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• Top 5 Reasons to Invest in Enterprise 2.0 Technologies

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  In 2010, Oracle's portal, content management, and collaboration solutions evolved rapidly, supported by increasingly deep integrations across Oracle Fusion Middleware and the entire Oracle stack. In light of these developments, we asked Vince Casarez, vice president of Enterprise 2.0 product management, for his top five reasons to invest in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) technologies--including real-world examples of businesses already realizing the benefits of next-generation E2.0 technologies. 1. Provide a modern user experience As E2.0 technologies gain widespread adoption, customers and employees expect intuitive Web experiences that are both interactive and community-based. By partnering with Oracle, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group is already making that happen. With 76,000 employees and operations in more than 100 countries, the company wanted a streamlined, personalized user experience with more relevant content in fewer clicks. Working with Oracle, they created a global support portal that supports personalization and integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle E-Business Suite--and drives collaboration with tools such as wikis, blogs, and forums. Learn more about Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group's Global Support Portal in this Webcast. 2. Improve productivity and collaboration As E2.0 technologies mature, Oracle anticipates companies moving beyond the idea of simply creating yet another Facebook-like destination for its employees, and instead shaping work environments around specific business tasks. After rapid growth--both organic and through acquisition--construction and infrastructure services leader Balfour Beatty found itself with multiple homegrown intranet sites with very minimal content-sharing capabilities. Today, thanks to Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle WebCenter Spaces, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Universal Content Management, Balfour Beatty is benefiting from collaborative workspaces, a central place to use and work with documents, and unified search across content. 3. Leverage business processes and applications Modern portals are now able to integrate users, content, and business processes in unprecedented ways. To take advantage of these new possibilities, leading dairy provider Land O'Lakes has implemented a fully integrated ERP solution together with Oracle's ECM platform. As a result, Land O'Lakes has been able to achieve better information management and compliance, increased adoption rates for enterprise tools, and increased business process efficiency thanks to more effective information sharing and collaboration. 4. Enhance customer and supplier relationships Companies have begun to move beyond the idea that E2.0 simply means enabling customer reviews or embedding chat functionality. They are taking E2.0 to the next level and providing interactive experiences for their customers. For example, to enhance customer and supplier relationships, Wind River, a global leader in device software optimization, successfully partnered with Oracle to: Integrate ERP and ECM content to provide customers the latest and most relevant support information for products they own Enable customers to personalize their support experience and receive updates regarding patches, application notes, and other relevant content Enable discussions, wikis, and blogs for more efficient collaboration 5. Increase business visibility and responsiveness By strategically embedding collaboration and communication tools into specific business contexts, companies significantly increase visibility into changing business conditions--and can respond much more agilely. Texas A&M University System--one of the largest systems of higher education in the U.S.--partnered with Oracle to create a unified repository that would enable the retrieval of research and grant data from disparate systems via an Enterprise 2.0 user interface. By enabling researchers to customize their own portals with easy-to-use tools, they have also been able to significantly reduce their reliance on the IT department. Learn how other Oracle customers are leveraging Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

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• I am trying to figure out the best way to understand how to cache domain objects

  - by Brett Ryan

  I've always done this wrong, I'm sure a lot of others have too, hold a reference via a map and write through to DB etc.. I need to do this right, and I just don't know how to go about it. I know how I want my objects to be cached but not sure on how to achieve it. What complicates things is that I need to do this for a legacy system where the DB can change without notice to my application. So in the context of a web application, let's say I have a WidgetService which has several methods: Widget getWidget(); Collection<Widget> getAllWidgets(); Collection<Widget> getWidgetsByCategory(String categoryCode); Collection<Widget> getWidgetsByContainer(Integer parentContainer); Collection<Widget> getWidgetsByStatus(String status); Given this, I could decide to cache by method signature, i.e. getWidgetsByCategory("AA") would have a single cache entry, or I could cache widgets individually, which would be difficult I believe; OR, a call to any method would then first cache ALL widgets with a call to getAllWidgets() but getAllWidgets() would produce caches that match all the keys for the other method invocations. For example, take the following untested theoretical code. Collection<Widget> getAllWidgets() { Entity entity = cache.get("ALL_WIDGETS"); Collection<Widget> res; if (entity == null) { res = loadCache(); } else { res = (Collection<Widget>) entity.getValue(); } return res } Collection<Widget> loadCache() { // Get widgets from underlying DB Collection<Widget> res = db.getAllWidgets(); cache.put("ALL_WIDGETS", res); Map<String, List<Widget>> byCat = new HashMap<>(); for (Widget w : res) { // cache by different types of method calls, i.e. by category if (!byCat.containsKey(widget.getCategory()) { byCat.put(widget.getCategory(), new ArrayList<Widget>); } byCat.get(widget.getCatgory(), widget); } cacheCategories(byCat); return res; } Collection<Widget> getWidgetsByCategory(String categoryCode) { CategoryCacheKey key = new CategoryCacheKey(categoryCode); Entity ent = cache.get(key); if (entity == null) { loadCache(); } ent = cache.get(key); return ent == null ? Collections.emptyList() : (Collection<Widget>)ent.getValue(); } NOTE: I have not worked with a cache manager, the above code illustrates cache as some object that may hold caches by key/value pairs, though it's not modelled on any specific implementation. Using this I have the benefit of being able to cache all objects in the different ways they will be called with only single objects on the heap, whereas if I were to cache the method call invocation via say Spring It would (I believe) cache multiple copies of the objects. I really wish to try and understand the best ways to cache domain objects before I go down the wrong path and make it harder for myself later. I have read the documentation on the Ehcache website and found various articles of interest, but nothing to give a good solid technique. Since I'm working with an ERP system, some DB calls are very complicated, not that the DB is slow, but the business representation of the domain objects makes it very clumsy, coupled with the fact that there are actually 11 different DB's where information can be contained that this application is consolidating in a single view, this makes caching quite important.

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• New Version 3.1 Endeca Information Discovery Now Available

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Business User Self-Service Data Mash-up Analysis and Discovery integrated with OBI11g and Hadoop Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.1 (OEID) is a major release that incorporates significant new self-service discovery capabilities for business users, including agile data mashup, extended support for unstructured analytics, and an even tighter integration with Oracle BI.  · Self-Service Data Mashup and Discovery Dashboards: business users can combine information from multiple sources, including their own up-loaded spreadsheets, to conduct analysis on the complete set.  Creating discovery dashboards has been made even easier by intuitive drag-and drop layouts and wizard-based configuration.  Business users can now build new discovery applications in minutes, without depending on IT. · Enhanced Integration with Oracle BI: OEID 3.1 enhances its’ native integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation. Business users can now incorporate information from trusted BI warehouses, leveraging dimensions and attributes defined in Oracle’s Common Enterprise Information Model, but evolve them based on the varying day-to-day demands and requirements that they personally manage. · Deep Unstructured Analysis: business users can gain new insights from a wide variety of enterprise and public sources, helping companies to build an actionable Big Data strategy.  With OEID’s long-standing differentiation in correlating unstructured information with structured data, business users can now perform their own text mining to identify hidden concepts, without having to request support from IT. They can augment these insights with best in class keyword search and pattern matching, all in the context of rich, interactive visualizations and analytic summaries. · Enterprise-Class Self-Service Discovery:  OEID 3.1 enables IT to provide a powerful self-service platform to the business as part of a broader Business Analytics strategy, preserving the value of existing investments in data quality, governance, and security.  Business users can take advantage of IT-curated information to drive discovery across high volumes and varieties of data, and share insights with colleagues at a moment’s notice. · Harvest Content from the Web with the Endeca Web Acquisition Toolkit:  Oracle now provides best-of-breed data access to website content through the Oracle Endeca Web Acquisition Toolkit.  This provides an agile, graphical interface for developers to rapidly access and integrate any information exposed through a web front-end.  Organizations can now cost-effectively include content from consumer sites, industry forums, government or supplier portals, cloud applications, and myriad other web sources as part of their overall strategy for data discovery and unstructured analytics. For more information: OEID 3.1 OTN Software and Documentation Download And Endeca available for download on Software Delivery Cloud (eDelivery) New OEID 3.1 Videos on YouTube Oracle.com Endeca Site /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• Looking for a real-world example illustrating that composition can be superior to inheritance

