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• Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 2

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome back, in part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies. In this blog post I’ll get into the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. Tools => Options => Test Tools Have you visited the treasures of Visual Studio Menu bar tools => Options => Test Tools lately? The options to enable disable prompts on creating, editing, deleting or running manual/automated tests can be controller from here. The default test project language and default test types created on a new test project creation could be selected/unselected from here. Ever wondered how you can change the default limit of 25 test results, this can again be changed from here. If you record a lot of Web Tests and wish for the web test recorder to start with “that” URL populated, well this again can be specified from here. If you haven’t so far, I would urge you to spend 2 minutes in the test tools options.   Test Menu => Ready Steady Test Action! The Test tools are under the Test Menu in Visual Studio, apart from being able to create a new Test and Test List you can also load an existing vsmdi file. You can also manage your test controllers from here. A solution can have one or more test setting files, but there can only be one active test settings file at any time. Again, this selection can be done from here.  You can open the various test windows from under the windows option from the test menu. If you open the Test view window you will see that you have the option to group the tests by work items, project, test type, etc. You can set these properties by right clicking a test in the test list and choosing properties from the context menu.    So, what is a vsmdi file? vsmdi stands for Visual Studio Test Metadata File. Placed under the Solution Items this file keeps track of the list of unit tests in your solution. If you open the vsmdi file as an xml file you will see a series of Test Links nested with in the list Test List tags along with the Run Configuration tag. When in visual studio you run tests, the IDE looks at the vsmdi file to see what tests need to be run. You also have the option of using the vsmdi file in your team builds to specify which tests need to run as part of the build. Refer here for a walkthrough from a fellow blogger on how to use the vsmdi file in the team builds. Web Performance Test – The Truth! In Visual Studio 2010 “Web Tests” have been renamed to “Web Performance Tests”. Apart from renaming this test type there have been several improvements to this test type in visual studio 2010. I am very active on the MSDN Visual Studio And Load Testing forum and a frequent question from many users is “Do Web Tests support Pages that run JavaScript?” I will start with a little bit of background before answering this question. Web Performance Tests operate at the HTTP Layer, but why? To enable you to generate high loads with a relatively low amount of hardware, Web performance tests are driven at the protocol layer rather than instantiating a browser.The most common source of confusion is that users do not realize Web Performance Tests work at the HTTP layer. The tool adds to that misconception. After all, you record in IE, and when running a Web test you can select which browser to use, and then the result viewer shows the results in a browser window. So that means the tests run through the browser, right? NO! The Web test engine works at the HTTP layer, and does not instantiate a browser. What does that mean? In the diagram below, you can see there are no browsers running when the engine is sending and receiving requests. Does that mean I can’t test pages that use Java script? The best example for java script generating HTTP traffic is AJAX calls. The most common example of browser plugins are Silverlight or Flash. The Web test recorder will record HTTP traffic from AJAX calls and from most (but not all) browser plugins. This means you will still be able to web performance test pages that use java script or plugin and play back the results but the playback engine will not show the java script or plug in results in the ‘browser control’. If you want to test the page behaviour as a result of the java script or plug in consider using Coded UI Tests. This page looks like it failed, when in fact it succeeded! Looking closely at the response, and subsequent requests, it is clear the operation succeeded. As stated above, the reason why the browser control is pasting this message is because java script has been disabled in this control. So, to reiterate, the web performance test recorder: - Sends and receives data at the HTTP layer. - Does NOT run a browser. - Does NOT run java script. - Does NOT host ActiveX controls or plugins. There is a great series of blog posts from Ed Glas, i would highly recommend his blog to any one performing Load/Performance testing through Visual Studio. Demo – Web Performance Test [Demo] - Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Test Settings and Configuration   [Demo]–Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Web Performance Test   In this short video I try and answer the following questions, Why is performance Testing important? How does Visual Studio Help you performance Test your applications? How do i record a web performance test? How do make a web performance test data driven, transaction driven, loop driven, convert to code, add validations? Best practices for recording Web Performance Tests. I have a web performance test, what next? Creating the Web Performance Test was the first step towards load testing your application. Now that we have the base test we can test the page behaviour when N-users access the page. Have you ever had the head of business call you and mention that the marketing team has done a fantastic job and are expecting increased traffic on the web site, can the website survive the weekend with that additional load? This is the perfect opportunity to capacity test your application to see how your website holds up under various levels of load, you can work the results backwards to see how much hardware you may need to scale up your application to survive the weekend. Apart from that it is always a good idea to have some benchmarks around how the application performs under light loads for short duration, under heavy load for long duration and soak test the application run a constant load for a very week or two to record the effects of constant load for really long durations, this is a great way of identifying how your application handles the default IIS application pool reset which by default is configured to once every 25 hours. These bench marks will act as the perfect yard stick to measure performance gains when you start making improvements. BUT there are some best practices! => Goal Based Load Testing Approach Since the subject is vast and there are a lot of things to measure and analyse, … it is very easy to get distracted from the real goal!  You can optimize your application once you know where the pain points are. There is no point performing a load test of 5000 users if your intranet application will only have a 100 simultaneous users, it is important to keep focussed on the real goals of the project. So the idea is to have a user story around your load testing scenarios and test realistically. So it is recommended that you follow the below outline, It is an Iterative process, refine your objectives, identify the key scenarios, what is the expected workload, key metrics you want to report, record the web performance tests, simulate load and analyse results. Is your application already deployed in Production? This is great! You can analyse the IIS Logs to understand the user behaviour… But what are IIS LOGS? The IIS logs allow you to record events for each application and Web site on the Web server. You can create separate logs for each of your applications and Web sites. Logging information in IIS goes beyond the scope of the event logging or performance monitoring features provided by Windows. The IIS logs can include information, such as who has visited your site, what the visitor viewed, and when the information was last viewed. You can use the IIS logs to identify any attempts to gain unauthorized access to your Web server. How to configure IIS LOGS? For those Ninjas who already have IIS Logs configured (by the way its on by default) and need a way to analyse the IIS Logs, can use the Windows IIS Utility – Log Parser. Log Parser is a very powerful tool that provides a generic SQL-like language on top of many types of data like IIS Logs, Event Viewer entries, XML files, CSV files, File System and others; and it allows you to export the result of the queries to many output formats such as CSV, XML, SQL Server, Charts and others; and it works well with IIS 5, 6, 7 and 7.5. Frequently used Log Parser queries. Demo – Load Test [Demo]–Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Load Testing   In this short video I try and answer the following questions, - Types of Performance Testing? - Perform Goal driven Load Testing, analyse Test Run Result and Generate a report? Recap A quick recap of what we have covered so far,     Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, in part III of this blog series I’ll be getting into the details of Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, and the Asp.net Profiler. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. See you on in Part III   Share this post : CodeProject

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• Running TeamCity from Amazon EC2 - Cloud based scalable build and continuous Integration

  - by RoyOsherove

  I’ve been having fun playing with the amazon EC2 cloud service. I set up a server running TeamCity, and an image of a server that just runs a TeamCity agent. I also setup TeamCity  to automatically instantiate agents on EC2 and shut them down based upon availability of free agents. Here’s how I did it: The first step was setting up the teamcity server. Create an account on amazon EC2 (BTW, amazon’s sites works better in IE than it does in chrome.. who knew!?) Open the EC2 dashboard, and click “Launch Instance” . From the “Quick Start” tab I selected from the list: “Getting Started on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (AMI Id: ami-c5e40dac)” .  it’s good enough to just run teamcity. In the instance details, I used the default (Small instance, 1.7 GB mem). You might want to choose a close availability zone based on where you are. We want to “Launch instances” so click continue. Select the default kernel, RAM disk and all. No need to enable monitoring for now (you can do that later). click continue. If you don’t have a key pair, you will be prompted to create one. Once you do, select it in the list. Now you’ll be prompted to create a security group. I named mine “TC” as in “TeamCity”. each group is a bunch of settings on which ports can be let through into and out of a hosted machine.  keep it as the default settings. We will change them later. Click continue,  review and then click “Launch”. Now you’ll be able to see the new instance in the running instances list on your site. Now, you need to install stuff on that instance (TeamCity!) . To do that, you’ll need to Remote desktop into that instance. To do that, we’ll get the admin password for that instance: Check it on the list, and click “Instance Actions” - “Get Windows Admin Password”. You might have to wait about 10 minutes or so for the password to be generated for you. Once you have the password, you will remote desktop (start-run-‘mstsc’) into the instance. It’s address is a dns address shown below the list under “Public DNS”. it looks something like: ec2-256-226-194-91.compute-1.amazonaws.com Once you’re inside the instance – you’ll need to open IE (it is in hardened mode so you’ll have to relax its security settings to download stuff). I first downloaded chrome and using chrome I downloaded TeamCity. Note that the download speed is FAST. several MBs per second. To be able to see TeamCity from the outside, you will need to open the advanced firewall settings inside the remote machine, and add incoming and outgoing rules for port 80 (HTTP). Once you do that, you should be able to see the machine from the outside. If you still can’t, see the next step. I also enabled ports 9090 since I will use this machine to create an agent image later as well. Now configure the security group (TC) to enable talking to agents: IN the EC2 dashboard click on “Security Groups” and select your group. To add a rule, click on the empty list under the ‘protocol’ header. select TCP. from and ‘to’ ports are 9090. source ip is 0.0.0.0/0 (every ip is allowed). click “Save.  Also make sure you can see “HTTP” tcp 80 in that list. if you can’t see it, add it or you won’t be able to browse to the machine’s teamcity server home page. I also set an elastic IP for the machine: so I always have the same IP for the machine instance. Allocate and set one through the”Elastic IP” link on the EC2 dashboard.   you should now have a working instance of teamcity.   Now let’s create an agent image. Repeat steps 1-9, but this time, make sure you select a machine that fits what an agent might do. I selected Instance type – Hihg-CPU medium machine,  that is much faster. On that machine, I installed what I needed (VS 2010, PostSharp etc..). downloading VS 2010 from MSDN (2 GB took less than 10 min!) Now, instead of installing teamcity, browse using the browser to the teamcity homepage (from within the remote machine). go to the Administration page, and click the upper right link “Install agents”. Install the agent on he local machine – set it to the IP or DNS of the running TeamCity server. That way you’ll be able to check their connectivity live before making this machine your official agent image to reuse. Once the agent is installed, see that the TC server can see it and use it. see steps 13-14 above if they can’t. Once it works, you can take steps to make this image your agent image to be reused. next, here is a copy-paste of several steps to take from http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/TCD5/Setting+Up+TeamCity+for+Amazon+EC2 Configure system so that agent it is started on machine boot (and make sure TeamCity server is accessible on machine boot). Test the setup by rebooting machine and checking that the agent connects normally to the server. Prepare the Image for bundling: Remove any temporary/history information in the system. Stop the agent (under Windows stop the service but leave it in Automatic startup type) Delete content agent logs and temp directories (not necessary) Delete "<Agent Home>/conf/amazon-*" file (not necessary) Change config/buildAgent.properties to remove properties: name, serverAddress, authToken (not necessary)   Now, we need to: Make AMI from the running instance. Configure TeamCity EC2 support on TeamCity server. Making an AMI: Check the instance of the agent in the EC2 dashboard instance list, and select instance actions->Create Image (EBS AMI) you’ll see the image pending in the APIs list in the EC2 dashboard. this could take 30 minutes or more. meanwhile we can configure the could support in the teamcity server. COPY THE AMI ID to the clipboard (looks like ami-a88aa4ce) Configuring TeamCity for Cloud: In TeamCity, click on “Agents” and then on “Cloud” tab. this is where you will control your cloud agents. to configure new cloud agents based on APIs, click on the right link to the “configuration page” Create a new profile and select AMazon EC2 as cloud type. Use your AMI ID that you copied to the clipboard into the “Images” field. Select an availability zone that is the same as the one your instance is running on for best communication perf between them make sure you select the ‘TC’ security group hopefully, that should be it, and teamcity will try to instantiate new instances on demand. Note that it may take around 10 minutes for an agent to become available to teamcity from the time it’s started.

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• How I Work: A Cloud Developer's Workstation

