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• How can a software agency deliver quality software/win projects?

  - by optician

  I currently work for a bespoke software agency. Does anyone have any experience of how to win well priced work? It seems there is so much competition from offshore/bedroom program teams, that cost is extremely competetive these days. I feel that it is very different compared to a software product company or an internal it department, in terms of budget. As someone else said before, we only ever really get to version 1.0 of a lot of our software, unless the client is big enough. In which case it doesn't make business sense to spend ages making the software the best we can. Its like we are doing the same quality of work of internal it. Also a Lot of our clients are not technically minded and so therefor will not pay for things they don't understand. As our company does not have the money to turn down work it often goes that we take on complicated work for far too little money. I have got a lot better at managing change and keeping tight specs etc. It is still hard.

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• HTML href with css ie Problem

  - by Jordan Pagaduan

  <style type="text/css"> .web_westloh { background-image: url(images/web_westloh.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; height: 100px; width: 350px; } .web_westloh:hover { border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-color: #999999; padding-bottom: 5px; } .web_money { background-image: url(images/web_money.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; height: 100px; width: 350px; } .web_money:hover { border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-color: #999999; padding-bottom: 5px; } </style> <a href="http://www.westloh.com" title="Click to Visit http://www.westloh.com" target="_blank" class="web_westloh"> <div class="web_westloh"></div> </a> <a href="http://www.money-mind-set.com" title="Click to Visit http://www.money-mind-set.com" target="_blank"> <div class="web_money"></div> </a> The Problem is: In mozilla linking is ok. No problem. But in IE the link is a problem, it will not link in the target. See this page to see Problem: http://replytowest.com -- at the bottom. Thank You

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• Software Company Library

  - by dbemerlin

  Hi. A few days ago i had the idea to create a company library since my company has no training and many developers still develop as they did when they learned it 5 years ago. My hope is that they can lend books, read them and hopefully learn something from them (for example: object oriented programming or unit testing, which noone here knows how to use). After asking around most agreed that it was a good idea, so i brought my books, made a simple printed sheet with "Book A belongs to B" and "Developer A took the Book on dd.mm.yyyy" to get it started. Now i want to get some ideas for Books that i could add to the shelf (sadly from my own money since 100€/month for training is too much money for this multi-million euro company). We develop mostly PHP & MySQL so books specific to this topic would be preferred but i think if people learn other languages they might get ideas on how to develop better with the current language so other books are ok, too. Which books would you recommend? PS: Personally i'd like to add some Project Management books, too, as it's a topic i'm interested in, eventhough i'm just a junior developer (We've got Peopleware already, great book btw).

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• API-based solutions for sending payments to people without bank accounts

  - by Tauren

  I'm looking for inexpensive ways to send payments to hundreds or thousands of individual contractors, even if they do not have a bank account. Currently I only need to support payment in the USA, but may eventually be international. Here's the scenario: I offer a service that allows an organization or manager-type person to coordinate contractors for very short term jobs. These jobs are typically only an hour or two in length. A contractor may get only one job over an entire month, several jobs spread out over a month, multiple jobs on a single day, or any other combination. Thus, a single contractor could earn as little as one job's payment up to potentially payment for dozens. Payment for a month could be as little as $10 up to $1000's. Right now, the system provides payroll reports to the manager and it is the manager's responsibility to produce checks, stuff envelopes, and send mail via the US postal service. I'd like to remove this burden from the manager and have all the payments taken care of for them automatically by the system. I'm not sure where to start or what the best options would be. I'm starting to look into the following solutions, but don't know specifics yet and would like some advice before pursuing them. I'd also like to hear about other ideas or suggestions. PayPal (Send Money, Adaptive Payments, x.com, other???) Amazon (Flexible Payments System?) Fund some sort of pre-paid debit card? Web service with API that mails checks for you? Direct deposit via a bank API (for users with bank accounts)? The problem is that many of these contractors may not be able to obtain bank accounts or credit cards within the USA. I don't mind doing a hybrid of solutions, but are there any that would work well with this issue? I want the solution to be easy to use for the contractors, meaning that they can get the money easily (via check in the mail, debit card ATM withdrawal, etc.)

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• How SQLite on Android handles long strings?

