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• What's new in the RightNow November 2012 release?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  What new in the RightNow November 2012? In order to find out, please watch this tutorial with imbedded demonstration or read the November 2012 Release notes.   News Facts The November 2012 release of     Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service marks the completion of development efforts for 2012 and continues Oracle’s commitment to enhancing the Oracle RightNow offering following the acquisition. New release delivers key capabilities designed to help organizations improve customer experiences in order to increase customer acquisition and retention, while reducing total cost of ownership. Part of the Oracle Cloud, Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service now integrates Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service with Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service, helping organizations intelligently and proactively engage with customers through the right channel at the right time. Chat solutions have emerged as an important component of a cross-channel customer experience strategy. According to Forrester Research, Inc., chat adoption has risen dramatically between 2009 and 2011 from 19% to 37%, and it has the highest satisfaction level of all customer service channels at 62% satisfaction. (*) To help companies deliver enhanced customer experiences, Oracle has made significant investments in Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service throughout 2012. With the addition of rules-based engagement to existing capabilities such as co-browse, mobile chat, and cross-channel knowledge integration with the contact center, all delivered via the cloud, Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service is differentiated as the industry-leading chat solution. The Oracle Cloud offers a broad portfolio of software as-a-service applications, including Oracle Customer Service and Support Cloud Service, which is based on the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. New Capabilities Key Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service and other cross-channel capabilities include: Chat Business Rules, with over 70 built-in rule conditions, leverage the Oracle Engagement Engine to help enable organizations capture rich visitor data and invoke complex actions and triggers. Chat Business Rules allow granular control over when to engage a customer via the chat channel based on customer behavior, customer profile information and operational information. Click-to-Call provides the option for a customer to engage with a live agent over the phone during the Web browsing experience. Chat Availability Controls provide organizations with the ability to throttle volume through the chat channel based on real-time agent availability and wait time thresholds. This ability to manage the channel more efficiently allows organizations to provide a better experience to customers using the chat channel. Strategic and Operational Chat Channel Analytics provide better insight into channel and agent productivity and utilization and effectiveness with both out-of-the-box reports and ad hoc reports. New chat channel analytics provide comprehensive metrics with full data transparency. Background Service Updates improve high availability metrics for Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service during service update periods, setting the industry leading standard for sales and service delivery to customers via the chat channel. Additional Capabilities include: Improved Web developer tools for more efficient self-service user interface design Improved administration for enhanced user sessions management Increased cross-channel community collaboration Enhanced extensibility widgets and syndication management Streamlined content management and analytics capabilities Read the full announcement here

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• 14+ WordPress Portfolio Themes

  - by Edward

  There are various portfolio themes for WordPress out there, with this collection we are trying to help you choose the best one. These themes can be used to create any type of personal, photography, art or corporate portfolio. Display 3 in 1 Display 3 in 1 – Business & Portfolio WordPress Theme. Features a fantastic 3D Image slideshow that can be controlled from your backend with a custom tool. The Theme has a huge wordpress custom backend (8 additional Admin Pages) that make customization of the Theme easy for those who dont know much about coding or wordpress. Price: $40 View Demo Download DeepFocus Tempting features such as automatic separation of blog and portfolio content by template, publishing of most important information on homepage, styles to choose from and many more such features. It also provides for page templates for blog, portfolio, blog archive, tags etc. It has the best feature that helps you to manage everything from one place. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download SimplePress Simple, yet awesome. One of the best portfolio theme. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download Graphix Graphix is one of best word press portfolio themes. It is most suited to aspiring designers, developers, artists and photographers who’d like a framework theme, which has a great-looking portfolio with a feature-rich blog. It has theme option page, 5-color style, SEO option, featured content blocks, drop down multi-level menu, social profile link custom widgets, custom post, custom page template etc. Price: $69 Single & $149 Developer Package View Demo Download Bizznizz It boasts of many features such as custom homepage, custom post types, custom widgets, portfolio templates, alternative styles and many more. View Demo Download Showtime Ultimate WordPress Theme for you to create your web portfolio, It has 3 different styles for you to choose from. Price: $40 View Demo Download Montana WP Horizontal Portfolio Theme Montana Theme – WP Horizontal Portfolio Theme, best suited for creative studios to showcase design, photography, illustration, paintings and art. Price: $30 View Demo Download OverALL OverALL Premium WordPress Blog & Portfolio Theme, is low priced & has amazing tons of features. Price: $17 View Demo Download Habitat Habitat – Blog and Portfolio Theme. Unique Portfolio Sorting/Filtering with a custom jQuery script (each entry supports multiple images or a video) Multiple Featured Images for each post to generate individual Slideshows per Post, or the option to directly embed video content from youtube, vimeo, hulu etc. Price: $35 View Demo Download Fresh Folio Fresh Folio from WooThemes, can be used as both portfolio and a premium WordPress theme. The theme is a remix of the Fresh News Theme and Proud Folio Theme which combines all the best elements of the respective blog and portfolio style themes. View Demo Download Fresh Folio Features: Can be used to create an impressive portfolio. 7 diverse theme styles to choose from (default, blue, red, grunge light, grunge floral, antique, blue creamer, nightlife) The template will automatically (visually) separate your blog & portfolio content, making this an amazing theme for aspiring designers, developers, artists, photographers etc. Unique page templates types for the portfolio, blog, blog archives, tags & search results. Integrated Theme Options (for WordPress) to tweak the layout, colour scheme etc. for the theme Optional Automatic Image Resize, which is used to dynamically create the thumbnails and featured images Includes Widget enabled Sidebars. eGallery eGallery is a theme made to transform your wordpress blog into a fully functional online portfolio. Theme is perfectly designed to emphasize the artwork you choose to showcase. The design has been greatly enhanced using javascript, and is easy to implement. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download ProudFolio ProudFolio is a portfolio premium WordPress theme from Woo Themes. The theme is for designers, developers, artists and photographers who would like a showcase theme which would depict as a portfolio and also serves a purpose of blog. ProudFolio puts a strong emphasis on the portfolio pieces, allowing for decent-sized thumbnails, huge fullscreen views via Lightbox, and full details on the single page. The theme file also contains a choice of three different background images and color schemes. Price: $70 Single $150 Developer License View Demo Download Features: The template will automatically (visually) separate your blog & portfolio content. An unique homepage layout, which publishes only the most important information; Unique page templates for the portfolio, blog, blog archives, tags & search results. Integrated Theme Options (for WordPress) to tweak the layout, colour scheme etc. for the theme; Built-in video panel, which you can use to publish any web-based Flash videos; Automatic Image Resize, which is used to dynamically create the thumbnails and featured images; Custom Page Templates for Archives, Sitemap & Image Gallery; Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments; Integrated Banner Management script to display randomized banner ads of your choice site-wide; Pretty drop down navigation everywhere; and Widget Enabled Sidebars. Porftolio WordPress Theme A FREE wordpress theme designed for web portfolios and (for now) just for web portfolios. It is coming with an Administrative Panel from where you can edit the head quote text, you can edit all theme colors, font families, font sizes and you can fill a curriculum vitae and display it into a special page. Theme demo and download can be found here Viz | Biz Viz | Biz is a premium WordPress photo gallery and portfolio theme designed specifically for photographers, graphic designers and web designers who want to display their creative work online, market their services, as well as have a typical text blog, using the power and flexibility of WordPress. It is priced for $79.95. Theme Features: Premium quality portfolio template Custom logo uploader to replace the standard graphic with your own unique look from the WP Dashboard Integrated blog component (front images are custom fields and thumbnails, but you can also have a typical blog) Four tabbed feature areas (About Me, Services, Recent Posts, and Tags) Two home page feature photos (You choose which photos to feature using a WP category) Manage your online portfolio through the WordPress CMS Crop two sizes of your work: One for the front page thumbnails and another full size version and upload to WP Search engine optimized. Related posts:14 WordPress Photo Blog & Portfolio Themes 6 PhotoBlog Portfolio WordPress Themes Professional WordPress Business Themes

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• Massive Silverlight Giveaway! DevExpress , Syncfusion, Crypto Obfuscator and SL Spy!

