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• May 20th Links: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, .NET 4, VS 2010, Silverlight

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET MVC How to Localize an ASP.NET MVC Application: Michael Ceranski has a good blog post that describes how to localize ASP.NET MVC 2 applications. ASP.NET MVC with jTemplates Part 1 and Part 2: Steve Gentile has a nice two-part set of blog posts that demonstrate how to use the jTemplate and DataTable jQuery libraries to implement client-side data binding with ASP.NET MVC. CascadingDropDown jQuery Plugin for ASP.NET MVC: Raj Kaimal has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to implement a dynamically constructed cascading dropdownlist on the client using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC. How to Configure VS 2010 Code Coverage for ASP.NET MVC Unit Tests: Visual Studio enables you to calculate the “code coverage” of your unit tests.  This measures the percentage of code within your application that is exercised by your tests – and can give you a sense of how much test coverage you have.  Gunnar Peipman demonstrates how to configure this for ASP.NET MVC projects. Shrinkr URL Shortening Service Sample: A nice open source application and code sample built by Kazi Manzur that demonstrates how to implement a URL Shortening Services (like bit.ly) using ASP.NET MVC 2 and EF4.  More details here. Creating RSS Feeds in ASP.NET MVC: Damien Guard has a nice post that describes a cool new “FeedResult” class he created that makes it easy to publish and expose RSS feeds from within ASP.NET MVC sites. NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC Part 1 and Part 2: Nice two-part blog series by Shiju Varghese on how to use MongoDB (a document database) with ASP.NET MVC.  If you are interested in document databases also make sure to check out the Raven DB project from Ayende. Using the FCKEditor with ASP.NET MVC: Quick blog post that describes how to use FCKEditor – an open source HTML Text Editor – with ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET Replace Html.Encode Calls with the New HTML Encoding Syntax: Phil Haack has a good blog post that describes a useful way to quickly update your ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET MVC views to use the new <%: %> encoding syntax in ASP.NET 4.  I blogged about the new <%: %> syntax – it provides an easy and concise way to HTML encode content. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website using OAuth: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to take advantage of Twiter within an ASP.NET Website using the OAuth protocol – which is a simple, secure protocol for granting API access. Creating an ASP.NET report using VS 2010 Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3: Raj Kaimal has a nice three part set of blog posts that detail how to use SQL Server Reporting Services, ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 to create a dynamic reporting solution. Three Hidden Extensibility Gems in ASP.NET 4: Phil Haack blogs about three obscure but useful extensibility points enabled with ASP.NET 4. .NET 4 Entity Framework 4 Video Series: Julie Lerman has a nice, free, 7-part video series on MSDN that walks through how to use the new EF4 capabilities with VS 2010 and .NET 4.  I’ll be covering EF4 in a blog series that I’m going to start shortly as well. Getting Lazy with System.Lazy: System.Lazy and System.Lazy<T> are new features in .NET 4 that provide a way to create objects that may need to perform time consuming operations and defer the execution of the operation until it is needed.  Derik Whittaker has a nice write-up that describes how to use it. LINQ to Twitter: Nifty open source library on Codeplex that enables you to use LINQ syntax to query Twitter. Visual Studio 2010 Using Intellitrace in VS 2010: Chris Koenig has a nice 10 minute video that demonstrates how to use the new Intellitrace features of VS 2010 to enable DVR playback of your debug sessions. Make the VS 2010 IDE Colors look like VS 2008: Scott Hanselman has a nice blog post that covers the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor extension – which allows you to customize the VS 2010 IDE however you want. How to understand your code using Dependency Graphs, Sequence Diagrams, and the Architecture Explorer: Jennifer Marsman has a nice blog post describes how to take advantage of some of the new architecture features within VS 2010 to quickly analyze applications and legacy code-bases. How to maintain control of your code using Layer Diagrams: Another great blog post by Jennifer Marsman that demonstrates how to setup a “layer diagram” within VS 2010 to enforce clean layering within your applications.  This enables you to enforce a compiler error if someone inadvertently violates a layer design rule. Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer Extension: Useful VS 2010 extension that enables you to quickly collapse “child nodes” within the Visual Studio Solution Explorer.  If you have deeply nested project structures this extension is useful. Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Building a Simple Windows Phone 7 Application: A nice tutorial blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of Expression Blend to create an animated Windows Phone 7 application. If you haven’t checked out my Windows Phone 7 Twitter Tutorial I also recommend reading that. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.

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• Install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet

  - by Stephen Walther

  The Ajax Control Toolkit is now available from NuGet. This makes it super easy to add the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit to any Web Forms application. If you haven’t used NuGet yet, then you are missing out on a great tool which you can use with Visual Studio to add new features to an application. You can use NuGet with both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms applications. NuGet is compatible with both Websites and Web Applications and it works with both C# and VB.NET applications. For example, I habitually use NuGet to add the latest version of ELMAH, Entity Framework, jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Templates to applications that I create. To download NuGet, visit the NuGet website at: http://NuGet.org Imagine, for example, that you want to take advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit RoundedCorners extender to create cross-browser compatible rounded corners in a Web Forms application. Follow these steps. Right click on your project in the Solution Explorer window and select the option Add Library Package Reference. In the Add Library Package Reference dialog, select the Online tab and enter AjaxControlToolkit in the search box: Click the Install button and the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit will be installed. Installing the Ajax Control Toolkit makes several modifications to your application. First, a reference to the Ajax Control Toolkit is added to your application. In a Web Application Project, you can see the new reference in the References folder: Installing the Ajax Control Toolkit NuGet package also updates your Web.config file. The tag prefix ajaxToolkit is registered so that you can easily use Ajax Control Toolkit controls within any page without adding a @Register directive to the page. <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="ajaxToolkit" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" /> </controls> </pages> </system.web> </configuration> You should do a rebuild of your application by selecting the Visual Studio menu option Build, Rebuild Solution so that Visual Studio picks up on the new controls (You won’t get Intellisense for the Ajax Control Toolkit controls until you do a build). After you add the Ajax Control Toolkit to your application, you can start using any of the 40 Ajax Control Toolkit controls in your application (see http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/samples/ for a reference for the controls). <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="WebForm1.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm1" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Rounded Corners</title> <style type="text/css"> #pnl1 { background-color: gray; width: 200px; color:White; font: 14pt Verdana; } #pnl1_contents { padding: 10px; } </style> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <asp:Panel ID="pnl1" runat="server"> <div id="pnl1_contents"> I have rounded corners! </div> </asp:Panel> <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="sm1" runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:RoundedCornersExtender TargetControlID="pnl1" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> The page contains the following three controls: Panel – The Panel control named pnl1 contains the content which appears with rounded corners. ToolkitScriptManager – Every page which uses the Ajax Control Toolkit must contain a single ToolkitScriptManager. The ToolkitScriptManager loads all of the JavaScript files used by the Ajax Control Toolkit. RoundedCornersExtender – This Ajax Control Toolkit extender targets the Panel control. It makes the Panel control appear with rounded corners. You can control the “roundiness” of the corners by modifying the Radius property. Notice that you get Intellisense when typing the Ajax Control Toolkit tags. As soon as you type <ajaxToolkit, all of the available Ajax Control Toolkit controls appear: When you open the page in a browser, then the contents of the Panel appears with rounded corners. The advantage of using the RoundedCorners extender is that it is cross-browser compatible. It works great with Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari even though different browsers implement rounded corners in different ways. The RoundedCorners extender even works with an ancient browser such as Internet Explorer 6. Getting the Latest Version of the Ajax Control Toolkit The Ajax Control Toolkit continues to evolve at a rapid pace. We are hard at work at fixing bugs and adding new features to the project. We plan to have a new release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each month. The easiest way to get the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit is to use NuGet. You can open the NuGet Add Library Package Reference dialog at any time to update the Ajax Control Toolkit to the latest version.

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• Ich bin jetzt Oracle Certified Associate!

  - by britta.wolf

  Jan Peuker, Absolvent der Hochschule Augsburg und University of Melbourne, hat vor kurzem das Zertifikat Oracle Database 10g Administrator Certified Associate erworben. Er hat uns netterweise mit diesem kleinen Text versorgt: "Die Oracle Zertifizierung beginnt üblicherweise mit dem Oracle Certified Associate. Für diese Zertifizierung ist noch keine tiefgehende Praxiserfahrung notwendig. Um den Titel des Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Associate zu erlangen, muss man eine Prüfung zu SQL (z.B. 1Z0-051) sowie eine Prüfung zur Administration (1Z0-045) ablegen. Beide Prüfungen dauern 2 Stunden und haben ca. 80 Fragen von denen etwa drei Viertel richtig beantwortet werden müssen, um zu bestehen. Eine Note gibt es nicht. Die Prüfungen finden immer elektronisch statt, die Software erlaubt das Überspringen und Markieren von Fragen. Während meiner Arbeitszeit nach meinem ersten Studium hatte ich häufig mit dem Oracle Datenbanksystem zu tun. Als ich mein Aufbaustudium an der University of Melbourne absolvierte, wurde mir von der Studienberaterin vorgeschlagen, den Kurs „Advanced Database Administration" zu belegen. Dieser beruht vollständig auf den offiziellen Oracle Trainings-Unterlagen zur Prüfung in Oracle Administration und erlaubt daher die Teilnahme an der offiziellen Zertifizierung. Im Gegensatz zur SQL Prüfung, deren Inhalt man sich gut selbst aneignen kann, hilft bei der Administrator-Zertifizierung ein echter Kurs mit Seminar ungemein. Viele Konzepte lassen sich schwer aus einem Buch lernen. Die Bestandteile der SGA oder das Anlegen von Benutzern mögen leicht zugänglich sein, Redo- und Undo-Management sowie Backup und Recovery kann man nur verstehen, wenn man Beispiele hat und diese an einem Testsystem (keine "kleine" XE-Datenbank, sondern eine "richtige" Datenbank mit Enterprise Manager) ausprobieren kann. Übermäßig viel Zeit habe ich keinesfalls investiert, weil das Grundsystem sehr logisch ist. Für die weniger nachvollziehbaren Bereiche, besonders die neuen Features, habe ich mir Fachbegriffe auf Lernkarten geschrieben und die Trainingsunterlagen am System durchgespielt. Die Prüfung war für mich überraschend schwer, weil das einfache "Tagesgeschäft" deutlich unterrepräsentiert ist. In den Multiple-Choice-Fragen werden viele Besonderheiten und Use-Cases abgefragt (online findet man viele Beispielfragen). Da beide Tests in Englisch sind, sollte man nicht nur in der Terminologie des Oracle Datenbanksystems sondern auch in Fachbegriffen der Datenbankwelt allgemein bewandert sein. Oft machen einzelne Wörter (z.B. redundant oder synchronized, redo log oder redo log buffer) die richtige Antwort aus, ein signifikanter Anteil der Fragen beruht auf Zeichnungen oder Diagrammen, die beschrieben werden müssen. So muss man z.B. anhand eines Log-Auszugs beurteilen, warum die Datenbank nicht sauber geschlossen wurde. Allgemeines Wissen über Datenbanksysteme hilft leider nicht viel, da überproportional viele Fragen zu Oracle-spezifischen Themen gestellt werden, wie z.B. Optimierungs-Dienste (ADDM), Flashback, SQL Loader und ein wenig PL/SQL. Die SQL Prüfung ist dagegen sehr geradlinig - was aber nicht einfacher heißt. Hier kommt es mehr auf Auswendiglernen von Syntax an, was mir persönlich nicht liegt. Vor allem als Anwendungsprogrammierer kennt man oft proprietäre SQL-Funktionen nicht, es fällt schwer, sich einzelne Datumsberechnungsfunktionen, Typkonvertierungen, Namespaces oder krude Join-Methoden zu merken. Auf all dies wird in der Prüfung aber sehr viel Wert gelegt. Auch hier wird man wieder mit zweideutigen Multiple-Choice Fragen konfrontiert, bei denen sich z.B. nur die Reihenfolge der Parameter unterscheidet. Zudem sind die Parameter auch nicht ausgeschrieben, sondern in einem Entity-Relationship-Diagramm gegeben, wobei man auf die richtigen Datentypen achten muss. Mir persönlich war die Zeit fast zu knapp bemessen, weil man bei vielen Fragen erst ein Diagramm, einen Datenauszug oder einen längeren Text lesen muss, um dann die richtigen Statements zu finden. Hier helfen Lernkarten also nur bedingt - stattdessen üben, üben, üben. Durch den relativ niedrigen Pass-Score von 70% kann man es sich leisten, unsichere Fragen zuerst zu überspringen und erst nachdem alle sicheren beantwortet sind, zu überdenken. Die Prüfung ist auf jeden Fall fair. Ich habe durch das Oracle-Zertifizierungsprogramm viel gelernt. Die Datenbanken unter meiner Aufsicht laufen deutlich performanter und liefern höhere Verfügbarkeit, weil ich Probleme eliminieren konnte, die mir vorher nicht klar waren. Eine klassische Misskonfiguration, volle Archive Logs, weil diese mit zu lange gehaltenem Flashback-Speicher kollidieren, konnte ich bereits in einer der ersten Stunden meines Kurses an der Uni Melbourne mit Hilfe meines Professors klären. Beide Prüfungen waren problemlos parallel zu anderen Prüfungen zu absolvieren. Empfehlen kann ich eine gründliche Online-Recherche aber auch die Oracle Press-Bücher, welche mit Prüfungsfragen am Ende jedes Kapitels aufwarten. So spart man sich Zeit und ist trotzdem gut vorbereitet. Auch wenn ich keine Laufbahn als Administrator einschlagen werde, bin ich froh die zugrundeliegende Technologie vieler Anwendungen besser zu verstehen. Für meine tägliche Arbeit als Anwendungsentwickler hat es mir vor allem geholfen, Oracle-Konzepte z.B. im Bereich der Transaktionssteuerung und Wiederherstellung zu verstehen und damit viele Open Source Produkte jetzt sinnvoller bewerten und empfehlen zu können." Eine Übersicht der Zertifizierungspfade finden Sie auf der Oracle University Webseite (dann einfach "Deutschland""auswählen und anschließend auf den Punkt "Zertifizierungen" klicken).

