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• Why We Do What We Do. (Part 3 of 5 Part Series on JDE 5G Postponed)

  - by Kem Butller-Oracle

  By Lyle Ekdahl - Oracle JD Edwards Sr. VP General Manager  In the closing of part two of this 5 part blog series, I stated that in the next installment I would explore the expected results of the digital overdrive era and the impact it will have on our economy. While I have full intentions of writing on that topic, I am inspired today to write about something that is top of mind. It’s top of mind because it has come up several times recently conversations with my Oracle’s JD Edwards team members, with customers and our partners, plus I feel passionately about why I do what I do…. It is not what we do but why we do that thing that we do Do you know what you do? For the most part, I bet you could tell me what you do even if your work has changed over the years.  My real question is, “Do you get excited about what you do, and are you fulfilled? Does your work deliver a sense of purpose, a cause to work for, and something to believe in?”  Alright, I guess that was not a single question. So let me just ask, “Why?” Why are you here, right now? Why do you get up in the morning? Why do you go to work? Of course, I can’t answer those questions for you but I can share with you my POV.   For starters, there are several things that drive me. As many of you know by now, I have a somewhat competitive nature but it is not solely the thrill of winning that actually fuels me. Now don’t get me wrong, I do like winning occasionally. However winning is only a potential result of competing and is clearly not guaranteed. So why compete? Why compete in business, and particularly why in this Enterprise Software business?  Here’s why! I am fascinated by creative and building processes. It is about making or producing things, causing something to come into existence. With the right skill, imagination and determination, whether it’s art or invention; the result can deliver value and inspire. In both avocation and vocation I always gravitate towards the create/build processes.  I believe one of the skills necessary for the create/build process is not just the aptitude but also, and especially, the desire and attitude that drives one to gain a deeper understanding. The more I learn about our customers, the more I seek to understand what makes the successful and what difficult issues cause them to struggle. I like to look for the complex, non-commodity process problems where streamlined design and modern technology can provide an easy and simple solution. It is especially gratifying to see our customers use our software to increase their own ability to deliver value to the market. What an incredible network effect! I know many of you share this customer obsession as well as the create/build addiction focused on simple and elegant design. This is what I believe is at the root of our common culture.  Are JD Edwards customers on a whole different than other ERP solutions’ customers? I would argue that for the most part, yes, they are. They selected our software, and our software is different. Why? Because I believe that the create/build process will generally result in solutions that reflect who built it and their culture. And a culture of people focused on why they create/build will attract different customers than one that is based on what is built or how the solution is delivered. In the past I have referred to this idea as character of the customer, and it transcends industry, size and run rate. Now some would argue that JD Edwards has some customers who are characters. But that is for a different post. As I have told you before, the JD Edwards culture is unique, and its resulting economy is valuable and deserving of our best efforts. 

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• Chalk Talk with John: What Does User Experience Mean to You?

  - by Tanu Sood

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Author: John Brunswick The "Chalk Talk with John" series will explore the practical value of Middleware in the context of two fictional communities, shared through analogies aligned to enterprise technology.  This format offers business stakeholders and IT a common language for understanding the benefits of technology in support of their business initiatives, regardless of their current level of technical knowledge. I will endeavor to showcase an episode highlighting business use cases and how technology plays a role in business on a bi-weekly basis. The debut episode highlights the benefits of user experience capabilities supplied by Portal technologies, by juxtaposing the communities of Middleware Fields and Codeaway Valley with regard to the time and effort their residents spend performing everyday tasks.  This comparison provides insight into the benefits of leveraging a common user experience foundation to support the tasks that our employees, customers and partners engage in on a daily basis with our organizations. Take a look and let me know your thoughts! 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} About me: Hi, I am John Brunswick, an Oracle Enterprise Architect. As an Oracle Enterprise Architect, I focus on the alignment of technical capabilities in support of business vision and objectives, as well as the overall business value of technology.  Before coming to Oracle, I was a Practice Manager within BEA System's Business Interaction Division consulting organization, orchestrating enterprise systems in support of line of business goals. Connect with me on Twitter and visit my site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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• How do I cap rendering of tiles in a 2D game with SDL?

  - by farmdve

  I have some boilerplate code working, I basically have a tile based map composed of just 3 colors, and some walls and render with SDL. The tiles are in a bmp file, but each tile inside it corresponds to an internal number of the type of tile(color, or wall). I have pretty basic collision detection and it works, I can also detetc continuous presses, which allows me to move pretty much anywhere I want. I also have a moving camera, which follows the object. The problem is that, the tile based map is bigger than the resolution, thus not all of the map can be displayed on the screen, but it's still rendered. I would like to cap it, but since this is new to me, I pretty much have no idea. Although I cannot post all the code, as even though I am a newbie and the code pretty basic, it's already quite a few lines, I can post what I tried to do void set_camera() { //Center the camera over the dot camera.x = ( player.box.x + DOT_WIDTH / 2 ) - SCREEN_WIDTH / 2; camera.y = ( player.box.y + DOT_HEIGHT / 2 ) - SCREEN_HEIGHT / 2; //Keep the camera in bounds. if(camera.x < 0 ) { camera.x = 0; } if(camera.y < 0 ) { camera.y = 0; } if(camera.x > LEVEL_WIDTH - camera.w ) { camera.x = LEVEL_WIDTH - camera.w; } if(camera.y > LEVEL_HEIGHT - camera.h ) { camera.y = LEVEL_HEIGHT - camera.h; } } set_camera() is the function which calculates the camera position based on the player's positions. I won't pretend I know much about it. Rectangle box = {0,0,0,0}; for(int t = 0; t < TOTAL_TILES; t++) { if(box.x < (camera.x - TILE_WIDTH) || box.y > (camera.y - TILE_HEIGHT)) apply_surface(box.x - camera.x, box.y - camera.y, surface, screen, &clips[tiles[t]]); box.x += TILE_WIDTH; //If we've gone too far if(box.x >= LEVEL_WIDTH) { //Move back box.x = 0; //Move to the next row box.y += TILE_HEIGHT; } } This is basically my render code. The for loop loops over 192 tiles stored in an int array, each with their own unique value describing the tile type(wall or one of three possible colored tiles). box is an SDL_Rect containing the current position of the tile, which is calculated on render. TILE_HEIGHT and TILE_WIDTH are of value 80. So the cap is determined by if(box.x < (camera.x - TILE_WIDTH) || box.y > (camera.y - TILE_HEIGHT)) However, this is just me playing with the values and see what doesn't break it. I pretty much have no idea how to calculate it. My screen resolution is 1024/768, and the tile map is of size 1280/960.

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• Taking HRMS to the Cloud to Simplify Human Resources Management

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Anke Mogannam With human capital management (HCM) a top-of-mind issue for executives in every industry, human resources (HR) organizations are poised to have their day in the sun—proving not just their administrative worth but their strategic value as well.  To make good on that promise, however, HR must modernize. Indeed, if HR is to act as an agent of change—providing the swift reallocation of employees  and the rapid absorption of employee data required for enterprises to shift course on a dime—it must first deal with the disruptive change at its own front door. And increasingly, that means choosing the right technology and human resources management system (HRMS) for managing the entire employee lifecycle. Unfortunately, for most organizations, this task has proved easier said than done. This is because while much has been written about advances in HRMS technology, until recently, most of those advances took the form of disparate on-premises solutions designed to serve very specific purposes. Although this may have resulted in key competencies in certain areas, it also meant that processes for core HR functions like payroll and benefits were being carried out in separate systems from those used for talent management, workforce optimization, training, and so on. With no integration—and no single system of record—processes were disconnected, ease of use was impeded, user experience was diminished, and vital data was left untapped.  Today, however, that scenario has begun to change, and end-to-end cloud-based HCM solutions have moved from wished-for innovations to real-life solutions. Why, then, have HR organizations been so slow in adopting them? The answer—it would seem—is, “It’s complicated.” So complicated, in fact, that 45 percent of the respondents to PwC’s “Annual HR Technology Survey” (for 2013) reported having no formal HR software roadmap, and 40 percent stated that they “did not know” whether their organizations would be increasing their use of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) for HR.  Clearly, HR organizations need help sorting through the morass of HR software options confronting them. But just as clearly, there’s an enormous opportunity awaiting those that do. The trick will come in charting a course that allows HR to leverage existing technology while investing in the cloud-based solutions that will deliver the end-to-end processes, easy-to-understand analytics, and superior adaptability required to simplify—and add value to—every aspect of employee management. The Opportunity therefore is to cut costs, drive Innovation, and increase engagement by moving to cloud-based HCM.  Then you will benefit from one Interface, leverage many access points, and  gain at-a-glance insight across your entire workforce. With many legacy on-premises HR systems not being efficient anymore and cloud-based, integrated systems that span the range of HR functions finally reaching maturity, the time is ripe for moving core HR to the cloud. Indeed, for the first time ever there are more HRMS replacement initiatives than HRMS upgrade initiatives under way, and the majority of them involve moving to the cloud per Cedar Crestone’s 2013-2014 HRMS survey. To learn how you can launch your own cloud HCM initiative and begin using HR to power the enterprise, visit Oracle HRMS in the Cloud and Oracle’s new customer 2 cloud program. Anke Mogannam brings more than 16 years of marketing and human capital management experience in the technology industries to her role at Oracle where she is part of the Human Capital Management applications marketing team. In that role, Anke drives content marketing, messaging, go-to-market activities, integrated marketing campaigns, and field enablement. Prior to joining Oracle, Anke held several roles in communications, marketing, HCM product strategy and product management at PeopleSoft, SAP, Workday and Saba. Follow her on Twitter @amogannam

