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  • Must-see sessions at TCUK11

    - by Roger Hart
    Technical Communication UK is probably the best professional conference I've been to. Last year, I spoke there on content strategy, and this year I'll be co-hosting a workshop on embedded user assistance. Obviously, I'd love people to come along to that; but there are some other sessions I'd like to flag up for anybody thinking of attending. Tuesday 20th Sept - workshops This will be my first year at the pre-conference workshop day, and I'm massively glad that our workshop hasn't been scheduled along-side the one I'm really interested in. My picks: It looks like you're embedding user assistance. Would you like help? My colleague Dom and I are presenting this one. It's our paen to Clippy, to the brilliant idea he represented, and the crashing failure he was. Less precociously, we'll be teaching embedded user assistance, Red Gate style. Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data This doesn't need to do anything apart from what it says on the tin in order to be gold dust. But given the speakers, I suspect it will. A data-informed approach is a great asset to technical communications, so I'd recommend this session to anybody event faintly interested. The speakers here have a great track record of giving practical, accessible introductions to big topics. Go along. Wednesday 21st Sept - day one There's no real need to recommend the keynote for a conference, but I will just point out that this year it's Google's Patrick Hofmann. That's cool. You know what else is cool: Focus on the user, the rest follows An intro to modelling customer experience. This is a really exciting area for tech comms, and potentially touches on one of my personal hobby-horses: the convergence of technical communication and marketing. It's all part of delivering customer experience, and knowing what your users need lets you help them, sell to them, and delight them. Content strategy year 1: a tale from the trenches It's often been observed that content strategy is great at banging its own drum, but not so hot on compelling case studies. Here you go, folks. This is the presentation I'm most excited about so far. On a mission to communicate! Skype help their users communicate, but how do they communicate with them? I guess we'll find out. Then there's the stuff that I'm not too excited by, but you might just be. The standards geeks and agile freaks can get together in a presentation on the forthcoming ISO standards for agile authoring. Plus, there's a session on VBA for tech comms. I do have one gripe about day 1. The other big UK tech comms conference, UA Europe, have - I think - netted the more interesting presentation from Ellis Pratt. While I have no doubt that his TCUK case study on producing risk assessments will be useful, I'd far rather go to his talk on game theory for tech comms. Hopefully UA Europe will record it. Thursday 22nd Sept - day two Day two has a couple of slots yet to be confirmed. The rumour is that one of them will be the brilliant "Questions and rants" session from last year. I hope so. It's not ranting, but I'll be going to: RTFMobile: beyond stating the obvious Ultan O'Broin is an engaging speaker with a lot to say, and mobile is one of the most interesting and challenging new areas for tech comms. Even if this weren't a research-based presentation from a company with buckets of technology experience, I'd be going. It is, and you should too. Pattern recognition for technical communicators One of the best things about TCUK is the tendency to include sessions that tackle the theoretical and bring them towards the practical. Kai and Chris delivered cracking and well-received talks last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for us on some of the conceptual underpinning of technical communication. Developing an interactive non-text learning programme Annoyingly, this clashes with Pattern Recognition, so I hope at least one of the streams is recorded again this year. The idea of communicating complex information without words us fascinating and this sounds like a great example of this year's third stream: "anything but text". For the localization and DITA crowds, there's rich pickings on day two, though I'm not sure how many of those sessions I'm interested in. In the 13:00 - 13:40 slot, there's an interesting clash between Linda Urban on re-use and training content, and a piece on minimalism I'm sorely tempted by. That's my pick of #TCUK11. I'll be doing a round-up blog after the event, and probably talking a bit more about it beforehand. I'm also reliably assured that there are still plenty of tickets.

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  • .NET - refactoring code

    - by w0051977
    I have inherited and now further develop a large application consisting of an ASP.NET application, VB6 and VB.NET application. The software was poorly written. I am trying to refactor the code as I go along. The changes I am making are not live (they are contained in a folder on my development machine). This is proving to be time consuming and I am doing this along side other work which is the prioritiy. My question is: is this a practical approach or is there a better methodology for refactoring code? I don't have any experience with version control software or source control software and I am wandering if this is what I am missing. I am a sole developer.

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  • 1 Google Analytics account or top-level domain + profiles for sub-domains vs. 1 account for each sub-domain

    - by Eric Nguyen
    We have the following websites An online magazine Singapore edition - sg.abc.com The same online magazine Malaysia edition - my.abc.com Forums around the same subjects as the online magazine but functions independently - forums.abc.com Classifieds site rather also around the same subjects but functions independently - directory.abc.com Each of the above websites currently has its own Google Analytics account. abc.com has a separate Google Analytics account too. sg.abc.com has the most traffic and generates most revenues Are there any practical benefits of merging all the above sub-domains to be under abc.com? I can think of more reliable analytics and consistency for sure. Are there more? cross-sales?

