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• What is a good design model for my new class?

  - by user66662

  I am a beginning programmer who, after trying to manage over 2000 lines of procedural php code, now has discovered the value of OOP. I have read a few books to get me up to speed on the beginning theory, but would like some advice on practical application. So,for example, let's say there are two types of content objects - an ad and a calendar event. what my application does is scan different websites (a predefined list), and, when it finds an ad or an event, it extracts the data and saves it to a database. All of my objects will share a $title and $description. However, the Ad object will have a $price and the Event object will have $startDate. Should I have two separate classes, one for each object? Should I have a 'superclass' with the $title and $description with two other Ad and Event classes with their own properties? The latter is at least the direction I am on now. My second question about this design is how to handle the logic that extracts the data for $title, $description, $price, and $date. For each website in my predefined list, there is a specific regex that returns the desired value for each property. Currently, I have an extremely large switch statement in my constructor which determines what website I am own, sets the regex variables accordingly, and continues on. Not only that, but now I have to repeat the logic to determine what site I am on in the constructor of each class. This doesn't feel right. Should I create another class Algorithms and store the logic there for each site? Should the functions of to handle that logic be in this class? or specific to the classes whos properties they set? I want to take into account in my design two things: 1) I will add different content objects in the future that share $title and $description, but will have their own properties, so, I want to be able to easily grow these as needed. 2) I will add more websites constantly (each with their own algorithms for data extraction) so I would like to plan efficienty managing and working with these now. I thought about extending the Ad or Event class with 'websiteX' class and store its functions there. But, this didn't feel right either as now I have to manage 100s of little website specific class files. Note, I didn't know if this was the correct site or stackoverflow was the better choice. If so, let me know and I'll post there.

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• Styling Windows Phone Silverlight Applications

  - by Tim Murphy

  If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get.  One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade.  What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file.  This is of course analogous to placing a style in your HTML file versus an external CSS file.  This is the type of style I will concentrate on in this post. The first thing to look it how styles associate to elements.  TargetType defines the object type that your style will apply to.  In the example below the style is targeting the TextBlock object type. <Style x:Key="TextBlockSmallGray" TargetType="TextBlock"> Next we use a Setter which allows you to apply values for specific attributes of the target object type.  The setters can be a simple value or complex.  The first example here is simply applying a color to the background property of the target. <Setter Property="Background" Value="White"/> The second setter example here is for the same property, but we are applying a the definition of a LinearGradientBrush. <Setter Property="Background"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush> <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Black"/> <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="White"/> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> The last thing I want to cover here is that you can leverage the system styles and then override or extend them.  The BasedOn attribute of the Style tag allows this sort of inheritance.  In the example below I am going to start with the PhoneTextTitleStyle and then override properties as needed. <Style x:Key="TextBlockTitle" BasedOn="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}" TargetType="TextBlock"> So now that we have our styles defined applying it is fairly straight forward.  Add the style name as a static resource to the style property of the element in your page and off you go. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Style="{StaticResource PageGridStyle}"> So this is one step in creating consistency in your application’s look.  In future posts I will dig a little deeper. del.icio.us Tags: windows phone 7,mobile development,windows phone 7 development,.NET,software development,design,UX

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• What to answer to a customer who asks which one of two equivalent technologies must be used?

  - by MainMa

  As a freelancer, I am often asked by my customers what they must choose between similar elements, neither of which being better than another. Examples: “Do I need my e-commerce website be in PHP or ASP.NET?” “Do I need to host this ordinary web service in Cloud or use an ordinary hosting service?” “Which one is better for my new website: MySQL or Oracle?” etc. There is maybe at most 1% of cases where the choice is relevant, and there is a real, objective reason to use one over another, based on the precise metrics and studies. In all other cases, it doesn't matter at all. It is totally, completely irrelevant, either because there are no implications¹, or because those implications are too small to be taken in account², or, finally, because it's impossible to predict those implications³. If you know one thing and not another one, the answer to those questions is easy: “You can either write the application in C# or Java, both being probably equivalent in your case. Note that I'm a C# developer, so if you choose Java, I would not be able to work on your project and you would need to find another freelancer.” When you know both technologies, you can't answer that. In this case, how to explain to the customer that the question he asks is subject to flamewar and has no real consequences on his project? In other words, how to explain that you've chosen to use one technology rather than an equivalent one for the reasons related to human resources, without giving the impression to be unprofessional or to not care about the project? ¹ Example: Is MySQL better (worse?), performance-wise, compared to Oracle, for a personal website which will be accessed by, oh, let's be optimistic, two people per day? ² Example: for a given project, I was asked to asset if Windows Azure hosting would be cheaper than the hosting of the same application on a well-known ASP.NET hosting provider. The cost revealed to be exactly the same. ³ Example: your customer have an idea of a future application (the idea itself being extremely vague). There is no business plan, no requirements, nothing at all. Just an idea. You are asked if Java is better than C# for this app. What do you answer?

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• What arguments can I use to "sell" the BDD concept to a team reluctant to adopt it?