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• Problem connecting to Hsqldb via Hibernate when running a Eclipse GWT project.

  - by Toby

  Hi, I'm trying to run a simple GWT project where I'm trying to do a simple persitence via hibernate to a HSQLDB database. The database I'm using I have been using for at least 2 years with several osgi applications without any problems. So all I done is reused the same configuration and added a simple object mapping file. The problem I have is that I get a socket creation error when ever I try to persist the object with in GWT jetty. I now the database is up and running, I can telnet to it, run OSGI projects that uses the same config with out problems. This is the stack I get when running 25 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Environment - Hibernate 3.3.1.GA 30 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Environment - hibernate.properties not found 34 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Environment - Bytecode provider name : javassist 42 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Environment - using JDK 1.4 java.sql.Timestamp handling 162 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration - configuring from resource: hibernate.cfg.xml 162 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration - Configuration resource: hibernate.cfg.xml 268 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration - Reading mappings from resource : hbm-mappings/project.hbm.xml 382 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.HbmBinder - Mapping class: se.kanit.projectmgr.db.ProjectDAO - T_PROJECT 419 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration - Configured SessionFactory: null 3534 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider - Using Hibernate built-in connection pool (not for production use!) 3534 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider - Hibernate connection pool size: 1 3534 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider - autocommit mode: false 3537 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider - using driver: org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver at URL: jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:1476/dirtyharry 3537 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider - connection properties: {user=sa, password=****} 3594 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] WARN org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Could not obtain connection metadata java.sql.SQLException: socket creation error at org.hsqldb.jdbc.Util.sqlException(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbc.jdbcConnection.(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.getConnection(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.connect(Unknown Source) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:582) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:154) at org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider.getConnection(DriverManagerConnectionProvider.java:133) at org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory.buildSettings(SettingsFactory.java:111) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSettings(Configuration.java:2101) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSessionFactory(Configuration.java:1325) at se.kanit.projectmgr.db.HibernateUtil.(HibernateUtil.java:24) at se.kanit.web.projectmgr.server.issues.IssuesService.addIssue(IssuesService.java:26) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.agent.runtime.Runtime.invoke(Runtime.java:100) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RPC.invokeAndEncodeResponse(RPC.java:562) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processCall(RemoteServiceServlet.java:188) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processPost(RemoteServiceServlet.java:224) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.doPost(AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.java:62) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:713) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:806) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:511) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1166) at com.google.appengine.api.blobstore.dev.ServeBlobFilter.doFilter(ServeBlobFilter.java:51) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.TransactionCleanupFilter.doFilter(TransactionCleanupFilter.java:43) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.StaticFileFilter.doFilter(StaticFileFilter.java:122) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388) at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418) at com.google.apphosting.utils.jetty.DevAppEngineWebAppContext.handle(DevAppEngineWebAppContext.java:70) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.JettyContainerService$ApiProxyHandler.handle(JettyContainerService.java:349) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.content(HttpConnection.java:938) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:755) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:218) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404) at org.mortbay.io.nio.SelectChannelEndPoint.run(SelectChannelEndPoint.java:409) at org.mortbay.thread.QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:582) 3626 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.dialect.Dialect - Using dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect 3640 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.transaction.TransactionFactoryFactory - Using default transaction strategy (direct JDBC transactions) 3644 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.transaction.TransactionManagerLookupFactory - No TransactionManagerLookup configured (in JTA environment, use of read-write or transactional second-level cache is not recommended) 3644 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Automatic flush during beforeCompletion(): disabled 3644 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Automatic session close at end of transaction: disabled 3645 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Scrollable result sets: disabled 3645 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - JDBC3 getGeneratedKeys(): disabled 3645 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Connection release mode: auto 3646 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Default batch fetch size: 1 3646 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Generate SQL with comments: disabled 3646 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Order SQL updates by primary key: disabled 3646 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Order SQL inserts for batching: disabled 3646 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Query translator: org.hibernate.hql.ast.ASTQueryTranslatorFactory 3651 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.hql.ast.ASTQueryTranslatorFactory - Using ASTQueryTranslatorFactory 3651 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Query language substitutions: {} 3652 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - JPA-QL strict compliance: disabled 3652 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Second-level cache: enabled 3652 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Query cache: disabled 3664 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Cache region factory : org.hibernate.cache.impl.bridge.RegionFactoryCacheProviderBridge 3665 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cache.impl.bridge.RegionFactoryCacheProviderBridge - Cache provider: org.hibernate.cache.NoCacheProvider 3666 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Optimize cache for minimal puts: disabled 3666 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Structured second-level cache entries: disabled 3678 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Statistics: disabled 3678 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Deleted entity synthetic identifier rollback: disabled 3678 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Default entity-mode: pojo 3679 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory - Named query checking : enabled 3775 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryImpl - building session factory 4155 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryObjectFactory - Not binding factory to JNDI, no JNDI name configured 4170 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate - Running hbm2ddl schema update 4170 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] INFO org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate - fetching database metadata 4171 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] ERROR org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate - could not get database metadata java.sql.SQLException: socket creation error at org.hsqldb.jdbc.Util.sqlException(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbc.jdbcConnection.(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.getConnection(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.connect(Unknown Source) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:582) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:154) at org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider.getConnection(DriverManagerConnectionProvider.java:133) at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SuppliedConnectionProviderConnectionHelper.prepare(SuppliedConnectionProviderConnectionHelper.java:51) at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate.execute(SchemaUpdate.java:168) at org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryImpl.(SessionFactoryImpl.java:346) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSessionFactory(Configuration.java:1327) at se.kanit.projectmgr.db.HibernateUtil.(HibernateUtil.java:24) at se.kanit.web.projectmgr.server.issues.IssuesService.addIssue(IssuesService.java:26) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.agent.runtime.Runtime.invoke(Runtime.java:100) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RPC.invokeAndEncodeResponse(RPC.java:562) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processCall(RemoteServiceServlet.java:188) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processPost(RemoteServiceServlet.java:224) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.doPost(AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.java:62) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:713) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:806) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:511) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1166) at com.google.appengine.api.blobstore.dev.ServeBlobFilter.doFilter(ServeBlobFilter.java:51) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.TransactionCleanupFilter.doFilter(TransactionCleanupFilter.java:43) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.StaticFileFilter.doFilter(StaticFileFilter.java:122) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388) at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418) at com.google.apphosting.utils.jetty.DevAppEngineWebAppContext.handle(DevAppEngineWebAppContext.java:70) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.JettyContainerService$ApiProxyHandler.handle(JettyContainerService.java:349) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.content(HttpConnection.java:938) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:755) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:218) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404) at org.mortbay.io.nio.SelectChannelEndPoint.run(SelectChannelEndPoint.java:409) at org.mortbay.thread.QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:582) 4172 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] ERROR org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate - could not complete schema update java.sql.SQLException: socket creation error at org.hsqldb.jdbc.Util.sqlException(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbc.jdbcConnection.(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.getConnection(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.connect(Unknown Source) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:582) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:154) at org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider.getConnection(DriverManagerConnectionProvider.java:133) at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SuppliedConnectionProviderConnectionHelper.prepare(SuppliedConnectionProviderConnectionHelper.java:51) at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate.execute(SchemaUpdate.java:168) at org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryImpl.(SessionFactoryImpl.java:346) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSessionFactory(Configuration.java:1327) at se.kanit.projectmgr.db.HibernateUtil.(HibernateUtil.java:24) at se.kanit.web.projectmgr.server.issues.IssuesService.addIssue(IssuesService.java:26) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.agent.runtime.Runtime.invoke(Runtime.java:100) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RPC.invokeAndEncodeResponse(RPC.java:562) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processCall(RemoteServiceServlet.java:188) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processPost(RemoteServiceServlet.java:224) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.doPost(AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.java:62) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:713) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:806) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:511) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1166) at com.google.appengine.api.blobstore.dev.ServeBlobFilter.doFilter(ServeBlobFilter.java:51) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.TransactionCleanupFilter.doFilter(TransactionCleanupFilter.java:43) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.StaticFileFilter.doFilter(StaticFileFilter.java:122) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388) at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418) at com.google.apphosting.utils.jetty.DevAppEngineWebAppContext.handle(DevAppEngineWebAppContext.java:70) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.JettyContainerService$ApiProxyHandler.handle(JettyContainerService.java:349) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.content(HttpConnection.java:938) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:755) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:218) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404) at org.mortbay.io.nio.SelectChannelEndPoint.run(SelectChannelEndPoint.java:409) at org.mortbay.thread.QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:582) 4293 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] WARN org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter - SQL Error: -80, SQLState: 08000 4293 [21704474@qtp-26509496-0] ERROR org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter - socket creation error Cannot open connection org.hibernate.exception.JDBCConnectionException: Cannot open connection at org.hibernate.exception.SQLStateConverter.convert(SQLStateConverter.java:97) at org.hibernate.exception.JDBCExceptionHelper.convert(JDBCExceptionHelper.java:66) at org.hibernate.exception.JDBCExceptionHelper.convert(JDBCExceptionHelper.java:52) at org.hibernate.jdbc.ConnectionManager.openConnection(ConnectionManager.java:449) at org.hibernate.jdbc.ConnectionManager.getConnection(ConnectionManager.java:167) at org.hibernate.jdbc.JDBCContext.connection(JDBCContext.java:142) at org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransaction.begin(JDBCTransaction.java:85) at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.beginTransaction(SessionImpl.java:1353) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.agent.runtime.Runtime.invoke(Runtime.java:100) at org.hibernate.context.ThreadLocalSessionContext$TransactionProtectionWrapper.invoke(ThreadLocalSessionContext.java:342) at $Proxy7.beginTransaction(Unknown Source) at se.kanit.projectmgr.db.HibernateUtil.saveOrUpdate(HibernateUtil.java:115) at se.kanit.web.projectmgr.server.issues.IssuesService.addIssue(IssuesService.java:26) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.agent.runtime.Runtime.invoke(Runtime.java:100) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RPC.invokeAndEncodeResponse(RPC.java:562) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processCall(RemoteServiceServlet.java:188) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processPost(RemoteServiceServlet.java:224) at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.doPost(AbstractRemoteServiceServlet.java:62) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:713) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:806) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:511) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1166) at com.google.appengine.api.blobstore.dev.ServeBlobFilter.doFilter(ServeBlobFilter.java:51) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.TransactionCleanupFilter.doFilter(TransactionCleanupFilter.java:43) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.StaticFileFilter.doFilter(StaticFileFilter.java:122) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388) at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418) at com.google.apphosting.utils.jetty.DevAppEngineWebAppContext.handle(DevAppEngineWebAppContext.java:70) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at com.google.appengine.tools.development.JettyContainerService$ApiProxyHandler.handle(JettyContainerService.java:349) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152) at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.content(HttpConnection.java:938) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:755) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:218) at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404) at org.mortbay.io.nio.SelectChannelEndPoint.run(SelectChannelEndPoint.java:409) at org.mortbay.thread.QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:582) Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: socket creation error at org.hsqldb.jdbc.Util.sqlException(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbc.jdbcConnection.(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.getConnection(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver.connect(Unknown Source) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:582) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:154) at org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider.getConnection(DriverManagerConnectionProvider.java:133) at org.hibernate.jdbc.ConnectionManager.openConnection(ConnectionManager.java:446) ... 49 more Any tips and ideas are greatly appreciated. Cheers. Toby.

