rich anderson - Page 62

Today's Links (6/29/2011)

- by Bob Rhubart

Event-Driven SOA: Events meet Services | Guido Schmutz Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz shows you how to achieve extreme loose coupling within a Service-Oriented Architecture by using event-driven interactions. Misconceptions About Software Architecture | Sanjeev Kumar A concise, to-the-point, and informative article by Sanjeev Kumar. Good Leaders Acknowledge What Can't Be Done - Jeffrey Pfeffer - Harvard Business Review "None of us likes to admit to bad decisions," says Jeffrey Pfeffer. "But imagine how much harder that is for someone who has been chosen to lead a large organization precisely because he or she is thought to have the power to see the future more clearly and chart a wise course." Suboptimal Thinking within Enterprise Architecture | James McGovern McGovern says: "We need to remember that enterprises live and thrive beyond just the current person at the helm." Boundaryless Information Flow | Richard Veryard "If all the boundaries are removed or porous, then the (extended) enterprise or ecosystem becomes like a giant sponge, in which all information permeates the whole," Veryard says. "Some people may think that's a good idea, but it's not what I'd call loose coupling." Coming to a City Near You: Oracle Business Analytics Summits | Rob Reynolds This series of events includes a Technology and Architecture track. New Date for Implementation of Sun Hands-On Course Requirement (Oracle Certification) As announced on the Oracle Certification website, Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification tracks will include a new mandatory course attendance requirement. VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now available for download | Bob Netherton Netherton shares information on the new release. Updated Technical Best Practices whitepaper | Anthony Shorten The Technical Best Practices whitepaper has been updated with the latest advice. "New advice includes new installation advice, advanced settings, new security settings and advice for both Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere installations," says Shorten. Kscope 11 ADF, AIA and Business Rules | Peter Paul van de Beek Whitehorses Solution Architect Peter Paul van de Beek shares his impressions of KScope11 presentations by Markus Eisele, Sten Vesterli, and Edwin Biemond. Amazon AWS for the learning experience | Andrej Koelewijn "Using AWS changes your expectations how your internal data center should operate," says Koelewijn. BPMN is dead, long live BPEL! (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jürgen Kress shares information -- including a long list of speakers -- for the SOA & BPM Integration Days 2011 conference, October 12th & 13th 2011 in Düsseldorf. InfoQ: HTML5 and the Dawn of Rich Mobile Web Applications James Pearce introduces cross-platform web apps development using HTML5 and web frameworks, such as jQTouch, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, outlining what makes a good framework. InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Development "Frameworks like TOGAF are used to define an architecture that aligns IT assets and resources to support key business needs and processes of key stakeholders," says SEI's Mike Konrad. "But the individual application systems, capabilities, services, networks, and other IT assets and infrastructure still need to be acquired, developed, or sustained." InfoQ: Architecting a Cloud-Scale Identity Fabric | Eric Olden "The most cited reason for not moving to the cloud is concern about security," says Olden. "In particular, managing user identity and access in the cloud is a tough problem to solve and a big security concern for organizations."

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You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if…

- by Mark Rackley

Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down. Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you. :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer: “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields. You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well. Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET, sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast! Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe. Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible. Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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The Next Wave of PeopleSoft Capabilities for the Staffing Industry Is Here

- by Mark Rosenberg

With the release of PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 in January this year, we introduced substantial new capabilities for our Staffing Industry customers. Through a co-development project with Infosys Limited, we have enriched Oracle's PeopleSoft Staffing Solution with new tools aimed at accelerating and improving the quality of job order fulfillment, increasing branch recruiter productivity, and driving profitable growth. Staffing industry firms succeed based on their ability to rapidly, cost-effectively, and continually fill their pipelines with new clients and job orders, recruit the best talent, and match orders with talent. Pressure to execute in each of these functional areas is even more acute on staffing firms as contingent labor becomes a more substantial and permanent part of the workforce mix. In an industry that creates value through speedy execution, there is little room for manual, inefficient processes and brittle, custom integrations, which throttle profitability and growth. The latest wave of investment in the PeopleSoft Staffing Solution focuses on generating efficiency and flexibility for our customers. Simplicity To operate profitably and continue growing, a Staffing enterprise needs its client management, recruiting, order fulfillment, and other processes to function in harmony. Most importantly, they need to be simple for recruiters, branch managers, and applicants to access and understand. The latest PeopleSoft Staffing Solution set of enhancements includes numerous automated defaulting mechanisms and information-rich dashboard pagelets that even a new employee can learn quickly. Pending Applicant, Agenda management, Search, and other pagelets are just a few of the newest, easy-to-use tools that not only aggregate and summarize information, but also provide instant access to applicants, tasks, and key reports for branch staff. Productivity The leading firms in the Staffing industry are those that can more efficiently orchestrate large numbers of candidates, clients, and orders than their competitors can. PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 delivers productivity boosters that Staffing firms can leverage to streamline tasks and processes for competitive advantage. For example, we enhanced the Recruiting Funnel, which manages the candidate on-boarding process, with a highly interactive user interface. It integrates disparate Staffing business processes and exploits new PeopleTools technologies to offer a superior on-boarding user experience. Automated creation of agenda items and assignment tasks for each candidate minimizes setup and organizes assignment steps for the on-boarding process. Mass updates of tasks and instant access to the candidate overview page (which we also expanded), candidate event status, event counts, and other key data enable recruiters to better serve clients and candidates. Lower TCO Constructing and maintaining an efficient yet flexible labor supply chain can be complicated, let alone expensive. Traditionally, Staffing firms have been challenged in controlling their technology cost of ownership because connecting candidate and client-facing tools involved building and integrating custom applications and technologies and managing staff turnover, placing heavy demands on IT and support staff. With PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2, there are two major enhancements that aggressively tackle these challenges. First, we added another integration framework to enable cost-effective linking of the Staffing firm’s PeopleSoft applications and its job board distributors. (The first PeopleSoft 9.1 Feature Pack released in March 2011 delivered an integration framework to connect to resume parsing providers.) Second, we introduced the teaming concept to enable work to be partitioned to groups, as well as individuals. These two capabilities, combined with a host of others, position Staffing firms to configure and grow their businesses without growing their IT and overhead expenditures. For our Staffing Industry customers, PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 is loaded with high-value tools aimed at enabling and sustaining a flexible labor supply chain. For more information, contact [email protected] or [email protected].

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Changing the action of a hyperlink in a Silverlight RichTextArea

- by Marc Schluper

The title of this post could also have been "Move over Hyperlink, here comes Actionlink" or "Creating interactive text in Silverlight." But alas, there can be only one. Hyperlinks are very useful. However, they are also limited because their action is fixed: browse to a URL. This may have been adequate at the start of the Internet, but nowadays, in web applications, the one thing we do not want to happen is a complete change of context. In applications we typically like a hyperlink selection to initiate an action that updates a part of the screen. For instance, if my application has a map displayed with some text next to it, the map would react to a selection of a hyperlink in the text, e.g. by zooming in on a location and displaying additional locational information in a popup. In this way, the text becomes interactive text. It is quite common that one company creates and maintains websites for many client companies. To keep maintenance cost low, it is important that the content of these websites can be updated by the client companies themselves, without the need to involve a software engineer. To accommodate this scenario, we want the author of the interactive text to configure all hyperlinks (without writing any code). In a Silverlight RichTextArea, the default action of a Hyperlink is the same as a traditional hyperlink, but it can be changed: if the Command property has a value then upon a click event this command is called with the value of the CommandParameter as parameter. How can we let the author of the text specify a command for each hyperlink in the text, and how can we let an application react properly to a hyperlink selection event? We are talking about any command here. Obviously, the application would recognize only a specific set of commands, with well defined parameters, but the approach we take here is generic in the sense that it pertains to the RichTextArea and any command. So what do we require? We wish that: As a text author, I can configure the action of a hyperlink in a (rich) text without writing code; As a text author, I can persist the action of a hyperlink with the text; As a reader of persisted text, I can click a hyperlink and the configured action will happen; As an application developer, I can configure a control to use my application specific commands. In an excellent introduction to the RichTextArea, John Papa shows (among other things) how to persist a text created using this control. To meet our requirements, we can create a subclass of RichTextArea that uses John's code and allows plugging in two command specific components: one to prompt for a command definition, and one to execute the command. Since both of these plugins are application specific, our RichTextArea subclass should not assume anything about them except their interface. public interface IDefineCommand { void Prompt(string content, // the link content Action<string, object> callback); // the method called to convey the link definition } public interface IPerformCommand : ICommand {} The IDefineCommand plugin receives the content of the link (the text visible to the reader) and displays some kind of control that allows the author to define the link. When that's done, this (possibly changed) content string is conveyed back to the RichTextArea, together with an object that defines the command to execute when the link is clicked by the reader of the published text. The IPerformCommand plugin simply implements System.Windows.Input.ICommand. Let's use MEF to load the proper plugins. In the example solution there is a project that contains rudimentary implementations of these. The IDefineCommand plugin simply prompts for a command string (cf. a command line or query string), and the IPerformCommand plugin displays a MessageBox showing this command string. An actual application using this extended RichTextArea would have its own set of commands, each having their own parameters, and hence would provide more user friendly application specific plugins. Nonetheless, in any case a command can be persisted as a string and hence the two interfaces defined above suffice. For a Visual Studio 2010 solution, see my article on The Code Project.