  - by Levara

  I'm wondering how Android's implementation of SQLite handles long Strings. Reading from online documentation on sqlite, it said that strings in sqlite are limited to 1 million characters. My strings are definitely smaller. I'm creating a simple RSS application, and after parsing a html document, and extracting text, I'm having problem saving it to a database. I have 2 tables in database, feeds and articles. RSS feeds are correctly saved and retrieved from feeds table, but when saving to the articles table, logcat is saying that it cannot save extracted text to it's column. I don't know if other columns are making problems too, no mention of them in logcat. I'm wondering, since text is from an article on web, are signs like (",',;) creating problems? Is Android automaticaly escaping them, or I have to do that. I'm using a technique for inserting similar to one in notepad tutorial: public long insertArticle(long feedid, String title, String link, String description, String h1,tring h2, String h3, String p, String image, long date) { ContentValues initialValues = new ContentValues(); initialValues.put(KEY_FEEDID, feedid); initialValues.put(KEY_TITLE, title); initialValues.put(KEY_LINK, link); initialValues.put(KEY_DESCRIPTION, description ); initialValues.put(KEY_H1, h1 ); initialValues.put(KEY_H2, h2); initialValues.put(KEY_H3, h3); initialValues.put(KEY_P, p); initialValues.put(KEY_IMAGE, image); initialValues.put(KEY_DATE, date); return mDb.insert(DATABASE_TABLE_ARTICLES,null, initialValues); } Column P is for extracted text, h1, h2 and h3 are for headers from a page. Logcat reports only column p to be the problem. The table is created with following statement: private static final String DATABASE_CREATE_ARTICLES = "create table articles( _id integer primary key autoincrement, feedid integer, title text, link text not null, description text," + "h1 text, h2 text, h3 text, p text, image text, date integer);";

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• How to track auto-generated id's in select-insert statement

  - by k rey

  I have two tables detail and head. The detail table will be written first. Later, the head table will be written. The head is a summary of the detail table. I would like to keep a reference from the detail to the head table. I have a solution but it is not elegant and requires duplicating the joins and filters that were used during summation. I am looking for a better solution. The below is an example of what I currently have. In this example, I have simplified the table structure. In the real world, the summation is very complex. -- Preparation create table #detail ( detail_id int identity(1,1) , code char(4) , amount money , head_id int null ); create table #head ( head_id int identity(1,1) , code char(4) , subtotal money ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'A', 5 ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'A', 5 ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'B', 2 ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'B', 2 ); -- I would like to somehow simplify the following two queries insert into #head ( code, subtotal ) select code, sum(amount) from #detail group by code update #detail set head_id = h.head_id from #detail d inner join #head h on d.code = h.code -- This is the desired end result select * from #detail Desired end result of detail table: detail_id code amount head_id 1 A 5.00 1 2 A 5.00 1 3 B 2.00 2 4 B 2.00 2

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• Why is my django bulk database population so slow and frequently failing?

  - by bryn

  I decided I'd like to use django's model system rather than coding raw SQL to interface with my database, but I am having a problem that surely is avoidable. My models.py contains: class Student(models.Model): student_id = models.IntegerField(unique = True) form = models.CharField(max_length = 10) preferred = models.CharField(max_length = 70) surname = models.CharField(max_length = 70) and I'm populating it by looping through a list as follows: from models import Student for id, frm, pref, sname in large_list_of_data: s = Student(student_id = id, form = frm, preferred = pref, surname = sname) s.save() I don't really want to be saving this to the database each time but I don't know another way to get django to not forget about it (I'd rather add all the rows and then do a single commit). There are two problems with the code as it stands. It's slow -- about 20 students get updated each second. It doesn't even make it through large_list_of_data, instead throwing a DatabaseError saying "unable to open database file". (Possibly because I'm using sqlite3.) My question is: How can I stop these two things from happening? I'm guessing that the root of both problems is that I've got the s.save() but I don't see a way of easily batching the students up and then saving them in one commit to the database.

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• Rails problem with Delayed_Job and Active Record

  - by Michael Waxman

  I'm using Delayed_Job to grab a Twitter user's data from the API, but it's not saving it in the model for some reason! Please help! (code below) class BandJob < Struct.new(:band_id, :band_username) #parameter def perform require 'json' require 'open-uri' band = Band.find_by_id(band_id) t = JSON.parse(open("http://twitter.com/users/show/#{band_username}.json").read) band.screen_name = t['screen_name'] band.profile_background_image = t['profile_background_image_url'] band.url = 'http://' + band_username + '.com' band.save! end end To clarify, I'm actually not getting any errors, it's just not saving. Here's what my log looks like: * [JOB] acquiring lock on BandJob [4;36;1mDelayed::Job Update (3.1ms)[0m [0;1mUPDATE "delayed_jobs" SET locked_at = '2009-11-09 18:59:45', locked_by = 'host:dhcp128036151228.central.yale.edu pid:2864' WHERE (id = 10442 and (locked_at is null or locked_at < '2009-11-09 14:59:45') and (run_at <= '2009-11-09 18:59:45')) [0m [4;35;1mBand Load (1.5ms)[0m [0mSELECT * FROM "bands" WHERE ("bands"."id" = 34) LIMIT 1[0m [4;36;1mBand Update (0.6ms)[0m [0;1mUPDATE "bands" SET "updated_at" = '2009-11-09 18:59:45', "profile_background_image" = 'http://a3.twimg.com/profile_background_images/38193417/fbtile4.jpg', "url" = 'http://Coldplay.com', "screen_name" = 'coldplay' WHERE "id" = 34[0m [4;35;1mDelayed::Job Destroy (0.5ms)[0m [0mDELETE FROM "delayed_jobs" WHERE "id" = 10442[0m * [JOB] BandJob completed after 0.5448 1 jobs processed at 1.8011 j/s, 0 failed ... Thanks!

