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• Importing Multiple Schemas to a Model in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Your physical data model might stretch across multiple Oracle schemas. Or maybe you just want a single diagram containing tables, views, etc. spanning more than a single user in the database. The process for importing a data dictionary is the same, regardless if you want to suck in objects from one schema, or many schemas. Let’s take a quick look at how to get started with a data dictionary import. I’m using Oracle SQL Developer in this example. The process is nearly identical in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler – the only difference being you’ll use the ‘File’ menu to get started versus the ‘File – Data Modeler’ menu in SQL Developer. Remember, the functionality is exactly the same whether you use SQL Developer or SQL Developer Data Modeler when it comes to the data modeling features – you’ll just have a cleaner user interface in SQL Developer Data Modeler. Importing a Data Dictionary to a Model You’ll want to open or create your model first. You can import objects to an existing or new model. The easiest way to get started is to simply open the ‘Browser’ under the View menu. The Browser allows you to navigate your open designs/models You’ll see an ‘Untitled_1′ model by default. I’ve renamed mine to ‘hr_sh_scott_demo.’ Now go back to the File menu, and expand the ‘Data Modeler’ section, and select ‘Import – Data Dictionary.’ This is a fancy way of saying, ‘suck objects out of the database into my model’ Connect! If you haven’t already defined a connection to the database you want to reverse engineer, you’ll need to do that now. I’m going to assume you already have that connection – so select it, and hit the ‘Next’ button. Select the Schema(s) to be imported Select one or more schemas you want to import The schemas selected on this page of the wizard will dictate the lists of tables, views, synonyms, and everything else you can choose from in the next wizard step to import. For brevity, I have selected ALL tables, views, and synonyms from 3 different schemas: HR SCOTT SH Once I hit the ‘Finish’ button in the wizard, SQL Developer will interrogate the database and add the objects to our model. The Big Model and the 3 Little Models I can now see ALL of the objects I just imported in the ‘hr_sh_scott_demo’ relational model in my design tree, and in my relational diagram. Quick Tip: Oracle SQL Developer calls what most folks think of as a ‘Physical Model’ the ‘Relational Model.’ Same difference, mostly. In SQL Developer, a Physical model allows you to define partitioning schemes, advanced storage parameters, and add your PL/SQL code. You can have multiple physical models per relational models. For example I might have a 4 Node RAC in Production that uses partitioning, but in test/dev, only have a single instance with no partitioning. I can have models for both of those physical implementations. The list of tables in my relational model Wouldn’t it be nice if I could segregate the objects based on their schema? Good news, you can! And it’s done by default Several of you might already know where I’m going with this – SUBVIEWS. You can easily create a ‘SubView’ by selecting one or more objects in your model or diagram and add them to a new SubView. SubViews are just mini-models. They contain a subset of objects from the main model. This is very handy when you want to break your model into smaller, more digestible parts. The model information is identical across the model and subviews, so you don’t have to worry about making a change in one place and not having it propagate across your design. SubViews can be used as filters when you create reports and exports as well. So instead of generating a PDF for everything, just show me what’s in my ‘ABC’ subview. But, I don’t want to do any work! Remember, I’m really lazy. More good news – it’s already done by default! The schemas are automatically used to create default SubViews Auto-Navigate to the Object in the Diagram In the subview tree node, right-click on the object you want to navigate to. You can ask to be taken to the main model view or to the SubView location. If you haven’t already opened the SubView in the diagram, it will be automatically opened for you. The SubView diagram only contains the objects from that SubView Your SubView might still be pretty big, many dozens of objects, so don’t forget about the ‘Navigator‘ either! In summary, use the ‘Import’ feature to add existing database objects to your model. If you import from multiple schemas, take advantage of the default schema based SubViews to help you manage your models! Sometimes less is more!

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• UCM 11g is 4 days old!

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  Ok...so I missed posting a blog entry when UCM 11g and the entire ECM suite released on Tuesday. Hopefully you've already seen the announcements on any number of the Oracle ECM blogs out there such as ECM Alerts, Fusion ECM, bex huff, or C4. So I won't bore you with the same talking points like 179 million check-ins per day or 124 web site page hits per second. Instead, I thought I'd show some screenshots of the new features in UCM and URM 11g. WebLogic Server and Enterprise Manager So probably the biggest change in 11g is UCM and URM now run on top of the WebLogic Server application server. This is a huge step as ECM is now on a standard platform with the rest of Oracle Fusion Middleware which makes installation, configuration, and integration consistent among all the products. From a feature perspective, it's also beneficial because it's now integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager provides a lot of provisioning control over servers as well as performance monitoring and access to logs and debugging information. Desktop Integration Suite Desktop Integration Suite got a complete overhaul for 11g. It exposes a lot more features within Windows Explorer such as saved searches, workflow queue, and checked-out items. It also now support metadata pop-up screens to let users fill in additional metadata when they drag-n-drop files in! And the integration within Office applications has changed significantly by introducing a dedicated UCM menu to do open, save, compare, etc. Site Studio for External Applications In UCM Site Studio 10gR4, a major architectural shift was introduced which brought several new objects such as elements, region definitions, region templates, and placeholder definitions. This truly separated the content from the display and from the definition. It also allowed separation of the content from needing to be rendered on a complete Site Studio page. Well, the new Site Studio for External Applications takes advantage of that architecture and introduces pre-built tags and plug-ins to JDeveloper to allow to go from simply adding a content area to your web application page to building an entire web site, just like you would have done in Site Studio Designer. In addition to these changes, enhancements to the core Site Studio have been added as well. One of the big ones is called Designer Mode which allows power-users to bypass the standard rules defined by the placeholder definition or template and perform any number of additional actions. This reduces the need to go back to Site Studio Designer or JDeveloper to make more advanced changes to the site. Dashboards As part of the updated records management functionality in both UCM and URM, users can now set a dashboard view on their home page to surface common functions in a single view. It has pre-built "portlets" users can choose from to display and organize they way they want. Behind the scenes, these dashboards are stored as Content Folios. So the dashboards themselves are content items that can be revisioned and shared between users. And new dashboard portlets can be easily added (like the User Profile one in the screenshots) by getting a copy of an existing one, modifying the display, and then checking it in as a new one to select from. URM Interface Enhancements URM includes several new UI and usability enhancements in 11g. There is a new view for physical records, a place to configure "favorite" items to quickly get to, and new placement of the records management menu. BI Publisher Reports Records management in UCM and URM now offer reports generated through embedded BI Publisher. Templates are controlled by rich text files checked directly into the repository, so they can be easily modified. Other Features A new Inbound Refinery conversion option is available that does native Microsoft Office HTML conversion. If your IBR is on Windows and you have the native applications loaded, the IBR can use them to produce HTML. A new GUI template editor for Dynamic Converter is available. It's written in Java so is available through all the supported browsers and platforms. The original ActiveX based editor is also still available. The Component Manager interface has changed to help provide an easier and more descriptive way to enable core components that are installed along with UCM. All of the supported components are immediately available to turn on and do not have to be installed separately as in previous versions. My Downloads is located in the My Content Server menu and provides for easy download of client installs including Desktop Integration Suite and Site Studio Designer. Well, hopefully that gives you a taste for some of the new things in 11g. We're all pretty excited here at Oracle about all the new changes and enhancements. Over the next few months I hope to highlight some of these features more in-depth, so keep your eye out for those posts.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 1, Decomposition

  - by Reed

  The first step in designing any parallelized system is Decomposition.  Decomposition is nothing more than taking a problem space and breaking it into discrete parts.  When we want to work in parallel, we need to have at least two separate things that we are trying to run.  We do this by taking our problem and decomposing it into parts. There are two common abstractions that are useful when discussing parallel decomposition: Data Decomposition and Task Decomposition.  These two abstractions allow us to think about our problem in a way that helps leads us to correct decision making in terms of the algorithms we’ll use to parallelize our routine. To start, I will make a couple of minor points. I’d like to stress that Decomposition has nothing to do with specific algorithms or techniques.  It’s about how you approach and think about the problem, not how you solve the problem using a specific tool, technique, or library.  Decomposing the problem is about constructing the appropriate mental model: once this is done, you can choose the appropriate design and tools, which is a subject for future posts. Decomposition, being unrelated to tools or specific techniques, is not specific to .NET in any way.  This should be the first step to parallelizing a problem, and is valid using any framework, language, or toolset.  However, this gives us a starting point – without a proper understanding of decomposition, it is difficult to understand the proper usage of specific classes and tools within the .NET framework. Data Decomposition is often the simpler abstraction to use when trying to parallelize a routine.  In order to decompose our problem domain by data, we take our entire set of data and break it into smaller, discrete portions, or chunks.  We then work on each chunk in the data set in parallel. This is particularly useful if we can process each element of data independently of the rest of the data.  In a situation like this, there are some wonderfully simple techniques we can use to take advantage of our data.  By decomposing our domain by data, we can very simply parallelize our routines.  In general, we, as developers, should be always searching for data that can be decomposed. Finding data to decompose if fairly simple, in many instances.  Data decomposition is typically used with collections of data.  Any time you have a collection of items, and you’re going to perform work on or with each of the items, you potentially have a situation where parallelism can be exploited.  This is fairly easy to do in practice: look for iteration statements in your code, such as for and foreach. Granted, every for loop is not a candidate to be parallelized.  If the collection is being modified as it’s iterated, or the processing of elements depends on other elements, the iteration block may need to be processed in serial.  However, if this is not the case, data decomposition may be possible. Let’s look at one example of how we might use data decomposition.  Suppose we were working with an image, and we were applying a simple contrast stretching filter.  When we go to apply the filter, once we know the minimum and maximum values, we can apply this to each pixel independently of the other pixels.  This means that we can easily decompose this problem based off data – we will do the same operation, in parallel, on individual chunks of data (each pixel). Task Decomposition, on the other hand, is focused on the individual tasks that need to be performed instead of focusing on the data.  In order to decompose our problem domain by tasks, we need to think about our algorithm in terms of discrete operations, or tasks, which can then later be parallelized. Task decomposition, in practice, can be a bit more tricky than data decomposition.  Here, we need to look at what our algorithm actually does, and how it performs its actions.  Once we have all of the basic steps taken into account, we can try to analyze them and determine whether there are any constraints in terms of shared data or ordering.  There are no simple things to look for in terms of finding tasks we can decompose for parallelism; every algorithm is unique in terms of its tasks, so every algorithm will have unique opportunities for task decomposition. For example, say we want our software to perform some customized actions on startup, prior to showing our main screen.  Perhaps we want to check for proper licensing, notify the user if the license is not valid, and also check for updates to the program.  Once we verify the license, and that there are no updates, we’ll start normally.  In this case, we can decompose this problem into tasks – we have a few tasks, but there are at least two discrete, independent tasks (check licensing, check for updates) which we can perform in parallel.  Once those are completed, we will continue on with our other tasks. One final note – Data Decomposition and Task Decomposition are not mutually exclusive.  Often, you’ll mix the two approaches while trying to parallelize a single routine.  It’s possible to decompose your problem based off data, then further decompose the processing of each element of data based on tasks.  This just provides a framework for thinking about our algorithms, and for discussing the problem.