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Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: TEAM Informatics

- by Kellsey Ruppel

Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Here comes another Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge entry, this one courtesy of TEAM Informatics (@teaminformatics). As their name suggests, their entry was a true team effort, featuring the work of Jon Chartrand, Deepthi Sanikommu, Dmitry Shtulman, Raghavendra Joshi, and Daniel Stitely with Wayne Boerger doing the presentation honors. Speaking of the presentation, Wayne’s laptop wouldn’t project onto the plasma we had in the OTN Lounge, but luckily, Noel (@noelportugal) had his iPad and VGA dongle in his backpack of goodies, so they were able to improvise by using the iPad camera to capture Wayne’s demo and project the video to the plasma. Code will find a way. Anyway, TEAM built Do Over, an integration with Atlassian’s JIRA, coincidentally something I’ve chatted with Rich (@rmanalan) about in the past. The basic idea is simple; integrate JIRA issues with Oracle Social Network to expand and centralize the conversation around issue resolution. In Dmitry’s words: We were able to put together a team on fairly short notice and, after batting a few ideas around, decided to pursue an integration with JIRA, an issue and project tracking tool used in-house at TEAM. After getting to know WebCenter Social, we saw immediate benefits that a JIRA integration could bring, primarily due to the fact that JIRA only allows assignment of an issue to one person at a time. Integrating Social would allow collaboration and issue resolution to happen right from the JIRA Issue interface. TEAM tackled a very common pain point among developers, i.e. including everyone who needs to be involved in issue resolution into a single thread. If you’ve ever fixed bugs or participated in that process, you’ll know that not everyone has access to the issue resolution system, which makes consolidating discussion time-consuming and fragmented. Why? Because we typically use email as the tool for collaboration. Oracle Social Network allows for all parties involved to work in a single, private and secure conversation, and through its RESTful Public API, information from external systems like JIRA can be brought in for context. TEAM only had time to address half the solution, but given more time, I’m sure they would have made the integration bidirectional, allowing for relevant commentary to be pushed back to JIRA, closing the loop. Here are some screenshot of their integration. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } When Oracle Social Network is released, TEAM will have something they use internally to work on issues, and maybe they’ll even productize their work and add it to the Atlassian Marketplace so that other JIRA users can benefit from the combination of Oracle Social Network and JIRA. Thanks to everyone at TEAM for participating in our challenge. We hope they had a good experience. Look for the details of the other entries this week. Be sure to check out a full recap from Dmitry over on the TEAM blog.

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OOW 2013 Summary for Fusion Middleware Architects & Administrators by Simon Haslam

- by JuergenKress

OOW 2013 Summary for Fusion Middleware Architects & Administrators by Simon Haslam This September during Oracle OpenWorld 2013 the weather in San Francisco, as you see can from the photo, was exceptionally sunny. The dramatic final few days of the Americas Cup sailing competition, being held every day in the bay, coincided with the conference and meant that there was almost a holiday feel to the whole event. Here's my annual round-up of what I think was most interesting at OpenWorld 2013 for Fusion Middleware architects and administrators; I hope you find it useful and if you think I've missed something please add a comment! WebLogic and Cloud Application Foundation (CAF) The big WebLogic release of the year has already happened a few months ago with 12.1.2 so I won't duplicate that here. Will Lyons discussed the WebLogic and Coherence roadmap which essentially is that 12.1.3 will probably be released to coincide with SOA 12c next year and that 12.1.4, the next feature-rich WebLogic release, is more likely to be in 2015. This latter release will probably include full Java EE 7 support, have enhancements for multi-tenancy and further auto-scaling features to support increased density (i.e. more WebLogic usage for the same amount of hardware). There's a new Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder (OVAB) out already and an Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) 12c release round the corner too. Also of relevance to administrators is that Oracle has increased the support lifetime for Fusion Middleware 11g (e.g. WebLogic 10.3.6) so that Premier Support will now run to the end of 2018 and Extended Support until 2021 - this should remove any Oracle-driven pressure to upgrade at least. Java Mission Control Java Mission Control (JMC) is the HotSpot Java 7 version of JRockit 6 Mission Control, a very nice performance monitoring tool from Oracle's BEA acquisition. Flight Recorder is a feature built into the JVM which records diagnostic events into, typically, a circular buffer which can then be used for historical analysis, particularly in the case of a JVM crash or hang. It's been available separately for WebLogic only for perhaps a year now but, more significantly, it now includes JVM events and was bundled in with JDK7 Update 40 a few weeks ago. I attended a couple of interesting Java One sessions on JMC/Flight Recorder and have to say it's looking really good - it has all the previous JRMC features except for memory leak detector, plus some enhancements around operative sets and ECID filtering I think. Marcus also showed how you could add your own events into flight recorder by building your own event class - they are then available for graphing alongside all the other events in JMC. This uses a currently an unsupported/undocumented API, but it's also the same one that WebLogic uses for WLDF events so I imagine it is stable. I'm not sure quite whether this would be useful to custom applications, as opposed to infrastructure services or ISV packaged applications, but it was a very nice demonstration. I've been testing JMC / FR enabling on several environments recently and my confidence is growing - it feels robust and I think could very soon be part of my standard builds. Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: OOW,Simon Haslam,Oracle OpenWorld,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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Oracle Text query parser

- by Roger Ford

Oracle Text provides a rich query syntax which enables powerful text searches.However, this syntax isn't intended for use by inexperienced end-users. If you provide a simple search box in your application, you probably want users to be able to type "Google-like" searches into the box, and have your application convert that into something that Oracle Text understands.For example if your user types "windows nt networking" then you probably want to convert this into something like"windows ACCUM nt ACCUM networking". But beware - "NT" is a reserved word, and needs to be escaped. So let's escape all words:"{windows} ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}". That's fine - until you start introducing wild cards. Then you must escape only non-wildcarded searches:"win% ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}". There are quite a few other "gotchas" that you might encounter along the way.Then there's the issue of scoring. Given a query for "oracle text query syntax", it would be nice if we could score a full phrase match higher than a hit where all four words are present but not in a phrase. And then perhaps lower than that would be a document where three of the four terms are present. Progressive relaxation helps you with this, but you need to code the "progression" yourself in most cases.To help with this, I've developed a query parser which will take queries in Google-like syntax, and convert them into Oracle Text queries. It's designed to be as flexible as possible, and will generate either simple queries or progressive relaxation queries. The input string will typically just be a string of words, such as "oracle text query syntax" but the grammar does allow for more complex expressions: word : score will be improved if word exists +word : word must exist -word : word CANNOT exist "phrase words" : words treated as phrase (may be preceded by + or -) field:(expression) : find expression (which allows +,- and phrase as above) within "field". So for example if I searched for +"oracle text" query +syntax -ctxcatThen the results would have to contain the phrase "oracle text" and the word syntax. Any documents mentioning ctxcat would be excluded from the results. All the instructions are in the top of the file (see "Downloads" at the bottom of this blog entry). Please download the file, read the instructions, then try it out by running "parser.pls" in either SQL*Plus or SQL Developer.I am also uploading a test file "test.sql". You can run this and/or modify it to run your own tests or run against your own text index. test.sql is designed to be run from SQL*Plus and may not produce useful output in SQL Developer (or it may, I haven't tried it).I'm putting the code up here for testing and comments. I don't consider it "production ready" at this point, but would welcome feedback. I'm particularly interested in comments such as "The instructions are unclear - I couldn't figure out how to do XXX" "It didn't work in my environment" (please provide as many details as possible) "We can't use it in our application" (why not?) "It needs to support XXX feature" "It produced an invalid query output when I fed in XXXX" Downloads: parser.pls test.sql

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PDF Converter Elite Giveaway – Lets you create, convert and edit any type of PDF with ease

- by Gopinath

Are you looking for a PDF editing software that lets you create, edit and convert any type of PDF with ease? Then here is a chance for you to win a lifetime free license of PDF Converter Elite software. Tech Dreams in partnership with pdfconverter.com brings a giveaway contest exclusively for our readers. Continue reading to know the features of the application and giveaway contest details Adobe Acrobat is the best software for creating, editing and converting PDF files, but you need spend a lot of money to buy it. PDF Converter Elite, which is priced at $100 has a rich set of features that satisfies most of your PDF management needs. Here is a quick run down of the feature of the application Create PDF files from almost every popular Windows file format – You can create a PDF from almost 300 popular file formats supported by Windows. Want to convert a word document to PDF? It’s just a click away. How about converting Excels, PowerPoint presentations, text files, images, etc? Yes, with a single click you will be able to turn them to PDF Files. Convert PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, HTML – This is one of the best features i liked in this software. You can convert a PDF to any MS Office file format without loosing alignment and quality of the document. The converted documents looks exactly same as your PDF documents and you would be surprised to see near 100% layout replication in the converted document. I feel in love with the perfection at which the files are converted. Edit PDF files easily – You can rework with your PDF documents by inserting watermarks, numbers, headers, footers and more. Also you will be able to merge two PDF files, overlay pages, remove unwanted pages, split a single PDF in to multiple files. Secure PDF files by setting password – You can secure PDF files by limiting how others can use them – set password to open the documents, restrict various activities like printing, copy & paste, screen reading, form filling, etc.. If you are looking for an affordable PDF editing application then PDF Converter Elite is there for you. 10 x PDF Converter Elite Licenses Giveaway Here comes the details on wining a free single user license for our readers – we have 10 PDF Converter Elite single user licenses worth of $100 each. To win a license all you need to do is Like Tech Dreams Fan page on Facebook Tweet or Like this post – buttons are available just below the post heading in the top section of this page Finally drop a comment on how you would like to use PDF Converter Elite We will choose 10 winners through a lucky draw and the licenses will be sent to them in a personal email. Names of the winners will also be announced on Tech Dreams. So are you ready to grab a free copy of PDF Converter worth of $100?

