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  • Big Data – Buzz Words: What is Hadoop – Day 6 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is NoSQL. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – Hadoop. What is Hadoop? Apache Hadoop is an open-source, free and Java based software framework offers a powerful distributed platform to store and manage Big Data. It is licensed under an Apache V2 license. It runs applications on large clusters of commodity hardware and it processes thousands of terabytes of data on thousands of the nodes. Hadoop is inspired from Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. The major advantage of Hadoop framework is that it provides reliability and high availability. What are the core components of Hadoop? There are two major components of the Hadoop framework and both fo them does two of the important task for it. Hadoop MapReduce is the method to split a larger data problem into smaller chunk and distribute it to many different commodity servers. Each server have their own set of resources and they have processed them locally. Once the commodity server has processed the data they send it back collectively to main server. This is effectively a process where we process large data effectively and efficiently. (We will understand this in tomorrow’s blog post). Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a virtual file system. There is a big difference between any other file system and Hadoop. When we move a file on HDFS, it is automatically split into many small pieces. These small chunks of the file are replicated and stored on other servers (usually 3) for the fault tolerance or high availability. (We will understand this in the day after tomorrow’s blog post). Besides above two core components Hadoop project also contains following modules as well. Hadoop Common: Common utilities for the other Hadoop modules Hadoop Yarn: A framework for job scheduling and cluster resource management There are a few other projects (like Pig, Hive) related to above Hadoop as well which we will gradually explore in later blog posts. A Multi-node Hadoop Cluster Architecture Now let us quickly see the architecture of the a multi-node Hadoop cluster. A small Hadoop cluster includes a single master node and multiple worker or slave node. As discussed earlier, the entire cluster contains two layers. One of the layer of MapReduce Layer and another is of HDFC Layer. Each of these layer have its own relevant component. The master node consists of a JobTracker, TaskTracker, NameNode and DataNode. A slave or worker node consists of a DataNode and TaskTracker. It is also possible that slave node or worker node is only data or compute node. The matter of the fact that is the key feature of the Hadoop. In this introductory blog post we will stop here while describing the architecture of Hadoop. In a future blog post of this 31 day series we will explore various components of Hadoop Architecture in Detail. Why Use Hadoop? There are many advantages of using Hadoop. Let me quickly list them over here: Robust and Scalable – We can add new nodes as needed as well modify them. Affordable and Cost Effective – We do not need any special hardware for running Hadoop. We can just use commodity server. Adaptive and Flexible – Hadoop is built keeping in mind that it will handle structured and unstructured data. Highly Available and Fault Tolerant – When a node fails, the Hadoop framework automatically fails over to another node. Why Hadoop is named as Hadoop? In year 2005 Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella while working at Yahoo. Doug Cutting named Hadoop after his son’s toy elephant. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss Buzz Word – MapReduce. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • What Counts For a DBA: Simplicity

    - by Louis Davidson
    Too many computer processes do an apparently simple task in a bizarrely complex way. They remind me of this strip by one of my favorite artists: Rube Goldberg. In order to keep the boss from knowing one was late, a process is devised whereby the cuckoo clock kisses a live cuckoo bird, who then pulls a string, which triggers a hat flinging, which in turn lands on a rod that removes a typewriter cover…and so on. We rely on creating automated processes to keep on top of tasks. DBAs have a lot of tasks to perform: backups, performance tuning, data movement, system monitoring, and of course, avoiding being noticed.  Every day, there are many steps to perform to maintain the database infrastructure, including: checking physical structures, re-indexing tables where needed, backing up the databases, checking those backups, running the ETL, and preparing the daily reports and yes, all of these processes have to complete before you can call it a day, and probably before many others have started that same day. Some of these tasks are just naturally complicated on their own. Other tasks become complicated because the database architecture is excessively rigid, and we often discover during “production testing” that certain processes need to be changed because the written requirements barely resembled the actual customer requirements.   Then, with no time to change that rigid structure, we are forced to heap layer upon layer of code onto the problematic processes. Instead of a slight table change and a new index, we end up with 4 new ETL processes, 20 temp tables, 30 extra queries, and 1000 lines of SQL code.  Report writers then need to build reports and make magical numbers appear from those toxic data structures that are overly complex and probably filled with inconsistent data. What starts out as a collection of fairly simple tasks turns into a Goldbergian nightmare of daily processes that are likely to cause your dinner to be interrupted by the smartphone doing the vibration dance that signifies trouble at the mill. So what to do? Well, if it is at all possible, simplify the problem by either going into the code and refactoring the complex code to simple, or taking all of the processes and simplifying them into small, independent, easily-tested steps.  The former approach usually requires an agreement on changing underlying structures that requires countless mind-numbing meetings; while the latter can generally be done to any complex process without the same frustration or anger, though it will still leave you with lots of steps to complete, the ability to test each step independently will definitely increase the quality of the overall process (and with each step reporting status back, finding an actual problem within the process will be definitely less unpleasant.) We all know the principle behind simplifying a sequence of processes because we learned it in math classes in our early years of attending school, starting with elementary school. In my 4 years (ok, 9 years) of undergraduate work, I remember pretty much one thing from my many math classes that I apply daily to my career as a data architect, data programmer, and as an occasional indentured DBA: “show your work”. This process of showing your work was my first lesson in simplification. Each step in the process was in fact, far simpler than the entire process.  When you were working an equation that took both sides of 4 sheets of paper, showing your work was important because the teacher could see every step, judge it, and mark it accordingly.  So often I would make an error in the first few lines of a problem which meant that the rest of the work was actually moving me closer to a very wrong answer, no matter how correct the math was in the subsequent steps. Yet, when I got my grade back, I would sometimes be pleasantly surprised. I passed, yet missed every problem on the test. But why? While I got the fact that 1+1=2 wrong in every problem, the teacher could see that I was using the right process. In a computer process, the process is very similar. We take complex processes, show our work by storing intermediate values, and test each step independently. When a process has 100 steps, each step becomes a simple step that is tested and verified, such that there will be 100 places where data is stored, validated, and can be checked off as complete. If you get step 1 of 100 wrong, you can fix it and be confident (that if you did your job of testing the other steps better than the one you had to repair,) that the rest of the process works. If you have 100 steps, and store the state of the process exactly once, the resulting testable chunk of code will be far more complex and finding the error will require checking all 100 steps as one, and usually it would be easier to find a specific needle in a stack of similarly shaped needles.  The goal is to strive for simplicity either in the solution, or at least by simplifying every process down to as many, independent, testable, simple tasks as possible.  For the tasks that really can’t be done completely independently, minimally take those tasks and break them down into simpler steps that can be tested independently.  Like working out division problems longhand, have each step of the larger problem verified and tested.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 23, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 23, 2012Popular ReleasesChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: 00.00.08 for DNN6: BEFORE USE YOU need to install the MSBuild Community Tasks available from http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org For best results you should configure your development environment as described in this blog post Then read this latest blog post about customizing and using these custom templates. Installation is simple To use this template place the ZIP (not extracted) file in your My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Web OR for VB My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Te...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.53: fix issue #18106, where member operators on numeric literals caused the member part to be duplicated when not minifying numeric literals ADD NEW FEATURE: ability to create source map files! The first mapfile format to be supported is the Script# format. Use the new -map filename switch to create map files when building your sources.Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008 Analysis Services Project: AdventureWorks 2008 Analysis Services sample database project files. Project files for Analysis Services 2008 sample cubes (standard and enterprise). Lessons 1 to 10 tutorial files.HigLabo: HigLabo_20120522: Bug fix of EncodeToMailHeaderLine method when TransferEncoding is QuotedPrintable and Encoding is not ASCII.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.3: 2012.05.22 Ver5.6.3  (1) HTTP????????、ftp://??????????????????????LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.12.5.22: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionThis release is fixing start up issue.Internals Viewer (updated) for SQL Server 2008 R2.: Internals Viewer for SSMS 2008 R2: Updated code to work with SSMS 2008 R2. Changed dependancies, removing old assemblies no longer present and replacing them with updated versions.Orchard Project: Orchard 1.4.2: This is a service release to address 1.4 and 1.4.1 bugs. Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4.2: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-NotesVirtu: Virtu 0.9.2: Source Requirements.NET Framework 4 Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 or Visual Studio 2010 Express with SP1 Silverlight 5 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools (which includes XNA Game Studio 4) Binaries RequirementsSilverlight 5 .NET Framework 4 XNA Framework 4SharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.0): New fetures:View other users predictions Hide/Show background image (web part property) Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint Euro 2012 Predictor has been developed as a SharePoint Sandbox solution to support SharePoint Online (Office 365) Download the solution havivi.euro2012.wsp from the download page: Downloads Upload this solution to your Site Collection via the solutions area. Click on Activate to make the web parts in the solution available for use in the Site C...Metadata Document Generator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Metadata Document Generator (2.0.0.0): New UI Metro style New features Save and load settings to/from file Export only OptionSet attributes Use of Gembox Spreadsheet to generate Excel (makes application lighter : 1,5MB instead of 7MB)Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 4.2.0: Backward / Forward buttons Improved features for encoding, streaming, menu Bug fixesSilverlight socket component: Smark.NetDisk: Smark.NetDisk?????Silverlight ?.net???????????,???????????????????????。Smark.NetDisk??????????,????.net???????????????????????tcp??;???????Silverlight??????????????????????callisto: callisto 2.0.28: Update log: - Extended Scribble protocol. - Updated HTML5 client code - now supports the latest versions of Google Chrome.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.6: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???,????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???,????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript,?? CSS,?? UpdatePanel,?? ViewState,?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????:Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??:http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??:http://demo.extasp.net/ ??:http://doc.extasp.net/ ??:http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??:http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????: +2012-05-20 v3.1.6 -??RowD...Dynamics XRM Tools: Dynamics XRM Tools BETA 1.0: The Dynamics XRM Tools 1.0 BETA is now available Seperate downloads are available for On Premise and Online as certain features are only available On Premise. This is a BETA build and may not resemble the final release. Many enhancements are in development and will be made available soon. Please provide feedback so that we may learn and discover how to make these tools better.PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.7: See Change Log for details of the new features and bugfixes included in this release. BREAKING CHANGE! From PHPExcel 1.7.8 onwards, the 3rd-party tcPDF library will no longer be bundled with PHPExcel for rendering PDF files through the PDF Writer. The PDF Writer is being rewritten to allow a choice of 3rd party PDF libraries (tcPDF, mPDF, and domPDF initially), none of which will be bundled with PHPExcel, but which can be downloaded seperately from the appropriate sites.GhostBuster: GhostBuster Setup (91520): Added WMI based RestorePoint support Removed test code from program.cs Improved counting. Changed color of ghosted but unfiltered devices. Changed HwEntries into an ObservableCollection. Added Properties Form. Added Properties MenuItem to Context Menu. Added Hide Unfiltered Devices to Context Menu. If you like this tool, leave me a note, rate this project or write a review or Donate to Ghostbuster. Donate to GhostbusterEXCEL??、??、????????:DataPie(??MSSQL 2008、ORACLE、ACCESS 2007): DataPie_V3.2: V3.2, 2012?5?19? ????ORACLE??????。AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.0795: Welcome to the Beta release of AvalonDock 2.0 After 4 months of hard work I'm ready to upload the beta version of AvalonDock 2.0. This new version boosts a lot of new features and now is stable enough to be deployed in production scenarios. For this reason I encourage everyone is using AD 1.3 or earlier to upgrade soon to this new version. The final version is scheduled for the end of June. What is included in Beta: 1) Stability! thanks to all users contribution I’ve corrected a lot of issues...New ProjectsAits HRM: Human Resource ManagermentBeeWix Toolkit: The toolkit is a set of classes we are using here at Beewix for our Social Network project. Church Management: Simple Church Management Software By Lalit Kumar & Ivan Lewis.Client Center for ConfigurationManager: The tool is designed for IT Professionals to troubleshoot SCCM/CM12 Client related Issues. The Client Center for Configuration Manager provides a quick and easy overview of client settings, including running services and Agent settings in a good easy to use, user interface.Common Instance Factory: Provides an abstraction over dependency injection and IoC containers using the abstract factory design pattern. It was created as an alternative to the Common Service Locator, but it does not use the service location anti-pattern and it provides support for releasing instances. Adapters are available for various dependency injection containers, such as Ninject and SimpleInjector, with more to come shortly. There are also WCF extensions available for decoupling services from DI containers.ConfigMgrRegistrationRequest: ConfigMgrRegistrationRequest allows you to simulate a client using System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Client SDK Basically, this project allows you to create Fake CM12 Clients, ideal when you need test load, reports, etc... when you run the tool (as a local Administrator), it will - Open a csv file and send request to register a new client to sccm - Send a update client id to sccm - Request policy - Send a ddr message - Send hinv more info on my blog at http://wmug.co.uk/w...COSC 320 TWIN System v2.0: Migration of previous version due to one month server limitationCultiv Photometadata for Umbraco: The PhotoMetaData package will extract meta data from images that you upload in your Umbraco media section. Dependency Injection Service Provider (DISP): Dependency Injection Service Provider (DISP) is a wrapper or an interface that aim to allow .NET developers use one of the inversion of control (IoC) containers out there such as StructureMap or Ninject from a high level of abstraction, using the same interface and classes without having to worry about the concrete implementation of each of the IoC containers. DISP provides an interface that will create and instance of an IoC container of your election, and provide generic interface to co...DirectPOS.NET: DirectPOS is a set of classes that bypasses OPOS and other libraries to talk to POS devices directly currently focusing on support for Bixolon, Samsung, and Epson thermal printers and some other devices.Dodongo's Quest: Roguelike in C# and XNAEpicCms: epiccms is only a name. The underlying system consists of two components: an api data service that replicates database tables, views, and procedures directly by url routes; a web interface that is very lightweight and purposed only to directly edit database table data. It is the intention that users will have full control over their data, how it is distributed, who has access, and when or how long anything(anyone) has access to all single pieces of data. It is also the intention that users wi...Find Duplicate file: This application is developed in WPF. you can find duplicate files from the file impression not from file size of from file name. Although this process is very time consuming. You can search and delete the similar file from the application itself. you can also open file location and delete manually from windows explorer. HoleFilling: We present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which conta...ILCC: A C compiler made in C# that generates .NET CIL code, XML, YAML and .NET PInvokeKendo UI framework for Orchard: This is a common location for kendo UI framework and related script libraries to use with Orchard CMS.MASAS SharePoint: This project is all about creating a SharePoint 2010-based capability to use the Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (of systems) - MASAS. MASAS is focused on the exchange of structured information. This module is focused on using that information in your SharePoint 2010-based applications. Think of it this way - MASAS is an information bucket. MASAS allows you to share structured information by putting information into the bucket and by pulling information out of the bucket. ...MCP History: History Module for CB websiteMediaWikiSPMigrator: This project is aimed to make it easier to migrate from Mediawiki wiki's into SharePoint. The big differentiator is that it will allow you to map templates into a specific content type in SharePoint. NConf - Advanced Configuration Manager: NConf is an advanced configuration system for .Net projects. It's written out of the need for more advanced configuration than what .Net provides. The key features it supports is multiple configuration sources, simple to use syntax, the ability to reload/update configuration at runtime, and the easy ability to implement custom configuration sources.NMEA Interpreter: NMEA Interpreter is a class library created for one of my projects. It's main function is to parse NMEA sentences into usable easy to read and display data.Occupado: Time management for the School enviroment.OmahaMTG Site: Omaha MTG SiteProject Bloodlust Fury: Group project for CIS 375Radar IoC container: Very simple, fast and easy to use IoC container. Don't have any dependencies on external libraries - just pure .NET 4 Client Profile. Minimal size (~18kB in release build) makes it suitable to use in any project type.Service Request System: Service Request System (SRS) is a lightweight application for submitting and managing Service Requests of any type. The application is written in ASP.net (C#), and can utilize any type of database.Sign In As A Different User: Running your browser (IE) in a corporate environment will give you single sign on to web applications running in your intranet. But in some cases you need to access an URL with different credentials (admin purpose, etc.). Applications like SharePoint will provide you a solution right out of the box, but if this is not available the SignInAsADifferentUser project may help you. We as Glück & Kanja Consulting AG deployed such configurations in relation to Microsoft Lync components. Searching the...SimIn - Simulate Input in Your .NET Applications: SimIn is a light-weight .NET library which allows You to send user input to another applications. You can use SimIn in two modes: simulating user input (SendMessages), or control Your mouse. It supports DirectX input simulation, which means you can send mouse or keyboard messages to any DirectX game you want, and the game will register it correctly. SocialVeris: Este projeto consiste em uma rede social da instituição de ensino Veris IBTA. É um projeto de conclusão do curso de Análise e Desenvolvimento de Sistemas.Sprocket: Web application to management tasks in small company. TheList: A web an mobile application oriented to users that need a support in the creation of the supermarket list.Turntable Enhanced: TT Enhanced is a Turntable.fm Chrome extension used for giving the Turntable.fm website a bit of a face-lift. It adds cosmetic changes to the website, room moderation, drop down lists for easier usability, and much more.Web Part Collector: WebPart collector will help you identify any webpart or all webparts that are located inside your site collection

