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  • Be the surgeon

    - by Rob Farley
    It’s a phrase I use often, especially when teaching, and I wish I had realised the concept years earlier. (And of course, fits with this month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic, hosted by Argenis Fernandez) When I’m sick enough to go to the doctor, I see a GP. I used to typically see the same guy, but he’s moved on now. However, when he has been able to roughly identify the area of the problem, I get referred to a specialist, sometimes a surgeon. Being a surgeon requires a refined set of skills. It’s why they often don’t like to be called “Doctor”, and prefer the traditional “Mister” (the history is that the doctor used to make the diagnosis, and then hand the patient over to the person who didn’t have a doctorate, but rather was an expert cutter, typically from a background in butchering). But if you ask the surgeon about the pain you have in your leg sometimes, you’ll get told to ask your GP. It’s not that your surgeon isn’t interested – they just don’t know the answer. IT is the same now. That wasn’t something that I really understood when I got out of university. I knew there was a lot to know about IT – I’d just done an honours degree in it. But I also knew that I’d done well in just about all my subjects, and felt like I had a handle on everything. I got into developing, and still felt that having a good level of understanding about every aspect of IT was a good thing. This got me through for the first six or seven years of my career. But then I started to realise that I couldn’t compete. I’d moved into management, and was spending my days running projects, rather than writing code. The kids were getting older. I’d had a bad back injury (ask anyone with chronic pain how it affects  your ability to concentrate, retain information, etc). But most of all, IT was getting larger. I knew kids without lives who knew more than I did. And I felt like I could easily identify people who were better than me in whatever area I could think of. Except writing queries (this was before I discovered technical communities, and people like Paul White and Dave Ballantyne). And so I figured I’d specialise. I wish I’d done it years earlier. Now, I can tell you plenty of people who are better than me at any area you can pick. But there are also more people who might consider listing me in some of their lists too. If I’d stayed the GP, I’d be stuck in management, and finding that there were better managers than me too. If you’re reading this, SQL could well be your thing. But it might not be either. Your thing might not even be in IT. Find out, and then see if you can be a world-beater at it. But it gets even better, because you can find other people to complement the things that you’re not so good at. My company, LobsterPot Solutions, has six people in it at the moment. I’ve hand-picked those six people, along with the one who quit. The great thing about it is that I’ve been able to pick people who don’t necessarily specialise in the same way as me. I don’t write their T-SQL for them – generally they’re good enough at that themselves. But I’m on-hand if needed. Consider Roger Noble, for example. He’s doing stuff in HTML5 and jQuery that I could never dream of doing to create an amazing HTML5 version of PivotViewer. Or Ashley Sewell, a guy who does project management far better than I do. I could go on. My team is brilliant, and I love them to bits. We’re all surgeons, and when we work together, I like to think we’re pretty good! @rob_farley

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  • Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    When Gartner Vice President and leading analyst Whit Andrews kicked off the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit on Monday, March 12 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL by bringing a shovel to the stage, eyebrows raised and a few thoughts went through my head. Either this guy plans to go help the construction workers outside construct that new pool at the Gaylord or he took a wrong turn and is at the wrong conference. Oh and how did he get that shovel through airport security? As Whit explained more his objective became more clear…take everything anyone has ever told you about portals and throw it out the window, as portals have evolved and times they are most certainly changing. The future Web is here, available not only on browsers but also via a broad spectrum of access points, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more and more mobile devices. Not merely prevalent, the future Web is also multimedia-driven and operates in real time, driven by mobility, social media, streaming video and other dynamic services. Applications and user experiences are in the midst of an evolution — from the early, simple mobile Web models to today’s Web 2.0 mobile apps and, ultimately, to a world of predominantly Web apps. Additionally, cloud services will forever change how portals and user experience are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. So what does this mean for you? Today’s organizations need software that will enable them to not just do their jobs, but to do it in a way that is familiar and easy for them.  What does this mean for IT? Use software and technology as an enabler, not as a roadblock. Overall, we had a great week in Orlando learning about how to improve the user experience, manage content explosion, launch social initiatives, transition to mobile environments and understand cloud and SaaS options.  We had some great conversations throughout the conference and at the Oracle booth. Lots of demonstrations were given of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Social Network. And as Christie mentioned earlier this week, our Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for WebCenter Loren Weinberg presented on the topic of customer engagement and talked about how organization’s relationships with their customers have fundamentally changed today and the resulting impact that has on their priorities.  Loren also talked about the importance of customer engagement, why that matters now more than ever, and what you can do to help your company or organization succeed in this new world. The question asked in every keynote and session was a simple one: What is your “ah-ha” moment? I personally had quite a few, some of which I’ve captured below. 70% of internal social initiatives eventually fail. By 2014, refusing to communicate with consumers via social media will be as harmful as ignoring emails/phone calls is today. Customer engagement = multi-channel + social & interactive + personal & relevant + optimized. If people choose to talk about your product/company/service, it's because it's remarkable. -- Seth Godin's keynote (one of the highlights of the conference!) The Web will become the primary method used for delivering content and applications to mobile devices. By 2015, 20% of smart phone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis.  86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. 6 P's of Quality User Experience. Product. Enabled by: People, Patterns, Process, Profit, Priorities. Did you attend the Gartner Summit? What were your ah-ha moments?

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  • On The Road with the HR Community

    - by Kathryn Perry
    A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle One of the best ways to connect with and to get a feel for what is on the minds of Human Resources leaders is to get out of the office and hit the road. I’ve had the great honor to attend and/or present at a number of events recently, including the massive SHRM Annual Conference, the HR Florida Conference, and Taleo World in Chicago. These events, and many others, offer solution providers, talent management professionals, business leaders, and even more casual observers of the Human Resources field with tremendous opportunities to connect, to share information, and to learn from each other. Attending the conferences also give people a sense of how they can improve and enhance their skills and knowledge, learn about the latest workforce technologies, and bring new and innovative ideas back to their organizations. And sure, the parties and conference swag can be pretty nice as well! If you attend a few of these industry events, one of the most beneficial by-products that you can emerge with -- whether you are on the front lines in HR at your organization, or as we are at Oracle, in the business of developing and delivering innovative and impactful technology solutions to our customers -- is to get a larger sense of the big ideas and major trends, concerns, and challenges facing organizations all across the landscape, and to be able to better understand how your strategies and solutions can be improved with this greater perspective. So what are HR folks discussing and debating? What questions and problems keep them up at night? What are the bloggers and large community of HR social media enthusiasts buzzing about? From my perspective some of the common themes you see over and again across the HR community break down (broadly), into three main areas: Talent attraction - How can we locate, attract, recruit, and hire the best talent possible? What new strategies, approaches, and technologies can help us in this critically important area? What role do external social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter play in the increasingly competitive search for talent? Talent Retention - How can we make sure to keep that talent on our team? What engagement, development, recognition, and compensation tools can help us in this regard? How can we continue, (or become), an employer of choice? What is our unique and compelling employer value proposition? Talent Empowerment - How can we put our employees in the best position to succeed? What can we do to better align our talent with the organization’s mission and goals, while simultaneously providing the best and most driven to succeed individuals a clear path to achieve their career goals and aspirations? How can new technologies, particularly social and collaboration tools help in this area? While these are the ‘big themes’ that I know I have seen this year, certainly they are not really new, nor are they likely to fundamentally change in the next year or two. I think the reason is that at the core of any successful enterprise is a collection of smart, interested, engaged, challenged, and empowered group of people. And that was likely the case 10 or 20 years ago, and will probably be the case 10 or 20 years into the future. But what has changed, and what you can see -- evidenced by simply following the Twitter backchannel for an event and by reading some of the many fantastic HR blogs out there -- is that the HR professional's ability, along with technology solution providers like Oracle, to connect, to more openly share information with each other, and to make each other better in the process, (and to create new, improved, and more innovative solutions), has never been greater. And I think it is with this heretofore unprecedented level of opportunity to connect with other members of the community that HR professionals will be better equipped to help their organizations attract, retain, and empower their teams. We at Oracle HCM look forward to continuing to meet, engage, and connect with the HR community in the coming months. Until then -- follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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  • Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service