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Iron Speed Designer 7.0 - the great gets greater!

- by GGBlogger

For Immediate Release Iron Speed, Inc. Kelly Fisher +1 (408) 228-3436 [email protected] http://www.ironspeed.com Iron Speed Version 7.0 Generates SharePoint Applications New! Support for Microsoft SharePoint speeds application generation and deployment San Jose, CA – June 8, 2010. Software development tools-maker Iron Speed, Inc. released Iron Speed Designer Version 7.0, the latest version of its popular Web 2.0 application generator. Iron Speed Designer generates rich, interactive database and reporting applications for .NET, Microsoft SharePoint and the Cloud. In addition to .NET applications, Iron Speed Designer V7.0 generates database-driven SharePoint applications. The ability to quickly create database-driven applications for SharePoint eliminates a lot of work, helping IT departments generate productivity-enhancing applications in just a few hours. Generated applications include integrated SharePoint application security and use SharePoint master pages. “It’s virtually impossible to build database-driven application in SharePoint by hand. Iron Speed Designer V7.0 not only makes this possible, the tool makes it easy.” – Razi Mohiuddin, President, Iron Speed, Inc. Integrated SharePoint application security Generated applications include integrated SharePoint application security. SharePoint sites and their groups are used to retrieve security roles. Iron Speed Designer validates the user against a Microsoft SharePoint server on your network by retrieving the logged in user’s credentials from the SharePoint Context. “The Iron Speed Designer generated application integrates seamlessly with SharePoint security, removing the hassle of designing, testing and approving your own security layer.” -Michael Landi, Solutions Architect, Light Speed Solutions SharePoint Solution Packages Iron Speed Designer V7.0 creates SharePoint Solution Packages (WSPs) for easy application deployment. Using the Deployment Wizard, a single application WSP is created and can be deployed to your SharePoint server. “Iron Speed Designer is the first product on the market that allows easy and painless deployment of database-driven .NET web applications inside the SharePoint environment.” -Bryan Patrick, Developer, Pseudo Consulting SharePoint master pages and themes In V7.0, generated applications use SharePoint master pages and contain the same content as other SharePoint pages. Generated applications use the current SharePoint color scheme and display standard SharePoint navigation controls on each page. “Iron Speed Designer preserves the look and feel of the SharePoint environment in deployed database applications without additional hand-coding.” -Kirill Dmitriev, Software Developer, Iron Speed, Inc. Iron Speed Designer Version 7.0 System Requirements Iron Speed Designer Version 7.0 runs on Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 and 2008. It generates .NET Web applications for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Microsoft Access and MySQL. These applications may be deployed on any machine running the .NET Framework. Iron Speed Designer supports Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS3). Find complete information about Iron Speed Designer Version 7.0 at www.ironspeed.com. About Iron Speed, Inc. Iron Speed is the leader in enterprise-class application generation. Our software development tools generate database and reporting applications in significantly less time and cost than hand-coding. Our flagship product, Iron Speed Designer, is the fastest way to deliver applications for the Microsoft .NET and software-as-a-service cloud computing environments. With products built on decades of experience in enterprise application development and large-scale e-commerce systems, Iron Speed products eliminate the need for developers to choose between "full featured" and "on schedule." Founded in 1999, Iron Speed is well funded with a capital base of over $20M and strategic investors that include Arrow Electronics and Avnet, as well as executives from AMD, Excelan, Onsale, and Oracle. The company is based in San Jose, Calif., and is located online at www.ironspeed.com.

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Combining Scrum, TFS2010 and Email to keep everyone in the loop

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Often you will receive rich information from your Product Owner (Customer) about tasks. That information can be in the form of Word documents, HTML Emails and Pictures, but you generally receive them in the context of an Email. You need to keep these so your Team can refer to it later, and so you can send a “done” when the task has been completed. This preserves the “history” of the task and allows you to keep relevant partied included in any future conversation. At SSW we keep the original email so that we can reply Done and delete the email. But keeping it in your email does not help other members of the team if they complete the task and need to send the “done”. Worse yet, the description field in Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS 2010) does not support HTML and images, nor does the default task template support an “interested parties” or CC field. You can attach this content manually, but it can be time consuming. Figure: Description only supports plain text, and History supports HTML with no images What should we do? At SSW we always follow the rules, and it just so happened that we have rules to both achieve this, and to make it easier. You should follow the existing Rules to Better Project Management and attach the email to your task so you can refer to and reply to it later when you close the task: Do you know what Outlook add-ins you need? Describe the work item request in an email Use Outlook Add-in to move the email to a TFS Work Item When replying to an email with “done” you should follow: Do you update Team Companion template, so the email "subject" doesn't change? Do you update Team Companion template, so you can generate a proper "done" mail? Following these simple rules will help your Product Owner understand you better, and allow your team to more effectively collaborate with each other. An added bonus is that as we are keeping the email history in sync with TFS. When you “reply all” to the email all of the interested partied to the Task are also included. This notified those that may have been blocked by your task to keep up to date with its status. This has been published as Do you know to ensure that relevant emails are attached to tasks in our Rules to Better Scrum using TFS. What could we do better? I would like to see this process automated so that we capture the information correctly in the task without the need to use email. This would require a change to the process template in Team Foundation Server to add an “Interested Parties” field. Each reply to the email would need to be automatically processed into a Work Item. This could be done by adding a task identifier as the first item in the “Relates to” email header, and copying in an email address that you watch. This would then parse out the relevant information and add the new message to the history, update the “Interested parties” field and attach the Images. Upon reflection, it may even be possible, but more difficult to do this using ONLY the History field and including some of the header information in there to the build a done email with history. This would not currently deal with email “forks” well, but I think it would be adequate for our needs. It would be nice if we could find time to implement this, but currently it is but a pipe dream. Maybe Microsoft could implement something in the next version of Team Foundation Server, and in the mean time we have a process that works well. Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW Rules,TFS 2010,TFS 2008