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• Azure &ndash; Part 6 &ndash; Blob Storage Service

  - by Shaun

  When migrate your application onto the Azure one of the biggest concern would be the external files. In the original way we understood and ensure which machine and folder our application (website or web service) is located in. So that we can use the MapPath or some other methods to read and write the external files for example the images, text files or the xml files, etc. But things have been changed when we deploy them on Azure. Azure is not a server, or a single machine, it’s a set of virtual server machine running under the Azure OS. And even worse, your application might be moved between thses machines. So it’s impossible to read or write the external files on Azure. In order to resolve this issue the Windows Azure provides another storage serviec – Blob, for us. Different to the table service, the blob serivce is to be used to store text and binary data rather than the structured data. It provides two types of blobs: Block Blobs and Page Blobs. Block Blobs are optimized for streaming. They are comprised of blocks, each of which is identified by a block ID and each block can be a maximum of 4 MB in size. Page Blobs are are optimized for random read/write operations and provide the ability to write to a range of bytes in a blob. They are a collection of pages. The maximum size for a page blob is 1 TB.   In the managed library the Azure SDK allows us to communicate with the blobs through these classes CloudBlobClient, CloudBlobContainer, CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob. Similar with the table service managed library, the CloudBlobClient allows us to reach the blob service by passing our storage account information and also responsible for creating the blob container is not exist. Then from the CloudBlobContainer we can save or load the block blobs and page blobs into the CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob classes.   Let’s improve our exmaple in the previous posts – add a service method allows the user to upload the logo image. In the server side I created a method name UploadLogo with 2 parameters: email and image. Then I created the storage account from the config file. I also add the validation to ensure that the email passed in is valid. 1: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 2: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 3:  4: // validation 5: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 6: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 7: .ToList() 8: .Count; 9: if (accountNumber <= 0) 10: { 11: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Cannot find the account with the email {0}.", email)); 12: } Then there are three steps for saving the image into the blob service. First alike the table service I created the container with a unique name and create it if it’s not exist. 1: // create the blob container for account logos if not exist 2: CloudBlobClient blobStorage = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 3: CloudBlobContainer container = blobStorage.GetContainerReference("account-logo"); 4: container.CreateIfNotExist(); Then, since in this example I will just send the blob access URL back to the client so I need to open the read permission on that container. 1: // configure blob container for public access 2: BlobContainerPermissions permissions = container.GetPermissions(); 3: permissions.PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Container; 4: container.SetPermissions(permissions); And at the end I combine the blob resource name from the input file name and Guid, and then save it to the block blob by using the UploadByteArray method. Finally I returned the URL of this blob back to the client side. 1: // save the blob into the blob service 2: string uniqueBlobName = string.Format("{0}_{1}.jpg", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString()); 3: CloudBlockBlob blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(uniqueBlobName); 4: blob.UploadByteArray(image); 5:  6: return blob.Uri.ToString(); Let’s update a bit on the client side application and see the result. Here I just use my simple console application to let the user input the email and the file name of the image. If it’s OK it will show the URL of the blob on the server side so that we can see it through the web browser. Then we can see the logo I’ve just uploaded through the URL here. You may notice that the blob URL was based on the container name and the blob unique name. In the document of the Azure SDK there’s a page for the rule of naming them, but I think the simple rule would be – they must be valid as an URL address. So that you cannot name the container with dot or slash as it will break the ADO.Data Service routing rule. For exmaple if you named the blob container as Account.Logo then it will throw an exception says 400 Bad Request.   Summary In this short entity I covered the simple usage of the blob service to save the images onto Azure. Since the Azure platform does not support the file system we have to migrate our code for reading/writing files to the blob service before deploy it to Azure. In order to reducing this effort Microsoft provided a new approch named Drive, which allows us read and write the NTFS files just likes what we did before. It’s built up on the blob serivce but more properly for files accessing. I will discuss more about it in the next post.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question&hellip;

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  UPDATE:  Thanks for the feedback and comments.  I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations.  I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping.  According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care?  Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this?  Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed.  No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members.  Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability.  The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose.  It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified.  The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help?  Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched.  I have been interested in ORM for some time now.  My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations.  However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns.  Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO).  The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO.  With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps.  While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking.  DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it.  This sounds worse than it really is.  What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with.  Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable.  And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - -   Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes                 I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities.  In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these.  We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers.  Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly.  This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team.  I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”.  In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework.  Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements.  With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance.  Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems.  If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it?  Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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• JPA - insert and retrieve clob and blob types

  - by pachunoori.vinay.kumar(at)oracle.com

  This article describes about the JPA feature for handling clob and blob data types.You will learn the following in this article. @Lob annotation Client code to insert and retrieve the clob/blob types End to End ADFaces application to retrieve the image from database table and display it in web page. Use Case Description Persisting and reading the image from database using JPA clob/blob type. @Lob annotation By default, TopLink JPA assumes that all persistent data can be represented as typical database data types. Use the @Lob annotation with a basic mapping to specify that a persistent property or field should be persisted as a large object to a database-supported large object type. A Lob may be either a binary or character type. TopLink JPA infers the Lob type from the type of the persistent field or property. For string and character-based types, the default is Clob. In all other cases, the default is Blob. Example Below code shows how to use this annotation to specify that persistent field picture should be persisted as a Blob. public class Person implements Serializable {    @Id    @Column(nullable = false, length = 20)    private String name;    @Column(nullable = false)    @Lob    private byte[] picture;    @Column(nullable = false, length = 20) } Client code to insert and retrieve the clob/blob types Reading a image file and inserting to Database table Below client code will read the image from a file and persist to Person table in database.                       Person p=new Person();                      p.setName("Tom");                      p.setSex("male");                      p.setPicture(writtingImage("Image location"));// - c:\images\test.jpg                       sessionEJB.persistPerson(p); //Retrieving the image from Database table and writing to a file                       List<Person> plist=sessionEJB.getPersonFindAll();//                      Person person=(Person)plist.get(0);//get a person object                      retrieveImage(person.getPicture());   //get picture retrieved from Table //Private method to create byte[] from image file  private static byte[] writtingImage(String fileLocation) {      System.out.println("file lication is"+fileLocation);     IOManager manager=new IOManager();        try {           return manager.getBytesFromFile(fileLocation);                    } catch (IOException e) {        }        return null;    } //Private method to read byte[] from database and write to a image file    private static void retrieveImage(byte[] b) {    IOManager manager=new IOManager();        try {            manager.putBytesInFile("c:\\webtest.jpg",b);        } catch (IOException e) {        }    } End to End ADFaces application to retrieve the image from database table and display it in web page. Please find the application in this link. Following are the j2ee components used in the sample application. ADFFaces(jspx page) HttpServlet Class - Will make a call to EJB and retrieve the person object from person table.Read the byte[] and write to response using Outputstream. SessionEJBBean - This is a session facade to make a local call to JPA entities JPA Entity(Person.java) - Person java class with setter and getter method annotated with @Lob representing the clob/blob types for picture field.

