced on the last meetup. Nirvan was the lucky one and he did a good job on summarizing the various abbreviations of the first level of being a CCD. Actually, more interesting, we exchanged experience about the principles and practices of Red Grade, and it was very informative to get to know that Yann actually 'interviewed' a couple of friends, other students, local guys working in IT companies as well as some IT friends from India in order to counter-check on what he learned first-hand about Clean Code. Currently, he is reading the book of Robert C. Martin on that topic and I'm looking forward to his review soon. More output generates more input What seems to be like a personal mantra is working out pretty well for me since the beginning of this year. Being more active on social media networks, writing more article on my blog, starting the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community, and contributing more to other online communities has helped me to receive more project requests, job offers and possibilities to expand my business at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. Actually, it is not a coincidence that one of the questions new craftsmen should answer during registration asks about having a personal blog. Whether you are just curious about IT, right in the middle of your Computer Studies, or already working in software development or system administration since a while you should consider to advertise and market yourself online. Easiest way to resolve this are to have online profiles on professional social media networks like LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, and Google+ (no Facebook should be considered for private only), and considering to have a personal blog. Why? -- Be yourself, be proud of your work, and let other people know that you're passionate about your profession. Trust me, this is going to open up opportunities you might not have dreamt about... Exchanging ideas about having a professional online presence - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 Furthermore, consider to put your Curriculum Vitae online, too. There are quite a number of service providers like 1ClickCV, Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, etc. which give you the ability to have an up to date CV online. At least put it on your site, next to your personal blog. Similar to what you would be able to see on my site here. Cyber Island Mauritius - are we there? A couple of weeks ago I got a 'cold' message on LinkedIn from someone living in the U.S. asking about the circumstances and conditions of the IT world of Mauritius. He has a great business idea, venture capital and is currently looking for a team of software developers (mainly mobile - iOS) for a new startup here in Mauritius. Since then we exchanged quite some details through private messages and Skype conversations, and I suggested that it might be a good chance to join our meetup through a conference call and see for yourself about potential candidates. During approximately 30 to 40 minutes the brief idea of the new startup was presented - very promising state-of-the-art technology aspects and integration of various public APIs -, and we had a good Q&A session about it. Also thanks to the excellent bandwidth provided by the Ebene Accelerator the video conference between three parties went absolutely well. Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade Hahaha - nice one... Being at the Orange Tower at Ebene and then talking about an Orange Grade as CCD. Well, once again I provided an overview of the principles and practices in that rank of Clean Code, and similar to our last meetup we discussed on the various aspect of each principle, whether someone already got in touch with it during studies or work, and how it could affect their future view on their source code. Following are the principles and practices of Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade: CCD Orange Grade - Principles Single Level of Abstraction (SLA) Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) Separation of Concerns (SoC) Source Code conventions CCD Orange Grade - Practices Issue Tracking Automated Integration Tests Reading, Reading, Reading Reviews Especially the part on reading technical books got some extra attention. We quickly gathered our views on that and came up with a result that ranges between Zero (0) and up to Fifteen (15) book titles per year. Personally, I'm keeping my progress between Six (6) and Eight (8) titles per year, but at least One (1) per quarter of a year. Which is also connected to the fact that I'm participating in the O'Reilly Reader Review Program and have a another benefit to get access to free books only by writing and publishing a review afterwards. We also had a good exchange on the extended topic of 'Reviews' - which to my opinion is abnormal difficult here in Mauritius for various reasons. As far as I can tell from my experience working with Mauritian software developers, either as colleagues, employees or during consulting services there are unfortunately two dominant pattern on that topic: Keeping quiet Running away Honestly, I have no evidence about why these are the two 'solutions' on reviews but that's the situation that I had to face over the last couple of years. Sitting together and talking about problematic issues, tackling down root causes of de-motivational activities and working on general improvements doesn't seem to have a ground within the IT world of Mauritius. Are you a typist or a creative software craftsman? - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 One very good example that we talked about was the fact of 'job hoppers' as you can easily observe it on someone's CV - those people change job every single year; for no obvious reason! Frankly speaking, I wouldn't even consider an IT person like to for an interview. As a company you're investing money and effort into the abilities of your employees. Hiring someone that won't stay for a longer period is out of question. And sorry to say, these kind of IT guys smell fishy about their capabilities and more likely to cause problems than actually produce productive results. One of the reasons why there is a probation period on an employment contract is to give you the liberty to leave as early as possible in case that you don't like your new position. Don't fool yourself or waste other people's time and money by hanging around a full year only to snatch off the bonus payment... Future outlook: Developer's Conference Even though it is not official yet I already mentioned it several times during our weekly Code & Coffee sessions. The MSCC is looking forward to be able to organise or to contribute to an upcoming IT event. Currently, the rough schedule is set for April 2014 but this mainly depends on availability of location(s), a decent time frame for preparations, and the underlying procedures with public bodies to have it approved and so on. As soon as the information about date and location has been fixed there will be a 'Call for Papers' period in order to attract local IT enthusiasts to apply for a session slot and talk about their field of work and their passion in IT. More to come for sure... My resume of the day It was a great gathering and I am very pleased about the fact that we had another 15 craftsmen (plus 2 businessmen on conference call plus 2 young apprentices) in the same room, talking about IT related topics and sharing their experience as employees and students. Personally, I really appreciated the feedback from the students about their current view on their future career, and I really hope that some of them are going to pursue their dreams. Start promoting yourself and it will happen... Looking forward to your blogs! And last but not least our numbers on Meetup and Facebook have been increased as a direct consequence of this meetup. Please, spread the word about the MSCC and get your friends and colleagues to join our official site. The higher the number of craftsmen we have the better chances we have t achieve something great! Thanks!

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 03, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 03, 2013Popular ReleasesuComponents: uComponents v6.0.0: This release of uComponents will compile against and support the new API in Umbraco v6.1.0. What's new in uComponents v6.0.0? New DataTypesImage Point XML DropDownList XPath Templatable List New features / Resolved issuesThe following workitems have been implemented and/or resolved: 14781 14805 14808 14818 14854 14827 14868 14859 14790 14853 14790 DataType Grid 14788 14810 14873 14833 14864 14855 / 14860 14816 14823 Drag & Drop support for rows Su...SmartStore.NET - Free ASP.NET MVC Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution: SmartStore.NET 1.2.1: New FeaturesAdded option Limit to current basket subtotal to HadSpentAmount discount rule Items in product lists can be labelled as NEW for a configurable period of time Product templates can optionally display a discount sign when discounts were applied Added the ability to set multiple favicons depending on stores and/or themes Plugin management: multiple plugins can now be (un)installed in one go Added a field for the HTML body id to store entity (Developer) New property 'Extra...WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.9 binaries: Fixed issue with ICollectionView containg null values (AutoFilter issue)Community TFS Build Extensions: October 2013: The October 2013 release contains Scripts - a new addition to our delivery. These are a growing library of PowerShell scripts to use with VS2013. See our documentation for more on scripting. VS2010 Activities(target .NET 4.0) VS2012 Activities (target .NET 4.5) VS2013 Activities (target .NET 4.5.1) Community TFS Build Manager VS2012 Community TFS Build Manager VS2013 The Community TFS Build Managers for VS2010, 2012 and 2013 can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery where upda...WMI Inventory Client: WMI Inventory Client: WMI Inventory Client ?????????????? ?????????????? ?? WMISuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6 stable: Changes included in this release: Process level isolation SuperSocket ServerManager (include server and client) Connect to client from server side initiatively Client certificate validation New configuration attributes "textEncoding", "defaultCulture", and "storeLocation" (certificate node) Many bug fixes http://docs.supersocket.net/v1-6/en-US/New-Features-and-Breaking-ChangesFile System Explorer: Beta 1: Try me and please give feedback via Discussions and issues Installation: Download the zip file Unblock it Unzip to a suitable location Just run Filesystemexplorer.exe Enjoy Updates: V1.1 Beta: Fixed some low level file search issuesBarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.1: Check Version History for more information about this release.Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit 2.1: v 2.1 Added the 'Should' class instead of the 'Validate' class. The 'Validate' class is now obsolete. Added 'Toolkit.Annotations' to support the Mugen MVVM Toolkit ReSharper plugin. Updated JetBrains annotations within the project. Added the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultActivationPolicy' property to represent the default activation policy. Removed the 'GetSettings' method from the 'ViewModelBase' class. Instead of it, the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultViewModelSettings' property is used. Updated...SharePoint User Permission Check: SP User Permission Check: Modified Current.Web.Title in output label.TFS Event Workflows: TFS Event Workflows 0.10.41576.0 - TFS 2012-2013: Supports TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 For a TFS 2010 version look at https://tfseventworkflows.codeplex.com/releases/view/102444 New Features multiple application tiers storage of workflows, configurations and activities in the version control support for async execution in TFS job agent selection of collection/project filters in config file simple disable in config file simplified configurationCrowd CMS: Crowd CMS FREE - Official Release: This is the original source files for Crowd CMS Free (v1.0.0) and is the latest stable release which has been bug-tested and fixed.Sea Dragon AJAX Viewer Web Part: Sea Dragon Ajax Web Part: The Seadragon Viewer WSP and companion literature. There are three seperate guides that explain how to get up and running: - Seadragon Viewer Web Part Installation Guide Creating Deep Zoom Images for Seadragon Viewer Bringing it all together These guides are currently very basic and are offered as guides for getting full usage out Seadragon. Please post any suggestions for further documentation in the discussions forumProject Nonnon: 2013_10_30: ----------==========----------==========----------==========---------- "No news is good news." ----------==========----------==========----------==========---------- Change Log 2013/10/30 BUGFIX win32/explorer.c n_explorer_path_get() : comment OLD : typo NEW : fixed Felis Win8 or latert : Link Maker OLD : not function in some cases NEW : fixed Nyaurism Formatter : byte count label : when resized OLD : text will be broken NEW : fixed NEW_FEATURE win...NAudio: NAudio 1.7: full release notes available at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/naudio-17-release-notes.htmlFormula Calculation Toolkit: FCT Library: Alfa release for Formula Calculation Toolkit.WebExtras: v1.3.0 Beta: Enh: Adding support for Bootstrap 3.x Enh: Adding support for Gumby 2.5.x Enh: Adding a new string extension Remove() to remove occurences of given string Enh: Adding a ToDictionary() for name value collections Enh: The dataTable sort extension is now a little more intelligent and robust Enh: General under the hood code enhancements Fix: Hyperlink extensions now handle MVC Areas Fix: Marking JsFunc as serializable otherwise when using the ASP.NET State Server, the object does no...DirectX Tool Kit: October 2013: October 28, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM Added DGSLEffect, DGSLEffectFactory, VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTexture, and VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTextureSkinning Model loading and effect factories support loading skinned models MakeSpriteFont now has a smooth vs. sharp antialiasing option: /sharp Model loading from CMOs now handles UV transforms for texture coordinates A number of small fixes for EffectFactory Minor code and project cleanup ...ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.0beta1: +2013-10-28 v4.0 beta1 +?????Collapsed???????????????。 -????：window/group_panel.aspx??，???????，???????，?????????。 +??????SelectedNodeIDArray???????????????。 -????：tree/checkbox/tree_checkall.aspx??，?????，?????，????????????。 -??TimerPicker???????（????、????ing）。 -??????????????????????（???）。 -?????????????，??type=text/css（??~`）。 -MsgTarget???MessageTarget，???None。 -FormOffsetRight?????20px??5px。 -?Web.config?PageManager??FormLabelAlign???。 -ToolbarPosition??Left/Right。 -??Web.conf...CODE Framework: 4.0.31028.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.New Projects.NET Site Storage: Write .NET code to use an abstract storage system that can work with a variety of storage, such as local file system and Azure blob.Asp.net Mvc Ajax Infinite Scroll: Asp.net Mvc 4 Ajax Json Infinite Scrollblueblue: tetCar: CArCSharp Generic Data Access: Yet another generic data access for .NETDotNet Manuals: DotNet Manuals aims to provide developers an easy way to create, manage and distribute manuals and various documentation for their applications and libraries.EIB Watcher .Net Library: .Net Library for EIB/NKX bus accessopenGamification: This intends to become an open source gamification framework based on TypeScript.PaginaWebCursoNetAcc: aSimple Person Manager: The application accepts POST requests with JSON data about a Person, stored the values in Azure Table Storage and accepts GET requests to retrieve it back.Stock Track: If you have a small retail store with simple stock management and tracking requirements, this program might work for you. Stock Track easily categorises your ptrapawebapp: testVisualStateManager: This is a simple, but quite powerful mechanism allowing you to separate the application UI from application logic in Windows Forms.Yet Another VirtualBox ToolSet: This is going to be another VirtualBox Toolset.Zodinet: Co ca ngua

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• Towards Ultra-Reusability for ADF - Adaptive Bindings

