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  • Blog Web Hosting Services in India

    Blog Hosting Services in India are quite new in comparison to the new trend that has started across the world of service providers providing services to host blogs. Blogs get written to describe thin... [Author: John Anthony - Computers and Internet - May 24, 2010]

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  • How do you automate a SharePoint 2010 deployment?

    - by Enrique Lima
    In the last couple of months SharePoint traffic (consulting, training and speaking) has picked up.  And with that also the requests for deployments.  There are good, great, bad and really bad things around this. But that is for another topic.  However part of the good and great has been the fact of organizations wanting to do a proof of concept deployment (even when WSS or MOSS has been deployed). We can go through a session (Microsoft has the SDPS concept, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services) of discovering what the customer wants to achieve from their investment in the platform and then also proceed to model the solution that would fit their needs.  But it should not stop there.  The next step should be a POC (as many have requested) to test out. Now, on to the meat of this post.  How do I deploy?  While it is a good process to watch and see all of it take place, not many have the time to sit through that.  Even more so, when that has been part of the description of deploying the platform in the sessions mentioned above. I will, though, break it into a deployment for development purposes and a deployment of a farm. Two tools (or scripts) for those two different types of deployment. First, let me address the development environment.  Around the last week in October, Chris Johnson (SharePoint Product Team) announced a SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers.  The kit itself will assist you in installing SharePoint Server (in standalone mode), the tools that go around Visual Studio, Expression Studio and the Office 2010 tools. Here is the link to Chris’ post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cjohnson/archive/2010/10/28/announcing-sharepoint-easy-setup-for-developers.aspx The other scenario is the use of a script in assisting you through the deployment of a farm. Now, this is not to override planning.  It should highlight the need for planning even more.  How?  Having your service accounts planned, the structure of the sites and the scale of your deployment.  Enter AutoSPInstaller.  This is a CodePlex project, and the intent behind this is not only to automate the installation but to give some meaning and get some sense out of what goes on during a SharePoint deployment. How?  Take for example the creation of the databases, when we do the initial OOB deployment by using the wizard, more times than not, we leave the names as they are.  How is that a “bad thing”?  Let’s make it a better practice to rename those Databases, and have them take on a name that is not “GUID-ized”. Having a better naming convention will not hurt, on the other hand will allow for consistency. Here is the link to AutoSPInstaller’s site on CodePlex: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/

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  • How to Overcome or fix MIXED_DML_OPERATION error in Salesforce APEX without future method ?

    - by sathya
    How to Overcome or fix MIXED_DML_OPERATION error in Salesforce APEX without future method ?MIXED_DML_OPERATION :-one of the worst issues we have ever faced :)While trying to perform DML operation on a setup object and non-setup object in a single action you will face this error.Following are the solutions I tried and the final one worked out :-1. perform the 1st objects DML on normal apex method. Then Call the 2nd objects DML through a future method.    Drawback :- You cant get a response from the future method as its context is different and because its executing asynchronously and that its static.2. Tried the following option but it didnt work :-    1. perform the dml operation on the normal apex method.    2. tried calling the 2nd dml from trigger thinking that it would be in a different context. But it didnt work.    3. Some suggestions were given in some blogs that we could try System.runas()   Unfortunately that works only for test class.   4. Finally achieved it with response synchronously through the following solution :-    a. Created 2 apex:commandbuttons :-        1. <apex:commandButton value="Save and Send Activation Email" action="{!CreateContact}"  rerender="junkpanel" oncomplete="callSimulateUserSave()">            Note :- Oncomplete will not work if you dont have a rerender attribute. So just try refreshing a junk panel.        2. <apex:commandButton value="SimulateUserSave" id="SimulateUserSave" action="{!SaveUser}"  style="display:none;margin-left:5px;"/>        Have a junk panel as well just for rerendering  :-        <apex:outputPanel id="junkpanel"></apex:outputPanel>    b. Created this javascript function which is called from first button's oncomplete and clicks the second button :-                function callSimulateUserSave()                {                    // Specify the id of the button that needs to be clicked. This id is based on the Apex Component Hierarchy.                    // You will not get this value if you dont have the id attribute in the button which needs to be clicked from javascript                    // If you have any doubt in getting this value. Just hover over the button using Chrome developer tools to get the id.                    // But it will show like theForm:SimulateUserSave but you need to replace the colon with a dot here.                    // Note :- I have given display:none in the style of the second button to make sure that, it is not visible for the user.                    var mybtn=document.getElementById('{!$Component.theForm.SimulateUserSave}');                                    mybtn.click();                }    c. Apex Methods CreateContact and SaveUser are the pagereference methods which contains the code to create contact and user respectively.       After inserting the user inside the second apex method you can just set some public Properties in the page,        for ex:- created userid to get the user details and display in the page to show the acknowledgement to the users that the User is created.

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  • Methods Of Blocking Or Preventing Blog Spamming

    Spam in blogs or comment spam are known as one of the most widely used forms of spamdexing in SEO or search engine optimization. This technique involves the use of blogs in which a spammer would manu... [Author: Margarette Mcbride - Web Design and Development - May 05, 2010]

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  • What is the Recognition of SEO Today?

    As a matter of fact, link building is the strongest recognition of search engine optimization over the World Wide Web these days. The truth of the matter is that it involves a wide range of techniques as well as options for the professional SEO experts such as article marketing, social media submission, blogs postings, blogs commenting, press release, forums, and directory submission.