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  • My Right-to-Left Foot (T-SQL Tuesday #13)

    - by smisner
    As a business intelligence consultant, I often encounter the situation described in this month's T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Steve Jones ( Blog | Twitter) – “What the Business Says Is Not What the  Business Wants.” Steve posed the question, “What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done?” My profession requires me to have one foot firmly planted in the technology world and the other foot planted in the business world. I learned long ago that the business never says exactly what the business wants because the business doesn't have the words to describe what the business wants accurately enough for IT. Not only do technological-savvy barriers exist, but there are also linguistic barriers between the two worlds. So how do I cope? The adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" is particularly helpful when I'm called in to help design a new business intelligence solution. Many of my students in BI classes have heard me explain ("rant") about left-to-right versus right-to-left design. To understand what I mean about these two design options, let's start with a picture: When we design a business intelligence solution that includes some sort of traditional data warehouse or data mart design, we typically place the data sources on the left, the new solution in the middle, and the users on the right. When I've been called in to help course-correct a failing BI project, I often find that IT has taken a left-to-right approach. They look at the data sources, decide how to model the BI solution as a _______ (fill in the blank with data warehouse, data mart, cube, etc.), and then build the new data structures and supporting infrastructure. (Sometimes, they actually do this without ever having talked to the business first.) Then, when they show what they've built to the business, the business says that is not what we want. Uh-oh. I prefer to take a right-to-left approach. Preferably at the beginning of a project. But even if the project starts left-to-right, I'll do my best to swing it around so that we’re back to a right-to-left approach. (When circumstances are beyond my control, I carry on, but it’s a painful project for everyone – not because of me, but because the approach just doesn’t get to what the business wants in the most effective way.) By using a right to left approach, I try to understand what it is the business is trying to accomplish. I do this by having them explain reports to me, and explaining the decision-making process that relates to these reports. Sometimes I have them explain to me their business processes, or better yet show me their business processes in action because I need pictures, too. I (unofficially) call this part of the project "getting inside the business's head." This is starting at the right side of the diagram above. My next step is to start moving leftward. I do this by preparing some type of prototype. Depending on the nature of the project, this might mean that I simply mock up some data in a relational database and build a prototype report in Reporting Services. If I'm lucky, I might be able to use real data in a relational database. I'll either use a subset of the data in the prototype report by creating a prototype database to hold the sample data, or select data directly from the source. It all depends on how much data there is, how complex the queries are, and how fast I need to get the prototype completed. If the solution will include Analysis Services, then I'll build a prototype cube. Analysis Services makes it incredibly easy to prototype. You can sit down with the business, show them the prototype, and have a meaningful conversation about what the BI solution should look like. I know I've done a good job on the prototype when I get knocked out of my chair so that the business user can explore the solution further independently. (That's really happened to me!) We can talk about dimensions, hierarchies, levels, members, measures, and so on with something tangible to look at and without using those terms. It's not helpful to use sample data like Adventure Works or to use BI terms that they don't really understand. But when I show them their data using the BI technology and talk to them in their language, then they truly have a picture worth a thousand words. From that, we can fine tune the prototype to move it closer to what they want. They have a better idea of what they're getting, and I have a better idea of what to build. So right to left design is not truly moving from the right to the left. But it starts from the right and moves towards the middle, and once I know what the middle needs to look like, I can then build from the left to meet in the middle. And that’s how I get past what the business says to what the business wants.

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  • Tip #13 java.io.File Surprises

    - by ByronNevins
    There is an assumption that I've seen in code many times that is totally wrong.  And this assumption can easily bite you.  The assumption is: File.getAbsolutePath and getAbsoluteFile return paths that are not relative.  Not true!  Sort of.  At least not in the way many people would assume.  All they do is make sure that the beginning of the path is absolute.  The rest of the path can be loaded with relative path elements.  What do you think the following code will print? public class Main {    public static void main(String[] args) {        try {            File f = new File("/temp/../temp/../temp/../");            File abs  = f.getAbsoluteFile();            File parent = abs.getParentFile();            System.out.println("Exists: " + f.exists());            System.out.println("Absolute Path: " + abs);            System.out.println("FileName: " + abs.getName());            System.out.printf("The Parent Directory of %s is %s\n", abs, parent);            System.out.printf("The CANONICAL Parent Directory of CANONICAL %s is %s\n",                        abs, abs.getCanonicalFile().getParent());            System.out.printf("The CANONICAL Parent Directory of ABSOLUTE %s is %s\n",                        abs, parent.getCanonicalFile());            System.out.println("Canonical Path: " + f.getCanonicalPath());        }        catch (IOException ex) {            System.out.println("Got an exception: " + ex);        }    }} Output: Exists: trueAbsolute Path: D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\..FileName: ..The Parent Directory of D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\.. is D:\temp\..\temp\..\tempThe CANONICAL Parent Directory of CANONICAL D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\.. is nullThe CANONICAL Parent Directory of ABSOLUTE D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\.. is D:\tempCanonical Path: D:\ Notice how it says that the parent of d:\ is d:\temp !!!The file, f, is really the root directory.  The parent is supposed to be null. I learned about this the hard way! getParentXXX simply hacks off the final item in the path. You can get totally unexpected results like the above. Easily. I filed a bug on this behavior a few years ago[1].   Recommendations: (1) Use getCanonical instead of getAbsolute.  There is a 1:1 mapping of files and canonical filenames.  I.e each file has one and only one canonical filename and it will definitely not have relative path elements in it.  There are an infinite number of absolute paths for each file. (2) To get the parent file for File f do the following instead of getParentFile: File parent = new File(f, ".."); [1] http://bt2ws.central.sun.com/CrPrint?id=6687287

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  • SQLAuthority News – 7th Anniversary of Blog – A Personal Note

    - by Pinal Dave
    Special Day Today is a very special day – seven years ago I blogged for the very first time.  Seven years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know how to blog, or even what a blog was or what to write.  I was working as a DBA, and I was trying to solve a problem – at my job, there were a few issues I had to fix again and again and again.  There were days when I was rewriting the same solution over and over, and there were times when I would get very frustrated because I could not write the same elegant solution that I had written before.  I came up with a solution to this problem – posting these solutions online, where I could access them whenever I needed them.  At that point, I had no idea what a blog was, or even how the internet worked, I had no idea that a blog would be visible to others.  Can you believe it? Google it on Yahoo! After a few posts on this “blog,” there was a surprise for me – an e-mail saying that someone had left me a comment.  I was surprised, because I didn’t even know you could comment on a blog!  I logged on and read my comment.  It said: “I like your script,but there is a small bug.  If you could fix it, it will run on multiple other versions of SQL Server.”  I was like, “wow, someone figured out how to find my blog, and they figured out how to fix my script!”  I found the bug, I fixed the script, and a wrote a thank you note to the guy.  My first question for him was: how did you figure it out – not the script, but how to find my blog?  He said he found it from Yahoo Search (this was in the time before Google, believe it or not). From that day, my life changed.  I wrote a few more posts, I got a few more comments, and I started to watch my traffic.  People were reading, commenting, and giving feedback.  At the end of the day, people enjoyed what I was writing.  This was a fantastic feeling!  I never thought I would be writing for others.  Even today, I don’t feel like I am writing for others, but that I am simply posting what I am learning every day.  From that very first day, I decided that I would not change my intent or my blog’s purpose. 72 Million Views – 2600 Posts – 57000 comments – 10 books – 9 courses Today, this blog is my habit, my addiction, my baby.  Every day I try to learn something new, and that lesson gets posted on the blog.  Lately there have been days where I am traveling for a full 24 hours, but even on those days I try to learn something new, and later when I have free time, I will still post it to the blog.  Because of this habit, this blog has over 72 millions views, I have written more than 2600 posts, and there are 57,000 comments and counting.  I have also written 10 books, 9 courses, and learned so many things.  This blog has given me back so much more than I ever put it into it.  It gave me an education, a reason to learn something new every day, and a way to connect to people.  I like to think of it as a learning chain, a relay where we all pass knowledge from one to another. Never Ending Journey When I started the blog, I thought I would write for a few days and stop, but now after seven years I haven’t stopped and I have no intention of stopping!  However, change happens, and for this blog it will start today.  This blog started as a single resource for SQL Server, but now it has grown beyond, to Sharepoint, Personal Development, Developer Training, MySQL, Big Data, and lots of other things.  Truly speaking, this blog is more than just SQL Server, and that was always my intention.  I named it “SQL Authority,” not “SQL Server Authority”!  Loudly and clearly, I would like to announce that I am going to go back to my roots and start writing more about SQL, more about big data, and more about the other technology like relational databases, MySQL, Oracle, and others.  My goal is not to become a comprehensive resource for every technology, my goal is to learn something new every day – and now it can be so much more than just SQL Server.  I will learn it, and post it here for you. I have written a very long post on this anniversary, but here is the summary: Thank You.  You all have been wonderful.  Seven years is a long journey, and it makes me emotional.  I have been “with” this blog before I met my wife, before we had our daughter.  This blog is like a fourth member of the family.  Keep reading, keep commenting, keep supporting.  Thank you all. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: About Me, MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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  • The clock hands of the buffer cache