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• Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

  - by Lewis Benge

  One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

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• Hello With Oracle Identity Manager Architecture

  - by mustafakaya

  Hi, my name is Mustafa! I'm a Senior Consultant in Fusion Middleware Team and living in Istanbul,Turkey. I worked many various Java based software development projects such as end-to-end web applications, CRM , Telco VAS and integration projects.I want to share my experiences and research about Fusion Middleware Products in this column. Customer always wants best solution from software consultants or developers. Solution will be a code snippet or change complete architecture. We faced different requests according to the case of customer. In my posts i want to discuss Fusion Middleware Products Architecture or how can extend usability with apis or UI customization and more and I look forward to engaging with you on your experiences and thoughts on this.  In my first post, i will be discussing Oracle Identity Manager architecture  and i plan to discuss Oracle Identity Manager 11g features in next posts. Oracle Identity Manager System Architecture Oracle Identity Governance includes Oracle Identity Manager,Oracle Identity Analytics and Oracle Privileged Account Manager. I will discuss Oracle Identity Manager architecture in this post.  In basically, Oracle Identity Manager is a n-tier standard  Java EE application that is deployed on Oracle WebLogic Server and uses  a database .  Oracle Identity Manager presentation tier has three different screen and two different client. Identity Self Service and Identity System Administration are web-based thin client. Design Console is a Java Swing Client that communicates directly with the Business Service Tier.  Identity Self Service provides end-user operations and delegated administration features. System Administration provides system administration functions. And Design Console mostly use for development management operations such as  create and manage adapter and process form,notification , workflow desing, reconciliation rules etc. Business service tier is implemented as an Enterprise JavaBeans(EJB) application. So you can extense Oracle Identity Manager capabilities.  -The SMPL and EJB APIs allow develop custom plug-ins such as management roles or identities.  -Identity Services allow use core business capabilites of Oracle Identity Manager such as The User provisioning or reconciliation service. -Integration Services allow develop custom connectors or adapters for various deployment needs. -Platform Services allow use Entitlement Servers, Scheduler or SOA composites. The Middleware tier allows you using capabilites ADF Faces,SOA Suites, Scheduler, Entitlement Server and BI Publisher Reports. So OIM allows you to configure workflows uses Oracle SOA Suite or define authorization policies use with Oracle Entitlement Server. Also you can customization of OIM UI without need to write code and using ADF Business Editor  you can extend custom attributes to user,role,catalog and other objects. Data tiers; Oracle Identity Manager is driven by data and metadata which provides flexibility and adaptability to Oracle Identity Manager functionlities.  -Database has five schemas these are OIM,SOA,MDS,OPSS and OES. Oracle Identity Manager uses database to store runtime and configuration data. And all of entity, transactional and audit datas are stored in database. -Metadata Store; customizations and personalizations are stored in file-based repository or database-based repository.And Oracle Identity Manager architecture,the metadata is in Oracle Identity Manager database to take advantage of some of the advanced performance and availability features that this mode provides. -Identity Store; Oracle Identity Manager provides the ability to integrate an LDAP-based identity store into Oracle Identity Manager architecture.  Oracle Identity Manager uses the human workflow module of Oracle Service Oriented Architecture Suite. OIM connects to SOA using the T3 URL which is front-end URL for the SOA server.Oracle Identity Manager uses embedded Oracle Entitlement Server for authorization checks in OIM engine.  Several Oracle Identity Manager modules use JMS queues. Each queue is processed by a separate Message Driven Bean (MDB), which is also part of the Oracle Identity Manager application. Message producers are also part of the Oracle Identity Manager application. Oracle Identity Manager uses a scheduled jobs for some activities in the background.Some of scheduled jobs come with Out-Of-Box such as the disable users after the end date of the users or you can define your custom schedule jobs with Oracle Identity Manager APIs. You can use Oracle BI Publisher for reporting Oracle Identity Manager transactions or audit data which are in database. About me: Mustafa Kaya is a Senior Consultant in Oracle Fusion Middleware Team, living in Istanbul. Before coming to Oracle, he worked in teams developing web applications and backend services at a telco company. He is a Java technology enthusiast, software engineer and addicted to learn new technologies,develop new ideas. Follow Mustafa on Twitter,Connect on LinkedIn, and visit his site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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• Measuring Usability with Common Industry Format (CIF) Usability Tests

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience A User-centered Research and Design Process The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience was five years in the making. The development of this suite included an extensive and comprehensive user experience design process: ethnographic research, low-fidelity workflow prototyping, high fidelity user interface (UI) prototyping, iterative formative usability testing, development feedback and iteration, and sales and customer evaluation throughout the design cycle. However, this process does not stop when our products are released. We conduct summative usability testing using the ISO 25062 Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports as an organizational framework. CIF tests allow us to measure the overall usability of our released products.  These studies provide benchmarks that allow for comparisons of a specific product release against previous versions of our product and against other products in the marketplace. What Is a CIF Usability Test? CIF refers to the internationally standardized method for reporting usability test findings used by the software industry. The CIF is based on a formal, lab-based test that is used to benchmark the usability of a product in terms of human performance and subjective data. The CIF was developed and is endorsed by more than 375 software customer and vendor organizations led by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a US government entity. NIST sponsored the CIF through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards-making processes. Oracle played a key role in developing the CIF. The CIF report format and metrics are consistent with the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Our goal in conducting CIF tests is to measure performance and satisfaction of a representative sample of users on a set of core tasks and to help predict how usable a product will be with the larger population of customers. Why Do We Perform CIF Testing? The overarching purpose of the CIF for usability test reports is to promote incorporation of usability as part of the procurement decision-making process for interactive products. CIF provides a common format for vendors to report the methods and results of usability tests to customer organizations, and enables customers to compare the usability of our software to that of other suppliers. CIF also enables us to compare our current software with previous versions of our software. CIF Testing for Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications comprises more than 100 modules in seven different product families. These modules encompass more than 400 task flows and 400 user roles. Due to resource constraints, we cannot perform comprehensive CIF testing across the entire product suite. Therefore, we had to develop meaningful inclusion criteria and work with other stakeholders across the applications development organization to prioritize product areas for testing. Ultimately, we want to test the product areas for which customers might be most interested in seeing CIF data. We also want to build credibility with customers; we need to be able to make the case to current and prospective customers that the product areas tested are representative of the product suite as a whole. Our goal is to test the top use cases for each product. The primary activity in the scoping process was to work with the individual product teams to identify the key products and business process task flows in each product to test. We prioritized these products and flows through a series of negotiations among the user experience managers, product strategy, and product management directors for each of the primary product families within the Oracle Fusion Applications suite (Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Projects, and Procurement). The end result of the scoping exercise was a list of 47 proposed CIF tests for the Fusion Applications product suite.  Figure 1. A participant completes tasks during a usability test in Oracle’s Usability Labs Fusion Supplier Portal CIF Test The first Fusion CIF test was completed on the Supplier Portal application in July of 2011.  Fusion Supplier Portal is part of an integrated suite of Procurement applications that helps supplier companies manage orders, schedules, shipments, invoices, negotiations and payments. The user roles targeted for the usability study were Supplier Account Receivables Specialists and Supplier Sales Representatives, including both experienced and inexperienced users across a wide demographic range.  The test specifically focused on the following functionality and features: Manage payments – view payments Manage invoices – view invoice status and create invoices Manage account information – create new contact, review bank account information Manage agreements – find and view agreement, upload agreement lines, confirm status of agreement lines upload Manage purchase orders (PO) – view history of PO, request change to PO, find orders Manage negotiations – respond to request for a quote, check the status of a negotiation response These product areas were selected to represent the most important subset of features and functionality of the flow, in terms of frequency and criticality of use by customers. A total of 20 users participated in the usability study. The results of the Supplier Portal evaluation were favorable and exceeded our expectations. Figure 2. Fusion Supplier Portal Next Studies We plan to conduct two Fusion CIF usability studies per product family over the next nine months. The next product to be tested will be Self-service Procurement. End users are currently being recruited to participate in this usability study, and the test sessions are scheduled to begin during the last week of November.

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• Task-It Webinar - Source Code

  Last week I presented a webinar called "Building a real-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4". For those that didn't get to see the webinar, you can view it here: Building a read-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4 Since the webinar I've received several requests asking if I could post the source code for the simple application I showed demonstrating some of the techniques used in the development of Task-It, such as MVVM, Commands and Internationalization. This source code is now available for downloadhere. After downloading the source: Extract it to the location of your choice on your hard-drive Open the solution Right-click ModuleProject.Web and selecte 'Set as StartUp Project'. Right-click ProjectTestPage.aspx and selected 'Set as Start Page' Create a database in SQL Server called WebinarProject. Navigate to the Database folder under the WebinarProject directory and run the .sql script against your WebinarProject database. The last two steps are necessary only for the Tasks page to work properly (using WCF RIA Services). Now some notes about each page: Code-behind This is not the way I recommend coding a line-of-business application in Silverlight, but simply wanted to show how the code-behind approach would look. Command This page introduces MVVM and Commands. You'll notice in the XAML that the Command property of theRadMenuItem and the Button are both bound to a SaveCommand. That comes from the view model. If you look in the code- behind of the user control you'll see that an instance of a CommandViewModel is instantiated and set as the DataContext of the UserControl.There is also a listener for the view model's SaveCompleted event. When this is fired, it tells the view (UserControl) to display the MessageBox. Internationalization This sample is similar to the previous one, but instead of using hard-coded strings in the UI, the strings are obtained via binding toview model properties. The view model gets the strings from the .resx files (Strings.resx or Strings.de.resx) under Assets/Resources. If you uncomment the call to ShowGerman() in App.xaml.cs's Application_Startup method and re-run the application, you will see the UI in German. Note that this code, which sets the CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture on the current thread to "de" (German) is for testing purposes only. RadWindow Once again, very similar to the previous example.The difference is that we are now using a RadWindow to display the 'Saved' message instead of a MessageBox. The advantage here is that we do not have to hold on to a reference to the view model in our code behind so that we can get the 'Saved' message from it. The RadWindow's DataContext is now also bound to the view model, so within its XAML we can bind directly to properties in the view model. Much nicer, and cleaner. One other thing I introduced in this example is the use of spacer Rectangles. Rather than setting a width and/or height on the rectangles for spacing, I am now referencing a style in my ResourceDictionary called StandardSpacerStyle. I like doing this better than using margins or padding because now I have a reusable way to create space between elements, the Rectangle does not show (because I have not set its Fill color), and I can change my spacing throughout the user interface in one place if I'd like. Tasks This page is quite a bit different than the other four. It is a very simple, stripped-down version of the Tasks page in the Task-It application. The Tasks.xaml UserControl has a ContentControl, and the Content of that control is set based on whether we are looking at the list of tasks or editing a task. So it displays one of two child UserControls, which are called List and Details. List has the RadGridView, Details has the form. In the code-behind of the Tasks UserControl I am once again setting its DataContext to a view model class. The nice thing is, whichever child UserControl is being displayed (List or Details) inherits its DataContext from its parent control (Tasks), so I do not have to explicitly set it. The List UserControl simply displays a RadGridView whose ItemsSource is bound to a property in the view model called Tasks, and its SelectedItem property is bound to a property in the view model called SelectedItem. The SelectedItem binding must be TwoWay so that the view is notified when the SelectedItem changes in the view model, and the view model is notified when something changes in the view (like when a user changes the Name and/or DueDate in the form). You'll also notice that the form's TextBox and RadDatePicker are also TwoWay bound to the SelectedItem property in the view model. You can experiment with the binding by removing TwoWay and see how changes in the form do not show up in the RadGridView. So here we have an example of two different views (List and Details) that are both bound to the same view model...and actually, so is the Tasks UserControl, so it is really three views. WCF RIA Services By the way, I am using WCF RIA Services to retrieve data for the RadGridView and save the data when the user clicks the Save button in the form. I created a really simple ADO.NET Entity Data Model in WebinarProject.Web called DataModel.edmx. I also created a simple Domain Data Service called DataService that has methods for retrieving data, inserting, updating and deleting. However I am only using the retrieval and update methods in this sample. Note that I do not currently have any validation in place on the form, as I wanted to keep the sample as simple as possible. Wrap up Technically, I should move the calls to WCF RIA Services out of the view model and put them into a separate layer, but this works for now, and that is a topic for another day! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Code Structure / Level Design: Plants vs Zombies game level dissection

