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• Using JUnit with App Engine and Eclipse

  - by Mark M

  I am having trouble setting up JUnit with App Engine in Eclipse. I have JUnit set up correctly, that is, I can run tests that don't involve the datastore or other services. However, when I try to use the datastore in my tests they fail. The code I am trying right now is from the App Engine site (see below): http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/localunittesting.html#Running_Tests So far I have added the external JAR (using Eclipse) appengine-testing.jar. But when I run the tests I get the exception below. So, I am clearly not understanding the instructions to enable the services from the web page mentioned above. Can someone clear up the steps needed to make the App Engine services available in Eclipse? java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/google/appengine/api/datastore/dev/LocalDatastoreService at com.google.appengine.tools.development.testing.LocalDatastoreServiceTestConfig.tearDown(LocalDatastoreServiceTestConfig.java:138) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.testing.LocalServiceTestHelper.tearDown(LocalServiceTestHelper.java:254) at com.cooperconrad.server.MemberTest.tearDown(MemberTest.java:28) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.junit.runners.model.FrameworkMethod$1.runReflectiveCall(FrameworkMethod.java:44) at org.junit.internal.runners.model.ReflectiveCallable.run(ReflectiveCallable.java:15) at org.junit.runners.model.FrameworkMethod.invokeExplosively(FrameworkMethod.java:41) at org.junit.internal.runners.statements.RunAfters.evaluate(RunAfters.java:37) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:73) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:46) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.runChildren(ParentRunner.java:180) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.access$000(ParentRunner.java:41) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$1.evaluate(ParentRunner.java:173) at org.junit.internal.runners.statements.RunBefores.evaluate(RunBefores.java:28) at org.junit.internal.runners.statements.RunAfters.evaluate(RunAfters.java:31) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.run(ParentRunner.java:220) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestReference.run(JUnit4TestReference.java:46) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.TestExecution.run(TestExecution.java:38) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:467) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:683) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.run(RemoteTestRunner.java:390) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.main(RemoteTestRunner.java:197) Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.google.appengine.api.datastore.dev.LocalDatastoreService at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248) ... 25 more Here is the actual code (pretty much copied from the site): package com.example; import static org.junit.Assert.*; import org.junit.After; import org.junit.Before; import org.junit.Test; import com.google.appengine.api.datastore.DatastoreService; import com.google.appengine.api.datastore.DatastoreServiceFactory; import com.google.appengine.api.datastore.Entity; import com.google.appengine.api.datastore.Query; import com.google.appengine.tools.development.testing.LocalDatastoreServiceTestConfig; import com.google.appengine.tools.development.testing.LocalServiceTestHelper; public class MemberTest { private final LocalServiceTestHelper helper = new LocalServiceTestHelper(new LocalDatastoreServiceTestConfig()); @Before public void setUp() { helper.setUp(); } @After public void tearDown() { helper.tearDown(); } // run this test twice to prove we're not leaking any state across tests private void doTest() { DatastoreService ds = DatastoreServiceFactory.getDatastoreService(); assertEquals(0, ds.prepare(new Query("yam")).countEntities()); ds.put(new Entity("yam")); ds.put(new Entity("yam")); assertEquals(2, ds.prepare(new Query("yam")).countEntities()); } @Test public void testInsert1() { doTest(); } @Test public void testInsert2() { doTest(); } @Test public void foo() { assertEquals(4, 2 + 2); } }

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• Agile: User Stories for Machine Learning Project?

  - by benjismith

  I've just finished up with a prototype implementation of a supervised learning algorithm, automatically assigning categorical tags to all the items in our company database (roughly 5 million items). The results look good, and I've been given the go-ahead to plan the production implementation project. I've done this kind of work before, so I know how the functional components of the software. I need a collection of web crawlers to fetch data. I need to extract features from the crawled documents. Those documents need to be segregated into a "training set" and a "classification set", and feature-vectors need to be extracted from each document. Those feature vectors are self-organized into clusters, and the clusters are passed through a series of rebalancing operations. Etc etc etc etc. So I put together a plan, with about 30 unique development/deployment tasks, each with time estimates. The first stage of development -- ignoring some advanced features that we'd like to have in the long-term, but aren't high enough priority to make it into the development schedule yet -- is slated for about two months worth of work. (Keep in mind that I already have a working prototype, so the final implementation is significantly simpler than if the project was starting from scratch.) My manager said the plan looked good to him, but he asked if I could reorganize the tasks into user stories, for a few reasons: (1) our project management software is totally organized around user stories; (2) all of our scheduling is based on fitting entire user stories into sprints, rather than individually scheduling tasks; (3) other teams -- like the web developers -- have made great use of agile methodologies, and they've benefited from modelling all the software features as user stories. So I created a user story at the top level of the project: As a user of the system, I want to search for items by category, so that I can easily find the most relevant items within a huge, complex database. Or maybe a better top-level story for this feature would be: As a content editor, I want to automatically create categorical designations for the items in our database, so that customers can easily find high-value data within our huge, complex database. But that's not the real problem. The tricky part, for me, is figuring out how to create subordinate user stories for the rest of the machine learning architecture. Case in point... I know that the algorithm requires two major architectural subdivisions: (A) training, and (B) classification. And I know that the training portion of the architecture requires construction of a cluster-space. All the Agile Development literature I've read seems to indicate that a user story should be the "smallest possible implementation that provides any business value". And that makes a lot of sense when designing a piece of end-user software. Start small, and then incrementally add value when users demand additional functionality. But a cluster-space, in and of itself, provides zero business value. Nor does a crawler, or a feature-extractor. There's no business value (not for the end-user, or for any of the roles internal to the company) in a partial system. A trained cluster-space is only possible with the crawler and feature extractor, and only relevant if we also develop an accompanying classifier. I suppose it would be possible to create user stories where the subordinate components of the system act as the users in the stories: As a supervised-learning cluster-space construction routine, I want to consume data from a feature extractor, so that I can exist. But that seems really weird. What benefit does it provide me as the developer (or our users, or any other stakeholders, for that matter) to model my user stories like that? Although the main story can be easily divided along architectural-component boundaries (crawler, trainer, classifier, etc), I can't think of any useful decomposition from a user's perspective. What do you guys think? How do you plan Agile user stories for sophisticated, indivisible, non-user-facing components?

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• Using Handlebars.js issue

  - by Roland

  I'm having a small issue when I'm compiling a template with Handlebars.js . I have a JSON text file which contains an big array with objects : Source ; and I'm using XMLHTTPRequest to get it and then parse it so I can use it when compiling the template. So far the template has the following structure : <div class="product-listing-wrapper"> <div class="product-listing"> <div class="left-side-content"> <div class="thumb-wrapper"> <img src="{{ThumbnailUrl}}"> </div> <div class="google-maps-wrapper"> <div class="google-coordonates-wrapper"> <div class="google-coordonates"> <p>{{LatLon.Lat}}</p> <p>{{LatLon.Lon}}</p> </div> </div> <div class="google-maps-button"> <a class="google-maps" href="#" data-latitude="{{LatLon.Lat}}" data-longitude="{{LatLon.Lon}}">Google Maps</a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="right-side-content"></div> </div> And the following block of code would be the way I'm handling the JS part : $(document).ready(function() { /* Default Javascript Options ~a javascript object which contains all the variables that will be passed to the cluster class */ var default_cluster_options = { animations : ['flash', 'bounce', 'shake', 'tada', 'swing', 'wobble', 'wiggle', 'pulse', 'flip', 'flipInX', 'flipOutX', 'flipInY', 'flipOutY', 'fadeIn', 'fadeInUp', 'fadeInDown', 'fadeInLeft', 'fadeInRight', 'fadeInUpBig', 'fadeInDownBig', 'fadeInLeftBig', 'fadeInRightBig', 'fadeOut', 'fadeOutUp', 'fadeOutDown', 'fadeOutLeft', 'fadeOutRight', 'fadeOutUpBig', 'fadeOutDownBig', 'fadeOutLeftBig', 'fadeOutRightBig', 'bounceIn', 'bounceInUp', 'bounceInDown', 'bounceInLeft', 'bounceInRight', 'bounceOut', 'bounceOutUp', 'bounceOutDown', 'bounceOutLeft', 'bounceOutRight', 'rotateIn', 'rotateInDownLeft', 'rotateInDownRight', 'rotateInUpLeft', 'rotateInUpRight', 'rotateOut', 'rotateOutDownLeft', 'rotateOutDownRight', 'rotateOutUpLeft', 'rotateOutUpRight', 'lightSpeedIn', 'lightSpeedOut', 'hinge', 'rollIn', 'rollOut'], json_data_url : 'data.json', template_data_url : 'template.php', base_maps_api_url : 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false', cluser_wrapper_id : '#content-wrapper', maps_wrapper_class : '.google-maps', }; /* Cluster ~main class, handles all javascript operations */ var Cluster = function(environment, cluster_options) { var self = this; this.options = $.extend({}, default_cluster_options, cluster_options); this.environment = environment; this.animations = this.options.animations; this.json_data_url = this.options.json_data_url; this.template_data_url = this.options.template_data_url; this.base_maps_api_url = this.options.base_maps_api_url; this.cluser_wrapper_id = this.options.cluser_wrapper_id; this.maps_wrapper_class = this.options.maps_wrapper_class; this.test_environment_mode(this.environment); this.initiate_environment(); this.test_xmlhttprequest_availability(); this.initiate_gmaps_lib_load(self.base_maps_api_url); this.initiate_data_processing(); }; /* Test Environment Mode ~adds a modernizr test which looks wheater the cluster class is initiated in development or not */ Cluster.prototype.test_environment_mode = function(environment) { var self = this; return Modernizr.addTest('test_environment', function() { return (typeof environment !== 'undefined' && environment !== null && environment === "Development") ? true : false; }); }; /* Test XMLHTTPRequest Availability ~adds a modernizr test which looks wheater the xmlhttprequest class is available or not in the browser, exception makes IE */ Cluster.prototype.test_xmlhttprequest_availability = function() { return Modernizr.addTest('test_xmlhttprequest', function() { return (typeof window.XMLHttpRequest === 'undefined' || window.XMLHttpRequest === null) ? true : false; }); }; /* Initiate Environment ~depending on what the modernizr test returns it puts LESS in the development mode or not */ Cluster.prototype.initiate_environment = function() { return (Modernizr.test_environment) ? (less.env = "development", less.watch()) : true; }; Cluster.prototype.initiate_gmaps_lib_load = function(lib_url) { return Modernizr.load(lib_url); }; /* Initiate XHR Request ~prototype function that creates an xmlhttprequest for processing json data from an separate json text file */ Cluster.prototype.initiate_xhr_request = function(url, mime_type) { var request, data; var self = this; (Modernizr.test_xmlhttprequest) ? request = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP') : request = new XMLHttpRequest(); request.onreadystatechange = function() { if(request.readyState == 4 && request.status == 200) { data = request.responseText; } }; request.open("GET", url, false); request.overrideMimeType(mime_type); request.send(); return data; }; Cluster.prototype.initiate_google_maps_action = function() { var self = this; return $(this.maps_wrapper_class).each(function(index, element) { return $(element).on('click', function(ev) { var html = $('<div id="map-canvas" class="map-canvas"></div>'); var latitude = $(element).attr('data-latitude'); var longitude = $(element).attr('data-longitude'); log("LAT : " + latitude); log("LON : " + longitude); $.lightbox(html, { "width": 900, "height": 250, "onOpen" : function() { } }); ev.preventDefault(); }); }); }; Cluster.prototype.initiate_data_processing = function() { var self = this; var json_data = JSON.parse(self.initiate_xhr_request(self.json_data_url, 'application/json; charset=ISO-8859-1')); var source_data = self.initiate_xhr_request(self.template_data_url, 'text/html'); var template = Handlebars.compile(source_data); for(var i = 0; i < json_data.length; i++ ) { var result = template(json_data[i]); $(result).appendTo(self.cluser_wrapper_id); } self.initiate_google_maps_action(); }; /* Cluster ~initiate the cluster class */ var cluster = new Cluster("Development"); }); My problem would be that I don't think I'm iterating the JSON object right or I'm using the template the wrong way because if you check this link : http://rolandgroza.com/labs/valtech/ ; you will see that there are some numbers there ( which represents latitude and longitude ) but they are all the same and if you take only a brief look at the JSON object each number is different. So what am I doing wrong that it makes the same number repeat ? Or what should I do to fix it ? I must notice that I've just started working with templates so I have little knowledge it.