  - by mbcrump

  Oh my, have we grown! Maybe I should change the name to Multiple Silverlight Giveaways. So far, my Silverlight giveaways have been such a success that I’m going to be able to give away more than one Silverlight product every month. Last month, we gave away 3 great products. 1) ComponentOne Silverlight Controls 2)  ComponentOne XAP Optimizer (with obfuscation) and 3) Silverlight Spy. This month, we will give away 4 great Silverlight products and have 4 different winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away: DevExpress Silverlight Controls – Over 50+ Silverlight Controls Syncfusion User Interface Edition - Create stunning line of business silverlight applications with a wide range of components including a high performance grid, docking manager, chart, gauge, scheduler and much more. Crypto Obfuscator – Works for all .NET including Silverlight/Windows Phone 7. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above! 4 winners will be announced on April 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. – Use Google Reader, email or whatever is best for you.  Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DevExpress Silverlight Controls Let’s take a quick look at some of the software that is provided in this giveaway. Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark for the DevExpress Silverlight Controls: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. Great Video Tutorials of the Silverlight Controls are here. One thing that I liked about the DevExpress is how easy it was to find demos of each control. After you install the controls the following Program Group appears complete with “demos” that include full-source.   So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. The Book – Very rich animation between switching pages. Very easy to add your own images and custom text. The Menu – This is another control that just looked great. You can easily add images to the menu items with a few lines of XAML. The Window / Dialog Box – You can use this control to make a very beautiful “Wizard” to help your users navigate between pages. This is useful in setup or installation. Calculator – This would be useful for any type of Banking app. Also a first that I’ve seen from a 3rd party Control company. DatePicker – This controls feels a lot smoother than the one provided by Microsoft. It also provides the ability to “Clear” the selection. Overall the DevExpress Silverlight Controls feature a lot of quality controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. If you win the contest you can simply enter your registration key and continue using the product without reinstalling. Syncfusion User Interface Edition Before we get started with the Syncfusion User Interface Edition, here is a couple of links to bookmark. The Live Demos can be found here. You can download a demo of it now at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/evalstart. After you install the Syncfusion, you can view the dashboard to run locally installed samples. You may also download the documentation to your local machine if needed. Since the name of the package is “User Interface Edition”, I decided to share several samples that struck me as “awesome”. Dashboard Gauges – I was very impressed with the various gauges they have included. The digital clock also looks very impressive. Diagram – The diagrams are also very easy to build. In the sample project below you can drag/drop the shapes onto the content pane. More complex lines like the Bezier lines are also easy to create using Syncfusion. Scheduling – Another strong component was the Scheduling with built-in support for Themes. Tools – If all of that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a nice pack of essential tools. Syncfusion has a nice variety of Silverlight Controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. Crypto Obfuscator The following feature set is what is important to me in an Obfuscator since I am a Silverlight/WP7 Developer: And thankfully this is what you get in Crypto Obfuscator. You can download a trial version right now if you want to go ahead and play with it. Let’s spend a few moments taking a look at the application. After you have installed Crypto Obfuscator you will see the following screen: After you click on Assemblies you have the option to add your .XAP file in: I went ahead and loaded my .xap file from a Silverlight Application. At this point, you can simply save your project and hit “Obfuscate” and your done. You don’t have to mess with any of the other settings if you don’t want too. Of course, you can change the settings and add obfuscation rules, watermarks and signing if you wish.  After Obfuscation, it looks like this in .NET Reflector: I was trying to browse through methods and it actually crashed Reflector. This confirms the level of protection the obfuscator is providing. If this were a commercial application that my team built, I would have a huge smile on my face right now. Crypto Obfuscator is a great product and I hope you will spend the time learning more about it. Silverlight Spy Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more. This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the four prizes available! Subscribe to my feed

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• Using CTAS & Exchange Partition Replace IAS for Copying Partition on Exadata

  - by Bandari Huang

  Usage Scenario: Copy data&index from one partition to another partition in a partitioned table. Solution: Create a partition definition Copy data from one partition to another partiton by 'Insert as select (IAS)' Create a nonpartitioned table by 'Create table as select (CTAS)' Convert a nonpartitioned table into a partition of partitoned table by exchangng their data segments. Rebuild unusable index Exchange Partition Convertion Mutual convertion between a partition (or subpartition) and a nonpartitioned table Mutual convertion between a hash-partitioned table and a partition of a composite *-hash partitioned table Mutual convertiton a [range | list]-partitioned table into a partition of a composite *-[range | list] partitioned table. Exchange Partition Usage Scenario High-speed data loading of new, incremental data into an existing partitioned table in DW environment Exchanging old data partitions out of a partitioned table, the data is purged from the partitioned table without actually being deleted and can be archived separately Exchange Partition Syntax ALTER TABLE schema.table EXCHANGE [PARTITION|SUBPARTITION] [partition|subprtition] WITH TABLE schema.table [INCLUDE|EXCLUDING] INDEX [WITH|WITHOUT] VALIDATION UPDATE [INDEXES|GLOBAL INDEXES] INCLUDING | EXCLUDING INDEXES Specify INCLUDING INDEXES if you want local index partitions or subpartitions to be exchanged with the corresponding table index (for a nonpartitioned table) or local indexes (for a hash-partitioned table). Specify EXCLUDING INDEXES if you want all index partitions or subpartitions corresponding to the partition and all the regular indexes and index partitions on the exchanged table to be marked UNUSABLE. If you omit this clause, then the default is EXCLUDING INDEXES. WITH | WITHOUT VALIDATION Specify WITH VALIDATION if you want Oracle Database to return an error if any rows in the exchanged table do not map into partitions or subpartitions being exchanged. Specify WITHOUT VALIDATION if you do not want Oracle Database to check the proper mapping of rows in the exchanged table. If you omit this clause, then the default is WITH VALIDATION.  UPADATE INDEX|GLOBAL INDEX Unless you specify UPDATE INDEXES, the database marks UNUSABLE the global indexes or all global index partitions on the table whose partition is being exchanged. Global indexes or global index partitions on the table being exchanged remain invalidated. (You cannot use UPDATE INDEXES for index-organized tables. Use UPDATE GLOBAL INDEXES instead.) Exchanging Partitions&Subpartitions Notes Both tables involved in the exchange must have the same primary key, and no validated foreign keys can be referencing either of the tables unless the referenced table is empty.  When exchanging partitioned index-organized tables: – The source and target table or partition must have their primary key set on the same columns, in the same order. – If key compression is enabled, then it must be enabled for both the source and the target, and with the same prefix length. – Both the source and target must be index organized. – Both the source and target must have overflow segments, or neither can have overflow segments. Also, both the source and target must have mapping tables, or neither can have a mapping table. – Both the source and target must have identical storage attributes for any LOB columns. 

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• How to Create a Task From an Email Message in Outlook 2013

  - by Lori Kaufman

  If you need to do something related to an email message you received, you can easily create a task from the message in Outlook. A task can be created that contains all the content of the message without requiring you to re-enter the information. Creating a task in Outlook from an email message is different from flagging the message. As it says on Microsoft’s site: “When you flag an email message, the message appears in the To-Do List in Tasks and on the Tasks peek. However, if you delete the message, it also disappears from the To-Do List in Tasks and on the Tasks peek. Flagging a message doesn’t create a separate task.” Using the method described below to create a task from an email message, the task is separate from the message. The original message can be deleted or changed and the related task will not be affected. In Outlook, make sure the Mail section is active. If not, click Mail on the Navigation Bar at the bottom of the Outlook window. Then, click on the message you want to add to a task and drag it to Tasks on the Navigation Bar. A new Task window displays containing the email message and allowing you to enter the subject of the task, the Start and Due dates, Status, Priority, among other settings. When you have specified the settings for the task, click Save & Close in the Actions section of the Task tab. When the Task window closes, the Mail section is still active. If you move your mouse over Tasks on the Navigation Bar, a snippet from the new task displays in a popup window (the Task peek). Click Tasks to go to the Tasks section of Outlook. The To-Do List displays with your newly-added task listed in the middle pane. The right pane displays the details of the task and the contents of the message included in the task (as pictured at the beginning of this article). Click on Tasks to see a complete listing of all your tasks, including the one you just added from your email message. Note that attachments in an email message added to a new task are not copied to the task. You can also create new tasks by dragging contacts, calendar items, and notes to Tasks on the Navigation Bar.     

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• BPEL 11.1.1.6 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite can either be custom integrations that you build yourself or prebuilt integrations from Oracle.  For more information about the differences between the two options for SOA integrations, see this previously-published certification announcement. There are five prebuilt BPEL business processes by Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 product teams: Oracle Price Protection (DPP) Complex Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (CMRO/AHL) Oracle Transportation Management (WMS, WSH, PO) Advanced Supply Chain Planning (MSC) Product Information Management (PIM/EGO) Last year we announced the certification of BPEL 11.1.1.5 for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA integrations.  The five prebuilt BPEL processes have now been certified with Oracle BPEL Process Manager 11g version 11.1.1.6 (in Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite 11g).  These prebuilt BPEL processes are certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 and higher. Note: The Supply Chain Trading Connector (CLN) product team has opted not to support BPEL 11g with their prebuilt business processes previously certified with BPEL 10.1.3.5.  If you have a requirement for that certification, I would recommend contacting your Oracle account manager to ensure that the Supply Chain team is notified appropriately.  For additional information about prebuilt integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3, please refer to the following documentation: Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle BPEL available in Oracle SOA Suite 11g (Note 1321776.1) Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g (11.1.1.6.0) Documentation Library Installing Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite Release Notes for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g (11.1.1.6) Certified Platforms Linux x86 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) Linux x86 (RHEL 5) Linux x86 (SLES 10) Linux x86-64 (Oracle Linux 4, 5, 6) Linux x86-64 (RHEL 5) Linux x86-64 (SLES 10)  Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (9, 10, 11) HP-UX Itanium (11.23, 11.31) HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) (11.23, 11.31) IBM AIX on Power Systems (64-bit) (5.3, 6.1, 7) IBM: Linux on System z (RHEL 5, SLES 10) Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) (2003, 2008)  Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (2008 R2) Getting SupportIf you need support for the prebuilt EBS 12.1.3 BPEL business processes, you can log Service Requests against the Applications Technology Group product family. Related Articles BPEL 11.1.1.5 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations Webcast Replay Available: SOA Integration Options for E-Business Suite Securing E-Business Suite Web Services with Integrated SOA Gateway

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• More Great Improvements to the Windows Azure Management Portal

