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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014Popular ReleasesGoogle .Net API: Drive.Sample: Google .NET Client API – Drive.SampleInstructions for the Google .NET Client API – Drive.Sample</h2> http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/?repo=samples#hg%2FDrive.SampleBrowse Source, or main file http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/Drive.Sample/Program.cs?repo=samplesProgram.cs <h3>1. Checkout Instructions</h3> <p><b>Prerequisites:</b> Install Visual Studio, and <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>.</p> ...FineUI - jQuery / ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.1.1: -??Form??????????????（???-5929）。 -?TemplateField??ExpandOnDoubleClick、ExpandOnEnter、ExpandToSelectRow????（LZOM-5932）。 -BodyPadding???????，??“5”“5 10”，???????????“5px”“5px 10px”。 -??TriggerBox?EnableEdit=false????，??????????????（Jango_Jing-5450）。 -???????????DataKeyNames???????????（yygy-6002）。 -????????????????????????（Gnid-6018）。 -??PageManager???AutoSizePanelID????，??????????????????（yygy-6008）。 -?FState???????????????，????????????????（????-5925）。 -??????OnClientClick???return?????????（FineU...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.042.020 Release 1: Updated Mod support. On startup, only stock items will appear in the Components list. Upon selecting and loading a saved world, the mods for that world only will then be loaded, and only from the local drive. If a mod has not been downloaded in Space Engineers, it will not download it for you. If you are developing a Mod, hitting "Reload" will also reload the mods as well as the saved world. If SEToolbox is crashing when loading a saved world containing mods, it is most likely because one ...Gum UI Tool: Gum 0.6.09: Fixed bug which would not allow plugins to be loaded when the app was distributed. Added animation plugin7zbackup - PowerShell Script to Backup Files with 7zip: 7zBackup v. 1.9.8 Stable: Do you like this piece of software ? It took some time and effort to develop. Please consider helping me with a donation Feat : Lock file now holds process ID and RootDir. On subsequent launches script checks if previous process is still alive. In case it is not it will clean up orphaned junction root directory. Ensure no orphaned rootdirs are on disk and no lockfiles in %temp% directory before running this releaseDNN CMS Platform: 07.03.02: Major Highlights Fixed backwards compatibility issue with 3rd party control panels Fixed issue in the drag and drop functionality of the File Uploader in IE 11 and Safari Fixed issue where users were able to create pages with the same name Fixed issue that affected older versions of DNN that do not include the maxAllowedContentLength during upgrade Fixed issue that stopped some skins from being upgraded to newer versions Fixed issue that randomly showed an unexpected error during us...WordMat: WordMat for Mac: WordMat for Mac has a few limitations compared to the Windows version - Graph is not supported (Gnuplot, GeoGebra and Excel works) - Units are not supported yet (Coming up) The Mac version is yet as tested as the windows version.ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140814 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" HP OneView PowerShell Library: HP OneView PowerShell Library 1.10.1193: Branch to HP OneView 1.10 Release. NOTE: This library version does not support older appliance versions. Fixed New-HPOVProfile to check for Firmware and BIOS management for supported platforms. Would erroneously error when neither -firmware or -bios were passed. Fixed Remove-HPOV* cmdlets which did not handle -force switch parameter correctly Fixed New-HPOVUplinkSet and New-HPOVNetwork Fixed Download-File where HTTP stream compression was not handled, resulting in incorrectly writt...NeoLua (Lua for .net dynamic language runtime): NeoLua-0.8.17: Fix: table.insert Fix: table auto convert Fix: Runtime-functions were defined as private it should be internal. Fix: min,max MichaelSenko release.MFCMAPI: August 2014 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1042 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010/2013 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeOooPlayer: 1.1: Added: Support for speex, TAK and OptimFrog files Added: An option to not to load cover art Added: Smaller package size Fixed: Unable to drag&drop audio files to playlist Updated: FLAC, WacPack and Opus playback libraries Updated: ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag librariesEWSEditor: EwsEditor 1.10 Release: • Export and import of items as a full fidelity steam works - without proxy classes! - I used raw EWS POSTs. • Turned off word wrap for EWS request field in EWS POST windows. • Several windows with scrolling texts boxes were limiting content to 32k - I removed this restriction. • Split server timezone info off to separate menu item from the timezone info windows so that the timezone info window could be used without logging into a mailbox. • Lots of updates to the TimeZone window. • UserAgen...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.1 RC: Release notes for PTVS 2.1 RC We’re pleased to announce the release candidate for Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, editing, IntelliSense, interactive debugging, profiling, Microsoft Azure, IPython, and cross-platform debugging support. PTVS 2.1 RC is available for: Visual Studio Expre...Sense/Net ECM - Enterprise CMS: SenseNet 6.3.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.3.1 Community EditionSense/Net 6.3.1 is an important step toward a more modular infrastructure, robustness and maintainability. With this release we finally introduce a packaging and a task management framework, and the Image Editor that will surely make the job of content editors more fun. Please review the changes and new features since Sense/Net 6.3 and give a feedback on our forum! Main new featuresSnAdmin (packaging framework) Task Management Image Editor OData REST A...Fluffy: Fluffy 0.3.35.4: Change log: Text editorSKGL - Serial Key Generating Library: SKGL Extension Methods 4 (1.0.5.1): This library contains methods for: Time change check (make sure the time has not been changed on the client computer) Key Validation (this will use http://serialkeymanager.com/ to validate keys against the database) Key Activation (this will, depending on the settings, activate a key with a specific machine code) Key Activation Trial (allows you to update a key if it is a trial key) Get Machine Code (calculates a machine code given any hash function) Get Eight Byte Hash (returns an...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...New Projectsapple TV: Apple TV project homepageArma 3 Battle Eye Client: Arma3BEClientASP.NET MVC AngularJS w/ Google Maps API: ASP.NET MVC sample using Google Maps API w/ AngularJS.CC-Classwork: Classwork from CoderCampsCompanyPortal: CompanyPortalcore: Building an Internet of Things (IoT, also Cloud of Things or CoT) core, drawing inspirations from the pre-existing Linus Torvalds linux kernel made from GNU/nixCRM Early Bound Class Simplifier: Simplifies the creation of a Dynamics CRM Early Bound Class. Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura: Este proyecto web se ha elaborado para la dirección desconcentrada de cultura de cajamarca a cargo de los practicantes de UPNC Sitemas computacionales.Energy Trail Site: NGO Site for designing and collaboration work.Hybrid Platform - Build anything: A Platform that built by loosely coupled architecture. You can build applications for Web, Desktop, Mobile, WCF Services - ASP.NET MVC on this concrete platformipad air: a web tool to sim display same as ipad airipad apps: A serices to support Ipad HD devise to request CURD for codeplex.comiphone 6: iphone6iphone air: Opend API lists for IPhone 6(iphone air)iphone apps: Bus API for iphoneiwatch: A priview version for iwtach API Named Colors in Silverlight: This project is a Silverlight dll to add the missing named colors from System.Windows.Media.Color. Once added as a reference, it makes using named colors easy!OOP_2113110295: Name: Nguyen Trung Thao ID 2113110295 Truong Cao Dang Cong Thuong Mon: OOPPagepark: PageparkProjektRepository: Eine virtuelle Forschungsumgebung (VFU) um Forschungsdaten und Artefakte zu sammeln, gemeinsam zu nutzen, erschließen und mit Metadaten anreichern zu könnenRamonaSniffer: This will be the repository to host the zigbee snifferseawol: A Blog system base on node.jsSonar settings for TFS Build: Sample of configurations for Sonar to work with TFS for copy/pasteSon's Homework and learning to code: Just a collection of coding projects to learn from.SunBurn Terrain Editor: A fully functional standalone WYSWYG terrain (height map and color map) editor. Built upon the SunBurn Platform Framework allowing scope for Linux and Mac ports????.????????: 1) ??????? ???????? ?? 2) C# ?????????? (??????) ??? ???????? ?????? ???? (? ??????? *.dbf) ? ????? ???? 3) WinForms-?????????? ??? ???????????? ?????? ????

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)