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• XNA Notes 009

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week the MVPs (myself included) were on Microsoft campus for the MVP summit. So I apologize in advance if you did something cool or heard of something cool happening with XNA and XBLIGs and it’s not in my notes. I did my best to stay on top of things, but honestly this community is fast and furious with what it’s doing and creating. I really can’t keep up and that’s fantastic! But here’s what I *did* notice while I was there on Microsoft Campus (and I did make sure to point out to the XNA team several of these very cool happenings while I had their ears). Time Critical XNA News: The XNA team wants you to know that Dream Build Play registration is now open! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/28/registration-now-open-for-dream-build-play-2011-challenge.aspx Join the XNA-UK create on March 24, 2011 at the Microsoft Tech Days Conference http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/27/join-the-xna-uk-crew-at-the-microsoft-tech-days-conference-on-24th-march-2011.aspx XNA Team: Shawn Hargreaves shares one of the coolest things that’s happened in the XNA community http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/03/02/xbox-indies-pivot-view.aspx Nick Gravelyn continues his unique marketing/work prioritization strategy as he tries to get to 5,000 Pixel Man users before he makes Pixel Man 2 (and he’s almost there!) http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: A lot of the XNA MVPs were at the Microsoft MVP Summit 2011. Due to NDAs, most things can’t be shared, but I’m sure if you’re curious you could ask them about the general vibe and feeling they got from the team and the future of XNA/XBLIG and more. Catalin Zima and team release the free WP7 game Chickens Can Dream http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/41174062923390976 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/chickens-can-dream-is-live/ Charles Humphrey (NemoKrad) posts his March talk source and PowerPoint http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/03/04/march-2011-talk-post-processing-framework.aspx XNA Developers: Michael B. McLaughlin posts about ANTS Memory Profile and creates a CheckMemoryAllocationGame sample (extremely useful if you’re looking to see how much memory some operation allocates!) http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/28/ants-memory-profiler-7.0-review.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/01/checkmemoryallocationgame-sample.aspx Andy Schatz (2009 IGF winner for Monaco) talking XNA at GDC 2011 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33313/GDC_2011_Andy_Schatz_Ill_Make_My_Last_Game_When_I_Die.php Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Clover: A Curious Tale by BinaryTweed is coming as a Deal of the Week during St. Patricks Day http://majornelson.com/archive/2011/03/03/comingsoontothexboxlivemarketplacemarchthird.aspx Ska Studios away at GDC but still very post happy as always http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/02/swamped-picture-pack/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/28/the-february-showcase/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/25/good-morning-gato-51-smelling-the-roses/ Just Press Start interviews Matthew Mikuszewski of Darkwind Media about Blocks Indie http://justpressstart.net/?p=516 Gamergeddon Xbox Indie Game Round Up - February 27th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/27/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-27th/ http://www.gamergeddon.com/category/xbox-360/indie-games/ GameMarx does a round up of all the Xbox Live Indie Game podcasts that are currently available http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/27/xbox-live-indie-game-podcasts.aspx GameMarx episode 11 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/26/ep-11-february-25-2011.aspx In perhaps what I feel is the most exciting news I’ve heard all week, Michael C. Neel (ViNull of GameMarx fame) re-launch XboxIndies.com! http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/03/01/the-relaunch-of-xboxindies-com.aspx http://xboxindies.com/ Armless Octopus shares a little of what they heard from Luke Schneider of Radiangames during his GDC 2011 talk http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/02/gdc-2011-luke-schneider-offers-insight-into-radiangames-success/ VVGindiecast Episode 1 with guests Derek Strickland(Mr_Deeke), Kris Steele(Kriswd40 from FunInfused Games) and Dave Voyles(From armlessoctopus.com) http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/25/vvgindiecast-xblig-podcast/ If you’re doing Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews get in touch with XboxIndies.com to get into their aggregated feed http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76931/467189.aspx#467189 B.U.T.T.O.N and Flotilla represented XNA very well at the Independent Games Festival (are there any more games entered that were created using XNA? Stand up and be heard!) http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2011.php?id=374 Armless Ocotopus interview at GDC 2011 with Soulcaster creator Ian Stocker http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/04/gdc-2011-interview-with-soulcaster-creator-ian-stocker/ MommysBestGames gets a nod in the DarkBasic newsletter where it features the Explosionade Editor (just do a search for Explosionade to get to the interesting bits!) http://www.thegamecreators.com/pages/newsletters/newsletter_issue_98.html You may be hearing the cries of FortressCraft (coming soon to XBLIG) being so wrong for stealing the idea from MineCraft. But did you know the the game MineCraft started from was an XNA game called Infiniminer? XNA is getting it’s fingers into EVERYTHING! http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Infiniminer XNA Development: TorqueX is NOT dead thanks to the tremendous efforts of the XNA Community working on the CEV (special thanks to @PinoEire for all his hard work on making that happen!) http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20878 http://torquecev.com/ Dave Henry has posted XNA 3.x adding platformer start kit to the network game state management on his new site http://twitter.com/#!/mort8088/status/43407715908853760 http://mort8088.com/2011/03/03/xna-3-x-adding-platformer-starter-kit-to-network-game-state-management/ Mark Bamford releases XNAViewer 4.0, great for running XNA games inside of a Windows Form (for building level editors, etc.) http://twitter.com/#!/xzodia04/status/43466830412660736 http://xnaviewer.codeplex.com/ Unit testing an XNA game with Resharper and NUnit http://smnbss.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/planetx-unit-testing-an-xna-game-with-resharper-and-nunit-wp7-xbox-xna/ XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures) http://ht.ly/1bxwUE Mike McLaughlin shares a link he stumbled across for those looking to understand vector and matrix math http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/42587074725036032 http://chortle.ccsu.edu/VectorLessons/vectorIndex.html DigitalRune Resources Pooling in XNA (Part 1) http://www.digitalrune.com/Support/Blog/tabid/719/EntryId/84/DigitalRune-Helper-Library-Resource-Pooling-in-XNA-Part-1.aspx JohnK “bobthecbuilder” released a new SunBurn Update that lowers the requirements for Windows Games http://twitter.com/#!/bobthecbuilder/status/43457306578522112 http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2011/03/03/sunburn-update-windows-redistributable.aspx Quick update on the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.4 development status http://indiefreaks.com/2011/03/04/quick-update-on-igf-v0-4-development/

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• XNA Notes 007

  - by George Clingerman

  Every week I keep wondering if there’s going to be enough activity in the community to keep doing these notes on a weekly basis and every week I’m reminded of just how awesome and active the XNA community is. There’s engines being made, tutorials being created, games being crafted. There’s information being shared, questions being answered and then there’s another whole community around the Xbox LIVE Indie Games themselves. It’s really incredibly to just watch all that’s going on and I’m glad I’m playing a small part in all of this. So here’s what I noticed happening in the XNA community last week. If there’s things I’m missing, always feel free to let me know. I love learning about new corners of the XNA community that I wasn’t aware of or just have been missing! XNA Developers: Uditha Bandara held an XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://uditha.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities-event-update/ Binary Tweed gives his talks about Indie City and gives his opinion on the false promise of digital distribution http://www.develop-online.net/news/37053/OPINION-The-false-promise-of-digital-distribution Kris Steele posts his Trivia or Die postmortem http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=246 @MadNinjaSkills (James Johnston) posts his feelings on testing for XBLIG http://www.ezmuze.co.uk/101 Simon (@DDReaper) posts hints and tips for XNA developers to help get the size of their projects down http://twitter.com/#!/DDReaper/status/38279440924545024 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/17/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing.aspx Michael B. McLaughlin proving why he should be an XNA MVP posts the list of commonly used value types in XNA games http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/17/list-of-commonly-used-value-types-in-xna-games.aspx http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/38166541354811392 Paul Powell (@ITSligoPaul) posts about a common sprite batch as a game service http://itspaulsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-common-sprite-batch-as-game-service.html @SigilXNA (John Defenbaugh) posts his new level editor video for the sequel to Opac’s Journey http://twitter.com/SigilXNA/statuses/36548174373982209 http://twitter.com/#!/SigilXNA/status/36548174373982209 http://youtu.be/QHbmxB_2AW8 @jwatte updates kW Animation for XNA 4.0 http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-animation @DSebJ posts Blender to SunBurn http://twitter.com/#!/DSebJ/status/36564920224976896 http://dsebj.evolvingsoftware.com/?p=187 Ads and WP7 Games - @mechaghost shares his revenue data for his ad based games http://www.occasionalgamer.com/2011/02/09/ads-and-wp7-games/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Steven Hurdle posts day 100 of his quest to find a fantastic XBLIG purchase every day http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/02/17/day-100-radiangames-ballistic/ Xbox 360 Indie Game Buying Guide - 12 games for $60 including several Xbox LIVE Indie games! (although if the XNA community was asked we could have recommended 60 games for $60...) http://www.indiegamemag.com/xbox360-indie-games-buying-guide/ The best selling Xbox LIVE Indie games of 2010 http://www.1up.com/news/xbox-live-most-popular-games I’d buy that for a dollar! - the California Literary Review points out a few gems on the XBLIG marketplace (and other places) where you can game on the cheap. http://calitreview.com/14125 Armless Octopus Episode 39 - The Indie Gem Octocast http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/17/armless-octocast-episode-39-the-indie-gem-octocast/ Ska Studios posts a plethora of updates http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/11/good-morning-gato-49/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/14/vampire-smile-valentines/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/16/the-dishwasher-vs-finds-a-home/ Kotaku posts about the Xbox LIVE Indie Game that makes you go Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew http://kotaku.com/#!5760632/the-game-that-makes-you-go-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew GameMarx continues to be active and doing a ton for the XBLIG community reviews and Top 5 indie games of the week 2/4-2/10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/22/ep-9-february-11-2010.aspx a new podcast Xbox Indie New Releases http://twitter.com/#!/gamemarx/status/36888849107910656 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/13/a-new-podcast-xbox-indie-new-releases.aspx @MasterBlud uploads Indocalypse XBLIG Collections #2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzCZSv075mc&feature=youtu.be&a http://twitter.com/#!/MasterBlud/status/37100029697064960 Just Press Start interviews Michael Hicks from MichaelArts, 18 year old creator of Honor in Vengeance http://justpressstart.net/?p=465 Achievement Locked interviews Kris Steele of FunInfused Games http://xboxindies.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/interview-fun-infused-games/ XNA Game Development: XNA -UK launches their XAP test service to help the XNA community http://xna-uk.net/blogs/news/archive/2011/02/18/xna-uk-xap-test-service-now-live.aspx Transmute shows off a video of the standard character editor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqH6gErG948&feature=youtu.be Microsoft Tech Student introduces their first tech student of the month.  Meet Daniel Van Tassel from the University of Utah and learn how he created an Xbox LIVE Indie Game using XNA Studio http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techstudent/archive/2010/12/22/introducing-our-first-tech-student-of-the-month-daniel-van-tassel.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 3 - Animation (transforms) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 4 - Animation (frame based) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-4-Animation-frame-based.aspx @suhinini tweets about an XNA Sprite Font generation tool http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/36841370131890176 http://www.nubik.com/SpriteFont/ XNATouch 1.5 is out and in it’s words is faster, simpler, more reliable and has the XNA 4.0 API http://monogame.codeplex.com/releases/view/60815 IndieCity is hosting marketing workshops for Indie Developers (UK and US) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/75197/457654.aspx#457654 New York Students - Learn XNA and Silverlight for Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72753/456964.aspx#456964 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/learn-to-build-your-own-games-for-xbox-360-and-windows-phone-7.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/build-a-game-in-48-hours-win-a-kinect-or-windows-phone-7.aspx Extra Credits: Videogame Music http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2019-Videogame-Music Steve Pavlina posts an article with useful information for all XNA/XBLIG developers http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/02/completion-vs-perfection/

