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• JMaghreb 2012 Trip Report

  - by arungupta

  JMaghreb is the inaugural Java conference organized by Morocco JUG. It is the biggest Java conference in Maghreb (5 countries in North West Africa). Oracle was the exclusive platinum sponsor with several others. The registrations had to be closed at 1412 for the free conference and several folks were already on the waiting list. Rabat with 531 registrations and Casablanca with 426 were the top cities. Some statistics ... 850+ attendees over 2 days, 500+ every day 30 sessions were delivered by 18 speakers from 10 different countries 10 sessions in French and 20 in English 6 of the speakers spoke at JavaOne 2012 8 will be at Devoxx Attendees from 5 different countries and 57 cities in Morocco 40.9% qualified them as professional and rest as students Topics ranged from HTML5, Java EE 7, ADF, JavaFX, MySQL, JCP, Vaadin, Android, Community, JCP Java EE 6 hands-on lab was sold out within 7 minutes and JavaFX in 12 minutes I gave the keynote along with Simon Ritter which was basically a recap of the Strategy and Technical keynotes presented at JavaOne 2012. An informal survey during the keynote showed the following numbers: 25% using NetBeans, 90% on Eclipse, 3 on JDeveloper, 1 on IntelliJ About 10 subscribers to free online Java magazine. This digital magazine is a comprehensive source of information for everything Java - subscribe for free!! About 10-15% using Java SE 7. Download JDK 7 and get started today! Even JDK 8 builds have been available for a while now. My second talk explained the core concepts of WebSocket and how JSR 356 is providing a standard API to build WebSocket-driven applications in Java EE 7. TOTD #183 explains how you can easily get started with WebSocket in GlassFish 4. The complete slide deck is available: Next day started with a community keynote by Sonya Barry. Some of us live the life of JCP, JSR, EG, EC, RI, etc every day, but not every body is. To address that, Sonya prepared an excellent introductory presentation providing an explanation of these terms and how java.net infrastructure supports Java development. The registration for the lab showed there is a definite demand for these technologies in this part of the world. I delivered the Java EE 6 hands-on lab to a packed room of about 120 attendees. Most of the attendees were able to progress and follow the lab instructions. Some of the attendees did not have a laptop but were taking extensive notes on paper notepads. Several attendees were already using Java EE 6 in their projects and typically they are the ones asking deep dive questions. Also gave out three copies of my recently released Java EE 6 Pocket Guide and new GlassFish t-shirts. Definitely feels happy to coach ~120 more Java developers learn standards-based enterprise Java programming. I also participated in a JCP BoF along with Werner, Sonya, and Badr. Adotp-a-JSR, java.net infrastructure, how to file a JSR, what is an RI, and other similar topics were discussed in a candid manner. You can follow @JMaghrebConf or check out their facebook page. java.net published a timely conversation with Badr El Houari - the fearless leader of the Morocco JUG team. Did you know that Morocco JUG stood for JCP EC elections (ADD LINK) ? Even though they did not get elected but did fairly well. Now some sample tweets from #JMaghreb ... #JMaghreb is over. Impressive for a first edition! Thanks @badrelhouari and all the @MoroccoJUG team ! Since you @speakjava : System.out.println("Thank you so much dear Tech Evangelist ! The JavaFX was pretty amazing !!! "); #JMaghreb @YounesVendetta @arungupta @JMaghrebConf Right ! hope he will be back to morocco again and again .. :) @Alji_ @arungupta @JMaghrebConf That dude is a genius ;) Put it on your wall :p @arungupta rocking Java EE 6 at @JMaghrebConf #Java #JavaEE #JMaghreb http://t.co/isl0Iq5p @sonyabarry you are an awesome speaker ;-) #JMaghreb rich more than 550 attendees in day one. Expecting more tomorrow! ongratulations @badrelhouari the organisation was great! The talks were pretty interesting, and the turnout was surprising at #JMaghreb! #JMaghreb is truly awesome... The speakers are unbelievable ! #JavaFX... Just amazing #JMaghreb Charmed by the talk about #javaFX ( nodes architecture, MVC, Lazy loading, binding... ) gotta start using it intead of SWT. #JMaghreb JavaFX is killing JFreeChart. It supports Charts a lot of kind of them ... #JMaghreb The british man is back #JMaghreb I do like him!! #JMaghreb @arungupta rocking @JMaghrebConf. pic.twitter.com/CNohA3PE @arungupta Great talk about the future of Java EE (JEE 7 & JEE 8) Thank you. #JMaghreb JEE7 more mooore power , leeess less code !! #JMaghreb They are simplifying the existing API for Java Message Service 2.0 #JMaghreb good to know , the more the code is simplified the better ! The Glassdoor guy #arungupta is doing it RIGHT ! #JMaghreb Great presentation of The Future of the Java Platform: Java EE 7, Java SE 8 & Beyond #jMaghreb @arungupta is a great Guy apparently #JMaghreb On a personal front, the hotel (Soiftel Jardin des Roses) was pretty nice and the location was perfect. There was a 1.8 mile loop dirt trail right next to it so I managed to squeeze some runs before my upcoming marathon. Also enjoyed some great Moroccan cuisine - Couscous, Tajine, mint tea, and moroccan salad. Visit to Kasbah of the Udayas, Hassan II (one of the tallest mosque in the world), and eating in a restaurant in a kasbah are some of the exciting local experiences. Now some pictures from the event (and around the city) ... And the complete album: Many thanks to Badr, Faisal, and rest of the team for organizing a great conference. They are already thinking about how to improve the content, logisitics, and flow for the next year. I'm certainly looking forward to JMaghreb 2.0 :-)

