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  • Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

    - by Matthew Guay
    Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7.  Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running on Windows 7 x64.  For fun, we ran the 95 upgrade on the 3.1 virtual machine we built last week. Windows 95 So let’s get started.  Here’s the first setup screen.  For the record, Windows 95 installed in about 15 minutes or less in VMware in our test. Strangely, Windows 95 offered several installation choices.  They actually let you choose what extra parts of Windows to install if you wished.  Oh, and who wants to run Windows 95 on your “Portable Computer”?  Most smartphones today are more powerful than the “portable computers” of 95. Your productivity may vastly increase if you run Windows 95.  Anyone want to switch? No, I don’t want to restart … I want to use my computer! Welcome to Windows 95!  Hey, did you know you can launch programs from the Start button? Our quick spin around Windows 95 reminded us why Windows got such a bad reputation in the ‘90’s for being unstable.  We didn’t even get our test copy fully booted after installation before we saw our first error screen.  Windows in space … was that the most popular screensaver in Windows 95, or was it just me? Hello Windows 3.1!  The UI was still outdated in some spots.   Ah, yes, Media Player before it got 101 features to compete with iTunes. But, you couldn’t even play CDs in Media Player.  Actually, CD player was one program I used almost daily in Windows 95 back in the day. Want some new programs?  This help file about new programs designed for Windows 95 lists a lot of outdated names in tech.    And, you really may want some programs.  The first edition of Windows 95 didn’t even ship with Internet Explorer.   We’ve still got Minesweeper, though! My Computer had really limited functionality, and by default opened everything in a new window.  Double click on C:, and it opens in a new window.  Ugh. But Explorer is a bit more like more modern versions. Hey, look, Start menu search!  If only it found the files you were looking for… Now I’m feeling old … this shutdown screen brought back so many memories … of shutdowns that wouldn’t shut down! But, you still have to turn off your computer.  I wonder how many old monitors had these words burned into them? So there’s yet another trip down Windows memory lane.  Most of us can remember using Windows 95, so let us know your favorite (or worst) memory of it!  At least we can all be thankful for our modern computers and operating systems today, right?  Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Fun: Remember the Old-School SkiFree Game?Geek Fun: Virtualized old school Windows 3.11Stupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7Stupid Geek Tricks: Select Multiple Windows on the TaskbarHow to Delete a System File in Windows 7 or Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Add Zune Desktop Player to Windows 7 Media Center

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Are you a Zune owner who prefers the Zune player for media playback? Today we’ll show you how to integrate the Zune player with WMC using Media Center Studio. You’ll need to download Media Center Studio and the Zune Desktop player software. (See download links below) Also, make sure you have Media Center closed. Some of the actions in Media Center Studio cannot be performed while WMC is open. Open Media Center Studio and click on the Start Menu tab at the top of the application.   Click the Application button. Here we will create an Entry Point for the Zune player so that we can add it to Media Center. Type in a name for your entry point in the title text box. This is the name that will appear under the tile when added to the Media Center start menu. Next, type in the path to the Zune player. By default this should be C:\Program Files\Zune\Zune.exe. Note: Be sure to use the original path, not a link to the desktop icon.   The Active image is the image that will appear on the tile in Media Center. If you wish to change the default image, click the Browse button and select a different image. Select Stop the currently playing media from the When launched do the following: dropdown list.  Otherwise, if you open Zune player from WMC while playing another form of media, that media will continue to play in the background.   Now we will choose a keystroke to use to exit the Zune player software and return to Media Center. Click on the the green plus (+) button. When prompted, press a key to use to the close the Zune player. Note: This may also work with your Media Center remote. You may want to set a keyboard keystroke as well as a button on your remote to close the program. You may not be able to set certain remote buttons to close the application. We found that the back arrow button worked well. You can also choose a keystroke to kill the program if desired. Be sure to save your work before exiting by clicking the Save button on the Home tab.   Next, select the Start Menu tab and click on the next to Entry points to reveal the available entry points. Find the Zune player tile in the Entry points area. We want to drag the tile out onto one of the menu strips on the start menu. We will drag ours onto the Extras Library strip. When you begin to drag the tile, green plus (+) signs will appear in between the tiles. When you’ve dragged the tile over any of the green plus signs, the  red “Move” label will turn to a blue “Move to” label. Now you can drop the tile into position. Save your changes and then close Media Center Studio. When you open Media Center, you should see your Zune tile on the start menu. When you select the Zune tile in WMC, Media Center will be minimized and Zune player will be launched. Now you can enjoy your media through the Zune player. When you close Zune player with the previously assigned keystroke or by clicking the “X” at the top right, Windows Media Center will be re-opened. Conclusion We found the Zune player worked with two different Media Center remotes that we tested. It was a times a little tricky at times to tell where you were when navigating through the Zune software with a remote, but it did work. In addition to managing your music, the Zune player is a nice way to add podcasts to your Media Center setup. We should also mention that you don’t need to actually own a Zune to install and use the Zune player software. Media Center Studio works on both Vista and Windows 7. We covered Media Center Studio a bit more in depth in a previous post on customizing the Windows Media Center start menu. Are you new to Zune player? Familiarize yourself a bit more by checking out some of our earlier posts like how to update your Zune player, and experiencing your music a whole new way with Zune for PC.   Downloads Zune Desktop Player download Media Center Studio download Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Rip a Music CD in Windows 7 Media CenterIntegrate Hulu Desktop and Windows Media Center in Windows 7Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesBuilt-in Quick Launch Hotkeys in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes Twelve must-have Google Chrome plugins

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  • New Product: Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 – Small, Smart, Connected

    - by terrencebarr
    The Internet of Things (IoT) is coming. And, with todays launch of the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 product, Java is going to play an even greater role in it. Java in the Internet of Things By all accounts, intelligent embedded devices are penetrating the world around us – driving industrial processes, monitoring environmental conditions, providing better health care, analyzing and processing data, and much more. And these devices are becoming increasingly connected, adding another dimension of utility. Welcome to the Internet of Things. As I blogged yesterday, this is a huge opportunity for the Java technology and ecosystem. To enable and utilize these billions of devices effectively you need a programming model, tools, and protocols which provide a feature-rich, consistent, scalable, manageable, and interoperable platform.  Java technology is ideally suited to address these technical and business problems, enabling you eliminate many of the typical challenges in designing embedded solutions. By using Java you can focus on building smarter, more valuable embedded solutions faster. To wit, Java technology is already powering around 10 billion devices worldwide. Delivering on this vision and accelerating the growth of embedded Java solutions, Oracle is today announcing a brand-new product: Oracle Java Micro Edition (ME) Embedded 3.2, accompanied by an update release of the Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK) to version 3.2. What is Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 is a complete Java runtime client, optimized for ARM architecture connected microcontrollers and other resource-constrained systems. The product provides dedicated embedded functionality and is targeted for low-power, limited memory devices requiring support for a range of network services and I/O interfaces.  What features and APIs are provided by Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 is a Java ME runtime based on CLDC 1.1 (JSR-139) and IMP-NG (JSR-228). The runtime and virtual machine (VM) are highly optimized for embedded use. Also included in the product are the following optional JSRs and Oracle APIs: File I/O API’s (JSR-75)  Wireless Messaging API’s (JSR-120) Web Services (JSR-172) Security and Trust Services subset (JSR-177) Location API’s (JSR-179) XML API’s (JSR-280)  Device Access API Application Management System (AMS) API AccessPoint API Logging API Additional embedded features are: Remote application management system Support for continuous 24×7 operation Application monitoring, auto-start, and system recovery Application access to peripheral interfaces such as GPIO, I2C, SPIO, memory mapped I/O Application level logging framework, including option for remote logging Headless on-device debugging – source level Java application debugging over IP Connection Remote configuration of the Java VM What type of platforms are targeted by Oracle Java ME 3.2 Embedded? The product is designed for embedded, always-on, resource-constrained, headless (no graphics/no UI), connected (wired or wireless) devices with a variety of peripheral I/O.  The high-level system requirements are as follows: System based on ARM architecture SOCs Memory footprint (approximate) from 130 KB RAM/350KB ROM (for a minimal, customized configuration) to 700 KB RAM/1500 KB ROM (for the full, standard configuration)  Very simple embedded kernel, or a more capable embedded OS/RTOS At least one type of network connection (wired or wireless) The initial release of the product is delivered as a device emulation environment for x86/Windows desktop computers, integrated with the Java ME SDK 3.2. A standard binary of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 for ARM KEIL development boards based on ARM Cortex M-3/4 (KEIL MCBSTM32F200 using ST Micro SOC STM32F207IG) will soon be available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).  What types of applications can I develop with Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? The Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 product is a full-featured embedded Java runtime supporting applications based on the IMP-NG application model, which is derived from the well-known MIDP 2 application model. The runtime supports execution of multiple concurrent applications, remote application management, versatile connectivity, and a rich set of APIs and features relevant for embedded use cases, including the ability to interact with peripheral I/O directly from Java applications. This rich feature set, coupled with familiar and best-in class software development tools, allows developers to quickly build and deploy sophisticated embedded solutions for a wide range of use cases. Target markets well supported by Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 include wireless modules for M2M, industrial and building control, smart grid infrastructure, home automation, and environmental sensors and tracking. What tools are available for embedded application development for Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? Along with the release of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2, Oracle is also making available an updated version of the Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK), together with plug-ins for the NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs, to deliver a complete development environment for embedded application development.  OK – sounds great! Where can I find out more? And how do I get started? There is a complete set of information, data sheet, API documentation, “Getting Started Guide”, FAQ, and download links available: For an overview of Oracle Embeddable Java, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 press release, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 data sheet, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 landing page, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 documentation page, including a “Getting Started Guide” and FAQ, see here. For the Oracle Java ME SDK 3.2 landing and download page, see here. Finally, to ask more questions, please see the OTN “Java ME Embedded” forum To get started, grab the “Getting Started Guide” and download the Java ME SDK 3.2, which includes the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 device emulation.  Can I learn more about Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 at JavaOne and/or Java Embedded @ JavaOne? Glad you asked Both conferences, JavaOne and Java Embedded @ JavaOne, will feature a host of content and information around the new Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 product, from technical and business sessions, to hands-on tutorials, and demos. Stay tuned, I will post details shortly. Cheers, – Terrence Filed under: Mobile & Embedded Tagged: "Oracle Java ME Embedded", Connected, embedded, Embedded Java, Java Embedded @ JavaOne, JavaOne, Smart

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  • SQL SERVER – Database Dynamic Caching by Automatic SQL Server Performance Acceleration

