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

  - by Richard Lefebvre

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

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• List of Commonly Used Value Types in XNA Games

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). Of concern to XNA programmers is the fact that it runs automatically after a fixed amount of GC-managed memory has been allocated (currently 1MB on both systems). Many beginning XNA programmers are unaware of what constitutes GC-managed memory, though. So here’s a quick overview. In .NET, there are two different “types” of types: value types and reference types. Only reference types are managed by the garbage collector. Value types are not managed by the garbage collector and are instead managed in other ways that are implementation dependent. For purposes of XNA programming, the important point is that they are not managed by the GC and thus do not, by themselves, increment that internal 1 MB allocation counter. (n.b. Structs are value types. If you have a struct that has a reference type as a member, then that reference type, when instantiated, will still be allocated in the GC-managed memory and will thus count against the 1 MB allocation counter. Putting it in a struct doesn’t change the fact that it gets allocated on the GC heap, but the struct itself is created outside of the GC’s purview). Both value types and reference types use the keyword ‘new’ to allocate a new instance of them. Sometimes this keyword is hidden by a method which creates new instances for you, e.g. XmlReader.Create. But the important thing to determine is whether or not you are dealing with a value types or a reference type. If it’s a value type, you can use the ‘new’ keyword to allocate new instances of that type without incrementing the GC allocation counter (except as above where it’s a struct with a reference type in it that is allocated by the constructor, but there are no .NET Framework or XNA Framework value types that do this so it would have to be a struct you created or that was in some third-party library you were using for that to even become an issue). The following is a list of most all of value types you are likely to use in a generic XNA game: AudioCategory (used with XACT; not available on WP7) AvatarExpression (Xbox 360 only, but exposed on Windows to ease Xbox development) bool BoundingBox BoundingSphere byte char Color DateTime decimal double any enum (System.Enum itself is a class, but all enums are value types such that there are no GC allocations for enums) float GamePadButtons GamePadCapabilities GamePadDPad GamePadState GamePadThumbSticks GamePadTriggers GestureSample int IntPtr (rarely but occasionally used in XNA) KeyboardState long Matrix MouseState nullable structs (anytime you see, e.g. int? something, that ‘?’ denotes a nullable struct, also called a nullable type) Plane Point Quaternion Ray Rectangle RenderTargetBinding sbyte (though I’ve never seen it used since most people would just use a short) short TimeSpan TouchCollection TouchLocation TouchPanelCapabilities uint ulong ushort Vector2 Vector3 Vector4 VertexBufferBinding VertexElement VertexPositionColor VertexPositionColorTexture VertexPositionNormalTexture VertexPositionTexture Viewport So there you have it. That’s not quite a complete list, mind you. For example: There are various structs in the .NET framework you might make use of. I left out everything from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.PackedVector namespace, since everything in there ventures into the realm of advanced XNA programming anyway (n.b. every single instantiable thing in that namespace is a struct and thus a value type; there are also two interfaces but interfaces cannot be instantiated at all and thus don’t figure in to this discussion). There are so many enums you’re likely to use (PlayerIndex, SpriteSortMode, SpriteEffects, SurfaceFormat, etc.) that including them would’ve flooded the list and reduced its utility. So I went with “any enum” and trust that you can figure out what the enums are (and it’s rare to use ‘new’ with an enum anyway). That list also doesn’t include any of the pre-defined static instances of some of the classes (e.g. BlendState.AlphaBlend, BlendState.Opaque, etc.) which are already allocated such that using them doesn’t cause any new allocations and therefore doesn’t increase that 1 MB counter. That list also has a few misleading things. VertexElement, VertexPositionColor, and all the other vertex types are structs. But you’re only likely to ever use them as an array (for use with VertexBuffer or DynamicVertexBuffer), and all arrays are reference types (even arrays of value types such as VertexPositionColor[ ] or int[ ]). * So that’s it for now. The note below may be a bit confusing (it deals with how the GC works and how arrays are managed in .NET). If so, you can probably safely ignore it for now but feel free to ask any questions regardless. * Arrays of value types (where the value type doesn’t contain any reference type members) are much faster for the GC to examine than arrays of reference types, so there is a definite benefit to using arrays of value types where it makes sense. But creating arrays of value types does cause the GC’s allocation counter to increase. Indeed, allocating a large array of a value type is one of the quickest ways to increment the allocation counter since a .NET array is a sequential block of memory. An array of reference types is just a sequential block of references (typically 4 bytes each) while an array of value types is a sequential block of instances of that type. So for an array of Vector3s it would be 12 bytes each since each float is 4 bytes and there are 3 in a Vector3; for an array of VertexPositionNormalTexture structs it would typically be 32 bytes each since it has two Vector3s and a Vector2. (Note that there are a few additional bytes taken up in the creation of an array, typically 12 but sometimes 16 or possibly even more, which depend on the implementation details of the array type on the particular platform the code is running on).

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 28, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 28, 2011Popular ReleasesCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 - Alpha: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. Samples in <root>\src\Lib\CommonLibrary.NET\Samples CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 AlphaNew Dynamic Scripting Language : workitem : 7493 Fixes 1622 6803Widget Suite for DotNetNuke: 01.04.00: The following features/enhancements are associated with this release: Bug: Removed the empty box/white space created by some widgets New Widget: FlexSlider New Widget: Google+ Button New Widget: Klout Badge Sample Widget Script FileTools for SharePoint: Reset SharePoint Configuration Cache: This tool is used to detect the existing location of the SharePoint configuration cache files then remove them to trigger the timer service to rebuild a fresh new cache. This tool runs on any SharePoint box version 2003 and above supporting x64 bit & x32 bit OS assuming .NET framework 3.5 is installed. You must run the tool with elevated privileges if running on Win 2008 server to ensure that the tool has enough rights to restart the timer service. The tool auto-detects whether its running i...WinRT File Based Database: 0.9.1.5: Implement IsBusy property to support Save button state. See Quick Start project that is distributed as part of the download for details on how to implement Save button, use IsBusy property and how to implement SimpleCommand to use behind the Save button.Multiwfn: Multiwfn2.2_source: Multiwfn2.2_sourceBatchus-GUI: Batchus-GUI-vb 0.1.3.3: Here is v0.1.3.3. It is relatively stable. Just need some more designer layout, and tutorials, and templates.Groovy IM: Groovy IM Version 0.3: Groovy IM Version 0.3 for Windows Phone 7Internet Cache Examiner: Internet Cache Examiner 0.9.2: This is the release binary for the 0.9.2 version of Internet Cache Examiner.Composite Data Service Framework: Composite Data Service Framework 1.0: This solution contains the Composite Data Service framework solution along with a Sample Project.FxCop Integrator for Visual Studio 2010: FxCop Integrator 2.0.0 RC: Replaced the MSBuild Tasks installer to fix the bug of the targets file. FxCop Integrator is not affected by this bug. (Nov 28 2011) New FeatureSupported calculating code metrics with Code Metrics PowerTool. (Work Item #6568: 6568). Provided MSBuild tasks. #7454: 7454 Supported to filter out auto-generated code from code analysis result. #7485: 7485 Supported exporting report of code analysis result. Supported multi-project analysis. Supported file level analysis. Added the featu...Terminals: Version 2 - Beta 4 Release: Beta 4 Refresh Build Dont forget to backup your config files BEFORE upgrading! As usual, please take time to use and abuse this release. We left logging in place, and this is a debug build so be sure to submit your logs on each bug reported, and please do report all bugs! Updated the About form to include the date and time of the build. Useful for CI builds to ensure we have the correct version "Favourites" and "History" save their expanded states after app restarts Code cleanup, secu...MiniTwitter: 1.76: MiniTwitter 1.76 ???? ?? ?????????? User Streams ???????????? User Streams ???????????、??????????????? REST ?????????? ?????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????Media Companion: MC 3.424b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movie Show Resolutions... Resolved issue when reverting multiselection of movies to "-none-" Added movie rename support for subtitle files '.srt' & '.sub' Finalised code for '-1' fix - radiobutton to choose either filename or title Fixed issue with Movie Batch Wizard Fanart - ...Advanced Windows Phone Enginering Tool: WPE Downloads: This version of WPE gives you basic updating, restoring, and, erasing for your Windows Phone device.Anno 2070 Assistant: Beta v1.0 (STABLE): Anno 2070 Assistant Beta v1.0 Released! Features Included: Complete Building Layouts for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Complete Production Chains for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Completed Credits Screen Known Issues: Not all production chains and building layouts may be on the lists because they have not yet been discovered. However, data is still 99.9% complete. Currently the Supply & Demand, including Calculator screen are disabled until version 1.1.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.7: Including updated Minecraft Biome Extractor and mcmap to support the new Minecraft 1.0.0 release (new block types, etc).Visual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.2.1: Enhancements: * strdup and _wcsdup functions support added. * Preliminary support for VS 11 added. Bugs Fixed: * Low performance after upgrading from VLD v2.1. * Memory leaks with static linking fixed (disabled calloc support). * Runtime error R6002 fixed because of wrong memory dump format. * version.h fixed in installer. * Some PVS studio warning fixed.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.10: 3.6.0.10 22-Nov-2011 Update: Removed PreEmptive Platform integration (PreEmptive analytics) Removed all PreEmptive attributes Removed PreEmptive.dll assembly references from all projects Added first support to ADAM/AD LDS Thanks to PatBea. Work Item 9775: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/9775VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.22: The new version contains Silverlight 5 library: Vlc.DotNet.Silverlight. A sample could be tested here The new version add and correct many features : Correction : Reinitialize some variables Deprecate : Logging API, since VLC 1.2 (08/20/2011) Add subitem in LocationMedia (for Youtube videos, ...) Update Wpf sample to use Youtube videos Many others correctionsSharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...New ProjectsA lightweight database access component: DataAccessor?????????????，??DataAccessor????????????： 1.??????????SQL??，?????SQL???????????； 2.?????????； 3.????????????，??MSAccess??????????????????????????????????????，?????????； 4.?????????????DBMS，??：SqlServer、Oracle??MSAccess，??????DBMS???，??????N?????????； 5.????，?????????DataAccess??????DBMS； 6.???Sql????xml??????????????dbms?SQL?????，??sql??????????????； 7.???，???DLL??????????……AdHoc.Wavesque: Wavesque provides a simple infrastructure to generate waveforms.AIRO - Interoperable Experiment Automation Package: The main goal of this project is to provide engineers and scientists flexible and extendable framework for building test, measurement and control applications. This framework is compatible with IVI-COM drivers and extends IVI Instrument Classes with custom .NET (and COM) interfaces for such devices as: step motors, different positioning devices, magnet power supplies, lock-in amplifiers etc. We maintain IVI Foundation's aim: "simplify upgrading or replacing components in complex test systems...AKBK-Schulprojekt - USB-Guard: Das Projekt USB-Überwachung wird im Rahmen des Anwendungsentwicklungs-Unterrichts des Adolf-Kolping-Berufskollegs geplant und durchgeführt. Die Software wird zur Prävention von Manipulationsversuchen während einer Informatikklausur entwickelt. Sie erkennt manipulierte und nicht erlaubte USB-Datenträger, protokolliert deren Inhalt und gibt ggf. eine Warnung aus. Sie hilft dem Lehrer dabei, Manipulationsversuche schneller und effizienter zu erkennen.Android Vision: Project to learn all things Android and some image processingAuto Fill Title of Document in Document Library in SharePoint 2010: Automatically fill title of any document in any document library in SharePoint 2010.Batchus-GUI: A graphical user interface, used to create batch files.Bazeli: Windows Phone 7 application that supports tracking of expenses.Clannad: This is a family of many things.Csv2Entity: CSV 2 Entity is a serials of tools that deal with CSV files as well as Excel files and Access files. This framework include: A VSIX file which contains VB and CS source code generate wizard for CSV Objects. Read/Write CSV files facilities. Documentation Help facilities.Cypher Bot: Encrypt secrets, messages, documents, files and more. Then decrypt them. Then repeat with the US government's encryption standard: AES 256-bit (Accepted by NIST and NSA).Cypher Bot makes it fun and easy for anyone to secure files. This is the best security solution available on the web. You are now able to encrypt/decrypt files (avi, mov, mpeg, mp3, wav, png, jpg, txt, html, vb, js) and text ALL IN ONE beautiful slick interface. Cypher Bot is developed in visual basic.EmailWebLinker: A very simple text to html converter designed to deal with those email messages that contain a list of links to images. Any http links it finds to pictures are converted inline. eps files are downloaded and rendered. Can be easily extended.FileHasher: This project provides a simple tool for generating and verifying file hashes. I created this to help the QA team I work with. The project is all C# using .NET 3.5 SP1.Financial Controls: WPF/Silverlight Controls for Financial ApplicationsGroovy IM: Groovy IM makes it easy for Windows Phone 7 consumers to chat while on there Windows Phone 7 device(s). Groovy IM is developed in C# under the GPL V2 license.IBlog: Project created to learn things ASP.NETInjectivity (Dependency Injection): Injectivity is a dependency injection framework (written in C#) with a strong focus on the ease of configuration and performance. Having been written over 5 years and at version 2.8 with unit tests & intellisense comments it is a mature framework.Lizard Chess: Chess openings preparation tool using F#. WinForms C# used for UI.MCPD: I am doing a self study course for MCPD in .NET 4 (web track), so I am committing any custom source code as a result of my study in this open source location which I can later show the work for. * MCTS Exam 70-515 Web Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4MVC TreeView Helper: This fluent MVC TreeView helper makes it easy to build and customize an HTML unordered-list tree from a recursive model.Onion Architecture with ASP.NET MVC: Onion Architecture with ASP.NET MVCOpenBank: OpenBank est une application client/serveur destinée à la gestion de compte banquaire.Philosophy Widget: This Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard aids in memorizing the association between known works of philosophy and their authors.Physic Engine: Physic EnginePUL Programming Utility Language: PUL is a programming utility language that allows people to do tasks automatically without having to manually do them, which that process would take longer. Using PUL, you can make programs that automatically do the work for you.QuakeMeApp: QuakeMeApp is a Windows Phone 7 Earthquake Alert AppSense/Net SourceCode Field Control: This is a Field Control for Sense/Net ECMS, it provides syntax highlighting.Silverlight Video CoverFlow: This a Silverlight Sample Application including a Coverflow of Video (streaming)SpaceConquest: Incorporated standard design patterns to build a peer to peer game in Java. The game rules were similar in complexity to games like Civilization and StarcraftSPGE - An XNA 2D graphics engine for Windows and Windows Phone 7.: SPGE is an open-source graphics engine build over XNA that allows the creation of simple 2D games that target Windows and Windows Phone 7. The aim of this graphic engine is to allow for an easy creation of simle 2D games, game prototyping, and teaching of game development.SQL CRUD Expression Builder: A library to build sql crud commands that is based on expressions so every part of the sql statement could be an expression like ColumnSetExpression, FilterExpression, JoinExpression, etc, is intended to be agnostic but right now is being tested only with SqlServer and MySql.TDD-Katas: *TDD-Katas* simply defines the Test Driven Development Katas. In this, I tried to create most famous katas to understand what is exactly Kata. So, get into the code and let us know for any improvementTFS Team Project Manager: TFS Team Project Manager automates various tasks across Team Projects in Team Foundation Server. If you find yourself managing multiple Team Projects for an organization and have recurring tasks and questions that repeat themselves over and over again, Team Project Manager probably has some answers for you. Team Project Manager can help you... * Manage build process templates (understanding which build templates are used by which build definitions, uploading new build process templates,...USB Camera Driver for Windows Embedded Compact 7: This project helps people to get the USB camera working on the Windows Embedded Compact 7.This is modified source of the WinCE 6.0 USB Camera Shared source available from the following link http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=19512 User Profile with RecordID replicator: <User Profile with RecordID replicator> will let SharePoint 2010 administrators create a new Profile database maintaining the RecordId of the profile to make sure the social features (I like it, tags, notes) are not gone.VS Tool for WSS 3.0: Visual Studio (2005 and 2008) add-ons for WSS. Included: - schema.xml explorerWhs2Smugmug: Windows Home Server Add-In for uploading files to Smugmug. Written in C# using .Net 3.5 and WCF. Also using the Smugmug API Project. ??UBBCODE: PHP????UBBCODE????，??????： 1.??????（10px ? 24px）； 2.????； 3.?????； 4.??????； 5.??????； 6.??????（????????????）； 7.??????； 8.?????； 9.?????； 10.???QQ??，??????； 11.???????（?????，??????????）； 12.?????????； 13.????????； 14.?????????； 15.?????????； 16.?????????。