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  • top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – November 2011

    - by JuergenKress
    Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity glassfish GlassFish Marek’s JAX-RS 2.0 content from Devoxx 2011 – bit.ly/sp2NJO chriscmuir chriscmuir New blog post: ADF bug: missing af:column borders in af:table for IE7 – t.co/81np2jug chriscmuir chriscmuir Reading: Oracle’s ADF Rich Client User Interface (RCUI) Guidelines – oracle.com/webfolder/ux/m… netbeans NetBeans Team Bottlenecks be gone! #Java Performance Tuning workshop in Munich w Kirk Pepperdine, Nov 29-Dec 2: ow.ly/7Akh5 OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Creating ADF Faces Comamnd Button at Runtime ow.ly/1fM9dE alexismp Alexis MP blogged "GlassFish Back from Devoxx 2011, Mature Java EE 6 and EE 7 well on its way" – bit.ly/rP8LV0 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Usage of jQuery in ADF dlvr.it/x3t84 20 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Webcast: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c: Developer Deep Dive – Dec 1 – 11am PT / 2pm ET bit.ly/t61W4G oraclepartners ORCL PartnerNetwork Brand new Oracle WebLogic 12c will launch on December 1, 10AM PT with a global Webcast highlighting salient… t.co/aflQQ3IX OracleBlogs OracleBlogs JDeveloper and ADF at UKOUG t.co/2CQTiB9n fnimphiu Frank Nimphius Attending UKOUG? All ADF sessions at a glance: t.co/TcMNTMXp 21 Nov Favorite Retweet Reply JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Free Webinar ‘ADF Task Flows for Beginners’, information and registration t.co/66jXnGgo via javafx4you javafx4you Java Developer Workshop #2 – Dec 1, 2011 @ Oracle Aoyama center in Tokyo t.co/8p9q3W2B AMIS_Services AMIS Services #vacature #Oracle #ADF ontwikkelaars. bit.ly/AMISADF Gun jezelf een nieuwe uitdaging? Meer op: dld.bz/azZ5N OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Launch Invitation: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c t.co/bRxCKwAk fnimphiu Frank Nimphius The brand new WebLogic 12c will be released on December 1st 2011 !!! Register for online launch event t.co/pPScg4Xh glassfish GlassFish Announcing Oracle WebLogic 12c – t.co/qh8TdFEl AdamBien Adam Bien Sun Coding Conventions–The Only Standard (Stop Inventing): Code written according to the Sun Coding Conventions… t.co/qaUWp5Mz wlscommunity WebLogic Community Launch Invitation: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c wp.me/p1LMIb-4y andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Custom Exception Registration for ADF BC EO Attribute fb.me/1m6nXQD52 MNEMONIC01 Michel Schildmeijer Blog by Michel Schildmeijer: "Oracle WebLogic 12c has been announced" bit.ly/vk6WQL glassfish GlassFish Tab Sweep – Coherence, SBT for GlassFish, OSGi in question, Java EE plugins, … t.co/tVIL95lj OracleBlogs OracleBlogs JavaFX 2.0 at Devoxx 2011 ow.ly/1fJ5iT JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Experimenting with ADF BC Application Module Pool Tuning dlvr.it/wjLC1 OracleWebLogic Oracle WebLogic Brand New #WebLogic 12c Launch Event, Dec 1 10am PT. Hasan Rizvi, SVP Fusion Middleware. Developer session. bit.ly/weblogic12clau… JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF PopUp and Esc/Cancel operations. ADF 11g dlvr.it/whrmC JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF BPM Workspace: issue loading ADF task flows t.co/vk1gKPx5 OpenJDK OpenJDK Kelly O’Hair — OpenJDK B24 Available : t.co/1bFws6Nw JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Oracle ADF setting Task flow to use same page definition file of caller page t.co/9k6UIoYZ JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Master Detail Data presentation and CRUD Operations. Detail records in an Editable Popup. ADF 11g t.co/H8uudR0Y JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Entity Attribute Validation Rule (Business Rule) based on Master View Object Attribute Example ADF 11g t.co/1agxEQcZ oracletechnet Justin Kestelyn Webcast: Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Launch/Developer Deep-Dive (Dec. 1) t.co/OVBdGKzC JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF How to render different node icons for different tree levels dlvr.it/wY2jL JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Query Component with ‘dynamic’ view criteria dlvr.it/wXlF1 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF How to play Flash .swf file in Oracle ADF application t.co/zaSONWAH Devoxx Devoxx Duke at the #Devoxx 2011 Noxx Party! pic.twitter.com/bVJWyu1Z brhubart Bob Rhubart Adam Leftik: JavaEE adoption continues to increase, reaching 40+ million downloads this year. #qconsf11 