    - by pinaldave
    My second look at SafePeak’s new version (2.1) revealed to me few additional interesting features. For those of you who hadn’t read my previous reviews SafePeak and not familiar with it, here is a quick brief: SafePeak is in business of accelerating performance of SQL Server applications, as well as their scalability, without making code changes to the applications or to the databases. SafePeak performs database dynamic caching, by caching in memory result sets of queries and stored procedures while keeping all those cache correct and up to date. Cached queries are retrieved from the SafePeak RAM in microsecond speed and not send to the SQL Server. The application gets much faster results (100-500 micro seconds), the load on the SQL Server is reduced (less CPU and IO) and the application or the infrastructure gets better scalability. SafePeak solution is hosted either within your cloud servers, hosted servers or your enterprise servers, as part of the application architecture. Connection of the application is done via change of connection strings or adding reroute line in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file on all application servers. For those who would like to learn more on SafePeak architecture and how it works, I suggest to read this vendor’s webpage: SafePeak Architecture. More interesting new features in SafePeak 2.1 In my previous review of SafePeak new I covered the first 4 things I noticed in the new SafePeak (check out my article “SQLAuthority News – SafePeak Releases a Major Update: SafePeak version 2.1 for SQL Server Performance Acceleration”): Cache setup and fine-tuning – a critical part for getting good caching results Database templates Choosing which database to cache Monitoring and analysis options by SafePeak Since then I had a chance to play with SafePeak some more and here is what I found. 5. Analysis of SQL Performance (present and history): In SafePeak v.2.1 the tools for understanding of performance became more comprehensive. Every 15 minutes SafePeak creates and updates various performance statistics. Each query (or a procedure execute) that arrives to SafePeak gets a SQL pattern, and after it is used again there are statistics for such pattern. An important part of this product is that it understands the dependencies of every pattern (list of tables, views, user defined functions and procs). From this understanding SafePeak creates important analysis information on performance of every object: response time from the database, response time from SafePeak cache, average response time, percent of traffic and break down of behavior. One of the interesting things this behavior column shows is how often the object is actually pdated. The break down analysis allows knowing the above information for: queries and procedures, tables, views, databases and even instances level. The data is show now on all arriving queries, both read queries (that can be cached), but also any types of updates like DMLs, DDLs, DCLs, and even session settings queries. The stats are being updated every 15 minutes and SafePeak dashboard allows going back in time and investigating what happened within any time frame. 6. Logon trigger, for making sure nothing corrupts SafePeak cache data If you have an application with many parts, many servers many possible locations that can actually update the database, or the SQL Server is accessible to many DBAs or software engineers, each can access some database directly and do some changes without going thru SafePeak – this can create a potential corruption of the data stored in SafePeak cache. To make sure SafePeak cache is correct it needs to get all updates to arrive to SafePeak, and if a DBA will access the database directly and do some changes, for example, then SafePeak will simply not know about it and will not clean SafePeak cache. In the new version, SafePeak brought a new feature called “Logon Trigger” to solve the above challenge. By special click of a button SafePeak can deploy a special server logon trigger (with a CLR object) on your SQL Server that actually monitors all connections and informs SafePeak on any connection that is coming not from SafePeak. In SafePeak dashboard there is an interface that allows to control which logins can be ignored based on login names and IPs, while the rest will invoke cache cleanup of SafePeak and actually locks SafePeak cache until this connection will not be closed. Important to note, that this does not interrupt any logins, only informs SafePeak on such connection. On the Dashboard screen in SafePeak you will be able to see those connections and then decide what to do with them. Configuration of this feature in SafePeak dashboard can be done here: Settings -> SQL instances management -> click on instance -> Logon Trigger tab. Other features: 7. User management ability to grant permissions to someone without changing its configuration and only use SafePeak as performance analysis tool. 8. Better reports for analysis of performance using 15 minute resolution charts. 9. Caching of client cursors 10. Support for IPv6 Summary SafePeak is a great SQL Server performance acceleration solution for users who want immediate results for sites with performance, scalability and peak spikes challenges. Especially if your apps are packaged or 3rd party, since no code changes are done. SafePeak can significantly increase response times, by reducing network roundtrip to the database, decreasing CPU resource usage, eliminating I/O and storage access. SafePeak team provides a free fully functional trial www.safepeak.com/download and actually provides a one-on-one assistance during such trial. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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  • Best WordPress Video Themes for a Video Blog

    - by Matt
    WordPress has made blogging so easy & fun, there are plenty of video blog themes that you can pick from. However there is always rarity in quality. We at JustSkins have gathered some high quality, tested, tried video themes list. We tried to find some WordPress themes for vloggers, we knew all along that there are very few yet some of them are just brilliant premium wordpress themes. More on that later, let’s find out some themes which you can install on your vlog right now. On Demand 2.0 A fully featured video WordPress premium theme from Press75. Includes  theme options panel for personal customization and content management options, post thumbnails, drop down navigation menu, custom widgets and lots more. Demo | Price: $75 | DOWNLOAD VideoZoom An outstanding premium WordPress video theme from WPZoom featuring standard video integration plus additionally it lets you play any video from all the popular video websites. VideoZoom theme also includes a featured video slider on the homepage, multiple post layout options, theme options panel, WordPress 3.0 menus, backgrounds etc. Demo | Price Single: $69, Developer: $149 | DOWNLOAD Vidley Press75′s easy to use premium WordPress video theme. This theme is full of great features, it can be a perfect choice if you intend to make it a portal someday..it is scalable to shape like a news portal or portfolios. The Theme is widget ready. It has ability to place Featured Content and Featured Category section on homepage. The drop down menus on this theme are nifty! Demo | Price $75 |  DOWNLOAD Live A video premium WordPress theme designed for streaming video, and live event broadcasting. You can embed live video broadcasts from third party services like Ustream etc, and features a prominent timer counting down to the next broadcast, rotating bumper images, Facebook and twitter integration for viewer interaction, theme admin options panel and more make this theme one of its kind. Demo | Price: $99, Support License: $149| DOWNLOAD Groovy Video Woo Themes is pioneer in making beautiful wordpress themes,  One such theme that is built by keeping the video blogger in mind. The Groovy Theme is very colourful video blog premium WordPress theme. Creating video posts is quick and easy with just a copy / paste of the video’s embed code. The theme enables automatic video resizing, plenty of widgets. Also allows you to pick color of your choice. Price: Single Use $70, Developer Price : $150 | DOWNLOAD Video Flick Another exciting Video blogging theme by Press75 is the Video Flick theme. Video Flick is compatible with any video service that provides embed code, or if you want to host your own videos, Video Flick is also compatible with FLV (Flash Video) and Quicktime formats. This theme allows you to either keep standard Blog and/or have Video posts. You can pick a light or dark color option. Demo | Price : $75 | DOWNLOAD Woo Tube An excellent video premium WordPress theme from Woothemes, the WooTube theme is a very easy video blog platform, as it comes with  automatic video resizing, a completely widgetised sidebar and 7 different colour schemes to choose from. The theme  has the ability to be used as a normal blog or a gallery. A very wise choice! Price: Single Use $70, Developer Price : $150 | DOWNLOAD eVid Theme One of the nicest WordPress theme designed specifically for the video bloggers. Simple to integrate videos from video hosts such as Youtube, Vimeo, Veoh, MetaCafe etc. Demo | Price: $19 | DOWNLOAD Tubular A video premium WordPress theme from StudioPress which can also be used as a used a simple website or a blog. The theme is also available in a light color version. Demo | Price: $59.95 | DOWNLOAD Video Elements 2.0 Another beautiful video premium WordPress theme from Press75. Video Elements 2.0 has been re-designed to include the features you need to easily run and maintain a video blog on WordPress. Demo | Price: $75 | DOWNLOAD TV Elements 3.0 The theme includes a featured video carousel on the homepage which can display any number of videos, a featured category section which displays up to 12 channels, creates automatic thumbnails and a lots more… Demo | Price: $75 | DOWNLOAD Wave A beautiful premium video wordpress theme, Flexible & Super cool looking. The Design has very earthy feel to it. The theme has featured video area & latest listing on the homepage. All in all a simple design no fancy features. Demo | Price: $35 | Download

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  • Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 12 &ndash; Networking Security

    - by MarkPearl
    After reading this section you should be able to Identify security risks in LANs and WANs and design security policies that minimize risks Explain how physical security contributes to network security Discuss hardware and design based security techniques Understand methods of encryption such as SSL and IPSec, that can secure data in storage and in transit Describe how popular authentication protocols such as RADIUS< TACACS,Kerberos, PAP, CHAP, and MS-CHAP function Use network operating system techniques to provide basic security Understand wireless security protocols such as WEP, WPA and 802.11i Security Audits Before spending time and money on network security, examine your networks security risks – rate and prioritize risks. Different organizations have different levels of network security requirements. Security Risks Not all security breaches result from a manipulation of network technology – there are human factors that can play a role as well. The following categories are areas of considerations… Risks associated with People Risks associated with Transmission and Hardware Risks associated with Protocols and Software Risks associated with Internet Access An effective security policy A security policy identifies your security goals, risks, levels of authority, designated security coordinator and team members, responsibilities for each team member, and responsibilities for each employee. In addition it specifies how to address security breaches. It should not state exactly which hardware, software, architecture, or protocols will be used to ensure security, nor how hardware or software will be installed and configured. A security policy must address an organizations specific risks. to understand your risks, you should conduct a security audit that identifies vulnerabilities and rates both the severity of each threat and its likelihood of occurring. Security Policy Content Security policy content should… Policies for each category of security Explain to users what they can and cannot do and how these measures protect the networks security Should define what confidential means to the organization Response Policy A security policy should provide for a planned response in the event of a security breach. The response policy should identify the members of a response team, all of whom should clearly understand the the security policy, risks, and measures in place. Some of the roles concerned could include… Dispatcher – the person on call who first notices the breach Manager – the person who coordinates the resources necessary to solve the problem Technical Support Specialist – the person who focuses on solving the problem Public relations specialist – the person who acts as the official spokesperson for the organization Physical Security An important element in network security is restricting physical access to its components. There are various techniques for this including locking doors, security people at access points etc. You should identify the following… Which rooms contain critical systems or data and must be secured Through what means might intruders gain access to these rooms How and to what extent are authorized personnel granted access to these rooms Are authentication methods such as ID cards easy to forge etc. Security in Network Design The optimal way to prevent external security breaches from affecting you LAN is not to connect your LAN to the outside world at all. The next best protection is to restrict access at every point where your LAN connects to the rest of the world. Router Access List – can be used to filter or decline access to a portion of a network for certain devices. Intrusion Detection and Prevention While denying someone access to a section of the network is good, it is better to be able to detect when an attempt has been made and notify security personnel. This can be done using IDS (intrusion detection system) software. One drawback of IDS software is it can detect false positives – i.e. an authorized person who has forgotten his password attempts to logon. Firewalls A firewall is a specialized device, or a computer installed with specialized software, that selectively filters or blocks traffic between networks. A firewall typically involves a combination of hardware and software and may reside between two interconnected private networks. The simplest form of a firewall is a packet filtering firewall, which is a router that examines the header of every packet of data it receives to determine whether that type of packet is authorized to continue to its destination or not. Firewalls can block traffic in and out of a LAN. NOS (Network Operating System) Security Regardless of the operating system, generally every network administrator can implement basic security by restricting what users are authorized to do on a network. Some of the restrictions include things related to Logons – place, time of day, total time logged in, etc Passwords – length, characters used, etc Encryption Encryption is the use of an algorithm to scramble data into a format that can be read only by reversing the algorithm. The purpose of encryption is to keep information private. Many forms of encryption exist and new ways of cracking encryption are continually being invented. The following are some categories of encryption… Key Encryption PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) SSH (Secure Shell) SCP (Secure CoPy) SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) For a detailed explanation on each section refer to pages 596 to 604 of textbook Authentication Protocols Authentication protocols are the rules that computers follow to accomplish authentication. Several types exist and the following are some of the common authentication protocols… RADIUS and TACACS PAP (Password Authentication Protocol) CHAP and MS-CHAP EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) 802.1x (EAPoL) Kerberos Wireless Network Security Wireless transmissions are particularly susceptible to eavesdropping. The following are two wireless network security protocols WEP WPA