  - by Job

  I watched a bunch of lectures on Clojure and functional programming by Rich Hickey as well as some of the SICP lectures, and I am sold on many concepts of functional programming. I incorporated some of them into my C# code at a previous job, and luckily it was easy to write C# code in a more functional style. At my new job we use Python and multiple inheritance is all the rage. My co-workers are very smart but they have to produce code fast given the nature of the company. I am learning both the tools and the codebase, but the architecture itself slows me down as well. I have not written the existing class hierarchy (neither would I be able to remember everything about it), and so, when I started adding a fairly small feature, I realized that I had to read a lot of code in the process. At the surface the code is neatly organized and split into small functions/methods and not copy-paste-repetitive, but the flip side of being not repetitive is that there is some magic functionality hidden somewhere in the hierarchy chain that magically glues things together and does work on my behalf, but it is very hard to find and follow. I had to fire up a profiler and run it through several examples and plot the execution graph as well as step through a debugger a few times, search the code for some substring and just read pages at the time. I am pretty sure that once I am done, my resulting code will be short and neatly organized, and yet not very readable. What I write feels declarative, as if I was writing an XML file that drives some other magic engine, except that there is no clear documentation on what the XML should look like and what the engine does except for the existing examples that I can read as well as the source code for the 'engine'. There has got to be a better way. IMO using composition over inheritance can help quite a bit. That way the computation will be linear rather than jumping all over the hierarchy tree. Whenever the functionality does not quite fit into an inheritance model, it will need to be mangled to fit in, or the entire inheritance hierarchy will need to be refactored/rebalanced, sort of like an unbalanced binary tree needs reshuffling from time to time in order to improve the average seek time. As I mentioned before, my co-workers are very smart; they just have been doing things a certain way and probably have an ability to hold a lot of unrelated crap in their head at once. I want to convince them to give composition and functional as opposed to OOP approach a try. To do that, I need to find some very good material. I do not think that a SCIP lecture or one by Rich Hickey will do - I am afraid it will be flagged down as too academic. Then, simple examples of Dog and Frog and AddressBook classes do not really connivence one way or the other - they show how inheritance can be converted to composition but not why it is truly and objectively better. What I am looking for is some real-world example of code that has been written with a lot of inheritance, then hit a wall and re-written in a different style that uses composition. Perhaps there is a blog or a chapter. I am looking for something that can summarize and illustrate the sort of pain that I am going through. I already have been throwing the phrase "composition over inheritance" around, but it was not received as enthusiastically as I had hoped. I do not want to be perceived as a new guy who likes to complain and bash existing code while looking for a perfect approach while not contributing fast enough. At the same time, my gut is convinced that inheritance is often the instrument of evil and I want to show a better way in a near future. Have you stumbled upon any great resources that can help me?

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• Using Recursive SQL and XML trick to PIVOT(OK, concat) a "Document Folder Structure Relationship" table, works like MySQL GROUP_CONCAT

  - by Kevin Shyr

  I'm in the process of building out a Data Warehouse and encountered this issue along the way.In the environment, there is a table that stores all the folders with the individual level.  For example, if a document is created here:{App Path}\Level 1\Level 2\Level 3\{document}, then the DocumentFolder table would look like this:IDID_ParentFolderName1NULLLevel 121Level 232Level 3To my understanding, the table was built so that:Each proposal can have multiple documents stored at various locationsDifferent users working on the proposal will have different access level to the folder; if one user is assigned access to a folder level, she/he can see all the sub folders and their content.Now we understand from an application point of view why this table was built this way.  But you can quickly see the pain this causes the report writer to show a document link on the report.  I wasn't surprised to find the report query had 5 self outer joins, which is at the mercy of nobody creating a document that is buried 6 levels deep, and not to mention the degradation in performance.With the help of 2 posts (at the end of this post), I was able to come up with this solution:Use recursive SQL to build out the folder pathUse SQL XML trick to concat the strings.Code (a reminder, I built this code in a stored procedure.  If you copy the syntax into a simple query window and execute, you'll get an incorrect syntax error) 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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} -- Get all folders and group them by the original DocumentFolderID in PTSDocument table;WITH DocFoldersByDocFolderID(PTSDocumentFolderID_Original, PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent, sDocumentFolder, nLevel)AS (-- first member      SELECT 'PTSDocumentFolderID_Original' = d1.PTSDocumentFolderID            , PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent            , 'sDocumentFolder' = sName            , 'nLevel' = CONVERT(INT, 1000000)      FROM (SELECT DISTINCT PTSDocumentFolderID                  FROM dbo.PTSDocument_DY WITH(READPAST)            ) AS d1            INNER JOIN dbo.PTSDocumentFolder_DY AS df1 WITH(READPAST)                  ON d1.PTSDocumentFolderID = df1.PTSDocumentFolderID      UNION ALL      -- recursive      SELECT ddf1.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original            , df1.PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent            , 'sDocumentFolder' = df1.sName            , 'nLevel' = ddf1.nLevel - 1      FROM dbo.PTSDocumentFolder_DY AS df1 WITH(READPAST)            INNER JOIN DocFoldersByDocFolderID AS ddf1                  ON df1.PTSDocumentFolderID = ddf1.PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent)-- Flatten out folder path, DocFolderSingleByDocFolderID(PTSDocumentFolderID_Original, sDocumentFolder)AS (SELECT dfbdf.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original            , 'sDocumentFolder' = STUFF((SELECT '\' + sDocumentFolder                                         FROM DocFoldersByDocFolderID                                         WHERE (PTSDocumentFolderID_Original = dfbdf.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original)                                         ORDER BY PTSDocumentFolderID_Original, nLevel                                         FOR XML PATH ('')),1,1,'')      FROM DocFoldersByDocFolderID AS dfbdf      GROUP BY dfbdf.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original) And voila, I use the second CTE to join back to my original query (which is now a CTE for Source as we can now use MERGE to do INSERT and UPDATE at the same time).Each part of this solution would not solve the problem by itself because:If I don't use recursion, I cannot build out the path properly.  If I use the XML trick only, then I don't have the originating folder ID info that I need to link to the document.If I don't use the XML trick, then I don't have one row per document to show in the report.I could conceivably do this in the report function, but I'd rather not deal with the beginning or ending backslash and how to attach the document name.PIVOT doesn't do strings and UNPIVOT runs into the same problem as the above.I'm excited that each version of SQL server provides us new tools to solve old problems and/or enables us to solve problems in a more elegant wayThe 2 posts that helped me along:Recursive Queries Using Common Table ExpressionHow to use GROUP BY to concatenate strings in SQL server?

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• Oh no! My padding's invalid!