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• Fetching Partition Information

  - by Mike Femenella

  For a recent SSIS package at work I needed to determine the distinct values in a partition, the number of rows in each partition and the file group name on which each partition resided in order to come up with a grouping mechanism. Of course sys.partitions comes to mind for some of that but there are a few other tables you need to link to in order to grab the information required. The table I’m working on contains 8.8 billion rows. Finding the distinct partition keys from this table was not a fast operation. My original solution was to create  a temporary table, grab the distinct values for the partitioned column, then update via sys.partitions for the rows and the $partition function for the partitionid and finally look back to the sys.filegroups table for the filegroup names. It wasn’t pretty, it could take up to 15 minutes to return the results. The primary issue is pulling distinct values from the table. Queries for distinct against 8.8 billion rows don’t go quickly. A few beers into a conversation with a friend and we ended up talking about work which led to a conversation about the task described above. The solution was already built in SQL Server, just needed to pull it together. The first table I needed was sys.partition_range_values. This contains one row for each range boundary value for a partition function. In my case I have a partition function which uses dayid values. For example July 4th would be represented as an int, 20130704. This table lists out all of the dayid values which were defined in the function. This eliminated the need to query my source table for distinct dayid values, everything I needed was already built in here for me. The only caveat was that in my SSIS package I needed to create a bucket for any dayid values that were out of bounds for my function. For example if my function handled 20130501 through 20130704 and I had day values of 20130401 or 20130705 in my table, these would not be listed in sys.partition_range_values. I just created an “everything else” bucket in my ssis package just in case I had any dayid values unaccounted for. To get the number of rows for a partition is very easy. The sys.partitions table contains values for each partition. Easy enough to achieve by querying for the object_id and index value of 1 (the clustered index) The final piece of information was the filegroup name. There are 2 options available to get the filegroup name, sys.data_spaces or sys.filegroups. For my query I chose sys.filegroups but really it’s a matter of preference and data needs. In order to bridge between sys.partitions table and either sys.data_spaces or sys.filegroups you need to get the container_id. This can be done by joining sys.allocation_units.container_id to the sys.partitions.hobt_id. sys.allocation_units contains the field data_space_id which then lets you join in either sys.data_spaces or sys.file_groups. The end result is the query below, which typically executes for me in under 1 second. I’ve included the join to sys.filegroups and to sys.dataspaces, and I’ve  just commented out the join sys.filegroups. As I mentioned above, this shaves a good 10-15 minutes off of my original ssis package and is a really easy tweak to get a boost in my ETL time. Enjoy.

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• 7-Eleven Improves the Digital Guest Experience With 10-Minute Application Provisioning

  - by MichaelM-Oracle

  By Vishal Mehra - Director, Cloud Computing, Oracle Consulting Making the Cloud Journey Matter There’s much more to cloud computing than cutting costs and closing data centers. In fact, cloud computing is fast becoming the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age. Oracle Consulting Services contributes to our customers’ cloud journey by accelerating application provisioning and rapidly deploying enterprise solutions. By blending flexibility with standardization, our Middleware as a Service (MWaaS) offering is ensuring the success of many cloud initiatives. 10-Minute Application Provisioning Times at 7-Eleven As a case in point, 7-Eleven recently highlighted the scope, scale, and results of a cloud-powered environment. The world’s largest convenience store chain is rolling out a Digital Guest Experience (DGE) program across 8,500 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Everyday, 7-Eleven connects with tens of millions of customers through point-of-sale terminals, web sites, and mobile apps. Promoting customer loyalty, targeting promotions, downloading digital coupons, and accepting digital payments are all part of the roadmap for a comprehensive and rewarding customer experience. And what about the time required for deploying successive versions of this mission-critical solution? Ron Clanton, 7-Eleven's DGE Program Manager, Information Technology reported at Oracle Open World, " We are now able to provision new environments in less than 10 minutes. This includes the complete SOA Suite on Exalogic, and Enterprise Manager managing both the SOA Suite, Exalogic, and our Exadata databases ." OCS understands the complex nature of innovative solutions and has processes and expertise to help clients like 7-Eleven rapidly develop technology that enhances the customer experience with little more than the click of a button. OCS understood that the 7-Eleven roadmap required careful planning, agile development, and a cloud-capable environment to move fast and perform at enterprise scale. Business Agility Today’s business-savvy technology leaders face competing priorities as they confront the digital disruptions of the mobile revolution and next-generation enterprise applications. To support an innovation agenda, IT is required to balance competing priorities between development and operations groups. Standardization and consolidation of computing resources are the keys to success. With our operational and technical expertise promoting business agility, Oracle Consulting's deep Middleware as a Service experience can make a significant difference to our clients by empowering enterprise IT organizations with the computing environment they seek to keep up with the pace of change that digitally driven business units expect. Depending on the needs of the organization, this environment runs within a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Through on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, IT delivers the standard tools and methods for developing, integrating, deploying, and scaling next-generation applications. Gold profiles of predefined configurations eliminate the version mismatches among databases, application servers, and SOA suite components, delivered both by Oracle and other enterprise ISVs. These computing resources are well defined in business terms, enabling users to select what they need from a service catalog. Striking the Balance between Development and Operations As a result, development groups have the flexibility to choose among a menu of available services with descriptions of standard business functions, service level guarantees, and costs. Faced with the consumerization of enterprise IT, they can deliver the innovative customer experiences that seamlessly integrate with underlying enterprise applications and services. This cloud-powered development and testing environment accelerates release cycles to ensure agile development and rapid deployments. At the same time, the operations group is relying on certified stacks and frameworks, tuned to predefined environments and patterns. Operators can maintain a high level of security, and continue best practices for applications/systems monitoring and management. Moreover, faced with the challenges of delivering on service level agreements (SLAs) with the business units, operators can ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of the infrastructure. The elasticity of a cloud-computing environment – the ability to rapidly add virtual machines and storage in response to computing demands -- makes a difference for hardware utilization and efficiency. Contending with Continuous Change What does it take to succeed on the promise of the cloud? As the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age, IT must face not only the technical transformations but also the organizational challenges of the cloud. Standardizing key technologies, resources, and services through cloud computing is only one part of the cloud journey. Managing relationships among multiple department and projects over time – developing the management, governance, and monitoring capabilities within IT – is an often unmentioned but all too important second part. In fact, IT must have the organizational agility to contend with continuous change. This is where a skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. With a lifecycle services approach to delivering innovative business solutions, Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help enterprise customers succeed on their cloud journeys as well as other converging mega trends .