  - by S.Robins

  I am a bit of a vocal proponent of the BDD methodology. I've been applying BDD for a couple of years now, and have adopted StoryQ as my framework of choice when developing DotNet applications. Even though I have been unit testing for many years, and had previously shifted to a test-first approach, I've found that I get much more value out of using a BDD framework, because my tests capture the intent of the requirements in relatively clear English within my code, and because my tests can execute multiple assertions without ending the test halfway through - meaning I can see which specific assertions pass/fail at a glance without debugging to prove it. This has really been the tip of the iceberg for me, as I've also noticed that I am able to debug both test and implementation code in a more targeted manner, with the result that my productivity has grown significantly, and that I can more easily determine where a failure occurs if a problem happens to make it all the way to the integration build due to the output that makes its way into the build logs. Further, the StoryQ api has a lovely fluent syntax that is easy to learn and which can be applied in an extraordinary number of ways, requiring no external dependencies in order to use it. So with all of these benefits, you would think it an easy to introduce the concept to the rest of the team. Unfortunately, the other team members are reluctant to even look at StoryQ to evaluate it properly (let alone entertain the idea of applying BDD), and have convinced each other to try and remove a number of StoryQ elements from our own core testing framework, even though they originally supported the use of StoryQ, and that it doesn't impact on any other part of our testing system. Doing so would end up increasing my workload significantly overall and really goes against the grain, as I am convinced through practical experience that it is a better way to work in a test-first manner in our particular working environment, and can only lead to greater improvements in the quality of our software, given I've found it easier to stick with test first using BDD. So the question really comes down to the following: What arguments can I use to really drive the point home that it would be better to use StoryQ, or at the very least apply the BDD methodology? Can you point me to any anecdotal evidence that I can use to support my argument to adopt BDD as our standard method of choice? What counter arguments can you think of that could suggest that my wish to convert the team efforts to BDD might be in error? Yes, I'm happy to be proven wrong provided the argument is a sound one. NOTE: I am not advocating that we rewrite our tests in their entirety, but rather to simply start working in a different manner for all future testing work.

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• How do I know if I am using Scrum methodologies?

  - by Jake

  When I first started at my current job, my purpose was to rewrite a massive excel-VBA workbook-application to C# Winforms because it was thought that the new C# app will fix all existing problems and have all the new features for a perfect world. If it were a direct port, in theory it would be easy as i just need to go through all the formulas, conditional formatting, validations, VBA etc. to understand it. However, that was not the case. Many of the new features are tightly dependant on business logic which I am unfamiliar with. As a solo programmer, the first year was spent solely on deciphering the excel workbook and writing the C# app. In theory, I had the business people to "help" me specify requirements, how GUI looks and work, and testing of the app etc; but in practice it is like a contant tsunami of feature creep. At the beginning of the second year I managed to convince the management that this is not going anywhere. I made them start from scratch with the excel-VBA. I have this "issue log" saved on the network, each time they found something they didn't like about the excel-VBA app, they will write it in there. I check the log daily and consolidate issues (in my mind) mainly into 2 groups: (1) requires massive change. (2) can be fixed in current version. For massive change issues, I make a copy of the latest excel-VBA and give it a new version number, then work on it whenever I can. For current version fixes, I make the changes in a few days to a week, and then immediately release it. I also ensure I update the same change in any in-progress massive change future versions. This has gone on for about 4 months and I feel it works great. I made many releases and solved many real issues, also understood the business logic more and more. However, my boss (non-IT trained) thinks what I am doing are just adhoc changes and that i am not looking at the "bigger picture". I am struggling to convince my boss that this works. So I hope to formalise my approach and maybe borrow a buzzword to confuse him. Incidentally, I read about Agile and SCRUM, about backlog and sprints. But it's all very vague to me still. QUESTION (finally): I want to tell him that this is SCRUM! But I want to hold my breath first and ask whether my current approach is considered SCRUM or SCRUM-like? How can I make it more SCRUM-like? Note that I have only myself, there's no project leader or teams.

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• Feedback from SQLBits 8

  - by Peter Larsson

  This years SQLBits occurred in Brighton. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to attend the full conference, I did a presentation at Saturday. Getting to Brighton was easy. Drove to Copenhagen airport at 0415, flew 0605 and arrived at Gatwick 0735. Then I took the direct train to Brighton and showed up at 0830, just one hour before presenting. This was the easy part. Getting home was much worse. Presentation ended at 1030 and I had to rush to the train station to get back to London, change to tube for Heathrow. Made it at the gate just 15 seconds before closing. That included a half mile run in the airport… Anyway, yesterday I got the feedback for my presentation. It does look good, especially since English is not my first language. This is the first graph Seems to be just halfway between conference average and best session. I can live with that. Second graph shows more detail about attendees voting. It also look acceptable. A wider spread for the 9’s, but it is an inevitable effect from how attendees percept the session. I did get a lot of 8’s and the lower grades in an descending order. The two people voting 4 and 5 didn’t say why they voted this so I don’t know how to remedy this. Third graph is about each category of votes.   Again, I find this acceptable. The Session abstract and Speaker’s knowledge seems to follow attendees expectations compared to conference average. I seem to have met the attendees expectations (and some more) for the other four categories, also compared to conference average. Since this did encourage me, I believe I will present some more at future meetings. I do have a new presentation about something all developers are doing every day but they may not know it. I will also cover this new topic in the next Deep Dives II book. Stay tuned! //Peter

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• Running a program on boot without login, using the screen