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• How can i fetch the large image from url

  - by Kutbi

  i used below code to fetch the image from url.but its not working for large image.. i missing something to add for that type of image to fetch. imgView = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.ImageView01); imgView.setImageBitmap(loadBitmap("http://www.360technosoft.com/mx4.jpg")); //imgView.setImageBitmap(loadBitmap("http://sugardaddydiaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/how_do_i_get_sugar_daddy.jpg")); //setImageDrawable("http://sugardaddydiaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/holding-money-copy.jpg"); //Drawable drawable = LoadImageFromWebOperations("http://www.androidpeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/android.png"); //imgView.setImageDrawable(drawable); /* try { ImageView i = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.ImageView01); Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream((InputStream)new URL("http://sugardaddydiaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/holding-money-copy.jpg").getContent()); i.setImageBitmap(bitmap); } catch (MalformedURLException e) { System.out.println("hello"); } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println("hello"); }*/ } protected Drawable ImageOperations(Context context, String string, String string2) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub try { InputStream is = (InputStream) this.fetch(string); Drawable d = Drawable.createFromStream(is, "src"); return d; } catch (MalformedURLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } }

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• My project is no longer used - how should I feel?

  - by flybywire

  For the last two years I have been developing and supporting an important project for a big customer. The project included mining data from the customer's existing systems, processing, and displaying and updating in the customer's public home page. The project was defined as crucial by the customer and I was payed good money and flown at the customer's expense to meet key employees. Some months ago, when the project was finished and in maintainance mode, I informed the customer that I am no longer interested in doing it as I had a new opportunity that would not be compatible with my existing customer. I was payed to train one of their employees, flown to meet him, make sure everything works and that he can be safely left in charge of the project. We finished in good terms after I complied with all my obligations and they payed me all they owed me. Some days ago, just out of curiosity, I entered to their website to see how the data continues to be updated and much to my dismay I discovered that the day after my contract was finished my system was "turned off" and it ceased to feed data to the public website. Let's put it clear, there is no issue of money or broken contract here. They are in they full right to do whatever they want with my software. But it is an issue of broken "programmer's ego". Should I feel bad about it (I do). Should I care and check out with my customer if they need some help? Or is it none of my matters?

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• Loading user control dynamically looses data

  - by user228777

  I have a created a user control. This user control I dynamically load on a page inside Telerik Panelbar control. I have done all necessary coding to save the viewstate and load this dynamically created usercontrol every time page loads. On this User control I have a asp panel. By default this panel is invisible. When user clicks a button on this user control panel is made visible. On page load of this user control I populate all the controls on this panel. Everything works fine if I don’t load this use control dynamically but when I load this user control dynamically and if I make panel visible by default then only all fields on the panel are populated. But if I make by default invisible and on button click make panel visible none of the text boxes or comboboxes are populated. I populate comboboxes on page load of the userControl but inbetween postbacks all the comboboxes on the user control loose data. ON the parent page I am saving the viewstate This is my code on parent page to dynamically load userControl ( which has panel on it) Dim ucPiggyBank As SubscriberSetupPages_UserControls_PiggyBank = CType(LoadControl("~/SubscriberSetupPages/UserControls/PiggyBank.ascx"), SubscriberSetupPages_UserControls_PiggyBank) With ucPiggyBank .PiggyBankID = account.Id .ID = account.Id.ToString 'Setting up following 3 properties here to avoid database trips .PiggyBankEligibleAccounts = piggyBankEligibleAccountCollection .MemorizedNames = memorizednames .Period = period End With radPanelNewChild.Controls.Add(ucPiggyBank) radPanelNew.Items.Add(radPanelNewChild) radPanelNew.Expanded = True ‘this is the Panel item on parent page of Telerik Panelbar control. Dim radPanelPiggyBank As RadPanelItem = DirectCast(pnlbarPiggyBank.FindItemByValue("TestItem"), RadPanelItem) With radPanelPiggyBank .Items.Add(radPanelNew) .DataBind() End With ‘I am doing everything for saving viewstate on parent control This is the code on page load of userControl If Not IsPostBack Then If m_PiggyBankID <> Guid.Empty Then 'Load data Call GetPiggyBankDetails() End If I have a edit button on the user control which makes panel visible. It makes panel visible but with no data. Can you please tell me what’s happening? Thanks in advance.