  - by Simon Cooper

  Recently, I've been doing some work involving cryptography, and encountered the standard .NET CryptographicException: 'Padding is invalid and cannot be removed.' Searching on StackOverflow produces 57 questions concerning this exception; it's a very common problem encountered. So I decided to have a closer look. To test this, I created a simple project that decrypts and encrypts a byte array: // create some random data byte[] data = new byte[100]; new Random().NextBytes(data); // use the Rijndael symmetric algorithm RijndaelManaged rij = new RijndaelManaged(); byte[] encrypted; // encrypt the data using a CryptoStream using (var encryptor = rij.CreateEncryptor()) using (MemoryStream encryptedStream = new MemoryStream()) using (CryptoStream crypto = new CryptoStream( encryptedStream, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write)) { crypto.Write(data, 0, data.Length); encrypted = encryptedStream.ToArray(); } byte[] decrypted; // and decrypt it again using (var decryptor = rij.CreateDecryptor()) using (CryptoStream crypto = new CryptoStream( new MemoryStream(encrypted), decryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Read)) { byte[] decrypted = new byte[data.Length]; crypto.Read(decrypted, 0, decrypted.Length); } Sure enough, I got exactly the same CryptographicException when trying to decrypt the data even in this simple example. Well, I'm obviously missing something, if I can't even get this single method right! What does the exception message actually mean? What am I missing? Well, after playing around a bit, I discovered the problem was fixed by changing the encryption step to this: // encrypt the data using a CryptoStream using (var encryptor = rij.CreateEncryptor()) using (MemoryStream encryptedStream = new MemoryStream()) { using (CryptoStream crypto = new CryptoStream( encryptedStream, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write)) { crypto.Write(data, 0, data.Length); } encrypted = encryptedStream.ToArray(); } Aaaah, so that's what the problem was. The CryptoStream wasn't flushing all it's data to the MemoryStream before it was being read, and closing the stream causes it to flush everything to the backing stream. But why does this cause an error in padding? Cryptographic padding All symmetric encryption algorithms (of which Rijndael is one) operates on fixed block sizes. For Rijndael, the default block size is 16 bytes. This means the input needs to be a multiple of 16 bytes long. If it isn't, then the input is padded to 16 bytes using one of the padding modes. This is only done to the final block of data to be encrypted. CryptoStream has a special method to flush this final block of data - FlushFinalBlock. Calling Stream.Flush() does not flush the final block, as you might expect. Only by closing the stream or explicitly calling FlushFinalBlock is the final block, with any padding, encrypted and written to the backing stream. Without this call, the encrypted data is 16 bytes shorter than it should be. If this final block wasn't written, then the decryption gets to the final 16 bytes of the encrypted data and tries to decrypt it as the final block with padding. The end bytes don't match the padding scheme it's been told to use, therefore it throws an exception stating what is wrong - what the decryptor expects to be padding actually isn't, and so can't be removed from the stream. So, as well as closing the stream before reading the result, an alternative fix to my encryption code is the following: // encrypt the data using a CryptoStream using (var encryptor = rij.CreateEncryptor()) using (MemoryStream encryptedStream = new MemoryStream()) using (CryptoStream crypto = new CryptoStream( encryptedStream, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write)) { crypto.Write(data, 0, data.Length); // explicitly flush the final block of data crypto.FlushFinalBlock(); encrypted = encryptedStream.ToArray(); } Conclusion So, if your padding is invalid, make sure that you close or call FlushFinalBlock on any CryptoStream performing encryption before you access the encrypted data. Flush isn't enough. Only then will the final block be present in the encrypted data, allowing it to be decrypted successfully.

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• Caching factory design

  - by max

  I have a factory class XFactory that creates objects of class X. Instances of X are very large, so the main purpose of the factory is to cache them, as transparently to the client code as possible. Objects of class X are immutable, so the following code seems reasonable: # module xfactory.py import x class XFactory: _registry = {} def get_x(self, arg1, arg2, use_cache = True): if use_cache: hash_id = hash((arg1, arg2)) if hash_id in _registry: return _registry[hash_id] obj = x.X(arg1, arg2) _registry[hash_id] = obj return obj # module x.py class X: # ... Is it a good pattern? (I know it's not the actual Factory Pattern.) Is there anything I should change? Now, I find that sometimes I want to cache X objects to disk. I'll use pickle for that purpose, and store as values in the _registry the filenames of the pickled objects instead of references to the objects. Of course, _registry itself would have to be stored persistently (perhaps in a pickle file of its own, in a text file, in a database, or simply by giving pickle files the filenames that contain hash_id). Except now the validity of the cached object depends not only on the parameters passed to get_x(), but also on the version of the code that created these objects. Strictly speaking, even a memory-cached object could become invalid if someone modifies x.py or any of its dependencies, and reloads it while the program is running. So far I ignored this danger since it seems unlikely for my application. But I certainly cannot ignore it when my objects are cached to persistent storage. What can I do? I suppose I could make the hash_id more robust by calculating hash of a tuple that contains arguments arg1 and arg2, as well as the filename and last modified date for x.py and every module and data file that it (recursively) depends on. To help delete cache files that won't ever be useful again, I'd add to the _registry the unhashed representation of the modified dates for each record. But even this solution isn't 100% safe since theoretically someone might load a module dynamically, and I wouldn't know about it from statically analyzing the source code. If I go all out and assume every file in the project is a dependency, the mechanism will still break if some module grabs data from an external website, etc.). In addition, the frequency of changes in x.py and its dependencies is quite high, leading to heavy cache invalidation. Thus, I figured I might as well give up some safety, and only invalidate the cache only when there is an obvious mismatch. This means that class X would have a class-level cache validation identifier that should be changed whenever the developer believes a change happened that should invalidate the cache. (With multiple developers, a separate invalidation identifier is required for each.) This identifier is hashed along with arg1 and arg2 and becomes part of the hash keys stored in _registry. Since developers may forget to update the validation identifier or not realize that they invalidated existing cache, it would seem better to add another validation mechanism: class X can have a method that returns all the known "traits" of X. For instance, if X is a table, I might add the names of all the columns. The hash calculation will include the traits as well. I can write this code, but I am afraid that I'm missing something important; and I'm also wondering if perhaps there's a framework or package that can do all of this stuff already. Ideally, I'd like to combine in-memory and disk-based caching.

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• ReSharper 8.0 EAP now available

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/28/resharper-8.0-eap-now-available.aspxJetbrains have just released |ReSharper 8.0 Beta on their Early Access |Programme at http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/whatsnew/?utm_source=resharper8b&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=resharper&utm_content=customersResharper 8.0 comes with the following new features:Support for Visual Studio 2013 Preview. Yes, ReSharper is known to work well with the fresh preview of Visual Studio 2013, and if you have already started digging into it, ReSharper 8.0 Beta is ready for the challenge.Faster code fixes. Thanks to the new Fix in Scope feature, you can choose to batch-fix some of the code issues that ReSharper detects in the scope of a project or the whole solution. Supported fixes include removing unused directives and redundant casts.Project dependency viewer. ReSharper is now able to visualize a project dependency graph for a bird's eye view of dependencies within your solution, all without compiling anything!Multifile templates. ReSharper's file templates can now be expanded to generate more than one file. For instance, this is handy for generating pairs of a main logic class and a class for extensions, or sets of partial files.Navigation improvements. These include a new action called Go to Everything to let you search for a file, type or method name from the same input box; support for line numbers in navigation actions; a new tool window called Assembly Explorer for browsing through assemblies; and two more contextual navigation actions: Navigate to Generic Substitutions and Navigate to Assembly Explorer.New solution-wide refactorings. The set of fresh refactorings is headlined by the highly requested Move Instance Method to move methods between classes without making them static. In addition, there are Inline Parameter and Pull Parameter. Last but not least, we're also introducing 4 new XAML-specific refactorings!Extraordinary XAML support. A plethora of new and improved functionality for all developers working with XAML code includes dedicated grid inspections and quick-fixes; Extract Style, Extract, Move and Inline Resource refactorings; atomic renaming of dependency properties; and a lot more.More accessible code completion. ReSharper 8 makes more of its IntelliSense magic available in automatic completion lists, including extension methods and an option to import a type. We're also introducing double completion which gives you additional completion items when you press the corresponding shortcut for the second time.A new level of extensibility. With the new NuGet-based Extension Manager, discovering, installing and uninstalling ReSharper extensions becomes extremely easy in Visual Studio 2010 and higher. When we say extensions, we mean not only full-fledged plug-ins but also sets of templates or SSR patterns that can now be shared much more easily.CSS support improvements. Smarter usage search for CSS attributes, new CSS-specific code inspections, configurable support for CSS3 and earlier versions, compatibility checks against popular browsers - there's a rough outline of what's new for CSS in ReSharper 8.A command-line version of ReSharper. ReSharper 8 goes beyond Visual Studio: we now provide a free standalone tool with hundreds of ReSharper inspections and additionally a duplicate code finder that you can integrate with your CI server or version control system.Multiple minor improvements in areas such as decompiling and code formatting, as well as support for the Blue Theme introduced in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.

