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  • People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste

    - by Michael Snow
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry. Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes. Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal  Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner Customer Overview Omnitracs, Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and weighting distribution, and many others. Customer Business Needs Already the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very intuitive and easy to use. The systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation. Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details. Omnitracs wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals. Omnitracs’ stated goal was to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large company customer base. Solution Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and external) customers. This solution was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on applications for the devices (much like the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts. This is a conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components that make up the solution. 12.00 The portal application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’ business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge whether eBS is running or not. Here are two sample screenshots of the portal application built in Oracle ADF. Customer Benefits The Customer Portal not only provided the scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are: Improved Customer Experience: With a modern look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all of the pages. Enabled new product launches: After successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now takes minutes Seamless Integrations Improves Customer Support: ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into one integrated solution. This provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations included: Unity Core Salesforce.com Merchant e-Solution for credit card Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and AUTO Security utilizing OID and OVD Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard) and iQ Database Business Impact Significant business impacts were realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and identifying the market for new products. Some of the Immediate Benefits are The entire onboarding process is now completely automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85% productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160 times faster! With the success of this self-service solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services. 90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality Unified login for all Customers, Partners and Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience Significantly improved customer experience with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal screens. Helped sales of the new product by having an easy way of ordering and activating the product. Data Guard helped increase availability of the Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave customers the feel of high availability of the portal application. Some of the anticipated longer term Benefits are: Platform that can be leveraged to launch any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new customers and new markets Easy integration with content management to allow business owners more control of the product catalog Overall reduced TCO with standardization of the Oracle platform Managed IT support cost savings through optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution ------------------------------------------------------------ 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:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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  • Keyword Research - 5 Steps to Find Six Figure Niches in Minutes

    Keyword Research is the single most important skill that anyone marketing online needs to know. If you master keyword research, you will be able to discover words that will generate money on demand. I will give you a quick and easy 5 step formula that you can use to find keywords that you can use to dominate any market, sometimes in hours.

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  • How to support email subscriptions to many rss feeds

    - by peter
    I am interested in having the option to be able to subscribe to any of my RSS feeds by email, without having to manage any of the email lists. Are there any email delivery services that allow easy subscription to arbitrary feeds? MailChimp's api doesn't allow list creation. The closest I can come up with is linking people to a google alert: http://www.google.com/alerts?q=site:mysite.com/category/food http://www.google.com/alerts?q=site:mysite.com/category/drinks

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  • Thinktecture.IdentityModel.Http and the ASP.NET Web API CodePlex bits

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    I will keep the github repo in sync with the major releases of Web API (like Beta, RC, RTM). Because of the changes made to Web API after beta, my current bits don’t build against the CodePlex version anymore. Today I installed a build environment for the CodePlex bits, and migrated my code. It turns out the changes are pretty easy: Simply replace Request.GetUserPrincipal() with Thread.CurrentPrincipal ;) I will update the repo when RC comes out.

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  • Think It's Hard to Integrate the Front and Back Office? Think Again...

    - by ruth.donohue
    There's no doubt about it, fragmented customer information across application silos exist because integration isn't easy. It can be expensive. And it can be further complicated by proprietary architectures and vendors. But by leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecure, Pillar Data Systems was able to integrate Oracle CRM On Demand with Oracle E-Business Suite in six weeks, reducing the time required to complete the integration by 50% and the maintenance by 20% to 25% to free IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives. Learn more...

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  • ASP.NET developers build rich management system using the VWG extension

    - by Visual WebGui
    When The Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) decided they needed a web application to allow easy access to the expenses management system they initially went to ASP.NET web forms combined with CSS. The outcome, however, was not satisfying enough as it appeared bland and lacked in richness. So in order to enrich the UI and give the web application some glitz, Visual WebGui was selected. Visual WebGui provided the needed richness and the familiar Windows look and feel also made the transition...(read more)

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  • Friday Fun: Heru

    - by Asian Angel
    This week’s game will test your ability to aim accurately, work quickly, and keep focused all at the same time. Just eliminate the entire chain marbles before it reaches the end of the track, but is it as easy to do as it sounds? There is only one way to find out! HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems

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  • SQL SERVER – Validating Spatial Object with IsValidDetailed Function