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• jquery form validation, and submit-on-change

  - by Bee

  I want to make all my settings forms across my site confirm that changes are saved, kinda like facebook does if you make changes in a form and then try to navigate away without saving. So I'm disabling the submit button on the forms only enabling if the values change. I then prompt the user to hit save before they leave the page in the case that they do have changes pending. var form = $('form.edit'); if(form.length > 0) { var orig_str = form.serialize(); $(':submit',form).attr('disabled','disabled'); form.on('change keyup', function(){ if(form.serialize() == orig_str) { setConfirmUnload(false); $(':submit',form).attr('disabled','disabled'); } else { setConfirmUnload(true); $(':submit',form).removeAttr('disabled') } }); $('input[type=submit]').click(function(){ setConfirmUnload(false); }); } function setConfirmUnload(on) { window.onbeforeunload = (on) ? unloadMessage : null; } function unloadMessage() { return 'If you navigate away from this page without saving your changes, they will be lost.'; } One of these forms needs some additional validation which I do using jQuery.validate library. e.g. if i wanted to ensure the user can't double submit the form on accident by double clicking on submit or somesuch (the actual validation in question is for a credit-card form and not this simple): $('form').validate({ submitHandler: function(form) { $(':submit', form).attr('disabled','disabled'); form.submit(); } }); Unfortunately both bits are trying to bind to submit button and they're interfering with each other such that the submit button remains disabled no matter what I do and it is impossible to submit the form at all. Is there some way to chain the validations together or something? Or some other way to avoid re-writing the validation code to repeat the "did you change anything in the form" business?

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• Security considerations processing emails

  - by Timmy O' Tool

  I have process that will be reading emails from an account. The objective of the process is saving to a database those emails with image(s) as attachments. I will be saving sender, subject body and image path (the image will be saved on the process). I will be showing this information on a page so I would like to know all (or most of them :) ) security aspects to cover. I plan to sanitize the subject and body of the email. I can remove most of the tags, probably it would be enough keeping the <p> tag. I'm not sure if I can trust just in a sanitizer. I would like to HTML encode everything except for the <p> tag after sanitize, just in case. Any suggestion? I'm only accepting images as attachment as I said above, any security risk I have to take into account in relation to the attachment? Thanks!

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• How can I identify an element from a list within another list

  - by Alex

  I have been trying to make a block of code that finds the index of the largest bid for each item. Then I was going to use the index as a way to identify the person who paid that much moneys name. However no matter what i try I can't link the person and what they have gained from the auction together. Here is the code I have been writing: It has to be able to work with any information inputted def sealedBids(): n = int(input('\nHow many people are in the group? ')) z = 0 g = [] s = [] b = [] f = [] w = []#goes by number of items q = [] while z < n: b.append([]) z = z + 1 z = 0 while z < n: g.append(input('Enter a bidders name: ')) z = z + 1 z = 0 i = int(input('How many items are being bid on?')) while z < i: s.append(input('Enter the name of an item: ')) w.append(z) z = z + 1 z = 0 for j in range(n):#specifies which persons bids your taking for k in range(i):#specifies which item is being bid on b[j].append(int(input('How much money has {0} bid on the {1}? '.format(g[j], s[k])))) print(' ') for j in range(n):#calculates fair share f.append(sum(b[j])/n) for j in range(i):#identifies which quantity of money was the largest for each item for k in range(n): if w[j] < b[k][j]: w[j] = b[k][j] q.append(k) any advice is much appreciated.

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• Are there really safe and legal resources for sound effects to use in applications?

  - by mystify

  For those who want to opt for "close" immediately: Great user interfaces need great sound effects, right? User interfaces are programmed by programmers, right? So this is a programming question, ok? I had a very hard time to find good and legal sound resources. I am not looking for free sounds. Proper licensing is absolutely crucial, and I don't want to get sued by multibilliondollar music companies, hollywood sound studios and their highly overpaid lawyers. They cry about people downloading their stuff in file sharing sites but when someone comes and wants to really license stuff, the market is so empty like an open and unwatched gold mine. Trust me, whatever I type into google, I always end up getting sort of opaque and strange music libraries that do charge money, but refuse to provide proper licensing evidence to the licensee. When you pay money and they only count how many files you downloaded, that can never be a valid license, nor any evidence for you that you did license the sounds. Imagine that contributor suing you and you say: "I licensed it at xy", and his lawyer just smiles: "Show me proof, mofo!". So you loose a million dollars, or 1 for every downloaded app. Congrats. But that's the way all those "hey we're the worlds largest sound effect library" libraries are doing it. It's really annoying. And I hope someone here is able to point out a sound effects ressource which is A) big B) used by professinals C) has a reasonable pricing and licensing model D) provides the licensee with proper legal evidence about licensed sounds You know, I'm not from the US and typically you US folks are the ones who invent the cool stuff on the net, and maybe I just missed a new great start up. So?