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 07, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 07, 2012Popular ReleasesStackBuilder: StackBuilder 1.0.5.0: + Added Collada/WebGL export to show 3D animation of pallet solutions...Delta Engine: Delta Engine Beta Preview v0.9.4: v0.9.4 is the release for February 2012, but it was delayed till 2012-03-07 until content generation worked much better for v0.9.4. The main improvements were done on the server side (content generation and improved build support for iOS and Android). v0.9.4 is also the first version everyone can use to deploy their application onto all supported platforms, see Marketplace Licensing for details: http://deltaengine.net/Marketplace Documentation for this version can be found at: http://help.de...PDFsharp - A .NET library for processing PDF: PDFsharp and MigraDoc Foundation 1.32: PDFsharp and MigraDoc Foundation 1.32 is a stable version that fixes a few bugs that were found with version 1.31. Version 1.32 includes solutions for Visual Studio 2010 only (but it should be possible to add the project files to existing solutions for VS 2005 or VS 2008). Users of VS 2005 or VS 2008 can still download version 1.31 with the solutions for those versions that allow them to easily try the samples that are included. While it may create smaller PDF files than version 1.30 because...Terminals: Version 2.0 - Release: Changes since version 1.9a:New art works New usability in Organize favorites window Improved usability of imports/exports and scans Large number of fixes Improvements in single instance mode Comparing November beta 4, this corrects: New application icons Doesn't show Logon error codes Fixed command line arguments exception for single instance mode Fixed detaching of tabs improved usability in detached window Fixed option settings for Capture manager Fixed system tray noti...MFCMAPI: March 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1032 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeSimple Injector: Simple Injector v1.4.1: This release adds two small improvements to the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll. No changes have been made to the core library. New features and improvements in this release for the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll The RegisterManyForOpenGeneric extension methods now accept non-generic decorator, as long as they implement the given open generic service type. GetTypesToRegister methods added to the OpenGenericBatchRegistrationExtensions class which allows to customize the behavior. Note that the...CommonLibrary: Code: CodePowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.5.2: Added support for PowerGUI 3.2.VidCoder: 1.3.1: Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.6 release (svn 4472). Removed erroneous "None" container choice. Change some logic and help text to stop assuming you have to pick the VIDEO_TS folder for a DVD scan. This should make previewing DVD titles on the Queue Multiple Titles window possible when you've picked the root DVD directory.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.0: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-03-04 v3.1.0 -??Hidden???????（〓?〓）。 -?PageManager??...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.1: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...Windows Phone Commands for VS2010: Version 1.0: Initial Release Version 1.0 Connect from device or emulator (Monitors the connection) Show Device information (Plataform, build , version, avaliable memory, total memory, architeture Manager installed applications (Launch, uninstall and explorer isolate storage files) Manager core applications (Launch blocked applications from emulator (Office, Calculator, alarm, calendar , etc) Manager blocked settings from emulator (Airplane Mode, Celullar Network, Wifi, etc) Deploy and update ap...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.01.00: Changes on Version 06.01.00 Fixed issue on GraySmallTitle container, that breaks the layout Fixed issue on Blue Metro7 Skin where the Search, Login, Register, Date is missing Fixed issue with the Version numbers on the target file Fixed issue where the jQuery and jQuery-UI files not deleted on upgrade from Version 01.00.00 Added a internal page where the Image Slider would be replaces with a BannerPaneMedia Companion: MC 3.433b Release: General More GUI tweaks (mostly imperceptible!) Updates for mc_com.exe TV The 'Watched' button has been re-instigated Added TV Menu sub-option to search ALL for new Episodes (includes locked shows) Movies Added 'Source' field (eg DVD, Bluray, HDTV), customisable in Advanced Preferences (try it out, let us know how it works!) Added HTML <<format>> tag with optional parameters for video container, source, and resolution (updated HTML tags to be added to Documentation shortly) Known Issu...Picturethrill: Version 2.3.2.0: Release includes Self-Update feature for Picturethrill. What that means for users is that they are always guaranteed to have a fresh copy of Picturethrill on their computers with all latest fixes. When Picturethrill adds a new website to get pictures from, you will get it too!Simple MVVM Toolkit for Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone: Simple MVVM Toolkit v3.0.0.0: Added support for Silverlight 5.0 and Windows Phone 7.1. Upgraded project templates and samples. Upgraded installer. There are some new prerequisites required for this version, namely Silverlight 5 Tools, Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5 (until the SDK is released), Windows Phone 7.1 SDK. Because it is in the experimental band, I have also removed the dependency on the Silverlight Testing Framework. You can use it if you wish, but the Ria Services project template no longer uses ...CODE Framework: 4.0.20301: The latest version adds a number of new features to the WPF system (such as stylable and testable messagebox support) as well as various new features throughout the system (especially in the Utilities namespace).MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.2 (Beta): A friendlier User Interface. A logger file to catch exceptions so you may send it to use to improve and fix any bugs that may occur. A feedback form because we always love hearing what you guy's think of MyRouter. Check for update menu item for you to stay up to date will the latest changes. Facebook fan page so you may spread the word and share MyRouter with friends and family And Many other exciting features were sure your going to love!WPF Sound Visualization Library: WPF SVL 0.3 (Source, Binaries, Examples, Help): Version 0.3 of WPFSVL. This includes three new controls: an equalizer, a digital clock, and a time editor.Orchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-NotesNew Projects1-2-3 Music Store Downloads Server: The 1-2-3 Music Store Downloads server is a WCF-powered web service allowing owners of the now defunct Easybe 1-2-3 music store to access downloads for their installation of the 1-2-3 music store via a web service.Bootstrap for Orchard: Bootstrap Framework for Orchard. Provides a dynamic build of the Bootstrap CSS framework allowing developers of modules and themes to dynamically add css (in less of course), variables, mixins, and settings. (includes the Orchard dotless module)Calculating With Workflow: Basic example of using the Workflow Foundation 4.CRM JS Helper for REST Endpoint: CRM JS Helper for REST EndpointDev3Lib: Dev3Lib is an opensource library. It tries to ease your daily business coding. You can find quite a few handy functions, class to facilitate your coding experiences. Have a fun in this library.Emotiv Engine Client: Provides an event-driven .NET framework wrapper around the managed Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset API.Ewk: All kinds of things.GeoTransformer: GeoTransformer focuses on making it easier for geocachers to process GPX files and publish them on their GPS devices.Glioma Visualizer 2: This C#.NET application does space-time analytical simulations for glioma modeling.Government of Canada Usability Web Experience Toolkit: This toolkit addresses the Governement of Canada usability for CLF. It is based on SharePoint 2010 Server and provides templates for a publishing site with variations enabled. This toolkit includes: 1. Master Pages 2. Page Layouts 3. Custom User Controls 4. Source CodeHappy Frog @ WinPhone: It is just another Angry-Birds-like game using Farseer physics engine and XNA framework. This project has didn't finish yet, but it is already stopped. Our developers had moved to another project base on this one, whatever, we'd like to public the code, as what we thought at begin —— this project is open source, under LGPL license 2.1.HyperVBackup: HyperVBackup is an open source tool to backup Hyper-V virtual machines, including support for Cluster Shared Storage (CSV).iBIOFind 3: This is a console based C#.NET application for experimental research work in informational retrieval for medical research.JV.MVVM: Jv.mvvm intents to bring the mvvm pattern to winform projects. This project provide a windows form extender control that allows to provide more rich binding information per control. The control interpret the bindings and manages them properly. It is developed in C#, and uses other projects like TinyPG, and Emmiter.jWeaving: Javascript PackageMicro APIs: Small APIs for .NETModel Maker 3: A C#.NET application for time series analysis.Neural Scribe 2: This C#.NET application classification of EEG signals.Object To Html Mapping (OHM) jQuery Plugin: Object To HTML Mapping(OHM) Is a jQuery Plugin that enables the ability to quickly transfer javascript object (or JSON) into your HTML and from the HTML revert back to object after user changes, easy use with ASP.NET . see http://www.lotofcode.blogspot.comRandomSamples: All my random tests and samplesRelate2spot: A C# and WPF application that finds relationships between entities using Latent Semantic Analysis in a large collection of texts.school15py: A Website base on Flask.Secure SQL Server: TBDSharePoint 2010 - Add Documents and List Items to Quick Deploy from ECB Dropdown: Adds functionality to the SharePoint 2010 graphical interface to allow end-users to add document library and list items to a Quick Deploy content deployment job. I copied http://quickdeploydoc.codeplex.com/ and made it 2010 compatible and for any item or document.SharePoint 2010 HTML5 MasterPage Templates: This project is the modification of the SharePoint 2010 v4.master template to support the HTML5 features in advanced browsers. It will provide a WSP package of the solutions with source to allow modification and deployment of a customized masterpage supporting HTML5.Sharepoint 2010 Workflow History & Task Custom SPField Column: This project was inspired by Marc D Anderson while attending Office365 Saturday event in Redmond, WA on February 25, 2012. While giving his presentation he mentioned that he created a solution to show tasks for a workflow via a jQuery dialog. Although I liked his idea, I hated that his solution was tailored for one client only, and could not be easily applied to any out of the box SPList. This is how this project came to be and I hope you can find it useful.SharePoint Content Database Size Monitor: Monitor and track the size of your SharePoint content databases and log files directly from Central AdministrationSNSpirit: A sns clientSoGames : jeux multi-écrans: SoGames : codes source des jeux mutli-écrans présentés aux Techdays 2012 Avec la palette des technologies et outils proposée par Microsoft, il est assez simple de réaliser des applications originales et de bonne qualité. Pour autant, rien n'est magique et quelques concepts nécessitent de se retrousser un peu les manches. Pour mieux les saisir, vous trouverez ici les codes source de nos jeux collaboratifs : - SoSlam : Le premier joueur doit lancer un écureuil dans les airs à l'aide de s...SPAC (SharePoint Auto Coder): SPAC is a code generation tool which developers can easily generate custom code to be used in custom SharePoint development projects. SPAC can generate code for a given language of choice based on a predefined code template. Developers can choose to define the code template and then with few clicks SPAC will generate the code based on the defined template.Sushi Library: ASP.Net MVC Helpers Library using BootStrap from TwitterSystemOfVote: ?????39?????，????2?： 1.??????，?????????，???????????????????； 2.?????????????????。test140880: testingTheatre: ??????Time Maestro 2: This is a C#.NET application for times series modeling and forecasting in the cloud.USGS DEM File Reader: USGS DEM file readerVoluntariado mobile (windows phone): Se trata de desarrollar una aplicación nativa para windows phone que ofrezca al usuario una oferta de oportunidades de voluntariado geolocalizadas en las que poder participarWCF Format Extensions for CSV, TXT: This project add support for Legacy formats like CSV, TXT (CSV Export) to the data service output and allow $format=txt query. By default WCF Data Services support Atom and JSON responses however legacy systems do not understand ATOM or JSON but they understand CSV, TXT formats. This project is intended to develop and TXT (CSV) for WCF Data services so that it can be used with legacy application.