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• Announcing SonicAgile – An Agile Project Management Solution

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m happy to announce the public release of SonicAgile – an online tool for managing software projects. You can register for SonicAgile at www.SonicAgile.com and start using it with your team today. SonicAgile is an agile project management solution which is designed to help teams of developers coordinate their work on software projects. SonicAgile supports creating backlogs, scrumboards, and burndown charts. It includes support for acceptance criteria, story estimation, calculating team velocity, and email integration. In short, SonicAgile includes all of the tools that you need to coordinate work on a software project, get stuff done, and build great software. Let me discuss each of the features of SonicAgile in more detail. SonicAgile Backlog You use the backlog to create a prioritized list of user stories such as features, bugs, and change requests. Basically, all future work planned for a product should be captured in the backlog. We focused our attention on designing the user interface for the backlog. Because the main function of the backlog is to prioritize stories, we made it easy to prioritize a story by just drag and dropping the story from one location to another. We also wanted to make it easy to add stories from the product backlog to a sprint backlog. A sprint backlog contains the stories that you plan to complete during a particular sprint. To add a story to a sprint, you just drag the story from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. Finally, we made it easy to track team velocity — the average amount of work that your team completes in each sprint. Your team’s average velocity is displayed in the backlog. When you add too many stories to a sprint – in other words, you attempt to take on too much work – you are warned automatically: SonicAgile Scrumboard Every workday, your team meets to have their daily scrum. During the daily scrum, you can use the SonicAgile Scrumboard to see (at a glance) what everyone on the team is working on. For example, the following scrumboard shows that Stephen is working on the Fix Gravatar Bug story and Pete and Jane have finished working on the Product Details Page story: Every story can be broken into tasks. For example, to create the Product Details Page, you might need to create database objects, do page design, and create an MVC controller. You can use the Scrumboard to track the state of each task. A story can have acceptance criteria which clarify the requirements for the story to be done. For example, here is how you can specify the acceptance criteria for the Product Details Page story: You cannot close a story — and remove the story from the list of active stories on the scrumboard — until all tasks and acceptance criteria associated with the story are done. SonicAgile Burndown Charts You can use Burndown charts to track your team’s progress. SonicAgile supports Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown by Task Estimates, and Sprint Burndown by Story Points charts. For example, here’s a sample of a Sprint Burndown by Story Points chart: The downward slope shows the progress of the team when closing stories. The vertical axis represents story points and the horizontal axis represents time. Email Integration SonicAgile was designed to improve your team’s communication and collaboration. Most stories and tasks require discussion to nail down exactly what work needs to be done. The most natural way to discuss stories and tasks is through email. However, you don’t want these discussions to get lost. When you use SonicAgile, all email discussions concerning a story or a task (including all email attachments) are captured automatically. At any time in the future, you can view all of the email discussion concerning a story or a task by opening the Story Details dialog: Why We Built SonicAgile We built SonicAgile because we needed it for our team. Our consulting company, Superexpert, builds websites for financial services, startups, and large corporations. We have multiple teams working on multiple projects. Keeping on top of all of the work that needs to be done to complete a software project is challenging. You need a good sense of what needs to be done, who is doing it, and when the work will be done. We built SonicAgile because we wanted a lightweight project management tool which we could use to coordinate the work that our team performs on software projects. How We Built SonicAgile We wanted SonicAgile to be easy to use, highly scalable, and have a highly interactive client interface. SonicAgile is very close to being a pure Ajax application. We built SonicAgile using ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, and Knockout. We would not have been able to build such a complex Ajax application without these technologies. Almost all of our MVC controller actions return JSON results (While developing SonicAgile, I would have given my left arm to be able to use the new ASP.NET Web API). The controller actions are invoked from jQuery Ajax calls from the browser. We built SonicAgile on Windows Azure. We are taking advantage of SQL Azure, Table Storage, and Blob Storage. Windows Azure enables us to scale very quickly to handle whatever demand is thrown at us. Summary I hope that you will try SonicAgile. You can register at www.SonicAgile.com (there’s a free 30-day trial). The goal of SonicAgile is to make it easier for teams to get more stuff done, work better together, and build amazing software. Let us know what you think!

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• Database model for keeping track of likes/shares/comments on blog posts over time

  - by gage

  My goal is to keep track of the popular posts on different blog sites based on social network activity at any given time. The goal is not to simply get the most popular now, but instead find posts that are popular compared to other posts on the same blog. For example, I follow a tech blog, a sports blog, and a gossip blog. The tech blog gets waaay more readership than the other two blogs, so in raw numbers every post on the tech blog will always out number views on the other two. So lets say the average tech blog post gets 500 facebook likes and the other two get an average of 50 likes per post. Then when there is a sports blog post that has 200 fb likes and a gossip blog post with 300 while the tech blog posts today have 500 likes I want to highlight the sports and gossip blog posts (more likes than average vs tech blog with more # of likes but just average for the blog) The approach I am thinking of taking is to make an entry in a database for each blog post. Every x minutes (say every 15 minutes) I will check how many likes/shares/comments an entry has received on all the social networks (facebook, twitter, google+, linkeIn). So over time there will be a history of likes for each blog post, i.e post 1234 after 15 min: 10 fb likes, 4 tweets, 6 g+ after 30 min: 15 fb likes, 15 tweets, 10 g+ ... ... after 48 hours: 200 fb likes, 25 tweets, 15 g+ By keeping a history like this for each blog post I can know the average number of likes/shares/tweets at any give time interval. So for example the average number of fb likes for all blog posts 48hrs after posting is 50, and a particular post has 200 I can mark that as a popular post and feature/highlight it. A consideration in the design is to be able to easily query the values (likes/shares) for a specific time-frame, i.e. fb likes after 30min or tweets after 24 hrs in-order to compute averages with which to compare against (or should averages be stored in it's own table?) If this approach is flawed or could use improvement please let me know, but it is not my main question. My main question is what should a database scheme for storing this info look like? Assuming that the above approach is taken I am trying to figure out what a database schema for storing the likes over time would look like. I am brand new to databases, in doing some basic reading I see that it is advisable to make a 3NF database. I have come up with the following possible schema. Schema 1 DB Popular Posts Table: Post post_id ( primary key(pk) ) url title Table: Social Activity activity_id (pk) url (fk) type (i.e. facebook,twitter,g+) value timestamp This was my initial instinct (base on my very limited db knowledge). As far as I under stand this schema would be 3NF? I searched for designs of similar database model, and found this question on stackoverflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11216080/data-structure-for-storing-height-and-weight-etc-over-time-for-multiple-users . The scenario in that question is similar (recording weight/height of users overtime). Taking the accepted answer for that question and applying it to my model results in something like: Schema 2 (same as above, but break down the social activity into 2 tables) DB Popular Posts Table: Post post_id (pk) url title Table: Social Measurement measurement_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp Table: Social stat stat_id (pk) measurement_id (fk) type (i.e. facebook,twitter,g+) value The advantage I see in schema 2 is that I will likely want to access all the values for a given time, i.e. when making a measurement at 30min after a post is published I will simultaneous check number of fb likes, fb shares, fb comments, tweets, g+, linkedIn. So with this schema it may be easier get get all stats for a measurement_id corresponding to a certain time, i.e. all social stats for post 1234 at time x. Another thought I had is since it doesn't make sense to compare number of fb likes with number of tweets or g+ shares, maybe it makes sense to separate each social measurement into it's own table? Schema 3 DB Popular Posts Table: Post post_id (pk) url title Table: fb_likes fb_like_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value Table: fb_shares fb_shares_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value Table: tweets tweets__id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value Table: google_plus google_plus_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value As you can see I am generally lost/unsure of what approach to take. I'm sure this typical type of database problem (storing measurements overtime, i.e temperature statistic) that must have a common solution. Is there a design pattern/model for this, does it have a name? I tried searching for "database periodic data collection" or "database measurements over time" but didn't find anything specific. What would be an appropriate model to solve the needs of this problem?

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• Mobile HCM: It’s not the future, it is right now

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Steve Boese, Director Product Strategy, Oracle I’ll bet you reached for your iPhone or Android or BlackBerry and took a quick look at email or Facebook or last night’s text messages before you even got out of bed this morning. Come on, admit it, it’s ok, you are among friends here. See, feel better now? But seriously, the incredible growth and near-ubiquity of increasingly powerful, capable, and for many of us, essential in our daily lives mobile devices has profoundly changed the way we communicate, consume information, socialize, and more and more, conduct business and get our work done. And if you doubt that profound change has happened, just think for a moment about the last time you misplaced your iPhone.  The shivers, the cold sweats, the panic... We have all been there. And indeed your personal experiences with mobile technology echoes throughout the world - here are a few data points to consider: Market research firm IDC estimates 1.8 billion mobile phones will be shipped in 2012. A recent Pew study reports 46% of Americans own a smartphone of some kind. And finally in the USA, ownership of tablets like the iPad has doubled from 10% to 19% in the last year. So truly for the Human Resources leader, the question is no longer, ‘Should HR explore ways to exploit mobile devices and their always-on nature to better support and empower the modern workforce?’, but rather ‘How can HR best take advantage of smartphone and tablet capability to provide information, enable transactions, and enhance decision making?’. Because even though moving HCM applications to mobile devices seems inherently logical given today’s fast-moving and mobile workforces, and its promise to deliver incredible value to the organization, HR leaders also have to consider many factors before devising their Mobile HCM strategy and embarking on mobile HR technology projects. Here are just some of the important considerations for HR leaders as you build your strategies and evaluate mobile HCM solutions: Does your organization provide mobile devices to the workforce today, and if so, will the current set of deployed devices have the necessary capability and ecosystems to support your mobile HCM initiatives? Will you allow workers to use or bring their own mobile devices, (commonly abbreviated as ‘BYOD’), and if so are your IT and Security organizations in agreement and capable of supporting that strategy? Do you know which workers need access to mobile HCM applications? Often mobile HCM capability flows down in an organization, with executives and other ‘road-warrior’ types having the most immediate needs, followed by field sales staff, project managers, and even potential job candidates. But just as an organization will have to spend time understanding ‘who’ should have access to mobile HCM technology, the ‘what’ of the way the solutions should be deployed to these groups will also vary. What works and makes sense for the executive, (company-wide dashboards and analytics on an iPad), might not be as relevant for a retail store manager, (employee schedules, location-level sales and inventory data, transaction approvals, etc.). With Oracle Fusion HCM, we are taking an approach to mobile HR that encompasses not just the mobile solution needs for the various types of worker, but also incorporates the fundamental attributes of great mobile applications - the ability to support end-to-end transactions, apps that respond with lightning-fast speed, with functions that are embedded in a worker’s daily activities, and features that can be mashed-up easily with other business areas like Finance and CRM. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Oracle Fusion HCM team, delivering mobile experiences that truly enhance, enable, and empower the mobile workforce, and deliver on the design mantras of the best-in-class consumer applications, continues to shape and drive design decisions. Mobile is no longer the future, it is right now, and the cutting-edge HR leader of today will need to consider how mobile fits her HCM technology strategy from here on out. You can learn more about our ideas and plans for Oracle Fusion HCM mobile solutions at https://fusiontap.oracle.com/.