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  • How to deal with D3DX .dll hell?

    - by bluescrn
    There's a large number of versions of the D3DX dll, from each SDK update, each version having a unique name (http://www.toymaker.info/Games/html/d3dx_dlls.html). All-too-often, people have versions missing. So even though they have a compatible version of DirectX, your D3D-based project won't run on their machine. I want to be able to distribute games (little spare-time projects, game jam entries, etc) as a simple zip file, without the need for an installer. But a significant percentage of users run into missing D3DX .dll errors. And without an installer, Microsoft's official solution (the DirectX web installer/updater) isn't really much of a solution. Unfortunately, Microsoft still won't give us the option of static linking to D3DX (which would be a nice clean solution). And avoiding using D3DX isn't very practical, especially if you're working with shaders (and no, I'm not switching to OpenGL, at least for now) Does anyone have clever solutions to avoiding this DLL hell?

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  • VS 2010, Silverlight, WP 7, Azure, F#, jQuery & more take Center Stage at India's Definitive Microso

    Microsoft has announced a slew of new and exciting releases that will help you take your code to the next level in 2010. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.NET at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. At GIDS.NET, 0n 20 April 2010 in Bangalore, expert speakers will address a wide range of topics, including .NET...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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  • Can WinRT really be used at just the boundaries?

    - by Bret Kuhns
    Microsoft (chiefly, Herb Sutter) recommends when using WinRT with C++/CX to keep WinRT at the boundaries of the application and keep the core of the application written in standard ISO C++. I've been writing an application which I would like to leave portable, so my core functionality was written in standard C++, and I am now attempting to write a Metro-style front end for it using C++/CX. I've had a bit of a problem with this approach, however. For example, if I want to push a vector of user-defined C++ types to a XAML ListView control, I have to wrap my user-defined type in a WinRT ref/value type for it to be stored in a Vector^. With this approach, I'm inevitably left with wrapping a large portion of my C++ classes with WinRT classes. This is the first time I've tried to write a portable native application in C++. Is it really practical to keep WinRT along the boundaries like this? How else could this type of portable core with a platform-specific boundary be handled?

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  • Random number generation algorithm for human brains?

    - by Magnus Wolffelt
    Are you aware of, or have you devised, any practical, simple-to-learn "in-head" algorithms that let humans generate (somewhat "true") random numbers? By "in-head" I mean.. preferrably without any external tools or devices. Also, a high output (many random numbers per minute) is desirable. Asked this on SO but it didn't get much interest. Maybe this is better suited for programmers.. :) I'm genuinely curious about anything that people might have come up with on this problem.

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  • What happens if you're unable to solve a problem?

    - by gablin
    I'm a year away from graduating from university, and I'm really looking forward to solving practical problems. Especially non-trivial ones which require a bit of research and a lot of thinking. But at the same time, that is also my greatest fear - being faced with a problem that I'm unable to solve, no matter how hard I try. And with pressure to deliver code on impending deadlines just around the corner, it does look a bit scary when viewing it from the safe playgrounds on uni (where the worst thing that can happen is that you have to redo a course or exam). So for those who have been in industry for any longer length of time, what would happen if you were told to solve a problem that you couldn't? Has it happened, and if so, what did happen? Did they just drop it and said "Oh well, guess we can make do with something else"? Were there consequences? Were you reprimanded, or even fired?

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  • Java - learning / migrating fast

    - by Yippie-Kai-Yay
    Hello! This is not one of those questions like "How do I learn Java extremely fast, I know nothing about programming, but I heard Java is cool, yo". I have an interview for a Java Software Developer in a couple of weeks and the thing is that I think that I know C++ really good and I am somewhat good at C# (like, here I can probably answer on a lot of questions related to these languages), but I have almost zero experience with Java. I have a lot of projects written in both languages, I participiated in several open-source projects (mostly C++, though). Now, what should I do (in your opinion) to prepare myself for this Java interview. I guess migrating from C# to Java should be kind of fast, especially when you know a lot about programming in global, patterns, modern techniques and have a lot of practical experience behind you. But still two weeks is obviously not enough to get Java in-depth - so what should I focus on to have the best chances to pass the interview? Thank you.