  - by mortezam

  In the previous blog post you saw that there are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy and I explained Table per Hierarchy (TPH) as the default mapping strategy in EF Code First. We argued that the disadvantages of TPH may be too serious for our design since it results in denormalized schemas that can become a major burden in the long run. In today’s blog post we are going to learn about Table per Type (TPT) as another inheritance mapping strategy and we'll see that TPT doesn’t expose us to this problem. Table per Type (TPT)Table per Type is about representing inheritance relationships as relational foreign key associations. Every class/subclass that declares persistent properties—including abstract classes—has its own table. The table for subclasses contains columns only for each noninherited property (each property declared by the subclass itself) along with a primary key that is also a foreign key of the base class table. This approach is shown in the following figure: For example, if an instance of the CreditCard subclass is made persistent, the values of properties declared by the BillingDetail base class are persisted to a new row of the BillingDetails table. Only the values of properties declared by the subclass (i.e. CreditCard) are persisted to a new row of the CreditCards table. The two rows are linked together by their shared primary key value. Later, the subclass instance may be retrieved from the database by joining the subclass table with the base class table. TPT Advantages The primary advantage of this strategy is that the SQL schema is normalized. In addition, schema evolution is straightforward (modifying the base class or adding a new subclass is just a matter of modify/add one table). Integrity constraint definition are also straightforward (note how CardType in CreditCards table is now a non-nullable column). Another much more important advantage is the ability to handle polymorphic associations (a polymorphic association is an association to a base class, hence to all classes in the hierarchy with dynamic resolution of the concrete class at runtime). A polymorphic association to a particular subclass may be represented as a foreign key referencing the table of that particular subclass. Implement TPT in EF Code First We can create a TPT mapping simply by placing Table attribute on the subclasses to specify the mapped table name (Table attribute is a new data annotation and has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5): public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } [Table("BankAccounts")] public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } [Table("CreditCards")] public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } If you prefer fluent API, then you can create a TPT mapping by using ToTable() method: protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().ToTable("BankAccounts");     modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().ToTable("CreditCards"); } Generated SQL For QueriesLet’s take an example of a simple non-polymorphic query that returns a list of all the BankAccounts: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; Executing this query (by invoking ToList() method) results in the following SQL statements being sent to the database (on the bottom, you can also see the result of executing the generated query in SQL Server Management Studio): Now, let’s take an example of a very simple polymorphic query that requests all the BillingDetails which includes both BankAccount and CreditCard types: projects some properties out of the base class BillingDetail, without querying for anything from any of the subclasses: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails             select new { b.BillingDetailId, b.Number, b.Owner }; -- var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; This LINQ query seems even more simple than the previous one but the resulting SQL query is not as simple as you might expect: -- As you can see, EF Code First relies on an INNER JOIN to detect the existence (or absence) of rows in the subclass tables CreditCards and BankAccounts so it can determine the concrete subclass for a particular row of the BillingDetails table. Also the SQL CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is just to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type) TPT ConsiderationsEven though this mapping strategy is deceptively simple, the experience shows that performance can be unacceptable for complex class hierarchies because queries always require a join across many tables. In addition, this mapping strategy is more difficult to implement by hand— even ad-hoc reporting is more complex. This is an important consideration if you plan to use handwritten SQL in your application (For ad hoc reporting, database views provide a way to offset the complexity of the TPT strategy. A view may be used to transform the table-per-type model into the much simpler table-per-hierarchy model.) SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Type as the second inheritance mapping in our series. So far, the strategies we’ve discussed require extra consideration with regard to the SQL schema (e.g. in TPT, foreign keys are needed). This situation changes with the Table per Concrete Type (TPC) that we will discuss in the next post. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 21, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 21, 2011Popular ReleasesSQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportdns?????: 1.0: ???????。??????。BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Anno 2070 Assistant: v0.1.0 (STABLE): Version 0.1.0 Features Production Chains Eco Production Chains (Complete) Tycoon Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Supply (Disabled - Incomplete) Calculator (Disabled - Incomplete) Building Layouts Eco Building Layouts (Complete) Tycoon Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Credits (Complete)Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.30: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Back in stock notifications. • Product special price support. • Catalog mode (based on customer role) To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).WPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b 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) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...Delta Engine: Delta Engine Beta Preview v0.9.1: v0.9.1 beta release with lots of refactoring, fixes, new samples and support for iOS, Android and WP7 (you need a Marketplace account however). If you want a binary release for the games (like v0.9.0), just say so in the Forum or here and we will quickly prepare one. It is just not much different from v0.9.0, so I left it out this time. See http://DeltaEngine.net/Wiki.Roadmap for details.ASP.net Awesome Samples (Web-Forms): 1.0 samples: Full Demo VS2008 Very Simple Demo VS2010 and Tutorials (demos for the ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls)SharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLR: SharpMap-0.9-AnyCPU-Trunk-2011.11.17: This is a build of SharpMap from the 0.9 development trunk as per 2011-11-17 For most applications the AnyCPU release is the recommended, but in case you need an x86 build that is included to. For some dataproviders (GDAL/OGR, SqLite, PostGis) you need to also referense the SharpMap.Extensions assembly For SqlServer Spatial you need to reference the SharpMap.SqlServerSpatial assemblyAJAX Control Toolkit: November 2011 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - November 2011 Release Version 51116November 2011 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found h...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.5: Added: Now the DateRanteAttribute accepts complex expressions containing "Now" and "Today" as static minimum and maximum. Menu, MenuFor helpers capable of handling a "currently selected element". The developer can choose between using a standard nested menu based on a standard SimpleMenuItem class or specifying an item template based on a custom class. Added also helpers to build the tree structure containing all data items the menu takes infos from. Improved the pager. Now the developer ...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.7: Reworked API to be more consistent. See Supported formats table. Added some more helper methods - e.g. OpenEntryStream (RarArchive/RarReader does not support this) Fixed up testsSilverlight Toolkit: Windows Phone Toolkit - Nov 2011 (7.1 SDK): This release is coming soon! What's new ListPicker once again works in a ScrollViewer LongListSelector bug fixes around OutOfRange exceptions, wrong ordering of items, grouping issues, and scrolling events. ItemTuple is now refactored to be the public type LongListSelectorItem to provide users better access to the values in selection changed handlers. PerformanceProgressBar binding fix for IsIndeterminate (item 9767 and others) There is no longer a GestureListener dependency with the C...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.01.01: Major Highlights Fixed problem with the core skin object rendering CSS above the other framework inserted files, which caused problems when using core style skin objects Fixed issue with iFrames getting removed when content is saved Fixed issue with the HTML module removing styling and scripts from the content Fixed issue with inserting the link to jquery after the header of the page Security Fixesnone Updated Modules/Providers ModulesHTML version 6.1.0 ProvidersnoneSCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8 is currently the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added "Wake On LAN" action. WOL.EXE is now included. Added new action "Get all active advertisements" to list all machine based advertisements on remote computers. Added new action "Get all active user advertisements" to list all user based advertisements for logged on users on remote computers. Added config.ini setting "enablePingTest" to control whether ping test is ru...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.3: New featuresAdd magnifier size and scale New file info view in the backstage Add dynamic properties on book and settings Sorting and grouping in the explorer with new design Rework on conversion : Images, PDF, Cbr/rar, Cbz/zip, Xps to the destination formats Images, Cbz and XPS ImprovmentsSuppress MainViewModel and ExplorerViewModel dependencies Add view notifications and Messages from MVVM Light for ViewModel=>View notifications Make thread better on open catalog, no more ihm freeze, less t...New ProjectsAnno 2070 Assistant: Anno 2070 Assistant is a program that is useable with the Ubisoft game Anno 2070. It shows you production chain information, building layouts, population supplies, etc.ASINDO Administration: Administration pages for ASINDO Pediatrics.Birthright Campaign Manager: Birthright Campaign Manager is a tool made with Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 designed to help players manage and handle games of Birthright at the domain level, let it be pen and paper, or play by email games.buttons: toolbar buttonsCAML Viewer: CAML Viewer Web Part lets you view CAML Query from Views. This Web Part also helps you find internal names for fields.CapitaList: The Craigslist for current and aspiring entrepreneurs to get all the information to start and establish a local business. This application offers its users access to licensing and permit information, financing option, business proposals and federal grants and awards for the area.CountryProject: Again country gameCSSMMS: ???????????Distributed replay GUI: With release of SQL Server 2012 RC0 I was disaapointed to discover that there was not User Interface for Distributed Replay. This is my contribution. May it help Distributed Replay to get the attention it deserves.DSCop: DSCop is an open source tool that analyzes IBM InfoSphere DataStage jobs and reports information such as violation of some commonly accepted best practices. It's developed in C# and uses MEF from .NET 4 to provide plug-in based architecture.Emailing Files as Attachments in Sharepoint 2010: This solution makes it easy for Sharepoint 2010 users to email files as attachments from the Sharepoint Ribbon Menu. The user can select multiple documents at a time, as well as Folders of files and document sets. The form contains fields for external email addresses as well a Sharepoint People Picker for internal users. If you want to exclude either of them, then simply set the containing panel to invisible. This is described in the documentationExtendable JSON Serialization: Contains an interface (IJSONSerializable) and a collection of JSON objects (conforms to the document set out at http://www.json.org) that enable you to add JSON serialization to your own data access classes. FitLib: A .NET library to parse FIT files used by Garmin GPS receivers.FlyComet: A simple ASP .Net comet implementation enabling ActiveMQ JMS Publisher to push live updates to the client using IHttpAsyncHandler.Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: in this project am pleased to offer these SharePoint 2010 custom templates. These templates are free to all and are provided “as is”. FullByte Tools: This is a test project of mine.GDL: This is the goddamn library. 'Nuff said.kimocsys: KiMoCSys stands for Kinect Motion Capture System. It captures the movement using the kinect hardware and kinect SDK for windows and generates a Collada file with the animation inside. Intended for indie game developers and enthusiasts. Use WPF and C#Leoscorp: This is a test.Nop 23 Multi Store: Nop Commerce Multi Store supportPaper Reader: Silverlight application for read rich text filesPivot Viewer for Office 365: Pivot Viewer Silverlight 5 control in a webpart for Office 365Projeto Teste: Projeto de testesReflective-C#: The Reflective-C# Project. It consists in a pre-preprocessor (yeah, still gotta work on that name xD ), which extends the C# language for more versatility and ease of use. The Project also includes a AOT compiler for IL assemblies, targeting inumerous plataforms.Secure Text Box for Windows Forms: A secure text box control that is implemented using SecureString for secure entering of passwords written in C#SharePoint Mystery: Source code for the SharePoint Mystery sample projectShenJH.Net: ShenJH NetSilverlight in the Enterprise: Project dedicated to Promoting Silverlight usage in the enterprise.Small demo: Call WCF web services using jQuery: Small asp.net web site used to show how to call a WCF service from JavaScript. The main goal is to add a custom BehaviorExtensionElement that will be used to log server errors. It's developed in C# (.net framework 4.0).ThapHaNoiGiaiThuatAKT: Demo d? án môn h?c Các Phuong Pháp L?p TrìnhVolgaTransTelecomClient: VolgaTransTelecomClient makes it easier for clients of "Volga TransTelecom" company to get info about account. It's developed in C#.Your Last Options Dialog: Are you tired of recreating the same option dialog logic for each Windows Phone app every time? "Your Last Options Dialog" is an attempt to create a generic, highly configurable implementation you can easily pull into your own app and set up for your needs quickly. It's extensible in case you need to add more features or want to change existing ones, and allows easy localization of the complete content to all of the languages supported by your app.

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• Securing an ADF Application using OES11g: Part 1

  - by user12587121

  Future releases of the Oracle stack should allow ADF applications to be secured natively with Oracle Entitlements Server (OES). In a sequence of postings here I explore one way to achive this with the current technology, namely OES 11.1.1.5 and ADF 11.1.1.6. ADF Security Basics ADF Bascis The Application Development Framework (ADF) is Oracle’s preferred technology for developing GUI based Java applications.  It can be used to develop a UI for Swing applications or, more typically in the Oracle stack, for Web and J2EE applications.  ADF is based on and extends the Java Server Faces (JSF) technology.  To get an idea, Oracle provides an online demo to showcase ADF components. ADF can be used to develop just the UI part of an application, where, for example, the data access layer is implemented using some custom Java beans or EJBs.  However ADF also has it’s own data access layer, ADF Business Components (ADF BC) that will allow rapid integration of data from data bases and Webservice interfaces to the ADF UI component.   In this way ADF helps implement the MVC  approach to building applications with UI and data components. The canonical tutorial for ADF is to open JDeveloper, define a connection to a database, drag and drop a table from the database view to a UI page, build and deploy.  One has an application up and running very quickly with the ability to quickly integrate changes to, for example, the DB schema. ADF allows web pages to be created graphically and components like tables, forms, text fields, graphs and so on to be easily added to a page.  On top of JSF Oracle have added drag and drop tooling with JDeveloper and declarative binding of the UI to the data layer, be it database, WebService or Java beans.  An important addition is the bounded task flow which is a reusable set of pages and transitions.   ADF adds some steps to the page lifecycle defined in JSF and adds extra widgets including powerful visualizations. It is worth pointing out that the Oracle Web Center product (portal, content management and so on) is based on and extends ADF. ADF Security ADF comes with it’s own security mechanism that is exposed by JDeveloper at development time and in the WLS Console and Enterprise Manager (EM) at run time. The security elements that need to be addressed in an ADF application are: authentication, authorization of access to web pages, task-flows, components within the pages and data being returned from the model layer. One  typically relies on WLS to handle authentication and because of this users and groups will also be handled by WLS.  Typically in a Dev environment, users and groups are stored in the WLS embedded LDAP server. One has a choice when enabling ADF security (Application->Secure->Configure ADF Security) about whether to turn on ADF authorization checking or not: In the case where authorization is enabled for ADF one defines a set of roles in which we place users and then we grant access to these roles to the different ADF elements (pages or task flows or elements in a page). An important notion here is the difference between Enterprise Roles and Application Roles. The idea behind an enterprise role is that is defined in terms of users and LDAP groups from the WLS identity store.  “Enterprise” in the sense that these are things available for use to all applications that use that store.  The other kind of role is an Application Role and the idea is that  a given application will make use of Enterprise roles and users to build up a set of roles for it’s own use.  These application roles will be available only to that application.   The general idea here is that the enterprise roles are relatively static (for example an Employees group in the LDAP directory) while application roles are more dynamic, possibly depending on time, location, accessed resource and so on.  One of the things that OES adds that is that we can define these dynamic membership conditions in Role Mapping Policies. To make this concrete, here is how, at design time in Jdeveloper, one assigns these rights in Jdeveloper, which puts them into a file called jazn-data.xml: When the ADF app is deployed to a WLS this JAZN security data is pushed to the system-jazn-data.xml file of the WLS deployment for the policies and application roles and to the WLS backing LDAP for the users and enterprise roles.  Note the difference here: after deploying the application we will see the users and enterprise roles show up in the WLS LDAP server.  But the policies and application roles are defined in the system-jazn-data.xml file.  Consult the embedded WLS LDAP server to manage users and enterprise roles by going to the domain console and then Security Realms->myrealm->Users and Groups: For production environments (or in future to share this data with OES) one would then perform the operation of “reassociating” this security policy and application role data to a DB schema (or an LDAP).  This is done in the EM console by reassociating the Security Provider.  This blog posting has more explanations and references on this reassociation process. If ADF Authentication and Authorization are enabled then the Security Policies for a deployed application can be managed in EM.  Our goal is to be able to manage security policies for the applicaiton rather via OES and it's console. Security Requirements for an ADF Application With this package tour of ADF security we can see that to secure an ADF application with we would expect to be able to take care of at least the following items: Authentication, including a user and user-group store Authorization for page access Authorization for bounded Task Flow access.  A bounded task flow has only one point of entry and so if we protect that entry point by calling to OES then all the pages in the flow are protected.  Authorization for viewing data coming from the data access layer In the next posting we will describe a sample ADF application and required security policies. References ADF Dev Guide: Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework: Enabling ADF Security in a Fusion Web Application Oracle tutorial on securing a sample ADF application, appears to require ADF 11.1.2 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 20, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 20, 2013Popular ReleasesHyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012: HyperVMPE2012: Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012 Beta ReleasePS3 Library .NET v3: PS3 Library v3: No bug found - Current Version 3.0.0.0 Put the PS3Lib.XML file in the same directory for get all comments for each methods.Outlook 2013 Add-In: Email appointments: This new version includes the following changes: - Ability to drag emails to the calendar to create appointments. Will gather all the recipients from all the emails and create an appointment on the day you drop the emails, with the text and subject of the last selected email (if more than one selected). - Increased maximum of numbers to display appointments to 30. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it before. Before unzipping the file...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight, WP7 and WinRT/Metro made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.5.2: v1.5.2 - This is a service release. We've fixed a number of issues with Tasks and IoC. We've made some consistency improvements across platforms and fixed a number of minor bugs. See changes.txt for details. Packages Available on Nuget Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly. Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view. Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro inversion of control container (IoC); source code...CODE Framework: 4.0.30618.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.18): XrmToolbox improvement Use new connection controls (use of Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll) New display capabilities for tools (size, image and colors) Added prerequisites check Added Most Used Tools feature Tools improvementNew toolSolution Transfer Tool (v1.0.0.0) developed by DamSim Updated toolView Layout Replicator (v1.2013.6.17) Double click on source view to display its layoutXml All tools list Access Checker (v1.2013.6.17) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.6.18) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.6.1...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.570b: New* Movie - using XBMC TMDB - now renames movies if option selected. * Movie - using Xbmc Tmdb - Actor images saved from TMDb if option selected. Fixed* Movie - Checks for poster.jpg against missing poster filter * Movie - Fixed continual scraping of vob movie file (not DVD structure) * Both - Correctly display audio channels * Both - Correctly populate audio info in nfo's if multiple audio tracks. * Both - added icons and checked for DTS ES and Dolby TrueHD audio tracks. * Both - Stream d...Document.Editor: 2013.24: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.24: Improved Video Editing support Improved Link Editing support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v3.3.0: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ???。 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 v2.0 ?：ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license)。 ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI???? ExtJS ?????????，???? ExtJS ?。 ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ?：http://fineui.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthrea...BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.0: Check Version History for more information about this release.ExpressProfiler: ExpressProfiler v1.5: [+] added Start time, End time event columns [+] added SP:StmtStarting, SP:StmtCompleted events [*] fixed bug with Audit:Logout eventpatterns & practices: Data Access Guidance: Data Access Guidance Drop4 2013.06.17: Drop 4Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.94: add dstLine and dstCol attributes to the -Analyze output in XML mode. un-combine leftover comma-separates expression statements after optimizations are complete so downstream tools don't stack-overflow on really deep comma trees. add support for using a single source map generator instance with multiple runs of MinifyJavaScript, assuming that the results are concatenated to the same output file.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 4.1.1: The stable release of Kooboo CMS 4.1.0 with fixed the following issues: https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/1 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/11 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/13 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/15 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/19 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/20 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/24 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/43 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/45 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/46 https://github....VidCoder: 1.5.0 Beta: The betas have started up again! If you were previously on the beta track you will need to install this to get back on it. That's because you can now run both the Beta and Stable version of VidCoder side-by-side! Note that the OpenCL and Intel QuickSync changes being tested by HandBrake are not in the betas yet. They will appear when HandBrake integrates them into the main branch. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5590. This adds a new FDK AAC encoder. The FAAC encoder has been removed and now...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.16: Date/Time are displayed as Local Time. (Last Contact, Last Report and DeadLine) Wpp now remember the last used path for update publishing. (See 'Settings' Form for options) Add an option to allow users to publish an update even if the Framework has judged the certificate as invalid. (Attention : Using this option will NOT allow you to publish or revise an update if your certificate is really invalid). When publishing a new update, filter update files to ensure that there is not files wi...Employee Info Starter Kit: v6.0 - ASP.NET MVC Edition: Release Home - Getting Started - Hands on Coding Walkthrough – Technology Stack - Design & Architecture EISK v6.0 – ASP.NET MVC edition bundles most of the greatest and successful platforms, frameworks and technologies together, to enable web developers to learn and build manageable and high performance web applications with rich user experience effectively and quickly. User End SpecificationsCreating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee reco...OLAP PivotTable Extensions: Release 0.8.1: Use the 32-bit download for... Excel 2007 Excel 2010 32-bit (even Excel 2010 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Excel 2013 32-bit (even Excel 2013 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Use the 64-bit download for... Excel 2010 64-bit Excel 2013 64-bit Just download and run the EXE. There is no need to uninstall the previous release. If you have problems getting the add-in to work, see the Troubleshooting Installation wiki page. The new features in this release are: View #VALUE! Err...DirectXTex texture processing library: June 2013: June 15, 2013 Custom filtering implementation for Resize & GenerateMipMaps(3D) - Point, Box, Linear, Cubic, and Triangle TEX_FILTER_TRIANGLE finite low-pass triangle filter TEX_FILTER_WRAP, TEX_FILTER_MIRROR texture semantics for custom filtering TEX_FILTER_BOX alias for TEX_FILTER_FANT WIC Ordered and error diffusion dithering for non-WIC conversion sRGB gamma correct custom filtering and conversion DDS_FLAGS_EXPAND_LUMINANCE - Reader conversion option for L8, L16, and A8L8 legacy ...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 3.0.0.440: Version: 3.0.0.440 (Release Candidate): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Please build the whole solution before you start one of the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.5 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2012) Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Samples: Use ValueConverters via StaticResource instead of x:Static. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewNew Projectsarduinoay: Plays 8-bit chip tunes and sends the data to an Arduino device acting as a serial device, which then sends it to an AY-3-8910/YM-2149 PSG.Aricie - Lucene Search: Aricie - Lucene Search is a powerful DotNetNuke module and Search / Indexing provider replacement based on Lucene.Net, with many extensibility pointsBalloon: coolBattaglia Navale: Battaglia Navale xml battaglia navale xml xaml data binding Broma Mod Launcher: It's a mod launcher for ArmA 2, possibly 3 in the futureC#Duino: Tento projekt Vás provede zacátky vývoje aplikací pro NetDuino Plus a Arduino Nano ve vývojovém prostredí Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 v jazyce .NET C#Customer Management Information System: Customer Management Information System (CMIS)Demo1: this is a demoFedFramework: ...FractionCPP: C++ Library for Fractional Arithmetic with Overflow Detection: This is a C++ library providing a 'Fraction' class that implements full precision arithmetic operations on rational numbers with overflow detection.InfoSys: InfoSysJQuerySamples: Gallery of jquery samples in asp.net applicationKookaburra library: Kookaburray LibraryLombiq Antispam Orchard module: An Orchard module for better spam protection.Lombiq Security Orchard module: An Orchard module to enhance security.MailWithAttachment: Outlook,Forgot to attach an Item while sending a very important mail. Use this Add-in. The Safest Risk.miaoshow: ????，????MyFramework: this project is a simple mvvmc frameworkNew Style SSO for use in BizTalk Projects: A new style of SSO config. The purpose of this project is to make it very easy to store items in SSO. Although there are several projects dedicated to SSO none of them were easy enough to use straight away. The idea is to have a base class that knows how to save/load itself from SSO. So when you need a config item stored in SSO, simply create a new class with some properties, Inherit from SSO Base functionality and Presto. You are done. Your class will have some extra methods to help you....newsandalert: project summarynoppoj: DirvingSystemprakark06192013Git01: bold* _italics_ +underline+ ! Heading 1 !! Heading 2 * Bullet List ** Bullet List 2 # Number List ## Number List 2 [another wiki page] [url:http://www.example.cprakark06192013Hg01: *bold* _italics_ +underline+ ! Heading 1 !! Heading 2 * Bullet List ** Bullet List 2 # Number List ## Number List 2 [another wiki page] [url:http://www.example.prakark06192013tfs01: *bold* _italics_ +underline+ ! Heading 1 !! Heading 2 * Bullet List ** Bullet List 2 # Number List ## Number List 2 [another wiki page] [url:http://www.example.PS3 Library .NET v3: Communicate via PS3 easily with .NET Applications !Quick Apply: This project is for anyone who is a job seeker. What it does is automates the job application process. This project is open to anyone: coders, users, ideas.Starting Windows 8 App Development with HTML/CSS/JS: This is a beginner's guide to creating Windows 8 Store Apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.Test Automation As A Service: Over the three years we have been developing a azure cloud based solution to provide "Test Automaton as a Service" (TaaaS) using a hybrid automation approachtestdd06192013hg01: fdgVMConnect.exe replacement using FreeRDP.exe: This is a replacemnet for VMconnect.exe that you do not get with Free Core Server 2012 to allow you to connect to your VM's from the Server console.vtccds: vtccdsWaterNet: ????Worklight Portal: Chuong trình Academic c?a IBM s? t? ch?c l?p h?c cho các giáo viên. Mobile Application Development with IBM Worklight V5 (WU503) XTool: jdk????????

