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• Michael Crump&rsquo;s notes for 70-563 PRO &ndash; Designing and Developing Windows Applications usi

  - by mbcrump

  TIME TO GO PRO! This is my notes for 70-563 PRO – Designing and Developing Windows Applications using .NET Framework 3.5 I created it using several resources (various certification web sites, msdn, official ms 70-548 book). The reason that I created this review is because a) I am taking the exam. b) MS did not create a book for this exam. Use the(MS 70-548)book. c) To make sure I am familiar with each before the exam. I hope that it provides a good start for your own notes. I hope that someone finds this useful. At least, it will give you a starting point of what to expect to know on the PRO exam. Also, for those wondering, the PRO exam does contains very little code. It is basically all theory. 1. Validation Controls – How to prevent users from entering invalid data on forms. (MaskedTextBox control and RegEx) 2. ServiceController – used to start and control the behavior of existing services. 3. User Feedback (know winforms Status Bar, Tool Tips, Color, Error Provider, Context-Sensitive and Accessibility) 4. Specific (derived) exceptions must be handled before general (base class) exceptions. By moving the exception handling for the base type Exception to after exception handling of ArgumentNullException, all ArgumentNullException thrown by the Helper method will be caught and logged correctly. 5. A heartbeat method is a method exposed by a Web service that allows external applications to check on the status of the service. 6. New users must master key tasks quickly. Giving these tasks context and appropriate detail will help. However, advanced users will demand quicker paths. Shortcuts, accelerators, or toolbar buttons will speed things along for the advanced user. 7. MSBuild uses project files to instruct the build engine what to build and how to build it. MSBuild project files are XML files that adhere to the MSBuild XML schema. The MSBuild project files contain complete file, build action, and dependency information for each individual projects. 8. Evaluating whether or not to fix a bug involves a triage process. You must identify the bug's impact, set the priority, categorize it, and assign a developer. Many times the person doing the triage work will assign the bug to a developer for further investigation. In fact, the workflow for the bug work item inside of Team System supports this step. Developers are often asked to assess the impact of a given bug. This assessment helps the person doing the triage make a decision on how to proceed. When assessing the impact of a bug, you should consider time and resources to fix it, bug risk, and impacts of the bug. 9. In large projects it is generally impossible and unfeasible to fix all bugs because of the impact on schedule and budget. 10. Code reviews should be conducted by a technical lead or a technical peer. 11. Testing Applications 12. WCF Services – application state 13. SQL Server 2005 / 2008 Express Edition – reliable storage of data / Microsoft SQL Server 3.5 Compact Database– used for client computers to retrieve and save data from a shared location. 14. SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition – used for minimum possible memory and can synchronize data with a corporate SQL Server 2008 Database. Supports offline user and minimum dependency on external components. 15. MDI and SDI Forms (specifically IsMDIContainer) 16. GUID – in the case of data warehousing, it is important to define unique keys. 17. Encrypting / Security Data 18. Understanding of Isolated Storage/Proper location to store items 19. LINQ to SQL 20. Multithreaded access 21. ADO.NET Entity Framework model 22. Marshal.ReleaseComObject 23. Common User Interface Layout (ComboBox, ListBox, Listview, MaskedTextBox, TextBox, RichTextBox, SplitContainer, TableLayoutPanel, TabControl) 24. DataSets Class - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.dataset%28VS.71%29.aspx 25. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) 26. SystemIcons.Shield (Vista UAC) 27. Leverging stored procedures to perform data manipulation for a database schema that can change. 28. DataContext 29. Microsoft Windows Installer Packages, ClickOnce(bootstrapping features), XCopy. 30. Client Application Services – will authenticate users by using the same data source as a ASP.NET web application. 31. SQL Server 2008 Caching 32. StringBuilder 33. Accessibility Guidelines for Windows Applications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228004.aspx 34. Logging erros 35. Testing performance related issues. 36. Role Based Security, GenericIdentity and GenericPrincipal 37. System.Net.CookieContainer will store session data for webapps (see isolated storage for winforms) 38. .NET CLR Profiler tool will identify objects that cause performance issues. 39. ADO.NET Synchronization (SyncGroup) 40. Globalization - CultureInfo 41. IDisposable Interface- reports on several questions relating to this. 42. Adding timestamps to determine whether data has changed or not. 43. Converting applications to .NET Framework 3.5 44. MicrosoftReportViewer 45. Composite Controls 46. Windows Vista KNOWN folders. 47. Microsoft Sync Framework 48. TypeConverter -Provides a unified way of converting types of values to other types, as well as for accessing standard values and sub properties. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.typeconverter.aspx 49. Concurrency control mechanisms The main categories of concurrency control mechanisms are: Optimistic - Delay the checking of whether a transaction meets the isolation rules (e.g., serializability and recoverability) until its end, without blocking any of its (read, write) operations, and then abort a transaction, if the desired rules are violated. Pessimistic - Block operations of a transaction, if they may cause violation of the rules. Semi-optimistic - Block operations in some situations, and do not block in other situations, while delaying rules checking to transaction's end, as done with optimistic. 50. AutoResetEvent 51. Microsoft Messaging Queue (MSMQ) 4.0 52. Bulk imports 53. KeyDown event of controls 54. WPF UI components 55. UI process layer 56. GAC (installing, removing and queuing) 57. Use a local database cache to reduce the network bandwidth used by applications. 58. Sound can easily be annoying and distracting to users, so use it judiciously. Always give users the option to turn sound off. Because a user might have sound off, never convey important information through sound alone.

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• Replacing jQuery.live() with jQuery.on()

  - by Rick Strahl

  jQuery 1.9 and 1.10 have introduced a host of changes, but for the most part these changes are mostly transparent to existing application usage of jQuery. After spending some time last week with a few of my projects and going through them with a specific eye for jQuery failures I found that for the most part there wasn't a big issue. The vast majority of code continues to run just fine with either 1.9 or 1.10 (which are supposed to be in sync but with 1.10 removing support for legacy Internet Explorer pre-9.0 versions). However, one particular change in the new versions has caused me quite a bit of update trouble, is the removal of the jQuery.live() function. This is my own fault I suppose - .live() has been deprecated for a while, but with 1.9 and later it was finally removed altogether from jQuery. In the past I had quite a bit of jQuery code that used .live() and it's one of the things that's holding back my upgrade process, although I'm slowly cleaning up my code and switching to the .on() function as the replacement. jQuery.live() jQuery.live() was introduced a long time ago to simplify handling events on matched elements that exist currently on the document and those that are are added in the future and also match the selector. jQuery uses event bubbling, special event binding, plus some magic using meta data attached to a parent level element to check and see if the original target event element matches the selected selected elements (for more info see Elijah Manor's comment below). An Example Assume a list of items like the following in HTML for example and further assume that the items in this list can be appended to at a later point. In this app there's a smallish initial list that loads to start, and as the user scrolls towards the end of the initial small list more items are loaded dynamically and added to the list.<div id="PostItemContainer" class="scrollbox"> <div class="postitem" data-id="4z6qhomm"> <div class="post-icon"></div> <div class="postitemheader"><a href="show/4z6qhomm" target="Content">1999 Buick Century For Sale!</a></div> <div class="postitemprice rightalign">$ 3,500 O.B.O.</div> <div class="smalltext leftalign">Jun. 07 @ 1:06am</div> <div class="post-byline">- Vehicles - Automobiles</div> </div> <div class="postitem" data-id="2jtvuu17"> <div class="postitemheader"><a href="show/2jtvuu17" target="Content">Toyota VAN 1987</a></div> <div class="postitemprice rightalign">$950</div> <div class="smalltext leftalign">Jun. 07 @ 12:29am</div> <div class="post-byline">- Vehicles - Automobiles</div> </div> … </div> With the jQuery.live() function you could easily select elements and hook up a click handler like this:$(".postitem").live("click", function() {...}); Simple and perfectly readable. The behavior of the .live handler generally was the same as the corresponding simple event handlers like .click(), except that you have to explicitly name the event instead of using one of the methods. Re-writing with jQuery.on() With .live() removed in 1.9 and later we have to re-write .live() code above with an alternative. The jQuery documentation points you at the .on() or .delegate() functions to update your code. jQuery.on() is a more generic event handler function, and it's what jQuery uses internally to map the high level event functions like .click(),.change() etc. that jQuery exposes. Using jQuery.on() however is not a one to one replacement of the .live() function. While .on() can handle events directly and use the same syntax as .live() did, you'll find if you simply switch out .live() with .on() that events on not-yet existing elements will not fire. IOW, the key feature of .live() is not working. You can use .on() to get the desired effect however, but you have to change the syntax to explicitly handle the event you're interested in on the container and then provide a filter selector to specify which elements you are actually interested in for handling the event for. Sounds more complicated than it is and it's easier to see with an example. For the list above hooking .postitem clicks, using jQuery.on() looks like this:$("#PostItemContainer").on("click", ".postitem", function() {...}); You specify a container that can handle the .click event and then provide a filter selector to find the child elements that trigger the  the actual event. So here #PostItemContainer contains many .postitems, whose click events I want to handle. Any container will do including document, but I tend to use the container closest to the elements I actually want to handle the events on to minimize the event bubbling that occurs to capture the event. With this code I get the same behavior as with .live() and now as new .postitem elements are added the click events are always available. Sweet. Here's the full event signature for the .on() function: .on( events [, selector ] [, data ], handler(eventObject) ) Note that the selector is optional - if you omit it you essentially create a simple event handler that handles the event directly on the selected object. The filter/child selector required if you want life-like - uh, .live() like behavior to happen. While it's a bit more verbose than what .live() did, .on() provides the same functionality by being more explicit on what your parent container for trapping events is. .on() is good Practice even for ordinary static Element Lists As a side note, it's a good practice to use jQuery.on() or jQuery.delegate() for events in most cases anyway, using this 'container event trapping' syntax. That's because rather than requiring lots of event handlers on each of the child elements (.postitem in the sample above), there's just one event handler on the container, and only when clicked does jQuery drill down to find the matching filter element and tries to match it to the originating element. In the early days of jQuery I used manually build handlers that did this and manually drilled from the event object into the originalTarget to determine if it's a matching element. With later versions of jQuery the various event functions in jQuery essentially provide this functionality out of the box with functions like .on() and .delegate(). All of this is nothing new, but I thought I'd write this up because I have on a few occasions forgotten what exactly was needed to replace the many .live() function calls that litter my code - especially older code. This will be a nice reminder next time I have a memory blank on this topic. And maybe along the way I've helped one or two of you as well to clean up your .live() code…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in jQuery   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Easily use google maps, openstreet maps etc offline.

  - by samkea

  I did it and i am going to explain step by step. The explanatination may appear long but its simple if you follow. Note: All the softwares i have used are the latest and i have packaged them and provided them in the link below. I use Nokia N96 1) RootSign smartComGPS and install it on your phone(i havent provided the signer so that u wuld do some little work. i used Secman' rootsign). 2) Install Universal Maps Downloader, SmartCom OGF2 converter and OziExplorer 3.95.4s on my PC. a) UMD is used to download map tiles from any map source like googlemaps,opensourcemaps etc... and also combine the tiles into an image file like png,jpg,bmp etc... b) SmartCom OGF2 converter is used to convert the image file into a format usable on your mobile phone. c) OziExplorer will help you to calibrate the usable map file so that it can be used with GPS on your mobile phone without the use of internet. 3) Go to google maps or where u pick your maps and pan to the area of your interest. Zoom the map to at least 15 or 16 zoom level where you can see your area clearly and the streets. 4) copy this script in a notepad file and save it on your desktop: javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().ge tCenter())); 5) Open the universal maps downloader. You will notice that you are required to add the: left longitude, right longitude,top latitude, bottom latitude. 6) On your map in google maps, doubleclick on the your prefered to most middle point. you will notice that the map will center in that area. 7) copy the script and paste it in the address bar then press enter. You will notice that a dialog with your (top latitude) and longitude respectively pops up. 8) copy the top latitude ONLY and paste it in the corresponding textbox in the UMD. 9) repeat steps 6-7 for the botton latitude. 10)repeat steps 6-7 for left longitude and right longitude too, but u have to copy the longitudes here. (***BTW record these points in the text file as they may be needed later in calibration) 11) Give the zoom level to the same zoom level that you prefered in google maps. 12) Dont forget to choose a path to save your files and under options set the proxy connection settings in UMD if you are using so. 13) Click on start and bingo! there you have your image tiles and a file with an extension .umd will be saved in the same folder. 14) On the UMD, go to tools, click on MapViewer and choose the .umd file. you will now see your map in one piece....and you will smile! 15) Still go to tools and click on map combiner. A dialog will popup for you to choose the .umd file and to enter the IMAGE file name. u can use another extension for the image file like png, jpg etc...i usually use png. 16) Combine.....bingo! there u go! u have an IMAGE file for your map. *I SUGGEST THAT CREATE A .BMP FILE and A .PNG file* 17) Close UMD and open SmartCom OGF2 converter. 18) Choose your .png image and create an ogf2 file. 19) Connect your phone to your PC in Mass Memory mode and transfer the file to the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 20) Now disconnect your phone and load smartComGPS. it will load the map and propt you to add a calibration point. Go ahead and add one calibration point with dummy coordinates. You will notice that it will add another file with extension .map in the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 21) Connect yiur ohone and copy that file and paste it in your working folder on your PC. Delete that .map file from the phone too because you are going to edit it from your PC and put it back. 22) Now Open the OziExplorer, go to file-->Load and Calibrate Map Image. 23) Choose the .bmp image and bingo! it will load with your map in the same zoom level. 24) Now you are going to calibrate. Use the MapView window and take the small box locater to all the 4 cornners of the map. You will notice that the map in the back ground moves to that area too. 25)On the right side, select the Point1 tab. Now you are in calibration mode. Now move the red box in mapview in the left upper corner to calibrate point1. 26) out of mapview go to the the left upper corner of the background map and choose poit (0,0) and your 1st calibration point. You will notice that these X,Y cordinated will be reflected in the Point1 image cordinates. 27) now go back to the text file where you saved your coordibates and enter the top latitude and the left longitude in the corresponding places. 28) Repeat steps 25-27 for point2,point3,point4 and click on save. Thats it, you have calibrated your image and you are about to finish. 29) Go to save and a dilaog which prompts you to save a .map file will poop up. Do save the map file in your working folder. 30) Right click that .map file and edit the filename in the .map file to remove the pc's directory structure. Eg. Change C\OziExplorer\data\Kampala.bmp to Kampala.ogf2. 31) Save the .map file in the smartComGPS\Maps folder on your phone. 32) now open smartComGPS on your phone and bingo! there is your map with GPS capability and in the same zoom level. 33) In smartComGPS options, choose connect and simulate. By now you should be smiling. Whoa! Hope i was of help. i case you get a problem, please inform me Below is the link to the software. regards. http://rapidshare.com/files/230296037/Utilities_Used.rar.html Ok, the Rapidshare files i posted are gone, so you will have to download as described in the solution. If you need more help, go here: http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-160491.html Some months later, someone else gave almost the same kind of solution here. http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-180123.html Note: the solutions were mean't to help view maps on Symbian phones, but i think now they ca even do for Windows Phones, iphones and others so read, extract what you want and use it. Hope it helps. Sam Kea