  - by BuckWoody

  I've written here a little about how I work during the day, including things like using a stand-up desk (still doing that, by the way). Inspired by a Twitter conversation yesterday, I thought I might explain how I set up my computing environment. First, a couple of important points. I work in Cloud Computing, specifically (but not limited to) Windows Azure. Windows Azure has features to run a Virtual Machine (IaaS), run code without having to control a Virtual Machine (PaaS) and use databases, video streaming, Hadoop and more (a kind of SaaS for tech pros). As such, my designs run the gamut of on-premises, VM's in the Cloud, and software that I write for a platform. I focus on data primarily, meaning that I design a lot of systems that use an RDBMS (like SQL Server or Windows Azure Databases) or a NoSQL approach (MongoDB on Azure or large-scale Key-Value Pairs in Table storage) and even Hadoop and R, and also Cloud Numerics in F#. All that being said, those things inform my choices below. Hardware I have a Lenovo X220 tablet/laptop which I really like a great deal - it's a light, tough, extremely fast system. When I travel, that's the system I take. It has 8GB of RAM, and an SSD drive. I sometimes use that to develop or work at a client's site, on the road, or in the living room when I'm not in my home office. My main system is a GateWay DX430017 - I've maxed it out on RAM, and I have two 1TB drives in it. It's not only my workstation for work; I leave it on all the time and it streams our videos, music and books. I have about 3400 e-books, and I've just started using Calibre to stream the library. I run Windows 8 on it so I can set up Hyper-V images, since Windows Azure allows me to move regular Hyper-V disks back and forth to the Cloud. That's where all my "servers" are, when I have to use an IaaS approach. The reason I use a desktop-style system rather than a laptop only approach is that a good part of my job is setting up architectures to solve really big, complex problems. That means I have to simulate entire networks on-premises, along with the Hybrid Cloud approach I use a lot. I need a lot of disk space and memory for that, and I use two huge monitors on my stand-up desk. I could probably use 10 monitors if I had the room for them. Also, since it's our home system as well, I leave it on all the time and it doesn't travel.   Software For the software for my systems, it's important to keep in mind that I not only write code, but I design databases, teach, present, and create Linux and other environments. Windows 8 - While the jury is out for me on the new interface, the context-sensitive search, integrated everything, and speed is just hands-down the right choice. I've evaluated a server OS, Linux, even an Apple, but I just am not as efficient on those as I am with Windows 8. Visual Studio Ultimate - I develop primarily in .NET (C# and F# mostly) and I use the Team Foundation Server in the cloud, and I'm asked to do everything from UI to Services, so I need everything. Windows Azure SDK, Windows Azure Training Kit - I need the first to set up my Azure PaaS coding, and the second has all the info I need for PaaS, IaaS and SaaS. This is primarily how I get paid. :) SQL Server Developer Edition - While I might install Oracle, MySQL and Postgres on my VM's, the "outside" environment is SQL Server for an RDBMS. I install the Developer Edition because it has the same features as Enterprise Edition, and comes with all the client tools and documentation. Microsoft Office -  Even if I didn't work here, this is what I would use. I've just grown too accustomed to doing business this way to change, so my advice is always "use what works", and this does. The parts I use are: OneNote (and a Math Add-in) - I do almost everything - and I mean everything in OneNote. I can code, do high-end math, present, design, collaborate and more. All my notebooks are on my Skydrive. I can use them from any system, anywhere. If you take the time to learn this program, you'll be hooked. Excel with PowerPivot - Don't make that face. Excel is the world's database, and every Data Scientist I know - even the ones where I teach at the University of Washington - know it, use it, and love it.  Outlook - Primary communications, CRM and contact tool. I have all of my social media hooked up to it, so when I get an e-mail from you, I see everything, see all the history we've had on e-mail, find you on a map and more. Lync - I was fine with LiveMeeting, although it has it's moments. For me, the Lync client is tres-awesome. I use this throughout my day, present on it, stay in contact with colleagues and the folks on the dev team (who wish I didn't have it) and more.  PowerPoint - Once again, don't make that face. Whenever I see someone complaining about PowerPoint, I have 100% of the time found they don't know how to use it. If you suck at presenting or creating content, don't blame PowerPoint. Works great on my machine. :) Zoomit - Magnifier - On Windows 7 (and 8 as well) there's a built-in magnifier, but I install Zoomit out of habit. It enlarges the screen. If you don't use one of these tools (or their equivalent on some other OS) then you're presenting/teaching wrong, and you should stop presenting/teaching until you get them and learn how to show people what you can see on your tiny, tiny monitor. :) Cygwin - Unix for Windows. OK, that's not true, but it's mostly that. I grew up on mainframes and Unix (IBM and HP, thank you) and I can't imagine life without  sed, awk, grep, vim, and bash. I also tend to take a lot of the "Science" and "Development" and "Database" packages in it as well. PuTTY - Speaking of Unix, when I need to connect to my Linux VM's in Windows Azure, I want to do it securely. This is the tool for that. Notepad++ - Somewhere between torturing myself in vim and luxuriating in OneNote is Notepad++. Everyone has a favorite text editor; this one is mine. Too many features to name, and it's free. Browsers - I install Chrome, Firefox and of course IE. I know it's in vogue to rant on IE, but I tend to think for myself a great deal, and I've had few (none) problems with it. The others I have for the haterz that make sites that won't run in IE. Visio - I've used a lot of design packages, but none have the extreme meta-data edit capabilities of Visio. I don't use this all the time - it can be rather heavy, but what it does it does really well. I also present this way when I'm not using PowerPoint. Yup, I just bring up Visio and diagram away as I'm chatting with clients. Depending on what we're covering, this can be the right tool for that. Tweetdeck - The AIR one, not that new disaster they came out with. I live on social media, since you, dear readers, are my cube-mates. When I get tired of you all, I close Tweetdeck. When I need help or someone needs help from me, or if I want to see a picture of a cat while I'm coding, I bring it up. It's up most all day and night. Windows Media Player - I listen to Trance or Classical when I code, and I find music managers overbearing and extra. I just use what comes in the box, and it works great for me. R - F# and Cloud Numerics now allows me to load in R libraries (yay!) and I use this for statistical work on big data loads. Microsoft Math - One of the most amazing, free, rich, amazing, awesome, amazing calculators out there. I get the 64-bit version for quick math conversions, plots and formula-checks. Python - I know, right? Who knew that the scientific community loved Python so much. But they do. I use 2.7; not as much runs with 3+. I also use IronPython in Visual Studio, or I edit in Notepad++ Camstudio recorder - Windows PSR - In much of my training, and all of my teaching at the UW, I need to show a process on a screen. Camstudio records screen and voice, and it's free. If I need to make static training, I use the Windows PSR tool that's built right in. It's ostensibly for problem duplication, but I use it to record for training.   OK - your turn. Post a link to your blog entry below, and tell me how you set your system up.  

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• Feedback Filtration&ndash;Processing Negative Comments for Positive Gains

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  After doing 7 conferences, 5 code camps, and countless user group events, I feel that this is a post I need to write. I actually toyed with other names for this post, however those names would just lend itself to the type of behaviour I want people to avoid – the reactionary, emotional response that speaks to some deeper issue beyond immediate facts and context. Humans are incredibly complex creatures. We’re also emotional, which serves us well in certain situations but can hinder us in others. Those of us in leadership build up a thick skin because we tend to encounter those reactionary, emotional responses more often, and we’re held to a higher standard because of our positions. While we could react with emotion ourselves, as the saying goes – fighting fire with fire just makes a bigger fire. So in this post I’ll share my thought process for dealing with negative feedback/comments and how you can still get value from them. The Thought Process Let’s take a real-world example. This week I held the Prairie IT Pro & Dev Con event. We’ve gotten a lot of session feedback already, most of it overwhelmingly positive. But some not so much – and some to an extreme I rarely see but isn’t entirely surprising to me. So here’s the example from a person we’ll refer to as Mr. Horrible: How was the speaker? Horrible! Worst speaker ever! Did the session meet your expectations? Hard to tell, speaker ruined it. Other Comments: DO NOT bring this speaker back! He was at this conference last year and I hoped enough negative feedback would have taught you to not bring him back...obviously not...I will not return to this conference next year if this speaker is brought back. Now those are very strong words. “Worst speaker ever!” “Speaker ruined it” “I will not return to this conference next year if the speaker is brought back”. The speakers I invite to speak at my conference are not just presenters but friends and colleagues. When I see this, my initial reaction is of course very emotional: I get defensive, I get angry, I get offended. So that’s where the process kicks in. Step 1 – Take a Deep Breath Take a deep breath, calm down, and walk away from the keyboard. I didn’t do that recently during an email convo between some colleagues and it ended up in my reacting emotionally on Twitter – did I mention those colleagues follow my Twitter feed? Yes, I ate some crow. Ok, now that we’re calm, let’s move on to step 2. Step 2 – Strip off the Emotion We need to take off the emotion that people wrap their words in and identify the root issues. For instance, if I see: “I hated this session, the presenter was horrible! He spoke so fast I couldn’t make out what he was saying!” then I drop off the personal emoting (“I hated…”) and the personal attack (“the presenter was horrible”) and focus on the real issue this person had – that the speaker was talking too fast. Now we have a root cause of the displeasure. However, we’re also dealing with humans who are all very different. Before I call up the speaker to talk about his speaking pace, I need to do some other things first. Back to our Mr. Horrible example, I don’t really have much to go on. There’s no details of how the speaker “ruined” the session or why he’s the “worst speaker ever”. In this case, the next step is crucial. Step 3 – Validate the Feedback When I tell people that we really like getting feedback for the sessions, I really really mean it. Not just because we want to hear what individuals have to say but also because we want to know what the group thought. When a piece of negative feedback comes in, I validate it against the group. So with the speaker Mr. Horrible commented on, I go to the feedback and look at other people’s responses: 2 x Excellent 1 x Alright 1 x Not Great 1 x Horrible (our feedback guy) That’s interesting, it’s a bit all over the board. If we look at the comments more we find that the people who rated the speaker excellent liked the presentation style and found the content valuable. The one guy who said “Not Great” even commented that there wasn’t anything really wrong with the presentation, he just wasn’t excited about it. In that light, I can try to make a few assumptions: - Mr. Horrible didn’t like the speakers presentation style - Mr. Horrible was expecting something else that wasn’t communicated properly in the session description - Mr. Horrible, for whatever reason, just didn’t like this presenter Now if the feedback was overwhelmingly negative, there’s a different pattern – one that validates the negative feedback. Regardless, I never take something at face value. Even if I see really good feedback, I never get too happy until I see that there’s a group trend towards the positive. Step 4 – Action Plan Once I’ve validated the feedback, then I need to come up with an action plan around it. Let’s go back to the other example I gave – the one with the speaker going too fast. I went and looked at the feedback and sure enough, other people commented that the speaker had spoken too quickly. Now I can go back to the speaker and let him know so he can get better. But what if nobody else complained about it? I’d still mention it to the speaker, but obviously one person’s opinion needs to be weighed as such. When we did PrDC Winnipeg in 2011, I surveyed the attendees about the food. Everyone raved about it…except one person. Am I going to change the menu next time for that one person while everyone else loved it? Of course not. There’s a saying – A sure way to fail is to try to please everyone. Let’s look at the Mr. Horrible example. What can I communicate to the speaker with such limited information provided in the feedback from Mr. Horrible? Well looking at the groups feedback, I can make a few suggestions: - Ensure that people understand in the session description the style of the talk - Ensure that people understand the level of detail/complexity of the talk and what prerequisite knowledge they should have I’m looking at it as possibly Mr. Horrible assumed a much more advanced talk and was disappointed, while the positive feedback by people who – from their comments – suggested this was all new to them, were thrilled with the session level. Step 5 – Follow Up For some feedback, I follow up personally. Especially with negative or constructive feedback, its important to let the person know you heard them and are making changes because of their comments. Even if their comments were emotionally charged and overtly negative, it’s still important to reach out personally and professionally. When you remove the emotion, negative comments can be the best feedback you get. Also, people have bad days. We’ve all had one of “those days” where we talked more sternly than normal to someone, or got angry at something we’d normally shrug off. We have various stresses in our lives and sometimes they seep out in odd ways. I always try to give some benefit of the doubt, and re-evaluate my view of the person after they’ve responded to my communication. But, there is such a thing as garbage feedback. What Mr. Horrible wrote is garbage. It’s mean spirited. It’s hateful. It provides nothing constructive at all. And a tell-tale sign that feedback is garbage – the person didn’t leave their name even though there was a field for it. Step 6 – Delete It Feedback must be processed in its raw form, and the end products should drive improvements. But once you’ve figured out what those things are, you shouldn’t leave raw feedback lying around. They are snapshots in time that taken alone can be damaging. Also, you should never rest on past praise. In a future blog post, I’m going to talk about how we can provide great feedback that, even when its critical, can still be constructive.

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• Thread placement policies on NUMA systems - update

  - by Dave

  In a prior blog entry I noted that Solaris used a "maximum dispersal" placement policy to assign nascent threads to their initial processors. The general idea is that threads should be placed as far away from each other as possible in the resource topology in order to reduce resource contention between concurrently running threads. This policy assumes that resource contention -- pipelines, memory channel contention, destructive interference in the shared caches, etc -- will likely outweigh (a) any potential communication benefits we might achieve by packing our threads more densely onto a subset of the NUMA nodes, and (b) benefits of NUMA affinity between memory allocated by one thread and accessed by other threads. We want our threads spread widely over the system and not packed together. Conceptually, when placing a new thread, the kernel picks the least loaded node NUMA node (the node with lowest aggregate load average), and then the least loaded core on that node, etc. Furthermore, the kernel places threads onto resources -- sockets, cores, pipelines, etc -- without regard to the thread's process membership. That is, initial placement is process-agnostic. Keep reading, though. This description is incorrect. On Solaris 10 on a SPARC T5440 with 4 x T2+ NUMA nodes, if the system is otherwise unloaded and we launch a process that creates 20 compute-bound concurrent threads, then typically we'll see a perfect balance with 5 threads on each node. We see similar behavior on an 8-node x86 x4800 system, where each node has 8 cores and each core is 2-way hyperthreaded. So far so good; this behavior seems in agreement with the policy I described in the 1st paragraph. I recently tried the same experiment on a 4-node T4-4 running Solaris 11. Both the T5440 and T4-4 are 4-node systems that expose 256 logical thread contexts. To my surprise, all 20 threads were placed onto just one NUMA node while the other 3 nodes remained completely idle. I checked the usual suspects such as processor sets inadvertently left around by colleagues, processors left offline, and power management policies, but the system was configured normally. I then launched multiple concurrent instances of the process, and, interestingly, all the threads from the 1st process landed on one node, all the threads from the 2nd process landed on another node, and so on. This happened even if I interleaved thread creating between the processes, so I was relatively sure the effect didn't related to thread creation time, but rather that placement was a function of process membership. I this point I consulted the Solaris sources and talked with folks in the Solaris group. The new Solaris 11 behavior is intentional. The kernel is no longer using a simple maximum dispersal policy, and thread placement is process membership-aware. Now, even if other nodes are completely unloaded, the kernel will still try to pack new threads onto the home lgroup (socket) of the primordial thread until the load average of that node reaches 50%, after which it will pick the next least loaded node as the process's new favorite node for placement. On the T4-4 we have 64 logical thread contexts (strands) per socket (lgroup), so if we launch 48 concurrent threads we will find 32 placed on one node and 16 on some other node. If we launch 64 threads we'll find 32 and 32. That means we can end up with our threads clustered on a small subset of the nodes in a way that's quite different that what we've seen on Solaris 10. So we have a policy that allows process-aware packing but reverts to spreading threads onto other nodes if a node becomes too saturated. It turns out this policy was enabled in Solaris 10, but certain bugs suppressed the mixed packing/spreading behavior. There are configuration variables in /etc/system that allow us to dial the affinity between nascent threads and their primordial thread up and down: see lgrp_expand_proc_thresh, specifically. In the OpenSolaris source code the key routine is mpo_update_tunables(). This method reads the /etc/system variables and sets up some global variables that will subsequently be used by the dispatcher, which calls lgrp_choose() in lgrp.c to place nascent threads. Lgrp_expand_proc_thresh controls how loaded an lgroup must be before we'll consider homing a process's threads to another lgroup. Tune this value lower to have it spread your process's threads out more. To recap, the 'new' policy is as follows. Threads from the same process are packed onto a subset of the strands of a socket (50% for T-series). Once that socket reaches the 50% threshold the kernel then picks another preferred socket for that process. Threads from unrelated processes are spread across sockets. More precisely, different processes may have different preferred sockets (lgroups). Beware that I've simplified and elided details for the purposes of explication. The truth is in the code. Remarks: It's worth noting that initial thread placement is just that. If there's a gross imbalance between the load on different nodes then the kernel will migrate threads to achieve a better and more even distribution over the set of available nodes. Once a thread runs and gains some affinity for a node, however, it becomes "stickier" under the assumption that the thread has residual cache residency on that node, and that memory allocated by that thread resides on that node given the default "first-touch" page-level NUMA allocation policy. Exactly how the various policies interact and which have precedence under what circumstances could the topic of a future blog entry. The scheduler is work-conserving. The x4800 mentioned above is an interesting system. Each of the 8 sockets houses an Intel 7500-series processor. Each processor has 3 coherent QPI links and the system is arranged as a glueless 8-socket twisted ladder "mobius" topology. Nodes are either 1 or 2 hops distant over the QPI links. As an aside the mapping of logical CPUIDs to physical resources is rather interesting on Solaris/x4800. On SPARC/Solaris the CPUID layout is strictly geographic, with the highest order bits identifying the socket, the next lower bits identifying the core within that socket, following by the pipeline (if present) and finally the logical thread context ("strand") on the core. But on Solaris on the x4800 the CPUID layout is as follows. [6:6] identifies the hyperthread on a core; bits [5:3] identify the socket, or package in Intel terminology; bits [2:0] identify the core within a socket. Such low-level details should be of interest only if you're binding threads -- a bad idea, the kernel typically handles placement best -- or if you're writing NUMA-aware code that's aware of the ambient placement and makes decisions accordingly. Solaris introduced the so-called critical-threads mechanism, which is expressed by putting a thread into the FX scheduling class at priority 60. The critical-threads mechanism applies to placement on cores, not on sockets, however. That is, it's an intra-socket policy, not an inter-socket policy. Solaris 11 introduces the Power Aware Dispatcher (PAD) which packs threads instead of spreading them out in an attempt to be able to keep sockets or cores at lower power levels. Maximum dispersal may be good for performance but is anathema to power management. PAD is off by default, but power management polices constitute yet another confounding factor with respect to scheduling and dispatching. If your threads communicate heavily -- one thread reads cache lines last written by some other thread -- then the new dense packing policy may improve performance by reducing traffic on the coherent interconnect. On the other hand if your threads in your process communicate rarely, then it's possible the new packing policy might result on contention on shared computing resources. Unfortunately there's no simple litmus test that says whether packing or spreading is optimal in a given situation. The answer varies by system load, application, number of threads, and platform hardware characteristics. Currently we don't have the necessary tools and sensoria to decide at runtime, so we're reduced to an empirical approach where we run trials and try to decide on a placement policy. The situation is quite frustrating. Relatedly, it's often hard to determine just the right level of concurrency to optimize throughput. (Understanding constructive vs destructive interference in the shared caches would be a good start. We could augment the lines with a small tag field indicating which strand last installed or accessed a line. Given that, we could augment the CPU with performance counters for misses where a thread evicts a line it installed vs misses where a thread displaces a line installed by some other thread.)