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• WebLogic Server Performance and Tuning: Part I - Tuning JVM

  - by Gokhan Gungor

  Each WebLogic Server instance runs in its own dedicated Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which is their runtime environment. Every Admin Server in any domain executes within a JVM. The same also applies for Managed Servers. WebLogic Server can be used for a wide variety of applications and services which uses the same runtime environment and resources. Oracle WebLogic ships with 2 different JVM, HotSpot and JRocket but you can choose which JVM you want to use. JVM is designed to optimize itself however it also provides some startup options to make small changes. There are default values for its memory and garbage collection. In real world, you will not want to stick with the default values provided by the JVM rather want to customize these values based on your applications which can produce large gains in performance by making small changes with the JVM parameters. We can tell the garbage collector how to delete garbage and we can also tell JVM how much space to allocate for each generation (of java Objects) or for heap. Remember during the garbage collection no other process is executed within the JVM or runtime, which is called STOP THE WORLD which can affect the overall throughput. Each JVM has its own memory segment called Heap Memory which is the storage for java Objects. These objects can be grouped based on their age like young generation (recently created objects) or old generation (surviving objects that have lived to some extent), etc. A java object is considered garbage when it can no longer be reached from anywhere in the running program. Each generation has its own memory segment within the heap. When this segment gets full, garbage collector deletes all the objects that are marked as garbage to create space. When the old generation space gets full, the JVM performs a major collection to remove the unused objects and reclaim their space. A major garbage collect takes a significant amount of time and can affect system performance. When we create a managed server either on the same machine or on remote machine it gets its initial startup parameters from $DOMAIN_HOME/bin/setDomainEnv.sh/cmd file. By default two parameters are set:     Xms: The initial heapsize     Xmx: The max heapsize Try to set equal initial and max heapsize. The startup time can be a little longer but for long running applications it will provide a better performance. When we set -Xms512m -Xmx1024m, the physical heap size will be 512m. This means that there are pages of memory (in the state of the 512m) that the JVM does not explicitly control. It will be controlled by OS which could be reserve for the other tasks. In this case, it is an advantage if the JVM claims the entire memory at once and try not to spend time to extend when more memory is needed. Also you can use -XX:MaxPermSize (Maximum size of the permanent generation) option for Sun JVM. You should adjust the size accordingly if your application dynamically load and unload a lot of classes in order to optimize the performance. You can set the JVM options/heap size from the following places:     Through the Admin console, in the Server start tab     In the startManagedWeblogic script for the managed servers     $DOMAIN_HOME/bin/startManagedWebLogic.sh/cmd     JAVA_OPTIONS="-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m" ${JAVA_OPTIONS}     In the setDomainEnv script for the managed servers and admin server (domain wide)     USER_MEM_ARGS="-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m" When there is free memory available in the heap but it is too fragmented and not contiguously located to store the object or when there is actually insufficient memory we can get java.lang.OutOfMemoryError. We should create Thread Dump and analyze if that is possible in case of such error. The second option we can use to produce higher throughput is to garbage collection. We can roughly divide GC algorithms into 2 categories: parallel and concurrent. Parallel GC stops the execution of all the application and performs the full GC, this generally provides better throughput but also high latency using all the CPU resources during GC. Concurrent GC on the other hand, produces low latency but also low throughput since it performs GC while application executes. The JRockit JVM provides some useful command-line parameters that to control of its GC scheme like -XgcPrio command-line parameter which takes the following options; XgcPrio:pausetime (To minimize latency, parallel GC) XgcPrio:throughput (To minimize throughput, concurrent GC ) XgcPrio:deterministic (To guarantee maximum pause time, for real time systems) Sun JVM has similar parameters (like  -XX:UseParallelGC or -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC) to control its GC scheme. We can add -verbosegc -XX:+PrintGCDetails to monitor indications of a problem with garbage collection. Try configuring JVM’s of all managed servers to execute in -server mode to ensure that it is optimized for a server-side production environment.

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• BizTalk Server 2009 - Architecture Options

  - by StuartBrierley

  I recently needed to put forward a proposal for a BizTalk 2009 implementation and as a part of this needed to describe some of the basic architecture options available for consideration.  While I already had an idea of the type of environment that I would be looking to recommend, I felt that presenting a range of options while trying to explain some of the strengths and weaknesses of those options was a good place to start.  These outline architecture options should be equally valid for any version of BizTalk Server from 2004, through 2006 and R2, up to 2009.   The following diagram shows a crude representation of the common implementation options to consider when designing a BizTalk environment.         Each of these options provides differing levels of resilience in the case of failure or disaster, with the later options also providing more scope for performance tuning and scalability.   Some of the options presented above make use of clustering. Clustering may best be described as a technology that automatically allows one physical server to take over the tasks and responsibilities of another physical server that has failed. Given that all computer hardware and software will eventually fail, the goal of clustering is to ensure that mission-critical applications will have little or no downtime when such a failure occurs. Clustering can also be configured to provide load balancing, which should generally lead to performance gains and increased capacity and throughput.   (A) Single Servers   This option is the most basic BizTalk implementation that should be considered. It involves the deployment of a single BizTalk server in conjunction with a single SQL server. This configuration does not provide for any resilience in the case of the failure of either server. It is however the cheapest and easiest to implement option of those available.   Using a single BizTalk server does not provide for the level of performance tuning that is otherwise available when using more than one BizTalk server in a cluster.   The common edition of BizTalk used in single server implementations is the standard edition. It should be noted however that if future demand requires increased capacity for a solution, this BizTalk edition is limited to scaling up the implementation and not scaling out the number of servers in use. Any need to scale out the solution would require an upgrade to the enterprise edition of BizTalk.   (B) Single BizTalk Server with Clustered SQL Servers   This option uses a single BizTalk server with a cluster of SQL servers. By utilising clustered SQL servers we can ensure that there is some resilience to the implementation in respect of the databases that BizTalk relies on to operate. The clustering of two SQL servers is possible with the standard edition but to go beyond this would require the enterprise level edition. While this option offers improved resilience over option (A) it does still present a potential single point of failure at the BizTalk server.   Using a single BizTalk server does not provide for the level of performance tuning that is otherwise available when using more than one BizTalk server in a cluster.   The common edition of BizTalk used in single server implementations is the standard edition. It should be noted however that if future demand requires increased capacity for a solution, this BizTalk edition is limited to scaling up the implementation and not scaling out the number of servers in use. You are also unable to take advantage of multiple message boxes, which would allow us to balance the SQL load in the event of any bottlenecks in this area of the implementation. Any need to scale out the solution would require an upgrade to the enterprise edition of BizTalk.   (C) Clustered BizTalk Servers with Clustered SQL Servers   This option makes use of a cluster of BizTalk servers with a cluster of SQL servers to offer high availability and resilience in the case of failure of either of the server types involved. Clustering of BizTalk is only available with the enterprise edition of the product. Clustering of two SQL servers is possible with the standard edition but to go beyond this would require the enterprise level edition.    The use of a BizTalk cluster also provides for the ability to balance load across the servers and gives more scope for performance tuning any implemented solutions. It is also possible to add more BizTalk servers to an existing cluster, giving scope for scaling out the solution as future demand requires.   This might be seen as the middle cost option, providing a good level of protection in the case of failure, a decent level of future proofing, but at a higher cost than the single BizTalk server implementations.   (D) Clustered BizTalk Servers with Clustered SQL Servers – with disaster recovery/service continuity   This option is similar to that offered by (C) and makes use of a cluster of BizTalk servers with a cluster of SQL servers to offer high availability and resilience in case of failure of either of the server types involved. Clustering of BizTalk is only available with the enterprise edition of the product. Clustering of two SQL servers is possible with the standard edition but to go beyond this would require the enterprise level edition.    As with (C) the use of a BizTalk cluster also provides for the ability to balance load across the servers and gives more scope for performance tuning the implemented solution. It is also possible to add more BizTalk servers to an existing cluster, giving scope for scaling the solution out as future demand requires.   In this scenario however, we would be including some form of disaster recovery or service continuity. An example of this would be making use of multiple sites, with the BizTalk server cluster operating across sites to offer resilience in case of the loss of one or more sites. In this scenario there are options available for the SQL implementation depending on the network implementation; making use of either one cluster per site or a single SQL cluster across the network. A multi-site SQL implementation would require some form of data replication across the sites involved.   This is obviously an expensive and complex option, but does provide an extraordinary amount of protection in the case of failure.

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• Your thoughts on Best Practices for Scientific Computing?