  - by Duncan Mills

  The task flow mechanism embodies one of the key value propositions of the ADF Framework, it's primary contribution being the componentization of your applications and implicitly the introduction of a re-use culture, particularly in large applications. However, what if we could do more? How could we make task flows even more re-usable than they are today? Well one great technique is to take advantage of a feature that is already present in the framework, a feature which I will call, for want of a better name, "adaptive bindings". What's an adaptive binding? well consider a simple use case.  I have several screens within my application which display tabular data which are all essentially identical, the only difference is that they happen to be based on different data collections (View Objects, Bean collections, whatever) , and have a different set of columns. Apart from that, however, they happen to be identical; same toolbar, same key functions and so on. So wouldn't it be nice if I could have a single parametrized task flow to represent that type of UI and reuse it? Hold on you say, great idea, however, to do that we'd run into problems. Each different collection that I want to display needs different entries in the pageDef file and: I want to continue to use the ADF Bindings mechanism rather than dropping back to passing the whole collection into the taskflow   If I do use bindings, there is no way I want to have to declare iterators and tree bindings for every possible collection that I might want the flow to handle  Ah, joy! I reply, no need to panic, you can just use adaptive bindings. Defining an Adaptive Binding  It's easiest to explain with a simple before and after use case.  Here's a basic pageDef definition for our familiar Departments table.  <executables> <iterator Binds="DepartmentsView1" DataControl="HRAppModuleDataControl" RangeSize="25"             id="DepartmentsView1Iterator"/> </executables> <bindings> <tree IterBinding="DepartmentsView1Iterator" id="DepartmentsView1">   <nodeDefinition DefName="oracle.demo.model.vo.DepartmentsView" Name="DepartmentsView10">     <AttrNames>       <Item Value="DepartmentId"/>         <Item Value="DepartmentName"/>         <Item Value="ManagerId"/>         <Item Value="LocationId"/>       </AttrNames>     </nodeDefinition> </tree> </bindings>  Here's the adaptive version: <executables> <iterator Binds="${pageFlowScope.voName}" DataControl="HRAppModuleDataControl" RangeSize="25"             id="TableSourceIterator"/> </executables> <bindings> <tree IterBinding="TableSourceIterator" id="GenericView"> <nodeDefinition Name="GenericViewNode"/> </tree> </bindings>  You'll notice three changes here.   Most importantly, you'll see that the hard-coded View Object name  that formally populated the iterator Binds attribute is gone and has been replaced by an expression (${pageFlowScope.voName}). This of course, is key, you can see that we can pass a parameter to the task flow, telling it exactly what VO to instantiate to populate this table! I've changed the IDs of the iterator and the tree binding, simply to reflect that they are now re-usable The tree binding itself has simplified and the node definition is now empty.  Now what this effectively means is that the #{node} map exposed through the tree binding will expose every attribute of the underlying iterator's collection - neat! (kudos to Eugene Fedorenko at this point who reminded me that this was even possible in his excellent "deep dive" session at OpenWorld  this year) Using the adaptive binding in the UI Now we have a parametrized  binding we have to make changes in the UI as well, first of all to reflect the new ID that we've assigned to the binding (of course) but also to change the column list from being a fixed known list to being a generic metadata driven set: <af:table value="#{bindings.GenericView.collectionModel}" rows="#{bindings.GenericView.rangeSize}"         fetchSize="#{bindings.GenericView.rangeSize}"           emptyText="#{bindings.GenericView.viewable ? 'No data to display.' : 'Access Denied.'}"           var="row" rowBandingInterval="0"           selectedRowKeys="#{bindings.GenericView.collectionModel.selectedRow}"           selectionListener="#{bindings.GenericView.collectionModel.makeCurrent}"           rowSelection="single" id="t1"> <af:forEach items="#{bindings.GenericView.attributeDefs}" var="def">   <af:column headerText="#{bindings.GenericView.labels[def.name]}" sortable="true"            sortProperty="#{def.name}" id="c1">     <af:outputText value="#{row[def.name]}" id="ot1"/>     </af:column>   </af:forEach> </af:table> Of course you are not constrained to a simple read only table here.  It's a normal tree binding and iterator that you are using behind the scenes so you can do all the usual things, but you can see the value of using ADFBC as the back end model as you have the rich pantheon of UI hints to use to derive things like labels (and validators and converters...)  One Final Twist  To finish on a high note I wanted to point out that you can take this even further and achieve the ultra-reusability I promised. Here's the new version of the pageDef iterator, see if you can notice the subtle change? <iterator Binds="{pageFlowScope.voName}"  DataControl="${pageFlowScope.dataControlName}" RangeSize="25"           id="TableSourceIterator"/>  Yes, as well as parametrizing the collection (VO) name, we can also parametrize the name of the data control. So your task flow can graduate from being re-usable within an application to being truly generic. So if you have some really common patterns within your app you can wrap them up and reuse then across multiple developments without having to dictate data control names, or connection names. This also demonstrates the importance of interacting with data only via the binding layer APIs. If you keep any code in the task flow generic in that way you can deal with data from multiple types of data controls, not just one flavour. Enjoy!

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• Navigation in Win8 Metro Style applications

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  In Windows 8, Touch is, as they say, a first class citizen. Now, to be honest: they also said that in Windows 7. However in Win8 this is actually true. Applications are meant to be used by touch. Yes, you can still use mouse, keyboard and pen and your apps should take that into account but touch is where you should focus on initially. Will all users have touch enabled devices? No, not in the first place. I don’t think touchscreens will be on every device sold next year. But in 5 years? Who knows? Don’t forget: if your app is successful it will be around for a long time and by that time touchscreens will be everywhere. Another reason to embrace touch is that it’s easier to develop a touch-oriented app and then to make sure that keyboard, nouse and pen work as doing it the other way around. Porting a mouse-based application to a touch based application almost never works. The reverse gives you much more chances for success. That being said, there are some things that you need to think about. Most people have more than one finger, while most users only use one mouse at the time. Still, most touch-developers translate their mouse-knowledge to the touch and think they did a good job. Martin Tirion from Microsoft said that since Touch is a new language people face the same challenges they do when learning a new real spoken language. The first thing people try when learning a new language is simply replace the words in their native language to the newly learned words. At first they don’t care about grammar. To a native speaker of that other language this sounds all wrong but they still will be able to understand what the intention was. If you don’t believe me: try Google translate to translate something for you from your language to another and then back and see what happens. The same thing happens with Touch. Most developers translate a mouse-click into a tap-event and think they’re done. Well matey, you’re not done. Not by far. There are things you can do with a mouse that you cannot do with touch. Think hover. A mouse has the ability to ‘slide’ over UI elements. Touch doesn’t (I know: with Pen you can do this but I’m talking about actual fingers here). A touch is either there or it isn’t. And right-click? Forget about it. A click is a click.  Yes, you have more than one finger but the machine doesn’t know which finger you use… The other way around is also true. Like I said: most users only have one mouse but they are likely to have more than one finger. So how do we take that into account? Thinking about this is really worth the time: you might come up with some surprisingly good ideas! Still: don’t forget that not every user has touch-enabled hardware so make sure your app is useable for both groups. Keep this in mind: we’re going to need it later on! Now. Apps should be easy to use. You don’t want your user to read through pages and pages of documentation before they can use the app. Imagine that spotter next to an airfield suddenly seeing a prototype of a Concorde 2 landing on the nearby runway. He probably wants to enter that information in our app NOW and not after he’s taken a 3 day course. Even if he still has to download the app, install it for the first time and then run it he should be on his way immediately. At least, fast enough to note down the details of that unique, rare and possibly exciting sighting he just did. So.. How do we do this? Well, I am not talking about games here. Games are in a league of their own. They fall outside the scope of the apps I am describing. But all the others can roughly be characterized as being one of two flavors: the navigation is either flat or hierarchical. That’s it. And if it’s hierarchical it’s no more than three levels deep. Not more. Your users will get lost otherwise and we don’t want that. Flat is simple. Just imagine we have one screen that is as high as our physical screen is and as wide as you need it to be. Don’t worry if it doesn’t fit on the screen: people can scroll to the right and left. Don’t combine up/down and left/right scrolling: it’s confusing. Next to that, since most users will hold their device in landscape mode it’s very natural to scroll horizontal. So let’s use that when we have a flat model. The same applies to the hierarchical model. Try to have at most three levels. If you need more space, find a way to group the items in such a way that you can fit it in three, very wide lanes. At the highest level we have the so called hub level. This is the entry point of the app and as such it should give the user an immediate feeling of what the app is all about. If your app has categories if items then you might show these categories here. And while you’re at it: also show 2 or 3 of the items itself here to give the user a taste of what lies beneath. If the user selects a category you go to the section part. Here you show several sections (again, go as wide as you need) with again some detail examples. After that: the details layer shows each item. By giving some samples of the underlaying layer you achieve several things: you make the layer attractive by showing several different things, you show some highlights so the user sees actual content and you provide a shortcut to the layers underneath. The image below is borrowed from the http://design.windows.com website which has tons and tons of examples: For our app we’ll use this layout. So what will we show? Well, let’s see what sorts of features our app has to offer. I’ll repeat them here: Note planes Add pictures of that plane Notify friends of new spots Share new spots on social media Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down the runway they take I am sure you can think of some more items but for now we'll use these. In the hub we’ll show something that represents “Spots”, “Friends”, “Social”. Apparently we have an inner list of spotter-friends that are in the app, while we also have to whole world in social. In the layer below we show something else, depending on what the user choose. When they choose “Spots” we’ll display the last spots, last spots by our friends (so we can actually jump from this category to the one next to it) and so on. When they choose a “spot” (or press the + icon in the App bar, which I’ll talk about next time) they go to the lowest and final level that shows details about that spot, including a picture, date and time and the notes belonging to that entry. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to organize your app this way. If you don’t have enough room in these three layers you probably could easily get away with grouping items. Take a look at our hub: we have three completely different things in one place. If you still can’t fit it all in in a logical and consistent way, chances are you are trying to do too much in this app. Go back to your mission statement, determine if it is specific enough and if your feature list helps that statement or makes it unclear. Go ahead. Give it a go! Next time we’ll talk about the look and feel, the charms and the app-bar….

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part IV)

  So finally we get to the fun part the fruits of all of our middle-tier/back end labors of generating classes to interface with an XML data source that the previous posts were about can now be presented quickly and easily to an end user.  I think.  Well see.  Well be using a WPF window to display all of our various MFL information that weve collected in the two XML files, and well provide a means of adding, updating and deleting each of these entities using as little code as possible.  Additionally, I would like to dig into the performance of this solution as well as the flexibility of it if were were to modify the underlying XML schema.  So first things first, lets create a WPF project and include our xml data in a data folder within.  On the main window, well drag out the following controls: A combo box to contain all of the teams A list box to show the players of the selected team, along with add/delete player buttons A text box tied to the selected players name, with a save button to save any changes made to the player name A combo box of all the available positions, tied to the currently selected players position A data grid tied to the statistics of the currently selected player, with add/delete statistic buttons This monstrosity of a form and its associated project will look like this (dont forget to reference the DataFoundation project from the Presentation project): To get to the visual data binding, as we learned in a previous post, you have to first make sure the project containing your bindable classes is compiled.  Do so, and then open the Data Sources pane to add a reference to the Teams and Positions classes in the DataFoundation project: Why only Team and Position?  Well, we will get to Players from Teams, and Statistics from Players so no need to make an interface for them as well see in a second.  As for Positions, well need a way to bind the dropdown to ALL positions they dont appear underneath any of the other classes so we need to reference it directly.  After adding these guys, expand every node in your Data Sources pane and see how the Team node allows you to drill into Players and then Statistics.  This is why there was no need to bring in a reference to those classes for the UI we are designing: Now for the seriously hard work of binding all of our controls to the correct data sources.  Drag the following items from the Data Sources pane to the specified control on the window design canvas: Team.Name > Teams combo box Team.Players.Name > Players list box Team.Players.Name > Player name text box Team.Players.Statistics > Statistics data grid Position.Name > Positions combo box That is it!  Really?  Well, no, not really there is one caveat here in that the Positions combo box is not bound the selected players position.  To do so, we will apply a binding to the position combo boxs SelectedValue to point to the current players PositionId value: That should do the trick now, all we need to worry about is loading the actual data.  Sadly, it appears as if we will need to drop to code in order to invoke our IO methods to load all teams and positions.  At least Visual Studio kindly created the stubs for us to do so, ultimately the code should look like this: Note the weirdness with the InitializeDataFiles call that is my current means of telling an IO where to load the data for each of the entities.  I havent thought of a more intuitive way than that yet, but do note that all data is loaded from Teams.xml besides for positions, which is loaded from Lookups.xml.   I think that may be all we need to do to at least load all of the data, lets run it and see: Yay!  All of our glorious data is being displayed!  Er, wait, whats up with the position dropdown?  Why is it red?  Lets select the RB and see if everything updates: Crap, the position didnt update to reflect the selected player, but everything else did.  Where did we go wrong in binding the position to the selected player?  Thinking about it a bit and comparing it to how traditional data binding works, I realize that we never set the value member (or some similar property) to tell the control to join the Id of the source (positions) to the position Id of the player.  I dont see a similar property to that on the combo box control, but I do see a property named SelectedValuePath that might be it, so I set it to Id and run the app again: Hey, all right!  No red box around the positions combo box.  Unfortunately, selecting the RB does not update the dropdown to point to Runningback.  Hmmm.  Now what could it be?  Maybe the problem is that we are loading teams before we are loading positions, so when it binds position Id, all of the positions arent loaded yet.  I went to the code behind and switched things so position loads first and no dice.  Same result when I run.  Why?  WHY?  Ok, ok, calm down, take a deep breath.  Get something with caffeine or sugar (preferably both) and think rationally. Ok, gigantic chocolate chip cookie and a mountain dew chaser have never let me down in the past, so dont fail me now!  Ah ha!  of course!  I didnt even have to finish the mountain dew and I think Ive got it:  Data Context.  By default, when setting on the selected value binding for the dropdown, the data context was list_team.  I dont even know what the heck list_team is, we want it to be bound to our team players view source resource instead, like this: Running it now and selecting the various players: Done and done.  Everything read and bound, thank you caffeine and sugar!  Oh, and thank you Visual Studio 2010.  Lets wire up some of those buttons now There has got to be a better way to do this, but it works for now.  What the add player button does is add a new player object to the currently selected team.  Unfortunately, I couldnt get the new object to automatically show up in the players list (something about not using an observable collection gotta look into this) so I just save the change immediately and reload the screen.  Terrible, but it works: Lets go after something easier:  The save button.  By default, as we type in new text for the players name, it is showing up in the list box as updated.  Cool!  Why couldnt my add new player logic do that?  Anyway, the save button should be as simple as invoking MFL.IO.Save for the selected player, like this: MFL.IO.Save((MFL.Player)lbTeamPlayers.SelectedItem, true); Surprisingly, that worked on the first try.  Lets see if we get as lucky with the Delete player button: MFL.IO.Delete((MFL.Player)lbTeamPlayers.SelectedItem); Refresh(); Note the use of the Refresh method again I cant seem to figure out why updates to the underlying data source are immediately reflected, but adds and deletes are not.  That is a problem for another day, and again my hunch is that I should be binding to something more complex than IEnumerable (like observable collection). Now that an example of the basic CRUD methods are wired up, I want to quickly investigate the performance of this beast.  Im going to make a special button to add 30 teams, each with 50 players and 10 seasons worth of stats.  If my math is right, that will end up with 15000 rows of data, a pretty hefty amount for an XML file.  The save of all this new data took a little over a minute, but that is acceptable because we wouldnt typically be saving batches of 15k records, and the resulting XML file size is a little over a megabyte.  Not huge, but big enough to see some read performance numbers or so I thought.  It reads this file and renders the first team in under a second.  That is unbelievable, but we are lazy loading and the file really wasnt that big.  I will increase it to 50 teams with 100 players and 20 seasons each - 100,000 rows.  It took a year and a half to save all of that data, and resulted in an 8 megabyte file.  Seriously, if you are loading XML files this large, get a freaking database!  Despite this, it STILL takes under a second to load and render the first team, which is interesting mostly because I thought that it was loading that entire 8 MB XML file behind the scenes.  I have to say that I am quite impressed with the performance of the LINQ to XML approach, particularly since I took no efforts to optimize any of this code and was fairly new to the concept from the start.  There might be some merit to this little project after all Look out SQL Server and Oracle, use XML files instead!  Next up, I am going to completely pull the rug out from under the UI and change a number of entities in our model.  How well will the code be regenerated?  How much effort will be required to tie things back together in the UI?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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• Scrum Master Stephen Forte Teaches Agile Development, Silverlight and BI at GIDS 2010