    - by Tony Davis
    Over a leisurely beer at our local pub, the Waggon and Horses, Phil Factor was holding forth on the esoteric, but strangely poetic, language of SQL Server internals, riddled as it is with 'sleeping threads', 'stolen pages', and 'memory sweeps'. Generally, I remain immune to any twinge of interest in the bowels of SQL Server, reasoning that there are certain things that I don't and shouldn't need to know about SQL Server in order to use it successfully. Suddenly, however, my attention was grabbed by his mention of the 'clock hands of the buffer cache'. Back at the office, I succumbed to a moment of weakness and opened up Google. He wasn't lying. SQL Server maintains various memory buffers, or caches. For example, the plan cache stores recently-used execution plans. The data cache in the buffer pool stores frequently-used pages, ensuring that they may be read from memory rather than via expensive physical disk reads. These memory stores are classic LRU (Least Recently Updated) buffers, meaning that, for example, the least frequently used pages in the data cache become candidates for eviction (after first writing the page to disk if it has changed since being read into the cache). SQL Server clearly needs some mechanism to track which pages are candidates for being cleared out of a given cache, when it is getting too large, and it is this mechanism that is somewhat more labyrinthine than I previously imagined. Each page that is loaded into the cache has a counter, a miniature "wristwatch", which records how recently it was last used. This wristwatch gets reset to "present time", each time a page gets updated and then as the page 'ages' it clicks down towards zero, at which point the page can be removed from the cache. But what is SQL Server is suffering memory pressure and urgently needs to free up more space than is represented by zero-counter pages (or plans etc.)? This is where our 'clock hands' come in. Each cache has associated with it a "memory clock". Like most conventional clocks, it has two hands; one "external" clock hand, and one "internal". Slava Oks is very particular in stressing that these names have "nothing to do with the equivalent types of memory pressure". He's right, but the names do, in that peculiar Microsoft tradition, seem designed to confuse. The hands do relate to memory pressure; the cache "eviction policy" is determined by both global and local memory pressures on SQL Server. The "external" clock hand responds to global memory pressure, in other words pressure on SQL Server to reduce the size of its memory caches as a whole. Global memory pressure – which just to confuse things further seems sometimes to be referred to as physical memory pressure – can be either external (from the OS) or internal (from the process itself, e.g. due to limited virtual address space). The internal clock hand responds to local memory pressure, in other words the need to reduce the size of a single, specific cache. So, for example, if a particular cache, such as the plan cache, reaches a defined "pressure limit" the internal clock hand will start to turn and a memory sweep will be performed on that cache in order to remove plans from the memory store. During each sweep of the hands, the usage counter on the cache entry is reduced in value, effectively moving its "last used" time to further in the past (in effect, setting back the wrist watch on the page a couple of hours) and increasing the likelihood that it can be aged out of the cache. There is even a special Dynamic Management View, sys.dm_os_memory_cache_clock_hands, which allows you to interrogate the passage of the clock hands. Frequently turning hands equates to excessive memory pressure, which will lead to performance problems. Two hours later, I emerged from this rather frightening journey into the heart of SQL Server memory management, fascinated but still unsure if I'd learned anything that I'd put to any practical use. However, I certainly began to agree that there is something almost Tolkeinian in the language of the deep recesses of SQL Server. Cheers, Tony.

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  • Day 4 - Game Sprites In Action

    - by dapostolov
    Yesterday I drew an image on the screen. Most exciting, but ... I spent more time blogging about it then actual coding. So this next little while I'm going to streamline my game and research and simply post key notes. Quick notes on the last session: The most important thing I wanted to point out were the following methods:           spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);           spriteBatch.End(); The spriteBatch object is used to draw Textures and a 2D texture is called a Sprite A texture is generally an image, which is called an Asset in XNA The Draw Method in the Game1.cs is looped (until exit) and utilises the spriteBatch object to draw a Scene To begin drawing a Scene you call the Begin Method. To end a Scene you call the End Method. And to place an image on the Scene you call the Draw method. The most simple implementation of the draw method is:           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White); 1) sprite - the 2D texture you loaded to draw 2) position - the 2d vector, a set of x & y coordinates 3) Color.White - the tint to apply to the texture, in this case, white light = nothing, nada, no tint. Game Sprites In Action! Today, I played around with Draw methods to get comfortable with their "quirks". The following is an example of the above draw method, but with more parameters available for us to use. Let's investigate!             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position2, null, Color.White, MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), new Vector2(sprite.Width / 2, sprite.Height / 2), 1.0F, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0F); The parameters (in order): 1) sprite  the texture to display 2) position2 the position on the screen / scene this can also be a rectangle 3) null the portion of the image to display within an image null = display full image this is generally used for animation strips / grids (more on this below) 4) Color.White Texture tinting White = no tint 5) MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f) rotation of the object, in this case 45 degrees rotates from the set plotting point. 6) new Vector(0,0) the plotting point in this case the top left corner the image will rotate from the top left of the texture in the code above, the point is set to the middle of the image. 7) 1.0f Image scaling (1x) 8) SpriteEffects.None you can flip the image horizontally or vertically 9) 0.0f The z index of the image. 0 = closer, 1 behind? And playing around with different combinations I was able to come up with the following whacky display:   Checking off Yesterdays Intention List: learn game development terminology (in progress) - We learned sprite, scene, texture, and asset. how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen (completed) - The thing to note was, it's was in radians and I found a cool helper method to convert degrees into radians. Also, the image rotates from it's specified point. how to layer static images on the screen (completed) - I couldn't seem to get the zIndex working, but one things for sure, the order you draw the image in also determines how it is rendered on the screen. understand image scaling (in progress) - I'm not sure I have this fully covered, but for the most part plug a number in the scaling field and the image grows / shrinks accordingly. can we reuse images? (completed) - yes, I loaded one image and plotted the bugger all over the screen. understand how framerate is handled in XNA (in progress) - I hacked together some code to display the framerate each second. A framerate of 60 appears to be the standard. Interesting to note, the GameTime object does provide you with some cool timing capabilities, such as...is the game running slow? Need to investigate this down the road. how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen (in progress) - i got text rendered on the screen, and i understand containing rectangles. However, I didn't display "shapes" & "colors" how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) (todo) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques (in progress) - I was able to create a stripe animation of numbers ranging from 1 - 4, each block was 40 x 40 pixles for a total stripe size of 160 x 40. Using the portion (source Rectangle) parameter, i limited this display to each section at varying intervals. It was interesting to note my first implementation animated at rocket speed. I then tried to create a smoother animation by limiting the redraw capacity, which seemed to work. I guess a little more research will have to be put into this for animating characters / scenes. how to detect colliding images or screen edges (todo) - but the rectangle object can detect collisions I believe. how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching (in progress) - I haven't figured out how to modify a specific color to be another color, but the tinting parameter definately could be used. As for stretching, use the rectangle object as the positioning and the image will stretch to fit! how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel (completed) - as per basic animation techniques what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) (todo) Tomorrows Intention Tomorrow I am going to take a stab at rendering a game menu and from there I'm going to investigate how I can improve upon the code and techniques. Intention List: Render a menu, fancy or not Show the mouse cursor Hook up click event A basic animation of somesort Investigate image / menu techniques D.

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  • BizTalk Envelopes explained

    - by Robert Kokuti
    Recently I've been trying to get some order into an ESB-BizTalk pub/sub scenario, and decided to wrap the payload into standardized envelopes. I have used envelopes before in a 'light weight' fashion, and I found that they can be quite useful and powerful if used systematically. Here is what I learned. The Theory In my experience, Envelopes are often underutilised in a BizTalk solution, and quite often their full potential is not well understood. Here I try to simplify the theory behind the Envelopes within BizTalk.   Envelopes can be used to attach additional data to the ‘real’ data (payload). This additional data can contain all routing and processing information, and allows treating the business data as a ‘black box’, possibly compressed and/or encrypted etc. The point here is that the infrastructure does not need to know anything about the business data content, just as a post man does not need to know the letter within the envelope. BizTalk has built-in support for envelopes through the XMLDisassembler and XMLAssembler pipeline components (these are part of the XMLReceive and XMLSend default pipelines). These components, among other things, perform the following: XMLDisassembler Extracts the payload from the envelope into the Message Body Copies data from the envelope into the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Typically, once the envelope is through the XMLDisassembler, the payload is submitted into the Messagebox, and the rest of the envelope data are copied into the context of the submitted message. The XMLDisassembler uses the Property Schemas, referenced by the Envelope Schema, to determine the name of the promoted Message Context element.   XMLAssembler Wraps the Message Body inside the specified envelope schema Populates the envelope values from the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Notice that there are no requirements to use the receiving envelope schema when sending. The sent message can be wrapped within any suitable envelope, regardless whether the message was originally received within an envelope or not. However, by sharing Property Schemas between Envelopes, it is possible to pass values from the incoming envelope to the outgoing envelope via the Message Context. The Practice Creating the Envelope Add a new Schema to the BizTalk project:   Envelopes are defined as schemas, with the <Schema> Envelope property set to Yes, and the root node’s Body XPath property pointing to the node which contains the payload. Typically, you’d create an envelope structure similar to this: Click on the <Schema> node and set the Envelope property to Yes. Then, click on the Envelope node, and set the Body XPath property pointing to the ‘Body’ node:   The ‘Body’ node is a Child Element, and its Data Structure Type is set to xs:anyType.  This allows the Body node to carry any payload data. The XMLReceive pipeline will submit the data found in the Body node, while the XMLSend pipeline will copy the message into the Body node, before sending to the destination. Promoting Properties Once you defined the envelope, you may want to promote the envelope data (anything other than the Body) as Property Fields, in order to preserve their value in the message context. Anything not promoted will be lost when the XMLDisassembler extracts the payload from the Body. Typically, this means you promote everything in the Header node. Property promotion uses associated Property Schemas. These are special BizTalk schemas which have a flat field structure. Property Schemas define the name of the promoted values in the Message Context, by combining the Property Schema’s Namespace and the individual Field names. It is worth being systematic when it comes to naming your schemas, their namespace and type name. A coherent method will make your life easier when it comes to referencing the schemas during development, and managing subscriptions (filters) in BizTalk Administration. I developed a fairly coherent naming convention which I’ll probably share in another article. Because the property schema must be flat, I recommend creating one for each level in the envelope header hierarchy. Property schemas are very useful in passing data between incoming as outgoing envelopes. As I mentioned earlier, in/out envelopes do not have to be the same, but you can use the same property schema when you promote the outgoing envelope fields as you used for the incoming schema.  As you can reference many property schemas for field promotion, you can pick data from a variety of sources when you define your outgoing envelope. For example, the outgoing envelope can carry some of the incoming envelope’s promoted values, plus some values from the standard BizTalk message context, like the AdapterReceiveCompleteTime property from the BizTalk message-tracking properties. The values you promote for the outgoing envelope will be automatically populated from the Message Context by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. Using the Envelope Receiving Enveloped messages are automatically recognized by the XMLReceive pipeline, or any other custom pipeline which includes the XMLDisassembler component. The Body Path node will become the Message Body, while the rest of the envelope values will be added to the Message context, as defined by the Property Shemas referenced by the Envelope Schema. Sending The Send Port’s filter expression can use the promoted properties from the incoming envelope. If you want to enclose the sent message within an envelope, the Send Port XMLAssembler component must be configured with the fully qualified envelope name:   One way of obtaining the fully qualified envelope name is copy it off from the envelope schema property page: The full envelope schema name is constructed as <Name>, <Assembly> The outgoing envelope is populated by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. The Message Body is copied to the specified envelope’s Body Path node, while the rest of the envelope fields are populated from the Message Context, according to the Property Schemas associated with the Envelope Schema. That’s all for now, happy enveloping!