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• Linux-Containers — Part 1: Overview

  - by Lenz Grimmer

  "Containers" by Jean-Pierre Martineau (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Linux Containers (LXC) provide a means to isolate individual services or applications as well as of a complete Linux operating system from other services running on the same host. To accomplish this, each container gets its own directory structure, network devices, IP addresses and process table. The processes running in other containers or the host system are not visible from inside a container. Additionally, Linux Containers allow for fine granular control of resources like RAM, CPU or disk I/O. Generally speaking, Linux Containers use a completely different approach than "classicial" virtualization technologies like KVM or Xen (on which Oracle VM Server for x86 is based on). An application running inside a container will be executed directly on the operating system kernel of the host system, shielded from all other running processes in a sandbox-like environment. This allows a very direct and fair distribution of CPU and I/O-resources. Linux containers can offer the best possible performance and several possibilities for managing and sharing the resources available. Similar to Containers (or Zones) on Oracle Solaris or FreeBSD jails, the same kernel version runs on the host as well as in the containers; it is not possible to run different Linux kernel versions or other operating systems like Microsoft Windows or Oracle Solaris for x86 inside a container. However, it is possible to run different Linux distribution versions (e.g. Fedora Linux in a container on top of an Oracle Linux host), provided it supports the version of the Linux kernel that runs on the host. This approach has one caveat, though - if any of the containers causes a kernel crash, it will bring down all other containers (and the host system) as well. For example, Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39) is supported for both Oracle Linux 5 and 6. This makes it possible to run Oracle Linux 5 and 6 container instances on top of an Oracle Linux 6 system. Since Linux Containers are fully implemented on the OS level (the Linux kernel), they can be easily combined with other virtualization technologies. It's certainly possible to set up Linux containers within a virtualized Linux instance that runs inside Oracle VM Server for Oracle VM Virtualbox. Some use cases for Linux Containers include: Consolidation of multiple separate Linux systems on one server: instances of Linux systems that are not performance-critical or only see sporadic use (e.g. a fax or print server or intranet services) do not necessarily need a dedicated server for their operations. These can easily be consolidated to run inside containers on a single server, to preserve energy and rack space. Running multiple instances of an application in parallel, e.g. for different users or customers. Each user receives his "own" application instance, with a defined level of service/performance. This prevents that one user's application could hog the entire system and ensures, that each user only has access to his own data set. It also helps to save main memory — if multiple instances of a same process are running, the Linux kernel can share memory pages that are identical and unchanged across all application instances. This also applies to shared libraries that applications may use, they are generally held in memory once and mapped to multiple processes. Quickly creating sandbox environments for development and testing purposes: containers that have been created and configured once can be archived as templates and can be duplicated (cloned) instantly on demand. After finishing the activity, the clone can safely be discarded. This allows to provide repeatable software builds and test environments, because the system will always be reset to its initial state for each run. Linux Containers also boot significantly faster than "classic" virtual machines, which can save a lot of time when running frequent build or test runs on applications. Safe execution of an individual application: if an application running inside a container has been compromised because of a security vulnerability, the host system and other containers remain unaffected. The potential damage can be minimized, analyzed and resolved directly from the host system. Note: Linux Containers on Oracle Linux 6 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39) are still marked as Technology Preview - their use is only recommended for testing and evaluation purposes. The Open-Source project "Linux Containers" (LXC) is driving the development of the technology behind this, which is based on the "Control Groups" (CGroups) and "Name Spaces" functionality of the Linux kernel. Oracle is actively involved in the Linux Containers development and contributes patches to the upstream LXC code base. Control Groups provide means to manage and monitor the allocation of resources for individual processes or process groups. Among other things, you can restrict the maximum amount of memory, CPU cycles as well as the disk and network throughput (in MB/s or IOP/s) that are available for an application. Name Spaces help to isolate process groups from each other, e.g. the visibility of other running processes or the exclusive access to a network device. It's also possible to restrict a process group's access and visibility of the entire file system hierarchy (similar to a classic "chroot" environment). CGroups and Name Spaces provide the foundation on which Linux containers are based on, but they can actually be used independently as well. A more detailed description of how Linux Containers can be created and managed on Oracle Linux will be explained in the second part of this article. Additional links related to Linux Containers: OTN Article: The Role of Oracle Solaris Zones and Linux Containers in a Virtualization Strategy Linux Containers on Wikipedia - Lenz Grimmer Follow me on: Personal Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Linux Blog |

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• SQL Developer Blitz at ODTUG Kscope12

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) puts on an outstanding event, and I enjoy that the content comes FIRST. Yes, the after-event parties and entertainment are first class, but I look forward most to sitting in on some excellent sessions. For Kscope12 one would expect Oracle to have a large presence, and you would be absolutely correct! The APEX team will be there in full force, and we’ll have sessions on JDeveloper, ADF, and .NET. But what I want to talk about today is our awesome line-up of coverage for Oracle SQL Developer (Surprise!) DB and Developer’s Toolbox Symposium Kris Rice or @krisrice, Product Development Manager for SQL Developer, will speak at 10AM Sunday about SQL Developer Data Modeler. Our free data modeling solution allows one to reverse engineer a data dictionary to a model, modify it, and create a script of the changes. Collaboration is an important part of any development team; with built-in subversion support, the modeler makes collaboration easy, not just possible. After the morning break, I’ll be talking about SQL Developer’s PL/SQL support. From creating your code, to debugging, tuning, testing, and documenting PL/SQL – SQL Developer fits the bill. Since I have a full hour, I should have time to do a little riff on using source control to version and manage your revisions too! At 3:15 Jagan Athreya will talk about the new integration between SQL Developer and Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. Enabling developers to define changes in SQLDeveloper and allowing DBAs to promote these changes to Test and Production via Enterprise Manager will reduce errors, accelerate productivity, and help eliminate unplanned downtime. Get your SQL Developer groove on at ODTUG Kscope12! Presentations SQL Developer Tips and Tricks Monday June 25, Session 5, 4:15 pm – 5:15 pm I’ll take you through my favorite keyboard shortcuts, top 10 preferences every user should tweak, and spotlight features that the average user probably hasn’t discovered yet. My goal for this session is for everyone to take 1-2 tips they can implement immediately to save mucho time. I enjoy interacting with the audience so no two versions of this presentation are the same. Oracle SQL Developer and Data Modeler New Features When: Tuesday June 26, Session 6, 8:30 am – 9:30 am Ashley Chen, my PM-partner-in-crime, will be covering all the new features from our two latest updates. So if you’re new to SQL Developer, or you’ve been using an older version, stop by and see what new toys you have to play with. I also have a bet with Ashley that she will have more attendees than me, so be sure to show up so I can collect. Debugging PL/SQL With SQL Developer When: Wednesday June 27, Session 16, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm Me again – sorry. This time I have an entire hour to JUST talk about PL/SQL and debugging! Should you use a watch with a break condition, or a breakpoint with a passcount? How does external debugging with a Perl script work? Can I just debug an anonymous PL/SQL block. So if debugging to you is just a DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE() call, stop by and see how our IDE can help you take things to the next level! Or is that level++? Hands-on-Training SQL Developer Soup to Nuts When: Tuesday, 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM If you learn by doing, this is the session for you. Bring your own laptop or use one of the lab machines. We’ll give you a VirtualBox OEL image running 11gR2 EE Database with all the fixin’s (that’s Southern speak for Partitioning, Advanced Compression, Tuning & Diagnostic Packs, etc), TimesTen, APEX and much more. All you have to do is login and run through our lab exercises. You can start with a model and work your way up to debugging and testing your own appliction, or you can pick and choose your lessons to suit your needs. We’ll have people on hand to help you out and answer your questions. Booth Hours We’ll be in the vendor area and have our very own ‘demo pod’ for SQL Developer. Between Kris, Ashley, and I we should be able to answer your questions or show you how to ‘do that thing’ in the tool. Or just stop by and say hello! We’ll be around the following hours’ish: Sunday, June 24, 2012 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM Monday, June 25, 2012 9:00 AM – 4:30 PM Tuesday, June 26, 2012 9:30 AM – 3:30 PM Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:15 AM – 2:00 PM No Excuses – If You Have Questions, This is Your Chance to Get Your Answers! We’re doing just about everything outside of a scavenger hunt to bring information and value to our users. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and we’ll do our best to do more of the former and less of the latter!