    - by pinaldave
    What do you prefer – error or warning indicating error may happen with the reason for the error. While writing the previous statement I remember the movie “Minory Report”. This blog post is not about minority report but I will still cover the concept in a single statement “Let us predict the future and prevent the crime which is about to happen in future”. (Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong about the movie concept, I really do not want to hurt your sentiment if you are dedicated fan). Let us switch to the SQL Server world. Spatial data types are interesting concepts. I love writing about spatial data types because it allows me to be creative with shapes (just like toddlers). When working with Spatial Datatypes it is all good when the spatial object works fine. However, when the spatial object has issue or it is created with invalid coordinates it used to give a simple error that there is an issue with the object but did not provide much information. This made it very difficult to debug. If this spatial object was used in the big procedure and while this big procedural error out because of the invalid spatial object, it is indeed very difficult to debug it. I always wished that the more information provided regarding what is the problem with spatial datatype. SQL Server 2012 has introduced the new function IsValidDetailed(). This function has made my life very easy. In simple words this function will check if the spatial object passed is valid or not. If it is valid it will give information that it is valid. If the spatial object is not valid it will return the answer that it is not valid and the reason for the same. This makes it very easy to debug the issue and make the necessary correction. DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'Polygon((2 2, 6 6, 4 2, 2 2))' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'Polygon((2 2, 3 3, 4 4, 5 5, 6 6, 2 2))' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'Polygon((2 2, 4 4, 4 2, 2 3, 2 2))' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'CIRCULARSTRING(2 2, 4 4, 0 0)' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'CIRCULARSTRING(2 2, 4 4, 0 0)' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'LINESTRING(2 2, 4 4, 0 0)' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO Here is the resultset of the above query. You can see any valid query and some invalid query. If the query is invalid it also demonstrates the reason along with the error message. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Spatial Database, SQL Spatial

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  • Server Migration Checklist II

    - by merrillaldrich
    Easy Breezy Login Audit for your Ol’ 2000 Server In the last post on this topic I put up the preparatory steps I’ve been using for server migrations. Here I am posting some code that has worked well for us to trace who/what is connecting to our older SQL Server 2000 machines. It’s a simple audit of login events, tracing the login name, host name, database, and last login time for connections to the server, and gave us valuable insight into who was really using the machines and which databases might...(read more)

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  • URL Rewrite 2.0 Performance

    - by The Official Microsoft IIS Site
    Do performance work it is easy when you have the right tools for measuring gains or lost. I will share some thoughts about how to improve performance during rewriting, but please keep in mind that any change you do must be well thought and with performance Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more)