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• Oracle @ E20 Conference Boston - Building Social Business

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle WebCenter is The Engagement Platform Powering Exceptional Experiences for Employees, Partners and Customers &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable contextual, agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and  networks of partners and customers. As many of you are aware, Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge  competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.The Enterprise 2.0 Conference takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process. Beyond discussion of the "why", there will also be in-depth opportunities for learning the "how" that will help you bring Enterprise 2.0 to your business. You won't want to miss this opportunity to learn and hear from leading experts in the fields of technology for business, collaboration, culture change and collective intelligence.Oracle was a proud Gold sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, taking place this past week in Boston. For those of you that weren't able to make it - we've made the Oracle Social Network Presentation session available here and have posted the slides below. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle. 12.00 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;}

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• Avoid the “Social Silo” - Learn Why and How

  - by Brian Dayton

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I’m not going to spend any more real estate than needed on this—social media is big. Facebook hit the Billion user mark in October, that’s 1 out of every 7 humans on the planet. This past Summer (in the Northern hemisphere) Twitter passed the 400 Million Tweet/day mark. The list of social properties and data points goes on and on. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} With social your customer, prospect, or constituent has pervasive access—through mobile—to a global audience, the ability to influence friends, friends of friends, and even people they will never meet. They also have the unique opportunity to forge a deeper relationship with your business—telling you what they like, what they don’t like, how you can help, and what they’d like to see more of. Are you listening? Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} What’s the Bottom Line for Business? Businesses need to be where their customers are—on social properties. They need to be available and responsive in those channels—24x7x365. They need to engage and communicate in new ways—sometimes in less than 140 characters and with empathy, not a 1-way megaphone. Finally, businesses need to look at social as an extension of their existing business practices. Not as a silo’d communication channel limited to marketing. Social Can’t Be a Silo – Learn Why @ Oracle CloudWorld When a business is on social networks they represent the whole business. That’s how a customer, constituent, partner or potential candidate sees it. Those organizations that have moved on the opportunity to build closer relationships through social marketing have already made the first step. Social Selling, Service, eCommerce, and Recruiting are external-facing opportunities that leading organizations are moving on right now. This strategy, one of weaving social into and across your business processes—and leveraging social concepts and technologies for internal collaboration—is something you can learn about during an Oracle CloudWorld event in a city near you. You’ll hear and see social relationship management concepts, best-practices, and recommendations woven into topics, discussions, and demonstrations throughout the event—from Marketing and Sales to Service and Human Resources. Stay Tuned and Avoid Potholes By all indications social is here to stay but it’s moving fast and social business strategies are evolving rapidly. At Oracle CloudWorld you’ll also get the opportunity to learn how to avoid some of the potholes on the road to #socialbusiness. Stay tuned to this blog. In future posts I’ll cover some of those potholes including the challenges of Social@Scale and Parallel Processes. Jump-start your social business strategy or learn how to refine and expand what you’re doing already at Oracle CloudWorld. Want to learn more about what Oracle is doing in social? Check out www.oracle.com/social or, if you're looking for a quick read my co-worker, Pat Ma, has a great post on this blog summarizing some popular Social Relationship Management use cases.

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• Oracle Expands Sun Blade Portfolio for Cloud and Highly Virtualized Environments

  - by Ferhat Hatay

  Oracle announced the expansion of Sun Blade Portfolio for cloud and highly virtualized environments that deliver powerful performance and simplified management as tightly integrated systems.  Along with the SPARC T3-1B blade server, Oracle VM blade cluster reference configuration and Oracle's optimized solution for Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle introduced the dual-node Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module with some impressive benchmark results.   Benchmarks on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module demonstrate the outstanding performance characteristics critical for running varied commercial applications used in cloud and highly virtualized environments.  These include best-in-class SPEC CPU2006 results with the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series, six Fluent world records and 1.8 times the price-performance of the IBM Power 755 running NAMD, a prominent bio-informatics workload.   Benchmarks for Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module  SPEC CPU2006  The Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module demonstrated best in class SPECint_rate2006 results for all published results using the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series, with a result of 679.  This result is 97% better than the HP BL460c G7 blade, 80% better than the IBM HS22V blade, and 79% better than the Dell M710 blade.  This result demonstrates the density advantage of the new Oracle's server module for space-constrained data centers.     Sun Blade X6275M2 (2 Nodes, Intel Xeon X5670 2.93GHz) - 679 SPECint_rate2006; HP ProLiant BL460c G7 (2.93 GHz, Intel Xeon X5670) - 347 SPECint_rate2006; IBM BladeCenter HS22V (Intel Xeon X5680)  - 377 SPECint_rate2006; Dell PowerEdge M710 (Intel Xeon X5680, 3.33 GHz) - 380 SPECint_rate2006.  SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 11/24/2010 and this report.    For more specifics about these results, please go to see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf   Fluent The Sun Fire X6275 M2 server module produced world-record results on each of the six standard cases in the current "FLUENT 12" benchmark test suite at 8-, 12-, 24-, 32-, 64- and 96-core configurations. These results beat the most recent QLogic score with IBM DX 360 M series platforms and QLogic "Truescale" interconnects.  Results on sedan_4m test case on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module are 23% better than the HP C7000 system, and 20% better than the IBM DX 360 M2; Dell has not posted a result for this test case.  Results can be found at the FLUENT website.   ANSYS's FLUENT software solves fluid flow problems, and is based on a numerical technique called computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which is used in the automotive, aerospace, and consumer products industries. The FLUENT 12 benchmark test suite consists of seven models that are well suited for multi-node clustered environments and representative of modern engineering CFD clusters. Vendors benchmark their systems with the principal objective of providing comparative performance information for FLUENT software that, among other things, depends on compilers, optimization, interconnect, and the performance characteristics of the hardware.   FLUENT application performance is representative of other commercial applications that require memory and CPU resources to be available in a scalable cluster-ready format.  FLUENT benchmark has six conventional test cases (eddy_417k, turbo_500k, aircraft_2m, sedan_4m, truck_14m, truck_poly_14m) at various core counts.   All information on the FLUENT website (http://www.fluent.com) is Copyrighted1995-2010 by ANSYS Inc. Results as of November 24, 2010. For more specifics about these results, please go to see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf   NAMD Results on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module running NAMD (a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems) show up to a 1.8X better price/performance than IBM's Power 7-based system.  For space-constrained environments, the ultra-dense Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module provides a 1.7X better price/performance per rack unit than IBM's system.     IBM Power 755 4-way Cluster (16U). Total price for cluster: $324,212. See IBM United States Hardware Announcement 110-008, dated February 9, 2010, pp. 4, 21 and 39-46.  Sun Blade X6275 M2 8-Blade Cluster (10U). Total price for cluster:  $193,939. Price/performance and performance/RU comparisons based on f1ATPase molecule test results. Sun Blade X6275 M2 cluster: $3,568/step/sec, 5.435 step/sec/RU. IBM Power 755 cluster: $6,355/step/sec, 3.189 step/sec/U. See http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/reports/system_perf.html. See http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/performance.html for more information, results as of 11/24/10.   For more specifics about these results, please go to see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf   Reverse Time Migration The Reverse Time Migration is heavily used in geophysical imaging and modeling for Oil & Gas Exploration.  The Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module showed up to a 40% performance improvement over the previous generation server module with super-linear scalability to 16 nodes for the 9-Point Stencil used in this Reverse Time Migration computational kernel.  The balanced combination of Oracle's Sun Storage 7410 system with the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module cluster showed linear scalability for the total application throughput, including the I/O and MPI communication, to produce a final 3-D seismic depth imaged cube for interpretation. The final image write time from the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module nodes to Oracle's Sun Storage 7410 system achieved 10GbE line speed of 1.25 GBytes/second or better performance. Between subsequent runs, the effects of I/O buffer caching on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module nodes and write optimized caching on the Sun Storage 7410 system gave up to 1.8 GBytes/second effective write performance. The performance results and characterization of this Reverse Time Migration benchmark could serve as a useful measure for many other I/O intensive commercial applications. 3D VTI Reverse Time Migration Seismic Depth Imaging, see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/3d_vti_reverse_time_migration for more information, results as of 11/14/2010.                            

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• Learning content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5