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• Silverlight 5 Hosting :: Features in Silverlight 5 and Release Date

  - by mbridge

  Silverlight 5 is finally announced in the Silverlight FireStarter Event on the 2nd December, 2010. This new version of Silverlight which was earlier labeled as 'Future of Microsoft Silverlight' has now come much closer to go live as the first Silverlight 5 Beta version is expected to be shipped during the early months of 2011. However for the full fledged and the final release of Silverlight 5, we have to wait many more months as the same is likely to be made available within the Q3 2011. As would have been usually expected, this latest edition would feature many new capabilities thereby extending the developer productivity to a whole new dimension of premium media experience and feature-rich business applications. It comes along with many new feature updates as well as the inclusion of new technologies to improve the standard of the Silverlight applications which are now fine-tuned to produce next generation business and media solutions that is capable to meet the requirements of the advanced web-based app development. The Silverlight 5 is all set to replace the previous fourth version which now includes more than forty new features while also dropping various deprecated elements that was prevalent earlier. It has brought around some major performance enhancements and also included better support for various other tools and technologies. Following are some of the changes that are registered to be available under the Silverlight 5 Beta edition which is scheduled to be launched during the Q1 2011. Silverlight 5 : Premium Media Experiences The media features of Silverlight 5 has seen some major enhancements with a lot of optimizations being made to deliver richer solutions. It's capability has now been extended to make things easier, faster and capable of performing the desired tasks in the most efficient manner. The Silverlight media solutions has already been a part of many companies in the recent days where various on-demand Silverlight services were featured but with the arrival of the next generation premium media solution of Silverlight 5, it is expected to register new heights of success and global user acclamation for using it with many esteemed web-based projects and media solutions. - The most happening element in the new Silverlight 5 will be its support for utilizing the GPU based hardware acceleration which is intended to lower down the CPU load to a significant extent and thereby allowing faster rendering of media contents without consuming much resources. This feature is believed to be particularly helpful for low configured machines to run full HD media content without any lagging caused due to processor load. It will hence be one great feature to revolutionize the new generation high quality media contents to be available within the web in a more efficient manner with its hardware decoded video playback capabilities. - With the inclusion of hardware video decoding to minimize the processor load, the Silverlight 5 also comes with another optimization enhancement to also reduce the power consumption level by making new methods to deal with the power-saver settings. With this optimization in effect, the computer would be automatically allowed to switch to sleep mode while no video playback is in progress and also to prevent any screensavers to popup and cause annoyances during any video playback. There would also be other power saver options which will be made available to best suit the users requirements and purpose. - The Silverlight trickplay feature is another great way to tweak any silverlight powered media content as is used for many video tutorial sites or for dealing with any sort of presentations. This feature enables the user to modify the playback speed to either slowdown or speedup during the playback durations based on the requirements without compromising on the quality of output. Normally such manipulations always makes the content's audio to go off-pitch, but the same will not be the case with TrickPlay and the audio would seamlessly progress with the video without skipping any of its part. - In addition to all of the above, the new Silverlight 5 will be featuring wireless control of all the media contents by making use of remote controllers. With the use of such remote devices, it will be easier to handle the various media playback controls thereby providing more freedom while experiencing the premium media services. Silverlight 5 : Business Application Development The application development standard has been extended with more possibilities by bringing forth new and useful technologies and also reviving the existing methods to work better than what it was used to. From the UI improvements to advanced technical aspects, the Silverlight 5 scores high on all grounds to produce great next generation business delivered applications by putting in more creativity and resourceful touch to all the apps being produced with it. - The WPF feature of Silverlight is made more effective by introducing new standards of Databinding which is intended to improve the productivity standards of the Silverlight application developer. It brings in a lot of convenience in debugging the databinding components or expressions and hence making things work in a flawless manner. Some additional features related to databinding includes that of Ancestor RelativeSource, Implicit DataTemplates and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) support with DataContextChanged event and many other new features relating it. - It now comes with a refined text and printing service which facilitates better clarity of the text rendering and also many positive changes which are being applied to the layout pattern. New supports has been added to include OpenType font, multi-column text, linked-text containers and character leading support to name a few among the available features.This also includes some important printing aspects like that of Postscript Vector Printing API which allows to program our printing tasks in a user defined way and Pivot functionality for visualization concerns of informations. - The Graphics support is the key improvements being incorporated which now enables to utilize three dimensional graphics pattern using GPU acceleration. It can manage to provide some really cool visualizations being curved to provide media contents within the business apps with also the support for full HD contents at 1080p quality. - Silverlight 5 includes the support for 64-bit operating systems and relevant browsers and is also optimized to provide better performance. It can support the background thread for the networking which can reduce the latency of the network to a considerable extent. The Out-of-Browser functionality adds the support for utilizing various libraries and also the Win32 API. It also comes with testing support with VS 2010 which is mostly an automated procedure and has also enabled increased security aspects of all the Silverlight 5 developed applications by using the improved version of group policy support.

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• Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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• Last week I was presented with a Microsoft MVP award in Virtual Machines – time to thank all who hel

  - by Liam Westley

  MVP in Virtual Machines Last week, on 1st April, I received an e-mail from Microsoft letting me know that I had been presented with a 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award for outstanding contributions in Virtual Machine technical communities during the past year.   It was an honour to be nominated, and is a great reflection on the vibrancy of the UK user group community which made this possible. Virtualisation for developers, not just IT Pros I consider it a special honour as my expertise in virtualisation is as a software developer utilising virtual machines to aid my software development, rather than an IT Pro who manages data centre and network infrastructure.  I’ve been on a minor mission over the past few years to enthuse developers in a topic usually seen as only for network admins, but which can make their life a whole lot easier once understood properly. Continuous learning is fun In 1676, the scientist Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke used the phrase (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/268025.html) ‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants’ I’m a nuclear physicist by education, so I am more than comfortable that any knowledge I have is based on the work of others.  Although far from a science, software development and IT is equally built upon the work of others. It’s one of the reasons I despise software patents. So in that sense this MVP award is a result of all the great minds that have provided virtualisation solutions for me to talk about.  I hope that I have always acknowledged those whose work I have used when blogging or giving presentations, and that I have executed my responsibility to share any knowledge gained as widely as possible. Thanks to all those who helped – a big thanks to the UK user group community I reckon this journey started in 2003 when I started attending a user group called the London .Net Users Group (http://www.dnug.org.uk) started by a nice chap called Ian Cooper. The great thing about Ian was that he always encouraged non professional speakers to take the stage at the user group, and my first ever presentation was on 30th September 2003; SQL Server CE 2.0 and the.NET Compact Framework. In 2005 Ian Cooper was on the committee for the first DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! day, the free community conference held at Microsoft’s UK HQ in Thames Valley park in Reading.  He encouraged me to take part and so on 14th May 2005 I presented a talk previously given to the London .Net User Group on Simplifying access to multiple DB providers in .NET.  From that point on I definitely had the bug; presenting at DDD2, DDD3, groking at DDD4 and SQLBits I and after a break, DDD7, DDD Scotland and DDD8.  What definitely made me keen was the encouragement and infectious enthusiasm of some of the other DDD organisers; Craig Murphy, Barry Dorrans, Phil Winstanley and Colin Mackay. During the first few DDD events I met the Dave McMahon and Richard Costall from NxtGenUG who made it easy to start presenting at their user groups.  Along the way I’ve met a load of great user group organisers; Guy Smith-Ferrier of the .Net Developer Network, Jimmy Skowronski of GL.Net and the double act of Ray Booysen and Gavin Osborn behind what was Vista Squad and is now Edge UG. Final thanks to those who suggested virtualisation as a topic ... Final thanks have to go the people who inspired me to create my Virtualisation for Developers talk.  Toby Henderson (@holytshirt) ensured I took notice of Sun’s VirtualBox, Peter Ibbotson for being a fine sounding board at the Kew Railway over quite a few Adnam’s Broadside and to Guy Smith-Ferrier for allowing his user group to be the guinea pigs for the talk before it was seen at DDD7.  Thanks to all of you I now know much more about virtualisation than I would have thought possible and it continues to be great fun. Conclusion If this was an academy award acceptance speech I would have been cut off after the first few paragraphs, so well done if you made it this far.  I’ll be doing my best to do justice to the MVP award and the UK community.  I’m fortunate in having a new employer who considers presenting at user groups as a good thing, so don’t expect me to stop any time soon. If you’ve never seen me in action, then you can view the original DDD7 Virtualisation for Developers presentation (filmed by the Microsoft Channel 9 team) as part of the full DDD7 video list here, http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1591.  Also thanks to Craig Murphy’s fine video work you can also view my latest DDD8 presentation on Commercial Software Development, here, http://vimeo.com/9216563 P.S. If I’ve missed anyone out, do feel free to lambast me in comments, it’s your duty.

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• What’s New for Oracle Commerce? Executive QA with John Andrews, VP Product Management, Oracle Commerce

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Oracle Commerce was for the fifth time positioned as a leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce. This inspired me to sit down with Oracle Commerce VP of Product Management, John Andrews to get his perspective on what continues to make Oracle a leader in the industry and what’s new for Oracle Commerce in 2013. Q: Why do you believe Oracle Commerce continues to be a leader in the industry? John: Oracle has a great acquisition strategy – it brings best-of-breed technologies into the product fold and then continues to grow and innovate them. This is particularly true with products unified into the Oracle Commerce brand. Oracle acquired ATG in late 2010 – and then Endeca in late 2011. This means that under the hood of Oracle Commerce you have market-leading technologies for cross-channel commerce and customer experience, both designed and developed in direct response to the unique challenges online businesses face. And we continue to innovate on capabilities core to what our customers need to be successful – contextual and personalized experience delivery, merchant-inspired tools, and architecture for performance and scalability. Q: It’s not a slow moving industry. What are you doing to keep the pace of innovation at Oracle Commerce? John: Oracle owes our customers the most innovative commerce capabilities. By unifying the core components of ATG and Endeca we are delivering on this promise. Oracle Commerce is continuing to innovate and redefine how commerce is done and in a way that drive business results and keeps customers coming back for experiences tailored just for them. Our January and May 2013 releases not only marked the seventh significant releases for the solution since the acquisitions of ATG and Endeca, we also continue to demonstrate rapid and significant progress on the unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities of the two commerce technologies. Q: Can you tell us what was notable about these latest releases under the Oracle Commerce umbrella? John: Specifically, our latest product innovations give businesses selling online the ability to get to market faster with more personalized commerce experiences in the following ways: Mobile: the latest Commerce Reference Application in this release offers a wider range of examples for online businesses to leverage for iOS development and specifically new iPad reference capabilities. This release marks the first release of the iOS Universal application that serves both the iPhone and iPad devices from a single download or binary. Business users can now drive page content management and layout of search results and category pages, as well as create additional storefront elements such as categories, facets / dimensions, and breadcrumbs through Experience Manager tools. Cross-Channel Commerce: key commerce platform capabilities have been added to support cross-channel commerce, including an expanded inventory model to maintain inventory for stores, pickup in stores and Web-based returns. Online businesses with in-store operations can now offer advanced shipping options on the web and make returns and exchange logic easily available on the web. Multi-Site Capabilities: significant enhancements to the Commerce Platform multi-site architecture that allows business users to quickly launch and manage multiple sites on the same cluster and share data, carts, and other components. First introduced in 2010, with this latest release business users can now partition or share customer profiles, control users’ site-based access, and manage personalization assets using site groups. Internationalization: continued language support and enhancements for business user tools as well and search and navigation. Guided Search now supports 35 total languages with 11 new languages (including Danish, Arabic, Norwegian, Serbian Cyrillic) added in this release. Commerce Platform tools now include localized support for 17 locales with 4 new languages (Danish, Portuguese (European), Finnish, and Thai). No development or customization is required in order for business users to use the applications in any of these supported languages. Business Tool Experience: valuable new Commerce Merchandising features include a new workflow for making emergency changes quickly and increased visibility into promotions rules and qualifications in preview mode. Oracle Commerce business tools continue to become more and more feature rich to provide intuitive, easy- to-use (yet powerful) capabilities to allow business users to manage content and the shopping experience. Commerce & Experience Unification: demonstrable unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities include – productized cartridges that provide supported integration between the Commerce Platform and Experience Management tools, cross-channel returns, Oracle Service Cloud integration, and integrated iPad application. The mission guiding our product development is to deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences across any device in a contextual manner – and to give the business the best tools to tune and optimize those user experiences to meet their business objectives. We also need to do this in a way that makes it operationally efficient for the business, keeping the overall total cost of ownership low – yet also allows the business to expand, whether it be to new business models, geographies or brands. To learn more about the latest Oracle Commerce releases and mission, visit the links below: • Hear more from John about the Oracle Commerce mission • Hear from Oracle Commerce customers • Documentation on the new releases • Listen to the Oracle ATG Commerce 10.2 Webcast • Listen to the Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 Webcast

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• Using Web Services from an XNA 4.0 WP7 Game