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  • The Great Divorce

    - by BlackRabbitCoder
    I have a confession to make: I've been in an abusive relationship for more than 17 years now.  Yes, I am not ashamed to admit it, but I'm finally doing something about it. I met her in college, she was new and sexy and amazingly fast -- and I'd never met anything like her before.  Her style and her power captivated me and I couldn't wait to learn more about her.  I took a chance on her, and though I learned a lot from her -- and will always be grateful for my time with her -- I think it's time to move on. Her name was C++, and she so outshone my previous love, C, that any thoughts of going back evaporated in the heat of this new romance.  She promised me she'd be gentle and not hurt me the way C did.  She promised me she'd clean-up after herself better than C did.  She promised me she'd be less enigmatic and easier to keep happy than C was.  But I was deceived.  Oh sure, as far as truth goes, it wasn't a complete lie.  To some extent she was more fun, more powerful, safer, and easier to maintain.  But it just wasn't good enough -- or at least it's not good enough now. I loved C++, some part of me still does, it's my first-love of programming languages and I recognize its raw power, its blazing speed, and its improvements over its predecessor.  But with today's hardware, at speeds we could only dream to conceive of twenty years ago, that need for speed -- at the cost of all else -- has died, and that has left my feelings for C++ moribund. If I ever need to write an operating system or a device driver, then I might need that speed.  But 99% of the time I don't.  I'm a business-type programmer and chances are 90% of you are too, and even the ones who need speed at all costs may be surprised by how much you sacrifice for that.   That's not to say that I don't want my software to perform, and it's not to say that in the business world we don't care about speed or that our job is somehow less difficult or technical.  There's many times we write programs to handle millions of real-time updates or handle thousands of financial transactions or tracking trading algorithms where every second counts.  But if I choose to write my code in C++ purely for speed chances are I'll never notice the speed increase -- and equally true chances are it will be far more prone to crash and far less easy to maintain.  Nearly without fail, it's the macro-optimizations you need, not the micro-optimizations.  If I choose to write a O(n2) algorithm when I could have used a O(n) algorithm -- that can kill me.  If I choose to go to the database to load a piece of unchanging data every time instead of caching it on first load -- that too can kill me.  And if I cross the network multiple times for pieces of data instead of getting it all at once -- yes that can also kill me.  But choosing an overly powerful and dangerous mid-level language to squeeze out every last drop of performance will realistically not make stock orders process any faster, and more likely than not open up the system to more risk of crashes and resource leaks. And that's when my love for C++ began to die.  When I noticed that I didn't need that speed anymore.  That that speed was really kind of a lie.  Sure, I can be super efficient and pack bits in a byte instead of using separate boolean values.  Sure, I can use an unsigned char instead of an int.  But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  The key is maintainability, and that's where C++ failed me.  I like to tell the other developers I work with that there's two levels of correctness in coding: Is it immediately correct? Will it stay correct? That is, you can hack together any piece of code and make it correct to satisfy a task at hand, but if a new developer can't come in tomorrow and make a fairly significant change to it without jeopardizing that correctness, it won't stay correct. Some people laugh at me when I say I now prefer maintainability over speed.  But that is exactly the point.  If you focus solely on speed you tend to produce code that is much harder to maintain over the long hall, and that's a load of technical debt most shops can't afford to carry and end up completely scrapping code before it's time.  When good code is written well for maintainability, though, it can be correct both now and in the future. And you know the best part is?  My new love is nearly as fast as C++, and in some cases even faster -- and better than that, I know C# will treat me right.  Her creators have poured hundreds of thousands of hours of time into making her the sexy beast she is today.  They made her easy to understand and not an enigmatic mess.  They made her consistent and not moody and amorphous.  And they made her perform as fast as I care to go by optimizing her both at compile time and a run-time. Her code is so elegant and easy on the eyes that I'm not worried where she will run to or what she'll pull behind my back.  She is powerful enough to handle all my tasks, fast enough to execute them with blazing speed, maintainable enough so that I can rely on even fairly new peers to modify my work, and rich enough to allow me to satisfy any need.  C# doesn't ask me to clean up her messes!  She cleans up after herself and she tries to make my life easier for me by taking on most of those optimization tasks C++ asked me to take upon myself.  Now, there are many of you who would say that I am the cause of my own grief, that it was my fault C++ didn't behave because I didn't pay enough attention to her.  That I alone caused the pain she inflicted on me.  And to some extent, you have a point.  But she was so high maintenance, requiring me to know every twist and turn of her vast and unrestrained power that any wrong term or bout of forgetfulness was met with painful reminders that she wasn't going to watch my back when I made a mistake.  But C#, she loves me when I'm good, and she loves me when I'm bad, and together we make beautiful code that is both fast and safe. So that's why I'm leaving C++ behind.  She says she's changing for me, but I have no interest in what C++0x may bring.  Oh, I'll still keep in touch, and maybe I'll see her now and again when she brings her problems to my door and asks for some attention -- for I always have a soft spot for her, you see.  But she's out of my house now.  I have three kids and a dog and a cat, and all require me to clean up after them, why should I have to clean up after my programming language as well?

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  • Suggestion for an application to do our company car fleet management

    - by Pitto
    (As suggested I've tried asking on webapps with no luck... So I try on askubuntu: I'll be luckier :) ) Hello, everybody! Our company could be a little more open source and a little "ubuntier" if I can find an easy and user friendly web application (we already have our LAMP server based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) to handle company's car fleet expenses and repairs planning. Any hints? :) Thanks for any kind of help.

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  • Multiple render targets and gamma correctness in Direct3D9