  - by lalan

  Hi Friends, I am interested in learning the class structure of Plants vs Zombies, particularly level design; for those who haven't played it - this video contains nice play-through: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89DfdOIJ4xw. How would I go ahead and design the code, mostly structure & classes, which allows for maximum flexibility & clean development? I am familiar with data driven design concepts, and would use events to handle most of dynamic behavior. Dissection at macro level: (Once every Level) Load tilemap, props, etc -- basically build the map (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) Show Enemies you'll face during present level (Once every Level) Unit Selection Window/Panel - selection of defensive plants (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) HUD Creation - based on unit selection (Level Loop) Enemy creation - based on types of zombies allowed (Level Loop) Sun/Resource generation (Level Loop) Show messages like 'huge wave of zombies coming', 'final wave' (Level Loop) Other unique events - Spawn gifts, money, tombstones, etc (Once every Level) Unlock new plant Potential game scripts: a) Level definitions: Level_1_1.xml, Level_1_2.xml, etc. Level_1_1.xml :: Sample script <map> <tilemap>tilemapFrontLawn</tilemap> <SpawnPoints> tiles where particular type of zombies (land vs water) may spawn</spawnPoints> <props> position, entity array -- lawnmower, </props> </map> <zombies> <... list of zombies who gonna attack by ids...> </zombies> <plants> <... list by plants which are available for defense by ids...> </plants> <progression> <ZombieWave name='first wave' spawnScript='zombieLightWave.lua' unlock='null'> <startMessages time=1.5>Ready</startMessages> <endMessages time=1.5>Huge wave of zombies incoming</endMessages> </ZombieWave> </progression> b) Entities definitions: .xmls containing zombies, plants, sun, lawnmower, coins, etc description. Potential classes: //LevelManager - Based on the level under play, it will load level script. Few of the // functions it may have: class LevelManager { public: bool load(string levelFileName); bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); private: LevelData* mLevelData; } // LevelData - Contains the details of level loaded by LevelManager. class LevelData { private: string file; // array of camera,dialog,attackwaves, etc in active level LevelCutSceneCamera** mArrayCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog** mArrayCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave** mArrayAttackWave; .... // which camera,dialog,attackwave is active in level uint mCursorCutSceneCamera; uint mCursorCutSceneDialog; uint mCursorAttackWave; public: // based on cursor, get the next camera,dialog,attackwave,etc in active level // return false/true based on failure/success bool nextCutSceneCamera(LevelCutSceneCamera**); bool nextCutSceneDialog(LevelCutSceneDialog**); } // LevelUnderPlay- LevelManager class LevelUnderPlay { private: LevelCutSceneCamera* mCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog* mCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave* mAttackWave; Entities** mSelectedPlants; Entities** mAllowedZombies; bool isCutSceneCameraActive; public: bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); } I am totally confused.. :( Does it make sense of using class composition (have flat class hierarchy) for managing levels. Is it a good idea to just add/remove/update sprites (or any drawable stuff) to current scene from LevelManager or LevelUnderPlay? If I want to make non-linear level design, how should I go ahead? Perhaps I would need a LevelProgression class, which would decide what to do based on decision tree. Any suggestions would be appreciated very much. Thank for your time, lalan

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• Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration

  - by Kiran Mundy

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration A typical implementation pattern we’re seeing with Fusion Apps early adopters is implementing a few Fusion HCM applications that bring the most benefit to their company with the least disruption to existing programs and interfaces. Very often this ends up being Fusion Goals & Performance, Talent, Compensation or Benefits, often with Taleo for recruiting. The implementation picture looks like what you see below: Here, you can see that all the “downstream integrations” from the On-Premise Core HR, are unaffected because the master for employee data is still your On-Premise Core HR system – all updates and new hires are made here (although they may be fed in from Taleo to start with). As a second phase when customers migrate Core HR to Fusion HCM, they have to come up with a strategy to manage integrations to all their downstream applications that require employee details. For customers coming from EBS HR, a short term strategy that allows for minimal impact, is to extract employee data from Fusion (Via HCM Extract), and load the shared EBS HR tables (which are part of an EBS Financials install anyways), and let your downstream integrations continue to function based on this data as shown below. If you are not coming from EBS HR and there are license implications, you may want to consider: Creating an On-Premise warehouse for extracting data from Fusion Apps. Leveraging Fusion Apps Web Services (available to SaaS customers starting R7) to directly retrieve/write data to Fusion Apps. Integration Tools File Based Loader This is the primary mechanism for loading HCM data (both initial load and incremental updates) into Fusion HCM. Employee & related data can be uploaded into Fusion HCM using File Based Loader. Note that ability to schedule File Based Loader to run on a pre-defined schedule will be available as a patch on top of Rel 5. Hr2Hr has been deprecated in favor of File Based Loader, but for existing customers using Hr2Hr, here are some sample scripts that show how to get more informative error messages. They can be run by creating data model sql queries in BI Publisher. The scripts currently have hard coded values for request id and loader batch id, which your developer will need to update to the correct values for you. The BI Publisher Training Session recorded on Apr 18th is available here (under "Recordings"). This will enable a somewhat technical resource to create a data model sql query. Links to Documentation & Traning Reference documentation for File Based Loader on docs.oracle.com FBL 1.1 MOS Doc Id 1533860.1 Sample demo data files for File Based Loader HCM SaaS Integrations ppt and recording. EBS api's Loading Information into EBS Full or Shared HCM This could be candidate information being loaded from Taleo into EBS or  Employee information being loaded from Fusion HCM into an EBS shared HR install (for downstream applications & EBS Financials). Oracle HRMS Product Family Publicly Callable Business Process APIs (A Reference Consolidation) [ID 216838.1] This is a guide to the EBS R12 Integration Repository accessible from an EBS instance. EBS HRMS Publicly Callable Business Process APIs in Release 11i & 12 [ID 121964.1] Fusion HCM Extract Fusion HCM Extract is the primary mechanism used to extract employee information from Fusion HCM. Refer to the "Configure Identity Sync" doc on MOS  for additional mechanisms. Additional documentation (you'll need an oracle.com account to access) HCM Extracts User Guides (Rel 4 & 5) HCM Extract Entity/Attributes (Rel 5) HCM Extract User Guide (Rel 5) If you don’t have an oracle.com account, download the zipped HCM Extract Rel 5 Docs (Click on File --> Download on next screen). View Training Recordings on Fusion HCM Extract Benefits Extract To setup the benefits extract, refer to the following guide. Page 2-15 of the User Documentation describes how to use the benefits extract. Benefit enrollments can also be uploaded into Fusion Benefits. Instructions are here along with a sample upload file. However, if the defined benefits extract does not meet your requirements, you can use BI Publisher (Link to BI Publisher presentation recording from Apr 18th) to create your own version of Benefits extract. You can start with the data model query underlying the benefits extract. Payroll Interface Fusion Payroll Interface enables you to capture personal payroll information, such as earnings and deductions, along with other data from Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management, and send that information to a third-party payroll provider. Documentation: Payroll interface guide Sample file DBI's used for the payroll interface.Usage Patterns always accessible @ http://www.finapps.com Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Big Data – Evolution of Big Data – Day 3 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we answered what is the Big Data. Today we will understand why and how the evolution of Big Data has happened. Though the answer is very simple, I would like to tell it in the form of a history lesson. Data in Flat File In earlier days data was stored in the flat file and there was no structure in the flat file.  If any data has to be retrieved from the flat file it was a project by itself. There was no possibility of retrieving the data efficiently and data integrity has been just a term discussed without any modeling or structure around. Database residing in the flat file had more issues than we would like to discuss in today’s world. It was more like a nightmare when there was any data processing involved in the application. Though, applications developed at that time were also not that advanced the need of the data was always there and there was always need of proper data management. Edgar F Codd and 12 Rules Edgar Frank Codd was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He presented 12 rules for the Relational Database and suddenly the chaotic world of the database seems to see discipline in the rules. Relational Database was a promising land for all the unstructured database users. Relational Database brought into the relationship between data as well improved the performance of the data retrieval. Database world had immediately seen a major transformation and every single vendors and database users suddenly started to adopt the relational database models. Relational Database Management Systems Since Edgar F Codd proposed 12 rules for the RBDMS there were many different vendors who started them to build applications and tools to support the relationship between database. This was indeed a learning curve for many of the developer who had never worked before with the modeling of the database. However, as time passed by pretty much everybody accepted the relationship of the database and started to evolve product which performs its best with the boundaries of the RDBMS concepts. This was the best era for the databases and it gave the world extreme experts as well as some of the best products. The Entity Relationship model was also evolved at the same time. In software engineering, an Entity–relationship model (ER model) is a data model for describing a database in an abstract way. Enormous Data Growth Well, everything was going fine with the RDBMS in the database world. As there were no major challenges the adoption of the RDBMS applications and tools was pretty much universal. There was a race at times to make the developer’s life much easier with the RDBMS management tools. Due to the extreme popularity and easy to use system pretty much every data was stored in the RDBMS system. New age applications were built and social media took the world by the storm. Every organizations was feeling pressure to provide the best experience for their users based the data they had with them. While this was all going on at the same time data was growing pretty much every organization and application. Data Warehousing The enormous data growth now presented a big challenge for the organizations who wanted to build intelligent systems based on the data and provide near real time superior user experience to their customers. Various organizations immediately start building data warehousing solutions where the data was stored and processed. The trend of the business intelligence becomes the need of everyday. Data was received from the transaction system and overnight was processed to build intelligent reports from it. Though this is a great solution it has its own set of challenges. The relational database model and data warehousing concepts are all built with keeping traditional relational database modeling in the mind and it still has many challenges when unstructured data was present. Interesting Challenge Every organization had expertise to manage structured data but the world had already changed to unstructured data. There was intelligence in the videos, photos, SMS, text, social media messages and various other data sources. All of these needed to now bring to a single platform and build a uniform system which does what businesses need. The way we do business has also been changed. There was a time when user only got the features what technology supported, however, now users ask for the feature and technology is built to support the same. The need of the real time intelligence from the fast paced data flow is now becoming a necessity. Large amount (Volume) of difference (Variety) of high speed data (Velocity) is the properties of the data. The traditional database system has limits to resolve the challenges this new kind of the data presents. Hence the need of the Big Data Science. We need innovation in how we handle and manage data. We need creative ways to capture data and present to users. Big Data is Reality! Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer discuss Basics of Big Data Architecture. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• What should you bring to the table as a Software Architect?