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• Thou shalt not put code on a piedestal - Code is a tool, no more, no less

  - by Ralf Westphal

  “Write great code and everything else becomes easier” is what Paul Pagel believes in. That´s his version of an adage by Brian Marick he cites: “treat code as an end, not just a means.” And he concludes: “My post-Agile world is software craftsmanship.” I wonder, if that´s really the way to go. Will “simply” writing great code lead the software industry into the light? He´s alluding to the philosopher Kant who proposed, a human beings should never be treated as a means, but always as an end. But should we transfer this ethical statement into the world of software? I doubt it.   Reason #1: Human beings are categorially different from code. They are autonomous entities who need to find a way of living happily together. To Kant it seemed this goal could only be reached if nobody (ab)used a human being for his/her purposes. Because using a human being, i.e. treating it as a means, would contradict the fundamental autonomy and freedom of human beings. People should hold up a symmetric view of their relationships: Since nobody wants to be (ab)used, nobody should (ab)use anybody else. If you want to be treated decently, with respect, in accordance with your own free will - which means as an end - then do the same to other people. Code is dead, it´s a product, it´s a tool for people to reach their goals. No company spends any money on code other than to save money or earn money in the long run. Code is not a puppy. Enterprises do not commission software development to just feel good in its company. Code is not a buddy. Code is a slave, if you will. A mechanical slave, a non-tangible robot. Code is a tool, is a tool. And if we start to treat it differently, if we elevate its status unduely… I guess that will contort our relationship in a contraproductive way. Please get me right: Just because something is “just a tool”, “just a product” does not mean we should not be careful while designing, building, using it. Right to the contrary. We should be very careful when writing code – but not for the code´s sake! We should be careful because we respect our customers who are fellow human beings who should be treated as an end. If we are careless, neglectful, ignorant when producing code on their behalf, then we´re using them. Being sloppy means you´re caring more for yourself that for your customer. You´re then treating the customer as a means to fulfill some of your own needs. That´s plain unethical behavior.   Reason #2: The focus should always be on your purpose, not on any tool. But if code is treated as an end, then the focus is on the code. That might sound right, because where else should be your focus as a software developer? But, well, I´d say, your focus should be on delivering value to your customer. Because in the end your customer does not care if you write a single line of code. She just wants her problem to be solved. Solving problems is the purpose of any contractor. Code must be treated just as a means, a tool we know how to handle very well. But if we´re really trying to be craftsmen then we should be conscious about exactly that and act ethically. That means we must never be so focused on our tool as to be unable to suggest better solutions to the problems of our customers than code.   I´m all with Paul when he urges us to “Write great code”. Sure, if you need to write code, then by all means do so. Write the best code you can think of – and then try to improve it. Paul has all the best intentions when he signs Brians “treat code as an end” - but as we all know: “The road to hell is paved with best intentions” ;-) Yes, I can imagine a “hell of code focus”. In fact, I don´t need to imagine it, I´m seeing it quite often. Because code hell is whereever two developers stand together and are so immersed in talking about all sorts of coding tricks, design patterns, code smells, technologies, platforms, tools that they lose sight of the big picture. Talking about TDD or SOLID or refactoring is a sign of consciousness – relative to the “cowboy coders” view of the world. But from yet another point of view TDD, SOLID, and refactoring are just cures for ailments within a system. And I fear, if “Writing great code” is the only focus or the main focus of software development, then we as an industry lose the ability to see that. Focus draws a line around something, it defines a horizon for perceptions and thinking. So if we focus on code our horizon ends where “the land of code” ends. I don´t think that should be our professional attitude.   So what about Software Craftsmanship as the next big thing after Agility? I think Software Craftsmanship has an important message for all software developers and beyond. But to make it the successor of the Agility movement seems to miss a point. Agility never claimed to solve all software development problems, I´d say. So to blame it for having missed out on certain aspects of it is wrong. If I had to summarize Agility in one word I´d say “Value”. Agility put value for the customer back in software development. Focus on delivering value early and often – that´s Agility´s mantra. All else follows from that. And I ask you: Is that obsolete? Is delivering value not hip anymore? No, sure not. That´s our very purpose as software developers. So how can Agility become obsolete and need to be replaced? We need to do away with this “either/or”-thinking. It´s either Agility or Lean or Software Craftsmanship or whatnot. Instead we should start integrating concepts and movements. Think “both/and”. Think Agility plus Software Craftsmanship plus Lean plus whatnot. We don´t neet to tear down anything from a piedestal and replace it with a new idol. Instead we should do away with piedestals and arrange whatever is helpful is a circle. Then we can turn to concepts, movements for whatever they are best. After 10 years of Agility we should be able to identify what it was good at – and keep that. Keep Agility around and add whatever Agility was lacking or never concerned with. Add whatever is at the core of Software Craftsmanship. Add whatever is at the core of Lean etc. But don´t call out the age of Post-Agility. Because it better never will end. Because once we start to lose Agility´s core we´re losing focus of the customer.