  - by John Smith

  A recent paper by Wilson et al (2014) pointed out 24 Best Practices for scientific programming. It's worth to have a look. I would like to hear opinions about these points from experienced programmers in scientific data analysis. Do you think these advices are helpful and practical? Or are they good only in an ideal world? Wilson G, Aruliah DA, Brown CT, Chue Hong NP, Davis M, Guy RT, Haddock SHD, Huff KD, Mitchell IM, Plumbley MD, Waugh B, White EP, Wilson P (2014) Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLoS Biol 12:e1001745. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001745 Box 1. Summary of Best Practices Write programs for people, not computers. (a) A program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once. (b) Make names consistent, distinctive, and meaningful. (c) Make code style and formatting consistent. Let the computer do the work. (a) Make the computer repeat tasks. (b) Save recent commands in a file for re-use. (c) Use a build tool to automate workflows. Make incremental changes. (a) Work in small steps with frequent feedback and course correction. (b) Use a version control system. (c) Put everything that has been created manually in version control. Don’t repeat yourself (or others). (a) Every piece of data must have a single authoritative representation in the system. (b) Modularize code rather than copying and pasting. (c) Re-use code instead of rewriting it. Plan for mistakes. (a) Add assertions to programs to check their operation. (b) Use an off-the-shelf unit testing library. (c) Turn bugs into test cases. (d) Use a symbolic debugger. Optimize software only after it works correctly. (a) Use a profiler to identify bottlenecks. (b) Write code in the highest-level language possible. Document design and purpose, not mechanics. (a) Document interfaces and reasons, not implementations. (b) Refactor code in preference to explaining how it works. (c) Embed the documentation for a piece of software in that software. Collaborate. (a) Use pre-merge code reviews. (b) Use pair programming when bringing someone new up to speed and when tackling particularly tricky problems. (c) Use an issue tracking tool. I'm relatively new to serious programming for scientific data analysis. When I tried to write code for pilot analyses of some of my data last year, I encountered tremendous amount of bugs both in my code and data. Bugs and errors had been around me all the time, but this time it was somewhat overwhelming. I managed to crunch the numbers at last, but I thought I couldn't put up with this mess any longer. Some actions must be taken. Without a sophisticated guide like the article above, I started to adopt "defensive style" of programming since then. A book titled "The Art of Readable Code" helped me a lot. I deployed meticulous input validations or assertions for every function, renamed a lot of variables and functions for better readability, and extracted many subroutines as reusable functions. Recently, I introduced Git and SourceTree for version control. At the moment, because my co-workers are much more reluctant about these issues, the collaboration practices (8a,b,c) have not been introduced. Actually, as the authors admitted, because all of these practices take some amount of time and effort to introduce, it may be generally hard to persuade your reluctant collaborators to comply them. I think I'm asking your opinions because I still suffer from many bugs despite all my effort on many of these practices. Bug fix may be, or should be, faster than before, but I couldn't really measure the improvement. Moreover, much of my time has been invested on defence, meaning that I haven't actually done much data analysis (offence) these days. Where is the point I should stop at in terms of productivity? I've already deployed: 1a,b,c, 2a, 3a,b,c, 4b,c, 5a,d, 6a,b, 7a,7b I'm about to have a go at: 5b,c Not yet: 2b,c, 4a, 7c, 8a,b,c (I could not really see the advantage of using GNU make (2c) for my purpose. Could anyone tell me how it helps my work with MATLAB?)

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• EBS Techstack Sessions at OAUG/Collaborate 2010

  - by Steven Chan

  We have a large contingent of E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group staff rolling out to the OAUG/Collaborate 2010 conference in Las Vegas new week.  Our Applications Technology Group staff will be appearing as guest speakers or full-speakers at the following E-Business Suite technology stack related sessions:Database Special Interest GroupSunday, April 18, 11:00 AM, Breakers FSIG Leaders:  Michael Brown, Colibri; Sandra Vucinic, Vlad GroupGuest Speaker:  Steven ChanCovering database upcoming and past desupport dates, and database support policies as they apply to E-Business Suite environments, general Q&A E-Business Suite Technology Stack Special Interest GroupSunday, April 18, 3:00 PM, Breakers FSIG Leaders:  Elke Phelps, Paul Jackson, HumanaGuest Speaker:  Steven ChanCovering the latest EBS technology stack certifications, roadmap, desupport noticesupgrade options for Discoverer, OID, SSO, Portal, general Q&A E-Business Suite Applications Technology Roadmap & VisionMonday, April 19, 8:00 AM, South Seas GOracle Speaker:  Uma PrabhalaLatest developments for SOA, AOL, OAF, Web ADI, SES, AMP, ACMP, security, and other technologies Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager UpdateMonday, April 19, 2:30 PM, Mandalay Bay Ballroom DOracle Speaker:  Cliff GodwinUpdate on the entire Oracle E-Business Suite product line. The session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle's overall applications strategy 10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation ApplicationsTuesday, April 20, 8:00 AM, South Seas FOracle Speaker:  Nadia Bendjedou"Common sense" and "practical" steps that can be taken today to increase the value of your Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JDE) investments by using the latest Oracle solutions and technologiesReducing TCO using Oracle E-Business Suite Management PacksTuesday, April 20, 10:30 AM, South Seas EOracle Speaker:  Angelo RosadoLearn how you can reduce the Total Cost of Ownership by implementing Application Management Pack (AMP) and Application Change Management Pack (ACP) for E-Business Suite 11i, R12, R12.1. AMP is Oracle's next generation system manageability product offering that provides a centralized platform to manage and maintain EBS. ACP is Oracle's offering to monitor and manage E-Business Suite changes in the areas of E-Business Suite Customizations, Patches and Functional Setups. E-Business Suite Upgrade Special Interest GroupTuesday, April 20, 3:15 PM, South Seas ESIG Leaders:  John Stouffer; Sandra Vucinic, Vlad GroupGuest Speaker:  Steven ChanParticipating in general Q&A E-Business Suite Technology Essentials: Using the Latest Oracle Technologies with E-Business Suite Wednesday, April 21, 8:00 AM, South Seas HOracle Speaker:  Lisa ParekhOracle continues to build new functionality into the Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, and Enterprise Manager. Come see how you can enhance the value of E-Business Suite for your users and lower your costs of ownership by utilizing the latest features of these Oracle technologies with E-Business Suite. Learn about the latest advanced E-Business Suite topologies and features, including new options for security, performance, third-party integration, SOA, virtualization, clouds, systems management, and much more How to Leverage the New E-Business Suite R12.1 Solutions Without Upgrading your 11.5.10 EnvironmentWednesday, April 21, 10:30 AMOracle Speaker:  Nadia Bendjedou, South Seas ELearn how you can use the latest E-Business Suite 12.1 standalone solutions without upgrading from your E-Business Suite 11.5.10 environment Web 2.0 User Experience and Oracle Fusion Middleware Integration with Oracle E-Business SuiteWednesday, April 21, 4:00 PM, South Seas FOracle Speaker:  Padmaprabodh AmbaleSee the next generation Oracle E-Business Suite OA framework improvements that will provide new rich interactions in components such as LOV, Tables and Attachments.  See  new components like the Rich Container that allows any Web 2.0 content like Flash or OBIEE to be embedded in OA Framework pages. Advanced Technology Deployment Architectures for E-Business Suite Wednesday, April 21, 2:15 PM, South Seas EOracle Speaker:  Steven ChanLearn how to take advantage of the latest version of Oracle Fusion Middleware with Oracle E-Business Suite. Learn how to utilize identity management systems and LDAP directories. In addition, come to this session for answers about advanced network deployments involving reverse proxy servers, load balancers, and DMZ's, and to see how you can take benefit from virtualization and new system management capabilities. Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 - Best PracticesThursday, April 22, 11:00 AM, South Seas EOracle Speaker:  Lester Gutierrez, Udayan ParvateFundamental of upgrading to Release 12.1, which includes the technology stack components and differences, the upgrade path from various releases of Oracle E-Business Suite, upgrade steps, monitoring the upgrade, hints and tips for minimizing downtime and upgrade best practices for making the upgrade to Release 12.1 a success.  We look forward to seeing you there!

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Backup and Restore Events Report

  - by Pinal Dave

  A DBA wears multiple hats and in fact does more than what an eye can see. One of the core task of a DBA is to take backups. This looks so trivial that most developers shrug this off as the only activity a DBA might be doing. I have huge respect for DBA’s all around the world because even if they seem cool with all the scripting, automation, maintenance works round the clock to keep the business working almost 365 days 24×7, their worth is knowing that one day when the systems / HDD crashes and you have an important delivery to make. So these backup tasks / maintenance jobs that have been done come handy and are no more trivial as they might seem to be as considered by many. So the important question like: “When was the last backup taken?”, “How much time did the last backup take?”, “What type of backup was taken last?” etc are tricky questions and this report lands answers to the same in a jiffy. So the SSMS report, we are talking can be used to find backups and restore operation done for the selected database. Whenever we perform any backup or restore operation, the information is stored in the msdb database. This report can utilize that information and provide information about the size, time taken and also the file location for those operations. Here is how this report can be launched.   Once we launch this report, we can see 4 major sections shown as listed below. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Successful Backup Operations Backup Operation Errors Successful Restore Operations Let us look at each section next. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Information shown in “Average Time Taken For Backup Operations” section is taken from a backupset table in the msdb database. Here is the query and the expanded version of that particular section USE msdb; SELECT (ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY t1.TYPE))%2 AS l1 ,       1 AS l2 ,       1 AS l3 ,       t1.TYPE AS [type] ,       (AVG(DATEDIFF(ss,backup_start_date, backup_finish_date)))/60.0 AS AverageBackupDuration FROM backupset t1 INNER JOIN sys.databases t3 ON ( t1.database_name = t3.name) WHERE t3.name = N'AdventureWorks2014' GROUP BY t1.TYPE ORDER BY t1.TYPE On my small database the time taken for differential backup was less than a minute, hence the value of zero is displayed. This is an important piece of backup operation which might help you in planning maintenance windows. Successful Backup Operations Here is the expanded version of this section.   This information is derived from various backup tracking tables from msdb database.  Here is the simplified version of the query which can be used separately as well. SELECT * FROM sys.databases t1 INNER JOIN backupset t3 ON (t3.database_name = t1.name) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediaset t5 ON ( t3.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediafamily t6 ON ( t6.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) WHERE (t1.name = N'AdventureWorks2014') ORDER BY backup_start_date DESC,t3.backup_set_id,t6.physical_device_name; The report does some calculations to show the data in a more readable format. For example, the backup size is shown in KB, MB or GB. I have expanded first row by clicking on (+) on “Device type” column. That has shown me the path of the physical backup file. Personally looking at this section, the Backup Size, Device Type and Backup Name are critical and are worth a note. As mentioned in the previous section, this section also has the Duration embedded inside it. Backup Operation Errors This section of the report gets data from default trace. You might wonder how. One of the event which is tracked by default trace is “ErrorLog”. This means that whatever message is written to errorlog gets written to default trace file as well. Interestingly, whenever there is a backup failure, an error message is written to ERRORLOG and hence default trace. This section takes advantage of that and shows the information. We can read below message under this section, which confirms above logic. No backup operations errors occurred for (AdventureWorks2014) database in the recent past or default trace is not enabled. Successful Restore Operations This section may not be very useful in production server (do you perform a restore of database?) but might be useful in the development and log shipping secondary environment, where we might be interested to see restore operations for a particular database. Here is the expanded version of the section. To fill this section of the report, I have restored the same backups which were taken to populate earlier sections. Here is the simplified version of the query used to populate this output. USE msdb; SELECT * FROM restorehistory t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN restorefile t2 ON ( t1.restore_history_id = t2.restore_history_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupset t3 ON ( t1.backup_set_id = t3.backup_set_id) WHERE t1.destination_database_name = N'AdventureWorks2014' ORDER BY restore_date DESC,  t1.restore_history_id,t2.destination_phys_name Have you ever looked at the backup strategy of your key databases? Are they in sync and do we have scope for improvements? Then this is the report to analyze after a week or month of maintenance plans running in your database. Do chime in with what are the strategies you are using in your environments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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• Guest Post: Christian Finn: Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success?