  - by configurator

  Preface: I have a server running on an old laptop. The screen is always on with a login prompt, but because its keyboard is in pretty bad shape, I use it exclusively via ssh. The screen is in a good position, though; I want to use it to display a clock and some stats about what my server is doing. I have scripts to display all those things, but I want to always show them on the monitor screen. My question is, how do I get my script (called HUD) to run on /dev/tty1, instead of the login prompt. Hopefully, it should be possible to accept keyboard input as well as display its output, so that it can use the keyboard to show more info where needed in a future version. I'd also like tty2 etc. to remain active as login screens, in face I actually do need to login locally. For a start, I tried creating a script that I can run from ssh to start the HUD. It goes something like this: ( flock -n 9 watch --interval 0.2 --precise --color --notitle --exec /path/to/script & disown ) 9> /var/lock/hud > /dev/tty1 2> /dev/tty1 < /dev/tty1 (I had to use & disown instead of nohup because nohup recognized the tty and redirects output to nohup.out instead.) This sort-of works. However, it has a few issues: It doesn't steal the terminal's keyboard input, so you can't ctrl+c to get out of it (nor change the script to actually use the keyboard input), and if you press enter it show it and scrolls the display, never refreshing it correctly afterwards. Oddly, if I disconnect the ssh session which created it, it stops working and shows a message: exec: No such file or directory. If I reconnect to ssh, it resumes functioning properly. It feels hackish. Is there a better way to do this? How?

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• Perfect is the enemy of “Good Enough”

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is one of the quotes that I was against, but now it is totally part of my core beliefs: "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough" Folks used to share this quote a lot with me in my early career and my frequent interpretation was that they were incompetent people that were satisfied with mediocrity, i.e. I ignored them and their advice. (Yes, I went through an arrogance phase). I later "grew up" and "realized" that they were missing the point, so instead of ignoring them I would retort: "Of course we have to aim for perfection, because as human beings we'll never achieve perfection, so by aiming for perfection we will indeed achieve good enough results". (Yes, I went through a smart ass phase). Later I grew up a bit more and "understood" that what I was really being told is to finish my work earlier and move on to other things because by trying to perfect that one thing, another N things that I was responsible for were suffering by not getting my attention - all things on my plate need to move beyond the line, not just one of them to go way over the line. It is really a statement of increasing scale and scope. To put it in other words, getting PASS grades on 10 things is better than getting an A+ with distinction on 1-2 and a FAIL on the rest. Instead of saying “I am able to do very well these X items” it is best if you can say I can do well enough on these X * Y items”, where Y > 1. That is how breadth impact is achieved. In the future, I may grow up again and have a different interpretation, but for now - even though I secretly try to "perfect" things, I try not to do that at the expense of other responsibilities. This means that I haven't had anybody quote that saying to me in a while (or perhaps my quality of work has dropped so much that it doesn't apply to me any more - who knows :-)). Wikipedia attributes the quote to Voltaire and it also makes connections to the “Law of diminishing returns”, and to the “80-20 rule” or “Pareto principle”… it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort …check out the Wikipedia entry on “Perfect is the enemy of Good” and its links. Also use your favorite search engine to search and see what others are saying (Bing, Google) – it is worth internalizing this in a way that makes sense to you… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• How to explain bad software to non-technical people?

  - by mtutty

  In discussing software development with non-technical people (customers, business owners, project sponsors, etc.), I often resort to analogies and metaphors. It's relatively easy and effective to use a "house" or other metaphor for describing the size and complexity of new development. However, we often inherit someone else's code or data, and this approach doesn't seem to hold up as well when trying to explain why we're gutting something that already seems to work. Of course we can point to cycle time and cost to be saved in the future but this generally means nothing to business folks. I know doctors can say "just take this pill," but I'm not sure that software devs have the same authority. Ideas? EDIT: Let me add a bit to the discussion. The specific project I'm talking about has customers that don't realize (or care) about specific aspects of the system we're retiring (i.e., they think it was just fine): The system would save a NEW RECORD every time someone updated a field The system contained tables for reference data. These tables had new records added every day, even though they were duplicates of previous records. And there was no way to tie the reference data used for a particular case at the time it was closed. This is like 99% of the data in the old system. The field NAMES also have spaces, apostrophes and other inappropriate characters in them, making everything harder to work with. In addition to the incredible amount of duplicate data, they have around 1000 XLS files with data they want added to the system. Previously, they would do a spreadsheet for each case in the database, IN ADDITION TO what they typed into the database. Getting rid of this old, unneeded information and piping in the XLS data comprises about 80% of the total project effort, and was not something we could accurately predict. I'm trying to find a concrete way to describe how bad this thing was, mostly so that the customer will understand why the migration process has been so time-consuming. The actual coding was done pretty quickly and the new system works fine, but without the old data they won't be happy. Sorry to get into the weeds, but most of the answers I've seen so far are pretty basic scope/schedule/cost things. I've been doing this for 15 years, so this really is more of a reflective, philosophical question - but without some of the details it can be difficult to really appreciate the awful beauty of this problem.

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• Cloud Infrastructure has a new standard