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• OS Analytics with Oracle Enterprise Manager (by Eran Steiner)

  - by Zeynep Koch

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes. The recording of our call to discuss this blog is available here: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=71517797&rKey=4ec9d4a3508564b3Download the presentation here See also: Blog about Alert Monitoring and Problem Notification Blog about Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other content Here is quick summary of what you can do with OS Analytics in Ops Center: View historical charts and real time value of CPU, memory, network and disk utilization Find the top CPU and Memory processes in real time or at a certain historical day Determine proper monitoring thresholds based on historical data Drill down into a process details Where to start To start with OS Analytics, choose the OS asset in the tree and click the Analytics tab. You can see the CPU utilization, Memory utilization and Network utilization, along with the current real time top 5 processes in each category (click the image to see a larger version):  In the above screen, you can click each of the top 5 processes to see a more detailed view of that process. Here is an example of one of the processes: One of the cool things is that you can see the process tree for this process along with some port binding and open file descriptors. Next, click the "Processes" tab to see real time information of all the processes on the machine: An interesting column is the "Target" column. If you configured Ops Center to work with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, then the two products will talk to each other and Ops Center will display the correlated target from Cloud Control in this table. If you are only using Ops Center - this column will remain empty. The "Threshold" tab is particularly helpful - you can view historical trends of different monitored values and based on the graph - determine what the monitoring values should be: You can ask Ops Center to suggest monitoring levels based on the historical values or you can set your own. The different colors in the graph represent the current set levels: Red for critical, Yellow for warning and Blue for Information, allowing you to quickly see how they're positioned against real data. It's important to note that when looking at longer periods, Ops Center smooths out the data and uses averages. So when looking at values such as CPU Usage, try shorter time frames which are more detailed, such as one hour or one day. Applying new monitoring values When first applying new values to monitored attributes - a popup will come up asking if it's OK to get you out of the current Monitoring Policy. This is OK if you want to either have custom monitoring for a specific machine, or if you want to use this current machine as a "Gold image" and extract a Monitoring Policy from it. You can later apply the new Monitoring Policy to other machines and also set it as a default Monitoring Profile. Once you're done with applying the different monitoring values, you can review and change them in the "Monitoring" tab. You can also click the "Extract a Monitoring Policy" in the actions pane on the right to save all the new values to a new Monitoring Policy, which can then be found under "Plan Management" -> "Monitoring Policies". Visiting the past Under the "History" tab you can "go back in time". This is very helpful when you know that a machine was busy a few hours ago (perhaps in the middle of the night?), but you were not around to take a look at it in real time. Here's a view into yesterday's data on one of the machines: You can see an interesting CPU spike happening at around 3:30 am along with some memory use. In the bottom table you can see the top 5 CPU and Memory consumers at the requested time. Very quickly you can see that this spike is related to the Solaris 11 IPS repository synchronization process using the "pkgrecv" command. The "time machine" doesn't stop here - you can also view historical data to determine which of the zones was the busiest at a given time: Under the hood The data collected is stored on each of the agents under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/historical/ An "os.zip" file exists for the main OS. Inside you will find many small text files, named after the Epoch time stamp in which they were taken If you have any zones, there will be a file called "guests.zip" containing the same small files for all the zones, as well as a folder with the name of the zone along with "os.zip" in it If this is the Enterprise Controller or the Proxy Controller, you will have folders called "proxy" and "sat" in which you will find the "os.zip" for that controller The actual script collecting the data can be viewed for debugging purposes as well: On Linux, the location is: /opt/sun/xvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect If you would like to redirect all the standard error into a file for debugging, touch the following file and the output will go into it: # touch /tmp/.collect.stderr   The temporary data is collected under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/.collectdb until it is zipped. If you would like to review the properties for the Analytics, you can view those per each agent in /opt/sun/n1gc/lib/XVM.properties. Find the section "Analytics configurable properties for OS and VSC" to view the Analytics specific values. I hope you find this helpful! Please post questions in the comments below. Eran Steiner

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• ASP.NET MVC3 checkbox dropdownlist create [migrated]

  - by user95381

  i'm new in asp.net MVC and I/m use view model to poppulate the dropdown list and group of checkboxes. I use SQL Server 2012, where have many to many relationships between Students - Books; Student - Cities. I need collect StudentName, one city and many books for one student. I have next questions: 1. How can I get the values from database to my StudentBookCityViewModel? 2. How can I save the values to my database in [HttpPost] Create method? Here is the code: MODEL public class Student { public int StudentId { get; set; } public string StudentName { get; set; } public ICollection<Book> Books { get; set; } public ICollection<City> Cities { get; set; } } public class Book { public int BookId { get; set; } public string BookName { get; set; } public bool IsSelected { get; set; } public ICollection<Student> Students { get; set; } } public class City { public int CityId { get; set; } public string CityName { get; set; } public bool IsSelected { get; set; } public ICollection<Student> Students { get; set; } } VIEW MODEL public class StudentBookCityViewModel { public string StudentName { get; set; } public IList<Book> Books { get; set; } public StudentBookCityViewModel() { Books = new[] { new Book {BookName = "Title1", IsSelected = false}, new Book {BookName = "Title2", IsSelected = false}, new Book {BookName = "Title3", IsSelected = false} }.ToList(); } public string City { get; set; } public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> CityValues { get { return new[] { new SelectListItem {Value = "Value1", Text = "Text1"}, new SelectListItem {Value = "Value2", Text = "Text2"}, new SelectListItem {Value = "Value3", Text = "Text3"} }; } } } Context public class EFDbContext : DbContext{ public EFDbContext(string connectionString) { Database.Connection.ConnectionString = connectionString; } public DbSet<Book> Books { get; set; } public DbSet<Student> Students { get; set; } public DbSet<City> Cities { get; set; } protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) { modelBuilder.Entity<Book>() .HasMany(x => x.Students).WithMany(x => x.Books) .Map(x => x.MapLeftKey("BookId").MapRightKey("StudentId").ToTable("StudentBooks")); modelBuilder.Entity<City>() .HasMany(x => x.Students).WithMany(x => x.Cities) .Map(x => x.MapLeftKey("CityId").MapRightKey("StudentId").ToTable("StudentCities")); } } Controller public ActionResult Create() { return View(); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create() { //I don't understand how I can save values to db context.SaveChanges(); return RedirectToAction("Index"); } View @model UsingEFNew.ViewModels.StudentBookCityViewModel @using (Html.BeginForm()) { Your Name: @Html.TextBoxFor(model = model.StudentName) <div>Genre:</div> <div> @Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.City, Model.CityValues) </div> <div>Books:</div> <div> @for (int i = 0; i < Model.Books.Count; i++) { <div> @Html.HiddenFor(x => x.Books[i].BookId) @Html.CheckBoxFor(x => x.Books[i].IsSelected) @Html.LabelFor(x => x.Books[i].IsSelected, Model.Books[i].BookName) </div> } </div> <div> <input id="btnSubmit" type="submit" value="Submit" /> </div> </div> }