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• Inside BackgroundWorker

  - by João Angelo

  The BackgroundWorker is a reusable component that can be used in different contexts, but sometimes with unexpected results. If you are like me, you have mostly used background workers while doing Windows Forms development due to the flexibility they offer for running a background task. They support cancellation and give events that signal progress updates and task completion. When used in Windows Forms, these events (ProgressChanged and RunWorkerCompleted) get executed back on the UI thread where you can freely access your form controls. However, the logic of the progress changed and worker completed events being invoked in the thread that started the background worker is not something you get directly from the BackgroundWorker, but instead from the fact that you are running in the context of Windows Forms. Take the following example that illustrates the use of a worker in three different scenarios: – Console Application or Windows Service; – Windows Forms; – WPF. using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Threading; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Windows.Threading; class Program { static AutoResetEvent Synch = new AutoResetEvent(false); static void Main() { var bw1 = new BackgroundWorker(); var bw2 = new BackgroundWorker(); var bw3 = new BackgroundWorker(); Console.WriteLine("DEFAULT"); var unspecializedThread = new Thread(() => { OutputCaller(1); SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new SynchronizationContext()); bw1.DoWork += (sender, e) => OutputWork(1); bw1.RunWorkerCompleted += (sender, e) => OutputCompleted(1); // Uses default SynchronizationContext bw1.RunWorkerAsync(); }); unspecializedThread.IsBackground = true; unspecializedThread.Start(); Synch.WaitOne(); Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("WINDOWS FORMS"); var windowsFormsThread = new Thread(() => { OutputCaller(2); SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext()); bw2.DoWork += (sender, e) => OutputWork(2); bw2.RunWorkerCompleted += (sender, e) => OutputCompleted(2); // Uses WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext bw2.RunWorkerAsync(); Application.Run(); }); windowsFormsThread.IsBackground = true; windowsFormsThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); windowsFormsThread.Start(); Synch.WaitOne(); Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("WPF"); var wpfThread = new Thread(() => { OutputCaller(3); SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new DispatcherSynchronizationContext()); bw3.DoWork += (sender, e) => OutputWork(3); bw3.RunWorkerCompleted += (sender, e) => OutputCompleted(3); // Uses DispatcherSynchronizationContext bw3.RunWorkerAsync(); Dispatcher.Run(); }); wpfThread.IsBackground = true; wpfThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); wpfThread.Start(); Synch.WaitOne(); } static void OutputCaller(int workerId) { Console.WriteLine( "bw{0}.{1} | Thread: {2} | IsThreadPool: {3}", workerId, "RunWorkerAsync".PadRight(18), Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId, Thread.CurrentThread.IsThreadPoolThread); } static void OutputWork(int workerId) { Console.WriteLine( "bw{0}.{1} | Thread: {2} | IsThreadPool: {3}", workerId, "DoWork".PadRight(18), Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId, Thread.CurrentThread.IsThreadPoolThread); } static void OutputCompleted(int workerId) { Console.WriteLine( "bw{0}.{1} | Thread: {2} | IsThreadPool: {3}", workerId, "RunWorkerCompleted".PadRight(18), Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId, Thread.CurrentThread.IsThreadPoolThread); Synch.Set(); } } Output: //DEFAULT //bw1.RunWorkerAsync | Thread: 3 | IsThreadPool: False //bw1.DoWork | Thread: 4 | IsThreadPool: True //bw1.RunWorkerCompleted | Thread: 5 | IsThreadPool: True //WINDOWS FORMS //bw2.RunWorkerAsync | Thread: 6 | IsThreadPool: False //bw2.DoWork | Thread: 5 | IsThreadPool: True //bw2.RunWorkerCompleted | Thread: 6 | IsThreadPool: False //WPF //bw3.RunWorkerAsync | Thread: 7 | IsThreadPool: False //bw3.DoWork | Thread: 5 | IsThreadPool: True //bw3.RunWorkerCompleted | Thread: 7 | IsThreadPool: False As you can see the output between the first and remaining scenarios is somewhat different. While in Windows Forms and WPF the worker completed event runs on the thread that called RunWorkerAsync, in the first scenario the same event runs on any thread available in the thread pool. Another scenario where you can get the first behavior, even when on Windows Forms or WPF, is if you chain the creation of background workers, that is, you create a second worker in the DoWork event handler of an already running worker. Since the DoWork executes in a thread from the pool the second worker will use the default synchronization context and the completed event will not run in the UI thread.

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• Four Easy Ways to Save a Rocky CRM Relationship

  - by Divya Malik

   Today, I am pleased to introduce our guest blogger Luke Christianson. Luke is  an Application Sales rep based out of Minneapolis, MN.  You can find him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter. In any relationship, sooner or later, the excitement fades away.  The honeymoon period gives way to the old routines you had, before you committed to each other and you eventually begin doing things apart from one another.  I’m not talking about a marriage…  Well, I guess I am.Commitment to a CRM tool and building a deep and lasting relationship is not much different than the basics of a traditional love story.  After your controlled CRM pilot program, and maybe the National Sales Meeting where you couldn’t escape those three wonderful letters, CRM, you will soon find that if you haven’t designed an environment where it’s going to enable your reps to make more money, the relationship is doomed.   . If you’re currently in a dysfunctional CRM relationship, here are 4 simple tips to re-engaging users and getting that spark back. Shadow a Sales Rep:   Chances are you can find out exactly what is preventing your sales reps from using the application by simply watching how they go about their day.  Sales reps are driven by money, not by additional administrative duties.  Your system needs to be setup so that they can get the information they need quickly, facilitate making key updates and run their business out of one easy-to-use application.  Increase your sales team’s productivity by 5% automatically:    Cancel the weekly forecast calls with your reps and require them update their opportunities in CRM.  Something else that I’ve seen work extremely well, is when you do Monthly or Quarterly reviews, do not let your sales reps bring anything into the room with them; no spreadsheets, notebooks, or computers.  Everything they need to tell you should be able to be put into CRM and fully accessible by the Sales Manager at any time.  Tool time:      Make sure the tools that you have selected meet both your short-term goals and your long term goals.   You need tools that can adapt like your business does.  You probably can’t wait two months for an update to a picklist value or for the addition of a simple workflow rule.  Do you feel the tools that are in place can create the experience you want for your users? and finally, if all else fails... Keep It Simple, Stupid:     Do you really need to require 15 fields to create an Opportunity?  Do you need to clutter the interface with different reports that don’t add daily value?  Most CRM systems on the market today are flexible enough today that your admin could clean up most of the unnecessary interface ‘noise’ in a few hours.  If they're not, see #3. Every strong relationship can be tedious at times, you’ll fight and eventually make amends, you may even threaten to upgrade to a newer model…  But be patient and think about what you want to achieve and you’ll find a partner for life.

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• Right-Time Retail Part 2

  - by David Dorf

  This is part two of the three-part series. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Integration Of course these real-time enabling technologies are only as good as the systems that utilize them, and it only takes one bottleneck to slow everyone else down. What good is an immediate stock-out notification if the supply chain can’t react until tomorrow? Since being formed in 2006, Oracle Retail has been not only adding more integrations between systems, but also modernizing integrations for appropriate speed. Notice I tossed in the word “appropriate.” Not everything needs to be real-time – again, we’re talking about Right-Time Retail. The speed of data capture, analysis, and execution must be synchronized or you’re wasting effort. Unfortunately, there isn’t an enterprise-wide dial that you can crank-up for your estate. You’ll need to improve things piecemeal, with people and processes as limiting factors while choosing the appropriate types of integrations. There are three integration styles we see in the retail industry. First is batch. I know, the word “batch” just sounds slow, but this pattern is less about velocity and more about volume. When there are large amounts of data to be moved, you’ll want to use batch processes. Our technology of choice here is Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), which provides a fast version of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). Instead of the three-step process, the load and transform steps are combined to save time. ODI is a key technology for moving data into Retail Analytics where we can apply science. Performing analytics on each sale as it occurs doesn’t make any sense, so we batch up a statistically significant amount and submit all at once. The second style is fire-and-forget. For some types of data, we want the data to arrive ASAP but immediacy is not necessary. Speed is less important than guaranteed delivery, so we use message-oriented middleware available in both Weblogic and the Oracle database. For example, Point-of-Service transactions are queued for delivery to Central Office at corporate. If the network is offline, those transactions remain in the queue and will be delivered when the network returns. Transactions cannot be lost and they must be delivered in order. (Ever tried processing a return before the sale?) To enhance the standard queues, we offer the Retail Integration Bus (RIB) to help the management and monitoring of fire-and-forget messaging in the enterprise. The third style is request-response and is most commonly implemented as Web services. This is a synchronous message where the sender waits for a response. In this situation, the volume of data is small, guaranteed delivery is not necessary, but speed is very important. Examples include the website checking inventory, a price lookup, or processing a credit card authorization. The Oracle Service Bus (OSB) typically handles the routing of such messages, and we’ve enhanced its abilities with the Retail Service Backbone (RSB). To better understand these integration patterns and where they apply within the retail enterprise, we’re providing the Retail Reference Library (RRL) at no charge to Oracle Retail customers. The library is composed of a large number of industry business processes, including those necessary to support Commerce Anywhere, as well as detailed architectural diagrams. These diagrams allow implementers to understand the systems involved in integrations and the specific data payloads. Furthermore, with our upcoming release we’ll be providing a new tool called the Retail Integration Console (RIC) that allows IT to monitor and manage integrations from a single point. Using RIC, retailers can quickly discern where integration activity is occurring, volume statistics, average response times, and errors. The dashboards provide the ability to dive down into the architecture documentation to gather information all the way down to the specific payload. Retailers that want real-time integrations will also need real-time monitoring of those integrations to ensure service-level agreements are maintained. Part 3 looks at marketing.