  - by rajesh ahuja

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – Gold Standard for India's Software Developer Ecosystem Bangalore, March 25, 2010: The author of several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 and certified Scrum Master Stephen Forte is coming this summer to India's biggest summit for the developer ecosystem - Great Indian Developer Summit. At the summit, Stephen will conduct a workshop guaranteed to give attendees a jump start in taking a certified scrum master exam. Scrum, one of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, which is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an introduction to the basics of Scrum like project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen will show many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master. Negotiating with the business, estimation and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments and consulting environments. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and an off-shoring environment. He will then take a look at the tools we will use for Agile development, including planning poker, unit testing, and much more. On 20th April at the GIDS.NET Conference, Stephen will also conduct a series of sessions on Microsoft computing technologies. He will teach how to build data driven, n-tier Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with Silverlight 4.0. Line of business applications (LOB) in Silverlight 4.0 are easy by tapping the power of WCF RIA Services, the Silverlight Toolkit, and elevated out of browser support. Stephen's demo centric session will walk you through an example of building a LOB application with Silverlight 4.0. See how Silverlight and WCF RIA Services support domain logic, services, data binding, validation, server based paging, authentication, authorization and much more. Silverlight 4.0 means business. Silverlight runs C# and Visual Basic code, and so it seems natural that a business application might share some code between the Silverlight client and its ASP.NET Web server. You may want to run some code client-side for interactivity, but re-run that code on the server for security or reliability. This is possible, and there are several techniques you can use to accomplish this goal. In Stephen's second talk learn about the various techniques and their pros and cons. Some techniques work better in C#, others in VB. Still others are simpler with a little extra tooling or code-generation. Any serious Silverlight business application will almost certainly face this issue, and this session gets you going fast. In the third talk, Stephen will explain how to properly architect and deploy a BI application using a mix of some exciting new tools and some old familiar ones. He will start with a traditional relational transaction centric database (OLTP) and explore ways to build a data warehouse (OLAP), looking at the star and snowflake schemas. Next he will look at the process of extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) your OLTP data into your data warehouse. Different techniques for ETL will be described and the various tradeoffs will be discussed. Then he will look at using the warehouse for reporting, drill down, and data analysis in Microsoft Excel's PowerPivot 2010. The session will round off by showing how to properly build a cube and build a data analysis application on top of that cube, and conclude by looking at some tools to help with the data visualization process. Every year, GIDS is a game changer for several thousands of IT professionals, providing them with a competitive edge over their peers, enlightening them with bleeding-edge information most useful in their daily jobs, helping them network with world-class experts and visionaries, and providing them with a much needed thrust in their careers. Attend Great Indian Developer Summit to gain the information, education and solutions you seek. From post-conference workshops, breakout sessions by expert instructors, keynotes by industry heavyweights, enhanced networking opportunities, and more. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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• Backing up my data causes my server to crash using Symantec Backup Exec 12, or How I Came to Loathe

  - by Kyle Noland

  I have a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Windows Server 2003. It is the primary file server for one of my clients. I have another server also running Windows Server 2003 that acts as the core media server for Symantec Backup Exec 12. I recently upgraded from Backup Exec 11d to 12. This upgrade was necessary because we also just upgraded from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. After the upgrade I had to push-install the new version 12 Backup Exec Remote Agents to each of the servers I am backing up (about 6 total). 5 of my servers are doing just fine, faithfully completing backups every night. My file server routinely crashes. Observations: When the server crashes, it does not blue screen, it just locks up completely. Even the mouse is unresponsive. If you leave the server locked up long enough, it will eventually reboot itself and hang on the Windows splash screen. There is absolutely zero useful Event Viewer evidence of a problem. The logs go from routine logging to an Unexplained Shutdown Event the next morning when I have to hard reset the server to get it to boot. 90% of the time the server does not boot cleanly, it hangs on the Windows splash screen. I don't have any light to shed here. When the server hangs all I can do is hard reset it and try again. Even after a successful boot and chkdsk /r operation, if you reboot the machine, you have a 90% chance it won't back up again cleanly. The back story: This server started crashing during nightly backups about a month ago. I tried everything I could think of to troubleshoot the problem and eventually had to give up because I could not keep coming to the office at 4 AM to try to get the server back online. One Friday I got lucky and the server stayed up for its entire full backup. I took this opportunity to restore the full backup to a temporary server I set up and switched all my users to the temporary. Then I reloaded the ailing file server. I kept all my users on the temporary file server for about 3 weeks. I installed the same Backup Exec Remote Agent and Trend Micro A/V client on the temporary server that I was using on the regular file server. During this time, I had absolutely no problems backing up the temporary server. I tested the reloaded file server extensively. I rebooted the server once an hour every day for 3 weeks trying to make it fail. It never did. I felt confident that the reload was the answer to my problems. I moved all of the data from the temporary server back to the regular server. I got 3 nightly backups out of it before it locked up again and started the familiar failure to boot cleanly behavior. This weekend I decided to monitor the file server through the entire backup job. I RDPd into the file server and also into the server running Backup Exec. On the file server I opened the Task Manager so I could view the processes and watch CPU and memory usage. Everything was running smoothly for about 60GB worth of backup. Then I noticed that the byte count of the backup job in Backup Exec had stopped progressing. I looked back over at my RDP session into the file server, and I was getting real time updates about CPU and memory usage still - both nearly 0%, which is unusual. Backups usually hover around 40% usage for the duration of the backup job. Let me reiterate this point: The screen was refreshing and I was getting real time Task Manager updates - until I clicked on the Start menu. The screen went black and the server locked up. In truth, I think the server had already locked up, the video card just hadn't figured it out yet. I went back into my bag of trick: driving to the office and hard reseting the server over and over again when it hangs up at the Windows splash screen. I did this for 2 hours without getting a successful boot. I started panicking because I did not have a decent backup to use to get everything back onto the working temporary file server. Once I exhausted everything I knew to do, I took a deep breath, booted to the Windows Server 2003 CD and performed a repair installation of Windows. The server came back up fine, with all of my data intact. I can now reboot the server at will and it will come back up cleanly. The problem is that I'm afraid as soon as I try to back that data up again I will back at square one. So let me sum things up: Here is what I've done so far to troubleshoot this server: Deleted and recreated the RAID 5 sets. Initialized the drives. Reloaded the server with a fresh Server 2003 install. Confirmed with Dell that I have installed the latest, Dell approved BIOS and NIC drivers. Uninstalled / reinstalled the Backup Exec Remote Agent. Uninstalled the Trend Micro A/V client. Configured the server not to reboot itself after a blue screen so I can see any stop error. I used to think the server was blue screening, but since I enabled this setting I now know that the server just completely locks up. Run chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console. Several errors were found and corrected, but did not help my problem. Help confirm or deny the following assumptions: There are two problems at work here. Why the server is locking up in the first place, and why the server won't boot cleanly after a lockup. This is ultimately a software problem. The server works fine and can be rebooted cleanly all day long - until the first lockup - following a fresh OS load or even a Repair installation. This is not a problem with Backup Exec in general. All of my other servers back up just fine. For the record, all of the other servers run Server 2003, and some of them house more data than the file server in question here. Any help is appreciated. The irony is almost too much to bear. Backing up my data is what is jeopardizing it.

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• Problem with Variable Scoping in Rebol's Object

  - by Rebol Tutorial

  I have modified the rebodex app so that it can be called from rebol's console any time by typing rebodex. To show the title of the app, I need to store it in app-title: system/script/header/title so tha it could be used later in view/new/title dex reform [self/app-title version] That works but as you can see I have named the var name "app-title", but if I use "title" instead, the window caption would show weird stuff (vid code). Why ? REBOL [ Title: "Rebodex" Date: 23-May-2010 Version: 2.1.1 File: %rebodex.r Author: "Carl Sassenrath" Modification: "Rebtut" Purpose: "A simple but useful address book contact database." Email: %carl--rebol--com library: [ level: 'intermediate platform: none type: 'tool domain: [file-handling DB GUI] tested-under: none support: none license: none see-also: none ] ] rebodex.context: context [ app-title: system/script/header/title version: system/script/header/version set 'rebodex func[][ names-path: %names.r ;data file name-list: none fields: [name company title work cell home car fax web email smail notes updat] names: either exists? names-path [load names-path][ [[name "Carl Sassenrath" title "Founder" company "REBOL Technologies" email "%carl--rebol--com" web "http://www.rebol.com"]] ] brws: [ if not empty? web/text [ if not find web/text "http://" [insert web/text "http://"] error? try [browse web/text] ] ] dial: [request [rejoin ["Dial number for " name/text "? (Not implemented.)"] "Dial" "Cancel"]] dex-styles: stylize [ lab: label 60x20 right bold middle font-size 11 btn: button 64x20 font-size 11 edge [size: 1x1] fld: field 200x20 font-size 11 middle edge [size: 1x1] inf: info font-size 11 middle edge [size: 1x1] ari: field wrap font-size 11 edge [size: 1x1] with [flags: [field tabbed]] ] dex-pane1: layout/offset [ origin 0 space 2x0 across styles dex-styles lab "Name" name: fld bold return lab "Title" title: fld return lab "Company" company: fld return lab "Email" email: fld return lab "Web" brws web: fld return lab "Address" smail: ari 200x72 return lab "Updated" updat: inf 200x20 return ] 0x0 updat/flags: none dex-pane2: layout/offset [ origin 0 space 2x0 across styles dex-styles lab "Work #" dial work: fld 140 return lab "Home #" dial home: fld 140 return lab "Cell #" dial cell: fld 140 return lab "Alt #" dial car: fld 140 return lab "Fax #" fax: fld 140 return lab "Notes" notes: ari 140x72 return pad 136x1 btn "Close" #"^q" [store-entry save-file unview] ] 0x0 dex: layout [ origin 8x8 space 0x1 styles dex-styles srch: fld 196x20 bold across rslt: list 180x150 [ nt: txt 178x15 middle font-size 11 [ store-entry curr: cnt find-name nt/text update-entry unfocus show dex ] ] supply [ cnt: count + scroll-off face/text: "" face/color: snow if not n: pick name-list cnt [exit] face/text: select n 'name face/font/color: black if curr = cnt [face/color: system/view/vid/vid-colors/field-select] ] sl: slider 16x150 [scroll-list] return return btn "New" #"^n" [new-name] btn "Del" #"^d" [delete-name unfocus update-entry search-all show dex] btn "Sort" [sort names sort name-list show rslt] return at srch/offset + (srch/size * 1x0) bx1: box dex-pane1/size bx2: box dex-pane2/size return ] bx1/pane: dex-pane1/pane bx2/pane: dex-pane2/pane rslt/data: [] this-name: first names name-list: copy names curr: none search-text: "" scroll-off: 0 srch/feel: make srch/feel [ redraw: func [face act pos][ face/color: pick face/colors face system/view/focal-face if all [face = system/view/focal-face face/text search-text] [ search-text: copy face/text search-all if 1 = length? name-list [this-name: first name-list update-entry show dex] ] ] ] update-file: func [data] [ set [path file] split-path names-path if not exists? path [make-dir/deep path] write names-path data ] save-file: has [buf] [ buf: reform [{REBOL [Title: "Name Database" Date:} now "]^/[^/"] foreach n names [repend buf [mold n newline]] update-file append buf "]" ] delete-name: does [ remove find/only names this-name if empty? names [append-empty] save-file new-name ] clean-names: function [][n][ forall names [ if any [empty? first names none? n: select first names 'name empty? n][ remove names ] ] names: head names ] search-all: function [] [ent flds] [ clean-names clear name-list flds: [name] either empty? search-text [insert name-list names][ foreach nam names [ foreach word flds [ if all [ent: select nam word find ent search-text][ append/only name-list nam break ] ] ] ] scroll-off: 0 sl/data: 0 resize-drag scroll-list curr: none show [rslt sl] ] new-name: does [ store-entry clear-entry search-all append-empty focus name ; update-entry ] append-empty: does [append/only names this-name: copy []] find-name: function [str][] [ foreach nam names [ if str = select nam 'name [ this-name: nam break ] ] ] store-entry: has [val ent flag] [ flag: 0 if not empty? trim name/text [ foreach word fields [ val: trim get in get word 'text either ent: select this-name word [ if ent val [insert clear ent val flag: flag + 1] ][ if not empty? val [repend this-name [word copy val] flag: flag + 1] ] if flag = 1 [flag: 2 updat/text: form now] ] if not zero? flag [save-file] ] ] update-entry: does [ foreach word fields [ insert clear get in get word 'text any [select this-name word ""] ] show rslt ] clear-entry: does [ clear-fields bx1 clear-fields bx2 updat/text: form now unfocus show dex ] show-names: does [ clear rslt/data foreach n name-list [ if n/name [append rslt/data n/name] ] show rslt ] scroll-list: does [ scroll-off: max 0 to-integer 1 + (length? name-list) - (100 / 16) * sl/data show rslt ] do resize-drag: does [sl/redrag 100 / max 1 (16 * length? name-list)] center-face dex new-name focus srch show-names view/new/title dex reform [app-title version] insert-event-func [ either all [event/type = 'close event/face = dex][ store-entry unview ][event] ] do-events ] ]

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• Trying to get these list items to display inline

  - by Joel

  I have several unordered lists that I want to display like this: <ul> <li><img></li> <li><p></li> //inline </ul> //linebreak <ul> <li><img></li> <li><p></li> //inline </ul> ...etc I'm not able to get the li items to be inline with eachother. They are stacking vertically. I have stripped away most styling but still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong: html: <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/matepe.jpg" width="247" height="228" alt="Matepe" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The matepe is a 24 key instrument that is played by the Kore-Kore people in North-Eastern Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It utilizes four fingers-each playing an individual melody. These melodies also interwieve to create resultant melodies that can be manipulated thru accenting different fingers. The matepe is used in Rattletree as the bridge from the physical world to the spirit world. The matepe is used in the Kore-Kore culture to summon the Mhondoro spirits which are thought to be able to communicate directly with Mwari (God) without the need of an intermediary.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/soprano_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="170" alt="Soprano" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The highest voice of the Rattletree Marimba orchestra is the Soprano marimba. The soprano is used to whip up the energy on the dancefloor and help people reach ecstatic state with it's high and clear singing voice. The range of these sopranos goes much lower than 'typical' Zimbabwean style sopranos. The sopranos play the range of the right hand of the matepe and go two notes higher and five notes lower. Rattletree uses two sopranos.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/bari_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="170" alt="Baritone" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The Baritone is the next lower voice in the orchestra. The bari is where the funk is. Generally bubbling over the Bass line, the baritone creates the syncopations and polyrhythms that messes with the 'minds' of the dancers and helps seperate the listener from the physical realm of thought. The range of the baritone covers the full range of the left hand side of the matepe.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/darren_littlebass.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="195" alt="Bass"/><strong>Bass Marimba</strong></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The towering Bass Marimba is the foundation of the Rattletree Marimba sound. Putting out frequencies as low as 22hZ, the bass creates the drive that gets the dancefloor moving. It is 5.5' tall, 9' long, and 4' deep. It is played by standing on a platform and struck with mallets that have lacross-ball size heads (they are actually made with rubber dog balls). The Bass marimba's range covers the lowest five notes of the matepe and goes another five notes lower.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/wayne_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="177" alt="Drums"/><strong>Drumset</strong></li> <li class="textbox"><p>All the intricate polyrhythms are held together tastefully with the drumset. The drums provides the consistancy and grounding that the dancers need to keep going all night. While the steady kick and high-hat provide that grounding function, the toms and snare and allowed to be another voice in the poylrhythmic texture-helping the dancers abandon the concept of a "one" within this cyclical music.</p></li> </ul> css: ul.instrument { text-align:left; display:inline; } ul.instrument li { list-style-type: none; } li.imagebox { } li.textbox { } li.textbox p{ width: 247px; }