    - by David Dorf
    When most people discuss mobile in retail, they immediately go to shopping applications.  While I agree the consumer side of mobile is huge, I believe its also important to arm store associates with mobile tools.  There are around a dozen major roll-outs of mobile POS to chain retailers, and all have been successful.  This does not, however, signal the demise of traditional registers.  Retailers will adopt mobile POS slowly and reduce the number of fixed registers over time, but there's likely to be a combination of both for the foreseeable future.  Even Apple retains at least one fixed register in every store, you just have to know where to look. The business benefits for mobile POS are pretty straightforward: 1. Faster checkout.  Walmart's CFO recently reported that for every second they shave off the average transaction time, they can potentially save $12M a year in labor.  I think its more likely that labor will be redeployed to enhance the customer experience. 2. Smarter associates.  The sales associates on the floor need the same access to information that consumers have, if not more.  They need ready access to product details, reviews, inventory, etc. to meet consumer expectations.  In a recent study, 40% of consumers said a savvy store associate can impact their final product selection more than a website. 3. Lower costs.  Mobile POS hardware (iPod touch + sled) costs about a fifth of fixed registers, not to mention the reclaimed space that can be used for product displays. But almost all Mobile POS solutions can claim those benefits equally.  Where there's differentiation is on the technical side.  Oracle recently announced availability of the Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service, and it has three big technology advantages in the market: 1. Portable. We used a popular open-source component called PhoneGap that abstracts the app from the underlying OS and hardware so that iOS, Android, and other platforms could be supported.  Further, we used Web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, which are commonly known by many programmers, as opposed to ObjectiveC which is more difficult to find.  The screen can adjust to different form-factors and sizes, just like you see with browsers.  In the future when a new, zippy device gets released, retailers will have the option to move to that device more easily than if they used a native app. 2. Flexible.  Our Mobile POS is free with the Oracle Retail Point-of-Service product.  Retailers can use any combination of fixed and mobile registers, and those ratios can change as required.  Perhaps start with 1 mobile and 4 fixed per store, then transition over time to 4 mobile and 1 fixed without any additional software licenses.  Our scalable solution supports lots of combinations. 3. Consistent.  Because our Mobile POS is fully integrated to our traditional POS, the same business logic is reused.  Third-party Mobile POS solutions often handle pricing, promotions, and tax calculations separately leading to possible inconsistencies within the store.  That won't happen with Oracle's solution. For many retailers, Mobile POS can lower costs, increase customer service, and generally enhance a consumer's in-store experience.  Apple led the way, but lots of other retailers are discovering the many benefits of adding mobile capabilities in their stores.  Just be sure to examine both the business and technology benefits so you get the most value from your solution for the longest period of time.

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  • The Evolution of Oracle Direct EMEA by John McGann

    - by user769227
    John is expanding his Dublin based team and is currently recruiting a Director with marketing and sales leadership experience: http://bit.ly/O8PyDF Should you wish to apply, please send your CV to [email protected] Hi, my name is John McGann and I am part of the Oracle Direct management team, based in Dublin.   Today I’m writing from the Oracle London City office, right in the heart of the financial district and up to very recently at the centre of a fantastic Olympic Games. The Olympics saw individuals and teams from across the globe competing to decide who is Citius, Altius, Fortius - “Faster, Higher, Stronger" There are lots of obvious parallels between the competitive world of the Olympics and the Business environments that many of us operate in, but there are also some interesting differences – especially in my area of responsibility within Oracle. We are of course constantly striving to be the best - the best solution on offer for our clients, bringing simplicity to their management, consumption and application of information technology, and the best provider when compared with our many niche competitors.   In Oracle and especially in Oracle Direct, a key aspect of how we achieve this is what sets us apart from the Olympians.  We have long ago eliminated geographic boundaries as a limitation to what we can achieve. We assemble the strongest individuals across multiple countries and bring them together in teams focussed on a single goal. One such team is the Oracle Direct Sales Programs team. In case you don’t know, Oracle Direct EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) is the inside sales division in Oracle and it is where I started my Oracle career.  I remember that my first role involved putting direct mail in envelopes.... things have moved on a bit since then – for me, for Oracle Direct and in how we interact with our customers. Today, the team of over 1000 people is located in the different Oracle Direct offices around Europe – the main ones are Malaga, Berlin, Prague and Dubai plus the headquarters in Dublin. We work in over 20 languages and are in constant contact with current and future Oracle customers, using the latest internet and telephone technologies to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other, our customers and prospects. One of my areas of responsibility within Oracle Direct is the Sales Programs team. This team of 25 people manages the planning and execution of demand generation, leading the process of finding new and incremental revenue within Oracle Direct. The Sales Programs Managers or ‘SPMs’ are embedded within each of the Oracle Direct sales teams, focussed on distinct geographies or product groups. The SPMs are virtual members of the regional sales management teams, and work closely with the sales and marketing teams to define and deliver demand generation activities. The customer contact elements of these activities are executed via the Oracle Direct Sales and Business Development/Lead Generation teams, to deliver the pipeline required to meet our revenue goals. Activities can range from pan-EMEA joint sales and marketing campaigns, to very localised niche campaigns. The campaigns might focus on particular segments of our existing customers, introducing elements of our evolving solution portfolio which customers may not be familiar with. The Sales Programs team also manages ‘Nurture’ activities to ensure that we develop potential business opportunities with contacts and organisations that do not have immediate requirements. Looking ahead, it is really important that we continue to evolve our ability to add value to our clients and reduce the physical limitations of our distance from them through the innovative application of technology. This enables us to enhance the customer buying experience and to enable the Inside Sales teams to manage ever more complex sales cycles from start to finish.  One of my expectations of my team is to actively drive innovation in how we leverage data to better understand our customers, and exploit emerging technologies to better communicate with them.   With the rate of innovation and acquisition within Oracle, we need to ensure that existing and potential customers are aware of all we have to offer that relates to their business goals.   We need to achieve this via a coherent communication and sales strategy to effectively target the right people using the most effective medium. This is another area where the Sales Programs team plays a key role.

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  • Are Chief Digital Officers the Result of CMO/CIO Refusal to Change?