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• TFS, G.I. Joe and Under-doing

  If I were to rank the most consistently irritating parts of my work day, using TFS would come in first by a wide margin. Even repeated network outages this week seem like a pleasant reprieve from this monolithic beast. This is not a reflexive anti-Microsoft feeling, that attitude just wouldnt work for a consultant who does .NET development. It is also not an utter dismissal of TFS as worthless; Ive seen people use it effectively on several projects. So why? Ill start with a laundry list of shortcomings. An out of the box UI for work items that is insultingly bad, a source control system that is confoundingly fragile when handling merges, folder renames and long file names, the arcane XML wizardry necessary to customize a template and a build system that adds an extra layer of oddness on top of msbuild. Im sure my legion of readers will soon point out to me how I can work around all these issues, how this is fixed in TFS 2010 or with this add-in, and how once you have everything set up, youre fine. And theyd be right, any one of these problems could be worked around. If not dirty laundry, what else? I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that TFS is so irritating to me because it represents a vision of software development that I find unappealing. To expand upon this, lets start with some wisdom from those great PSAs at the end of the G.I. Joe cartoons of the 80s: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. In software development, Id go further and say knowing is more than half the battle. Understanding the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve, the needs of the users, the value that your software can provide are more than half the battle. Implementation of this understanding is not easy, but it is not even possible without this knowledge. Assuming we have a fixed amount of time and mental energy for any project, why does this spell trouble for TFS? If you think about what TFS is doing, its offering you a huge array of options to track the day to day implementation of your project. From tasks, to code churn, to test coverage. All valuable metrics, but only in exchange for valuable time to get it all working. In addition, when you have a shiny toy like TFS, the temptation is to feel obligated to use it. So the push from TFS is to encourage a project manager and team to focus on process and metrics around process. You can get great visibility, and graphs to show your project stakeholders, but none of that is important if you are not implementing the right product. Not just unimportant, these activities can be harmful as they drain your time and sap your creativity away from the rest of the project. To be more concrete, lets suppose your organization has invested the time to create a template for your projects and trained people in how to use it, so there is no longer a big investment of time for each project to get up and running. First, Id challenge if that template could be specific enough to be full featured and still applicable for any project. Second, the very existence of this template would be a indication to a project manager that the success of their project was somehow directly related to fitting management of that project into this format. Again, while the capabilities are wonderful, the mirage is there; just get everything into TFS and your project will run smoothly. Ill close the loop on this first topic by proposing a thought experiment. Think of the projects youve worked on. How many times have you been chagrined to discover youve implemented the wrong feature, misunderstood how a feature should work or just plain spent too much time on a screen that nobody uses? That sounds like a really worthwhile area to invest time in improving. How about going back to these projects and thinking about how many times you wished you had optimized the state change flow of your tasks or been embarrassed to not have a code churn report linked back to the latest changeset? With thanks to the Real American Heroes, Ill move on to a more current influence, that of the developers at 37signals, and their philosophy towards software development. This philosophy, fully detailed in the books Getting Real and Rework, is a vision of software that under does the competition. This is software that is deliberately limited in functionality in order to concentrate fully on making sure ever feature that is there is awesome and needed. Why is this relevant? Well, in one of those fun seeming paradoxes in life, constraints can be a spark for creativity. Think Twitter, the small screen of an iPhone, the limitations of HTML for applications, the low memory limits of older or embedded system. As long as there is some freedom within those constraints, amazing things emerge. For project management, some of the most respected people in the industry recommend using just index cards, pens and tape. They argue that with change the constant in software development, your process should be as limited (yet rigorous) as possible. Looking at TFS, this is not a system designed to under do anybody. It is a big jumble of components and options, with every feature you could think of. Predictably this means many basic functions are hard to use. For task management, many people just use an Excel spreadsheet linked up to TFS. Not a stirring endorsement of the tooling there. TFS as a whole would be far more appealing to me if there was less of it, but better. Id cut 50% of the features to make the other half really amaze and inspire me. And thats really the heart of the matter. TFS has great promise and I want to believe it can work better. But ultimately it focuses your attention on a lot of stuff that doesnt really matter and then clamps down your creativity in a mess of forms and dialogs obscuring what does.   --- Relevant Links --- All those great G.I. Joe PSAs are on YouTube, including lots of mashed up versions. A simple Google search will get you on the right track.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Change or Reset Windows Password from a Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  If you can’t log in even after trying your twelve passwords, or you’ve inherited a computer complete with password-protected profiles, worry not – you don’t have to do a fresh install of Windows. We’ll show you how to change or reset your Windows password from a Ubuntu Live CD. This method works for all of the NT-based version of Windows – anything from Windows 2000 and later, basically. And yes, that includes Windows 7. You’ll need a Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD, or a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 Flash Drive. If you don’t have one, or have forgotten how to boot from the flash drive, check out our article on creating a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 flash drive. The program that lets us manipulate Windows passwords is called chntpw. The steps to install it are different in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. Installation: 32-bit Open up Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System at the top of the screen, expanding the Administration section, and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager. chntpw is found in the universe repository. Repositories are a way for Ubuntu to group software together so that users are able to choose if they want to use only completely open source software maintained by Ubuntu developers, or branch out and use software with different licenses and maintainers. To enable software from the universe repository, click on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic window. Add a checkmark beside the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)” and then click close. When you change the repositories you are selecting software from, you have to reload the list of available software. In the main Synaptic window, click on the Reload button. The software lists will be downloaded. Once downloaded, Synaptic must rebuild its search index. The label over the text field by the Search button will read “Rebuilding search index.” When it reads “Quick search,” type chntpw in the text field. The package will show up in the list. Click on the checkbox near the chntpw name. Click on Mark for Installation. chntpw won’t actually be installed until you apply the changes you’ve made, so click on the Apply button in the Synaptic window now. You will be prompted to accept the changes. Click Apply. The changes should be applied quickly. When they’re done, click Close. chntpw is now installed! You can close Synaptic Package Manager. Skip to the section titled Using chntpw to reset your password. Installation: 64-bit The version of chntpw available in Ubuntu’s universe repository will not work properly on a 64-bit machine. Fortunately, a patched version exists in Debian’s Unstable branch, so let’s download it from there and install it manually. Open Firefox. Whether it’s your preferred browser or not, it’s very readily accessible in the Ubuntu Live CD environment, so it will be the easiest to use. There’s a shortcut to Firefox in the top panel. Navigate to http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/chntpw/download and download the latest version of chntpw for 64-bit machines. Note: In most cases it would be best to add the Debian Unstable branch to a package manager, but since the Live CD environment will revert to its original state once you reboot, it’ll be faster to just download the .deb file. Save the .deb file to the default location. You can close Firefox if desired. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications at the top-left of the screen, expanding the Accessories folder, and clicking on Terminal. In the terminal window, enter the following text, hitting enter after each line: cd Downloadssudo dpkg –i chntpw* chntpw will now be installed. Using chntpw to reset your password Before running chntpw, you will have to mount the hard drive that contains your Windows installation. In most cases, Ubuntu 9.10 makes this simple. Click on Places at the top-left of the screen. If your Windows drive is easily identifiable – usually by its size – then left click on it. If it is not obvious, then click on Computer and check out each hard drive until you find the correct one. The correct hard drive will have the WINDOWS folder in it. When you find it, make a note of the drive’s label that appears in the menu bar of the file browser. If you don’t already have one open, start a terminal window by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal. In the terminal window, enter the commands cd /medials pressing enter after each line. You should see one or more strings of text appear; one of those strings should correspond with the string that appeared in the title bar of the file browser earlier. Change to that directory by entering the command cd <hard drive label> Since the hard drive label will be very annoying to type in, you can use a shortcut by typing in the first few letters or numbers of the drive label (capitalization matters) and pressing the Tab key. It will automatically complete the rest of the string (if those first few letters or numbers are unique). We want to switch to a certain Windows directory. Enter the command: cd WINDOWS/system32/config/ Again, you can use tab-completion to speed up entering this command. To change or reset the administrator password, enter: sudo chntpw SAM SAM is the file that contains your Windows registry. You will see some text appear, including a list of all of the users on your system. At the bottom of the terminal window, you should see a prompt that begins with “User Edit Menu:” and offers four choices. We recommend that you clear the password to blank (you can always set a new password in Windows once you log in). To do this, enter “1” and then “y” to confirm. If you would like to change the password instead, enter “2”, then your desired password, and finally “y” to confirm. If you would like to reset or change the password of a user other than the administrator, enter: sudo chntpw –u <username> SAM From here, you can follow the same steps as before: enter “1” to reset the password to blank, or “2” to change it to a value you provide. And that’s it! Conclusion chntpw is a very useful utility provided for free by the open source community. It may make you think twice about how secure the Windows login system is, but knowing how to use chntpw can save your tail if your memory fails you two or eight times! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDChange Your Forgotten Windows Password with the Linux System Rescue CDHow to Create and Use a Password Reset Disk in Windows Vista & Windows 7Reset Your Forgotten Password the Easy Way Using the Ultimate Boot CD for WindowsHow to install Spotify in Ubuntu 9.10 using Wine TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC Live Map of Marine Traffic NoSquint Remembers Site Specific Zoom Levels (Firefox) New Firefox release 3.6.3 fixes 1 Critical bug Dark Side of the Moon (8-bit)

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• The Art of Productivity

  - by dwahlin

  Getting things done has always been a challenge regardless of gender, age, race, skill, or job position. No matter how hard some people try, they end up procrastinating tasks until the last minute. Some people simply focus better when they know they’re out of time and can’t procrastinate any longer. How many times have you put off working on a term paper in school until the very last minute? With only a few hours left your mental energy and focus seem to kick in to high gear especially as you realize that you either get the paper done now or risk failing. It’s amazing how a little pressure can turn into a motivator and allow our minds to focus on a given task. Some people seem to specialize in procrastinating just about everything they do while others tend to be the “doers” who get a lot done and ultimately rise up the ladder at work. What’s the difference between these types of people? Is it pure laziness or are other factors at play? I think that some people are certainly more motivated than others, but I also think a lot of it is based on the process that “doers” tend to follow - whether knowingly or unknowingly. While I’ve certainly fought battles with procrastination, I’ve always had a knack for being able to get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. I think a lot of my “get it done” attitude goes back to the the strong work ethic my parents instilled in me at a young age. I remember my dad saying, “You need to learn to work hard!” when I was around 5 years old. I remember that moment specifically because I was on a tractor with him the first time I heard it while he was trying to move some large rocks into a pile. The tractor was big but so were the rocks and my dad had to balance the tractor perfectly so that it didn’t tip forward too far. It was challenging work and somewhat tedious but my dad finished the task and taught me a few important lessons along the way including persistence, the importance of having a skill, and getting the job done right without skimping along the way. In this post I’m going to list a few of the techniques and processes I follow that I hope may be beneficial to others. I blogged about the general concept back in 2009 but thought I’d share some updated information and lessons learned since then. Most of the ideas that follow came from learning and refining my daily work process over the years. However, since most of the ideas are common sense (at least in my opinion), I suspect they can be found in other productivity processes that are out there. Let’s start off with one of the most important yet simple tips: Start Each Day with a List. Start Each Day with a List What are you planning to get done today? Do you keep track of everything in your head or rely on your calendar? While most of us think that we’re pretty good at managing “to do” lists strictly in our head you might be surprised at how affective writing out lists can be. By writing out tasks you’re forced to focus on the most important tasks to accomplish that day, commit yourself to those tasks, and have an easy way to track what was supposed to get done and what actually got done. Start every morning by making a list of specific tasks that you want to accomplish throughout the day. I’ll even go so far as to fill in times when I’d like to work on tasks if I have a lot of meetings or other events tying up my calendar on a given day. I’m not a big fan of using paper since I type a lot faster than I write (plus I write like a 3rd grader according to my wife), so I use the Sticky Notes feature available in Windows. Here’s an example of yesterday’s sticky note: What do you add to your list? That’s the subject of the next tip. Focus on Small Tasks It’s no secret that focusing on small, manageable tasks is more effective than trying to focus on large and more vague tasks. When you make your list each morning only add tasks that you can accomplish within a given time period. For example, if I only have 30 minutes blocked out to work on an article I don’t list “Write Article”. If I do that I’ll end up wasting 30 minutes stressing about how I’m going to get the article done in 30 minutes and ultimately get nothing done. Instead, I’ll list something like “Write Introductory Paragraphs for Article”. The next day I may add, “Write first section of article” or something that’s small and manageable – something I’m confident that I can get done. You’ll find that once you’ve knocked out several smaller tasks it’s easy to continue completing others since you want to keep the momentum going. In addition to keeping my tasks focused and small, I also make a conscious effort to limit my list to 4 or 5 tasks initially. I’ve found that if I list more than 5 tasks I feel a bit overwhelmed which hurts my productivity. It’s easy to add additional tasks as you complete others and you get the added benefit of that confidence boost of knowing that you’re being productive and getting things done as you remove tasks and add others. Getting Started is the Hardest (Yet Easiest) Part I’ve always found that getting started is the hardest part and one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. Getting started working on tasks is a lot like getting a large rock pushed to the bottom of a hill. It’s difficult to get the rock rolling at first, but once you manage to get it rocking some it’s really easy to get it rolling on its way to the bottom. As an example, I’ve written 100s of articles for technical magazines over the years and have really struggled with the initial introductory paragraphs. Keep in mind that these are the paragraphs that don’t really add that much value (in my opinion anyway). They introduce the reader to the subject matter and nothing more. What a waste of time for me to sit there stressing about how to start the article. On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour trying to come up with 2-3 paragraphs of text.  Talk about a productivity killer! Whether you’re struggling with a writing task, some code for a project, an email, or other tasks, jumping in without thinking too much is the best way to get started I’ve found. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have an overall plan when jumping into a task, but on some occasions you’ll find that if you simply jump into the task and stop worrying about doing everything perfectly that things will flow more smoothly. For my introductory paragraph problem I give myself 5 minutes to write out some general concepts about what I know the article will cover and then spend another 10-15 minutes going back and refining that information. That way I actually have some ideas to work with rather than a blank sheet of paper. If I still find myself struggling I’ll write the rest of the article first and then circle back to the introductory paragraphs once I’m done. To sum this tip up: Jump into a task without thinking too hard about it. It’s better to to get the rock at the top of the hill rocking some than doing nothing at all. You can always go back and refine your work.   Learn a Productivity Technique and Stick to It There are a lot of different productivity programs and seminars out there being sold by companies. I’ve always laughed at how much money people spend on some of these motivational programs/seminars because I think that being productive isn’t that hard if you create a re-useable set of steps and processes to follow. That’s not to say that some of these programs/seminars aren’t worth the money of course because I know they’ve definitely benefited some people that have a hard time getting things done and staying focused. One of the best productivity techniques I’ve ever learned is called the “Pomodoro Technique” and it’s completely free. This technique is an extremely simple way to manage your time without having to remember a bunch of steps, color coding mechanisms, or other processes. The technique was originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s and can be implemented with a simple timer. In a nutshell here’s how the technique works: Pick a task to work on Set the timer to 25 minutes and work on the task Once the timer rings record your time Take a 5 minute break Repeat the process Here’s why the technique works well for me: It forces me to focus on a single task for 25 minutes. In the past I had no time goal in mind and just worked aimlessly on a task until I got interrupted or bored. 25 minutes is a small enough chunk of time for me to stay focused. Any distractions that may come up have to wait until after the timer goes off. If the distraction is really important then I stop the timer and record my time up to that point. When the timer is running I act as if I only have 25 minutes total for the task (like you’re down to the last 25 minutes before turning in your term paper….frantically working to get it done) which helps me stay focused and turns into a “beat the clock” type of game. It’s actually kind of fun if you treat it that way and really helps me focus on a the task at hand. I automatically know how much time I’m spending on a given task (more on this later) by using this technique. I know that I have 5 minutes after each pomodoro (the 25 minute sprint) to waste on anything I’d like including visiting a website, stepping away from the computer, etc. which also helps me stay focused when the 25 minute timer is counting down. I use this technique so much that I decided to build a program for Windows 8 called Pomodoro Focus (I plan to blog about how it was built in a later post). It’s a Windows Store application that allows people to track tasks, productive time spent on tasks, interruption time experienced while working on a given task, and the number of pomodoros completed. If a time estimate is given when the task is initially created, Pomodoro Focus will also show the task completion percentage. I like it because it allows me to track my tasks, time spent on tasks (very useful in the consulting world), and even how much time I wasted on tasks (pressing the pause button while working on a task starts the interruption timer). I recently added a new feature that charts productive and interruption time for tasks since I wanted to see how productive I was from week to week and month to month. A few screenshots from the Pomodoro Focus app are shown next, I had a lot of fun building it and use it myself to as I work on tasks.   There are certainly many other productivity techniques and processes out there (and a slew of books describing them), but the Pomodoro Technique has been the simplest and most effective technique I’ve ever come across for staying focused and getting things done.   Persistence is Key Getting things done is great but one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that persistence is key especially when you’re trying to get something done that at times seems insurmountable. Small tasks ultimately lead to larger tasks getting accomplished, however, it’s not all roses along the way as some of the smaller tasks may come with their own share of bumps and bruises that lead to discouragement about the end goal and whether or not it is worth achieving at all. I’ve been on several long-term projects over my career as a software developer (I have one personal project going right now that fits well here) and found that repeating, “Persistence is the key!” over and over to myself really helps. Not every project turns out to be successful, but if you don’t show persistence through the hard times you’ll never know if you succeeded or not. Likewise, if you don’t persistently stick to the process of creating a daily list, follow a productivity process, etc. then the odds of consistently staying productive aren’t good.   Track Your Time How much time do you actually spend working on various tasks? If you don’t currently track time spent answering emails, on phone calls, and working on various tasks then you might be surprised to find out that a task that you thought was going to take you 30 minutes ultimately ended up taking 2 hours. If you don’t track the time you spend working on tasks how can you expect to learn from your mistakes, optimize your time better, and become more productive? That’s another reason why I like the Pomodoro Technique – it makes it easy to stay focused on tasks while also tracking how much time I’m working on a given task.   Eliminate Distractions I blogged about this final tip several years ago but wanted to bring it up again. If you want to be productive (and ultimately successful at whatever you’re doing) then you can’t waste a lot of time playing games or on Twitter, Facebook, or other time sucking websites. If you see an article you’re interested in that has no relation at all to the tasks you’re trying to accomplish then bookmark it and read it when you have some spare time (such as during a pomodoro break). Fighting the temptation to check your friends’ status updates on Facebook? Resist the urge and realize how much those types of activities are hurting your productivity and taking away from your focus. I’ll admit that eliminating distractions is still tough for me personally and something I have to constantly battle. But, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut back on my visits and updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Sure, my Klout score has suffered as a result lately, but does anyone actually care about those types of scores aside from your online “friends” (few of whom you’ve actually met in person)? :-) Ultimately it comes down to self-discipline and how badly you want to be productive and successful in your career, life goals, hobbies, or whatever you’re working on. Rather than having your homepage take you to a time wasting news site, game site, social site, picture site, or others, how about adding something like the following as your homepage? Every time your browser opens you’ll see a personal message which helps keep you on the right track. You can download my ubber-sophisticated homepage here if interested. Summary Is there a single set of steps that if followed can ultimately lead to productivity? I don’t think so since one size has never fit all. Every person is different, works in their own unique way, and has their own set of motivators, distractions, and more. While I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject of productivity, I do think that if you learn what steps work best for you and gradually refine them over time that you can come up with a personal productivity process that can serve you well. Productivity is definitely an “art” that anyone can learn with a little practice and persistence. You’ve seen some of the steps that I personally like to follow and I hope you find some of them useful in boosting your productivity. If you have others you use please leave a comment. I’m always looking for ways to improve.