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• Dont Throw Duplicate Exceptions

  In your code, youll sometimes have write code that validates input using a variety of checks.  Assuming you havent embraced AOP and done everything with attributes, its likely that your defensive coding is going to look something like this: public void Foo(SomeClass someArgument) { if(someArgument == null) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument"); } if(!someArgument.IsValid()) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument"); }   // Do Real Work } Do you see a problem here?  Heres the deal Exceptions should be meaningful.  They have value at a number of levels: In the code, throwing an exception lets the develop know that there is an unsupported condition here In calling code, different types of exceptions may be handled differently At runtime, logging of exceptions provides a valuable diagnostic tool Its this last reason I want to focus on.  If you find yourself literally throwing the exact exception in more than one location within a given method, stop.  The stack trace for such an exception is likely going to be identical regardless of which path of execution led to the exception being thrown.  When that happens, you or whomever is debugging the problem will have to guess which exception was thrown.  Guessing is a great way to introduce additional problems and/or greatly increase the amount of time require to properly diagnose and correct any bugs related to this behavior. Dont Guess Be Specific When throwing an exception from multiple code paths within the code, be specific.  Virtually ever exception allows a custom message use it and ensure each case is unique.  If the exception might be handled differently by the caller, than consider implementing a new custom exception type.  Also, dont automatically think that you can improve the code by collapsing the if-then logic into a single call with short-circuiting (e.g. if(x == null || !x.IsValid()) ) that will guarantee that you cant easily throw different information into the message as easily as constructing the exception separately in each case. The code above might be refactored like so:   public void Foo(SomeClass someArgument) { if(someArgument == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("someArgument"); } if(!someArgument.IsValid()) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument"); }   // Do Real Work } In this case its taking advantage of the fact that there is already an ArgumentNullException in the framework, but if you didnt have an IsValid() method and were doing validation on your own, it might look like this: public void Foo(SomeClass someArgument) { if(someArgument.Quantity < 0) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument", "Quantity cannot be less than 0. Quantity: " + someArgument.Quantity); } if(someArgument.Quantity > 100) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument", "SomeArgument.Quantity cannot exceed 100. Quantity: " + someArgument.Quantity); }   // Do Real Work }   Note that in this last example, Im throwing the same exception type in each case, but with different Message values.  Im also making sure to include the value that resulted in the exception, as this can be extremely useful for debugging.  (How many times have you wished NullReferenceException would tell you the name of the variable it was trying to reference?) Dont add work to those who will follow after you to maintain your application (especially since its likely to be you).  Be specific with your exception messages follow DRY when throwing exceptions within a given method by throwing unique exceptions for each interesting case of invalid state. 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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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• Issues glVertexAttribPointer last 2 parameters?

  - by NoobScratcher

  Introduction Hello I will start out by explaining my setup, showing samples as I go along explaining the situation. I'm using these tools: OpenGL 3.3 GLSL 330 C++ Problem The problem is when I render the wavefront obj 3d model it gives a very weird visual glitch the model was supposed to be a square but instead its a triangluated mess with parts of the vertexes pointing in a stretched direction in massive amounts towards the bottom left side of the frustum.... Explanation: I'm using std::vectors to store my wavefront .obj model data using sscanf to get the floating point values into the structure members x,y,z and store them into the Points structure variable p; int index = IndexAssigner(1, 1); ifstream file (list[index].c_str() ); points.push_back(Point()); Point p; int face[4]; while (!file.eof() ) { char modelbuffer[10000]; file.getline(modelbuffer, 10000); switch(modelbuffer[0]) { case 'v' : sscanf(modelbuffer, "v %f %f %f", &p.x, &p.y, &p.z); points.push_back(p); break; case 'f': sscanf(modelbuffer, "f %d %d %d %d", face, face+1, face+2, face+3 ); faces.push_back(face[0]); faces.push_back(face[1]); faces.push_back(face[2]); faces.push_back(face[3]); } //Turn on FileReader aka "RENDER CODE" FileReader = true; } then I render the Points vector using the .data() member of std::vectors to the frustum. Other declarations: int numfloats = 4; float* point=reinterpret_cast<float*>(&points[0]); int num_bytes=numfloats*sizeof(float); Vector declarations: struct Point {float x, y , z; }; std::vector<int>faces; std::vector<Point>points; Render code: glGenBuffers(1, &vertexbuffer); glGenTextures(1, &ModelTexture); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexbuffer); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_3D, ModelTexture); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0,GL_RGBA, ModelSurface->w, ModelSurface->h, 0, GL_BGR, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, ModelSurface->pixels); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(points), points.data(), GL_STATIC_DRAW); glVertexAttribPointer(3, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE,num_bytes ,points.data()); glEnableVertexAttribArray(3); //Translation Process GLfloat TranslationMatrix[] = { 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0 }; //Send Translation Matrix up to the vertex shader glUniformMatrix4fv(translation, 1, TRUE, TranslationMatrix); glDrawElements( GL_QUADS, faces.size(), GL_UNSIGNED_INT, faces.data()); I tried looking at what was causing this and went through every function every parameter ,etc looked at the man pages. Then found out that it could be my glVertexAttribPointer. Here are the man pages for glVertexAttribPointer http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/xhtml/glVertexAttribPointer.xml The last 2 parameters is my problem How do I write those 2 last parameters do I try putting the data from Points into it?. glVertexAttribPointer(3, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE,num_bytes ,points.data()); How does it work with vectors? Is it fast?* if you can not be bothered too look at the man pages here is the scripts coming from the man pages directly. Stride Specifies the byte offset between consecutive generic vertex attributes. If stride is 0, the generic vertex attributes are understood to be tightly packed in the array. The initial value is 0. Pointer Specifies a pointer to the first component of the first generic vertex attribute in the array. The initial value is 0. If you want my full source - http://ideone.com/fPfkg Thanks Again if you do read this.

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• Capgemini Global Business Process Management Report

  - by JuergenKress

  Welcome to the Capgemini Global Business Process Management (BPM) Report. This report is an exploration of key trends in BPM as seen by CXOs across a broad selection of sectors and geographies. BPM is perhaps at a tipping point - it’s certainly at an exciting stage in its evolution. As both an engineer and an Operational Research practitioner in my early career, and subsequently as a consultant, I have seen BPM through its development over the last 26 years. BPM has its roots in management practices such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering & Model Based Development; but the advent of the new generation of sophisticated modelling and process execution technologies has greatly enhanced BPM’s power to truly transform businesses. This has created one of the most rapidly growing and attractive market sectors for both services and technology. We see BPM as a critical management discipline that when executed against clear, cross organizational business objectives, can deliver exceptional value to that organization. However, we also see that the potential for BPM is not well understood. Our decision to conduct this global survey stemmed from discussions with our clients. We sought to gain a better impression of their understanding of BPM, how they measure its value, and how far it is prioritized within their Business and Technology Transformation efforts. This research confirms our belief that BPM needs to be a jointly owned Business and IT discipline. It also demonstrates that it is starting to gain significant traction in the market and investments are starting to pay dividends to the early adopters. At Capgemini we are being asked by our clients to help them simplify and improve their business models and the technology that supports them and we are already seeing BPM become an integral and key part of this proposition. Business Process Management is becoming ever more relevant to both large and small organizations in the current economic climate. At a time when many different market sectors are facing slow revenue growth, customer churn and increased pressures on costs, BPM becomes a critical weapon in the battle for efficiency and effectiveness in processes. Furthermore, in a challenging and changing business environment that is characterized by uncertainty, it allows organizations to adapt, be more agile and fleet of foot. Capgemini is seeing strong demand for BPM services in markets such as the USA, the UK, the Netherlands and France; and there are clear signs of increased interest in other geographies such as, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Australia. In sector terms, the financial services industry has led the way in BPM adoption over the recent past, driven by increased focus on customer- centricity and regulatory compliance. Other sectors, public sector, utilities, telco, retail and manufacturing are now not only catching up, but are starting o use BPM in new ways to create new business models to serve customers and outsmart the competition. The research findings also show however that this is a complex landscape, and we are not seeing adoption of BPM in a clear and consistent way. This report also looks at some of the barriers to adoption, with organizational silos being a major obstacle. Waters are further muddied by fragmented budgets, lack of clear governance and ownership and internal politics. The objective of our investment in this research project was to shed some light on these elements with a view to assisting organizations to create strategies that avoid or at least mitigate some of these barriers to success. Management of change in such endea vours is a key part in enabling the appropriate alignment of business and technology to support their transformation efforts. I hope that you find this report of benefit in the further adoption of Business Process Management. Get the full report here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Capgemini,bpm report,bpm market,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Projective texture and deferred lighting