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  • To Bit or Not To Bit

    - by Johnm
    'Twas a long day of troubleshooting and firefighting and now, with most of the office vacant, you face a blank scripting window to create a new table in his database. Many questions circle your mind like dirty water gurgling down the bathtub drain: "How normalized should this table be?", "Should I use an identity column?", "NVarchar or Varchar?", "Should this column be NULLABLE?", "I wonder what apple blue cheese bacon cheesecake tastes like?" Well, there are times when the mind goes it's own direction. A Bit About Bit At some point during your table creation efforts you will encounter the decision of whether to use the bit data type for a column. The bit data type is an integer data type that recognizes only the values of 1, 0 and NULL as valid. This data type is often utilized to store yes/no or true/false values. An example of its use would be a column called [IsGasoline] which would be intended to contain the value of 1 if the row's subject (a car) had a gasoline engine and a 0 if the subject did not have a gasoline engine. The bit data type can even be found in some of the system tables of SQL Server. For example, the sysssispackages table in the msdb database which contains SQL Server Integration Services Package information for the packages stored in SQL Server. This table contains a column called [IsEncrypted]. A value of 1 indicates that the package has been encrypted while the value of 0 indicates that it is not. I have learned that the most effective way to disperse the crowd that surrounds the office coffee machine is to engage into SQL Server debates. The bit data type has been one of the most reoccurring, as well as the most enjoyable, of these topics. It contains a practical side and a philosophical side. Practical Consideration This data type certainly has its place and is a valuable option for database design; but it is often used in situations where the answer is really not a pure true/false response. In addition, true/false values are not very informative or scalable. Let's use the previously noted [IsGasoline] column for illustration. While on the surface it appears to be a rather simple question when evaluating a car: "Does the car have a gasoline engine?" If the person entering data is entering a row for a Jeep Liberty, the response would be a 1 since it has a gasoline engine. If the person is entering data is entering a row for a Chevrolet Volt, the response would be a 0 since it is an electric engine. What happens when a person is entering a row for the gasoline/electric hybrid Toyota Prius? Would one person's conclusion be consistent with another person's conclusion? The argument could be made that the current intent for the database is to be used only for pure gasoline and pure electric engines; but this is where the scalability issue comes into play. With the use of a bit data type a database modification and data conversion would be required if the business decided to take on hybrid engines. Whereas, alternatively, if the int data type were used as a foreign key to a reference table containing the engine type options, the change to include the hybrid option would only require an entry into the reference table. Philosophical Consideration Since the bit data type is often used for true/false or yes/no data (also called Boolean) it presents a philosophical conundrum of what to do about the allowance of the NULL value. The inclusion of NULL in a true/false or yes/no response simply violates the logical principle of bivalence which states that "every proposition is either true or false". If NULL is not true, then it must be false. The mathematical laws of Boolean logic support this concept by stating that the only valid values of this scenario are 1 and 0. There is another way to look at this conundrum: NULL is also considered to be the absence of a response. In other words, it is the equivalent to "undecided". Anyone who watches the news can tell you that polls always include an "undecided" option. This could be considered a valid option in the world of yes/no/dunno. Through out all of these considerations I have discovered one absolute certainty: When you have found a person, or group of persons, who are willing to entertain a philosophical debate of the bit data type, you have found some true friends.

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  • Apress Deal of the day - 23/Feb/2011 - Ultra-Fast ASP.NET: Building Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Scalable Websites Using ASP.NET and SQL Server

    - by TATWORTH
    Today's $10 deal of the day at http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal  is Ultra-Fast ASP.NET: Building Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Scalable Websites Using ASP.NET and SQL Server by Richard Kessig - ISBN 978-1-4302-2383-2 I won a copy of this book at 101 Books. Richard Kessig is an all-star member of forums.asp.net - see http://forums.asp.net/members/RickNZ.aspx - this book has been on before as deal of the day. If you did not get a copy then, I suggest getting it today. " Ultra-Fast ASP.NET provides a practical guide to building extremely fast and scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server. It strikes a balance between imparting usable advice and backing that advice up with supporting background information. $49.99 | Published Nov 2009 | Rick Kiessig"

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  • Learn About HTML5 and the Future of the Web

    Learn About HTML5 and the Future of the Web San Francisco Java, PHP, and HTML5 user groups hosted an event on May 11th, 2010 on HTML5 with three amazing speakers: Brad Neuberg from Google, Giorgio Sardo from Microsoft, and Peter Lubbers from Kaazing. In this first of the three videos, Brad Neuberg from Google (formerly an HTML5 advocate and currently a Software Engineer on the Google Buzz team) explains why HTML5 matters - to consumers as well as developers! His overview of HTML5 included SVG/Canvas rendering, CSS transforms, app-cache, local databases, web workers, and much more. He also identified the scope and practical implications of the changes that are coming along with HTML5 support in modern browsers. This event was organized by Marakana, Michael Tougeron from Gamespot, and Bruno Terkaly from Microsoft. Microsoft was the host and Marakana, Gamespot, Medallia, TEKsystems, and Guidewire Software sponsored the event. marakana.com From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 177 6 ratings Time: 50:44 More in Science & Technology

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  • Is Silverlight only for eye-candy, or does it have a use in business?