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  • SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

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

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  • Becoming A Great Developer

    - by Lee Brandt
    Image via Wikipedia I’ve been doing the whole programming thing for awhile and reading and watching some of the best in the business. I have come to notice that the really great developers do a few things that (I think) makes them great. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that I am one of these few. I still struggle with doing some of the things that makes one great at development. Coincidently, many of these things also make you a better person period. Believe That Guidance Is Better Than Answers This is one I have no problem with. I prefer guidance any time I am learning from another developer. Answers may get you going, but guidance will leave you stranded. At some point, you will come across a problem that can only be solved by thinking for yourself and this is where that guidance will really come in handy. You can use that guidance and extrapolate whatever technology to salve that problem (if it’s the right tool for solving that problem). The problem is, lots of developers simply want someone to tell them, “Do this, then this, then set that, and write this.” Favor thinking and learn the guidance of doing X and don’t ask someone to show you how to do X, if that makes sense. Read, Read and Read If you don’t like reading, you’re probably NOT going to make it into the Great Developer group. Great developers read books, they read magazines and they read code. Open source playgrounds like SourceForge, CodePlex and GitHub, have made it extremely easy to download code from developers you admire and see how they do stuff. Chances are, if you read their blog too, they’ll even explain WHY they did what they did (see “Guidance” above). MSDN and Code Magazine have not only code samples, but explanations of how to use certain technologies and sometimes even when NOT to use that same technology. Books are also out on just about every topic. I still favor the less technology centric books. For instance, I generally don’t buy books like, “Getting Started with Jiminy Jappets”. I look for titles like, “How To Write More Effective Code” (again, see guidance). The Addison-Wesley Signature Series is a great example of these types of books. They teach technology-agnostic concepts. Head First Design Patterns is another great guidance book. It teaches the "Gang Of Four" Design Patterns in a very easy-to-understand, picture-heavy way (I LIKE pictures). Hang Your Balls Out There Even though the advice came from a 3rd-shift Kinko’s attendant, doesn’t mean it’s not sound advice. Write some code and put it out for others to read, criticize and castigate you for. Understand that there are some real jerks out there who are absolute geniuses. Don’t be afraid to get some great advice wrapped in some really nasty language. Try to take what’s good about it and leave what’s not. I have a tough time with this myself. I don’t really have any code out there that is available for review (other than my demo code). It takes some guts to do, but in the end, there is no substitute for getting a community of developers to critique your code and give you ways to improve. Get Involved Speaking of community, the local and online user groups and discussion forums are a great place to hear about technologies and techniques you might never come across otherwise. Mostly because you might not know to look. But, once you sit down with a bunch of other developers and start discussing what you’re interested in, you may open up a whole new perspective on it. Don’t just go to the UG meetings and watch the presentations either, get out there and talk, socialize. I realize geeks weren’t meant to necessarily be social creatures, but if you’re amongst other geeks, it’s much easier. I’ve learned more in the last 3-4 years that I have been involved in the community that I did in my previous 8 years of coding without it. Socializing works, even if socialism doesn’t. Continuous Improvement Lean proponents might call this “Kaizen”, but I call it progress. We all know, especially in the technology realm, if you’re not moving ahead, you’re falling behind. It may seem like drinking from a fire hose, but step back and pick out the technologies that speak to you. The ones that may you’re little heart go pitter-patter. Concentrate on those. If you’re still overloaded, pick the best of the best. Just know that if you’re not looking at the code you wrote last week or at least last year with some embarrassment, you’re probably stagnating. That’s about all I can say about that, cause I am all out of clichés to throw at it. :0) Write Code Great painters paint, great writers write, and great developers write code. The most sure-fire way to improve your coding ability is to continue writing code. Don’t just write code that your work throws on you, pick that technology you love or are curious to know more about and walk through some blog demo examples. Take the language you use everyday and try to get it to do something crazy. Who knows, you might create the next Google search algorithm! All in all, being a great developer is about finding yourself in all this code. If it is just a job to you, you will probably never be one of the “Great Developers”, but you’re probably okay with that. If, on the other hand, you do aspire to greatness, get out there and GET it. No one’s going hand it to you.

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  • Stumbling Through: Making a case for the K2 Case Management Framework

    I have recently attended a three-day training session on K2s Case Management Framework (CMF), a free framework built on top of K2s blackpearl workflow product, and I have come away with several different impressions for some of the different aspects of the framework.  Before we get into the details, what is the Case Management Framework?  It is essentially a suite of tools that, when used together, solve many common workflow scenarios.  The tool has been developed over time by K2 consultants that have realized they tend to solve the same problems over and over for various clients, so they attempted to package all of those common solutions into one framework.  Most of these common problems involve workflow process that arent necessarily direct and would tend to be difficult to model.  Such solutions could be achieved in blackpearl alone, but the workflows would be complex and difficult to follow and maintain over time.  CMF attempts to simplify such scenarios not so much by black-boxing the workflow processes, but by providing different points of entry to the processes allowing them to be simpler, moving the complexity to a middle layer.  It is not a solution in and of itself, development is still required to tie the pieces together. CMF is under continuous development, both a plus and a minus in that bugs are fixed quickly and features added regularly, but it may be difficult to know which versions are the most stable.  CMF is not an officially supported K2 product, which means you will not get technical support but you will get access to the source code. The example given of a business process that would fit well into CMF is that of a file cabinet, where each folder in said file cabinet is a case that contains all of the data associated with one complaint/customer/incident/etc. and various users can access that case at any time and take one of a set of pre-determined actions on it.  When I was given that example, my first thought was that any workflow I have ever developed in the past could be made to fit this model there must be more than just this model to help decide if CMF is the right solution.  As the training went on, we learned that one of the key features of CMF is SharePoint integration as each case gets a SharePoint site created for it, and there are a number of excellent web parts that can be used to design a portal for users to get at all the information on their cases.  While CMF does not require SharePoint, without it you will be missing out on a huge portion of functionality that CMF offers.  My opinion is that without SharePoint integration, you may as well write your workflows and other components the old fashioned way. When I heard that each case gets its own SharePoint site created for it, warning bells immediately went off in my head as I felt that depending on the data load, a CMF enabled solution could quickly overwhelm SharePoint with thousands of sites so we have yet another deciding factor for CMF:  Just how many cases will your solution be creating?  While it is not necessary to use the site-per-case model, it is one of the more useful parts of the framework.  Without it, you are losing a big chunk of what CMF has to offer. When it comes to developing on top of the Case Management Framework, it becomes a matter of configuring what makes up a case, what can be done to a case, where each action on a case should take the user, and then typing up actions to case statuses.  This last step is one that I immediately warmed up to, as just about every workflow Ive designed in the past needed some sort of mapping table to set the status of a work item based on the action being taken definitely one of those common solutions that it is good to see rolled up into a re-useable entity (and it gets a nice configuration UI to boot!).  This concept is a little different than traditional workflow design, in that you dont have to think of an end-to-end process around passing a case along a path, rather, you must envision the case as central object with workflow threads branching off of it and doing their own thing with the case data.  Certainly there can be certain workflow threads that get rather complex, but the idea is that they RELATE to the case, they dont BECOME the case (though it is still possible with action->status mappings to prevent certain actions in certain cases, so it isnt always a wide-open free for all of actions on a case). I realize that this description of the Case Management Framework merely scratches the surface on what the product actually can do, and I dont think Ive conclusively defined for what sort of business scenario you can make a case for Case Management Framework.  What I do hope to have accomplished with this post is to raise awareness of CMF there is a (free!) product out there that could potentially simplify a tangled workflow process and give (for free!) a very useful set of SharePoint web parts and a nice set of (free!) reports.  The best way to see if it will truly fit your needs is to give it a try did I mention it is FREE?  Er, ok, so it is free, but only obtainable at this time for K2 partnersDid 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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  • Interview with Geoff Bones, developer on SQL Storage Compress

    - by red(at)work
    How did you come to be working at Red Gate? I've been working at Red Gate for nine months; before that I had been at a multinational engineering company. A number of my colleagues had left to work at Red Gate and spoke very highly of it, but I was happy in my role and thought, 'It can't be that great there, surely? They'll be back!' Then one day I visited to catch up them over lunch in the Red Gate canteen. I was so impressed with what I found there, that, three days later, I'd applied for a role as a developer. And how did you get into software development? My first job out of university was working as a systems programmer on IBM mainframes. This was quite a while ago: there was a lot of assembler and loading programs from tape drives and that kind of stuff. I learned a lot about how computers work, and this stood me in good stead when I moved over the development in the 90s. What's the best thing about working as a developer at Red Gate? Where should I start? One of the great things as a developer at Red Gate is the useful feedback and close contact we have with the people who use our products, either directly at trade shows and other events or through information coming through the product managers. The company's whole ethos is built around assisting the user, and this is in big contrast to my previous development roles. We aim to produce tools that people really want to use, that they enjoy using, and, as a developer, this is a great thing to aim for and a great feeling when we get it right. At Red Gate we also try to cut out the things that distract and stop us doing our jobs. As a developer, this means that I can focus on the code and the product I'm working on, knowing that others are doing a first-class job of making sure that the builds are running smoothly and that I'm getting great feedback from the testers. We keep our process light and effective, as we want to produce great software more than we want to produce great audit trails. Tell us a bit about the products you are currently working on. You mean HyperBac? First let me explain a bit about what HyperBac is. At heart it's a compression and encryption technology, but with a few added features that open up a wealth of really exciting possibilities. Right now we have the HyperBac technology in just three products: SQL HyperBac, SQL Virtual Restore and SQL Storage Compress, but we're only starting to develop what it can do. My personal favourite is SQL Virtual Restore; for example, I love the way you can use it to run independent test databases that are all backed by a single compressed backup. I don't think the market yet realises the kind of things you do once you are using these products. On the other hand, the benefits of SQL Storage Compress are straightforward: run your databases but use only 20% of the disk space. Databases are getting larger and larger, and, as they do, so does your ROI. What's a typical day for you? My days are pretty varied. We have our daily team stand-up meeting and then sometimes I will work alone on a current issue, or I'll be pair programming with one of my colleagues. From time to time we give half a day up to future planning with the team, when we look at the long and short term aims for the product and working out the development priorities. I also get to go to conferences and events, which is unusual for a development role and gives me the chance to meet and talk to our customers directly. Have you noticed anything different about developing tools for DBAs rather than other IT kinds of user? It seems to me that DBAs are quite independent minded; they know exactly what the problem they are facing is, and often have a solution in mind before they begin to look for what's on the market. This means that they're likely to cherry-pick tools from a range of vendors, picking the ones that are the best fit for them and that disrupt their environments the least. When I've met with DBAs, I've often been very impressed at their ability to summarise their set up, the issues, the obstacles they face when implementing a tool and their plans for their environment. It's easier to develop products for this audience as they give such a detailed overview of their needs, and I feel I understand their problems.