    - by Mario
    Let's say in a deferred renderer when building your G-Buffer you're going to render texture color, normals, depth and whatever else to your multiple render targets at once. Now if you want to have a gamma-correct rendering pipeline and you use regular sRGB textures as well as rendertargets, you'll need to apply some conversions along the way, because your filtering, sampling and calculations should happen in linear space, not sRGB space. Of course, you could store linear color in your textures and rendertargets, but this might very well introduce bad precision and banding issues. Reading from sRGB textures is easy: just set SRGBTexture = true; in your texture sampler in your HLSL effect code and the hardware does the conversion sRGB-linear for you. Writing to an sRGB rendertarget is theoretically easy, too: just set SRGBWriteEnable = true; in your effect pass in HLSL and your linear colors will be converted to sRGB space automatically. But how does this work with multiple rendertargets? I only want to do these corrections to the color textures and rendertarget, not to the normals, depth, specularity or whatever else I'll be rendering to my G-Buffer. Ok, so I just don't apply SRGBTexture = true; to my non-color textures, but when using SRGBWriteEnable = true; I'll do a gamma correction to all the values I write out to my rendertargets, no matter what I actually store there. I found some info on gamma over at Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb173460%28v=vs.85%29.aspx For hardware that supports Multiple Render Targets (Direct3D 9) or Multiple-element Textures (Direct3D 9), only the first render target or element is written. If I understand correctly, SRGBWriteEnable should only be applied to the first rendertarget, but according to my tests it doesn't and is used for all rendertargets instead. Now the only alternative seems to be to handle these corrections manually in my shader and only correct the actual color output, but I'm not totally sure, that this'll not have any negative impact on color correctness. E.g. if the GPU does any blending or filtering or multisampling after the Linear-sRGB conversion... Do I even need gamma correction in this case, if I'm just writing texture color without lighting to my rendertarget? As far as I know, I DO need it because of the texture filtering and mip sampling happening in sRGB space instead, if I don't correct for it. Anyway, it'd be interesting to hear other people's solutions or thoughts about this.

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed

    - by mbridge
    You can built sample application on ASP.NET MVC 3 for deploying it to your hosting first. To try it out first put it to web server where ASP.NET MVC 3 installed. In this posting I will tell you what files you need and where you can find them. Here are the files you need to upload to get application running on server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed. Also you can deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed like this example: you can change reference to System.Web.Helpers.dll to be the local one so it is copied to bin folder of your application. First file in this list is my web application dll and you don’t need it to get ASP.NET MVC 3 running. All other files are located at the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\v1.0\Assemblies\ If there are more files needed in some other scenarios then please leave me a comment here. And… don’t forget to convert the folder in IIS to application. While developing an application locally, this isn’t a problem. But when you are ready to deploy your application to a hosting provider, this might well be a problem if the hoster does not have the ASP.NET MVC assemblies installed in the GAC. Fortunately, ASP.NET MVC is still bin-deployable. If your hosting provider has ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 installed, then you’ll only need to include the MVC DLL. If your hosting provider is still on ASP.NET 3.5, then you’ll need to deploy all three. It turns out that it’s really easy to do so. Also, ASP.NET MVC runs in Medium Trust, so it should work with most hosting providers’ Medium Trust policies. It’s always possible that a hosting provider customizes their Medium Trust policy to be draconian. Deployment is easy when you know what to copy in archive for publishing your web site on ASP.NET MVC 3 or later versions. What I like to do is use the Publish feature of Visual Studio to publish to a local directory and then upload the files to my hosting provider. If your hosting provider supports FTP, you can often skip this intermediate step and publish directly to the FTP site. The first thing I do in preparation is to go to my MVC web application project and expand the References node in the project tree. Select the aforementioned three assemblies and in the Properties dialog, set Copy Local to True. Now just right click on your application and select Publish. This brings up the following Publish wizard Notice that in this example, I selected a local directory. When I hit Publish, all the files needed to deploy my app are available in the directory I chose, including the assemblies that were in the GAC. Another ASP.NET MVC 3 article: - New Features in ASP.NET MVC 3 - ASP.NET MVC 3 First Look

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  • Python platform

    - by LazyTiberius
    I'm looking for a python platform or environment. I'm looking for something like or similar to easyphp ou xampp for try and learn some cms. i've find mezzanine cms http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ and skeletonz http://orangoo.com/skeletonz/ usually i use and know apache environment. But python is new for me. i'm a noob with this 2 cms (mezzanine and skeletonz). My configuration os is windows 7 and windows 8 i need something easy to simulate a python environment hosting Thank all for your help

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  • iPhone SDK vs. Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 2: MoveMe