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• Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

  - by Bil Simser

  Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

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• My powerpoint seems working in right-to-left

  - by Pavel Radzivilovsky

  I don't seem to find a way to switch it off. See picture. There seems to be no way to say the paragraph is not RTL. There are addable RTL buttons in the customize ribbon dialog, but they are grayed in ribbon cfg view, even though buttons that are actually there are also grayed in the same way. Looks like there's no way to get some other buttons shown on the office ribbon. I already found how to do it with VBA, but I find no way of doing it from UI and I spent much time searching and trying. Am I senile?

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• New Release of Oracle EPM (Enterprise Performance Management)

  - by Theresa Hickman

  I'm a huge fan of Hyperion products and consider Hyperion to be one of the best acquisitions Oracle has made in terms of applications. So I am really excited to talk about their latest release, Release 11.1.2 of the Oracle EPM System. This is EPM's largest release in 2 years, and it's jam-packed with new modules and features. In terms of brand new products, there are three: 1. Public Sector Planning and Budgeting meets the needs of public sector agencies, higher education, governments, etc. that have complex budget requirements. It supports position or employee-based budgeting and integrates with MS Office and your ERP ledgers to perform commitment control. 2. Hyperion Financial Close Management is a complete financial close solution that orchestrates the entire close process from subledgers and general ledger to financial reporting and disclosure submissions. And of course, it is integrated with GL systems and consolidation systems. I saw a demo of this and it looked pretty slick. They have this unified close calendar that looks like a regular calendar that gives each person participating in the close process a task list. It comes with a Gantt chart that shows the relationships and dependencies among closing tasks. There are dashboards to allow you to track the close progress and completion of tasks as well as perform trend analysis and see how much time is being spent on different activities in the close process. This gives you visibility that you never had before to understand where the bottlenecks are and where improvements could be made. I think what I liked best about this product was that it provides a central place for all participants to communicate their progress. When I worked as an Accountant, we used ad hoc tools, such as spreadsheets, Word documents, emails, and phone calls during the close process. I like the idea of having a central system to track the overall progress as well as automate the entire financial close process. Who knows, maybe Accountants won't have to revolve their lives around the month end close anymore with a tool like this. Those periodic fire drills can become predictable, well managed processes. 3. Disclosure Management is an out-of-the-box, pre-packaged XBRL solution to meet statutory reporting requirements. This product is really going to help companies improve the timeliness of producing financial reports. Reports can be authored using MS Word and Excel and then XBRL instance documents can be produced with its embedded XBRL tags. It even supports footnotes and disclosures of non-financial information. With a product like this, companies no longer have to outsource their XBRL filing; they can bring it back in house to save costs and time. In terms of other enhancements, they have ERP Integrator that provides integration and drill downs from Hyperion products to source systems, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and SAP. No other vendor offers this level of integration. There's also a new product that links Oracle Essbase directly to Hyperion Financial Management for internal financial reporting, and new integrations between Hyperion Financial Management and Oracle's GRC products. They also improved the usability of Oracle Hyperion Planning. They made it much easier for end users to use the system via the web or via MS Excel when submitting plans and budgets. It is also integrated with intelligent approval workflows that are data-driven, user-configurable, and scenario-specific to efficiently streamline the budgeting process. Here's the press release from April 7, 2010. Here's the pre-recorded web cast where you can see the demos. Just register and watch the hour long presentation. And finally, here's the newsletter

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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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• Differentiate procedural language(c) from oop languages(c++)

  - by niko

  I have been trying to differentiate c and c++(or oop languages) but I don't understand where the difference is. Note I have never used c++ but I asked my friends and some of them to differentiate c and c++ They say c++ has oop concepts and also the public, private modes for definition of variables and which c does not have though. Seriously I have done vb.net programming for a while 2 to 3 months, I never faced a situation to use class concepts and modes of definition like public and private. So I thought what could be the use for these? My friend explained me a program saying that if a variable is public, it can be accessed anywhere I said why not declare it as a global variable like in c? He did not get back to my question and he said if a variable is private it cannot be accessed by some other functions I said why not define it as a local variable, even these he was unable to answer. No matter where I read private variables cannot be accessed whereas public variables can be then why not make public as global and private as local whats the difference? whats the real use of public and private ? please don't say it can be used by everyone, I suppose why not we use some conditions and make the calls? I have heard people saying security reasons, a friend said if a function need to be accessed it should be inherited first. He explained saying that only admin should be able to have some rights and not all so that functions are made private and inherited only by the admin to use Then I said why not we use if condition if ( login == "admin") invoke the function he still did not answer these question. Please clear me with these things, I have done vb.net and vba and little c++ without using oop concepts because I never found their real use while I was writing the code, I'm a little afraid am I too back in oop concepts?

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• CSV Anyone?