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  • Productivity vs Security [closed]

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

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  • Sort Data in Windows Phone using Collection View Source

    - by psheriff
    When you write a Windows Phone application you will most likely consume data from a web service somewhere. If that service returns data to you in a sort order that you do not want, you have an easy alternative to sort the data without writing any C# or VB code. You use the built-in CollectionViewSource object in XAML to perform the sorting for you. This assumes that you can get the data into a collection that implements the IEnumerable or IList interfaces.For this example, I will be using a simple Product class with two properties, and a list of Product objects using the Generic List class. Try this out by creating a Product class as shown in the following code:public class Product {  public Product(int id, string name)   {    ProductId = id;    ProductName = name;  }  public int ProductId { get; set; }  public string ProductName { get; set; }}Create a collection class that initializes a property called DataCollection with some sample data as shown in the code below:public class Products : List<Product>{  public Products()  {    InitCollection();  }  public List<Product> DataCollection { get; set; }  List<Product> InitCollection()  {    DataCollection = new List<Product>();    DataCollection.Add(new Product(3,        "PDSA .NET Productivity Framework"));    DataCollection.Add(new Product(1,        "Haystack Code Generator for .NET"));    DataCollection.Add(new Product(2,        "Fundamentals of .NET eBook"));    return DataCollection;  }}Notice that the data added to the collection is not in any particular order. Create a Windows Phone page and add two XML namespaces to the Page.xmlns:scm="clr-namespace:System.ComponentModel;assembly=System.Windows"xmlns:local="clr-namespace:WPSortData"The 'local' namespace is an alias to the name of the project that you created (in this case WPSortData). The 'scm' namespace references the System.Windows.dll and is needed for the SortDescription class that you will use for sorting the data. Create a phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources section in your Windows Phone page that looks like the following:<phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources>  <local:Products x:Key="products" />  <CollectionViewSource x:Key="prodCollection"      Source="{Binding Source={StaticResource products},                       Path=DataCollection}">    <CollectionViewSource.SortDescriptions>      <scm:SortDescription PropertyName="ProductName"                           Direction="Ascending" />    </CollectionViewSource.SortDescriptions>  </CollectionViewSource></phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources>The first line of code in the resources section creates an instance of your Products class. The constructor of the Products class calls the InitCollection method which creates three Product objects and adds them to the DataCollection property of the Products class. Once the Products object is instantiated you now add a CollectionViewSource object in XAML using the Products object as the source of the data to this collection. A CollectionViewSource has a SortDescriptions collection that allows you to specify a set of SortDescription objects. Each object can set a PropertyName and a Direction property. As you see in the above code you set the PropertyName equal to the ProductName property of the Product object and tell it to sort in an Ascending direction.All you have to do now is to create a ListBox control and set its ItemsSource property to the CollectionViewSource object. The ListBox displays the data in sorted order by ProductName and you did not have to write any LINQ queries or write other code to sort the data!<ListBox    ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource prodCollection}}"   DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" />SummaryIn this blog post you learned that you can sort any data without having to change the source code of where the data comes from. Simply feed the data into a CollectionViewSource in XAML and set some sort descriptions in XAML and the rest is done for you! This comes in very handy when you are consuming data from a source where the data is given to you and you do not have control over the sorting.NOTE: You can download this article and many samples like the one shown in this blog entry at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips and Tricks”, then “Sort Data in Windows Phone using Collection View Source” from the drop down list.Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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  • Come meet our Interns in Dublin

    - by klaudia.drulis
    Oracle Worldwide Product Translation Group (WPTG) provides solutions for all Oracle product and Content translation requirements. WPTG is a global organisation with its headquarters in Ireland and employees in Oracle offices worldwide. WPTG offer expertise in fields such as process engineering, tools development, linguistic quality, terminology, global product release, financial and vendor management. WPTG provides translation solution for over 40 languages including Asia Pacific, European, American and Middle Eastern languages. WPTG first introduced an intern program over 10 years ago and it has become a key component of our teams structure. The majority of Interns are sourced from a Computer Science related course, these Interns joining the engineering team. Others are sourced from Business courses and work within the Business / Project management area. The intern program allows us to maintain ties with current course curriculum and brings fresh energy and perspective into our Organisation. Four of the full time staff working in Dublin today joined us originally as Interns and subsequently were offered permanent positions. Come Meet some of our 2010 Interns, Come and see what Darragh, Anthony, Caoimhe, James and Artemij thought about working within the WPTG at Oracle: Darragh “Oracle has been a fun, challenging work placement for me. From day one I was treated as a full member of staff, this was both comforting and a little bit scary. The responsibilities stack up but I found I was able to keep on top of everything and even make improvements to how we handle a few things thanks to a great team and a very supportive manager. There’s a very positive atmosphere in work that’s really conducive to getting a lot of work done. Ideas seem to be the central hub in my line of business so all of my ideas and innovations were greeted with enthusiasm. Oracle has given me a fantastic opportunity and I urge you to grab it with both hands, you’ll find that you’re with a set of like minded people from all works of life that make work both interesting and fun. Even when the pressure is on you know that you can always get help and advice from someone nearby. My last word of advice is don’t be afraid to stick your neck out, everyone here is willing to learn, try something new and innovate, your voice will be heard and who knows, you could end up having a large impact on Oracle and your career.” Anthony “I had a great experience working with Oracle, from day one I was treated like a full member of staff with responsibilities of my own. I found that the more I put into the work the more I got out from the experience. Volunteering and being willing to face challenges have made this a more exciting placement. I am given a lot of leeway to do my own projects and so I’ve found that I am really enjoying my time here.” Caoimhe “I am currently spending my year of placement within the Release Management Team in the WPTG. My main role is to handle the finance process of all translation projects under 100k which includes creating workspecs and PO's, sending out kits, dealing with vendor queries and handling the invoicing and payment part. I am really enjoying my time here at Oracle, everyone is very open and friendly and willing to help you out with any questions you may have. I would definitely be interested in returning to Oracle after I graduate!” James “I am currently on a 12 month placement with Oracle, working as part of the Worldwide Product Translation Group in the Business Management. The Business Management team provides a global view on WPTG’s vendor and business strategy and is an interface into WPTG for new business. The business management team work together to support the external translation partner network. My role is to support the Business Management team and also to work on various projects when the need arises. This involves working with translation vendors and working with other Oracle employees worldwide. I am really enjoying my time working for Oracle, at times it can be challenging bit also very rewarding. I would recommend any student wanting to undertake a placement year to apply to Oracle, I made some great friends and I will never forget my time in Dublin.” Artemij “From working within Oracle, I have truly understood what "career path" is, and what opportunities a large corporation like Oracle can offer. Without any illusions, the work itself is exciting, sometimes challenging, tests your ability to handle pressure, to make decisions and take responsibility, to learn quickly and cooperate efficiently in order to solve a problem. I have learned a lot about myself. What I am good at, where and what I can do better. My placement at Oracle has allowed me to get a clearer picture of what I want, and which door I am going to open after college. If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 24, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 24, 2011Popular ReleasesDeveloper Guidance - Onboarding Windows Phone 7: Fuel Tracker Source: Release NotesThis project is almost complete. We'll be making small updates to the code and documentation over the next week or so. We look forward to your feedback. This documentation and accompanying sample application will get you started creating a complete application for Windows Phone 7. You will learn about common developer issues in the context of a simple fuel-tracking application named Fuel Tracker. Some of the tasks that you will learn include the following: Creating a UI that...Password Generator: 2.2: Parallel password generation Password strength calculation ( Same method used by Microsoft here : https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx ) Minor code refactoringProcess Enactment Tool Framework: PET 1.2.3: Bug fixing release. Introduced installer. General Upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 Created installer PET Wizard Fixed log bug if PET is placed in read-only folder SharePoint Tool Provider Fixed provider crash in case SharePoint.dll is not availableVisual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance: Spanish - Architecture Guidance: Francisco Fagas http://geeks.ms/blogs/ffagas, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), localized the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance for the Spanish communities, based on http://vsarchitectureguide.codeplex.com/releases/view/47828. Release Notes The guidance is available in a xps-only (default) or complete package. The complete package contains the files in xps, pdf and Office 2007 formats. 2011-01-24 Publish version 1.0 of the Spanish localized bits.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager the html generation has been optimized, the html page size is much smaller nowSSH.NET Library: 2011.1.24: No new features in this release, only fixes to issues reported by users: Fixes Fix SFTP path resolution to allow for client to work with glibc and BSD based servers. Close handle when file download completes Fix reusing command object to execute different commands.Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.6: new Facebook Graph objects: Application, Page, Post, Comment Improved Intellisense documentation new Graph Api connections: albums, photos, posts, feed, home, friends JSON Toolkit upgraded to version 0.9 (beta release) with bug fixes and new features bug fixed: error when handling empty JSON arrays bug fixed: error when handling JSON array with square or large brackets in the message bug fixed: error when handling JSON obejcts with double quotation in the message bug fixed: erro...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-01-23: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.4.0.0: This version requires an update for WControls.dll. - Removed option to use Old Rune Strike - Fixed an issue that was causing Ratings to not properly update when running Progressive simulations - Ability data is now loaded from an XML file in the BloodSim directory that is user editable. This data will be reloaded each time a fresh simulation is run. - Added toggle for showing Graph window. When unchecked, output data will instead be saved to a text file in the BloodSim directory based on the...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (3): Instructions for installation: http://www.galasoft.ch/mvvm/installing/manually/ Includes the hotfix templates for Windows Phone 7 development. This is only relevant if you didn't already install the hotfix described at http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2010/07/22/mvvm-light-hotfix-for-windows-phone-7-developer-tools-beta.aspx.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V42: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Decoding of Subject now also supports multi-line subjects (occurs only if you have very long subjects with non-ASCII characters)Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.3: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds automatic block list updates, so MTS will recognize blocks added in game updates properly rather than drawing them in bright pink. New in this version of MTS: Support for all new blocks added since the Halloween update Auto-update of blockcolors.xml to support future game updates A splash screen that shows while the program searches for upd...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14996.000: New Features: ============= This release is just compiled against the latest release of JetBrains ReSharper 5.1.1766.4 Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes...jqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: Version 1.2.0.0: jqGrid 3.8 support jquery 1.4 support New and exciting features Many bugfixes Complete separation from the jquery, & jqgrid codeMediaScout: MediaScout 3.0 Preview 4: Update ReleaseCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1MFCMAPI: January 2011 Release: Build: 6.0.0.1024 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the tool, get the executable. If you want to debug it, get the symbol file and the source. The 64 bit build will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit build, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.4: Added champion: Renekton Removed automatic file association Fix: The recent files combobox didn't always open a file when an item was selected Fix: Removing a recently opened file caused an errorDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01: Major Highlights Fixed issue to remove preCondition checks when upgrading to .Net 4.0 Fixed issue where some valid domains were failing email validation checks. Fixed issue where editing Host menu page settings assigns the page to a Portal. Fixed issue which caused XHTML validation problems in 5.6.0 Fixed issue where an aspx page in any subfolder was inaccessible. Fixed issue where Config.Touch method signature had an unintentional breaking change in 5.6.0 Fixed issue which caused...iTracker Asp.Net Starter Kit: Version 3.0.0: This is the inital release of the version 3.0.0 Visual Studio 2010 (.Net 4.0) remake of the ITracker application. I connsider this a working, stable application but since there are still some features missing to make it "complete" I'm leaving it listed as a "beta" release. I am hoping to make it feature complete for v3.1.0 but anything is possible.New ProjectsAIMP2 .NET Interop Plugin: AIMP2 .NET Interop Plugin allows to write plugin for AIMP2 with managed code (C#, VB and so on).asp.net c# website: hot millions project is an asp.net c# sql express website where you can login and book and order your menu items. This project is built in Visual studio 2008 with asp.net c# sql express editionAutomatic Build Updater: A small tool with scripts to show the recent build of your program on your homepage or blog. It works fully automatically and is easy to use. Works with each IDE which supports Build-Events.BurakoNET: Burako OnLineDelNet: Tool created in C # to automate the development process. With this tool, you do not need to spend time with the creation of classes of connection, data access layer, view or update data with Windows Forms. Everything is here, ready.Droid Builder: Droid Builder is a WPF based application that can help Android ROM maker to create customized ROM. The basic functions of Droid Build are: 1. Deodex 2. Packaging 3. Signing In future, Droid Builder will provide more function on Android ROM customization.eatables: Eatables 2011Food information system: Food information system makes it easier for content providers to deliver information about food producers, contents and information about quality, recipes, allergy and other considerations to the consumers. ForceHttps: Very simple httpModule to ensure that all http requests are https. 1. Drop the dll into your website's bin directory 2. Update httpModules section of your web.config to reference the dll 3. Make sure your Web Server can handle SSL requests for the URL ALL http requests will be redirected as https.Frolic Game Engine for .NET: The Frolic game engine is an attempt at creating a retained style game engine that is agnostic to the rendering technology, allowing for easier inplementations of rendering engines for various graphics layers.Import VCF to MS Outlook: simple tools to import many *.vcf files to default contact in MS OutlookLe blog à TiK: Le blog à TiK is a blog engine written for the Windows Azure platformLearning CPP: Learning CPP.MinConsole: A minimilastic console application with configurable logging and debuggingMineSweeperChallenge: C# programming exercise. Simulates a given number of minesweeper games using a given ISweeper implementation (or use the step by step mode to study how the ISweeper implementations work). Create your own implementation and see how it compares to other implementations.MvcCss: MvcCss brings the convention-based simplicity of MVC to CSS.Natur Map Editor: Natur allows you to easily create and manage maps in 3D using the Xna framework. As you build your map, you can enter simulation mode at any time; this will activate bounds, physics, and any game logic such as animations and triggers.OneGames Open Framework: Projeto open-source da OneGames de desenvolvimento de jogos 2D com a engine SpriteCraft(tm).QQFindX: QQFindXsadd.practical.approach: SADD workshop is a project testorage to demonstrate practical approach of sadd while Lessons Learned site was developing. ?????? ???? ?????????? ??????????? ??? ?? ???????? ?????????? SADD ??? ???????? ????? "????????? ??????", ??????????? ????????? ??????????????? ?????? ?????.Seesmic Feed Reader: A simple plugin for Seesmic Desktop 2 that allows you to read syndication feeds (Rss 2.0 and Atom 1.0) inside Seesmic.Simple Farseer physics platform: Sample described on rabidlion.comSIN Generator: Social Insurance Number (SIN) Generator is a utility designed to generate SIN numbers to testing application software. It uses SIN generation algorithm provided on fakenamegenerator.com It is developed in C# and is meant for application testing ONLY!UsingLib: A library of automatically removed utilities: 1.Changing cursor to hourglass in Windows Forms 2.Logging It's developed in C#WP7Contrib: WP7 Contrib is a set of components to help build WP7 Apps. It can be plugged into MVVM Light or used as separate components in your App. Our goal is to provide a set of tools and patterns that help WP7 developers.