  - by Vodácek

  In my previous question, I asked whether it is possible to do projective texturing with deferred lighting. Now (more than half a year later) I have a problem with my implementation of the same thing. I am trying to apply this technique in light pass. (my projector doesn't affect albedo). I have this projector View a Projection matrix: Matrix projection = Matrix.CreateOrthographicOffCenter(-halfWidth * Scale, halfWidth * Scale, -halfHeight * Scale, halfHeight * Scale, 1, 100000); Matrix view = Matrix.CreateLookAt(Position, Target, Vector3.Up); Where halfWidth and halfHeight is are half of the texture's width and height, Position is the Projector's position and target is the projector's target. This seems to be ok. I am drawing full screen quad with this shader: float4x4 InvViewProjection; texture2D DepthTexture; texture2D NormalTexture; texture2D ProjectorTexture; float4x4 ProjectorViewProjection; sampler2D depthSampler = sampler_state { texture = <DepthTexture>; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; sampler2D normalSampler = sampler_state { texture = <NormalTexture>; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; sampler2D projectorSampler = sampler_state { texture = <ProjectorTexture>; AddressU = Clamp; AddressV = Clamp; }; float viewportWidth; float viewportHeight; // Calculate the 2D screen position of a 3D position float2 postProjToScreen(float4 position) { float2 screenPos = position.xy / position.w; return 0.5f * (float2(screenPos.x, -screenPos.y) + 1); } // Calculate the size of one half of a pixel, to convert // between texels and pixels float2 halfPixel() { return 0.5f / float2(viewportWidth, viewportHeight); } struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position :POSITION0; float4 PositionCopy : TEXCOORD1; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; output.Position = input.Position; output.PositionCopy=output.Position; return output; } float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { float2 texCoord =postProjToScreen(input.PositionCopy) + halfPixel(); // Extract the depth for this pixel from the depth map float4 depth = tex2D(depthSampler, texCoord); //return float4(depth.r,0,0,1); // Recreate the position with the UV coordinates and depth value float4 position; position.x = texCoord.x * 2 - 1; position.y = (1 - texCoord.y) * 2 - 1; position.z = depth.r; position.w = 1.0f; // Transform position from screen space to world space position = mul(position, InvViewProjection); position.xyz /= position.w; //compute projection float3 projection=tex2D(projectorSampler,postProjToScreen(mul(position,ProjectorViewProjection)) + halfPixel()); return float4(projection,1); } In first part of pixel shader is recovered position from G-buffer (this code I am using in other shaders without any problem) and then is tranformed to projector viewprojection space. Problem is that projection doesn't appear. Here is an image of my situation: The green lines are the rendered projector frustum. Where is my mistake hidden? I am using XNA 4. Thanks for advice and sorry for my English. EDIT: Shader above is working but projection was too small. When I changed the Scale property to a large value (e.g. 100), the projection appears. But when the camera moves toward the projection, the projection expands, as can bee seen on this YouTube video.

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• The Social Enterprise: Gangnam Style

  - by Mike Stiles

  Are only small and medium businesses able to put social strategies in place, generate consistent, compelling content for customers, and be nimble enough to listen and respond to the social communities they build? Or are enterprise organizations eagerly and effectively adopting social as well? It depends on whom inside the organization you ask. A study from Attensity looked at who “gets” social inside enterprise organizations. The results were unsurprising. Mostly, Generation X and Y employees who came of age with social as part of their lives and as a key communications vehicle understand it. Imagine being a 25-year-old at a company that bans employees from accessing Facebook at work. You may as well tell them they can’t use phones and must do all calculations on an abacus. To them, such policy is absent of real-world logic and signals to them the organization is destined to be the victim of an up-and-comer. After that, it’s senior management that gets social. You don’t get to be in senior management without reading a few things and paying attention. Most senior managers are well aware of the impact social has had and will have, though they may be unsure of what to do about it. The better ones will utilize those on the inside who do inherently know how to communicate and build virtual relationships using social. The very best will get the past out of the way for these social innovators, so the new communications can be enacted minus counterproductive dictums, double-clutching, meeting-creep, and all the other fading internal practices that water down content and impede change. Organizationally, the Attensity study found 81% of enterprise companies believe failing to embrace social will result in their being left behind. Yet our old friend fear still has many captive in its clutches. 79% feel overwhelmed by the volume of social data available, something a social technology partner with goal-oriented analytics expertise could go a long way toward alleviating. Then there’s the fear of social having a negative impact. This comes from a lack of belief in the product, the customer service, or both. The public uses social not to go out and slay brands. They’re using it to be honest. If the fear is that honesty will reflect badly on the brand, the brand has much bigger, broader problems than what happens on Facebook. Sadly, most enterprise organizations still see social as a megaphone, a one-way channel with which to hit people with ads. They either don’t understand social relationships, or don’t want any. The truly unenlightened manager will always say, “We help them by selling them our stuff.” “Brand affinity” is a term, it’s just not one assigned much value in enterprise organizations. Which brings us to Psy, the Korean performer whose Internet video phenom “Gangnam Style,” as of this writing, has been viewed 438,550,238 times on YouTube. It’s bigger than anything a brand will probably ever publish. Most brands would never have seen the point of making or publishing it. But a funny thing happened on the way to Internet success. The video literally doubled the stock price of Psy’s father’s software firm. NH Investment and Securities said, "The positive sentiment has attracted investors just because of the fact the company is owned by Psy's father and uncle.” The company wasn’t mentioned or seen in the video in any way, yet reaped tangible rewards just for being tangentially associated with it. Imagine your brand being visibly and directly responsible for such a smash and tell me it’s worthless. When enterprise organizations embrace the value of igniting passions, making people happier, solving their problems, informing them, helping them have fun, etc., then they will have fully embraced social, and will reap the brand affinity rewards of heightened awareness, brand loyalty and yes, sales.

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• Application Composer: Exposing Your Customizations in BI Analytics and Reporting