  - by macoracle

  I have been working for more than two years now in the DMTF working group tasked with creating a Cloud Management standard. That work has culminated in the release today of the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) version 1.0 by the DMTF. CIMI is a single interface that a cloud consumer can use to manage their cloud infrastructure in multiple clouds. As CIMI is adopted by the cloud vendors, no more will you need to adapt client code to each of the proprietary interfaces from these multiple vendors. Unlike a de facto standard where typically one vendor has change control over the interface, and everyone else has to reverse engineer the inner workings of it, CIMI is a de jure standard that is under change control of a standards body. One reason the standard took two years to create is that we factored in use cases, requirements and contributed APIs from multiple vendors. These vendors have products shipping today and as a result CIMI has a strong foundation in real world experience. What does CIMI allow? CIMI is both a model for the resources (computing, storage networking) in the cloud as well as a RESTful protocol binding to HTTP. This means that to create a Machine (guest VM) for example, the client creates a “document” that represents the Machine resource and sends it to the server using HTTP. CIMI allows the resources to be encoded in either JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or the eXentsible Markup Language (XML). CIMI provides a model for the resources that can be mapped to any existing cloud infrastructure offering on the market. There are some features in CIMI that may not be supported by every cloud, but CIMI also supports the discovery of which features are implemented. This means that you can still have a client that works across multiple clouds and is able to take full advantage of the features in each of them. Isn’t it too early for a standard? A key feature of a successful standard is that it allows for compatible extensions to occur within the core framework of the interface itself. CIMI’s feature discovery (through metadata) is used to convey to the client that additional features that may be vendor specific have been implemented. As multiple vendors implement such features, they become candidates to add the future versions of CIMI. Thus innovation can continue in the cloud space without being slowed down by a lowest common denominator type of specification. Since CIMI was developed in the open by dozens of stakeholders who are already implementing infrastructure clouds, I expect to CIMI being adopted by these same companies and others over the next year or two. Cloud Customers who can see the benefit of this standard should start to ask their cloud vendors to show a CIMI implementation in their roadmap.  For more information on CIMI and the DMTF's other cloud efforts, go to: http://dmtf.org/cloud

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• You probably have enough

  - by BuckWoody

  This a decidedly non-technical post, and even a little preachy. I post it here because you, the technical professional, are the perfect audience for it. I have enough stuff. I never think so, of course, but I do. I don’t consider myself rich, but if you have a comfortable place to sleep,  enough food to eat and you can plan for your future, you are rich. And when we are rich enough to have “enough” stuff, that usually means we have too much stuff. Stuff costs money that could be put to better use, stuff needs painting, cleaning, fueling, feeding, storage and caring for. Stuff is a burden. So I decided a few years back that I had enough stuff. We gave away a lot of things, and we don’t buy any new (meaning we didn’t have one before)  things – only replacement things. We’d rather “do something” than “have something”. But even so, when birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas rolled around, we got more stuff. So I asked all of my friends and relatives to do something for me.   I ask folks that want to give me a gift (for whatever reason) to donate the price they would have paid for the gift to a charity they care about. This does a few things: They have to find a charity to care about The fact that I made it through a calendar year now actually means something Someone else gets the help they need Everybody feels better No, I’m not saying these things so you’ll think I’m a wonderful person - the reason I’m posting this here is that as a technical professional you probably have enough stuff like I do. So I ask you to try this out. Try it for one birthday, or one Holiday, or even for a year. I can promise this: it will change your life, the life of the person who gives the gift, and the person’s life who receives it. If you do try it, I’d love to have a comment here on your thoughts.

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• Oredev 2012: Summary and source code

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This week, I had the pleasure to be invited to talk at Oredev, a really cool conference taking place in Malmo, Sweden. The whole event is awesome, including a very special dinner on Monday including sauna and swimming in a 6 degrees cold Baltic sea, and a reception with dinner at the town hall, including the mayor himself. Considering Malmo is a town of 300'000 inhabitants, it is a pretty nice occasion and the historical building itself is really worth seeing. For those interested, I placed my pictures on my Flickr account. I had a workshop on Tuesday morning about Windows 8 development with XAML/C#, and then a session on Wednesday about MVVM in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8, of course using MVVM Light. I was very nervous because I reworked some of my demos as recently as this morning, in the wake of the Build conference last week and the release of both the Windows Phone SDK and MVVM Light V4.1. Everything went well however, and if I judge by the people I talked t after the talk, and Twitter, everything went pretty well. Before my talk on Tuesday, I had the pleasure to see a talk by Iris Classon (@irisclasson) on the challenges of being a "n00b" and a woman in software development. I especially appreciated her research and conclusions on the lack of women I our industry, a topic that is dear to my heart (because I want the best possible future for my two daughters, and also because I really enjoy working with women on projects, and getting a different insight on the art of software development. I really want to thank the excellent organization committee for their hard work and their fantastic welcome to Malmo. In particular Emily Holweck did a wonderful job and was super helpful throughout the preparation and the conference itself. I made a few pictures during my stay, all with the new Nokia Lumia 920, and hope you will enjoy them too. The source code and the slides… The source code is available for download from Skydrive. You will find the following: Windows 8 workshop slides. MVVM Applied slides Source code package with Win8Demo: The demo I built during the 4 hours workshop, with some light MVVM, web services (JSON), GridView, Design time data (Blend / Visual Studio designer), Bing maps integration, location sensor, Search pane integration. SemanticZoomSample: a sample I put together to demonstrate the SemanticZoom control, with two GridViews and of course full design time data for Blend work. Due to time constraints, I was not able to show this demo during the workshop, but I publish it anyway, hoping it will be useful to someone. PictureUploader: The demo I built during my 50 minutes session about MVVM Applied in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. Code sharing, design time data, MVVM Light are used in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 apps. And in video… You can also see the video of my MVVM talk thanks to the good services of the Oredev team! MVVM Applied in Windows Phone and Windows 8 from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• SQL Saturday 194 - Exeter