  Recently, I started again to learn for various Microsoft certifications. First candidate on my way to MSCD: Web Applications is the Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3. Motivation to go for a Microsoft exam I guess, this is quite personal but let me briefly describe my intentions to go that exam. First, I'm doing web development since the 1990's. Working with HTML, CSS and Javascript is happening almost daily in my workspace. And honestly, I do not only do 'pure' web development but already integrated several HTML/CSS/Javascript frontend UIs into an existing desktop application (written in Visual FoxPro) inclusive two-way communication and data exchange. Hm, might be an interesting topic for another blog article here... Second, this exam has a very interesting aspect which is listed at the bottom of the exam's details: Credit Toward Certification When you pass Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, you complete the requirements for the following certification(s): Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3: counts as credit toward the following certification(s): MCSD: Web Applications MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5 So, passing one single exam will earn you specialist certification straight-forward, and opens the path to higher levels of certifications. Preparations and learning path Well, due to a newsletter from Microsoft Learning (MSL) I caught interest in picking up the circumstances and learning materials for this particular exam. As of writing this article there is a promotional / voucher code available which enables you to register for this exam for free! Simply register yourself with or log into your existing account at Prometric, choose the exam for a testing facility near to you and enter the voucher code HTMLJMP (available through 31.03.2013 or while supplies last). Hurry up, there are restrictions... As stated above, I'm already very familiar with web development and the programming flavours involved into this. But of course, it is always good to freshen up your knowledge and reflect on yourself. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort to attract any kind of developers into the 'App Development'. Whether it is for the Windows 8 Store or the Windows Phone 8 Store, doesn't really matter. They simply need more apps. This demand for skilled developers also comes with a nice side-effect: Lots and lots of material to study. During the first couple of hours, I could easily gather high quality preparation material - again for free! Following is just a small list of starting points. If you have more resources, please drop me a message in the comment section, and I'll be glad to update this article accordingly. Developing HTML5 Apps Jump Start This is an accelerated jump start video course on development of HTML5 Apps for Windows 8. There are six modules that are split into two video sessions per module. Very informative and intense course material. This is packed stuff taken from an official preparation course for exam 70-480. Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML5 Jump Start Again, an accelerated preparation video course on Windows 8 Apps. There are six modules with two video sessions each which will catapult you to your exam. This is also related to preps for exam 70-481. Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Kraig Brockschmidt delves into the ups and downs of Windows 8 App development over 800+ pages. Great eBook to read, study, and to practice the samples - best of all, it's for free. codeSHOW() This is a Windows 8 HTML/JS project with the express goal of demonstrating simple development concepts for the Windows 8 platform. Code, code and more code... absolutely great stuff to study and practice. Microsoft Virtual Academy I already wrote about the MVA in a previous article. Well, if you haven't registered yourself yet, now is the time. The list is not complete for sure, but this might keep you busy for at least one or even two weeks to go through the material. Please don't hesitate to add more resources in the comment section. Right now, I'm already through all videos once, and digging my way through chapter 4 of Kraig's book. Additional material - Pluralsight Apart from those free online resources, I also following some courses from the excellent library of Pluralsight. They already have their own section for Windows 8 development, but of course, you get companion material about HTML5, CSS and Javascript in other sections, too. Introduction to Building Windows 8 Applications Building Windows 8 Applications with JavaScript and HTML Selling Windows 8 Apps HTML5 Fundamentals Using HTML5 and CSS3 HTML5 Advanced Topics CSS3 etc... Interesting to see that Michael Palermo provides his course material on multiple platforms. Fantastic! You might also pay a visit to his personal blog. Hm, it just came to my mind that Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight publishes so-called '24 hours Learning Paths' based on courses available in the course library. Would be interested to see a combination for Windows 8 App development using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript in the future. Recommended workspace environment Well, you might have guessed it but this requires Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 Express or another flavour, and a valid Developers License. Due to an MSDN subscription I working on VS 2012 Premium with some additional tools by Telerik. Honestly, the fastest way to get you up and running for Windows 8 App development is the source code archive of codeSHOW(). It does not only give you all source code in general but contains a couple of SDKs like Bing Maps, Microsoft Advertising, Live ID, and Telerik Windows 8 controls... for free! Hint: Get the Windows Phone 8 SDK as well. Don't worry, while you are studying the material for Windows 8 you will be able to leverage from this knowledge to development for the phone platform, too. It takes roughly one to two hours to get your workspace and learning environment, at least this was my time frame due to slow internet connection and an aged spare machine. ;-) Oh, before I forget to mention it, as soon as you're done, go quickly to the Windows Store and search for ClassBrowserPlus. You might not need it ad hoc for your development using HTML5, CSS and Javascript but I think that it is a great developer's utility that enables you to view the properties, methods and events (along with help text) for all Windows 8 classes. It's always good to look behind the scenes and to explore how it is made. Idea: Start/join a learning group The way you learn new things or intensify your knowledge in a certain technology is completely up to your personal preference. Back in my days at the university, we used to meet once or twice a week in a small quiet room to exchange our progress, questions and problems we ran into. In general, I recommend to any software craftsman to lift your butt and get out to exchange with other developers. Personally, I like this approach, as it gives you new points of view and an insight into others' own experience with certain techniques and how they managed to solve tricky issues. Just keep it relaxed and not too formal after all, and you might a have a good time away from your dull office desk. Give your machine a break, too.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 23, 2010New Projects.NET StarCraft II Replay Parser: A .NET 3.5 Library used to parse StarCraft II replays. Developed in C# 3.5.BackToBasics "B2B" Chat: With technology and software getting more and more complicated, why not get back to basics with BackToBasicsChat. B2B allows you to chat over a ser...Dark Neuron Game Engine: Dark Neuron allows you to easily create fun and interesting games with no need of developing basic game components. This engine is developed for C#...DeepZoom Pivot Constructor: Library to make building DeepZoom images and Pivot displays simpler.ePaper reader: The project is aimed at creating a tool which helps in reading electronic editions of news papers(pdf/flash)FSharpPageProvider for EPiServer CMS 6: This project starts as the port of EPiServer XmlPageProvider to F# programming language. Hammock for REST: Hammock is a REST library for .NET that greatly simplifies consuming and wrapping RESTful services.Kirill Osenkov: Various small projects, tools, utilities and samples by Kirill OsenkovliveDB: liveDB - web client for sql serverLucilla Framework: lucilla frameworkMVC Foolproof Validation: MVC Foolproof Validation aims to extend the Data Annotation validation provided in ASP.NET MVC. Initial efforts are focused on adding contingent va...MVC2Forums: MVC2Forums is simply a forum system based upon MVC2.Mvvm Foundation Silverlight: Mvvm Foundation Silverlight is a library of classes that are helpful when building Silverlight applications based in the MVVM pattern. This librar...MyPersonalWebsite: This is my personal web site developed using ASP.NET MVC 2Planner: Planner makes it easier for all peoples to plan your tasks. It's developed in Delphi.Prose: Prose is an playground for an experimental JavaScript like language compiler. Eventually it will implement 0-CFA, CFA2, and a Tracing JITQuestTracker: QuestTracker is a todo list presented in the format of a quest tracking list such as the one in World of Warcraft.SevenZipLib: SevenZipLib is a C# interface to the 7-zip library.SimpleGeo .Net: .Net Client library for the SimpleGeo.com serviceNew ReleasesAutenticar no OpenLDAP utilizando pGIna: DLL LDAPAuth Plus: New Group: No LoginBMap.NET: BMap.NET 2: This is the 2nd version of BMap.NET. It has included these tags: Bing Maps, and "About BMap.NET".Cronos: Version 2.04: This is primarily a bug-fix release. Several numerical issues have been resolved, and a resource leak (of MS Windows graphics objects) has been fi...EV Dashboard: v1.0: This release includes support for an App.config file and Auto Connect, which will connect to the specified BMS at startup. Note: You still have to ...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.1 Beta: 0.1 Beta Added More utilities and functions RefactoringsGLB Virtual Player Builder: 0.4.2 Beta: Beta build that includes a new player creator.HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201003222215): New features: (None) Bug fix: Fixed bugs of unable to parse XML file stream returned from HKGolden API, as the encoding of XML file stream chang...jQuery Web Controls ASP.Net: jQueryWebControls 1.1.1.2: En esta versión se han corregido problemas existentes en la ejecución de los scripts de jquery cuando se utilizaban MasterPage y/o Ajax Control Too...LightKit: Version 0.2.2: Fixed: fixed bug when CollectionItemsEditor ditermines IsChanged property incorrectly fixed ObjectEditor`a thisstring propertyName method wrong l...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.8: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 22): This version fixes the icons for the desktop installer and changes the install directory to Program Files\MapWindow instead of Program Files\ISU.Math.NET Numerics: 2010.3.22.1334 Build: Latest alpha buildMiniCalendar Web Part: MiniCalendar Web Part 1.8: A small web part to display links to events stored in a list (or document library) in a mini calendar (in month view mode). It shows tooltips for t...OCInject: Release Two: This release brings some missing features such as Singleton support, Func<T> factories and child containers. It, also, has an updated constructor ...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (March 2010): Installer of the latest binaries of Phalanger 2.0 (March 2010) and its integration into Visual Studio 2008. Easy installer with automatic IIS int...Planner: Planner: firstQuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1: This is the preliminary release of QuestTracker. There's not much documentation or many features yet, but it is functional. Any feedback would be a...QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1.1: Bugfix for QuestTracker 0.1QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1.2: Fixes an issue with saving the quest list.Rawr: Rawr 2.3.13: We're pleased to announce that, after long last, Rawr3 has entered public beta. You're still welcome to continue using Rawr2 (that's what you're re...Single Web Session: Alpha Model Plugin: !How to use Single Web Session add following line into your web config <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.W...SMIL - SharePoint Map Integration Layer: SMIL 1.0: Custom data field Extracts Lat/Lon from EXIF from images being uploaded. Map Web Part Filter with SharePoint views Filter by connecting to...sTASKedit: sTASKedit 42532 (Developer Alpha): This release is only to verify the currently decoded task structure... Supported files: tasks.data (v1.3.6 client)VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30322.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Advanced Notepad (Visual C++ 2008): An notepad written in c that can save in a rich text file format.Wallpaper Rotator: Wallpaper Rotator 0.5: Wallpaper Rotator 0.5 This version includes the following improvements: Saving the choice of "Random Order (Shuffle Mode)" Updating the configu...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETLINQ to TwitterPHPExcelFarseer Physics EngineFacebook Developer ToolkitNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightN2 CMS

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #039

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 FQL – Facebook Query Language Facebook list following advantages of FQL: Condensed XML reduces bandwidth and parsing costs. More complex requests can reduce the number of requests necessary. Provides a single consistent, unified interface for all of your data. It’s fun! UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function The day of the week can be retrieved in SQL Server by using the DatePart function. The value returned by the function is between 1 (Sunday) and 7 (Saturday). To convert this to a string representing the day of the week, use a CASE statement. UDF – Function to Get Previous And Next Work Day – Exclude Saturday and Sunday While reading ColdFusion blog of Ben Nadel Getting the Previous Day In ColdFusion, Excluding Saturday And Sunday, I realize that I use similar function on my SQL Server Database. This function excludes the Weekends (Saturday and Sunday), and it gets previous as well as next work day. Complete Series of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Introduction Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 1 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 2 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 3 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers Complete List Download 2008 Introduction to Log Viewer In SQL Server all the windows event logs can be seen along with SQL Server logs. Interface for all the logs is same and can be launched from the same place. This log can be exported and filtered as well. DBCC SHRINKFILE Takes Long Time to Run If you are DBA who are involved with Database Maintenance and file group maintenance, you must have experience that many times DBCC SHRINKFILE operations takes a long time but any other operations with Database are relatively quicker. mssqlsystemresource – Resource Database The purpose of resource database is to facilitates upgrading to the new version of SQL Server without any hassle. In previous versions whenever version of SQL Server was upgraded all the previous version system objects needs to be dropped and new version system objects to be created. 2009 Puzzle – Write Script to Generate Primary Key and Foreign Key In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), there is no option to script all the keys. If one is required to script keys they will have to manually script each key one at a time. If database has many tables, generating one key at a time can be a very intricate task. I want to throw a question to all of you if any of you have scripts for the same purpose. Maximizing View of SQL Server Management Studio – Full Screen – New Screen I had explained the following two different methods: 1) Open Results in Separate Tab - This is a very interesting method as result pan shows up in a different tab instead of the splitting screen horizontally. 2) Open SSMS in Full Screen - This works always and to its best. Not many people are aware of this method; hence, very few people use it to enhance performance. 2010 Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan T-SQL script gets all the queries and their execution plan where parallelism operations are kicked up. Pay attention there is TOP 10 is used, if you have lots of transactional operations, I suggest that you change TOP 10 to TOP 50 This is the list of the all the articles in the series of computed columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage This article talks about how computed columns are created and why they take more storage space than before. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance This article talks about how PERSISTED columns give better performance than non-persisted columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance – Part 2 This article talks about how non-persisted columns give better performance than PERSISTED columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column and Performance – Part 3 This article talks about how Index improves the performance of Computed Columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage – Part 2 This article talks about how creating index on computed column does not grow the row length of table. SQL SERVER – Computed Columns – Index and Performance This article summarized all the articles related to computed columns. 2011 SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 21 of 31 What is Data Warehousing? What is Business Intelligence (BI)? What is a Dimension Table? What is Dimensional Modeling? What is a Fact Table? What are the Fundamental Stages of Data Warehousing? What are the Different Methods of Loading Dimension tables? Describes the Foreign Key Columns in Fact Table and Dimension Table? What is Data Mining? What is the Difference between a View and a Materialized View? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 22 of 31 What is OLTP? What is OLAP? What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP? What is ODS? What is ER Diagram? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 23 of 31 What is ETL? What is VLDB? Is OLTP Database is Design Optimal for Data Warehouse? If denormalizing improves Data Warehouse Processes, then why is the Fact Table is in the Normal Form? What are Lookup Tables? What are Aggregate Tables? What is Real-Time Data-Warehousing? What are Conformed Dimensions? What is a Conformed Fact? How do you Load the Time Dimension? What is a Level of Granularity of a Fact Table? What are Non-Additive Facts? What is a Factless Facts Table? What are Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 24 of 31 What is Hybrid Slowly Changing Dimension? What is BUS Schema? What is a Star Schema? What Snow Flake Schema? Differences between the Star and Snowflake Schema? What is Difference between ER Modeling and Dimensional Modeling? What is Degenerate Dimension Table? Why is Data Modeling Important? What is a Surrogate Key? What is Junk Dimension? What is a Data Mart? What is the Difference between OLAP and Data Warehouse? What is a Cube and Linked Cube with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Snapshot with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Active Data Warehousing? What is the Difference between Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence? What is MDS? Explain the Paradigm of Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball. SQL SERVER – Azure Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Paras Doshi – Day 25 of 31 Paras Doshi has submitted 21 interesting question and answers for SQL Azure. 1.What is SQL Azure? 2.What is cloud computing? 3.How is SQL Azure different than SQL server? 4.How many replicas are maintained for each SQL Azure database? 5.How can we migrate from SQL server to SQL Azure? 6.Which tools are available to manage SQL Azure databases and servers? 7.Tell me something about security and SQL Azure. 8.What is SQL Azure Firewall? 9.What is the difference between web edition and business edition? 10.How do we synchronize On Premise SQL server with SQL Azure? 11.How do we Backup SQL Azure Data? 12.What is the current pricing model of SQL Azure? 13.What is the current limitation of the size of SQL Azure DB? 14.How do you handle datasets larger than 50 GB? 15.What happens when the SQL Azure database reaches Max Size? 16.How many databases can we create in a single server? 17.How many servers can we create in a single subscription? 18.How do you improve the performance of a SQL Azure Database? 19.What is code near application topology? 20.What were the latest updates to SQL Azure service? 21.When does a workload on SQL Azure get throttled? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Malathi Mahadevan – Day 26 of 31 Malachi had asked a simple question which has several answers. Each answer makes you think and ponder about the reality of the IT world. Look at the simple question – ‘What is the toughest challenge you have faced in your present job and how did you handle it’? and its various answers. Each answer has its own story. SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Rick Morelan – Day 27 of 31 Rick Morelan of Joes2Pros has written an excellent blog post on the subject how to find top N values. Most people are fully aware of how the TOP keyword works with a SELECT statement. After years preparing so many students to pass the SQL Certification I noticed they were pretty well prepared for job interviews too. Yes, they would do well in the interview but not great. There seemed to be a few questions that would come up repeatedly for almost everyone. Rick addresses similar questions in his lucid writing skills. 2012 Observation of Top with Index and Order of Resultset SQL Server has lots of things to learn and share. It is amazing to see how people evaluate and understand different techniques and styles differently when implementing. The real reason may be absolutely different but we may blame something totally different for the incorrect results. Read the blog post to learn more. How do I Record Video and Webcast How to Convert Hex to Decimal or INT Earlier I asked regarding a question about how to convert Hex to Decimal. I promised that I will post an answer with Due Credit to the author but never got around to post a blog post around it. Read the original post over here SQL SERVER – Question – How to Convert Hex to Decimal. Query to Get Unique Distinct Data Based on Condition – Eliminate Duplicate Data from Resultset The natural reaction will be to suggest DISTINCT or GROUP BY. However, not all the questions can be solved by DISTINCT or GROUP BY. Let us see the following example, where a user wanted only latest records to be displayed. Let us see the example to understand further. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Going Paperless