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  • To Bit or Not To Bit

    - by Johnm
    'Twas a long day of troubleshooting and firefighting and now, with most of the office vacant, you face a blank scripting window to create a new table in his database. Many questions circle your mind like dirty water gurgling down the bathtub drain: "How normalized should this table be?", "Should I use an identity column?", "NVarchar or Varchar?", "Should this column be NULLABLE?", "I wonder what apple blue cheese bacon cheesecake tastes like?" Well, there are times when the mind goes it's own direction. A Bit About Bit At some point during your table creation efforts you will encounter the decision of whether to use the bit data type for a column. The bit data type is an integer data type that recognizes only the values of 1, 0 and NULL as valid. This data type is often utilized to store yes/no or true/false values. An example of its use would be a column called [IsGasoline] which would be intended to contain the value of 1 if the row's subject (a car) had a gasoline engine and a 0 if the subject did not have a gasoline engine. The bit data type can even be found in some of the system tables of SQL Server. For example, the sysssispackages table in the msdb database which contains SQL Server Integration Services Package information for the packages stored in SQL Server. This table contains a column called [IsEncrypted]. A value of 1 indicates that the package has been encrypted while the value of 0 indicates that it is not. I have learned that the most effective way to disperse the crowd that surrounds the office coffee machine is to engage into SQL Server debates. The bit data type has been one of the most reoccurring, as well as the most enjoyable, of these topics. It contains a practical side and a philosophical side. Practical Consideration This data type certainly has its place and is a valuable option for database design; but it is often used in situations where the answer is really not a pure true/false response. In addition, true/false values are not very informative or scalable. Let's use the previously noted [IsGasoline] column for illustration. While on the surface it appears to be a rather simple question when evaluating a car: "Does the car have a gasoline engine?" If the person entering data is entering a row for a Jeep Liberty, the response would be a 1 since it has a gasoline engine. If the person is entering data is entering a row for a Chevrolet Volt, the response would be a 0 since it is an electric engine. What happens when a person is entering a row for the gasoline/electric hybrid Toyota Prius? Would one person's conclusion be consistent with another person's conclusion? The argument could be made that the current intent for the database is to be used only for pure gasoline and pure electric engines; but this is where the scalability issue comes into play. With the use of a bit data type a database modification and data conversion would be required if the business decided to take on hybrid engines. Whereas, alternatively, if the int data type were used as a foreign key to a reference table containing the engine type options, the change to include the hybrid option would only require an entry into the reference table. Philosophical Consideration Since the bit data type is often used for true/false or yes/no data (also called Boolean) it presents a philosophical conundrum of what to do about the allowance of the NULL value. The inclusion of NULL in a true/false or yes/no response simply violates the logical principle of bivalence which states that "every proposition is either true or false". If NULL is not true, then it must be false. The mathematical laws of Boolean logic support this concept by stating that the only valid values of this scenario are 1 and 0. There is another way to look at this conundrum: NULL is also considered to be the absence of a response. In other words, it is the equivalent to "undecided". Anyone who watches the news can tell you that polls always include an "undecided" option. This could be considered a valid option in the world of yes/no/dunno. Through out all of these considerations I have discovered one absolute certainty: When you have found a person, or group of persons, who are willing to entertain a philosophical debate of the bit data type, you have found some true friends.

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  • Using Event Driven Programming in games, when is it beneficial?

    - by Arthur Wulf White
    I am learning ActionScript 3 and I see the Event flow adheres to the W3C recommendations. From what I learned events can only be captured by the dispatcher unless, the listener capturing the event is a DisplayObject on stage and a parent of the object firing the event. You can capture the events in the capture(before) or bubbling(after) phase depending on Listner and Event setup you use. Does this system lend itself well for game programming? When is this system useful? Could you give an example of a case where using events is a lot better than going without them? Are they somehow better for performance in games? Please do not mention events you must use to get a game running, like Event.ENTER_FRAME Or events that are required to get input from the user like, KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN and MouseEvent.CLICK. I am asking if there is any use in firing events that have nothing to do with user input, frame rendering and the likes(that are necessary). I am referring to cases where objects are communicating. Is this used to avoid storing a collection of objects that are on the stage? Thanks Here is some code I wrote as an example of event behavior in ActionScript 3, enjoy. package regression { import flash.display.Shape; import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.events.Event; import flash.events.EventDispatcher; import flash.events.KeyboardEvent; import flash.events.MouseEvent; import flash.events.EventPhase; /** * ... * @author ... */ public class Check_event_listening_1 extends Sprite { public const EVENT_DANCE : String = "dance"; public const EVENT_PLAY : String = "play"; public const EVENT_YELL : String = "yell"; private var baby : Shape = new Shape(); private var mom : Sprite = new Sprite(); private var stranger : EventDispatcher = new EventDispatcher(); public function Check_event_listening_1() { if (stage) init(); else addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init); } private function init(e:Event = null):void { trace("test begun"); addChild(mom); mom.addChild(baby); stage.addEventListener(EVENT_YELL, onEvent); this.addEventListener(EVENT_YELL, onEvent); mom.addEventListener(EVENT_YELL, onEvent); baby.addEventListener(EVENT_YELL, onEvent); stranger.addEventListener(EVENT_YELL, onEvent); trace("\nTest1 - Stranger yells with no bubbling"); stranger.dispatchEvent(new Event(EVENT_YELL, false)); trace("\nTest2 - Stranger yells with bubbling"); stranger.dispatchEvent(new Event(EVENT_YELL, true)); stage.addEventListener(EVENT_PLAY, onEvent); this.addEventListener(EVENT_PLAY, onEvent); mom.addEventListener(EVENT_PLAY, onEvent); baby.addEventListener(EVENT_PLAY, onEvent); stranger.addEventListener(EVENT_PLAY, onEvent); trace("\nTest3 - baby plays with no bubbling"); baby.dispatchEvent(new Event(EVENT_PLAY, false)); trace("\nTest4 - baby plays with bubbling"); baby.dispatchEvent(new Event(EVENT_PLAY, true)); trace("\nTest5 - baby plays with bubbling but is not a child of mom"); mom.removeChild(baby); baby.dispatchEvent(new Event(EVENT_PLAY, true)); mom.addChild(baby); stage.addEventListener(EVENT_DANCE, onEvent, true); this.addEventListener(EVENT_DANCE, onEvent, true); mom.addEventListener(EVENT_DANCE, onEvent, true); baby.addEventListener(EVENT_DANCE, onEvent); trace("\nTest6 - Mom dances without bubbling - everyone is listening during capture phase(not target and bubble phase)"); mom.dispatchEvent(new Event(EVENT_DANCE, false)); trace("\nTest7 - Mom dances with bubbling - everyone is listening during capture phase(not target and bubble phase)"); mom.dispatchEvent(new Event(EVENT_DANCE, true)); } private function onEvent(e : Event):void { trace("Event was captured"); trace("\nTYPE : ", e.type, "\nTARGET : ", objToName(e.target), "\nCURRENT TARGET : ", objToName(e.currentTarget), "\nPHASE : ", phaseToString(e.eventPhase)); } private function phaseToString(phase : int):String { switch(phase) { case EventPhase.AT_TARGET : return "TARGET"; case EventPhase.BUBBLING_PHASE : return "BUBBLING"; case EventPhase.CAPTURING_PHASE : return "CAPTURE"; default: return "UNKNOWN"; } } private function objToName(obj : Object):String { if (obj == stage) return "STAGE"; else if (obj == this) return "MAIN"; else if (obj == mom) return "Mom"; else if (obj == baby) return "Baby"; else if (obj == stranger) return "Stranger"; else return "Unknown" } } } /*result : test begun Test1 - Stranger yells with no bubbling Event was captured TYPE : yell TARGET : Stranger CURRENT TARGET : Stranger PHASE : TARGET Test2 - Stranger yells with bubbling Event was captured TYPE : yell TARGET : Stranger CURRENT TARGET : Stranger PHASE : TARGET Test3 - baby plays with no bubbling Event was captured TYPE : play TARGET : Baby CURRENT TARGET : Baby PHASE : TARGET Test4 - baby plays with bubbling Event was captured TYPE : play TARGET : Baby CURRENT TARGET : Baby PHASE : TARGET Event was captured TYPE : play TARGET : Baby CURRENT TARGET : Mom PHASE : BUBBLING Event was captured TYPE : play TARGET : Baby CURRENT TARGET : MAIN PHASE : BUBBLING Event was captured TYPE : play TARGET : Baby CURRENT TARGET : STAGE PHASE : BUBBLING Test5 - baby plays with bubbling but is not a child of mom Event was captured TYPE : play TARGET : Baby CURRENT TARGET : Baby PHASE : TARGET Test6 - Mom dances without bubbling - everyone is listening during capture phase(not target and bubble phase) Event was captured TYPE : dance TARGET : Mom CURRENT TARGET : STAGE PHASE : CAPTURE Event was captured TYPE : dance TARGET : Mom CURRENT TARGET : MAIN PHASE : CAPTURE Test7 - Mom dances with bubbling - everyone is listening during capture phase(not target and bubble phase) Event was captured TYPE : dance TARGET : Mom CURRENT TARGET : STAGE PHASE : CAPTURE Event was captured TYPE : dance TARGET : Mom CURRENT TARGET : MAIN PHASE : CAPTURE */

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  • How Estimates Became Quotes

    - by Lee Brandt
    It’s our fault. Well, not completely, but we haven’t helped the situation any. All of what follows comes from my own experiences which, from talking to lots of other developers about it, seems to be pretty much par for the course. Where We Started When we first started estimating, we estimated pretty clearly. We would try to imagine something we’d done that was similar to the project being estimated and we’d toss it about in our heads a bit and see how much bigger or smaller we thought this new thing was, and add or subtract accordingly. We wouldn’t spend too much time on it, because we wanted to get to writing the software. Eventually, we’d come across some huge problem that there was now way we could’ve known about ahead of time. Either we didn’t see this thing or, we didn’t realize that this particular version of a problem would be so… problematic. We usually call this “not knowing what we don’t know”. It’s unavoidable. We just can’t know. Until we wade in and start putting some code together, there are just some things we won’t know… and some things we don’t even know that we don’t know. Y’know? So what happens? We go over budget. Project managers scream and dance the dance of the stressed-out project manager, and there is nothing we can do (or could’ve done) about it. We didn’t know. We thought about it for a bit and we didn’t see this herculean task sitting in the middle of our nice quiet project, and it has bitten us in the rear end. We now know how to handle this in the future, though. We will take some more time to pick around the requirements and discover all those things we don’t know. We’ll do some prototyping, we’ll read some blogs about similar projects, we’ll really grill the customer with questions during the requirements gathering phase. We’ll keeping asking “what else?” until the shove us down the stairs. We’ll take our time and uncover it all. We Learned, But Good The next time comes, and you know what happens? We do it. We grill the customer for weeks and prototype and read and research and we estimate everything down to the last button on the last form. Know what that gets us? It gets us three months of wasted time, and our estimate will still be off. Possibly off by a factor of four. WTF, mate? No way we could be surprised by something! We uncovered every particle. We turned every stone. How is it we still came across unknowns? Because we STILL didn’t know what we didn’t know. How could we? We didn’t know to ask. The worst part is, we’ve now convinced the product that this is NOT an estimate. It is a solid number based on massive research and an endless number of questions that they answered. There is absolutely now way you don’t know everything there is to know about this project now. No way there is anything you haven’t uncovered. And their faith in that “Esti-Quote” goes through the roof. When the project goes over this time, they might even begin to question whether or not you know what you’re doing. Who could blame them? You drilled them for weeks about every little thing, and when they complained about all the questions, you told them you wanted to uncover everything so there would be no surprises. SO we set them up to faile Guess, Then Plan We had a chance. At the beginning we could have just said, “That’s just a gut-feeling estimate, based on my past experience with similar projects. There could still be surprises.” If we spend SOME time doing SOME discovery and then bounce that against our own past experiences, we can come up with a fairly healthy estimate. We can then help the product owner understand that an estimate is a guess. Sure, it’s an educated guess, but it is still a guess. If we get it right it will be almost completely luck. Then, we help them to plan the development by taking that guess (yes, they still need the guess for planning purposes) and start measuring early and often to see if we still think we are right. We should adjust the estimate and alert the product owner as soon as we see problems (bad news does not age well) and we should be able to see any problems immediately if we are constantly measuring our pace. In lean software, we start with that guess and begin measuring cycle times immediately. Then we can make projections based on those cycle times and compare them to our estimate. This constant feedback is the best way to ensure that there are no surprises at the END of the project. There sill still be surprises, but we’ll see them sooner and have a better understanding of how they will affect our overall timeline. What do you think?