  - by ScottGu

  Over the last 3 weeks we’ve released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Localization Support for 6 languages Operation Log Support Support for SQL Database Metrics Virtual Machine Enhancements (quick create Windows + Linux VMs) Web Site Enhancements (support for creating sites in all regions, private github repo deployment) Cloud Service Improvements (deploy from storage account, configuration support of dedicated cache) Media Service Enhancements (upload, encode, publish, stream all from within the portal) Virtual Networking Usability Enhancements Custom CNAME support with Storage Accounts All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Localization Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports 6 languages – English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese. You can easily switch between languages by clicking on the Avatar bar on the top right corner of the Portal: Selecting a different language will automatically refresh the UI within the portal in the selected language: Operation Log Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports the ability for administrators to review the “operation logs” of the services they manage – making it easy to see exactly what management operations were performed on them.  You can query for these by selecting the “Settings” tab within the Portal and then choosing the “Operation Logs” tab within it.  This displays a filter UI that enables you to query for operations by date and time: As of the most recent release we now show logs for all operations performed on Cloud Services and Storage Accounts.  You can click on any operation in the list and click the “Details” button in the command bar to retrieve detailed status about it.  This now makes it possible to retrieve details about every management operation performed. In future updates you’ll see us extend the operation log capability to apply to all Windows Azure Services – which will enable great post-mortem and audit support. Support for SQL Database Metrics You can now monitor the number of successful connections, failed connections and deadlocks in your SQL databases using the new “Dashboard” view provided on each SQL Database resource: Additionally, if the database is added as a “linked resource” to a Web Site or Cloud Service, monitoring metrics for the linked SQL database are shown along with the Web Site or Cloud Service metrics in the dashboard. This helps with viewing and managing aggregated information across both resources in your application. Enhancements to Virtual Machines The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Virtual Machines: Integrated Quick Create experience for Windows and Linux VMs Creating a new Windows or Linux VM is now easy using the new “Quick Create” experience in the Portal: In addition to Windows VM templates you can also now select Linux image templates in the quick create UI: This makes it incredibly easy to create a new Virtual Machine in only a few seconds. Enhancements to Web Sites Prior to this past month’s release, users were forced to choose a single geographical region when creating their first site.  After that, subsequent sites could only be created in that same region.  This restriction has now been removed, and you can now create sites in any region at any time and have up to 10 free sites in each supported region: One of the new regions we’ve recently opened up is the “East Asia” region.  This allows you to now deploy sites to North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously.  Private GitHub Repository Support This past week we also enabled Git based continuous deployment support for Web Sites from private GitHub and BitBucket repositories (previous to this you could only enable this with public repositories).  Enhancements to Cloud Services Experience The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Cloud Services: Deploy a Cloud Service from a Windows Azure Storage Account The Windows Azure Portal now supports deploying an application package and configuration file stored in a blob container in Windows Azure Storage. The ability to upload an application package from storage is available when you custom create, or upload to, or update a cloud service deployment. To upload an application package and configuration, create a Cloud Service, then select the file upload dialog, and choose to upload from a Windows Azure Storage Account: To upload an application package from storage, click the “FROM STORAGE” button and select the application package and configuration file to use from the new blob storage explorer in the portal. Configure Windows Azure Caching in a caching enabled cloud service If you have deployed the new dedicated cache within a cloud service role, you can also now configure the cache settings in the portal by navigating to the configuration tab of for your Cloud Service deployment. The configuration experience is similar to the one in Visual Studio when you create a cloud service and add a caching role.  The portal now allows you to add or remove named caches and change the settings for the named caches – all from within the Portal and without needing to redeploy your application. Enhancements to Media Services You can now upload, encode, publish, and play your video content directly from within the Windows Azure Portal.  This makes it incredibly easy to get started with Windows Azure Media Services and perform common tasks without having to write any code. Simply navigate to your media service and then click on the “Content” tab.  All of the media content within your media service account will be listed here: Clicking the “upload” button within the portal now allows you to upload a media file directly from your computer: This will cause the video file you chose from your local file-system to be uploaded into Windows Azure.  Once uploaded, you can select the file within the content tab of the Portal and click the “Encode” button to transcode it into different streaming formats: The portal includes a number of pre-set encoding formats that you can easily convert media content into: Once you select an encoding and click the ok button, Windows Azure Media Services will kick off an encoding job that will happen in the cloud (no need for you to stand-up or configure a custom encoding server).  When it’s finished, you can select the video in the “Content” tab and then click PUBLISH in the command bar to setup an origin streaming end-point to it: Once the media file is published you can point apps against the public URL and play the content using Windows Azure Media Services – no need to setup or run your own streaming server.  You can also now select the file and click the “Play” button in the command bar to play it using the streaming endpoint directly within the Portal: This makes it incredibly easy to try out and use Windows Azure Media Services and test out an end-to-end workflow without having to write any code.  Once you test things out you can of course automate it using script or code – providing you with an incredibly powerful Cloud Media platform that you can use. Enhancements to Virtual Network Experience Over the last few months, we have received feedback on the complexity of the Virtual Network creation experience. With these most recent Portal updates, we have added a Quick Create experience that makes the creation experience very simple. All that an administrator now needs to do is to provide a VNET name, choose an address space and the size of the VNET address space. They no longer need to understand the intricacies of the CIDR format or walk through a 4-page wizard or create a VNET / subnet. This makes creating virtual networks really simple: The portal also now has a “Register DNS Server” task that makes it easy to register DNS servers and associate them with a virtual network. Enhancements to Storage Experience The portal now lets you register custom domain names for your Windows Azure Storage Accounts.  To enable this, select a storage resource and then go to the CONFIGURE tab for a storage account, and then click MANAGE DOMAIN on the command bar: Clicking “Manage Domain” will bring up a dialog that allows you to register any CNAME you want: Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. One of the other cool features that is now live within the portal is our new Windows Azure Store – which makes it incredibly easy to try and purchase developer services from a variety of partners.  It is an incredibly awesome new capability – and something I’ll be doing a dedicated post about shortly. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• links for 2011-01-06

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Coming to your town: Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit During these full-day events, cloud experts will share real-world best practices, reference architectures, detailed customer case studies, and more. Events scheduled in cities around the world.  (tags: oracle otn cloud event) Webcast: Security and Compliance for Private Cloud Consolidation Roxana Bradescu, Senior Director for Oracle Database Security Products, discusses Oracle Database Security Solutions to securely consolidate data and meet compliance requirements within private cloud computing environments. Thursday, January 13, 2011. 10am PST | 1pm EST (tags: oracle cloud security) Answering Questions about Mobile Devices | The AppsLab "How do the numbers of Android and iOS users compare? How often are people switching? Where are all these BlackBerry and Nokia users? Do they plan to jump to Android or iOS? What about webOS? Is it relevant?" Some answers in this AppsLab survey. (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 mobilecomputing iphone blackberry android) Webcast: Achieve 24/7 Cloud Availability Without Expensive Redundancy Ashish Ray and Matthew Baier discuss Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture and Oracle Database 11g. (tags: oracle cloud highavailability webcast) Converting a PV vm back into an HVM vm (Wim Coekaerts Blog) "I wanted to convert one of my VMs that was based on a paravirt kernel into a vm that just boots as a regular hardware virt VM with a standard x86-64 kernel...It took me a little while to figure out the fastest way so now that I have it pretty much down I wanted to share the steps." - Wim Coekaerts (tags: oracle otn virtualization oraclevm) @OTN_Garage: Resources for VirtualBox 4.0 Rick "@OTN_Garage" Ramsey shares links to several resources for those with a VirtualBox jones. (tags: oracle otn virtualization virtualbox) 'Federal Service Bus' Helps Belgian Government Speak a Common Language - SOA in Action Blog "The first SOA-enabled application was developed in less than two months and was fully operational in approximately 10 weeks. In addition, new FSB modules are reusable for other Belgian e-government applications, saving both time and taxpayer dollars." - Joe McKendrick (tags: soa oracle) Show Notes: Architects in the Cloud (ArchBeat Podcast) The complete 4-part interview with Stephen G. Bennett and Archie Reed, the authors of "Silver Clouds, Dark Linings: A Concise Guide to Cloud Computing," is now available. (tags: oracle otn cloud podcast archbeat)

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• Set up a TFS Server/Service demo environment in less than 1 minute now!

  - by Tarun Arora

  Release Notes – http://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/  | Download | Source Code | Report a Bug | Ideas To Demonstrate the capabilities of TFS 2012 Server/Service Task board you would need to set up TFS with some teams, a few team members, some sample stories, tasks, etc. That’s too many steps if you as me! Hi! My name is Tarun Arora, I am a Microsoft MVP in Visual Studio ALM & a Visual Studio ALM Ranger, as a consultant I have had to demo TFS Preview to potential customers several times a day. I usually create the team project during the demo to show off how quick and efficient it is, but setting up teams, team members, tasks usually takes longer I don’t prefer carrying out these steps during the demo. I have developed a .net based console application which uses the TFS API to create a standard demo environment saving me from all these manual steps. The console application reads the set up information from an XML file, leaving the setup process highly customizable. Figure 1 – Demo Dictionary, change values here for unique setup The console application today sets up, 1. Create a new Team 2. Set the team as the default team 3. Configure team settings      a. Set Backlog Iteration path      b. Set Team Iterations and start & finish dates      c. Set Team Area path 4. Add Team Members 5. Add Product Backlog Items & linked Tasks. Image 2 – The team website before (on the left) and after (on the right) running the console app Image 3 – Team configuration before (on left) and after (on right) with new team Demo and 2 members Image 4 – Iteration configuration before (on left) and after (on right) with new backlog iteration path & sprint dates set Image 5 – Area configuration (on left) and after (on right) with area path configured for the team   Image 6 – A demo ready Task Board and Task Board for Team Members Credits, - Mattias Sköld [Visual Studio ALM Ranger] – I have used TfsTeamTools to perform team creation & add members - Ivan Popek – TFS 2012 API blog posts had some fantastic reusable samples.  - Shai Raiten [Microsoft ALM MVP] – Great collection of posts on TFS API. Enjoy!