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• Sql Server 2005 Check Constraint not being applied in execution when using variables

  - by DarylS

  Here is some SQL sample code: --Create 2 Sales tables with constraints based on the saledate create table Sales1(SaleDate datetime, Amount money) ALTER TABLE dbo.Sales1 ADD CONSTRAINT CK_Sales1 CHECK (([SaleDate]>='01 May 2010')) GO create table Sales2(SaleDate datetime, Amount money) ALTER TABLE dbo.Sales2 ADD CONSTRAINT CK_Sales2 CHECK (([SaleDate]<'01 May 2010')) GO --Insert some data into Sales1 insert into Sales1 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('02 May 2010', 50) insert into Sales1 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('03 May 2010', 60) GO --Insert some data into Sales2 insert into Sales2 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('30 Mar 2010', 10) insert into Sales2 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('31 Mar 2010', 20) GO --Create a view that combines these 2 tables create VIEW [dbo].[Sales] AS SELECT SaleDate, Amount FROM Sales1 UNION ALL SELECT SaleDate, Amount FROM Sales2 GO --Get the results --Query 1 select * from Sales where SaleDate < '31 Mar 2010' -- if you look at the execution plan this query only looks at Sales2 (Which is good) --Query 2 DECLARE @SaleDate datetime SET @SaleDate = '31 Mar 2010' select * from Sales where SaleDate < @SaleDate -- if you look at the execution plan this query looks at Sales1 and Sales2 (Which is NOT good) Looking at the execution plan you will see that the two queries are differnt. For Query 1 the only table that is accessed is Sales1 (which is good). For Query 2 both tables are accessed (Which is bad). Why are these execution plans different, and how do i get Query 2 to only access the relevant table when variables are used? I have tried to add indexes for the SaleDate column and that does not seem to help.

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• Canvas - @font-face doesn't work on IE9+

  - by iMoses

  I've created a widget which allows the user to locate free-text over an image using a textarea. When saving the image a background canvas application reads the text and calculates its position, then it draws the text to the canvas over the image and saves a new image file. The font I use for this widget is league-gothic which I am importing using the @font-face method. This seems to work great and without any issues on all browsers except (of-course) for IE9 and IE10. When using internet explorer you can clearly see that the font was indeed loaded since the textarea uses the same font, but when trying to draw the text onto the canvas the font-family reverts to one of its fallback, in this case Arial. I've searched quite a bit and found nothing. Unlike most font issues I found that concern the canvas element, I am completely sure that the font has indeed loaded as I am viewing it before saving the result. Anything at all will help me at the moment. If you have any insight, experience with similar bugs or whatever, please share :) Thanks in advance. P.S. I can't expose a code example at the moment, but if it becomes a problem I'll do my best to provide one.

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• Reporting Services Sum of Inner Group in Outer Group

  - by Spoonybard

  I have a report in Reporting Services 2008 using ASP.net 3.5 and SQL Server 2008. The report has 2 groupings and a detail row. This is the current format: Outer Group Inner Group Detail Row The Detail Row represents an item on a receipt and a receipt can have multiple items. Each receipt was paid with a certain payment method. So the Outer Group is grouped by payment type, the Inner Group is grouped by the receipt's ID, and the Detail Row is each item for the given receipt. My raw data result set has two important columns: The Amount Received and the Amount Applied. The Amount Received is how much money in total was collected for all the items on the receipt. The Amount Applied is how much money each item got from the total Amount Received. Sample Result Set: ReceiptID Item ItemID AmountReceived AmountApplied Payment Method ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Book 1 $200.00 $40.00 Cash 1 CD 2 $200.00 $20.00 Cash 1 Software 3 $200.00 $100.00 Cash 1 Backpack 4 $200.00 $40.00 Cash The Inner Group displays the AmountReceived correctly as $200. However, the Outer Group displays the AmountReceived as $800, because I believe that it is going off each detail row which in this case is a count of 4 items. What I want is to see in the Outer Group that the Amount Received is $200. I tried restricting the scope in my SUM function to be the Inner Group, but I get the error "The scope parameter must be set to a string constant that is equal to either the name of a containing group, the name of a containing data region, or the name of a dataset." Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this issue? Thanks.

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• Processing a resultset to look up foriegn keys (and poulate a new table!)