  - by Michael Cummings

  Now that the Windows Phone 7 development tools have been out for a while, let’s talk about how you can use them. Windows Phone 7 ( WP7 ) has two application types that you can create, either Silverlight or XNA, and you can’t really mix the two together. The development environment for WP7 is a special edition of Visual Studio 2010 called Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. This edition will be installed with the WP7 tools, even if you have a full edition of VS2010 already installed. While you can use your full edition of VS2010 to do WP7 development, this astute developer has noticed that there are a few things that you can only do in the Express for Windows Phone edition. So lets start by discussing WP7 networking. On the WP7 platform the only networking available is through Web Services using WCF or if you’re really masochistic, you’ll use the WebClient to do http. In Silverlight, it’s fairly easy to wire up a WCF proxy to call a web service and get some data. In the XNA projects, not so much. Create WCF Service First, we’ll create our service that will return some information that we need in our game. Open Visual Studio 2010, and create a new WCF Web Service project. We’ll use the default implementation as we only need to see how to use a service, we are not interested in creating a really cool service at this point. However you may want to follow the instructions in the comments of Service1.svc.cs to change the name to something better, I used DataService and IDataService for the interface. You should now be able to run the project and the WCF Test Client will load and properly enumerate your service. At this point we have a functional service that can be consumed by our XNA game. Consume the WCF Service Open Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and create a new XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone Game project. Now if you try to add a service reference to the project, you’ll notice that the option is not available. However, if you add a Silverlight application to your solution, you’ll notice that you can create a service reference there. So using the Silverlight project, we can create the service reference. Unfortunately you can’t reference the Silverlight project from the XNA Game project, so using Windows Explorer copy the Service References folder from the Silverlight project directory to the XNA Game project directory, then add the folder to your XNA Game project. You’ll need to set the property Build Action to None for all the files, except for Reference.cs, which should be Build. Truely, we only need Reference.cs but I find it easier to copy the whole folder. If you try to compile at this point, you’ll notice that we are missing  a couple of references, System.Runtime.Serialization, System.Net and System.ServiceModel. Add these to the XNA Game project and you should build successfully. You’ll also need to copy the ServiceReference.ClientConfig file and add it to your project. The WCF infrastructure looks for this file and will complain if it can’t find it. You’ll need to set the Copy to Output Directory property to Copy if Newer. We now need to add the code to call the service and display the results on the screen. Go ahead and add a SpriteFont resource to the Content project and load it in the Game project. There’s nothing here that’s changed much from 3.1 other than your Content project is now under the Solution node and not the Project node. While you’re at it, add a string field to store the result of the service call, and intialize it to string.Empty. Then in the Draw method, write the string out to the screen, only if it does not equal string.Empty. Now to wrap this up, lets create a new field that’s of the type DataServiceClient. In the Initialize Method, create a new instance of this type using its default contructor, then in the LoadContent we can call the service. Since we can only call the GetData method of our service asynchronously we need to set up a Completed event handler first. Thankfully, Visual Studio helps out a lot there just create, using the tab key whatever VS says to. In the GetDataAsyncCompleted event handler assign the service result ( e.Result) to your string field. If you run your game, you should get something like this : Enjoy!

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• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 - Business Intelligence Samples

  - by smisner

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

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• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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• Measuring Usability with Common Industry Format (CIF) Usability Tests

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience A User-centered Research and Design Process The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience was five years in the making. The development of this suite included an extensive and comprehensive user experience design process: ethnographic research, low-fidelity workflow prototyping, high fidelity user interface (UI) prototyping, iterative formative usability testing, development feedback and iteration, and sales and customer evaluation throughout the design cycle. However, this process does not stop when our products are released. We conduct summative usability testing using the ISO 25062 Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports as an organizational framework. CIF tests allow us to measure the overall usability of our released products.  These studies provide benchmarks that allow for comparisons of a specific product release against previous versions of our product and against other products in the marketplace. What Is a CIF Usability Test? CIF refers to the internationally standardized method for reporting usability test findings used by the software industry. The CIF is based on a formal, lab-based test that is used to benchmark the usability of a product in terms of human performance and subjective data. The CIF was developed and is endorsed by more than 375 software customer and vendor organizations led by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a US government entity. NIST sponsored the CIF through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards-making processes. Oracle played a key role in developing the CIF. The CIF report format and metrics are consistent with the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Our goal in conducting CIF tests is to measure performance and satisfaction of a representative sample of users on a set of core tasks and to help predict how usable a product will be with the larger population of customers. Why Do We Perform CIF Testing? The overarching purpose of the CIF for usability test reports is to promote incorporation of usability as part of the procurement decision-making process for interactive products. CIF provides a common format for vendors to report the methods and results of usability tests to customer organizations, and enables customers to compare the usability of our software to that of other suppliers. CIF also enables us to compare our current software with previous versions of our software. CIF Testing for Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications comprises more than 100 modules in seven different product families. These modules encompass more than 400 task flows and 400 user roles. Due to resource constraints, we cannot perform comprehensive CIF testing across the entire product suite. Therefore, we had to develop meaningful inclusion criteria and work with other stakeholders across the applications development organization to prioritize product areas for testing. Ultimately, we want to test the product areas for which customers might be most interested in seeing CIF data. We also want to build credibility with customers; we need to be able to make the case to current and prospective customers that the product areas tested are representative of the product suite as a whole. Our goal is to test the top use cases for each product. The primary activity in the scoping process was to work with the individual product teams to identify the key products and business process task flows in each product to test. We prioritized these products and flows through a series of negotiations among the user experience managers, product strategy, and product management directors for each of the primary product families within the Oracle Fusion Applications suite (Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Projects, and Procurement). The end result of the scoping exercise was a list of 47 proposed CIF tests for the Fusion Applications product suite.  Figure 1. A participant completes tasks during a usability test in Oracle’s Usability Labs Fusion Supplier Portal CIF Test The first Fusion CIF test was completed on the Supplier Portal application in July of 2011.  Fusion Supplier Portal is part of an integrated suite of Procurement applications that helps supplier companies manage orders, schedules, shipments, invoices, negotiations and payments. The user roles targeted for the usability study were Supplier Account Receivables Specialists and Supplier Sales Representatives, including both experienced and inexperienced users across a wide demographic range.  The test specifically focused on the following functionality and features: Manage payments – view payments Manage invoices – view invoice status and create invoices Manage account information – create new contact, review bank account information Manage agreements – find and view agreement, upload agreement lines, confirm status of agreement lines upload Manage purchase orders (PO) – view history of PO, request change to PO, find orders Manage negotiations – respond to request for a quote, check the status of a negotiation response These product areas were selected to represent the most important subset of features and functionality of the flow, in terms of frequency and criticality of use by customers. A total of 20 users participated in the usability study. The results of the Supplier Portal evaluation were favorable and exceeded our expectations. Figure 2. Fusion Supplier Portal Next Studies We plan to conduct two Fusion CIF usability studies per product family over the next nine months. The next product to be tested will be Self-service Procurement. End users are currently being recruited to participate in this usability study, and the test sessions are scheduled to begin during the last week of November.

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• Unit testing is… well, flawed.

  - by Dewald Galjaard

  Hey someone had to say it. I clearly recall my first IT job. I was appointed Systems Co-coordinator for a leading South African retailer at store level. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an honest day’s labor and in fact I highly recommend it, however I’m obliged to refer to the designation cautiously; in reality all I had to do was monitor in-store prices and two UNIX front line controllers. If anything went wrong – I only had to phone it in… Luckily that wasn’t all I did. My duties extended to some other interesting annual occurrence – stock take. Despite a bit more curious affair, it was still a tedious process that took weeks of preparation and several nights to complete.  Then also I remember that no matter how elaborate our planning was, the entire exercise would be rendered useless if we couldn’t get the basics right – that being the act of counting. Sounds simple right? We’ll with a store which could potentially carry over tens of thousands of different items… we’ll let’s just say I believe that’s when I first became a coffee addict. In those days the act of counting stock was a very humble process. Nothing like we have today. A staff member would be assigned a bin or shelve filled with items he or she had to sort then count. Thereafter they had to record their findings on a complementary piece of paper. Every night I would manage several teams. Each team was divided into two groups - counters and auditors. Both groups had the same task, only auditors followed shortly on the heels of the counters, recounting stock levels, making sure the original count correspond to their findings. It was a simple yet hugely responsible orchestration of people and thankfully there was one fundamental and golden rule I could always abide by to ensure things run smoothly – No-one was allowed to audit their own work. Nope, not even on nights when I didn’t have enough staff available. This meant I too at times had to get up there and get counting, or have the audit stand over until the next evening. The reason for this was obvious - late at night and with so much to do we were prone to make some mistakes, then on the recount, without a fresh set of eyes, you were likely to repeat the offence. Now years later this rule or guideline still holds true as we develop software (as far removed as software development from counting stock may be). For some reason it is a fundamental guideline we’re simply ignorant of. We write our code, we write our tests and thus commit the same horrendous offence. Yes, the procedure of writing unit tests as practiced in most development houses today – is flawed. Most if not all of the tests we write today exercise application logic – our logic. They are based on the way we believe an application or method should/may/will behave or function. As we write our tests, our unit tests mirror our best understanding of the inner workings of our application code. Unfortunately these tests will therefore also include (or be unaware of) any imperfections and errors on our part. If your logic is flawed as you write your initial code, chances are, without a fresh set of eyes, you will commit the same error second time around too. Not even experience seems to be a suitable solution. It certainly helps to have deeper insight, but is that really the answer we should be looking for? Is that really failsafe? What about code review? Code review is certainly an answer. You could have one developer coding away and another (or team) making sure the logic is sound. The practice however has its obvious drawbacks. Firstly and mainly it is resource intensive and from what I’ve seen in most development houses, given heavy deadlines, this guideline is seldom adhered to. Hardly ever do we have the resources, money or time readily available. So what other options are out there? A quest to find some solution revealed a project by Microsoft Research called PEX. PEX is a framework which creates several test scenarios for each method or class you write, automatically. Think of it as your own personal auditor. Within a few clicks the framework will auto generate several unit tests for a given class or method and save them to a single project. PEX help to audit your work. It lends a fresh set of eyes to any project you’re working on and best of all; it is cost effective and fast. Check them out at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ In upcoming posts we’ll dive deeper into how it works and how it can help you.   Certainly there are more similar frameworks out there and I would love to hear from you. Please share your experiences and insights.