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Silverlight Cream for January 04, 2011 -- #1022

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Dennis Doomen, Doug Holland, Kunal Chowdhury, Sacha Barber, Paul Sheriff, Mike Snow(-2-), Peter Kuhn(-2-), and Mike Ormond. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically" Doug Holland Prism/Cinch: "PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region" Sacha Barber Shoutouts: Sacha Barber the author of Cinch asks for some advice from users: Cinch V2 : Question For The Reader Michael Crump introduces us to SnippetManager as a way to organize your Silverlight snippets... I'm thinking any snippet: A better way to organize your Silverlight Code Snippets. Andy Beaulieu announced an update of Physics Helper 4.2 using Farseer 3.2 ... check out the breaking changes though! Dennis Doomen blogged about a new release of his Fluent Assertions: A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions, with a blog post about it below From SilverlightCream.com: Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions Dennis Doomen release his latest Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and wrote up a big post about the new event monitoring syntax. Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically Doug Holland has a post up on MSDN blogs talking about searching the WP7 Marketplace programmatically... ya know you should be able to do it... here's how. Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part - 5) Kunal Chowdhury has Part 5 of a tutorial series on Lightswitch up at SilverlightShow... working with custom validation this time, and for the first time in this series so far actually writes some code! PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region Sacha Barber took time to look at Prism4/MEF and Cinch2 and found things to be fine then wrote a custom PRISM region adaptor that uses a TransitionalElement from the Microsoft Transitionals project... code available, blog post to come. Get Application Title from Windows Phone Paul Sheriff has a cool chunk of code up... getting the Application's title programmatically... and other attributes as well, if you were wondering why you might wanna do that. Detecting Users Win7 Mobile Theme Color Mike Snow has a couple as well... first up is how to detect your user's theme... obviously useful if you wanna match it. Selecting an Item in a ComboBox after Adding Items Second for Mike Snow is a general Silverlight issue... setting the selected item on a ComboBox after filling it... if you haven't stumbled across this yet, you will... A Simplified Grid Markup Reloaded Peter Kuhn has a pair of posts up since last time... this first is an extension of Colin Eberhardt's simplified Grid markup system, but it's only useful if you don't plan on using Blend... can we get a show of hands? :) Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample Next Peter Kuhn has some changes to the Bookshelf code, but more importantly has some excelling tips about shader effects, Effects on Visual Elements and how to make best use of all the above. Displaying HTML Content in Windows Phone 7 Mike Ormond has a WP7 post up describing problems a customer had early on displaying rich text and an attempt to use the WebBrowser control to pull it off and the problems that caused... check out the resultant code, and read the comments as well. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Autoscaling in a modern world…. last chapter

- by Steve Loethen

As we all know as coders, things like logging are never important. Our code will work right the first time. So, you can understand my surprise when the first time I deployed the autoscaling worker role to the actual Azure fabric, it did not scale. I mean, it worked on my machine. How dare the datacenter argue with that. So, how did I track down the problem? (turns out, it was not so much code as lack of the right certificate) When I ran it local in the developer fabric, I was able to see a wealth of information. Lots of periodic status info every time the autoscalar came around to check on my rules and decide to act or not. But that information was not making it to Azure storage. The diagnostics were not being transferred to where I could easily see and use them to track down why things were not being cooperative. After a bit of digging, I discover the problem. You need to add a bit of extra configuration code to get the correct information stored for you. I added the following to my app.config: Code Snippet <system.diagnostics> <sources> <source name="Autoscaling General"switchName="SourceSwitch" switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" > <listeners> <add name="AzureDiag" /> <remove name="Default"/> </listeners> </source> <source name="Autoscaling Updates"switchName="SourceSwitch" switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" > <listeners> <add name="AzureDiag" /> <remove name="Default"/> </listeners> </source> </sources> <switches> <add name="SourceSwitch" value="Verbose, Information, Warning, Error, Critical" /> </switches> <sharedListeners> <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiag"/> </sharedListeners> <trace> <listeners> <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiagnostics"> <filter type="" /> </add> </listeners> </trace> </system.diagnostics> Suddenly all the rich tracing info I needed was filling up my storage account. After a few cycles of trying to attempting to scale, I identified the cert problem, uploaded a correct certificate, and away it went. I hope this was helpful.

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The busy developers guide to the Kinect SDK Beta

- by mbcrump

The Kinect is awesome. From day one, I’ve said this thing has got potential. After playing with several open-source Kinect projects, I am please to announce that Microsoft has released the official SDK beta on 6/16/2011. I’ve created this quick start guide to get you up to speed in no time flat. Let’s begin: What is it? The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a starter kit for applications developers that includes APIs, sample code, and drivers. This SDK enables the academic research and enthusiast communities to create rich experiences by using Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect sensor technology on computers running Windows 7. (defined by Microsoft) Links worth checking out: Download Kinect for Windows SDK beta – You can either download a 32 or 64 bit SDK depending on your OS. Readme for Kinect for Windows SDK Beta from Microsoft Research Programming Guide: Getting Started with the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta Code Walkthroughs of the samples that ship with the Kinect for Windows SDK beta (Found in \Samples Folder) Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit – Lots of extension methods and controls for WPF and WinForms. Kinect Mouse Cursor – Use your hands to control things like a mouse created by Brian Peek. Kinect Paint – Basically MS Paint but use your hands! Kinect for Windows SDK Quickstarts Installing and Using the Kinect Sensor Getting it installed: After downloading the Kinect SDK Beta, double click the installer to get the ball rolling. Hit the next button a few times and it should complete installing. Once you have everything installed then simply plug in your Kinect device into the USB Port on your computer and hopefully you will get the following screen: Once installed, you are going to want to check out the following folders: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK – This contains the actual Kinect Sample Executables along with the documentation as a CHM file. Also check out the C:\Users\Public\Documents\Microsoft Research KinectSDK Samples directory: The main thing to note here is that these folders contain the source code to the applications where you can compile/build them yourself. Audio NUI DEMO Time Let’s get started with some demos. Navigate to the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK folder and double click on ShapeGame.exe. Next up is SkeletalViewer.exe (image taken from http://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/2619-microsoft-launch-kinect-sdk-beta.html as I could not get a good image using SnagIt) At this point, you will have to download Kinect Mouse Cursor – This is really cool because you can use your hands to control the mouse cursor. I actually used this to resize itself. Last up is Kinect Paint – This is very cool, just make sure you read the instructions! MS Paint on steroids! A few tips for getting started building Kinect Applications. It appears WPF is the way to go with building Kinect Applications. You must also use a version of Visual Studio 2010. Your going to need to reference Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll when building a Kinect Application. Right click on References and then goto Browse and navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK and select Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll. You are going to want to make sure your project has the Platform target set to x86. The Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit really makes things easier with extension methods and controls. Just note that this is for WinForms or WPF. Conclusion It looks like we have a lot of fun in store with the Kinect SDK. I’m very excited about the release and have already been thinking about all the applications that I can begin building. It seems that development will be easier now that we have an official SDK and the great work from Coding4Fun. Please subscribe to my blog or follow me on twitter for more information about Kinect, Silverlight and other great technology. Subscribe to my feed

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Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter

- by mbcrump

So Silverlight Firestarter is over and your sitting on your couch thinking… what now? Well its time to So how exactly can you pimp the Silverlight Firestarter? Well read below and you will find out: 1) Pimp the videos: First we are going to use a program named Juice to download all of the Silverlight Firestarter videos. Go ahead and point your browser to http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/ and download the application. It works on Mac, Linux and PC. After it is downloaded you are going to want to add an RSS feed by clicking the button highlighted below. At this point you are going to want to add the following URL inside the textbox and hit Save: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Silverlight-Firestarter/RSS This RSS feed includes all the Silverlight Firestarter Labs and Presentations located below. The Future of Silverlight Data Binding Strategies with Silverlight and WP7 Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns with Silverlight and WP7 Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Select all the videos and click the Download button located below (has blue arrow): Once all the videos are downloaded you will have about 4.64GB of Silverlight fun. You can now move these videos to your MediaServer and watch them with whatever device you want. Put it on an iPad, iPhone.. emm wait I mean WP7 or WMC7. 2) Pimp the Training Material – Download the offline installer for the labs here. This will give you almost a gig of free training materials. Here is the topics covered: Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 You will notice that it install Firestarter to the default of C:\Firestarter. So you will have to navigate to that folder and double click on Default.htm to get started. Now if you followed part one of the pimping guide then you will already have all the videos on your pc. You will notice that once you go into the lab you will get a Lab Document and Source at the bottom of the article. Now instead of opening the Source Folder in a web browser you can just copy the folder C:\Firestarter\Labs into your Visual Studio 2010 Project Folder. This will save a lot of time later. 3) Pimp my Silverlight 5 Knowledge – Always keep reading as much as possible and remember that the Silverlight 5 Beta should come Q1 of 2011 and the final release at the end of 2011. Here are 5 great blog post on Silverlight 5. Scott Gu’s Blog Mary Jo’s Article on Silverlight 5 The Future of Silverlight (Official) Kunal Chowdhury Blog Tim Heuer’s Blog Thats all that I got for now. Have fun with all the new Silverlight content. Subscribe to my feed

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The most challenging part of blogging about OpenWorld is…

- by Irem Radzik

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} ...not knowing where to start. Do I talk about the great presentations from our partners and executives in our keynote sessions; do I write about the music festival, or many great sessions we had in the Data integration track? A short blog can never do justice. For now I will stick to our data integration sessions for those who could not attend with so many other sessions running concurrently. And in the coming weeks we will be writing more about what we talked in our sessions and what we learned from our customers and partners. For today, I will give some of the key highlights from Data Integration sessions that took place on Wednesday and Thursday of last week On Wednesday, GoldenGate was highlighted in multiple Database and Data Integration sessions. I found particularly the session about Oracle’s own use of GoldenGate for its large E-Business Suite implementation for supply chain management and service contract management very interesting. In 2011, Oracle implemented a new operational reporting system using GoldenGate real-time data replication to an operational data store that leverages data from E-Business Suite.The results are very impressive. Data freshness improved by 2,210X while report run performance improved by 60X. For more information on this implementation and its results please see the white paper: Real-Time Operational Reporting for E-Business Suite via GoldenGate Replication to an Operational Data Store Other sessions that provided very rich content were: "Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active", "Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Database", "Next-Generation Data Integration on Oracle Exadata" and "Accelerate Oracle Data Integrator with Advanced Features, SOA, Groovy, SDK, and XML". Below is a slide presented by Stephan Haisley in the Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate session. If you missed them during OpenWorld, I highly recommend downloading the slides. We will continue to blog about these topics and related resources. .