  - by Gilly

  Hi, I've been handed a dataset that has some fairly basic table structures with no keys at all. eg {myRubishTable} - Area(varchar),AuthorityName(varchar),StartYear(varchar),StartMonth(varcha),EndYear(varchar),EndMonth(varchar),Amount(Money) there are other tables that use the Area and AuthorityName columns as well as a general use of Month and Years so I I figured a good first step was to pull Area and Authority into their own tables. I now want to process the data in the original table and lookup the key value to put into my new table with foreign keys which looks like this. (lookup Tables) {Area} - id (int, PK), name (varchar(50)) {AuthorityName} - id(int, PK), name(varchar(50) (TargetTable) {myBetterTable} - id (int,PK), area_id(int FK-Area),authority_name_id(int FK-AuthorityName),StartYear (varchar),StartMonth(varchar),EndYear(varchar),EndMonth(varchar),Amount(money) so row one in the old table read MYAREA, MYAUTHORITY,2009,Jan,2010,Feb,10000 and I want to populate the new table with 1,1,1,2009,Jan,2010,Feb,10000 where the first '1' is the primary key and the second two '1's are the ids in the lookup tables. Can anyone point me to the most efficient way of achieving this using just SQL? Thanks in advance Footnote:- I've achieved what I needed with some pretty simple WHERE clauses (I had left a rogue tablename in the FROM which was throwing me :o( ) but would be interested to know if this is the most efficient. ie SELECT [area].[area_id], [authority].[authority_name_id], [myRubishTable].[StartYear], [myRubishTable].[StartMonth], [myRubishTable].[EndYear], [myRubishTable].[EndMonth], [myRubishTable].[Amount] FROM [myRubishTable],[Area],[AuthorityName] WHERE [myRubishTable].[Area]=[Area].[name] AND [myRubishTable].[Authority Name]=[dim_AuthorityName].[name] TIA

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• SQL query select from table and group on other column...

  - by scaryjones

  I'm phrasing the question title poorly as I'm not sure what to call what I'm trying to do but it really should be simple. I've a link / join table with two ID columns. I want to run a check before saving new rows to the table. The user can save attributes through a webpage but I need to check that the same combination doesn't exist before saving it. With one record it's easy as obviously you just check if that attributeId is already in the table, if it is don't allow them to save it again. However, if the user chooses a combination of that attribute and another one then they should be allowed to save it. Here's an image of what I mean: So if a user now tried to save an attribute with ID of 1 it will stop them, but I need it to also stop them if they tried ID's of 1, 10 so long as both 1 and 10 had the same productAttributeId. I'm confusing this in my explanation but I'm hoping the image will clarify what I need to do. This should be simple so I presume I'm missing something.

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• jQuery only firing last class in multiple-class click

  - by user1134644

  I have a set of links like so: <a href="#internalLink1" class="classA">This has Class A</a> <a href="#internalLink2" class="classB">This has Class B</a> <a href="#internalLink3" class="classA classB">This has Class A and Class B</a> And here's the corresponding jQuery: $('.classA').click(function(){ // do class A stuff }); $('.classB').click(function(){ // do class B stuff }); Currently, when I click on the first link with Class A, it does the Class A stuff like it's supposed to. Similarly, when I click on the second link with Class B, it does the Class B stuff like it's supposed to. No worries there. My issue is, when I click on the third link with BOTH classes, it only fires the function for whichever class comes last (in this case, class B. If I put class A at the end instead, it performs class A's function). I want it to fire both. What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance. EDIT: To those posting fiddles, nearly all of them work, so as many have said, it's most likely not my code, but the way it displays in my file. For a little more clarification, I was teaching myself some jQuery and decided to try making a (very) simple "Choose Your Own Adventure" type game. Here's a jsfiddle containing the opening of my bare-bones-please-don't-laugh game. Click on "Hide in the bushes", then "Examine the victim", then "Take any valuables and leave, he's dead already" <-- THIS is where the issue is. It's supposed to add 98 gold ("hawks") to your inventory, AND tell you that your alignment has shifted 1 point towards Chaotic. At the moment, it only does the chaotic alert, and no gold gets added to your inventory. The other option (refresh the fiddle to restart) that adds money to your inventory, but DOES NOT make you chaotic, works just fine (if you select "Search him for identification" instead of "take the money and run") Sorry this is so long!

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• How to improve my software project's speed?