    - by Cyberherbalist
    Granted that Silverlight may make eye-popping websites of great beauty, is there any justification for using it to make practical web applications that have serious business purposes? I'd like to use it (to learn it) for a new assignment I have, which is to build a web-based application that keeps track of the data interfaces used in our organization, but I'm not sure how to justify it, even to myself. Any thoughts on this? If I can't justify it then I will have to build the app using the same old tired straight ASP.NET approach I've used (it seems) a hundred times already.

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  • what is message passing in OO?

    - by Tom
    I've been studying OO programming, primarily in C++, C# and Java. I thought I had a good grasp on it with my understanding of encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism (as well as reading a lot of questions on this site). One thing that seems to popup up here and there is the concept of "message passing". Apparently, this is something that is not used whilst OO programming in today's mainstream languages, but is supported by Smalltalk. My questions are: What is message passing? (Can someone give a practical example?) Is there any support for this "message passing" in C++, C# or Java?

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  • Books or help on OO Analysis

    - by Pat
    I have this course where we learn about the domain model, use cases, contracts and eventually leap into class diagrams and sequence diagrams to define good software classes. I just had an exam and I got trashed, but part of the reason is we barely have any practical material, I spent at least two good months without drawing a single class diagram by myself from a case study. I'm not here to blame the system or the class I'm in, I'm just wondering if people have some exercise-style books that either provide domain models with glossaries, system sequence diagrams and ask you to use GRASP to make software classes? I could really use some alone-time practicing going from analysis to conception of software entities. I'm almost done with Larman's book called "Applying UML and Patterns An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development, Third Edition". It's a good book, but I'm not doing anything by myself since it doesn't come with exercises. Thanks.

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  • How do you balance documentation requirements with Agile developments

    - by Jeremy
    In our development group there is currently discussions around agile and waterfal methodology. No-one has any practical experience with agile, but we are doing some reading. The agile manifesto lists 4 values: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan We are an internal development group developing applications for the consumption of other units in our enterprise. A team of 10 developers builds and releases multiple projects simultanously, typically with 1 - maybe 2 (rarely) developer on each project. It seems to be that from a supportability perspective the organization needs to put some real value on documentation - as without it, there are serious risks with resourcing changes. With agile favouring interactions, and software deliverables over processes and documentation, how do you balance that with the requirements of supportable systems and maintaining knowledge and understanding of how those systems work? With a waterfall approach which favours documentation (requirements before design, design specs before construction) it is easy to build a process that meets some of the organizational requirements - how do we do this with an agile approach?

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  • SAP Applications Run Better on Oracle Exadata

    - by jgelhaus
    To yield the results necessary to stay competitive, your business-critical applications must be able to access the most reliable and up-to-date information. That’s why a growing number of SAP application customers are turning to Oracle Exadata Database Machine for better performance, better productivity—and big savings. Watch our latest Webcast to find out why Oracle Exadata is the ideal platform for running your SAP applications. You’ll learn how you can: Increase the performance of SAP applications Enhance reliability with a centralized, scalable platform Ensure quick, safe, and easy deployments Watch it now. Highlights include customer case studies and practical deployment strategies. Watch our latest on-demand Webcast to find out why Oracle Exadata is the ideal platform for running your SAP applications. Learn how to increase the performance of SAP applications, enhance reliability with a centralized, scalable platform and ensure quick, safe and easy deployments.

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  • No wireless network recognized on a Dell Vostro 3560

    - by Itai
    I just installed Ubuntu 12.04 along with Windows 7 on the same laptop - Dell Vostro 3560. Now, on Windows 7 I can access to different wi-fi networks. However, when I am logging onto the Ubuntu section (after re-starting my laptop) - an error message appears: Disconnected - you are now offline When I take a look at my network menu (in the upper bar on the screen), I see that no network is found (and I have a few of them in the area. ). I tried to look around but really could not find a concrete practical solution to this specific problem, would appreciate any solution from anyone out there that had this problem and solved it.

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  • When would I use pseudocode instead of flowchart?