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• 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Yesterday was 12/12/12, and everybody went crazy on Twitter with cool memes like this one. And maybe you are now wondering why I mentioned 7 (seven) on the blog title. Because I want to play numbers? Yes! Today is 7 days after JavaOne Latin America 2012 is over (... and I had to figure out an excuse for taking so long to blog about it...). So unless you were at JavaOne Latin America this year, here are 7 things you missed: OTN Lounge mini-theatreThere was a mini-theatre holding several lightning talks. We had people from SouJava JUG, GoJava JUG, Globalcode, and several other Java gurus and companies running demos, talks, and even more. For example, @drspockbr talked about the ScrumToys project, that demonstrates the power of JSF. Hands On Lab for JAX-RS and WebSocketsOne of the cool things to do during JavaOne is to come to these Hands On labs and really do something using new technologies with the help of experts. This one in particular, was covered by me, Arun Gupta, and Reza Rahman. The HOL had more people than laptops (and we had 48 laptops!) interested on understanding and learning about the new stuff that is coming within Java EE 7. Things like JAX-RS, Server-sent Events and WebSockets. Hey, if you want to try this HOL by yourself, it is available on Github, so go for it! If you have questions, just let me know! Java Community KeynoteThis keynote presented a lot of cool things like startups using Java in their projects, the Duke Awards, SouJava winning the JCP Outstanding Award, the Java Band, and even more! It was really a space where the Java community could present what they are doing and what they want to do. There's a lot of interest on the Adopt-a-JSR program and the Adopt-OpenJDK. There's also an Adopt-a-JavaEE-JSR program! Take a look if you want to participate and Make the Future Java. Java EE (JMS, JAX-RS) sessions from Reza Rahman, the HeavyMetal guyReza is a well know professional and Java EE enthusiast from the communitty who just joined Oracle this year. His sessions were very well attended, perhaps because of a high interest on the new things coming to Java EE 7 like JMS 2.0 and JAX-RS 2.0. If you want to look at what he did at this JavaOne edition, read his blog post. By the way, if you like Java and heavymetal, you should follow him on Twitter as well! :-) Java EE (WebSockets, HTML5) sessions from Arun Gupta, the GlassFish guyIf you don't know Arun Gupta, no worries. You will have time to know about him while you read his Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Arun has been evangelizing Java EE for a long time, and is now spreading his word about the new upcoming version Java EE 7. He gave one talk about HTML5 Productivity on the Java EE 7 platform, and another one on building web apps with WebSockets. Pretty neat! Arun blogged about JavaOne Latin America as well. Read it here. Java Embedded and JavaFXIf there are two things that are really trending in the Java World right now besides Java EE 7, certainly they are JavaFX and Java Embedded. There were 14 talks covering Java Embedded, from Java Cards to Raspberry.pi, from Java ME to Java on your TV with Ginga-J. The Internet of Things is becoming true, and Java is the only platform today that can connect it all in an standardized and concise way. JavaFX gained a lot of attention too. There were 8 sessions covering what the platform has to offer in terms of Rich User Experience. The JavaFX Scene Builder is an awesome tool to start playing designing an UI, and coding for JavaFX is like coding Swing with 8 hands, one holding your coffee cup. You can achieve a lot, with your two hands (unless, you really have 8 hands, then you can achieve 4 times more :-). If you want to read more about JavaFX, go to Stephen Chin's blog post. GlassFish and Friends Party, 1st edition at JavaOne Lating AmericaThis is probably the thing that I'm most proud. We brought to Brasil the tradition of holding a happy hour for all GlassFish, Java EE friends. This party started almost 7 years ago in San Francisco, and it was about time to bring it to Brazil! The party happened on Tuesday night, right after JavaOne General Keynote, at the Tribeca Pub. We had about 80 attendees and met a lot of Java EE developers there! People from JUGs, Oracle, Locaweb and Red Hat showed up too, including some execs from Oracle that didn't resist and could not miss a party like this one.Lots of caipirinhas, beer and food to everyone, some cool music... even The Fish walking around the party with Juggy!You can see more photos from the party on an album I shared with the recently created GlassFish Brasil community on Google+ here (but you may be more interested in joining the GlassFish english community). There's also more pictures that Arun took and shared on this link. So now you may want to consider coming to Brazil next year! Java EE 7 is on its way, and Brazil is happily and patiently waiting for it, with a lot of enthusiasm. By the way, GlassFish and Java EE 6 just celebrated a Happy Birthday!

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• MySQL Connect Only 10 Days Away - Focus on InnoDB Sessions

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Time flies and MySQL Connect is only 10 days away! You can check out the full program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Mat recently blogged about the MySQL Cluster sessions you’ll have the opportunity to attend, and below are those focused on InnoDB. Remember you can plan your schedule with Schedule Builder. Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: 10 Things You Should Know About InnoDB—Calvin Sun, Oracle InnoDB is the default storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL as of MySQL Release 5.5. It provides the standard ACID-compliant transactions, row-level locking, multiversion concurrency control, and referential integrity. InnoDB also implements several innovative technologies to improve its performance and reliability. This presentation gives a brief history of InnoDB; its main features; and some recent enhancements for better performance, scalability, and availability. Saturday, 5.30 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: Demystified MySQL/InnoDB Performance Tuning—Dimitri Kravtchuk, Oracle This session covers performance tuning with MySQL and the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL and explains the main improvements made in MySQL Release 5.5 and Release 5.6. Which setting for which workload? Which value will be better for my system? How can I avoid potential bottlenecks from the beginning? Do I need a purge thread? Is it true that InnoDB doesn't need thread concurrency anymore? These and many other questions are asked by DBAs and developers. Things are changing quickly and constantly, and there is no “silver bullet.” But understanding the configuration setting’s impact is already a huge step in performance improvement. Bring your ideas and problems to share them with others—the discussion is open, just moderated by a speaker. Sunday, 10.15 am, Room Golden Gate 4: Better Availability with InnoDB Online Operations—Calvin Sun, Oracle Many top Web properties rely on Oracle’s MySQL as a critical piece of infrastructure for serving millions of users. Database availability has become increasingly important. One way to enhance availability is to give users full access to the database during data definition language (DDL) operations. The online DDL operations in recent MySQL releases offer users the flexibility to perform schema changes while having full access to the database—that is, with minimal delay of operations on a table and without rebuilding the entire table. These enhancements provide better responsiveness and availability in busy production environments. This session covers these improvements in the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL for online DDL operations such as add index, drop foreign key, and rename column. Sunday, 11.45 am, Room Golden Gate 7: Developing High-Throughput Services with NoSQL APIs to InnoDB and MySQL Cluster—Andrew Morgan and John Duncan, Oracle Ever-increasing performance demands of Web-based services have generated significant interest in providing NoSQL access methods to MySQL (MySQL Cluster and the InnoDB storage engine of MySQL), enabling users to maintain all the advantages of their existing relational databases while providing blazing-fast performance for simple queries. Get the best of both worlds: persistence; consistency; rich SQL queries; high availability; scalability; and simple, flexible APIs and schemas for agile development. This session describes the memcached connectors and examines some use cases for how MySQL and memcached fit together in application architectures. It does the same for the newest MySQL Cluster native connector, an easy-to-use, fully asynchronous connector for Node.js. Sunday, 1.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: InnoDB Performance Tuning—Inaam Rana, Oracle The InnoDB storage engine has always been highly efficient and includes many unique architectural elements to ensure high performance and scalability. In MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, InnoDB includes many new features that take better advantage of recent advances in operating systems and hardware platforms than previous releases did. This session describes unique InnoDB architectural elements for performance, new features, and how to tune InnoDB to achieve better performance. Sunday, 4.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: InnoDB Compression for OLTP—Nizameddin Ordulu, Facebook and Inaam Rana, Oracle Data compression is an important capability of the InnoDB storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL. Compressed tables reduce the size of the database on disk, resulting in fewer reads and writes and better throughput by reducing the I/O workload. Facebook pushes the limit of InnoDB compression and has made several enhancements to InnoDB, making this technology ready for online transaction processing (OLTP). In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of InnoDB compression. You will also learn the enhancements the Facebook team has made to improve InnoDB compression, such as reducing compression failures, not logging compressed page images, and allowing changes of compression level. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

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• Searching for the Perfect Developer&rsquo;s Laptop.

  - by mbcrump

  I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted a true Quad-core machine, not 2 dual-core fused together). 15.6” monitor SSD 128GB or Larger. – It’s almost 2011 and I don’t want an old standard HDD in this machine. 8GB of DDR3 Ram. – The more the better, right? 1GB Video Card (Prefer NVidia) – I might want to play games with this. HDMI Port – Almost a standard on new Machines. This would be used when I am on the road and want to stream Netflix to the HDTV in the Hotel room. Webcam Built-in – This would be to video chat with the wife and kids if I am on the road. 6-Cell Battery. – I’ve read that an i7 in a laptop really kills the battery. A 6-cell or 9-cell is even better. That is a pretty long list for a budget of around $1200. I searched around the internet and could not buy this machine prebuilt for under $1200. That was even with coupons and my company’s 10% Dell discount. The only way that I would get a machine like this was to buy a prebuilt and replace parts. I chose the  Lenovo Y560 on Newegg to start as my base. Below is a top-down picture of it.   Part 1: The Hardware The Specs for this machine: Color :  GrayOperating System : Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitCPU Type : Intel Core i7-740QM(1.73GHz)Screen : 15.6" WXGAMemory Size : 4GB DDR3Hard Disk : 500GBOptical Drive : DVD±R/RWGraphics Card : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730Video Memory : 1GBCommunication : Gigabit LAN and WLANCard slot : 1 x Express Card/34Battery Life : Up to 3.5 hoursDimensions : 15.20" x 10.00" x 0.80" - 1.30"Weight : 5.95 lbs. This computer met most of the requirements above except that it didn’t come with an SSD or have 8GB of DDR3 Memory. So, I needed to start shopping except this time for an SSD. I asked around on twitter and other hardware forums and everyone pointed me to the Crucial C300 SSD. After checking prices of the drive, it was going to cost an extra $275 bucks and I was going from a spacious 500GB drive to 128GB. After watching some of the SSD videos on YouTube I started feeling better. Below is a pic of the Crucial C300 SSD. The second thing that I needed to upgrade was the RAM. It came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, but it was slow. I decided to buy the Crucial 8GB (4GB x 2) Kit from Newegg. This RAM cost an extra $120 and had a CAS Latency of 7. In the end this machine delivered everything that I wanted and it cost around $1300. You are probably saying, well your budget was $1200. I have spare parts that I’m planning on selling on eBay or Anandtech.  =) If you are interested then shoot me an email and I will give you a great deal mbcrump[at]gmail[dot]com. 500GB Laptop 7200RPM HDD 4GB of DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2) faceVision HD 720p Camera – Unopened In the end my Windows Experience Rating of the SSD was 7.7 and the CPU 7.1. The max that you can get is a 7.9. Part 2: The Software I’m very lucky that I get a lot of software for free. When choosing a laptop, the OS really doesn’t matter because I would never keep the bloatware pre-installed or Windows 7 Home Premium on my main development machine. Matter of fact, as soon as I got the laptop, I immediately took out the old HDD without booting into it. After I got the SSD into the machine, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. The BIOS was out of date, so I updated that to the latest version and started downloading drivers off of Lenovo’s site. I had to download the Wireless Networking Drivers to a USB-Key before I could get my machine on my wireless network. I also discovered that if the date on your computer is off then you cannot join the Windows 7 Homegroup until you fix it. I’m aware that most people like peeking into what programs other software developers use and I went ahead and listed my “essentials” of a fresh build. I am a big Silverlight guy, so naturally some of the software listed below is specific to Silverlight. You should also check out my master list of Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer. See a killer app that I’m missing? Feel free to leave it in the comments below. My Software Essential List. CPU-Z Dropbox Everything Search Tool Expression Encoder Update Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Foxit Reader Google Chrome Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Edition Keepass Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Microsoft Security Essentials 2  Mindscape Silverlight Elements Notepad 2 (with shell extension) Precode Code Snippet Manager RealVNC Reflector ReSharper v5.1.1753.4 Silverlight 4 Toolkit Silverlight Spy Snagit 10 SyncFusion Reporting Controls for Silverlight Telerik Silverlight RadControls TweetDeck Virtual Clone Drive Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VS KB2403277 Update to get Feature Pack 2 to work. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit Windows Live Essentials 2011 Windows Live Writer Backup. Windows Phone Development Tools That is pretty much it, I have a new laptop and am happy with the purchase. If you have any questions then feel free to leave a comment below.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Subterranean IL: Constructor constraints