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Many kudos goes to Jonathan and Annette Allen and the others on the team for confirming SQL Saturday 194 in Exeter on the 8th and 9th of March.  The event home page is here http://www.sqlsaturday.com/194/eventhome.aspx and I delighted that myself and Dave Morrison will be presenting a full day pre-con on the 8th on favourite subjects “TSQL and Internals”. Here is the full abstract : TSQL and internals - When faced with performance issues there are many lines of attack. Tuning the engine itself can get you so far, however for maximum effect you need to understand how the engine and how it translates SQL statements into performable actions. This is not a simple task, it is a massive task to deal with a multi-table join and the number of permutations can be immense. To back up this knowledge, we can create better performing TSQL and understand the impact that is has upon the engine and recognize the pitfalls and gotcha’s that exist in SQLServer. Ultimately, there is no ‘best way’ to perform a single task only many variations of ‘it depends’ , but now we can pick the most appropriate option for the required dataload. Over the years, there have been many myths and misconceptions have grown around the product, some have basis in older versions and some are just wrong. Continuing to build on the knowledge given so far these issue will be explored and broken down and proved or disproved. Finally we will look to the future and explore SQL Server 2012 and the new functionality that that brings and some of the common uses that we will be able to address. After completion of this days pre-con, attendees will have a more complete knowledge of execution plans, and how they relate to the physical and logical actions that SQLServer will be executing on their behalf. The attendees will also have a more rounded and fuller knowledge of TSQL and the implications of incorrectly defining a query. Dave is a fountain of knowledge on execution plans and optimizer internals and ,though i may flatter myself, I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to TSQL and such matters.  I hope that if you cant join us, then there are other pre-cons available from other experts in their fields that may ‘float you boat’ too.  The pre-con page is http://sqlsouthwest.co.uk/SQLSaturday_precon.htm Also, excitingly, this pre-con day is sponsored by Fusion-IO which is a great boon for the day. If you want a more of this then i am offering a 2 day TSQL course starting on the 19th of March. More details on this are available here

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• Is IE9 a modern browser?

  - by anirudha

  Is IE9 a modern browser? i show you a post who compare IE as well as they compare chrome. Is IE9 a modern browser? well Are you thing that they make something bettter then thing another that what Firefox and chrome do whenever Microsoft do this. that's point that Microsoft always blast IE because they make version upon version not upon update like Firefox make 3.6.14 after 3.6.13 and chrome give update soon as possible but IE not come soon. they will thing for making 10 instead of giving update on 9. well what they tell us new. they make fool public everytime i believe they make fool public as same as today they maked for version 9 they show developer tool in 9 have three new tabs or pael are this enough. whenever  in chrome and firefox their is many plugin who make development easier IE still have a developer tool who not have enough power like Firebug in Firefox. they show performance but forget luna user [window xp] and their IE never runs on other plateform but chrome and firefox can. no customization in IE whenever chrome and firefox have uncountable plugin and addons. show features now in IE who already implemented in firefox very early. well their is no rule that static goes right every time not sure that IE and Firefox both are right in their language. their is no one predict what thing goes better in future. so well keep a thing in mind never wasted time and also thing to make task easier even you need to use sollution opensource or closesoure inside or outside MS does not matter. well everyone tell you much more then they do even IE and some other. they never tell you this thing not in IE but in another can be found they never tell you use other whenever you need a thing and never can be found in their software. you need to more beware of IE because they make them commorcial not really for public if really then why they stop wxp user to use them as well firefox and chrome never force. because they need a thing that force more then more copy of windows sale. so they thing to add a thing in window 8. the IE9 they thing to make before that they thing to make  this for windows 8. they always force user to purchase this for this. this for this. and this trick sell their software. well outside MS Mozilla and Chrome all behave better with user and their feedback. they respect user their privacy and feedback. if you not believe that how much problem you found in IE and they got solved soon as in chrome and firefox bug kill soon. because IE not opensource we need to  boycutt them secondly their is no customization then they make user task easier even with twitter and facebook.

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• Help writing server script to ban IP's from a list

  - by Chev_603

  I have a VPS that I use as an openvpn and web server. For some reason, my apache log files are filled with thousands of these hack attempts: "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 404 395 These attack attempts fill up 90% of my logs. I think it's a WordPress vulnerability they're looking for. Obviously they are not successful (I don't even have Wordpress on my server), but it's annoying and probably resource consuming as well. I am trying to write a bash script that will do the following: Search the apache logs and grab the offending IP's (even if they try it once), Sort them into a list with each unique IP on a seperate line, And then block them using the IP table rules. I am a bash newb, and so far my script does everything except Step 3. I can manually block the IP's, but that's tedious and besides, this is Linux and it's perfectly capable of doing it for me. I also want the script to be customizable so that I (or anyone else who wants to use it) can change the variables to suit whatever situation I/they may deal with in the future. Here is the script so far: #!/bin/bash ##IP LIST GENERATOR ##Author Chev Young ##Script to search Apache logs and list IP's based on custom filters ## ##Define our variables: DIRECT=~/Script ##Location of script&where to put results/temp files LOGFILE=/var/log/apache2/access.log ## Logfile to search for offenders TEMPLIST=xml_temp ## Temporary file name IP_LIST=ipstoban ## Name of results file FILTER1=xmlrpc ## What are we looking for? (Requests we want to ban) cd $DIRECT if [ ! -f $TEMPLIST ];then touch $TEMPLIST ##Create temp file fi cat $LOGFILE | grep $FILTER1 >> $DIRECT/$TEMPLIST ## Only interested in the IP's, so: sed -e 's/\([0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+\).*$/\1/' -e t -e d $DIRECT/$TEMPLIST | sort | uniq > $DIRECT/$IP_LIST rm $TEMPLIST ## Clean temp file echo "Done. Results located at $DIRECT/$IP_LIST" So I need help with the next part of the script, which should ban the IP's (incoming and perhaps outgoing too) from the resulting $IP_LIST file. I don't care if it utilizes UFW or IPTables directly, as long as it bans the IP's. I'd probably run it as a cron task. What I'm having trouble with is understanding how to use line of the result file as a seperate variable to do something like: ufw deny $IP1 $IP2 $IP3, ect Any ideas? Thanks.