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• 5 Best Practices - Laying the Foundation for WebCenter Projects

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Today’s guest post comes from Oracle WebCenter expert John Brunswick. John specializes in enterprise portal and content management solutions and actively contributes to the enterprise software business community and has authored a series of articles about optimal business involvement in portal, business process management and SOA development, examining ways of helping organizations move away from monolithic application development. We’re happy to have John join us today! Maximizing success with Oracle WebCenter portal requires a strategic understanding of Oracle WebCenter capabilities.  The following best practices enable the creation of portal solutions with minimal resource overhead, while offering the greatest flexibility for progressive elaboration. They are inherently project agnostic, enabling a strong foundation for future growth and an expedient return on your investment in the platform.  If you are able to embrace even only a few of these practices, you will materially improve your deployment capability with WebCenter. 1. Segment Duties Around 3Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data "Agility" is one of the most common business benefits touted by modern web platforms.  It sounds good - who doesn't want to be Agile, right?  How exactly IT organizations go about supplying agility to their business counterparts often lacks definition - hamstrung by ambiguity. Ultimately, businesses want to benefit from reduced development time to deliver a solution to a particular constituent, which is augmented by as much self-service as possible to develop and manage the solution directly. All done in the absence of direct IT involvement. With Oracle WebCenter's depth in the areas of content management, pallet of native collaborative services, enterprise mashup capability and delegated administration, it is very possible to execute on this business vision at a technical level. To realize the benefits of the platform depth we can think of Oracle WebCenter's segmentation of duties along the lines of the 3 Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data.  All three of which can have their foundations developed by IT, then provisioned to the business on a per role basis. Content – Oracle WebCenter benefits from an extremely mature content repository.  Work flow, audit, notification, office integration and conversion capabilities for documents (HTML & PDF) make this a haven for business users to take control of content within external and internal portals, custom applications and web sites.  When deploying WebCenter portal take time to think of areas in which IT can provide the "harness" for content to reside, then allow the business to manage any content items within the site, using the content foundation to ensure compliance with business rules and process.  This frees IT to work on more mission critical challenges and allows the business to respond in short order to emerging market needs. Collaboration – Native collaborative services and WebCenter spaces are a perfect match for business users who are looking to enable document sharing, discussions and social networking.  The ability to deploy the services is granular and on the basis of roles scoped to given areas of the system - much like the first C “content”.  This enables business analysts to design the roles required and IT to provision with peace of mind that users leveraging the collaborative services are only able to do so in explicitly designated areas of a site. Bottom line - business will not need to wait for IT, but cannot go outside of the scope that has been defined based on their roles. Contextual Data – Collaborative capabilities are most powerful when included within the context of business data.  The ability to supply business users with decision shaping data that they can include in various parts of a portal or portals, just as they would with content items, is one of the most powerful aspects of Oracle WebCenter.  Imagine a discussion about new store selection for a retail chain that re-purposes existing information from business intelligence services about various potential locations and or custom backend systems - presenting it directly in the context of the discussion.  If there are some data sources that are preexisting in your enterprise take a look at how they can be made into discrete offerings within the portal, then scoped to given business user roles for inclusion within collaborative activities. 2. Think Generically, Execute Specifically Constructs.  Anyone who has spent much time around me knows that I am obsessed with this word.  Why? Because Constructs offer immense power - more than APIs, Web Services or other technical capability. Constructs offer organizations the ability to leverage a platform's native characteristics to offer substantial business functionality - without writing code.  This concept becomes more powerful with the additional understanding of the concepts from the platform that an organization learns over time.  Let's take a look at an example of where an Oracle WebCenter construct can substantially reduce the time to get a subscription-based site out the door and into the hands of the end consumer. Imagine a site that allows members to subscribe to specific disciplines to access information and application data around that various discipline.  A space is a collection of secured pages within Oracle WebCenter.  Spaces are not only secured, but also default content stored within it to be scoped automatically to that space. Taking this a step further, Oracle WebCenter’s Activity Stream surfaces events, discussions and other activities that are scoped to the given user on the basis of their space affiliations.  In order to have a portal that would allow users to "subscribe" to information around various disciplines - spaces could be used out of the box to achieve this capability and without using any APIs or low level technical work to achieve this. 3. Make Governance Work for You Imagine driving down the street without the painted lines on the road.  The rules of the road are so ingrained in our minds, we often do not think about the process, but seemingly mundane lane markers are critical enablers. Lane markers allow us to travel at speeds that would be impossible if not for the agreed upon direction of flow. Additionally and more importantly, it allows people to act autonomously - going where they please at any given time. The return on the investment for mobility is high enough for people to buy into globally agreed up governance processes. In Oracle WebCenter we can use similar enablers to lane markers.  Our goal should be to enable the flow of information and provide end users with the ability to arrive at business solutions as needed, not on the basis of cumbersome processes that cannot meet the business needs in a timely fashion. How do we do this? Just as with "Segmentation of Duties" Oracle WebCenter technologies offer the opportunity to compartmentalize various business initiatives from each other within the system due to constructs and security that are available to use within the platform. For instance, when a WebCenter space is created, any content added within that space by default will be secured to that particular space and inherits meta data that is associated with a folder created for the space. Oracle WebCenter content uses meta data to support a broad range of rich ECM functionality and can automatically impart retention, workflow and other policies automatically on the basis of what has been defaulted for that space. Depending on your business needs, this paradigm will also extend to sub sections of a space, offering some interesting possibilities to enable automated management around content. An example may be press releases within a particular area of an extranet that require a five year retention period and need to the reviewed by marketing and legal before release.  The underlying content system will transparently take care of this process on the basis of the above rules, enabling peace of mind over unstructured data - which could otherwise become overwhelming. 4. Make Your First Project Your Second Imagine if Michael Phelps was competing in a swimming championship, but told right before his race that he had to use a brand new stroke.  There is no doubt that Michael is an outstanding swimmer, but chances are that he would like to have some time to get acquainted with the new stroke. New technologies should not be treated any differently.  Before jumping into the deep end it helps to take time to get to know the new approach - even though you may have been swimming thousands of times before. To quickly get a handle on Oracle WebCenter capabilities it can be helpful to deploy a sandbox for the team to use to share project documents, discussions and announcements in an effort to help the actual deployment get under way, while increasing everyone’s knowledge of the platform and its functionality that may be helpful down the road. Oracle Technology Network has made a pre-configured virtual machine available for download that can be a great starting point for this exercise. 5. Get to Know the Community If you are reading this blog post you have most certainly faced a software decision or challenge that was solved on the basis of a small piece of missing critical information - which took substantial research to discover.  Chances were also good that somewhere, someone had already come across this information and would have been excited to share it. There is no denying the power of passionate, connected users, sharing key tips around technology.  The Oracle WebCenter brand has a rich heritage that includes industry-leading technology and practitioners.  With the new Oracle WebCenter brand, opportunities to connect with these experts has become easier. Oracle WebCenter Blog Oracle Social Enterprise LinkedIn WebCenter Group Oracle WebCenter Twitter Oracle WebCenter Facebook Oracle User Groups Additionally, there are various Oracle WebCenter related blogs by an excellent grouping of services partners.

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• Finally, upgrade from Nokia X3 to Samsung Galaxy S III

  This time, something slightly different but nonetheless not less interesting, hopefully. Living on a remote island like Mauritius, ill-praised 'Cyber Island' in the Indian Ocean, has its advantages in life style and relaxed environment to life in but in terms of technological aspects it can be quite a nightmare. Well, I guess this might be different story to report about... one day. Cyber Island Mauritius Despite it's shiny advertisement as Cyber Island and business in ICT hub to Africa, Mauritius is not on the latest track of available models in computer hardware or, in the context of this article, cellulars or smart-phone, or communication technology in general. Okay, I have to admit that this statement is only partly true. Money can buy, even here in Mauritius. Luckily, there are ways and ways to deal with this outcry of modern, read: technological, civilisation issues. Online shopping you might think? Yes, for sure, until you discover in your checkout procedure that a small island in the Indian Ocean isn't a preferred destination for delivery and the precious time you spent on putting your items into your cart and feeding your personal level of anticipation gets ruined on the last stint. Ordering from abroad saves you money Anyway, I got in touch with my personal courier and luckily there were some extra-kilos left in the luggage. First obstacle sorted, we have a Transporter! Okay, on the next occasion off to Amazon online and using their Prime service for fast delivery. Actually, the order was placed on Saturday evening and everything got delivered on Tuesday morning - nice job in less than 72 hours. Okay, among the items of that shopping rush I ordered a shiny Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB in oceanic blue - did I mention, that you hardly get a blue model in Mauritius? - for my BWE. Interesting side-notes: First, Amazon Germany dropped the prices for roughly 30% on the S3, and we got the 16GB model for less than 500 Euro (or approx. Rs. 19.500,-) compared to the usual Rs. 27.000,- on the local market. It even varies whether the local price is inclusive or exclusive VAT (15%). Second, since a while she was bothering me to get an iPhone and an iPad for her, fair enough I thought, decent hardware, posh design and reliable services. Until we watched the 'magical' introduction of Samsung's new models at the IFA exhibition, she read the bashing comments on Google+ on the iPhone 5 and I gave her a brief summary on the law suit between Apple and Samsung in the USA. So, yes, Samsung USA is right, the next big thing is already here - literally. My BWE loves the look and touch of the Galaxy S3. And for me it was more cost-effective in terms of purchases done at the App Store, ups, Play Store. Transfer of contacts, text messages and media files Okay, now that the hardware is in place, how to transfer all those contacts, text messages, media files, etc. between those two devices? In the past, I used to use the Nokia Communication Suite between various models but now for Android? Well, as usual Google and Bing are reliable friends and among the first hits I came across an article about How to Transfer Contacts from Nokia to Android. Couldn't be easier, right? Well, sort of... my main Windows systems are already running on Windows 8, and this actually caused problems with the mobile/smart-phone device drivers. The article provides the download for an older version 1.10 which upgrades to 2.11 (as time of writing this entry) but both couldn't get the Galaxy S3 and the Nokia connected. Shame on me... the product page clearly doesn't mention Windows 8 (for now) and Windows 8 isn't available for the general audience at all... After I took a spare machine running on Windows Vista everything went smooth. Software installed, upgrade done, device drivers for Android automatically downloaded and installed, and the same painless routine for the Nokia part. I think, I rebooted the system twice during the whole setup procedure but hey, it was more or less a distraction while coding some stuff in ASP.NET MVC and Telerik Kendo UI. The transfer of contacts and text messages was done via Wondershare MobileGo for Android, and all media files by moving the additional microSD card from one device to the other. But even without an external SD card, it would have been very easy to copy the files via Windows Explorer directly. Little catch and excellent service Fine, we are almost done and the only step left is to shift the SIM card... Ouch, gotcha! The X3 uses a standard size SIM card while the S III only accepts microSIM form factor. What an irony, bigger smartphone needs smaller SIM card. Luckily, the next showroom of Emtel is just 5 mins away up the road, and the service staff over there know their job. Finally, after roughly 10 mins of paper work, activation and small chit-chat, the S3 came to life on the mobile network. Owning a smart-phone now and knowing that my BWE would like to interact more on social networks away from home, especially to upload pictures and provide local 'check-ins', I activated a data package for her in advance, too. Even that it is Saturday, everything was already done and ready to be used. Nice bonus: The Emtel clerk directly offered me to set up the configuration for the Emtel data services, yes sure, go ahead, this saves me to search for that in the settings. Okay, spoiler-alert here, setting a static APN to access the Emtel network and the internet wouldn't be a challenge. But hey, she already had the phone in her hands and I could keep my eyes on the children. Well done, Emtel! Resume Thanks to the useful software package by Wondershare is was a hands-free experience to transfer all the data from a Nokia mobile on Symbian S60 to a Samsung Galaxy S III on Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). In the future, this wont be a serious issue at all anymore thanks to synchronisation services and cloud storage. And for now, I'm only waiting for the official upgrades for Jelly Bean.

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• The Future of Project Management is Social

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Kazim Isfahani, Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Rapid Ascent. Breakneck Speed. Lightning Fast. Perhaps even overwhelming. No matter which set of adjectives we use to describe it, social media’s rise into the enterprise mainstream has been unprecedented. Indeed, the big 4 social media powerhouses (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter), have nearly 2 Billion users between them. You may be asking (as you should really) “That’s all well and good for the consumer, but for me at my company, what’s your point? Beyond the fact that I can check and post updates, that is.” Good question, kind sir. Impact of Social and Collaboration on Project Management I’ll dovetail this discussion to the project management realm, since that’s what I’m writing about. Speed is a big challenge for project-driven organizations. Anything that can help speed up project delivery - be it a new product introduction effort or a geographical expansion project - fast is a good thing. So where does this whole social thing fit particularly since there are already a host of tools to help with traditional project execution? The fact is companies have seen improvements in their productivity by deploying departmental collaboration and other social-oriented solutions. McKinsey’s survey on social tools shows we have reached critical scale: 72% of respondents report that their companies use at least one and over 40% say they are using social networks and blogs. We don’t hear as much about the impact of social media technologies at the project and project manager level, but that does not mean there is none. Consider the new hire. The type of individual entering the workforce and executing on projects is a generation of worker expecting visually appealing, easy to use and easy to understand technology meshing hand-in-hand with business processes. Consider the project manager. The social era has enhanced the role that the project manager must play. Today’s project manager must be a supreme communicator, an influencer, a sympathizer, a negotiator, and still manage to keep all stakeholders in the loop on project progress. Social tools play a significant role in this effort. Now consider the impact to the project team. The way that a project team functions has changed, with newer, social oriented technologies making the process of information dissemination and team communications much more fluid. It’s clear that a shift is occurring where “social” is intersecting with project management. The Rise of Social Project Management We refer to the melding of project management and social networking as Social Project Management. Social Project Management is based upon the philosophy that the project team is one part of an integrated whole, and that valuable and unique abilities exist within the larger organization. For this reason, Social Project Management systems should be integrated into the collaborative platform(s) of an organization, allowing communication to proceed outside the project boundaries. What makes social project management "social" is an implicit awareness where distributed teams build connected links in ways that were previously restricted to teams that were co-located. Just as critical, Social Project Management embraces the vision of seamless online collaboration within a project team, but also provides for, (and enhances) the use of rigorous project management techniques. Social Project Management acknowledges that projects (particularly large projects) are a social activity - people doing work with people, for other people, with commitments to yet other people. The more people (larger projects), the more interpersonal the interactions, and the more social affects the project. The Epitome of Social - Fusion Project Portfolio Management If I take this one level further to discuss Fusion Project Portfolio Management, the notion of Social Project Management is on full display. With Fusion Project Portfolio Management, project team members have a single place for interaction on projects and access to any other resources working within the Fusion ERP applications. This allows team members the opportunity to be informed with greater participation and provide better information. The application’s the visual appeal, and highly graphical nature makes it easy to navigate information. The project activity stream adds to the intuitive user experience. The goal of productivity is pervasive throughout Fusion Project Portfolio Management. Field research conducted with Oracle customers and partners showed that users needed a way to stay in the context of their core transactions and yet easily access social networking tools. This is manifested in the application so when a user executes a business process, they not only have the transactional application at their fingertips, but also have things like e-mail, SMS, text, instant messaging, chat – all providing a number of different ways to interact with people and/or groups of people, both internal and external to the project and enterprise. But in the end, connecting people is relatively easy. The larger issue is finding a way to serve up relevant, system-generated, actionable information, in real time, which will allow for more streamlined execution on key business processes. Fusion Project Portfolio Management’s design concept enables users to create project communities, establish discussion threads, manage event calendars as well as deliver project based work spaces to organize communications within the context of a project – all within a secure business environment. We’d love to hear from you and get your thoughts and ideas about how Social Project Management is impacting your organization. To learn more about Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management, please visit this link