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• Perm SSIS Developer Urgently Required

  - by blakmk

    Job Role To provide dedicated data services support to the company, by designing, creating, maintaining and enhancing database objects, ensuring data quality, consistency and integrity. Migrating data from various sources to central SQL 2008 data warehouse will be the primary function. Migration of data from bespoke legacy database’s to SQL 2008 data warehouse. Understand key business requirements, Liaising with various aspects of the company. Create advanced transformations of data, with focus on data cleansing, redundant data and duplication. Creating complex business rules regarding data services, migration, Integrity and support (Best Practices). Experience ·         Minimum 3 year SSIS experience, in a project or BI Development role and involvement in at least 3 full ETL project life cycles, using the following methodologies and tools o    Excellent knowledge of ETL concepts including data migration & integrity, focusing on SSIS. o    Extensive experience with SQL 2005 products, SQL 2008 desirable. o    Working knowledge of SSRS and its integration with other BI products. o    Extensive knowledge of T-SQL, stored procedures, triggers (Table/Database), views, functions in particular coding and querying. o    Data cleansing and harmonisation. o    Understanding and knowledge of indexes, statistics and table structure. o    SQL Agent – Scheduling jobs, optimisation, multiple jobs, DTS. o    Troubleshoot, diagnose and tune database and physical server performance. o    Knowledge and understanding of locking, blocks, table and index design and SQL configuration. ·         Demonstrable ability to understand and analyse business processes. ·         Experience in creating business rules on best practices for data services. ·         Experience in working with, supporting and troubleshooting MS SQL servers running enterprise applications ·         Proven ability to work well within a team and liaise with other technical support staff such as networking administrators, system administrators and support engineers. ·         Ability to create formal documentation, work procedures, and service level agreements. ·         Ability to communicate technical issues at all levels including to a non technical audience. ·         Good working knowledge of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.   Location Based in Crawley with possibility of some remote working Contact me for more info: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/blakmk/contact.aspx      

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• Server-Sent Events using GlassFish (TOTD #179)

  - by arungupta

  Bhakti blogged about Server-Sent Events on GlassFish and I've been planning to try it out for past some days. Finally, I took some time out today to learn about it and build a simplistic example showcasing the touch points. Server-Sent Events is developed as part of HTML5 specification and provides push notifications from a server to a browser client in the form of DOM events. It is defined as a cross-browser JavaScript API called EventSource. The client creates an EventSource by requesting a particular URL and registers an onmessage event listener to receive the event notifications. This can be done as shown var url = 'http://' + document.location.host + '/glassfish-sse/simple';eventSource = new EventSource(url);eventSource.onmessage = function (event) { var theParagraph = document.createElement('p'); theParagraph.innerHTML = event.data.toString(); document.body.appendChild(theParagraph);} This code subscribes to a URL, receives the data in the event listener, adds it to a HTML paragraph element, and displays it in the document. This is where you'll parse JSON and other processing to display if some other data format is received from the URL. The URL to which the EventSource is subscribed to is updated on the server side and there are multipe ways to do that. GlassFish 4.0 provide support for Server-Sent Events and it can be achieved registering a handler as shown below: @ServerSentEvent("/simple")public class MySimpleHandler extends ServerSentEventHandler { public void sendMessage(String data) { try { connection.sendMessage(data); } catch (IOException ex) { . . . } }} And then events can be sent to this handler using a singleton session bean as shown: @Startup@Statelesspublic class SimpleEvent { @Inject @ServerSentEventContext("/simple") ServerSentEventHandlerContext<MySimpleHandler> simpleHandlers; @Schedule(hour="*", minute="*", second="*/10") public void sendDate() { for(MySimpleHandler handler : simpleHandlers.getHandlers()) { handler.sendMessage(new Date().toString()); } }} This stateless session bean injects ServerSentEventHandlers listening on "/simple" path. Note, there may be multiple handlers listening on this path. The sendDate method triggers every 10 seconds and send the current timestamp to all the handlers. The client side browser simply displays the string. The HTTP request headers look like: Accept: text/event-streamAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdchAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8Cache-Control: no-cacheConnection: keep-aliveCookie: JSESSIONID=97ff28773ea6a085e11131acf47bHost: localhost:8080Referer: http://localhost:8080/glassfish-sse/faces/index2.xhtmlUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.54 Safari/536.5 And the response headers as: Content-Type: text/event-streamDate: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 21:16:10 GMTServer: GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0Transfer-Encoding: chunkedX-Powered-By: Servlet/3.0 JSP/2.2 (GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0 Java/Apple Inc./1.6) Notice, the MIME type of the messages from server to the client is text/event-stream and that is defined by the specification. The code in Bhakti's blog can be further simplified by using the recently-introduced Twitter API for Java as shown below: @Schedule(hour="*", minute="*", second="*/10") public void sendTweets() { for(MyTwitterHandler handler : twitterHandler.getHandlers()) { String result = twitter.search("glassfish", String.class); handler.sendMessage(result); }} The complete source explained in this blog can be downloaded here and tried on GlassFish 4.0 build 34. The latest promoted build can be downloaded from here and the complete source code for the API and implementation is here. I tried this sample on Chrome Version 19.0.1084.54 on Mac OS X 10.7.3.

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• Investigating Strategies For Functional Decomposition

  - by Liam McLennan

  Introducing Functional Decomposition Before I begin I must apologise. I think I am using the term ‘functional decomposition’ loosely, and probably incorrectly. For the purpose of this article I use functional decomposition to mean the recursive splitting of a large problem into increasingly smaller ones, so that the one large problem may be solved by solving a set of smaller problems. The justification for functional decomposition is that the decomposed problem is more easily solved. As software developers we recognise that the smaller pieces are more easily tested, since they do less and are more cohesive. Functional decomposition is important to all scientific pursuits. Once we understand natural selection we can start to look for humanities ancestral species, once we understand the big bang we can trace our expanding universe back to its origin. Isaac Newton acknowledged the compositional nature of his scientific achievements: If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants   The Two Strategies For Functional Decomposition of Computer Programs Private Methods When I was working on my undergraduate degree I was taught to functionally decompose problems by using private methods. Consider the problem of painting a house. The obvious solution is to solve the problem as a single unit: public void PaintAHouse() { // all the things required to paint a house ... } We decompose the problem by breaking it into parts: public void PaintAHouse() { PaintUndercoat(); PaintTopcoat(); } private void PaintUndercoat() { // everything required to paint the undercoat } private void PaintTopcoat() { // everything required to paint the topcoat } The problem can be recursively decomposed until a sufficiently granular level of detail is reached: public void PaintAHouse() { PaintUndercoat(); PaintTopcoat(); } private void PaintUndercoat() { prepareSurface(); fetchUndercoat(); paintUndercoat(); } private void PaintTopcoat() { fetchPaint(); paintTopcoat(); } According to Wikipedia, at least one computer programmer has referred to this process as “the art of subroutining”. The practical issues that I have encountered when using private methods for decomposition are: To preserve the top level API all of the steps must be private. This means that they can’t easily be tested. The private methods often have little cohesion except that they form part of the same solution. Decomposing to Classes The alternative is to decompose large problems into multiple classes, effectively using a class instead of each private method. The API delegates to related classes, so the API is not polluted by the sub-steps of the problem, and the steps can be easily tested because they are each in their own highly cohesive class. Additionally, I think that this technique facilitates better adherence to the Single Responsibility Principle, since each class can be decomposed until it has precisely one responsibility. Revisiting my previous example using class composition: public class HousePainter { private undercoatPainter = new UndercoatPainter(); private topcoatPainter = new TopcoatPainter(); public void PaintAHouse() { undercoatPainter.Paint(); topcoatPainter.Paint(); } } Summary When decomposing a problem there is more than one way to represent the sub-problems. Using private methods keeps the logic in one place and prevents a proliferation of classes (thereby following the four rules of simple design) but the class decomposition is more easily testable and more compatible with the Single Responsibility Principle.