  - by Tim Dexter

  CSV, a dead format? With today's abilities to generate Excel output (Im working on some posts for the shiny new Excel templates) and the sophistication of the eText outputs, do you really need CSV? I guess so seeing as it was added after the base product was released as an enhancement. But I'd be interested in hearing use cases? I used to think the same of text output. But now Im working in the public sector where older technologies abound I can see a use for text output. Its also used as a machine readable format, etc. BIP still does not support a text format from its RTF templates but its very doable using XSL templates. Back to CSV, I noticed an enhancement in the big list of new stuff in the 10.1.3.4.1 rollup. You can now generate CSV from structured data ie a data template or a SQL XML query. This piqued my interest so I ran off a data template to CSV. Its interesting, in a geeky kinda way, I guess Im that way inclined.Here's my data structure:<EMPLOYEES> <LIST_G_DEPT> <G_DEPT>  <DEPARTMENT_ID>10</DEPARTMENT_ID>  <DEPARTMENT_NAME>Administration</DEPARTMENT_NAME>  <LIST_G_EMP>   <G_EMP>     <EMPLOYEE_ID>200</EMPLOYEE_ID>     <EMP_NAME>Jennifer Whalen</EMP_NAME>     <EMAIL>JWHALEN</EMAIL>     <PHONE_NUMBER>515.123.4444</PHONE_NUMBER>     <HIRE_DATE>1987-09-17T00:00:00.000-06:00</HIRE_DATE>     <SALARY>4400</SALARY>    </G_EMP>   </LIST_G_EMP>  <TOTAL_EMPS>1</TOTAL_EMPS>  <TOTAL_SALARY>4400</TOTAL_SALARY>  <AVG_SALARY>4400</AVG_SALARY>  <MAX_SALARY>4400</MAX_SALARY>  <MIN_SALARY>4400</MIN_SALARY> </G_DEPT>Poor ol Jennifer, she needs some help in the Admin department :0)Pushing this to CSV and BP completely flattens the data out so you get a completely denormalized data output in the CSV.TOTAL_SALARY,DEPARTMENT_ID,DEPARTMENT_NAME,MIN_SALARY,AVG_SALARY,MAX_SALARY,EMPLOYEE_ID,SALARY,PHONE_NUMBER,HIRE_DATE,EMP_NAME,EMAIL,TOTAL_EMPS4400,10,Administration,4400,4400,4400,200,4400,515.123.4444,1987-09-17T00:00:00.000-06:00,"Jennifer Whalen",JWHALEN,119000,20,Marketing,6000,9500,13000,201,13000,515.123.5555,1996-02-17T00:00:00.000-07:00,"Michael Hartstein",MHARTSTE,219000,20,Marketing,6000,9500,13000,202,6000,603.123.6666,1997-08-17T00:00:00.000-06:00,"Pat Fay",PFAY,2Useful? Its a little confusing to start with but it is completely de-normalized so there is lots of repetition. But if it floats your boat, you got it!

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• I want to turn VB.Net Option Strict On

  - by asjohnson

  I recently found out about strong typing in VB.Net (naturally it was on here, thanks!) and am deciding I should take another step toward being a better programmer. I went from vba macros - VB.Net, because I needed a program that I could automate and I never read anything about strong typing, so I kind of fell into the VB.Net default trap. Now I am looking to turn it on and sort out this whole type thing. I was hoping someone could direct me towards some resources to make this transistion as painless as possible. I have read around some and ctype seems to come up a lot, but past that I am at a bit of a loss. What are the benefits of switching? Is there more to it than just using ctype to cast things? I feel like there is a good article that I have failed to come across and any direction would be great. Would a good approach to be to rewrite a program that is written with option strict off and note differences?

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• Access Denied

  - by Tony Davis

  When Microsoft executives wake up in the night screaming, I suspect they are having a nightmare about their own version of Frankenstein's monster. Created with the best of intentions, without thinking too hard of the long-term strategy, and having long outlived its usefulness, the monster still lives on, occasionally wreaking vengeance on the innocent. Its name is Access; a living synthesis of disparate body parts that is resistant to all attempts at a mercy-killing. In 1986, Microsoft had no database products, and needed one for their new OS/2 operating system, the successor to MSDOS. In 1986, they bought exclusive rights to Sybase DataServer, and were also intent on developing a desktop database to capture Ashton-Tate's dominance of that market, with dbase. This project, first called 'Omega' and later 'Cirrus', eventually spawned two products: Visual Basic in 1991 and Access in late 1992. Whereas Visual Basic battled with PowerBuilder for dominance in the client-server market, Access easily won the desktop database battle, with Dbase III and DataEase falling away. Access did an excellent job of abstracting and simplifying the task of building small database applications in a short amount of time, for a small number of departmental users, and often for a transient requirement. There is an excellent front end and forms generator. We not only see it in Access but parts of it also reappear in SSMS. It's good. A business user can pull together useful reports, without relying on extensive technical support. A skilled Access programmer can deliver a fairly sophisticated application, whilst the traditional client-server programmer is still sharpening his pencil. Even for the SQL Server programmer, the forms generator of Access is useful for sketching out application designs. So far, so good, but here's where the problems start; Access ties together two different products and the backend of Access is the bugbear. The limitations of Jet/ACE are well-known and documented. They range from MDB files that are prone to corruption, especially as they grow in size, pathetic security, and "copy and paste" Backups. The biggest problem though, was an infamous lack of scalability. Because Microsoft never realized how long the product would last, they put little energy into improving the beast. Microsoft 'ate their own dog food' by using Access for Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. They choked on it. For years, scalability and performance problems with Exchange Server have been laid at the door of the Jet Blue engine on which it relies. Substantial development work in Exchange 2010 was required, just in order to improve the engine and storage schema so that it more efficiently handled the reading and writing of mails. The alternative of using SQL Server just never panned out. The Jet engine was designed to limit concurrent users to a small number (10-20). When Access applications outgrew this, bitter experience proved that there really is no easy upgrade path from Access to SQL Server, beyond rewriting the whole lot from scratch. The various initiatives to do this never quite bridged the cultural gulf between Access and a true relational database So, what are the obvious alternatives for small, strategic database applications? I know many users who, for simple 'list maintenance' requirements are very happy using Excel databases. Surely, now that PowerPivot has led the way, it is time for Microsoft to offer a new RAD package for database application development; namely an Excel-based front end for SQL Server Express. In that way, we'll have a powerful and familiar front end, to a scalable database, and a clear upgrade path when an app takes off and needs to go enterprise. Cheers, Tony.