  - by Simon Cooper

  The constructor generic constraint is a slightly wierd one. The ECMA specification simply states that it: constrains [the type] to being a concrete reference type (i.e., not abstract) that has a public constructor taking no arguments (the default constructor), or to being a value type. There seems to be no reference within the spec to how you actually create an instance of a generic type with such a constraint. In non-generic methods, the normal way of creating an instance of a class is quite different to initializing an instance of a value type. For a reference type, you use newobj: newobj instance void IncrementableClass::.ctor() and for value types, you need to use initobj: .locals init ( valuetype IncrementableStruct s1 ) ldloca 0 initobj IncrementableStruct But, for a generic method, we need a consistent method that would work equally well for reference or value types. Activator.CreateInstance<T> To solve this problem the CLR designers could have chosen to create something similar to the constrained. prefix; if T is a value type, call initobj, and if it is a reference type, call newobj instance void !!0::.ctor(). However, this solution is much more heavyweight than constrained callvirt. The newobj call is encoded in the assembly using a simple reference to a row in a metadata table. This encoding is no longer valid for a call to !!0::.ctor(), as different constructor methods occupy different rows in the metadata tables. Furthermore, constructors aren't virtual, so we would have to somehow do a dynamic lookup to the correct method at runtime without using a MethodTable, something which is completely new to the CLR. Trying to do this in IL results in the following verification error: newobj instance void !!0::.ctor() [IL]: Error: Unable to resolve token. This is where Activator.CreateInstance<T> comes in. We can call this method to return us a new T, and make the whole issue Somebody Else's Problem. CreateInstance does all the dynamic method lookup for us, and returns us a new instance of the correct reference or value type (strangely enough, Activator.CreateInstance<T> does not itself have a .ctor constraint on its generic parameter): .method private static !!0 CreateInstance<.ctor T>() { call !!0 [mscorlib]System.Activator::CreateInstance<!!0>() ret } Going further: compiler enhancements Although this method works perfectly well for solving the problem, the C# compiler goes one step further. If you decompile the C# version of the CreateInstance method above: private static T CreateInstance() where T : new() { return new T(); } what you actually get is this (edited slightly for space & clarity): .method private static !!T CreateInstance<.ctor T>() { .locals init ( [0] !!T CS$0$0000, [1] !!T CS$0$0001 ) DetectValueType: ldloca.s 0 initobj !!T ldloc.0 box !!T brfalse.s CreateInstance CreateValueType: ldloca.s 1 initobj !!T ldloc.1 ret CreateInstance: call !!0 [mscorlib]System.Activator::CreateInstance<T>() ret } What on earth is going on here? Looking closer, it's actually quite a clever performance optimization around value types. So, lets dissect this code to see what it does. The CreateValueType and CreateInstance sections should be fairly self-explanatory; using initobj for value types, and Activator.CreateInstance for reference types. How does the DetectValueType section work? First, the stack transition for value types: ldloca.s 0 // &[!!T(uninitialized)] initobj !!T // ldloc.0 // !!T box !!T // O[!!T] brfalse.s // branch not taken When the brfalse.s is hit, the top stack entry is a non-null reference to a boxed !!T, so execution continues to to the CreateValueType section. What about when !!T is a reference type? Remember, the 'default' value of an object reference (type O) is zero, or null. ldloca.s 0 // &[!!T(null)] initobj !!T // ldloc.0 // null box !!T // null brfalse.s // branch taken Because box on a reference type is a no-op, the top of the stack at the brfalse.s is null, and so the branch to CreateInstance is taken. For reference types, Activator.CreateInstance is called which does the full dynamic lookup using reflection. For value types, a simple initobj is called, which is far faster, and also eliminates the unboxing that Activator.CreateInstance has to perform for value types. However, this is strictly a performance optimization; Activator.CreateInstance<T> works for value types as well as reference types. Next... That concludes the initial premise of the Subterranean IL series; to cover the details of generic methods and generic code in IL. I've got a few other ideas about where to go next; however, if anyone has any itching questions, suggestions, or things you've always wondered about IL, do let me know.

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• Inside Red Gate - Be Reasonable!

  - by Simon Cooper

  As I discussed in my previous posts, divisions and project teams within Red Gate are allowed a lot of autonomy to manage themselves. It's not just the teams though, there's an awful lot of freedom given to individual employees within the company as well. Reasonableness How Red Gate treats it's employees is embodied in the phrase 'You will be reasonable with us, and we will be reasonable with you'. As an employee, you are trusted to do your job to the best of you ability. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one clocking you in and out each day. Everyone is working at the company because they want to, and one of the core ideas of Red Gate is that the company exists to 'let people do the best work of their lives'. Everything is geared towards that. To help you do your job, office services and the IT department are there. If you need something to help you work better (a third or fourth monitor, footrests, or a new keyboard) then ask people in Information Systems (IS) or Office Services and you will be given it, no questions asked. Everyone has administrator access to their own machines, and you can install whatever you want on it. If there's a particular bit of software you need, then ask IS and they will buy it. As an example, last year I wanted to replace my main hard drive with an SSD; I had a summer job at school working in a computer repair shop, so knew what to do. I went to IS and asked for 'an SSD, a SATA cable, and a screwdriver'. And I got it there and then, even the screwdriver. Awesome. I screwed it in myself, copied all my main drive files across, and I was good to go. Of course, if you're not happy doing that yourself, then IS will sort it all out for you, no problems. If you need something that the company doesn't have (say, a book off Amazon, or you need some specifications printing off & bound), then everyone has a expense limit of £100 that you can use without any sign-off needed from your managers. If you need a company credit card for whatever reason, then you can get it. This freedom extends to working hours and holiday; you're expected to be in the office 11am-3pm each day, but outside those times you can work whenever you want. If you need a half-day holiday on a days notice, or even the same day, then you'll get it, unless there's a good reason you're needed that day. If you need to work from home for a day or so for whatever reason, then you can. If it's reasonable, then it's allowed. Trust issues? A lot of trust, and a lot of leeway, is given to all the people in Red Gate. Everyone is expected to work hard, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and there will be a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles that stop you doing your work. What happens if you abuse this trust? Well, an example is company trip expenses. You're free to expense what you like; food, drink, transport, etc, but if you expenses are not reasonable, then you will never travel with the company again. Simple as that. Everyone knows when they're abusing the system, so simply don't do it. Along with reasonableness, another phrase used is 'Don't be a ***'. If you act like a ***, and abuse any of the trust placed in you, even if you're the best tester, salesperson, dev, or manager in the company, then you won't be a part of the company any more. From what I know about other companies, employee trust is highly variable between companies, all the way up to CCTV trained on employee's monitors. As a dev, I want to produce well-written & useful code that solves people's problems. Being able to get whatever I need - install whatever tools I need, get time off when I need to, obtain reference books within a day - all let me do my job, and so let Red Gate help other people do their own jobs through the tools we produce. Plus, I don't think I would like working for a company that doesn't allow admin access to your own machine and blocks Facebook!

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• Announcing the New Windows Azure Web Sites Shared Scaling Tier

  - by Clint Edmonson

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

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 14, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 14, 2011Popular ReleasesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11045.2118: v2.4.11045.2118 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects.Document.Editor: 2011.4: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.4: New Subscript support New Superscript support New column display in statusbar Improved dialogs Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksOpenSyobon-M: 0.1: Changes to OpenSyobon rc2: -Replaced TTF fonts with bitmap fonts. -Ported to Mac OS X. -Fixed several graphic glitches. -Fixed Joystick support.NuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues listEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.0: 2.4.0This release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 - Upd...Sterling Isolated Storage Database with LINQ for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7: Sterling OODB v1.0: Note: use this changeset to download the source example that has been extended to show database generation, backup, and restore in the desktop example. Welcome to the Sterling 1.0 RTM. This version is not backwards-compatible with previous versions of Sterling. Sterling is also available via NuGet. This product has been used and tested in many applications and contains a full suite of unit tests. You can refer to the User's Guide for complete documentation, and use the unit tests as guide...PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5.1: Changes from the previous version * Use dynamic layout to better fit text in other languages * Includes French and Spanish localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.5.1-setup.exe" (reccomended) 2. Down...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.6.1: This release is a bug fixing release. Most importantly, issues have been seen around WPF 4.0 applications not always showing up in the app chooser. Hopefully, they are fixed now. I thought this issue warranted a minor release since more and more people are going WPF 4.0 and I don't want anyone to have any problems. Dan Hanan also contributes again with several usability features. Thanks Dan! Happy Snooping! p.s. By request, I am also attaching a .zip file ... so that people can install it ...SharePoint Learning Kit: 1.5: SharePoint Learning Kit 1.5 has the following new functionality: *Support for SharePoint 2010 *E-Learning Actions can be localised *Two New Document Library Edit Options *Automatically add the Assignment List Web Part to the Web Part Gallery *Various Bug Fixes for the Drop Box There are 2 downloads for this release SLK-1.5-2010.zip for SharePoint 2010 SLK-1.5-2007.zip for SharePoint 2007 (WSS3 & MOSS 2007)GMare: GMare Alpha 02: Alpha version 2. With fixes detailed in the issue tracker.Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.3 (BETA): This is fourth BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Writing your first Facebook Application Facebook C# SDK v5 Beta Internals Facebook C# SDK V5.0.0 (BETA) Released We have spend time trying ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.161: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release adds a new Twitter List network importer, makes some minor feature improvements, and fixes a few bugs. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file...WCF Data Services Toolkit: WCF Data Services Toolkit: The source code and binary releases of the WCF Data Services Toolkit. For simplicity, the source code download doesn't include any of the MSTest files. If you want those, you can pull the code down via MercurialyoutubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Video capturing improved Supports YouTube's new layout (january 2011) Internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details. Webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 28785b7248052465ea0738a7775e8e8744d84c27fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroNew ProjectsBrunoFigueiredo.com Code Samples: Code samples for the brunofigueiredo.com blog.CityLizard++: CityLizard++ is a set of general header-only C++ libraries.Cm - CSharp Based Mathematical Computation: CM is a C# based Mathematical language which makes it easier for scientist, engineers and students to do scientific computation. CM will provide a mechanism for “NO LOOP” programming which is much like MatLab or Fortran. It's developed in C#.DirectX Wrapper for Vortex2D: Satellite project for Vortex2D graphics framework/game engine. It contains thin DirectX API wrapper written in C++/CLI which is used by Vortex2D graphics/input modules.Dynamicweb Project Template for VS.NET: Dynamicweb Project Template for Visual Studio.NET is a project template that servces a collection of many common development issues you face when developing custom solutions on top of Dynamicweb CMS and Dynamicweb eCommerce.Flashcards - Sample App for SQLAzure, MVC3, Razor, Jquery, and Entity Framework: This is a simple flashcard application. It shows a card and allows you to test yourself against the answers. You can also add a new flashcard, or edit existing flashcards. I wrote it to help myself learn these technologies and thought you'd like to see a simple example, too.libopc: libopc is a standard conformant, cross-platform, open source, standard C-based implementation of Part II (OPC) and Part III (MCE) of the ISO/IEC 29500 specification (OOXML). Love in AHU: For more detail, please refer to http://www.loveinahu.cnMoonUnit: MoonUnit is a unit testing framework. It's designed to be small and compact, yet powerful. It's developed in C#.NUnit4PowerShell: NUnit4PowerShell has been done to test PowerShell scripts with the NUnit framework. Fixtures are written in PowerShell and this dll will read and execute them. The goal is to automatically execute unit tests, for instance with a Hudson job, and look for scripts regressions.Phoenix 2 - .NET Web Browser: Phoenix 2 - .NET Web Browser SQLITE Favourties and History DB Fast, clean UI, various tools. SharePoint Filter Enabled Content Query Web Part: This project is an enhanced version of SharePoint's Content Query WebPart. It enables you to send filtered data connection values to the CQWP Filter Fields. It also enables you to edit the Item and Header XSLT, and the CommonViewFields, directly from the Web Part Properties paneSilverlight 4 Toolkit Chart Zoom and Pan Extension: This solution extends the Silverlight 4 Toolkit Chart to give Zoom, Pan and Span functionality with frozen scrolling and no change to source!Simple Units of Measurement: Simple Units of Measurement is a C# Library, which eases the use of common Measurement Units like Kilogram, Meter, etc. This project is in early alpha stage.Spring ASP.NET Demonstration Application: Spring ASP.NET, Dependency Injection, ADO.NET, Data BindingSQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) AddIn to automatically name SQL windows: This project extends SQL Server Management Studio (2005, 2008 and 2008R2) by automatically naming SQL windows - no more searching through hundreds of untitled windows looking for the one you want, and no more having hundreds of windows open. Also auto-saves all SQL.StudioSite Image Preloader - jQuery-based image preloader: Features: - Javascript library - Preloads images for faster display - Support loading queue (loads one image at once) - Support notifications Author: Ivan Nikitin (ivan@indevel.net) Usage: See Demo.htm Requirements: - jQuery v1.4.4 - Low Pro JQ - Jasmine for testingSuperNover: SuperNover is a OS based on COSMOS system with a good GUI and framework.USN Journal Explorer: This is a project based around StCroixSkipper's USN Journal Explorer to read the NTFS Disk Structures. All work is attributed to StCroixSkipper, I simply brought it together here. The original site can found here http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1017-stcroixskippersWithingsLib (Withings Body Scale .NET Wrapper): This is a wrapper for the Withings Body metrics Services API (WBS API) including a sample app. Use is wrapper to read data from you withings scale to use it in your application.