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• Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.2.0.0.0 Released

  - by ACShorten

  The Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.2.0.0.0 has been released with Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing V2.4. This release includes new functionality and updates to existing functionality and will be progressively released across the Oracle Utilities applications. The release is quite substantial with lots of new and exciting changes. The release notes shipped with the product includes a summary of the changes implemented in V4.2.0.0.0. They include the following: Configuration Migration Assistant (CMA) - A new data management capability to allow you to export and import Configuration Data from one environment to another with support for Approval/Rejection of individual changes. Database Connection Tagging - Additional tags have been added to the database connection to allow database administrators, Oracle Enterprise Manager and other Oracle technology the ability to monitor and use individual database connection information. Native Support for Oracle WebLogic - In the past the Oracle Utilities Application Framework used Oracle WebLogic in embedded mode, and now, to support advanced configuration and the ExaLogic platform, we are adding Native Support for Oracle WebLogic as configuration option. Native Web Services Support - In the past the Oracle Utilities Application Framework supplied a servlet to handle Web Services calls and now we offer an alternative to use the native Web Services capability of Oracle WebLogic. This allows for enhanced clustering, a greater level of Web Service standards support, enchanced security options and the ability to use the Web Services management capabilities in Oracle WebLogic to implement higher levels of management including defining additional security rules to control access to individual Web Services. XML Data Type Support - Oracle Utilities Application Framework now allows implementors to define XML Data types used in Oracle in the definition of custom objects to take advantage of XQuery and other XML features. Fuzzy Operator Support - Oracle Utilities Application Framework supports the use of the fuzzy operator in conjunction with Oracle Text to take advantage of the fuzzy searching capabilities within the database. Global Batch View - A new JMX based API has been implemented to allow JSR120 compliant consoles the ability to view batch execution across all threadpools in the Coherence based Named Cache Cluster. Portal Personalization - It is now possible to store the runtime customizations of query zones such as preferred sorting, field order and filters to reuse as personal preferences each time that zone is used. These are just the major changes and there are quite a few more that have been delivered (and more to come in the service packs!!). Over the next few weeks we will be publishing new whitepapers and new entries in this blog outlining new facilities that you want to take advantage of.

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• Developing a Cost Model for Cloud Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in this post: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/  When writing software that is run on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering like Windows Azure / SQL Azure, one of the questions you must answer is how much the system will cost. I will not discuss the comparisons between on-premise costs (which are nigh impossible to calculate accurately) versus cloud costs, but instead focus on creating a general model for estimating costs for a given application. You should be aware that there are (at this writing) two billing mechanisms for Windows and SQL Azure: “Pay-as-you-go” or consumption, and “Subscription” or commitment. Conceptually, you can consider the former a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan, where you pay by the unit used (at a slightly higher rate) and the latter as a standard cell phone plan where you commit to a contract and thus pay lower rates. In this post I’ll stick with the pay-as-you-go mechanism for simplicity, which should be the maximum cost you would pay. From there you may be able to get a lower cost if you use the other mechanism. In any case, the model you create should hold. Developing a good cost model is essential. As a developer or architect, you’ll most certainly be asked how much something will cost, and you need to have a reliable way to estimate that. Businesses and Organizations have been used to paying for servers, software licenses, and other infrastructure as an up-front cost, and power, people to the systems and so on as an ongoing (and sometimes not factored) cost. When presented with a new paradigm like distributed computing, they may not understand the true cost/value proposition, and that’s where the architect and developer can guide the conversation to make a choice based on features of the application versus the true costs. The two big buckets of use-types for these applications are customer-based and steady-state. In the customer-based use type, each successful use of the program results in a sale or income for your organization. Perhaps you’ve written an application that provides the spot-price of foo, and your customer pays for the use of that application. In that case, once you’ve estimated your cost for a successful traversal of the application, you can build that into the price you charge the user. It’s a standard restaurant model, where the price of the meal is determined by the cost of making it, plus any profit you can make. In the second use-type, the application will be used by a more-or-less constant number of processes or users and no direct revenue is attached to the system. A typical example is a customer-tracking system used by the employees within your company. In this case, the cost model is often created “in reverse” - meaning that you pilot the application, monitor the use (and costs) and that cost is held steady. This is where the comparison with an on-premise system becomes necessary, even though it is more difficult to estimate those on-premise true costs. For instance, do you know exactly how much cost the air conditioning is because you have a team of system administrators? This may sound trivial, but that, along with the insurance for the building, the wiring, and every other part of the system is in fact a cost to the business. There are three primary methods that I’ve been successful with in estimating the cost. None are perfect, all are demand-driven. The general process is to lay out a matrix of: components units cost per unit and then multiply that times the usage of the system, based on which components you use in the program. That sounds a bit simplistic, but using those metrics in a calculation becomes more detailed. In all of the methods that follow, you need to know your application. The components for a PaaS include computing instances, storage, transactions, bandwidth and in the case of SQL Azure, database size. In most cases, architects start with the first model and progress through the other methods to gain accuracy. Simple Estimation The simplest way to calculate costs is to architect the application (even UML or on-paper, no coding involved) and then estimate which of the components you’ll use, and how much of each will be used. Microsoft provides two tools to do this - one is a simple slider-application located here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/  The other is a tool you download to create an “Return on Investment” (ROI) spreadsheet, which has the advantage of leading you through various questions to estimate what you plan to use, located here: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/msft/AutoLogin.do?d=176318219048082115  You can also just create a spreadsheet yourself with a structure like this: Program Element Azure Component Unit of Measure Cost Per Unit Estimated Use of Component Total Cost Per Component Cumulative Cost               Of course, the consideration with this model is that it is difficult to predict a system that is not running or hasn’t even been developed. Which brings us to the next model type. Measure and Project A more accurate model is to actually write the code for the application, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which can run entirely disconnected from Azure. The code should be instrumented to estimate the use of the application components, logging to a local file on the development system. A series of unit and integration tests should be run, which will create load on the test system. You can use standard development concepts to track this usage, and even use Windows Performance Monitor counters. The best place to start with this method is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics subsystem in your code, which you can read more about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sumitm/archive/2009/11/18/introducing-windows-azure-diagnostics.aspx This set of API’s greatly simplifies tracking the application, and in fact you can use this information for more than just a cost model. After you have the tracking logs, you can plug the numbers into ay of the tools above, which should give a representative cost or in some cases a unit cost. The consideration with this model is that the SDK fabric is not a one-to-one comparison with performance on the actual Windows Azure fabric. Those differences are usually smaller, but they do need to be considered. Also, you may not be able to accurately predict the load on the system, which might lead to an architectural change, which changes the model. This leads us to the next, most accurate method for a cost model. Sample and Estimate Using standard statistical and other predictive math, once the application is deployed you will get a bill each month from Microsoft for your Azure usage. The bill is quite detailed, and you can export the data from it to do analysis, and using methods like regression and so on project out into the future what the costs will be. I normally advise that the architect also extrapolate a unit cost from those metrics as well. This is the information that should be reported back to the executives that pay the bills: the past cost, future projected costs, and unit cost “per click” or “per transaction”, as your case warrants. The challenge here is in the model itself - statistical methods are not foolproof, and the larger the sample (in this case I recommend the entire population, not a smaller sample) is key. References and Tools Articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2010/02/10/windows-azure-billing-overview.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg213848.aspx http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2011/06/05/azure-faq-how-much-will-it-cost-me-to-run-my-application-on-windows-azure/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnalioto/archive/2010/08/25/10054193.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/02/08/qampa-how-can-i-calculate-the-tco-and-roi-when.aspx   Other Tools: http://cloud-assessment.com/ http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud_tools

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• What&rsquo;s new in RadChart for 2010 Q1 (Silverlight / WPF)

  Greetings, RadChart fans! It is with great pleasure that I present this short highlight of our accomplishments for the Q1 release :). Weve worked very hard to make the best silverlight and WPF charting product even better. Here is some of what we did during the past few months.   1) Zooming&Scrolling and the new sampling engine: Without a doubt one of the most important things we did. This new feature allows you to bind your chart to a very large set of data with blazing performance. Dont take my word for it give it a try!   2) New Smart Label Positioning and Spider-like labels feature: This new feature really helps with very busy graphs. You can play with the different settings we offer in this example.   3) Sorting and Filtering. Much like our RadGridview control the chart now allows you to sort and filter your data out of the box with a single line of code!   4) Legend improvements Weve also been paying attention to those of you who wanted a much improved legend. It is now possible to customize the look and feel of legend items and legend position with a single click.   5) Custom palette brushes. You have told us that you want to easily customize all palette colors using a single clean API from both XAML and code behind. The new custom palette brushes API does exactly that.   There are numerous other improvements as well, as much improved themes, performance optimizations and other features that we did. If you want to dig in further check the release notes and changes and backwards compatibility topics.   Feel free to share the pains and gains of working with RadChart. Our team is always open to receiving constructive feedback and beer :-)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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• Mixed Solaris 10 and 11 versions in logical domains on the same server