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

  - by Simon Cooper

  SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• TGIF: Engagement Wrap-up

  - by Michael Snow

  We've had a very busy week here at Oracle and as we build up to Oracle OpenWorld starting in less than 10 days - it doesn't look like things will be slowing down. Engagement is definitely in the air this week. Our friend, John Mancini published a great article entitled: "The World of Engagement" on his Digital Landfill blog yesterday and we hosted a great webcast with R "Ray" Wang from Constellation Research yesterday on the "9 C's of Engagement". 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} I wanted to wrap-up the week with some key takeaways from our webcast yesterday with Ray Wang. If you missed the webcast yesterday, fear not - it is now available  On-Demand. We'll leave you this week with lots of questions about how to navigate these churning waters of engagement. Stay tuned to the Oracle WebCenter Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series as we fuel this dialogue. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Company Culture Does company support a culture of putting customer satisfaction ahead of profits? Does culture promote creativity and cross functional employee collaboration? Does culture accept different views of multi-generational workforce? Does culture promote employee training and skills development Does culture support upward mobility and long term retention? Does culture support work-life balance? Does the culture provide rewards for employee for outstanding customer support? Channels What are the current primary channels for customer communications? What do you think will be the primary channels in two years? Is company developing support model for emerging channels? Do all channels consistently deliver the same level of customer support? Do you know the cost per transaction across all channels? Do you engage customers proactively across multiple channels? Do all channels have access to the same customer information? Community Does company extend customer support into virtual communities of interest? Does company facilitate educating users through its virtual communities? Does company mine its customer’s experience into useful data? Does company increase the value for customers through using data to deliver new products and services? Does company support two way interactions with its customers through communities of interest? Does company actively support social CRM, online communities and social media markets? Credibility Does company market its trustworthiness through external certificates such as business licenses, BBB certificates or other validations? Does company promote trust through customer testimonials and case studies on ethical business practices? Does company promote truthful market campaigns Does company make it easy for customers to complain? Does company build its reputation for standing behind its products with guarantees for satisfaction? Does company protect its customer data with high security measures> Content What sources do you use to create customer content? Does company mine social media and blogs for customer content? How does your company sort, store and retain its customer content? How frequently does content get updated? What external sources do you use for customer content? How many responses are typically received from a knowledge management system inquiry? Does your company use customer content to design and develop new product and services? Context Does your company market to customers in clusters or individually? Does your company customize its messages and personalize them to specific needs of each individual customer? Does your company store customer data based on their past behaviors, purchases, sentiment analysis and current activities? Does your company manage customer context according to channels used? For example identify personal use channels versus business channels? What is your frequency of collecting customer activities across various touch points? How is your customer data stored and analyzed? Is contextual data used for future customer outreach? Cadence Which channels does your company measure-web site visits, phone calls, IVR, store visits, face to face, social media? Does company make effective use of cross channel marketing to promote more frequent customer engagement? Does your company rate the patterns relevant for your product or service and monitor usage against this pattern? Does your company measure the frequency of both online and offline channels? Does your company apply metrics to the frequency of customer engagements with product or services revenues? Does your company consolidate data for customer engagement across various channels for a complete view of its customer? Catalyst Does company offer coupon discounts? Does company have a customer loyalty program or a VIP membership program? Does company mine customer data to target specific groups of buyers? Do internal employees serve as ambassadors for customer programs? Does company drive loyalty through social media loyalty programs? Does company build rewards based on using loyalty data? Does company offer an employee incentive program to drive customer loyalty?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.Active Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...BI System Monitor: v2.1: Data Audits report and supporting SQL, and SSIS package Environment Overview report enhancements, improving the appearance, addition of data audit finding indicators Note: SQL 2012 version coming soon.Hidden Capture (HC): Hidden Capture 1.1: Hidden Capture 1.1 by Mohsen E.Dawatgar http://Hidden-Capture.blogfa.comExt Spec: Ext Spec 0.2.1: Refined examples and improved distribution options.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.04: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.04 Don't forget to backup your installation before upgrade. Changes in 06.00.04 Fix: Sql Scripts for 6.003 missed object qualifiers within stored procedures Fix: added missing resource "cmdCancel.Text" in form.ascx.resx Changes in 06.00.03 Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext Changes in 06.00.02 The scripts are now compatible with SQL Azure, tested in a ne...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.New ProjectsAny-Service: AnyService is a .net 4.0 Windows service shell. It hosts any windows application in non-gui mode to run as a service.BabyCloudDrives - the multi cloud drive desktop's application: wpf ????BLACK ORANGE: Download The HPAD TEXT EDITOR and use it Wisely.. CodePlex New Release Checker: CodePlex New Release Checker is a small library that makes it easy to add, "New Version Available!" functionality to your CodePlex project.Collect: ????????！CSVManager: CSV??CSV?????，????CSV??，??????Exam Project: My Exam Project. Computer Vision, C and OpenCV-FTP: Hey guys thanks for checking out my ftp!Haushaltsbuch: 1ModMaker.Lua: ModMaker.Lua is an open source .NET library that parses and executes Lua code.MyJabbr: MyJabbr netduinoscope: Design shield and software to use netduino as oscilloscopeNetSurveillance Web Application: Net Surveillance Web ApplicationNiconicoApiHelper: ????API?????????OStega: A simple library for encrypt text into an bmp or png image.OURORM: ormTFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit: The TFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit is a set of tools that integrate with TFS 2010 to help manage configuration and deployment to various remote environments.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: A step-by-step guide for building Team Foundation Server 2012 environments that include SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 and more!WinRT LineChart: An attempt at creating an usable LineChart for everyone to use in his/her own Windows 8 Apps

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• Data-driven animation states

  - by user8363

  I'm trying to handle animations in a 2D game engine hobby project, without hard-coding them. Hard coding animation states seems like a common but very strange phenomenon, to me. A little background: I'm working with an entity system where components are bags of data and subsystems act upon them. I chose to use a polling system to update animation states. With animation states I mean: "walking_left", "running_left", "walking_right", "shooting", ... My idea to handle animations was to design it as a data driven model. Data could be stored in an xml file, a rdbms, ... And could be loaded at the start of a game / level/ ... This way you can easily edit animations and transitions without having to go change the code everywhere in your game. As an example I made an xml draft of the data definitions I had in mind. One very important piece of data would simply be the description of an animation. An animation would have a unique id (a descriptive name). It would hold a reference id to an image (the sprite sheet it uses, because different animations may use different sprite sheets). The frames per second to run the animation on. The "replay" here defines if an animation should be run once or infinitely. Then I defined a list of rectangles as frames. <animation id='WIZARD_WALK_LEFT'> <image id='WIZARD_WALKING' /> <fps>50</fps> <replay>true</replay> <frames> <rectangle> <x>0</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> <rectangle> <x>45</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> </frames> </animation> Animation data would be loaded and held in an animation resource pool and referenced by game entities that are using it. It would be treated as a resource like an image, a sound, a texture, ... The second piece of data to define would be a state machine to handle animation states and transitions. This defines each state a game entity can be in, which states it can transition to and what triggers that state change. This state machine would differ from entity to entity. Because a bird might have states "walking" and "flying" while a human would only have the state "walking". However it could be shared by different entities because multiple humans will probably have the same states (especially when you define some common NPCs like monsters, etc). Additionally an orc might have the same states as a human. Just to demonstrate that this state definition might be shared but only by a select group of game entities. <state id='IDLE'> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_LEFT'> <event trigger='LEFT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_RIGHT'> <event trigger='RIGHT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> </state> These states can be handled by a polling system. Each game tick it grabs the current state of a game entity and checks all triggers. If a condition is met it changes the entity's state to the "goto" state. The last part I was struggling with was how to bind animation data and animation states to an entity. The most logical approach seemed to me to add a pointer to the state machine data an entity uses and to define for each state in that machine what animation it uses. Here is an xml example how I would define the animation behavior and graphical representation of some common entities in a game, by addressing animation state and animation data id. Note that both "wizard" and "orc" have the same animation states but a different animation. Also, a different animation could mean a different sprite sheet, or even a different sequence of animations (an animation could be longer or shorter). <entity name="wizard"> <state id="IDLE" animation="WIZARD_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="WIZARD_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> <entity name="orc"> <state id="IDLE" animation="ORC_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="ORC_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> When the entity is being created it would add a list of states with state machine data and an animation data reference. In the future I would use the entity system to build whole entities by defining components in a similar xml format. -- This is what I have come up with after some research. However I had some trouble getting my head around it, so I was hoping op some feedback. Is there something here what doesn't make sense, or is there a better way to handle these things? I grasped the idea of iterating through frames but I'm having trouble to take it a step further and this is my attempt to do that.

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• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• elffile: ELF Specific File Identification Utility

  - by user9154181

  Solaris 11 has a new standard user level command, /usr/bin/elffile. elffile is a variant of the file utility that is focused exclusively on linker related files: ELF objects, archives, and runtime linker configuration files. All other files are simply identified as "non-ELF". The primary advantage of elffile over the existing file utility is in the area of archives — elffile examines the archive members and can produce a summary of the contents, or per-member details. The impetus to add elffile to Solaris came from the effort to extend the format of Solaris archives so that they could grow beyond their previous 32-bit file limits. That work introduced a new archive symbol table format. Now that there was more than one possible format, I thought it would be useful if the file utility could identify which format a given archive is using, leading me to extend the file utility: % cc -c ~/hello.c % ar r foo.a hello.o % file foo.a foo.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table % ar r -S foo.a hello.o % file foo.a foo.a: current ar archive, 64-bit symbol table In turn, this caused me to think about all the things that I would like the file utility to be able to tell me about an archive. In particular, I'd like to be able to know what's inside without having to unpack it. The end result of that train of thought was elffile. Much of the discussion in this article is adapted from the PSARC case I filed for elffile in December 2010: PSARC 2010/432 elffile Why file Is No Good For Archives And Yet Should Not Be Fixed The standard /usr/bin/file utility is not very useful when applied to archives. When identifying an archive, a user typically wants to know 2 things: Is this an archive? Presupposing that the archive contains objects, which is by far the most common use for archives, what platform are the objects for? Are they for sparc or x86? 32 or 64-bit? Some confusing combination from varying platforms? The file utility provides a quick answer to question (1), as it identifies all archives as "current ar archive". It does nothing to answer the more interesting question (2). To answer that question, requires a multi-step process: Extract all archive members Use the file utility on the extracted files, examine the output for each file in turn, and compare the results to generate a suitable summary description. Remove the extracted files It should be easier and more efficient to answer such an obvious question. It would be reasonable to extend the file utility to examine archive contents in place and produce a description. However, there are several reasons why I decided not to do so: The correct design for this feature within the file utility would have file examine each archive member in turn, applying its full abilities to each member. This would be elegant, but also represents a rather dramatic redesign and re-implementation of file. Archives nearly always contain nothing but ELF objects for a single platform, so such generality in the file utility would be of little practical benefit. It is best to avoid adding new options to standard utilities for which other implementations of interest exist. In the case of the file utility, one concern is that we might add an option which later appears in the GNU version of file with a different and incompatible meaning. Indeed, there have been discussions about replacing the Solaris file with the GNU version in the past. This may or may not be desirable, and may or may not ever happen. Either way, I don't want to preclude it. Examining archive members is an O(n) operation, and can be relatively slow with large archives. The file utility is supposed to be a very fast operation. I decided that extending file in this way is overkill, and that an investment in the file utility for better archive support would not be worth the cost. A solution that is more narrowly focused on ELF and other linker related files is really all that we need. The necessary code for doing this already exists within libelf. All that is missing is a small user-level wrapper to make that functionality available at the command line. In that vein, I considered adding an option for this to the elfdump utility. I examined elfdump carefully, and even wrote a prototype implementation. The added code is small and simple, but the conceptual fit with the rest of elfdump is poor. The result complicates elfdump syntax and documentation, definite signs that this functionality does not belong there. And so, I added this functionality as a new user level command. The elffile Command The syntax for this new command is elffile [-s basic | detail | summary] filename... Please see the elffile(1) manpage for additional details. To demonstrate how output from elffile looks, I will use the following files: FileDescription configA runtime linker configuration file produced with crle dwarf.oAn ELF object /etc/passwdA text file mixed.aArchive containing a mixture of ELF and non-ELF members mixed_elf.aArchive containing ELF objects for different machines not_elf.aArchive containing no ELF objects same_elf.aArchive containing a collection of ELF objects for the same machine. This is the most common type of archive. The file utility identifies these files as follows: % file config dwarf.o /etc/passwd mixed.a mixed_elf.a not_elf.a same_elf.a config: Runtime Linking Configuration 64-bit MSB SPARCV9 dwarf.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 /etc/passwd: ascii text mixed.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table mixed_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table not_elf.a: current ar archive same_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table By default, elffile uses its "summary" output style. This output differs from the output from the file utility in 2 significant ways: Files that are not an ELF object, archive, or runtime linker configuration file are identified as "non-ELF", whereas the file utility attempts further identification for such files. When applied to an archive, the elffile output includes a description of the archive's contents, without requiring member extraction or other additional steps. Applying elffile to the above files: % elffile config dwarf.o /etc/passwd mixed.a mixed_elf.a not_elf.a same_elf.a config: Runtime Linking Configuration 64-bit MSB SPARCV9 dwarf.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 /etc/passwd: non-ELF mixed.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table, mixed ELF and non-ELF content mixed_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table, mixed ELF content not_elf.a: current ar archive, non-ELF content same_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table, ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 The output for same_elf.a is of particular interest: The vast majority of archives contain only ELF objects for a single platform, and in this case, the default output from elffile answers both of the questions about archives posed at the beginning of this discussion, in a single efficient step. This makes elffile considerably more useful than file, within the realm of linker-related files. elffile can produce output in two other styles, "basic", and "detail". The basic style produces output that is the same as that from 'file', for linker-related files. The detail style produces per-member identification of archive contents. This can be useful when the archive contents are not homogeneous ELF object, and more information is desired than the summary output provides: % elffile -s detail mixed.a mixed.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table mixed.a(dwarf.o): ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable 80386 Version 1 mixed.a(main.c): non-ELF content mixed.a(main.o): ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 [SSE]

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• Attaching a Command to the WP7 Application Bar.