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• Chart Control in ASP.Net 4 – Second Part

  - by sreejukg

    Couple of weeks before, I have written an introduction about the chart control available in .Net framework. In that article, I explained the basic usage of the chart control with a simple example. You can read that article from the url http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2010/12/31/getting-started-with-chart-control-in-asp-net-4-0.aspx. In this article I am going to demonstrate how one can generate various types of charts that can be generated easily using the ASP.Net chart control. Let us recollect the data sample we were working in the previous sample. The following is the data I used in the previous article. id SaleAmount SalesPerson SaleType SaleDate CompletionStatus (%) 1 1000 Jack Development 2010-01-01 100 2 300 Mills Consultancy 2010-04-14 90 3 4000 Mills Development 2010-05-15 80 4 2500 Mike eMarketting 2010-06-15 40 5 1080 Jack Development 2010-07-15 30 6 6500 Mills Consultancy 2010-08-24 65 In this article I am going to demonstrate various graphical reports generated from this data with the help of chart control. The following are the reports I am going to generate 1. Representation of share of Sales by each Sales person. 2. Representation of share of sales data according to sale type 3. Representation of sales progress over time period I am going to demonstrate how to bind the chart control programmatically. In order to facilitate this, I created an aspx page named “SalesAnalysis.Aspx” to my project. In the page I added the following controls 1. Dropdownlist control – with id ddlAnalysisType, user will use this to choose the type of chart they want to see. 2. A Button control – with id btnSubmit , by clicking this button, the chart based on the dropdownlist selection will be shown to the user 3. A label Control – with id lblMessage, to display the message to the user, initially this will ask the user to select an option and click on the button. 4. Chart control – with id chrtAnalysis, by default, I set visible = false so that during the page load the chart will be hidden to the users. The following is the initial output of the page. Generating chart for salesperson share Now from Visual Studio, I have double clicked on the button; it created the event handler btnSubmit_Click. In the button Submit event handler, I am using a switch case to execute the corresponding SQL statement and bind it to the chart control. The below is the code for generating the sales person share chart using a pie chart. The above code produces the following output The steps for creating the above chart can be summarized as follows. You specify a chart area, then a series and bind the chart to some x and y values. That is it. If you want to control the chart size and position, you can set the properties for the ChartArea.Position element. For e.g. in the previous code, after instantiating the chart area, setting the below code will give you a bigger pie chart. c.Position.Width = 100; c.Position.Height = 100; The width and height values are in percentage. In this case the chart will be generated by utilizing all the width and height of the chart object. See the output updated with the width and height set to 100% each. Generate Chart for sales type share Now for generating the chart according to the sales type, you just need to change the SQL query and x and y values of the chart. The Sql query used is “SELECT SUM(saleAmount) amount, SaleType from SalesData group by SaleType” and the X-Value is amount and Y-Values is SaleType. s.XValueMember = "SaleType"; s.YValueMembers = "amount"; After modifying the above code with these, the following output is generated. Generate Chart for sales progress over time period For generating the progress of sale chart against sales amount / period, line chart is the ideal tool. In order to facilitate the line chart, you can use Chart Type as System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.SeriesChartType.Line. Also we need to retrieve the amount and sales date from the data source. I have used the following query to facilitate this. “SELECT SaleAmount, SaleDate FROM SalesData” The output for the line chart is as follows Now you have seen how easily you can build various types of charts. Chart control is an excellent one that helps you to bring business intelligence to your applications. What I demonstrated in only a small part of what you can do with the chart control. Refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd456632.aspx for further reading. If you want to get the project files in zip format, post your email below. Hope you enjoyed reading this article.

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• Meet our 2009 Oracle Graduates in South Africa

  - by anca.rosu

  Focusing on the broader Oracle community, Oracle South Africa initiated its first skills development programme in May 1988. Since its inception the programme has developed and improved and every year more graduates are taken on board. The Oracle Graduate Programme is made up of specific learning paths designed around customer, partner and Oracle specifications and is structured to meet the urgent skills requirements in the Oracle “economy”. The training programmes have a specific duration and incorporate both theoretical and practical application of Oracle product sets. It is aimed at creating: Meaningful employment for graduates; Learning opportunities for individuals within the organization so that career growth opportunities are exploited to the fullest; Capacity building for small enterprises which is aligned to Oracle’s Enterprise Development Programme Meet our five graduates who joined us in December 2008 and have spent over a year with us! Let’s get their initial feedback on the graduate programme and on their assignment to Jordan. Lector   On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “The Oracle Graduate Programme is an experience of a life time. I would not trade it for anything. It’s challenging and rewarding. I am proud and happy to be in an organization like Oracle” On the assignment in Jordan: "Friendly, welcoming people, world class instructors always willing to go the extra mile. What more can you ask for?"   Lungile On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “I joined Oracle as part of the graduate intake for pre-sales in order to develop my skills and knowledge. Working at Oracle has been an overwhelmingly positive experience as it has encouraged me to progress with my personal development. I am hugely grateful. It has been a great challenge and an awesome opportunity.” On the assignment to Jordan: “Going to Jordan was a great opportunity and the experience of a lifetime. The people were very welcoming and friendly. The culture was totally different from ours - the food, the clothes and the weather. It was an amazingly different experience to work from Sunday to Thursday with Friday and Saturday as the weekend.” Thabo On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “Life is an infinite learning path. I truly value growth. I believe for one to grow, one needs to be challenged to your full potential. The Oracle Graduate Programme offers real growth – and so much more.” On the assignment to Jordan: “I was amazed by the cultural differences. I now understood that to be part of the global community, I must embrace our similarities and understand our differences.”   Albeauty On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “Responsibility, dedication, focus and taking initiative … these are the key points I learned from Oracle. It is such an honour to finally be part of the Oracle family. The graduate programme itself was a great experience as I managed to learn how Oracle operates – it has been the highlight of my year. I believe that my hard work will assist in the growth of the company.” On the Jordan assignment: “A memory worth embracing. Going to Jordan was a great opportunity as I learned a lot with respect to integration between different cultures and getting to adapt to all things different. I, along with almost every other graduate, discovered that Oracle is far more than a database company. Now I know there is far more to the ‘Big Red’ name.” Emmanuel On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “The programme gave me invaluable exposure to the ICT sector and also provided an opportunity to travel, network and exchange ideas with others. The formal training helped me to improve my presentation skills and gave me a better understanding of business etiquette and communication.” On the assignment to Jordan: “It was my first trip abroad. It was a great chance to get to know each other. I had the opportunity to share ideas, share personal stuff as a team. We met experts who gave us superb training in Oracle Technologies. It was great.”   If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com.   Technorati Tags: Oracle community,South Africa,Graduate Programme,Jordan,Technologies

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• SQL SERVER – Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together

  - by pinaldave

  I receive a lot of emails every day. I try to answer each and every email and comments on Facebook and Twitter. I prefer communication on social media as this gives opportunities to others to read the questions and participate along with me. There is always some question which everyone likes to read and remember. Here is one of the questions which I received in email. I believe the same question will be there any many developers who are beginning with SQL Server. I decided to blog about it so everyone can read it and participate. “I am beginner in SQL Server. I have a very interesting situation and need your help. I am beginner to SQL Server and that is why I do not have access to the production server and I work entirely on the development server. The project I am working on is also in the infant stage as well. In product I had to create a multiple tables and every table had few columns. Later on I have written Stored Procedures using those tables. During a code review my manager has requested to change one of the column which I have used in the table. As per him the naming convention was not accurate. Now changing the columname in the table is not a big issue. I figured out that I can do it very quickly either using T-SQL script or SQL Server Management Studio. The real problem is that I have used this column in nearly 50+ stored procedure. This looks like a very mechanical task. I believe I can go and change it in nearly 50+ stored procedure but is there a better solution I can use. Someone suggested that I should just go ahead and find the text in system table and update it there. Is that safe solution? If not, what is your solution. In simple words, How to replace a column name in multiple stored procedure efficiently and quickly? Please help me here with keeping my experience and non-production server in mind.” Well, I found this question very interesting. Honestly I would have preferred if this question was asked on my social media handles (Facebook and Twitter) as I am very active there and quite often before I reach there other experts have already answered this question. Anyway I am now answering the same question on the blog so all of us can participate here and come up with an appropriate answer. Here is my answer - “My Friend, I do not advice to touch system table. Please do not go that route. It can be dangerous and not appropriate. The issue which you faced today is what I used to face in early career as well I still face it often. There are two sets of argument I have observed – there are people who see no value in the name of the object and name objects like obj1, obj2 etc. There are sets of people who carefully chose the name of the object where object name is self-explanatory and almost tells a story. I am not here to take any side in this blog post – so let me go to a quick solution for your problem. Note: Following should not be directly practiced on Production Server. It should be properly tested on development server and once it is validated they should be pushed to your production server with your existing deployment practice. The answer is here assuming you have regular stored procedures and you are working on the Development NON Production Server. Go to Server Note >> Databases >> DatabaseName >> Programmability >> Stored Procedure Now make sure that Object Explorer Details are open (if not open it by clicking F7). You will see the list of all the stored procedures there. Now you will see a list of all the stored procedures on the right side list. Select either all of them or the one which you believe are relevant to your query. Now… Right click on the stored procedures >> SELECT DROP and CREATE to >> Now select New Query Editor Window or Clipboard. Paste the complete script to a new window if you have selected Clipboard option. Now press Control+H which will bring up the Find and Replace Screen. In this screen insert the column to be replaced in the “Find What”box and new column name into “Replace With” box. Now execute the whole script. As we have selected DROP and CREATE to, it will created drop the old procedure and create the new one. Another method would do all the same procedure but instead of DROP and CREATE manually replace the CREATE word with ALTER world. There is a small advantage in doing this is that if due to any reason the error comes up which prevents the new stored procedure to be created you will have your old stored procedure in the system as it is. “ Well, this was my answer to the question which I have received. Do you see any other workaround or solution? Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Stored Procedure, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Calling All Agile Customers-Share Your Stories at the Upcoming PLM Summit