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Print 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Since we have a number of new members of the WebCenter Evangelist team - I thought it would be appropriate to close the week with the newest hire and leader of the global WebCenter Evangelists, Christian Finn, who has just joined the Red team after many years with the small technology company up in Redmond, WA. He gave an intro to himself in an earlier post this morning but his post below is a great example of how customer engagement takes on a life of its own in our global online connected and social digital ecosystem. Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success? What if I told you that your brand could advertise so successfully, you wouldn’t have to pay for the ads? A recent campaign by Ford Motor Company for the Ford Focus featuring Doug the spokespuppet (I am not making this up) did just that—and it raises some interesting issues for marketers and social media alike in the brave new world of customer engagement that is the Social Web. Allow me to elaborate. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week—“Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay” tells the story of Ford’s recently concluded online campaign for the 2012 Ford Focus. (Ford, by the way, under the leadership of people such as Scott Monty, has been a pioneer of effective social campaigns.) The centerpiece of the campaign was the aforementioned Doug, who appeared as a character on Facebook in videos and via chat. (If you are not familiar with Doug, you can see him in action here, and read the WSJ story here.) You may be thinking puppet ads are a sign of Internet Bubble 2.0 and want to stop now, but bear with me. The Journal reported that Ford spent about $95M on its overall Ford Focus campaign, with TV accounting for over $60M of that spend. The Internet buy for the campaign was just over $10M, which included ad buys to drive traffic to Facebook for people to meet and ‘Like’ Doug and some amount on Facebook ads, too, to promote Doug and by extension, the Ford Focus. So far, a fairly straightforward consumer marketing story in the Internet Era. Yet here’s the curious thing: once Doug reached 10,000 fans on Facebook, Ford stopped paying for Facebook ads. Doug had gone viral with people sharing his videos with one another; once critical mass was reached there was no need to buy more ads on Facebook. Doug went on to be Liked by over 43,000 people, and 61% of his fans said they would be more likely to consider buying a Focus. According to the article, Ford says Focus sales are up this year—and increasing sales is every marketer’s goal. And so in effect, Ford found its Facebook campaign so successful that it could stop paying for it, instead letting its target consumers communicate its messages for fun—and for free. Not only did they get a 3X increase in fans beyond their paid campaign, they had thousands of customers sharing their messages in video form for months. Since free advertising is the Holy Grail of marketing both old and new-- and it appears social networks have an advantage in generating that buzz—it seems reasonable to ask: what would happen to brands’ advertising strategies—and the media they use to engage customers, if this success were repeated at scale? It seems logical to conclude that, at least initially, more ad dollars would be spent with social networks like Facebook as brands attempt to replicate Ford’s success. Certainly Facebook ad revenues are on the rise—eMarketer expects Facebook’s ad revenues to quintuple by 2012 compared with 2009 levels, to nearly 2.9B. That’s bad news for TV and the already battered print media and good news for Facebook. But perhaps not so over the longer run. With TV buys, you have to keep paying to generate impressions. If Doug the spokespuppet is any guide, however, that may not be true for social media campaigns. After an initial outlay, if a social campaign takes off, the audience will generate more impressions on its own. Thus a social medium like Facebook could be the victim of its own success when it comes to ad revenue. It may be there is an inherent limiting factor in the ad spend they can capture, as exemplified by Ford’s experience with Dough and the Focus. And brands may spend much less overall on advertising, with as good or better results, than they ever have in the past. How will these trends evolve? Can brands create social campaigns that repeat Ford’s formula for the Focus with effective results? Can social networks find ways to capture more spend and overcome their potential tendency to make further spend unnecessary? And will consumers become tired and insulated from social campaigns, much as they have to traditional advertising channels? These are the questions CMOs and Facebook execs alike will be asking themselves in the brave new world of customer engagement. As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

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• Microsoft, jQuery, and Templating

  - by Stephen Walther

  About two months ago, John Resig and I met at Café Algiers in Harvard square to discuss how Microsoft can contribute to the jQuery project. Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his second-day MIX keynote that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind jQuery and making it the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies. What does this announcement mean? It means that Microsoft is shifting its resources to invest in jQuery. Developers on the ASP.NET team are now working full-time to contribute features to the core jQuery library. Furthermore, we are working with other teams at Microsoft to ensure that our technologies work great with jQuery. We are contributing to the open-source jQuery project in the exact same way that any other company or individual from the community can contribute to jQuery. We are writing proposals, submitting the proposals to the jQuery forums, and revising the proposals in response to community feedback. The jQuery team can decide to reject or accept any feature that we propose. Any feature that Microsoft contributes to jQuery will be platform neutral. In other words, Microsoft contributions will benefit PHP and RAILS developers just as much as they benefit ASP.NET developers. Microsoft contributions to jQuery will improve the web for everyone. Contributing Support for Templates to jQuery Core Our first proposal concerns templating. We want to contribute support for templates to jQuery so that JavaScript developers can use jQuery to easily display a set of database records. You can read our templating proposal here: http://wiki.github.com/nje/jquery/jquery-templates-proposal You can download and play with our prototype for templating here: http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl The following code illustrates how you can use a template to display a set of products in a bulleted list: <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(function(){ var products = [ { name: "Product 1", price: 12.99}, { name: "Product 2", price: 9.99}, { name: "Product 3", price: 35.59} ]; $("ul").append("#template", products); }); </script> <script id="template" type="text/html"> <li>{%= name %} - {%= price %}</li> </script> <ul></ul> The template is contained in a SCRIPT element that has a TYPE=”text/html” attribute. Browsers ignore the contents of a SCRIPT element when they don’t understand the content type. Notice that the placeholder {%=...%} is used within the template to indicate where the name and price of a product should appear. The delimiters {%=…%} are used for expressions and the delimiters {%...%} are used for code. Finally, the products are rendered using the template with the call to $(“ul”).append(“#template”, products). The standard jQuery DOM manipulation methods have been modified to support templates. When the page above is rendered, you get the bulleted list displayed in the following figure. Our goal is to keep our proposal for templates as simple as possible. After support for templating has been added to jQuery, plug-in authors can take advantage of templating when building complex data-driven plug-ins such as a DataGrid plug-in. The Ajax Control Toolkit Over 100,000 developers download the Ajax Control Toolkit every month. That’s a mind-boggling number of downloads. We realize that the Ajax Control Toolkit is extremely popular among ASP.NET Web Forms developers and we want to continue to invest in the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you are adding JavaScript interactivity to an ASP.NET Web Forms application, and you don’t want to write JavaScript, then we recommend that you use the server controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. Using the Ajax Control Toolkit does not require knowledge of JavaScript and the toolkit enables you to build applications with the concepts familiar to ASP.NET Web Forms applications developers. If, however, you are interested in creating client-side interactivity without server controls then we recommend that you use jQuery. We plan to continue to release new versions of the Ajax Control Toolkit every few months. Our goal is to continue to improve the quality of the Ajax Control Toolkit and to make it easier for the community to contribute code, bug fixes, and documentation. The ASP.NET Ajax Library We are moving the ASP.NET Ajax Library into the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you currently use ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates, client data-binding, or the client script loader then you can continue to use these features by downloading the Ajax Control Toolkit. Be aware that our focus with the Ajax Control Toolkit is server-side Ajax.  For client-side Ajax, we are shifting our focus to jQuery. For example, if you have been using ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates then we recommend that you shift to using jQuery instead. Conclusion Our plan is to focus on jQuery as the primary technology for building client-side Ajax applications moving forward. We want to adapt Microsoft technologies to work great with jQuery and we want to contribute features to jQuery that will make the web better for everyone. We are very excited to be working with the jQuery core team.

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• Windows Azure Use Case: Hybrid Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx  Description: Organizations see the need for computing infrastructures that they can “rent” or pay for only when they need them. They also understand the benefits of distributed computing, but do not want to create this infrastructure themselves. However, they may have considerations that prevent them from moving all of their current IT investment to a distributed environment: Private data (do not want to send or store sensitive data off-site) High dollar investment in current infrastructure Applications currently running well, but may need additional periodic capacity Current applications not designed in a stateless fashion In these situations, a “hybrid” approach works best. In fact, with Windows Azure, a hybrid approach is an optimal way to implement distributed computing even when the stipulations above do not apply. Keeping a majority of the computing function in an organization local while exploring and expanding that footprint into Windows and SQL Azure is a good migration or expansion strategy. A “hybrid” architecture merely means that part of a computing cycle is shared between two architectures. For instance, some level of computing might be done in a Windows Azure web-based application, while the data is stored locally at the organization. Implementation: There are multiple methods for implementing a hybrid architecture, in a spectrum from very little interaction from the local infrastructure to Windows or SQL Azure. The patterns fall into two broad schemas, and even these can be mixed. 1. Client-Centric Hybrid Patterns In this pattern, programs are coded such that the client system sends queries or compute requests to multiple systems. The “client” in this case might be a web-based codeset actually stored on another system (which acts as a client, the user’s device serving as the presentation layer) or a compiled program. In either case, the code on the client requestor carries the burden of defining the layout of the requests. While this pattern is often the easiest to code, it’s the most brittle. Any change in the architecture must be reflected on each client, but this can be mitigated by using a centralized system as the client such as in the web scenario. 2. System-Centric Hybrid Patterns Another approach is to create a distributed architecture by turning on-site systems into “services” that can be called from Windows Azure using the service Bus or the Access Control Services (ACS) capabilities. Code calls from a series of in-process client application. In this pattern you move the “client” interface into the server application logic. If you do not wish to change the application itself, you can “layer” the results of the code return using a product (such as Microsoft BizTalk) that exposes a Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) endpoint to Windows Azure using the Application Fabric. In effect, this is similar to creating a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment, and has the advantage of de-coupling your computing architecture. If each system offers a “service” of the results of some software processing, the operating system or platform becomes immaterial, assuming it adheres to a service contract. There are important considerations when you federate a system, whether to Windows or SQL Azure or any other distributed architecture. While these considerations are consistent with coding any application for distributed computing, they are especially important for a hybrid application. Connection resiliency - Applications on-premise normally have low-latency and good connection properties, something you’re not always guaranteed in a distributed and hybrid application. Whether a centralized client or a distributed one, the code should be able to handle extended retry logic. Authorization and Access - In a single authorization environment like a Active Directory domain, security is handled at a user-password level. In a distributed computing environment, you have more options. You can mitigate this with  using The Windows Azure Application Fabric feature of ACS to make the Azure application aware of the App Fabric as an ADFS provider. However, a claims-based authentication structure is often a superior choice.  Consistency and Concurrency - When you have a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), Consistency and Concurrency are part of the design. In a Service Architecture, you need to plan for sequential message handling and lifecycle. Resources: How to Build a Hybrid On-Premise/In Cloud Application: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ignitionshowcase/archive/2010/11/09/how-to-build-a-hybrid-on-premise-in-cloud-application.aspx  General Architecture guidance: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2010/12/21/windows-azure-learning-plan-architecture.aspx   