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Free #ODTUG Seminar – #ADF Task Flows for Beginners – sign up today. www3.gotomeeting.com/register/13372… java Java New Project: OpenJFX j.mp/tI4k3s #javafx #openjdk #devoxx << JavaFX is open source! /via frankmunz Frank Munz WebLogic 12c launch event Dec 1st. t.co/jQKinBqN brhubart Bob Rhubart Spring to Java EE Migration | David Heffelfinger feedly.com/k/td8ccG odtug ODTUG Mark your calendars and register for our upcoming webinars: bit.ly/dWKG1C ADF Task Flows & Measuring Scalability & Performance w/TCP myfear Markus Eisele Anybody willing to take this question? Using #JavaMail with #Weblogic Server bit.ly/stJOET AMIS_Services AMIS Services 20-22 december #training #Oracle JHeadstart #11g, productief ontwikkelen met ADF. Schrijf je in op: amis.nl/trainingen/ora… AdamBien Adam Bien Stress Testing Java EE 6 Applications – Free Article In Free Java Magazine: In the November / December 2011 issu… bit.ly/vmzKkc java Java New Tech Article: Spring to #JavaEE Migration t.co/0EvdHNxb OracleBlogs OracleBlogs WebLogic Java record SPARC T4-4 Servers Set World Record on SPECjEnterprise2010 t.co/Eu1b6ZE0 OracleBlogs OracleBlogs What Is JavaFX? ow.ly/1frb6I OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat The openJDK Windows Binary Download | Adam Bien ow.ly/7fRiG wlscommunity WebLogic Community WebLogic – Java record – SPARC T4-4 Servers Set World Record on SPECjEnterprise2010 glassfish GlassFish "youtube.com/java" blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/en… OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Beta Testing Concludes: 1Z1-102 – "Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: System Administration I" (Oracle Certification) ow.ly/7fJCl wlscommunity WebLogic Community A deep dive in Oracle WebLogic! @ Contribute – November 29th, 2011 Kontich Belgium wp.me/p1LMIb-4u glassfish GlassFish Gartner’s Latest Enterprise Application Server Magic Quadrant – Oracle’s leadership t.co/aYDqipD8 OpenJDK OpenJDK Terrence Barr – Open sourcing of JavaFX: OpenJFX Project proposed – bit.ly/uKVnEl OpenJDK OpenJDK Maurizio Cimadamore – Testing overload resolution: bit.ly/vgXAbQ java Java Java User Groups Roundup, November 2011 : t.co/hea6vVnk /via @robilad << in German JavaSpotlight The Java Spotlight Java Spotlight Episode 54: Stuart Marks on the Coinification of JDK7 goo.gl/fb/3UXoM OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Article Series: Migrating Spring to Java EE 6 | Arun Gupta bit.ly/twUJtz glassfish GlassFish New Java EE 6 Hands-On lab, Devoxx-approved! bit.ly/vup5uE java Java Brian Goetz’s enthusiasm for Java is palpable! #devoxx interview adf_emg ADF EMG "ADF testing with a mock framework" – what is a mock framework? Visit the forum and see: groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/… java Java Taping a bunch of interviews today with Java experts at #devoxx. View on Parleys.com tomorrow. glassfish GlassFish New screencast to configure and run a cross-machine cluster using GlassFish 3.1.1 in < 7 mins faissalb.blogspot.com/2011/11/glassf… (via @bfaissal) glassfish GlassFish Oracle Contributor Agreements – New Home! bit.ly/tD2eLo OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Java Magazine – by and for the Java Community- inaugural issue bit.ly/tTv8UD OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat The Heroes of Java: Michael Hüttermann | @MyFear bit.ly/rYYOFe javafx4you javafx4you Development with #JavaFX on #Linux j.mp/uOpe69 #not_for_the_faint_of_heart java Java Contribute Technical Questions for Java Experts at #devoxx bit.ly/up2cN0 netbeans NetBeans Team A simple REST service using #NetBeans 7, #Java Servlet, and #JAXB: t.co/pKkufsD8 AdamBien Adam Bien The most beautiful, and portable slide of the whole #jaxcon for "Die Hard Java EE 6"session checked-in: kenai.com/projects/javae… jaxlondon JAX London Mark Little’s (@nmcl) excellent keynote from #jaxlondon ‘Middleware Everywhere…’ is available in full – t.co/8vBmtDJ1 AdamBien Adam Bien Calculator sample from "Die Hard Java EE 6" #jaxcon session checked-in: t.co/0UqaULfg OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat ADF Faces – a logic bomb in the order of bean instantiations | @ChrisCMuir bit.ly/vjqRaZ OracleBlogs OracleBlogs ODI 11g y JMS Queue de Weblogic ow.ly/1fzfQJ frankmunz Frank Munz Which WebLogic book do you recommend? Review of S. Alapati’s WebLogic 11g Administration Handbook. bit.ly/rP0RtW JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF PageFlowScope with Unbounded Task Flows: the magic sauce for multi-browser-tab support in JDeveloper ADF applications dlvr.it/vNFgn OracleBlogs OracleBlogs 3 New ADF Insider Essential training videos published. ow.ly/1fz94q OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials book and eBook t.co/ykzwIaqs OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your Events t.co/qTgyEpY4 wlscommunity WebLogic Community Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials book and eBook andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Intern… andrejusb.blogspot.com/2011/11/stress… OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Frank Nimphius presenting a full day of Oracle ADF in Switzerland ow.ly/1fxU78 java Java #JavaEE and #GlassFish: #JavaOne11 Slides, Demos, Replays, Hands-on Labs t.co/tLM0ehrD OracleBlogs OracleBlogs weblogic.security.SecurityInitializationException: Authentication for user weblogic denied ow.ly/1fxmiu glassfish GlassFish The Last Migration – GlassFish Wiki : t.co/Dc5FT1SJ OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat A Successful Year of @MiddlewareMagic t.co/amcGGTTk OracleWebLogic Oracle WebLogic Unbeatable Performance for your Cloud Applications with Exalogic, #OracleCoherence and #WebLogic. ow.ly/7lYKm OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Passivation and Activation | @AndrejusB bit.ly/sASssL OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Review: "Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials" by Michel Schildmeijer | @MyFear t.co/ll6ra0J9 OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat GlassFish 3.1.2 themes and features | The Aquarium bit.ly/vVqr9r Andre_van_Dalen Andre van Dalen Masterclass: Advanced Oracle ADF 11g lnkd.in/M_45Pi AdamBien Adam Bien The "lunch" edition of RentACar is pushed into: kenai.com/projects/javae… #wjax AdamBien Adam Bien In munich, room munich at #wjax. Welcome to #javaee workshop. Gather your questions. 15 minutes to go lucasjellema Lucas Jellema Review by Markus of Michel’s book: t.co/41U9wvOb In short: valuable for novice WLS users, maybe not so much for die-hard WLS admin. biemond Edwin Biemond “@myfear: [blog] #Review: "#Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials" t.co/LsODcb3e” got the same conclusion on amazon glassfish GlassFish Practical advice for deploying Lift apps to GlassFish: bit.ly/t3KUml glassfish GlassFish The unbearable lightness of GlassFish t.co/v9307SEJ javafx4you javafx4you Building Java EE applications in JavaFX: JavaFX 2.0, FXML and Spring j.mp/tiMDUh andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Passiv… andrejusb.blogspot.com/2011/11/stress… wlscommunity WebLogic Community “@AMIS_Services: Follow @amis_services To Win a copy of SOA Suite 11g Handbook by @lucasjellema dld.bz/axD22 pls RT” excellent book! glassfish GlassFish GlassFish 3.1.2 themes and features bit.ly/uEc6uZ biemond Edwin Biemond Weblogic pre-sales exam was hard, you really need to know the versions , upgrade path and have a score above 80% monkchips James Governor The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java. JAX 2011 london keynote. how big data and the web are floating the boat. slidesha.re/u3Kzlo glassfish GlassFish Tab Sweep – Jersey, Hudson, GlassFish Hosting, GC’s compared, Spring to JavaEE, Modularity, … bit.ly/u9Cc30 oracletechnet Justin Kestelyn Oracle Tuxedo: A renewed acquaintance t.co/gp0mmf20 OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, OEPE 11.1.1.8 bit.ly/tC3eKp OracleBlogs OracleBlogs NetBeans HTML Editor and Groovy Editor in a Multiview Component (Part 2) ow.ly/1ftCeI myfear Markus Eisele [blog] #Oracle 2008 – 2011 in Gartners Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers t.co/2Bs1vgMZ myfear Markus Eisele [blog] #EclipseCon Europe – Java 7 in the Enterprise goo.gl/fb/r80df #ece2011 #java7 javafx4you javafx4you JavaFX 2.0 for Mac build b07 (developer preview) is available for download j.mp/vSwmBP Enjoy! #JavaFX #Mac OracleBlogs OracleBlogs A deep dive in Oracle WebLogic! @ Contribute November 29th, 2011 Kontich Belgium ow.ly/1fsEZs arungupta Arun Gupta #JavaEE7 slides from #jaxlondon and #jfall11 now available: slidesha.re/sh4iFq AdamBien Adam Bien Just checked-in the results of the #jaxlondon community night (somehow beer related): kenai.com/projects/javae… glassfish GlassFish GlassFish Podcast Episode #080 – User Stories, Part 3: Adam Bien and Sean Comerford (ESPN) blogs.oracle.com/glassfishpodca… glassfish GlassFish Story: t.co/jQPqihJb using GlassFish blogs.oracle.com/stories/entry/… "3000+ requests/sec" and more enterprisejava Java EE Mentions New blog post WebLogic deployment status checks for CI wp.me/pOOSs-F #weblogic #continuousintegration /vi… bit.ly/uZz0fk The become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please first login at http://partner.oracle.com and then visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress

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  • NRF Online Merchandising Workshop: Where Online Retailers Are Focusing for Holiday and Beyond

    - by Rose Spicer-Oracle
    0 0 1 1204 6863 Oracle Corporation 57 16 8051 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; 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;} Last month we attended the NRF Online Merchandising Workshop in LA, and it was a great opportunity to catch up with our customers, meet new retailers, and hear some great presentations from VF Corporation, Zazzle, Julep Beauty, Backcountry, eBags and more. The one-on-one conversations with Merchants and the keynote presentations carry the same themes across companies of all sizes and across verticals. With only 125 days left (and counting) until Black Friday, these conversations provided some great insight in to what’s top of mind for retailers during the most stressful time of their year, and a sneak peek in to what they will deliver this holiday season.  Some of the most popular topics were: When to start promoting for holiday: seems like a funny conversation to have in July, but a number of retailers said they already had their holiday shopping gift guides live on their site, and it was attracting a significant portion of their onsite traffic. When it comes to timing, most retailers were questioning when to begin their holiday promotions -- carefully balancing when to release pricing and specials, and knowing that customers are holding out for last-minute deals and price drops. Many retailers noted the frustrations around transparent pricing by Amazon and a few other mega-retailers last year, publishing their “lowest prices of the season” as early as October – ensuring shoppers that those prices were the best they could get all season long. Many retailers felt their hands were forced to drop prices. Others kept their set pricing with negative customer reaction, causing some to miss their holiday goals. The pressure is on, and most retailers identified November 1 as their target start date for the holiday promotions blitz. Some are even waiting for the big guys to release their “lowest prices of the season” guides and will then follow suit.      Attribution is tough – and a huge focus: understanding the path to conversion is a tough nut to crack, especially in the new omnichannel world where consumers use multiple touchpoints to make a single purchase, and internal management wants to know hard data. This has lead many retailers to invest in attribution; carefully tracking their online marketing efforts to determine what gets “credit” for the sale, instead of giving credit to the “last click.” Retailers noted that it is very difficult to determine the numbers when online and offline worlds collide – like when a shopper uses digital channels for research and then makes a purchase in a store. As one of the presenters from The North Face mentioned in her keynote, a key to enabling better customer service and satisfaction when it comes to converged online and offline sales is training the in-store staff, and creating a culture where it eventually “doesn’t matter what group gets the credit” if they all add to the sale. No doubt, the area of attribution will be a big area of retail investment in the coming years.      How to plan for the converged world: planning to ensure inventory gets where it needs to be was another concern. In conversations with retailers, we advised them to analyze customer patterns: where shoppers purchase items, where the items were sourced from and even where items are returned. This analysis is very valuable in determining inventory plans. From there, retailers can more accurately plan and allocate inventory to support both the online and offline customer behavior. As we head into the holiday season, the need for accurate enterprise-wide inventory visibility, and providing that information to associates, is even more critical to the brand-wide customer experience.       Improving the search / navigation / usability of the site(s): Aside from some of the big ideas and standard holiday pricing pressure, most conversations we had centered around continuing to improve the basics of the site. Reinvesting in search and navigation came up time and time again (FitForCommerce blogged about what a big topic it was at the event as well). Obviously getting shoppers on their path quickly and allowing them to find what they need fast is critical, but it was definitely interesting to hear just how much effort is still going in to honing the search and navigation experience. Adding new elements to search and navigation like typeahed, inventive navigation refinements, and new navigation categories like gift guides, specialized boutiques and flash sales were top of mind, in addition to searchandising and making search-driven product recommendations. (Oracle can help!)       Reducing cart abandonment: always a hot topic that is top of mind for every online retailer. Getting shoppers to the cart is often less then half the battle; getting them to click “buy” and complete the transaction is much more difficult. While retailers carefully study the checkout process and where shoppers tend to bounce, they know that how they design their checkout page is critical. We’re all online shoppers in our personal lives and we know how frustrating it can be when total prices are not transparent (i.e. shipping, processing, taxes is not included until the very last possible screen before clicking that buy button). Online retailers are struggling with where in the checkout process to surface the total price to be charged to reduce cart abandonment, while not showing the total figure too early in the process that it keeps shoppers from getting to checkout altogether. Recent research shows that providing total pricing prior to the checkout process dramatically reduces cart abandonment – as it serves as a filter to those shopping within a specific price band. Much of the cart abandonment discussion leads us to…       The free shipping / free returns question: it’s no secret that because of Amazon and programs like Prime, consumers expect free shipping, much to the chagrin of the smaller retailer. The reality is that if you’re not a mega-retailer, shipping is an expensive part of doing business that doesn’t allow most retailers to keep their prices low and offer free shipping. This has many retailers venturing out on the “free returns” path, especially in apparel. A number of retailers we spoke with are testing a flat rate shipping fee with free returns to see if they can crack the price threshold where shoppers are willing to pay for shipping with an added service. But, free shipping remains king.      Social ads and retargeting: they are working, but do they turn off consumers? That’s the big question. Every retailer we spoke with during a roundtable on the topic said that social ads and retargeting (where that pair of boots you’re been eyeing on a site magically follows you around the Internet) work and are meeting campaign goals. The larger question many retailers are asking is if this type of tactic is turning off a large number of shoppers, even if these campaigns are meeting their early goals. Retailers also mentioned that Facebook ads are working very well for them, especially when it comes to new customer acquisition, serving as a complimentary a channel to SEO when it comes to engaging new customers. While there are always new things to experiment with in retail, standard challenges are top of mind as retailers scramble to get ready for holiday. It will undoubtedly be another record-breaking online shopping season, but as retailers get more and more advanced with each Black Friday, expect some exciting things. This excitement needs to be backed by sound solutions and optimized operations. Then again, consumers are expecting more than ever, so I don’t doubt that retailers are already thinking about the possibilities of holiday 2015… and beyond. Customers who read this article, also found value in the following stories: Personalization for Retail: http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/personalization_for_retailShop Direct User Experience Focus Drives Sales:https://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/shop_direct_user_experience_focusMaking Waves: Australian Online Retailer SurfStitch: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracleretail/entry/surf_stitchWhat’s new in Oracle Commerce v11.1 for RetailWhat the Content+Commerce Equation is Missing

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  • New Enhancements for InnoDB Memcached