    In this series, I will be taking sample applications from the iPhone SDK and implementing them on Windows Phone 7 Series.  My goal is to do as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can.  This series will be written to not only compare and contrast how easy or difficult it is to complete tasks on either platform, how many lines of code, etc., but Id also like it to be a way for iPhone developers to either get started on Windows Phone 7 Series development, or for developers in general to learn the platform. Heres my methodology: Run the iPhone SDK app in the iPhone Simulator to get a feel for what it does and how it works, without looking at the implementation Implement the equivalent functionality on Windows Phone 7 Series using Silverlight. Compare the two implementations based on complexity, functionality, lines of code, number of files, etc. Add some functionality to the Windows Phone 7 Series app that shows off a way to make the scenario more interesting or leverages an aspect of the platform, or uses a better design pattern to implement the functionality. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP here, and the Expression Blend 4 Beta here. If youre seeing this series for the first time, check out Part 1: Hello World. A note on methodologyin the prior post there was some feedback about lines of code not being a very good metric for this exercise.  I dont really disagree, theres a lot more to this than lines of code but I believe that is a relevant metric, even if its not the ultimate one.  And theres no perfect answer here.  So I am going to continue to report the number of lines of code that I, as a developer would need to write in these apps as a data point, and Ill leave it up to the reader to determine how that fits in with overall complexity, etc.  The first example was so basic that I think it was difficult to talk about in real terms.  I think that as these apps get more complex, the subjective differences in concept count and will be more important.  MoveMe The MoveMe app is the main end-to-end app writing example in the iPhone SDK, called Creating an iPhone Application.  This application demonstrates a few concepts, including handling touch input, how to do animations, and how to do some basic transforms. The behavior of the application is pretty simple.  User touches the button: The button does a throb type animation where it scales up and then back down briefly. User drags the button: After a touch begins, moving the touch point will drag the button around with the touch. User lets go of the button: The button animates back to its original position, but does a few small bounces as it reaches its original point, which makes the app fun and gives it an extra bit of interactivity. Now, how would I write an app that meets this spec for Windows Phone 7 Series, and how hard would it be?  Lets find out!     Implementing the UI Okay, lets build the UI for this application.  In the HelloWorld example, we did all the UI design in Visual Studio and/or by hand in XAML.  In this example, were going to use the Expression Blend 4 Beta. You might be wondering when to use Visual Studio, when to use Blend, and when to do XAML by hand.  Different people will have different takes on this, but heres mine: XAML by hand simple UI that doesnt contain animations, gradients, etc., and or UI that I want to really optimize and craft when I know exactly what I want to do. Visual Studio Basic UI layout, property setting, data binding, etc. Blend Any serious design work needs to be done in Blend, including animations, handling states and transitions, styling and templating, editing resources. As in Part 1, go ahead and fire up Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (yes, soon it will take longer to say the name of our products than to start them up!), and create a new Windows Phone Application.  As in Part 1, clear out the XAML from the designer.  An easy way to do this is to just: Click on the design surface Hit Control+A Hit Delete Theres a little bit left over (the Grid.RowDefinitions element), just go ahead and delete that element so were starting with a clean state of only one outer Grid element. To use Blend, we need to save this project.  See, when you create a project with Visual Studio Express, it doesnt commit it to the disk (well, in a place where you can find it, at least) until you actually save the project.  This is handy if youre doing some fooling around, because it doesnt clutter your disk with WindowsPhoneApplication23-like directories.  But its also kind of dangerous, since when you close VS, if you dont save the projectits all gone.  Yes, this has bitten me since I was saving files and didnt remember that, so be careful to save the project/solution via Save All, at least once. So, save and note the location on disk.  Start Expression Blend 4 Beta, and chose File > Open Project/Solution, and load your project.  You should see just about the same thing you saw over in VS: a blank, black designer surface. Now, thinking about this application, we dont really need a button, even though it looks like one.  We never click it.  So were just going to create a visual and use that.  This is also true in the iPhone example above, where the visual is actually not a button either but a jpg image with a nice gradient and round edges.  Well do something simple here that looks pretty good. In Blend, look in the tool pane on the left for the icon that looks like the below (the highlighted one on the left), and hold it down to get the popout menu, and choose Border:    Okay, now draw out a box in the middle of the design surface of about 300x100.  The Properties Pane to the left should show the properties for this item. First, lets make it more visible by giving it a border brush.  Set the BorderBrush to white by clicking BorderBrush and dragging the color selector all the way to the upper right in the palette.  Then, down a bit farther, make the BorderThickness 4 all the way around, and the CornerRadius set to 6. In the Layout section, do the following to Width, Height, Horizontal and Vertical Alignment, and Margin (all 4 margin values): Youll see the outline now is in the middle of the design surface.  Now lets give it a background color.  Above BorderBrush select Background, and click the third tab over: Gradient Brush.  Youll see a gradient slider at the bottom, and if you click the markers, you can edit the gradient stops individually (or add more).  In this case, you can select something you like, but wheres what I chose: Left stop: #BFACCFE2 (I just picked a spot on the palette and set opacity to 75%, no magic here, feel free to fiddle these or just enter these numbers into the hex area and be done with it) Right stop: #FF3E738F Okay, looks pretty good.  Finally set the name of the element in the Name field at the top of the Properties pane to welcome. Now lets add some text.  Just hit T and itll select the TextBlock tool automatically: Now draw out some are inside our welcome visual and type Welcome!, then click on the design surface (to exit text entry mode) and hit V to go back into selection mode (or the top item in the tool pane that looks like a mouse pointer).  Click on the text again to select it in the tool pane.  Just like the border, we want to center this.  So set HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment to Center, and clear the Margins: Thats it for the UI.  Heres how it looks, on the design surface: Not bad!  Okay, now the fun part Adding Animations Using Blend to build animations is a lot of fun, and its easy.  In XAML, I can not only declare elements and visuals, but also I can declare animations that will affect those visuals.  These are called Storyboards. To recap, well be doing two animations: The throb animation when the element is touched The center animation when the element is released after being dragged. The throb animation is just a scale transform, so well do that first.  In the Objects and Timeline Pane (left side, bottom half), click the little + icon to add a new Storyboard called touchStoryboard: The timeline view will appear.  In there, click a bit to the right of 0 to create a keyframe at .2 seconds: Now, click on our welcome element (the Border, not the TextBlock in it), and scroll to the bottom of the Properties Pane.  Open up Transform, click the third tab ("Scale), and set X and Y to 1.2: This all of this says that, at .2 seconds, I want the X and Y size of this element to scale to 1.2. In fact you can see this happen.  Push the Play arrow in the timeline view, and youll see the animation run! Lets make two tweaks.  First, we want the animation to automatically reverse so it scales up then back down nicely. Click in the dropdown that says touchStoryboard in Objects and Timeline, then in the Properties pane check Auto Reverse: Now run it again, and youll see it go both ways. Lets even make it nicer by adding an easing function. First, click on the Render Transform item in the Objects tree, then, in the Property Pane, youll see a bunch of easing functions to choose from.  