    - by Mike Stiles
    Apparently CDO no longer just stands for “Collateralized Debt Obligations.”  It stands for Chief Digital Officer. And they’re the ones who are supposed to answer the bat signal CEO’s are throwing into the sky, swoop in and POW! drive the transition of the enterprise to integrated digital systems. So imagine being a CMO or a CIO at such an enterprise and realizing it’s been determined that you are not the answer that’s needed. In fact, IntelligentHQ author Ashley Friedlein points out the very rise of the CDO is an admission of C-Suite failure to become savvy enough, quickly enough in modern technology. Is that fair? Despite the repeated drumbeat that CMO’s and CIO’s must enter a new era of cooperation and collaboration to enact the social-enabled enterprise, the verdict seems to be that if it’s happening at all, it’s not happening fast enough. Therefore, someone else is needed with the authority to make things happen. So who is this relatively new beast? Gartner VP David Willis says, “The Chief Digital Officer plays in the place where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated, and the mission accomplished.” In other words, where the rubber meets the road. They aren’t just another “C” heading up a unit. They’re the CEO’s personal SWAT team, able to call the shots necessary across all units to affect what has become job one…customer experience. And what are the CMO’s and CIO’s doing while this is going on? Playing corporate games. Accenture reports 38% of CMOs say IT deliberately keeps them out of the loop, with 35% saying marketing’s needs aren’t a very high priority. 31% of CIOs say marketers don’t understand tech and regularly go around them for solutions. Fun! Meanwhile the CEO feels the need to bring in a parental figure to pull it all together. Gartner thinks 25% of all orgs will have a CDO by 2015 as CMO’s and particularly CIO’s (Peter Hinssen points out many CDO’s are coming “from anywhere but IT”) let the opportunity to be the agent of change their company needs slip away. Perhaps most interestingly, these CDO’s seem to be entering the picture already on the fast track. One consultancy counted 7 instances of a CDO moving into the CEO role, which, as this Wired article points out, is pretty astounding since nobody ever heard of the job a few years ago. And vendors are quickly figuring out that this is the person they need to be talking to inside the brand. The position isn’t without its critics. Forrester’s Martin Gill says the reaction from executives at some traditional companies to someone being brought in to be in charge of digital might be to wash their own hands of responsibility for all things digital – a risky maneuver given the pervasiveness of digital in business. They might not even be called Chief Digital Officers. They might be the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Experience Officer, etc. You can call them Twinkletoes if you want to, but essentially anyone who has the mandate direct from the CEO to enact modern technology changes not currently being championed by the CMO or CIO can be regarded as “boss.” @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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  • Why are you doing this? [closed]

    - by NIcholas Lawson
    I am working on a story that I am going to be querying to several magazines in my hometown about this work that is being done by the AXR group. This is a group of people who have networked online and are working on developing a higher level syntax structure than CSS and HTML currently offer. I am covering this is as a story because I see potential in this as a human interest story in cosmopolitan society. I have been asked by the group to pose this question to you and would appreciate any and all comments you would have on the following ... To AXR: So when does the internet become finished? At what point does a computer scientist say to himself ... my job here is finished ... the internet is complete? When is the internet ready to be more about the display of content than the uploading of new websites or computer tech? You are embarking on upon a sixty year project every day you work with this internet, what drives you? Why are you spending your hard earned hours working on the code to this computer? I spend thirty hours a week online because I love the writing and I know what would make the internet better ... ease of use ... i know it is difficult to program but I see some very elegant solutions online ... in this early inception phase of your programming development for this HSS prototype ... I would like to know why I do not see you programmers asking questions such as ... What would make the end user's life the easiest when using this code? I know you can solve the problem but an evolution forward would be simple, not simple to a computer scientist but simple to use for a career janitor ... if you could solve the problem of alleviating the stress at using a the computer you could get better content out of the computer ... right now the main problem is that the best content is in the hands of the people least likely to use the computer and the more simple you make the computer to use ... the better the content collection will be in the long run ... That is not what I want to talk about though ... why are you writing code when you could be writing stories? I know the computer is worthless without content so I build content, I know the book is worthless without the combinations of words in them, i know the television is worthless without the television news anchor or the actor, what I want to know from you folks in a very journalistic sense is why are you even bothering to bother to write code for a machine that has only made our lives i would dare say less interesting. why are you feeding the beast your time when you could be writing stories or being an actor or musician or auto mechanic ... why code? why this machine? what do you love about it? what do you hate about it? what do you wonder about it? I want to know so that starting out I know how to further shape my questions with axr ... i want the full story ... i want the real answers ... and i want to know why you are doing this, it would make for great writing if you could elucidate on this point.

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  • Crime Scene Investigation: SQL Server

    - by Rodney Landrum
    “The packages are running slower in Prod than they are in Dev” My week began with this simple declaration from one of our lead BI developers, quickly followed by an emailed spreadsheet demonstrating that, over 5 executions, an extensive ETL process was running average 630 seconds faster on Dev than on Prod. The situation needed some scientific investigation to determine why the same code, the same data, the same schema would yield consistently slower results on a more powerful server. Prod had yet to be officially christened with a “Go Live” date so I had the time, and having recently been binge watching CSI: New York, I also had the inclination. An inspection of the two systems, Prod and Dev, revealed the first surprise: although Prod was indeed a “bigger” system, with double the amount of RAM of Dev, the latter actually had twice as many processor cores. On neither system did I see much sign of resources being heavily taxed, while the ETL process was running. Without any real supporting evidence, I jumped to a conclusion that my years of performance tuning should have helped me avoid, and that was that the hardware differences explained the better performance on Dev. We spent time setting up a Test system, similarly scoped to Prod except with 4 times the cores, and ported everything across. The results of our careful benchmarks left us truly bemused; the ETL process on the new server was slower than on both other systems. We burned more time tweaking server configurations, monitoring IO and network latency, several times believing we’d uncovered the smoking gun, until the results of subsequent test runs pitched us back into confusion. Finally, I decided, enough was enough. Hadn’t I learned very early in my DBA career that almost all bottlenecks were caused by code and database design, not hardware? It was time to get back to basics. With over 100 SSIS packages and hundreds of queries, each handling specific tasks such as file loads, bulk inserts, transforms, logging, and so on, the task seemed formidable. And yet, after barely an hour spent with Profiler, Extended Events, and wait statistics DMVs, I had a lead in the shape of a query that joined three tables, containing millions of rows, returned 3279 results, but performed 239K logical reads. As soon as I looked at the execution plans for the query in Dev and Test I saw the culprit, an implicit conversion warning on a join predicate field that was numeric in one table and a varchar(50) in another! I turned this information over to the BI developers who quickly resolved the data type mismatches and found and fixed “several” others as well. After the schema changes the same query with the same databases ran in under 1 second on all systems and reduced the logical reads down to fewer than 300. The analysis also revealed that on Dev, the ETL task was pulling data across a LAN, whereas Prod and Test were connected across slower WAN, in large part explaining why the same process ran slower on the latter two systems. Loading the data locally on Prod delivered a further 20% gain in performance. As we progress through our DBA careers we learn valuable lessons. Sometimes, with a project deadline looming and pressure mounting, we choose to forget them. I was close to giving into the temptation to throw more hardware at the problem. I’m pleased at least that I resisted, though I still kick myself for not looking at the code on day one. It can seem a daunting prospect to return to the fundamentals of the code so close to roll out, but with the right tools, and surprisingly little time, you can collect the evidence that reveals the true problem. It is a lesson I trust I will remember for my next 20 years as a DBA, if I’m ever again tempted to bypass the evidence.