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• Jquery fade and swap an element when clicked which will also relate to an accordian menu

  - by Nik

  You will notice when you click posture 1 the description drops down and images appear on the right. Now when you click posture 2 or posture 3 the images and description change as they should. What I need to do now is - If posture 1 has been clicked and then posture 2 is clicked the posture 1 menu needs to close so that there is only one posture description visible at one time. If I could also make it so that if the current open posture item is clicked so that it closes and there are no open posture descriptions that there also no images displayed on the right. Finally is there a way to make sure only one set of animation images is running, because just say the user goes through all 26 options and they continue to run in the background it may get sluggish (thanks to Nick Craver for bringing that up). At this stage only posture 1, 2 and 3 are available. Ok finally some code - //Description drop-down boxes $(document).ready(function(){ //Hide (Collapse) the toggle containers on load $(".toggle_container").hide(); //Switch the "Open" and "Close" state per click $("h5.trigger").toggle(function(){ $(this).addClass("active"); }, function () { $(this).removeClass("active"); }); //Slide up and down on click $("h5.trigger").click(function(){ $(this).next(".toggle_container").slideToggle("slow"); }); }); //Images on the right fade in and out thanks to aSeptik $(document).ready(function(){ $('#section_Q_01,#section_Q_02,#section_Q_03').hide(); $(function() { $('h5.trigger a').click( function(e) { e.preventDefault(); var trigger_id = $(this).parent().attr('id'); //get id Q_## $('.current').removeClass('current').hide(); //add a class for easy access & hide $('#section_' + trigger_id).addClass('current').fadeIn(5000); //show clicked one }); }); }); //Fading pics $(document).ready(function(){ $('.pics').cycle({ fx: 'fade', speed: 2500 }); }); Description boxes - <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_01" ><a href="#">Posture 1 : Standing Deep Breathing :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container" > <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Pranayama Series</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_02" ><a href="#">Posture 2 : Half Moon Pose With Hands To Feet Pose :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container"> <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Ardha Chandrasana with Pada-Hastasana</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_03" ><a href="#">Posture 3 : Awkward Pose :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container"> <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Utkatasana</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> and the images on the right - <div id="section_Q_01" class="01"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._01.jpg"/> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._02.jpg"/> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._03.jpg"/> </div> </div> <div id="section_Q_02" class="02"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Half_Moon_Pose_04.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Backward_Bending_05.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Hands_to_Feet_Pose_06.jpg" /> </div> </div> <div id="section_Q_03" class="03"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_01.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_02.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_03.jpg" /> </div> </div> It would be a bonus if images faded out when another element is clicked... but not a big deal. Thanks for having a look

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• Animation issue caused by C# parameters passed by reference rather than value, but where?

  - by Jordan Roher

  I'm having trouble with sprite animation in XNA that appears to be caused by a struct passed as a reference value. But I'm not using the ref keyword anywhere. I am, admittedly, a C# noob, so there may be some shallow bonehead error in here, but I can't see it. I'm creating 10 ants or bees and animating them as they move across the screen. I have an array of animation structs, and each time I create an ant or bee, I send it the animation array value it requires (just [0] or [1] at this time). Deep inside the animation struct is a timer that is used to change frames. The ant/bee class stores the animation struct as a private variable. What I'm seeing is that each ant or bee uses the same animation struct, the one I thought I was passing in and copying by value. So during Update(), when I advance the animation timer for each ant/bee, the next ant/bee has its animation timer advanced by that small amount. If there's 1 ant on screen, it animates properly. 2 ants, it runs twice as fast, and so on. Obviously, not what I want. Here's an abridged version of the code. How is BerryPicking's ActorAnimationGroupData[] getting shared between the BerryCreatures? class BerryPicking { private ActorAnimationGroupData[] animations; private BerryCreature[] creatures; private Dictionary<string, Texture2D> creatureTextures; private const int maxCreatures = 5; public BerryPickingExample() { this.creatures = new BerryCreature[maxCreatures]; this.creatureTextures = new Dictionary<string, Texture2D>(); } public void LoadContent() { // Returns data from an XML file Reader reader = new Reader(); animations = reader.LoadAnimations(); CreateCreatures(); } // This is called from another function I'm not including because it's not relevant to the problem. // In it, I remove any creature that passes outside the viewport by setting its creatures[] spot to null. // Hence the if(creatures[i] == null) test is used to recreate "dead" creatures. Inelegant, I know. private void CreateCreatures() { for (int i = 0; i < creatures.Length; i++) { if (creatures[i] == null) { // In reality, the name selection is randomized creatures[i] = new BerryCreature("ant"); // Load content and texture (which I create elsewhere) creatures[i].LoadContent( FindAnimation(creatures[i].Name), creatureTextures[creatures[i].Name]); } } } private ActorAnimationGroupData FindAnimation(string animationName) { int yourAnimation = -1; for (int i = 0; i < animations.Length; i++) { if (animations[i].name == animationName) { yourAnimation = i; break; } } return animations[yourAnimation]; } public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { for (int i = 0; i < creatures.Length; i++) { creatures[i].Update(gameTime); } } } class Reader { public ActorAnimationGroupData[] LoadAnimations() { ActorAnimationGroupData[] animationGroup; XmlReader file = new XmlTextReader(filename); // Do loading... // Then later file.Close(); return animationGroup; } } class BerryCreature { private ActorAnimation animation; private string name; public BerryCreature(string name) { this.name = name; } public void LoadContent(ActorAnimationGroupData animationData, Texture2D sprite) { animation = new ActorAnimation(animationData); animation.LoadContent(sprite); } public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { animation.Update(gameTime); } } class ActorAnimation { private ActorAnimationGroupData animation; public ActorAnimation(ActorAnimationGroupData animation) { this.animation = animation; } public void LoadContent(Texture2D sprite) { this.sprite = sprite; } public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { animation.Update(gameTime); } } struct ActorAnimationGroupData { // There are lots of other members of this struct, but the timer is the only one I'm worried about. // TimerData is another struct private TimerData timer; public ActorAnimationGroupData() { timer = new TimerData(2); } public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { timer.Update(gameTime); } } struct TimerData { public float currentTime; public float maxTime; public TimerData(float maxTime) { this.currentTime = 0; this.maxTime = maxTime; } public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { currentTime += (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; if (currentTime >= maxTime) { currentTime = maxTime; } } }

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• Backing up my data causes my server to crash using Symantec Backup Exec 12, or How I Came to Loathe Irony

  - by Kyle Noland

  I have a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Windows Server 2003. It is the primary file server for one of my clients. I have another server also running Windows Server 2003 that acts as the core media server for Symantec Backup Exec 12. I recently upgraded from Backup Exec 11d to 12. This upgrade was necessary because we also just upgraded from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. After the upgrade I had to push-install the new version 12 Backup Exec Remote Agents to each of the servers I am backing up (about 6 total). 5 of my servers are doing just fine, faithfully completing backups every night. My file server routinely crashes. Observations: When the server crashes, it does not blue screen, it just locks up completely. Even the mouse is unresponsive. If you leave the server locked up long enough, it will eventually reboot itself and hang on the Windows splash screen. There is absolutely zero useful Event Viewer evidence of a problem. The logs go from routine logging to an Unexplained Shutdown Event the next morning when I have to hard reset the server to get it to boot. 90% of the time the server does not boot cleanly, it hangs on the Windows splash screen. I don't have any light to shed here. When the server hangs all I can do is hard reset it and try again. Even after a successful boot and chkdsk /r operation, if you reboot the machine, you have a 90% chance it won't back up again cleanly. The back story: This server started crashing during nightly backups about a month ago. I tried everything I could think of to troubleshoot the problem and eventually had to give up because I could not keep coming to the office at 4 AM to try to get the server back online. One Friday I got lucky and the server stayed up for its entire full backup. I took this opportunity to restore the full backup to a temporary server I set up and switched all my users to the temporary. Then I reloaded the ailing file server. I kept all my users on the temporary file server for about 3 weeks. I installed the same Backup Exec Remote Agent and Trend Micro A/V client on the temporary server that I was using on the regular file server. During this time, I had absolutely no problems backing up the temporary server. I tested the reloaded file server extensively. I rebooted the server once an hour every day for 3 weeks trying to make it fail. It never did. I felt confident that the reload was the answer to my problems. I moved all of the data from the temporary server back to the regular server. I got 3 nightly backups out of it before it locked up again and started the familiar failure to boot cleanly behavior. This weekend I decided to monitor the file server through the entire backup job. I RDPd into the file server and also into the server running Backup Exec. On the file server I opened the Task Manager so I could view the processes and watch CPU and memory usage. Everything was running smoothly for about 60GB worth of backup. Then I noticed that the byte count of the backup job in Backup Exec had stopped progressing. I looked back over at my RDP session into the file server, and I was getting real time updates about CPU and memory usage still - both nearly 0%, which is unusual. Backups usually hover around 40% usage for the duration of the backup job. Let me reiterate this point: The screen was refreshing and I was getting real time Task Manager updates - until I clicked on the Start menu. The screen went black and the server locked up. In truth, I think the server had already locked up, the video card just hadn't figured it out yet. I went back into my bag of trick: driving to the office and hard reseting the server over and over again when it hangs up at the Windows splash screen. I did this for 2 hours without getting a successful boot. I started panicking because I did not have a decent backup to use to get everything back onto the working temporary file server. Once I exhausted everything I knew to do, I took a deep breath, booted to the Windows Server 2003 CD and performed a repair installation of Windows. The server came back up fine, with all of my data intact. I can now reboot the server at will and it will come back up cleanly. The problem is that I'm afraid as soon as I try to back that data up again I will back at square one. So let me sum things up: Here is what I've done so far to troubleshoot this server: Deleted and recreated the RAID 5 sets. Initialized the drives. Reloaded the server with a fresh Server 2003 install. Confirmed with Dell that I have installed the latest, Dell approved BIOS and NIC drivers. Uninstalled / reinstalled the Backup Exec Remote Agent. Uninstalled the Trend Micro A/V client. Configured the server not to reboot itself after a blue screen so I can see any stop error. I used to think the server was blue screening, but since I enabled this setting I now know that the server just completely locks up. Run chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console. Several errors were found and corrected, but did not help my problem. Help confirm or deny the following assumptions: There are two problems at work here. Why the server is locking up in the first place, and why the server won't boot cleanly after a lockup. This is ultimately a software problem. The server works fine and can be rebooted cleanly all day long - until the first lockup - following a fresh OS load or even a Repair installation. This is not a problem with Backup Exec in general. All of my other servers back up just fine. For the record, all of the other servers run Server 2003, and some of them house more data than the file server in question here. Any help is appreciated. The irony is almost too much to bear. Backing up my data is what is jeopardizing it.

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• Network throughput issue (ARP-related)

  - by Joel Coel

  The small college where I work is having some very strange network issues. I'm looking for any advice or ideas here. We were fine over the summer, but the trouble began few days after students returned to campus in force for the fall term. Symptoms The main symptom is that internet access will work, but it's very slow... often to the point of timeouts. As an example, a typical result from Speedtest.net will return .4Mbps download, but allow 3 to 8 Mbps upload speed. Lesser symptoms may include severely limited performance transferring data to and from our file server, or even in some cases the inability to log in to the computer (cannot reach the domain controller). The issue crosses multiple vlans, and has effected devices on nearly every vlan we operate. The issue does not impact all machines on the network. An unaffected machine will typically see at least 11Mbps download from speedtest.net, and perhaps much more depending on larger campus traffic patterns at the time. There is one variation on the larger issue. We have one vlan where users were unable to log into nearly all of the machines at all. IT staff would log in using a local administrator account (or in some cases cached credentials), and from there a release/renew or pinging the gateway would allow the machine to work... for a while. Complicating this issue is that this vlan covers our computer labs, which use software called Deep Freeze to completely reset the hard drives after a reboot. It could just the same issue manifesting differently because of stale data on machines that have not permanently altered low-level info for weeks. We were able to solve this, however, by creating a new vlan and moving the labs over to the new vlan wholesale. Instigations Eventually we noticed that the effected machines all had recent dhcp leases. We can predict when a machine will become "slow" by watching when a dhcp lease comes up for renewal. We played with setting the lease time very short for a test vlan, but all that did was remove our ability to predict when the machine would become slow. Machines with static IPs have pretty much always worked normally. Manually releasing/renewing an address will never cause a machine to become slow. In fact, in some cases this process has fixed a machine in that state. Most of the time, though, it doesn't help. We also noticed that mobile machines like laptops are likely to become slow when they cross to new vlans. Wireless on campus is divided up into "zones", where each zone maps to a small set of buildings. Moving to a new building can place you in a zone, thereby causing you to get a new address. A machine resuming from sleep mode is also very likely to be slow. Mitigations Sometimes, but not always, clearing the arp cache on an effected machine will allow it to work normally again. As already mentioned, releasing/renewing a local machine's IP address can fix that machine, but it's not guaranteed. Pinging the default gateway can also sometimes help with a slow machine. What seems to help most to mitigate the issue is clearing the arp cache on our core layer-3 switch. This switch is used for our dhcp system as the default gateway on all vlans, and it handles inter-vlan routing. The model is a 3Com 4900SX. To try to mitigate the issue, we have the cache timeout set on the switch all the way down to the lowest possible time, but it hasn't helped. I also put together a script that runs every few minutes to automatically connect to the switch and reset the cache. Unfortunately, this does not always work, and can even cause some machines to end up in the slow state for a short time (though these seem to correct themselves after a few minutes). We currently have a scheduled job that runs every 10 minutes to force the core switch to clear it's ARP cache, but this is far from perfect or desirable. Reproduction We now have a test machine that we can force into the slow state at will. It is connected to a switch with ports set up for each of our vlans. We make the machine slow by connecting to different vlans, and after a new connection or two it will be slow. It's also worth noting in this section that this has happened before at the start of prior terms, but in the past the problem has gone away on it's own after a few days. It solved itself before we had a chance to do much diagnostic work... hence why we've allowed it to drag so long into the term this time 'round; the expectation was this would be a short-lived situation. Other Factors It's worth mentioning that we have had about half a dozen switches just outright fail over the last year. These are mainly 2003/2004-era 3Coms (mostly 4200's) that were all put in at about the same time. They should still be covered under warranty, buy HP has made getting service somewhat difficult. Mostly in power supplies that have failed, but in a couple cases we have used a power supply from a switch with a failed mainboard to bring a switch with a failed power supply back to life. We do have UPS devices on all but three of four switches now, but that was not the case when I started two and a half years ago. Severe budget constraints (we were on the Dept. of Ed's financially challenged institutions list a couple years back) have forced me to look to the likes of Netgear and TrendNet for replacements, but so far these low-end models seem to be holding their own. It's also worth mentioning that the big change on our network this summer was migrating from a single cross-campus wireless SSID to the zoned approach mentioned earlier. I don't think this is the source of the issue, as like I've said: we've seen this before. However, it's possible this is exacerbating the issue, and may be much of the reason it's been so hard to isolate. Diagnosis At first it seemed clear to us, given the timing and persistent nature of the problem, that the source of the issue was an infected (or malicious) student machine doing ARP cache poisoning. However, repeated attempts to isolate the source have failed. Those attempts include numerous wireshark packet traces, and even taking entire buildings offline for brief periods. We have not been able even to find a smoking gun bad ARP entry. My current best guess is an overloaded or failing core switch, but I'm not sure on how to test for this, and the cost of replacing it blindly is steep. Again, any ideas appreciated.