    - by Calvin Sun
    In MySQL 5.6, we continued our development on InnoDB Memcached and completed a few widely desirable features that make InnoDB Memcached a competitive feature in more scenario. Notablely, they are 1) Support multiple table mapping 2) Added background thread to auto-commit long running transactions 3) Enhancement in binlog performance  Let’s go over each of these features one by one. And in the last section, we will go over a couple of internally performed performance tests. Support multiple table mapping In our earlier release, all InnoDB Memcached operations are mapped to a single InnoDB table. In the real life, user might want to use this InnoDB Memcached features on different tables. Thus being able to support access to different table at run time, and having different mapping for different connections becomes a very desirable feature. And in this GA release, we allow user just be able to do both. We will discuss the key concepts and key steps in using this feature. 1) "mapping name" in the "get" and "set" command In order to allow InnoDB Memcached map to a new table, the user (DBA) would still require to "pre-register" table(s) in InnoDB Memcached “containers” table (there is security consideration for this requirement). If you would like to know about “containers” table, please refer to my earlier blogs in blogs.innodb.com. Once registered, the InnoDB Memcached will then be able to look for such table when they are referred. Each of such registered table will have a unique "registration name" (or mapping_name) corresponding to the “name” field in the “containers” table.. To access these tables, user will include such "registration name" in their get or set commands, in the form of "get @@new_mapping_name.key", prefix "@@" is required for signaling a mapped table change. The key and the "mapping name" are separated by a configurable delimiter, by default, it is ".". So the syntax is: get [@@mapping_name.]key_name set [@@mapping_name.]key_name  or  get @@mapping_name set @@mapping_name Here is an example: Let's set up three tables in the "containers" table: The first is a map to InnoDB table "test/demo_test" table with mapping name "setup_1" INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_1", "test", "demo_test", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "PRIMARY");  Similarly, we set up table mappings for table "test/new_demo" with name "setup_2" and that to table "mydatabase/my_demo" with name "setup_3": INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_2", "test", "new_demo", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "secondary_index_x"); INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_3", "my_database", "my_demo", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "idx"); To switch to table "my_database/my_demo", and get the value corresponding to “key_a”, user will do: get @@setup_3.key_a (this will also output the value that corresponding to key "key_a" or simply get @@setup_3 Once this is done, this connection will switch to "my_database/my_demo" table until another table mapping switch is requested. so it can continue issue regular command like: get key_b  set key_c 0 0 7 These DMLs will all be directed to "my_database/my_demo" table. And this also implies that different connections can have different bindings (to different table). 2) Delimiter: For the delimiter "." that separates the "mapping name" and key value, we also added a configure option in the "config_options" system table with name of "table_map_delimiter": INSERT INTO config_options VALUES("table_map_delimiter", "."); So if user wants to change to a different delimiter, they can change it in the config_option table. 3) Default mapping: Once we have multiple table mapping, there should be always a "default" map setting. For this, we decided if there exists a mapping name of "default", then this will be chosen as default mapping. Otherwise, the first row of the containers table will chosen as default setting. Please note, user tables can be repeated in the "containers" table (for example, user wants to access different columns of the table in different settings), as long as they are using different mapping/configure names in the first column, which is enforced by a unique index. 4) bind command In addition, we also extend the protocol and added a bind command, its usage is fairly straightforward. To switch to "setup_3" mapping above, you simply issue: bind setup_3 This will switch this connection's InnoDB table to "my_database/my_demo" In summary, with this feature, you now can direct access to difference tables with difference session. And even a single connection, you can query into difference tables. Background thread to auto-commit long running transactions This is a feature related to the “batch” concept we discussed in earlier blogs. This “batch” feature allows us batch the read and write operations, and commit them only after certain calls. The “batch” size is controlled by the configure parameter “daemon_memcached_w_batch_size” and “daemon_memcached_r_batch_size”. This could significantly boost performance. However, it also comes with some disadvantages, for example, you will not be able to view “uncommitted” operations from SQL end unless you set transaction isolation level to read_uncommitted, and in addition, this will held certain row locks for extend period of time that might reduce the concurrency. To deal with this, we introduce a background thread that “auto-commits” the transaction if they are idle for certain amount of time (default is 5 seconds). The background thread will wake up every second and loop through every “connections” opened by Memcached, and check for idle transactions. And if such transaction is idle longer than certain limit and not being used, it will commit such transactions. This limit is configurable by change “innodb_api_bk_commit_interval”. Its default value is 5 seconds, and minimum is 1 second, and maximum is 1073741824 seconds. With the help of such background thread, you will not need to worry about long running uncommitted transactions when set daemon_memcached_w_batch_size and daemon_memcached_r_batch_size to a large number. This also reduces the number of locks that could be held due to long running transactions, and thus further increase the concurrency. Enhancement in binlog performance As you might all know, binlog operation is not done by InnoDB storage engine, rather it is handled in the MySQL layer. In order to support binlog operation through InnoDB Memcached, we would have to artificially create some MySQL constructs in order to access binlog handler APIs. In previous lab release, for simplicity consideration, we open and destroy these MySQL constructs (such as THD) for each operations. This required us to set the “batch” size always to 1 when binlog is on, no matter what “daemon_memcached_w_batch_size” and “daemon_memcached_r_batch_size” are configured to. This put a big restriction on our capability to scale, and also there are quite a bit overhead in creating destroying such constructs that bogs the performance down. With this release, we made necessary change that would keep MySQL constructs as long as they are valid for a particular connection. So there will not be repeated and redundant open and close (table) calls. And now even with binlog option is enabled (with innodb_api_enable_binlog,), we still can batch the transactions with daemon_memcached_w_batch_size and daemon_memcached_r_batch_size, thus scale the write/read performance. Although there are still overheads that makes InnoDB Memcached cannot perform as fast as when binlog is turned off. It is much better off comparing to previous release. And we are continuing optimize the solution is this area to improve the performance as much as possible. Performance Study: Amerandra of our System QA team have conducted some performance studies on queries through our InnoDB Memcached connection and plain SQL end. And it shows some interesting results. The test is conducted on a “Linux 2.6.32-300.7.1.el6uek.x86_64 ix86 (64)” machine with 16 GB Memory, Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz CPU X86_64 2 CPUs- 4 Core Each, 2 RAID DISKS (1027 GB,733.9GB). Results are described in following tables: Table 1: Performance comparison on Set operations Connections 5.6.7-RC-Memcached-plugin ( TPS / Qps) with memcached-threads=8*** 5.6.7-RC* X faster Set (QPS) Set** 8 30,000 5,600 5.36 32 59,000 13,000 4.54 128 68,000 8,000 8.50 512 63,000 6.800 9.23 * mysql-5.6.7-rc-linux2.6-x86_64 ** The “set” operation when implemented in InnoDB Memcached involves a couple of DMLs: it first query the table to see whether the “key” exists, if it does not, the new key/value pair will be inserted. If it does exist, the “value” field of matching row (by key) will be updated. So when used in above query, it is a precompiled store procedure, and query will just execute such procedures. *** added “–daemon_memcached_option=-t8” (default is 4 threads) So we can see with this “set” query, InnoDB Memcached can run 4.5 to 9 time faster than MySQL server. Table 2: Performance comparison on Get operations Connections 5.6.7-RC-Memcached-plugin ( TPS / Qps) with memcached-threads=8 5.6.7-RC* X faster Get (QPS) Get 8 42,000 27,000 1.56 32 101,000 55.000 1.83 128 117,000 52,000 2.25 512 109,000 52,000 2.10 With the “get” query (or the select query), memcached performs 1.5 to 2 times faster than normal SQL. Summary: In summary, we added several much-desired features to InnoDB Memcached in this release, allowing user to operate on different tables with this Memcached interface. We also now provide a background commit thread to commit long running idle transactions, thus allow user to configure large batch write/read without worrying about large number of rows held or not being able to see (uncommit) data. We also greatly enhanced the performance when Binlog is enabled. We will continue making efforts in both performance enhancement and functionality areas to make InnoDB Memcached a good demo case for our InnoDB APIs. Jimmy Yang, September 29, 2012