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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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  • Espeak SAPI/dll usage on Windows ?

    - by Quandary
    Question: I am trying to use the espeak text-to-speech engine. So for I got it working wounderfully on linux (code below). Now I wanted to port this basic program to windows, too, but it's nearly impossible... Part of the problem is that the windows dll only allows for AUDIO_OUTPUT_SYNCHRONOUS, which means it requires a callback, but I can't figure out how to play the audio from the callback... First it crashed, then I realized, I need a callback function, now I get the data in the callback function, but I don't know how to play it... as it is neither a wav file nor plays automatically as on Linux. The sourceforge site is rather useless, because it basically says use the SAPI version, but then there is no example on how to use the sapi espeak dll... Anyway, here's my code, can anybody help? #ifdef __cplusplus #include <cstdio> #include <cstdlib> #include <cstring> else #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> endif include include //#include "speak_lib.h" include "espeak/speak_lib.h" // libespeak-dev: /usr/include/espeak/speak_lib.h // apt-get install libespeak-dev // apt-get install libportaudio-dev // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -lespeak // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak // gcc -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak char voicename[40]; int samplerate; int quiet = 0; static char genders[4] = {' ','M','F',' '}; //const char *data_path = "/usr/share/"; // /usr/share/espeak-data/ const char *data_path = NULL; // use default path for espeak-data int strrcmp(const char *s, const char *sub) { int slen = strlen(s); int sublen = strlen(sub); return memcmp(s + slen - sublen, sub, sublen); } char * strrcpy(char *dest, const char *source) { // Pre assertions assert(dest != NULL); assert(source != NULL); assert(dest != source); // tk: parentheses while((*dest++ = *source++)) ; return(--dest); } const char* GetLanguageVoiceName(const char* pszShortSign) { #define LANGUAGE_LENGTH 30 static char szReturnValue[LANGUAGE_LENGTH] ; memset(szReturnValue, 0, LANGUAGE_LENGTH); for (int i = 0; pszShortSign[i] != '\0'; ++i) szReturnValue[i] = (char) tolower(pszShortSign[i]); const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { if( !strrcmp( v->languages, szReturnValue) ) { strcpy(szReturnValue, v->name); return szReturnValue; } } // End for strcpy(szReturnValue, "default"); return szReturnValue; } // End function getvoicename void ListVoices() { const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { printf("Shortsign: %s\n", v->languages); printf("age: %d\n", v->age); printf("gender: %c\n", genders[v->gender]); printf("name: %s\n", v->name); printf("\n\n"); } // End for } // End function getvoicename int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); const char* szVersionInfo = espeak_Info(NULL); printf("Espeak version: %s\n", szVersionInfo); samplerate = espeak_Initialize(AUDIO_OUTPUT_PLAYBACK,0,data_path,0); strcpy(voicename, "default"); // espeak --voices strcpy(voicename, "german"); strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("DE")); if(espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename) != EE_OK) { printf("Espeak setvoice error...\n"); } static char word[200] = "Hello World" ; strcpy(word, "TV-fäns aufgepasst, es ist 20 Uhr 15. Zeit für Rambo 3"); strcpy(word, "Unnamed Player wurde zum Opfer von GSG9"); int speed = 220; int volume = 500; // volume in range 0-100 0=silence int pitch = 50; // base pitch, range 0-100. 50=normal // espeak.cpp 625 espeak_SetParameter(espeakRATE, speed, 0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakVOLUME,volume,0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakPITCH,pitch,0); // espeakRANGE: pitch range, range 0-100. 0-monotone, 50=normal // espeakPUNCTUATION: which punctuation characters to announce: // value in espeak_PUNCT_TYPE (none, all, some), espeak_VOICE *voice_spec = espeak_GetCurrentVoice(); voice_spec->gender=2; // 0=none 1=male, 2=female, //voice_spec->age = age; espeak_SetVoiceByProperties(voice_spec); espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, NULL, NULL); espeak_Synchronize(); strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("EN")); espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename); strcpy(word, "Geany was fragged by GSG9 Googlebot"); strcpy(word, "Googlebot"); espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, NULL, NULL); espeak_Synchronize(); espeak_Terminate(); printf("Espeak terminated\n"); return EXIT_SUCCESS; } /* if(espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename) != EE_OK) { memset(&voice_select,0,sizeof(voice_select)); voice_select.languages = voicename; if(espeak_SetVoiceByProperties(&voice_select) != EE_OK) { fprintf(stderr,"%svoice '%s'\n",err_load,voicename); exit(2); } } */ The above code is for Linux. The below code is about as far as I got on Vista x64 (32 bit emu): #ifdef __cplusplus #include <cstdio> #include <cstdlib> #include <cstring> else #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> endif include include include "speak_lib.h" //#include "espeak/speak_lib.h" // libespeak-dev: /usr/include/espeak/speak_lib.h // apt-get install libespeak-dev // apt-get install libportaudio-dev // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -lespeak // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak // gcc -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak char voicename[40]; int iSampleRate; int quiet = 0; static char genders[4] = {' ','M','F',' '}; //const char *data_path = "/usr/share/"; // /usr/share/espeak-data/ //const char *data_path = NULL; // use default path for espeak-data const char *data_path = "C:\Users\Username\Desktop\espeak-1.43-source\espeak-1.43-source\"; int strrcmp(const char *s, const char *sub) { int slen = strlen(s); int sublen = strlen(sub); return memcmp(s + slen - sublen, sub, sublen); } char * strrcpy(char *dest, const char *source) { // Pre assertions assert(dest != NULL); assert(source != NULL); assert(dest != source); // tk: parentheses while((*dest++ = *source++)) ; return(--dest); } const char* GetLanguageVoiceName(const char* pszShortSign) { #define LANGUAGE_LENGTH 30 static char szReturnValue[LANGUAGE_LENGTH] ; memset(szReturnValue, 0, LANGUAGE_LENGTH); for (int i = 0; pszShortSign[i] != '\0'; ++i) szReturnValue[i] = (char) tolower(pszShortSign[i]); const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { if( !strrcmp( v->languages, szReturnValue) ) { strcpy(szReturnValue, v->name); return szReturnValue; } } // End for strcpy(szReturnValue, "default"); return szReturnValue; } // End function getvoicename void ListVoices() { const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { printf("Shortsign: %s\n", v->languages); printf("age: %d\n", v->age); printf("gender: %c\n", genders[v->gender]); printf("name: %s\n", v->name); printf("\n\n"); } // End for } // End function getvoicename /* Callback from espeak. Directly speaks using AudioTrack. */ define LOGI(x) printf("%s\n", x) static int AndroidEspeakDirectSpeechCallback(short *wav, int numsamples, espeak_EVENT *events) { char buf[100]; sprintf(buf, "AndroidEspeakDirectSpeechCallback: %d samples", numsamples); LOGI(buf); if (wav == NULL) { LOGI("Null: speech has completed"); } if (numsamples > 0) { //audout->write(wav, sizeof(short) * numsamples); sprintf(buf, "AudioTrack wrote: %d bytes", sizeof(short) * numsamples); LOGI(buf); } return 0; // continue synthesis (1 is to abort) } static int AndroidEspeakSynthToFileCallback(short *wav, int numsamples,espeak_EVENT *events) { char buf[100]; sprintf(buf, "AndroidEspeakSynthToFileCallback: %d samples", numsamples); LOGI(buf); if (wav == NULL) { LOGI("Null: speech has completed"); } // The user data should contain the file pointer of the file to write to //void* user_data = events->user_data; FILE* user_data = fopen ( "myfile1.wav" , "ab" ); FILE* fp = static_cast<FILE *>(user_data); // Write all of the samples fwrite(wav, sizeof(short), numsamples, fp); return 0; // continue synthesis (1 is to abort) } int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); const char* szVersionInfo = espeak_Info(NULL); printf("Espeak version: %s\n", szVersionInfo); iSampleRate = espeak_Initialize(AUDIO_OUTPUT_SYNCHRONOUS, 4096, data_path, 0); if (iSampleRate <= 0) { printf("Unable to initialize espeak"); return EXIT_FAILURE; } //samplerate = espeak_Initialize(AUDIO_OUTPUT_PLAYBACK,0,data_path,0); //ListVoices(); strcpy(voicename, "default"); // espeak --voices //strcpy(voicename, "german"); //strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("DE")); if(espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename) != EE_OK) { printf("Espeak setvoice error...\n"); } static char word[200] = "Hello World" ; strcpy(word, "TV-fäns aufgepasst, es ist 20 Uhr 15. Zeit für Rambo 3"); strcpy(word, "Unnamed Player wurde zum Opfer von GSG9"); int speed = 220; int volume = 500; // volume in range 0-100 0=silence int pitch = 50; // base pitch, range 0-100. 50=normal // espeak.cpp 625 espeak_SetParameter(espeakRATE, speed, 0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakVOLUME,volume,0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakPITCH,pitch,0); // espeakRANGE: pitch range, range 0-100. 0-monotone, 50=normal // espeakPUNCTUATION: which punctuation characters to announce: // value in espeak_PUNCT_TYPE (none, all, some), //espeak_VOICE *voice_spec = espeak_GetCurrentVoice(); //voice_spec->gender=2; // 0=none 1=male, 2=female, //voice_spec->age = age; //espeak_SetVoiceByProperties(voice_spec); //espeak_SetSynthCallback(AndroidEspeakDirectSpeechCallback); espeak_SetSynthCallback(AndroidEspeakSynthToFileCallback); unsigned int unique_identifier; espeak_ERROR err = espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, &unique_identifier, NULL); err = espeak_Synchronize(); /* strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("EN")); espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename); strcpy(word, "Geany was fragged by GSG9 Googlebot"); strcpy(word, "Googlebot"); espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, NULL, NULL); espeak_Synchronize(); */ // espeak_Cancel(); espeak_Terminate(); printf("Espeak terminated\n"); system("pause"); return EXIT_SUCCESS; }