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• IBM "per core" comparisons for SPECjEnterprise2010

  - by jhenning

  I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from Roman Kharkovski (an IBM employee) comparing some SPECjEnterprise2010 results for IBM vs. Oracle. Mr. Kharkovski's blog claims that SPARC delivers half the transactions per core vs. POWER7. Prior to any argument, I should say that my predisposition is to like Mr. Kharkovski, because he says that his blog is intended to be factual; that the intent is to try to avoid marketing hype and FUD tactic; and mostly because he features a picture of himself wearing a bike helmet (me too). Therefore, in a spirit of technical argument, rather than FUD fight, there are a few areas in his comparison that should be discussed. Scaling is not free For any benchmark, if a small system scores 13k using quantity R1 of some resource, and a big system scores 57k using quantity R2 of that resource, then, sure, it's tempting to divide: is  13k/R1 > 57k/R2 ? It is tempting, but not necessarily educational. The problem is that scaling is not free. Building big systems is harder than building small systems. Scoring  13k/R1  on a little system provides no guarantee whatsoever that one can sustain that ratio when attempting to handle more than 4 times as many users. Choosing the denominator radically changes the picture When ratios are used, one can vastly manipulate appearances by the choice of denominator. In this case, lots of choices are available for the resource to be compared (R1 and R2 above). IBM chooses to put cores in the denominator. Mr. Kharkovski provides some reasons for that choice in his blog entry. And yet, it should be noted that the very concept of a core is: arbitrary: not necessarily comparable across vendors; fluid: modern chips shift chip resources in response to load; and invisible: unless you have a microscope, you can't see it. By contrast, one can actually see processor chips with the naked eye, and they are a bit easier to count. If we put chips in the denominator instead of cores, we get: 13161.07 EjOPS / 4 chips = 3290 EjOPS per chip for IBM vs 57422.17 EjOPS / 16 chips = 3588 EjOPS per chip for Oracle The choice of denominator makes all the difference in the appearance. Speaking for myself, dividing by chips just seems to make more sense, because: I can see chips and count them; and I can accurately compare the number of chips in my system to the count in some other vendor's system; and Tthe probability of being able to continue to accurately count them over the next 10 years of microprocessor development seems higher than the probability of being able to accurately and comparably count "cores". SPEC Fair use requirements Speaking as an individual, not speaking for SPEC and not speaking for my employer, I wonder whether Mr. Kharkovski's blog article, taken as a whole, meets the requirements of the SPEC Fair Use rule www.spec.org/fairuse.html section I.D.2. For example, Mr. Kharkovski's footnote (1) begins Results from http://www.spec.org as of 04/04/2013 Oracle SUN SPARC T5-8 449 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010 (Oracle's WLS best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result on SPARC). IBM Power730 823 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result) The questionable tactic, from a Fair Use point of view, is that there is no such metric at the designated location. At www.spec.org, You can find the SPEC metric 57422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for Oracle and You can also find the SPEC metric 13161.07 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for IBM. Despite the implication of the footnote, you will not find any mention of 449 nor anything that says 823. SPEC says that you can, under its fair use rule, derive your own values; but it emphasizes: "The context must not give the appearance that SPEC has created or endorsed the derived value." Substantiation and transparency Although SPEC disclaims responsibility for non-SPEC information (section I.E), it says that non-SPEC data and methods should be accurate, should be explained, should be substantiated. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for the reader to independently verify the pricing: Were like units compared to like (e.g. list price to list price)? Were all components (hw, sw, support) included? Were all fees included? Note that when tpc.org shows IBM pricing, there are often items such as "PROCESSOR ACTIVATION" and "MEMORY ACTIVATION". Without the transparency of a detailed breakdown, the pricing claims are questionable. T5 claim for "Fastest Processor" Mr. Kharkovski several times questions Oracle's claim for fastest processor, writing You see, when you publish industry benchmarks, people may actually compare your results to other vendor's results. Well, as we performance people always say, "it depends". If you believe in performance-per-core as the primary way of looking at the world, then yes, the POWER7+ is impressive, spending its chip resources to support up to 32 threads (8 cores x 4 threads). Or, it just might be useful to consider performance-per-chip. Each SPARC T5 chip allows 128 hardware threads to be simultaneously executing (16 cores x 8 threads). The Industry Standard Benchmark that focuses specifically on processor chip performance is SPEC CPU2006. For this very well known and popular benchmark, SPARC T5: provides better performance than both POWER7 and POWER7+, for 1 chip vs. 1 chip, for 8 chip vs. 8 chip, for integer (SPECint_rate2006) and floating point (SPECfp_rate2006), for Peak tuning and for Base tuning. For example, at the 8-chip level, integer throughput (SPECint_rate2006) is: 3750 for SPARC 2170 for POWER7+. You can find the details at the March 2013 BestPerf CPU2006 page SPEC is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, www.spec.org. The two specific results quoted for SPECjEnterprise2010 are posted at the URLs linked from the discussion. Results for SPEC CPU2006 were verified at spec.org 1 July 2013, and can be rechecked here.

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• SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

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

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• ORA-7445 Troubleshooting

  - by [email protected]

      QUICKLINK: Note 153788.1 ORA-600/ORA-7445 Lookup tool Note 1082674.1 : A Video To Demonstrate The Usage Of The ORA-600/ORA-7445 Lookup Tool [Video]   Have you observed an ORA-07445 error reported in your alert log? While the ORA-600 error is "captured" as a handled exception in the Oracle source code, the ORA-7445 is an unhandled exception error due to an OS exception which should result in the creation of a core file.  An ORA-7445 is a generic error, and can occur from anywhere in the Oracle code. The precise location of the error is identified by the core file and/or trace file it produces.  Looking for the best way to diagnose? Whenever an ORA-7445 error is raised a core file is generated.  There may be a trace file generated with the error as well.   Prior to 11g, the core files are located in the CORE_DUMP_DEST directory.   Starting with 11g, there is a new advanced fault diagnosability infrastructure to manage trace data.  Diagnostic files are written into a root directory for all diagnostic data called the ADR home.   Core files at 11g will go to the ADR HOME/cdump directory.   For more information on the Oracle 11g Diagnosability feature see Note 453125.1 11g Diagnosability Frequently Asked Questions Note 443529.1 11g Quick Steps to Package and Send Critical Error Diagnostic Information to Support[Video]   NOTE:  While the core file is captured in the Diagnosability infrastructure, the file may not be included with a diagnostic package.1.  Check the Alert LogThe alert log may indicate additional errors or other internal errors at the time of the problem.   In some cases, the ORA-7445 error will occur along with ORA-600, ORA-3113, ORA-4030 errors.  The ORA-7445 error can be side effects of the other problems and you should review the first error and associated core file or trace file and work down the list of errors.   Note 1020463.6 DIAGNOSING ORA-3113 ERRORS Note 1812.1 TECH:  Getting a Stack Trace from a CORE file Note 414966.1 RDA Documentation Index   If the ORA-7445 errors are not associated with other error conditions, ensure the trace data is not truncated. If you see a message at the end of the file   "MAX DUMP FILE SIZE EXCEEDED"   the MAX_DUMP_FILE_SIZE parameter is not setup high enough or to 'unlimited'. There could be vital diagnostic information missing in the file and discovering the root issue may be very difficult.  Set the MAX_DUMP_FILE_SIZE appropriately and regenerate the error for complete trace information. For pointers on deeper analysis of these errors see   Note 390293.1 Introduction to 600/7445 Internal Error Analysis Note 211909.1 Customer Introduction to ORA-7445 Errors 2.  Search 600/7445 Lookup Tool Visit My Oracle Support to access the ORA-00600 Lookup tool (Note 153788.1). The ORA-600/ORA-7445 Lookup tool may lead you to applicable content in My Oracle Support on the problem and can be used to investigate the problem with argument data from the error message or you can pull out key stack pointers from the associated trace file to match up against known bugs.3.  "Fine tune" searches in Knowledge Base As the ORA-7445 error indicates an unhandled exception in the Oracle source code, your search in the Oracle Knowledge Base will need to focus on the stack data from the core file or the trace file. Keep in mind that searches on generic argument data will bring back a large result set.  The more you can learn about the environment and code leading to the errors, the easier it will be to narrow the hit list to match your problem. Note 153788.1 ORA-600/ORA-7445 TroubleshooterNote 1082674.1 A Video To Demonstrate The Usage Of The ORA-600/ORA-7445 Lookup Tool [Video] NOTE:  If no trace file is captured, see Note 1812.1 TECH:  Getting a Stack Trace from a CORE file.  Core files are managed through 11g Diagnosability, but are not packaged with other diagnostic data automatically.  The core files can be quite large, but may be useful during analysis within Oracle Support.4.  If assistance is required from Oracle Should it become necessary to get assistance from Oracle Support on an ORA-7445 problem, please provide at a minimum, the Alert log  Associated tracefile(s) or incident package at 11g Patch level  information Core file(s)  Information about changes in configuration and/or application prior to  issues  If error is reproducible, a self-contained reproducible testcase: Note.232963.1 How to Build a Testcase for Oracle Data Server Support to Reproduce ORA-600 and ORA-7445 Errors RDA report or Oracle Configuration Manager information Oracle Configuration Manager Quick Start Guide Note 548815.1 My Oracle Support Configuration Management FAQ Note 414966.1 RDA Documentation Index ***For reference to the content in this blog, refer to Note.1092832.1 Master Note for Diagnosing ORA-600