  - by Blitzkr1eg

  I'm doing a school software project with my class mates in Java. We store the info on a remote db. When we start the application we pull all the information from the database and transform it into objects to use in our application (using java sql statemens). In the application we edit some of these objects and then when we exit the application we save or update information in the database using Hibernate. As you see we dont use Hibernate for pulling in information, we use it just for saving and updating. We have 2, but very similar problems. The loading of object(when we start the app) and the saving of objects(with Hibernate) in the db(when closing the app) is taking too much time. And our project its not a huge enterprise application, its a quite small app, we just manage some students, teachers, homeworks and tests. So our db is also very very small. How could we increase performance ? later edit: if we use a local database it runs very quick, it just runs slow on remote databases

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

  - by Mark Rackley

  I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding?  Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code.  Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance…   Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites.  Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid.  Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it.  :)  We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested).  Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software.  SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

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• Prepping a conference

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  I have had the chance to talk at many conferences these past few years, and came up with a way to prepare them which works really well for me. Most importantly, it would make it quite easy to overcome an emergency (for example if my laptop would suddenly lose data). The whole code as well as the slides and other documents are in the cloud. I also use source control for my demos, so that I always have the latest and the greatest, but also a history of changes I made to my demos. Finally I have a system of code snippets which works great, and I often had very positive remarks from the audience regarding that. Putting everything in the cloud The one thing I used to be the most scared of was a sudden crash of my laptop, and being unable to restore in time for a conference. Most conferences ask speakers to send slides a few days (or weeks…) in advance, but let's face it, we all have last minute changes to our talks and I always come in the conference with updated slides that I pass to the management team. The answer to that dilemma used to be working off memory sticks, and that worked not bad. However last year I started putting all the documents relating to a conference in a DropBox folder, and that works great too. Obviously DropBox works only if you have connectivity, so if I for instance update slides while on an international flight, I cannot save to the cloud. The obvious answer to that is to backup everything on a memory stick… but I have to admit, I have been trusting my luck and working off my laptop HD and then synching everything to the cloud after landing. Of course on some US national flights you get WiFi on board, so in that case it is even simpler :) Usually after the conference is done, I remove the files from DropBox and copy them to their "final destination". They are backed up from there to BackBlaze, the great online backup service I am using routinely (I currently have about 90GB of data in BackBlaze). Outlining the presentations I like to have a written outline of my presentations written somewhere. I keep it simple, just write the various sections of the presentation with timing. I guess it is a remnant of the time when I was a private pilot, and using checklists for flight preparation. For example: Demo about designability 15' (0:37) Switch to Blend Open MainPage.xaml Create a DataTemplate ... Here I can immediately see during the presentation if I am taking too much time for my demo (0:37 is where I need to be when I am done with this section of the presentation, and 15' is the time that this particular section takes). I keep these sections reasonable, I don't detail every step of the preparation. Typically I have one such section for every 10-15 minutes of my talks. Yes, I am timing my presentations. I keep adjusting these numbers when I rehearse, and this really helps to feel more confident during the presentations. This is especially important for presentations that are long, like my MIX11 demo which clocked at 57 minutes (I had a lot of stuff to show…). Such presentations are risky, because if anything goes wrong, you will have to cut stuff, so the answer to that is: Rehearse, rehearse and when you're done rehearsing, rehearse a little more. I also have a "Preparation" section where I outline what I need to do before a presentation. For instance: Preparation Reboot in VHD Make sure MSN and Twitter are not running. Open VS10 and load demo Open Blend and load demo Run the WP7 emulator ... I typically start preparing my laptop an hour before the talk, starting everything I need to start and then putting my laptop to sleep. Saving and printing the outline, Timing Printing is a real problem because it is really hard to find a printer at most conference venues, and also quite hard in hotels. To solve that, I simply write everything in OneNote (synched to the cloud, now you start to know what I like ;) and then I print it to a PDF (I use CutePDFWriter) that I save to my Kindle. During the presentation, I read the outline off the Kindle (I mostly just need a quick check to see how I am timing). For timing during the presentation, I use the free tool ChronoGPS on my Windows Phone 7, but of course any phone these days has a clock/chrono application. In some conferences, they even have timers that the presenters can see, but they tend to count down and I prefer to count up… so I just use my own :) Source control for demos For demos, I create a separate folder and use Mercurial as source control. Mercurial has the huge advantage (over SVN or TFS) to work offline too, so I can commit while on a plane, and all the history is saved. Then when I have connectivity I push everything to the cloud (I am using the fantastic Trunksapp.com for my private repositories). Here too the obvious downside is the risk of losing my last changes if my laptop crashes before I can push to the cloud, and here too the obvious answer would be to work from a memory stick… though I have to admit I didn't do that lately (except when I was writing Silverlight 4 Unleashed, where I was really paranoid…) And code snippets? I am one of these presenters who hates to type in front of