  - by jsavit

  One question that comes up frequently is whether you can mix Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 in different logical domains under Oracle VM Server for SPARC. The answer is yes depending only on the system software requirements for the underlying hardware platform. Different versions of Solaris 10 and 11 can exist side-by-side on the same server and can act as control, service, I/O or guest domains subject only to the minimum software levels documented in the System Requirements section of the Oracle VM Server for SPARC Release Notes. Here's an example just taken from a running system. First, here's the control domain, which is running Solaris 10. I've highlighted a guest running Solaris 11. # uname -a SunOS atl-sewr-24 5.10 Generic_147440-01 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220 # ldm -V Logical Domains Manager (v 2.1) Hypervisor control protocol v 1.7 Using Hypervisor MD v 1.3 System PROM: Hypervisor v. 1.10.0 @(#)Hypervisor 1.10.0 2011/04/27 16:19\015 # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- SP 16 4G 1.6% 120d 17h atl-sewr-pool-148 active -n---- 5001 8 2G 0.1% 119d 21h atl-sewr-pool-152 active -n---- 5000 8 4G 0.2% 112d 19h atl-sewr-pool-154 active -n---- 5002 8 2G 0.1% 120d 15h atl-sewr-pool-155 active -n---- 5003 16 2G 0.0% 26d 14h 30m This system is running Oracle VM Server 2.1 with a Solaris 10 control domain. Hmm, I should update this machine to 2.2 when I get a few free moments. Upgrading is very straightforward. Here's a display logging into the highlighted guest: Last login: Mon May 21 10:18:16 2012 from dhcp-adc-twvpn- Oracle Corporation SunOS 5.11 11.0 November 2011 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ uname -a SunOS atl-sewr-pool-152 5.11 11.0 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ cat /etc/release Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 SPARC Copyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Assembled 18 October 2011 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ sudo virtinfo -ct Password: Domain role: LDoms guest Control domain: atl-sewr-24 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ That's running the GA version of Solaris 11, so I probably should update that some time too. Note the use of the virtinfo -ct command that lets the guest get information about the hosting environment. Summary You can mix and match versions of Solaris in logical domains. All the different combinations work: Solaris 10 and/or Solaris 11 control and service domains with Solaris 10 and/or Solaris 11 guests. Mixing different guest OS levels on the same server is one of the traditional reasons for using virtual machines in the first place since virtual machines were invented some 40 years ago, used to run production and test systems in parallel while upgrading OS levels. This can easily be done with Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains).

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• Review: Backbone.js Testing

  - by george_v_reilly

  Title: Backbone.js Testing Author: Ryan Roemer Rating: $stars(4.5) Publisher: Packt Copyright: 2013 ISBN: 178216524X Pages: 168 Keywords: programming, testing, javascript, backbone, mocha, chai, sinon Reading period: October 2013 Backbone.js Testing is a short, dense introduction to testing JavaScript applications with three testing libraries, Mocha, Chai, and Sinon.JS. Although the author uses a sample application of a personal note manager written with Backbone.js throughout the book, much of the material would apply to any JavaScript client or server framework. Mocha is a test framework that can be executed in the browser or by Node.js, which runs your tests. Chai is a framework-agnostic TDD/BDD assertion library. Sinon.JS provides standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. They complement each other and the author does a good job of explaining when and how to use each. I've written a lot of tests in Python (unittest and mock, primarily) and C# (NUnit), but my experience with JavaScript unit testing was both limited and years out of date. The JavaScript ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, with new browser frameworks and Node packages springing up everywhere. JavaScript has some particular challenges in testing—notably, asynchrony and callbacks. Mocha, Chai, and Sinon meet those challenges, though they can't take away all the pain. The author describes how to test Backbone models, views, and collections; dealing with asynchrony; provides useful testing heuristics, including isolating components to reduce dependencies; when to use stubs and mocks and fake servers; and test automation with PhantomJS. He does not, however, teach you Backbone.js itself; for that, you'll need another book. There are a few areas which I thought were dealt with too lightly. There's no real discussion of Test-driven_development or Behavior-driven_development, which provide the intellectual foundations of much of the book. Nor does he have much to say about testability and how to make legacy code more testable. The sample Notes app has plenty of testing seams (much of this falls naturally out of the architecture of Backbone); other apps are not so lucky. The chapter on automation is extremely terse—it could be expanded into a very large book!—but it does provide useful indicators to many areas for exploration. I learned a lot from this book and I have no hesitation in recommending it. Disclosure: Thanks to Ryan Roemer and Packt for a review copy of this book.

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• Azure Diagnostics: The Bad, The Ugly, and a Better Way

  - by jasont

  If you’re a .Net web developer today, no doubt you’ve enjoyed watching Windows Azure grow up over the past couple of years. The platform has scaled, stabilized (mostly), and added on a slew of great (and sometimes overdue) features. What was once just an endpoint to host a solution, developers today have tremendous flexibility and options in the platform. Organizations are building new solutions and offerings on the platform, and others have, or are in the process of, migrating existing applications out of their own data centers into the Azure cloud. Whether new application development or migrating legacy, every development shop and IT organization needs to monitor their applications in the cloud, the same as they do on premises. Azure Diagnostics has some capabilities, but what I constantly hear from users is that it’s either (a) not enough, or (b) too cumbersome to set up. Today, Stackify is happy to announce that we fully support Azure deployments, just the same as your on-premises deployments. Let’s take a look below and compare and contrast the options. Azure Diagnostics Let’s crack open the Windows Azure documentation on Azure Diagnostics and see just how easy it is to use. The high level steps are:   Step 1: Import the Diagnostics Oh, I’ve already deployed my app without the diagnostics module. Guess I can’t do anything until I do this and re-deploy. Step 2: Configure the Diagnostics (and multiple sub-steps) Do I want it all? Or just pieces of it? Whoops, forgot to include a specific performance counter, I guess I’ll have to deploy again. Wait a minute… I have to specifically code these performance counters into my role’s OnStart() method, compile and deploy again? And query and consume it myself? Step 3: (Optional) Permanently store diagnostic data Lucky for me, Azure storage has gotten pretty cheap. But how often should I move the data into storage? I want to see real-time data, so I guess that’s out now as well. Step 4: (Optional) View stored diagnostic data Optional? Of course I want to see it. Conveniently, Microsoft recommends 3 tools to do this with. Un-conveniently, none of these are web based and they all just give you access to raw data, and very little charting or real-time intelligence. Just….. data. Nevermind that one product seems to have gotten stale since a recent acquisition, and doesn’t even have screenshots!   So, let’s summarize: lots of diagnostics data is available, but think realistically. Think Dev Ops. What happens when you are in the middle of a major production performance issue and you don’t have the diagnostics you need? You are redeploying an application (and thankfully you have a great branching strategy, so you feel perfectly safe just willy-nilly launching code into prod, don’t you?) to get data, then shipping it to storage, and then digging through that data to find a needle in a haystack. Would you like to be able to troubleshoot a performance issue in the middle of the night, or on a weekend, from your iPad or home computer’s web browser? Forget it: the best you get is this spark line in the Azure portal. If it’s real pointy, you probably have an issue; but since there is no alert based on a threshold your customers have likely already let you know. And high CPU, Memory, I/O, or Network doesn’t tell you anything about where the problem is. The Better Way – Stackify Stackify supports application and server monitoring in real time, all through a great web interface. All of the things that Azure Diagnostics provides, Stackify provides for your on-premises deployments, and you don’t need to know ahead of time that you’ll need it. It’s always there, it’s always on. Azure deployments are essentially no different than on-premises. It’s a Windows Server (or Linux) in the cloud. It’s behind a different firewall than your corporate servers. That’s it. Stackify can provide the same powerful tools to your Azure deployments in two simple steps. Step 1 Add a startup task to your web or worker role and deploy. If you can’t deploy and need it right now, no worries! Remote Desktop to the Azure instance and you can execute a Powershell script to download / install Stackify.   Step 2 Log in to your account at www.stackify.com and begin monitoring as much as you want, as often as you want and see the results instantly. WMI? It’s there Event Viewer? You’ve got it. File System Access? Yes, please! Would love to make sure my web.config is correct.   IIS / App Pool Info? Yep. You can even restart it. Running Services? All of them. Start and Stop them to your heart’s content. SQL Database access? You bet’cha. Alerts and Notification? Of course! You should know before your customers let you know. … and so much more.   Conclusion Microsoft has shown, consistently, that they love developers, developers, developers. What every developer needs to realize from this is that they’ve given you a canvas, which is exactly what Azure is. It’s great infrastructure that is readily available, easy to manage, and fairly cost effective. However, the tooling is your responsibility. What you get, at best, is bare bones. App and server diagnostics should be available when you need them. While we, as developers, try to plan for and think of everything ahead of time, there will come times where we need to get data that just isn’t available. And having to go through a lot of cumbersome steps to get that data, and then have to find a friendlier way to consume it…. well, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’d rather spend my time writing and developing features and completing bug fixes for my applications, than to be writing code to monitor and diagnose.