  - by Richard Bingham

  Introduction This article explains in simple terms how to ensure the customizations and extensions you have made to your Fusion Applications are available for use in reporting and analytics. It also includes four embedded demo videos from our YouTube channel (if they don't appear check the browser address bar for a blocking shield icon). If you are new to Business Intelligence consider first reviewing our getting started article, and you can read more about the topic of custom subject areas in the documentation book Extending Sales. There are essentially four sections to this post. First we look at how custom fields added to standard objects are made available for reporting. Secondly we look at creating custom subject areas on the standard objects. Next we consider reporting on custom objects, starting with simple standalone objects, then child custom objects, and finally custom objects with relationships. Finally this article reviews how flexfields are exposed for reporting. Whilst this article applies to both Cloud/SaaS and on-premises deployments, if you are an on-premises developer then you can also use the BI Administration Tool to customize your BI metadata repository (the RPD) and create new subject areas. Whilst this is not covered here you can read more in Chapter 8 of the Extensibility Guide for Developers. Custom Fields on Standard Objects If you add a custom field to your standard object then it's likely you'll want to include it in your reports. This is very simple, since all new fields are instantly available in the "[objectName] Extension" folder in existing subject areas. The following two minute video demonstrates this. Custom Subject Areas for Standard Objects You can create your own subject areas for use in analytics and reporting via Application Composer. An example use-case could be to simplify the seeded subject areas, since they sometimes contain complex data fields and internal values that could confuse business users. One thing to note is that you cannot create subject areas in a sandbox, as it is not supported by BI, so once your custom object is tested and complete you'll need to publish the sandbox before moving forwards. The subject area creation processes is essentially two-fold. Once the request is submitted the ADF artifacts are generated, then secondly the related metadata is sent to the BI presentation server API's to make the updates there. One thing to note is that this second step may take up to ten minutes to complete. Once finished the status of the custom subject area request should show as 'OK' and it is then ready for use. Within the creation processes wizard-like steps there are three concepts worth highlighting: Date Flattening - this feature permits the roll up of reports at various date levels, such as data by week, month, quarter, or year. You simply check the box to enable it for that date field. Measures - these are your own functions that you can build into the custom subject area. They are related to the field data type and include min-max for dates, and sum(), avg(), and count() for  numeric fields. Implicit Facts - used to make the BI metadata join between your object fields and the calculated measure fields. The advice is to choose the most frequently used measure to ensure consistency. This video shows a simple example, where a simplified subject area is created for the customer 'Contact' standard object, picking just a few fields upon which users can then create reports. Custom Objects Custom subject areas support three types of custom objects. First is a simple standalone custom object and for which the same process mentioned above applies. The next is a custom child object created on a standard object parent, and finally a custom object that is related to a parent object - usually through a dynamic choice list. Whilst the steps in each of these last two are mostly the same, there are differences in the way you choose the objects and their fields. This is illustrated in the videos below.The first video shows the process for creating a custom subject area for a simple standalone custom object. This second video demonstrates how to create custom subject areas for custom objects that are of parent:child type, as well as those those with dynamic-choice-list relationships. &lt;span id=&quot;XinhaEditingPostion&quot;&gt;&lt;/span&gt; Flexfields Dynamic and Extensible Flexfields satisfy a similar requirement as custom fields (for Application Composer), with flexfields common across the Fusion Financials, Supply Chain and Procurement, and HCM applications. The basic principle is when you enable and configure your flexfields, in the edit page under each segment region (for both global and context segments) there is a BI Enabled check box. Once this is checked and you've completed your configuration, you run the Scheduled Process job named 'Import Oracle Fusion Data Extensions for Transactional Business Intelligence' to generate and migrate the related BI artifacts and data. This applies for dynamic, key, and extensible flexfields. Of course there is more to consider in terms of how you wish your flexfields to be implemented and exposed in your reports, and details are given in Chapter 4 of the Extending Applications guide.

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• WIF-less claim extraction from ACS: JWT

  - by Elton Stoneman

  ACS support for JWT still shows as "beta", but it meets the spec and it works nicely, so it's becoming the preferred option as SWT is losing favour. (Note that currently ACS doesn’t support JWT encryption, if you want encrypted tokens you need to go SAML). In my last post I covered pulling claims from an ACS token without WIF, using the SWT format. The JWT format is a little more complex, but you can still inspect claims just with string manipulation. The incoming token from ACS is still presented in the BinarySecurityToken element of the XML payload, with a TokenType of urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt: <t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse xmlns:t="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust">   <t:Lifetime>     <wsu:Created xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T07:39:55.337Z</wsu:Created>     <wsu:Expires xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T09:19:55.337Z</wsu:Expires>   </t:Lifetime>   <wsp:AppliesTo xmlns:wsp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/policy">     <EndpointReference xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">       <Address>http://localhost/x.y.z</Address>     </EndpointReference>   </wsp:AppliesTo>   <t:RequestedSecurityToken>     <wsse:BinarySecurityToken wsu:Id="_1eeb5cf4-b40b-40f2-89e0-a3343f6bd985-6A15D1EED0CDB0D8FA48C7D566232154" ValueType="urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd">[ base64string ] </wsse:BinarySecurityToken>   </t:RequestedSecurityToken>   <t:TokenType>urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt</t:TokenType>   <t:RequestType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust/Issue</t:RequestType>   <t:KeyType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/NoProofKey</t:KeyType> </t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse> The token as a whole needs to be base-64 decoded. The decoded value contains a header, payload and signature, dot-separated; the parts are also base-64, but they need to be decoded using a no-padding algorithm (implementation and more details in this MSDN article on validating an Exchange 2013 identity token). The values are then in JSON; the header contains the token type and the hashing algorithm: "{"typ":"JWT","alg":"HS256"}" The payload contains the same data as in the SWT, but JSON rather than querystring format: {"aud":"http://localhost/x.y.z" "iss":"https://adfstest-bhw.accesscontrol.windows.net/" "nbf":1346398795 "exp":1346404795 "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationinstant":"2012-08-31T07:39:53.652Z" "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationmethod":"http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/authenticationmethod/windows" "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/windowsaccountname":"xyz" "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/emailaddress":"[email protected]" "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/upn":"[email protected]" "identityprovider":"http://fs.svc.x.y.z.com/adfs/services/trust"} The signature is in the third part of the token. Unlike SWT which is fixed to HMAC-SHA-256, JWT can support other protocols (the one in use is specified as the "alg" value in the header). How to: Validate an Exchange 2013 identity token contains an implementation of a JWT parser and validator; apart from the custom base-64 decoding part, it’s very similar to SWT extraction. I've wrapped the basic SWT and JWT in a ClaimInspector.aspx page on gitHub here: SWT and JWT claim inspector. You can drop it into any ASP.Net site and set the URL to be your redirect page in ACS. Swap ACS to issue SWT or JWT, and using the same page you can inspect the claims that come out.

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• Test your internet connection - Emtel Fixed Broadband

  Already at the begin of April, I had a phone conversation with my representative at Emtel Ltd. about some upcoming issues due to the ongoing construction work in my neighbourhood. Unfortunately, they finally raised the house two levels above ours, and of course this has to have a negative impact on the visibility between the WiMAX outdoor unit on the roof and the aimed access point at Medine. So, today I had a technical team here to do a site survey and to come up with potential solutions. Short version: It doesn't look good after all. The site survey Well, the two technicians did their work properly, even re-arranged the antenna to check the connection with another end point down at La Preneuse. But no improvements. Looks like we are out of luck since the construction next door hasn't finished yet and at the moment, it even looks like they are planning to put at least one more level on top. I really wonder about the sanity of the responsible bodies at the local district council. But that's another story. Anyway, the outdoor unit was once again pointed towards Medine and properly fixed with new cable guides (air from the sea and rust...). Both of them did a good job and fine-tuned the reception signal to a mere 3 over 9; compared to the original 7 over 9 I had before the daily terror started. The site survey has been done, and now it's up to Emtel to come up with (better) solutions. Well, I wouldn't mind to have an unlimited, symmetric 3G/UMTS or even LTE connection. Let's see what they can do... Testing the connection There are several online sites available which offer you to check certain aspects of your internet connection. Personally, I'm used to speedtest.net and it works very well. I think it is good and necessary to check your connection from time to time, and only a couple of days ago, I posted the following on Emtel's wall at Facebook (21.05.2013 - 14:06 hrs): Dear Emtel, could you eventually provide an answer on the miserable results of SpeedTest? I chose Rose Hill (Hosted by Emtel Ltd.) as testing endpoint... Sadly, no response to this. Seems that the marketing department is not willing to deal with customers on Facebook. Okay, over at speedtest.net you can use their Flash-based test suite to check your connection to quite a number of servers of different providers world-wide. It's actually very interesting to see the results for different end points and to compare them to each other. The results Following are the results of Rose Hill (hosted by Emtel) and respectively Frankfurt, Germany (hosted by Vodafone DE): Speedtest.net result of 30.05.2013 between Flic en Flac and Rose Hill, Mauritius (Emtel - Fixed Broadband) Speedtest.net result of 30.05.2013 between Flic en Flac and Frankfurt, Germany (Emtel - Fixed Broadband) Luckily, the results are quite similar in terms of connection speed; which is good. I'm currently on a WiMAX tariff called 'Classic Browsing 2', or Fixed Broadband as they call it now, which provides a symmetric line of 768 Kbps (or roughly 0.75 Mbps). In terms of downloads or uploads this means that I would be able to transfer files in either direction with approximately 96 KB/s. Frankly speaking, thanks to compression, my choice of browser and operating system I usually exceed this value and I have download rates up to 120 KB/s - not too bad after all. Only the ping times are a little bit of concern. Due to the difference in distance, or better said based on the number of hubs between the endpoints, they indicate the amount of time that it takes to send a package from your machine to the remote server and get a response back. A lower value is better, and usually the ping is less than 300 ms between Mauritius and Europe. The alternatives in Mauritius Not sure whether I should note this done because for my requirements there are no alternatives to Emtel WiMAX at the moment. It would be great to have your opinion on the situation of internet connectivity in Mauritius. Are there really alternatives? And if so, what are the conditions?