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• Getting MySQL work with Entity Framework 4.0

  - by DigiMortal

  Does MySQL work with Entity Framework 4.0? The answer is: yes, it works! I just put up one experimental project to play with MySQL and Entity Framework 4.0 and in this posting I will show you how to get MySQL data to EF. Also I will give some suggestions how to deploy your applications to hosting and cloud environments. MySQL stuff As you may guess you need MySQL running somewhere. I have MySQL installed to my development machine so I can also develop stuff when I’m offline. The other thing you need is MySQL Connector for .NET Framework. Currently there is available development version of MySQL Connector/NET 6.3.5 that supports Visual Studio 2010. Before you start download MySQL and Connector/NET: MySQL Community Server Connector/NET 6.3.5 If you are not big fan of phpMyAdmin then you can try out free desktop client for MySQL – HeidiSQL. I am using it and I am really happy with this program. NB! If you just put up MySQL then create also database with couple of table there. To use all features of Entity Framework 4.0 I suggest you to use InnoDB or other engine that has support for foreign keys. Connecting MySQL to Entity Framework 4.0 Now create simple console project using Visual Studio 2010 and go through the following steps. 1. Add new ADO.NET Entity Data Model to your project. For model insert the name that is informative and that you are able later recognize. Now you can choose how you want to create your model. Select “Generate from database” and click OK. 2. Set up database connection Change data connection and select MySQL Database as data source. You may also need to set provider – there is only one choice. Select it if data provider combo shows empty value. Click OK and insert connection information you are asked about. Don’t forget to click test connection button to see if your connection data is okay. If everything works then click OK. 3. Insert context name Now you should see the following dialog. Insert your data model name for application configuration file and click OK. Click next button. 4. Select tables for model Now you can select tables and views your classes are based on. I have small database with events data. Uncheck the checkbox “Include foreign key columns in the model” – it is damn annoying to get them away from model later. Also insert informative and easy to remember name for your model. Click finish button. 5. Define your classes Now it’s time to define your classes. Here you can see what Entity Framework generated for you. Relations were detected automatically – that’s why we needed foreign keys. The names of classes and their members are not nice yet. After some modifications my class model looks like on the following diagram. Note that I removed attendees navigation property from person class. Now my classes look nice and they follow conventions I am using when naming classes and their members. NB! Don’t forget to see properties of classes (properties windows) and modify their set names if set names contain numbers (I changed set name for Entity from Entity1 to Entities). 6. Let’s test! Now let’s write simple testing program to see if MySQL data runs through Entity Framework 4.0 as expected. My program looks for events where I attended. using(var context = new MySqlEntities()) {     var myEvents = from e in context.Events                     from a in e.Attendees                     where a.Person.FirstName == "Gunnar" &&                             a.Person.LastName == "Peipman"                     select e;       Console.WriteLine("My events: ");       foreach(var e in myEvents)     {         Console.WriteLine(e.Title);     } }   Console.ReadKey(); And when I run it I get the result shown on screenshot on right. I checked out from database and these results are correct. At first run connector seems to work slow but this is only the effect of first run. As connector is loaded to memory by Entity Framework it works fast from this point on. Now let’s see what we have to do to get our program work in hosting and cloud environments where MySQL connector is not installed. Deploying application to hosting and cloud environments If your hosting or cloud environment has no MySQL connector installed you have to provide MySQL connector assemblies with your project. Add the following assemblies to your project’s bin folder and include them to your project (otherwise they are not packaged by WebDeploy and Azure tools): MySQL.Data MySQL.Data.Entity MySQL.Web You can also add references to these assemblies and mark references as local so these assemblies are copied to binary folder of your application. If you have references to these assemblies then you don’t have to include them to your project from bin folder. Also add the following block to your application configuration file. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <configuration> ...   <system.data>     <DbProviderFactories>         <add              name=”MySQL Data Provider”              invariant=”MySql.Data.MySqlClient”              description=”.Net Framework Data Provider for MySQL”              type=”MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlClientFactory, MySql.Data,                   Version=6.2.0.0, Culture=neutral,                   PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d”          />     </DbProviderFactories>   </system.data> ... </configuration> Conclusion It was not hard to get MySQL connector installed and MySQL connected to Entity Framework 4.0. To use full power of Entity Framework we used InnoDB engine because it supports foreign keys. It was also easy to query our model. To get our project online we needed some easy modifications to our project and configuration files.

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• Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning?  Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers.  As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work.  Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble.  It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected.  This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below).  You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program.  If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished.  Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health.  Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events.  On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed.  It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing.  If you’d like more information, click the link under the description.  Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them.  From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good.  However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F.   The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive.  Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status.  If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count.  These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer.  Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning.  We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows.  You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar.  If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected.  Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software.   If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem.  Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby.  To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program.  Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email.  If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options.   It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports.   Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes.  It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems.  Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP 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 HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

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• SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Introduction – Day 1 of 31

  - by pinaldave

  List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Posts covering interview questions and answers always make for interesting reading.  Some people like the subject for their helpful hints and thought provoking subject, and others dislike these posts because they feel it is nothing more than cheating.  I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of a Question and Answer format here. Interview Questions and Answers are Helpful Just like blog posts, books, and articles, interview Question and Answer discussions are learning material.  The popular Dummy’s books or Idiots Guides are not only for “dummies,” but can help everyone relearn the fundamentals.  Question and Answer discussions can serve the same purpose.  You could call this SQL Server Fundamentals or SQL Server 101. I have administrated hundreds of interviews during my career and I have noticed that sometimes an interviewee with several years of experience lacks an understanding of the fundamentals.  These individuals have been in the industry for so long, usually working on a very specific project, that the ABCs of the business have slipped their mind. Or, when a college graduate is looking to get into the industry, he is not expected to have experience since he is just graduated. However, the new grad is expected to have an understanding of fundamentals and theory.  Sometimes after the stress of final exams and graduation, it can be difficult to remember the correct answers to interview questions, though. An interview Question and Answer discussion can be very helpful to both these individuals.  It is simply a way to go back over the building blocks of a topic.  Many times a simple review like this will help “jog” your memory, and all those previously-memorized facts will come flooding back to you.  It is not a way to re-learn a topic, but a way to remind yourself of what you already know. A Question and Answer discussion can also be a way to go over old topics in a more interesting manner.  Especially if you have been working in the industry, or taking lots of classes on the topic, everything you read can sound like a repeat of what you already know.  Going over a topic in a new format can make the material seem fresh and interesting.  And an interested mind will be more engaged and remember more in the end. Interview Questions and Answers are Harmful A common argument against a Question and Answer discussion is that it will give someone a “cheat sheet.” A new guy with relatively little experience can read the interview questions and answers, and then memorize them. When an interviewer asks him the same questions, he will repeat the answers and get the job. Honestly, is he good hire because he memorized the interview questions? Wouldn’t it be better for the interviewer to hire someone with actual experience?  The answer is not as easy as it seems – there are many different factors to be considered. If the interviewer is asking fundamentals-related questions only, he gets the answers he wants to hear, and then hires this first candidate – there is a good chance that he is hiring based on personality rather than experience.  If the interviewer is smart he will ask deeper questions, have more than one person on the interview team, and interview a variety of candidates.  If one interviewee happens to memorize some answers, it usually doesn’t mean he will automatically get the job at the expense of more qualified candidates. Another argument against interview Question and Answers is that it will give candidates a false sense of confidence, and that they will appear more qualified than they are. Well, if that is true, it will not last after the first interview when the candidate is asked difficult questions and he cannot find the answers in the list of interview Questions and Answers.  Besides, confidence is one of the best things to walk into an interview with! In today’s competitive job market, there are often hundreds of candidates applying for the same position.  With so many applicants to choose from, interviewers must make decisions about who to call back and who to hire based on their gut feeling.  One drawback to reading an interview Question and Answer article is that you might sound very boring in your interview – saying the same thing as every single candidate, and parroting answers that sound like someone else wrote them for you – because they did.  However, it is definitely better to go to an interview prepared, just make sure that you give a lot of thought to your answers to make them sound like your own voice.  Remember that you will be hired based on your skills as well as your personality, so don’t think that having all the right answers will make get you hired.  A good interviewee will be prepared, confident, and know how to stand out. My Opinion A list of interview Questions and Answers is really helpful as a refresher or for beginners. To really ace an interview, one needs to have real-world, hands-on experience with SQL Server as well. Interview questions just serve as a starter or easy read for experienced professionals. When I have to learn new technology, I often search online for interview questions and get an idea about the breadth and depth of the technology. Next Action I am going to write about interview Questions and Answers for next 30 days. I have previously written a series of interview questions and answers; now I have re-written them keeping the latest version of SQL Server and current industry progress in mind. If you have faced interesting interview questions or situations, please write to me and I will publish them as a guest post. If you want me to add few more details, leave a comment and I will make sure that I do my best to accommodate. Tomorrow we will start the interview Questions and Answers series, with a few interesting stories, best practices and guest posts. We will have a prize give-away and other awards when the series ends. List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

  - by andrewbrust

  Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

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• JMX Based Monitoring - Part Four - Business App Server Monitoring