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 07, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 07, 2012Popular ReleasesTorrents-List Organizer: Torrents-list organizer v 0.5.0.0: ????? ? ?????? 0.5.0.0: 1) ????? ? ?????? ?????? ??????????? ???????? ?????????? ? ?????? ????????. ??????????????, ????????? ???????, ??? ????????? ???????? ?????? ("???????? ?? ??????"). 2) ????????? ???????? ???????? ???????-??????. ????? ??????, ?????? ??? ?????? ?????????????? ??? ???????-?????. 3) ?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?????? ? ????? ????????????? ?????????? ???????????, ? ?????????????, ??????? ?????? ????? ?????? ??????????, ?????????? ???? ??????? ???? ?????? ???????? ??????? ? ...fastJSON: v2.0.11: - bug fix single char number json - added UseEscapedUnicode parameter for controlling string output in \uxxxx for unicode/utf8 format - bug fix null and generic ToObject<>() - bug fix List<> of custom typesMedia Companion: MediaCompanion3.508b: Recommended Download - Fixes IMDB title scrape bug and several mc_com movie and actor cache bugs.testddgit060720122: asdf: asdfFile Upload App: FileUploadApp_Source: You can download this source code,and run it direstly.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.77: Look for and strip "IDENT:nomunge" minification hints that define fields that should not be automatically renamed within the current scope (multiple IDENT:nomunge pairs can be specified in a single string literal if comma-separated). Will only work if the field is actually defined within the current scope (can't be used to not rename an outer field, for instance; will be ignored in those cases). Minification hints are expression statements that are composed of a single string literal similar ...Periodic.Net: 0.8: Whats new for Periodic.Net 0.8: New Element Info Dialog New Website MenuItem Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsActor Framework for Windows Azure: ActorFx V0.10: ActorFx V0.10 Very Preliminary release of the Actor Framework for Windows Azure. The code is still fairly unstable. After you download the code, please refer to the Actor Runtime Manager help page for instructions.mp3player-xslt-plugin: mp3player module 1.0: This is a mp3 player module that you can install on your umbraco project. It can display the list of the media and you can click the button to play or stop.Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.2.0.0 - Epee: New : Web Optimization package! Cleaned up the nuget packages BugFix: minifying lots of files will now be faster because of a recent regression in some code. (We were instantiating something far too many times).DtPad - .NET Framework text editor: DtPad 2.9.0.40: http://dtpad.diariotraduttore.com/files/images/flag-eng.png English + A new built-in editor for the management of CSV files, including the edit of cells, deleting and adding new rows, replacement of delimiter character and much more (issue #1137) + The limit of rows allowed before the decommissioning of their side panel has been raised (new default: 1.000) (issue #1155, only partially solved) + Pressing CTRL+TAB now DtPad opens a screen that shows the list of opened tabs (issue #1143) + Note...AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.1746: Welcome to the new release of AvalonDock 2.0 This release contains a lot (lot) of bug fixes and some great improvements: Views Caching: Content of Documents and Anchorables is no more recreated everytime user move it. Autohide pane opens really fast now. Two new themes Expression (Dark and Light) and Metro (both of them still in experimental stage). If you already use AD 2.0 or plan to integrate it in your future projects, I'm interested in your ideas for new features: http://avalondock...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ?? v4.3.2?? ?????????????????? ??Acfun??????? ??Bilibili?????? ??Bilibili???????????? ??Bilibili????????? ??????????????? ???? ??Bilibili??????? ????32??64? Windows XP/...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.2: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ ???? +2012-12-03 v3.2.2 -?????????????，?????button/button_menu.aspx（????）。 +?Window????Plain??；?ToolbarPosition??Footer??；?????FooterBarAlign??。 -????win...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows Phone 8: This is a brand new version of the Player Framework for Windows Phone, available exclusively for Windows Phone 8, and now based upon the Player Framework for Windows 8. While this new version is not backward compatible with Windows Phone 7 (get that http://smf.codeplex.com/releases/view/88970), it does offer the same great feature set plus dozens of new features such as advertising, localization support, and improved skinning. Click here for more information about what's new in the Windows P...SSH.NET Library: 2012.12.3: New feature(s): + SynchronizeDirectoriesQuest: Quest 5.3 Beta: New features in Quest 5.3 include: Grid-based map (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Changable POV (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Game log (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Customisable object link colour (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) More room description options (by James Gregory) More mathematical functions now available to expressions Desktop Player uses the same UI as WebPlayer - this will make it much easier to implement customisation options New sorting functions: ObjectListSort(list,...Chinook Database: Chinook Database 1.4: Chinook Database 1.4 This is a sample database available in multiple formats: SQL scripts for multiple database vendors, embeded database files, and XML format. The Chinook data model is available here. ChinookDatabase1.4_CompleteVersion.zip is a complete package for all supported databases/data sources. There are also packages for each specific data source. Supported Database ServersDB2 EffiProz MySQL Oracle PostgreSQL SQL Server SQL Server Compact SQLite Issues Resolved293...RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: RiP-Ripper 2.9.34: changes FIXED: Thanks Function when "Download each post in it's own folder" is disabled FIXED: "PixHub.eu" linksD3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.6: Updated to work with D3 version 1.0.6.13300New Projects132702: dddActor Framework for Windows Azure: The goal for ActorFx for Windows Azure is to provide a non-prescriptive, language-independent model of dynamic distributed objects. Administração de Condominios: Sistema de administração de condominiosAssembly Searcher: Search references of assemblies to find interlinked assemblies.BadgeManager: Acceso Utenti Gestione gestionaleBee OPOA Platform: rapid-develop platform include 1,Multi-database supported, 2,MVC, 3,RBACBetterPlace WebApp: Student web site for out BetterPlaceBookingCanned Bytes Repository: A C# code repository for backing other codeplex open source projects I'm doing.churchtool: sermon, ftp, upload, churchDNN Schedule Clean DB log: Schedule task for cleaning database logs, eventlog and sitelog tables.Hestia's Cyberminer Software: Coming soon!IcyTowerMobile: A small project of two students from FH Hagenberg, Mobile Computing department, to port the great game IcyTower from desktop to Windows Phone 7.IronJS register custom javascript object: IronJS test examplesKaryadeka Alam Lestari Accounting: Sistem Informasi Akunting Penjualan Jasa PT Karyadeka Alam Lestari SemarangKJFramework????: KJFramework????, ???HA?????C/S????????????。Measure It: Measuring micro benchmarks in dot net Modern UI (Metro) Charts for Windows 8, WPF, Silverlight: This project provides a charting library which can be used in WPF, Windows8 and SilverlightMSurplus: NOMyGreatLittleSite: This is a demo projectNeznayka: Static Code Analysis Rule-set for Visual Studio 2010 Database Edition Nprove Pulgin for Visual Studio: Nprove Plugin A plugin for developers to ease the handling of .net projects on systems with hundreds of them.Nusya Tester: A software to create and use various tests with right answers explanations to help one in self-education. It's developed in C#Object Pool reference implementation: A simple object pooling reference implementation demonstrating how to create an object pool for expensive to create, but often used, objects. parserkit: little parserkit QConnectSDK: ????????OAuth2 SDK??sampleydoo: some stuff hereServEvo: ServEvo is an application that allows you to turn your computer into a complete development environmentSnakeApplet: Classic snake game.TestWSP: A test project setupWindSim: ...WinMoApps: A collection of useful Windows Mobile applications, including a secure password manager, poker blinds timer, shopping list manager and timer program.WParse: WParse is a CLS compliant class library developed in C# with .NET 4.0 as the target framework. WParse makes it easier to parse log files for the game Wurm Online and generate interesting and useful statistics from the logged data. It includes scripting support for parsers in C#.XLS File Deployment: Excel tool to support file deployment.Ynote Classic: Ynote Classic is a text editor made by SS Corporation Author : Samarjeet Singh It can compile batch files. And is a text editor which can color text. Ide too

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• In the Groove: PASS Board Year 1, Q3

  - by Denise McInerney

  It's nine months into my first year on the PASS Board and I feel like I've found my rhythm. I've accomplished one of the goals I set out for the year and have made progress on others. Here's a recap of the last few months. Anti-Harassment Policy & Process Completed In April I began work on a Code of Conduct for the PASS Summit. The Board had several good discussions and various PASS members provided feedback. You can read more about that in this blog post. Since the document was focused on issues of harassment we renamed it the "Anti-Harassment Policy " and it was approved by the Board in August. The next step was to refine the guideliness and process for enforcement of the AHP. A subcommittee worked on this and presented an update to the Board at the September meeting. You can read more about that in this post, and you can find the process document here. Global Growth Expanding PASS' reach and making the organization relevant to SQL Server communities around the world has been a focus of the Board's work in 2012. We took the Global Growth initiative out to the community for feedback, and everyone on the Board participated, via Twitter chats, Town Hall meetings, feedback forums and in-person discussions. This community participation helped shape and refine our plans. Implementing the vision for Global Growth goes across all portfolios. The Virtual Chapters are well-positioned to help the organization move forward in this area. One outcome of the Global Growth discussions with the community is the expansion of two of the VCs from country-specific to language-specific. Thanks to the leadership in Brazil & Mexico for taking the lead here. I look forward to continued success for the Portuguese- and Spanish-language Virtual Chapters. Together with the Global Chinese VC PASS is off to a good start in making the VC's truly global. Virtual Chapters The VCs continue to grow and expand. Volunteers recently rebooted the Azure and Virutalization VCs, and a new  Education VC will be launching soon. Every week VCs offer excellent free training on a variety of topics. It's the dedication of the VC leaders and volunteers that make all this possible and I thank them for it. Board meeting The Board had an in-person meeting in September in San Diego, CA.. As usual we covered a number of topics including governance changes to support Global Growth, the upcoming Summit, 2013 events and the (then) upcoming PASS election. Next Up Much of the last couple of months has been focused on preparing for the PASS Summit in Seattle Nov. 6-9. I'll be there all week;  feel free to stop me if you have a question or concern, or just to introduce yourself.  Here are some of the places you can find me: VC Leaders Meeting Tuesday 8:00 am the VC leaders will have a meeting. We'll review some of the year's highlights and talk about plans for the next year Welcome Reception The VCs will be at the Welcome Reception in the new VC Lounge. Come by, learn more about what the VCs have to offer and meet others who share your interests. Exceptional DBA Awards Party I'm looking forward to seeing PASS Women in Tech VC leader Meredith Ryan receive her award at this event sponsored by Red Gate Session Presentation I will be presenting a spotlight session entitled "Stop Bad Data in Its OLTP Tracks" on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. Exhibitor Reception This reception Wednesday evening in the Expo Hall is a great opportunity to learn more about tools and solutions that can help you in your job. Women in Tech Luncheon This year marks the 10th WIT Luncheon at PASS. I'm honored to be on the panel with Stefanie Higgins, Kevin Kline, Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup. This event is on Thursday at 11:30. Community Appreciation Party Thursday evening don't miss this event thanking all of you for everthing you do for PASS and the community. This year we will be at the Experience Music Project and it promises to be a fun party. Board Q & A Friday  9:45-11:15  am the members of the Board will be available to answer your questions. If you have a question for us, or want to hear what other members are thinking about, come by room 401 Friday morning.