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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Customize the SimpleMembership in ASP.NET MVC 4.0

  - by thangchung

  As we know, .NET 4.5 have come up to us, and come along with a lot of new interesting features as well. Visual Studio 2012 was also introduced some days ago. They made us feel very happy with cool improvement along with us. Performance when loading code editor is very good at the moment (immediate after click on the solution). I explore some of cool features at these days. Some of them like Json.NET integrated in ASP.NET MVC 4.0, improvement on asynchronous action, new lightweight theme on Visual Studio, supporting very good on mobile development, improvement on authentication… I reviewed them, and found out that in this version of .NET Microsoft was not only developed new feature that suggest from community but also focused on improvement performance of existing features or components. Besides that, they also opened source more projects, like Entity Framework, Reactive Extensions, ASP.NET Web Stack… At the moment, I feel Microsoft want to open source more and more their projects. Today, I am going to dive in deep on new SimpleMembership model. It is really good because in this security model, Microsoft actually focus on development needs. As we know, in the past, they introduce some of provider supplied for coding security like MembershipProvider, RoleProvider… I don’t need to talk but everyone that have ever used it know that they were actually hard to use, and not easy to maintain and unit testing. Why? Because every time you inherit it, you need to override all methods inside it. Some people try to abstract it by introduce more method with virtual keyword, and try to implement basic behavior, so in the subclass we only need to override the method that need for their business. But to me, it’s only the way to work around. ASP.NET team and Web Matrix knew about it, so they built the new features based on existing components on .NET framework. And one of component that comes to us is SimpleMembership and SimpleRole. They implemented the Façade pattern on the top of those, and called it is WebSecurity. In the web, we can call WebSecurity anywhere we want, and make a call to inside wrapper of it. I read a lot of them on web blog, on technical news, on MSDN as well. Matthew Osborn had an excellent article about it at his blog. Jon Galloway had an article like this at here. He analyzed why old membership provider not fixed well to ASP.NET MVC and how to get over it. Those are very good to me. It introduced to me about how to doing SimpleMembership on it, how to doing it on new ASP.NET MVC web application. But one thing, those didn’t tell me was how to doing it on existing security model (that mean we already had Users and Roles on legacy system, and how we can integrate it to this system), that’s a reason I will introduce it today. I have spent couples of hours to see what’s inside this, and try to make one example to clarify my concern. And it’s lucky that I can make it working well.The first thing, we need to create new ASP.NET MVC application on Visual Studio 2012. We need to choose Internet type for this web application. ASP.NET MVC actually creates all needs components for the basic membership and basic role. The cool feature is DoNetOpenAuth come along with it that means we can log-in using facebook, twitter or Windows Live if you want. But it’s only for LocalDb, so we need to change it to fix with existing database model on SQL Server. The next step we have to make SimpleMembership can understand which database we use and show it which column need to point to for the ID and UserName. I really like this feature because SimpleMembership on need to know about the ID and UserName, and they don’t care about rest of it. I assume that we have an existing database model like So we will point it in code like The codes for it, we put on InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute like [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]     public sealed class InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute     {         private static SimpleMembershipInitializer _initializer;         private static object _initializerLock = new object();         private static bool _isInitialized;         public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)         {             // Ensure ASP.NET Simple Membership is initialized only once per app start             LazyInitializer.EnsureInitialized(ref _initializer, ref _isInitialized, ref _initializerLock);         }         private class SimpleMembershipInitializer         {             public SimpleMembershipInitializer()             {                 try                 {                     WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection("DefaultDb", "User", "Id", "UserName", autoCreateTables: true);                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     throw new InvalidOperationException("The ASP.NET Simple Membership database could not be initialized. For more information, please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=256588", ex);                 }             }         }     }And decorating it in the AccountController as below [Authorize]     [InitializeSimpleMembership]     public class AccountController : ControllerIn this case, assuming that we need to override the ValidateUser to point this to existing User database table, and validate it. We have to add one more class like public class CustomAdminMembershipProvider : SimpleMembershipProvider     {         // TODO: will do a better way         private const string SELECT_ALL_USER_SCRIPT = "select * from [dbo].[User]private where UserName = '{0}'";         private readonly IEncrypting _encryptor;         private readonly SimpleSecurityContext _simpleSecurityContext;         public CustomAdminMembershipProvider(SimpleSecurityContext simpleSecurityContext)             : this(new Encryptor(), new SimpleSecurityContext("DefaultDb"))         {         }         public CustomAdminMembershipProvider(IEncrypting encryptor, SimpleSecurityContext simpleSecurityContext)         {             _encryptor = encryptor;             _simpleSecurityContext = simpleSecurityContext;         }         public override bool ValidateUser(string username, string password)         {             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(username))             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Argument cannot be null or empty", "username");             }             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(password))             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Argument cannot be null or empty", "password");             }             var hash = _encryptor.Encode(password);             using (_simpleSecurityContext)             {                 var users =                     _simpleSecurityContext.Users.SqlQuery(                         string.Format(SELECT_ALL_USER_SCRIPT, username));                 if (users == null && !users.Any())                 {                     return false;                 }                 return users.FirstOrDefault().Password == hash;             }         }     }SimpleSecurityDataContext at here public class SimpleSecurityContext : DbContext     {         public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }         public SimpleSecurityContext(string connStringName) :             base(connStringName)         {             this.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = true;             this.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled = false;         }         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);                          modelBuilder.Configurations.Add(new UserMapping());         }     }And Mapping for User as below public class UserMapping : EntityMappingBase<User>     {         public UserMapping()         {             this.Property(x => x.UserName);             this.Property(x => x.DisplayName);             this.Property(x => x.Password);             this.Property(x => x.Email);             this.ToTable("User");         }     }One important thing, you need to modify the web.config to point to our customize SimpleMembership <membership defaultProvider="AdminMemberProvider" userIsOnlineTimeWindow="15">       <providers>         <clear/>         <add name="AdminMemberProvider" type="CIK.News.Web.Infras.Security.CustomAdminMembershipProvider, CIK.News.Web.Infras" />       </providers>     </membership>     <roleManager enabled="false">       <providers>         <clear />         <add name="AdminRoleProvider" type="CIK.News.Web.Infras.Security.AdminRoleProvider, CIK.News.Web.Infras" />       </providers>     </roleManager>The good thing at here is we don’t need to modify the code on AccountController. We only need to modify on SimpleMembership and Simple Role (if need). Now build all solutions, run it. We should see a screen like thisIf I login to Twitter button at the bottom of this page, we will be transfer to twitter authentication pageYou have to waiting for a moment Afterwards it will transfer you back to your admin screenYou can find all source codes at my MSDN code. I will really happy if you guys feel free to put some comments as below. It will be helpful to improvement my code in the future. Thank for all your readings. 

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• Cold Start

  - by antony.reynolds

  Well we had snow drifts 3ft deep on Saturday so it must be spring time.  In preparation for Spring we decided to move the lawn tractor.  Of course after sitting in the garage all winter it refused to start.  I then come into the office and need to start my 11g SOA Suite installation.  I thought about this and decided my tractor might be cranky but at least I can script the startup of my SOA Suite 11g installation. So with this in mind I created 6 scripts.  I created them for Linux but they should translate to Windows without too many problems.  This is left as an exercise to the reader, note you will have to hardcode more than I did in the Linux scripts and create separate script files for the sqlplus and WLST sections. Order to start things I believe there should be order in all things, especially starting the SOA Suite.  So here is my preferred order. Start Database This is need by EM and the rest of SOA Suite so best to start it before the Admin Server and managed servers. Start Node Manager on all machines This is needed if you want the scripts to work across machines. Start Admin Server Once this is done in theory you can manually stat the managed servers using WebLogic console.  But then you have to wait for console to be available.  Scripting it all is quicker and easier way of starting. Start Managed Servers & Clusters Best to start them one per physical machine at a time to avoid undue load on the machines.  Non-clustered install will have just soa_server1 and bam_serv1 by default.  Clusters will have at least SOA and BAM clusters that can be started as a group or individually.  I have provided scripts for standalone servers, but easy to change them to work with clusters. Starting Database I have provided a very primitive script (available here) to start the database, the listener and the DB console.  The section highlighted in red needs to match your database name. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "#####################" echo "# Starting Database #" echo "#####################" sqlplus / as sysdba <<-EOF startup exit EOF echo "#####################" echo "# Starting Listener #" echo "#####################" lsnrctl start echo "######################" echo "# Starting dbConsole #" echo "######################" emctl start dbconsole read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Starting SOA Suite My script for starting the SOA Suite (available here) breaks the task down into five sections. Setting the Environment First set up the environment variables.  The variables highlighted in red probably need changing for your environment. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME Starting the Node Manager I start node manager with a nohup to stop it exiting when the script terminates and I redirect the standard output and standard error to a file in a logs directory. cd $DOMAIN_HOME echo "#########################" echo "# Starting Node Manager #" echo "#########################" nohup $WL_HOME/server/bin/startNodeManager.sh >logs/NodeManager.out 2>&1 & Starting the Admin Server I had problems starting the Admin Server from Node Manager so I decided to start it using the command line script.  I again use nohup and redirect output. echo "#########################" echo "# Starting Admin Server #" echo "#########################" nohup ./startWebLogic.sh >logs/AdminServer.out 2>&1 & Starting the Managed Servers I then used WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) to start the managed servers.  First I waited for the Admin Server to come up by putting a connect command in a loop.  I could have put the WLST commands into a separate script file but I wanted to reduce the number of files I was using and so used redirected input (here syntax). $ORACLE_HOME/common/bin/wlst.sh <<-EOF import time sleep=time.sleep print "#####################################" print "# Waiting for Admin Server to Start #" print "#####################################" while True:   try:     connect(adminServerName="AdminServer")     break   except:     sleep(10) I then start the SOA server and tell WLST to wait until it is started before returning.  If starting a cluster then the start command would be modified accordingly to start the SOA cluster. print "#######################" print "# Starting SOA Server #" print "#######################" start(name="soa_server1", block="true") I then start the BAM server in the same way as the SOA server. print "#######################" print "# Starting BAM Server #" print "#######################" start(name="bam_server1", block="true") EOF Finally I let people know the servers are up and wait for input in case I am running in a separate window, in which case the result would be lost without the read command. echo "#####################" echo "# SOA Suite Started #" echo "#####################" read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Stopping the SOA Suite My script for shutting down the SOA Suite (available here)  is basically the reverse of my startup script.  After setting the environment I connect to the Admin Server using WLST and shut down the managed servers and the admin server.  Again the script would need modifying for a cluster. Stopping the Servers If I cannot connect to the Admin Server I try to connect to the node manager, in case the Admin Server is down but the managed servers are up. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME cd $DOMAIN_HOME $MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA/common/bin/wlst.sh <<-EOF try:   print("#############################")   print("# Connecting to AdminServer #")   print("#############################")   connect(username='weblogic',password='welcome1',url='t3://localhost:7001') except:   print "#########################################"   print "#   Unable to connect to Admin Server   #"   print "# Attempting to connect to Node Manager #"   print "#########################################"   nmConnect(domainName=os.getenv("DOMAIN_NAME")) print "#######################" print "# Stopping BAM Server #" print "#######################" shutdown('bam_server1') print "#######################" print "# Stopping SOA Server #" print "#######################" shutdown('soa_server1') print "#########################" print "# Stopping Admin Server #" print "#########################" shutdown('AdminServer') disconnect() nmDisconnect() EOF Stopping the Node Manager I stopped the node manager by searching for the java node manager process using the ps command and then killing that process. echo "#########################" echo "# Stopping Node Manager #" echo "#########################" kill -9 `ps -ef | grep java | grep NodeManager |  awk '{print $2;}'` echo "#####################" echo "# SOA Suite Stopped #" echo "#####################" read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Stopping the Database Again my script for shutting down the database is the reverse of my start script.  It is available here.  The only change needed might be to the database name. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "######################" echo "# Stopping dbConsole #" echo "######################" emctl stop dbconsole echo "#####################" echo "# Stopping Listener #" echo "#####################" lsnrctl stop echo "#####################" echo "# Stopping Database #" echo "#####################" sqlplus / as sysdba <<-EOF shutdown immediate exit EOF read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Cleaning Up Cleaning SOA Suite I often run tests and want to clean up all the log files.  The following script (available here) does this for the WebLogic servers in a given domain on a machine.  After setting the domain I just remove all files under the servers logs directories.  It also cleans up the log files I created with my startup scripts.  These scripts could be enhanced to copy off the log files if you needed them but in my test environments I don’t need them and would prefer to reclaim the disk space. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME echo "##########################" echo "# Cleaning SOA Log Files #" echo "##########################" cd $DOMAIN_HOME rm -Rf logs/* servers/*/logs/* read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Cleaning Database I also created a script to clean up the dump files of an Oracle database instance and also the EM log files (available here).  This relies on the machine name being correct as the EM log files are stored in a directory that is based on the hostname and the Oracle SID. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "#############################" echo "# Cleaning Oracle Log Files #" echo "#############################" rm -Rf $ORACLE_BASE/admin/$ORACLE_SID/*dump/* rm -Rf $ORACLE_HOME/`hostname`_$ORACLE_SID/sysman/log/* read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Summary Hope you find the above scripts useful.  They certainly stop me hanging around waiting for things to happen on my test machine and make it easy to run a test, change parameters, bounce the SOA Suite and clean the logs between runs so I can see exactly what is happening. Now I need to get that mower started…