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• Is SQL Azure a newbies springboard?

  - by jamiet

  Earlier today I was considering the various SQL Server platforms that are available today and I wondered aloud, wonder how long until the majority of #sqlserver newcomers use @sqlazure instead of installing locally Let me explain. My first experience of development was way back in the early 90s when I would crank open VBA in Access or Excel and start hammering out some code, usually by recording macros and looking at the code that they produced (sound familiar?). The reason was simple, Office was becoming ubiquitous so the barrier to entry was incredibly low and, save for a short hiatus at university, I’ve been developing on the Microsoft platform ever since. These days spend most of my time using SQL Server. I take a look at SQL Azure today I see a lot of similarities with those early experiences, the barrier to entry is low and getting lower. I don’t have to download some software or actually install anything other than a web browser in order to get myself a fully functioning SQL Server  database against which I can ostensibly start hammering out some code and I believe that to be incredibly empowering. Having said that there are still a few pretty high barriers, namely: I need to get out my credit card Its pretty useless without some development tools such as SQL Server Management Studio, which I do have to install. The second of those barriers will disappear pretty soon when Project Houston delivers a web-based admin and presentation tool for SQL Azure so that just leaves the matter of my having to use a credit card. If Microsoft have any sense at all then they will realise the huge potential of opening up a free, throttled version of SQL Azure for newbies to party on; they get to developers early (just like they did with me all those years ago) and it gives potential customers an opportunity to try-before-they-buy. Perhaps in 20 years time people will be talking about SQL Azure as being their first foray into the world of coding! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• SQL SERVER – Why Do We Need Master Data Management – Importance and Significance of Master Data Management (MDM)

  - by pinaldave

  Let me paint a picture of everyday life for you.  Let’s say you and your wife both have address books for your groups of friends.  There is definitely overlap between them, so that you both have the addresses for your mutual friends, and there are addresses that only you know, and some only she knows.  They also might be organized differently.  You might list your friend under “J” for “Joe” or even under “W” for “Work,” while she might list him under “S” for “Joe Smith” or under your name because he is your friend.  If you happened to trade, neither of you would be able to find anything! This is where data management would be very important.  If you were to consolidate into one address book, you would have to set rules about how to organize the book, and both of you would have to follow them.  You would also make sure that poor Joe doesn’t get entered twice under “J” and under “S.” This might be a familiar situation to you, whether you are thinking about address books, record collections, books, or even shopping lists.  Wherever there is a lot of data to consolidate, you are going to run into problems unless everyone is following the same rules. I’m sure that my readers can figure out where I am going with this.  What is SQL Server but a computerized way to organize data?  And Microsoft is making it easier and easier to get all your “addresses” into one place.  In the  2008 version of SQL they introduced a new tool called Master Data Services (MDS) for Master Data Management, and they have improved it for the new 2012 version. MDM was hailed as a major improvement for business intelligence.  You might not think that an organizational system is terribly exciting, but think about the kind of “address books” a company might have.  Many companies have lots of important information, like addresses, credit card numbers, purchase history, and so much more.  To organize all this efficiently so that customers are well cared for and properly billed (only once, not never or multiple times!) is a major part of business intelligence. MDM comes into play because it will comb through these mountains of data and make sure that all the information is consistent, accurate, and all placed in one database so that employees don’t have to search high and low and waste their time. MDM also has operational MDM functions.  This is not a redundancy.  Operational MDM means that when one employee updates one bit of information in the database, for example – updating a new address for a customer, operational MDM ensures that this address is updated throughout the system so that all departments will have the correct information. Another cool thing about MDM is that it features Master Data Services Configuration Manager, which is exactly what it sounds like.  It has a built-in “helper” that lets you set up your database quickly, easily, and with the correct configurations.  While talking about cool features, I can’t skip over the add-in for Excel.  This allows you to link certain data to Excel files for easier sharing and uploading. In summary, I want to emphasize that the scariest part of the database is slowly disappearing.  Everyone knows that a database – one consolidated area for all your data – is a good idea, but the idea of setting one up is daunting.  But SQL Server is making data management easier and easier with features like Master Data Services (MDS). Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Master Data Services, MDM