  - by Anthony Shorten

  In the last blog entry I talked about the Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 feature for monitoring and managing aspects of the Web Application Server using JMX. In this blog entry I am going to discuss a similar new feature that allows JMX to be used for management and monitoring the Oracle Utilities business application server component. This feature is primarily focussed on performance tracking of the product. In first release of Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing (V1.x I am talking about), we used to use Oracle Tuxedo as part of the architecture. In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.0 and above, we removed Tuxedo from the architecture. One of the features that some customers used within Tuxedo was the performance tracking ability. The idea was that you enabled performance logging on the individual Tuxedo servers and then used a utility named txrpt to produce a performance report. This report would list every service called, the number of times it was called and the average response time. When I worked a performance consultant, I used this report to identify badly performing services and also gauge the overall performance characteristics of a site. When Tuxedo was removed from the architecture this information was also lost. While you can get some information from access.log and some Mbeans supplied by the Web Application Server it was not at the same granularity as txrpt or as useful. I am happy to say we have not only reintroduced this facility in Oracle Utilities Application Framework but it is now accessible via JMX and also we have added more detail into the performance tracking. Most of this new design was working with customers around the world to make sure we introduced a new feature that not only satisfied their performance tracking needs but allowed for finer grained performance analysis. As with the Web Application Server, the Business Application Server JMX monitoring is enabled by specifying a JMX port number in RMI Port number for JMX Business and initial credentials in the JMX Enablement System User ID and JMX Enablement System Password configuration options. These options are available using the configureEnv[.sh] -a utility. These credentials are shared across the Web Application Server and Business Application Server for authorization purposes. Once this is information is supplied a number of configuration files are built (by the initialSetup[.sh] utility) to configure the facility: spl.properties - contains the JMX URL, the security configuration and the mbeans that are enabled. For example, on my demonstration machine: spl.runtime.management.rmi.port=6750 spl.runtime.management.connector.url.default=service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:6750/oracle/ouaf/ejbAppConnector jmx.remote.x.password.file=scripts/ouaf.jmx.password.file jmx.remote.x.access.file=scripts/ouaf.jmx.access.file ouaf.jmx.com.splwg.ejb.service.management.PerformanceStatistics=enabled ouaf.jmx.* files - contain the userid and password. The default configuration uses the JMX default configuration. You can use additional security features by altering the spl.properties file manually or using a custom template. For more security options see JMX Security for more details. Once it has been configured and the changes reflected in the product using the initialSetup[.sh] utility the JMX facility can be used. For illustrative purposes I will use jconsole but any JSR160 complaint browser or client can be used (with the appropriate configuration). Once you start jconsole (ensure that splenviron[.sh] is executed prior to execution to set the environment variables or for remote connection, ensure java is in your path and jconsole.jar in your classpath) you specify the URL in the spl.runtime.management.connnector.url.default entry. For example: You are then able to track performance of the product using the PerformanceStatistics Mbean. The attributes of the PerformanceStatistics Mbean are counts of each object type. This is where this facility differs from txrpt. The information that is collected includes the following: The Service Type is captured so you can filter the results in terms of the type of service. For maintenance type services you can even see the transaction type (ADD, CHANGE etc) so you can see the performance of updates against read transactions. The Minimum and Maximum are also collected to give you an idea of the spread of performance. The last call is recorded. The date, time and user of the last call are recorded to give you an idea of the timeliness of the data. The Mbean maintains a set of counters per Service Type to give you a summary of the types of transactions being executed. This gives you an overall picture of the types of transactions and volumes at your site. There are a number of interesting operations that can also be performed: reset - This resets the statistics back to zero. This is an important operation. For example, txrpt is restricted to collecting statistics per hour, which is ok for most people. But what if you wanted to be more granular? This operation allows to set the collection period to anything you wish. The statistics collected will represent values since the last restart or last reset. completeExecutionDump - This is the operation that produces a CSV in memory to allow extraction of the data. All the statistics are extracted (see the Server Administration Guide for a full list). This can be then loaded into a database, a tool or simply into your favourite spreadsheet for analysis. Here is an extract of an execution dump from my demonstration environment to give you an idea of the format: ServiceName, ServiceType, MinTime, MaxTime, Avg Time, # of Calls, Latest Time, Latest Date, Latest User ... CFLZLOUL, EXECUTE_LIST, 15.0, 64.0, 22.2, 10, 16.0, 2009-12-16::11-25-36-932, ASHORTEN CILBBLLP, READ, 106.0, 1184.0, 466.3333333333333, 6, 106.0, 2009-12-16::11-39-01-645, BOBAMA CILBBLLP, DELETE, 70.0, 146.0, 108.0, 2, 70.0, 2009-12-15::12-53-58-280, BPAYS CILBBLLP, ADD, 860.0, 4903.0, 2243.5, 8, 860.0, 2009-12-16::17-54-23-862, LELLISON CILBBLLP, CHANGE, 112.0, 3410.0, 815.1666666666666, 12, 112.0, 2009-12-16::11-40-01-103, ASHORTEN CILBCBAL, EXECUTE_LIST, 8.0, 84.0, 26.0, 22, 23.0, 2009-12-16::17-54-01-643, LJACKMAN InitializeUserInfoService, READ_SYSTEM, 49.0, 962.0, 70.83777777777777, 450, 63.0, 2010-02-25::11-21-21-667, ASHORTEN InitializeUserService, READ_SYSTEM, 130.0, 2835.0, 234.85777777777778, 450, 216.0, 2010-02-25::11-21-21-446, ASHORTEN MenuLoginService, READ_SYSTEM, 530.0, 1186.0, 703.3333333333334, 9, 530.0, 2009-12-16::16-39-31-172, ASHORTEN NavigationOptionDescriptionService, READ_SYSTEM, 2.0, 7.0, 4.0, 8, 2.0, 2009-12-21::09-46-46-892, ASHORTEN ... There are other operations and attributes available. Refer to the Server Administration Guide provided with your product to understand the full et of operations and attributes. This is one of the many features I am proud that we implemented as it allows flexible monitoring of the performance of the product.

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• Run Your Tests With Any NUnit Version

  - by Alois Kraus

  I always thought that the NUnit test runners and the test assemblies need to reference the same NUnit.Framework version. I wanted to be able to run my test assemblies with the newest GUI runner (currently 2.5.3). Ok so all I need to do is to reference both NUnit versions the newest one and the official for the current project. There is a nice article form Kent Bogart online how to reference the same assembly multiple times with different versions. The magic works by referencing one NUnit assembly with an alias which does prefix all types inside it. Then I could decorate my tests with the TestFixture and Test attribute from both NUnit versions and everything worked fine except that this was ugly. After playing a little bit around to make it simpler I found that I did not need to reference both NUnit.Framework assemblies. The test runners do not require the TestFixture and Test attribute in their specific version. That is really neat since the test runners are instructed by attributes what to do in a declarative way there is really no need to tie the runners to a specific version. At its core NUnit has this little method hidden to find matching TestFixtures and Tests   public bool CanBuildFrom(Type type) {     if (!(!type.IsAbstract || type.IsSealed))     {         return false;     }     return (((Reflect.HasAttribute(type,           "NUnit.Framework.TestFixtureAttribute", true) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute"       , true)) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TestCaseAttribute"   , true)) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TheoryAttribute"     , true)); } That is versioning and backwards compatibility at its best. I tell NUnit what to do by decorating my tests classes with NUnit Attributes and the runner executes my intent without the need to bind me to a specific version. The contract between NUnit versions is actually a bit more complex (think of AssertExceptions) but this is also handled nicely by using not the concrete type but simply to check for the catched exception type by string. What can we learn from this? Versioning can be easy if the contract is small and the users of your library use it in a declarative way (Attributes). Everything beyond it will force you to reference several versions of the same assembly with all its consequences. Type equality is lost between versions so none of your casts will work. That means that you cannot simply use IBigInterface in two versions. You will need a wrapper to call the correct versioned one. To get out of this mess you can use one (and only one) version agnostic driver to encapsulate your business logic from the concrete versions. This is of course more work but as NUnit shows it can be easy. Simplicity is therefore not a nice thing to have but also requirement number one if you intend to make things more complex in version two and want to support any version (older and newer). Any interaction model above easy will not be maintainable. There are different approached to versioning. Below are my own personal observations how versioning works within the  .NET Framwork and NUnit.   Versioning Models 1. Bug Fixing and New Isolated Features When you only need to fix bugs there is no need to break anything. This is especially true when you have a big API surface. Microsoft did this with the .NET Framework 3.0 which did leave the CLR as is but delivered new assemblies for the features WPF, WCF and Windows Workflow Foundations. Their basic model was that the .NET 2.0 assemblies were declared as red assemblies which must not change (well mostly but each change was carefully reviewed to minimize the risk of breaking changes as much as possible) whereas the new green assemblies of .NET 3,3.5 did not have such obligations since they did implement new unrelated features which did not have any impact on the red assemblies. This is versioning strategy aimed at maximum compatibility and the delivery of new unrelated features. If you have a big API surface you should strive hard to do the same or you will break your customers code with every release. 2. New Breaking Features There are times when really new things need to be added to an existing product. The .NET Framework 4.0 did change the CLR in many ways which caused subtle different behavior although the API´s remained largely unchanged. Sometimes it is possible to simply recompile an application to make it work (e.g. changed method signature void Func() –> bool Func()) but behavioral changes need much more thought and cannot be automated. To minimize the impact .NET 2.0,3.0,3.5 applications will not automatically use the .NET 4.0 runtime when installed but they will keep using the “old” one. What is interesting is that a side by side execution model of both CLR versions (2 and 4) within one process is possible. Key to success was total isolation. You will have 2 GCs, 2 JIT compilers, 2 finalizer threads within one process. The two .NET runtimes cannot talk  (except via the usual IPC mechanisms) to each other. Both runtimes share nothing and run independently within the same process. This enables Explorer plugins written for the CLR 2.0 to work even when a CLR 4 plugin is already running inside the Explorer process. The price for isolation is an increased memory footprint because everything is loaded and running two times.   3. New Non Breaking Features It really depends where you break things. NUnit has evolved and many different Assert, Expect… methods have been added. These changes are all localized in the NUnit.Framework assembly which can be easily extended. As long as the test execution contract (TestFixture, Test, AssertException) remains stable it is possible to write test executors which can run tests written for NUnit 10 because the execution contract has not changed. It is possible to write software which executes other components in a version independent way but this is only feasible if the interaction model is relatively simple.   Versioning software is hard and it looks like it will remain hard since you suddenly work in a severely constrained environment when you try to innovate and to keep everything backwards compatible at the same time. These are contradicting goals and do not play well together. The easiest way out of this is to carefully watch what your customers are doing with your software. Minimizing the impact is much easier when you do not need to guess how many people will be broken when this or that is removed.

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• Big Data – Is Big Data Relevant to me? – Big Data Questionnaires – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions of SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I think the series from Pinal is a good one for anyone planning to start on Big Data journey from the basics. In my daily customer interactions this buzz of “Big Data” always comes up, I react generally saying – “Sir, do you really have a ‘Big Data’ problem or do you have a big Data problem?” Generally, there is a silence in the air when I ask this question. Data is everywhere in organizations – be it big data, small data, all data and for few it is bad data which is same as no data :). Wow, don’t discount me as someone who opposes “Big Data”, I am a big supporter as much as I am a critic of the abuse of this term by the people. In this post, I wanted to let my mind flow so that you can also think in the direction I want you to see these concepts. In any case, this is not an exhaustive dump of what is in my mind – but you will surely get the drift how I am going to question Big Data terms from customers!!! Is Big Data Relevant to me? Many of my customers talk to me like blank whiteboard with no idea – “why Big Data”. They want to jump into the bandwagon of technology and they want to decipher insights from their unexplored data a.k.a. unstructured data with structured data. So what are these industry scenario’s that come to mind? Here are some of them: Financials Fraud detection: Banks and Credit cards are monitoring your spending habits on real-time basis. Customer Segmentation: applies in every industry from Banking to Retail to Aviation to Utility and others where they deal with end customer who consume their products and services. Customer Sentiment Analysis: Responding to negative brand perception on social or amplify the positive perception. Sales and Marketing Campaign: Understand the impact and get closer to customer delight. Call Center Analysis: attempt to take unstructured voice recordings and analyze them for content and sentiment. Medical Reduce Re-admissions: How to build a proactive follow-up engagements with patients. Patient Monitoring: How to track Inpatient, Out-Patient, Emergency Visits, Intensive Care Units etc. Preventive Care: Disease identification and Risk stratification is a very crucial business function for medical. Claims fraud detection: There is no precise dollars that one can put here, but this is a big thing for the medical field. Retail Customer Sentiment Analysis, Customer Care Centers, Campaign Management. Supply Chain Analysis: Every sensors and RFID data can be tracked for warehouse space optimization. Location based marketing: Based on where a check-in happens retail stores can be optimize their marketing. Telecom Price optimization and Plans, Finding Customer churn, Customer loyalty programs Call Detail Record (CDR) Analysis, Network optimizations, User Location analysis Customer Behavior Analysis Insurance Fraud Detection & Analysis, Pricing based on customer Sentiment Analysis, Loyalty Management Agents Analysis, Customer Value Management This list can go on to other areas like Utility, Manufacturing, Travel, ITES etc. So as you can see, there are obviously interesting use cases for each of these industry verticals. These are just representative list. Where to start? A lot of times I try to quiz customers on a number of dimensions before starting a Big Data conversation. Are you getting the data you need the way you want it and in a timely manner? Can you get in and analyze the data you need? How quickly is IT to respond to your BI Requests? How easily can you get at the data that you need to run your business/department/project? How are you currently measuring your business? Can you get the data you need to react WITHIN THE QUARTER to impact behaviors to meet your numbers or is it always “rear-view mirror?” How are you measuring: The Brand Customer Sentiment Your Competition Your Pricing Your performance Supply Chain Efficiencies Predictive product / service positioning What are your key challenges of driving collaboration across your global business?  What the challenges in innovation? What challenges are you facing in getting more information out of your data? Note: Garbage-in is Garbage-out. Hold good for all reporting / analytics requirements Big Data POCs? A number of customers get into the realm of setting a small team to work on Big Data – well it is a great start from an understanding point of view, but I tend to ask a number of other questions to such customers. Some of these common questions are: To what degree is your advanced analytics (natural language processing, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics and classification) paired with your Big Data’s efforts? Do you have dedicated resources exploring the possibilities of advanced analytics in Big Data for your business line? Do you plan to employ machine learning technology while doing Advanced Analytics? How is Social Media being monitored in your organization? What is your ability to scale in terms of storage and processing power? Do you have a system in place to sort incoming data in near real time by potential value, data quality, and use frequency? Do you use event-driven architecture to manage incoming data? Do you have specialized data services that can accommodate different formats, security, and the management requirements of multiple data sources? Is your organization currently using or considering in-memory analytics? To what degree are you able to correlate data from your Big Data infrastructure with that from your enterprise data warehouse? Have you extended the role of Data Stewards to include ownership of big data components? Do you prioritize data quality based on the source system (that is Facebook/Twitter data has lower quality thresholds than radio frequency identification (RFID) for a tracking system)? Do your retention policies consider the different legal responsibilities for storing Big Data for a specific amount of time? Do Data Scientists work in close collaboration with Data Stewards to ensure data quality? How is access to attributes of Big Data being given out in the organization? Are roles related to Big Data (Advanced Analyst, Data Scientist) clearly defined? How involved is risk management in the Big Data governance process? Is there a set of documented policies regarding Big Data governance? Is there an enforcement mechanism or approach to ensure that policies are followed? Who is the key sponsor for your Big Data governance program? (The CIO is best) Do you have defined policies surrounding the use of social media data for potential employees and customers, as well as the use of customer Geo-location data? How accessible are complex analytic routines to your user base? What is the level of involvement with outside vendors and third parties in regard to the planning and execution of Big Data projects? What programming technologies are utilized by your data warehouse/BI staff when working with Big Data? These are some of the important questions I ask each customer who is actively evaluating Big Data trends for their organizations. These questions give you a sense of direction where to start, what to use, how to secure, how to analyze and more. Sign off Any Big data is analysis is incomplete without a compelling story. The best way to understand this is to watch Hans Rosling – Gapminder (2:17 to 6:06) videos about the third world myths. Don’t get overwhelmed with the Big Data buzz word, the destination to what your data speaks is important. In this blog post, we did not particularly look at any Big Data technologies. This is a set of questionnaire one needs to keep in mind as they embark their journey of Big Data. I did write some of the basics in my blog: Big Data – Big Hype yet Big Opportunity. Do let me know if these questions make sense?  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Base de Datos Oracle, su mejor opción para reducir costos de IT