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• Part 5: Choose the right tool - or - why

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  Consider the following client request “Please create a report for us to list expenses”. Which Oracle EBS tool would you choose? There are plenty of options available: Oracle Reports, or BI Publisher with PDF or Excel layout, or Discoverer, or BI Publisher Stand Alone, or PDF online generation, or Oracle WebADI, or Plain SQL*Plus as Concurrent Program, or Online review option … Assuming, you as development lead have to decide, you may decide by available skill set in your development team. However, is this a good decision? An important question to influence the decision is the “Why” question: why do you need this report, what process is behind, what exactly you like to achieve? We see often data created or printed, although it would be much better to get the data in Excel, and upload changes via WebADI directly. There are more points that should drive your decision: How many of such requirements you have got? Has this technique been used in the project already? Are there related reusable’s you may gain from? How difficult is it to maintain your solution? Can you merge this report with another one, to reduce test and maintenance work? In addition, also your own development standards should guide you a bit to come to a good decision. In one of my own projects, we discussed such topics in our weekly team meeting. By utilizing the team knowledge best, you may come to a better decision, and additionally, your team supports your decision. Unfortunately, I have rarely seen dedicated team trainings or planned knowledge transfer to support such processes. Often the pressure to deliver on time is too high to have discussion and decision time left. But exactly this can help keeping maintenance costs low by limiting the number of alternative solutions for similar requirements. Lastly, design decisions should be documented to allow another person taking this over easily. Decisions shall be reviewed and updated regularly, to reflect related procedures or Oracle products respective product versions. Summary: Oracle EBS offers plenty of alternatives to implement customizations. Create and maintain a decision tree to support the design process. Do not leave the decision just on developer side. Limit the number of alternative solutions as best as possible; choose one which is the most appropriate also from future maintenance perspective.

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• PASS: FY10 Actuals Posted

  - by Bill Graziano

  Earlier this year we published preliminary fiscal year 2010 financials to the Governance page on the PASS web site.  Please remember that FY10 runs from July 1st, 2009 through June 30th, 2010 and includes the November 2009 Summit.  We do our fiscal year this way so that the Summit falls earlier in the fiscal year.  The financials we had posted were P&L numbers at the portfolio level.  Prior to this we had posted our detailed budget but only posted the auditors report at the end of each year.  Today we updated our published financials to include: Pre-audit actuals from FY10 at the same level as our budget.  The document has both actuals and budget for FY10 side by side.  This is over 20 pages of detailed financial information covering hundreds of line-items. A letter describing key differences between our budget and actuals.  I walked through each line item where the difference was greater than $25,000 and explained what happened and why. We updated the financial graph going back to 2003 to include FY10. This update should “close the loop” on our financials.  You can now start with the published budget and compare it to the finished financials at the same level of detail.  We also plan to publish the auditor’s report when that is completed -- as we do every year. Overall I’m very happy with how FY10 turned out.  Keep in mind that this was the November 2009 Summit so we were still facing economic challenges.  With all that we were roughly break-even showing a $15,000 profit on $3.9 million of revenue.  I didn’t find anything shocking in reviewing our actual vs. budget but there were a few things that needed explanation.  You can see those in the letter on the governance page. Please keep in mind that these are the actuals from our operating financials.  The auditor may have us make adjustments for depreciation or other financial transactions.  We may also account for certain transactions differently for tax purposes than we do for financial reporting purposes.  I feel these financial statements give you the clearest picture of how our organization spends its money. We were late publishing these this year.  We were working through some tax issues and that delayed our ability to file our final tax forms which delayed this process.  In hindsight I should have published these documents as soon as we had them and not waited for the tax issues.  We’ll do this better in the future. And on a final note, you don’t need to login to view these documents.  If you have any questions you can post them here.  If we get more than a few questions we may see about creating some forums for financial issues on the PASS web site.

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• Merging the Executive Committees

  - by Patrick Curran

  As I explained in this blog last year, we use the Process to change the Process. The first of three planned JSRs to modify the way the JCP operates (JSR 348: Towards a new version of the Java Community Process) completed in October 2011. That JSR focused on changes to make our process more transparent and to enable broader participation. The second JSR was inspired by our conviction that Java is One Platform and by our expectation that Java ME and Java SE will become more aligned over time. In anticipation of this change JSR 355: JCP Executive Committee Merge will merge the two Executive Committees into one. The JSR is going very well. We have reached consensus within the Executive Committees, which serve as the Expert Group for process-change JSRs. How we intend to make the transition to a single EC is explained in the revised versions of the Process and EC Standing Rules documents that are currently posted for Early Draft Review. Our intention is to reduce the total number of EC seats but to keep the same ratio (2:1) of ratified and elected seats. Briefly, the plan will be implemented in two stages. The October 2012 elections will be held as usual, but candidates will be informed that they will serve only a one-year term if elected. The two ECs will be merged immediately after this election; at the same time, Oracle's second permanent seat and one of IBM's two ratified seats will be eliminated. The initial merged EC will therefore have 30 members. In the October 2013 elections we will eliminate three more ratified seats and two elected seats, thereby reducing the size of the combined EC to 25 members (16 ratified seats, 8 elected seats, plus Oracle's permanent seat.) All remaining seats, including those of members who were elected in 2012, will be up for re-election in 2013; that election should be particularly interesting. Starting in 2013 we will change from a three-year to a two-year election cycle (half of all EC members will be up for re-election each year.) We believe that these changes will streamline our operations, and position us for a future in which the distinctions between desktop and mobile devices become increasingly blurred. Please take this opportunity to review and comment on our proposed changes - we appreciate your input. Thank you, and onward to JCP.next.3!