Feel free to play with this, then seeing how each runs.  I chose Circle In, but some other ones are fun.  Try them out!  Elastic In is kind of fun, but well stick with Circle In.  Thats it for that animation. Now, we also want an animation to move the Border back to its original position when the user ends the touch gesture.  This is exactly the same process as above, but just targeting a different transform property. Create a new animation called releaseStoryboard Select a timeline point at 1.2 seconds. Click on the welcome Border element again Scroll to the Transforms panel at the bottom of the Properties Pane Choose the first tab (Translate), which may already be selected Set both X and Y values to 0.0 (we do this just to make the values stick, because the value is already 0 and we need Blend to know we want to save that value) Click on RenderTransform in the Objects tree In the properties pane, choose Bounce Out Set Bounces to 6, and Bounciness to 4 (feel free to play with these as well) Okay, were done. Note, if you want to test this Storyboard, you have to do something a little tricky because the final value is the same as the initial value, so playing it does nothing.  If you want to play with it, do the following: Next to the selection dropdown, hit the little "x (Close Storyboard) Go to the Translate Transform value for welcome Set X,Y to 50, 200, respectively (or whatever) Select releaseStoryboard again from the dropdown Hit play, see it run Go into the object tree and select RenderTransform to change the easing function. When youre done, hit the Close Storyboard x again and set the values in Transform/Translate back to 0 Wiring Up the Animations Okay, now go back to Visual Studio.  Youll get a prompt due to the modification of MainPage.xaml.  Hit Yes. In the designer, click on the welcome Border element.  In the Property Browser, hit the Events button, then double click each of ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta, ManipulationCompleted.  Youll need to flip back to the designer from code, after each double click. Its code time.  Here we go. Here, three event handlers have been created for us: welcome_ManipulationStarted: This will execute when a manipulation begins.  Think of it as MouseDown. welcome_ManipulationDelta: This executes each time a manipulation changes.  Think MouseMove. welcome_ManipulationCompleted: This will  execute when the manipulation ends. Think MouseUp. Now, in ManipuliationStarted, we want to kick off the throb animation that we called touchAnimation.  Thats easy: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationStarted(object sender, ManipulationStartedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: touchStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Likewise, when the manipulation completes, we want to re-center the welcome visual with our bounce animation: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationCompleted(object sender, ManipulationCompletedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: releaseStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Note there is actually a way to kick off these animations from Blend directly via something called Triggers, but I think its clearer to show whats going on like this.  A Trigger basically allows you to say When this event fires, trigger this Storyboard, so its the exact same logical process as above, but without the code. But how do we get the object to move?  Well, for that we really dont want an animation because we want it to respond immediately to user input. We do this by directly modifying the transform to match the offset for the manipulation, and then well let the animation bring it back to zero when the manipulation completes.  The manipulation events do a great job of keeping track of all the stuff that you usually had to do yourself when doing drags: where you started from, how far youve moved, etc. So we can easily modify the position as below: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e) 2: { 3: CompositeTransform transform = (CompositeTransform)welcome.RenderTransform; 4:   5: transform.TranslateX = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.X; 6: transform.TranslateY = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.Y; 7: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Thats it! Go ahead and run the app in the emulator.  I suggest running without the debugger, its a little faster (CTRL+F5).  If youve got a machine that supports DirectX 10, youll see nice smooth GPU accelerated graphics, which also what it looks like on the phone, running at about 60 frames per second.  If your machine does not support DX10 (like the laptop Im writing this on!), it wont be quite a smooth so youll have to take my word for it! Comparing Against the iPhone This is an example where the flexibility and power of XAML meets the tooling of Visual Studio and Blend, and the whole experience really shines.  So, for several things that are declarative and 100% toolable with the Windows Phone 7 Series, this example does them with code on the iPhone.  In parens is the lines of code that I count to do these operations. PlacardView.m: 19 total LOC Creating the view that hosts the button-like image and the text Drawing the image that is the background of the button Drawing the Welcome text over the image (I think you could technically do this step and/or the prior one using Interface Builder) MoveMeView.m:  63 total LOC Constructing and running the scale (throb) animation (25) Constructing the path describing the animation back to center plus bounce effect (38) Beyond the code count, yy experience with doing this kind of thing in code is that its VERY time intensive.  When I was a developer back on Windows Forms, doing GDI+ drawing, we did this stuff a lot, and it took forever!  You write some code and even once you get it basically working, you see its not quite right, you go back, tweak the interval, or the math a bit, run it again, etc.  You can take a look at the iPhone code here to judge for yourself.  Scroll down to animatePlacardViewToCenter toward the bottom.  I dont think this code is terribly complicated, but its not what Id call simple and its not at all simple to get right. And then theres a few other lines of code running around for setting up the ViewController and the Views, about 15 lines between MoveMeAppDelegate, PlacardView, and MoveMeView, plus the assorted decls in the h files. Adding those up, I conservatively get something like 100 lines of code (19+63+15+decls) on iPhone that I have to write, by hand, to make this project work. The lines of code that I wrote in the examples above is 5 lines of code on Windows Phone 7 Series. In terms of incremental concept counts beyond the HelloWorld app, heres a shot at that: iPhone: Drawing Images Drawing Text Handling touch events Creating animations Scaling animations Building a path and animating along that Windows Phone 7 Series: Laying out UI in Blend Creating & testing basic animations in Blend Handling touch events Invoking animations from code This was actually the first example I tried converting, even before I did the HelloWorld, and I was pretty surprised.  Some of this is luck that this app happens to match up with the Windows Phone 7 Series platform just perfectly.  In terms of time, I wrote the above application, from scratch, in about 10 minutes.  I dont know how long it would take a very skilled iPhone developer to write MoveMe on that iPhone from scratch, but if I was to write it on Silverlight in the same way (e.g. all via code), I think it would likely take me at least an hour or two to get it all working right, maybe more if I ended up picking the wrong strategy or couldnt get the math right, etc. Making Some Tweaks Silverlight contains a feature called Projections to do a variety of 3D-like effects with a 2D surface. So lets play with that a bit. Go back to Blend and select the welcome Border in the object tree.  In its properties, scroll down to the bottom, open Transform, and see Projection at the bottom.  Set X,Y,Z to 90.  Youll see the element kind of disappear, replaced by a thin blue line. Now Create a new animation called startupStoryboard. Set its key time to .5 seconds in the timeline view Set the projection values above to 0 for X, Y, and Z. Save Go back to Visual Studio, and in the constructor, add the following bold code (lines 7-9 to the constructor: 1: public MainPage() 2: { 3: InitializeComponent(); 4:   5: SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait; 6:   7: this.Loaded += (s, e) => 8: { 9: startupStoryboard.Begin(); 10: }; 11: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If the code above looks funny, its using something called a lambda in C#, which is an inline anonymous method.  Its just a handy shorthand for creating a handler like the manipulation ones above. So with this youll get a nice 3D looking fly in effect when the app starts up.  Here it is, in flight: Pretty cool!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Play Your Position Until the Play Breaks Down&hellip;then Do Whatever it Takes.