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  • 8 Things You Can Do In Android’s Developer Options

    - by Chris Hoffman
    The Developer Options menu in Android is a hidden menu with a variety of advanced options. These options are intended for developers, but many of them will be interesting to geeks. You’ll have to perform a secret handshake to enable the Developer Options menu in the Settings screen, as it’s hidden from Android users by default. Follow the simple steps to quickly enable Developer Options. Enable USB Debugging “USB debugging” sounds like an option only an Android developer would need, but it’s probably the most widely used hidden option in Android. USB debugging allows applications on your computer to interface with your Android phone over the USB connection. This is required for a variety of advanced tricks, including rooting an Android phone, unlocking it, installing a custom ROM, or even using a desktop program that captures screenshots of your Android device’s screen. You can also use ADB commands to push and pull files between your device and your computer or create and restore complete local backups of your Android device without rooting. USB debugging can be a security concern, as it gives computers you plug your device into access to your phone. You could plug your device into a malicious USB charging port, which would try to compromise you. That’s why Android forces you to agree to a prompt every time you plug your device into a new computer with USB debugging enabled. Set a Desktop Backup Password If you use the above ADB trick to create local backups of your Android device over USB, you can protect them with a password with the Set a desktop backup password option here. This password encrypts your backups to secure them, so you won’t be able to access them if you forget the password. Disable or Speed Up Animations When you move between apps and screens in Android, you’re spending some of that time looking at animations and waiting for them to go away. You can disable these animations entirely by changing the Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale options here. If you like animations but just wish they were faster, you can speed them up. On a fast phone or tablet, this can make switching between apps nearly instant. If you thought your Android phone was speedy before, just try disabling animations and you’ll be surprised how much faster it can seem. Force-Enable FXAA For OpenGL Games If you have a high-end phone or tablet with great graphics performance and you play 3D games on it, there’s a way to make those games look even better. Just go to the Developer Options screen and enable the Force 4x MSAA option. This will force Android to use 4x multisample anti-aliasing in OpenGL ES 2.0 games and other apps. This requires more graphics power and will probably drain your battery a bit faster, but it will improve image quality in some games. This is a bit like force-enabling antialiasing using the NVIDIA Control Panel on a Windows gaming PC. See How Bad Task Killers Are We’ve written before about how task killers are worse than useless on Android. If you use a task killer, you’re just slowing down your system by throwing out cached data and forcing Android to load apps from system storage whenever you open them again. Don’t believe us? Enable the Don’t keep activities option on the Developer options screen and Android will force-close every app you use as soon as you exit it. Enable this app and use your phone normally for a few minutes — you’ll see just how harmful throwing out all that cached data is and how much it will slow down your phone. Don’t actually use this option unless you want to see how bad it is! It will make your phone perform much more slowly — there’s a reason Google has hidden these options away from average users who might accidentally change them. Fake Your GPS Location The Allow mock locations option allows you to set fake GPS locations, tricking Android into thinking you’re at a location where you actually aren’t. Use this option along with an app like Fake GPS location and you can trick your Android device and the apps running on it into thinking you’re at locations where you actually aren’t. How would this be useful? Well, you could fake a GPS check-in at a location without actually going there or confuse your friends in a location-tracking app by seemingly teleporting around the world. Stay Awake While Charging You can use Android’s Daydream Mode to display certain apps while charging your device. If you want to force Android to display a standard Android app that hasn’t been designed for Daydream Mode, you can enable the Stay awake option here. Android will keep your device’s screen on while charging and won’t turn it off. It’s like Daydream Mode, but can support any app and allows users to interact with them. Show Always-On-Top CPU Usage You can view CPU usage data by toggling the Show CPU usage option to On. This information will appear on top of whatever app you’re using. If you’re a Linux user, the three numbers on top probably look familiar — they represent the system load average. From left to right, the numbers represent your system load over the last one, five, and fifteen minutes. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d want enabled most of the time, but it can save you from having to install third-party floating CPU apps if you want to see CPU usage information for some reason. Most of the other options here will only be useful to developers debugging their Android apps. You shouldn’t start changing options you don’t understand. If you want to undo any of these changes, you can quickly erase all your custom options by sliding the switch at the top of the screen to Off.     

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  • Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Real World Perspectives from Oracle WebCenter Customers

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} If you frequent the Oracle WebCenter blog you’ve probably read a lot about the customer experience revolution over the last few months.  An important aspect of the customer experience revolution is the increasing role that peers play in influencing how others perceive a product, brand or solution, simply by sharing their own, real-world experiences.  Think about it, who do you trust more -- marketers and sales people pitching polished messages or peers with similar roles and similar challenges to the ones you face in your business every day? With this spirit in mind, this polished marketer personally invites you to hear directly from Oracle WebCenter customers about their real-life experiences during our customer panel sessions at Oracle OpenWorld next week.  If you’re currently using WebCenter, thinking about it, or just want to find out more about best practices in social business, next-generation portals, enterprise content management or web experience management, be sure to attend these sessions: CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West - 3000Priscilla Hancock - Vice President/CIO, University of Louisville Kellie Christensen - Director of Information Technology, Banner EngineeringWhat does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change your organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. This session will take a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel DiscussionWednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West - 3000Roberts Wayne - Director, IT, Canadian Partnership Against CancerMike Beattie - VP Application Development, Aramark Uniform ServicesJohn Chen - Utilities Services Manager 6, Los Angeles Department of Water & PowerJörg Modlmayr - Head of Product Managment, Siemens AGSocial and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM NirvanaThursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001Stephen Madsen - Senior Management Consultant, Alberta Agriculture and Rural DevelopmentHimanshu Parikh - Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Middleware, Ross Stores, Inc.Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we're not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing SuccessThursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001Blane Nelson - Chief Architect, Ancestry.comMike Remedios - CIO, ArbonneCaitlin Scanlon - Product Manager, Monster WorldwideEvery year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from customers on how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. Your Handy Guide to WebCenter at Oracle OpenWorld Want a quick and easy guide to all the keynotes, demos, hands-on labs and WebCenter sessions you definitely don't want to miss at Oracle OpenWorld? Download this handy guide, Focus on WebCenter. More helpful links: * Oracle OpenWorld* Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld* Oracle OpenWorld on Facebook * Oracle OpenWorld on Twitter* Oracle OpenWorld on LinkedIn* Oracle OpenWorld Blog

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  • Render MVCContrib Grid with No Header Row

    - by Ben Griswold
    The MVCContrib Grid allows for the easy construction of HTML tables for displaying data from a collection of Model objects. I add this component to all of my ASP.NET MVC projects.  If you aren’t familiar with what the grid has to offer, it’s worth the looking into. What you may notice in the busy example below is the fact that I render my column headers independent of the grid contents.  This allows me to keep my headers fixed while the user searches through the table content which is displayed in a scrollable div*.  Thus, I needed a way to render my grid without headers. That’s where Grid Renderers come into play.  <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="projectHeaderTable">     <tr>         <td class="memberTableMemberHeader">             <%= Html.GridColumnHeader("Member", "Index", "MemberFullName")%>              </td>         <td class="memberTableRoleHeader">             <%= Html.GridColumnHeader("Role", "Index", "ProjectRoleTypeName")%>              </td>                <td class="memberTableActionHeader">             Action         </td>     </tr> </table> <div class="scrollContentWrapper"> <% Html.Grid(Model)     .Columns(column =>             {                 column.For(c => c.MemberFullName).Attributes(@class => "memberTableMemberCol");                 column.For(c => c.ProjectRoleTypeName).Attributes(@class => "memberTableRoleCol");                 column.For(x => Html.ActionLink("View", "Details", new { Id = x.ProjectMemberId }) + " | " +                                 Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { Id = x.ProjectMemberId }) + " | " +                                 Html.ActionLink("Remove", "Delete", new { Id = x.ProjectMemberId }))                     .Attributes(@class => "memberTableActionCol").DoNotEncode();             })     .Empty("There are no members associated with this project.")     .Attributes(@class => "lbContent")     .RenderUsing(new GridNoHeaderRenderer<ProjectMemberDetailsViewModel>())     .Render(); %> </div> <div class="scrollContentBottom">     <!– –> </div> <%=Html.Pager(Model) %> Maybe you noticed the reference to the GridNoHeaderRenderer class above?  Yep, rendering the grid with no header is straightforward.   public class GridNoHeaderRenderer<T> :     HtmlTableGridRenderer<T> where T: class {     protected override bool RenderHeader()     {         // Explicitly returning true would suppress the header         // just fine, however, Render() will always assume that         // items exist in collection and RenderEmpty() will         // never be called.           // In other words, return ShouldRenderHeader() if you         // want to maintain the Empty text when no items exist.         return ShouldRenderHeader();     } } Well, if you read through the comments, there is one catch.  You might be tempted to have the RenderHeader method always return true.  This would work just fine but you should return the result of ShouldRenderHeader() instead so the Empty text will continue to display if there are no items in the collection. The GridRenderer feature found in the MVCContrib Grid is so well put together, I just had to share.  * Though you can find countless alternatives to the fixed headers problem online, this is the only solution that I’ve ever found to reliably work across browsers. If you know something I don’t, please share.