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• Some New .NET Toys (Repost)

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit. It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft. The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of. The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today. Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1. You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)? Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox). With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target. Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks. Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment. This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight. You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model. Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here. You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/. This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform. If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs. You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others. Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies. By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done. Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need. I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities. Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results. First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from. For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings. All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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• Social Business Forum Milano: Day 2

  - by me

  @YourService. The business world has flipped and small business can capitalize  by Frank Eliason (twitter: @FrankEliason ) Technology and social media tools have made it easier than ever for companies to communicate with consumers. They can listen and join in on conversations, solve problems, get instant feedback about their products and services, and more. So why, then, are most companies not doing this? Instead, it seems as if customer service is at an all time low, and that the few companies who are choosing to focus on their customers are experiencing a great competitive advantage. At Your Service explains the importance of refocusing your business on your customers and your employees, and just how to do it. Explains how to create a culture of empowered employees who understand the value of a great customer experience Advises on the need to communicate that experience to their customers and potential customers Frank Eliason, recognized by BusinessWeek as the 'most famous customer service manager in the US, possibly in the world,' has built a reputation for helping large businesses improve the way they connect with customers and enhance their relationships Quotes from the Audience: Bertrand Duperrin ?@bduperrin social service is not about shutting up the loudest cutsomers ! #sbf12 @frankeliason Paolo Pelloni ?@paolopelloniGautam Ghosh ?@GautamGhosh RT @cecildijoux: #sbf12 @frankeliason you need to change things and fix the approach it's not about social media it's about driving change  Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 Company Experience = Product Experience + Customer Interactions + Employee Experience @yourservice Engage or lose! Socialize, mobilize, conversify: engage your employees to improve business performance Christian Finn (twitter: @cfinn) First Christian was presenting the flying monkey   Then he outlined the four principals to fix the Intranet: 1. Socalize the Intranet 2. Get Thee to a Single Repository 3. Mobilize the Intranet 4. Conversationalize Your Processes Quotes from the Audience: Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Engaged employees think their work bring out the best of their ideas @cfinn #sbf12 http://pic.twitter.com/68eddp48 John Stepper ?@johnstepper I like @cfinn's "conversify your processes" A nice related concept to "narrating your work", part of working out loud. http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/ Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Organizations are talent markets - socializing your intranet makes this market function better @cfinn #sbf12 For profit, productivity, and personal benefit: creating a collaborative culture at Deutsche Bank John Stepper (twitter:@johnstepper) Driving adoption of collaboration + social media platforms at Deutsche Bank. John shared some great best practices on how to deploy an enterprise wide  community model  in a large company. He started with the most important question What is the commercial value of adding social ? Then he talked about the success of Community of Practices deployment and outlined some key use cases including the relevant measures to proof the ROI of the investment. Examples:  Community of practice -> measure: systematic collection of value stories  Self-service website  -> measure: based on representative models Optimizing asset inventory - > measure: Actual counts  This use case was particular interesting.  It is a crowd sourced spending/saving of infrastructure model.  User can cancel IT services they don't need (as example Software xx).  5% of the saving goes to social responsibility projects. The John outlined some  best practices on how to address the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question of the individual users:  - change from hierarchy to graph -  working out loud = observable work + narrating  your work  - add social skills to career objectives - example: building a purposeful social network course/training as part of the job development curriculum And last but not least John gave some important tips on how to get senior management buy-in by establishing management sponsored division level collaboration boards which defines clear uses cases and measures. This divisional use cases are then implemented using a common social platform.  Thanks John - I learned a lot from your presentation!   Quotes from the Audience: Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 what's in it for individuals at Deutsche Bank? Shapping their reputations in a big org says @johnstepper #e20Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl Any reason why not? MT @magatorlibero #sbf12 is Deutsche B. experience on applying social inside company applicable to Italian people? Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Your career is not a ladder, it is a network that opens up opportunities - @johnstepper #sbf12 Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg @johnstepper: Institutionalizing collaboration is next - collaboration woven into the fabric of daily work #sbf12 Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 @johnstepper talking about how Deutsche Bank is using #socbiz to build purposeful CoP & save money

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #005

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 SQL SERVER – Cursor to Kill All Process in Database I indeed wrote this cursor and when I often look back, I wonder how naive I was to write this. The reason for writing this cursor was to free up my database from any existing connection so I can do database operation. This worked fine but there can be a potentially big issue if there was any important transaction was killed by this process. There is another way to to achieve the same thing where we can use ALTER syntax to take database in single user mode. Read more about that over here and here. 2007 Rules of Third Normal Form and Normalization Advantage – 3NF The rules of 3NF are mentioned here Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. Correct Syntax for Stored Procedure SP Sometime a simple question is the most important question. I often see in industry incorrectly written Stored Procedure. Few writes code after the most outer BEGIN…END and few writes code after the GO Statement. In this brief blog post, I have attempted to explain the same. 2008 Switch Between Result Pan and Query Pan – SQL Shortcut Many times when I am writing query I have to scroll the result displayed in the result set. Most of the developer uses the mouse to switch between and Query Pane and Result Pane. There are few developers who are crazy about Keyboard shortcuts. F6 is the keyword which can be used to switch between query pane and tabs of the result pane. Interesting Observation – Use of Index and Execution Plan Query Optimization is a complex game and it has its own rules. From the example in the article we have discovered that Query Optimizer does not use clustered index to retrieve data, sometime non clustered index provides optimal performance for retrieving Primary Key. When all the rows and columns are selected Primary Key should be used to select data as it provides optimal performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY If you pull up any application or system where there are more than 100 SQL Server Views are created – I am very confident that at one or two places you will notice the scenario wherein View the ORDER BY clause is used with TOP 100 PERCENT. SQL Server 2008 VIEW with ORDER BY clause does not throw an error; moreover, it does not acknowledge the presence of it as well. In this article we have taken three perfect examples and demonstrated which clause we should use when. Comma Separated Values (CSV) from Table Column A Very common question – How to create comma separated values from a table in the database? The answer is also very common if we use XML. Check out this article for quick learning on the same subject. Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide Though Azure portal has changed a quite bit since I wrote this article, the concept used in this article are not old. They are still valid and many of the functions are still working as mentioned in the article. I believe this one article will put you on the track to use Azure! Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution Earlier I have posted a small question on this blog and requested help from readers to participate here and provide a solution. The puzzle was to write a query that will return the size for each index that is on any particular table. We need a query that will return an additional column in the above listed query and it should contain the size of the index. This article presents two of the best solutions from the puzzle. 2010 Well, this week in 2010 was the week of puzzles as I posted three interesting puzzles. Till today I am noticing pretty good interesting in the puzzles. They are tricky but for sure brings a great value if you are a database developer for a long time. I suggest you go over this puzzles and their answers. Did you really know all of the answers? I am confident that reading following three blog post will for sure help you enhance the experience with T-SQL. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists 2011 DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012 Have you ever faced a situation where something does not work? When you try to fix it - you enjoy fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this was exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story, I want to candidly state that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. Now the disclaimer is over – I suggest you read the original story – you will love it! Get Directory Structure using Extended Stored Procedure xp_dirtree Here is the question to you – why would you do something in SQL Server where you can do the same task in command prompt much easily. Well, the answer is sometime there are real use cases when we have to do such thing. This is a similar example where I have demonstrated how in SQL Server 2012 we can use extended stored procedure to retrieve directory structure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• HTML5 and CSS3 Editing in Windows Live Writer

  - by Rick Strahl

  Windows Live Writer is a wonderful tool for editing blog posts and getting them posted to your blog. What makes it nice is that it has a small set of useful features, plus a simple plug-in model that has spawned many useful add-ins. Small tool with a reasonably decent plug-in model to extend equals a great solution to a simple problem. If you're running Windows, have a blog and aren’t using Live Writer you’re probably doing it wrong…One of Live Writer’s nice features is that it can download your blog’s CSS for preview and edit displays. It lets you edit your content inside of the context of that CSS using the WYSIWYG editor, so your content actually looks very close to what you’ll see on your blog while you’re editing your post. Unfortunately Live Writer renders the HTML content in the Web Browser Control’s  default IE 7 rendering mode. Yeah you read that right: IE 7 is the default for the Web Browser control and most applications that use it, are stuck in this modus unless the application explicitly overrides this default. The Web Browser control does not use the version of Internet Explorer installed on the system (IE 10 on my Win8 machine) but uses IE 7 mode for ‘compatibility’ for old applications.If you are importing your blog’s CSS that may suck if you’re using rich HTML 5 and CSS 3 formatting. Hack the Registry to get Live Writer to render using IE 9 or 10In order to get Live Writer (or any other application that uses the Web Browser Control for that matter) to render you can apply a registry hack that overrides the Web Browser Control engine usage for a specific application. I wrote about this in detail in a previous blog post a couple of years back.Here’s how you can set up Windows Live Writer to render your CSS 3 by making a change in your registry:The above is for setup on a 64 bit machine, where I configure Live Writer which is a 32 bit application for using IE 10 rendering. The keys set are as follows:32bit Configuration on 64 bit machine:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATIONKey: WindowsLiveWriter.exeValue: 9000 or 10000  (IE 9 or 10 respectively) (DWORD value)On a 32 bit only machine: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATIONKey: WindowsLiveWriter.exeValue: 9000 or 10000  (IE 9 or 10 respectively) (DWORD value)Use decimal values of 9000, 10000 or 11000 to specify specific versions of Internet Explorer. This is a minor tweak, but it’s nice to actually see my blog posts now with the proper CSS formatting intact. Notice the rounded borders and shadow on the code blocks as well as the overflow-x and scrollbars that show up. In this particular case I can see what the code blocks actually look like in a specific resolution – much better than in the old plain view which just chopped things off at the end of the window frame. There are a few other elements that now show properly in the editor as well including block quotes and note boxes that I occasionally use. It’s minor stuff, but it makes the editing experience better yet and closer to the final things so there are less republish operations than I previously had. Sweet!Note that this approach of putting an IE version override into the registry works with most applications that use the Web Browser control. If you are using the Web Browser control in your own applications, it’s a good idea to switch the browser to a more recent version so you can take advantage of HTML 5 and CSS 3 in your browser displayed content by automatically setting this flag in the registry or as part of the application’s startup routine if not dedicated setup tool is used. At the very least you might set it to 9000 (IE 9) which supports most of the basic CSS3 features and is a decent baseline that works for most Windows 7 and 8 machines. If running pre-IE9, the browser will fall back to IE7 rendering and look bad but at least more recent browsers will see an improved experience.I’m surprised that there aren’t more vendors and third party apps using this feature. You can see in my first screen shot that there are only very few entries in the registry key group on my machine – any other apps use the Web Browser control are using IE7. Go figure. Certainly Windows Live Writer should be writing this key into the registry automatically as part of installation to support this functionality out of the box, but alas since it does not, this registry hack lets you get your way anyway…Resources.reg Files to register Live Write Browser Emulation (set for IE9)Specifying Internet Explorer Version for ApplicationsSnagIt LiveWriter Plug-inDownload Windows Live WriterDownload Windows Live Writer with Chocolatey© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Live Writer  Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Hello With Oracle Identity Manager Architecture