  - by Ahmad Mageed

  There have been many questions with good answers about the role of a Software Architect (SA) on StackOverflow and Programmers SE. I am trying to ask a slightly more focused question than those. The very definition of a SA is broad so for the sake of this question let's define a SA as follows: A Software Architect guides the overall design of a project, gets involved with coding efforts, conducts code reviews, and selects the technologies to be used. In other words, I am not talking about managerial rest and vest at the crest (further rhyming words elided) types of SAs. If I were to pursue any type of SA position I don't want to be away from coding. I might sacrifice some time to interface with clients and Business Analysts etc., but I am still technically involved and I'm not just aware of what's going on through meetings. With these points in mind, what should a SA bring to the table? Should they come in with a mentality of "laying down the law" (so to speak) and enforcing the usage of certain tools to fit "their way," i.e., coding guidelines, source control, patterns, UML documentation, etc.? Or should they specify initial direction and strategy then be laid back and jump in as needed to correct the ship's direction? Depending on the organization this might not work. An SA who relies on TFS to enforce everything may struggle to implement their plan at an employer that only uses StarTeam. Similarly, an SA needs to be flexible depending on the stage of the project. If it's a fresh project they have more choices, whereas they might have less for existing projects. Here are some SA stories I have experienced as a way of sharing some background in hopes that answers to my questions might also shed some light on these issues: I've worked with an SA who code reviewed literally every single line of code of the team. The SA would do this for not just our project but other projects in the organization (imagine the time spent on this). At first it was useful to enforce certain standards, but later it became crippling. FxCop was how the SA would find issues. Don't get me wrong, it was a good way to teach junior developers and force them to think of the consequences of their chosen approach, but for senior developers it was seen as somewhat draconian. One particular SA was against the use of a certain library, claiming it was slow. This forced us to write tons of code to achieve things differently while the other library would've saved us a lot of time. Fast forward to the last month of the project and the clients were complaining about performance. The only solution was to change certain functionality to use the originally ignored approach despite early warnings from the devs. By that point a lot of code was thrown out and not reusable, leading to overtime and stress. Sadly the estimates used for the project were based on the old approach which my project was forbidden from using so it wasn't an appropriate indicator for estimation. I would hear the PM say "we've done this before," when in reality they had not since we were using a new library and the devs working on it were not the same devs used on the old project. The SA who would enforce the usage of DTOs, DOs, BOs, Service layers and so on for all projects. New devs had to learn this architecture and the SA adamantly enforced usage guidelines. Exceptions to usage guidelines were made when it was absolutely difficult to follow the guidelines. The SA was grounded in their approach. Classes for DTOs and all CRUD operations were generated via CodeSmith and database schemas were another similar ball of wax. However, having used this setup everywhere, the SA was not open to new technologies such as LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework. I am not using this post as a platform for venting. There were positive and negative aspects to my experiences with the SA stories mentioned above. My questions boil down to: What should an SA bring to the table? How can they strike a balance in their decision making? Should one approach an SA job (as defined earlier) with the mentality that they must enforce certain ground rules? Anything else to consider? Thanks! I'm sure these job tasks are easily extended to people who are senior devs or technical leads, so feel free to answer at that capacity as well.

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• Union,Except and Intersect operator in Linq

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  While developing a windows service using Linq-To-SQL i was in need of something that will intersect the two list and return a list with the result. After searching on net i have found three great use full operators in Linq Union,Except and Intersect. Here are explanation of each operator. Union Operator: Union operator will combine elements of both entity and return result as third new entities. Except Operator: Except operator will remove elements of first entities which elements are there in second entities and will return as third new entities. Intersect Operator: As name suggest it will return common elements of both entities and return result as new entities. Let’s take a simple console application as  a example where i have used two string array and applied the three operator one by one and print the result using Console.Writeline. Here is the code for that. C#, using GeSHi 1.0.8.6 using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text;     namespace ConsoleApplication1 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             string[] a = { "a", "b", "c", "d" };             string[] b = { "d","e","f","g"};               var UnResult = a.Union(b);             Console.WriteLine("Union Result");               foreach (string s in UnResult)             {                 Console.WriteLine(s);                          }               var ExResult = a.Except(b);             Console.WriteLine("Except Result");             foreach (string s in ExResult)             {                 Console.WriteLine(s);             }               var InResult = a.Intersect(b);             Console.WriteLine("Intersect Result");             foreach (string s in InResult)             {                 Console.WriteLine(s);             }             Console.ReadLine();                        }          } }   Parsed in 0.022 seconds at 45.54 KB/s Here is the output of console application as Expected. Hope this will help you.. Technorati Tags: Linq,Except,InterSect,Union,C#

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• How to Secure a Data Role by Multiple Business Units

  - by Elie Wazen

  In this post we will see how a Role can be data secured by multiple Business Units (BUs).  Separate Data Roles are generally created for each BU if a corresponding data template generates roles on the basis of the BU dimension. The advantage of creating a policy with a rule that includes multiple BUs is that while mapping these roles in HCM Role Provisioning Rules, fewer number of entires need to be made. This could facilitate maintenance for enterprises with a large number of Business Units. Note: The example below applies as well if the securing entity is Inventory Organization. Let us take for example the case of a user provisioned with the "Accounts Payable Manager - Vision Operations" Data Role in Fusion Applications. This user will be able to access Invoices in Vision Operations but will not be able to see Invoices in Vision Germany. Figure 1. A User with a Data Role restricting them to Data from BU: Vision Operations With the role granted above, this is what the user will see when they attempt to select Business Units while searching for AP Invoices. Figure 2.The List Of Values of Business Units is limited to single one. This is the effect of the Data Role granted to that user as can be seen in Figure 1 In order to create a data role that secures by multiple BUs,  we need to start by creating a condition that groups those Business Units we want to include in that data role. This is accomplished by creating a new condition against the BU View .  That Condition will later be used to create a data policy for our newly created Role.  The BU View is a Database resource and  is accessed from APM as seen in the search below Figure 3.Viewing a Database Resource in APM The next step is create a new condition,  in which we define a sql predicate that includes 2 BUs ( The ids below refer to Vision Operations and Vision Germany).  At this point we have simply created a standalone condition.  We have not used this condition yet, and security is therefore not affected. Figure 4. Custom Role that inherits the Purchase Order Overview Duty We are now ready to create our Data Policy.  in APM, we search for our newly Created Role and Navigate to “Find Global Policies”.  we query the Role we want to secure and navigate to view its global policies. Figure 5. The Job Role we plan on securing We can see that the role was not defined with a Data Policy . So will create one that uses the condition we created earlier.   Figure 6. Creating a New Data Policy In the General Information tab, we have to specify the DB Resource that the Security Policy applies to:  In our case this is the BU View Figure 7. Data Policy Definition - Selection of the DB Resource we will secure by In the Rules Tab, we  make the rule applicable to multiple values of the DB Resource we selected in the previous tab.  This is where we associate the condition we created against the BU view to this data policy by entering the Condition name in the Condition field Figure 8. Data Policy Rule The last step of Defining the Data Policy, consists of  explicitly selecting  the Actions that are goverened by this Data Policy.  In this case for example we select the Actions displayed below in the right pane. Once the record is saved , we are ready to use our newly secured Data Role. Figure 9. Data Policy Actions We can now see a new Data Policy associated with our Role.  Figure 10. Role is now secured by a Data Policy We now Assign that new Role to the User.  Of course this does not have to be done in OIM and can be done using a Provisioning Rule in HCM. Figure 11. Role assigned to the User who previously was granted the Vision Ops secured role. Once that user accesses the Invoices Workarea this is what they see: In the image below the LOV of Business Unit returns the two values defined in our data policy namely: Vision Operations and Vision Germany Figure 12. The List Of Values of Business Units now includes the two we included in our data policy. This is the effect of the data role granted to that user as can be seen in Figure 11

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• 2D OBB collision detection, resolving collisions?

  - by Milo

  I currently use OBBs and I have a vehicle that is a rigid body and some buildings. Here is my update() private void update() { camera.setPosition((vehicle.getPosition().x * camera.getScale()) - ((getWidth() ) / 2.0f), (vehicle.getPosition().y * camera.getScale()) - ((getHeight() ) / 2.0f)); //camera.move(input.getAnalogStick().getStickValueX() * 15.0f, input.getAnalogStick().getStickValueY() * 15.0f); if(input.isPressed(ControlButton.BUTTON_GAS)) { vehicle.setThrottle(1.0f, false); } if(input.isPressed(ControlButton.BUTTON_BRAKE)) { vehicle.setBrakes(1.0f); } vehicle.setSteering(input.getAnalogStick().getStickValueX()); vehicle.update(16.6666f / 1000.0f); ArrayList<Building> buildings = city.getBuildings(); for(Building b : buildings) { if(vehicle.getRect().overlaps(b.getRect())) { vehicle.update(-17.0f / 1000.0f); break; } } } The collision detection works well. What doesn't is how they are dealt with. My goal is simple. If the vehicle hits a building, it should stop, and never go into the building. When I apply negative torque to reverse the car should not feel buggy and move away from the building. I don't want this to look buggy. This is my rigid body class: class RigidBody extends Entity { //linear private Vector2D velocity = new Vector2D(); private Vector2D forces = new Vector2D(); private float mass; //angular private float angularVelocity; private float torque; private float inertia; //graphical private Vector2D halfSize = new Vector2D(); private Bitmap image; public RigidBody() { //set these defaults so we don't get divide by zeros mass = 1.0f; inertia = 1.0f; } //intialize out parameters public void initialize(Vector2D halfSize, float mass, Bitmap bitmap) { //store physical parameters this.halfSize = halfSize; this.mass = mass; image = bitmap; inertia = (1.0f / 20.0f) * (halfSize.x * halfSize.x) * (halfSize.y * halfSize.y) * mass; RectF rect = new RectF(); float scalar = 10.0f; rect.left = (int)-halfSize.x * scalar; rect.top = (int)-halfSize.y * scalar; rect.right = rect.left + (int)(halfSize.x * 2.0f * scalar); rect.bottom = rect.top + (int)(halfSize.y * 2.0f * scalar); setRect(rect); } public void setLocation(Vector2D position, float angle) { getRect().set(position, getWidth(), getHeight(), angle); } public Vector2D getPosition() { return getRect().getCenter(); } @Override public void update(float timeStep) { //integrate physics //linear Vector2D acceleration = Vector2D.scalarDivide(forces, mass); velocity = Vector2D.add(velocity, Vector2D.scalarMultiply(acceleration, timeStep)); Vector2D c = getRect().getCenter(); c = Vector2D.add(getRect().getCenter(), Vector2D.scalarMultiply(velocity , timeStep)); setCenter(c.x, c.y); forces = new Vector2D(0,0); //clear forces //angular float angAcc = torque / inertia; angularVelocity += angAcc * timeStep; setAngle(getAngle() + angularVelocity * timeStep); torque = 0; //clear torque } //take a relative Vector2D and make it a world Vector2D public Vector2D relativeToWorld(Vector2D relative) { Matrix mat = new Matrix(); float[] Vector2Ds = new float[2]; Vector2Ds[0] = relative.x; Vector2Ds[1] = relative.y; mat.postRotate(JMath.radToDeg(getAngle())); mat.mapVectors(Vector2Ds); return new Vector2D(Vector2Ds[0], Vector2Ds[1]); } //take a world Vector2D and make it a relative Vector2D public Vector2D worldToRelative(Vector2D world) { Matrix mat = new Matrix(); float[] Vectors = new float[2]; Vectors[0] = world.x; Vectors[1] = world.y; mat.postRotate(JMath.radToDeg(-getAngle())); mat.mapVectors(Vectors); return new Vector2D(Vectors[0], Vectors[1]); } //velocity of a point on body public Vector2D pointVelocity(Vector2D worldOffset) { Vector2D tangent = new Vector2D(-worldOffset.y, worldOffset.x); return Vector2D.add( Vector2D.scalarMultiply(tangent, angularVelocity) , velocity); } public void applyForce(Vector2D worldForce, Vector2D worldOffset) { //add linear force forces = Vector2D.add(forces ,worldForce); //add associated torque torque += Vector2D.cross(worldOffset, worldForce); } @Override public void draw( GraphicsContext c) { c.drawRotatedScaledBitmap(image, getPosition().x, getPosition().y, getWidth(), getHeight(), getAngle()); } } Essentially, when any rigid body hits a building it should exhibit the same behavior. How is collision solving usually done? Thanks

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• Creating Property Set Expression Trees In A Developer Friendly Way