  - by Jesse

  One year ago I came to work for a company where the entire development team is 100% “remote”; we’re spread over 3 time zones and each of us works from home. This seems to be an increasingly popular way for people to work and there are many articles and blog posts out there enumerating the advantages and disadvantages of working this way. I had read a lot about telecommuting before accepting this job and felt as if I had a pretty decent idea of what I was getting into, but I’ve encountered a few things over the past year that I did not expect. Among the most surprising by-products of working from home for me has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of paper that I use on a weekly basis. Hoarding In The Workplace Prior to my current telecommute job I worked in what most would consider pretty traditional office environments. I sat in cubicles furnished with an enormous plastic(ish) modular desks, had a mediocre (at best) PC workstation, and had ready access to a seemingly endless supply of legal pads, pens, staplers and paper clips. The ready access to paper, countless conference room meetings, and abundance of available surface area on my desk and in drawers created a perfect storm for wasting paper. I brought a pad of paper with me to every meeting I ever attended, scrawled some brief notes, and then tore that sheet off to keep next to my keyboard to follow up on any needed action items. Once my immediate need for the notes was fulfilled, that sheet would get shuffled off into a corner of my desk or filed away in a drawer “just in case”. I would guess that for all of the notes that I ever filed away, I might have actually had to dig up and refer to 2% of them (and that’s probably being very generous). That said, on those rare occasions that I did have to dig something up from old notes, it was usually pretty important and I ended up being very glad that I saved them. It was only when I would leave a job or move desks that I would finally gather all those notes together and take them to shredding bin to be disposed of. When I left my last job the amount of paper I had accumulated over my three years there was absurd, and I knew coworkers who had substance-abuse caliber paper wasting addictions that made my bad habit look like nail-biting in comparison. A Product Of My Environment I always hated using all of this paper, but simply couldn’t bring myself to stop. It would look bad if I showed up to an important conference room meeting without a pad of paper. What if someone said something profound! Plus, everyone else always brought paper with them. If you saw someone walking down the hallway with a pad of paper in hand you knew they must be on their way to a conference room meeting. Some people even had fancy looking portfolio notebook sheaths that gave their legal pads all the prestige of a briefcase. No one ever worried about running out of fresh paper because there was an endless supply, and there certainly was no shortage of places to store and file used paper. In short, the traditional office was setup for using tons and tons of paper; it’s baked into the culture there. For that reason, it didn’t take long for me to kick the paper habit once I started working from home. In my home office, desk and drawer space are at a premium. I don’t have the budget (or the tolerance) for huge modular office furniture in my spare bedroom. I also no longer have access to a bottomless pit of office supplies stock piled in cabinets and closets. If I want to use some paper, I have to go out and buy it. Finally (and most importantly), all of the meetings that I have to attend these days are “virtual”. We use instant messaging, VOIP, video conferencing, and e-mail to communicate with each other. All I need to take notes during a meeting is my computer, which I happen to be sitting right in front of all day. I don’t have any hard numbers for this, but my gut feeling is that I actually take a lot more notes now than I ever did when I worked in an office. The big difference is I don’t have to use any paper to do so. This makes it far easier to keep important information safe and organized. The Right Tool For The Job When I first started working from home I tried to find a single application that would fill the gap left by the pen and paper that I always had at my desk when I worked in an office. Well, there are no silver bullets and I’ve evolved my approach over time to try and find the best tool for the job at hand. Here’s a quick summary of how I take notes and keep everything organized. Notepad++ – This is the first application I turn to when I feel like there’s some bit of information that I need to write down and save. I use Launchy, so opening Notepad++ and creating a new file only takes a few keystrokes. If I find that the information I’m trying to get down requires a more sophisticated application I escalate as needed. The Desktop – By default, I save every file or other bit of information to the desktop. Anyone who has ever had to fix their parents computer before knows that this is a dangerous game (any file my mother has ever worked on is saved directly to the desktop and rarely moves anywhere else). I agree that storing things on the desktop isn’t a great long term approach to keeping organized, which is why I treat my desktop a bit like my e-mail inbox. I strive to keep both empty (or as close to empty as I possibly can). If something is on my desktop, it means that it’s something relevant to a task or project that I’m currently working on. About once a week I take things that I’m not longer working on and put them into my ‘Notes’ folder. The ‘Notes’ Folder – As I work on a task, I tend to accumulate multiple files associated with that task. For example, I might have a bit of SQL that I’m working on to gather data for a new report, a quick C# method that I came up with but am not yet ready to commit to source control, a bulleted list of to-do items in a .txt file, etc. If the desktop starts to get too cluttered, I create a new sub-folder in my ‘Notes’ folder. Each sub-folder’s name is the current date followed by a brief description of the task or project. Then all files related to that task or project go into that sub folder. By using the date as the first part of the folder name, these folders are automatically sorted in reverse chronological order. This means that things I worked on recently will generally be near the top of the list. Using the built-in Windows search functionality I now have a pretty quick and easy way to try and find something that I worked on a week ago or six months ago. Dropbox – Dropbox is a free service that lets you store up to 2GB of files “in the cloud” and have those files synced to all of the different computers that you use. My ‘Notes’ folder lives in Dropbox, meaning that it’s contents are constantly backed up and are always available to me regardless of which computer I’m using. They also have a pretty decent iPhone application that lets you browse and view all of the files that you have stored there. The free 2GB edition is probably enough for just storing notes, but I also pay $99/year for the 50GB storage upgrade and keep all of my music, e-books, pictures, and documents in Dropbox. It’s a fantastic service and I highly recommend it. Evernote – I use Evernote mostly to organize information that I access on a fairly regular basis. For example, my Evernote account has a running grocery shopping list, recipes that my wife and I use a lot, and contact information for people I contact infrequently enough that I don’t want to keep them in my phone. I know some people that keep nearly everything in Evernote, but there’s something about it that I find a bit clunky, so I tend to use it sparingly. Google Tasks – One of my biggest paper wasting habits was keeping a running task-list next to my computer at work. Every morning I would sit down, look at my task list, cross off what was done and add new tasks that I thought of during my morning commute. This usually resulted in having to re-copy the task list onto a fresh sheet of paper when I was done. I still keep a running task list at my desk, but I’ve started using Google Tasks instead. This is a dead-simple web-based application for quickly adding, deleting, and organizing tasks in a simple checklist style. You can quickly move tasks up and down on the list (which I use for prioritizing), and even create sub-tasks for breaking down larger tasks into smaller pieces. Balsamiq Mockups – This is a simple and lightweight tool for creating drawings of user interfaces. It’s great for sketching out a new feature, brainstorm the layout of a interface, or even draw up a quick sequence diagram. I’m terrible at drawing, so Balsamiq Mockups not only lets me create sketches that other people can actually understand, but it’s also handy because you can upload a sketch to a common location for other team members to access. I can honestly say that using these tools (and having limited resources at home) have lead me to cut my paper usage down to virtually none. If I ever were to return to a traditional office workplace (hopefully never!) I’d try to employ as many of these applications and techniques as I could to keep paper usage low. I feel far less cluttered and far better organized now.

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• Using Node.js as an accelerator for WCF REST services

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform "for easily building fast, scalable network applications". It's built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine and uses an (almost) entirely async event-driven processing model, running in a single thread. If you're new to Node and your reaction is "why would I want to run JavaScript on the server side?", this is the headline answer: in 150 lines of JavaScript you can build a Node.js app which works as an accelerator for WCF REST services*. It can double your messages-per-second throughput, halve your CPU workload and use one-fifth of the memory footprint, compared to the WCF services direct.   Well, it can if: 1) your WCF services are first-class HTTP citizens, honouring client cache ETag headers in request and response; 2) your services do a reasonable amount of work to build a response; 3) your data is read more often than it's written. In one of my projects I have a set of REST services in WCF which deal with data that only gets updated weekly, but which can be read hundreds of times an hour. The services issue ETags and will return a 304 if the client sends a request with the current ETag, which means in the most common scenario the client uses its local cached copy. But when the weekly update happens, then all the client caches are invalidated and they all need the same new data. Then the service will get hundreds of requests with old ETags, and they go through the full service stack to build the same response for each, taking up threads and processing time. Part of that processing means going off to a database on a separate cloud, which introduces more latency and downtime potential.   We can use ASP.NET output caching with WCF to solve the repeated processing problem, but the server will still be thread-bound on incoming requests, and to get the current ETags reliably needs a database call per request. The accelerator solves that by running as a proxy - all client calls come into the proxy, and the proxy routes calls to the underlying REST service. We could use Node as a straight passthrough proxy and expect some benefit, as the server would be less thread-bound, but we would still have one WCF and one database call per proxy call. But add some smart caching logic to the proxy, and share ETags between Node and WCF (so the proxy doesn't even need to call the servcie to get the current ETag), and the underlying service will only be invoked when data has changed, and then only once - all subsequent client requests will be served from the proxy cache.   I've built this as a sample up on GitHub: NodeWcfAccelerator on sixeyed.codegallery. Here's how the architecture looks:     The code is very simple. The Node proxy runs on port 8010 and all client requests target the proxy. If the client request has an ETag header then the proxy looks up the ETag in the tag cache to see if it is current - the sample uses memcached to share ETags between .NET and Node. If the ETag from the client matches the current server tag, the proxy sends a 304 response with an empty body to the client, telling it to use its own cached version of the data. If the ETag from the client is stale, the proxy looks for a local cached version of the response, checking for a file named after the current ETag. If that file exists, its contents are returned to the client as the body in a 200 response, which includes the current ETag in the header. If the proxy does not have a local cached file for the service response, it calls the service, and writes the WCF response to the local cache file, and to the body of a 200 response for the client. So the WCF service is only troubled if both client and proxy have stale (or no) caches.   The only (vaguely) clever bit in the sample is using the ETag cache, so the proxy can serve cached requests without any communication with the underlying service, which it does completely generically, so the proxy has no notion of what it is serving or what the services it proxies are doing. The relative path from the URL is used as the lookup key, so there's no shared key-generation logic between .NET and Node, and when WCF stores a tag it also stores the "read" URL against the ETag so it can be used for a reverse lookup, e.g:   Key Value /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3 "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3    In Node we read the cache using the incoming URL path as the key and we know that "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" is the current ETag; we look for a local cached response in /caches/28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6.body (and the corresponding .header file which contains the original service response headers, so the proxy response is exactly the same as the underlying service). When the data is updated, we need to invalidate the ETag cache – which is why we need the reverse lookup in the cache. In the WCF update service, we don't need to know the URL of the related read service - we fetch the entity from the database, do a reverse lookup on the tag cache using the old ETag to get the read URL, update the new ETag against the URL, store the new reverse lookup and delete the old one.   Running Apache Bench against the two endpoints gives the headline performance comparison. Making 1000 requests with concurrency of 100, and not sending any ETag headers in the requests, with the Node proxy I get 102 requests handled per second, average response time of 975 milliseconds with 90% of responses served within 850 milliseconds; going direct to WCF with the same parameters, I get 53 requests handled per second, mean response time of 1853 milliseconds, with 90% of response served within 3260 milliseconds. Informally monitoring server usage during the tests, Node maxed at 20% CPU and 20Mb memory; IIS maxed at 60% CPU and 100Mb memory.   Note that the sample WCF service does a database read and sleeps for 250 milliseconds to simulate a moderate processing load, so this is *not* a baseline Node-vs-WCF comparison, but for similar scenarios where the  service call is expensive but applicable to numerous clients for a long timespan, the performance boost from the accelerator is considerable.     * - actually, the accelerator will work nicely for any HTTP request, where the URL (path + querystring) uniquely identifies a resource. In the sample, there is an assumption that the ETag is a GUID wrapped in double-quotes (e.g. "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6") – which is the default for WCF services. I use that assumption to name the cache files uniquely, but it is a trivial change to adapt to other ETag formats.

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• In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

  - by Mike Stiles

  0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

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• Performance in backpropagation algorithm

  - by Taban

  I've written a matlab program for standard backpropagation algorithm, it is my homework and I should not use matlab toolbox, so I write the entire code by myself. This link helped me for backpropagation algorithm. I have a data set of 40 random number and initial weights randomly. As output, I want to see a diagram that shows the performance. I used mse and plot function to see performance for 20 epochs but the result is this: I heard that performance should go up through backpropagation, so I want to know is there any problem with my code or this result is normal because local minimums. This is my code: Hidden_node=inputdlg('Enter the number of Hidden nodes'); a=0.5;%initialize learning rate hiddenn=str2num(Hidden_node{1,1}); randn('seed',0); %creating data set s=2; N=10; m=[5 -5 5 5;-5 -5 5 -5]; S = s*eye(2); [l,c] = size(m); x = []; % Creating the training set for i = 1:c x = [x mvnrnd(m(:,i)',S,N)']; end % target value toutput=[ones(1,N) zeros(1,N) ones(1,N) zeros(1,N)]; for epoch=1:20; %number of epochs for kk=1:40; %number of patterns %initial weights of hidden layer for ii=1 : 2; for jj=1 :hiddenn; whidden{ii,jj}=rand(1); end end initial the wights of output layer for ii=1 : hiddenn; woutput{ii,1}=rand(1); end for ii=1:hiddenn; x1=x(1,kk); x2=x(2,kk); w1=whidden{1,ii}; w2=whidden{2,ii}; activation{1,ii}=(x1(1,1)*w1(1,1))+(x2(1,1)*w2(1,1)); end %calculate output of hidden nodes for ii=1:hiddenn; hidden_to_out{1,ii}=logsig(activation{1,ii}); end activation_O{1,1}=0; for jj=1:hiddenn; activation_O{1,1} = activation_O{1,1}+(hidden_to_out{1,jj}*woutput{jj,1}); end %calculate output out{1,1}=logsig(activation_O{1,1}); out_for_plot(1,kk)= out{1,ii}; %calculate error for output node delta_out{1,1}=(toutput(1,kk)-out{1,1}); %update weight of output node for ii=1:hiddenn; woutput{ii,jj}=woutput{ii,jj}+delta_out{1,jj}*hidden_to_out{1,ii}*dlogsig(activation_O{1,jj},logsig(activation_O{1,jj}))*a; end %calculate error of hidden nodes for ii=1:hiddenn; delta_hidden{1,ii}=woutput{ii,1}*delta_out{1,1}; end %update weight of hidden nodes for ii=1:hiddenn; for jj=1:2; whidden{jj,ii}= whidden{jj,ii}+(delta_hidden{1,ii}*dlogsig(activation{1,ii},logsig(activation{1,ii}))*x(jj,kk)*a); end end a=a/(1.1);%decrease learning rate end %calculate performance e=toutput(1,kk)-out_for_plot(1,1); perf(1,epoch)=mse(e); end plot(perf); Thanks a lot.

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• Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

  - by [email protected]

  A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

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• Is Financial Inclusion an Obligation or an Opportunity for Banks?