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• I have 5 days of vouchers for MS training… help me choose? [closed]

  - by Shyatic

  I'm a Microsoft centric guy (systems engineering side) and I already know the syntax of VB, have done VBScript pretty extensively and Excel VBA stuff as well. I want to make the leap into proper programming, probably with C# because it teaches me syntax I can use for Java if I want to go that route at some point. Since I have vouchers for 5 days of programming, and I can understand logic and understand how the .NET framework works... I would love to hear ideas on which MS Courses I should take. My primary focus is to work on web applications with web services that interact and do neat stuff... like for example, to create a 'chat' room or something interactive on the web. Or should I do something with HTML5/JS? I am really not sure... like I said, I want to work to make web services/sites. Not making the next Facebook mind you, but I'd like to work towards something in that spectrum on a much smaller scale. Please give me any advice, I'd like to book these classes asap Obviously getting involved with SQL and things that I will require would be important here.. you guys know better than me! Thanks!

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• Rapid Evolution of Society & Technology

  - by Michael Snow

  We caught up with Brian Solis on the phone the other day and Christie Flanagan had a chance to chat with him and learn a bit more about him and some of the concepts he'll be addressing in our Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast on Thursday 12/13/12. «--- Interview with Brian Solis  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast- mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Be sure and register for this week's webcast ---» ------------------- Guest post by Brian Solis. Reposted (Borrowed) from his posting of May 24, 2012 Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise? - Brian Solis You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words. You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people. Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors. You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not tried to find the value for yourself. You’re a change agent and you truly wish to bring about change, but you’ve not invested time or resources to answer “why” in your endeavors to become a connected or social business. If we are to truly change, we must find purpose. We must uncover the essence of our business and the value it delivers to traditional and connected consumers. We must rethink the spirit of today’s embrace and clearly articulate how transformation is going to improve customer and employee experiences and relationships now and over time. Without doing so, any attempts at evolution will be thwarted by reality. In an era of Digital Darwinism, no business is too big to fail or too small to succeed. These are undisciplined times which require alternative approaches to recognize and pursue new opportunities. But everything begins with acknowledging the 360 view of the world that you see today is actually a filtered view of managed and efficient convenience. Today, many organizations that were once inspired by innovation and engagement have fallen into a process of marketing, operationalizing, managing, and optimizing. That might have worked for the better part of the last century, but for the next 10 years and beyond, new vision, leadership and supporting business models will be written to move businesses from rigid frameworks to adaptive and agile entities. I believe that today’s executives will undergo a great test; a test of character, vision, intention, and universal leadership. It starts with a simple, but essential question…what is your promise? Notice, I didn’t ask about your brand promise. Nor did I ask for you to cite your mission and vision statements. This is much more than value propositions or manufactured marketing language designed to hook audiences and stakeholders. I asked for your promise to me as your consumer, stakeholder, and partner. This isn’t about B2B or B2C, but instead, people to people, person to person. It is this promise that will breathe new life into an organization that on the outside, could be misdiagnosed as catatonic by those who are disrupting your markets. A promise, for example, is meant to inspire. It creates alignment. It serves as the foundation for your vision, mission, and all business strategies and it must come from the top to mean anything. For without it, we cannot genuinely voice what it is we stand for or stand behind. Think for a moment about the definition of community. It’s easy to confuse a workplace or a market where everyone simply shares common characteristics. However, a community in this day and age is much more than belonging to something, it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter The next few years will force a divide where companies are separated by intention as measured by actions and words. But, becoming a social business is not enough. Becoming more authentic and transparent doesn’t serve as a mantra for a renaissance. A promise is the ink that inscribes the spirit of the relationship between you and me. A promise serves as the words that influence change from within and change beyond the halls of our business. It is the foundation for a renewed embrace, one that must then find its way to every aspect of the organization. It’s the difference between a social business and an adaptive business. While an adaptive business can also be social, it is the culture of the organization that strives to not just use technology to extend current philosophies or processes into new domains, but instead give rise to a new culture where striving for relevance is among its goals. The tools and networks simply become enablers of a greater mission You are reading this because you believe in something more than what you’re doing today. While you fight for change within your organization, remember to aim for a higher purpose. Organizations that strive for innovation, imagination, and relevance will outperform those that do not. Part of your job is to lead a missionary push that unites the groundswell with a top down cascade. Change will only happen because you and other internal champions see what others can’t and will do what other won’t. It takes resolve. It takes the ability to translate new opportunities into business value. And, it takes courage. “This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us”-Steve Jobs ----------------------------------------------------------------- So -- where do you begin to evaluate the kind of experience you are delivering for your customers, partners, and employees?  Take a look at this White Paper: Creating a Successful and Meaningful Customer Experience on the Web and then have a cup of coffee while you listen to the sage advice of Guy Kawasaki in a short video below.   An interview with Guy Kawasaki on Maximizing Social Media Channels 