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• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part 2

  - by shiju

  In my previous post Developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part 1, we have discussed on how to work with ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First for developing web apps. We have created generic repository and unit of work with EF Code First for our ASP.NET MVC 3 application and did basic CRUD operations against a simple domain entity. In this post, I will demonstrate on working with domain entity with deep object graph, Service Layer and View Models and will also complete the rest of the demo application. In the previous post, we have done CRUD operations against Category entity and this post will be focus on Expense entity those have an association with Category entity. You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com . The following frameworks will be used for this step by step tutorial.    1. ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM    2. EF Code First CTP 5    3. Unity 2.0 Domain Model Category Entity public class Category   {       public int CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]       [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]       public string Name { get; set;}       public string Description { get; set; }       public virtual ICollection<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }   } Expense Entity public class Expense     {                public int ExpenseId { get; set; }                public string  Transaction { get; set; }         public DateTime Date { get; set; }         public double Amount { get; set; }         public int CategoryId { get; set; }         public virtual Category Category { get; set; }     } We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category. Repository class for Expense Transaction Let’s create repository class for handling CRUD operations for Expense entity public class ExpenseRepository : RepositoryBase<Expense>, IExpenseRepository     {     public ExpenseRepository(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)         : base(databaseFactory)         {         }                } public interface IExpenseRepository : IRepository<Expense> { } Service Layer If you are new to Service Layer, checkout Martin Fowler's article Service Layer . According to Martin Fowler, Service Layer defines an application's boundary and its set of available operations from the perspective of interfacing client layers. It encapsulates the application's business logic, controlling transactions and coordinating responses in the implementation of its operations. Controller classes should be lightweight and do not put much of business logic onto it. We can use the service layer as the business logic layer and can encapsulate the rules of the application. Let’s create a Service class for coordinates the transaction for Expense public interface IExpenseService {     IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenses(DateTime startDate, DateTime ednDate);     Expense GetExpense(int id);             void CreateExpense(Expense expense);     void DeleteExpense(int id);     void SaveExpense(); } public class ExpenseService : IExpenseService {     private readonly IExpenseRepository expenseRepository;            private readonly IUnitOfWork unitOfWork;     public ExpenseService(IExpenseRepository expenseRepository, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork)     {                  this.expenseRepository = expenseRepository;         this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork;     }     public IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenses(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate)     {         var expenses = expenseRepository.GetMany(exp => exp.Date >= startDate && exp.Date <= endDate);         return expenses;     }     public void CreateExpense(Expense expense)     {         expenseRepository.Add(expense);         unitOfWork.Commit();     }     public Expense GetExpense(int id)     {         var expense = expenseRepository.GetById(id);         return expense;     }     public void DeleteExpense(int id)     {         var expense = expenseRepository.GetById(id);         expenseRepository.Delete(expense);         unitOfWork.Commit();     }     public void SaveExpense()     {         unitOfWork.Commit();     } }   View Model for Expense Transactions In real world ASP.NET MVC applications, we need to design model objects especially for our views. Our domain objects are mainly designed for the needs for domain model and it is representing the domain of our applications. On the other hand, View Model objects are designed for our needs for views. We have an Expense domain entity that has an association with Category. While we are creating a new Expense, we have to specify that in which Category belongs with the new Expense transaction. The user interface for Expense transaction will have form fields for representing the Expense entity and a CategoryId for representing the Category. So let's create view model for representing the need for Expense transactions. public class ExpenseViewModel {     public int ExpenseId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Category Required")]     public int CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Transaction Required")]     public string Transaction { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Date Required")]     public DateTime Date { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Amount Required")]     public double Amount { get; set; }       public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Category { get; set; } } The ExpenseViewModel is designed for the purpose of View template and contains the all validation rules. It has properties for mapping values to Expense entity and a property Category for binding values to a drop-down for list values of Category. Create Expense transaction Let’s create action methods in the ExpenseController for creating expense transactions public ActionResult Create() {     var expenseModel = new ExpenseViewModel();     var categories = categoryService.GetCategories();     expenseModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(-1);     expenseModel.Date = DateTime.Today;     return View(expenseModel); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(ExpenseViewModel expenseViewModel) {                      if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {             var categories = categoryService.GetCategories();             expenseViewModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(expenseViewModel.CategoryId);             return View("Save", expenseViewModel);         }         Expense expense=new Expense();         ModelCopier.CopyModel(expenseViewModel,expense);         expenseService.CreateExpense(expense);         return RedirectToAction("Index");              } In the Create action method for HttpGet request, we have created an instance of our View Model ExpenseViewModel with Category information for the drop-down list and passing the Model object to View template. The extension method ToSelectListItems is shown below   public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems(         this IEnumerable<Category> categories, int  selectedId) {     return           categories.OrderBy(category => category.Name)                 .Select(category =>                     new SelectListItem                     {                         Selected = (category.CategoryId == selectedId),                         Text = category.Name,                         Value = category.CategoryId.ToString()                     }); } In the Create action method for HttpPost, our view model object ExpenseViewModel will map with posted form input values. We need to create an instance of Expense for the persistence purpose. So we need to copy values from ExpenseViewModel object to Expense object. ASP.NET MVC futures assembly provides a static class ModelCopier that can use for copying values between Model objects. ModelCopier class has two static methods - CopyCollection and CopyModel.CopyCollection method will copy values between two collection objects and CopyModel will copy values between two model objects. We have used CopyModel method of ModelCopier class for copying values from expenseViewModel object to expense object. Finally we did a call to CreateExpense method of ExpenseService class for persisting new expense transaction. List Expense Transactions We want to list expense transactions based on a date range. So let’s create action method for filtering expense transactions with a specified date range. public ActionResult Index(DateTime? startDate, DateTime? endDate) {     //If date is not passed, take current month's first and last dte     DateTime dtNow;     dtNow = DateTime.Today;     if (!startDate.HasValue)     {         startDate = new DateTime(dtNow.Year, dtNow.Month, 1);         endDate = startDate.Value.AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }     //take last date of start date's month, if end date is not passed     if (startDate.HasValue && !endDate.HasValue)     {         endDate = (new DateTime(startDate.Value.Year, startDate.Value.Month, 1)).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }     var expenses = expenseService.GetExpenses(startDate.Value ,endDate.Value);     //if request is Ajax will return partial view     if (Request.IsAjaxRequest())     {         return PartialView("ExpenseList", expenses);     }     //set start date and end date to ViewBag dictionary     ViewBag.StartDate = startDate.Value.ToShortDateString();     ViewBag.EndDate = endDate.Value.ToShortDateString();     //if request is not ajax     return View(expenses); } We are using the above Index Action method for both Ajax requests and normal requests. If there is a request for Ajax, we will call the PartialView ExpenseList. Razor Views for listing Expense information Let’s create view templates in Razor for showing list of Expense information ExpenseList.cshtml @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Expense>   <table>         <tr>             <th>Actions</th>             <th>Category</th>             <th>                 Transaction             </th>             <th>                 Date             </th>             <th>                 Amount             </th>         </tr>       @foreach (var item in Model) {              <tr>             <td>                 @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit",new { id = item.ExpenseId })                 @Ajax.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.ExpenseId }, new AjaxOptions { Confirm = "Delete Expense?", HttpMethod = "Post", UpdateTargetId = "divExpenseList" })             </td>              <td>                 @item.Category.Name             </td>             <td>                 @item.Transaction             </td>             <td>                 @String.Format("{0:d}", item.Date)             </td>             <td>                 @String.Format("{0:F}", item.Amount)             </td>         </tr>          }       </table>     <p>         @Html.ActionLink("Create New Expense", "Create") |         @Html.ActionLink("Create New Category", "Create","Category")     </p> Index.cshtml @using MyFinance.Helpers; @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Expense> @{     ViewBag.Title = "Index"; }    <h2>Expense List</h2>    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.ui.datepicker.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/jquery-ui-1.8.6.custom.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />      @using (Ajax.BeginForm(new AjaxOptions{ UpdateTargetId="divExpenseList", HttpMethod="Get"})) {     <table>         <tr>         <td>         <div>           Start Date: @Html.TextBox("StartDate", Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:mm/dd/yyyy}", ViewData["StartDate"].ToString())), new { @class = "ui-datepicker" })         </div>         </td>         <td><div>            End Date: @Html.TextBox("EndDate", Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:mm/dd/yyyy}", ViewData["EndDate"].ToString())), new { @class = "ui-datepicker" })          </div></td>          <td> <input type="submit" value="Search By TransactionDate" /></td>         </tr>     </table>         }   <div id="divExpenseList">             @Html.Partial("ExpenseList", Model)     </div> <script type="text/javascript">     $().ready(function () {         $('.ui-datepicker').datepicker({             dateFormat: 'mm/dd/yy',             buttonImage: '@Url.Content("~/Content/calendar.gif")',             buttonImageOnly: true,             showOn: "button"         });     }); </script> Ajax search functionality using Ajax.BeginForm The search functionality of Index view is providing Ajax functionality using Ajax.BeginForm. The Ajax.BeginForm() method writes an opening <form> tag to the response. You can use this method in a using block. In that case, the method renders the closing </form> tag at the end of the using block and the form is submitted asynchronously by using JavaScript. The search functionality will call the Index Action method and this will return partial view ExpenseList for updating the search result. We want to update the response UI for the Ajax request onto divExpenseList element. So we have specified the UpdateTargetId as "divExpenseList" in the Ajax.BeginForm method. Add jQuery DatePicker Our search functionality is using a date range so we are providing two date pickers using jQuery datepicker. You need to add reference to the following JavaScript files to working with jQuery datepicker. jquery-ui.js jquery.ui.datepicker.js For theme support for datepicker, we can use a customized CSS class. In our example we have used a CSS file “jquery-ui-1.8.6.custom.css”. For more details about the datepicker component, visit jquery UI website at http://jqueryui.com/demos/datepicker . In the jQuery ready event, we have used following JavaScript function to initialize the UI element to show date picker. <script type="text/javascript">     $().ready(function () {         $('.ui-datepicker').datepicker({             dateFormat: 'mm/dd/yy',             buttonImage: '@Url.Content("~/Content/calendar.gif")',             buttonImageOnly: true,             showOn: "button"         });     }); </script>   Source Code You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com/ . Summary In this two-part series, we have created a simple web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM, Razor and EF Code First CTP 5. I have demonstrated patterns and practices  such as Dependency Injection, Repository pattern, Unit of Work, ViewModel and Service Layer. My primary objective was to demonstrate different practices and options for developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First. You can implement these approaches in your own way for building web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3. I will refactor this demo app on later time.

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• eBooks on iPad vs. Kindle: More Debate than Smackdown