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  • Updating the managed debugging API for .NET v4

    - by Brian Donahue
    In any successful investigation, the right tools play a big part in collecting evidence about the state of the "crime scene" as it was before the detectives arrived. Unfortunately for the Crash Scene Investigator, we don't have the budget to fly out to the customer's site, chalk the outline, and eat their doughnuts. We have to rely on the end-user to collect the evidence for us, which means giving them the fingerprint dust and the evidence baggies and leaving them to it. With that in mind, the Red Gate support team have been writing tools that can collect vital clues with a minimum of fuss. Years ago we would have asked for a memory dump, where we used to get the customer to run CDB.exe and produce dumps that we could analyze in-house, but those dumps were pretty unwieldy (500MB files) and the debugger often didn't dump exactly where we wanted, or made five or more dumps. What we wanted was just the minimum state information from the program at the time of failure, so we produced a managed debugger that captured every first and second-chance exception and logged the stack and a minimal amount of variables from the memory of the application, which could all be exported as XML. This caused less inconvenience to the end-user because it is much easier to send a 65KB XML file in an email than a 500MB file containing all of the application's memory. We don't need to have the entire victim shipped out to us when we just want to know what was under the fingernails. The thing that made creating a managed debugging tool possible was the MDbg Engine example written by Microsoft as part of the Debugging Tools for Windows distribution. Since the ICorDebug interface is a bit difficult to understand, they had kindly created some wrappers that provided an event-driven debugging model that was perfect for our needs, but .NET 4 applications under debugging started complaining that "The debugger's protocol is incompatible with the debuggee". The introduction of .NET Framework v4 had changed the managed debugging API significantly, however, without an update for the MDbg Engine code! After a few hours of research, I had finally worked out that most of the version 4 ICorDebug interface still works much the same way in "legacy" v2 mode and there was a relatively easy fix for the problem in that you can still get a reference to legacy ICorDebug by changing the way the interface is created. In .NET v2, the interface was acquired using the CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion method in mscoree.dll. In v4, you must first create IClrMetaHost, enumerate the runtimes, get an ICLRRuntimeInfo interface to the .NET 4 runtime from that, and use the GetInterface method in mscoree.dll to return a "legacy" ICorDebug interface. The rest of the MDbg Engine will continue working the old way. Here is how I had changed the MDbg Engine code to support .NET v4: private void InitFromVersion(string debuggerVersion){if( debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v1") ){throw new ArgumentException( "Can't debug a version 1 CLR process (\"" + debuggerVersion + "\"). Run application in a version 2 CLR, or use a version 1 debugger instead." );} ICorDebug rawDebuggingAPI=null;if (debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v4")){Guid CLSID_MetaHost = new Guid("9280188D-0E8E-4867-B30C-7FA83884E8DE"); Guid IID_MetaHost = new Guid("D332DB9E-B9B3-4125-8207-A14884F53216"); ICLRMetaHost metahost = (ICLRMetaHost)NativeMethods.ClrCreateInterface(CLSID_MetaHost, IID_MetaHost); IEnumUnknown runtimes = metahost.EnumerateInstalledRuntimes(); ICLRRuntimeInfo runtime = GetRuntime(runtimes, debuggerVersion); //Defined in metahost.hGuid CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy = new Guid(0xDF8395B5, 0xA4BA, 0x450b, 0xA7, 0x7C, 0xA9, 0xA4, 0x77, 0x62, 0xC5, 0x20);Guid IID_ICorDebug = new Guid("3D6F5F61-7538-11D3-8D5B-00104B35E7EF"); Object res;runtime.GetInterface(ref CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy, ref IID_ICorDebug, out res); rawDebuggingAPI = (ICorDebug)res; }elserawDebuggingAPI = NativeMethods.CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion((int)CorDebuggerVersion.Whidbey,debuggerVersion);if (rawDebuggingAPI != null)InitFromICorDebug(rawDebuggingAPI);elsethrow new ArgumentException("Support for debugging version " + debuggerVersion + " is not yet implemented");} The changes above will ensure that the debugger can support .NET Framework v2 and v4 applications with the same codebase, but we do compile two different applications: one targeting v2 and the other v4. As a footnote I need to add that some missing native methods and wrappers, along with the EnumerateRuntimes method code, came from the Mindbg project on Codeplex. Another change is that when using the MDbgEngine.CreateProcess to launch a process in the debugger, do not supply a null as the final argument. This does not work any more because GetCORVersion always returns "v2.0.50727" as the function has been deprecated in .NET v4. What's worse is that on a system with only .NET 4, the user will be prompted to download and install .NET v2! Not nice! This works much better: proc = m_Debugger.CreateProcess(ProcessName, ProcessArgs, DebugModeFlag.Default,String.Format("v{0}.{1}.{2}",System.Environment.Version.Major,System.Environment.Version.Minor,System.Environment.Version.Build)); Microsoft "unofficially" plan on updating the MDbg samples soon, but if you have an MDbg-based application, you can get it working right now by changing one method a bit and adding a few new interfaces (ICLRMetaHost, IEnumUnknown, and ICLRRuntimeInfo). The new, non-legacy implementation of MDbg Engine will add new, interesting features like dump-file support and by association I assume garbage-collection/managed object stats, so it will be well worth looking into if you want to extend the functionality of a managed debugger going forward.

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  • Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

    - by ScottGu
    Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

    - by Brian Jackett
    This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at.  I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event.  I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees.  Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd.  So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival     Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm.  I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups.  Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident.  I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps.  Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner”     Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.”  I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday.  By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night.  Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions     The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot.  The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation     I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues.  As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos.  As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V.  As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V.  About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector…     As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation.  Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive.  Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP.  Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far.  The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards.  Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files     For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below.  Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate.  As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session   Picture Albums     For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend.  The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.)  The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion     A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI.  As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session.  For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well.  Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels.  Thanks for reading my recap.  Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences.         -Frog Out   links: Michigan image

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  • Change Comes from Within

    - by John K. Hines
    I am in the midst of witnessing a variety of teams moving away from Scrum. Some of them are doing things like replacing Scrum terms with more commonly understood terminology. Mainly they have gone back to using industry standard terms and more traditional processes like the RAPID decision making process. For example: Scrum Master becomes Project Lead. Scrum Team becomes Project Team. Product Owner becomes Stakeholders. I'm actually quite sad to see this happening, but I understand that Scrum is a radical change for most organizations. Teams are slowly but surely moving away from Scrum to a process that non-software engineers can understand and follow. Some could never secure the education or personnel (like a Product Owner) to get the whole team engaged. And many people with decision-making authority do not see the value in Scrum besides task planning and tracking. You see, Scrum cannot be mandated. No one can force a team to be Agile, collaborate, continuously improve, and self-reflect. Agile adoptions must start from a position of mutual trust and willingness to change. And most software teams aren't like that. Here is my personal epiphany from over a year of attempting to promote Agile on a small development team: The desire to embrace Agile methodologies must come from each and every member of the team. If this desire does not exist - if the team is satisfied with its current process, if the team is not motivated to improve, or if the team is afraid of change - the actual demonstration of all the benefits prescribed by Agile and Scrum will take years. I've read some blog posts lately that criticise Scrum for demanding "Big Change Up Front." One's opinion of software methodologies boils down to one's perspective. If you see modern software development as successful, you will advocate for small, incremental changes to how it is done. If you see it as broken, you'll be much more motivated to take risks and try something different. So my question to you is this - is modern software development healthy or in need of dramatic improvement? I can tell you from personal experience that any project that requires exploration, planning, development, stabilisation, and deployment is hard. Trying to make that process better with only a slightly modified approach is a mistake. You will become completely dependent upon the skillset of your team (the only variable you can change). But the difficulty of planned work isn't one of skill. It isn't until you solve the fundamental challenges of communication, collaboration, quality, and efficiency that skill even comes into play. So I advocate for Big Change Up Front. And I advocate for it to happen often until those involved can say, from experience, that it is no longer needed. I hope every engineer has the opportunity to see the benefits of Agile and Scrum on a highly functional team. I'll close with more key learnings that can help with a Scrum adoption: Your leaders must understand Scrum. They must understand software development, its inherent difficulties, and how Scrum helps. If you attempt to adopt Scrum before the understanding is there, your leaders will apply traditional solutions to your problems - often creating more problems. Success should be measured by quality, not revenue. Namely, the value of software to an organization is the revenue it generates minus ongoing support costs. You should identify quality-based metrics that show the effect Agile techniques have on your software. Motivation is everything. I finally understand why so many Agile advocates say you that if you are not on a team using Agile, you should leave and find one. Scrum and especially Agile encompass many elegant solutions to a wide variety of problems. If you are working on a team that has not encountered these problems the the team may never see the value in the solutions.   Having said all that, I'm not giving up on Agile or Scrum. I am convinced it is a better approach for software development. But reality is saying that its adoption is not straightforward and highly subject to disruption. Unless, that is, everyone really, really wants it.

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  • Microsoft, jQuery, and Templating