  - by mustafakaya

  Hi, my name is Mustafa! I'm a Senior Consultant in Fusion Middleware Team and living in Istanbul,Turkey. I worked many various Java based software development projects such as end-to-end web applications, CRM , Telco VAS and integration projects.I want to share my experiences and research about Fusion Middleware Products in this column. Customer always wants best solution from software consultants or developers. Solution will be a code snippet or change complete architecture. We faced different requests according to the case of customer. In my posts i want to discuss Fusion Middleware Products Architecture or how can extend usability with apis or UI customization and more and I look forward to engaging with you on your experiences and thoughts on this.  In my first post, i will be discussing Oracle Identity Manager architecture  and i plan to discuss Oracle Identity Manager 11g features in next posts. Oracle Identity Manager System Architecture Oracle Identity Governance includes Oracle Identity Manager,Oracle Identity Analytics and Oracle Privileged Account Manager. I will discuss Oracle Identity Manager architecture in this post.  In basically, Oracle Identity Manager is a n-tier standard  Java EE application that is deployed on Oracle WebLogic Server and uses  a database .  Oracle Identity Manager presentation tier has three different screen and two different client. Identity Self Service and Identity System Administration are web-based thin client. Design Console is a Java Swing Client that communicates directly with the Business Service Tier.  Identity Self Service provides end-user operations and delegated administration features. System Administration provides system administration functions. And Design Console mostly use for development management operations such as  create and manage adapter and process form,notification , workflow desing, reconciliation rules etc. Business service tier is implemented as an Enterprise JavaBeans(EJB) application. So you can extense Oracle Identity Manager capabilities.  -The SMPL and EJB APIs allow develop custom plug-ins such as management roles or identities.  -Identity Services allow use core business capabilites of Oracle Identity Manager such as The User provisioning or reconciliation service. -Integration Services allow develop custom connectors or adapters for various deployment needs. -Platform Services allow use Entitlement Servers, Scheduler or SOA composites. The Middleware tier allows you using capabilites ADF Faces,SOA Suites, Scheduler, Entitlement Server and BI Publisher Reports. So OIM allows you to configure workflows uses Oracle SOA Suite or define authorization policies use with Oracle Entitlement Server. Also you can customization of OIM UI without need to write code and using ADF Business Editor  you can extend custom attributes to user,role,catalog and other objects. Data tiers; Oracle Identity Manager is driven by data and metadata which provides flexibility and adaptability to Oracle Identity Manager functionlities.  -Database has five schemas these are OIM,SOA,MDS,OPSS and OES. Oracle Identity Manager uses database to store runtime and configuration data. And all of entity, transactional and audit datas are stored in database. -Metadata Store; customizations and personalizations are stored in file-based repository or database-based repository.And Oracle Identity Manager architecture,the metadata is in Oracle Identity Manager database to take advantage of some of the advanced performance and availability features that this mode provides. -Identity Store; Oracle Identity Manager provides the ability to integrate an LDAP-based identity store into Oracle Identity Manager architecture.  Oracle Identity Manager uses the human workflow module of Oracle Service Oriented Architecture Suite. OIM connects to SOA using the T3 URL which is front-end URL for the SOA server.Oracle Identity Manager uses embedded Oracle Entitlement Server for authorization checks in OIM engine.  Several Oracle Identity Manager modules use JMS queues. Each queue is processed by a separate Message Driven Bean (MDB), which is also part of the Oracle Identity Manager application. Message producers are also part of the Oracle Identity Manager application. Oracle Identity Manager uses a scheduled jobs for some activities in the background.Some of scheduled jobs come with Out-Of-Box such as the disable users after the end date of the users or you can define your custom schedule jobs with Oracle Identity Manager APIs. You can use Oracle BI Publisher for reporting Oracle Identity Manager transactions or audit data which are in database. About me: Mustafa Kaya is a Senior Consultant in Oracle Fusion Middleware Team, living in Istanbul. Before coming to Oracle, he worked in teams developing web applications and backend services at a telco company. He is a Java technology enthusiast, software engineer and addicted to learn new technologies,develop new ideas. Follow Mustafa on Twitter,Connect on LinkedIn, and visit his site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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• C++ Little Wonders: The C++11 auto keyword redux

  - by James Michael Hare

  I’ve decided to create a sub-series of my Little Wonders posts to focus on C++.  Just like their C# counterparts, these posts will focus on those features of the C++ language that can help improve code by making it easier to write and maintain.  The index of the C# Little Wonders can be found here. This has been a busy week with a rollout of some new website features here at my work, so I don’t have a big post for this week.  But I wanted to write something up, and since lately I’ve been renewing my C++ skills in a separate project, it seemed like a good opportunity to start a C++ Little Wonders series.  Most of my development work still tends to focus on C#, but it was great to get back into the saddle and renew my C++ knowledge.  Today I’m going to focus on a new feature in C++11 (formerly known as C++0x, which is a major move forward in the C++ language standard).  While this small keyword can seem so trivial, I feel it is a big step forward in improving readability in C++ programs. The auto keyword If you’ve worked on C++ for a long time, you probably have some passing familiarity with the old auto keyword as one of those rarely used C++ keywords that was almost never used because it was the default. That is, in the code below (before C++11): 1: int foo() 2: { 3: // automatic variables (allocated and deallocated on stack) 4: int x; 5: auto int y; 6:  7: // static variables (retain their value across calls) 8: static int z; 9:  10: return 0; 11: } The variable x is assumed to be auto because that is the default, thus it is unnecessary to specify it explicitly as in the declaration of y below that.  Basically, an auto variable is one that is allocated and de-allocated on the stack automatically.  Contrast this to static variables, that are allocated statically and exist across the lifetime of the program. Because auto was so rarely (if ever) used since it is the norm, they decided to remove it for this purpose and give it new meaning in C++11.  The new meaning of auto: implicit typing Now, if your compiler supports C++ 11 (or at least a good subset of C++11 or 0x) you can take advantage of type inference in C++.  For those of you from the C# world, this means that the auto keyword in C++ now behaves a lot like the var keyword in C#! For example, many of us have had to declare those massive type declarations for an iterator before.  Let’s say we have a std::map of std::string to int which will map names to ages: 1: std::map<std::string, int> myMap; And then let’s say we want to find the age of a given person: 1: // Egad that's a long type... 2: std::map<std::string, int>::const_iterator pos = myMap.find(targetName); Notice that big ugly type definition to declare variable pos?  Sure, we could shorten this by creating a typedef of our specific map type if we wanted, but now with the auto keyword there’s no need: 1: // much shorter! 2: auto pos = myMap.find(targetName); The auto now tells the compiler to determine what type pos should be based on what it’s being assigned to.  This is not dynamic typing, it still determines the type as if it were explicitly declared and once declared that type cannot be changed.  That is, this is invalid: 1: // x is type int 2: auto x = 42; 3:  4: // can't assign string to int 5: x = "Hello"; Once the compiler determines x is type int it is exactly as if we typed int x = 42; instead, so don’t' confuse it with dynamic typing, it’s still very type-safe. An interesting feature of the auto keyword is that you can modify the inferred type: 1: // declare method that returns int* 2: int* GetPointer(); 3:  4: // p1 is int*, auto inferred type is int 5: auto *p1 = GetPointer(); 6:  7: // ps is int*, auto inferred type is int* 8: auto p2 = GetPointer(); Notice in both of these cases, p1 and p2 are determined to be int* but in each case the inferred type was different.  because we declared p1 as auto *p1 and GetPointer() returns int*, it inferred the type int was needed to complete the declaration.  In the second case, however, we declared p2 as auto p2 which means the inferred type was int*.  Ultimately, this make p1 and p2 the same type, but which type is inferred makes a difference, if you are chaining multiple inferred declarations together.  In these cases, the inferred type of each must match the first: 1: // Type inferred is int 2: // p1 is int* 3: // p2 is int 4: // p3 is int& 5: auto *p1 = GetPointer(), p2 = 42, &p3 = p2; Note that this works because the inferred type was int, if the inferred type was int* instead: 1: // syntax error, p1 was inferred to be int* so p2 and p3 don't make sense 2: auto p1 = GetPointer(), p2 = 42, &p3 = p2; You could also use const or static to modify the inferred type: 1: // inferred type is an int, theAnswer is a const int 2: const auto theAnswer = 42; 3:  4: // inferred type is double, Pi is a static double 5: static auto Pi = 3.1415927; Thus in the examples above it inferred the types int and double respectively, which were then modified to const and static. Summary The auto keyword has gotten new life in C++11 to allow you to infer the type of a variable from it’s initialization.  This simple little keyword can be used to cut down large declarations for complex types into a much more readable form, where appropriate.   Technorati Tags: C++, C++11, Little Wonders, auto

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• Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners 2012: ADF & Fusion Development