  - by andrewbrust

  When the iPad was presented at its San Francisco launch event on January 28th, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time explaining how well the device would serve as an eBook reader. He showed the iBooks reader application and iBookstore and laid down the gauntlet before Amazon and its beloved Kindle device. Almost immediately afterwards, criticism came rushing forth that the iPad could never beat the Kindle for book reading. The curious part of that criticism is that virtually no one offering it had actually used the iPad yet. A few weeks later, on April 3rd, the iPad was released for sale in the United States. I bought one on that day and in the few additional weeks that have elapsed, I’ve given quite a workout to most of its capabilities, including its eBook features. I’ve also spent some time with the Kindle, albeit a first-generation model, to see how it actually compares to the iPad. I had some expectations going in, but I came away with conclusions about each device that were more scenario-based than absolute. I present my findings to you here.   Vital Statistics Let’s start with an inventory of each device’s underlying technology. The iPad has a color, backlit LCD screen and an on-screen keyboard. It has a battery which, on a full charge, lasts anywhere from 6-10 hours. The Kindle offers a monochrome, reflective E Ink display, a physical keyboard and a battery that on my first gen loaner unit can go up to a week between charges (Amazon claims the battery on the Kindle 2 can last up to 2 weeks on a single charge). The Kindle connects to Amazon’s Kindle Store using a 3G modem (the technology and network vary depending on the model) that incurs no airtime service charges whatsoever. The iPad units that are on-sale today work over WiFi only. 3G-equipped models will be on sale shortly and will command a $130 premium over their WiFi-only counterparts. 3G service on the iPad, in the U.S. from AT&T, will be fee-based, with a 250MB plan at $14.99 per month and an unlimited plan at $29.99. No contract is required for 3G service. All these tech specs aside, I think a more useful observation is that the iPad is a multi-purpose Internet-connected entertainment device, while the Kindle is a dedicated reading device. The question is whether those differences in design and intended use create a clear-cut winner for reading electronic publications. Let’s take a look at each device, in isolation, now.   Kindle To me, what’s most innovative about the Kindle is its E Ink display. E Ink really looks like ink on a sheet of paper. It requires no backlight, it’s fully visible in direct sunlight and it causes almost none of the eyestrain that LCD-based computer display technology (like that used on the iPad) does. It’s really versatile in an all-around way. Forgive me if this sounds precious, but reading on it is really a joy. In fact, it’s a genuinely relaxing experience. Through the Kindle Store, Amazon allows users to download books (including audio books), magazines, newspapers and blog feeds. Books and magazines can be purchased either on a single-issue basis or as an annual subscription. Books, of course, are purchased singly. Oddly, blogs are not free, but instead carry a monthly subscription fee, typically $1.99. To me this is ludicrous, but I suppose the free 3G service is partially to blame. Books and magazine issues download quickly. Magazine and blog subscriptions cause new issues or posts to be pushed to your device on an automated basis. Available blogs include 9000-odd feeds that Amazon offers on the Kindle Store; unless I missed something, arbitrary RSS feeds are not supported (though there are third party workarounds to this limitation). The shopping experience is integrated well, has an huge selection, and offers certain graphical perks. For example, magazine and newspaper logos are displayed in menus, and book cover thumbnails appear as well. A simple search mechanism is provided and text entry through the physical keyboard is relatively painless. It’s very easy and straightforward to enter the store, find something you like and start reading it quickly. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s even faster. Given Kindle’s high portability, very reliable battery, instant-on capability and highly integrated content acquisition, it makes reading on whim, and in random spurts of downtime, very attractive. The Kindle’s home screen lists all of your publications, and easily lets you select one, then start reading it. Once opened, publications display in crisp, attractive text that is adjustable in size. “Turning” pages is achieved through buttons dedicated to the task. Notes can be recorded, bookmarks can be saved and pages can be saved as clippings. I am not an avid book reader, and yet I found the Kindle made it really fun, convenient and soothing to read. There’s something about the easy access to the material and the simplicity of the display that makes the Kindle seduce you into chilling out and reading page after page. On the other hand, the Kindle has an awkward navigation interface. While menus are displayed clearly on the screen, the method of selecting menu items is tricky: alongside the right-hand edge of the main display is a thin column that acts as a second display. It has a white background, and a scrollable silver cursor that is moved up or down through the use of the device’s scrollwheel. Picking a menu item on the main display involves scrolling the silver cursor to a position parallel to that menu item and pushing the scrollwheel in. This navigation technique creates a disconnect, literally. You don’t really click on a selection so much as you gesture toward it. I got used to this technique quickly, but I didn’t love it. It definitely created a kind of anxiety in me, making me feel the need to speed through menus and get to my destination document quickly. Once there, I could calm down and relax. Books are great on the Kindle. Magazines and newspapers much less so. I found the rendering of photographs, and even illustrations, to be unacceptably crude. For this reason, I expect that reading textbooks on the Kindle may leave students wanting. I found that the original flow and layout of any publication was sacrificed on the Kindle. In effect, browsing a magazine or newspaper was almost impossible. Reading the text of individual articles was enjoyable, but having to read this way made the whole experience much more “a la carte” than cohesive and thematic between articles. I imagine that for academic journals this is ideal, but for consumer publications it imposes a stripped-down, low-fidelity experience that evokes a sense of deprivation. In general, the Kindle is great for reading text. For just about anything else, especially activity that involves exploratory browsing, meandering and short-attention-span reading, it presents a real barrier to entry and adoption. Avid book readers will enjoy the Kindle (if they’re not already). It’s a great device for losing oneself in a book over long sittings. Multitaskers who are more interested in periodicals, be they online or off, will like it much less, as they will find compromise, and even sacrifice, to be palpable.   iPad The iPad is a very different device from the Kindle. While the Kindle is oriented to pages of text, the iPad orbits around applications and their interfaces. Be it the pinch and zoom experience in the browser, the rich media features that augment content on news and weather sites, or the ability to interact with social networking services like Twitter, the iPad is versatile. While it shares a slate-like form factor with the Kindle, it’s effectively an elegant personal computer. One of its many features is the iBook application and integration of the iBookstore. But it’s a multi-purpose device. That turns out to be good and bad, depending on what you’re reading. The iBookstore is great for browsing. It’s color, rich animation-laden user interface make it possible to shop for books, rather than merely search and acquire them. Unfortunately, its selection is rather sparse at the moment. If you’re looking for a New York Times bestseller, or other popular titles, you should be OK. If you want to read something more specialized, it’s much harder. Unlike the awkward navigation interface of the Kindle, the iPad offers a nearly flawless touch-screen interface that seduces the user into tinkering and kibitzing every bit as much as the Kindle lulls you into a deep, concentrated read. It’s a dynamic and interactive device, whereas the Kindle is static and passive. The iBook reader is slick and fun. Use the iPad in landscape mode and you can read the book in 2-up (left/right 2-page) display; use it in portrait mode and you can read one page at a time. Rather than clicking a hardware button to turn pages, you simply drag and wipe from right-to-left to flip the single or right-hand page. The page actually travels through an animated path as it would in a physical book. The intuitiveness of the interface is uncanny. The reader also accommodates saving of bookmarks, searching of the text, and the ability to highlight a word and look it up in a dictionary. Pages display brightly and clearly. They’re easy to read. But the backlight and the glare made me less comfortable than I was with the Kindle. The knowledge that completely different applications (including the Web and email and Twitter) were just a few taps away made me antsy and very tempted to task-switch. The knowledge that battery life is an issue created subtle discomfort. If the Kindle makes you feel like you’re in a library reading room, then the iPad makes you feel, at best, like you’re under fluorescent lights at a Barnes and Noble or Borders store. If you’re lucky, you’d be on a couch or at a reading table in the store, but you might also be standing up, in the aisles. Clearly, I didn’t find this conducive to focused and sustained reading. But that may have more to do with my own tendency to read periodicals far more than books, and my neurotic . And, truth be known, the book reading experience, when not explicitly compared to Kindle’s, was still pleasant. It is also important to point out that Kindle Store-sourced books can be read on the iPad through a Kindle reader application, from Amazon, specific to the device. This offered a less rich experience than the iBooks reader, but it was completely adequate. Despite the Kindle brand of the reader, however, it offered little in terms of simulating the reading experience on its namesake device. When it comes to periodicals, the iPad wins hands down. Magazines, even if merely scanned images of their print editions, read on the iPad in a way that felt similar to reading hard copy. The full color display, touch navigation and even the ability to render advertisements in their full glory makes the iPad a great way to read through any piece of work that is measured in pages, rather than chapters. There are many ways to get magazines and newspapers onto the iPad, including the Zinio reader, and publication-specific applications like the Wall Street Journal’s and Popular Science’s. The New York Times’ free Editors’ Choice application offers a Times Reader-like interface to a subset of the Gray Lady’s daily content. The completely Web-based but iPad-optimized Times Skimmer site (at www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer) works well too. Even conventional Web sites themselves can be read much like magazines, given the iPad’s ability to zoom in on the text and crop out advertisements on the margins. While the Kindle does have an experimental Web browser, it reminded me a lot of early mobile phone browsers, only in a larger size. For text-heavy sites with simple layout, it works fine. For just about anything else, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth. And given the way magazine articles make me think of things I want to look up online, I think that’s a real liability for the Kindle.   Summing Up What I came to realize is that the Kindle isn’t so much a computer or even an Internet device as it is a printer. While it doesn’t use physical paper, it still renders its content a page at a time, just like a laser printer does, and its output appears strikingly similar. You can read the rendered text, but you can’t interact with it in any way. That’s why the navigation requires a separate cursor display area. And because of the page-oriented rendering behavior, turning pages causes a flash on the display and requires a sometimes long pause before the next page is rendered. The good side of this is that once the page is generated, no battery power is required to display it. That makes for great battery life, optimal viewing under most lighting conditions (as long as there is some light) and low-eyestrain text-centric display of content. The Kindle is highly portable, has an excellent selection in its store and is refreshingly distraction-free. All of this is ideal for reading books. And iPad doesn’t offer any of it. What iPad does offer is versatility, variety, richness and luxury. It’s flush with accoutrements even if it’s low on focused, sustained text display. That makes it inferior to the Kindle for book reading. But that also makes it better than the Kindle for almost everything else. As such, and given that its book reading experience is still decent (even if not superior), I think the iPad will give Kindle a run for its money. True book lovers, and people on a budget, will want the Kindle. People with a robust amount of discretionary income may want both devices. Everyone else who is interested in a slate form factor e-reading device, especially if they also wish to have leisure-friendly Internet access, will likely choose the iPad exclusively. One thing is for sure: iPad has reduced Kindle’s market, and may have shifted its mass market potential to a mere niche play. If Amazon is smart, it will improve its iPad-based Kindle reader app significantly. It can then leverage the iPad channel as a significant market for the Kindle Store. After all, selling the eBooks themselves is what Amazon should care most about.

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• Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

  - by bob.ertl(at)oracle.com

    Welcome to Oracle BI Development's BI Foundation blog, focused on helping you get the most value from your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) platform deployments.  In my first series of posts, I plan to show developers the concepts and best practices for modeling in the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), the semantic layer of Oracle BI EE.  In this segment, I will lay the groundwork for the modeling concepts.  First, I will cover the big picture of how the BI Server fits into the system, and how the CEIM controls the query processing. Oracle BI EE Query Cycle The purpose of the Oracle BI Server is to bridge the gap between the presentation services and the data sources.  There are typically a variety of data sources in a variety of technologies: relational, normalized transaction systems; relational star-schema data warehouses and marts; multidimensional analytic cubes and financial applications; flat files, Excel files, XML files, and so on. Business datasets can reside in a single type of source, or, most of the time, are spread across various types of sources. Presentation services users are generally business people who need to be able to query that set of sources without any knowledge of technologies, schemas, or how sources are organized in their company. They think of business analysis in terms of measures with specific calculations, hierarchical dimensions for breaking those measures down, and detailed reports of the business transactions themselves.  Most of them create queries without knowing it, by picking a dashboard page and some filters.  Others create their own analysis by selecting metrics and dimensional attributes, and possibly creating additional calculations. The BI Server bridges that gap from simple business terms to technical physical queries by exposing just the business focused measures and dimensional attributes that business people can use in their analyses and dashboards.   After they make their selections and start the analysis, the BI Server plans the best way to query the data sources, writes the optimized sequence of physical queries to those sources, post-processes the results, and presents them to the client as a single result set suitable for tables, pivots and charts. The CEIM is a model that controls the processing of the BI Server.  It provides the subject areas that presentation services exposes for business users to select simplified metrics and dimensional attributes for their analysis.  It models the mappings to the physical data access, the calculations and logical transformations, and the data access security rules.  The CEIM consists of metadata stored in the repository, authored by developers using the Administration Tool client.     Presentation services and other query clients create their queries in BI EE's SQL-92 language, called Logical SQL or LSQL.  The API simply uses ODBC or JDBC to pass the query to the BI Server.  Presentation services writes the LSQL query in terms of the simplified objects presented to the users.  The BI Server creates a query plan, and rewrites the LSQL into fully-detailed SQL or other languages suitable for querying the physical sources.  For example, the LSQL on the left below was rewritten into the physical SQL for an Oracle 11g database on the right. Logical SQL   Physical SQL SELECT "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_0, "D4 Product"."P01  Product" saw_1, "F2 Units"."2-01  Billed Qty  (Sum All)" saw_2 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1       WITH SAWITH0 AS ( select T986.Per_Name_Month as c1, T879.Prod_Dsc as c2,      sum(T835.Units) as c3, T879.Prod_Key as c4 from      Product T879 /* A05 Product */ ,      Time_Mth T986 /* A08 Time Mth */ ,      FactsRev T835 /* A11 Revenue (Billed Time Join) */ where ( T835.Prod_Key = T879.Prod_Key and T835.Bill_Mth = T986.Row_Wid) group by T879.Prod_Dsc, T879.Prod_Key, T986.Per_Name_Month ) select SAWITH0.c1 as c1, SAWITH0.c2 as c2, SAWITH0.c3 as c3 from SAWITH0 order by c1, c2   Probably everybody reading this blog can write SQL or MDX.  However, the trick in designing the CEIM is that you are modeling a query-generation factory.  Rather than hand-crafting individual queries, you model behavior and relationships, thus configuring the BI Server machinery to manufacture millions of different queries in response to random user requests.  This mass production requires a different mindset and approach than when you are designing individual SQL statements in tools such as Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly Brio), or Oracle BI Publisher.   The Structure of the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM) The CEIM has a unique structure specifically for modeling the relationships and behaviors that fill the gap from logical user requests to physical data source queries and back to the result.  The model divides the functionality into three specialized layers, called Presentation, Business Model and Mapping, and Physical, as shown below. Presentation services clients can generally only see the presentation layer, and the objects in the presentation layer are normally the only ones used in the LSQL request.  When a request comes into the BI Server from presentation services or another client, the relationships and objects in the model allow the BI Server to select the appropriate data sources, create a query plan, and generate the physical queries.  That's the left to right flow in the diagram below.  When the results come back from the data source queries, the right to left relationships in the model show how to transform the results and perform any final calculations and functions that could not be pushed down to the databases.   Business Model Think of the business model as the heart of the CEIM you are designing.  This is where you define the analytic behavior seen by the users, and the superset library of metric and dimension objects available to the user community as a whole.  It also provides the baseline business-friendly names and user-readable dictionary.  For these reasons, it is often called the "logical" model--it is a virtual database schema that persists no data, but can be queried as if it is a database. The business model always has a dimensional shape (more on this in future posts), and its simple shape and terminology hides the complexity of the source data models. Besides hiding complexity and normalizing terminology, this layer adds most of the analytic value, as well.  This is where you define the rich, dimensional behavior of the metrics and complex business calculations, as well as the conformed dimensions and hierarchies.  It contributes to the ease of use for business users, since the dimensional metric definitions apply in any context of filters and drill-downs, and the conformed dimensions enable dashboard-wide filters and guided analysis links that bring context along from one page to the next.  The conformed dimensions also provide a key to hiding the complexity of many sources, including federation of different databases, behind the simple business model. Note that the expression language in this layer is LSQL, so that any expression can be rewritten into any data source's query language at run time.  This is important for federation, where a given logical object can map to several different physical objects in different databases.  It is also important to portability of the CEIM to different database brands, which is a key requirement for Oracle's BI Applications products. Your requirements process with your user community will mostly affect the business model.  This is where you will define most of the things they specifically ask for, such as metric definitions.  For this reason, many of the best-practice methodologies of our consulting partners start with the high-level definition of this layer. Physical Model The physical model connects the business model that meets your users' requirements to the reality of the data sources you have available. In the query factory analogy, think of the physical layer as the bill of materials for generating physical queries.  Every schema, table, column, join, cube, hierarchy, etc., that will appear in any physical query manufactured at run time must be modeled here at design time. Each physical data source will have its own physical model, or "database" object in the CEIM.  The shape of each physical model matches the shape of its physical source.  In other words, if the source is normalized relational, the physical model will mimic that normalized shape.  If it is a hypercube, the physical model will have a hypercube shape.  If it is a flat file, it will have a denormalized tabular shape. To aid in query optimization, the physical layer also tracks the specifics of the database brand and release.  This allows the BI Server to make the most of each physical source's distinct capabilities, writing queries in its syntax, and using its specific functions. This allows the BI Server to push processing work as deep as possible into the physical source, which minimizes data movement and takes full advantage of the database's own optimizer.  For most data sources, native APIs are used to further optimize performance and functionality. The value of having a distinct separation between the logical (business) and physical models is encapsulation of the physical characteristics.  This encapsulation is another enabler of packaged BI applications and federation.  It is also key to hiding the complex shapes and relationships in the physical sources from the end users.  Consider a routine drill-down in the business model: physically, it can require a drill-through where the first query is MDX to a multidimensional cube, followed by the drill-down query in SQL to a normalized relational database.  The only difference from the user's point of view is that the 2nd query added a more detailed dimension level column - everything else was the same. Mappings Within the Business Model and Mapping Layer, the mappings provide the binding from each logical column and join in the dimensional business model, to each of the objects that can provide its data in the physical layer.  When there is more than one option for a physical source, rules in the mappings are applied to the query context to determine which of the data sources should be hit, and how to combine their results if more than one is used.  These rules specify aggregate navigation, vertical partitioning (fragmentation), and horizontal partitioning, any of which can be federated across multiple, heterogeneous sources.  These mappings are usually the most sophisticated part of the CEIM. Presentation You might think of the presentation layer as a set of very simple relational-like views into the business model.  Over ODBC/JDBC, they present a relational catalog consisting of databases, tables and columns.  For business users, presentation services interprets these as subject areas, folders and columns, respectively.  (Note that in 10g, subject areas were called presentation catalogs in the CEIM.  In this blog, I will stick to 11g terminology.)  Generally speaking, presentation services and other clients can query only these objects (there are exceptions for certain clients such as BI Publisher and Essbase Studio). The purpose of the presentation layer is to specialize the business model for different categories of users.  Based on a user's role, they will be restricted to specific subject areas, tables and columns for security.  The breakdown of the model into multiple subject areas organizes the content for users, and subjects superfluous to a particular business role can be hidden from that set of users.  Customized names and descriptions can be used to override the business model names for a specific audience.  Variables in the object names can be used for localization. For these reasons, you are better off thinking of the tables in the presentation layer as folders than as strict relational tables.  The real semantics of tables and how they function is in the business model, and any grouping of columns can be included in any table in the presentation layer.  In 11g, an LSQL query can also span multiple presentation subject areas, as long as they map to the same business model. Other Model Objects There are some objects that apply to multiple layers.  These include security-related objects, such as application roles, users, data filters, and query limits (governors).  There are also variables you can use in parameters and expressions, and initialization blocks for loading their initial values on a static or user session basis.  Finally, there are Multi-User Development (MUD) projects for developers to check out units of work, and objects for the marketing feature used by our packaged customer relationship management (CRM) software.   The Query Factory At this point, you should have a grasp on the query factory concept.  When developing the CEIM model, you are configuring the BI Server to automatically manufacture millions of queries in response to random user requests. You do this by defining the analytic behavior in the business model, mapping that to the physical data sources, and exposing it through the presentation layer's role-based subject areas. While configuring mass production requires a different mindset than when you hand-craft individual SQL or MDX statements, it builds on the modeling and query concepts you already understand. The following posts in this series will walk through the CEIM modeling concepts and best practices in detail.  We will initially review dimensional concepts so you can understand the business model, and then present a pattern-based approach to learning the mappings from a variety of physical schema shapes and deployments to the dimensional model.  Along the way, we will also present the dimensional calculation template, and learn how to configure the many additivity patterns.