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• About the K computer

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  Okay ? after getting yet another mail because of the new #1 on the Top500 list, I want to add some comments from my side: Yes, the system is using SPARC processor. And that is great news for a SPARC fan like me. It is using the SPARC VIIIfx processor from Fujitsu clocked at 2 GHz. No, it isn't the only one. Most people are saying there are two in the Top500 list using SPARC (#77 JAXA and #1 K) but in fact there are three. The Tianhe-1 (#2 on the Top500 list) super computer contains 2048 Galaxy "FT-1000" 1 GHz 8-core processors. Don't know it? The FeiTeng-1000 ? this proc is a 8 core, 8 threads per core, 1 ghz processor made in China. And it's SPARC based. By the way ? this sounds really familiar to me ? perhaps the people just took the opensourced UltraSPARC-T2 design, because some of the parameters sound just to similar. However it looks like that Tianhe-1 is using the SPARCs as input nodes and not as compute notes. No, I don't see it as the next M-series processor. Simple reason: You can't create SMP systems out of them ? it simply hasn't the functionality to do so. Even when there are multiple CPUs on a single board, they are not connected like an SMP/NUMA machine to a shared memory machine ? they are connected with the cluster interconnect (in this case the Tofu interconnect) and work like a large cluster. Yes, it has a lot of oomph in Linpack ? however I assume a lot came from the extensions to the SPARCv9 standard. No, Linpack has no relevance for any commercial workload ? Linpack is such a special load, that even some HPC people are arguing that it isn't really a good benchmark for HPC. It's embarrassingly parallel, it can work with relatively small interconnects compared to the interconnects in SMP systems (however we get in spheres SMP interconnects where a few years ago). Amdahl isn't hitting that hard when running Linpack. Yes, it's a good move to use SPARC. At some time in the last 10 years, there was an interesting twist in perception: SPARC was considered as proprietary architecture and x86 was the open architecture. However it's vice versa ? try to create a x86 clone and you have a lot of intellectual property problems, create a SPARC clone and you have to spend 100 bucks or so to get the specification from the SPARC Foundation and develop your own SPARC processor. Fujitsu is doing this for a long time now. So they had their own processor, their own know-how. So why was SPARC a good choice? Well ? essentially Fujitsu can do what they want with their core as it is their core, for example adding the extensions to the SPARCv9 chipset ? getting Intel to create extensions to x86 to help you with your product is a little bit harder. So Fujitsu could do they needed to do with their processor in order to create such a supercomputer. No, the K is really using no FPGA or GPU as accelerators. The K is really using the CPU at doing this job. Yes, it has a significantly enhanced FPU capable to execute 8 instructions in parallel. No, it doesn't run Solaris. Yes, it uses Linux. No, it doesn't hurt me ... as my colleague Roland Rambau (he knows a lot about HPC) said once to me ... it doesn't matter which OS is staying out of the way of the workload in HPC.

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• Identity in .NET 4.5&ndash;Part 2: Claims Transformation in ASP.NET (Beta 1)

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  In my last post I described how every identity in .NET 4.5 is now claims-based. If you are coming from WIF you might think, great – how do I transform those claims? Sidebar: What is claims transformation? One of the most essential features of WIF (and .NET 4.5) is the ability to transform credentials (or tokens) to claims. During that process the “low level” token details are turned into claims. An example would be a Windows token – it contains things like the name of the user and to which groups he belongs to. That information will be surfaced as claims of type Name and GroupSid. Forms users will be represented as a Name claim (all the other claims that WIF provided for FormsIdentity are gone in 4.5). The issue here is, that your applications typically don’t care about those low level details, but rather about “what’s the purchase limit of alice”. The process of turning the low level claims into application specific ones is called claims transformation. In pre-claims times this would have been done by a combination of Forms Authentication extensibility, role manager and maybe ASP.NET profile. With claims transformation all your identity gathering code is in one place (and the outcome can be cached in a single place as opposed to multiple ones). The structural class to do claims transformation is called ClaimsAuthenticationManager. This class has two purposes – first looking at the incoming (low level) principal and making sure all required information about the user is present. This is your first chance to reject a request. And second – modeling identity information in a way it is relevant for the application (see also here). This class gets called (when present) during the pipeline when using WS-Federation. But not when using the standard .NET principals. I am not sure why – maybe because it is beta 1. Anyhow, a number of people asked me about it, and the following is a little HTTP module that brings that feature back in 4.5. public class ClaimsTransformationHttpModule : IHttpModule {     public void Dispose()     { }     public void Init(HttpApplication context)     {         context.PostAuthenticateRequest += Context_PostAuthenticateRequest;     }     void Context_PostAuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)     {         var context = ((HttpApplication)sender).Context;         // no need to call transformation if session already exists         if (FederatedAuthentication.SessionAuthenticationModule != null &&             FederatedAuthentication.SessionAuthenticationModule.ContainsSessionTokenCookie(context.Request.Cookies))         {             return;         }         var transformer = FederatedAuthentication.FederationConfiguration.IdentityConfiguration.ClaimsAuthenticationManager;         if (transformer != null)         {             var transformedPrincipal = transformer.Authenticate(context.Request.RawUrl, context.User as ClaimsPrincipal);             context.User = transformedPrincipal;             Thread.CurrentPrincipal = transformedPrincipal;         }     } } HTH

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• Dont Throw Duplicate Exceptions

  In your code, youll sometimes have write code that validates input using a variety of checks.  Assuming you havent embraced AOP and done everything with attributes, its likely that your defensive coding is going to look something like this: public void Foo(SomeClass someArgument) { if(someArgument == null) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument"); } if(!someArgument.IsValid()) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument"); }   // Do Real Work } Do you see a problem here?  Heres the deal Exceptions should be meaningful.  They have value at a number of levels: In the code, throwing an exception lets the develop know that there is an unsupported condition here In calling code, different types of exceptions may be handled differently At runtime, logging of exceptions provides a valuable diagnostic tool Its this last reason I want to focus on.  If you find yourself literally throwing the exact exception in more than one location within a given method, stop.  The stack trace for such an exception is likely going to be identical regardless of which path of execution led to the exception being thrown.  When that happens, you or whomever is debugging the problem will have to guess which exception was thrown.  Guessing is a great way to introduce additional problems and/or greatly increase the amount of time require to properly diagnose and correct any bugs related to this behavior. Dont Guess Be Specific When throwing an exception from multiple code paths within the code, be specific.  Virtually ever exception allows a custom message use it and ensure each case is unique.  If the exception might be handled differently by the caller, than consider implementing a new custom exception type.  Also, dont automatically think that you can improve the code by collapsing the if-then logic into a single call with short-circuiting (e.g. if(x == null || !x.IsValid()) ) that will guarantee that you cant easily throw different information into the message as easily as constructing the exception separately in each case. The code above might be refactored like so:   public void Foo(SomeClass someArgument) { if(someArgument == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("someArgument"); } if(!someArgument.IsValid()) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument"); }   // Do Real Work } In this case its taking advantage of the fact that there is already an ArgumentNullException in the framework, but if you didnt have an IsValid() method and were doing validation on your own, it might look like this: public void Foo(SomeClass someArgument) { if(someArgument.Quantity < 0) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument", "Quantity cannot be less than 0. Quantity: " + someArgument.Quantity); } if(someArgument.Quantity > 100) { throw new InvalidArgumentException("someArgument", "SomeArgument.Quantity cannot exceed 100. Quantity: " + someArgument.Quantity); }   // Do Real Work }   Note that in this last example, Im throwing the same exception type in each case, but with different Message values.  Im also making sure to include the value that resulted in the exception, as this can be extremely useful for debugging.  (How many times have you wished NullReferenceException would tell you the name of the variable it was trying to reference?) Dont add work to those who will follow after you to maintain your application (especially since its likely to be you).  Be specific with your exception messages follow DRY when throwing exceptions within a given method by throwing unique exceptions for each interesting case of invalid state. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Data breakpoints to find points where data gets broken