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Oracle Products Reflect Key Trends Shaping Enterprise 2.0

- by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

Following up on his predictions for 2011, we asked Enterprise 2.0 veteran Andy MacMillan to map out the ways Oracle solutions are at the forefront of industry trends--and how Oracle customers can benefit in the coming year. 1. Increase organizational awareness | Oracle WebCenter Suite Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a unique set of capabilities to drive organizational awareness. In particular, the expansive activity graph connects users directly to key enterprise applications, activities, and interests. In this way, applicable and critical business information is automatically and immediately visible--in the context of key tasks--via real-time dashboards and comprehensive reporting. Oracle WebCenter Suite also integrates key E2.0 services, such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, into critical business processes, including back-office systems of records such as ERP and CRM systems. 2. Drive online customer engagement | Oracle Real-Time Decisions With more and more business being conducted on the Web, driving increased online customer engagement becomes a critical key to success. This effort is usually spearheaded by an increasingly important executive role, the Head of Online, who usually reports directly to the CMO. To help manage the Web experience online, Oracle solutions are driving a new kind of intelligent social commerce by combining Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions with leading e-commerce and product recommendations. Oracle Real-Time Decisions provides multichannel recommendations for content, products, and services--including seamless integration across Web, mobile, and social channels. The result: happier customers, increased customer acquisition and retention, and improved critical success metrics such as shopping cart abandonment. 3. Easily build composite applications | Oracle Application Development Framework Thanks to the shared user experience strategy across Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Fusion Applications and many other Oracle Applications, customers can easily create real, customer-specific composite applications using Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Application Development Framework. Oracle Application Development Framework components provide modular user interface components that can build rich, social composite applications. In addition, a broad set of components spanning BPM, SOA, ECM, and beyond can be quickly and easily incorporated into composite applications. 4. Integrate records management into a global content platform | Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g provides leading records management capabilities as part of a unified ECM platform for managing records, documents, Web content, digital assets, enterprise imaging, and application imaging. This unique strategy provides comprehensive records management in a consistent, cost-effective way, and enables organizations to consolidate ECM repositories and connect ECM to critical business applications. 5. Achieve ECM at extreme scale | Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Exadata To support the high-performance demands of a unified and rationalized content platform, Oracle has pioneered highly scalable and high-performing ECM infrastructures. Two innovations in particular helped make this happen. The core ECM platform itself moved to an Enterprise Java architecture, so organizations can now use Oracle WebLogic Server for enhanced scalability and manageability. Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g can leverage Oracle Exadata for extreme performance and scale. Likewise, Oracle Exalogic--Oracle's foundation for cloud computing--enables extreme performance for processor-intensive capabilities such as content conversion or dynamic Web page delivery. Learn more about Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

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Great ADF Content at Collaborate 12

- by Shay Shmeltzer

If you are attending the Collaborate 12 conference this month in Las Vegas and you are interested in Oracle ADF you are going to be very busy. There are more than 20 sessions covering ADF and a special Wednesday ADF Enterprise Methodology Group event focused on ADF. Session range from how to get started to deep technical dives and real world war stories of customers and their implementations. Also don't forget to drop by the Oracle ADF booth at the Oracle Demoground and say hello. Here is a quick list of session that list ADF as a keyword in their content: Sun. Apr. 22 9613 A Fusion Approach to Building Unified and Scalable Applications With Rich User Experience 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Mon. Apr. 23 669 Fusion DBA Boot Camp: Tailoring Your Application to Customer Needs in a Upgrade-safe Way - Support in ADF and Fusion Apps 9:45 am - 10:45 am Mon. Apr. 23 438 Oracle Fusion Applications Security 9:45 am - 10:45 am Mon. Apr. 23 176 How to get started with Oracle ADF 12:15 pm - 12:45 pm Mon. Apr. 23 330 Fusion DBA Boot Camp: Implementing Self-Service Portals for Partners/Distributors Using EBS/WebCenter/Fusion Technologies 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm Mon. Apr. 23 288 Working with Portlets in ADF and Webcenter 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Tue. Apr. 24 503 Who’s Converting My Portal? 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Tue. Apr. 24 9370 Coexistence of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications: Platform Perspective 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 647 Developing Custom BI Solutions - OBIEE vs. Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) 9:30 am - 10:30 am Wed. Apr. 25 173 ADF: A Path to the Future for Dinosaur Nerds 11:00 am - 12:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 581 How Will You Build Your Next System? 11:00 am - 12:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 10351 Integrating CRM On Demand With the E-Business Suite to Supercharge Your Sales Team 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 9348 Mobile,ADF, Coherence and Live Data Streaming? A Herbalife Case Study 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 566 Getting Started with ADF 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 775 WebCenter Portal Template Design and Development Best Practices 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 791 Surfacing Oracle Social Network into Your Business Applications 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 9407 The Latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release User Interface and Usability Enhancements 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 100080 Extending JD Edwards with Oracle ADF and Oracle SOA Suite 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 172 JDeveloper ADF and the Oracle database – friends not foes 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 595 Achieving Real-Time Social Collaboration in WebCenter 11g 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Wed. Apr. 25 164 ADF + Faces: Do I Have to Write ANY Java code? 4:15 pm - 5:15 pm Thu. Apr. 26 257 Mobile App Development with Oracle ADF Mobile: develop once and for all 8:30 am - 9:30 am Thu. Apr. 26 177 Understanding Oracle ADF and its role in Oracle Fusion Middleware 9:45 am - 10:45 am Thu. Apr. 26 523 Making Next-Generation Mobile Apps With The Latest ADF Mobile Tools 9:45 am - 10:45 am Thu. Apr. 26 356 ADF Integration with WebCenter Content 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

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Combine the Address & Search Bars in Firefox

- by Asian Angel

The Search Bar in Firefox is very useful for finding additional information or images while browsing but the UI space it takes up can be frustrating at times. Now you can reclaim that UI space and still have access to all that searching goodness with the Foobar extension. Note: This is about the Foobar Firefox extension and not to be confused with Foobar2000 the open source music player. Before If you have the “Search Bar” displayed there is no doubt that it is taking up valuable space in your browser’s UI. What you need is the ability to reclaim that UI space and still have the same access to your search capability as before…no more sacrificing one for a gain with the other. After As soon as you have installed the extension you can see that the top part of your browser will look much sleeker without the “Search Bar” to clutter it up. The “Search Engine Icon” will now be visible inside of your “Address Bar” as seen here. You will be able to access the same “Search Engine Menu” as before by clicking on the “Search Engine Icon”. There are two display modes for search results (setting available in the “Options”). The first one shown here is “Simple Mode” where all results are in a condensed format. Notice that not only are there search suggestions but also “Bookmarks & History” listings as well. You can literally get the best of both when conducting a search. Note: The number of entries for search suggestions and bookmark/history listings can be adjusted higher or lower in the “Options”. The second one is “Rich Mode” where the results are shown with more details. Choose the “mode” that best suits your personal style. For our first example you can see the results when we conducted a quick search on “Windows 7” (using the first of the three offerings shown from Bing). Our second example was a search for “Flowers” using our Photobucket search engine. Once again nice results opened in a new tab for us. Options The options are easy to go through. It is really nice to be able to choose the number of results that you want displayed and the format that you want them shown in. Note: Changing the “Suggestion popup style” will require a browser restart to take effect. Conclusion If you love using the “Search Bar” in Firefox but want to reclaim the UI space then you will definitely want to add this extension to your browser. The ability to customize the number of results and choose the formatting make this extension even better. Links Download the Foobar extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Combine the Address Bar and Progress Bar Together in FirefoxHide Some or All of the GUI Bars in FirefoxEnable Partial Match AutoComplete in the Firefox Address BarQuick Firefox UI TweaksAdd Search Forms to the Firefox Search Bar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Scan your PC for nasties with Panda ActiveScan CleanMem – Memory Cleaner AceStock – The Personal Stock Monitor Add Multiple Tabs to Office Programs The Wearing of the Green – St. Patrick’s Day Theme (Firefox) Perform a Background Check on Yourself

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ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple (Book Review)