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• Challenge: Learn One New Thing Today

  - by BuckWoody

  Most of us know that there's a lot to learn. I'm teaching a class this morning, and even on the subject where I'm the "expert" (that word always makes me nervous!) I still have a lot to learn. To learn, sometimes I take a class, read a book, or carve out a large chunk of time so that I can fully grasp the subject. But since I've been working, I really don't have a lot of opportunities to do that. Like you, I'm really busy. So what I've been able to learn is to take just a few moments each day and learn something new about SQL Server. I thought I would share that process here. First, I started with an outline of the product. You can use Books Online, a college class syllabus, a training class outline, or a comprehensive book table of contents. Then I checked off the things I felt I knew a little about. Sure, I'll come back around to those, but I want to be as efficient as I can. I then trolled various checklists to see what I needed to know about the subjects I didn't have checked off. From there (I'm doing all this in a notepad, and then later in OneNote when that came out) I developed a block of text for that subject. Every time I ran across a book, article, web site or recording on that topic I wrote that reference down. Later I went back and quickly looked over those resources and tried to figure out how I could parcel it out - 10 minutes for this one, a free seminar (like the one I'm teaching today - ironic) takes 4 hours, a web site takes an hour to grok, that sort of thing.  Then all I did was figure out how much time each day I'll give to training. Sure, it literally may be ten minutes, but it adds up. One final thing - as I used something I learned, I came back and made notes in that topic. You learn to play the piano not just from a book, but by playing the piano, after all. If you don't use what you learn, you'll lose it. So if you're interested in getting better at SQL Server, and you're willing to do a little work, try out this method. Leave a note here for others to encourage them.  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Archbeat Link-O-Rama Top 10 Facebook Faves - June 16-22, 2013

  - by Bob Rhubart

  2,819 people now follow OTN ArchBeat on Facebook. These are the Top 10 most popular items shared there for the week of June 16-22, 2013. Getting started with Java EE 7: Hands-on in 10 minutes | Lucas Jellema Oracle ACE Director and prolific blogger Lucas Jellema offers his take on the Java EE7 release and shares tips and resources to help you on your way. Not ‘how’ but ‘why’ should you upgrade to JDeveloper & ADF 11.1.1.7.0 | Chris Muir Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall and Oracle ADF Product Manager Chris Muir collaborated on this dialog that just might help you in your decision. OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing - July 9, Redwood Shores, CA You won't need 3D glasses to see the technical sessions at OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing, July 9, 2013. Redwood Shores, CA. It's free! It's live! Register now! Video: Frédéric Desbiens: Bringing Java to On-Device iOS and Android Apps (QCon NYC 2013) Oracle Application Development Tools product manager Frédéric Desbiens recaps his QCon New York presentation about how Java developers can leverage existing skills to develop enterprise mobile applications. OEPE 12.1.1.2.2 with GlassFish Tools released | Peter Benedikovic Peter Benedikovic's brief post offers an overview of some of the features in the new version of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, released in conjunction with the release of Java EE 7. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Configuration Best Practices (Part 2 of 3) | Bethany Lapaglia Part 2 of Beth Lapaglia's 3-part series on the most commonly implemented configuration changes to improve performance and operation of a large Enterprise Manager 12c environment focuses on recommended WebLogic Server changes. Video: Doug Clarke: Polyglot Persistence: From NoSQL to HTML5 (QCon NYC 2013) Doug Clarke, EclipseLink Project Lead and Oracle Director of Product Management gives a very condensed version of his QCon New York presentation on "Polyglot Persistence: From NoSQL to HTML5." Podcast Show Notes: DevOps, Cloud, and Role Creep - Part 2 Automation and innovation had a huge impact on the manufacturing jobs of years gone by. Is something similar happening to some IT jobs? Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra, Basheer Khan, and Cary Millsap discuss what's happening in part 2 of this 3-part podcast. Video: Reza Rahman: Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 (QCon NYC 2013) Java EE/GlassFish evangelist Reza Rahman talks about how WebSocket provides "the basis for a new generation of interactive and live Web applications" for mobile developers. Lessons from Fusion HCM Implementations | Tim Warner Oracle ACE Tim Warner shares summaries of the Fusion HCM implementation experiences of several companies, as detailed in presentations at the 2013 Oracle HCM Users Group Conference. Thought for the Day "If the mind really is the finest computer, then there are a lot of people out there who need to be rebooted." — Tim Bryce Source: softwarequotes.com

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• How To Disable Individual Plug-ins in Google Chrome

  - by The Geek

  Have you ever wondered how to disable useless or insecure browser plug-ins in Google Chrome? Here’s the lowdown on how to get rid of Java, Acrobat, Silverlight, and the rest of the plugins you probably want to get rid of. Disabling Plugins in Google Chrome If you head to about:plugins in your address bar, you’ll probably see a list of plugins, but won’t be able to disable them yet. What you’ll need to do is switch over to the Dev channel of Chrome, which gives you access to all the latest features—though you might be warned that sometimes the dev channel might be less stable than the release or beta channels. Ready to proceed? Head to the Dev Channel page, and then click the link to run the installer. You’ll be prompted to restart Chrome when you’re done. Note that Mac and Windows users can both run an installer to switch. Linux users will have to install a package. Note: Once you’ve switched to the Dev channel, you can’t really switch to the stable channel. You’ll have to uninstall Chrome and then reinstall the regular version. Now that you’ve switched to the dev channel and restarted your browser, head to about:plugins in the address bar, and then just disable each plugin you really don’t need. Plugins you can generally live without?  Java, Acrobat, Microsoft Office, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight. These will be on a case-by-case basis, of course, but the vast majority of large websites don’t require any of those. When it comes right down to it, the only plugin that most people require is Flash… and leave the “Default Plug-in” alone too. Special thanks to @jordanconway for pointing out the solution. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable YouTube Comments while using ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single ClickAdd Notes to Google Notebook from ChromeAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar

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• Oracle at ASMC PDI 2012

  - by jeffrey.waterman

  Recently, I had the pleasure of representing Oracle at the American Society of Military Comptrollers National Professional Development Institute (PDI).  The PDI is the premier training event for resource managers in the Department of Defense and US Coast Guard.  Each year they assemble top presenters and key note speakers to convey their experiences and share the upcoming goals and vision for the Defense Department's financial and resource management community.  This year, the common themes were centered around 'auditability' and 'efficiency'.   What is auditability?  There were many definitions/themes tossed around, but to summarize my notes, it boiled down to:- the proper tracking of funds- audit readiness- proper controls- proper documentation There were sessions regarding entire programs focused on the need for auditability.  For example, FIAR: Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (http://comptroller.defense.gov/fiar/index.html)   The FIAR stresses the "...improve(ment of) the Department's financial processes, controls and information." The entire conference, one set of solutions kept popping into my head around, "how can Oracle's solutions assist the Department of Defense", or any other Federal Agency, improve their financial processes and controls?   One answer came to mind:  Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management. Commonly referred to as "GRC". Let me summarize the main components around Oracle's GRC solution: GRC Manager: This solution is the central repository for documenting business processes, policies, and established controls.  All identified risks and issues are documented within the repository as well as action plans necessary for mitigation. GRC Controls:  This solution consists of a set of tools which are embedded with your ERP (financial, human resource, supply chain, etc.) applications to detect, prevent, and/or enforce the policies and procedures established by your Agency.  Components of the solution include:- Application Access Control Governor: a robust tool for managing application roles and responsibilities; simplify segregation of duty maintenance- Configuration Controls Governor: complete audit trail for changes made to configurations- Transactions Control Governor: track violations of internal controls; alert management to suspicious activities; be warned when high dollar transactions are occurring on an irregular basis; - Preventative Controls Governor: prevent sensitive information from being viewed by unauthorized parties; enforce field, block, and form change control If you are in the financial or resource management community and are concerned about auditability within your organization I suggest you follow up this post by reading about Oracle's GRC solutions.  www.oracle.com/grc Please feel free to follow up with thought and questions in the comments section below.  Also, if you have a topic you would like addressed in this blog, just drop me a note at [email protected]  or leave the suggestion in the comment section as well. Thank you for reading.

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• Benchmarking MySQL Replication with Multi-Threaded Slaves