    - by user1276078
    I'm a student working with various techniques of programming, and I've come across pseudocode and flowchart. I know that these are both used in order to think through the problem before actually programming, but I have a few questions with this. When would I use pseudocode to plan out and when would I use flowcharts? Or is it better to do both before actually programming. Particularly for a small arcade sort of game in JAVA since that is my next project. I've noticed that pseudocode is very similar to the actual code rather than flowcharts. Would this make pseudocoding better because you essentially copy/paste the pseudocode into your program (of course, you have to change it to fit the language. I understand that part). Is it practical to use both of these while programming? Particularly the same game mentioned earlier. Thanks.

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  • Why are tools like git-svn that allow git to integrate with svn useful? [closed]

    - by Wes
    I have read these related questions: I'm a Subversion geek, why should I consider or not consider Mercurial or Git or any other DVCS? git for personal (one-man) projects. Overkill? ...and I understand why git is useful. What I don't understand is why tools like git-svn that allow git to integrate with svn are useful. When, for example, a team is working with svn, or any other centralised SCM, why would a member of the team opt to use git-svn? Are there any practical advantages for a developer that has to synchronize with a centralized repository?

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  • Liskov substitution and abstract classes / strategy pattern

    - by Kolyunya
    I'm trying to follow LSP in practical programming. And I wonder if different constructors of subclasses violate it. It would be great to hear an explanation instead of just yes/no. Thanks much! P.S. If the answer is no, how do I make different strategies with different input without violating LSP? class IStrategy { public: virtual void use() = 0; }; class FooStrategy : public IStrategy { public: FooStrategy(A a, B b) { c = /* some operations with a, b */ } virtual void use() { std::cout << c; } private: C c; }; class BarStrategy : public IStrategy { public: BarStrategy(D d, E e) { f = /* some operations with d, e */ } virtual void use() { std::cout << f; } private: F f; };

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  • How to choose the right web development language for my app without much programming experience?

    - by twinbornJoint
    I have my own idea for a web application, and I am not a programmer. The application will work similar to Facebook and Twitter, profiles and feeds. I have learned some computer science theory, all the way up to OOP, but have no practical experience. Without any experience, is there a way I can evaluate the different language and platform choices available to me? What kind of things should I be looking at? Ease of setup? How many followers it has? How can I evaluate whether a language will have the capabilities I need?

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  • How are you using the Managed Extensibility Framework?

    - by dboarman
    I have been working with MEF for about 2 weeks. I started thinking about what MEF is for, researching to find out how to use MEF, and finally implementing a Host with 3 modules. The contracts are proving to be easy to grasp and the modules are easily managed. Although MEF has a very practical use, I am wondering to what extent? I mean, is everyone going to be rewriting existing applications for extensibility? Yes, that sounds, and is insanely impractical. Rhetorically speaking: how is MEF affecting the current trends in programming? have you begun looking for opportunities to use MEF? have you begun planning a major re-write of an existing app that may benefit from extensibility? That said, my questions are: how do I know when I should plan a new project with extensibility? how will I know if an existing project needs to be re-written for extensibility? Is anyone using MEF?

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  • ASP.NET 3.5 Functions and Subroutines

    The most basic of all ASP.NET 3.5 server side scripts that I ve covered using the Visual Basic programming language is not modular in nature. This means that an ASP.NET 3.5 server will interpret the scripts in the Visual Basic file e.g Default.aspx.vb from top to bottom. In most real-world applications that use Visual Basic in ASP.NET websites however most web developers structure their programs in modules. This article will give you information about subroutines and functions along with practical examples and their advantages.... Cloud Servers in Demand - GoGrid Start Small and Grow with Your Business. $0.10/hour

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  • Live Webcast, Dec. 6: Enterprise Clouds with Oracle VM

    - by Monica Kumar
    Mark your calendar! On Tuesday, Dec. 6th at 9am PT, we are hosting a live webcast with Oracle VM experts. Enterprise Clouds with Oracle VM Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 9 AM US PT The ability to create a cloud leveraging public or private infrastructure has been hampered by the lack of availability of practical, cost-effective choices for server virtualization. In this session, you will learn how Oracle provides a single virtualization solution for your entire infrastructure, and how Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder help you manage Oracle Applications across the cloud. Also find out how virtualization was leveraged to transform IT for Oracle University and support more than 350,00 students in more than 40,000 classes each year. Those lessons have paved the path to private cloud computing inside Oracle. Speakers: Adam Hawley, Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle Dan Herrup, Principal Systems Engineer, Oracle Corporate Citizenship Register Now.

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