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  • Projet Doneness and Einstein's Razor

    - by Malcolm Anderson
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I’ve started working on a series of articles about the value of having testers involved in requirements gathering.  Today I was reminded of a useful tool that has provided value to me for at least 20 years.  To those of you who already use this tool, I’m interested in your stories where it has made a difference for you, and to those of you who have never heard of it, I hope sharing it will make a difference in your careers.   I was reminded of it because I just finished a 3 month set of personal projects and was reviewing the success of those projects while putting together my next set of 3 month projects.  During this review, I noticed that a good number of my projects did not have the level of success that I wanted.  The results were good, but they could have been better.  Then it hit me, I didn’t have clear enough doneness criteria.  As a Scrum Practitioner, I wouldn’t think of running a sprint without reviewing the backlog with Einstein's Razor, so why wouldn’t I do the same for my own projects?    I can hear a few of you asking "What's Einstein's Razor?"   I'm glad you asked.  I was once told that Einstein told an audience, "If you can't explain what you do to a relatively bright six year old, you probably don't understand it yourself."    This quote had an impact on me, especially early in my career as a solo developer.  At the time, I was mostly doing end to end software development.  I found that I saved myself a lot of pain and trouble by turning that quote around to “If you can't explain your project's doneness criteria in such a way that a relatively bright six year old can't competently determine your projects success or failure, then you have not broken it down to a fine enough level.”  There are more negatives in that quote than I’m happy with, but it still gives me tons of value to this day.     In your opinion, in your current projects, could a 6 year old competently pass or fail your next sprint?  What risks are you running if your answer is “No” ?

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  • PASS Summit 2013 Review

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.  Many of the new folks that I met at the Summit this year, upon hearing that I was from Seattle, commented that I must have been disappointed to have to travel to the Summit this year after 5 years in a row in Seattle.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  I cheered loudly when I first heard that the 2013 Summit would be outside Seattle.  I have many fond memories of trips to Orlando, Florida and Grapevine, Texas for past Summits (missed out on Denver, unfortunately).  And there is a funny dynamic that takes place when the conference is local.  If you do as I have done the last several years and saved my company money by not getting a hotel, but rather just commuting from home, then both family and coworkers tend to act like you’re just on a normal schedule.  For example, I have a young family, and my wife and kids really wanted to still see me come home “after work”, but there are a whole lot of after-hours activities, social events, and great food to be enjoyed at the Summit each year.  Even more so if you really capitalize on the opportunities to meet face-to-face with people you either met at previous summits or have spoken to or heard of, from Twitter, blogs, and forums.  Then there is also the lovely commuting in Seattle traffic from neighboring cities rather than the convenience of just walking across the street from your hotel.  So I’m just saying, there are really nice aspects of having the conference 2500 miles away. Beyond that, the training was fantastic as usual.  The SQL Server community has many outstanding presenters and experts with deep knowledge of the tools who are extremely willing to share all of that with anyone who wants to listen.  The opening video with PASS President Bill Graziano in a NASCAR race turned dream sequence was very well done, and the keynotes, as usual, were great.  This year I was particularly impressed with how well attended were the Professional Development sessions.  Not too many years ago, those were very sparsely attended, but this year, the two that I attended were standing-room only, and these were not tiny rooms.  I would say this is a testament to both the maturity of the attendees realizing how important these topics are to career success, as well as to the ever-increasing skills of the presenters and the program committee for selecting speakers and topics that resonated with people.  If, as is usually the case, you were not able to get to every session that you wanted to because there were just too darn many good ones, I encourage you to get the recordings. Overall, it was a great time as these events always are.  It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones, and the people of Charlotte did an awesome job hosting the event and letting their hospitality shine (extra kudos to SQLSentry for all they did with the shuttle, maps, and other event sponsorships).  We’re back in Seattle next year (it is a release year, after all) but I would say that with the success of this year’s event, I strongly encourage the Board and PASS HQ to firmly reestablish the location rotation schedule.  I’ll even go so far as to suggest standardizing on an alternating Seattle – Charlotte schedule, or something like that. If you missed the Summit this year, start saving now, and register early, so you can join us!

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  • A developer&rsquo;s WBS &ndash; 3 factors of 5

    - by johndoucette
    As a development manager, I have requested work breakdown structures (WBS) many times from the dev leads. Everyone has their own approach and why it takes sometimes days to get this simple list is often frustrating. Here is a simple way to get that elusive WBS done in 30 minutes and have 125 items in your list – well, 126. The WBS is made up of parent-child entities representing the overall outcome of the project. At the bottom of the hierarchical list should be the task item that a developer would perform in support of the branch in the list or WBS. Because I work with different dev leads on every project, I always ask the “what time value would you like to see at the lowest task in order to assign it to a developer and ensure it gets done within the timeframe”. I am particular to a task being 8 hours. Some like 8 to 24 hours. Stay away from tasks defaulting to 1 week. The task becomes way to vague and hard to manage completeness, especially on short budgets. As a developer, your focus is identifying the tasks you to accomplish in order to deliver the product. As a project manager, you will take the developer's WBS and add all the “other stuff” like quality testing, meetings, documentation, transition to maintenance, etc… Start your exercise with the name of the product you are delivering as a result of the project. You should be able to represent what you are building and deploying with one to three words. Example; XYZ Public Website Middleware BizTalk Application The reason you start with that single identifier is to always see the list as the product. It helps during each of the next three passes. Now, choose 5 tasks which in their entirety represent the product you will be delivering and add them to list under the product name you created earlier; Public Website     Security     Sites     Infrastructure     Publishing     Creative Continue this concept of seeing the list as the complete picture and decompose it one more level. You should have 25 items. Public Website     Security         Authentication         Login Control         Administration         DRM         Workflow     Sites         Masterpages         Page Layouts         Web Parts (RIA, Multimedia)         Content Types         Structures     Infrastructure         ...     Publishing         ...     Creative         ... And one more time for a total of 125 items. The top item makes the list 126. Public Website     Security         Authentication             Install (AD/ADAM/LDAP/SQL)             Configuration             Management             Web App Configuration             Implement Provider         Login Control             Login Form             Login/Logoff             pw change             pw recover/forgot             email verification         Administration             ...         DRM             ...         Workflow             ...     Sites         Masterpages         Page Layouts         Web Parts (RIA, Multimedia)         Content Types         Structures     Infrastructure         ...     Publishing         ...     Creative         ... The next step is to make sure the task at the bottom of every branch represents the “time value” you planned for the project. You can add more to the WBS and of course if you can’t find 5 items, 4 is fine. If a task can be done in a fraction of the time value you determined for the project, try to roll it up into a larger task. In the task actions (later when the iteration is being planned), decompose the details back to the simple tasks. Now, go estimate!

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  • Q&A: Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    We had a great webcast yesterday and wanted to recap the questions that were asked throughout. Can ECM distribute contents to 3rd party sites?ECM, which is now called WebCenter Content can distribute content to 3rd party sites via several means as well as SSXA - Site Studio for External Applications. Will you be able to provide more information on these means and SSXA?If you have an existing JSP application, you can add the SSXA libraries to your IDE where your application was built (JDeveloper for example).  You can now drop some code into your 3rd party site/application that can both create and pull dynamically contributable content out of the Content Server for inclusion in your pages.   If the 3rd party site is not a JSP application, there is also the option of leveraging two Site Studio (not SSXA) specific custom WebCenter Content services to pull Site Studio XML content into a page. More information on SSXA can be found here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17904_01/doc.1111/e13650/toc.htm Is there another way than a ”gadget” to integrate applications (like loan simulator) in WebCenter Sites?There are some other ways such as leveraging the Pagelet Producer, which is a core component of WebCenter Portal. Oracle WebCenter Portal's Pagelet Producer (previously known as Oracle WebCenter Ensemble) provides a collection of useful tools and features that facilitate dynamic pagelet development. A pagelet is a reusable user interface component. Any HTML fragment can be a pagelet, but pagelet developers can also write pagelets that are parameterized and configurable, to dynamically interact with other pagelets, and respond to user input. Pagelets are similar to portlets, but while portlets were designed specifically for portals, pagelets can be run on any web page, including within a portal or other web application. Pagelets can be used to expose platform-specific portlets in other web environments. More on Page Producer can be found here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/webcenter.1111/e10148/jpsdg_pagelet.htm#CHDIAEHG Can you describe the mechanism available to achieve the context transfer of content?The primary goal of context transfer is to provide a uniform experience to customers as they transition from one channel to another, for instance in the use-case discussed in the webcast, it was around a customer moving from the .com marketing website to the self-service site where the customer wants to manage his account information. However if WebCenter Sites was able to identify and segment the customers  to a specific category where the customer is a potential target for some promotions, the same promotions should be targeted to the customer when he is in the self-service site, which is managed by WebCenter Portal. The context transfer can be achieved by calling out the WebCenter Sites Engage Server API’s, which will identify the segment that the customer has been bucketed into. Again through REST API’s., WebCenter Portal can then request WebCenter Sites for specific content that needs to be targeted for a customer for the identified segment. While this integration can be achieved through custom integration today, Oracle is looking into productizing this integration in future releases.  How can context be transferred from WebCenter Sites (marketing site) to WebCenter Portal (Online services)?WebCenter Portal Personalization server can call into WebCenter Sites Engage Server to identify the segment for the user and then through REST API’s request specific content that needs to be surfaced in the Portal. Still have questions? Leave them in the comments section! And you can catch a replay of the webcast here.