  - by Ivan Hassig

  Por Victoria Cadavid Sr. Sales Cosultant Oracle Direct Uno de los principales desafíos en la administración de centros de datos es la reducción de costos de operación. A medida que las compañías crecen y los proveedores de tecnología ofrecen soluciones cada vez más robustas, conservar el equilibrio entre desempeño, soporte al negocio y gestión del Costo Total de Propiedad es un desafío cada vez mayor para los Gerentes de Tecnología y para los Administradores de Centros de Datos. Las estrategias más comunes para conseguir reducción en los costos de administración de Centros de Datos y en la gestión de Tecnología de una organización en general, se enfocan en la mejora del desempeño de las aplicaciones, reducción del costo de administración y adquisición de hardware, reducción de los costos de almacenamiento, aumento de la productividad en la administración de las Bases de Datos y mejora en la atención de requerimientos y prestación de servicios de mesa de ayuda, sin embargo, las estrategias de reducción de costos deben contemplar también la reducción de costos asociados a pérdida y robo de información, cumplimiento regulatorio, generación de valor y continuidad del negocio, que comúnmente se conciben como iniciativas aisladas que no siempre se adelantan con el ánimo de apoyar la reducción de costos. Una iniciativa integral de reducción de costos de TI, debe contemplar cada uno de los factores que  generan costo y pueden ser optimizados. En este artículo queremos abordar la reducción de costos de tecnología a partir de la adopción del que según los expertos es el motor de Base de Datos # del mercado.Durante años, la base de datos Oracle ha sido reconocida por su velocidad, confiabilidad, seguridad y capacidad para soportar cargas de datos tanto de aplicaciones altamente transaccionales, como de Bodegas de datos e incluso análisis de Big Data , ofreciendo alto desempeño y facilidades de administración, sin embrago, cuando pensamos en proyectos de reducción de costos de IT, además de la capacidad para soportar aplicaciones (incluso aplicaciones altamente transaccionales) con alto desempeño, pensamos en procesos de automatización, optimización de recursos, consolidación, virtualización e incluso alternativas más cómodas de licenciamiento. La Base de Datos Oracle está diseñada para proveer todas las capacidades que un área de tecnología necesita para reducir costos, adaptándose a los diferentes escenarios de negocio y a las capacidades y características de cada organización.Es así, como además del motor de Base de Datos, Oracle ofrece una serie de soluciones para optimizar la administración de la información a través de mecanismos de optimización del uso del storage, continuidad del Negocio, consolidación de infraestructura, seguridad y administración automática, que propenden por un mejor uso de los recursos de tecnología, ofrecen opciones avanzadas de configuración y direccionan la reducción de los tiempos de las tareas operativas más comunes. Una de las opciones de la base de datos que se pueden provechar para reducir costos de hardware es Oracle Real Application Clusters. Esta solución de clustering permite que varios servidores (incluso servidores de bajo costo) trabajen en conjunto para soportar Grids o Nubes Privadas de Bases de Datos, proporcionando los beneficios de la consolidación de infraestructura, los esquemas de alta disponibilidad, rápido desempeño y escalabilidad por demanda, haciendo que el aprovisionamiento, el mantenimiento de las bases de datos y la adición de nuevos nodos se lleve e cabo de una forma más rápida y con menos riesgo, además de apalancar las inversiones en servidores de menor costo. Otra de las soluciones que promueven la reducción de costos de Tecnología es Oracle In-Memory Database Cache que permite almacenar y procesar datos en la memoria de las aplicaciones, permitiendo el máximo aprovechamiento de los recursos de procesamiento de la capa media, lo que cobra mucho valor en escenarios de alta transaccionalidad. De este modo se saca el mayor provecho de los recursos de procesamiento evitando crecimiento innecesario en recursos de hardware. Otra de las formas de evitar inversiones innecesarias en hardware, aprovechando los recursos existentes, incluso en escenarios de alto crecimiento de los volúmenes de información es la compresión de los datos. Oracle Advanced Compression permite comprimir hasta 4 veces los diferentes tipos de datos, mejorando la capacidad de almacenamiento, sin comprometer el desempeño de las aplicaciones. Desde el lado del almacenamiento también se pueden conseguir reducciones importantes de los costos de IT. En este escenario, la tecnología propia de la base de Datos Oracle ofrece capacidades de Administración Automática del Almacenamiento que no solo permiten una distribución óptima de los datos en los discos físicos para garantizar el máximo desempeño, sino que facilitan el aprovisionamiento y la remoción de discos defectuosos y ofrecen balanceo y mirroring, garantizando el uso máximo de cada uno de los dispositivos y la disponibilidad de los datos. Otra de las soluciones que facilitan la administración del almacenamiento es Oracle Partitioning, una opción de la Base de Datos que permite dividir grandes tablas en estructuras más pequeñas. Esta aproximación facilita la administración del ciclo de vida de la información y permite por ejemplo, separar los datos históricos (que generalmente se convierten en información de solo lectura y no tienen un alto volumen de consulta) y enviarlos a un almacenamiento de bajo costos, conservando la data activa en dispositivos de almacenamiento más ágiles. Adicionalmente, Oracle Partitioning facilita la administración de las bases de datos que tienen un gran volumen de registros y mejora el desempeño de la base de datos gracias a la posibilidad de optimizar las consultas haciendo uso únicamente de las particiones relevantes de una tabla o índice en el proceso de búsqueda. Otros factores adicionales, que pueden generar costos innecesarios a los departamentos de Tecnología son: La pérdida, corrupción o robo de datos y la falta de disponibilidad de las aplicaciones para dar soporte al negocio. Para evitar este tipo de situaciones que pueden acarrear multas y pérdida de negocios y de dinero, Oracle ofrece soluciones que permiten proteger y auditar la base de datos, recuperar la información en caso de corrupción o ejecución de acciones que comprometan la integridad de la información y soluciones que permitan garantizar que la información de las aplicaciones tenga una disponibilidad de 7x24. Ya hablamos de los beneficios de Oracle RAC, para facilitar los procesos de Consolidación y mejorar el desempeño de las aplicaciones, sin embrago esta solución, es sumamente útil en escenarios dónde las organizaciones de quieren garantizar una alta disponibilidad de la información, ante fallo de los servidores o en eventos de desconexión planeada para realizar labores de mantenimiento. Además de Oracle RAC, existen soluciones como Oracle Data Guard y Active Data Guard que permiten replicar de forma automática las bases de datos hacia un centro de datos de contingencia, permitiendo una recuperación inmediata ante eventos que deshabiliten por completo un centro de datos. Además de lo anterior, Active Data Guard, permite aprovechar la base de datos de contingencia para realizar labores de consulta, mejorando el desempeño de las aplicaciones. Desde el punto de vista de mejora en la seguridad, Oracle cuenta con soluciones como Advanced security que permite encriptar los datos y los canales a través de los cueles se comparte la información, Total Recall, que permite visualizar los cambios realizados a la base de datos en un momento determinado del tiempo, para evitar pérdida y corrupción de datos, Database Vault que permite restringir el acceso de los usuarios privilegiados a información confidencial, Audit Vault, que permite verificar quién hizo qué y cuándo dentro de las bases de datos de una organización y Oracle Data Masking que permite enmascarar los datos para garantizar la protección de la información sensible y el cumplimiento de las políticas y normas relacionadas con protección de información confidencial, por ejemplo, mientras las aplicaciones pasan del ambiente de desarrollo al ambiente de producción. Como mencionamos en un comienzo, las iniciativas de reducción de costos de tecnología deben apalancarse en estrategias que contemplen los diferentes factores que puedan generar sobre costos, los factores de riesgo que puedan acarrear costos no previsto, el aprovechamiento de los recursos actuales, para evitar inversiones innecesarias y los factores de optimización que permitan el máximo aprovechamiento de las inversiones actuales. Como vimos, todas estas iniciativas pueden ser abordadas haciendo uso de la tecnología de Oracle a nivel de Base de Datos, lo más importante es detectar los puntos críticos a nivel de riesgo, diagnosticar las proporción en que están siendo aprovechados los recursos actuales y definir las prioridades de la organización y del área de IT, para así dar inicio a todas aquellas iniciativas que de forma gradual, van a evitar sobrecostos e inversiones innecesarias, proporcionando un mayor apoyo al negocio y un impacto significativo en la productividad de la organización. Más información http://www.oracle.com/lad/products/database/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=otnes 1Fuente: Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide 2011 by Colleen Graham, Joanne Correia, David Coyle, Fabrizio Biscotti, Matthew Cheung, Ruggero Contu, Yanna Dharmasthira, Tom Eid, Chad Eschinger, Bianca Granetto, Hai Hong Swinehart, Sharon Mertz, Chris Pang, Asheesh Raina, Dan Sommer, Bhavish Sood, Marianne D'Aquila, Laurie Wurster and Jie Zhang. - March 29, 2012 2Big Data: Información recopilada desde fuentes no tradicionales como blogs, redes sociales, email, sensores, fotografías, grabaciones en video, etc. que normalmente se encuentran de forma no estructurada y en un gran volumen

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 08, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 08, 2010New ProjectsBackUpAnyWhere: BackUpAnyWhereCustomFormbyEndUser: 在项目开发中，经常遇到不同的用户对同一报表有不同要求的情况，有时甚至用户需要从头生成一个报表，在以前可能使用第三方的开发工具来实现。在SQL Server2005中，通过使用Reporting Services可以使最终用户不通过编码，只要了解数据结构就能自行编辑报表。本例使用Adventur...DbExecutor - linq based database executor: IEnumerable based database reader. (linq like primitive sql executor)DeepZoomRenderingPack: A collection of libraries and plug-ins architecture that turns various files (like PDF, PS, etc.) into a "Visual" representation that the DeepZoom ...DotNetNuke Russian Language packs: DNNRussianLP - DotNetNuke Russian Language pack. F# Refactor: Deisgned to bring Code Refactoring capabilities to the F# Language in Visual Studio 2010. Invocando WebService e Site HTTP dinamicamente com HTTPWebRequest C#: Invocando Site HTTP e WebService dinamicamente com HTTPWebRequest Passando o SoapAction e Envelope XML Escrito em C# www.biztalkbrasil.c...Jitbit WYSWYG BBCode Editor: "Jitbit WYSIWYG-BBCode" is a browser-based JavaScript-powered WYSIWYG BBCode editorMRDS Services for Phidgets: MRDS (Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio) Services for Phidgets provides additional services for Phidgets sensors and controllers that are not inc...MSBuild Addin: This tool is a simple addin for VisualStudio 2008 used in association with Microsoft MSBuild. It allows you to run MSBuild directly inside Visual S...NISHIL-BizTalk Custom Eventlog Functiod: While testing our maps at times when it fails we cant trace it because we don’t know what the output of the functiods are. Normally in a single ma...Northest GNSG: Supinfo B3C Paris Northest University project. Galego, Neveu, Simon, Geissmann.Oily: Composite application project for oil parameters. It's developed in C#Outlook.Utility: The MSDN article Outlook Customization for Integrating with Enterprise Applications at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa479345 has quite a...Particle Plot Pivot: Scan select particle physics experiment web sites for plots and generate a Pivot display for easy browsing.project tca: project tca - translating chat application. Satisfyr: A new way of performing assertions on tests so that they remain agnostic to the underlying test framework, and leverage .NET built-in lambda syntax.sejce2008: jce se course wiki and projects linksSGB Controls: SGB Controls is a set of standard .net controls that include a number of enhancements to make life easier for the developer. These controls incl...Syringe: Syringe is a lightweight service container and dependency injection library designed for use with ASP.NET MVC2. Supported features: Dependency inj...topicbox: topicboxUr-Index: Ur-Index makes it a lot easier to create onomastic indexes for books in pdf format.VietGeeks ZohoDocApis: Implement .NET Zoho Document Apis library to help developer can intergrate Zoho Docs easy with their websitesWebometrics Dashboard: Webometrics Dashboardwebpress: It is a WebBased CMS and Blog platform.WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar: WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar makes it easy for WPF developers to use pen input in TabletPC or UMPC applications. The WPF InkCanvas control has drawing, e...WS-TMS: WS GISG HTT TMSNew ReleasesBatterySaver: Version 1.0: Fixed battery increase/decrease events not firing Fixed memory corruption error Added working set trimming (used very sparingly) Fixed poorly rende...Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.65: Added in Transactions, Subscription Re-activation, and finally XML documentation (which has been missing in the previous releases).DbExecutor - linq based database executor: DbExecutor ver.1.0.0.1: renameDotNetNuke Russian Language packs: Russian Language Pack for DotNetNuke 04.09.02: Russian Language Pack for DotNetNuke 04.09.02Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6.3: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.6.3), with general improvements. It has an installer that will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My ...Invocando WebService e Site HTTP dinamicamente com HTTPWebRequest C#: Código projeto CallSiteHTTP: Código escrito em C#.NET 2.0 - VS2005 Contem: Solution completa(código e executável) XML de configuração - Config.xml ...Jitbit WYSWYG BBCode Editor: Main package: Contains the JS-file, CSS-file and a sample.Live Writer Picasa Plugin: Live Writer Picasa Plugin 1.1.0: Changelog Communication with Picasa Web Albums is done directly via HTTP now (v1.0.0 used Google's GData .NET Libraries) The plugin can search fo...MRDS Services for Phidgets: Phidgets for RDS 2008 R3: First Beta Release This ZIP file contains a web page called Readme_CodePlex.html that explains how to install the RDS Phidgets services for RDS 200...MSBuild Addin: MsBuildAddin-v1.0.0: Initial versionMSBuild Addin: MsBuildAddin-v1.0.0-src.zip: Initial versionOutlook.Utility: Outlook.Utility v1: I have used most of the code in previous projects and seems to be quite stable. Of course the point of open sourcing this is so this project is use...Scrum Dashboard: Scrum Dashboard v3 Alpha 1: Scrum Dashboard v3 is targeting .NET 4, TFS 2010 and the brand new Scrum for Team System v3 process templates. Most of the code has been rewritten ...SharePoint Labs: SPLab4004A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4004A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the 4th best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab La...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5012A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5012A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to provision a new welcome page (how to change and rename the default.aspx page) on ...Shweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with Pex: Shweet Source Code: Although the latest version pex and moles used with this project is not available, we thought it would be useful to provide a download to the source.Syringe: Syringe 1.0: Features Dependency injection on properties of services in container Dependency injection on constructors of services in container ASP.Net Mvc ...Text to HTML: 0.4.1.0: Cambios de la versiónOptimización del código de exportación reduciendo el código. Cambio en el icono de exportación. Añadido menú Seleccionar t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 23: Build 23 Fix: Executing "Blame" through the Solution Explorer on a file opens TortoiseMerge rather than TortoiseBlame. Build 22 (beta) New: Visua...WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar: WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar 1.0: First release - included custom colour selectionMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with Pexpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryAcadsysAutoPocoIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNcqrs Framework - The CQRS framework for .NETFarseer Physics Engine

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• Tricks and Optimizations for you Sitecore website