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  • Can Kind People Finish First?

    - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies
    by Jim Lein, Oracle Midsize Programs In an earlier post, I expressed my undying love for KIND Snacks' products. This month's Oracle Profit magazine features an interview with KIND Healthy Snacks Founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky entitled "Better Business". Lubetzky expresses his vision for making KIND a "not for profit only" company.  All great companies start with a good idea. In this case, that one great idea was to offer a healthy snack with ingredients you can "see and pronounce". That's one of things I really like about this company--that coupled with the fact that their snacks taste great. They compete in an over crowded playing field but I've found that it's rare to find an energy snack that both tastes good and is good for you.  A couple of interesting facts I learned from reading this article: 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-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;} 9 out of 10 consumers who try a KIND bar will purchase a KIND product again and recommend it to others KIND has the highest Net Promoter Score among the top 10 brands in the nutritional bar category (I confess I've never heard about this rating before but now that I have it's pretty cool) KIND's coporate mantra, "Do the Kind Thing" both encourages people to do random acts of kindness and provides easy mechanisms for doing so. Not coincidentally, I think, KIND is indeed a story about how nice guys can finish first. KIND has doubled in size every year for the last ten  years and now employees over 300 people, with sales exceeding $120M annually. Growth Applies Pressures One thing I know for certain from interacting our with fast growing customers over the last fifteen years is that growth applies myriad pressures across the organization--resources, processes, technology systems, and leadership agility. And it's easy to forget that Oracle was once an entrepreneurial startup and experienced all those same pressures that other growing companies are experiencing today. When asked by Profit Editor in Chief Aaron Lazenby, " What sort of pressure does KIND"s growth and success place on operations?", Lubetzky responded, "We have a demand planning process right now that is manual to a significant extent, and it just takes so much management time. It takes us days and sometimes weeks to produce information that is critical to our business—and by the time we get the results, we need revised data. Our sales leadership could go out selling, but instead they’re talking to our team about forecasts." Hitching Your Wagon to Oracle Lubetzky and his team selected Oracle for what I believe is our company's greatest strength: hitch your wagon to Oracle and you can trust that we will be there for the long run with the solutions you need and financial staying power. In Lubetzky's words, "The KIND philosophy requires you to have a long-term view of things; taking shortcuts may be the fastest way to get things done, but in the long term that can come back and bite you. Oracle is the type of company—and has the kind of platform—that is here for the long term. It’s not going to go away tomorrow. And Oracle is going to invest all the necessary resources into staying ahead of the game and improving." o next time you're in the supermarket or an REI (my favorite store in the world) or any of the other 80,000 locations that carry KIND, give one a try. Maybe some day you'll want to become a KIND Brand Ambassador.   Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Jim Lein I evangelize Oracle's enterprise solutions for growing midsize companies. I recently celebrated 15 years with Oracle, having joined JD Edwards in 1999. I'm based in Evergreen, Colorado and love relating stories about creativity and innovation whether they be about software, live music, or the mountains. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle.

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  • The Joy Of Hex

    - by Jim Giercyk
    While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is not a knock on programmers; in the age of IntelliSense, what reason do we have to work with data at the bit level? Many computer theory classes treat bit-level programming as a thing of the past, no longer necessary now that storage space is plentiful. The trouble with that mindset is that the world is full of legacy systems that run programs written in the 1970’s.  Today our jobs require us to extract data from those systems, regardless of the format, and that often involves low-level programming. Because it seems knowledge of the low-level concepts is waning in recent times, I thought a review would be in order.       CHARACTER: See Spot Run HEX: 53 65 65 20 53 70 6F 74 20 52 75 6E DECIMAL: 83 101 101 32 83 112 111 116 32 82 117 110 BINARY: 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110000 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101110 In this example, I have broken down the words “See Spot Run” to a level computers can understand – machine language.     CHARACTER:  The character level is what is rendered by the computer.  A “Character Set” or “Code Page” contains 256 characters, both printable and unprintable.  Each character represents 1 BYTE of data.  For example, the character string “See Spot Run” is 12 Bytes long, exclusive of the quotation marks.  Remember, a SPACE is an unprintable character, but it still requires a byte.  In the example I have used the default Windows character set, ASCII, which you can see here:  http://www.asciitable.com/ HEX:  Hex is short for hexadecimal, or Base 16.  Humans are comfortable thinking in base ten, perhaps because they have 10 fingers and 10 toes; fingers and toes are called digits, so it’s not much of a stretch.  Computers think in Base 16, with numeric values ranging from zero to fifteen, or 0 – F.  Each decimal place has a possible 16 values as opposed to a possible 10 values in base 10.  Therefore, the number 10 in Hex is equal to the number 16 in Decimal.  DECIMAL:  The Decimal conversion is strictly for us humans to use for calculations and conversions.  It is much easier for us humans to calculate that [30 – 10 = 20] in decimal than it is for us to calculate [1E – A = 14] in Hex.  In the old days, an error in a program could be found by determining the displacement from the entry point of a module.  Since those values were dumped from the computers head, they were in hex. A programmer needed to convert them to decimal, do the equation and convert back to hex.  This gets into relative and absolute addressing, a topic for another day.  BINARY:  Binary, or machine code, is where any value can be expressed in 1s and 0s.  It is really Base 2, because each decimal place can have a possibility of only 2 characters, a 1 or a 0.  In Binary, the number 10 is equal to the number 2 in decimal. Why only 1s and 0s?  Very simply, computers are made up of lots and lots of transistors which at any given moment can be ON ( 1 ) or OFF ( 0 ).  Each transistor is a bit, and the order that the transistors fire (or not fire) is what distinguishes one value from  another in the computers head (or CPU).  Consider 32 bit vs 64 bit processing…..a 64 bit processor has the capability to read 64 transistors at a time.  A 32 bit processor can only read half as many at a time, so in theory the 64 bit processor should be much faster.  There are many more factors involved in CPU performance, but that is the fundamental difference.    DECIMAL HEX BINARY 0 0 0000 1 1 0001 2 2 0010 3 3 0011 4 4 0100 5 5 0101 6 6 0110 7 7 0111 8 8 1000 9 9 1001 10 A 1010 11 B 1011 12 C 1100 13 D 1101 14 E 1110 15 F 1111   Remember that each character is a BYTE, there are 2 HEX characters in a byte (called nibbles) and 8 BITS in a byte.  I hope you enjoyed reading about the theory of data processing.  This is just a high-level explanation, and there is much more to be learned.  It is safe to say that, no matter how advanced our programming languages and visual studios become, they are nothing more than a way to interpret bits and bytes.  There is nothing like the joy of hex to get the mind racing.