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  • Q&A: Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    We had a great webcast yesterday and wanted to recap the questions that were asked throughout. Can ECM distribute contents to 3rd party sites?ECM, which is now called WebCenter Content can distribute content to 3rd party sites via several means as well as SSXA - Site Studio for External Applications. Will you be able to provide more information on these means and SSXA?If you have an existing JSP application, you can add the SSXA libraries to your IDE where your application was built (JDeveloper for example).  You can now drop some code into your 3rd party site/application that can both create and pull dynamically contributable content out of the Content Server for inclusion in your pages.   If the 3rd party site is not a JSP application, there is also the option of leveraging two Site Studio (not SSXA) specific custom WebCenter Content services to pull Site Studio XML content into a page. More information on SSXA can be found here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17904_01/doc.1111/e13650/toc.htm Is there another way than a ”gadget” to integrate applications (like loan simulator) in WebCenter Sites?There are some other ways such as leveraging the Pagelet Producer, which is a core component of WebCenter Portal. Oracle WebCenter Portal's Pagelet Producer (previously known as Oracle WebCenter Ensemble) provides a collection of useful tools and features that facilitate dynamic pagelet development. A pagelet is a reusable user interface component. Any HTML fragment can be a pagelet, but pagelet developers can also write pagelets that are parameterized and configurable, to dynamically interact with other pagelets, and respond to user input. Pagelets are similar to portlets, but while portlets were designed specifically for portals, pagelets can be run on any web page, including within a portal or other web application. Pagelets can be used to expose platform-specific portlets in other web environments. More on Page Producer can be found here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/webcenter.1111/e10148/jpsdg_pagelet.htm#CHDIAEHG Can you describe the mechanism available to achieve the context transfer of content?The primary goal of context transfer is to provide a uniform experience to customers as they transition from one channel to another, for instance in the use-case discussed in the webcast, it was around a customer moving from the .com marketing website to the self-service site where the customer wants to manage his account information. However if WebCenter Sites was able to identify and segment the customers  to a specific category where the customer is a potential target for some promotions, the same promotions should be targeted to the customer when he is in the self-service site, which is managed by WebCenter Portal. The context transfer can be achieved by calling out the WebCenter Sites Engage Server API’s, which will identify the segment that the customer has been bucketed into. Again through REST API’s., WebCenter Portal can then request WebCenter Sites for specific content that needs to be targeted for a customer for the identified segment. While this integration can be achieved through custom integration today, Oracle is looking into productizing this integration in future releases.  How can context be transferred from WebCenter Sites (marketing site) to WebCenter Portal (Online services)?WebCenter Portal Personalization server can call into WebCenter Sites Engage Server to identify the segment for the user and then through REST API’s request specific content that needs to be surfaced in the Portal. Still have questions? Leave them in the comments section! And you can catch a replay of the webcast here.

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  • Numbers not adding up? (What am I not understanding here?) [closed]

    - by Milo
    I have the following output: Short version: The last numbers on the S= lines increase by H and SHOULD theoretically be linearly decreasing, ex: -285,-290,-295...but the fourth one jumps to -252. Yet, every other number is linearly increasing. Why is that and how could I fix that? To explain the numbers, it comes from slider value changed. I have a slider whose value is used to generate the float on the next line. Everything should be growing linearly here. This value is used to determine the size of a flow layout and it is also used in conjunction with a scrollbar. But basically I have a background for the flow layout and that number is the start location for rendering it. The numbers should linearly change to create a smooth transition but when that one jumps, it looks weird on screen and I dont understand why the numbers are jumping every X slider value changes. Mathematically what could be causing this? Here is the code for rendering the background and the function that is called when value changes: void LobbyTableManager::renderBG( GraphicsContext* g, agui::Rectangle& absRect, agui::Rectangle& childRect ) { float scale = 0.35f; int w = m_bgSprite->getWidth() * getTableScale() * scale; int h = m_bgSprite->getHeight() * getTableScale() * scale; int numX = ceil(absRect.getWidth() / (float)w) + 2; int numY = ceil(absRect.getHeight() / (float)h) + 2; int startY = childRect.getY(); int numAttempts = 0; while(startY + h < absRect.getY() && numAttempts < 1000) { startY += h; if(moo) { std::cout << startY << ","; } numAttempts++; } g->holdDrawing(); for(int i = 0; i < numX; ++i) { for(int j = 0; j < numY; ++j) { g->drawScaledSprite(m_bgSprite,0,0,m_bgSprite->getWidth(),m_bgSprite->getHeight(), absRect.getX() + (i * w) + (offsetX),absRect.getY() + (j * h) + startY,w,h,0); } } g->unholdDrawing(); g->setClippingRect(cx,cy,cw,ch); } void LobbyTableManager::setTableScale( float scale ) { scale += 0.3f; scale *= 2.0f; float scrollRel = m_vScroll->getRelativeValue(); setScale(scale); rescaleTables(); resizeFlow(); updateScrollBars(); float newVal = scrollRel * m_vScroll->getMaxValue(); m_vScroll->setValue(newVal); } void LobbyTableManager::valueChanged( agui::VScrollBar* source,int val ) { m_flow->setLocation(0,-val); } Any insight on mathematically why the anomaly might happen every Nth time would be helpful. I just dont understand why if every number linearly increates it jumps from -295 to -252! Thanks

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  • Capgemini Global Business Process Management Report

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

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  • TechEd 2010 Important Events

    If youll be attending TechEd in New Orleans in a couple of weeks, make sure the following are all on your calendar:   Party with Palermo TechEd 2010 Edition Sunday 6 June 2010 7:30-930pm Central Time RSVP and see who else is coming here.  The party takes place from 730pm to 930pm Central (Local) Time,  and includes a full meal, free swag, and prizes.  The event is being held at Jimmy Buffetts Margaritaville located at 1104 Decatur Street.   Developer Practices Session: DPR304 FAIL: Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices Monday 7 June 2010 4:30pm-545pm Central Time Room 276 Come to my session and hear about what NOT to do on your software project.  Hear my own and others war stories and lessons learned.  Youll laugh, youll cry, youll realize youre a much better developer than a lot of folks out there.  Heres the official description: Everybody likes to talk about best practices, tips, and tricks, but often it is by analyzing failures that we learn from our own and others' mistakes. In this session, Steve describes various anti-patterns and worst practices in software development that he has encountered in his own experience or learned about from other experts in the field, along with advice on recognizing and avoiding them. View DPR304 in TechEd Session Catalog >> Exhibition Hall Reception Monday 7 June 2010 545pm-9pm Immediately following my session, come meet the shows exhibitors, win prizes, and enjoy plenty of food and drink.  Always a good time.   Party: Geekfest Tuesday 8 June 8pm-11pm Central Time, Pat OBriens Lets face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career but its not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet. You need to have fun. Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist) We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat OBriens for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk. You must have wristband to get in. Tuesday, June 8th from 8pm 11pm Pat OBriens New Orleans 624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130 Closing Party at Mardi Gras World Thursday 10 June 730pm-10pm Central Time Join us for the Closing Party and enjoy great food, beverages, and the excitement of New Orleans at Mardi Gras World. The colors, the lights, the music, the joie de vivreits all here.  Learn more >> 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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  • Is this Hybrid of Interface / Composition kosher?