    - by Stephen Walther
    About two months ago, John Resig and I met at Café Algiers in Harvard square to discuss how Microsoft can contribute to the jQuery project. Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his second-day MIX keynote that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind jQuery and making it the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies. What does this announcement mean? It means that Microsoft is shifting its resources to invest in jQuery. Developers on the ASP.NET team are now working full-time to contribute features to the core jQuery library. Furthermore, we are working with other teams at Microsoft to ensure that our technologies work great with jQuery. We are contributing to the open-source jQuery project in the exact same way that any other company or individual from the community can contribute to jQuery. We are writing proposals, submitting the proposals to the jQuery forums, and revising the proposals in response to community feedback. The jQuery team can decide to reject or accept any feature that we propose. Any feature that Microsoft contributes to jQuery will be platform neutral. In other words, Microsoft contributions will benefit PHP and RAILS developers just as much as they benefit ASP.NET developers. Microsoft contributions to jQuery will improve the web for everyone. Contributing Support for Templates to jQuery Core Our first proposal concerns templating. We want to contribute support for templates to jQuery so that JavaScript developers can use jQuery to easily display a set of database records. You can read our templating proposal here: http://wiki.github.com/nje/jquery/jquery-templates-proposal You can download and play with our prototype for templating here: http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl The following code illustrates how you can use a template to display a set of products in a bulleted list: <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(function(){ var products = [ { name: "Product 1", price: 12.99}, { name: "Product 2", price: 9.99}, { name: "Product 3", price: 35.59} ]; $("ul").append("#template", products); }); </script> <script id="template" type="text/html"> <li>{%= name %} - {%= price %}</li> </script> <ul></ul> The template is contained in a SCRIPT element that has a TYPE=”text/html” attribute. Browsers ignore the contents of a SCRIPT element when they don’t understand the content type. Notice that the placeholder {%=...%} is used within the template to indicate where the name and price of a product should appear. The delimiters {%=…%} are used for expressions and the delimiters {%...%} are used for code. Finally, the products are rendered using the template with the call to $(“ul”).append(“#template”, products). The standard jQuery DOM manipulation methods have been modified to support templates. When the page above is rendered, you get the bulleted list displayed in the following figure. Our goal is to keep our proposal for templates as simple as possible. After support for templating has been added to jQuery, plug-in authors can take advantage of templating when building complex data-driven plug-ins such as a DataGrid plug-in. The Ajax Control Toolkit Over 100,000 developers download the Ajax Control Toolkit every month. That’s a mind-boggling number of downloads. We realize that the Ajax Control Toolkit is extremely popular among ASP.NET Web Forms developers and we want to continue to invest in the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you are adding JavaScript interactivity to an ASP.NET Web Forms application, and you don’t want to write JavaScript, then we recommend that you use the server controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. Using the Ajax Control Toolkit does not require knowledge of JavaScript and the toolkit enables you to build applications with the concepts familiar to ASP.NET Web Forms applications developers. If, however, you are interested in creating client-side interactivity without server controls then we recommend that you use jQuery. We plan to continue to release new versions of the Ajax Control Toolkit every few months. Our goal is to continue to improve the quality of the Ajax Control Toolkit and to make it easier for the community to contribute code, bug fixes, and documentation. The ASP.NET Ajax Library We are moving the ASP.NET Ajax Library into the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you currently use ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates, client data-binding, or the client script loader then you can continue to use these features by downloading the Ajax Control Toolkit. Be aware that our focus with the Ajax Control Toolkit is server-side Ajax.  For client-side Ajax, we are shifting our focus to jQuery. For example, if you have been using ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates then we recommend that you shift to using jQuery instead. Conclusion Our plan is to focus on jQuery as the primary technology for building client-side Ajax applications moving forward. We want to adapt Microsoft technologies to work great with jQuery and we want to contribute features to jQuery that will make the web better for everyone. We are very excited to be working with the jQuery core team.

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  • On Life and TechEd&hellip;

    - by MOSSLover
    I haven’t been writing here I know.  I am very sorry, but I am just too busy trying to make my personal life just as good as my SharePoint life.  So I was at TechEd again helping with the hands on labs, but I had a very long couple of weeks.  I will have a long week again.  I started out going to my friend, Randy Walker’s, wedding and I ended up at my grandmother’s condo in Fort Lauderdale.  It was a very trying week.  I had to drive 5 1/2 hours to the wedding from St. Louis and back.  So Randy is an awesome person.  He is a great guy and he was the first person ever to nominate me for MVP.  I knew it probably wasn’t going anywhere, but it was the thought that count.  I met Randy in 2008 at Tulsa Techfest.  We had fun jamming out to Rockband.  I knew he was good people back then.  He has let me vent and I have let him vent over countless personal problems.  He has always been a great friend.  So it was a no brainer when I decided to go to his wedding no matter how much driving or stress or lack of sleep it was worth it.  I am incredibly happy for him to finally find a diamond amongst a lot of coal.  To take part in his celebration was so awesome.  I thank him again for letting me participate in this ceremony. Now after Randy’s wedding I drove 5 1/2 hours landed in St. Louis, fed a cat an asthma pill hidden in wet cat food, and slept for 4 hours.  I immediately saw my best friend who dropped me off at the airport and proceeded to TechEd.  I slept 1 hour on each flight, then ended up working a 3 hour shift at TechEd.  The rest of the week was a haze of connecting with people and sleeping very little.  I got to see my friend Tasha and her husband Casey plus a billion other people.  It was a great week and then I got a call from my grandmother.  It turns out her husband was admitted to the hospital. My grandparents on my dad's side have been divorced since the 60s, which means I never got to see them together.  I always felt like they never cliqued.  When I was a kid we would always spend half our time in Chicago at grandma’s and half our time at grandpa’s houses.  We would hang out with my grandpa’s wife Bobbi and my grandma’s husband Leo.  My cousin’s always called Leo by Pappa and my brother and I would use Leo.  My cousins lived in Chicago up until my cousin Gavi was born then they moved to Philadelphia.  I remember complaining to my dad that we never visited anywhere cool just Chicago and Kansas City.  I also remember Leo teaching me and my brother, Sam, how to climb a tree and play tennis on the back of the apartment wall.  My grandfather’s was kind of stuffy and boring, but we always enjoyed my grandmother’s.  She had games and Disney Movies and toys.  Leo always made it a ton of fun to visit.  I’m not sure a lot of people knew this fact, but when I was 16 years old I saw my grandfather on my mother’s side slowly die of congestive heart failure in a nursing home.  When I was 18 I saw my grandmother on my mother’s side slowly die of an infection over a 30 day period.  I hate hospitals and I hate nursing homes, but sometimes you have to suck in your gut and be strong.  I tried to do that this weekend and I hope I did an ok job.  I really hope things get better, but if they don’t I really appreciate everything he has given me in life.  I am a terrible tennis player and I haven’t climbed a tree in ages, but they both encouraged me when encouragement from my parents was lacking.  It was Father’s Day today and I have to at least pay tribute to Leo Morris, because he has been a good person to me all my life.  Technorati Tags: TechEd,Grandparents,Father's Day

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  • Performance considerations for common SQL queries

    - by Jim Giercyk
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/NibblesAndBits/archive/2013/10/16/performance-considerations-for-common-sql-queries.aspxSQL offers many different methods to produce the same results.  There is a never-ending debate between SQL developers as to the “best way” or the “most efficient way” to render a result set.  Sometimes these disputes even come to blows….well, I am a lover, not a fighter, so I decided to collect some data that will prove which way is the best and most efficient.  For the queries below, I downloaded the test database from SQLSkills:  http://www.sqlskills.com/sql-server-resources/sql-server-demos/.  There isn’t a lot of data, but enough to prove my point: dbo.member has 10,000 records, and dbo.payment has 15,554.  Our result set contains 6,706 records. The following queries produce an identical result set; the result set contains aggregate payment information for each member who has made more than 1 payment from the dbo.payment table and the first and last name of the member from the dbo.member table.   /*************/ /* Sub Query  */ /*************/ SELECT  a.[Member Number] ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         a.[Number Of Payments] ,         a.[Average Payment] ,         a.[Total Paid] FROM    ( SELECT    member_no 'Member Number' ,                     AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                     SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                     COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'           FROM      dbo.payment           GROUP BY  member_no           HAVING    COUNT(Payment_No) > 1         ) a         JOIN dbo.member m ON a.[Member Number] = m.member_no         /***************/ /* Cross Apply  */ /***************/ SELECT  ca.[Member Number] ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         ca.[Number Of Payments] ,         ca.[Average Payment] ,         ca.[Total Paid] FROM    dbo.member m         CROSS APPLY ( SELECT    member_no 'Member Number' ,                                 AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                                 SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                                 COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'                       FROM      dbo.payment                       WHERE     member_no = m.member_no                       GROUP BY  member_no                       HAVING    COUNT(Payment_No) > 1                     ) ca /********/                    /* CTEs  */ /********/ ; WITH    Payments           AS ( SELECT   member_no 'Member Number' ,                         AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                         SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                         COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'                FROM     dbo.payment                GROUP BY member_no                HAVING   COUNT(Payment_No) > 1              ),         MemberInfo           AS ( SELECT   p.[Member Number] ,                         m.lastname ,                         m.firstname ,                         p.[Number Of Payments] ,                         p.[Average Payment] ,                         p.[Total Paid]                FROM     dbo.member m                         JOIN Payments p ON m.member_no = p.[Member Number]              )     SELECT  *     FROM    MemberInfo /************************/ /* SELECT with Grouping   */ /************************/ SELECT  p.member_no 'Member Number' ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments' ,         AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,         SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' FROM    dbo.payment p         JOIN dbo.member m ON m.member_no = p.member_no GROUP BY p.member_no ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname HAVING  COUNT(Payment_No) > 1   We can see what is going on in SQL’s brain by looking at the execution plan.  The Execution Plan will demonstrate which steps and in what order SQL executes those steps, and what percentage of batch time each query takes.  SO….if I execute all 4 of these queries in a single batch, I will get an idea of the relative time SQL takes to execute them, and how it renders the Execution Plan.  We can settle this once and for all.  Here is what SQL did with these queries:   Not only did the queries take the same amount of time to execute, SQL generated the same Execution Plan for each of them.  Everybody is right…..I guess we can all finally go to lunch together!  But wait a second, I may not be a fighter, but I AM an instigator.     Let’s see how a table variable stacks up.  Here is the code I executed: /********************/ /*  Table Variable  */ /********************/ DECLARE @AggregateTable TABLE     (       member_no INT ,       AveragePayment MONEY ,       TotalPaid MONEY ,       NumberOfPayments MONEY     ) INSERT  @AggregateTable         SELECT  member_no 'Member Number' ,                 AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                 SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                 COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'         FROM    dbo.payment         GROUP BY member_no         HAVING  COUNT(Payment_No) > 1   SELECT  at.member_no 'Member Number' ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         at.NumberOfPayments 'Number Of Payments' ,         at.AveragePayment 'Average Payment' ,         at.TotalPaid 'Total Paid' FROM    @AggregateTable at         JOIN dbo.member m ON m.member_no = at.member_no In the interest of keeping things in groupings of 4, I removed the last query from the previous batch and added the table variable query.  Here’s what I got:     Since we first insert into the table variable, then we read from it, the Execution Plan renders 2 steps.  BUT, the combination of the 2 steps is only 22% of the batch.  It is actually faster than the other methods even though it is treated as 2 separate queries in the Execution Plan.  The argument I often hear against Table Variables is that SQL only estimates 1 row for the table size in the Execution Plan.  While this is true, the estimate does not come in to play until you read from the table variable.  In this case, the table variable had 6,706 rows, but it still outperformed the other queries.  People argue that table variables should only be used for hash or lookup tables.  The fact is, you have control of what you put IN to the variable, so as long as you keep it within reason, these results suggest that a table variable is a viable alternative to sub-queries. If anyone does volume testing on this theory, I would be interested in the results.  My suspicion is that there is a breaking point where efficiency goes down the tubes immediately, and it would be interesting to see where the threshold is. Coding SQL is a matter of style.  If you’ve been around since they introduced DB2, you were probably taught a little differently than a recent computer science graduate.  If you have a company standard, I strongly recommend you follow it.    If you do not have a standard, generally speaking, there is no right or wrong answer when talking about the efficiency of these types of queries, and certainly no hard-and-fast rule.  Volume and infrastructure will dictate a lot when it comes to performance, so your results may vary in your environment.  Download the database and try it!