  - by amaniar

  When working with Sitecore there are some optimizations/configurations I usually repeat in order to make my app production ready. Following is a small list I have compiled from experience, Sitecore documentation, communicating with Sitecore Engineers etc. This is not supposed to be technically complete and might not be fit for all environments.   Simple configurations that can make a difference: 1) Configure Sitecore Caches. This is the most straight forward and sure way of increasing the performance of your website. Data and item cache sizes (/databases/database/ [id=web] ) should be configured as needed. You may start with a smaller number and tune them as needed. <cacheSizes hint="setting"> <data>300MB</data> <items>300MB</items> <paths>5MB</paths> <standardValues>5MB</standardValues> </cacheSizes> Tune the html, registry etc cache sizes for your website.   <cacheSizes> <sites> <website> <html>300MB</html> <registry>1MB</registry> <viewState>10MB</viewState> <xsl>5MB</xsl> </website> </sites> </cacheSizes> Tune the prefetch cache settings under the App_Config/Prefetch/ folder. Sample /App_Config/Prefetch/Web.Config: <configuration> <cacheSize>300MB</cacheSize> <!--preload items that use this template--> <template desc="mytemplate">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</template> <!--preload this item--> <item desc="myitem">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX }</item> <!--preload children of this item--> <children desc="childitems">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</children> </configuration> Break your page into sublayouts so you may cache most of them. Read the caching configuration reference: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/sc62keywords/cache_configuration_reference_a4.pdf   2) Disable Analytics for the Shell Site <site name="shell" virtualFolder="/sitecore/shell" physicalFolder="/sitecore/shell" rootPath="/sitecore/content" startItem="/home" language="en" database="core" domain="sitecore" loginPage="/sitecore/login" content="master" contentStartItem="/Home" enableWorkflow="true" enableAnalytics="false" xmlControlPage="/sitecore/shell/default.aspx" browserTitle="Sitecore" htmlCacheSize="2MB" registryCacheSize="3MB" viewStateCacheSize="200KB" xslCacheSize="5MB" />   3) Increase the Check Interval for the MemoryMonitorHook so it doesn’t run every 5 seconds (default). <hook type="Sitecore.Diagnostics.MemoryMonitorHook, Sitecore.Kernel"> <param desc="Threshold">800MB</param> <param desc="Check interval">00:05:00</param> <param desc="Minimum time between log entries">00:01:00</param> <ClearCaches>false</ClearCaches> <GarbageCollect>false</GarbageCollect> <AdjustLoadFactor>false</AdjustLoadFactor> </hook>   4) Set Analytics.PeformLookup (Sitecore.Analytics.config) to false if your environment doesn’t have access to the internet or you don’t intend to use reverse DNS lookup. <setting name="Analytics.PerformLookup" value="false" />   5) Set the value of the “Media.MediaLinkPrefix” setting to “-/media”: <setting name="Media.MediaLinkPrefix" value="-/media" /> Add the following line to the customHandlers section: <customHandlers> <handler trigger="-/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/api/" handler="sitecore_api.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/xaml/" handler="sitecore_xaml.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/icon/" handler="sitecore_icon.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/feed/" handler="sitecore_feed.ashx" /> </customHandlers> Link: http://squad.jpkeisala.com/2011/10/sitecore-media-library-performance-optimization-checklist/   6) Performance counters should be disabled in production if not being monitored <setting name="Counters.Enabled" value="false" />   7) Disable Item/Memory/Timing threshold warnings. Due to the nature of this component, it brings no value in production. <!--<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.StartMeasurements, Sitecore.Kernel" />--> <!--<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.StopMeasurements, Sitecore.Kernel"> <TimingThreshold desc="Milliseconds">1000</TimingThreshold> <ItemThreshold desc="Item count">1000</ItemThreshold> <MemoryThreshold desc="KB">10000</MemoryThreshold> </processor>—>   8) The ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections setting is a hidden setting in the web.config file, which by default is true. Setting it to false will improve client performance for authoring environments. <setting name="ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections" value="false" />   9) Add a machineKey section to your Web.Config file when using a web farm. Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649308.aspx   10) If you get errors in the log files similar to: WARN Could not create an instance of the counter 'XXX.XXX' (category: 'Sitecore.System') Exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException Message: Access to the registry key 'Global' is denied. Make sure the ApplicationPool user is a member of the system “Performance Monitor Users” group on the server.   11) Disable WebDAV configurations on the CD Server if not being used. More: http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2011/04/disable-webdav-in-sitecore.html   12) Change Log4Net settings to only log Errors on content delivery environments to avoid unnecessary logging. <root> <priority value="ERROR" /> <appender-ref ref="LogFileAppender" /> </root>   13) Disable Analytics for any content item that doesn’t add value. For example a page that redirects to another page.   14) When using Web User Controls avoid registering them on the page the asp.net way: <%@ Register Src="~/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" TagName="MyControl" TagPrefix="uc2" %> Use Sublayout web control instead – This way Sitecore caching could be leveraged <sc:Sublayout ID="ID" Path="/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" Cacheable="true" runat="server" />   15) Avoid querying for all children recursively when all items are direct children. Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectItems("/sitecore/content/Home//*"); //Use: Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem("/sitecore/content/Home");   16) On IIS — you enable static & dynamic content compression on CM and CD More: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754668%28WS.10%29.aspx   17) Enable HTTP Keep-alive and content expiration in IIS.   18) Use GUID’s when accessing items and fields instead of names or paths. Its faster and wont break your code when things get moved or renamed. Context.Database.GetItem("{324DFD16-BD4F-4853-8FF1-D663F6422DFF}") Context.Item.Fields["{89D38A8F-394E-45B0-826B-1A826CF4046D}"]; //is better than Context.Database.GetItem("/Home/MyItem") Context.Item.Fields["FieldName"]   Hope this helps.

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• Code excavations, wishful invocations, perimeters and domain specific unit test frameworks

  - by RoyOsherove

  One of the talks I did at QCON London was about a subject that I’ve come across fairly recently , when I was building SilverUnit – a “pure” unit test framework for silverlight objects that depend on the silverlight runtime to run. It is the concept of “cogs in the machine” – when your piece of code needs to run inside a host framework or runtime that you have little or no control over for testability related matters. Examples of such cogs and machines can be: your custom control running inside silverlight runtime in the browser your plug-in running inside an IDE your activity running inside a windows workflow your code running inside a java EE bean your code inheriting from a COM+ (enterprise services) component etc.. Not all of these are necessarily testability problems. The main testability problem usually comes when your code actually inherits form something inside the system. For example. one of the biggest problems with testing objects like silverlight controls is the way they depend on the silverlight runtime – they don’t implement some silverlight interface, they don’t just call external static methods against the framework runtime that surrounds them – they actually inherit parts of the framework: they all inherit (in this case) from the silverlight DependencyObject Wrapping it up? An inheritance dependency is uniquely challenging to bring under test, because “classic” methods such as wrapping the object under test with a framework wrapper will not work, and the only way to do manually is to create parallel testable objects that get delegated with all the possible actions from the dependencies.    In silverlight’s case, that would mean creating your own custom logic class that would be called directly from controls that inherit from silverlight, and would be tested independently of these controls. The pro side is that you get the benefit of understanding the “contract” and the “roles” your system plays against your logic, but unfortunately, more often than not, it can be very tedious to create, and may sometimes feel unnecessary or like code duplication. About perimeters A perimeter is that invisible line that your draw around your pieces of logic during a test, that separate the code under test from any dependencies that it uses. Most of the time, a test perimeter around an object will be the list of seams (dependencies that can be replaced such as interfaces, virtual methods etc.) that are actually replaced for that test or for all the tests. Role based perimeters In the case of creating a wrapper around an object – one really creates a “role based” perimeter around the logic that is being tested – that wrapper takes on roles that are required by the code under test, and also communicates with the host system to implement those roles and provide any inputs to the logic under test. in the image below – we have the code we want to test represented as a star. No perimeter is drawn yet (we haven’t wrapped it up in anything yet). in the image below is what happens when you wrap your logic with a role based wrapper – you get a role based perimeter anywhere your code interacts with the system: There’s another way to bring that code under test – using isolation frameworks like typemock, rhino mocks and MOQ (but if your code inherits from the system, Typemock might be the only way to isolate the code from the system interaction.   Ad-Hoc Isolation perimeters the image below shows what I call ad-hoc perimeter that might be vastly different between different tests: This perimeter’s surface is much smaller, because for that specific test, that is all the “change” that is required to the host system behavior.   The third way of isolating the code from the host system is the main “meat” of this post: Subterranean perimeters Subterranean perimeters are Deep rooted perimeters  - “always on” seams that that can lie very deep in the heart of the host system where they are fully invisible even to the test itself, not just to the code under test. Because they lie deep inside a system you can’t control, the only way I’ve found to control them is with runtime (not compile time) interception of method calls on the system. One way to get such abilities is by using Aspect oriented frameworks – for example, in SilverUnit, I’ve used the CThru AOP framework based on Typemock hooks and CLR profilers to intercept such system level method calls and effectively turn them into seams that lie deep down at the heart of the silverlight runtime. the image below depicts an example of what such a perimeter could look like: As you can see, the actual seams can be very far away form the actual code under test, and as you’ll discover, that’s actually a very good thing. Here is only a partial list of examples of such deep rooted seams : disabling the constructor of a base class five levels below the code under test (this.base.base.base.base) faking static methods of a type that’s being called several levels down the stack: method x() calls y() calls z() calls SomeType.StaticMethod()  Replacing an async mechanism with a synchronous one (replacing all timers with your own timer behavior that always Ticks immediately upon calls to “start()” on the same caller thread for example) Replacing event mechanisms with your own event mechanism (to allow “firing” system events) Changing the way the system saves information with your own saving behavior (in silverunit, I replaced all Dependency Property set and get with calls to an in memory value store instead of using the one built into silverlight which threw exceptions without a browser) several questions could jump in: How do you know what to fake? (how do you discover the perimeter?) How do you fake it? Wouldn’t this be problematic  - to fake something you don’t own? it might change in the future How do you discover the perimeter to fake? To discover a perimeter all you have to do is start with a wishful invocation. a wishful invocation is the act of trying to invoke a method (or even just create an instance ) of an object using “regular” test code. You invoke the thing that you’d like to do in a real unit test, to see what happens: Can I even create an instance of this object without getting an exception? Can I invoke this method on that instance without getting an exception? Can I verify that some call into the system happened? You make the invocation, get an exception (because there is a dependency) and look at the stack trace. choose a location in the stack trace and disable it. Then try the invocation again. if you don’t get an exception the perimeter is good for that invocation, so you can move to trying out other methods on that object. in a future post I will show the process using CThru, and how you end up with something close to a domain specific test framework after you’re done creating the perimeter you need.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 02, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 02, 2010New ProjectsAdventureWorks in Access: AdventureWorks database in Access format. Data has been ported in Access starting from Adventure Works database for SQL Server 2008.amplifi: This project is still under construction. We will add more information here as soon as it is available.ASP.NET MVC Bug Tracker: Bug Track written in C# ASP.NET MVC 2BigDecimal: BigDecimal is an attempt to create a number class that can have large precision. It is developed in vb.net (.net 4).CBM-Command: Coming soon....Chuyou: ChuyouCMinus: A C Minus Compiler!Complex and advanced mathematical functions: Mathematics toolkit is a Class Library Project which help Programmers to Calculate Mathematics Functions easily.Confuser: Confuser is a obfuscator for .NET. It is developed in C# and using Mono.Cecil for assembly manipulation.easypos: Micro punto de venta que permite ventas express de ropa, que se acopla fácil y transaparente con el ERP Click OneElmech Address Book: Web based Address Book for maintaining details of your business clients. This project targets Suppliers - Traders - Manufacturers - users. Applicat...Feed Viewer: Feed Viewer is able to synchronize subscribed feed and red news among all computers you are using. It understands both RSS and Atom format. It can ...Google URL Shortener, C#: Implementation in C# of generating short URLs by Goo.gl service (Google URL Shortener)MARS - Medical Assistant Record System: MARS - Medical Assistant Record SystemRx Contrib: Rx Contrib is a library which contain extensions for the Rx frameworkSimple Service Administration Tool: A simple tool to start/stop/restart a service of a WinNT based system. The tool is placed in the task bar as a notify icon, so the specified servic...Vis3D: Visual 3D controls for Silverlight.VisContent: XML content controls for ASP.NET.Windows Phone 7 database: This project implements a Isolated Storage (IsolatedStorage) based database for Windows Phone 7. The database consists of table object, each one s...New Releases$log$ / Keyword Substitution / Expansion Check-In Policy (TFS - LogSubstPol): LogSubstPol_v1.2010.0.4 (VS2010): LogSubstPol is a TFS check-in policy which insertes the check-in comments and other keywords into your source code, so you can keep track of the ch...Bojinx: Bojinx Core V4.5.1: The following new features were added: You can now use either BojinxMXMLContext or ContextModule to configure your application or module context. ...CBM-Command: Initial Public Demonstration: Initial public demonstration version. Can browse attached drives and display directory of any attached drive. A common question is "How does it w...Confuser: Confuser v1.0: It is the Confuser v1.0 that used to confuse the reverse-engineers :)Font Family Name Retrieval: 2nd Release: Added New MKV Font Extractor application to showcase the library. MKV Font Extractor depends on MKVToolnix to be installed before it will work. R...Google URL Shortener, C#: Goo.gl-CS v1 Beta: Extract the ZIP file to any location. Two files have to be in the same folder!HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls alpha 0.9.6.1: HouseFly controls release 0.9.6.1 alphaIsWiX: IsWiX 1.0.261.0: Build 1.0.261.0 - built against Fireworks 1.0.264.0. Adds support for VS2010 Integration to support WiX 3.5 beta releases.Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Contrib: MefContrib 0.9.2.0: Added conventions based catalog (read more at http://www.thecodejunkie.com/2010/03/bringing-convention-based-registration.html) MEF + Unity integ...MARS - Medical Assistant Record System: license: licenseNSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.5: This release includes source code, executable binary, files and example materials.PHP.net: Release 0.0.0.1: This is the first release of PHP.Net. The features available in this release are: new File Save File Save As Open File In the rar file is th...Rx Contrib: V1: Rx Contrib is ongoing effort for community additions for Rx. Current features are: ReactiveQueue: ISubject that does not loose values if there are ...Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4 v1.0: - Added a margin for icon display. - Added the PopupMenuItem class which is a derivative of the DockPanel. - Find* methods can now drill down the v...Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4 v1.1 Beta: - Added a margin for icon display. - Added the PopupMenuItem class which is a derivative of the DockPanel. - Added a AddSeperator method. - The Fin...Simple Service Administration Tool: SSATool 0.1.3: New Simple Service Administration Tool Version 0.1.3 compiled with Visual Studio .NET 2010.sMAPedit: sMAPedit v0.7a + Map-Pack: Required Additional Map-Pack Added: height setting by color picker (shift+leftclick)sMAPedit: sMAPedit v0.7b: Fixed: force a gargabe collection update to prevent pictureBox's memory leaksqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.228.0 (alpha): This release corrects a critical bug in ConnexityNotifier service. We strongly recommend you to upgrade to this version. Known bugs : if you open...StackOverflow Desktop Client in C# and WPF: StackOverflow Client 0.1: Source code for the sample.TortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.0.2: This is a bug fix release, we recommend all users upgrade to 1.0.2VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30501.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVidCoder: 0.4.0: Changes: Added ability to queue up multiple video files or titles at once. These queued jobs will use the currently selected encoding settings. Mul...WabbitStudio Z80 Software Tools: Wabbitemu 32-bit Test Release: Wabbitemu Visual Studio build for testing purposesWindows Phone 7 database: Initial Release v1.0: This project implements a Isolated Storage (IsolatedStorage) based database for Windows Phone 7. The usage of this software is very simple. You cre...YouTubeEmbeddedVideo WebControl for ASP.NET: VideoControls version 1: This zip file contains the VideoControls.dll, version 1.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Serverpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceTinyProjectNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETDambach Linear Algebra FrameworkFacebook Developer Toolkit