  - by raccoon_tim

  When working with a large code base, finding reasons for bizarre bugs can often be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Finding out why an object gets corrupted without no apparent reason can be quite daunting, especially when it seems to happen randomly and totally out of context. Scenario Take the following scenario as an example. You have defined the a class that contains an array of characters that is 256 characters long. You now implement a method for filling this buffer with a string passed as an argument. At this point you mistakenly expect the buffer to be 256 characters long. At some point you notice that you require another character buffer and you add that after the previous one in the class definition. You now figure that you don’t need the 256 characters that the first member can hold and you shorten that to 128 to conserve space. At this point you should start thinking that you also have to modify the method defined above to safeguard against buffer overflow. It so happens, however, that in this not so perfect world this does not cross your mind. Buffer overflow is one of the most frequent sources for errors in a piece of software and often one of the most difficult ones to detect, especially when data is read from an outside source. Many mass copy functions provided by the C run-time provide versions that have boundary checking (defined with the _s suffix) but they can not guard against hard coded buffer lengths that at some point get changed. Finding the bug Getting back to the scenario, you’re now wondering why does the second string get modified with data that makes no sense at all. Luckily, Visual Studio provides you with a tool to help you with finding just these kinds of errors. It’s called data breakpoints. To add a data breakpoint, you first run your application in debug mode or attach to it in the usual way, and then go to Debug, select New Breakpoint and New Data Breakpoint. In the popup that opens, you can type in the memory address and the amount of bytes you wish to monitor. You can also use an expression here, but it’s often difficult to come up with an expression for data in an object allocated on the heap when not in the context of a certain stack frame. There are a couple of things to note about data breakpoints, however. First of all, Visual Studio supports a maximum of four data breakpoints at any given time. Another important thing to notice is that some C run-time functions modify memory in kernel space which does not trigger the data breakpoint. For instance, calling ReadFile on a buffer that is monitored by a data breakpoint will not trigger the breakpoint. The application will now break at the address you specified it to. Often you might immediately spot the issue but the very least this feature can do is point you in the right direction in search for the real reason why the memory gets inadvertently modified. Conclusions Data breakpoints are a great feature, especially when doing a lot of low level operations where multiple locations modify the same data. With the exception of some special cases, like kernel memory modification, you can use it whenever you need to check when memory at a certain location gets changed on purpose or inadvertently.

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• MySQL for Excel new features (1.2.0): Save and restore Edit sessions

  - by Javier Rivera

  Today we are going to talk about another new feature included in the latest MySQL for Excel release to date (1.2.0) which can be Installed directly from our MySQL Installer downloads page.Since the first release you were allowed to open a session to directly edit data from a MySQL table at Excel on a worksheet and see those changes reflected immediately on the database. You were also capable of opening multiple sessions to work with different tables at the same time (when they belong to the same schema). The problem was that if for any reason you were forced to close Excel or the Workbook you were working on, you had no way to save the state of those open sessions and to continue where you left off you needed to reopen them one by one. Well, that's no longer a problem since we are now introducing a new feature to save and restore active Edit sessions. All you need to do is in click the options button from the main MySQL for Excel panel:  And make sure the Edit Session Options (highlighted in yellow) are set correctly, specially that Restore saved Edit sessions is checked: Then just begin an Edit session like you would normally do, select the connection and schema on the main panel and then select table you want to edit data from and click over Edit MySQL Data. and just import the MySQL data into Excel:You can edit data like you always did with the previous version. To test the save and restore saved sessions functionality, first we need to save the workbook while at least one Edit session is opened and close the file.Then reopen the workbook. Depending on your version of Excel is where the next steps are going to differ:Excel 2013 extra step (first): In Excel 2013 you first need to open the workbook with saved edit sessions, then click the MySQL for Excel Icon on the the Data menu (notice how in this version, every time you open or create a new file the MySQL for Excel panel is closed in the new window). Please note that if you work on Excel 2013 with several workbooks with open edit sessions each at the same time, you'll need to repeat this step each time you open one of them: Following steps:  In Excel 2010 or previous, you just need to make sure the MySQL for Excel panel is already open at this point, if its not, please do the previous step specified above (Excel 2013 extra step). For Excel 2010 or older versions you will only need to do this previous step once.  When saved sessions are detected, you will be prompted what to do with those sessions, you can click Restore to continue working where you left off, click Discard to delete the saved sessions (All edit session information for this file will be deleted from your computer, so you will no longer be prompted the next time you open this same file) or click Nothing to continue without opening saved sessions (This will keep the saved edit sessions intact, to be prompted again about them the next time you open this workbook): And there you have it, now you will be able to save your Edit sessions, close your workbook or turn off your computer and you will still be able to reopen them in the future, to continue working right where you were. Today we talked about how you can save your active Edit sessions and restore them later, this is another feature included in the latest MySQL for Excel release (1.2.0). Please remember you can try this product and many others for free downloading the installer directly from our MySQL Installer downloads page.Happy editing !

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• Microsoft Certifications &ndash; how to prep? and why?

  - by Kelly Jones

  I often get asked by my colleagues, “how do you prepare for Microsoft exams?” Well, the answer for me is a little complicated, so I thought I’d write up here what I do. The first thing I do is go to Microsoft’s website to find the exam that I need to take.  If you’re looking to get a particular certification, then their site lists the exam or exams that you’ll need to pass.  If you’ve already taken an exam, you can log onto the MCP website and use their certification planner.  This little tool tells you what tests you need, based on the exams you’ve already passed.  It is very helpful with the certifications that are multiple tests and especially ones that have electives. Once you’ve identified the test, you can use Microsoft’s website to see the topics that it covers.  This is a good outline to follow when you study.  I’ll keep this handy to reference back throughout my studying to make sure that I’m covering all the topics I need to know. The next step is probably where I am a little different from others.  IF the exam outline covers material that I’ve already been working with, then I’ll skip a lot of the studying and go directly to the practice tests.  However, if I’m looking at the outline and wondering how in the world do you do that? – then it’s time to hit the books. So, where to find study materials?  Try typing in the exam number into any search engine.  You’ll typically find a ton of resources.  If you’re lucky, you’ll find books that others recommend based on their studying and exam experience.  As a Sogeti employee, I have access to three really good resources: an internal company list of all of the consultants who have passed particular tests (on our Connex website), Books 24x7, and Transcender practice exams. Once my studying is done (either through books or experience), I’ll go through the practice exams.  I find them really helpful in getting my knowledge lined up to the thinking process that the exam writers use.  If I’m relying on my experience, then this really helps me to identify gaps in my knowledge that I’ll need to fill. That’s about it.  If I’m doing ok on the practice exams, then I’ll take the real thing.  I’ve found that the practice exams are usually more difficult than then real thing. Oh – one other thing I do related to Microsoft exams – I try to take any beta exams that Microsoft makes available that fall into my skill set.  Microsoft has started a blog to announce these and the seats usually fill up really quick.  The blog is at http://blogs.technet.com/betaexams/ . You don’t get your results instantly, like a normal exam, instead you have to wait for everyone to finish taking the beta exams and for Microsoft to determine which questions they are using and which they are dropping.  So, be prepared to wait six to eight weeks for your results.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists

  - by Argenis

    Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company - and your employer trusts you with keeping them safe. Probably one of the most important of these assets are passwords. As you well know, the can be used anywhere: for service accounts, credentials, proxies, linked servers, DTS/SSIS packages, symmetrical keys, private keys, etc., etc. Have you given some thought to what you're doing to keep these passwords safe? Are you backing them up somewhere? Who else besides you can access them? Good-Ol’ Post-It Notes Under Your Keyboard If you have a password-protected Excel sheet for your passwords, I have bad news for you: Excel's level of encryption is good for your grandma's budget spreadsheet, not for a list of enterprise passwords. I will try to summarize the main point of this best practice in one sentence: You should keep your passwords on an encrypted, access and version-controlled, backed-up, well-known shared location that every DBA on your team is aware of, and maintain copies of this password "database" on your DBA's workstations. Now I have to break down that statement to you: - Encrypted: what’s the point of saving your passwords on a file that any Windows admin with enough privileges can read? - Access controlled: This one is pretty much self-explanatory. - Version controlled: Passwords change (and I’m really hoping you do change them) and version control would allow you to track what a previous password was if the utility you’ve chosen doesn’t handle that for you. - Backed-up: You want a safe copy of the password list to be kept offline, preferably in long term storage, with relative ease of restoring. - Well-known shared location: This is critical for teams: what good is a password list if only one person in the team knows where it is? I have seen multiple examples of this that work well. They all start with an encrypted database. Certainly you could leverage SQL Server's native encryption solutions like cell encryption for this. I have found such implementations to be impractical, for the most part. Enter The World Of Utilities There are a myriad of open source/free software solutions to help you here. One of my favorites is KeePass, which creates encrypted files that can be saved to a network share, Sharepoint, etc. KeePass has UIs for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Other solutions I've used before worth mentioning include PasswordSafe and 1Password, with the latter one being a paid solution – but wildly popular in mobile devices. There are, of course, even more "enterprise-level" solutions available from 3rd party vendors. The truth is that most of the customers that I work with don't need that level of protection of their digital assets, and something like a KeePass database on Sharepoint suits them very well. What are you doing to safeguard your passwords? Leave a comment below, and join the discussion! Cheers, -Argenis