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  • Parallelism in .NET – Part 8, PLINQ’s ForAll Method

    - by Reed
    Parallel LINQ extends LINQ to Objects, and is typically very similar.  However, as I previously discussed, there are some differences.  Although the standard way to handle simple Data Parellelism is via Parallel.ForEach, it’s possible to do the same thing via PLINQ. PLINQ adds a new method unavailable in standard LINQ which provides new functionality… LINQ is designed to provide a much simpler way of handling querying, including filtering, ordering, grouping, and many other benefits.  Reading the description in LINQ to Objects on MSDN, it becomes clear that the thinking behind LINQ deals with retrieval of data.  LINQ works by adding a functional programming style on top of .NET, allowing us to express filters in terms of predicate functions, for example. PLINQ is, generally, very similar.  Typically, when using PLINQ, we write declarative statements to filter a dataset or perform an aggregation.  However, PLINQ adds one new method, which provides a very different purpose: ForAll. The ForAll method is defined on ParallelEnumerable, and will work upon any ParallelQuery<T>.  Unlike the sequence operators in LINQ and PLINQ, ForAll is intended to cause side effects.  It does not filter a collection, but rather invokes an action on each element of the collection. At first glance, this seems like a bad idea.  For example, Eric Lippert clearly explained two philosophical objections to providing an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method, one of which still applies when parallelized.  The sole purpose of this method is to cause side effects, and as such, I agree that the ForAll method “violates the functional programming principles that all the other sequence operators are based upon”, in exactly the same manner an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method would violate these principles.  Eric Lippert’s second reason for disliking a ForEach extension method does not necessarily apply to ForAll – replacing ForAll with a call to Parallel.ForEach has the same closure semantics, so there is no loss there. Although ForAll may have philosophical issues, there is a pragmatic reason to include this method.  Without ForAll, we would take a fairly serious performance hit in many situations.  Often, we need to perform some filtering or grouping, then perform an action using the results of our filter.  Using a standard foreach statement to perform our action would avoid this philosophical issue: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action foreach (var item in filteredItems) { // These will now run serially item.DoSomething(); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This would cause a loss in performance, since we lose any parallelism in place, and cause all of our actions to be run serially. We could easily use a Parallel.ForEach instead, which adds parallelism to the actions: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action once the filter completes Parallel.ForEach(filteredItems, item => { // These will now run in parallel item.DoSomething(); }); This is a noticeable improvement, since both our filtering and our actions run parallelized.  However, there is still a large bottleneck in place here.  The problem lies with my comment “perform an action once the filter completes”.  Here, we’re parallelizing the filter, then collecting all of the results, blocking until the filter completes.  Once the filtering of every element is completed, we then repartition the results of the filter, reschedule into multiple threads, and perform the action on each element.  By moving this into two separate statements, we potentially double our parallelization overhead, since we’re forcing the work to be partitioned and scheduled twice as many times. This is where the pragmatism comes into play.  By violating our functional principles, we gain the ability to avoid the overhead and cost of rescheduling the work: // Perform an action on the results of our filter collection .AsParallel() .Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ) .ForAll( i => i.DoSomething() ); The ability to avoid the scheduling overhead is a compelling reason to use ForAll.  This really goes back to one of the key points I discussed in data parallelism: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task.  Here, this means leaving the statement attached to the expression, even though it causes side effects and is not standard usage for LINQ. This leads to my one guideline for using ForAll: The ForAll extension method should only be used to process the results of a parallel query, as returned by a PLINQ expression. Any other usage scenario should use Parallel.ForEach, instead.

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  • Edit Media Center TV Recordings with Windows Live Movie Maker

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Have you ever wanted to take a TV program you’ve recorded in Media Center and remove the commercials or save clips of favorite scenes? Today we’ll take a look at editing WTV and DVR-MS files with Windows Live Movie Maker. Download and Install Windows Live Movie Maker. The download link can be found at the end of the article. WLMM is part of Windows Live Essentials, but you can choose to install only the applications you want. You’ll also want to be sure to uncheck any unwanted settings like settings Bing as default search provider or MSN as your browser home page.   Add your recorded TV file to WLMM by clicking the Add videos and photos button, or by dragging and dropping it onto the storyboard.   You’ll see your video displayed in the Preview window on the left and on the storyboard. Adjust the Zoom Time Scale slider at the lower right to change the level of detail displayed on the storyboard. You may want to start zoomed out and zoom in for more detailed edits.   Removing Commercials or Unwanted Sections Note: Changes and edits made in Windows Live Movie Maker do not change or effect the original video file. To accomplish this, we will makes cuts, or “splits,” and the beginning and end of the section we want to remove, and then we will delete that section from our project. Click and drag the slider bar along the the storyboard to scroll through the video. When you get to the end of a row in on the storyboard, drag the slider down to the beginning of the next row. We’ve found it easiest and most accurate to get close to the end of the commercial break and then use the Play button and the Previous Frame and Next Frame buttons underneath the Preview window to fine tune your cut point. When you find the right place to make your first cut, click the split button on the Edit tab on the ribbon. You will see your video “split” into two sections. Now, repeat the process of scrolling through the storyboard to find the end of the section you wish to cut. When you are at the proper point, click the Split button again.   Now we’ll delete that section by selecting it and pressing the Delete key, selecting remove on the Home tab, or by right clicking on the section and selecting Remove.   Trim Tool This tool allows you to select a portion of the video to keep while trimming away the rest.   Click and drag the sliders in the preview windows to select the area you want to keep. The area outside the sliders will be trimmed away. The area inside is the section that is kept in the movie. You can also adjust the Start and End points manually on the ribbon.   Delete any additional clips you don’t want in the final output. You can also accomplish this by using the Set start point and Set end point buttons. Clicking Set start point will eliminate everything before the start point. Set end point will eliminate everything after the end point. And you’re left with only the clip you want to keep.   Output your Video Select the icon at the top left, then select Save movie. All of these settings will output your movie as a WMV file, but file size and quality will vary by setting. The Burn to DVD option also outputs a WMV file, but then opens Windows DVD Maker and prompts you to create and burn a DVD.   Conclusion WLMM is one of the few applications that can edit WTV files, and it’s the only one we’re aware of that’s free. We should note only WTV and DVR-MS files will appear in the Recorded TV library in Media Center, so if you want to view your WMV output file in WMC you’ll need to add it to the Video or Movie library. Would you like to learn more about Windows Live Movie Maker? Check out are article on how to turn photos and home videos into movies with Windows Live Movie Maker. Need to add videos from a network location? WLMM doesn’t allow this by default, but you check out how to add network support to Windows Live Move Maker. Download Windows Live Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Rotate a Video 90 degrees with VLC or Windows Live Movie MakerHow to Make/Edit a movie with Windows Movie Maker in Windows VistaFamily Fun: Share Photos with Photo Gallery and Windows Live SpacesAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media CenterAutomatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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  • ISO Files to USB &ndash; The Cheap and Easy Way

    - by RonGarlit
    (DISCLAIMER: Yes there are lots of more elegant ISO software beside the free Microsoft one I’m about to show. But free is free and it has been tested and works for me for making advance bootable USB drives. That is another story. Look up Windows 8 Developer Preview for that one on BING.) For those of use that work with new technology all the time we accumulate a lot of ISO files and have to burn them to CD/DVD’s quite often. But we now have machines without burner in the corporate environment. We have personally Netbooks and light wait highly mobile laptops that do not have DVD burner. USB ports are all the rage and now we have USB 3.0 which is way faster than the 2.0 we are used to. Just looking at the technology, space saving and the cost issues alone is a reason to buy these answer to the DVD’s. So what is special about USB 2.0 and USB 3.0? USB 2 has a maximum speed of 480 Mbps... (That is Megabits per SECOND!!) Now look at the storage that we have with USB thumb drives that are now up to 64 GB in size, cell phone and PDAs that have a lots of internal storage built in well above the 16 Gig range. At the MAX USB 2.0 speed of 480 Mbps a full transfer of data in between devices can take a long time. Time is money right. Every back up a iPhone? Don’t get me started. So at least the engineers have been planning ahead with USB 3.0 which offers a maximum transfer speed of 4.8 Gbps... (That is Giga bits per SECOND!!) That speed is almost 10 times faster than USB 2.0 …. We don’t need to do the math on that one do we? But for now I'm thrilled with USB 2.0 and the fact I can get these little 4 Gig USB drives for $4.00 each at Staples on sale. Well that is a no brainer don’t you think. But what can you do with them to replace that DVD. Simply and cheaply put………. THIS! First let’s get an ISO file like the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate DVD ISO from MSDN to demonstrate with. I develop on several computers so this is a good choice for me. So we downloaded the ISO file and put it in a folder somewhere like this. Next we go download to the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool site and read about the tool. http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool And click this like to get the tool and install it. Once it is installed you go to the Start, Programs menu, Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool folder. And then click the tool to open it up. As you will see it is a sweet, simple tool that was originally designed to put the ISO for Windows 7 which is designed to be bootable on a USB or DVD for us geeks to play with. It is now being used for the Windows 8 Developer Preview by many developers for that for the same purpose it was built for in the past. But for now we will use it to put a NON Bootable ISO on a USB. Hey it does the job and I’m reusing a left over program. Why buy the fancy one or a free trial and clutter up my machine. We will click the BROWSE button and navigate to where we put our ISO file we want to put on the USB drive. Obviously we are going to click NEXT and continue to select a USB Device (you can guess what the DVD button is for). Next we select the USB that we have plugged into one of our laptops USB ports. Then we click the BEGIN COPYING button and the first thing the program does is format our USB drive. Then it starts copying out files out of the ISO and constructing the USB as if it was a DVD. So now that the files are copying to the drive I’m going to warn you. We will error out here. This program was design for bootable ISO’s of which this one is NOT. No problem because what fails it the writing of the bootable data to the drive that isn’t there. No biggie…. Forget the STARTOVER button is even there and click the dialog’s CLOSE button and exit the program. Now go to Windows Explorer and navigate to the USB Device. You can now access everything and even add stuff to the drive. But for me I want to keep this drive for one purpose and that is to install VS2010 on various machines. So the only stuff I’ll add to this is a folder of notes on things on visual studio that I might want to put on other machines I’m installing VS2010 on to. So that is it. Have a nice day! The Ron