  - by mbcrump

  One of the biggest problems that I’ve seen with people creating WP7 applications is how do you bind the application bar to a Relay Command. If your using MVVM then this is particular important. Let’s examine the code that one might add to start with.  <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar> <shell:ApplicationBar IsVisible="True" IsMenuEnabled="True"> <shell:ApplicationBarIconButton x:Name="appbar_button1" IconUri="/icons/appbar.questionmark.rest.png" Text="About"> <i:Interaction.Triggers> <i:EventTrigger EventName="Click"> <GalaSoft_MvvmLight_Command:EventToCommand Command="{Binding DisplayAbout, Mode=OneWay}" /> </i:EventTrigger> </i:Interaction.Triggers> </shell:ApplicationBarIconButton> <shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems> <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem x:Name="menuItem1" Text="MenuItem 1"></shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem> <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem x:Name="menuItem2" Text="MenuItem 2"></shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem> </shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems> </shell:ApplicationBar> </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar> Everything looks right. But we quickly notice that we have a squiggly line under our Interaction.Triggers. The problem is that the object is not a FrameworkObject. This same code would have worked perfect if this were a normal button. OK. Point has been proved. Let’s make the ApplicationBar support Commands. So, go ahead and create a new project using MVVM Light. If you want to check out the source and work along side this tutorial then click here.  7 Easy Steps to have binding on the Application Bar using MVVM Light (I might add that you don’t have to use MVVM Light to get this functionality, I just prefer it.) 1) Download MVVM Light if you don’t already have it and install the project templates. It is available at http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/. 2) Click File-New Project and navigate to Silverlight for Windows Phone. Make sure you use the MVVM Light (WP7) Template. 3) Now that we have our project setup and ready to go let’s download a wrapper created by Nicolas Humann here, it is called Phone7.Fx. After you download it then extract it somewhere that you can find it. This wrapper will make our application bar/menu item bindable. 4) Right click References inside your WP7 project and add the .dll file to your project. 5) In your MainPage.xaml you will need to add the proper namespace to it. Don’t forget to build your project afterwards. xmlns:Preview="clr-namespace:Phone7.Fx.Preview;assembly=Phone7.Fx.Preview" 6) Now you can add the BindableAppBar to your MainPage.xaml with a few lines of code.  <Preview:BindableApplicationBar x:Name="AppBar" BarOpacity="1.0" > <Preview:BindableApplicationBarIconButton Command="{Binding DisplayAbout}" IconUri="/icons/appbar.questionmark.rest.png" Text="About" /> <Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> <Preview:BindableApplicationBarMenuItem Text="Settings" Command="{Binding InputBox}" /> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar> So your final MainPage.xaml will look similar to this: NOTE: The AppBar will be located inside of the Grid using this wrapper.   <!--LayoutRoot contains the root grid where all other page content is placed--> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <!--TitlePanel contains the name of the application and page title--> <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="24,24,0,12"> <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="{Binding ApplicationTitle}" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="{Binding PageName}" Margin="-3,-8,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}" /> </StackPanel> <!--ContentPanel - place additional content here--> <Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Welcome}" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" FontSize="40" /> </Grid> <Preview:BindableApplicationBar x:Name="AppBar" BarOpacity="1.0" > <Preview:BindableApplicationBarIconButton Command="{Binding DisplayAbout}" IconUri="/icons/appbar.questionmark.rest.png" Text="About" /> <Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> <Preview:BindableApplicationBarMenuItem Text="Settings" Command="{Binding InputBox}" /> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar> </Grid> 7) Let’s go ahead and create the RelayCommands and write them up to a MessageBox by editing our MainViewModel.cs file. public class MainViewModel : ViewModelBase { public string ApplicationTitle { get { return "MVVM LIGHT"; } } public string PageName { get { return "My page:"; } } public string Welcome { get { return "Welcome to MVVM Light"; } } public RelayCommand DisplayAbout { get; private set; } public RelayCommand InputBox { get; private set; } /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the MainViewModel class. /// </summary> public MainViewModel() { if (IsInDesignMode) { // Code runs in Blend --> create design time data. } else { DisplayAbout = new RelayCommand(() => { MessageBox.Show("About box called!"); }); InputBox = new RelayCommand(() => { MessageBox.Show("settings button called"); }); } } If you run the project now you should get something similar to this (notice the AppBar at the bottom):  Now if you hit the question mark then you will get the following MessageBox: The MenuItem works as well so for Settings: As you can see, its pretty easy to add a Command to the ApplicationBar/MenuItem. If you want to look through the full source code then click here.   Subscribe to my feed

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• Windows Azure – Write, Run or Use Software

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem. The primary location for Windows Azure information is located at http://windowsazure.com. You can find everything there from the development kits for writing software to pricing, licensing and tutorials on all of that. I have a few links here for learning to use Windows Azure – although it’s best if you focus not on the tools, but what you want to solve. I’ve got it broken down here into various sections, so you can quickly locate things you want to know. I’ll include resources here from Microsoft and elsewhere – I use these same resources in the Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) I do with my clients worldwide. Write Software Also called “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), Windows Azure has lots of components you can use together or separately that allow you to write software in .NET or various Open Source languages to work completely online, or in partnership with code you have on-premises or both – even if you’re using other cloud providers. Keep in mind that all of the features you see here can be used together, or independently. For instance, you might only use a Web Site, or use Storage, but you can use both together. You can access all of these components through standard REST API calls, or using our Software Development Kit’s API’s, which are a lot easier. In any case, you simply use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Cloud9 IDE, or even a text editor to write your code from a Mac, PC or Linux.  Components you can use: Azure Web Sites: Windows Azure Web Sites allow you to quickly write an deploy websites, without setting a Virtual Machine, installing a web server or configuring complex settings. They work alone, with other Windows Azure Web Sites, or with other parts of Windows Azure. Web and Worker Roles: Windows Azure Web Roles give you a full stateless computing instance with Internet Information Services (IIS) installed and configured. Windows Azure Worker Roles give you a full stateless computing instance without Information Services (IIS) installed, often used in a "Services" mode. Scale-out is achieved either manually or programmatically under your control. Storage: Windows Azure Storage types include Blobs to store raw binary data, Tables to use key/value pair data (like NoSQL data structures), Queues that allow interaction between stateless roles, and a relational SQL Server database. Other Services: Windows Azure has many other services such as a security mechanism, a Cache (memcacheD compliant), a Service Bus, a Traffic Manager and more. Once again, these features can be used with a Windows Azure project, or alone based on your needs. Various Languages: Windows Azure supports the .NET stack of languages, as well as many Open-Source languages like Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, C++ and more.   Use Software Also called “Software as a Service” (SaaS) this often means consumer or business-level software like Hotmail or Office 365. In other words, you simply log on, use the software, and log off – there’s nothing to install, and little to even configure. For the Information Technology professional, however, It’s not quite the same. We want software that provides services, but in a platform. That means we want things like Hadoop or other software we don’t want to have to install and configure.  Components you can use: Kits: Various software “kits” or packages are supported with just a few clicks, such as Umbraco, Wordpress, and others. Windows Azure Media Services: Windows Azure Media Services is a suite of services that allows you to upload media for encoding, processing and even streaming – or even one or more of those functions. We can add DRM and even commercials to your media if you like. Windows Azure Media Services is used to stream large events all the way down to small training videos. High Performance Computing and “Big Data”: Windows Azure allows you to scale to huge workloads using a few clicks to deploy Hadoop Clusters or the High Performance Computing (HPC) nodes, accepting HPC Jobs, Pig and Hive Jobs, and even interfacing with Microsoft Excel. Windows Azure Marketplace: Windows Azure Marketplace offers data and programs you can quickly implement and use – some free, some for-fee.   Run Software Also known as “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), this offering allows you to build or simply choose a Virtual Machine to run server-based software.  Components you can use: Persistent Virtual Machines: You can choose to install Windows Server, Windows Server with Active Directory, with SQL Server, or even SharePoint from a pre-configured gallery. You can configure your own server images with standard Hyper-V technology and load them yourselves – and even bring them back when you’re done. As a new offering, we also even allow you to select various distributions of Linux – a first for Microsoft. Windows Azure Connect: You can connect your on-premises networks to Windows Azure Instances. Storage: Windows Azure Storage can be used as a remote backup, a hybrid storage location and more using software or even hardware appliances.   Decision Matrix With all of these options, you can use Windows Azure to solve just about any computing problem. It’s often hard to know when to use something on-premises, in the cloud, and what kind of service to use. I’ve used a decision matrix in the last couple of years to take a particular problem and choose the proper technology to solve it. It’s all about options – there is no “silver bullet”, whether that’s Windows Azure or any other set of functions. I take the problem, decide which particular component I want to own and control – and choose the column that has that box darkened. For instance, if I have to control the wiring for a solution (a requirement in some military and government installations), that means the “Networking” component needs to be dark, and so I select the “On Premises” column for that particular solution. If I just need the solution provided and I want no control at all, I can look as “Software as a Service” solutions. Security, Pricing, and Other Info  Security: Security is one of the first questions you should ask in any distributed computing environment. We have certification info, coding guidelines and more, even a general “Request for Information” RFI Response already created for you.   Pricing: Are there licenses? How much does this cost? Is there a way to estimate the costs in this new environment? New Features: Many new features were added to Windows Azure - a good roundup of those changes can be found here. Support: Software Support on Virtual Machines, general support.    

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• Building an OpenStack Cloud for Solaris Engineering, Part 1