    - by paul
    I'm working on a project in which I'm considering using a hybrid of interfaces and composition as a single thing. What I mean by this is having a contain*ee* class be used as a front for functionality implemented in a contain*er* class, where the container exposes the containee as a public property. Example (pseudocode): class Visibility(lambda doShow, lambda doHide, lambda isVisible) public method Show() {...} public method Hide() {...} public property IsVisible public event Shown public event Hidden class SomeClassWithVisibility private member visibility = new Visibility(doShow, doHide, isVisible) public property Visibility with get() = visibility private method doShow() {...} private method doHide() {...} private method isVisible() {...} There are three reasons I'm considering this: The language in which I'm working (F#) has some annoyances w.r.t. implementing interfaces the way I need to (unless I'm missing something) and this will help avoid a lot of boilerplate code. The containee classes could really be considered properties of the container class(es); i.e. there seems to be a fairly strong has-a relationship. The containee classes will likely implement code which would have been pretty much the same when implemented in all the container classes, so why not do it once in one place? In the above example, this would include managing and emitting the Shown/Hidden events. Does anyone see any isseus with this Composiface/Intersition method, or know of a better way? EDIT 2012.07.26 - It seems a little background information is warranted: Where I work, we have a bunch of application front-ends that have limited access to system resources -- they need access to these resources to fully function. To remedy this we have a back-end application that can access the needed resources, with which the front-ends can communicate. (There is an API written for the front-ends for accessing back-end functionality as though it were part of the front-end.) The back-end program is out of date and its functionality is incomplete. It has made the transition from company to company a couple of times and we can't even compile it anymore. So I'm trying to rewrite it in my spare time. I'm trying to update things to make a nice(r) interface/API for the front-ends (while allowing for backwards compatibility with older front-ends), hopefully something full of OOPy goodness. The thing is, I don't want to write the front-end API after I've written pretty much the same code in F# for implementing the back-end; so, what I'm planning on doing is applying attributes to classes/methods/properties that I would like to have code for in the API then generate this code from the F# assembly using reflection. The method outlined in this question is a possible alternative I'm considering instead of implementing straight interfaces on the classes in F# because they're kind of a bear: In order to access something of an interface that has been implemented in a class, you have to explicitly cast an instance of that class to the interface type. This would make things painful when getting calls from the front-ends. If you don't want to have to do this, you have to call out all of the interface's methods/properties again in the class, outside of the interface implementation (which is separate from regular class members), and call the implementation's members. This is basically repeating the same code, which is what I'm trying to avoid!

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  • Life at Oracle Russia: Stanislav, Tech Sales Manager

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oracle is a place that brings together talented people from various countries and with a diversity of backgrounds. We often invite our employees to speak about their life at Oracle as we think It is important to share an insight into what working for our company looks like. This time we asked Stanislav to speak about his experience at Oracle. He is Technology Sales Manager at Oracle Russia. He joined the company in July 2011 as a Sales Representative for the Financial sector and had previously worked for another American IT company. He was promoted to a Management position in 2013. “I have been in this Industry for 15 years and I am now Technology Sales Manager, covering Database, BI and Fusion Middleware products. What I’ve learned in my role is that respect is one of the most important values a good professional should have. By respecting and embracing everyone’s opinions, we create a very good work environment that encourages innovation and change. It eventually leads to a stronger team where people listen to each other and value each other’s opinion. On the other hand, It is mandatory to have good knowledge about the area you work in and to continously seek to improve your expertise. Last but not least, working as a team is a top priority and It is something that I’ve learned at Oracle. There’s little you can achieve by yourself comparing to what you can do when you’re part of a team.” Stanislav shared the top three words that best describe his team and those were: professional, dynamic and smart. “The team I manage is a very professional, dynamic and smart one. I am really proud to work with such talented people! They are an asset to the Oracle business because they are the very best in the IT industry worldwide!” When asked why he would apply at Oracle if he was looking for a job, Stanislav responded “I would say because Oracle is a legend of the IT industry. It is a very dynamic company where you can fulfill your potential and gain extremely valuable knowledge. No doubt this is the number 1 IT company!” We invite you to explore our career opportunities on oracle.com/careers and to discover more stories about the life at Oracle on our blog. You can get the latest updates about careers within Oracle by following Oracle LinkedIn, CareersatOracle Facebook or joinOracleEMEA Twitter. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • TechEd 2010 Important Events

    If youll be attending TechEd in New Orleans in a couple of weeks, make sure the following are all on your calendar:   Party with Palermo TechEd 2010 Edition Sunday 6 June 2010 7:30-930pm Central Time RSVP and see who else is coming here.  The party takes place from 730pm to 930pm Central (Local) Time,  and includes a full meal, free swag, and prizes.  The event is being held at Jimmy Buffetts Margaritaville located at 1104 Decatur Street.   Developer Practices Session: DPR304 FAIL: Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices Monday 7 June 2010 4:30pm-545pm Central Time Room 276 Come to my session and hear about what NOT to do on your software project.  Hear my own and others war stories and lessons learned.  Youll laugh, youll cry, youll realize youre a much better developer than a lot of folks out there.  Heres the official description: Everybody likes to talk about best practices, tips, and tricks, but often it is by analyzing failures that we learn from our own and others' mistakes. In this session, Steve describes various anti-patterns and worst practices in software development that he has encountered in his own experience or learned about from other experts in the field, along with advice on recognizing and avoiding them. View DPR304 in TechEd Session Catalog >> Exhibition Hall Reception Monday 7 June 2010 545pm-9pm Immediately following my session, come meet the shows exhibitors, win prizes, and enjoy plenty of food and drink.  Always a good time.   Party: Geekfest Tuesday 8 June 8pm-11pm Central Time, Pat OBriens Lets face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career but its not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet. You need to have fun. Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist) We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat OBriens for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk. You must have wristband to get in. Tuesday, June 8th from 8pm 11pm Pat OBriens New Orleans 624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130 Closing Party at Mardi Gras World Thursday 10 June 730pm-10pm Central Time Join us for the Closing Party and enjoy great food, beverages, and the excitement of New Orleans at Mardi Gras World. The colors, the lights, the music, the joie de vivreits all here.  Learn more >> 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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  • Getting Started with Cloud Computing