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  • Big Data – Buzz Words: What is HDFS – Day 8 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is MapReduce. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – HDFS. What is HDFS ? HDFS stands for Hadoop Distributed File System and it is a primary storage system used by Hadoop. It provides high performance access to data across Hadoop clusters. It is usually deployed on low-cost commodity hardware. In commodity hardware deployment server failures are very common. Due to the same reason HDFS is built to have high fault tolerance. The data transfer rate between compute nodes in HDFS is very high, which leads to reduced risk of failure. HDFS creates smaller pieces of the big data and distributes it on different nodes. It also copies each smaller piece to multiple times on different nodes. Hence when any node with the data crashes the system is automatically able to use the data from a different node and continue the process. This is the key feature of the HDFS system. Architecture of HDFS The architecture of the HDFS is master/slave architecture. An HDFS cluster always consists of single NameNode. This single NameNode is a master server and it manages the file system as well regulates access to various files. In additional to NameNode there are multiple DataNodes. There is always one DataNode for each data server. In HDFS a big file is split into one or more blocks and those blocks are stored in a set of DataNodes. The primary task of the NameNode is to open, close or rename files and directory and regulate access to the file system, whereas the primary task of the DataNode is read and write to the file systems. DataNode is also responsible for the creation, deletion or replication of the data based on the instruction from NameNode. In reality, NameNode and DataNode are software designed to run on commodity machine build in Java language. Visual Representation of HDFS Architecture Let us understand how HDFS works with the help of the diagram. Client APP or HDFS Client connects to NameSpace as well as DataNode. Client App access to the DataNode is regulated by NameSpace Node. NameSpace Node allows Client App to connect to the DataNode based by allowing the connection to the DataNode directly. A big data file is divided into multiple data blocks (let us assume that those data chunks are A,B,C and D. Client App will later on write data blocks directly to the DataNode. Client App does not have to directly write to all the node. It just has to write to any one of the node and NameNode will decide on which other DataNode it will have to replicate the data. In our example Client App directly writes to DataNode 1 and detained 3. However, data chunks are automatically replicated to other nodes. All the information like in which DataNode which data block is placed is written back to NameNode. High Availability During Disaster Now as multiple DataNode have same data blocks in the case of any DataNode which faces the disaster, the entire process will continue as other DataNode will assume the role to serve the specific data block which was on the failed node. This system provides very high tolerance to disaster and provides high availability. If you notice there is only single NameNode in our architecture. If that node fails our entire Hadoop Application will stop performing as it is a single node where we store all the metadata. As this node is very critical, it is usually replicated on another clustered as well as on another data rack. Though, that replicated node is not operational in architecture, it has all the necessary data to perform the task of the NameNode in the case of the NameNode fails. The entire Hadoop architecture is built to function smoothly even there are node failures or hardware malfunction. It is built on the simple concept that data is so big it is impossible to have come up with a single piece of the hardware which can manage it properly. We need lots of commodity (cheap) hardware to manage our big data and hardware failure is part of the commodity servers. To reduce the impact of hardware failure Hadoop architecture is built to overcome the limitation of the non-functioning hardware. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss the importance of the relational database in Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 27, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 27, 2012Popular ReleasesCodeGen Code Generator: CodeGen 4.2.6: IMPORTANT: If you are using CodeGen in conjunction with Symphony Framework then it is important that you do not upgrade to this version of CodeGen until you also upgrade to Symphony Framework V2.1.0.0. Changes in this release include: The CodeGen installation on Windows now supports upgrading from a previously installed version. We use Windows Installers "major upgrade" mechanism, which essentially performs an automatic uninstall of a previous version before installing the new version. The ea...SimpleRest Integrated Pipeline: Beta: Beta version of the integrated REST pipeline.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.3.0: New features: Dropdown/Radio/Checkbox Lists no longer references the userkey. Instead they refer to the UUID field for input value. You can now delete, export, import content from database in the site settings. Labels can now be imported and exported. You can now set the required password strength and maximum number of incorrect login attempts. Child sites can inherit plugins from its parent sites. The view parameter can be changed through the page_context.current value. Addition of c...Facebook Windows 8 Sample: Facebook Windows 8 Sample: The current drop holds two versions of the sample: A basic version that uses a Facebook application to list the content of facebook page. A full version including the use of Bing Maps sdk for positioning the restaurant in a map, and showing how to get there. See Developing a Windows Store App to learn how to use the Bing Maps AJAX Control to add Bing Maps to your Windows Store app.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.75: Fix over-aggressive removal of local-variable assignments in return statements. Can't remove them if there are any inner-scope references. add settings properties/switches for V3 source map source root value, and a flag to indicate whether to add an XSSI-busting header to the map file.Distributed Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) Event System: Distributed Pub Sub Event System Version 3.0: Important Wsp 3.0 is NOT backward compatible with Wsp 2.1. Prerequisites You need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package. You can find it at: x64 http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=14632x86 http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5555 Wsp now uses Rx (Reactive Extensions) and .Net 4.0 3.0 Enhancements I changed the topology from a hierarchy to peer-to-peer groups. This should provide much greater scalability and more fault-resi...sb0t v.5: sb0t 500 alpha 5: Keep those bug reports coming. :)Redmine Reports: Redmine Reports V 1.0.7: added new sample report added new DateRange feature for report generation (see issue Tracker ID 15372) updated to latest MySql (6.6.4.0)datajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications: datajs version 1.1.0: datajs is a cross-browser and UI agnostic JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications with the following features: OData client that enables CRUD operations including batching and metadata support using both ATOM and JSON payloads. Single store abstraction that provides a common API on top of HTML5 local storage technologies. Data cache component that allows reading data ranges from a collection and storing them locally to reduce the number of network requests. Changes...Team Foundation Server Administration Tool: 2.2: TFS Administration Tool 2.2 supports the Team Foundation Server 2012 Object Model. Visual Studio 2012 or Team Explorer 2012 must be installed before you can install this tool. You can download and install Team Explorer 2012 from http://aka.ms/TeamExplorer2012. There are no functional changes between the previous release (2.1) and this release.Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0, C# 4.0 and C# 5.0: Coding Guidelines for CSharp 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0: See Change History for a detailed list of modifications.Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.3.0: Portable Library Build: Adds support for WP8 (.Net 4.0 and higher, SL5, WP8 and .NET for Windows Store apps) New: portable build also for F# extensions (.Net 4.5, SL5 and .NET for Windows Store apps) NuGet: portable builds are now included in the main packages, no more need for special portable packages Linear Algebra: Continued major storage rework, in this release focusing on vectors (previous release was on matrices) Thin QR decomposition (in addition to existing full QR) Static Cr...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.1: +2012-11-25 v3.2.1 +????????。 -MenuCheckBox?CheckedChanged??????,??????????。 -???????window.IDS??????????????。 -?????(??TabCollection,ControlBaseCollection)???,????????????????。 +Grid??。 -??SelectAllRows??。 -??PageItems??,?????????????,?????、??、?????。 -????grid/gridpageitems.aspx、grid/gridpageitemsrowexpander.aspx、grid/gridpageitems_pagesize.aspx。 -???????????????????。 -??ExpandAllRowExpanders??,?????????????????(grid/gridrowexpanderexpandall2.aspx)。 -??????ExpandRowExpande...VidCoder: 1.4.9 Beta: Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5079. Fixed crashes when encoding DVDs with title gaps.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.10.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2521 of the java version windows phone 8 assemblies improvements and fixesBlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.3: 2012.11.24 Ver5.7.3 (1)SMTP???????、?????????、??????????????????????? (2)?????????、?????????????????????????? (3)DNS???????CNAME????CNAME????????????????? (4)DNS????????????TTL???????? (5)???????????????????????、?????????????????? (6)???????????????????????????????Liberty: v3.4.3.0 Release 23rd November 2012: Change Log -Added -H4 A dialog which gives further instructions when attempting to open a "Halo 4 Data" file -H4 Added a short note to the weapon editor stating that dropping your weapons will cap their ammo -Reach Edit the world's gravity -Reach Fine invincibility controls in the object editor -Reach Edit object velocity -Reach Change the teams of AI bipeds and vehicles -Reach Enable/disable fall damage on the biped editor screen -Reach Make AIs deaf and/or blind in the objec...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.11.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.11.0. Whats new50 bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesGetPropertyValue now returns an object, not a string (only affects upgrades from 4.10.x to 4.11.0) NoteIf you need Courier use the release candidate (as of build 26). The code editor has been greatly improved, but is sometimes problematic in Internet Explorer 9 and lower. Previously it was just disabled for IE and...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.3: Fixed supported files list on open dialog (added .pls and .m3u) Impulse Media Player splash message (can be disabled anyway)WiX Toolset: WiX v3.7 RC: WiX v3.7 RC (3.7.1119.0) provides feature complete Bundle update and reference tracking plus several bug fixes. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/11/20/WiX-v3.7-Release-Candidate-availableNew Projects20121126: ??????SVN????。AHMobe: Testing deployments to AppHarborArborium: A versatile, tree-based data structure to store or exchange data and metadata efficiently (in binary format). Written in pure C#.Ballenato: Mobile app salidas.Blend Assets Manager (Blasm): Blend Assets Manager (Blasm) is a simple application to allow users of Expression Blend adding custom and third-party controls to Blend Assets tab.Cornell Class Explorer: Cornell University Courses of Study Windows 8 AppCustom Cursor for Metro APP XAML Based: It's a porting program from Nielsen for win 8 Metro Style app XAML based. original: http://www.sharpgis.net/post/2011/05/09/Custom-Cursors-in-Silverlight.aspxDataAnalyzer: Application for analyzing protocols and other binary dataDebugWriterTextBox: This is modified TextBox which can catch up Debug.Write() and display log. Also it can write log data to file - all you need is to set up file name!Dewin: Solution th? nghi?m cho chuong trình Dewin, dùng d? th?c hi?n co b?n v? hu?ng d?i tu?ngEducação no Trânsito: Sistema para Educação para o Trânsito – Um Ambiente para o Aprendizado tem como principal função gerir conteúdos de educação no trânsitoEjemplos alabra: Ejemplos para el blog http://www.alejandrolabra.comEnterprise MVC Music Store: The Enterprise Music Store takes the MvcMusicStore sample from ASP.Net and adds Dependency Injection, Unit Tests and a more maintainable architecture. ERC - Easy Redirect Converter: Tool to convert websites using .htaccess to maintain redirects on sites that do not support it. Great for moving from Apache to IIS Facebook Windows 8 Sample: This sample shows a way to work with Facebook APIs by using the Open Graph API in a Windows Store App. Gruyas: Plataforma educativa online Os like.G's Syndication Pocket: G's Syndication Pocket is simple RSS Aggregate application. This is suitable for .NET Compact Framework. I checked it on Sharp's W-ZERO3.HTML to OpenXML (PHP Script): H2OXML : HTML to OpenXML Converter is a simple PHP script which take HTML code and transform it into OpenXML Code. (for Docx) Indexr: Indexr is an open source project, where I am trying to share how to build a web application with Strong Architecture, Manageable, High Performance, EffectivelyjQuery Expandable Menu for SharePoint 2010: Packaged as a site collection feature, this component transforms the SharePoint 2010 standard navigation menu into an expandable-collapsible menu, using jQuery.K-Vizinhos: K-VizinhosLa Ranisima: La Ranisima is an open source "Space Invaders" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows and others.lambdaCommandBuilderData: ???????????????????,????????????,???????。 ??????test??,?????????。LeyRay: Quick view and merge Doc and Pdf filesMessegeBox RightToLeft Lib: This is really simple lib project for use RTL in MessegeBox class. This just for short code and default option for RTL.MineFlagger: MineFlagger is a mine clearing game modeled after Microsoft’s Minesweeper. In addition to standard play, MineFlagger incorporates an AI for fun and training.MineSweeperChallenge: C# programming exercise. Simulates a given number of minesweeper games using a given ISweeper implementation (or use the step by step mode to study how the ISweeper implementations work). Create your own implementation and see how it compares to other implementations.MVVM Light Plus: Multiplatform MVVM Framework.Nethouse MVP: Nethouse MVP is a framework incorporating MVP base presenters, views and interfaces. Neznayka: Static Ruleset for VS2010 Database Edition. Noctl Library: Noctl is a C# library which contains tools to improve production time. It supports .net 4.5, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Store applications.Oridea.Data.Fetching: Oridea.Data.Fetching is a class library that consists of a few wrappers over the LINQ's IQueryable interface narrowing its scope to fetching, ordering, and paging operations. It is designed for use in the implementations of the Repository pattern.p301: Old project.PluggEd: To be continuedProject13241127: papaProject13271127: papareading control for windows phone: reading control for windows phoneRSUtility: RS Utility is a C# application that interacts with a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) web service to manage items on a report server.sadd.practical.approach: SADD workshop is a project testorage to demonstrate practical approach of sadd while Lessons Learned site was developing. ?????? ???? ?????????? ??????????? ??? ?? ???????? ?????????? SADD ??? ???????? ????? "????????? ??????", ??????????? ????????? ??????????????? ?????? ?????.SimpleRest Integrated Pipeline: Simple light weight integrated extensible REST pipeline that developers can use to very quickly and reliably create REST services. Influenced by WebApi 0..6.0.0Substitute - Variable Substitution Utility for Config Management: Variable Substitution Utility for Configuration Management (FinalBuilder etc)Synq Placement Management Console: A client-service system for dynamic application deployment which integrates directly into active directory. This is the management console.Task Manager Student Project: Task manager or tmanager is a student ASP.NET MVC 4.0 project for Software Engineering classes. It is a web site, where you can planning your tasks.Tempus Fugate: YAFA for tracking music ratings and statistics. End state of these tools, utilities, plug-ins, and services will be to allow merging of statistic data between the various services and repositories in which users store their musical preferences. Examples of musical preferences include rating information and play history. Examples of services include last.fm, Facebook, iLike, Windows Media Player, and iTunes. tysyjsj: afaprojectWASM: Simple ASP.MVC windows azure storage manager with SQL Azure query window.Weather Slice: Use the German weather sevice Wetter.com for a weather forecast gadget Wettervorhersage von Wetter.comwwtfly: 111YBOT_Field_Control_2013: YBOT 2013 Field Control Software. Used to control the Youth BOT game field. Score the games and track field actions. The field currently uses 1-wire.??_iwtfly: ??_iwtfly

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  • Agile Executives

    - by Robert May
    Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However, not all executives understand Scrum and how to get the information from development teams that use Scrum. I think that these executives need a support system for managing Agile teams. Historical Software Management When Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, I doubt he realized the impact he’d have on Management through the ages. Historically, management was about managing the process of building things. The people were just cogs in that process. Like all cogs, they were replaceable. Unfortunately, most of the software industry followed this same style of management. Many of today’s senior managers learned how to manage companies before software was a significant influence on how the company did business. Software development is a very creative process, but too many managers have treated it like an assembly line. Idea’s go in, working software comes out, and we just have to figure out how to make sure that the ideas going in are perfect, then the software will be perfect. Lean Manufacturing In the manufacturing industry, Lean manufacturing has revolutionized Henry Ford’s assembly line. Derived from the Toyota process, Lean places emphasis on always providing value for the customer. Anything the customer wouldn’t be willing to pay for is wasteful. Agile is based on similar principles. We’re building software for people, and anything that isn’t useful to them doesn’t add value. Waterfall development would have teams build reams and reams of documentation about how the software should work. Agile development dispenses with this work because excessive documentation doesn’t add value. Instead, teams focus on building documentation only when it truly adds value to the customer. Many other Agile principals are similar. Playing Catch-up Just like in the manufacturing industry, many managers in the software industry have yet to understand the value of the principles of Lean and Agile. They think they can wrap the uncertainties of software development up in a nice little package and then just execute, usually followed by failure. They spend a great deal of time and money trying to exactly predict the future. That expenditure of time and money doesn’t add value to the customer. Managers that understand that Agile know that there is a better way. They will instead focus on the priorities of the near term in detail, and leave the future to take care of itself. They have very detailed two week plans with less detailed quarterly plans. These plans are guided by a general corporate strategy that doesn’t focus on the exact implementation details. These managers also think in smaller features rather than large functionality. This adds a great deal of value to customers, since the features that matter most are the ones that the team focuses on in the near term and then are able to deliver to the customers that are paying for them. Agile managers also realize that stale software is very costly. They know that keeping the technology in their software current is much less expensive and risky than large rewrites that occur infrequently and schedule time in each release for refactoring of the existing software. Agile Executives Even though Agile is a better way, I’ve still seen failures using the Agile process. While some of these failures can be attributed to the team, most of them are caused by managers, not the team. Managers fail to understand what Agile is, how it works, and how to get the information that they need to make good business decisions. I think this is a shame. I’m very pleased that Veracity understands this problem and is trying to do something about it. Veracity is a key sponsor of Agile Executives. In fact, Galen is this year’s acting president for Agile Executives. The purpose of Agile Executives is to help managers better manage Agile teams and see better success. Agile Executives is trying to build a community of executives that range from managers interested in Agile to managers that have successfully adopted Agile. Together, these managers can form a community of support and ideas that will help make Agile teams more successful. Helping Your Team You can help too! Talk with your manager and get them involved in Agile Executives. Help Veracity build the community. If your manager understands Agile better, he’ll understand how to help his teams, which will result in software that adds more value for customers. If you have any questions about how you can be involved, please let me know. Technorati Tags: Agile,Agile Executives

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