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• Representing Mauritius in the 2013 Bench Games

  Only by chance I came across an interesting option for professionals and enthusiasts in IT, and quite honestly I can't even remember where I caught attention of Brainbench and their 2013 Bench Games event. But having access to 600+ free exams in a friendly international intellectual competition doesn't happen to be available every day. So, it was actually a no-brainer to sign up and browse through the various categories. Most interestingly, Brainbench is not only IT-related. They offer a vast variety of fields in their Test Center, like Languages and Communication, Office Skills, Management, Aptitude, etc., and it can be a little bit messy about how things are organised. Anyway, while browsing through their test offers I added a couple of exams to 'My Plan' which I would give a shot afterwards. Self-assessments Actually, I took the tests based on two major aspects: 'Fun Factor' and 'How good would I be in general'... Usually, you have to pay for any kind of exams and given this unique chance by Brainbench to simply train this kind of tests was already worth the time. Frankly speaking, the tests are very close to the ones you would be asked to do at Prometric or Pearson Vue, ie. Microsoft exams, etc. Go through a set of multiple choice questions in a given time frame. Most of the tests I did during the Bench Games were based on 40 questions, each with a maximum of 3 minutes to answer. Ergo, one test in maximum 2 hours - that sounds feasible, doesn't it? The Measure of Achievement While the 2013 Bench Games are considered a worldwide friendly competition of knowledge I was really eager to get other Mauritians attracted. Using various social media networks and community activities it all looked quite well at the beginning. Mauritius was listed on rank #19 of Most Certified Citizens and rank #10 of Most Master Level Certified Nation - not bad, not bad... Until... the next update of the Bench Games Leaderboard. The downwards trend seemed to be unstoppable and I couldn't understand why my results didn't show up on the Individual Leader Board. First of all, I passed exams that were not even listed and second, I had better results on some exams listed. After some further information from the organiser it turned out that my test transcript wasn't available to the public. Only then results are considered and counted in the competition. During that time, I actually managed to hold 3 test results on the Individuals... Other participants were merciless, eh, more successful than me, produced better test results than I did. But still I managed to stay on the final score board: An 'exotic' combination of exam, test result, country and person itself Representing Mauritius and the Visual FoxPro community in that fun event. And although I mainly develop in Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2 and C# using .NET Framework from 2.0 to 4.5 since a couple of years I still managed to pass on Master Level. Hm, actually my Microsoft Certified Programmer (MCP) exams are dated back in June 2004 - more than 9 years ago... Look who got lucky... As described above I did a couple of exams as time allowed and without any preparations, but still I received the following mail notification: "Thank you for recently participating in our Bench Games event.  We wanted to inform you that you obtained a top score on our test(s) during this event, and as a result, will receive a free annual Brainbench subscription.  Your annual subscription will give you access to all our tests just like Bench Games, but for an entire year plus additional benefits!" -- Leader Board Notification from Brainbench Even fun activities get rewarded sometimes. Thanks to @Brainbench_com for the free annual subscription based on my passed 2013 Bench Games Master Level exam. It would be interesting to know about the total figures, especially to see how many citizens of Mauritius took part in this year's Bench Games. Anyway, I'm looking forward to be able to participate in other challenges like this in the future.

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• Get More From Your Service Request

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Leveraging Service Request Best Practices Use best practices to get there faster. In the daily conversations I have with customers, they sometimes express frustration over their Service Requests. They often feel powerless to make needed changes, so their sense of frustration grows. To help you avoid some of the frustration you might feel in dealing with your Service Requests (SR), here are a few pointers that come from our best practice discussions. Be proactive. If you can anticipate some of the questions that Support will ask, or the information they may need, try to provide this up front, when you log the SR. This could be output from the Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA), if this is a database issue, or the output from another diagnostic tool, if you’re an EBS customer. Any information you can supply that helps us understand the situation better, helps us resolve the issue sooner. As you use some of these tools proactively, you might even find the solution to the problem before you log an SR! Be right. Make sure you have the correct severity level. Since you select the initial severity level, it’s easy to accept the default without considering how significant this may be. Business impact is the driving factor, so make sure you take a moment to select the severity level that is appropriate to the situation. Also, make sure you ask us to change the severity level, should the situation dictate. Be responsive! If this is an important issue to you, quickly follow up on any action plan submitted to you by Oracle Support. The support engineer assigned to your Service Request will be able to move the issue forward more aggressively when they have the needed information. This is crucial in resolving your issues in a timely manner. Be thorough. If there are five questions in the action plan, make sure you provide an answer for all five questions in one response, rather than trickling them in one at a time. This will allow the engineer to look at all of the information as a whole and to avoid multiple trips to your SR, saving valuable time and getting you a resolution sooner. Be your own advocate! You know your situation best; make sure Oracle Support understands both how and why this issue is important to you and your company. Use the escalation process if you're concerned that your SR isn't going the right direction, the right pace, or through the right person. Don't wait until you're frustrated and angry. An escalation is as simple as a quick conversation on the phone and can be amazingly effective in getting your issues back on track. The support manager you speak with is empowered to make any needed changes. Be our partner. You can make your support experience better. When your SR has been resolved, you may receive a survey request. This is intended to get your feedback about how your SR went and what we can do to improve your overall support experience. Oracle Support is here to help you. Our goal with any Service Request is to provide the best possible solution as quickly as possible. With your help, we’ll be able to do this with your Service Request too.  

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• Access Control Lists for Roles

  - by Kyle Hatlestad

  Back in an earlier post, I wrote about how to enable entity security (access control lists, aka ACLs) for UCM 11g PS3.  Well, there was actually an additional security option that was included in that release but not fully supported yet (only for Fusion Applications).  It's the ability to define Roles as ACLs to entities (documents and folders).  But now in PS5, this security option is now fully supported.   The benefit of defining Roles for ACLs is that those user roles come from the enterprise security directory (e.g. OID, Active Directory, etc) and thus the WebCenter Content administrator does not need to define them like they do with ACL Groups (Aliases).  So it's a bit of best of both worlds.  Users are managed through the LDAP repository and are automatically granted/denied access through their group membership which are mapped to Roles in WCC.  A different way to think about it is being able to add multiple Accounts to content items...which I often get asked about.  Because LDAP groups can map to Accounts, there has always been this association between the LDAP groups and access to the entity in WCC.  But that mapping had to define the specific level of access (RWDA) and you could only apply one Account per content item or folder.  With Roles for ACLs, it basically takes away both of those restrictions by allowing users to define more then one Role and define the level of access on-the-fly. To turn on ACLs for Roles, there is a component to enable.  On the Component Manager page, click the 'advanced component manager' link in the description paragraph at the top.   In the list of Disabled Components, enable the RoleEntityACL component. Then restart.  This is assuming the other configuration settings have been made for the other ACLs in the earlier post.   Once enabled, a new metadata field called xClbraRoleList will be created.  If you are using OracleTextSearch as the search indexer, be sure to run a Fast Rebuild on the collection. For Users and Groups, these values are automatically picked up from the corresponding database tables.  In the case of Roles, there is an explicitly defined list of choices that are made available.  These values must match the roles that are coming from the enterprise security repository. To add these values, go to Administration -> Admin Applets -> Configuration Manager.  On the Views tab, edit the values for the ExternalRolesView.  By default, 'guest' and 'authenticated' are added.  Once added, you can assign the roles to your content or folder. If you are a user that can both access the Security Group for that item and you belong to that particular Role, you now have access to that item.  If you don't belong to that Role, you won't! [Extra] Because the selection mechanism for the list is using a type-ahead field, users may not even know the possible choices to start typing to.  To help them, one thing you can add to the form is a placeholder field which offers the entire list of roles as an option list they can scroll through (assuming its a manageable size)  and view to know what to type to.  By being a placeholder field, it won't need to be added to the custom metadata database table or search engine.  