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  • HR According to Batman

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    Any idea who that guy is running alongside the Caped Crusader? That’s Nightwing, but you may know him as Robin…well, the first Robin anyway. There were actually like 5 Robin’s according to Wikipedia: Dick Grayson, the original, who’s parents were circus performers killed by a gangster. Jason Todd, who was caught trying to steal tires off of the Batmobile. Tim Drake, who saw Dick’s parents die and figured out who Batman and Robin were. and a few others that get into recent time travel/altered reality storylines. What does this have to do with HR? Well, it somewhat ties in with an article by Alex Papadimoulis from 2008. In the article he talks about the “Cravath System”. The Craveth system was developed by a law firm called Cravath, Swaine & Moore back in the 19th century. In a nutshell, they believed in hiring the best and brightest straight out of school. These aspiring lawyers would then begin a fight for survival in the firm, with the strong surviving. In what’s termed the “Up and Out” rule, employees needed to be promoted within 3 years or leave the company. They should achieve partner within 7 – 8 years and no later than 10 after initially coming on board (read all about the system on Wikipedia here). Back to Alex’s article, he quotes from a book published in 1947 about the lawfirm: Under the “Cravath system” of taking a substantial number of men annually and keeping a current constantly moving up in the office, and its philosophy of tenure, men are constantly leaving… it is often difficult to keep the best men long enough to determine whether they shall be made partners, for Cravath-trained men are always in demand, usually at premium salaries. And so we see a pattern forming here: 1. Hire a whole whack of smart college graduates 2. Put them to work 3. The ones that stick around should move up the ladder. The ones that don’t stick around served the company well and left to expound the quality of the Cravath firm. Those that didn’t fall into either of those categories were just let go. There’s some interesting undercurrents to these ideas. If you stick around, you better keep your feet moving! I was at a Microsoft shindig a few months back, and was talking to a Microsoft employee. He shared that at MS you have 5 years to achieve a “senior” position within the company. Once you hit that mark, you can stay there for the rest of your career (he told about a guy who’s a “senior” developer and has been for the last 20+ years working on audio drivers for Windows), but you *must* hit that mark within the timeframe. What we see with Microsoft is Cravath’s system in action, whether intentional or not: bring in smart young people and see which ones stick. You need to give people something to work towards. Saying “You must reach this level or else!” is one way to look at it. The other way is to see achieving a higher rank in the organization as something for ambitious employees to reach towards. It’s important for an organization to always have the next generation of executives waiting in the wings, and unless you’re encouraging that early on you may find yourself in a position of needing to fill positions that nobody has been working towards. Now, you might suggest that this isn’t that big of a deal because you could just hire someone from outside the organization, but the Cravath system holds to the tenet of promoting internally; develop your own talent, since your business is the best place for the future leadership to learn teh business from. It’s OK for people to quit. Alex’s article really drives this point home, but its worth noting here also: its OK for your people to quit. In fact its inevitable…and more inevitable that it’ll be good people that leave. Some will stay and work towards the internal awards of promotion, but a number will get experience, serve the organization well, and then move on to something else. This should be expected and treated as a natural business occurrence. The idea of an alumni of an organization begins to come into play here: “That guy used to work for <insert company here>”. There’s a benefit in that: those best and brightest will be drawn to your organization and your reputation will permeate your market through former staff that are sought after because of how well you nurtured them. The Batman Hook All of this brings us back to Batman and his HR practice: when Dick decided he’d had enough of the Robin schtick, he quit and became his own…but he was always associated with Batman and people understood where his training had come from. To the Dark Knight’s credit, he continued training partners under the Robin brand. Luckily he didn’t have to worry about firing any of them (the ship sort of sails when you reveal a secret identity), although there was that unfortunate “quitting” of the second Robin when the Joker blew him up…but regardless, we see the Cravath system at work: bring in talent, expect great things, and be ok with whatever they decide for their careers. It’s an interesting way to approach HR, and luckily for us our business isn’t as dangerous or over-the-top as the caped crusader’s.

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  • Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

    - by mbcrump
    Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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  • Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective – Part 3

    - by pinaldave
    Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Congratulations!  You are now a fully trained developer!  You spent hours in a classroom, watching webinars, and reading materials.  You are now more educated and more prepared than ever before.  Now what? Stay or Quit The simple answer is that you now have two options – stay where you are or move on to a new job.  Even though you might now be smarter than you have ever felt before, this can still be a tough decision to make.  You feel extra trained and ready for a promotion or a raise, but you and your employer might not see eye to eye on this issue.  The logical conclusion is to go on a job hunt, but that might not be the most ethical thing to do. Click Image to Enlarge Manager’s Perspective Click Image to Enlarge Try to see the issue from your manager’s perspective.  You feel that you have just spent a lot of time and energy getting trained, and you should be rewarded.  But they have invested their time and energy in you.  They might see the training as a way to help you complete the goals they require from you, or as a way to help you complete tasks that will ultimately end in a reward or promotion. Moral Compass As in most cases, honesty is the best policy.  Be open with your manager about your expectations, and ask them to explain their goals.  When there is open and honest communication, everyone can walk away happy.  If you’re unable to discuss with your manager for one reason or another, just try to keep the company policy in mind and follow your own moral compass.  If all else fails, and your company is unwilling to make allowances for your new value, offer to pay the company back for the training before moving on your way. Whether you stay at your old job or move on to a new one, you are still faced with the question of what you’re going to do with all your new knowledge.  If you feel comfortable, offer to train others around you who are interested in the same subject.  This can look very good on your resume, and if you are working in a team environment it is sure to help you in the long run! What Next? You can even offer to train other trainers at the company – managers, those above you, or even report back to your original trainer about how your education is helping you in the work place.  Obviously this should be completely voluntary on the trainer’s part.  Taking advice from a “newbie” may not be their favorite idea, but it could also show the company that you are open to expanding your horizons and being helpful to everyone around you. Last in Line for Opportunity Click Image to Enlarge At this time, let us address a subject related to training and what to do with it – what if you are always overlooked for training?  This can as thorny a problem as receiving training in the first place.  The best advice is to let your supervisors know that you are always open to training and very interested in certain topics.  If you are consistently passed over, be patient.  Your turn will probably come, but the company as a whole has to focus on other problems at the moment.  If you feel that there are more personal issues at play, be sure to bring this up with your supervisor in a calm and professional manager so that everything can be worked out best for both parties. You, Yourself and Your Future! If all else fails, offer to pay for training yourself.  Perhaps money problems are at the root of being passed over.  Even if there are other reasons, offering to pay your own way shows your dedication and could work out well for you in the long run.  Always remember – in life you have to go out and make your own way, you cannot always sit and wait for things to land in your lap. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Weekend reading: Microsoft/Oracle and SkyDrive based code-editor

    - by jamiet
    A couple of news item caught my eye this weekend that I think are worthy of comment. Microsoft/Oracle partnership to be announced tomorrow (24/06/2013) According to many news site Microsoft and Oracle are about to announce a partnership (Oracle set for major Microsoft, Salesforce, Netsuite partnerships) and they all seem to be assuming that it will be something to do with “the cloud”. I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment, Microsoft are heavily pushing Azure and Oracle seem (to me anyway) to be rather lagging behind in the cloud game. More specifically folks seem to be assuming that Oracle’s forthcoming 12c database release will be offered on Azure. I did a bit of reading about Oracle 12c and one of its key pillars appears to be that it supports multi-tenant topologies and multi-tenancy is a common usage scenario for databases in the cloud. I’m left wondering then, if Microsoft are willing to push a rival’s multi-tenant solution what is happening to its own cloud-based multi-tenant offering – SQL Azure Federations. We haven’t heard anything about federations for what now seems to be a long time and moreover the main Program Manager behind the technology, Cihan Biyikoglu, recently left Microsoft to join Twitter. Furthermore, a Principle Architect for SQL Server, Conor Cunningham, recently presented the opening keynote at SQLBits 11 where he talked about multi-tenant solutions on SQL Azure and not once did he mention federations. All in all I don’t have a warm fuzzy feeling about the future of SQL Azure Federations so I hope that that question gets asked at some point following the Microsoft/Oracle announcement. Text Editor on SkyDrive with coding-specific features Liveside.net got a bit of a scoop this weekend with the news (Exclusive: SkyDrive.com to get web-based text file editing features) that Microsoft’s consumer-facing file storage service is going to get a new feature – a web-based code editor. Here’s Liveside’s screenshot: I’ve long had a passing interest in online code editors, indeed back in December 2009 I wondered out loud on this blog site: I started to wonder when the development tools that we use would also become cloud-based. After all, if we’re using cloud-based services does it not make sense to have cloud-based tools that work with them? I think it does. Project Houston Since then the world has moved on. Cloud 9 IDE (https://c9.io/) have blazed a trail in the fledgling world of online code editors and I have been wondering when Microsoft were going to start playing catch-up. I had no doubt that an online code editor was in Microsoft’s future; its an obvious future direction, why would I want to have to download and install a bloated text editor (which, arguably, is exactly what Visual Studio amounts to) and have to continually update it when I can simply open a web browser and have ready access to all of my code from wherever I am. There are signs that Microsoft is already making moves in this direction, after all the URL for their new offering Team Foundation Service doesn’t mention TFS at all – my own personalised URL for Team Foundation Service is http://jamiet.visualstudio.com – using “Visual Studio” as the domain name for a service that isn’t strictly speaking part of Visual Studio leads me to think that there’s a much bigger play here and that one day http://visualstudio.com will house an online code editor. With that in mind then I find Liveside’s revelation rather intriguing, why would a code editing tool show up in Skydrive? Perhaps SkyDrive is going to get integrated more tightly into TFS, I’m very interested to see where this goes. The larger question playing on my mind though is whether an online code editor from Microsoft will support SQL Server developers. I have opined before (see The SQL developer gap) about the shoddy treatment that SQL Server developers have to experience from Microsoft and I haven’t seen any change in Microsoft’s attitude in the three and a half years since I wrote that post. I’m constantly bewildered by the lack of investment in SQL Server developer productivity compared to the riches that are lavished upon our appdev brethren. When you consider that SQL Server is Microsoft’s third biggest revenue stream it is, frankly, rather insulting. SSDT was a step in the right direction but the hushed noises I hear coming out of Microsoft of late in regard to SSDT don’t bode fantastically well for its future. So, will an online code editor from Microsoft support T-SQL development? I have to assume not given the paucity of investment on us lowly SQL Server developers over the last few years, but I live in hope! Your thoughts in the comments section please. I would be very interested in reading them. @Jamiet

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