    - by juanlarios
    You’ve likely heard about how Office 365 and Windows Intune are great applications to get you started with Cloud Computing. Many of you emailed me asking for more info on what Cloud Computing is, including the distinction between "Public Cloud" and "Private Cloud". I want to address these questions and help you get started. Let's begin with a brief set of definitions and some places to find more info; however, an excellent place where you can always learn more about Cloud Computing is the Microsoft Virtual Academy. Public Cloud computing means that the infrastructure to run and manage the applications users are taking advantage of is run by someone else and not you. In other words, you do not buy the hardware or software to run your email or other services being used in your organization – that is done by someone else. Users simply connect to these services from their computers and you pay a monthly subscription fee for each user that is taking advantage of the service. Examples of Public Cloud services include Office 365, Windows Intune, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Hotmail, and others. Private Cloud computing generally means that the hardware and software to run services used by your organization is run on your premises, with the ability for business groups to self-provision the services they need based on rules established by the IT department. Generally, Private Cloud implementations today are found in larger organizations but they are also viable for small and medium-sized businesses since they generally allow an automation of services and reduction in IT workloads when properly implemented. Having the right management tools, like System Center 2012, to implement and operate Private Cloud is important in order to be successful. So – how do you get started? The first step is to determine what makes the most sense to your organization. The nice thing is that you do not need to pick Public or Private Cloud – you can use elements of both where it makes sense for your business – the choice is yours. When you are ready to try and purchase Public Cloud technologies, the Microsoft Volume Licensing web site is a good place to find links to each of the online services. In particular, if you are interested in a trial for each service, you can visit the following pages: Office 365, CRM Online, Windows Intune, and Windows Azure. For Private Cloud technologies, start with some of the courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy and then download and install the Microsoft Private Cloud technologies including Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 in your own environment and take it for a spin. Also, keep up to date with the Canadian IT Pro blog to learn about events Microsoft is delivering such as the IT Virtualization Boot Camps and more to get you started with these technologies hands on. Finally, I want to ask for your help to allow the team at Microsoft to continue to provide you what you need. Twice a year through something we call "The Global Relationship Study" – they reach out and contact you to see how they're doing and what Microsoft could do better. If you get an email from "Microsoft Feedback" with the subject line "Help Microsoft Focus on Customers and Partners" between March 5th and April 13th, please take a little time to tell them what you think. Cloud Computing Resources: Microsoft Server and Cloud Computing site – information on Microsoft's overall cloud strategy and products. Microsoft Virtual Academy – for free online training to help improve your IT skillset. Office 365 Trial/Info page – get more information or try it out for yourself. Office 365 Videos – see how businesses like yours have used Office 365 to transition to the cloud. Windows Intune Trial/Info – get more information or try it out for yourself. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online page – information on trying and licensing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Additional Resources You May Find Useful: Springboard Series Your destination for technical resources, free tools and expert guidance to ease the deployment and management of your Windows-based client infrastructure. TechNet Evaluation Center Try some of our latest Microsoft products for free, Like System Center 2012 Pre-Release Products, and evaluate them before you buy. AlignIT Manager Tech Talk Series A monthly streamed video series with a range of topics for both infrastructure and development managers. Ask questions and participate real-time or watch the on-demand recording. Tech·Days Online Discover what's next in technology and innovation with Tech·Days session recordings, hands-on labs and Tech·Days TV.

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  • What's new in Servlet 3.1 ? - Java EE 7 moving forward

    - by arungupta
    Servlet 3.0 was released as part of Java EE 6 and made huge changes focused at ease-of-use. The idea was to leverage the latest language features such as annotations and generics and modernize how Servlets can be written. The web.xml was made as optional as possible. Servet 3.1 (JSR 340), scheduled to be part of Java EE 7, is an incremental release focusing on couple of key features and some clarifications in the specification. The main features of Servlet 3.1 are explained below: Non-blocking I/O - Servlet 3.0 allowed asynchronous request processing but only traditional I/O was permitted. This can restrict scalability of your applications. Non-blocking I/O allow to build scalable applications. TOTD #188 provide more details about how non-blocking I/O can be done using Servlet 3.1. HTTP protocol upgrade mechanism - Section 14.42 in the HTTP 1.1 specification (RFC 2616) defines an upgrade mechanism that allows to transition from HTTP 1.1 to some other, incompatible protocol. The capabilities and nature of the application-layer communication after the protocol change is entirely dependent upon the new protocol chosen. After an upgrade is negotiated between the client and the server, the subsequent requests use the new chosen protocol for message exchanges. A typical example is how WebSocket protocol is upgraded from HTTP as described in Opening Handshake section of RFC 6455. The decision to upgrade is made in Servlet.service method. This is achieved by adding a new method: HttpServletRequest.upgrade and two new interfaces: javax.servlet.http.HttpUpgradeHandler and javax.servlet.http.WebConnection. TyrusHttpUpgradeHandler shows how WebSocket protocol upgrade is done in Tyrus (Reference Implementation for Java API for WebSocket). Security enhancements Applying run-as security roles to #init and #destroy methods Session fixation attack by adding HttpServletRequest.changeSessionId and a new interface HttpSessionIdListener. You can listen for any session id changes using these methods. Default security semantic for non-specified HTTP method in <security-constraint> Clarifying the semantics if a parameter is specified in the URI and payload Miscellaneous ServletResponse.reset clears any data that exists in the buffer as well as the status code, headers. In addition, Servlet 3.1 will also clears the state of calling getServletOutputStream or getWriter. ServletResponse.setCharacterEncoding: Sets the character encoding (MIME charset) of the response being sent to the client, for example, to UTF-8. Relative protocol URL can be specified in HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect. This will allow a URL to be specified without a scheme. That means instead of specifying "http://anotherhost.com/foo/bar.jsp" as a redirect address, "//anotherhost.com/foo/bar.jsp" can be specified. In this case the scheme of the corresponding request will be used. Clarification in HttpServletRequest.getPart and .getParts without multipart configuration. Clarification that ServletContainerInitializer is independent of metadata-complete and is instantiated per web application. A complete replay of What's New in Servlet 3.1: An Overview from JavaOne 2012 can be seen here (click on CON6793_mp4_6793_001 in Media). Each feature will be added to the JSR subject to EG approval. You can share your feedback to [email protected]. Here are some more references for you: Servlet 3.1 Public Review Candidate Downloads Servlet 3.1 PR Candidate Spec Servlet 3.1 PR Candidate Javadocs Servlet Specification Project JSR Expert Group Discussion Archive Java EE 7 Specification Status Several features have already been integrated in GlassFish 4 Promoted Builds. Have you tried any of them ? Here are some other Java EE 7 primers published so far: Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236) Collaborative Whiteboard using WebSocket in GlassFish 4 (TOTD #189) Non-blocking I/O using Servlet 3.1 (TOTD #188) What's New in EJB 3.2 ? JPA 2.1 Schema Generation (TOTD #187) WebSocket Applications using Java (JSR 356) Jersey 2 in GlassFish 4 (TOTD #182) WebSocket and Java EE 7 (TOTD #181) Java API for JSON Processing (JSR 353) JMS 2.0 Early Draft (JSR 343) And of course, more on their way! Do you want to see any particular one first ?