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• Code Camp 2011 – Summary

  - by hajan

  Waiting whole twelve months to come this year’s Code Camp 2011 event was something which all Microsoft technologies (and even non-Microsoft techs.) developers were doing in the past year. Last year’s success was enough big to be heard and to influence everything around our developer community and beyond. Code Camp 2011 was nothing else but a invincible success which will remain in our memory for a long time from now. Darko Milevski (president of MKDOT.NET UG and SharePoint MVP) said something interesting at the event keynote that up to now we were looking at the past by saying what we did… now we will focus on the future and how to develop our community more and more in the future days, weeks, months and I hope so for many years… Even though it was held only two days ago (26th of November 2011), I already feel the nostalgia for everything that happened there and for the excellent time we have spent all together. ORGANIZED BY ENTHUSIASTS AND EXPERTS Code Camp 2011 was organized by number of community enthusiasts and experts who have unselfishly contributed with all their free time to make the best of this event. The event was organized by a known community group called MKDOT.NET User Group, name of a user group which is known not only in Macedonia, but also in many countries abroad. Organization mainly consists of software developers, technical leaders, team leaders in several known companies in Macedonia, as well as Microsoft MVPs. SPEAKERS There were 24 speakers at five parallel tracks. At Code Camp 2011 we had two groups of speakers: Professional Experts in various technologies and Student Speakers. The new interesting thing here is the Student Speakers, which draw attention a lot, especially to other students who were interested to see what their colleagues are going to speak about and how do they use Microsoft technologies in different coding scenarios and practices, in different topics. From the rest of the professional speakers, there were 7 Microsoft MVPs: Two ASP.NET/IIS MVPs, Two C# MVPs, and One MVP in SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange Server. I must say that besides the MVP Speakers, who definitely did a great job as always… there were other excellent speakers as well, which were speaking on various technologies, such as: Web Development, Windows Phone Development, XNA, Windows 8, Games Development, Entity Framework, Event-driven programming, SOLID, SQLCLR, T-SQL, e.t.c. SESSIONS There were 25 sessions mainly all related to Microsoft technologies, but ranging from Windows 8, WP7, ASP.NET till Games Development, XNA and Event-driven programming. Sessions were going in five parallel tracks named as Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Student track. Five presentations in each track, each with level 300 or 400. More info MY SESSION (ASP.NET MVC Best Practices) I must say that from the big number of speaking engagements I have had, this was one of my best performances and definitely I have set new records of attendees at my sessions and probably overall. I spoke on topic ASP.NET MVC Best Practices, where I have shown tips, tricks, guidelines and best practices on what to use and what to avoid by developing with one of the best web development frameworks nowadays, ASP.NET MVC. I had approximately 350+ attendees, the hall was full so that there was no room for staying at feet. Besides .NET developers, there were a lot of other technology oriented developers, who has also received the presentation very well and I really hope I gave them reason to think about ASP.NET as one of the best options for web development nowadays (if you ask me, it’s the best one ;-)). I have included 10 tips in using ASP.NET MVC each of them followed by a demo. Besides these 10 tips, I have briefly introduced the concept of ASP.NET MVC for those that haven’t been working with the framework and at the end some bonus tips. I must say there was lot of laugh for some funny sentences I have stated, like “If you code ASP.NET MVC, girls will love you more” – same goes for girls, only replace girls with boys :). [LINK TO SESSION WILL GO HERE, ONCE SESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE ON MK CODECAMP WEBSITE] VOLUNTEERS Without strong organization, such events wouldn’t be able to gather hundreds of attendees at one place and still stay perfectly organized to the smallest details, without dedicated organization and volunteers. I would like to dedicate this space in my blog to them and to say one big THANK YOU for supporting us before the event and during the whole day in the event. With such young and dedicated volunteers, we couldn’t achieve anything but great results. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION! NETWORKING One of the main reasons why we do such events is to gather all professionals in one place. Networking is what everyone wants because through this way of networking, we can meet incredible people in one place. It is amazing feeling to share your knowledge with others and exchange thoughts on various topics. Meet and talk to interesting people. I have had very special moments with many attendees especially after my presentation. Special Thank You to all of them who come to meet me in person, whether to ask a question, say congrats for my session or simply meet me and just smile :)… everything counts! Thank You! TWITTER During the event, twitter was one of the most useful event-wide communication tool where everyone could tweet with hash tag #mkcodecamp or #mkdotnet and say what he/she wants to say about the current state and happenings at that moment… In my next blog post I will list the top craziest tweets that were posted at this event… FUTURE OF MKDOT.NET Having such strong community around MKDOT.NET, the future seems very bright. The initial plans are to have sub-groups in several technologies, however all these sub-groups will belong to the MKDOT.NET UG which will be, somehow, the HEAD of these sub-groups. We are doing this to provide better divisions by technologies and organize ourselves better since our community is very big, around 500 members in MKDOT.NET.We will have five sub-groups:- Web User Group (Lead:Hajan Selmani - me)- Mobile User Group (Lead: Filip Kerazovski)- Visual C# User Group (Lead: Vekoslav Stefanovski)- SharePoint User Group (Lead: Darko Milevski)- Dynamics User Group (Lead: Vladimir Senih) SUMMARY Online registered attendees: ~1.200 Event attendees: ~800 Number of members in organization: 40+ Organized by: MKDOT.NET User Group Number of tracks: 5 Number of speakers: 24 Number of sessions: 25 Event official website: http://codecamp.mkdot.net Total number of sponsors: 20 Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik Place held: FON University City and Country: Skopje, Macedonia THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE BEST EVENT IN MACEDONIA, CODE CAMP 2011. Regards, Hajan

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• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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• Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

  The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010New ProjectsAlter gear SQL index Management: SQL Index management displays a list of indexes available for the chosen database and allows you to select an individual / group of indexes to be r...ASP League Ladder System: An ASP ladder / league system for online gaming league or real life leagues also.Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator is a software suite to promote computer aided strategy planning. Sports team can visualize their strategy usin...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Simple syntax hightlighting VSX add-in for Boo language in Visual Studio 2010.easySan: easySan zur einfachen Mitgliedsverwaltung im BRKFsUnit: FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog is a simple to use, component based 2D framework for XNA game development. At present it is very early in development and as such is f...miniTodo: WPFでMVVMの練習にてきとうに作ったTODOアプリ 実用は無理です。My Common Library on .NET with CSharp: My Common Library on .NET with CSharp, it conclude database assecc, encrypt string, data caching, StringUtility, thank you for your view.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Ever thought about creating HUGE FILES for future use but felt bad for the wasted memory? Well, SPARSE FILES are the ANSWER! This FSUTIL SPARSE CO...Open SOA Platform: A centralized system for administering applications throught a SOA Enterprise Service Bus: Runtime environment (PROD, DEV, ...) , application and s...P-DBMS: Network and Database ProjectPraiseSight: PraiseSight is supposed to become a practical tool for churches to catalog an present their songs, lyrics and presentations on a beamer. The soluti...Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend is a sample frontend for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 and MDT 2010 Zero Touch. S3Appender (Appender for Log4Net that Uses Amazon S3 For Storing Log Files): The S3Appender is a log4net appender that stores log events in either a MemoryStream or FileStream and sends them to S3 based on time intervals and...sEmit: sEmit (sms emitter) is an application written in C# which was built to send text messages. The project was founded in May 2009 by cansik. It works ...Silverlight RIA Tools: A tool set that generates a full RIA Solutions in Silverlightthommo cannon: Cannon for shooting down ThommosTianjin Polytechnic University Online Judge: Online Judge System Built on Microsoft technologies. Vision & Scope: A distributed OJ Solution on Windows and Cloud. Technologies used or planed...Tinare: Tinare is an byte encryption and decryption alogrithm. The input key is a string password.TinyPlug: Small Plugin Manager, written in C# Allows a project to define supported interfaces, and at runtime add plugins which support (inherit) these in...Utility niconv helps to convert text from one encoding to another: .NET implementation of GUN iconv console converter utility. The niconv program converts text from one encoding to another encoding. In the future r...WareFeed - Software Business Analytics: WareFeed is a simple but effective Software Business Analytics tool written in PHP and compatible others languages such as .NET, Java or Python. It...Y36API1: Semestralni projekt na Y36APINew ReleasesAlter gear SQL index Management: Setup 1.0.0: setup for first alpha releaseASP League Ladder System: ASPLeagueRelease_0_4_1: Release v 0.41Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Version 1.0 InstallerAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10e: Version 1.10e will be the final iteration of version 1 development. Version 2 will begin adding switches and options. Pleae email your suggestio...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Boo syntax VS 2010 - alpha: First release TODO: Multiline comments!Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.6: Updated library, using Metered Components and updated Product information.Composer: V1.0.326.1000 Alpha: Initial Alpha release. Should be stable, with minor issues.CoNatural Components: CoNatural Components 1.6: Code fixes: Created helper classes to generate source code for type mapper/materializer. Fixed issue in optimized type materializer when loading ...CRM External View: 1.2: New Features in v1.2 release Password protected views. No more using Web Data Access role from v1. Filtering capabilities Caching for performan...Designit Video Embed Package: Release 1.1.0 beta1: You can now either have the video embeded directly in the template or have a preview in template that opens the video in a lightbox window.FsUnit: FsUnit 0.9.0 for NUnit: This release is for F# 2.0 and NUnit 2.5+.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog 0.0.1: Laughing Dog - Alpla - v 0.0.1 First released version of the Laughing Dog framework.LiveUpload to Facebook: LiveUpload to Facebook 3.2: Version 3.2Become a fan on Facebook! Features Quickly and easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Win...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi March 26: This version adds the Join feature for creating a new "featureset" with attributes that are joined with attributes from a Excel data label named 'D...Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor: Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor 1.2.2: This edition supports: Newer and older editions of Birdstep Technology's EasyConnect HUAWEI Mobile Partner MWConn User defined location for s...Multiplayer Quiz: Release 1_6_351_0: A beta release of the next version. Please leave any errors in discussions or comments.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Fsutil sparse file native code - c sharp wrapper: Project Description A C# code wrapping a native code-Sparse files1 The code is about SPARSE files- the abillity to create huge files (for future us...Nice Libraries: 1.30 build 50325.01: Release 1.30 build 50325.01Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend binaries v1.0: This is the first public release of the Pretty Good Frontend binariesPylor: Pylor 0.1 alpha: This is the very first published version. I hope I can put a sample project soon.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.1 refresh: There was a typo or two in the sample batch file. Corrected now.Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.3: 0.8.1 introduced the ability to advance to the next episode. In 0.8.2 a bug was found that if episode number is less then 10, then the preceding 0...RapidWebDev - .NET Enterprise Software Development Infrastructure: RapidWebDev 1.52: RapidWebDev is an infrastructure helps to develop enterprise software solutions in Microsoft .NET easily and productively. This is the release vers...thommo cannon: game: gamethommo cannon: setup: setupthommo cannon: test: testTinare: Tinare DLL: Tinare DLL is a dynamic-link library written in C# which provides the functions to encrypt and decrypt a byte stream with tinare.WeatherBar: WeatherBar 2.1 [No Installation]: Minor changes to release 2.0 (http://weatherbar.codeplex.com/releases/view/42490). Fixed the bug that caused an exception to be thrown if the user...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightLINQ to TwitterTable2ClassFluent Ribbon Control SuiteNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 06, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 06, 2010New ProjectsActive Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk): Active Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk)Combina: Smart calculator for large combinatorial calculations.Concurrent Cache: ConcurrentCache is a smart output cache library extending OutputCacheProvider. It consists of in memory, cache files and compressed files modes and...Decay: Personal use. For learningFazTalk: FazTalk is a suite of tools and products that are designed to improve collaboration and workflow interactions. FazTalk takes an innovative approach...grouped: A peer to peer text editor, written in C# [update] I wrote this little thing a while back and even forgot about it, I stopped coding for more tha...HitchARide MVC 2 Sample: An MVC 2 sample written as part of the Microsoft 2010 London Web Camp based on the wireframes at http://schematics.earthware.co.uk/hitcharide. Not...Inspiration.Web: Description: A simple (but entertaining) ASP.NET MVC (C#) project to suggest random code names for projects. Intended audience: People who ne...NetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: tinyMCE file plugin with asp.netOil Slick Live Feeds: All live feeds from BP's Remotely Operated VehiclesParticle Lexer: Parser and Tokenizer libraryPdf Form Tool: Pdf Form Tool demonstrates how the iTextSharp library could be used to fill PDF forms. The input data is provided as a csv file. The application ...Planning Poker Windows Mobile 7: This project is a Planning Poker application for Windows Mobile 7 (and later?). RandomRat: RandomRat is a program for generating random sets that meet specific criteriaScience.NET: A scientific library written in managed code. It supports advanced mathematics (algebra system, sequences, statistics, combinatorics...), data stru...Spider Compiler: Spider Compiler parses the input of a spider programming source file and compiles it (with help of csc.exe; the C#-Compiler) to an exe-file. This p...Sununpro: sunun's project for study by team foundation server.TFS Buddy: An application that manipulates your I-Buddy whenever something happens in your Team Foundation ServerValveSoft: ValveSysWiiMote Physics: WiiMote Physics is an application that allows you to retrieve data from your WiiMote or Balance Board and display it in real-time. It has a number...WinGet: WinGet is a download manager for Windows. You can drag links onto the WinGet Widget and it will download a file on the selected folder. It is dev...XProject.NET: A project management and team collaboration platformNew Releases.NET DiscUtils: Version 0.9 Preview: This release is still under development. New features available in this release: Support for accessing short file names stored in WIM files Incr...Active Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk): Active World Dot Net Wrapper (0.0.1.85): Based on AwSdk 85AwSdk UnOfficial Wrapper Howto Use: C# using AwWrapper; VB.Net Import AwWrapperAjaxControlToolkit additional extenders: ZhecheAjaxControls for .NET3.5: Used AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - April 12th 2010 Release Version 40412. Fixed deadlock in long operation canceling Some other fixesAnyCAD: AnyCAD.v1.2.ENU.Install: http://www.anycad.net Parametric Modeling *3D: Sphere, Box, Cylinder, Cone •2D: Line, Rectangle, Arc, Arch, Circle, Spline, Polygon •Feature: Extr...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V29: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Concurrent Cache: 1.0: This is the first release for the ConcurrentCache library.Configuration Section Designer: 2.0.0: This is the first Beta Release for VS 2010 supportDoxygen Browser Addin for VS: Doxygen Browser Addin - v0.1.4 Beta: Support for Visual Studio 2010 improved the logging of errors (Event Logs) Fixed some issues/bugs Hot key for navigation "Control + F1, Contr...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.2: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.2), with new UI changes. Once you have extracted the file, do not delete any files/folders. They are n...HERB.IQ: Beta 0.1 Source code release 5: Beta 0.1 Source code release 5Inspiration.Web: Initial release (deployment package): Initial release (deployment package)NetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: Demo Project: Demo ProjectNetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: NetFileBrowser: NetImageBrowserNLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.06.05.001: Changes since the last build:2010-06-04 23:29:42 Jarek Kowalski Massive update to documentation generator. 2010-05-28 15:41:42 Jarek Kowalski upda...Oil Slick Live Feeds: Oil Slick Live Feeds 0.1: A the first release, with feeds from the MS Skandi, Boa Deep C, Enterprise and Q4000. They are live streams from the ROV's monitoring the damaged...Pcap.Net: Pcap.Net 0.7.0 (46671): Pcap.Net - June 2010 Release Pcap.Net is a .NET wrapper for WinPcap written in C++/CLI and C#. It Features almost all WinPcap features and includes...sqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.289.0 (alpha): API supportTFS Buddy: TFS Buddy First release (Beta 1): This is the first release of the TFS Buddy.Visual Studio DSite: Looping Animation (Visual C++ 2008): A solider firing a bullet that loops and displays an explosion everytime it hits the edge of the form.WiiMote Physics: WiiMote Physics v4.0: v4.0.0.1 Recovered from existing compiled assembly after hard drive failure Now requires .NET 4.0 (it seems to make it run faster) Added new c...WinGet: Alpha 1: First Alpha of WinGet. It includes all the planned features but it contains many bugs. Packaged using 7-Zip and ClickOnce.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)PHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationN2 CMSIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterStyleCopsmark C# LibraryFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and Silverlight