an audience. I can type really fast (writing two books has this advantage, it really teaches you to touch type and be fast at it) but in the context of an audience, on a stage where it is often damn cold (an issue I had a lot in past conferences, air conditioning can freeze your fingers and make it really hard to type), it doesn't work as well. I don't know for you, but I really dislike seeing a presentation where the speaker uses the backspace key more often than others ;) To solve that, I like to have my code ready in snippets, and drag them to the screen. Then I can spend time explaining each code snippet, while highlighting portions of the code (always highlight what you talk about, the audience often doesn't even see the cursor and doesn't know where you are on the screen!) Over the years I have used various solutions for code snippets, and now I have one which works really well… if you take a few precautions! I use the Visual Studio Toolbox. Preparing the code snippets You can store code snippets in the Toolbox for anything, XAML, C# etc. I arrange the snippets in the order in which I need them, which is a great way to remember what comes next in the presentation. I also separate them by topic, to make it easier to find them, for example when I switch to the slides and then back to the code. Remember that no matter how experienced you are, you will feel more nervous on stage than while you are preparing, so any way to make it easier for you is going to be beneficial to the audience. To store a code snippet, I do the following: Open the final demo that you want to show to the audience in Visual Studio. In your code, select a snippet of code that you want to explain in particular. Make sure that the Visual Studio Toolbox is open (menu View, Toolbox or Ctrl-Alt-X). Drag the selected snippet from the code window to the toolbox. (if needed) drag the snippet to the correct location (for example between two other code snippets so that you can access it as you speak through the demo). Right click on the snippet and select Rename Item from the context menu. Select a meaningful name. For me I use the following conventions: If it is a method, I use the method's name. If it is not a whole method, I use a descriptive name. If it is the content of a method (i.e. the body only, without the method's signature), I use "-> MethodName". This reminds me during the presentation that this is only the body, and that I need to insert that into an existing signature. This is the case, for instance, when I use Visual Studio to automatically generate the members of an interface’s implementation; then I only need to insert my snippet inside the generated method body. Saving the snippets This is the most important!! It happened to me a few times that VS10 lost its settings. When that happens, the snippets are lost too! Yeah that really sucks, especially (as it happened once) when this is the case about an hour before a talk… Stress and sweat follows, not good conditions to start a talk in front of an audience believe me. Thankfully, saving snippets is really easy with the following steps: Select the menu Tools, Import and Export Settings. Select Export selected environment settings and press Next. Uncheck All Settings. Then expand General Settings and select Toolbox (only!). Press Next. Select your source control folder and save under a meaningful name (for instance Snippets.vssettings). Commit to source control and push to the cloud. By the way, this also has the advantage of applying source control to the snippets file (which is an XML file), so you get history for free on that file! Reimporting the snippets If VS loses its settings and you need to reimport the snippets, this can be done super easily and very fast. Make sure that the Toolbox is empty. When you import snippets, they are merged with existing ones, they do not replace the content of the Toolbox. Unless merging is really what you want, make sure that your Toolbox is clean before you import, it is really easier. Select the menu Tools, Import and Export Settings. Select Import selected environment settings and press Next. Select No, just import new settings and press Next. Press Browse and select the Snippets.vssettings file. Press Finish. Et voila, all your snippets appear again in the Toolbox. Whew, the worst was averted and you can start your demo without sweating! (I had to do that once literally 5 minutes before the start of a demo, while my laptop was already hooked to the projector, and it went just fine). What about special tools? When using special tools (for example beta versions of tools you have an early access to), or a special configuration of your laptop, things can get tricky because you cannot really be sure that you will get a laptop with the same tools and the same configuration at the conference. To solve that, I use the following precautions: I make my demos from a Virtual Hard Disk. The great John Papa made a very easy-to-follow web page where he explains how to create a VHD and install Win7 to it. This gives you the full power of your laptop (as fast as booting from the metal). For me, I have a basic configuration that I saved on a USB harddrive (Win7 plus drivers, basic settings for desktop, folder options, taskbar etc) and Visual Studio 2010 SP1 on it. When preparing, I start by copying this "basis VHD" to my laptop. I install additional tools and configurations. I save the VHD back to the USB harddrive in a different folder. This would allow me to reinstall my demo environment quite fast, for example in case of harddrive failure. Replace the harddrive, copy the VHD to it, configure the BCD and you can start. Unfortunately this only works if the laptop itself still works. In the worst case of total failure, my security is to back all the installers up: The installers I use are synched on all my laptops and backed up to BackBlaze. If the worst happens and my laptop is absolutely broken, I can download the installer from BackBlaze and install on another laptop. This of course takes some time, and if that happens 5 minutes before a presentation, well… I don't have an answer to that, except of course crossing my fingers. Still, all that gives me additional security. Conclusion Remember folks, talking to an audience, large or small, will make you nervous. Just ask Scott Hanselman :) The goal here is to create the best possible conditions for you, and to create an environment where everything is saved and easy to restore, where everything is well known and provides you with additional confidence. The cooler you feel before the presentation (and during ;)), the better your presentation will be. Here too, the goal is to provide the best user experience you can have, which in turn will make it more enjoyable for your audience! Happy presenting :) Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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