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• Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.”  Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard  What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals.  In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense.  In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable.  But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk.  There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires.   Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence.   Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development.  2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others.  Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts.  Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day)  Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users.   Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts.  The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits.  Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

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• NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC - Part 2

  - by shiju

   In my last post, I have given an introduction to MongoDB and NoRM using an ASP.NET MVC demo app. I have updated the demo ASP.NET MVC app and a created a new drop at codeplex. You can download the demo at http://mongomvc.codeplex.com/In my last post, we have discussed to doing basic CRUD operations against a simple domain entity. In this post, let’s discuss on domain entity with deep object graph.The below is our domain entities  public class Category {       [MongoIdentifier]     public ObjectId Id { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]     [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]     public string Name { get; set;}     public string Description { get; set; }     public List<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }       public Category()     {         Expenses = new List<Expense>();     } }    public class Expense {     [MongoIdentifier]     public ObjectId Id { get; set; }     public Category Category { get; set; }     public string  Transaction { get; set; }     public DateTime Date { get; set; }     public double Amount { get; set; }   }   We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category.The MongoSession class  internal class MongoSession : IDisposable {     private readonly MongoQueryProvider provider;       public MongoSession()     {         this.provider = new MongoQueryProvider("Expense");     }       public IQueryable<Category> Categories     {         get { return new MongoQuery<Category>(this.provider); }     }     public IQueryable<Expense> Expenses     {         get { return new MongoQuery<Expense>(this.provider); }     }     public MongoQueryProvider Provider     {         get { return this.provider; }     }       public void Add<T>(T item) where T : class, new()     {         this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Insert(item);     }       public void Dispose()     {         this.provider.Server.Dispose();     }     public void Delete<T>(T item) where T : class, new()     {         this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Delete(item);     }       public void Drop<T>()     {         this.provider.DB.DropCollection(typeof(T).Name);     }       public void Save<T>(T item) where T : class,new()     {         this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Save(item);                }     }     ASP.NET MVC view model  for Expense transaction  public class ExpenseViewModel {     public ObjectId Id { get; set; }       public ObjectId CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Transaction Required")]            public string Transaction { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Date Required")]            public DateTime Date { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Amount Required")]        public double Amount { get; set; }       public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Category { get; set; } }  Let's create action method for Insert and Update a expense transaction   [HttpPost] public ActionResult Save(ExpenseViewModel expenseViewModel) {     try     {         if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {             using (var session = new MongoSession())             {                 var categories = session.Categories.AsEnumerable<Category>();                 expenseViewModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(expenseViewModel.CategoryId);                }             return View("Save", expenseViewModel);         }           var expense=new Expense();         ModelCopier.CopyModel(expenseViewModel, expense);           using (var session = new MongoSession())         {             ObjectId Id = expenseViewModel.CategoryId;             var category = session.Categories                 .Where(c => c.Id ==Id  )                 .FirstOrDefault();             expense.Category = category;             session.Save(expense);         }         return RedirectToAction("Index");     }     catch     {         return View();     } } Query with Expenses  using (var session = new MongoSession()) {     var expenses = session.Expenses.         Where(exp => exp.Date >= StartDate && exp.Date <= EndDate)         .AsEnumerable<Expense>(); }  We are doing a LINQ query expression with a Date filter. We can easily work with MongoDB using NoRM driver and can managing object graph of domain entities are pretty cool. Download the Source - You can download the source code form http://mongomvc.codeplex.com

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• The Inkremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #4 - Make increments tangible

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/12/the-inkremental-architectacutes-napkin---4---make-increments-tangible.aspxThe driver of software development are increments, small increments, tiny increments. With an increment being a slice of the overall requirement scope thin enough to implement and get feedback from a product owner within 2 days max. Such an increment might concern Functionality or Quality.[1] To make such high frequency delivery of increments possible, the transition from talking to coding needs to be as easy as possible. A user story or some other documentation of what´s supposed to get implemented until tomorrow evening at latest is one side of the medal. The other is where to put the logic in all of the code base. To implement an increment, only logic statements are needed. Functionality like Quality are just about expressions and control flow statements. Think of Assembler code without the CALL/RET instructions. That´s all is needed. Forget about functions, forget about classes. To make a user happy none of that is really needed. It´s just about the right expressions and conditional executions paths plus some memory allocation. Automatic function inlining of compilers which makes it clear how unimportant functions are for delivering value to users at runtime. But why then are there functions? Because they were invented for optimization purposes. We need them for better Evolvability and Production Efficiency. Nothing more, nothing less. No software has become faster, more secure, more scalable, more functional because we gathered logic under the roof of a function or two or a thousand. Functions make logic easier to understand. Functions make us faster in producing logic. Functions make it easier to keep logic consistent. Functions help to conserve memory. That said, functions are important. They are even the pivotal element of software development. We can´t code without them - whether you write a function yourself or not. Because there´s always at least one function in play: the Entry Point of a program. In Ruby the simplest program looks like this:puts "Hello, world!" In C# more is necessary:class Program { public static void Main () { System.Console.Write("Hello, world!"); } } C# makes the Entry Point function explicit, not so Ruby. But still it´s there. So you can think of logic always running in some function. Which brings me back to increments: In order to make the transition from talking to code as easy as possible, it has to be crystal clear into which function you should put the logic. Product owners might be content once there is a sticky note a user story on the Scrum or Kanban board. But developers need an idea of what that sticky note means in term of functions. Because with a function in hand, with a signature to run tests against, they have something to focus on. All´s well once there is a function behind whose signature logic can be piled up. Then testing frameworks can be used to check if the logic is correct. Then practices like TDD can help to drive the implementation. That´s why most code katas define exactly how the API of a solution should look like. It´s a function, maybe two or three, not more. A requirement like “Write a function f which takes this as parameters and produces such and such output by doing x” makes a developer comfortable. Yes, there are all kinds of details to think about, like which algorithm or technology to use, or what kind of state and side effects to consider. Even a single function not only must deliver on Functionality, but also on Quality and Evolvability. Nevertheless, once it´s clear which function to put logic in, you have a tangible starting point. So, yes, what I´m suggesting is to find a single function to put all the logic in that´s necessary to deliver on a the requirements of an increment. Or to put it the other way around: Slice requirements in a way that each increment´s logic can be located under the roof of a single function. Entry points Of course, the logic of a software will always be spread across many, many functions. But there´s always an Entry Point. That´s the most important function for each increment, because that´s the root to put integration or even acceptance tests on. A batch program like the above hello-world application only has a single Entry Point. All logic is reached from there, regardless how deep it´s nested in classes. But a program with a user interface like this has at least two Entry Points: One is the main function called upon startup. The other is the button click event handler for “Show my score”. But maybe there are even more, like another Entry Point being a handler for the event fired when one of the choices gets selected; because then some logic could check if the button should be enabled because all questions got answered. Or another Entry Point for the logic to be executed when the program is close; because then the choices made should be persisted. You see, an Entry Point to me is a function which gets triggered by the user of a software. With batch programs that´s the main function. With GUI programs on the desktop that´s event handlers. With web programs that´s handlers for URL routes. And my basic suggestion to help you with slicing requirements for Spinning is: Slice them in a way so that each increment is related to only one Entry Point function.[2] Entry Points are the “outer functions” of a program. That´s where the environment triggers behavior. That´s where hardware meets software. Entry points always get called because something happened to hardware state, e.g. a key was pressed, a mouse button clicked, the system timer ticked, data arrived over a wire.[3] Viewed from the outside, software is just a collection of Entry Point functions made accessible via buttons to press, menu items to click, gestures, URLs to open, keys to enter. Collections of batch processors I´d thus say, we haven´t moved forward since the early days of software development. We´re still writing batch programs. Forget about “event-driven programming” with its fancy GUI applications. Software is just a collection of batch processors. Earlier it was just one per program, today it´s hundreds we bundle up into applications. Each batch processor is represented by an Entry Point as its root that works on a number of resources from which it reads data to process and to which it writes results. These resources can be the keyboard or main memory or a hard disk or a communication line or a display. Together many batch processors - large and small - form applications the user perceives as a single whole: Software development that way becomes quite simple: just implement one batch processor after another. Well, at least in principle ;-) Features Each batch processor entered through an Entry Point delivers value to the user. It´s an increment. Sometimes its logic is trivial, sometimes it´s very complex. Regardless, each Entry Point represents an increment. An Entry Point implemented thus is a step forward in terms of Agility. At the same time it´s a tangible unit for developers. Therefore, identifying the more or less numerous batch processors in a software system is a rewarding task for product owners and developers alike. That´s where user stories meet code. In this example the user story translates to the Entry Point triggered by clicking the login button on a dialog like this: The batch then retrieves what has been entered via keyboard, loads data from a user store, and finally outputs some kind of response on the screen, e.g. by displaying an error message or showing the next dialog. This is all very simple, but you see, there is not just one thing happening, but several. Get input (email address, password) Load user for email address If user not found report error Check password Hash password Compare hash to hash stored in user Show next dialog Viewed from 10,000 feet it´s all done by the Entry Point function. And of course that´s technically possible. It´s just a bunch of logic and calling a couple of API functions. However, I suggest to take these steps as distinct aspects of the overall requirement described by the user story. Such aspects of requirements I call Features. Features too are increments. Each provides some (small) value of its own to the user. Each can be checked individually by a product owner. Instead of implementing all the logic behind the Login() entry point at once you can move forward increment by increment, e.g. First implement the dialog, let the user enter any credentials, and log him/her in without any checks. Features 1 and 4. Then hard code a single user and check the email address. Features 2 and 2.1. Then check password without hashing it (or use a very simple hash like the length of the password). Features 3. and 3.2 Replace hard coded user with a persistent user directoy, but a very simple one, e.g. a CSV file. Refinement of feature 2. Calculate the real hash for the password. Feature 3.1. Switch to the final user directory technology. Each feature provides an opportunity to deliver results in a short amount of time and get feedback. If you´re in doubt whether you can implement the whole entry point function until tomorrow night, then just go for a couple of features or even just one. That´s also why I think, you should strive for wrapping feature logic into a function of its own. It´s a matter of Evolvability and Production Efficiency. A function per feature makes the code more readable, since the language of requirements analysis and design is carried over into implementation. It makes it easier to apply changes to features because it´s clear where their logic is located. And finally, of course, it lets you re-use features in different context (read: increments). Feature functions make it easier for you to think of features as Spinning increments, to implement them independently, to let the product owner check them for acceptance individually. Increments consist of features, entry point functions consist of feature functions. So you can view software as a hierarchy of requirements from broad to thin which map to a hierarchy of functions - with entry points at the top.   I like this image of software as a self-similar structure on many levels of abstraction where requirements and code match each other. That to me is true agile design: the core tenet of Agility to move forward in increments is carried over into implementation. Increments on paper are retained in code. This way developers can easily relate to product owners. Elusive and fuzzy requirements are not tangible. Software production is moving forward through requirements one increment at a time, and one function at a time. In closing Product owners and developers are different - but they need to work together towards a shared goal: working software. So their notions of software need to be made compatible, they need to be connected. The increments of the product owner - user stories and features - need to be mapped straightforwardly to something which is relevant to developers. To me that´s functions. Yes, functions, not classes nor components nor micro services. We´re talking about behavior, actions, activities, processes. Their natural representation is a function. Something has to be done. Logic has to be executed. That´s the purpose of functions. Later, classes and other containers are needed to stay on top of a growing amount of logic. But to connect developers and product owners functions are the appropriate glue. Functions which represent increments. Can there always be such a small increment be found to deliver until tomorrow evening? I boldly say yes. Yes, it´s always possible. But maybe you´ve to start thinking differently. Maybe the product owner needs to start thinking differently. Completion is not the goal anymore. Neither is checking the delivery of an increment through the user interface of a software. Product owners need to become comfortable using test beds for certain features. If it´s hard to slice requirements thin enough for Spinning the reason is too little knowledge of something. Maybe you don´t yet understand the problem domain well enough? Maybe you don´t yet feel comfortable with some tool or technology? Then it´s time to acknowledge this fact. Be honest about your not knowing. And instead of trying to deliver as a craftsman officially become a researcher. Research an check back with the product owner every day - until your understanding has grown to a level where you are able to define the next Spinning increment. ? Sometimes even thin requirement slices will cover several Entry Points, like “Add validation of email addresses to all relevant dialogs.” Validation then will it put into a dozen functons. Still, though, it´s important to determine which Entry Points exactly get affected. That´s much easier, if strive for keeping the number of Entry Points per increment to 1. ? If you like call Entry Point functions event handlers, because that´s what they are. They all handle events of some kind, whether that´s palpable in your code or note. A public void btnSave_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {…} might look like an event handler to you, but public static void Main() {…} is one also - for then event “program started”. ?

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