    - by AjarnMark
    If I didn’t know better, I would think that K. Brian Kelley (blog | twitter) has been listening in on conversations with my boss. In his recent blog post Successful Teams: Knowing When to Step Out of Your Role, Brian describes quite clearly a philosophy that my boss has been trying to get across to everyone in the department.  We have been using sports analogies, like how important it is to play your position, until the play breaks down (such as a fumble) and then do whatever it takes it to cover each other / recover the ball / win.  While we like having very skilled people who could do a lot of different tasks, it is important that you first do your assigned tasks, and only once those are complete, or failure of the larger mission is probable, do you consider walking away from them to help someone else with their responsibilities. The thing that you cannot afford, especially on a lean team, is the really nice guy who is always trying to help out other people, but in doing so, is never quite getting his own responsibilities taken care of.  Yes, if the Running Back drops the football, you want any member of the team in the vicinity to jump on it, whether that is the leading blocker or the Quarterback.  But until the fumble happens, you want the leading blocker to focus on doing his job, and block for the Running Back.  If the blocker is doing any other job than his primary responsibility, you’re probably going to lose. This sounds logical enough, but it is really easy to go astray with the best of intentions.  This is especially true on a small, tight-knit team, where it is really easy to get sucked into someone else’s task or problem, doubly so if you think you can do it better or faster than them.  Now you are really setting yourself up for failure.  The right thing is to let the other person do the job, even if it seems less efficient in the short-run, so that you can focus on the tasks which require your expertise.  Don’t break formation…don’t abandon your assignment, until it is clear that mission failure is imminent, and even then, as Brian writes, it should be with the agreement of the mission leader. Thanks, Brian, for putting it so well.  This has been distributed throughout our department.