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  • Solving Big Problems with Oracle R Enterprise, Part II

    - by dbayard
    Part II – Solving Big Problems with Oracle R Enterprise In the first post in this series (see https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/solving_big_problems_with_oracle), we showed how you can use R to perform historical rate of return calculations against investment data sourced from a spreadsheet.  We demonstrated the calculations against sample data for a small set of accounts.  While this worked fine, in the real-world the problem is much bigger because the amount of data is much bigger.  So much bigger that our approach in the previous post won’t scale to meet the real-world needs. From our previous post, here are the challenges we need to conquer: The actual data that needs to be used lives in a database, not in a spreadsheet The actual data is much, much bigger- too big to fit into the normal R memory space and too big to want to move across the network The overall process needs to run fast- much faster than a single processor The actual data needs to be kept secured- another reason to not want to move it from the database and across the network And the process of calculating the IRR needs to be integrated together with other database ETL activities, so that IRR’s can be calculated as part of the data warehouse refresh processes In this post, we will show how we moved from sample data environment to working with full-scale data.  This post is based on actual work we did for a financial services customer during a recent proof-of-concept. Getting started with the Database At this point, we have some sample data and our IRR function.  We were at a similar point in our customer proof-of-concept exercise- we had sample data but we did not have the full customer data yet.  So our database was empty.  But, this was easily rectified by leveraging the transparency features of Oracle R Enterprise (see https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/analyzing_big_data_using_the).  The following code shows how we took our sample data SimpleMWRRData and easily turned it into a new Oracle database table called IRR_DATA via ore.create().  The code also shows how we can access the database table IRR_DATA as if it was a normal R data.frame named IRR_DATA. If we go to sql*plus, we can also check out our new IRR_DATA table: At this point, we now have our sample data loaded in the database as a normal Oracle table called IRR_DATA.  So, we now proceeded to test our R function working with database data. As our first test, we retrieved the data from a single account from the IRR_DATA table, pull it into local R memory, then call our IRR function.  This worked.  No SQL coding required! Going from Crawling to Walking Now that we have shown using our R code with database-resident data for a single account, we wanted to experiment with doing this for multiple accounts.  In other words, we wanted to implement the split-apply-combine technique we discussed in our first post in this series.  Fortunately, Oracle R Enterprise provides a very scalable way to do this with a function called ore.groupApply().  You can read more about ore.groupApply() here: https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/analyzing_big_data_using_the1 Here is an example of how we ask ORE to take our IRR_DATA table in the database, split it by the ACCOUNT column, apply a function that calls our SimpleMWRR() calculation, and then combine the results. (If you are following along at home, be sure to have installed our myIRR package on your database server via  “R CMD INSTALL myIRR”). The interesting thing about ore.groupApply is that the calculation is not actually performed in my desktop R environment from which I am running.  What actually happens is that ore.groupApply uses the Oracle database to perform the work.  And the Oracle database is what actually splits the IRR_DATA table by ACCOUNT.  Then the Oracle database takes the data for each account and sends it to an embedded R engine running on the database server to apply our R function.  Then the Oracle database combines all the individual results from the calls to the R function. This is significant because now the embedded R engine only needs to deal with the data for a single account at a time.  Regardless of whether we have 20 accounts or 1 million accounts or more, the R engine that performs the calculation does not care.  Given that normal R has a finite amount of memory to hold data, the ore.groupApply approach overcomes the R memory scalability problem since we only need to fit the data from a single account in R memory (not all of the data for all of the accounts). Additionally, the IRR_DATA does not need to be sent from the database to my desktop R program.  Even though I am invoking ore.groupApply from my desktop R program, because the actual SimpleMWRR calculation is run by the embedded R engine on the database server, the IRR_DATA does not need to leave the database server- this is both a performance benefit because network transmission of large amounts of data take time and a security benefit because it is harder to protect private data once you start shipping around your intranet. Another benefit, which we will discuss in a few paragraphs, is the ability to leverage Oracle database parallelism to run these calculations for dozens of accounts at once. From Walking to Running ore.groupApply is rather nice, but it still has the drawback that I run this from a desktop R instance.  