  - by tushar.chitra

  Why should banks care about financial inclusion? First, the statistics, I think this will set the tone for this blog post. There are close to 2.5 billion people who are excluded from the banking stream and out of this, 2.2 billion people are from the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia (McKinsey on Society: Global Financial Inclusion). However, this is not just a third-world phenomenon. According to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), in the US, post 2008 financial crisis, one family out of five has either opted out of the banking system or has been moved out (American Banker). Moving this huge unbanked population into mainstream banking is both an opportunity and a challenge for banks. An obvious opportunity is the significant untapped customer base that banks can target, so is the positive brand equity a bank can build by fulfilling its social responsibilities. Also, as banks target the cost-conscious unbanked customer, they will be forced to look at ways to offer cost-effective products and services, necessitating technology upgrades and innovations. However, cost is not the only hurdle in increasing the adoption of banking services. The potential users need to be convinced of the benefits of banking and banks will also face stiff competition from unorganized players. Finally, the banks will have to believe in the viability of this business opportunity, and not treat financial inclusion as an obligation. In what ways can banks target the unbanked For financial inclusion to be a success, banks should adopt innovative business models to develop products that address the stated and unstated needs of the unbanked population and also design delivery channels that are cost effective and viable in the long run. Through business correspondents and facilitators In rural and remote areas, one of the major hurdles in increasing banking penetration is connectivity and accessibility to banking services, which makes last mile inclusion a daunting challenge. To address this, banks can avail the services of business correspondents or facilitators. This model allows banks to establish greater connectivity through a trusted and reliable intermediary. In India, for instance, banks can leverage the local Kirana stores (the mom & pop stores) to service rural and remote areas. With a supportive nudge from the central bank, the commercial banks can enlist these shop owners as business correspondents to increase their reach. Since these neighborhood stores are acquainted with the local population, they can help banks manage the KYC norms, besides serving as a conduit for remittance. Banks also have an opportunity over a period of time to cross-sell other financial products such as micro insurance, mutual funds and pension products through these correspondents. To exercise greater operational control over the business correspondents, banks can also adopt a combination of branch and business correspondent models to deliver financial inclusion. Through mobile devices According to a 2012 world bank report on financial inclusion, out of a world population of 7 billion, over 5 billion or 70% have mobile phones and only 2 billion or 30% have a bank account. What this means for banks is that there is scope for them to leverage this phenomenal growth in mobile usage to serve the unbanked population. Banks can use mobile technology to service the basic banking requirements of their customers with no frills accounts, effectively bringing down the cost per transaction. As I had discussed in my earlier post on mobile payments, though non-traditional players have taken the lead in P2P mobile payments, banks still hold an edge in terms of infrastructure and reliability. Through crowd-funding According to the Crowdfunding Industry Report by Massolution, the global crowdfunding industry raised $2.7 billion in 2012, and is projected to grow to $5.1 billion in 2013. With credit policies becoming tighter and banks becoming more circumspect in terms of loan disbursals, crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative channel for lending. Typically, these initiatives target the unbanked population by offering small loans that are unviable for larger banks. Though a significant proportion of crowdfunding initiatives globally are run by non-banking institutions, banks are also venturing into this space. The next step towards inclusive finance Banks by themselves cannot make financial inclusion a success. There is a need for a whole ecosystem that is supportive of this mission. The policy makers, that include the regulators and government bodies, must be in sync, the IT solution providers must put on their thinking caps to come out with innovative products and solutions, communication channels such as internet and mobile need to expand their reach, and the media and the public need to play an active part. The other challenge for financial inclusion is from the banks themselves. While it is true that financial inclusion will unleash a hitherto hugely untapped market, the normal banking model may be found wanting because of issues such as flexibility, convenience and reliability. The business will be viable only when there is a focus on increasing the usage of existing infrastructure and that is possible when the banks can offer the entire range of products and services to the large number of users of essential banking services. Apart from these challenges, banks will also have to quickly master and replicate the business model to extend their reach to the remotest regions in their respective geographies. They will need to ensure that the transactions deliver a viable business benefit to the bank. For tapping cross-sell opportunities, banks will have to quickly roll-out customized and segment-specific products. The bank staff should be brought in sync with the business plan by convincing them of the viability of the business model and the need for a business correspondent delivery model. Banks, in collaboration with the government and NGOs, will have to run an extensive financial literacy program to educate the unbanked about the benefits of banking. Finally, with the growing importance of retail banking and with many unconventional players eyeing the opportunity in payments and other lucrative areas of banking, banks need to understand the importance of micro and small branches. These micro and small branches can help banks increase their presence without a huge cost burden, provide bankers an opportunity to cross sell micro products and offer a window of opportunity for the large non-banked population to transact without any interference from intermediaries. These branches can also help diminish the role of the unorganized financial sector, such as local moneylenders and unregistered credit societies. This will also help banks build a brand awareness and loyalty among the users, which by itself has a cascading effect on the business operations, especially among the rural and un-banked centers. In conclusion, with the increasingly competitive banking sector facing frequent slowdowns and downturns, the unbanked population presents a huge opportunity for banks to enhance their customer base and fulfill their social responsibility.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 13, 2012Popular ReleasesGardens Point Parser Generator: Gardens Point Parser Generator version 1.5.0: ChangesVersion 1.5.0 contains a number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly. The default encoding of the *.y file is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The /report option has been improved, as has the automaton tracing facility. New facilities are included that allow multiple parsers to share a common token type. A complete change-log is available as a separate documentation file. The source project has been upgraded to Visual...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.0: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.0 contains a small number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly by default. The default encoding for lex input files is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The distribution also contains helper code for symbol pushback by GPPG parsers. A complete changelog is available as a separate documenta...Kinect Quiz Engine: update for sdk v1.0: updated to the new sdkMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.502b: It has been a slow week, but this release addresses a couple of recent bugs: Movies Multi-part Movies - Existing .nfo files that differed in name from the first part, were missed and scraped again. Trailers - MC attempted to scrape info for existing trailers. TV Shows Show Scraping - shows available only in the non-default language would not show up in the main browser. The correct language can now be selected using the TV Show Selector for a single show. General Will no longer prompt for ...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.5.2012.0508、XCoder v4.7.2012.0320: X????： 1，????For .Net 4.0?? XCoder????： 1，???????，????X????，?????? XCode????： 1，Insert/Update/Delete???????????????，???SQL???? 2，IEntityOperate?????? 3，????????IEntityTree 4，????????????????? 5，?????????? 6，??????????????Assembly Analyzer: Assembly Analyzer 2.2.29: This version primarily focuses on performance, both speed and memory usage. Here are a few more things to check out: Custom colors for source code generation Assembly Overview More dependency graphs for types (parameters, return types, extension methods) More accurate MSIL No expansion of macro instructions Fixed signed/unsigned problem for short-form instructionsiFinity Friendly Url Provider: 05.04.01: Fix for reported errors with DotNetNuke 6.x installations.Google Book Downloader: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Alpha: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Alpha. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports Cpython, IronPython, Jython and Pypy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging...AD Gallery: AD Gallery 1.2.7: NewsFixed a bug which caused the current thumbnail not to be highlighted Added a hook to take complete control over how descriptions are handled, take a look under Documentation for more info Added removeAllImages()WebsitePanel: 1.2.2: The following work items has been fixed/closed in WebsitePanel 1.2.2.1: 225 135 59 96 23 29 191 72 48 240 245 244 160 16 65 7 156 This build is for Beta Testing only. DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION.51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.4.8: One Click Install from NuGet Data ChangesIncludes 42 new browser properties in both the Lite and Premium data sets. Premium Data includes many new devices including Nokia Lumia 900, BlackBerry 9220 and HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range and Samsung Galaxy S III. Lite data includes devices released in January 2012. Changes to Version 2.1.4.81. The IsFirstTime method of the RedirectModule will now return the same value when called multiple times for the same request. This was prevent...Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection ver 2.2 (WinRT supported): Added NamedParameterAttribute, OptionalParameterAttribute. Added behaviors ICycleDependencyBehavior, IResolveUnregisteredTypeBehavior. Added WinRT support. Added support for NET 4.5. Added support for MVC 4.NShape - .Net Diagramming Framework for Industrial Applications: NShape 2.0.1: Changes in 2.0.1:Bugfixes: IRepository.Insert(Shape shape) and IRepository.Insert(IEnumerable<Shape> shapes) no longer insert shape connections. Several context menu items did display although the required permission was not granted Display did not reset the visible and active layers when changing the diagram NullReferenceException when pressing Del key and no shape was selected Changed Behavior: LayerCollection.Find("") no longer throws an exception. Improvements: Display does not rese...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.11.6: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...sb0t: sb0t 4.64: New commands added: #scribble <url> #adminscribble on #adminscribble offDocument.Editor: 2012.4: Whats new for Document.Editor 2012.4: Improved Template support Improved Options Dialog Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5: New feature - Added ItemIsReference, ItemReferenceLoopHandling, ItemTypeNameHandling, ItemConverterType to JsonPropertyAttribute New feature - Added ItemRequired to JsonObjectAttribute New feature - Added Path to JsonWriterException Change - Improved deserializer call stack memory usage Change - Moved the PDB files out of the NuGet package into a symbols package Fix - Fixed infinite loop from an input error when reading an array and error handling is enabled Fix - Fixed base objec...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.1: 2012.05.07 Ver5.6.1 (1)????????????????(Ver5.6.0??)??? (2)HTTP?????SSL????????????（Ver5.6.0??）??? (3)HTTP?????2G??????????????????????????? (4)HTP????　?????????ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.5: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-05-06 v3.1.5 -????????：grid/grid_twogrid.aspx。 +?...New ProjectsbillyTest: summarybwoodring: My personal toolkit and projects.CodeQuarantine: A .NET quality test service. Projects are loaded, and unit tests will be tested and timed once pr. hour for 24 hours, to ensure stability in new releases. If a build gives preformance issue, it will not be pushed to deploy site, without user interaction. This will ensure that all releases are stable, even features not directly edited.Continuous Automated Backup: The goal of this project is to provide a continuous automated backup solution to a variety of backup locationsDonateBoat: Donate Your Boat to Charity DotNetIRCD: DotNetIRCD is (Will be) a full-featured IRC Deamon built on the Microsoft DotNet Framework 4.0 It will have all the IRC Features defined in the relevant RFC's, whicle also implementing the Microsoft IRCX Extensions.DynCMS.NET: DynCMS.NET is extensible engine for dynamic web applications. It enables fast startup of new site & development of new functionalities in iterations.foothill2: my own website in ASP.NETFourPoints: Four Points YachtsGoogleAuth C#: The purpose of this project is to create a set of C# tools to integrate Google Authenticator for .Net application development.KaChing: A Personal Finances Manager, the way it's meant to beliketryrobot: ????????,????lyblog: ??????ThinkPHP???????，????。Metro Calc: This is a small calculator app for Windows 8.Netduino Device Library: My repository of code for the Netduino line of NETMF controllers. Prism 4.1 on.Net for Metro Style App: A conversion of Prism 4.1 to work with .Net for Metro Style Apps. Its a pragmatic conversion and keeps most of the existing functionality that you get in Prism 4.1 apart from features that don’t naturally work within Metro (such as reflectively loading modules). I’ve kept the namespaces intact ; so its easy to replace with the official Prism framework when it is ready. However, I have renamed the assemblies to avoid any confusion. It uses a MetroIoC - (port from microIoc done by Ia...SeaTurtleStore: Sea Turtle StoreSIIV: Sistema Integral de Investigaciones Veterinarias

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 18, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 18, 2012Popular ReleasesRiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: RiP-Ripper 2.9.28: changes NEW: Added Support for "PixHub.eu" linksSmartNet: V1.0.0.0: DY SmartNet ?????? V1.0callisto: callisto 2.0.21: Added an option to disable local host detection.Javascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.6: Upgraded to the latest stable branch of v8 (/tags/3.9.18), and switched to using their scons build system. We no longer include v8 source code as part of this project's source code. Simultaneous multithreaded use of v8 now supported (v8 Isolates), although different contexts may not share objects or call each other. 64-bit .Net 4.0 DLL now included. (Download now includes x86 and x64 for both .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.0.)MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.6: This release should be more stable there were a few bug fixes including the x64 issue as well as an error popping up when MyRouter started this was caused by a NULL valuePulse: Pulse Beta 4: This version is still in development but should include: Logging and error handling have been greatly improved. If you run into an error or Pulse crashes make sure to check the Log folder for a recently modified log file so you can report the details of the issue A bunch of new features for the Wallbase.cc provider. Cleaner separation between inputs, downloading and output. Input and downloading are fairly clean now but outputs are still mixed up in the mix which I'm trying to resolve ...Google Books Downloader for Windows: Google Books Downloader-2.0.0.0.: Google Books DownloaderFinestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4501: This is a very minor update release. Please see the information about the 2.5 and 2.5.4500 releases for more information on recent changes. This update did not even have an automatic update triggered for it. Adds error checking and reporting to all threads, not only those with message loopsAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.2: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Release Candidate: Your feedback is welcome - and this is your last chance to get your fixes in for this version! Includes installer for both Feature Server extension and Desktop extension, enhanced functionality for the Desktop tools, and enhanced built-in Javascript Editor for the Feature Server component. This release candidate includes fixes to beta 4 that accommodate domain users for setting up the Server Component, and fixes for reporting/uploading references tracked in the revision table. See Code In-P...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.6: 20 Issue trackers are closed and a lot of bugs too Localize view is now MVVM and delete is working. Added the unused flag (take care that it goes to true only when displaying screen elements) Backstage - new input/output format choice control for the conversion Backstage - Add display, behaviour and register file type options in the extended options dialog Explorer list view has been transformed to a custom control. New group header, colunms order and size are saved Single insta...Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Prv: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Preview Release v1.2.1Minor updates to setup experience: Check for WebPI before install Dependency Check updated to support the following VS 11 and VS 2010 SKUs Ultimate, Premium, Professional and Express Certs Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Preview Release v1.2.0 Please download this for Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 functionality on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The core features of the toolkit include:...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 3.0: ships with JSON Toolkit v3.0, offering parse speed up to 10 times of last version supports Facebook's new auth dialog supports new extend access token endpoint new example Page Tab app filter Graph Api connections using dates fixed bugs in Page Tab appsCODE Framework: 4.0.20312.0: This version includes significant improvements in the WPF system (and the WPF MVVM/MVC system). This includes new styles for Metro controls and layouts. Improved color handling. It also includes an improved theme/style swapping engine down to active (open) views. There also are various other enhancements and small fixes throughout the entire framework.ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.4: 3/12/2012 Jacob Slusser Added support for annotations. Issues Fixed with this Release Issue # Title 25012 25012 25018 25018 25023 25023 25014 25014 Visual Studio ALM Quick Reference Guidance: v3 - For Visual Studio 11: RELEASE README Welcome to the BETA release of the Quick Reference Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation ...AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.0345: Welcome to early alpha release of AvalonDock 2.0 I've completely rewritten AvalonDock in order to take full advantage of the MVVM pattern. New version also boost a lot of new features: 1) Deep separation between model and layout. 2) Full WPF binding support thanks to unified logical tree between main docking manager, auto-hide windows and floating windows. 3) Support for Aero semi-maximized windows feature. 4) Support for multiple panes in the same floating windows. For a short list of new f...Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.2.2: Changes Added Start Menu Item for Easy Startup Added Link to Getting Started Document Added Ability to Persist Subscription Data to Disk Fixed Get-Deployment to not throw on empty slot Simplified numerous default values for cmdlets Breaking Changes: -SubscriptionName is now mandatory in Set-Subscription. -DefaultStorageAccountName and -DefaultStorageAccountKey parameters were removed from Set-Subscription. Instead, when adding multiple accounts to a subscription, each one needs to be added ...IronPython: 2.7.2.1: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release IronPython 2.7.2. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498 and 62475 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. Unlike previous releases, the assemblies for all supported platforms are included in the installer as well as the zip package, in the "Platforms" directory. IronPython 2...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.2.0.0: Breaking changes: When upgrade from previous versions, MUST reset the all the content type templates, otherwise the content manager might get a compile error. New features Integrate with Windows azure. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS on Azure Complete solution to deploy on load balance servers. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS load balance Update Jquery and Jquery ui to the lastest version(Jquery 1.71, Jquery UI 1.8.16). Tree style text content editing. See:h...New Projects4sr4ss1: Assignment 1 WDT Due date: 26 March 2012ADLN: Project to ADLNbook2guest: book2guestBundlingTweaks: BundlingTweaks makes it easier for developers to develop ASP.NET MVC 4 projects with Bundling/Minification support. You can now take advantage of Bundling, but still see non-minified JavaScript when debugging.COBOL SCREENSAVER: This project will show how to create a Windows screen saver using 1) an object-oriented isCOBOL GUI application, 2) an OpenCobol Windows native executable wrapper for the isCOBOL GUI, and 3) XML, XSLT, HTML5, and a Java FX 2.0 web browser component. Release 0.1 consists of a Java GUI application, the OpenCobol wrapper, and a README file detailing usage, system requirements, and installation of the recommended OpenCobol binaries for Windows.Colorado Time System Get CTS Results to Text File: This application will query a Colorado Time System 5, retrieve the lane results by event and heat. These can then be written to a text file.CommonEventLog: This project provides a simple means of logging messages and exceptions to a custom event log.ContainerTrack: Application for tracking container locationContent Widgets Orchard module: This Orchard module makes it possible to add arbitrary widgets to content types (with the option to disable per item).Cup of Badminton: This is a application for draw cup of badminton. You can insert, edit and delete player. You can choose many variant of draw.FSGREE: FSGREEKeepSafety: ??、??、?????????LibGrafx: LibGrafix is a C++ DLL that contains several classes useful when developing computer graphics applications, particularly OpenGL applications, in the Windows environment. It also includes a class that loads and displays the ModelX format exported by the XNA Model Viewer program. Linq to SQL code generator for Windows Phone: Linq to SQL code generator for Windows Phone is an add-in for Visual Studio 2010 or later to generate the Linq to SQL classes from a DBML diagram. Offline Navigation for Windows Phone 7: This is a simple implementation of offline navigation for windows phone 7 with map offset adjustment support.PayrollSystemRedux: Payroll case study book Robert Martin (Agile PPP in C#)PhoneFlipMenu Control for Windows Phone: A control that mimics the behaviour of the Email app's reply/reply all/forward menu.QTscenarist: QTscenarist makes it easier for Synfig animation to create Synfig movies. You can write scenaries and create your movie with it. It's developed in QT. recycle: This is a recycle web pageSharePoint 2010 Accordian Launch: SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Foundation Quick Launch Accordian Solution.SharePoint 2010 JavaScript Registration Panel: The SharePoint 2010 JavaScript Registration Panel allows you to add JavaScript files to a site collection without SharePoint 2010 Designer intervention. This is helpful in scenarios where SharePoint Designer 2010 is disabled globally, but you have to add some JavaScript files (e.g. jQuery) to your site collection for every page load. The aim of this project is to provide following features: - load JavaScript files on every page load of your site collection - define the sequence for loadi...Sistema de Gestion Escolar: Projecto final monografico universidad dominicana O&MSmartNet: DYSmartNet????????????????????????。???TCP??，??????????，??????????... solution: solution team explorerTanmiaGrp: This is the tanmia base project library.VideoMobileSteraming: Will Update soonXNASter: XNASter is a short library that allows beginner developers to create simple XNA games. Right now it is in the very early stages of development. Included are the following parts: * 2D generic sprite-based object that supports movement, acceleration, etc. In the future, we are also planning to support: * KinectSkeleton controller Together with the project, there are also a few sample games that show how to use it.???WP: HateCoWP is Hatena Coco Client.???: ????????????????????。