  - by Dave Miner

  One of the signature features of the recently-released Solaris 11.2 is the OpenStack cloud computing platform.  Over on the Solaris OpenStack blog the development team is publishing lots of details about our version of OpenStack Havana as well as some tips on specific features, and I highly recommend reading those to get a feel for how we've leveraged Solaris's features to build a top-notch cloud platform.  In this and some subsequent posts I'm going to look at it from a different perspective, which is that of the enterprise administrator deploying an OpenStack cloud.  But this won't be just a theoretical perspective: I've spent the past several months putting together a deployment of OpenStack for use by the Solaris engineering organization, and now that it's in production we'll share how we built it and what we've learned so far.In the Solaris engineering organization we've long had dedicated lab systems dispersed among our various sites and a home-grown reservation tool for developers to reserve those systems; various teams also have private systems for specific testing purposes.  But as a developer, it can still be difficult to find systems you need, especially since most Solaris changes require testing on both SPARC and x86 systems before they can be integrated.  We've added virtual resources over the years as well in the form of LDOMs and zones (both traditional non-global zones and the new kernel zones).  Fundamentally, though, these were all still deployed in the same model: our overworked lab administrators set up pre-configured resources and we then reserve them.  Sounds like pretty much every traditional IT shop, right?  Which means that there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies from greater use of virtualization and the self-service style of cloud computing.  As we were well into development of OpenStack on Solaris, I was recruited to figure out how we could deploy it to both provide more (and more efficient) development and test resources for the organization as well as a test environment for Solaris OpenStack.At this point, let's acknowledge one fact: deploying OpenStack is hard.  It's a very complex piece of software that makes use of sophisticated networking features and runs as a ton of service daemons with myriad configuration files.  The web UI, Horizon, doesn't often do a good job of providing detailed errors.  Even the command-line clients are not as transparent as you'd like, though at least you can turn on verbose and debug messaging and often get some clues as to what to look for, though it helps if you're good at reading JSON structure dumps.  I'd already learned all of this in doing a single-system Grizzly-on-Linux deployment for the development team to reference when they were getting started so I at least came to this job with some appreciation for what I was taking on.  The good news is that both we and the community have done a lot to make deployment much easier in the last year; probably the easiest approach is to download the OpenStack Unified Archive from OTN to get your hands on a single-system demonstration environment.  I highly recommend getting started with something like it to get some understanding of OpenStack before you embark on a more complex deployment.  For some situations, it may in fact be all you ever need.  If so, you don't need to read the rest of this series of posts!In the Solaris engineering case, we need a lot more horsepower than a single-system cloud can provide.  We need to support both SPARC and x86 VM's, and we have hundreds of developers so we want to be able to scale to support thousands of VM's, though we're going to build to that scale over time, not immediately.  We also want to be able to test both Solaris 11 updates and a release such as Solaris 12 that's under development so that we can work out any upgrade issues before release.  One thing we don't have is a requirement for extremely high availability, at least at this point.  We surely don't want a lot of down time, but we can tolerate scheduled outages and brief (as in an hour or so) unscheduled ones.  Thus I didn't need to spend effort on trying to get high availability everywhere.The diagram below shows our initial deployment design.  We're using six systems, most of which are x86 because we had more of those immediately available.  All of those systems reside on a management VLAN and are connected with a two-way link aggregation of 1 Gb links (we don't yet have 10 Gb switching infrastructure in place, but we'll get there).  A separate VLAN provides "public" (as in connected to the rest of Oracle's internal network) addresses, while we use VxLANs for the tenant networks. One system is more or less the control node, providing the MySQL database, RabbitMQ, Keystone, and the Nova API and scheduler as well as the Horizon console.  We're curious how this will perform and I anticipate eventually splitting at least the database off to another node to help simplify upgrades, but at our present scale this works.I had a couple of systems with lots of disk space, one of which was already configured as the Automated Installation server for the lab, so it's just providing the Glance image repository for OpenStack.  The other node with lots of disks provides Cinder block storage service; we also have a ZFS Storage Appliance that will help back-end Cinder in the near future, I just haven't had time to get it configured in yet.There's a separate system for Neutron, which is our Elastic Virtual Switch controller and handles the routing and NAT for the guests.  We don't have any need for firewalling in this deployment so we're not doing so.  We presently have only two tenants defined, one for the Solaris organization that's funding this cloud, and a separate tenant for other Oracle organizations that would like to try out OpenStack on Solaris.  Each tenant has one VxLAN defined initially, but we can of course add more.  Right now we have just a single /24 network for the floating IP's, once we get demand up to where we need more then we'll add them.Finally, we have started with just two compute nodes; one is an x86 system, the other is an LDOM on a SPARC T5-2.  We'll be adding more when demand reaches the level where we need them, but as we're still ramping up the user base it's less work to manage fewer nodes until then.My next post will delve into the details of building this OpenStack cloud's infrastructure, including how we're using various Solaris features such as Automated Installation, IPS packaging, SMF, and Puppet to deploy and manage the nodes.  After that we'll get into the specifics of configuring and running OpenStack itself.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, September 03, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, September 03, 2012Popular ReleasesMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 03.01.03: Cambios Aury: Ajuste del margen del reporte. Visualización de la columna de Supuestos en la parte del módulo de Decisión. Cambios John: Integración de código con cambios enviados por Aury Niño. Generación de instaladores. Soporte técnico por correo electrónico y telefónico.Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...Thisismyusername's codeplex page.: HTML5 Mulititouch Fruit Ninja Proof of Concept: This is an example of how you could create a game such as Fruit Ninja using HTML5's multitouch capabilities. Sorry this example doesn't have great graphics. If I had my own webpage, I could store some graphics and upload the game there and it might look halfway decent, but since I'm only using a Codeplex page and most mobile devices can't open .zip files, the fruits are just circles. I hope you enjoy reading the source code anyway.GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.TSQL Code Smells Finder: POC 1.01: Proof of concept 1.01 TSQLDomTest.ps1 and Errors.Txt are requiredConfuser: Confuser build 76542: This is a build of changeset 76542.Reactive State Machine: ReactiveStateMachine-beta: TouchStateMachine now supports Microsoft Surface 2.0 SDK. The TouchStateMachine is an extension to the Reactive State Machine. Reactive State Machine uses NuGet for dependency managementSharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.2: Version 1.2 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerMihmojsos OS: Mihmojsos OS 3 (Smart Rabbit): !Mihmojsos OS 3 Smart Rabbit Mihmojsos Smart Rabbit is now availableDotNetNuke Translator: 01.00.00 Beta: First release of the project.YNA: YNA 0.2 alpha: Wath's new since 0.1 alpha ? A lot of changes but there are the most interresting : StateManager is now better and faster Mouse events for all YnObjects (Sprites, Images, texts) A really big improvement for YnGroup Gamepad support And the news : Tiled Map support (need refactoring) Isometric tiled map support (need refactoring) Transition effect like "FadeIn" and "FadeOut" (YnTransition) Timers (YnTimer) Path management (YnPath, need more refactoring) Downloads All downloads...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.2: fixed several issues with streaming modeUrlPager: UrlPager 1.2: Fixed bug in which url parameters will lost after paging; ????????url???bug；Sofire Suite: Sofire v1.5.0.0: Sofire v1.5.0.0 ?? ???????? ?????： 1、?? 2、????EntLib.com????????: EntLib.com???????? v3.0: EntLib eCommerce Solution ???Microsoft .Net Framework?????????????????????。Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.2.1: Major linear algebra rework since v2.1, now available on Codeplex as well (previous versions were only available via NuGet). Since v2.2.0: Student-T density more robust for very large degrees of freedom Sparse Kronecker product much more efficient (now leverages sparsity) Direct access to raw matrix storage implementations for advanced extensibility Now also separate package for signed core library with a strong name (we dropped strong names in v2.2.0) Also available as NuGet packages...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Databases – 2012, 2008R2 and 2008: About this release This release consolidates AdventureWorks databases for SQL Server 2012, 2008R2 and 2008 versions to one page. Each zip file contains an mdf database file and ldf log file. This should make it easier to find and download AdventureWorks databases since all OLTP versions are on one page. There are no database schema changes. For each release of the product, there is a light-weight and full version of the AdventureWorks sample database. The light-weight version is denoted by ...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke Project Templates V1.1 for VS2012: This release is specifically for Visual Studio 2012 Support, distributed through the Visual Studio Extensions gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ After you build in Release mode the installable packages (source/install) can be found in the INSTALL folder now, within your module's folder, not the packages folder anymore Check out the blog post for all of the details about this release. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Blogs/EntryId/3471/New-Visual-Studio-2012-Projec...New ProjectsBPVote4PPT: BPVote For PowerPointCosmo OS: La semplicità in un OSFinancial Analytic Tools: C#.Net Financial Analytic ToolsGeminiMVC: An Open Source CMS written in ASP.net MVC 4 with speed, extensibility, and ease-of-us in mind.JQuery SharePoint Autocomplete People Picker: This JQUery bundle provides an autocomplete people picker based on SharePoint profiles. It can be hosted on the SharePoint itself or on remote applications.Kerbal Space Program PartModule Library: This project is designed to add various functionalities to custom parts for the space program simulation game Kerbal Space Program.KeyboardRemapper: This tool to remaps keys in the keyboard. If you have more than one keyboard or an additional keypad, you can remap the keys of the each keyboard independentlyKHStudent: ??????Localized DataAnnotations with T4 templates: Simplified DataAnnotations localization using T4 templates.MfcLightToolkit: Supports development for small and simple MFC application. Provides asynchronous programming model like .NET, file download, easy control resizing, and so on.Müslüm ÖZTÜRK Code Lib: Test amaçli olusturulan projemdirPolska: Testproject in how a polish grammerprogram can look like.QueueLessApp: Here is the codeRusIS.CMS: aaaSGPS: Projeto de controle de produtos e serviçosStemmersNet: Stemmers pack for .Net FrameworkTrabajo Final de Ingenieria - Javier Vallejos: Tesis Final de la carrera de Ingenieria - Universidad Abierta Interamericana.TSQL Code Smells Finder: TSQL 'smells' findersXNA and Data Driven Design: This project includes links for XNA and Data Driven DesignXNA and System Testing: This project includes code for XNA and System TestingYUGI-AR Project: an open source project for yugioh based augmented reality???????? ? ?????????????: ???? ??????? ??????? ?????????????? ??????????? ?????????? ??? ? ????? ?????? ? ? ??? ??? ????? ? ??? ?????????? ????????????.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 07, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 07, 2013Popular ReleasesCompare .NET Objects: Version 1.7.4.0: Manual merge of patch 15325 from Farris to fix issues 9075 and 9076 relating to defects with Ignoring the Collection Order Applied patch 15263 from MariuszWojcik to support LINQ enumerators.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.9.25): XrmToolbox improvement Correct changing connection from the status dropdown Tools improvement Updated tool Audit Center (v1.2013.9.10) -> Publish entities Iconator (v1.2013.9.27) -> Optimized asynchronous loading of images and entities MetadataDocumentGenerator (v1.2013.11.6) -> Correct system entities reading with incorrect attribute type Script Manager (v1.2013.9.27) -> Retrieve only custom events SiteMapEditor (v1.2013.11.7) -> Reset of CRM 2013 SiteMap ViewLayoutReplicator (v1.201...Event-Based Components AppBuilder: AB3.AppDesigner.59: Iteration 59 (Feature): By selecting the center thumb of a selected wire you can add a point attribute by context menu (to redirect a wire). Therefore all possible wire outlines are possible... New: AddNewWirePointAttributeFlow, AddNewWirePointAttributeAdapter, NewPointAttributeAdder Improved: LineAdorner, WireLineDecoratorBase, WireLineSourceToTargetDecorator, WiresRenderer, ... See: https://ebcappbuilder.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Modify%20the%20view%20of%20a%20wire Coming soon: Iterat...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: SQL Server 2014 CTP2 In-Memory OLTP Sample, based: This sample showcases the new In-Memory OLTP feature, which is part of SQL Server 2014 CTP2. It shows the new memory-optimized tables and natively-compiled stored procedures, and can be used to show the performance benefit of in-memory OLTP. Installation instructions for the sample are included in the file ‘awinmemsample.doc’, which is part of the download. You can ask a question about this sample at the SQL Server Samples Forum Composite C1 CMS - Open Source on .NET: Composite C1 4.1: Composite C1 4.1 (4.1.5058.34326) Write a review for this release - help us improve, recommend us. Getting started If you are new to Composite C1 and want to install it: http://docs.composite.net/Getting-started What's new in Composite C1 4.1 The following are highlights of major changes since Composite C1 4.0: General user features: Drag-and-drop images and files like PDF and Word directly from own your desktop and folders into page content Allow you to install Composite Form Builder ...xFunc: xFunc 2.10.1: Fixed https://github.com/sys27/xFunc/issues/60.Win_8 (??? Devel Studio 2 ??? 3): Win8 0.8 + Sample (.dvs): ???????------------------------------------------ 1. ????????? ??????????? ????????? ??????. 2. ?????????? ???? , ????????? ? ?????????? ???? ????. 3. ?????????? ?????? ??????. 4. ?????????? ????????? ???????????. 5. ????????????? ??? . English----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Added ability to load icons. 2. Fixed bugs related to obtaining names of shapes. 3. Fixed a memory leak. 4. Fixed some defects. 5. Optimized code. ---------------------------...ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 131105 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe"CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.9.0: Implemented Recent Scripts list Added checking for plugin updates from AboutBox Multiple formatting improvements/fixes Implemented selection of the CLR version when preparing distribution package Added project panel button for showing plugin shortcuts list Added 'What's New?' panel Fixed auto-formatting scrolling artifact Implemented navigation to "logical" file (vs. auto-generated) file from output panel To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.Home Access Plus+: v9.7: Updated: JSON.net Fixed: Issue with the Windows 8 App Added: Windows 8.1 App Added: Win: Self Signed HAP+ Install Support Added: Win: Delete File Support Added: Timeout for the Logon Tracker Removed: Error Dialogs on the User Card Fixed: Green line showing over the booking form Note: a web.config file update is requiredxUnit.net - Unit testing framework for C# and .NET (a successor to NUnit): xUnit.net Visual Studio Runner: A placeholder for downloading Visual Studio runner VSIX files, in case the Gallery is down (or you want to downgrade to older versions).Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.9.1): This new version includes: - Include me option is back - Fixed the login bug reported latelyVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0c: Changes between 1.0b and 1.0c (11 November 2013) : Set correctly the minimum required version in volumes header (this value must always follow the program version after any major changes). This also solves also the hidden volume issueCaptcha MVC: Captcha MVC 2.5: v 2.5: Added support for MVC 5. The DefaultCaptchaManager is no longer throws an error if the captcha values was entered incorrectly. Minor changes. v 2.4.1: Fixed issues with deleting incorrect values of the captcha token in the SessionStorageProvider. This could lead to a situation when the captcha was not working with the SessionStorageProvider. Minor changes. v 2.4: Changed the IIntelligencePolicy interface, added ICaptchaManager as parameter for all methods. Improved font size ...Duplica: duplica 0.2.498: this is first stable releaseDNN Blog: 06.00.01: 06.00.01 ReleaseThis is the first bugfix release of the new v6 blog module. These are the changes: Added some robustness in v5-v6 scripts to cater for some rare upgrade scenarios Changed the name of the module definition to avoid clash with Evoq Social Addition of sitemap providerVG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.50: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageHostHQ.com" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgMoney.net" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgSavy.com" links NEW: Added Support for "PixTreat.com" links Bug fixesVidCoder: 1.5.11 Beta: Added Encode Details window. Exposes elapsed time, ETA, current and average FPS, running file size, current pass and pass progress. Open it by going to Windows -> Encode Details while an encode is running. Subtitle dialog now disables the "Burn In" checkbox when it's either unavailable or it's the only option. It also disables the "Forced Only" when the subtitle type doesn't support the "Forced" flag. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5872. Fixed crash in the preview window when a source fil...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1311.02: Add three new Actions in Custom Updates : Work with Files (Copy, Delete, Rename), Work with Folders (Add, Delete, Rename) and Work with Registry Keys (Add, Delete, Rename). Fix a bug, where after resigning an update, the display is not refresh. Modify the way WPP sort rows in 'Updates Detail Viewer' and 'Computer List Viewer' so that dates are correctly sorted. Add a Tab in the settings form to set Proxy settings when WPP needs to go on Internet. Fix a bug where 'Manage Catalogs Subsc...uComponents: uComponents v6.0.0: This release of uComponents will compile against and support the new API in Umbraco v6.1.0. What's new in uComponents v6.0.0? New DataTypesImage Point XML DropDownList XPath Templatable List New features / Resolved issuesThe following workitems have been implemented and/or resolved: 14781 14805 14808 14818 14854 14827 14868 14859 14790 14853 14790 DataType Grid 14788 14810 14873 14833 14864 14855 / 14860 14816 14823 Drag & Drop support for rows Su...New ProjectsAuto Mapping MVVM: A simple MVVM Kit that works with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, with the ability to automatically map between Views and ViewModels.BMS Converter: BMS Converter is a converter for .bms files (Be-Music Source), which converts them to audio and/or video files.Car Management: The software which is going to be developed aims to give an interface in order to manage cars booking with ABC University institution.Classic Algorithms: This is a collection of classic algorithms written in C#. I'll start with the Graphs.Community TFS Work Item Tracking Extensions: The Community TFS WIT Extensions project is a place to share tools and extensions to the TFS work item tracking system.D3N: "port" of D3 to .NETdoinik tara client: The Daily Star ClientLEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 API: API for the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 brick usable from desktop, Windows Phone and WinRT.LudejoWcf: Playground wcfMy Test: This is a demoPearson API Wrapper: Pearson API Wrapper enables you to develop Learning Apps faster !Pescar2013ShopAyelenArce: Lalalapescar2013-shop-ElectroShop: ya contiene: EF5 agrega: layouts bootstrap bootstrap js js linq(?) knockout(?) jquery jquery ui Pescar2013Shop-MaruMati: Venta de productos a través de una pagina web.Pescar2013Shop-The_Future_2014: primer proyecto.RatatoskSMS: SMS gateway based on library GSMComm, that can handle multiple GSM modems to send and recieve messages to/from database, with http interface.SharePoint Enhanced New: A replacement to the "New Document" split button in document libraries with a modal dialog displaying available document Content Types.Task Management Application: The Eisenhower Matrix with BacklogTridion: This project provides an analog to Tridion Core Services for older versions of Tridion that rely on the TOM (COM) architecture.Web Scripting - Assignment 2 - Website Prototype: Assignment 2 - Website PrototypeWindows Azure Custom Performance Counters: The project Windows Azure Custom Performance Counters is a startup task to help working with custom performance counters on web and worker roles.