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• Is Your Company Social on the Inside?

  - by Mike Stiles

  As we talk about the extension of social from an outbound-facing marketing tool to a platform that will reach across the entire enterprise, servicing multiple functions of that enterprise, it might be time to take a look at how social can be effectively employed for internal communications. Remember the printed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Remember the emailed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Why not? Shouldn’t your employees care about the company more than anything else in life and be voraciously hungry for any information related to it? The more realistic prospect is that a company’s employees don’t behave much differently at work where information is concerned than they do in their personal lives. They “tune in” to information that’s immediately relevant to them, that peaks their interest, and/or that’s presented in a visually engaging way. That currently makes an internal social platform the most ideal way to communicate within the organization. It not only facilitates more immediate, more targeted (and thus more relevant) messaging from the company out to employees, it sets a stage for employees to communicate with each other and efficiently get answers to questions from peers. It’s a collaboration tool on steroids. If you build such an internal social portal and you do it right, will employees use it? Considering social media has officially been declared more addictive than cigarettes, booze and sex…probably. But what does it mean to do an internal social platform “right”? The bar has been set pretty high. Your employees are used to Twitter and Facebook, and would roll their eyes at anything less simple or harder to navigate than those. All the Facebook best practices would apply to your internal social as well, including the importance of managing posting frequency, using photos and video, moderation & response, etc. And don’t worry, you won’t be the first to jump in. WPP's global digital agency Possible has its own social network called Colab. Nestle has “The Nest.” Red Robin’s got one. I myself got an in-depth look at McGraw-Hill’s internal social platform at Blogwell NYC. Some of these companies are building their own platforms, others are buying them off the shelf or customizing readymade solutions. But you won’t be the last either. Prescient Digital Media and the IABC learned 39% of companies don’t offer employees any social tools. Not a social network, not discussion forums, not even IM. And a great many continue to ban the use of Facebook and Twitter on the premises. That’s pretty astonishing since social has become as essential a modern day communications tool as the telephone. But such holdouts will pay a big price for being mired in fear while competitors exploit social connections unchallenged. Fish where the fish are. If social has become the way people communicate and take in information, let that be the way communication is trafficked in the organization.

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• Monitoring Windows Azure Service Bus Endpoint with BizTalk 360?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I'm currently working with a customer who is undergoing an initiative to expose some of their line of business applications to external partners and SAAS applications and as part of this we have been looking at using the Windows Azure Service Bus. For the first part of the project we were focused on some synchronous request response scenarios where an external application would use the Service Bus relay functionality to get data from some internal applications. When we were looking at the operational monitoring side of the solution it was obvious that although most of the normal server monitoring capabilities would be required for the on premise components we would have to look at new approaches to validate that the operation of the service from outside of the organization was working as expected. A number of months ago one of my colleagues Elton Stoneman wrote about an approach I have introduced with a number of clients in the past where we implement a diagnostics service in each service component we build. This service would allow us to make a call which would flex some of the working parts of the system to prove it was working within any SLA. This approach is discussed on the following article: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2011/12/12/the-value-of-a-diagnostics-service.aspx In our solution we wanted to take the same approach but we had to consider that the service clients were external to the service. We also had to consider that by going through Windows Azure Service Bus it's not that easy to make most of your standard monitoring solutions just give you an easy way to do this. In a previous article I have described how you can use BizTalk 360 to monitor things using a custom extension to the Web Endpoint Manager and I felt that we could use this approach to provide an excellent way to monitor our service bus endpoint. The previous article is available on the following link: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/12/150696.aspx   The Monitoring Solution BizTalk 360 currently has an easy way to hook up the endpoint manager to a url which it will then call and if a successful response is returned it then considers the endpoint to be in a healthy state. We would take advantage of this by creating an ASP.net web page which would be called by BizTalk 360 and behind this page we would implement the functionality to call the diagnostics service on our Service Bus endpoint. The ASP.net page could include logic to work out how to handle the response from the diagnostics service. For example if the overall result of the diagnostics service was successful but the call to the diagnostics service was longer than a certain amount of time then we could return an error and indicate the service is taking too long. The following diagram illustrates the monitoring pattern.   The diagnostics service which is hosted in the line of business application allows us to ping a simple message through the Azure Service Bus relay to the WCF services in the LOB application and we they get a response back indicating that the service is working fine. To implement this I used the exact same approach I described in my previous post to create a custom web page which calls the diagnostics service and then it would return an HTTP response code which would depend on the error condition returned or a 200 if it was successful. One of the limitations of this approach is that the competing consumer pattern for listening to messages from service bus means that you cannot guarantee which server would process your diagnostics check message but with BizTalk 360 you could simply add multiple endpoint checks so that it could access the individual on-premise web servers directly to ensure that each server is working fine and then check that messages can also be processed through the cloud. Conclusion It took me about 15 minutes to get a proof of concept of this up and running which was able to monitor our web services which had been exposed via Windows Azure Service Bus. I was then able to inherit all of the monitoring benefits of BizTalk 360 to provide an enterprise class monitoring solution for our cloud enabled API.

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• Using WKA in Large Coherence Clusters (Disabling Multicast)

  - by jpurdy

  Disabling hardware multicast (by configuring well-known addresses aka WKA) will place significant stress on the network. For messages that must be sent to multiple servers, rather than having a server send a single packet to the switch and having the switch broadcast that packet to the rest of the cluster, the server must send a packet to each of the other servers. While hardware varies significantly, consider that a server with a single gigabit connection can send at most ~70,000 packets per second. To continue with some concrete numbers, in a cluster with 500 members, that means that each server can send at most 140 cluster-wide messages per second. And if there are 10 cluster members on each physical machine, that number shrinks to 14 cluster-wide messages per second (or with only mild hyperbole, roughly zero). It is also important to keep in mind that network I/O is not only expensive in terms of the network itself, but also the consumption of CPU required to send (or receive) a message (due to things like copying the packet bytes, processing a interrupt, etc). Fortunately, Coherence is designed to rely primarily on point-to-point messages, but there are some features that are inherently one-to-many: Announcing the arrival or departure of a member Updating partition assignment maps across the cluster Creating or destroying a NamedCache Invalidating a cache entry from a large number of client-side near caches Distributing a filter-based request across the full set of cache servers (e.g. queries, aggregators and entry processors) Invoking clear() on a NamedCache The first few of these are operations that are primarily routed through a single senior member, and also occur infrequently, so they usually are not a primary consideration. There are cases, however, where the load from introducing new members can be substantial (to the point of destabilizing the cluster). Consider the case where cluster in the first paragraph grows from 500 members to 1000 members (holding the number of physical machines constant). During this period, there will be 500 new member introductions, each of which may consist of several cluster-wide operations (for the cluster membership itself as well as the partitioned cache services, replicated cache services, invocation services, management services, etc). Note that all of these introductions will route through that one senior member, which is sharing its network bandwidth with several other members (which will be communicating to a lesser degree with other members throughout this process). While each service may have a distinct senior member, there's a good chance during initial startup that a single member will be the senior for all services (if those services start on the senior before the second member joins the cluster). It's obvious that this could cause CPU and/or network starvation. In the current release of Coherence (3.7.1.3 as of this writing), the pure unicast code path also has less sophisticated flow-control for cluster-wide messages (compared to the multicast-enabled code path), which may also result in significant heap consumption on the senior member's JVM (from the message backlog). This is almost never a problem in practice, but with sufficient CPU or network starvation, it could become critical. For the non-operational concerns (near caches, queries, etc), the application itself will determine how much load is placed on the cluster. Applications intended for deployment in a pure unicast environment should be careful to avoid excessive dependence on these features. Even in an environment with multicast support, these operations may scale poorly since even with a constant request rate, the underlying workload will increase at roughly the same rate as the underlying resources are added. Unless there is an infrastructural requirement to the contrary, multicast should be enabled. If it can't be enabled, care should be taken to ensure the added overhead doesn't lead to performance or stability issues. This is particularly crucial in large clusters.

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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