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• New OFM versions released SOA Suite 11.1.1.4 &amp; BPM 11.1.1.4 &amp; JDeveloper 11.1.1.4 WebLogic on JRockit 10.3.4 feedback from the community

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Oracle SOA Suite 11g Installations This is the latest release of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g. Please see the Documentation tab for Release Notes, Installation Guides and other release specific information. Please also see the List of New Features and Samples provided for this release. Release 11gR1 (11.1.1.4.0) Microsoft Windows (32-bit JVM) Linux (32-bit JVM) Generic Oracle JDeveloper 11g Rel 1 (11.1.1.x) (JDeveloper + ADF) Integrated development environment certified on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. License is free (read the Pricing FAQ). Studio Edition for Windows (1.2 GB) | Studio Edition for Linux (1.3 GB) | See All See Additional Development Tools Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Rel 1 (10.3.4) Installers The WebLogic Server installers include Oracle Coherence and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and supports development with other Fusion Middleware products . The zip includes WebLogic Server only and is intended for WebLogic Server development only. Linux x86 (1.1 GB) | Windows x86 (1 GB) Zip for Windows x86, Linux x86, Mac OS X (316 MB) | See All Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.4) on JRockit Virtual Edition Download For additional downloads please visit the Oracle Fusion Middleware Products Update Center Share your feedback with the @soacommunity on twitter SOASimone Simone Geib SOA Suite 11gR1 (11.1.1.4.0) has just been released: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/downloads/index.html gschmutz gschmutz My new blog post: WebLogic Server, JDev, SOA, BPM, OSB and CEP 11.1.1.4 (PS3) available! - http://tinyurl.com/4negnpn simon_haslam Simon Haslam I'm very pleased to see WLS 10.3.4 for JRockit VE launched at the same time as the rest of PS3 http://j.mp/gl1nQm (32bit anyway) lucasjellema Lucas Jellema See http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@otn/documents/webcontent/156082.xml for PS3 extension downloads BPM, SOA Editor, WebCenter demed demed List of new features in @OracleSOA 11gR1 PS3: http://bit.ly/fVRwsP is not extremely long but huge release by # of bugs fixed. Go! biemond Edwin Biemond WebLogic 10.3.4 new features http://bit.ly/f7L1Eu Exalogic Elastic Cloud , JPA2 , Maven plugin, OWSM policies on WebLogic SCA applications JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF JDeveloper and Oracle ADF 11g Release 1 Patch Set 3 (11.1.1.4.0): New Features and Bug Fixes http://bit.ly/feghnY simon_haslam Simon Haslam WebLogic Server 10.3.4 (i.e. 11gR1 PS3) available now too http://bit.ly/eeysZ2 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Share your impressions on the new JDeveloper 11g Patchset 3 release that came out today! Download it here: http://bit.ly/dogRN8 VikasAatOracle Vikas Anand SOA Suite 11gR1PS3 is Hotpluggable ...see list of features that @Demed posted..#soa #soacommunity   New versions of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.x)  include: Oracle WebLogic Server 11g R1 (10.3.4) Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Business Process Management 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Complex Event Processing 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Service Bus 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Enterprise Repository 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Identity Management 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle WebCenter 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) - coming soon Oracle Forms, Reports, Portal & Discoverer 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Repository Creation Utility 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle JDeveloper & Application Development Runtime 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Resources Download  (OTN) Certification Documentation   New Features in Oracle SOA Suite 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.4.0) Updated: January, 2011 Go to Oracle SOA Suite 11g Doc Introduction Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 (11.1.1.4.0) includes both bug fixes as well as new features listed below - click on the title of each feature for more details. Downloads, documentation links and more information on the Oracle SOA Suite available on the SOA Suite OTN page and as always, we welcome your feedback on the SOA OTN forum. New in Oracle SOA Suite in this release BPEL Component BPEL 2.0 support in JDeveloper The BPEL editor in JDeveloper now generates BPEL 2.0 code and introduces several new activities. Augmented XML variables auto-initialization capabilities The XML variable auto-initialization capabilities have been enhanced to support two need additional use cases: to initialize the to-spec node if it doesn't exist during the rule and to initialize array elements. New Assign Activity dialog The new Assign Activity supports the same drag & drop paradigm used for the XSLT mapper, greatly streamlining the task of assigning multiple variables. Mediator Component Time window parameter for the resequencer This new parameter lets users initiate a best-effort resequencing based on a time window rather than a number of messages. Support for attachments in the Mediator assign dialog The Mediator assign dialog now supports attachment, enabling usage of the Mediator to transmit attachments even if source and target schemas are different. Adapters & Bindings ChunkSize property added to the File Adapter header properties The ChunkSize property of the File Adapter is now available as a header property, allowing in-process modification of the value for this property. Improved support for distributed WLS JMS topics though automatic rebalancing of listeners The JMS Adapter has been enhanced to subscribe to administrative events from WLS JMS. Based on these events, it dynamically rebalances listeners when there are changes to the members of a local or remote WLS JMS distributed destination. JDeveloper configuration wizard for custom JCA adapters A new wizard is available in JDeveloper to configure custom-built adapters Administration & Enterprise Manager Enhanced purging capabilities to manage database growth Historical instance data can now be purged using three different strategies: batch script, scheduled batch script or data partitioning. Asynchronous bulk instance deletion in Enterprise Manager Bulk deletion of instances in Enterprise Manager now executes as an asynchronous operation in Enterprise Manager, returning control to the user as soon as the action has been submitted and acknowledged. B2B Ability to schedule partner downtime This feature allows trading partners to notify each other about planned downtime and to delay delivery of messages during that period. Message sequencing B2B now supports both inbound and outbound message sequencing. Simplified BAM integration with B2B B2B ships with various pre-configured artifacts to simplify monitoring in BAM. Instance Message Java API for B2B The new instance message Java API supports programmatic access to B2B instance message data. Oracle Service Bus (OSB) Certification of the File and FTP JCA Adapters The File and FTP JCA adapters are now certified for use with Oracle Service Bus (in addition to the native transports). Security enhancements Oracle Service Bus now supports SAML 2.0 as well as the OWSM authorization policies. Check the Oracle Service Bus 11.1.1.4 Release Notes for a complete list of new features. Installation, Hot-Pluggability & Certifications Ability to run Oracle SOA Suite on IBM WebSphere Application Server Oracle SOA Suite can now be deployed on IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment (ND) 7.0.11 and IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0.11. Single JVM developer installation template Oracle SOA Suite can now be targeted to the WebLogic admin server - there is no requirement to also have a managed server. This topology is intended to minimize the memory foorprint of development environments. This is in addition to the list of supported browsers, operating systems and databases already certified in prior releases. Complex Event Processing (CEP) IDE enhancements This release introduces several enhancements to the development IDE, such as adapter wizards and event-type repository. CQL enhancements CQL enhancements include JDBC data cartridges and parametrized queries. Tracing and injecting events in the Event Processing Network (EPN) In the development environment you can now trace and inject events. Check the Oracle CEP 11.1.1.4 Release Notes for a complete list of new features. SOA Suite page on OTN For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Suite 11.1.1.4,JDeveloper 11.1.1.4,WebLogic 10.3.4,JRockit 10.3.4,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,SOA,Simone Geib,Guido Schmutz,Edwin Biemond,Lucas Jellema,Simon Haslam,Demed,Vikas Anand,Jürgen Kress

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• Running SSIS packages from C#

  - by Piotr Rodak

  Most of the developers and DBAs know about two ways of deploying packages: You can deploy them to database server and run them using SQL Server Agent job or you can deploy the packages to file system and run them using dtexec.exe utility. Both approaches have their pros and cons. However I would like to show you that there is a third way (sort of) that is often overlooked, and it can give you capabilities the ‘traditional’ approaches can’t. I have been working for a few years with applications that run packages from host applications that are implemented in .NET. As you know, SSIS provides programming model that you can use to implement more flexible solutions. SSIS applications are usually thought to be batch oriented, with fairly rigid architecture and processing model, with fixed timeframes when the packages are executed to process data. It doesn’t to be the case, you don’t have to limit yourself to batch oriented architecture. I have very good experiences with service oriented architectures processing large amounts of data. These applications are more complex than what I would like to show here, but the principle stays the same: you can execute packages as a service, on ad-hoc basis. You can also implement and schedule various signals, HTTP calls, file drops, time schedules, Tibco messages and other to run the packages. You can implement event handler that will trigger execution of SSIS when a certain event occurs in StreamInsight stream. This post is just a small example of how you can use the API and other features to create a service that can run SSIS packages on demand. I thought it might be a good idea to implement a restful service that would listen to requests and execute appropriate actions. As it turns out, it is trivial in C#. The application is implemented as console application for the ease of debugging and running. In reality, you might want to implement the application as Windows service. To begin, you have to reference namespace System.ServiceModel.Web and then add a few lines of code: Uri baseAddress = new Uri("http://localhost:8011/");               WebServiceHost svcHost = new WebServiceHost(typeof(PackRunner), baseAddress);                           try             {                 svcHost.Open();                   Console.WriteLine("Service is running");                 Console.WriteLine("Press enter to stop the service.");                 Console.ReadLine();                   svcHost.Close();             }             catch (CommunicationException cex)             {                 Console.WriteLine("An exception occurred: {0}", cex.Message);                 svcHost.Abort();             } The interesting lines are 3, 7 and 13. In line 3 you create a WebServiceHost object. In line 7 you start listening on the defined URL and then in line 13 you shut down the service. As you have noticed, the WebServiceHost constructor is accepting type of an object (here: PackRunner) that will be instantiated as singleton and subsequently used to process the requests. This is the class where you put your logic, but to tell WebServiceHost how to use it, the class must implement an interface which declares methods to be used by the host. The interface itself must be ornamented with attribute ServiceContract. [ServiceContract]     public interface IPackRunner     {         [OperationContract]         [WebGet(UriTemplate = "runpack?package={name}")]         string RunPackage1(string name);           [OperationContract]         [WebGet(UriTemplate = "runpackwithparams?package={name}&rows={rows}")]         string RunPackage2(string name, int rows);     } Each method that is going to be used by WebServiceHost has to have attribute OperationContract, as well as WebGet or WebInvoke attribute. The detailed discussion of the available options is outside of scope of this post. I also recommend using more descriptive names to methods . Then, you have to provide the implementation of the interface: public class PackRunner : IPackRunner     {         ... There are two methods defined in this class. I think that since the full code is attached to the post, I will show only the more interesting method, the RunPackage2.   /// <summary> /// Runs package and sets some of its variables. /// </summary> /// <param name="name">Name of the package</param> /// <param name="rows">Number of rows to export</param> /// <returns></returns> public string RunPackage2(string name, int rows) {     try     {         string pkgLocation = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["PackagePath"];           pkgLocation = Path.Combine(pkgLocation, name.Replace("\"", ""));           Console.WriteLine();         Console.WriteLine("Calling package {0} with parameter {1}.", name, rows);                  Application app = new Application();         Package pkg = app.LoadPackage(pkgLocation, null);           pkg.Variables["User::ExportRows"].Value = rows;         DTSExecResult pkgResults = pkg.Execute();         Console.WriteLine();         Console.WriteLine(pkgResults.ToString());         if (pkgResults == DTSExecResult.Failure)         {             Console.WriteLine();             Console.WriteLine("Errors occured during execution of the package:");             foreach (DtsError er in pkg.Errors)                 Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", er.ErrorCode, er.Description);             Console.WriteLine();             return "Errors occured during execution. Contact your support.";         }                  Console.WriteLine();         Console.WriteLine();         return "OK";     }     catch (Exception ex)     {         Console.WriteLine(ex);         return ex.ToString();     } }   The method accepts package name and number of rows to export. The packages are deployed to the file system. The path to the packages is configured in the application configuration file. This way, you can implement multiple services on the same machine, provided you also configure the URL for each instance appropriately. To run a package, you have to reference Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime namespace. This namespace is implemented in Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS.dll which in my case was installed in the folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\SDK\Assemblies”. Once you have done it, you can create an instance of Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Application as in line 18 in the above snippet. It may be a good idea to create the Application object in the constructor of the PackRunner class, to avoid necessity of recreating it each time the service is invoked. Then, in line 19 you see that an instance of Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Package is created. The method LoadPackage in its simplest form just takes package file name as the first parameter. Before you run the package, you can set its variables to certain values. This is a great way of configuring your packages without all the hassle with dtsConfig files. In the above code sample, variable “User:ExportRows” is set to value of the parameter “rows” of the method. Eventually, you execute the package. The method doesn’t throw exceptions, you have to test the result of execution yourself. If the execution wasn’t successful, you can examine collection of errors exposed by the package. These are the familiar errors you often see during development and debugging of the package. I you run the package from the code, you have opportunity to persist them or log them using your favourite logging framework. The package itself is very simple; it connects to my AdventureWorks database and saves number of rows specified in variable “User::ExportRows” to a file. You should know that before you run the package, you can change its connection strings, logging, events and many more. I attach solution with the test service, as well as a project with two test packages. To test the service, you have to run it and wait for the message saying that the host is started. Then, just type (or copy and paste) the below command to your browser. http://localhost:8011/runpackwithparams?package=%22ExportEmployees.dtsx%22&rows=12 When everything works fine, and you modified the package to point to your AdventureWorks database, you should see "OK” wrapped in xml: I stopped the database service to simulate invalid connection string situation. The output of the request is different now: And the service console window shows more information: As you see, implementing service oriented ETL framework is not a very difficult task. You have ability to configure the packages before you run them, you can implement logging that is consistent with the rest of your system. In application I have worked with we also have resource monitoring and execution control. We don’t allow to run more than certain number of packages to run simultaneously. This ensures we don’t strain the server and we use memory and CPUs efficiently. The attached zip file contains two projects. One is the package runner. It has to be executed with administrative privileges as it registers HTTP namespace. The other project contains two simple packages. This is really a cool thing, you should check it out!

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