  - by Terri Hiskey

  Now that we've closed the door on another Oracle OpenWorld, planning is in full swing for the next PLM Summit, taking place February 4-6, 2013 in San Francisco, in conjunction with the Oracle Value Chain Summit. This event is a must-attend for all Agile PLM customers. We will be holding five tracks with over forty Agile PLM-focused sessions covering a range of topics and industries. If you'd like to be notified once registration is live for this event, be sure to sign up at www.oracle.com/goto/vcs. CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS: We are looking for some fresh, new customer stories to share with attendees. Read below for descriptions of the five tracks, and the suggested topics that we'd like to hear from customers. If you are interested in presenting at the PLM Summit (and getting a FREE pass to attend if your presentation is accepted!) send me an email at terri.hiskey-AT-oracle.com with: Your proposed session title and the track your session fits into 3-5 bullets of takeaways that attendees will get from your presentation Your complete contact information including name, title, company, telephone number and email The deadline for this call for presentations is Thursday, November 15, so get your submission in soon! PLM Track #1:  Product Insights and Best Practices This track will provide executive attendees and line of business managers with an overview of how Agile PLM has been deployed and used at customers to enable and manage critical product-related business processes including enterprise quality and supplier management, compliance, product cost management, portfolio management, commercialization and software lifecycle management. These sessions will also provide details around how to manage the development and rollout of the solutions and how to achieve and track value. Possible session topics: Software Lifecycle Management Enterprise Quality Management New Product Development Integrated Business Planning ECO effectivity planning Rapid Commercialization             Manage the Design to Release Process for Complex Configured Products PLM for Life Sciences Companies I (Compliant Data Set) PLM for Life Sciences Companies II (eMDR, UDI) Discrete CPG – Private Label Mgmt Cost Management and Strategic Sourcing IP Mgmt in the Semiconductor Industry Implementing the Enterprise Training Record using Agile PLM PLM Track #2: Product Deep Dives & Demos This track is aimed at line of business  and IT managers who would like to understand the benefits of expanding their PLM footprint. The sessions in this track will provide attendees with an up-close and in-depth look Agile PLM’s newer and exciting applications, including analytics and innovation management, and will detail features and functionality that are available in the latest version of Agile PLM Possible session topics: Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Integrating PLM with Engineering and Supply Chain Systems Streamline PLM Design to Manufacturing Processes with AutoVue Visualization Solutions         Achieve Environmental Compliance (REACH and ROHS) with Agile Product Governance & Compliance PIM Deep Dive Achieving Integrated Change Control with Agile PLM and E-Business Suite Deploying PLM at Small and Midsize Enterprises Enhancing Oracle PQM w/APQP and 8D functionality Advanced Roles and Privileges – Enabling ITAR Model Unit Effectivity Implementing REACH with 9.3.2 Deploying Job Functions, Functional Teams in 9.3.2 to Improve Your Approval Matrix PLM Track #3: Administration & Integrations This track will provide sessions for Agile administrators, managers and daily Agile PLM users who are preparing to upgrade or looking to extend the use of their current PLM implementation through AIA and process extensions. It will include deeper conversation about Agile PLM features and best practices on managing an Agile PLM infrastructure. Possible session topics: Expand the Value of your Agile Investment with Innovative Process Extension Ideas Ensuring Implementation & Upgrade Success Ensure the Integrity and Accuracy of Product Data Across the Enterprise              Maximize the Benefits of an Integrated Architecture with AIA Integrating your PLM Implementation with ERP               Infrastructure Optimization Expanding Your PLM Implementation PLM Administrator Open Forum Q&A/Discussion FDA Validation Best Practices Best Practices for Managing a large Agile Deployment: Clustering, Load Balancing and Firewalls PLM Track #4: Agile PLM for Process This track is aimed at attendees interested in or currently using Agile PLM for Process. The sessions in this track will go over new features and functionality available in the newest version of PLM for Process and will give attendees an overview on how PLM for Process is being used to manage critical business processes such as formulation, recipe and specification management Possible session topics: PLM for Process Strategy, Roadmap and Update New Product Development and Introduction Effective Product Supplier Collaboration             Leverage Agile Formulation and Compliance to Manage Cost, Compliance, Quality, Labeling and Nutrition Menu Management Innovation Data Management Food Safety/ Introduction of P4P Quality Mgmt PLM Track #5: Agile PLM and Innovation Management This track consists of five sessions, and is for attendees interested in learning more about Oracle’s Agile Innovation Management, an exciting new addition to the Agile PLM application family that redefines the industry’s scope of product lifecycle management. Oracle’s innovation solutions enable companies to collaborate in a focused way among various functional groups (marketing, sales, operations, engineering/R&D and sourcing), combining insights of customer needs/requirements, competition, available technologies, alternate design scenarios and portfolio constraints to deliver what customers truly value. The results are better products, higher margins, greater efficiencies, more satisfied customers and the increased ability to continuously innovate. Possible session topics: Product Innovation Management Solution Overview Product Requirements & Ideation Management Concept Design Management Product Lifecycle Portfolio Management Innovation as a Competitive Differentiator

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• Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp - Reading (UK) - October 1-12, 2012

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  REGISTER NOW: Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp Reading, UK, October 1-12, 2012! OPN invites you to join us for a 10-day implementation bootcamp on Oracle ATG Web Commerce in Reading, UK from October 1-12, 2012.This 10-day boot camp is designed to provide partners with hands-on experience and technical training to successfully build and deploy Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Applications. This particular boot camp is focused on helping partners develop the essential skills needed to implement every aspect of an ATG Commerce Application from scratch, (not CRS-based), with a specific goal of enabling experienced Java/J2EE developers with a path towards becoming functional, effective, and contributing members of an ATG implementation team. Built for both new and experienced ATG developers alike, the collaborative nature of this program and its exercises, have proven to be highly effective and extremely valuable in learning the best practices for implementing ATG solutions. Though not required, this bootcamp provides a structured path to earning a Certified Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Specialization! What Is Covered: This boot camp is for Application Developers and Software Architects wanting to gain valuable insight into ATG application development best practices, as well as relevant and applicable implementation experience on projects modeled after four of the most common types of applications built on the ATG platform. The following learning objectives are all critical, and are of equal priority in enabling this role to succeed. This learning boot camp will help with: Building a basic functional transaction-ready ATG Web Commerce 10 Application. Utilizing ATG’s platform features such as scenarios, slots, targeters, user profiles and segments, to create a personalized user experience. Building Nucleus components to support and/or extend application functionality. Understanding the intricacies of ATG order checkout and fulfillment. Specifying, designing and implementing new commerce features in ATG 10. Building a functional commerce application modeled after four of the most common types of applications built on the ATG platform, within an agile-based project team environment and under simulated real-world project conditions. Duration: The Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp is an instructor-led workshop spanning 10 days. Audience: Application Developers Software Architects Prerequisite Training and Environment Requirements: Programming and Markup Experience with Java J2EE, JavaScript, XML, HTML and CSS Completion of Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Specialist Development Guided Learning Path modules Participants will be required to bring their own laptop that meets the minimum specifications:   64-bit PC and OS (e.g. Windows 7 64-bit) 4GB RAM or more 40GB Hard Disk Space Laptops will require access to the Internet through Remote Desktop via Windows. Agenda Topics: Week 1 – Day 1 through 5 Build a Basic Commerce Application In week one of the boot camp training, we will apply knowledge learned from the ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Guided Learning Path modules, towards building a basic transaction-ready commerce application. There will be little to no lectures delivered in this boot camp, as developers will be fully engaged in ATG Application Development activities and best practices. Developers will work independently on the following lab assignments from day's 1 through 5: Lab Assignments  1 Environment Setup 2 Build a dynamic Home Page 3 Site Authentication 4 Build Customer Registration 5 Display Top Level Categories 6 Display Product Sub-Categories 7 Display Product List Page 8 Display Product Detail Page 9 ATG Inventory 10 Build “Add to Cart” Functionality 11 Build Shopping Cart 12 Build Checkout Page  13 Build Checkout Review Page 14 Create an Order and Build Order Confirmation Page 15 Implement Slots and Targeters for Personalization 16 Implement Pricing and Promotions 17 Order Fulfillment Back to top Week 2 – Day 6 through 10 Team-based Case Project In the second week of the boot camp training, participants will be asked to join a project team that will select a case project for the team to implement. Teams will be able to choose from four of the most common application types developed and deployed on the ATG platform. They are as follows: Hard goods with physical fulfillment, Soft goods with electronic fulfillment, a Service or subscription case example, a Course/Event registration case example. Team projects will have approximately 160 hours of use cases/stories for each team to build (40 hours per developer). Each day's Use Cases/Stories will build upon the prior day's work, and therefore must be fully completed at the end of each day. Please note that this boot camp intends to simulate real-world project conditions, and as such will likely require the need for project teams to possibly work beyond normal business hours. To promote further collaboration and group learning, each team will be asked to present their work and share the methodologies and solutions that they've applied to their cases at the end of each day. Location: Oracle Reading CVC TPC510 Room: Wraysbury Reading, UK 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM  Registration Fee (10 Days): US $3,375 Please click on the following link to REGISTER or  visit the Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp page for more information. Questions: Patrick Ty Partner Enablement, Oracle Commerce Phone: 310.343.7687 Mobile: 310.633.1013 Email: [email protected]

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• New Replication, Optimizer and High Availability features in MySQL 5.6.5!

  - by Rob Young

  As the Product Manager for the MySQL database it is always great to announce when the MySQL Engineering team delivers another great product release.  As a field DBA and developer it is even better when that release contains improvements and innovation that I know will help those currently using MySQL for apps that range from modest intranet sites to the most highly trafficked web sites on the web.  That said, it is my pleasure to take my hat off to MySQL Engineering for today's release of the MySQL 5.6.5 Development Milestone Release ("DMR"). The new highlighted features in MySQL 5.6.5 are discussed here: New Self-Healing Replication ClustersThe 5.6.5 DMR improves MySQL Replication by adding Global Transaction Ids and automated utilities for self-healing Replication clusters.  Prior to 5.6.5 this has been somewhat of a pain point for MySQL users with most developing custom solutions or looking to costly, complex third-party solutions for these capabilities.  With 5.6.5 these shackles are all but removed by a solution that is included with the GPL version of the database and supporting GPL tools.  You can learn all about the details of the great, problem solving Replication features in MySQL 5.6 in Mat Keep's Developer Zone article.  New Replication Administration and Failover UtilitiesAs mentioned above, the new Replication features, Global Transaction Ids specifically, are now supported by a set of automated GPL utilities that leverage the new GTIDs to provide administration and manual or auto failover to the most up to date slave (that is the default, but user configurable if needed) in the event of a master failure. The new utilities, along with links to Engineering related blogs, are discussed in detail in the DevZone Article noted above. Better Query Optimization and ThroughputThe MySQL Optimizer team continues to amaze with the latest round of improvements in 5.6.5. Along with much refactoring of the legacy code base, the Optimizer team has improved complex query optimization and throughput by adding these functional improvements: Subquery Optimizations - Subqueries are now included in the Optimizer path for runtime optimization.  Better throughput of nested queries enables application developers to simplify and consolidate multiple queries and result sets into a single unit or work. Optimizer now uses CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as default for DATETIME columns - For simplification, this eliminates the need for application developers to assign this value when a column of this type is blank by default. Optimizations for Range based queries - Optimizer now uses ready statistics vs Index based scans for queries with multiple range values. Optimizations for queries using filesort and ORDER BY.  Optimization criteria/decision on execution method is done now at optimization vs parsing stage. Print EXPLAIN in JSON format for hierarchical readability and Enterprise tool consumption. You can learn the details about these new features as well all of the Optimizer based improvements in MySQL 5.6 by following the Optimizer team blog. You can download and try the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR here. (look under "Development Releases")  Please let us know what you think!  The new HA utilities for Replication Administration and Failover are available as part of the MySQL Workbench Community Edition, which you can download here .Also New in MySQL LabsAs has become our tradition when announcing DMRs we also like to provide "Early Access" development features to the MySQL Community via the MySQL Labs.  Today is no exception as we are also releasing the following to Labs for you to download, try and let us know your thoughts on where we need to improve:InnoDB Online OperationsMySQL 5.6 now provides Online ADD Index, FK Drop and Online Column RENAME.  These operations are non-blocking and will continue to evolve in future DMRs.  You can learn the grainy details by following John Russell's blog.InnoDB data access via Memcached API ("NotOnlySQL") - Improved refresh of an earlier feature releaseSimilar to Cluster 7.2, MySQL 5.6 provides direct NotOnlySQL access to InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. This provides the ultimate in flexibility for developers who need fast, simple key/value access and complex query support commingled within their applications.Improved Transactional Performance, ScaleThe InnoDB Engineering team has once again under promised and over delivered in the area of improved performance and scale.  These improvements are also included in the aggregated Spring 2012 labs release:InnoDB CPU cache performance improvements for modern, multi-core/CPU systems show great promise with internal tests showing:    2x throughput improvement for read only activity 6x throughput improvement for SELECT range Read/Write benchmarks are in progress More details on the above are available here. You can download all of the above in an aggregated "InnoDB 2012 Spring Labs Release" binary from the MySQL Labs. You can also learn more about these improvements and about related fixes to mysys mutex and hash sort by checking out the InnoDB team blog.MySQL 5.6.5 is another installment in what we believe will be the best release of the MySQL database ever.  It also serves as a shining example of how the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle leads in MySQL innovation.You can get the overall Oracle message on the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR and Early Access labs features here. As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL, the #1 open source database on the planet!