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• Girl's Day 2012 in Potsdam

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  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: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-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Every year in April 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: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-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} , technical enterprises and other organisations are invited to organise an open day for girls – called Girl´s Day. It has become a tradition for Oracle for more than 6 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: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-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} years, to participate in this special day and to encourage girls to discover technical work environments.   On the 26th of April 2012, 27 pupils aged 12 to 15 came to Oracle’s office in Potsdam in order to obtain interesting insights about Oracle´s business practices. An interactive 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: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-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} four-hour program was specifically organized for all participants. At first, all pupils got to know Oracle as an enterprise with it’s different departments and it’s particular „business language“. What is hardware and software? Why do companies need a database? Questions as such were tailored and simply illustrated by 13 colleagues from the areas of Sales, Sales Consulting, Support and Recruitment.   Followed by a short introduction about career paths from our female colleagues and their respective departments, the girls decided, according to their interests, which business area they would like to get more insights from. Based on their decision the groups were set up and the girls than discovered the work places. This helped everyone to dive deep into the everyday work life, how the offices are structured and how communication with clients is done via web conferences. All girls were encouraged to take part in the conference together with their Oracle advisor. 12 o´clock – lunch time. Besides a well-prepared buffet 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: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-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} , all girls had now the opportunity to get all open questions clarified or to ask questions they did not dare to ask in front of a big group. After the lunch break, Anja Raack from the Graduate Recruitment team presented more about recruitment topics and gave useful advice on how to write professional emails.   After a short group assignment, where all participants had to identify common mistakes done in an email, a quiz completed this special day. All 5 groups showed a lot of enthusiasm during this game but no one had to worry as every single participant was rewarded with a prize and certificate.   To sum it up, we were very proud to host the girls for half a day and were impressed by their dedication. Hopefully, sooner or later, we will see some of them coming back to Oracle – either for the next Girl´s Day or one of our entry level positions. This day has shown that everyone can start a challenging career within an exciting industry. What matters is dedication and commitment to strive for the best.  Do you want to find out more about our job opportunities? Follow us on http://campus.oracle.com.

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• Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

  - by johndoucette

  I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is;   A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about &frac12; hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples  Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1.  [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2.  [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations.   Deliverables 1.1  Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2  Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1  Two Factor authentication recommendation document   Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

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• How accurate is "Business logic should be in a service, not in a model"?

  - by Jeroen Vannevel

  Situation Earlier this evening I gave an answer to a question on StackOverflow. The question: Editing of an existing object should be done in repository layer or in service? For example if I have a User that has debt. I want to change his debt. Should I do it in UserRepository or in service for example BuyingService by getting an object, editing it and saving it ? My answer: You should leave the responsibility of mutating an object to that same object and use the repository to retrieve this object. Example situation: class User { private int debt; // debt in cents private string name; // getters public void makePayment(int cents){ debt -= cents; } } class UserRepository { public User GetUserByName(string name){ // Get appropriate user from database } } A comment I received: Business logic should really be in a service. Not in a model. What does the internet say? So, this got me searching since I've never really (consciously) used a service layer. I started reading up on the Service Layer pattern and the Unit Of Work pattern but so far I can't say I'm convinced a service layer has to be used. Take for example this article by Martin Fowler on the anti-pattern of an Anemic Domain Model: There are objects, many named after the nouns in the domain space, and these objects are connected with the rich relationships and structure that true domain models have. The catch comes when you look at the behavior, and you realize that there is hardly any behavior on these objects, making them little more than bags of getters and setters. Indeed often these models come with design rules that say that you are not to put any domain logic in the the domain objects. Instead there are a set of service objects which capture all the domain logic. These services live on top of the domain model and use the domain model for data. (...) The logic that should be in a domain object is domain logic - validations, calculations, business rules - whatever you like to call it. To me, this seemed exactly what the situation was about: I advocated the manipulation of an object's data by introducing methods inside that class that do just that. However I realize that this should be a given either way, and it probably has more to do with how these methods are invoked (using a repository). I also had the feeling that in that article (see below), a Service Layer is more considered as a façade that delegates work to the underlying model, than an actual work-intensive layer. Application Layer [his name for Service Layer]: Defines the jobs the software is supposed to do and directs the expressive domain objects to work out problems. The tasks this layer is responsible for are meaningful to the business or necessary for interaction with the application layers of other systems. This layer is kept thin. It does not contain business rules or knowledge, but only coordinates tasks and delegates work to collaborations of domain objects in the next layer down. It does not have state reflecting the business situation, but it can have state that reflects the progress of a task for the user or the program. Which is reinforced here: Service interfaces. Services expose a service interface to which all inbound messages are sent. You can think of a service interface as a façade that exposes the business logic implemented in the application (typically, logic in the business layer) to potential consumers. And here: The service layer should be devoid of any application or business logic and should focus primarily on a few concerns. It should wrap Business Layer calls, translate your Domain in a common language that your clients can understand, and handle the communication medium between server and requesting client. This is a serious contrast to other resources that talk about the Service Layer: The service layer should consist of classes with methods that are units of work with actions that belong in the same transaction. Or the second answer to a question I've already linked: At some point, your application will want some business logic. Also, you might want to validate the input to make sure that there isn't something evil or nonperforming being requested. This logic belongs in your service layer. "Solution"? Following the guidelines in this answer, I came up with the following approach that uses a Service Layer: class UserController : Controller { private UserService _userService; public UserController(UserService userService){ _userService = userService; } public ActionResult MakeHimPay(string username, int amount) { _userService.MakeHimPay(username, amount); return RedirectToAction("ShowUserOverview"); } public ActionResult ShowUserOverview() { return View(); } } class UserService { private IUserRepository _userRepository; public UserService(IUserRepository userRepository) { _userRepository = userRepository; } public void MakeHimPay(username, amount) { _userRepository.GetUserByName(username).makePayment(amount); } } class UserRepository { public User GetUserByName(string name){ // Get appropriate user from database } } class User { private int debt; // debt in cents private string name; // getters public void makePayment(int cents){ debt -= cents; } } Conclusion All together not much has changed here: code from the controller has moved to the service layer (which is a good thing, so there is an upside to this approach). However this doesn't look like it had anything to do with my original answer. I realize design patterns are guidelines, not rules set in stone to be implemented whenever possible. Yet I have not found a definitive explanation of the service layer and how it should be regarded. Is it a means to simply extract logic from the controller and put it inside a service instead? Is it supposed to form a contract between the controller and the domain? Should there be a layer between the domain and the service layer? And, last but not least: following the original comment Business logic should really be in a service. Not in a model. Is this correct? How would I introduce my business logic in a service instead of the model?

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• Waterfall Model (SDLC) vs. Prototyping Model

  The characters in the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare can easily be used to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the Waterfall and Prototyping software development models. This children fable is about a race between a consistently slow moving but steadfast turtle and an extremely fast but unreliable rabbit. After closely comparing each character’s attributes in correlation with both software development models, a trend seems to appear in that the Waterfall closely resembles the Tortoise in that Waterfall Model is typically a slow moving process that is broken up in to multiple sequential steps that must be executed in a standard linear pattern. The Tortoise can be quoted several times in the story saying “Slow and steady wins the race.” This is the perfect mantra for the Waterfall Model in that this model is seen as a cumbersome and slow moving. Waterfall Model Phases Requirement Analysis & Definition This phase focuses on defining requirements for a project that is to be developed and determining if the project is even feasible. Requirements are collected by analyzing existing systems and functionality in correlation with the needs of the business and the desires of the end users. The desired output for this phase is a list of specific requirements from the business that are to be designed and implemented in the subsequent steps. In addition this phase is used to determine if any value will be gained by completing the project. System Design This phase focuses primarily on the actual architectural design of a system, and how it will interact within itself and with other existing applications. Projects at this level should be viewed at a high level so that actual implementation details are decided in the implementation phase. However major environmental decision like hardware and platform decision are typically decided in this phase. Furthermore the basic goal of this phase is to design an application at the system level in those classes, interfaces, and interactions are defined. Additionally decisions about scalability, distribution and reliability should also be considered for all decisions. The desired output for this phase is a functional  design document that states all of the architectural decisions that have been made in regards to the project as well as a diagrams like a sequence and class diagrams. Software Design This phase focuses primarily on the refining of the decisions found in the functional design document. Classes and interfaces are further broken down in to logical modules based on the interfaces and interactions previously indicated. The output of this phase is a formal design document. Implementation / Coding This phase focuses primarily on implementing the previously defined modules in to units of code. These units are developed independently are intergraded as the system is put together as part of a whole system. Software Integration & Verification This phase primarily focuses on testing each of the units of code developed as well as testing the system as a whole. There are basic types of testing at this phase and they include: Unit Test and Integration Test. Unit Test are built to test the functionality of a code unit to ensure that it preforms its desired task. Integration testing test the system as a whole because it focuses on results of combining specific units of code and validating it against expected results. The output of this phase is a test plan that includes test with expected results and actual results. System Verification This phase primarily focuses on testing the system as a whole in regards to the list of project requirements and desired operating environment. Operation & Maintenance his phase primarily focuses on handing off the competed project over to the customer so that they can verify that all of their requirements have been met based on their original requirements. This phase will also validate the correctness of their requirements and if any changed need to be made. In addition, any problems not resolved in the previous phase will be handled in this section. The Waterfall Model’s linear and sequential methodology does offer a project certain advantages and disadvantages. Advantages of the Waterfall Model Simplistic to implement and execute for projects and/or company wide Limited demand on resources Large emphasis on documentation Disadvantages of the Waterfall Model Completed phases cannot be revisited regardless if issues arise within a project Accurate requirement are never gather prior to the completion of the requirement phase due to the lack of clarification in regards to client’s desires. Small changes or errors that arise in applications may cause additional problems The client cannot change any requirements once the requirements phase has been completed leaving them no options for changes as they see their requirements changes as the customers desires change. Excess documentation Phases are cumbersome and slow moving Learn more about the Major Process in the Sofware Development Life Cycle and Waterfall Model. Conversely, the Hare shares similar traits with the prototyping software development model in that ideas are rapidly converted to basic working examples and subsequent changes are made to quickly align the project with customers desires as they are formulated and as software strays from the customers vision. The basic concept of prototyping is to eliminate the use of well-defined project requirements. Projects are allowed to grow as the customer needs and request grow. Projects are initially designed according to basic requirements and are refined as requirement become more refined. This process allows customer to feel their way around the application to ensure that they are developing exactly what they want in the application This model also works well for determining the feasibility of certain approaches in regards to an application. Prototypes allow for quickly developing examples of implementing specific functionality based on certain techniques. Advantages of Prototyping Active participation from users and customers Allows customers to change their mind in specifying requirements Customers get a better understanding of the system as it is developed Earlier bug/error detection Promotes communication with customers Prototype could be used as final production Reduced time needed to develop applications compared to the Waterfall method Disadvantages of Prototyping Promotes constantly redefining project requirements that cause major system rewrites Potential for increased complexity of a system as scope of the system expands Customer could believe the prototype as the working version. Implementation compromises could increase the complexity when applying updates and or application fixes When companies trying to decide between the Waterfall model and Prototype model they need to evaluate the benefits and disadvantages for both models. Typically smaller companies or projects that have major time constraints typically head for more of a Prototype model approach because it can reduce the time needed to complete the project because there is more of a focus on building a project and less on defining requirements and scope prior to the start of a project. On the other hand, Companies with well-defined requirements and time allowed to generate proper documentation should steer towards more of a waterfall model because they are in a position to obtain clarified requirements and have to design and optimal solution prior to the start of coding on a project.