  - by Dana Singleterry

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Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. The awards were presented during Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and following winners are for the category of ADF & Fusion Development. Micros – an OPN Platinum partner – has been working closely with Oracle product management teams in applying industry best practices in the development of their solutions. Their current application suite for the hospitality industry was built on Oracle Forms and the Oracle database running on MS Windows. The next generation of this suite is being developed and released in modules that are now based on Oracle FMW (including ADF) 11g technologies and Oracle Database 11g all running on Oracle Linux. The primary driver was that of modernization and hence the reason Oracle ADF was selected to provide a rich UI for business processes that could be served up through traditional methods or through mobile devices globally. SOA Suite & ADF allowed for loosely-coupled services that could evolve with the needs of the business. Micros's application innovations includes the use of business application portlets that have been published from ADF Faces Task Flows generated using WebCenter portlet libraries  & Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) with multi-layered customizations using Oracle WebCenter Composer. PCS (Marfin Egnatia Bank of Greece) – PCS Wealth Management is a WM Software Solution, which captures and automates the WM business processes allowing Service Providers to allocate enough time and effort into Customer Service and Investment Strategies, under Advisory or Execution-Only Services. The Product is built upon the latest Web Technologies and ensures Best Practices covering all functional expectations, meeting local regulatory requirements and discovering successful opportunities for the WM Customers' Portfolios. The new unified Wealth Management system offers an unparalleled User Interface taking full advantage of the user friendly ADF Faces Components to a great extent, all serving Private Banking purposes. The application offers a true Account Officer Cockpit with shallow navigation, one-click access to informed decisions and a perfect customer service. ADF Grids and Pivots, the Data Visualization Components, as well as the Calendar and Map Components are cleverly used to help the user eliminate the usage of Excel, Outlook and other systems. PCS's application is unique in the way it leverages the ADF Faces data visualization components to create a truly attractive and insightful dashboard for their application. PCS Wealth Management Demo Qualcomm – Qualcomm, a $17B per year company, designs and sells semiconductor products for wireless telecommunications, mobile and computing markets. In addition, Qualcomm companies provide various hardware and software products to facilitate the design, development and deployment of phones and the applications that run on them. Qualcomm’s challenge has been to not only develop and deploy new business system functions to keep pace with customer demand, but also to provide a customer collaboration capability that is sufficiently robust, easy to use, and flexible to meet emerging and future needs. Qualcomm has taken successful steps in building and deploying the customer engagement platform Ieveraging various Oracle technologies including Fusion Middleware (ADF, SOA, OBIEE) and their proven ERP foundation of EBS and 11g databases. The new platform delivers a more unified and “seamless” business solution with a consistent, modern “look and feel” all based on standard business processes which facilitate efficient collaboration with Qualcomm and its customers. The look and feel leverages ADF in innovative ways and includes hover over navigation, custom pagination components, and skinning. Qualcomm has exposed a services layer that provides significant functionality including order-to-ship, quote-to-order, customer on-boarding and contract validation. Qualcomm's creative designs leverage Oracle's SOA Suite to integrate with Oracle EBS and desperate applications to provide a rich user interface through the use use of Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components providing a self-service solution to their customers.

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• Task-It Webinar - Source Code

  Last week I presented a webinar called "Building a real-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4". For those that didn't get to see the webinar, you can view it here: Building a read-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4 Since the webinar I've received several requests asking if I could post the source code for the simple application I showed demonstrating some of the techniques used in the development of Task-It, such as MVVM, Commands and Internationalization. This source code is now available for downloadhere. After downloading the source: Extract it to the location of your choice on your hard-drive Open the solution Right-click ModuleProject.Web and selecte 'Set as StartUp Project'. Right-click ProjectTestPage.aspx and selected 'Set as Start Page' Create a database in SQL Server called WebinarProject. Navigate to the Database folder under the WebinarProject directory and run the .sql script against your WebinarProject database. The last two steps are necessary only for the Tasks page to work properly (using WCF RIA Services). Now some notes about each page: Code-behind This is not the way I recommend coding a line-of-business application in Silverlight, but simply wanted to show how the code-behind approach would look. Command This page introduces MVVM and Commands. You'll notice in the XAML that the Command property of theRadMenuItem and the Button are both bound to a SaveCommand. That comes from the view model. If you look in the code- behind of the user control you'll see that an instance of a CommandViewModel is instantiated and set as the DataContext of the UserControl.There is also a listener for the view model's SaveCompleted event. When this is fired, it tells the view (UserControl) to display the MessageBox. Internationalization This sample is similar to the previous one, but instead of using hard-coded strings in the UI, the strings are obtained via binding toview model properties. The view model gets the strings from the .resx files (Strings.resx or Strings.de.resx) under Assets/Resources. If you uncomment the call to ShowGerman() in App.xaml.cs's Application_Startup method and re-run the application, you will see the UI in German. Note that this code, which sets the CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture on the current thread to "de" (German) is for testing purposes only. RadWindow Once again, very similar to the previous example.The difference is that we are now using a RadWindow to display the 'Saved' message instead of a MessageBox. The advantage here is that we do not have to hold on to a reference to the view model in our code behind so that we can get the 'Saved' message from it. The RadWindow's DataContext is now also bound to the view model, so within its XAML we can bind directly to properties in the view model. Much nicer, and cleaner. One other thing I introduced in this example is the use of spacer Rectangles. Rather than setting a width and/or height on the rectangles for spacing, I am now referencing a style in my ResourceDictionary called StandardSpacerStyle. I like doing this better than using margins or padding because now I have a reusable way to create space between elements, the Rectangle does not show (because I have not set its Fill color), and I can change my spacing throughout the user interface in one place if I'd like. Tasks This page is quite a bit different than the other four. It is a very simple, stripped-down version of the Tasks page in the Task-It application. The Tasks.xaml UserControl has a ContentControl, and the Content of that control is set based on whether we are looking at the list of tasks or editing a task. So it displays one of two child UserControls, which are called List and Details. List has the RadGridView, Details has the form. In the code-behind of the Tasks UserControl I am once again setting its DataContext to a view model class. The nice thing is, whichever child UserControl is being displayed (List or Details) inherits its DataContext from its parent control (Tasks), so I do not have to explicitly set it. The List UserControl simply displays a RadGridView whose ItemsSource is bound to a property in the view model called Tasks, and its SelectedItem property is bound to a property in the view model called SelectedItem. The SelectedItem binding must be TwoWay so that the view is notified when the SelectedItem changes in the view model, and the view model is notified when something changes in the view (like when a user changes the Name and/or DueDate in the form). You'll also notice that the form's TextBox and RadDatePicker are also TwoWay bound to the SelectedItem property in the view model. You can experiment with the binding by removing TwoWay and see how changes in the form do not show up in the RadGridView. So here we have an example of two different views (List and Details) that are both bound to the same view model...and actually, so is the Tasks UserControl, so it is really three views. WCF RIA Services By the way, I am using WCF RIA Services to retrieve data for the RadGridView and save the data when the user clicks the Save button in the form. I created a really simple ADO.NET Entity Data Model in WebinarProject.Web called DataModel.edmx. I also created a simple Domain Data Service called DataService that has methods for retrieving data, inserting, updating and deleting. However I am only using the retrieval and update methods in this sample. Note that I do not currently have any validation in place on the form, as I wanted to keep the sample as simple as possible. Wrap up Technically, I should move the calls to WCF RIA Services out of the view model and put them into a separate layer, but this works for now, and that is a topic for another day! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Hylton

  Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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• C# 4.0: Covariance And Contravariance In Generics

  - by Paulo Morgado

  C# 4.0 (and .NET 4.0) introduced covariance and contravariance to generic interfaces and delegates. But what is this variance thing? According to Wikipedia, in multilinear algebra and tensor analysis, covariance and contravariance describe how the quantitative description of certain geometrical or physical entities changes when passing from one coordinate system to another.(*) But what does this have to do with C# or .NET? In type theory, a the type T is greater (>) than type S if S is a subtype (derives from) T, which means that there is a quantitative description for types in a type hierarchy. So, how does covariance and contravariance apply to C# (and .NET) generic types? In C# (and .NET), variance applies to generic type parameters and not to the resulting generic type. A generic type parameter is: covariant if the ordering of the generic types follows the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. contravariant if the ordering of the generic types is reversed from the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. invariant if neither of the above apply. If this definition is applied to arrays, we can see that arrays have always been covariant because this is valid code: object[] objectArray = new string[] { "string 1", "string 2" }; objectArray[0] = "string 3"; objectArray[1] = new object(); However, when we try to run this code, the second assignment will throw an ArrayTypeMismatchException. Although the compiler was fooled into thinking this was valid code because an object is being assigned to an element of an array of object, at run time, there is always a type check to guarantee that the runtime type of the definition of the elements of the array is greater or equal to the instance being assigned to the element. In the above example, because the runtime type of the array is array of string, the first assignment of array elements is valid because string = string and the second is invalid because string = object. This leads to the conclusion that, although arrays have always been covariant, they are not safely covariant – code that compiles is not guaranteed to run without errors. In C#, the way to define that a generic type parameter as covariant is using the out generic modifier: public interface IEnumerable<out T> { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> { T Current { get; } bool MoveNext(); } Notice the convenient use the pre-existing out keyword. Besides the benefit of not having to remember a new hypothetic covariant keyword, out is easier to remember because it defines that the generic type parameter can only appear in output positions — read-only properties and method return values. In a similar way, the way to define a type parameter as contravariant is using the in generic modifier: public interface IComparer<in T> { int Compare(T x, T y); } Once again, the use of the pre-existing in keyword makes it easier to remember that the generic type parameter can only be used in input positions — write-only properties and method non ref and non out parameters. Because covariance and contravariance apply only to the generic type parameters, a generic type definition can have both covariant and contravariant generic type parameters in its definition: public delegate TResult Func<in T, out TResult>(T arg); A generic type parameter that is not marked covariant (out) or contravariant (in) is invariant. All the types in the .NET Framework where variance could be applied to its generic type parameters have been modified to take advantage of this new feature. In summary, the rules for variance in C# (and .NET) are: Variance in type parameters are restricted to generic interface and generic delegate types. A generic interface or generic delegate type can have both covariant and contravariant type parameters. Variance applies only to reference types; if you specify a value type for a variant type parameter, that type parameter is invariant for the resulting constructed type. Variance does not apply to delegate combination. That is, given two delegates of types Action<Derived> and Action<Base>, you cannot combine the second delegate with the first although the result would be type safe. Variance allows the second delegate to be assigned to a variable of type Action<Derived>, but delegates can combine only if their types match exactly. If you want to learn more about variance in C# (and .NET), you can always read: Covariance and Contravariance in Generics — MSDN Library Exact rules for variance validity — Eric Lippert Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Afterward: Effective Events — Chris Burrows Note: Because variance is a feature of .NET 4.0 and not only of C# 4.0, all this also applies to Visual Basic 10.

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• Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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