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 1145 6530 Homework 54 15 7660 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6. As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to: · Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data) · Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog) The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems deployed in cloud environments. Multi-Threaded Slaves are just one of many enhancements to replication previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which include: · Global Transaction Identifiers coupled with MySQL utilities for automatic failover / switchover and slave promotion · Crash Safe Slaves and Binlog · Optimized Row Based Replication · Replication Event Checksums · Time Delayed Replication These and many more are discussed in the “MySQL 5.6 Replication: Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services” Developer Zone article  Back to the benchmark - details are as follows. Environment The test environment consisted of two Linux servers: · one running the replication master · one running the replication slave. Only the slave was involved in the actual measurements, and was based on the following configuration: - Hardware: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 Server - CPU: 2 sockets, 6 cores with hyper-threading, 2930 MHz. - OS: 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.1 - Memory: 48 GB Test Procedure Initial Setup: Two MySQL servers were started on two different hosts, configured as replication master and slave. 10 sysbench schemas were created, each with a single table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (    `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,    `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',    `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    PRIMARY KEY (`id`),    KEY `k` (`k`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 10,000 rows were inserted in each of the 10 tables, for a total of 100,000 rows. When the inserts had replicated to the slave, the slave threads were stopped. The slave data directory was copied to a backup location and the slave threads position in the master binlog noted. 10 sysbench clients, each configured with 10 threads, were spawned at the same time to generate a random schema load against each of the 10 schemas on the master. Each sysbench client executed 10,000 "update key" statements: UPDATE sbtest set k=k+1 WHERE id = <random row> In total, this generated 100,000 update statements to later replicate during the test itself. Test Methodology: The number of slave workers to test with was configured using: SET GLOBAL slave_parallel_workers=<workers> Then the slave IO thread was started and the test waited for all the update queries to be copied over to the relay log on the slave. The benchmark clock was started and then the slave SQL thread was started. The test waited for the slave SQL thread to finish executing the 100k update queries, doing "select master_pos_wait()". When master_pos_wait() returned, the benchmark clock was stopped and the duration calculated. The calculated duration from the benchmark clock should be close to the time it took for the SQL thread to execute the 100,000 update queries. The 100k queries divided by this duration gave the benchmark metric, reported as Queries Per Second (QPS). Test Reset: The test-reset cycle was implemented as follows: · the slave was stopped · the slave data directory replaced with the previous backup · the slave restarted with the slave threads replication pointer repositioned to the point before the update queries in the binlog. The test could then be repeated with identical set of queries but a different number of slave worker threads, enabling a fair comparison. The Test-Reset cycle was repeated 3 times for 0-24 number of workers and the QPS metric calculated and averaged for each worker count. MySQL Configuration The relevant configuration settings used for MySQL are as follows: binlog-format=STATEMENT relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE As described in the test procedure, the slave_parallel_workers setting was modified as part of the test logic. The consequence of changing this setting is: 0 worker threads:    - current (i.e. single threaded) sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread and 1 x SQL thread    - SQL thread both reads and executes the events 1 worker thread:    - sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 1 x Worker thread    - coordinator reads the event and hands it to the worker who executes 2+ worker threads:    - parallel execution    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 2+ Worker threads    - coordinator reads events and hands them to the workers who execute them Results Figure 1 below shows that Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver ~5x higher replication performance when configured with 10 worker threads, with the load evenly distributed across our 10 x schemas. This result is compared to the current replication implementation which is based on a single SQL thread only (i.e. zero worker threads). Figure 1: 5x Higher Performance with Multi-Threaded Slaves The following figure shows more detailed results, with QPS sampled and reported as the worker threads are incremented. The raw numbers behind this graph are reported in the Appendix section of this post. Figure 2: Detailed Results As the results above show, the configuration does not scale noticably from 5 to 9 worker threads. When configured with 10 worker threads however, scalability increases significantly. The conclusion therefore is that it is desirable to configure the same number of worker threads as schemas. Other conclusions from the results: · Running with 1 worker compared to zero workers just introduces overhead without the benefit of parallel execution. · As expected, having more workers than schemas adds no visible benefit. Aside from what is shown in the results above, testing also demonstrated that the following settings had a very positive effect on slave performance: relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE For 5+ workers, it was up to 2.3 times as fast to run with TABLE compared to FILE. Conclusion As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver significant performance increases to MySQL replication when handling multiple schemas. This, and the other replication enhancements introduced in MySQL 5.6 are fully available for you to download and evaluate now from the MySQL Developer site (select Development Release tab). You can learn more about MySQL 5.6 from the documentation  Please don’t hesitate to comment on this or other replication blogs with feedback and questions. Appendix – Detailed Results

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• Retrieving a list of eBay categories using the .NET SDK and GetCategoriesCall

  - by Bill Osuch

  eBay offers a .Net SDK for its Trading API - this post will show you the basics of making an API call and retrieving a list of current categories. You'll need the category ID(s) for any apps that post or search eBay. To start, download the latest SDK from https://www.x.com/developers/ebay/documentation-tools/sdks/dotnet and create a new console app project. Add a reference to the eBay.Service DLL, and a few using statements: using eBay.Service.Call; using eBay.Service.Core.Sdk; using eBay.Service.Core.Soap; I'm assuming at this point you've already joined the eBay Developer Network and gotten your app IDs and user tokens. If not: Join the developer program Generate tokens Next, add an app.config file that looks like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration>   <appSettings>     <add key="Environment.ApiServerUrl" value="https://api.ebay.com/wsapi"/>     <add key="UserAccount.ApiToken" value="YourBigLongToken"/>   </appSettings> </configuration> And then add the code to get the xml list of categories: ApiContext apiContext = GetApiContext(); GetCategoriesCall apiCall = new GetCategoriesCall(apiContext); apiCall.CategorySiteID = "0"; //Leave this commented out to retrieve all category levels (all the way down): //apiCall.LevelLimit = 4; //Uncomment this to begin at a specific parent category: //StringCollection parentCategories = new StringCollection(); //parentCategories.Add("63"); //apiCall.CategoryParent = parentCategories; apiCall.DetailLevelList.Add(DetailLevelCodeType.ReturnAll); CategoryTypeCollection cats = apiCall.GetCategories(); using (StreamWriter outfile = new StreamWriter(@"C:\Temp\EbayCategories.xml")) {    outfile.Write(apiCall.SoapResponse); } GetApiContext() (provided in the sample apps in the SDK) is required for any call:         static ApiContext GetApiContext()         {             //apiContext is a singleton,             //to avoid duplicate configuration reading             if (apiContext != null)             {                 return apiContext;             }             else             {                 apiContext = new ApiContext();                 //set Api Server Url                 apiContext.SoapApiServerUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Environment.ApiServerUrl"];                 //set Api Token to access eBay Api Server                 ApiCredential apiCredential = new ApiCredential();                 apiCredential.eBayToken = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["UserAccount.ApiToken"];                 apiContext.ApiCredential = apiCredential;                 //set eBay Site target to US                 apiContext.Site = SiteCodeType.US;                 return apiContext;             }         } Running this will give you a large (4 or 5 megs) XML file that looks something like this: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">    <soapenv:Body>       <GetCategoriesResponse >          <Timestamp>2012-06-06T16:03:46.158Z</Timestamp>          <Ack>Success</Ack>          <CorrelationID>d02dd9e3-295a-4268-9ea5-554eeb2e0e18</CorrelationID>          <Version>775</Version>          <Build>E775_CORE_BUNDLED_14891042_R1</Build> -          <CategoryArray>             <Category>                <BestOfferEnabled>true</BestOfferEnabled>                <AutoPayEnabled>true</AutoPayEnabled>                <CategoryID>20081</CategoryID>                <CategoryLevel>1</CategoryLevel>                <CategoryName>Antiques</CategoryName>                <CategoryParentID>20081</CategoryParentID>             </Category>             <Category>                <BestOfferEnabled>true</BestOfferEnabled>                <AutoPayEnabled>true</AutoPayEnabled>                <CategoryID>37903</CategoryID>                <CategoryLevel>2</CategoryLevel>                <CategoryName>Antiquities</CategoryName>                <CategoryParentID>20081</CategoryParentID>             </Category> (etc.) You could work with this, but I wanted a nicely nested view, like this: <CategoryArray>    <Category Name='Antiques' ID='20081' Level='1'>       <Category Name='Antiquities' ID='37903' Level='2'/> </CategoryArray> ...so I transformed the xml: private void TransformXML(CategoryTypeCollection cats)         {             XmlElement topLevelElement = null;             XmlElement childLevelElement = null;             XmlNode parentNode = null;             string categoryString = "";             XmlDocument returnDoc = new XmlDocument();             XmlElement root = returnDoc.CreateElement("CategoryArray");             returnDoc.AppendChild(root);             XmlNode rootNode = returnDoc.SelectSingleNode("/CategoryArray");             //Loop through CategoryTypeCollection             foreach (CategoryType category in cats)             {                 if (category.CategoryLevel == 1)                 {                     //Top-level category, so we know we can just add it                     topLevelElement = returnDoc.CreateElement("Category");                     topLevelElement.SetAttribute("Name", category.CategoryName);                     topLevelElement.SetAttribute("ID", category.CategoryID);                     rootNode.AppendChild(topLevelElement);                 }                 else                 {                     // Level number will determine how many Category nodes we are deep                     categoryString = "";                     for (int x = 1; x < category.CategoryLevel; x++)                     {                         categoryString += "/Category";                     }                     parentNode = returnDoc.SelectSingleNode("/CategoryArray" + categoryString + "[@ID='" + category.CategoryParentID[0] + "']");                     childLevelElement = returnDoc.CreateElement("Category");                     childLevelElement.SetAttribute("Name", category.CategoryName);                     childLevelElement.SetAttribute("ID", category.CategoryID);                     parentNode.AppendChild(childLevelElement);                 }             }             returnDoc.Save(@"C:\Temp\EbayCategories-Modified.xml");         } Yes, there are probably much cleaner ways of dealing with it, but I'm not an xml expert… Keep in mind, eBay categories do not change on a regular basis, so you should be able to cache this data (either in a file or database) for some time. The xml returns a CategoryVersion node that you can use to determine if the category list has changed. Technorati Tags: Csharp, eBay

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• Community Outreach - Where Should I Go