- by Frank Nimphius

Sten E. Vesterli wrote the "Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development – Made Simple" book published by Packt Publishing in 2011 http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-adf-enterprise-application-development/book A common question on OTN, but also when talking to clients or customers is about where and how to start your ADF application development. Especially when the current programming background is not in Java, but 4 GL or PLSQL, developers often look for answers to the following questions: · How long does it take to learn Oracle ADF ? · How long does it take to replace a Forms application with ADF ? · How many developers do I need? · Do I need to know Java to use ADF and if yes, how good do I need to know this? · How do I structure my programming files, organizing them in JDeveloper work spaces, projects and libraries? · What is best practices for naming Java packages and how to void naming conflicts in ADF in general? · How many Application Modules do I need or should I create? · How to test applications? Sten Vesterli answers all of the above questions and more in his book http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-adf-enterprise-application-development/book , which makes it great value add to the 3 existing Oracle ADF books. In order of complexity (which also is the order in which reading the available Oracle ADF books makes sense), in my opinion, Sten's book should come second – though it also is useful to those that are already more advanced with Oracle ADF. So if you are absolutely new to Oracle ADF, then the order of books to read to get you up on an expert level should be: 1. Grant Ronald; "Quick Start Guide to Oracle Fusion Development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF" (McGraw Hill 2010) 2. Sten Vesterli; "Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development – Made Simple" (Packt Publishing 2011) 3. Duncan Mills, Peter Koletzke; " Oracle JDeveloper 11g Handbook: A Guide to Fusion Web Development" (McGraw Hill 2009) 4. Frank Nimphius, Lynn Munsinger; " Oracle Fusion Developer Guide: Building Rich Internet Applications with Oracle ADF Business Components and Oracle ADF Faces" (McGraw Hill 2010) If you are not new to Oracle ADF and Orace JDeveloper, then buy Sten Vesterli's book anyway. It is worth it and you want to have it on your book shelf. See below the table of content to get a better idea of what this book covers: · Chapter 1: The ADF Proof of Concept · Chapter 2: Estimating the Effort · Chapter 3: Getting Organized · Chapter 4: Productive Teamwork · Chapter 5: Prepare to Build · Chapter 6: Building the Enterprise Application · Chapter 7: Testing your Application · Chapter 8: Look and Feel · Chapter 9: Customizing the Functionality · Chapter 10: Securing your ADF Application · Chapter 11: Package and Deliver · Appendix: Internationalization The book is written with a lot of good humor, which makes the read very enjoyable (from a geek's perspective, of course). My favorite quote – just in case you are interested - is from page 97, when Sten talks about getting organized: " Stop sending e-mails to your team. Just stop it. E-mail is so last century.…" So true, so true! This quote's runner up is the "boss key" on page 128 where Sten talks about productivity and how Oracle Team Productivity Center (TPC) can help you with this. Quotes like these stick to your brains and make sure you never forget. Go for it!

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Welcome to the Oracle Retail International Blog

- by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

Welcome to the first post of the new Oracle Retail International Blog. Retail is an international business and today's successful retailers view themselves in the context of a global market. A niche fashion business in Tokyo will learn marketing strategies from the luxury brands of Milan, an independent grocer in Oslo will source the same global brands as a supermarket in Oklahoma, and every retailer in the world will measure their multi-channel operation against the international e-commerce giant Amazon. Why? Because today's customer is a global customer with unparalleled expectations on choice, price and service. Today's consumers have access to more information on retail than ever before. Technology allows people to shop from their home, their office or from the phone in their pocket, wherever they are and at whatever time suits them. Customers are using the web to search for products and promotions. They are also using the web to develop their voice in commenting on products and services that have delighted or disappointed. In an information rich industry, this customer element creates a new world of data. The best retailers are developing eagle eyes for reading customer activity and turning it into profitable decisions. Ultimately, whether you choose to compete or shop on price, service, product innovation, excellent operations or all of the above - the international world of retail has become an inspiration for all - retailer and consumer alike. Retail as an industry is growing and diversifying at a faster rate than ever before. Yet it is still the customer who picks the winners and the losers on the retail field. Economic circumstances transform the rules, but it is still the customer who dictates the game, the pace, the price, and the perception of the brand. Wise retailers never rest on their laurels. They are always shopping for ideas on how to improve and differentiate the offer at every touch point to meet the customer's needs better than anyone else and to gain each customer's loyalty at a time when loyalty can be cheap. With this blog, I hope that we might provide a hub for discussion around what unifies retail and how technology supports both the retailer and customer experience. Despite the competitive nature of this market, we hope that this will provide an opportunity to share experiences and lessons learnt with a view that knowledge can only help this industry to grow and develop. At Oracle we've been supporting retailers for many years. Many of us have worked within retail organisations all over the world, myself included. With this in mind, I don't feel it is too bold a statement to say that Oracle understands retail. We wouldn't be so heavily integrated in some of the biggest and most well-known names in retail if we didn't. With this blog, we intend to create a community of international retailers that can exchange ideas and experiences, debate collective challenges and drive a better understanding of this continually evolving industry. Events such as the World Retail Congress and NRF's Big Show bring enormous value to the retail industry providing platforms for discussion and learning but they happen once a year. We wanted to create a platform for discussion on a different level and that like retail, is always on. We hope not only to bring commitment to being not only the infrastructure that brings all of their systems together within a retail business, but an infrastructure that supports the industry internationally to grow and flourish through creating a platform for networking, discussion, creativity, vision and strategy. Please feel free to ask questions or comment using the comments functionality. You might also want to visit our other Oracle Retail social media sites: Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/oracleretail YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/oracleretail Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/oracleretailInsight-Driven Retailing Blog - http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/

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SQL SERVER – Introduction to Big Data – Guest Post

- by pinaldave

BIG Data – such a big word – everybody talks about this now a days. It is the word in the database world. In one of the conversation I asked my friend Jasjeet Sigh the same question – what is Big Data? He instantly came up with a very effective write-up. Jasjeet is working as a Technical Manager with Koenig Solutions. He leads the SQL domain, and holds rich IT industry experience. Talking about Koenig, it is a 19 year old IT training company that offers several certification choices. Some of its courses include SharePoint Training, Project Management certifications, Microsoft Trainings, Business Intelligence programs, Web Design and Development courses etc. Big Data, as the name suggests, is about data that is BIG in nature. The data is BIG in terms of size, and it is difficult to manage such enormous data with relational database management systems that are quite popular these days. Big Data is not just about being large in size, it is also about the variety of the data that differs in form or type. Some examples of Big Data are given below : Scientific data related to weather and atmosphere, Genetics etc Data collected by various medical procedures, such as Radiology, CT scan, MRI etc Data related to Global Positioning System Pictures and Videos Radio Frequency Data Data that may vary very rapidly like stock exchange information Apart from difficulties in managing and storing such data, it is difficult to query, analyze and visualize it. The characteristics of Big Data can be defined by four Vs: Volume: It simply means a large volume of data that may span Petabyte, Exabyte and so on. However it also depends organization to organization that what volume of data they consider as Big Data. Variety: As discussed above, Big Data is not limited to relational information or structured Data. It can also include unstructured data like pictures, videos, text, audio etc. Velocity: Velocity means the speed by which data changes. The higher is the velocity, the more efficient should be the system to capture and analyze the data. Missing any important point may lead to wrong analysis or may even result in loss. Veracity: It has been recently added as the fourth V, and generally means truthfulness or adherence to the truth. In terms of Big Data, it is more of a challenge than a characteristic. It is difficult to ascertain the truth out of the enormous amount of data and the one that has high velocity. There are always chances of having un-precise and uncertain data. It is a challenging task to clean such data before it is analyzed. Big Data can be considered as the next big thing in the IT sector in terms of innovation and development. If appropriate technologies are developed to analyze and use the information, it can be the driving force for almost all industrial segments. These include Retail, Manufacturing, Service, Finance, Healthcare etc. This will help them to automate business decisions, increase productivity, and innovate and develop new products. Thanks Jasjeet Singh for an excellent write up. Jasjeet Sign is working as a Technical Manager with Koenig Solutions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Database, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Big Data

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IPgallery banks on Solaris SPARC