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• Announcing the New Windows Azure Web Sites Shared Scaling Tier

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Windows Azure Web Sites has added a new pricing tier that will solve the #1 blocker for the web development community. The shared tier now supports custom domain names mapped to shared-instance web sites. This post will outline the plan changes and elaborate on how the new pricing model makes Windows Azure Web Sites an even richer option for web development shops of all sizes. Free Shared Reserved # of Sites 10 100 100 Egress 165MB/Day 5GB/Month Included 5GB/Month Included Storage 1GB 1GB 10GB Throttling CPU/Memory/Egress CPU/Memory Unlimited Price Free $.02/hr per site, per instance $.08/hr per core Setting the Stage In June, we released the first public preview of Windows Azure Web Sites, which gave web developers a great platform on which to get web sites running using their web development framework of choice. PHP, Node.js, classic ASP, and ASP.NET developers can all utilize the Windows Azure platform to create and launch their web sites. Likewise, these developers have a series of data storage options using Windows Azure SQL Databases, MySQL, or Windows Azure Storage. The Windows Azure Web Sites free offer enabled startups to get their site up and running on Windows Azure with a minimal investment, and with multiple deployment and continuous integration features such as Git, Team Foundation Services, FTP, and Web Deploy.  The response to the Windows Azure Web Sites offer has been overwhelmingly positive. Since the addition of the service on June 12th, tens of thousands of web sites have been deployed to Windows Azure and the volume of adoption is increasing every week. Preview Feedback In spite of the growth and success of the product, the community has had questions about features lacking in the free preview offer. The main question web developers asked regarding Windows Azure Web Sites relates to the lack of the free offer’s support for domain name mapping. During the preview launch period, customer feedback made it obvious that the lack of domain name mapping support was an area of concern. We’re happy to announce that this #1 request has been delivered as a feature of the new shared plan. New Shared Tier Portal Features In the screen shot below, the “Scale” tab in the portal shows the new tiers – Free, Shared, and Reserved – and gives the user the ability to quickly move any of their free web sites into the shared tier. With a single mouse-click, the user can move their site into the shared tier. Once a site has been moved into the shared tier, a new Manage Domains button appears in the bottom action bar of the Windows Azure Portal giving site owners the ability to manage their domain names for a shared site. This button brings up the domain-management dialog, which can be used to enter in a specific domain name that will be mapped to the Windows Azure Web Site. Shared Tier Benefits Startups and large web agencies will both benefit from this plan change. Here are a few examples of scenarios which fit the new pricing model: Startups no longer have to select the reserved plan to map domain names to their sites. Instead, they can use the free option to develop their sites and choose on a site-by-site basis which sites they elect to move into the shared plan, paying only for the sites that are finished and ready to be domain-mapped Agencies who manage dozens of sites will realize a lower cost of ownership over the long term by moving their sites into reserved mode. Once multi-site companies reach a certain price point in the shared tier, it is much more cost-effective to move sites to a reserved tier.  Long-term, it’s easy to see how the new Windows Azure Web Sites shared pricing tier makes Windows Azure Web Sites it a great choice for both startups and agency customers, as it enables rapid growth and upgrades while keeping the cost to a minimum. Large agencies will be able to have all of their sites in their own instances, and startups will have the capability to scale up to multiple-shared instances for minimal cost and eventually move to reserved instances without worrying about the need to incur continually additional costs. Customers can feel confident they have the power of the Microsoft Windows Azure brand and our world-class support, at prices competitive in the market. Plus, in addition to realizing the cost savings, they’ll have the whole family of Windows Azure features available. Continuous Deployment from GitHub and CodePlex Along with this new announcement are two other exciting new features. I’m proud to announce that web developers can now publish their web sites directly from CodePlex or GitHub.com repositories. Once connections are established between these services and your web sites, Windows Azure will automatically be notified every time a check-in occurs. This will then trigger Windows Azure to pull the source and compile/deploy the new version of your app to your web site automatically. Walk-through videos on how to perform these functions are below: Publishing to an Azure Web Site from CodePlex Publishing to an Azure Web Site from GitHub.com These changes, as well as the enhancements to the reserved plan model, make Windows Azure Web Sites a truly competitive hosting option. It’s never been easier or cheaper for a web developer to get up and running. Check out the free Windows Azure web site offering and see for yourself. Stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows Azure announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

  Since a while I'm considering to pick up my activities as a student and I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science. Personal motivation I mean after all this years as a professional software (and database) developer I have the personal urge to complete this part of my education. Having various certifications by Microsoft and being awarded as an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) twice looks pretty awesome on a resume but having a "proper" degree would just complete my package. During the last couple of years I already got in touch with C-SAC (local business school with degree courses), the University of Mauritius and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT to check the options to enroll as an experienced software developer. Quite frankly, it was kind of alienating to receive that feedback: Start from scratch! No seriously? Spending x amount of years to sit for courses that might be outdated and form part of your daily routine? Probably being in an awkward situation in which your professional expertise might exceed the lecturers knowledge? I don't know... but if that's path to walk... Well, then I might have to go for it. SUPINFO International University Some weeks ago I was contacted by the General Manager, Education Recruitment and Development of Medine Education Village, Yamal Matabudul, to have a chat on how the local IT scene, namely the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC), could assist in their plans to promote their upcoming campus. Medine went into partnership with the French-based SUPINFO International University and Mauritius will be the 36th location world-wide for SUPINFO. Actually, the concept of SUPINFO is very likely to the common understanding of an apprenticeship in Germany. Not only does a student enroll into the programme but will also be placed into various internships as part of the curriculum. It's a big advantage in my opinion as the person stays in touch with the daily procedures and workflows in the real world of IT. Statements like "We just received a 'crash course' of information and learned new technology which is equivalent to 1.5 months of lectures at the university" wouldn't form part of the experience of such an education. Open Day at the Medine Education Village Last Saturday, Medine organised their Open Day and it was the official inauguration of the SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. It's now listed on their website, too - but be warned, the site is mainly in French language although the courses are all done in English. Not only was it a big opportunity to "hang out" on the campus of Medine but it was great to see the first professional partners for their internship programme, too. Oh, just for the records, IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. will also be among the future employers for SUPINFO students. More about that in an upcoming blog entry. Open Day at Medine Education Village - SUPINFO International University in Mauritius Mr Alick Mouriesse, President of SUPINFO, arrived the previous day and he gave all attendees a great overview of the roots of SUPINFO, the general development of the educational syllabus and their high emphasis on their partnerships with local IT companies in order to assist their students to get future jobs but also feel the heartbeat of technology live. Something which is completely missing in classic institutions of tertiary education in Computer Science. And since I was on tour with my children, as usual during weekends, he also talked about the outlook of having a SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. Apart from the close connection to IT companies and providing internships to students, SUPINFO clearly works on an international level. Meaning students of SUPINFO can move around the globe and can continue their studies seamlessly. For example, you might enroll for your first year in France, then continue to do 2nd and 3rd year in Canada or any other country with a SUPINFO campus to earn your bachelor degree, and then live and study in Mauritius for the next 2 years to achieve a Master degree. Having a chat with Dale Smith, Expand Technologies, after his interesting session on Technological Entrepreneurship - TechPreneur More questions by other craftsmen of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community And of course, this concept works in any direction, giving Mauritian students a huge (!) opportunity to live, study and work abroad. And thanks to this, Medine already announced that there will be new facilities near Cascavelle to provide dormitories and other facilities to international students coming to our island. Awesome! Okay, but why SUPINFO? Well, coming back to my original statement - I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science - SUPINFO has a process called Validation of Acquired Experience (VAE) which is tailor-made for employees in the field of IT, and allows you to enroll in their course programme. I already got in touch with their online support chat but was only redirected to some FAQs on their website, unfortunately. So, during the Open Day I seized the opportunity to have an one-on-one conversation with Alick Mouriesse, and he clearly encouraged me to gather my certifications and working experience. SUPINFO does an individual evaluation prior to their assignment regarding course level, and hopefully my chances of getting some modules ahead of studies are looking better than compared to the other institutes. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go down the easy route but why should someone sit for "Database 101" or "Principles of OOP" when applying and preaching database normalisation and practicing Clean Code Developer are like flesh and blood? Anyway, I'll be off to get my transcripts of certificates together with my course assignments from the old days at the university. Yes, I studied Applied Chemistry for a couple of years before intersecting into IT and software development particularly... ;-)

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• IndyTechFest Recap

  - by Johnm

  The sun had yet to raise above the horizon on Saturday, May 22nd and I was traveling toward the location of the 2010 IndyTechFest. In my freshly awaken, and pre-coffee, state I reflected on the months that preceded this day and how quickly they slipped away. The big day had finally come and the morning dew glistened with a unique brightness that morning. What is this all about? For those who are unfamiliar with IndyTechFest, it is a regional conference held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA) and the Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server (IndyPASS).  The event presents multiple tracks and sessions covering subjects such as Business Intelligence,  Database Administration, .NET Development, SharePoint Development, Windows Mobile Development as well as non-Microsoft topics such as Lean and MongoDB. This year's event was the third hosting of IndyTechFest. No man is an island No event such as IndyTechFest is executed by a single person. My fellow co-founders, with their highly complementary skill sets and philanthropy make the process very enjoyable. Our amazing volunteers and their aid were indispensible. The generous financial support of our sponsors that made the event and fabulous prizes possible. The spectacular line up of speakers who came from near and far to donate their time and knowledge. Our beloved attendees who sacrificed the first sunny Saturday in weeks to expand their skill sets and network with their peers. We are deeply appreciative. Challenges in preparation With the preparation of any event comes challenges. It is these challenges that makes the process of planning an event so interesting. This year's largest challenge was the location of the event. In the past two years IndyTechFest was held at the Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Center in Indianapolis. This facility has been the hub of the Indy technical community for many years. As the big day drew near, the facility's availability came into question due to some recent changes that had occurred with those who operated the facility. We began our search for an alternative option. Thankfully, the Marriott Indianapolis East was available, was very spacious and willing to work within the range of our budget. Within days of our event, the decision to move proved to be wise since the prior location had begun renovations to the interior. Whew! Always trust your gut. Every day it's getting better At the ending of each year, we huddle together, review the evaluations and identify an area in which the event could improve. This year's big opportunity for improvement resided in the prize give-away portion at the end of the day. In the 2008 event, admittedly, this portion was rather chaotic, rushed and disorganized. This year, we broke the drawing into two sections, of which each attendee received two tickets. The first ticket was a drawing for the mountain of books that were given away. The second ticket was a drawing for the big prizes, the 2 Xboxes, 3 laptops and iPad. We peppered the ticket drawings with gift card raffles and tossing t-shirts into the audience. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again Each year of IndyTechFest, we have offered a means for ad-hoc sessions or discussion groups to pop-up. To our disappointment it was something that never quite took off. We have always believed that this unique type of session was valuable and wanted to figure out a way to make it work for this year. A special thanks to Alan Stevens, who took on and facilitated the "open space" track and made it an official success. Share with your tweety When the attendee badges were designed we decided to place an emphasis on the attendee's Twitter account as well as the events hash-tag (#IndyTechFest) to encourage some real-time buzz during the day. At the host table we displayed a Twitter feed for all to enjoy. It was quite successful and encouraging use of social media. My badge was missing my Twitter account since it was recently changed. For those who care to follow my rather sparse tweets, my address is @johnnydata. Man, this is one long blog post! All in all it was a very successful event. It is always great to see new faces and meet old friends. The planning for the 2011 IndyTechFest will kick off very soon. We have more capacity for future growth and a truck full of great ideas. Stay tuned!

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