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• In-Store Tracking Gets a Little Harder

  - by David Dorf

  Remember how Nordstrom was tracking shopper movements within their stores using the unique number, called a MAC, emitted by the WiFi radio in smartphones?  The phones didn't need to connect to the network, only have their WiFi enabled, as most people do by default.  They did this, presumably, to track shoppers' path to purchase and better understand traffic patterns.  Although there were signs explaining this at the entrances, people didn't like the notion of being tracked.  (Nevermind that there are cameras in the ceiling watching them.)  Nordstrom stopped the program. To address this concern the Future of Privacy, a Washington think tank, created Smart Store Privacy, a do-not-track service that allows consumers to register their MAC address in much the same way people register their phone numbers in the national do-not-call list.  A group of companies agreed to respect consumers' wishes and ignore smartphones listed in the database.  The database includes Bluetooth identifiers as well.  Of course you could simply turn your bluetooth and WiFi off when shopping as well. Most know that Apple prefers to use BLE beacons to contact and track smartphones within their stores.  This feature extends the typical online experience to also work in physical stores.  By identifying themselves, shoppers can expect a more tailored shopping experience much like what we've come to expect from Amazon's website, with product recommendations and offers that are (usually) relevant. But the upcoming release of iOS8 is purported to have a new feature that randomizes the WiFi MAC address of smartphones during the "probing" phase.  That is, before connecting to the WiFi network, a random MAC number is used so as to keep the smartphone's real MAC address secret.  Unless you actually connect to the store's WiFi, they won't recognize the MAC address. The details on this are still sketchy, but if the random MAC is consistent for a short period, retailers will still be able to track movements anonymously, but they won't recognize repeat visitors.  That may be sufficient for traffic analytics, but it will stymie target marketing.  In the case of marketing, using iBeacons with opt-in permission from consumers will be the way forward. There is always a battle between utility and privacy, so I expect many more changes in this area.  Incidentally, if you'd like to see where beacons are being used this site tracks them around the world.

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• Summit 2014 Registration Is Open

  - by KemButller

  Attention Oracle (employees) Field Team and Oracle JD Edwards Partners REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN for Oracle's 5th Annual JD Edwards Summit - Monday, January 27th through Friday, January 31st, 2014, in Broomfield, Colorado. The theme of this year's Summit is "Success Through Continued Innovation”.  Our goals are to update you on our current and future product roadmap, new products, selling strategies for new prospects, growing the footprint in our JD Edwards install base, as well as providing a venue for networking.  The JD Edwards Summit is to the selling and servicing community what COLLABORATE is to the user community.  This is a MUST ATTEND event if you recommend, sell, implement and/or support the JD Edwards product, whether you are new to JD Edwards or a seasoned pro, an executive, account executive, in presales or in consulting.  The Summit promises a content-rich and unique networking experience for all attendees. Highlights include:  Monday afternoon kicks off the Summit with a variety of workshops as well as an afternoon preview of the Sponsor Showcase.  Start your networking at the Summit kickoff party Monday evening. Tuesday morning features several informative keynotes in the Summit General Assembly followed by key messages delivered in Super Sessions in the afternoon, focused on each of the JD Edwards community audiences. The educational offerings continue on Wednesday and Thursday with over 90 breakout sessions on topics spanning technology, applications (core JD Edwards, Edge, Fusion), Sales, Presales and Implementation. Friday concludes with new workshops for the implementation community.A Attendees will be enriched with numerous opportunities to network with fellow partners and Oracle throughout the week.  Consider bringing your team and using this venue to hold your own organization kickoff meeting prior to or post Summit. Contact Sheila Ebbitt (Sheila.ebbitt@oracle-DOT-com) for further assistance with your planning.  Attendees will be charged a Summit fee of US$ 250. Online registration cut-off is January 17, 2014. All registration requests after that time will be processed on-site at the event with an attendee fee of US$ 500. Please contact Rene Chapman (rene.chapman@oracle-DOT-com) for information on sponsorship opportunities. For further details on the JD Edwards Summit including agenda, workshops, educational sessions, lodging,  sponsors and Summit registration, click here! Register now! This is going to be an awesome event! John Schiff Vice President JD Edwards Business Development 

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• PHP - Internal APIs/Libraries - What makes sense?