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• To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 3

  - by AshishRay

  I can't believe it has been almost a year since my last blog post. I know, that's an absolute no-no in the blogosphere. And I know that "I have been busy" is not a good excuse. So - without trying to come up with an excuse - let me state this - my apologies for taking such a long time to write the next Part. Without further ado, here goes. This is Part 3 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In this article, I will talk in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing. I will also talk about distance implications for setting up such a configuration. So, Why Good? Why is Data Guard SYNC a good thing? Because, at the end of the day, this gives you the assurance of zero data loss - it doesn’t matter what outage may befall your primary system. Befall! Boy, that sounds theatrical. But seriously - think about this - it minimizes your data risks. That’s a big deal. Whether you have an outage due to bad disks, faulty hardware components, hardware / software bugs, physical data corruptions, power failures, lightning that takes out significant part of your data center, fire that melts your assets, water leakage from the cooling system, human errors such as accidental deletion of online redo log files - it doesn’t matter - you can have that “Om - peace” look on your face and then you can failover to the standby system, without losing a single bit of data in your Oracle database. You will be a hero, as shown in this not so imaginary conversation: IT Manager: Well, what’s the status? You: John is doing the trace analysis on the storage array. IT Manager: So? How long is that gonna take? You: Well, he is stuck, waiting for a response from <insert your not-so-favorite storage vendor here>. IT Manager: So, no root cause yet? You: I told you, he is stuck. We have escalated with their Support, but you know how long these things take. IT Manager: Darn it - the site is down! You: Not really … IT Manager: What do you mean? You: John is stuck, but Sreeni has already done a failover to the Data Guard standby. IT Manager: Whoa, whoa - wait! Failover means we lost some data, why did you do this without letting the Business group know? You: We didn’t lose any data. Remember, we had set up Data Guard with SYNC? So now, any problems on the production – we just failover. No data loss, and we are up and running in minutes. The Business guys don’t need to know. IT Manager: Wow! Are we great or what!! You: I guess … Ok, so you get it - SYNC is good. But as my dear friend Larry Carpenter says, “TANSTAAFL”, or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". Yes, of course - investing in Data Guard SYNC means that you have to invest in a low-latency network, you have to monitor your applications and database especially in peak load conditions, and you cannot under-provision your standby systems. But all these are good and necessary things, if you are supporting mission-critical apps that are supposed to be running 24x7. The peace of mind that this investment will give you is priceless, especially if you are serious about HA. How Far Can We Go? Someone may say at this point - well, I can’t use Data Guard SYNC over my coast-to-coast deployment. Most likely - true. So how far can you go? Well, we have customers who have deployed Data Guard SYNC over 300+ miles! Does this mean that you can also deploy over similar distances? Duh - no! I am going to say something here that most IT managers don’t like to hear - “It depends!” It depends on your application design, application response time / throughput requirements, network topology, etc. However, because of the optimal way we do SYNC, customers have been able to stretch Data Guard SYNC deployments over longer distances compared to traditional, storage-centric ways of doing this. The MAA Database 10.2 best practices paper Data Guard Redo Transport & Network Configuration, and Oracle Database 11.2 High Availability Best Practices Manual talk about some of these SYNC-related metrics. For example, a test deployment of Data Guard SYNC over 330 miles with 10ms latency showed an impact less than 5% for a busy OLTP application. Even if you can’t deploy Data Guard SYNC over your WAN distance, or if you already have an ASYNC standby located 1000-s of miles away, here’s another nifty way to boost your HA. Have a local standby, configured SYNC. How local is “local”? Again - it depends. One customer runs a local SYNC standby across the campus. Another customer runs it across 15 miles in another data center. Both of these customers are running Data Guard SYNC as their HA standard. If a localized outage affects their primary system, no problem! They have all the data available on the standby, to which they can failover. Very fast. In seconds. Wait - did I say “seconds”? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But you have to wait till the next blog article to find out more. I assure you tho’ that this time you won’t have to wait for another year for this.

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• 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

  - by MarkPearl

  For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 10 &ndash; In Depth TCP/IP Networking

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Understand methods of network design unique to TCP/IP networks, including subnetting, CIDR, and address translation Explain the differences between public and private TCP/IP networks Describe protocols used between mail clients and mail servers, including SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Employ multiple TCP/IP utilities for network discovery and troubleshooting Designing TCP/IP-Based Networks The following sections explain how network and host information in an IPv4 address can be manipulated to subdivide networks into smaller segments. Subnetting Subnetting separates a network into multiple logically defined segments, or subnets. Networks are commonly subnetted according to geographic locations, departmental boundaries, or technology types. A network administrator might separate traffic to accomplish the following… Enhance security Improve performance Simplify troubleshooting The challenges of Classful Addressing in IPv4 (No subnetting) The simplest type of IPv4 is known as classful addressing (which was the Class A, Class B & Class C network addresses). Classful addressing has the following limitations. Restriction in the number of usable IPv4 addresses (class C would be limited to 254 addresses) Difficult to separate traffic from various parts of a network Because of the above reasons, subnetting was introduced. IPv4 Subnet Masks Subnetting depends on the use of subnet masks to identify how a network is subdivided. A subnet mask indicates where network information is located in an IPv4 address. The 1 in a subnet mask indicates that corresponding bits in the IPv4 address contain network information (likewise 0 indicates the opposite) Each network class is associated with a default subnet mask… Class A = 255.0.0.0 Class B = 255.255.0.0 Class C = 255.255.255.0 An example of calculating  the network ID for a particular device with a subnet mask is shown below.. IP Address = 199.34.89.127 Subnet Mask = 255.255.255.0 Resultant Network ID = 199.34.89.0 IPv4 Subnetting Techniques Subnetting breaks the rules of classful IPv4 addressing. Read page 490 for a detailed explanation Calculating IPv4 Subnets Read page 491 – 494 for an explanation Important… Subnetting only applies to the devices internal to your network. Everything external looks at the class of the IP address instead of the subnet network ID. This way, traffic directed to your network externally still knows where to go, and once it has entered your internal network it can then be prioritized and segmented. CIDR (classless Interdomain Routing) CIDR is also known as classless routing or supernetting. In CIDR conventional network class distinctions do not exist, a subnet boundary can move to the left, therefore generating more usable IP addresses on your network. A subnet created by moving the subnet boundary to the left is known as a supernet. With CIDR also came new shorthand for denoting the position of subnet boundaries known as CIDR notation or slash notation. CIDR notation takes the form of the network ID followed by a forward slash (/) followed by the number of bits that are used for the extended network prefix. To take advantage of classless routing, your networks routers must be able to interpret IP addresses that don;t adhere to conventional network class parameters. Routers that rely on older routing protocols (i.e. RIP) are not capable of interpreting classless IP addresses. Internet Gateways Gateways are a combination of software and hardware that enable two different network segments to exchange data. A gateway facilitates communication between different networks or subnets. Because on device cannot send data directly to a device on another subnet, a gateway must intercede and hand off the information. Every device on a TCP/IP based network has a default gateway (a gateway that first interprets its outbound requests to other subnets, and then interprets its inbound requests from other subnets). The internet contains a vast number of routers and gateways. If each gateway had to track addressing information for every other gateway on the Internet, it would be overtaxed. Instead, each handles only a relatively small amount of addressing information, which it uses to forward data to another gateway that knows more about the data’s destination. The gateways that make up the internet backbone are called core gateways. Address Translation An organizations default gateway can also be used to “hide” the organizations internal IP addresses and keep them from being recognized on a public network. A public network is one that any user may access with little or no restrictions. On private networks, hiding IP addresses allows network managers more flexibility in assigning addresses. Clients behind a gateway may use any IP addressing scheme, regardless of whether it is recognized as legitimate by the Internet authorities but as soon as those devices need to go on the internet, they must have legitimate IP addresses to exchange data. When a clients transmission reaches the default gateway, the gateway opens the IP datagram and replaces the client’s private IP address with an Internet recognized IP address. This process is known as NAT (Network Address Translation). TCP/IP Mail Services All Internet mail services rely on the same principles of mail delivery, storage, and pickup, though they may use different types of software to accomplish these functions. Email servers and clients communicate through special TCP/IP application layer protocols. These protocols, all of which operate on a variety of operating systems are discussed below… SMTP (Simple Mail transfer Protocol) The protocol responsible for moving messages from one mail server to another over TCP/IP based networks. SMTP belongs to the application layer of the ODI model and relies on TCP as its transport protocol. Operates from port 25 on the SMTP server Simple sub-protocol, incapable of doing anything more than transporting mail or holding it in a queue MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) The standard message format specified by SMTP allows for lines that contain no more than 1000 ascii characters meaning if you relied solely on SMTP you would have very short messages and nothing like pictures included in an email. MIME us a standard for encoding and interpreting binary files, images, video, and non-ascii character sets within an email message. MIME identifies each element of a mail message according to content type. MIME does not replace SMTP but works in conjunction with it. Most modern email clients and servers support MIME POP (Post Office Protocol) POP is an application layer protocol used to retrieve messages from a mail server POP3 relies on TCP and operates over port 110 With POP3 mail is delivered and stored on a mail server until it is downloaded by a user Disadvantage of POP3 is that it typically does not allow users to save their messages on the server because of this IMAP is sometimes used IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) IMAP is a retrieval protocol that was developed as a more sophisticated alternative to POP3 The single biggest advantage IMAP4 has over POP3 is that users can store messages on the mail server, rather than having to continually download them Users can retrieve all or only a portion of any mail message Users can review their messages and delete them while the messages remain on the server Users can create sophisticated methods of organizing messages on the server Users can share a mailbox in a central location Disadvantages of IMAP are typically related to the fact that it requires more storage space on the server. Additional TCP/IP Utilities Nearly all TCP/IP utilities can be accessed from the command prompt on any type of server or client running TCP/IP. The syntaxt may differ depending on the OS of the client. Below is a list of additional TCP/IP utilities – research their use on your own! Ipconfig (Windows) & Ifconfig (Linux) Netstat Nbtstat Hostname, Host & Nslookup Dig (Linux) Whois (Linux) Traceroute (Tracert) Mtr (my traceroute) Route

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