  - by Paulo Morgado

  In a previous post I showed how to create expression trees to set properties on an object. The way I did it was not very developer friendly. It involved explicitly creating the necessary expressions because the compiler won’t generate expression trees with property or field set expressions. Recently someone contacted me the help develop some kind of command pattern framework that used developer friendly lambdas to generate property set expression trees. Simply putting, given this entity class: public class Person { public string Name { get; set; } } The person in question wanted to write code like this: var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name = "me"); Where et is the expression tree that represents the property assignment. So, if we can’t do this, let’s try the next best thing that is splitting retrieving the property information from the retrieving the value to assign o the property: var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name, () => "me"); And this is something that the compiler can handle. The implementation of Set receives an expression to retrieve the property information from and another expression the retrieve the value to assign to the property: public static Expression<Action<TEntity>> Set<TEntity, TValue>( Expression<Func<TEntity, TValue>> propertyGetExpression, Expression<Func<TValue>> valueExpression) The implementation of this method gets the property information form the body of the property get expression (propertyGetExpression) and the value expression (valueExpression) to build an assign expression and builds a lambda expression using the same parameter of the property get expression as its parameter: public static Expression<Action<TEntity>> Set<TEntity, TValue>( Expression<Func<TEntity, TValue>> propertyGetExpression, Expression<Func<TValue>> valueExpression) { var entityParameterExpression = (ParameterExpression)(((MemberExpression)(propertyGetExpression.Body)).Expression); return Expression.Lambda<Action<TEntity>>( Expression.Assign(propertyGetExpression.Body, valueExpression.Body), entityParameterExpression); } And now we can use the expression to translate to another context or just compile and use it: var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name, () => name); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: p => (p.Name = “me”) var d = et.Compile(); d(person); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: me It can even support closures: var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name, () => name); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: p => (p.Name = value(<>c__DisplayClass0).name) var d = et.Compile(); name = "me"; d(person); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: me name = "you"; d(person); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: you Not so useful in the intended scenario (but still possible) is building an expression tree that receives the value to assign to the property as a parameter: public static Expression<Action<TEntity, TValue>> Set<TEntity, TValue>(Expression<Func<TEntity, TValue>> propertyGetExpression) { var entityParameterExpression = (ParameterExpression)(((MemberExpression)(propertyGetExpression.Body)).Expression); var valueParameterExpression = Expression.Parameter(typeof(TValue)); return Expression.Lambda<Action<TEntity, TValue>>( Expression.Assign(propertyGetExpression.Body, valueParameterExpression), entityParameterExpression, valueParameterExpression); } This new expression can be used like this: var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: (p, Param_0) => (p.Name = Param_0) var d = et.Compile(); d(person, "me"); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: me d(person, "you"); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: you The only caveat is that we need to be able to write code to read the property in order to write to it.

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• Stumbling Through: Making a case for the K2 Case Management Framework

  I have recently attended a three-day training session on K2s Case Management Framework (CMF), a free framework built on top of K2s blackpearl workflow product, and I have come away with several different impressions for some of the different aspects of the framework.  Before we get into the details, what is the Case Management Framework?  It is essentially a suite of tools that, when used together, solve many common workflow scenarios.  The tool has been developed over time by K2 consultants that have realized they tend to solve the same problems over and over for various clients, so they attempted to package all of those common solutions into one framework.  Most of these common problems involve workflow process that arent necessarily direct and would tend to be difficult to model.  Such solutions could be achieved in blackpearl alone, but the workflows would be complex and difficult to follow and maintain over time.  CMF attempts to simplify such scenarios not so much by black-boxing the workflow processes, but by providing different points of entry to the processes allowing them to be simpler, moving the complexity to a middle layer.  It is not a solution in and of itself, development is still required to tie the pieces together. CMF is under continuous development, both a plus and a minus in that bugs are fixed quickly and features added regularly, but it may be difficult to know which versions are the most stable.  CMF is not an officially supported K2 product, which means you will not get technical support but you will get access to the source code. The example given of a business process that would fit well into CMF is that of a file cabinet, where each folder in said file cabinet is a case that contains all of the data associated with one complaint/customer/incident/etc. and various users can access that case at any time and take one of a set of pre-determined actions on it.  When I was given that example, my first thought was that any workflow I have ever developed in the past could be made to fit this model there must be more than just this model to help decide if CMF is the right solution.  As the training went on, we learned that one of the key features of CMF is SharePoint integration as each case gets a SharePoint site created for it, and there are a number of excellent web parts that can be used to design a portal for users to get at all the information on their cases.  While CMF does not require SharePoint, without it you will be missing out on a huge portion of functionality that CMF offers.  My opinion is that without SharePoint integration, you may as well write your workflows and other components the old fashioned way. When I heard that each case gets its own SharePoint site created for it, warning bells immediately went off in my head as I felt that depending on the data load, a CMF enabled solution could quickly overwhelm SharePoint with thousands of sites so we have yet another deciding factor for CMF:  Just how many cases will your solution be creating?  While it is not necessary to use the site-per-case model, it is one of the more useful parts of the framework.  Without it, you are losing a big chunk of what CMF has to offer. When it comes to developing on top of the Case Management Framework, it becomes a matter of configuring what makes up a case, what can be done to a case, where each action on a case should take the user, and then typing up actions to case statuses.  This last step is one that I immediately warmed up to, as just about every workflow Ive designed in the past needed some sort of mapping table to set the status of a work item based on the action being taken definitely one of those common solutions that it is good to see rolled up into a re-useable entity (and it gets a nice configuration UI to boot!).  This concept is a little different than traditional workflow design, in that you dont have to think of an end-to-end process around passing a case along a path, rather, you must envision the case as central object with workflow threads branching off of it and doing their own thing with the case data.  Certainly there can be certain workflow threads that get rather complex, but the idea is that they RELATE to the case, they dont BECOME the case (though it is still possible with action->status mappings to prevent certain actions in certain cases, so it isnt always a wide-open free for all of actions on a case). I realize that this description of the Case Management Framework merely scratches the surface on what the product actually can do, and I dont think Ive conclusively defined for what sort of business scenario you can make a case for Case Management Framework.  What I do hope to have accomplished with this post is to raise awareness of CMF there is a (free!) product out there that could potentially simplify a tangled workflow process and give (for free!) a very useful set of SharePoint web parts and a nice set of (free!) reports.  The best way to see if it will truly fit your needs is to give it a try did I mention it is FREE?  Er, ok, so it is free, but only obtainable at this time for K2 partnersDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Design review for application facing memory issues

  - by Mr Moose

  I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but I want to paint an accurate picture of the problems my app is facing and then pose some questions below; I am trying to address some self inflicted design pain that is now leading to my application crashing due to out of memory errors. An abridged description of the problem domain is as follows; The application takes in a “dataset” that consists of numerous text files containing related data An individual text file within the dataset usually contains approx 20 “headers” that contain metadata about the data it contains. It also contains a large tab delimited section containing data that is related to data in one of the other text files contained within the dataset. The number of columns per file is very variable from 2 to 256+ columns. The original application was written to allow users to load a dataset, map certain columns of each of the files which basically indicating key information on the files to show how they are related as well as identify a few expected column names. Once this is done, a validation process takes place to enforce various rules and ensure that all the relationships between the files are valid. Once that is done, the data is imported into a SQL Server database. The database design is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model used to cater for the variable columns per file. I know EAV has its detractors, but in this case, I feel it was a reasonable choice given the disparate data and variable number of columns submitted in each dataset. The memory problem Given the fact the combined size of all text files was at most about 5 megs, and in an effort to reduce the database transaction time, it was decided to read ALL the data from files into memory and then perform the following; perform all the validation whilst the data was in memory relate it using an object model Start DB transaction and write the key columns row by row, noting the Id of the written row (all tables in the database utilise identity columns), then the Id of the newly written row is applied to all related data Once all related data had been updated with the key information to which it relates, these records are written using SqlBulkCopy. Due to our EAV model, we essentially have; x columns by y rows to write, where x can by 256+ and rows are often into the tens of thousands. Once all the data is written without error (can take several minutes for large datasets), Commit the transaction. The problem now comes from the fact we are now receiving individual files containing over 30 megs of data. In a dataset, we can receive any number of files. We’ve started seen datasets of around 100 megs coming in and I expect it is only going to get bigger from here on in. With files of this size, data can’t even be read into memory without the app falling over, let alone be validated and imported. I anticipate having to modify large chunks of the code to allow validation to occur by parsing files line by line and am not exactly decided on how to handle the import and transactions. Potential improvements I’ve wondered about using GUIDs to relate the data rather than relying on identity fields. This would allow data to be related prior to writing to the database. This would certainly increase the storage required though. Especially in an EAV design. Would you think this is a reasonable thing to try, or do I simply persist with identity fields (natural keys can’t be trusted to be unique across all submitters). Use of staging tables to get data into the database and only performing the transaction to copy data from staging area to actual destination tables. Questions For systems like this that import large quantities of data, how to you go about keeping transactions small. I’ve kept them as small as possible in the current design, but they are still active for several minutes and write hundreds of thousands of records in one transaction. Is there a better solution? The tab delimited data section is read into a DataTable to be viewed in a grid. I don’t need the full functionality of a DataTable, so I suspect it is overkill. Is there anyway to turn off various features of DataTables to make them more lightweight? Are there any other obvious things you would do in this situation to minimise the memory footprint of the application described above? Thanks for your kind attention.

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• MySql for Visual Studio 1.0.2 GA has been released