- by Frederic Pariente

IPgallery is a global supplier of converged legacy and Next Generation Networks (NGN) products and solutions, including: core network components and cloud-based Value Added Services (VAS) for voice, video and data sessions. IPgallery enables network operators and service providers to offer advanced converged voice, chat, video/content services and rich unified social communications in a combined legacy (fixed/mobile), Over-the-Top (OTT) and Social Community (SC) environments for home and business customers. Technically speaking, this offer is a scalable and robust telco solution enabling operators to offer new services while controlling operating expenses (OPEX). In its solutions, IPgallery leverages the following Oracle components: Oracle Solaris, Netra T4 and SPARC T4 in order to provide a competitive and scalable solution without the price tag often associated with high-end systems. Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee A unique feature of Oracle Solaris is the guaranteed binary compatibility between releases of the Solaris OS. That means, if a binary application runs on Solaris 2.6 or later, it will run on the latest release of Oracle Solaris. IPgallery developed their application on Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 then runs it on Solaris 11, without any code modification or rebuild. The Solaris Binary Application Guarantee helps IPgallery protect their long-term investment in the development, training and maintenance of their applications. Oracle Solaris Image Packaging System (IPS) IPS is a new repository-based package management system that comes with Oracle Solaris 11. It provides a framework for complete software life-cycle management such as installation, upgrade and removal of software packages. IPgallery leverages this new packaging system in order to speed up and simplify software installation for the R&D and production environments. Notably, they use IPS to deliver Solaris Studio 12.3 packages as part of the rapid installation process of R&D environments, and during the production software deployment phase, they ensure software package integrity using the built-in verification feature. Solaris IPS thus improves IPgallery's time-to-market with a faster, more reliable software installation and deployment in production environments. Extreme Network Performance IPgallery saw a huge improvement in application performance both in CPU and I/O, when running on SPARC T4 architecture in compared to UltraSPARC T2 servers. The same application (with the same activation environment) running on T2 consumes 40%-50% CPU, while it consumes only 10% of the CPU on T4. The testing environment comprised of: Softswitch (Call management), TappS (Telecom Application Server) and Billing Server running on same machine and initiating various services in capacity of 1000 CAPS (Call Attempts Per Second). In addition, tests showed a huge improvement in the performance of the TCP/IP stack, which reduces network layer processing and in the end Call Attempts latency. Finally, there is a huge improvement within the file system and disk I/O operations; they ran all tests with maximum logging capability and it didn't influence any benchmark values. "Due to the huge improvements in performance and capacity using the T4-1 architecture, IPgallery has engineered the solution with less hardware. This means instead of deploying the solution on six T2-based machines, we will deploy on 2 redundant machines while utilizing Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM for higher availability and virtualization" Shimon Lichter, VP R&D, IPgallery In conclusion, using the unique combination of Oracle Solaris and SPARC technologies, IPgallery is able to offer solutions with much lower TCO, while providing a higher level of service capacity, scalability and resiliency. This low-OPEX solution enables the operator, the end-customer, to deliver a high quality service while maintaining high profitability.

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C#: A "Dumbed-Down" C++?

- by James Michael Hare

I was spending a lovely day this last weekend watching my sons play outside in one of the better weekends we've had here in Saint Louis for quite some time, and whilst watching them and making sure no limbs were broken or eyes poked out with sticks and other various potential injuries, I was perusing (in the correct sense of the word) this month's MSDN magazine to get a sense of the latest VS2010 features in both IDE and in languages. When I got to the back pages, I saw a wonderful article by David S. Platt entitled, "In Praise of Dumbing Down" (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336129.aspx). The title captivated me and I read it and found myself agreeing with it completely especially as it related to my first post on divorcing C++ as my favorite language. Unfortunately, as Mr. Platt mentions, the term dumbing-down has negative connotations, but is really and truly a good thing. You are, in essence, taking something that is extremely complex and reducing it to something that is much easier to use and far less error prone. Adding safeties to power tools and anti-kick mechanisms to chainsaws are in some sense "dumbing them down" to the common user -- but that also makes them safer and more accessible for the common user. This was exactly my point with C++ and C#. I did not mean to infer that C++ was not a useful or good language, but that in a very high percentage of cases, is too complex and error prone for the job at hand. Choosing the correct programming language for a job is a lot like choosing any other tool for a task. For example: if I want to dig a French drain in my lawn, I can attempt to use a huge tractor-like backhoe and the job would be done far quicker than if I would dig it by hand. I can't deny that the backhoe has the raw power and speed to perform. But you also cannot deny that my chances of injury or chances of severing utility lines or other resources climb at an exponential rate inverse to the amount of training I may have on that machinery. Is C++ a powerful tool? Oh yes, and it's great for those tasks where speed and performance are paramount. But for most of us, it's the wrong tool. And keep in mind, I say this even though I have 17 years of experience in using it and feel myself highly adept in utilizing its features both in the standard libraries, the STL, and in supplemental libraries such as BOOST. Which, although greatly help with adding powerful features quickly, do very little to curb the relative dangers of the language. So, you may say, the fault is in the developer, that if the developer had some higher skills or if we only hired C++ experts this would not be an issue. Now, I will concede there is some truth to this. Obviously, the higher skilled C++ developers you hire the better the chance they will produce highly performant and error-free code. However, what good is that to the average developer who cannot afford a full stable of C++ experts? That's my point with C#: It's like a kinder, gentler C++. It gives you nearly the same speed, and in many ways even more power than C++, and it gives you a much softer cushion for novices to fall against if they code less-than-optimally. A bug is a bug, of course, in any language, but C# does a good job of hiding and taking on the task of handling almost all of the resource issues that make C++ so tricky. For my money, C# is much more maintainable, more feature-rich, second only slightly in performance, faster to market, and -- last but not least -- safer and easier to use. That's why, where I work, I much prefer to see the developers moving to C#. The quantity of bugs is much lower, and we don't need to hire "experts" to achieve the same results since the language itself handles those resource pitfalls so prevalent in poorly written C++ code. C++ will still have its place in the world, and I'm sure I'll still use it now and again where it is truly the correct tool for the job, but for nearly every other project C# is a wonderfully "dumbed-down" version of C++ -- in the very best sense -- and to me, that's the smart choice.

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WebCenter Innovation Award Winners

- by Michael Snow

Of course, here on our WebCenter blog – we’d like to highlight and brag about our great WebCenter winners. The 2012 WebCenter Innovation Award Winners University of Louisville Location: Louisville, KY, USA Industry: Higher Education Fusion Middleware Products: WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, JDeveloper, WebLogic, Oracle BI, Oracle IdM University of Louisville is a state supported research university Statewide Informatics Network to improve public health The University of Louisville has implemented WebCenter as part of the LOUI (Louisville Informatics Institute) Initiative, a Statewide Informatics Network, which will improve public healthcare and lower cost through the use of novel technology and next generation analytics, decision support and innovative outcomes-based payment systems. ---------- News Limited Country/Region: Australia Industry: News/Media FMW Products: WebCenter Sites Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers News Corp is running half of Australia's newspaper websites on this shared platform powered by Oracle WebCenter Sites and have overtaken their nearest competitors and are now leading in terms of monthly page impressions. At peak they have over 250 editors on the system publishing in real-time.Sites include: www.newsspace.com.au, www.news.com.au, www.theaustralian.com.au and many others ------ Life Technologies Corp. Country/Region: Carlsbad, CA, USAIndustry: Life SciencesFMW Products: WebCenter Portal, SOA Suite Life Technologies Corp. is a global biotechnology tools company dedicated to improving the human condition with innovative life science products. They were awarded an innovation award for their solution utilizing WebCenter Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments. They deployed WebCenter as a portal that accesses Life Technologies cloud based service monitoring system where all customer deployed instruments can be remotely monitored and proactively repaired. The portal provides alerts from these cloud based monitoring services directly to the customer and to Life Technologies Field Engineers. The Portal provides insight into the instruments and services customers purchased for the purpose of analyzing and anticipating future customer needs and creating targeted sales and service programs. ----- China Mobile Jiangsu China Mobile Jiangsu is one of the biggest subsidiaries of China Mobile. It has over 25,000 employees and 40 million mobile subscribers. Country/Region: Jiangsu, China Industry: Telecommunications FMW Products: WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, JDeveloper, SOA Suite, IdM They were awarded an Innovation Award for their new employee platform powered by WebCenter Portal is designed to serve their 25,000+ employees and help them drive collaboration & productivity. JSMCC (Chian Mobile Jiangsu) Employee Enterprise Portal and Collaboration Platform. It is one of the China Mobile’s most important IT innovation projects. The new platform is designed to serve for JSMCC’s 25000+ employees and to help them improve the working efficiency, changing their traditional working mode to social ways, encouraging employees on business collaboration and innovation. The solution is built on top of Oracle WebCenter Portal Framework and WebCenter Spaces while also leveraging Weblogic Server, UCM, OID, OAM, SES, IRM and Oracle Database 11g. By providing rich collaboration services, knowledge management services, sensitive document protection services, unified user identity management services, unified information search services and personalized information integration capabilities, the working efficiency of JSMCC employees has been greatly improved. Main Functionality : Information portal, office automation integration, personal space, group space, team collaboration with web2.0 services, unified search engine for multiple data sources, document management and protection. SSO for multiple platforms. -------- LADWP – Los Angeles Department for Water and Power Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest public utility company in United States with over 1.6 Million customers. LADWP provides water and power for millions of residential & commercial customers in Southern California. LADWP also bills most of these customers for sanitation services provided by another city department. Country/Region: US – Los Angeles, CA Industry: Public Utility FMW Products: WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, JDeveloper, SOA Suite, IdM The new infrastructure consists of: Oracle WebCenter Portal including mobile portal Oracle WebCenter Content for Content Management and Digital Asset Management (DAM) Oracle OAM (IDM, OVD, OAM) integrated with AD for enterprise identity management Oracle Siebel for CRM Oracle DB Oracle SOA Suite for integration of various subsystems and back end systems The new portal's features include: Complete Graphical redesign based on best practices in UI Design for high usability Customer Self Service implemented through MyAccount (Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History, Usage Analysis, Service Request Management) Financial Assistance Programs (CRM, WebCenter) Customer Rebate Programs (CRM, WebCenter) Turn On/Off/Transfer of services (Commercial & Residential) Outage Reporting eNotification (SMS, email) Multilingual (English & Spanish) – using WebCenter multi-language support Section 508 (ADA) Compliant Search – Using WebCenter SES (Secured Enterprise Search) Distributed Authorship in WebCenter Content Mobile Access (any Mobile Browser)

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