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• Design for complex ATG applications

  - by Glen Borkowski

  Overview Needless to say, some ATG applications are more complex than others.  Some ATG applications support a single site, single language, single catalog, single currency, have a single development staff, single business team, and a relatively simple business model.  The real complex applications have to support multiple sites, multiple languages, multiple catalogs, multiple currencies, a couple different development teams, multiple business teams, and a highly complex business model (and processes to go along with it).  While it's still important to implement a proper design for simple applications, it's absolutely critical to do this for the complex applications.  Why?  It's all about time and money.  If you are unable to manage your complex applications in an efficient manner, the cost of managing it will increase dramatically as will the time to get things done (time to market).  On the positive side, your competition is most likely in the same situation, so you just need to be more efficient than they are. This article is intended to discuss a number of key areas to think about when designing complex applications on ATG.  Some of this can get fairly technical, so it may help to get some background first.  You can get enough of the required background information from this post.  After reading that, come back here and follow along. Application Design Of all the various types of ATG applications out there, the most complex tend to be the ones in the telecommunications industry - especially the ones which operate in multiple countries.  To get started, let's assume that we are talking about an application like that.  One that has these properties: Operates in multiple countries - must support multiple sites, catalogs, languages, and currencies The organization is fairly loosely-coupled - single brand, but different businesses across different countries There is some common functionality across all sites in all countries There is some common functionality across different sites within the same country Sites within a single country may have some unique functionality - relative to other sites in the same country Complex product catalog (mostly in terms of bundles, eligibility, and compatibility) At this point, I'll assume you have read through the required reading and have a decent understanding of how ATG modules work... Code / configuration - assemble into modules When it comes to defining your modules for a complex application, there are a number of goals: Divide functionality between the modules in a way that maps to your business Group common functionality 'further down in the stack of modules' Provide a good balance between shared resources and autonomy for countries / sites Now I'll describe a high level approach to how you could accomplish those goals...  Let's start from the bottom and work our way up.  At the very bottom, you have the modules that ship with ATG - the 'out of the box' stuff.  You want to make sure that you are leveraging all the modules that make sense in order to get the most value from ATG as possible - and less stuff you'll have to write yourself.  On top of the ATG modules, you should create what we'll refer to as the Corporate Foundation Module described as follows: Sits directly on top of ATG modules Used by all applications across all countries and sites - this is the foundation for everyone Contains everything that is common across all countries / all sites Once established and settled, will change less frequently than other 'higher' modules Encapsulates as many enterprise-wide integrations as possible Will provide means of code sharing therefore less development / testing - faster time to market Contains a 'reference' web application (described below) The next layer up could be multiple modules for each country (you could replace this with region if that makes more sense).  We'll define those modules as follows: Sits on top of the corporate foundation module Contains what is unique to all sites in a given country Responsible for managing any resource bundles for this country (to handle multiple languages) Overrides / replaces corporate integration points with any country-specific ones Finally, we will define what should be a fairly 'thin' (in terms of functionality) set of modules for each site as follows: Sits on top of the country it resides in module Contains what is unique for a given site within a given country Will mostly contain configuration, but could also define some unique functionality as well Contains one or more web applications The graphic below should help to indicate how these modules fit together: Web applications As described in the previous section, there are many opportunities for sharing (minimizing costs) as it relates to the code and configuration aspects of ATG modules.  Web applications are also contained within ATG modules, however, sharing web applications can be a bit more difficult because this is what the end customer actually sees, and since each site may have some degree of unique look & feel, sharing becomes more challenging.  One approach that can help is to define a 'reference' web application at the corporate foundation layer to act as a solid starting point for each site.  Here's a description of the 'reference' web application: Contains minimal / sample reference styling as this will mostly be addressed at the site level web app Focus on functionality - ensure that core functionality is revealed via this web application Each individual site can use this as a starting point There may be multiple types of web apps (i.e. B2C, B2B, etc) There are some techniques to share web application assets - i.e. multiple web applications, defined in the web.xml, and it's worth investigating, but is out of scope here. Reference infrastructure In this complex environment, it is assumed that there is not a single infrastructure for all countries and all sites.  It's more likely that different countries (or regions) could have their own solution for infrastructure.  In this case, it will be advantageous to define a reference infrastructure which contains all the hardware and software that make up the core environment.  Specifications and diagrams should be created to outline what this reference infrastructure looks like, as well as it's baseline cost and the incremental cost to scale up with volume.  Having some consistency in terms of infrastructure will save time and money as new countries / sites come online.  Here are some properties of the reference infrastructure: Standardized approach to setup of hardware Type and number of servers Defines application server, operating system, database, etc... - including vendor and specific versions Consistent naming conventions Provides a consistent base of terminology and understanding across environments Defines which ATG services run on which servers Production Staging BCC / Preview Each site can change as required to meet scale requirements Governance / organization It should be no surprise that the complex application we're talking about is backed by an equally complex organization.  One of the more challenging aspects of efficiently managing a series of complex applications is to ensure the proper level of governance and organization.  Here are some ideas and goals to work towards: Establish a committee to make enterprise-wide decisions that affect all sites Representation should be evenly distributed Should have a clear communication procedure Focus on high level business goals Evaluation of feature / function gaps and how that relates to ATG release schedule / roadmap Determine when to upgrade & ensure value will be realized Determine how to manage various levels of modules Who is responsible for maintaining corporate / country / site layers Determine a procedure for controlling what goes in the corporate foundation module Standardize on source code control, database, hardware, OS versions, J2EE app servers, development procedures, etc only use tested / proven versions - this is something that should be centralized so that every country / site does not have to worry about compatibility between versions Create a innovation team Quickly develop new features, perform proof of concepts All teams can benefit from their findings Summary At this point, it should be clear why the topics above (design, governance, organization, etc) are critical to being able to efficiently manage a complex application.  To summarize, it's all about competitive advantage...  You will need to reduce costs and improve time to market with the goal of providing a better experience for your end customers.  You can reduce cost by reducing development time, time allocated to testing (don't have to test the corporate foundation module over and over again - do it once), and optimizing operations.  With an efficient design, you can improve your time to market and your business will be more flexible  and agile.  Over time, you'll find that you're becoming more focused on offering functionality that is new to the market (creativity) and this will be rewarded - you're now a leader. In addition to the above, you'll realize soft benefits as well.  Your staff will be operating in a culture based on sharing.  You'll want to reward efforts to improve and enhance the foundation as this will benefit everyone.  This culture will inspire innovation, which can only lend itself to your competitive advantage.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012Popular ReleasesActipro WPF Controls Contrib: v2012.1: Updated to target WPF Studio 2012.1 Changes target framework to .NET 4.0, uses native WPF 4.0 DataGrid, and Prism 4.1.FileZilla Server Config File Editor: FileZillaConfig 1.0.0.1: Sorry for not including the config file with the previous release. It was a "lost in translation" when I was moving my local repository to CodePlex repository. Sorry for the rookie mistake.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.25: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Client Profile, and Windows 8. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet! Follow @JoeMayo.GAC Explorer: GACExplorer_x86_Setup: Version 1.0BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.6: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info BlogEngine.NET Hosting - 3 months free! Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here!! Click Here for More Info Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.2: 2012.05.07 Ver5.6.2 (1)　Web???????、????????·????????? (2)　Web???????、?????????? COMSPEC PATHEXT WINDIR SERVERADDR SERVERPORT DOCUMENTROOT SERVERADMIN REMOTE_PORT HTTPACCEPTCHRSET HTTPACCEPTLANGUAGE HTTPACCEPTEXCODINGGardens Point Parser Generator: Gardens Point Parser Generator version 1.5.0: ChangesVersion 1.5.0 contains a number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly. The default encoding of the *.y file is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The /report option has been improved, as has the automaton tracing facility. New facilities are included that allow multiple parsers to share a common token type. A complete change-log is available as a separate documentation file. The source project has been upgraded to Visual...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.0: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.0 contains a small number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly by default. The default encoding for lex input files is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The distribution also contains helper code for symbol pushback by GPPG parsers. A complete changelog is available as a separate documenta...Kinect Quiz Engine: update for sdk v1.0: updated to the new sdkMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.502b: It has been a slow week, but this release addresses a couple of recent bugs: Movies Multi-part Movies - Existing .nfo files that differed in name from the first part, were missed and scraped again. Trailers - MC attempted to scrape info for existing trailers. TV Shows Show Scraping - shows available only in the non-default language would not show up in the main browser. The correct language can now be selected using the TV Show Selector for a single show. General Will no longer prompt for ...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.5.2012.0508、XCoder v4.7.2012.0320: X????： 1，????For .Net 4.0?? XCoder????： 1，???????，????X????，?????? XCode????： 1，Insert/Update/Delete???????????????，???SQL???? 2，IEntityOperate?????? 3，????????IEntityTree 4，????????????????? 5，?????????? 6，??????????????Google Book Downloader: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Alpha: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Alpha. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports Cpython, IronPython, Jython and Pypy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging...AD Gallery: AD Gallery 1.2.7: NewsFixed a bug which caused the current thumbnail not to be highlighted Added a hook to take complete control over how descriptions are handled, take a look under Documentation for more info Added removeAllImages()51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.4.8: One Click Install from NuGet Data ChangesIncludes 42 new browser properties in both the Lite and Premium data sets. Premium Data includes many new devices including Nokia Lumia 900, BlackBerry 9220 and HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range and Samsung Galaxy S III. Lite data includes devices released in January 2012. Changes to Version 2.1.4.81. The IsFirstTime method of the RedirectModule will now return the same value when called multiple times for the same request. This was prevent...Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection ver 2.2 (WinRT supported): Added NamedParameterAttribute, OptionalParameterAttribute. Added behaviors ICycleDependencyBehavior, IResolveUnregisteredTypeBehavior. Added WinRT support. Added support for NET 4.5. Added support for MVC 4.NShape - .Net Diagramming Framework for Industrial Applications: NShape 2.0.1: Changes in 2.0.1:Bugfixes: IRepository.Insert(Shape shape) and IRepository.Insert(IEnumerable<Shape> shapes) no longer insert shape connections. Several context menu items did display although the required permission was not granted Display did not reset the visible and active layers when changing the diagram NullReferenceException when pressing Del key and no shape was selected Changed Behavior: LayerCollection.Find("") no longer throws an exception. Improvements: Display does not rese...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.11.6: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...sb0t: sb0t 4.64: New commands added: #scribble <url> #adminscribble on #adminscribble offJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5: New feature - Added ItemIsReference, ItemReferenceLoopHandling, ItemTypeNameHandling, ItemConverterType to JsonPropertyAttribute New feature - Added ItemRequired to JsonObjectAttribute New feature - Added Path to JsonWriterException Change - Improved deserializer call stack memory usage Change - Moved the PDB files out of the NuGet package into a symbols package Fix - Fixed infinite loop from an input error when reading an array and error handling is enabled Fix - Fixed base objec...New Projects[ACID]IMVU Cache Cleaner: A IMVU Cache cleaner simple as that just with some major tweaks to the code is all giving it more power then most[ACID]IMVU Modder: IMVU Software Modder for adding and removing features from IMVUs official ClientAmarok Framework Library: This framework library is an attempt to take advantage of the actor/agent programming model for standalone desktop applications. Most of the concepts are inspired by the actor model, Microsoft Robotics CCR and the TPL Dataflow library.amking: private...Bradaz Utilities: This is just a collection of some of my Utility classes i use within my Open Source ProjectsChris's Blog examples code: This project contains code examples from blog post I write. My blog can be found at http://chriscpetersonblog.blogspot.com/Culinary web site: Project for web site that will collect and display culinary receiptsdaboost: A Visual Studio add-in designed to auto-generate boilerplate data access code. Ever work with a lot of stored procedures? Ever work with displaying data returned by those stored procedures to a stock web forms pages. If so, please take a look at DaBoost. It will save you alot of typing and mis-spelled paramater names. FtLinq: The "Faster-than-Light integrated language query" library provides LINQ-to-enumerable queries that are pretty much as fast as regular 'foreach' statements.Jokeri: MVVM Silverlight Multiplayer Card Game hosted in Facebook. LSX?????: ????????，????Permutations with CUDA and OpenCL: Finding massive permutations on GPU with CUDA and OpenCLScon SDK: SDK for using the scon SB022S USB Servo Controller board available at http://sconcon.com/index.htmlscpEdit: scpEdit is a full feature text editor focused on data searching, extraction and transformation rather then focused on code editing. It makes extensive use of regular expressions, support VBscript macros and a lot more. For now, the interface is only available in french. Translators are welcome. scpEdit est un éditeur texte professionnel principalement caractérisé par des fonctionnalités avancées de recherche, d'extraction et de transformation de texte tirant pleinement profit de la puissan...Selection sort: HelloSkyline: The team is working hard to create a new way to made thingsSOAGame maker: This project is still undergoing extensive testing and tweaking as well as re-Edting as well. So changes may occur as this software is released to the public, however. This is designed to be a "Shell" project, meaning the UI is done. But the coding still remains to be seen.SokobanSolver: Simple Sokoban Editor+Solver+Game. Written in Java+Eclipse+SWT.SPListViewFilter: The SharePoint List search / filter WebPartStochasticSimulation: A stochastic simulator for chemical reactions with low copy numberString Extensions: The String Extensions project aims to provide a more complete String type experience by adding extension methods (including overloads of existing methods) providing commonly required functionality in a well-tested and well-documented fashion.Suucha Expression: Suucha Expression??????????(?????)??(????)??????，??????????：SuuchaMemberExpression（?????）、SuuchaConstantExpression（?????）、SuuchaBinaryExprssion（?????，?????????，????、??、In、Like?），??????IQueryable?Where??。VoxelEngine: Minecraft style terrain engine in SlimDX, C# XNA 4.0Web API For Swedish Soccer: A Web API For accessing information on the Swedish Soccer LeagueWhois Client .NET: This is .NET Class library of WHOIS client (with sample web site).xlcanvas: silverlight 5 xna canvas draw 2d or 3d obj use xna api in silverlight 5

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