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• Visual Basic link to SQL output to Word

  - by CLO_471

  I am in need of some advice/references. I am currently trying to develop a legal document interface. There are certain fields in which I need to query out of my sql db and have those fields output into a document that can be printed. I am trying to develop a user interface where people can enter fields that will output to a document template but at the same time I need the template to be able to pull data from the SQL database. This is the reason why I think that VB might be my best choice and because it is one of the only OOP languages I am familiar with presently. Does anyone know that best way to be able to handle this type of job?? I know that you can use VBA within MS Word and have the form output variables to a word template. But, is there a way to have the word document also pull information from the SQL db? Is the best option to use VB linked to SQL and run queries to get the information from the database and then have it output to a for within VB? Is it possible for VB to be linked to a SQL db and output variables and SQL fields to a Word Template? I have looked into Mail Merge and I see that it allows users to pull data from an Access query but I dont think it would be easy to automate and it seems that users would need to have an advanced knowledge of MS Word and Access to handle this. I am not finding much useful information online so I came here. Any advice or references would be greatly appreciated. If there is a better way please let me know.

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• How reduce size of PPT 2010 Notes Pages PDFs?

  - by KnowItAllWannabe

  I have a PPT presentation of about 400 slides that I periodically update and publish as PDF. The view I publish is the Notes Pages. This worked fine for several years, during which time I was using PPT 2002. I recently upgraded to PPT 2010, and now I find that the PDFs I create are about 25 times bigger than they used to be, and the text in the slides part of the Notes Pages is no longer selectable in Acrobat. According to Why does Powerpoint 2010 print notes pages to PDF as raster images? , the problem is that PPT 2010 is rendering the slides' content as images, which is not what earlier versions of PPT did. The solution offered in that discussion involves Office Automation and VBA, neither of which I know anything about, and it's not clear whether that approach solves the problem of the text in the slides not being selectable in the PDF. Isn't there a simple way to get PPT 2010 to print Notes Pages to PDF the way it did in PPT 2002?

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• New spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly 6.0 provides statistics for prioritizing bug fixes

  - by Jason Crease

  One problem developers face is how to prioritize the many voices providing input into software bugs. If there is something wrong with a function that is the darling of a particular user, he or she tends to want action - now! The developer's dilemma is how to ascertain that the problem is major or minor, and when it should be addressed. Now there is a new spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly that provides exactly that information in an objective manner. This might upset those used to getting their way by being the loudest or pushiest, but ultimately it will ensure that the biggest problems get the priority they deserve. Here's how it works: Feature Usage Reporting (FUR) in SmartAssembly 6.0 provides a wealth of data about how your software is used by its end-users, but in the SmartAssembly UI the data isn't mined to its full extent. The new Excel spreadsheet for FUR extracts statistics from that data and presents them in easy-to-understand forms. I developed the spreadsheet feature in Microsoft Excel, using a fair amount of VBA. The spreadsheet connects directly to the database which stores the feature-usage data, and shows a wide variety of statistics and tables extracted from that data.  You want to know what percentage of users have used the 'Export as XML' button?  No problem.  How popular is v5.3 is compared to v5.1?  There's graphs for that. You need to know whether you have more users in Russia or Brazil? There's a big pie chart for that. I recently witnessed the spreadsheet in use here at Red Gate Software. My bug is exposed as minor While testing new features in .NET Reflector, I found a usability bug in the Refresh button and filed it in the Red Gate bug-tracking system. The bug was labelled "V.NEXT MINOR," which means it would be fixed in the next point release. Although I'm a professional tester, I'm not much different than most software users when they discover a bug that affects them personally: I wanted it fixed immediately. There was an ulterior motive at play here, of course. I would get to see my colleagues put the spreadsheet to work. The Reflector team loaded up the spreadsheet to view the feature-usage statistics that SmartAssembly collected for the refresh button. The resulting statistics showed that only 8% of users have ever pressed the Refresh button, and only 2.6% of sessions involve pressing the button. When Refresh is used, it's only pressed on average 1.6 times a session, with a maximum of 8 times during a session. This was in stark contrast to what I was doing as a conscientious tester: pressing it dozens of times per session. The spreadsheet provides evidence that my bug was a minor one. On to more serious things Based on the solid evidence uncovered by the spreadsheet, the Reflector team concluded that my experience does not represent that of the vast majority of Reflector's recorded users. The Reflector team had ample data to send me back to my desk and keep the bug classified as "V.NEXT MINOR." The team then went back to fixing more serious bugs. If I'm in the shoes of the user, I might not be thoroughly happy, but I cannot deny that the evidence clearly placed me in a very small minority. Next time I'm hoping the spreadsheet will prove that my bug is more important. Find out more about Feature-Usage Reporting here. The spreadsheet is available for free download here.