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• Architect Day: Boston - Agenda Update

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Here's the latest information on the session schedule and content for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Boston, MA on September 12, 2012. Registration is open, but seating is limited. When: September 12, 2012 8:30am – 5:00pm Where: Boston Marriott Burlington One Burlington Mall Road Burlington, MA 01803 Register now Agenda Time Session Title Room 8:30 am - 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast Salon E Foyer 9:00 am - 9:15 am Welcome and Opening Comments | Bob Rhubart Salon E 9:15 am - 10:00 am Engineered Systems: Oracle's Vision for the Future | Ralf Dossmann Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic are impressive products in their own right. But working in combination they deliver unparalleled transaction processing performance with up to a 30x increase over existing legacy systems, with the lowest cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year basis than any other hardware. In this session you'll learn how to leverage Oracle's Engineered Systems within your enterprise to deliver record-breaking performance at the lowest TCO. Salon E 10:00 am - 10:30 am Securing Public and Private Clouds | Anton Nielsen Long before the term "Cloud Computing" existed, Oracle technologies supported and promoted the concept. Centralized data with remote users has been at the core of these technologies for decades. The public cloud, and extending private clouds to the internet, though, has added security challenges never imagined decades ago. This presentation will examine a real life security breach and introduce architecture, technologies and policies to secure public and private clouds.  Salon E 10:30 am - 10:45 am Break 10:45 am - 11:30 am Breakout Sessions (pick one) Cloud Computing - Making IT Simple | Scott Mattoon The road to Cloud Computing is not without a few bumps. This session will help to smooth out your journey by tackling some of the potential complications. We'll examine whether standardization is a prerequisite for the Cloud. We'll look at why refactoring isn't just for application code. We'll check out deployable entities and their simplification via higher levels of abstraction. And we'll close out the session with a look at engineered systems and modular clouds. Salon E Innovations in Grid Computing with Oracle Coherence | Rob Misek Learn how Coherence can increase the availability, scalability and performance of your existing applications with its advanced low-latency data-grid technologies. Also hear some interesting industry-specific use cases that customers had implemented and how Oracle is integrating Coherence into its Enterprise Java stack. Salon C 11:30 am - 12:15 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Enterprise Strategy for Cloud Security | Dave Chappelle Security is high on the list of concerns for many organizations as they evaluate their cloud computing options. This session will examine security in the context of the various forms of cloud computing. We'll consider technical and non-technical aspects of security, and discuss several strategies for cloud computing, from both the consumer and producer perspectives. Salon E Oracle Enterprise Manager | Avi Huber Much more than a DB management tool, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides management and monitoring coverage for the entire Oracle stack, and beyond. This session will concentrate on the middleware management functionality in OEM, starting with Real User Experience monitoring, through AppServer management, and into deep-dive Java diagnostics. We’ll discuss Business Driven Application Management (BDAM) and the benefits of top-down monitoring. Lastly, we’ll demonstrate how to trace a specific user experience problem, through a multitier SOA application, to its root cause, deep in the JVM. Salon C 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Lunch Salon E Foyer 1:15 pm - 2:00 pm Panel Discussion - Q&A with session speakers Salon E 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture | Anbu Krishnaswamy Cloud initiatives are beginning to dominate enterprise IT roadmaps. Successful adoption of Cloud and the subsequent governance challenges warrant a Cloud reference architecture that is applied consistently across the enterprise. This presentation will answer the important questions: What exactly is a Cloud, why you need it, what changes it will bring to the enterprise, and what are the key capabilities of a Cloud infrastructure are - using Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the IT Strategies from Oracle (ITSO) Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy (ETS). Salon E 21st Century SOA | Peter Belknap Service Oriented Architecture has evolved from concept to reality in the last decade. The right methodology coupled with mature SOA technologies has helped customers demonstrate success in both innovation and ROI. In this session you will learn how Oracle SOA Suite's orchestration, virtualization, and governance capabilities provide the infrastructure to run mission critical business and system applications. And we'll take a special look at the convergence of SOA & BPM using Oracle's Unified technology stack. Salon C 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm Break 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Roundtable Discussion Salon E 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Closing Comments & Readouts from Roundtables Salon E 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm Networking / Reception Salon E Foyer Note: Session schedule and content subject to change.

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• Explaining Explain Plan Notes for Auto DOP

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  I've recently gotten some questions around "why do I not see a parallel plan" while Auto DOP is on (I think)...? It is probably worthwhile to quickly go over some of the ways to find out what Auto DOP was thinking. In general, there is no need to go tracing sessions and look under the hood. The thing to start with is to do an explain plan on your statement and to look at the parameter settings on the system. Parameter Settings to Look At First and foremost, make sure that parallel_degree_policy = AUTO. If you have that parameter set to LIMITED you will not have queuing and we will only do the auto magic if your objects are set to default parallel (so no degree specified). Next you want to look at the value of parallel_degree_limit. It is typically set to CPU, which in default settings equates to the Default DOP of the system. If you are testing Auto DOP itself and the impact it has on performance you may want to leave it at this CPU setting. If you are running concurrent statements you may want to give this some more thoughts. See here for more information. In general, do stick with either CPU or with a specific number. For now avoid the IO setting as I've seen some mixed results with that... In 11.2.0.2 you should also check that IO Calibrate has been run. Best to simply do a: SQL> select * from V$IO_CALIBRATION_STATUS; STATUS        CALIBRATION_TIME ------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- READY         04-JAN-11 10.04.13.104 AM You should see that your IO Calibrate is READY and therefore Auto DOP is ready. In any case, if you did not run the IO Calibrate step you will get the following note in the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: skipped because of IO calibrate statistics are missing One more note on calibrate_io, if you do not have asynchronous IO enabled you will see:  ERROR at line 1: ORA-56708: Could not find any datafiles with asynchronous i/o capability ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RMIN", line 463 ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER", line 1296 ORA-06512: at line 7 While this is changed in some fixes to the calibrate procedure, you should really consider switching asynchronous IO on for your data warehouse. Explain Plan Explanation To see the notes that are shown and explained here (and the above little snippet ) you can use a simple explain plan mechanism. There should  be no need to add +parallel etc. explain plan for <statement> SELECT PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT FROM TABLE(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY()); Auto DOP The note structure displaying why Auto DOP did not work (with the exception noted above on IO Calibrate) is like this: Automatic degree of parallelism is disabled: <reason> These are the reason codes: Parameter -  parallel_degree_policy = manual which will not allow Auto DOP to kick in  Hint - One of the following hints are used NOPARALLEL, PARALLEL(1), PARALLEL(MANUAL) Outline - A SQL outline of an older version (before 11.2) is used SQL property restriction - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing Rule-based mode - Instead of the Cost Based Optimizer the system is using the RBO Recursive SQL statement - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing pq disabled/pdml disabled/pddl disabled - For some reason (alter session?) parallelism is disabled Limited mode but no parallel objects referenced - your parallel_degree_policy = LIMITED and no objects in the statement are decorated with the default PARALLEL degree. In most cases all objects have a specific degree in which case Auto DOP will honor that degree. Parallel Degree Limited When Auto DOP does it works you may see the cap you imposed with parallel_degree_limit showing up in the note section of the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 16 because of degree limit This is an obvious indication that your are being capped for this statement. There is one quite interesting one that happens when you are being capped at DOP = 1. First of you get a serial plan and the note changes slightly in that it does not indicate it is being capped (we hope to update the note at some point in time to be more specific). It right now looks like this: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 1 Dynamic Sampling With 11.2.0.2 you will start seeing another interesting change in parallel plans, and since we are talking about the note section here, I figured we throw this in for good measure. If we deem the parallel (!) statement complex enough, we will enact dynamic sampling on your query. This happens as long as you did not change the default for dynamic sampling on the system. The note looks like this: Note ----- - dynamic sampling used for this statement (level=5)

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• Deciding On Features For Open Source

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. It already works that way at work. I don’t want to come home from work and work on things that others decide for me unless they are paying me for those features. So how do I decide on features for our open source projects? I think there are at least three paths to feature selection and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Feature Selection IS the Set of Features For the Domain Your product, in whatever domain it is in, needs to have the basic set of features that make it answer the needs of that domain. That is different for every product, but if you take for example a build tool, at the very least it needs to be able to compile source. And these basic needed features are not always objective either. Two people could completely disagree what makes for a required feature to meet a domain need for a product. Even one person may disagree with himself/herself about what features are needed based on different timeframes. So that leads us down to subjective. Feature Selection IS An Answer To Competition Some features go in because the competition adds a feature that may draw others away from your product offering. With OSS, there are all free alternatives, so if your competition adds a killer feature and you don’t, there isn’t much other than learning (how to use the other product) to move your customers off to the competition. If you want to keep your customers, you need to be ready to answer the questions of adding the features your competition has added.  Sometimes it’s about adding a feature that your competition charges for, but you add it for free. That draws people to the free alternative – so sometimes that adds a motivation to select a feature. Sometimes it’s because you want those features in your product, either to learn how you can answer the question of how to do something and/or because you have a need for that feature and you want it in your product. That also leads us down the road to subjective. Feature Selection IS Subjective I decide on features based on what I want to see in the product I am working on. Things I am interested in or have the biggest need for usually get picked first, with things that do not interest me either coming later or not at all. Most people get interested in an area of OSS because it solves a need for them and/or they find it interesting. If one of these two things is not happening and they are not being paid, it’s likely that person will move on to something else they find interesting or just stop OSS altogether. OSS feature selection is just that – subjective. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be opinionated and it wouldn’t have a personality about it. Most people like certain OSS because they like where the product is going or the personalities behind the product. For me, I want my products to be easy to use and solve an important problem. If it takes you more than 5-10 minutes to learn how to use my product, I know you are probably going somewhere else. So I pick features that make the product easy to use and learn, and those are not always the simplest features to work on. I work for conventions and make the product opinionated, because I think that is what makes using a product easier, if it already works with little setup. And I like to provide the ability for power users to get in and change the conventions to suit their needs. So those are required features for me above and beyond the domain features. I like to think I do a pretty good job at this. Usually when I present on something I’ve created, I like seeing people’s eyes light up when they see how simple it is to set up a powerful product like UppercuT. Patches And/Or Donations But remember before you say I’m a bad person or won’t use my product, I’ll always accept patches or I might like the feature that you suggest. If you like using the products I provide and they solve a problem for you the two biggest compliments you can provide are either a patch or a donation.  If you think the product is great, but if it could do this one other thing, it would be awesome(!), then consider contacting me and providing a patch, or consider contacting me with a donation and a request to put the feature in. And alternatively, if it’s a big feature, you could hire me to work on the product to make it even better. What If There Are Multiple Committers? In the question of multiple committers, I choose that someone always makes the ultimate decision to select whether a feature should be part of a product or not. But for other OSS project maybe this is not the case. If there is not an ultimate decision maker, then there is the possibility of either adding every feature suggested or having a deadlock on two conflicting features.   So let me pose this question. If you work on Open Source, how do you decide on what features to put in your open source projects? How do you decide what doesn’t belong? What do you do when there are conflicting features?