  - by Roger Brinkley

  A few days ago I was talking to person new to community development and they asked me what guidelines I used to determine the worthiness of a particular event. After our conversation was over I thought about it a little bit more and figured out there are three ways to determine if any event (be it conference, blog, podcast or other social medias) is worth doing: Transferability, Multiplication, and Impact. Transferability - Is what I have to say useful to the people that are going to hear it. For instance, consider a company that has product offering that can connect up using a number of languages like Scala, Grovey or Java. Sending a Scala expert to talk about Scala and the product is not transferable to a Java User Group, but a Java expert doing the same talk with a Java slant is. Similarly, talking about JavaFX to any Java User Group meeting in Brazil was pretty much a wasted effort until it was open sourced. Once it was open sourced it was well received. You can also look at transferability in relation to the subject matter that you're dealing with. How transferable is a presentation that I create. Can I, or a technical writer on the staff, turn it into some technical document. Could it be converted into some type of screen cast. If we have a regular podcast can we make a reference to the document, catch the high points or turn it into a interview. Is there a way of using this in the sales group. In other words is the document purely one dimensional or can it be re-purposed in other forms. Multiplication - On every trip I'm looking for 2 to 5 solid connections that I can make with developers. These are long term connections, because I know that once that relationship is established it will lead to another 2 - 5 from that connection and within a couple of years were talking about some 100 connections from just one developer. For instance, when I was working on JavaHelp in 2000 I hired a science teacher with a programming background. We've developed a very tight relationship over the year though we rarely see each other more than once a year. But at this JavaOne, one of his employees came up to me and said, "Richard (Rick Hard in Czech) told me to tell you that he couldn't make it to JavaOne this year but if I saw you to tell you hi". Another example is from my Mobile & Embedded days in Brasil. On our very first FISL trip about 5 years ago there were two university students that had created a project called "Marge". Marge was a Bluetooth framework that made connecting bluetooth devices easier. I invited them to a "Sun" dinner that evening. Originally they were planning on leaving that afternoon, but they changed their plans recognizing the opportunity. Their eyes were as big a saucers when they realized the level of engineers at the meeting. They went home started a JUG in Florianoplis that we've visited more than a couple of times. One of them went to work for Brazilian government lab like Berkley Labs, MIT Lab, John Hopkins Applied Physicas Labs or Lincoln Labs in the US. That presented us with an opportunity to show Embedded Java as a possibility for some of the work they were doing there. Impact - The final criteria is how life changing is what I'm going to say be to the individuals I'm reaching. A t-shirt is just a token, but when I reach down and tug at their developer hearts then I know I've succeeded. I'll never forget one time we flew all night to reach Joan Pasoa in Northern Brazil. We arrived at 2am went immediately to our hotel only to be woken up at 6 am to travel 2 hours by car to the presentation hall. When we arrived we were totally exhausted. Outside the facility there were 500 people lined up to hear 6 speakers for the day. That itself was uplifting.  I delivered one of my favorite talks on "I have passion". It was a talk on golf and embedded java development, "Find your passion". When we finished a couple of first year students came up to me and said how much my talk had inspired them. FISL is another great example. I had been about 4 years in a row. FISL is a very young group of developers so capturing their attention is important. Several of the students will come back 2 or 3 years later and ask me questions about research or jobs. And then there's Louis. Louis is one my favorite Brazilians. I can only describe him as a big Brazilian teddy bear. I see him every year at FISL. He works primarily in Java EE but he's attended every single one of my talks over the last 4 years. I can't tell you why, but he always greets me and gives me a hug. For some reason I've had a real impact. And of course when it comes to impact you don't just measure a presentation but every single interaction you have at an event. It's the hall way conversations, the booth conversations, but more importantly it's the conversations at dinner tables or in the cars when you're getting transported to an event. There's a good story that illustrates this. Last year in the spring I was traveling to Goiânia in Brazil. I've been there many times and leaders there no me well. One young man has picked me up at the airport on more than one occasion. We were going out to dinner one evening and he brought his girl friend along. One thing let to another and I eventually asked him, in front of her, "Why haven't you asked her to marry you?" There were all kinds of excuses and she just looked at him and smiled. When I came back in December for JavaOne he came and sought me. "I just want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said, and I asked her to marry me. We're getting married next Spring." Sometimes just one presentation is all it takes to make an impact. Other times it takes years. Some impacts are directly related to the company and some are more personal in nature. It doesn't matter which it is because it's having the impact that matters.

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• Audio Stutters at gdm

  - by Allan

  Ok I have a problem every 2 times out of 3 I login (I cant be specific it fairly random) I get a Stuttering GDM warning (not the login sound just the Bell sound to wake you up) the only way to stop it is to login I have a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 1718 with a 2gig of memory (only hardware mod) using 10.10 Maverick and I have disabled KMS as my system was freezing as per the release notes. The only time this has happened before on the same machine was when I gave Kubuntu a try when 10.04 came out then it happened at the login screen and at random times while listening to music in any program. By the way audio is fine as is almost everything else once I have logged in. I would like an answer to this as I am an advocate of Ubuntu and its kind of embarrassing when the first thing that happens is *bing*. as requested Daniel alsa-info Pulse verbose log Not sure how useful the pulse log will be as I cant replicate the bug with a terminal open but I wouldnt be asking the question if I knew the answer so..... Edit 24/12/2010 ......been living on cocktail sausages and pickled onions for five days now made a make shift splint with cocktail sticks..... oops so updated the alsa drivers but I still get the same message in the dmesg No response from codec, disabling MSI: last cmd=0x10a90000 googleing it brings up a forum post from some other distro with a green logo the only common denominator seems to be graphics ie ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M which is why I have had to turn of kms as the chip is so old that small mice try to eat the "kernel" ;) funnily enough following the bug link at the end of the post, I found a comment about "Ubuntu Black Magic" so mabey I am coming at this from the wrong angle...... Bad Joo Joo any one. I will try the second part of Daniels Fix and Update with the result. The final Edit: (Plays air guitar) In the end neither of these solved the problem as such However I have given Roland a tick for reminding me of the solution and I gave Daniel the Bounty for the effort in trying to solve the problem. The answer for future readers was the enable the correct HD Audio Model I found the answer back when using Karmic Koala 9.10 in this forum post Amilo Li1718 Skype - Can't get it working... the model is options snd-hda-intel model=3stack position_fix=1 enable=yes which can be added to the end of alsa-base.conf thanks all for helping and hope anyone with a similar problem will find the answer here.

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• Web.NET: A Brief Retrospective

  - by Chris Massey

  It’s been several weeks since I had the pleasure of visiting Milan, and joining 150 enthusiastic web developers for a day of server-side frameworks and JavaScript. Lucky for me, I keep good notes. Overall the day went smoothly, with some solid logistics and very attentiveorganizerss, and an impressively diverse audience drawn by the fact that the event was ambitiously run in English. This was great in that it drew a truly pan-European audience (11 countries were represented on the day, and at least 1 visa had to be procured to get someone there!) It was trouble because, in some cases, it pushed speakers outside their comfort zone. Thankfully, despite a slightly rocky start, every session I attended was very well presented, and the consensus on the day was that the speakers were excellent. While I felt that a lot of the speakers had more that they wanted to cover, the topics were well-chosen, every room constantly had a stack of people in it, and all the sessions were pleasingly focused on code & demos. For all that the language barriers occasionally made networking a little challenging,organizerss Simone & Ugo nailed the logistics. Registration was slick, lunch was plentiful, and session management was great. The very generous Rui was kind enough to showcase a short video about Glimpse in his session, which seemed to go down well (Although the audio in the rooms was a little under-powered). Because I think you might need a mid-week chuckle, here are some out-takes.: And lets not forget the Hackathon. The idea was what having just learned about a stack of interesting technologies, attendees could spend an evening (fuelled by pizza and some good Github beer) hacking something together using them. Unfortunately, after a (great)10-hour day, and in many cases facing international travel in the morning, many of the attendees headed straight for their hotel rooms. This idea could work so beautifully, and I’m excited to see how it pans out in 2013. On top of the slick sessions, getting to finally meet Ugo and Simone in the flesh as a pleasure, as was the serendipitous introduction to the most excellent Rui. They’re all fantastic guys who are passionate about the web, and I’m looking forward to finding opportunities to work with them. Simone & Ugo put on a great event, and I’m excited to see what they do next year.

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• WPF Control Toolkits Comparison for LOB Apps

  In preparation for a new WPF project Ive been researching options for WPF Control toolkits.  While we want a lot of the benefits of WPF, the application is a fairly typical line of business application (LOB).  So were not focused on things like media and animations, but instead a simple, solid, intuitive, and modern user interface that allows for well architected separation of business logic and presentation layers. While WPF is mature, it hasnt lived the long life that Winforms has yet, so there is still a lot of room for third party and community control toolkits to fill the gaps between the controls that ship with the Framework.  There are two such gaps I was concerned about.  As this is an LOB app, we have needs for presenting lots of data and not surprisingly much of it is in grid format with the need for high performance, grouping, inline editing, aggregation, printing and exporting and things that weve been doing with LOB apps for a long time.  In addition we want a dashboard style for the UI in which the user can rearrange and shrink and grow tiles that house the content and functionality.  From a cost perspective, building these types of well performing controls from scratch doesnt make sense.  So I evaluated what you get from the .NET Framework along with a few different options for control toolkits.  I tried to be fairly thorough, but know that this isnt a detailed benchmarking comparison or intense evaluation.  Its just meant to be a feature set comparison to be used when thinking about building an LOB app in WPF.  I tried to list important feature differences and notes based on my experience with the trial versions and what I found in documentation and reference materials and samples.  Ive also listed the importance of the controls based on how I think they are needed in LOB apps.  There are several toolkits available, but given I dont have unlimited time, I picked just a few.  Maybe Ill add on more later.  The toolkits I compared are: Teleriks RadControls for WPF since I had heard some good things about Telerik Infragistics NetAdvantage WPF since both I and the customer have some experience with the vendors tools WPF Toolkit on codeplex since many of my colleagues have used it Blacklight codeplex project which had WPF support for the Tile View control  (with Release 4.3 WPF is not going to be supported in favor of focusing only on SilverLight controls, so I dropped that from the comparison) Click Here to Download the WPF Control Toolkits Comparison Hopefully this helps someone out there.  Feel free to post a comment on your experiences or if you think something I listed is incorrect or missing.  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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