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  • 12.10 unable to install or even run from Live CD with nVidia GTX 580

    - by user99056
    I've used Ubuntu in the past (set up as web server, etc over in Iraq), so I'm not a 100% Linux Noob, however, I'm running into a brick wall here. I've got a machine I built when I got back to the US earlier this year, running Windows 7 Ultimate on it, and I've now got some free time and would like to transition over to Ubuntu full time. I've searched around in the forums, and there seems to be an issue with the nVidia graphics cards, so I've tried going to the EVGA site to see if I could find a new BIOS update for it and had no luck, so I'm back searching the forums here again and decided to just go ahead and post my question. My apologies if this is covered in another post and I was just unable to find it. I've found a few 'similar' posts, but nothing as bad as my issue. With the history aside, here is the actual detailed issue: I purchased a new SSD (Intel 520 SSD), arrived today, and I disconnect my old Windows 7 SSD. I had pre downloaded the ubuntu-12.10-desktop-amd64 earlier today and burned it to DVD. Upon inserting the Live CD into the computer and booting up, everything was fine up to the 'Run From Live CD' or 'Install Ubuntu Now' buttons. As I was sure I wanted to go ahead and make the switch, I selected the 'Install Now' from the right hand side. CD Spins up, black window pops up, and then the errors started: date/time GPU Lockup date/time Failed to idle channel 1 date/time PFIFO - playlist update failed date/time Failed to idle channel 2 date/time PFIFO - playlist update failed Thinking it might correct itself, I let it run and it would swap over to a GUI Screen that was locked up with major blurring/etc, then back to the command line with the errors. Eventually it said something along the lines of 'unknown status' and switched back to the GUI and froze. So, that's when I tried to see if I could find a BIOS upgrade for the nVidia GTX580 cards, and had no luck. So I thought, why not try to just run it from the Live CD and see if I can at least get a look at it, maybe if I could get it running try to do some sort of install from there and fix the driver issue. I rebooted, brought up the Live CD, and this time chose the left option / run from the CD. It brought me all the way in to the desktop, I saw my drives, the other icons, could move the mouse, etc for about 30 seconds and then it locked up completely. I've tried this a couple of times and get the same results every time. Hardware: Intel i7-3930K CPU @ 3.2GHz (12 CPUs) / MSI MS-7760 Motherboard / 32GB RAM / 2 x EVGA (nVidia) GeForce GTX 580 (4GB Ram each) So the question is: Is there any way to install 12.10 if you can't even get the Live CD to run (for more than 30 seconds)? My current hardware configuration is both of the GTX 580 cards have an SLI jumper on them, and I have 2 monitors on each card. (Ubuntu info obviously only shows on the main monitor from the failed installation and the attempt at running the Live CD). Perhaps opening the machine back up and removing the SLI Jumper and removing the other 3 monitors (so it only would have 1 video card with one monitor on it) would actually allow me to get 12.10 installed, then I could work on an nVidia Video Driver fix for the GTX 580, and then possibly hook up the other video card and monitors? Or is this something that they are currently aware of and may update with a future release in the next few days/weeks? Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as I can't even try to fix the issue (assuming it is the nVidia drivers) if I can't even get it to install at all.

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  • how does scrolling in android listview work?

    - by gartenkralleb
    hi, i have an android-app with a listview in an activity. the listview has, if i call it so, three data states. no data loaded from inet - only one dummy item is visible, saying that data is loading data is loaded and shown in list one listitem is clicked and now shows more information for this listitem (so it is increased in its height) on every state change (1 - 2, 2 - 3) i call notifyDataSetChanged() on this ListAdapater. this causes the listview to scroll down to the last item. this is ugly in the first transition and even more ugly in the second because the clicked list item is now out of focus. as i can see, this happens with a google g1 with android 1.6. a htc touch with the same sdk acts like desired (i try to figure it out with some more devices). to avoid this i tried to read out getScrollY() and set this value back. but this returns 0. the reason for this return value i already found on stackoverflow in other qutestions. does anyone else comes along with my problem so far? why does the listview scrolls to the last item? it was mentioned, that listview does keep track on the scroll position. but it seems that it does not in my case. or may i call the wrong refresh method? is notifyDataSetChanged the correct one?

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  • UISplitViewController and complex view heirarchy

    - by Jasconius
    I'm doing an iPad tech demo and I'm running into a serious technical problem. I have an app concept that leverages UISplitViewController, but NOT as the primary controller for the entire app. The app flow could be described roughly as this: Home screen (UIViewController) List-Detail "Catalog" (UISplitViewController) Super Detail Screen (UIViewController but could conceivable also be a child of SplitView). The problem is in the flow between Home and Catalog. Once a UISplitViewController view is added to the UIWindow, it starts to throw hissy fits. The problem can be summarized at this: When a UISplitView generates a popover view, it appears to then be latched to its parent view. Upon removing the UISplitView from the UIWindow subviews, you will get a CoreGraphics exception and the view will fail to be removed. When adding other views (presumably in this case, the home screen to which you are returning), they do not autorotate, instead, the UISplitView, which has failed to be removed due to a CG exception, continues to respond to the rotation instead, causing horrible rendering bugs that can't be just "dealt with". At this point, adding any views, even re-adding the SplitView, causes a cascade of render bugs. I then tried simply to leave the SplitView ever present as the "bottom" view, and keeping adding and removing the Home Screen from on top of it, but this fails as SplitView dominates the Orientation change calls, and Home Screen will not rotate, even if you call [homeScreen becomeFirstResponder] You can't put SplitView into a hierarchy like UINavigationController, you will get an outright runtime error, so that option is off the table. Modals just look bad and are discourages anyway. My presumption at this moment is that the only proper way to deal with this problem is so somehow "disarm" UISplitViewController so that it can be removed from its parent view without throwing an unhandled exception, but I have no idea how. If you want to see an app that does exactly what I need to do, check out GILT Groupe in the iPad app store. They pulled it off, but they seem to have programmed an entire custom view transition set. Help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • LINQ to Entities exceptions (ElementAtOrDefault and CompareObjectEqual)

    - by OffApps Cory
    I am working on a shipping platform which will eventually automate shipping through several major carriers. I have a ShipmentsView Usercontrol which displayes a list of Shipments (returned by EntityFramework), and when a user clicks on a shipment item, it spawns a ShipmentEditView and passes the ShipmentID (RecordKey) to that view. I initially wrestled with trying to get the context from the parent (ShipmentsView) and finally gave up resolving to get to it later. I wanted to do this to keep a single instance of the context. anyhow, I now create a new instance of the context in my ShipmentEditViewModel, and query against it for the Shipment record. I know I could just pass the record, but I wanted to use the Ocean Framework that Karl Shifflett wrote and don't want to muck about writing new transition methods. So anyhow, I query and when stepping through, I can see that it returns a record, as soon as execution reached the point where it assigned the query result to the e.Result property, it throws up the following exception depending on the query I used. LINQToEntities Dim RecordID As Decimal = CDec(e.Argument) Dim myResult = From ship In _Context.Shipment _ Where ship.ShipID = e.Argument _ Select ship Select Case myResult.Count Case 0 e.Result = New Shipment Case 1 e.Result = myResult(0) Case Else e.Result = Nothing End Select "LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'System.Object.CompareObjectEqual(System.Object, System.Object, Boolean)' method, and this method cannot be translated into a store expression. LINQToEntities via Method calls Dim RecordID As Decimal = CDec(e.Argument) Dim myResult = _Context.Shipment.Where(Function(s) s.ShipID = RecordID) Select Case myResult.Count Case 0 e.Result = New Shipment Case 1 e.Result = myResult(0) Case Else e.Result = Nothing End Select LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'SnazzyShippingDAL.Shipment ElementAtOrDefault[Shipment] (System.Linq.IQueryable`1[SnazzyShippingDAL.Shipment], Int32)' method, and this method cannot be translated into a store expression. I have been trying to get this thing to display a record for like three days. i am seriously thinking about going back and re=-engineering it without the MVVM pattern (which I realize I am only starting to learn and understand) if only to make the &$^%ed thing work. Any help will be muchly appreciated. Cory

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