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• XNA 2D Board game - trouble with the cursor

  - by Adorjan

  I just have started making a simple 2D board game using XNA, but I got stuck at the movement of the cursor. This is my problem: I have a 10x10 table on with I should use a cursor to navigate. I simply made that table with the spriteBatch.Draw() function because I couldn't do it on another way. So here is what I did with the cursor: public override void LoadContent() { ... mutato.Position = new Vector2(X, Y); //X=103, Y=107; mutato.Sebesseg = 45; ... mutato.Initialize(content.Load<Texture2D>("cursor"),mutato.Position,mutato.Sebesseg); ... } public override void HandleInput(InputState input) { if (input == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("input"); // Look up inputs for the active player profile. int playerIndex = (int)ControllingPlayer.Value; KeyboardState keyboardState = input.CurrentKeyboardStates[playerIndex]; if (input.IsPauseGame(ControllingPlayer) || gamePadDisconnected) { ScreenManager.AddScreen(new PauseMenuScreen(), ControllingPlayer); } else { // Otherwise move the player position. if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Down)) { Y = (int)mutato.Position.Y + mutato.Move; } if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) { Y = (int)mutato.Position.Y - mutato.Move; } if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) { X = (int)mutato.Position.X - mutato.Move; } if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)) { X = (int)mutato.Position.X + mutato.Move; } } } public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { mutato.Draw(spriteBatch); } Here's the cursor's (mutato) class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace Battleship.Components { class Cursor { public Texture2D Cursortexture; public Vector2 Position; public int Move; public void Initialize(Texture2D texture, Vector2 position,int move) { Cursortexture = texture; Position = position; Move = move; } public void Update() { } public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { spriteBatch.Draw(Cursortexture, Position, Color.White); } } } And here is a part of the InputState class where I think I should change something: public bool IsNewKeyPress(Keys key, PlayerIndex? controllingPlayer, out PlayerIndex playerIndex) { if (controllingPlayer.HasValue) { // Read input from the specified player. playerIndex = controllingPlayer.Value; int i = (int)playerIndex; return (CurrentKeyboardStates[i].IsKeyDown(key) && LastKeyboardStates[i].IsKeyUp(key)); } } If I leave the movement operation like this it doesn't have any sense: X = (int)mutato.Position.X - mutato.Move; However if I modify it to this: X = (int)mutato.Position.X--; it moves smoothly. Instead of this I need to move the cursor by fields (45 pixels), but I don't have any idea how to manage it.

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• Asynchrony in C# 5 (Part II)

  - by javarg

  This article is a continuation of the series of asynchronous features included in the new Async CTP preview for next versions of C# and VB. Check out Part I for more information. So, let’s continue with TPL Dataflow: Asynchronous functions TPL Dataflow Task based asynchronous Pattern Part II: TPL Dataflow Definition (by quote of Async CTP doc): “TPL Dataflow (TDF) is a new .NET library for building concurrent applications. It promotes actor/agent-oriented designs through primitives for in-process message passing, dataflow, and pipelining. TDF builds upon the APIs and scheduling infrastructure provided by the Task Parallel Library (TPL) in .NET 4, and integrates with the language support for asynchrony provided by C#, Visual Basic, and F#.” This means: data manipulation processed asynchronously. “TPL Dataflow is focused on providing building blocks for message passing and parallelizing CPU- and I/O-intensive applications”. Data manipulation is another hot area when designing asynchronous and parallel applications: how do you sync data access in a parallel environment? how do you avoid concurrency issues? how do you notify when data is available? how do you control how much data is waiting to be consumed? etc.  Dataflow Blocks TDF provides data and action processing blocks. Imagine having preconfigured data processing pipelines to choose from, depending on the type of behavior you want. The most basic block is the BufferBlock<T>, which provides an storage for some kind of data (instances of <T>). So, let’s review data processing blocks available. Blocks a categorized into three groups: Buffering Blocks Executor Blocks Joining Blocks Think of them as electronic circuitry components :).. 1. BufferBlock<T>: it is a FIFO (First in First Out) queue. You can Post data to it and then Receive it synchronously or asynchronously. It synchronizes data consumption for only one receiver at a time (you can have many receivers but only one will actually process it). 2. BroadcastBlock<T>: same FIFO queue for messages (instances of <T>) but link the receiving event to all consumers (it makes the data available for consumption to N number of consumers). The developer can provide a function to make a copy of the data if necessary. 3. WriteOnceBlock<T>: it stores only one value and once it’s been set, it can never be replaced or overwritten again (immutable after being set). As with BroadcastBlock<T>, all consumers can obtain a copy of the value. 4. ActionBlock<TInput>: this executor block allows us to define an operation to be executed when posting data to the queue. Thus, we must pass in a delegate/lambda when creating the block. Posting data will result in an execution of the delegate for each data in the queue. You could also specify how many parallel executions to allow (degree of parallelism). 5. TransformBlock<TInput, TOutput>: this is an executor block designed to transform each input, that is way it defines an output parameter. It ensures messages are processed and delivered in order. 6. TransformManyBlock<TInput, TOutput>: similar to TransformBlock but produces one or more outputs from each input. 7. BatchBlock<T>: combines N single items into one batch item (it buffers and batches inputs). 8. JoinBlock<T1, T2, …>: it generates tuples from all inputs (it aggregates inputs). Inputs could be of any type you want (T1, T2, etc.). 9. BatchJoinBlock<T1, T2, …>: aggregates tuples of collections. It generates collections for each type of input and then creates a tuple to contain each collection (Tuple<IList<T1>, IList<T2>>). Next time I will show some examples of usage for each TDF block. * Images taken from Microsoft’s Async CTP documentation.

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• What Counts For a DBA – Depth

  - by Louis Davidson

  SQL Server offers very simple interfaces to many of its features. Most people could open up SSMS, connect to a server, write a simple query and see the results. Even several of the core DBA tasks are deceptively straightforward. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform a basic database backup or run a trace (even using the newfangled Extended Events!). However, appearances can be deceptive, and often times it is really important that a DBA understands not just the basics of how to perform a task, but why we do a task, and how that task works. As an analogy, consider a child walking into a darkened room. Most would know that they need to turn on the light, and how to do it, so they flick the switch. But what happens if light fails to shine forth. Most would immediately tell you that you need to consider changing the light bulb. So you hop in the car and take them to the local home store and instruct them to buy a replacement. Confronted with a 40 foot display of light bulbs, how will they decide which of the hundreds of types of bulbs, of different types, fittings, shapes, colors, power and efficiency ratings, is the right choice? Obviously the main lesson the child is going to learn this day is how to use their cell phone as a flashlight so they don’t have to ask for help the next time. Likewise, when the metaphorical toddlers who use your database server have issues, they will instinctively know something is wrong, and may even have some idea what caused it, but will have no depth of knowledge to figure out the right solution. That is where the DBA comes in and attempts to save the day. However, when one looks beneath the shiny UI, SQL Server has its own “40 foot display of light bulbs”, in the form of the tremendous number of tools and the often-bewildering amount of information they can present to the DBA, to help us find issues. Unfortunately, resorting to guesswork, to trying different “bulbs” over and over, hoping to stumble on the answer. This is where the right depth of knowledge goes a long way. If we need to write a SELECT statement, then knowing the syntax and where to find the data is not enough. Knowledge of indexes and query plans is essential. Without it, we might hit on a query that “works”, but we are basically still a user, not a programmer, because we have no real control over our platform. Is that level of knowledge deep enough? Probably not, since knowledge of the underlying metadata and structures would be very useful in helping us make sense of any query plan. Understanding the structure of an index makes the “key lookup” operator not sound like what you do when someone tapes your car key to the ceiling. So is even this level of understanding deep enough? Do we need to understand the memory architecture used to process the query? It might be a comforting level of knowledge, and will doubtless come in handy at some point, but is not strictly necessary in most cases. Beyond that lies (more or less) full knowledge of SQL language and the intricacies of every step the SQL Server engine takes to process our query. My personal theory is that, as a professional, our knowledge of a given task should extend, at a minimum, one level deeper than is strictly necessary to perform the task. Anything deeper can be left to the ridiculously smart, or obsessive, or both. As an example. tasked with storing an integer value between 0 and 99999999, it’s essential that I know that choosing an Integer over Decimal(8,0) will likely offer performance benefits. It is then useful that I also understand the value of adding a CHECK constraint, to make sure the values are valid to the desired range; and comforting that I know a little about the underlying processors, registers and computer math. Anything further, I leave to the likes of Joe Chang, whose recent blog post on the topic offers depth by the bucketful!  