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  • SQL Search- The Search and the Sequel

    It started out as an experiment to try to explore different ways of creating a software tool that people would want. It ended up as a tool that Red Gate is giving away to the SQL Server community in return for the contribution to the project of so many of Red Gate's friends within the community. But was it easy to do? Bob Cramblitt and Richard Collins went to find out by talking to Tanya Joseph, who managed the project that turned the concept into a product.

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  • Get Started with .Net and Apache Cassandra

    - by Sazzad Hossain
    Just came across a easy and nice to read article explaining how to get started with noSQL database system. These no relational databases are getting increasingly popular to tackle the distribution and large data set problems.Cassandra's ColumnFamily data model offers the convenience of column indexes with the performance of log-structured updates, strong support for materialized views, and powerful built-in caching.The article is nicely written by Kellabyte  and shows step by step process how to get going with the programming in a .net platform.Read more here.

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  • Typing for Fun

    Learning to type can be fun. You won';t need to attend any class or pay any tuition fee. As easy as ABC! You can learn typing at your own pace, anytime where you';re free. Back in those days, there ar... [Author: Anna Peacocks - Computers and Internet - April 27, 2010]

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  • Decoding the SQL Server Index Structure

    A deep dive into the implementation of indexes in SQL Server 2008 R2. This is information that you must know in order to tune your queries for optimum performance. Partial scans of indexes are now possible! SQL Server monitoring made easy "Keeping an eye on our many SQL Server instances is much easier with SQL Response." Mike Lile.Download a free trial of SQL Response now.

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  • Two front ends for Clamav

    <b>Experimenting with GNU/Linux:</b> "There are several graphical front ends for clam av which can make your life easy. The most popular among them are clamtk and Klamav."

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