  - by Mark Locker

  I've been having a discussion lately with some colleagues about the best way to approach a new project, and thought it'd be interesting to get some external thoughts thrown into the mix. Basically, we're redeveloping a fairly large site (written in PHP) and have differing opinions on how the platform should be setup. Requirements: The platform will need to support multiple internal websites, as well as external (non-PHP) projects which at the moment consist of a mobile app and a toolbar. We have no plans/need in the foreseeable future to open up an API externally (for use in products other than our own). My opinion: We should have a library of well documented native model classes which can be shared between projects. These models will represent everything in our database and can take advantage of object orientated features such as inheritance, traits, magic methods, etc. etc. As well as employing ORM. We can then add an API layer on top of these models which can basically accept requests and route them to the appropriate methods, translating the response so that it can be used platform independently. This routing for each method can be setup as and when it's required. Their opinion: We should have a single HTTP API which is used by all projects (internal PHP ones or otherwise). My thoughts: To me, there are a number of issues with using the sole HTTP API approach: It will be very expensive performance wise. One page request will result in several additional http requests (which although local, are still ones that Apache will need to handle). You'll lose all of the best features PHP has for OO development. From simple inheritance, to employing the likes of ORM which can save you writing a lot of code. For internal projects, the actual process makes me cringe. To get a users name, for example, a request would go out of our box, over the LAN, back in, then run through a script which calls a method, JSON encodes the output and feeds that back. That would then need to be JSON decoded, and be presented as an array ready to use. Working with arrays, as appose to objects, makes me sad in a modern PHP framework. Their thoughts (and my responses): Having one method of doing thing keeps things simple. - You'd only do things differently if you were using a different language anyway. It will become robust. - Seeing as the API will run off the library of models, I think my option would be just as robust. What do you think? I'd be really interested to hear the thoughts of others on this, especially as opinions on both sides are not founded on any past experience.

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• How to implement a component based system for items in a web game.

  - by Landstander

  Reading several other questions and answers on using a component based system to define items I want to use one for the items and spells in a web game written in PHP. I'm just stuck on the implementation. I'm going to use a DB schema suggested in this series (part 5 describes the schema); http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/ This means I'll have an items table with generic item properties, a table listing all of the components for an item and finally records in each component table used to make up the item. Assuming I can select the first two together in a single query, I'm still going to do N queries for each component type. I'm kind of fine with this because I can cache the data into memcache and check there first before doing any queries. I'll need to build up the items on every request they are used in so the implementation needs to be on the lean side even if they're pulled from memcache. But right there is where I feel confident about implementing a component system for my items ends. I figure I'd need to bring attributes and behaviors into the container from each component it uses. I'm just not sure how to do that effectively and not end up writing a lot of specialized code to deal with each component. For example an AttackComponent might need to know how to filter targets inside of a battle context and also maybe provide an attack behavior. That same item might also have a UsableComponent which allows the item to be used and apply some effect onto a different set of targets filtered differently from the same battle context. Then not every part of an item is an active part, an AttributeBonusComponent might need to only kick in when the item is in an equipped state or when displaying the item details page. Ultimately, how should I bring all of the components together into the container so when I use an item as a weapon I get the correct list of targets? Know when a weapon can also be used as an item? Or to apply the bonuses the item provides to a character object? I feel like I've gone too far down the rabbit hole and I can't grasp onto the simple solution in front of me. (If that makes any sense at all.) Likewise if I were to implement the best answer from here I feel like I'd have a lot of the same questions. How to model multiple "uses" (e.g. weapon) for usable-inventory/object/items (e.g. katana) within a relational database.

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• FREE EBus (ATG) webcast on Troubleshooting Invalid Objects

  - by cwarticki

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group (ATG) Advisor Webcast Program Invitation : Advisor Webcast December 2012 In December 2012 we have scheduled an Advisor Webcast, where we want to give you a closer look into the invalid objects in an E-Business Suite Environment. E-Business Suite – Troubleshooting invalid objects Agenda : · Introduction · Activities that generate invalid objects · EBS Architecture · EBS Patching Concepts · Troubleshooting Invalid Objects · References EMEA Session : o Tuesday December 11th, 2012 o at 09:00 AM UK / 10:00 AM CET / 13:30 India / 17:00 Japan / 18:00 Australia o Details & Registration : Note 1501696.1 o Direct link to register in WebEx US Session : o Wednesday December 12th, 2012 o at 18:00 UK / 19:00 CET / 10:00 AM Pacific / 11:00 AM Mountain/ 01:00 PM Eastern o Details & Registration : Note 1501697.1 o Direct link to register in WebEx If you have any question about the schedules or if you have a suggestion for an Advisor Webcast to be planned in future, please send an E-Mail to Ruediger Ziegler.

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• vJUG: Worldwide Virtual JUG Created

  - by Tori Wieldt

  London Java Community leader and technical evangelist Simon Maple has created a Meetup called vJUG, with aim toward connecting Java Developers in the virtual world. The aim for vJUG is: Get technical leaders from around the world to present to the vJUG members (without travel cost concerns!). Work with local JUGs to provide worldwide content to their members and help JUGs present to a worldwide audience. Provide content to devs without access to a local JUG. Be a hub that will stream content from other JUG sessions live.  The vJUG is not intended to replace local JUG efforts. "The vJUG can never be, and will never be, as vibrant and valuable to its members as a proper local JUG can. Why? Because the true value in JUG meetings are the face to face interactions and personal networking," said Maple. "However, many people do not have access to a really active JUG with great speakers and awesome content. Or, like me, the closest JUG is about 90 mins away." WebEx and Google Hangouts are great, Maple explained, he hopes vJUG will provide more coordination of online events.  Maple hopes that in the future, vJUG will provide An Events calendar with reminders and links to up coming meetings. A Newsletter with what's coming up and links to previous sessions. Coordination of links to IRC channels which are active during presentations (to create a feeling of virtual community). Comments and forums around sessions and presentations A place where physical JUGs could advertise their sessions (i.e. a NY JUG event) to a worldwide audience, when streamed, via an event that people can sign up to. A common Webex or Hangout. Maple encourages both people who need a JUG and existing JUG members to join vJUG. "I'm looking forward to talking with many of you one to get members, speakers, and JUG support!" Join vJUG now! (I sense a need for a logo...) 

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