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• Java2Days 2012 Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  Java2Days 2012 was held in beautiful Sofia, Bulgaria on October 25-26. For those of you not familiar with it, this is the third installment of the premier Java conference for the Balkan region. It is an excellent effort by admirable husband and wife team Emo Abadjiev and Iva Abadjieva as well as the rest of the Java2Days team including Yoana Ivanova and Nadia Kostova. Thanks to their hard work, the conference continues to grow vigorously with almost a thousand enthusiastic, bright young people attending this year and no less than three tracks on Java, the Cloud and Mobile. The conference is a true gem in this region of the world and I am very proud to have been a part of it again, along with the other world class speakers the event rightfully attracts. It was my honor to present the first talk of the conference. It was a full-house session on Java EE 7 and 8 titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". The talk was primarily along the same lines as Arun Gupta's JavaOne 2012 technical keynote. I covered the changes in JMS 2, the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356), the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), JAX-RS 2, JCache, JPA 2.1, JTA 1.2, JSF 2.2, Java Batch, Bean Validation 1.1 and the rest of the APIs in Java EE 7. I also briefly talked about the possible contents of Java EE 8. My stretch goal was to gather some feedback on some open issues in the Java EE EG (more on that soon) but I ran out of time in the short format forty-five minute session. The talk was received well and I had some pretty good discussions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from reza_rahman To my delight, the Java2Days folks were very interested in my domain-driven design/Java EE 6 talk (titled "Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6"). I've had this talk in my inventory for a long time now but it always gets overridden by less theoretical talks on APIs, tools, etc. The talk has three parts -- a brief overview of DDD theory, mapping DDD to Java EE and actual running DDD code in Java EE 6/GlassFish. For the demo, I converted the well-known DDD sample application (http://dddsample.sourceforge.net/) written mostly in Spring 2 and Hibernate 2 to Java EE 6. My eventual plan is to make the code available via a top level java.net project. Even despite the broad topic and time constraints, the talk went very well. It was a full house, the Q & A was excellent and one of the other speakers even told me they thought this was the best talk of the conference! The slides for the talk are here: Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6 from Reza Rahman The code examples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/reza/resource/dddsample.zip for now, as a simple zip file. Give me a shout if you would like to get it up and running. It was also a great honor to present the last session of the conference. It was a talk on the Java API for WebSocket/JSR 356 titled "Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 and GlassFish". The talk is based on Danny Coward's JavaOne 2012 talk. The talk covers the basic of WebSocket, the JSR 356 API and a simple demo using Tyrus/GlassFish. The talk went very well and there were some very good questions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with GlassFish and JSR 356 from Reza Rahman The code samples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/resource/totd183-HelloWebSocket.zip. You'll need the latest promoted GlassFish 4 build to run the code. Give me a shout if you need help. Besides presenting my talks, I got to attend some great sessions on OSGi, HTML5, cloud, agile and Java 8. I got an invite to speak at the Macedonia JUG when possible. Victor Grazi of InfoQ wrote about my sessions and Java2Days here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/Java2DaysConference. Stoyan Rachev was very kind to blog about my sessions here: http://www.stoyanr.com/2012/11/java2days-2012-java-ee.html. I definitely enjoyed Java2Days 2012 and hope to be part of the conference next year!

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• Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 &ndash; The failed Sprint

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”.  The standard flippant answer of all Scrum professionals, “Well that's not Scrum”, does not get you any brownie points in these situations. The response could be “Well we are not doing Scrum then” which in turn leads to “We are doing Scrum…But, we have split the scrum team into units of 2/3 so that they can concentrate on a specific area of work”. While this may work, it is not Scrum and should not be called so… It is just a form of Agile. Don’t get me wrong at this stage, there is nothing wrong with Agile, just don’t call it Scrum. The reason that the Product Owner wants to do this is that, in effect, through a number of miscommunications and failings in our implementation of Scrum, there was NO unit of potentially Shippable software at the end of the first sprint. It does not matter to them that most Scrum teams will fail the first Sprint, even those that are high performing teams. Remember it is the product owners their money! We should NOT break up scrum teams into smaller units for the purpose of having less people tied up in the Scrum Ceremonies. The amount of backlog the Team selects is solely up to the Team… Only the Team can assess what it can accomplish over the upcoming Sprint. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org The entire team must accept the work and in order to understand what they can accept they must be free to size it as a team. This both encourages common understanding and increases visibility on why team members think a task is of a particular size. This has the benefit of increasing the knowledge of the entire team in the problem domain. A new Team often first realizes that it will either sink or swim as a Team, not individually, in this meeting. The Team realizes that it must rely on itself. As it realizes this, it starts to self-organize to take on the characteristics and behaviour of a real Team. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org This paragraph goes to the why of having the whole team at the meeting; The goal of Scrum it to produce a unit of potentially shippable software at the end of every Sprint. In order to achieve this we need high performing teams and this is what Scrum as a framework has been optimised to produce. I think that our Product Owner is understandably upset over loosing two weeks work and is losing sight the end goal of Scrum in the failures of the moment. As the man spending the money, I completely understand his perspective and I think that we should not have started Scrum on an internal project, but selected a customer  that is open to the ideas and complications of Scrum. So, what should we have NOT done on our first Scrum project: Should not have had 3 interns as the only on site resource – This lead to bad practices as the experienced guys were not there helping and correcting as they usually would. Should not have had the only experienced guys offsite – With both the experienced technical guys in completely different time zones it was difficult to get time for questions. Helping the guys on site was just plain impossible. Should not have used a part time ScrumMaster – Although the ScrumMaster attended all of the Ceremonies, because they are only in 2 full days of the week it makes it difficult for the team to raise impediments as they go. Should not have used a proxy product owner. – This was probably the worst decision that was made. Mainly because the proxy product owner did not have the same vision as the product owner. While Scrum does not explicitly reject the idea of a Proxy Product Owner, I do not think it works very well in practice. The “single wringable neck” needs to contain both the Money and the Vision as well as attending the required meetings. I will be brining all of these things up at the Sprint Retrospective and we will learn from our mistakes and move on. Do, Inspect then Adapt…   Technorati Tags: Scrum,Sprint Planing,Sprint Retrospective,Scrum.org,Scrum Guide,Scrum Ceremonies,Scrummaster,Product Owner Need Help? Professional Scrum Developer Training SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

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• MCM Lab exam this week

  - by Rob Farley

  In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously. It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people actually search the internet for the results of mathematical questions? Really?) The list of Skills Measured for this exam is quite short, but can essentially be broken down into one word “Anything”. The Preparation Materials section is even better. Classroom Training – none available. Microsoft E-Learning – none available. Microsoft Press Books – none available. Practice Tests – none available. But there are links to Readiness Videos and a page which has no resources listed, but tells you a list of people who have already qualified. Three in Australia who have MCM SQL Server 2008 so far. The list doesn’t include some of the latest batch, such as Jason Strate or Tom LaRock. I’ve used SQL Server for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve been awarded SQL Server MVP seven times, but the MVP award doesn’t actually mean all that much when considering this particular certification. I know lots of MVPs who have tried this particular exam and failed – including Jason and Tom. Right now, I have no idea whether I’ll pass or not. People tell me I’ll pass no problem, but I honestly have no idea. There’s something about that “Anything” aspect that worries me. I keep looking at the list of things in the Readiness Videos, and think to myself “I’m comfortable with Resource Governor (or whatever) – that should be fine.” Except that then I feel like I maybe don’t know all the different things that can go wrong with Resource Governor (or whatever), and I wonder what kind of situations I’ll be faced with. And then I find myself looking through the stuff that’s explained in the videos, and wondering what kinds of things I should know that I don’t, and then I get amazingly bored and frustrated (after all, I tell people that these exams aren’t supposed to be studied for – you’ve been studying for the last 15 years, right?), and I figure “What’s the worst that can happen? A fail?” I’m told that the exam provides a list of scenarios (maybe 14 of them?) and you have 5.5 hours to complete them. When I say “complete”, I mean complete – you don’t get to leave them unfinished, that’ll get you ‘nil points’ for that scenario. Apparently no-one gets to complete all of them. Now, I’m a consultant. I get called on to fix the problems that people have on their SQL boxes. Sometimes this involves fixing corruption. Sometimes it’s figuring out some performance problem. Sometimes it’s as straight forward as getting past a full transaction log; sometimes it’s as tricky as recovering a database that has lost its metadata, without backups. Most situations aren’t a problem, but I also have the confidence of being able to do internet searches to verify my maths (in case I forget it’s –883). In the exam, I’ll have maybe twenty minutes per scenario (but if I need longer, I’ll have to take longer – no point in stopping half way if it takes more than twenty minutes, unless I don’t see an end coming up), so I’ll have time constraints too. And of course, I won’t have any of my usual tools. I can’t take scripts in, I can’t take staff members. Hopefully I can use the coffee machine that will be in the room. I figure it’s going to feel like one of those days when I’ve gone into a client site, and found that the problems are way worse than I expected, and that the site is down, with people standing over me needing me to get things right first time... ...so it should be fine, I’ve done that before. :) If I do fail, it won’t make me any less of a consultant. It won’t make me any less able to help all of my clients (including you if you get in touch – hehe), it’ll just mean that the particular problem might’ve taken me more than the twenty minutes that the exam gave me. @rob_farley PS: Apparently the done thing is to NOT advertise that you’re sitting the exam at a particular time, only that you’re expecting to take it at some point in the future. I think it’s akin to the idea of not telling people you’re pregnant for the first few months – it’s just in case the worst happens. Personally, I’m happy to tell you all that I’m going to take this exam the day after tomorrow (which is the 19th in the US, the 20th here). If I end up failing, you can all commiserate and tell me that I’m not actually as unqualified as I feel.

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• Productivity vs Security [closed]

  - by nerijus

  Really do not know is this right place to ask such a questions. But it is about programming in a different light. So, currently contracting with company witch pretends to be big corporation. Everyone is so important that all small issues like developers are ignored. Give you a sample: company VPN is configured so that if you have VPN then HTTP traffic is banned. Bearing this in mind can you imagine my workflow: Morning. Ok time to get latest source. Ups, no VPN. Let’s connect. Click-click. 3 sec. wait time. Ok getting source. Do I have emails? Ups. VPN is on, can’t check my emails. Need to wait for source to come up. Finally here it is! Ok Click-click VPN is gone. What is in my email. Someone reported a bug. Good, let’s track it down. It is in TFS already. Oh, dam, I need VPN. Click-click. Ok, there is description. Yea, I have seen this issue in stachoverflow.com. Let’s go there. Ups, no internet. Click-click. No internet. What? IPconfig… DHCP server kicked me out. Dam. Renew ip. 1..2..3. Ok internet is back. Google: site: stachoverflow.com 3 min. I have solution. Great I love stackoverflow.com. Don’t want to remember days where there was no stackoveflow.com. Ok. Copy paste this like to studio. Dam, studio is stalled, can’t reach files on TFS. Click-click. VPN is back. Get source out, paste my code. Grand. Let’s see what other comments about an issue in stackoverflow.com tells. Hmm.. There is a link. Click. Dammit! No internet. Click-click. No internet. DHCP kicked me out. Dammit. Now it is even worse: this happens 3-4 times a day. After certain amount of VPN connections open\closed my internet goes down solid. Only way to get internet back is reboot. All my browser tabs/SQL windows/studio will be gone. This happened just now when I am typing this. Back to issue I am solving right now: I am getting frustrated - I do not care about better solution for this issue. Let’s do it somehow and forget. This Click-click barrier between internet and TFS kills me… Sounds familiar? You could say there are VPN settings to change. No! This is company laptop, not allowed to do changes. I am very very lucky to have admin privileges on my machine. Most of developers don’t. So just learned to live with this frustration. It takes away 40-60 minutes daily. Tried to email company support, admins. They are too important ant too busy with something that just ignored my little man’s problem. Politely ignored. Question is: Is this normal in corporate world? (Have been in States, Canada, Germany. Never seen this.)

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