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• PASS Summit 2012: keynote and Mobile BI announcements #sqlpass

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP technology that will appear (I suppose) in the next release of the SQL Server relational engine. The improvement in performance and scalability is impressive and it enables new scenarios. I’m curious to see whether it can be used also to improve ETL performance and how it differs from using SSD technology. Updates on Columnstore: In the next major release of SQL Server the columnstore indexes will be updatable and it will be possible to create a clustered index with Columnstore index. This is really a great news for near real-time reporting needs! Polybase: in 2013 it will debut SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which will include the Polybase technology. By using Polybase a single T-SQL query will run queries across relational data and Hadoop data. A single query language for both. Sounds really interesting for using BigData in a more integrated way with existing relational databases. And, of course, to load a data warehouse using BigData, which is the ultimate goal that we all BI Pro have, right? SQL Server 2012 SP1: the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012 is available now and it enable the use of PowerPivot for SharePoint and Power View on a SharePoint 2013 installation with Excel 2013. Power View works with Multidimensional cube: the long-awaited feature of being able to use PowerPivot with Multidimensional cubes has been shown by Amir Netz in an amazing demonstration during the keynote. The interesting thing is that the data model behind was based on a many-to-many relationship (something that is not fully supported by Power View with Tabular models). Another interesting aspect is that it is Analysis Services 2012 that supports DAX queries run on a Multidimensional model, enabling the use of any future tool generating DAX queries on top of a Multidimensional model. There are still no info about availability by now, but this is *not* included in SQL Server 2012 SP1. So what about Mobile BI? Well, even if not announced during the keynote, there is a dedicated session on this topic and there are very important news in this area: iOS, Android and Microsoft mobile platforms: the commitment is to get data exploration and visualization capabilities working within June 2013. This should impact at least Power View and SharePoint/Excel Services. This is the type of UI experience we are all waiting for, in order to satisfy the requests coming from users and customers. The important news here is that native applications will be available for both iOS and Windows 8 so it seems that Android will be supported initially only through the web. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any demo, so it’s not clear what will be the offline navigation experience (and whether there will be one). But at least we know that Microsoft is working on native applications in this area. I’m not too surprised that HTML5 is not the magic bullet for all the platforms. The next PASS Business Analytics conference in 2013 seems a good place to see this in action, even if I hope we don’t have to wait other six months before seeing some demo of native BI applications on mobile platforms! Viewing Reporting Services reports on iPad is supported starting with SQL Server 2012 SP1, which has been released today. This is another good reason to install SP1 on SQL Server 2012. If you are at PASS Summit 2012, come and join me, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb at our book signing event tomorrow, Thursday 8 2012, at the bookstore between 12:00pm and 12:30pm, or follow one of our sessions!

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• Reaching Intermediate Programming Status

  - by George Stocker

  I am a software engineer that's had positions programming in VBA (though I dare not consider that 'real' experience, as it was trial and error!), Perl w/ CGI, C#, and ASP.NET. The latter two are post-undergraduate, with my entrance into the 'real world'. I'm 2 years out of college, and have had 5 years of experience (total) across the languages I've mentioned. However, when it comes to my resume, I can only put 2 years down for C#, and less than a year down for ASP.NET. I feel like I know C#, but I still have to spend time going 'What does this method do?', whereas some of the more senior level engineers can immediately say, "Oh, Method X does this, without ever having looked at that method before." So I know empirically that there's a gulf there, but I'm not exactly sure how to bridge it. I've started programming in Project Euler, and I picked up a book on design patterns, but I still feel like I spend each day treading water, instead of moving forward. That isn't to say that I don't feel like I've made progress, it just means that as far as I come each day, I still see the mountain top way off in the distance. My question is this: How did you overcome this plateau? How long did it take you? What methods can you suggest to assist me in this? I've read through Code Complete, The Mythical Man Month, and CLR via C#, 2nd edition -- my question is: What do I do now? Edit: I just found this question on projects for an intermediate level programmer. I think it adds to the discussion (though it does not supplant my question). As such, I'm adding it to the question as a "For More Information".

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

  - by Argenis

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

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• Automating the input of query criteria

  - by Steve Wren

  New user to this site and found an extremely informative answer to a question I had but can't find an answer to this one. Using Access 2010, I have 42 different criteria that I need to run individually using the same query. Rather than have 42 queries, or an input parameter dialogue box where I need to enter the criteria 42 times, can I automate this so that the 42 criteria are sourced sequentially from a different table and input to the query using a macro/ module etc. Unfortunately I have no experience of SQL/VBA so am struggling. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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• MS-Outlook add-on to move a new message to the same folder as the rest of the thread

  - by Guss

  I'm forced to use MS-Outlook in my job, while I very much like the feature that shows all the messages of a discussion thread (that are stored in different folders) in the inbox when a new message is received for that thread, if the previous messages are in a different data file (which I'm forced to have as the MS-Exchange server quota is very very small) then the message list only shows the name of the data file and not the name of the folder where the messages are stored. As a result, because I file my message by context (i.e. all the emails for project A go into a "Project A" folder, etc), and its important for me to have all the messages in a single thread in the same folder, it is sometimes hard to figure out into which folder should I file the new message. It would be great help if there was some add-on or VBA script that I could add to my setup that will offer a shortcut key or a button to "file this message to the same folder as the previous messages in the conversation thread".