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• Html.ValidationSummary and Multiple Forms

  - by MightyZot

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MightyZot/archive/2013/11/11/html.validationsummary-and-multiple-forms.aspxThe Html.ValidationSummary helper writes a div with a list of general errors added to the model state while a request is being serviced. There is generally one form per view or partial view, I think, so often there is only one call to Html.ValidationSummary in the page resulting from the assembly of your views. And, consequently, there is no problem with the markup that Html.ValidationSummary spits out as a result. What if you want to put multiple forms in one view? Even if you create a view model that’s an aggregate of the view models for each form, the error validation summary is going to contain errors from both forms. Check out this screen shot, which shows a page with multiple forms. Notice how the error validation summary shows up twice. Grrr! Errors for the login form also show up in the registration form. Luckily, there is an easy way around this. Pull the errors out of the model state and separate them for each form. You’ll need to identify the appropriate form by setting the key when you make calls to ModelState.AddModelError. Assume in my example that errors for the login form are added to model state using the “LoginForm” key. And, likewise, assume that errors for the registration form are added to model state using the “RegistrationForm” key. An example of that might look like this… // If we got this far, something failed, redisplay form ModelState.AddModelError("LoginForm", "User name or password is not right..."); return View(model); Over in the code for your View, you can pull each form’s errors from the model state using lambda expressions that look like these… var LoginFormErrors = ViewData.ModelState.Where(ms => ms.Key == "LoginForm"); var RegistrationFormErrors = ViewData.ModelState.Where(ms => ms.Key == "RegistrationForm"); Now that you have two collections containing errors, you can display only the errors specific to each form. I’m doing that in my code by removing the calls to Html.ValidationSummary and replacing them with enumerators that look like this… if(LoginFormErrors.Count() > 0) { <div class="cdt-error-list">     <ul>     @foreach (var entry in LoginFormErrors)     {         foreach (var error in entry.Value.Errors)         {             <li>@error.ErrorMessage</li>         }     }     </ul> </div> } …and for the registration form, the code looks like this… @if(RegistrationFormErrors.Count() > 0) { <div class="cdt-error-list">     <ul>     @foreach (var entry in RegistrationFormErrors)     {         foreach (var error in entry.Value.Errors)         {             <li>@error.ErrorMessage</li>         }     }     </ul> </div> } The result is a nice clean separation of the list of errors that are specific to each form. And, this is important because each form is submitted separately in my case, so both forms don’t generate errors in the same context. As you’ll see in the screen shot below, errors added to the model state when the login form is submitted do not show up in the registration form’s validation summary.

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• Oracle Executive Strategy Brief: Enterprise-Grade Cloud Applications

  - by B Shashikumar

  Cloud Computing has clearly evolved into one of the dominant secular trends in the industry. Organizations are looking to the cloud to change how they buy and consume IT. And its no longer about just lower up-front costs. The cloud promises to deliver greater agility and free up resources to focus on innovation versus running and maintaining systems. But are organizations actually realizing these benefits? The full promise of cloud is not being realized by customers who entrust their business to multiple niche cloud providers. While almost 9 out of 10 companies  expect more IT agility with cloud, only 47% are actually getting it (Source: 2011 State of Cloud Survey by Symantec). These niche cloud customers have also seen the promises of lower costs, efficiency gains, improved security, and compliance go unfulfilled. Having one cloud provider for customer relationship management (CRM) and another for human capital management (HCM), and then trying to glue these proprietary systems together while integrating to a back-office financial system can add to complexity and long-term costs. Completing a business process or generating an integrated report is cumbersome, and leverages incomplete data. Why can’t niche cloud providers deliver on the full promise of cloud? It’s simple: you still need to complete business processes. You still need reporting that enables you to take action using data from multiple systems. You still have to comply with SOX and other industry regulations. These requirements don’t go away just because you deploy in the cloud. Delivering lower up-front costs by enabling customers to buy software as a service (SaaS) is the easy part. To get real value that lasts longer than your quarterly report, it’s important to realize the benefits of cloud without compromising on functionality and while having the right level of control and flexibility. This is the true promise of cloud. Oracle’s cloud strategy centers around delivering the benefits of cloud—without compromise. We uniquely empower our customers with complete solutions and choice. From the richest functionality to integrated reporting and great user experience. It’s all available in the cloud. And it works not just with other Oracle cloud applications, but with your existing Oracle and third-party systems as well. This helps protect your current investments and extend their value as you journey to the cloud. We’ve made the necessary investments not only in our applications but also in the underlying technology that makes it all run—from the platform down to the hardware and operating system. We make it all. And we’ve engineered it to work together and be highly optimized for our customers, in the cloud. With Oracle enterprise-grade cloud applications, you get the benefits of cloud plus more power, more choice, and more confidence. Read more about how you can realize the true advantage of Cloud with Oracle Enterprise-grade Cloud applications in the Oracle Executive Strategy Brief here.  You can also attend an Oracle Cloud Conference event at a city near you. Register here. 

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• Patterns for a tree of persistent data with multiple storage options?

  - by Robin Winslow

  I have a real-world problem which I'll try to abstract into an illustrative example. So imagine I have data objects in a tree, where parent objects can access children, and children can access parents: // Interfaces interface IParent<TChild> { List<TChild> Children; } interface IChild<TParent> { TParent Parent; } // Classes class Top : IParent<Middle> {} class Middle : IParent<Bottom>, IChild<Top> {} class Bottom : IChild<Middle> {} // Usage var top = new Top(); var middles = top.Children; // List<Middle> foreach (var middle in middles) { var bottoms = middle.Children; // List<Bottom> foreach (var bottom in bottoms) { var middle = bottom.Parent; // Access the parent var top = middle.Parent; // Access the grandparent } } All three data objects have properties that are persisted in two data stores (e.g. a database and a web service), and they need to reflect and synchronise with the stores. Some objects only request from the web service, some only write to it. Data Mapper My favourite pattern for data access is Data Mapper, because it completely separates the data objects themselves from the communication with the data store: class TopMapper { public Top FetchById(int id) { var top = new Top(DataStore.TopDataById(id)); top.Children = MiddleMapper.FetchForTop(Top); return Top; } } class MiddleMapper { public Middle FetchById(int id) { var middle = new Middle(DataStore.MiddleDataById(id)); middle.Parent = TopMapper.FetchForMiddle(middle); middle.Children = BottomMapper.FetchForMiddle(bottom); return middle; } } This way I can have one mapper per data store, and build the object from the mapper I want, and then save it back using the mapper I want. There is a circular reference here, but I guess that's not a problem because most languages can just store memory references to the objects, so there won't actually be infinite data. The problem with this is that every time I want to construct a new Top, Middle or Bottom, it needs to build the entire object tree within that object's Parent or Children property, with all the data store requests and memory usage that that entails. And in real life my tree is much bigger than the one represented here, so that's a problem. Requests in the object In this the objects request their Parents and Children themselves: class Middle { private List<Bottom> _children = null; // cache public List<Bottom> Children { get { _children = _children ?? BottomMapper.FetchForMiddle(this); return _children; } set { BottomMapper.UpdateForMiddle(this, value); _children = value; } } } I think this is an example of the repository pattern. Is that correct? This solution seems neat - the data only gets requested from the data store when you need it, and thereafter it's stored in the object if you want to request it again, avoiding a further request. However, I have two different data sources. There's a database, but there's also a web service, and I need to be able to create an object from the web service and save it back to the database and then request it again from the database and update the web service. This also makes me uneasy because the data objects themselves are no longer ignorant of the data source. We've introduced a new dependency, not to mention a circular dependency, making it harder to test. And the objects now mask their communication with the database. Other solutions Are there any other solutions which could take care of the multiple stores problem but also mean that I don't need to build / request all the data every time?

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