  - by fernando

  MySQL for Visual Studio is a new product including all of the Visual Studio integration previously available as part of Connector/Net.  The product is now released as GA and is appropriate for use in production environments.  It is compatible with MySQL Server versions 5.0-5.7 and Visual Studio versions 2008-2012.  It is now available as part of MySql Installer for Windows (http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-installer-for-windows.html). The 1.0 version of MySQL for Visual Studio brings the following new features:   Workbench Launching.   MySql Utilities Launching.   Table Script Generation.   The functionality of the core libraries (ADO.NET, EF, ASP.NET providers is available as the separate download of Connector/NET 6.7). Features available from previous versions:        Server explorer connections     Design time support     Entity Framework designer (Database First & Model First)     Stored Routines Debugger     Intellisense     ASP.NET Website Configuration Tool Workbench Launching  ------------------------------------------- A context menu for connections in Server Explorer allows to launch Workbench (if Workbench is installed). MySql Utilities Launching  ------------------------------------------- A context menu for connections in Server Explorer allows to launch a prompt for MySql Utilities (if MySql Utilities is installed). Table Script Generation  ------------------------------------------- A context menu for tables is available in Server Explorer to generate the script for a table. The full list of bug fixes for "MySql for Visual Studio" 1.0 follows: 1.0.2 - Fix for Documentation not found (Oracle bug #6915712). - Fix for intellisense completion, now Views are displayed together with Tables calling intellisense (Oracle Bug #16881451). - Fix for parser syntax, now the parser supports the clause ALTER TABLE table_name RENAME {INDEX|KEY} old_index_name TO new_index_name introduced in MySql 5.7. (Oracle Bug #16881481) - Fix for Debugging a routine produces an error when binary log is enabled (Oracle bug #16941181). - Fix for WorkItem 552: MySql for Visual Studio Installer fails when installing against VS2008. - Fix for bug Vs plugin installer is not working (Oracle bug #16973339). - Fix for bug Release notes file has no notes about (Oracle bug #16973326). 1.0.1 - Fix for "README" file and "Release Notes" file referes to connector 6.6. - Fix for Parser fails to recognizes a complex view (Oracle bug #16815427). - Fix for Altering table's primary key in designer not working (Oracle bug #16866053). - Fix for Web configuration tool is not shown on mysql for visual studio (Oracle bug # 16902696). - Fix for Model first is not supported using mysql for visual studio (Oracle bug # 16902743). - Fix for Mysql for vs should not be installed with connector/net version < 6.7 (Oracle bug # 16902774). - Fix for Resolve assemblies dependencies between MySql.Data (Connector/Net version) and MySql.Data (WI # 460). - Fix for Showing an exception related to resources (Oracle bug #16903039). 1.0.0 - Added new option on Connection Node for Server Explorer Window in Visual Studio to give the user the option when WB is Installed to open the MySQL Utilities console window. - Added new option on Connection Node for Server Explorer Window in Visual Studio to give the user the option when WB is Installed to open the SQL Editor Window using the same connection. - Implemented a menu option to generate table script from server explorer context menu (Tracker task 433). - Fix for bug If using repair option, then vs2010 doesnt allow to connect to db (Oracle bug #16238242). - Fix for bug "Can't change the name for a view in view editor" (Oracle bug #13805346). - Fix for Debugger cannot debug stored procedures with a main begin labeled and declare statements included (Oracle bug #16002371). - Fix for bug If using repair option at Installer, then vs2010 doesnt allow to connect to db (Oracle bug #16238242). - Fix for "Cannot change the name for a Foreign Key in table designer" (Oracle bug #16238068). - Fix for error when trying to set primary key for a column with same name as mysql keyword (like INT) in table designer   (Oracle bug #16238102). - Fix for databases not displayed in connect dialog for mysql script when correcting credentials, after entering a bad password   (Oracle bug #13805337). - Fix for Debugger fails trying to debug a stored routine in a MySql server hosted in linux without lower_case_table_names option enabled   (MySql bug #69065, Oracle bug #16770384). - Fix for Debugger issue, Values through watch tab shouldn't allow to be modified (Oracle bug #14545448). - Fix for Visual Studio Mysql editor colors cannot be customized (Oracle bug #16453324, MySql bug #67994). The documentation is available as part of Connector/NET at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/connector-net.html  Enjoy and thanks for the support!  --  Fernando Gonzalez Sanchez | Software Engineer |  Oracle MySQL Windows Experience Team, Connector/NET  Guadalajara | Jalisco | Mexico

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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• ODI 12c - Aggregating Data

  - by David Allan

  This posting will look at the aggregation component that was introduced in ODI 12c. For many ETL tool users this shouldn't be a big surprise, its a little different than ODI 11g but for good reason. You can use this component for composing data with relational like operations such as sum, average and so forth. Also, Oracle SQL supports special functions called Analytic SQL functions, you can use a specially configured aggregation component or the expression component for these now in ODI 12c. In database systems an aggregate transformation is a transformation where the values of multiple rows are grouped together as input on certain criteria to form a single value of more significant meaning - that's exactly the purpose of the aggregate component. In the image below you can see the aggregate component in action within a mapping, for how this and a few other examples are built look at the ODI 12c Aggregation Viewlet here - the viewlet illustrates a simple aggregation being built and then some Oracle analytic SQL such as AVG(EMP.SAL) OVER (PARTITION BY EMP.DEPTNO) built using both the aggregate component and the expression component. In 11g you used to just write the aggregate expression directly on the target, this made life easy for some cases, but it wan't a very obvious gesture plus had other drawbacks with ordering of transformations (agg before join/lookup. after set and so forth) and supporting analytic SQL for example - there are a lot of postings from creative folks working around this in 11g - anything from customizing KMs, to bypassing aggregation analysis in the ODI code generator. The aggregate component has a few interesting aspects. 1. Firstly and foremost it defines the attributes projected from it - ODI automatically will perform the grouping all you do is define the aggregation expressions for those columns aggregated. In 12c you can control this automatic grouping behavior so that you get the code you desire, so you can indicate that an attribute should not be included in the group by, that's what I did in the analytic SQL example using the aggregate component. 2. The component has a few other properties of interest; it has a HAVING clause and a manual group by clause. The HAVING clause includes a predicate used to filter rows resulting from the GROUP BY clause. Because it acts on the results of the GROUP BY clause, aggregation functions can be used in the HAVING clause predicate, in 11g the filter was overloaded and used for both having clause and filter clause, this is no longer the case. If a filter is after an aggregate, it is after the aggregate (not sometimes after, sometimes having).  3. The manual group by clause let's you use special database grouping grammar if you need to. For example Oracle has a wealth of highly specialized grouping capabilities for data warehousing such as the CUBE function. If you want to use specialized functions like that you can manually define the code here. The example below shows the use of a manual group from an example in the Oracle database data warehousing guide where the SUM aggregate function is used along with the CUBE function in the group by clause. The SQL I am trying to generate looks like the following from the data warehousing guide; SELECT channel_desc, calendar_month_desc, countries.country_iso_code,       TO_CHAR(SUM(amount_sold), '9,999,999,999') SALES$ FROM sales, customers, times, channels, countries WHERE sales.time_id=times.time_id AND sales.cust_id=customers.cust_id AND   sales.channel_id= channels.channel_id  AND customers.country_id = countries.country_id  AND channels.channel_desc IN   ('Direct Sales', 'Internet') AND times.calendar_month_desc IN   ('2000-09', '2000-10') AND countries.country_iso_code IN ('GB', 'US') GROUP BY CUBE(channel_desc, calendar_month_desc, countries.country_iso_code); I can capture the source datastores, the filters and joins using ODI's dataset (or as a traditional flow) which enables us to incrementally design the mapping and the aggregate component for the sum and group by as follows; In the above mapping you can see the joins and filters declared in ODI's dataset, allowing you to capture the relationships of the datastores required in an entity-relationship style just like ODI 11g. The mix of ODI's declarative design and the common flow design provides for a familiar design experience. The example below illustrates flow design (basic arbitrary ordering) - a table load where only the employees who have maximum commission are loaded into a target. The maximum commission is retrieved from the bonus datastore and there is a look using employees as the driving table and only those with maximum commission projected. Hopefully this has given you a taster for some of the new capabilities provided by the aggregate component in ODI 12c. In summary, the actions should be much more consistent in behavior and more easily discoverable for users, the use of the components in a flow graph also supports arbitrary designs and the tool (rather than the interface designer) takes care of the realization using ODI's knowledge modules. Interested to know if a deep dive into each component is interesting for folks. Any thoughts? 

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• Basic WCF Unit Testing

  - by Brian

  Coming from someone who loves the KISS method, I was surprised to find that I was making something entirely too complicated. I know, shocker right? Now I'm no unit testing ninja, and not really a WCF ninja either, but had a desire to test service calls without a) going to a database, or b) making sure that the entire WCF infrastructure was tip top. Who does? It's not the environment I want to test, just the logic I’ve written to ensure there aren't any side effects. So, for the K.I.S.S. method: Assuming that you're using a WCF service library (you are using service libraries correct?), it's really as easy as referencing the service library, then building out some stubs for bunking up data. The service contract We’ll use a very basic service contract, just for getting and updating an entity. I’ve used the default “CompositeType” that is in the template, handy only for examples like this. I’ve added an Id property and overridden ToString and Equals. [ServiceContract] public interface IMyService { [OperationContract] CompositeType GetCompositeType(int id); [OperationContract] CompositeType SaveCompositeType(CompositeType item); [OperationContract] CompositeTypeCollection GetAllCompositeTypes(); } The implementation When I implement the service, I want to be able to send known data into it so I don’t have to fuss around with database access or the like. To do this, I first have to create an interface for my data access: public interface IMyServiceDataManager { CompositeType GetCompositeType(int id); CompositeType SaveCompositeType(CompositeType item); CompositeTypeCollection GetAllCompositeTypes(); } For the purposes of this we can ignore our implementation of the IMyServiceDataManager interface inside of the service. Pretend it uses LINQ to Entities to map its data, or maybe it goes old school and uses EntLib to talk to SQL. Maybe it talks to a tape spool on a mainframe on the third floor. It really doesn’t matter. That’s the point. So here’s what our service looks like in its most basic form: public CompositeType GetCompositeType(int id) { //sanity checks if (id == 0) throw new ArgumentException("id cannot be zero."); return _dataManager.GetCompositeType(id); } public CompositeType SaveCompositeType(CompositeType item) { return _dataManager.SaveCompositeType(item); } public CompositeTypeCollection GetAllCompositeTypes() { return _dataManager.GetAllCompositeTypes(); } But what about the datamanager? The constructor takes care of that. I don’t want to expose any testing ability in release (or the ability for someone to swap out my datamanager) so this is what we get: IMyServiceDataManager _dataManager; public MyService() { _dataManager = new MyServiceDataManager(); } #if DEBUG public MyService(IMyServiceDataManager dataManager) { _dataManager = dataManager; } #endif The Stub Now it’s time for the rubber to meet the road… Like most guys that ever talk about unit testing here’s a sample that is painting in *very* broad strokes. The important part however is that within the test project, I’ve created a bunk (unit testing purists would say stub I believe) object that implements my IMyServiceDataManager so that I can deal with known data. Here it is: internal class FakeMyServiceDataManager : IMyServiceDataManager { internal FakeMyServiceDataManager() { Collection = new CompositeTypeCollection(); Collection.AddRange(new CompositeTypeCollection { new CompositeType { Id = 1, BoolValue = true, StringValue = "foo 1", }, new CompositeType { Id = 2, BoolValue = false, StringValue = "foo 2", }, new CompositeType { Id = 3, BoolValue = true, StringValue = "foo 3", }, }); } CompositeTypeCollection Collection { get; set; } #region IMyServiceDataManager Members public CompositeType GetCompositeType(int id) { if (id <= 0) return null; return Collection.SingleOrDefault(m => m.Id == id); } public CompositeType SaveCompositeType(CompositeType item) { var existing = Collection.SingleOrDefault(m => m.Id == item.Id); if (null != existing) { Collection.Remove(existing); } if (item.Id == 0) { item.Id = Collection.Count > 0 ? Collection.Max(m => m.Id) + 1 : 1; } Collection.Add(item); return item; } public CompositeTypeCollection GetAllCompositeTypes() { return Collection; } #endregion } So it’s tough to see in this example why any of this is necessary, but in a real world application you would/should/could be applying much more logic within your service implementation. This all serves to ensure that between refactorings etc, that it doesn’t send sparking cogs all about or let the blue smoke out. Here’s a simple test that brings it all home, remember, broad strokes: [TestMethod] public void MyService_GetCompositeType_ExpectedValues() { FakeMyServiceDataManager fake = new FakeMyServiceDataManager(); MyService service = new MyService(fake); CompositeType expected = fake.GetCompositeType(1); CompositeType actual = service.GetCompositeType(2); Assert.AreEqual<CompositeType>(expected, actual, "Objects are not equal. Expected: {0}; Actual: {1};", expected, actual); } Summary That’s really all there is to it. You could use software x or framework y to do the exact same thing, but in my case I just didn’t really feel like it. This speaks volumes to my not yet ninja unit testing prowess.

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