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• How to add entries to combobox in Word XP

  - by Kris C

  I'm trying to follow the following instructions to add a combobox to a form and add some values to it for the user to pick: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/create-forms-that-users-complete-in-word-HP005230270.aspx I've created a .dot and then dragged a combobox onto the document. When I double-click on it though, it opens up the VBA editor. Do I have to add the items programatically as per the following question How do I add a combobox in Word? or is it possible to do this using the UI? The other question/answer refers to creating a form. Is there a step I've missed between creating a .dot to then create a form somehow before adding form elements to it? Right clicking gives the following menu options: Cut Copy Paste properties View code Combo Box Object - Edit or Convert Format Control Hyperlink Choosing edit allows me to type some text onto the visible part of the control, but doesn't allow me to add multiple options Right-clicking and selecting properties opens the following:

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• Using Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportViewer in a custom SharePoint WebPart

  - by iHeartDucks

  I have a requirement where I have to display some data (from a custom db) and let the user export it to an excel file. I decided to use the ReportViewer control present in Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportViewer. I added the required assembly to the project references and I add the following code to test it out protected override void CreateChildControls() { base.CreateChildControls(); objRV = new Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportViewer(); objRV.ID = "objRV"; this.Controls.Add(objRV); } The first error asked me to add this line in the web.config which I did and the next error says The type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Analytics.UI.ReportViewerMessages, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c' does not implement IReportViewerMessages Is it possible to use ReportViewer in my custom Web Part? I rather not bind a repeater and write my own export to excel code. I want to use something which is already built by Microsoft? Any ideas on what I can reuse? Edit I commented the following line <add key="ReportViewerMessages"... and now my code looks like this after I added a data source to it protected override void CreateChildControls() { base.CreateChildControls(); objRV = new Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportViewer(); objRV.ID = "objRV"; objRV.Visible = true; Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportDataSource datasource = new Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportDataSource("test", GroupM.Common.DB.GetAllClientCodes()); objRV.LocalReport.DataSources.Clear(); objRV.LocalReport.DataSources.Add(datasource); objRV.LocalReport.Refresh(); this.Controls.Add(objRV); } but now I do not see any data on the page. I did check my db call and it does return a data table with 15 rows. Any ideas why I don't see anything on the page?

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• outofmemoryerror when running jar but not when running in netbeans/ apache poi

  - by Laughy

  I basically have a program that filters records from one excel file to another excel file using the apache poi. My program runs fine when it runs using netbeans. However, upon doing a clean and build and double clicking the .jar file inside the dist folder, it runs for very long( too long!) and gives me the following error( that I got by running the program from command prompt ). Is there any work around for it? I have already increase the heap size to be -Xms1500m inside netbeans before cleaning and building. Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Saver$TextSaver.resize(Saver.java:1592) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Saver$TextSaver.preEmit(Saver.java:1223) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Saver$TextSaver.emit(Saver.java:1144) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Saver$TextSaver.emitElement(Saver.java:926) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Saver.processElement(Saver.java:456) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Saver.process(Saver.java:307) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Saver$TextSaver.saveToString(Saver.java:1727) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Cursor._xmlText(Cursor.java:546) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.store.Cursor.xmlText(Cursor.java:2436) at org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.values.XmlObjectBase.xmlText(XmlObjectBase.java:1455) at org.apache.poi.xssf.model.SharedStringsTable.getKey(SharedStringsTable.java:130) at org.apache.poi.xssf.model.SharedStringsTable.addEntry(SharedStringsTable.java:176) at org.apache.poi.xssf.usermodel.XSSFCell.setCellType(XSSFCell.java:755) at equity.EquityFrame_Updated.copyRowsFromOldToNew(EquityFrame_Updated.java:646) at equity.EquityFrame_Updated.init(EquityFrame_Updated.java:133) at equity.EquityFrame_Updated.createAndShowGUI(EquityFrame_Updated.java:71) at equity.EquityFrame_Updated.<init>(EquityFrame_Updated.java:50) at equity.FileOpener.generateButtonPressed(FileOpener.java:160) at equity.FileOpener.access$100(FileOpener.java:17) at equity.FileOpener$2.actionPerformed(FileOpener.java:61) at javax.swing.AbstractButton.fireActionPerformed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.AbstractButton$Handler.actionPerformed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.DefaultButtonModel.fireActionPerformed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.DefaultButtonModel.setPressed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicButtonListener.mouseReleased(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.processMouseEvent(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.processMouseEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.processEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Container.processEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)

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• C# StreamReader.ReadLine() - Need to pick up line terminators

  - by Tony Trozzo

  I wrote a C# program to read an Excel .xls/.xlsx file and output to CSV and Unicode text. I wrote a separate program to remove blank records. This is accomplished by reading each line with StreamReader.ReadLine(), and then going character by character through the string and not writing the line to output if it contains all commas (for the CSV) or all tabs (for the Unicode text). The problem occurs when the Excel file contains embedded newlines (\x0A) inside the cells. I changed my XLS to CSV converter to find these new lines (since it goes cell by cell) and write them as \x0A, and normal lines just use StreamWriter.WriteLine(). The problem occurs in the separate program to remove blank records. When I read in with StreamReader.ReadLine(), by definition it only returns the string with the line, not the terminator. Since the embedded newlines show up as two separate lines, I can't tell which is a full record and which is an embedded newline for when I write them to the final file. I'm not even sure I can read in the \x0A because everything on the input registers as '\n'. I could go character by character, but this destroys my logic to remove blank lines. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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