This is not ideal for integrating into typical operational processes like nightly data warehouse refreshes or monthly statement generation.  But, this is not an issue for ORE.  Oracle R Enterprise lets us run this from the database using regular SQL, which is easily integrated into standard operations.  That is extremely exciting and the way we actually did these calculations in the customer proof. As part of Oracle R Enterprise, it provides a SQL equivalent to ore.groupApply which it refers to as “rqGroupEval”.  To use rqGroupEval via SQL, there is a bit of simple setup needed.  Basically, the Oracle Database needs to know the structure of the input table and the grouping column, which we are able to define using the database’s pipeline table function mechanisms. Here is the setup script: At this point, our initial setup of rqGroupEval is done for the IRR_DATA table.  The next step is to define our R function to the database.  We do that via a call to ORE’s rqScriptCreate. Now we can test it.  The SQL you use to run rqGroupEval uses the Oracle database pipeline table function syntax.  The first argument to irr_dataGroupEval is a cursor defining our input.  You can add additional where clauses and subqueries to this cursor as appropriate.  The second argument is any additional inputs to the R function.  The third argument is the text of a dummy select statement.  The dummy select statement is used by the database to identify the columns and datatypes to expect the R function to return.  The fourth argument is the column of the input table to split/group by.  The final argument is the name of the R function as you defined it when you called rqScriptCreate(). The Real-World Results In our real customer proof-of-concept, we had more sophisticated calculation requirements than shown in this simplified blog example.  For instance, we had to perform the rate of return calculations for 5 separate time periods, so the R code was enhanced to do so.  In addition, some accounts needed a time-weighted rate of return to be calculated, so we extended our approach and added an R function to do that.  And finally, there were also a few more real-world data irregularities that we needed to account for, so we added logic to our R functions to deal with those exceptions.  For the full-scale customer test, we loaded the customer data onto a Half-Rack Exadata X2-2 Database Machine.  As our half-rack had 48 physical cores (and 96 threads if you consider hyperthreading), we wanted to take advantage of that CPU horsepower to speed up our calculations.  To do so with ORE, it is as simple as leveraging the Oracle Database Parallel Query features.  Let’s look at the SQL used in the customer proof: Notice that we use a parallel hint on the cursor that is the input to our rqGroupEval function.  That is all we need to do to enable Oracle to use parallel R engines. Here are a few screenshots of what this SQL looked like in the Real-Time SQL Monitor when we ran this during the proof of concept (hint: you might need to right-click on these images to be able to view the images full-screen to see the entire image): From the above, you can notice a few things (numbers 1 thru 5 below correspond with highlighted numbers on the images above.  You may need to right click on the above images and view the images full-screen to see the entire image): The SQL completed in 110 seconds (1.8minutes) We calculated rate of returns for 5 time periods for each of 911k accounts (the number of actual rows returned by the IRRSTAGEGROUPEVAL operation) We accessed 103m rows of detailed cash flow/market value data (the number of actual rows returned by the IRR_STAGE2 operation) We ran with 72 degrees of parallelism spread across 4 database servers Most of our 110seconds was spent in the “External Procedure call” event On average, we performed 8,200 executions of our R function per second (110s/911k accounts) On average, each execution was passed 110 rows of data (103m detail rows/911k accounts) On average, we did 41,000 single time period rate of return calculations per second (each of the 8,200 executions of our R function did rate of return calculations for 5 time periods) On average, we processed over 900,000 rows of database data in R per second (103m detail rows/110s) R + Oracle R Enterprise: Best of R + Best of Oracle Database This blog post series started by describing a real customer problem: how to perform a lot of calculations on a lot of data in a short period of time.  While standard R proved to be a very good fit for writing the necessary calculations, the challenge of working with a lot of data in a short period of time remained. This blog post series showed how Oracle R Enterprise enables R to be used in conjunction with the Oracle Database to overcome the data volume and performance issues (as well as simplifying the operations and security issues).  It also showed that we could calculate 5 time periods of rate of returns for almost a million individual accounts in less than 2 minutes. In a future post, we will take the same R function and show how Oracle R Connector for Hadoop can be used in the Hadoop world.  In that next post, instead of having our data in an Oracle database, our data will live in Hadoop and we will how to use the Oracle R Connector for Hadoop and other Oracle Big Data Connectors to move data between Hadoop, R, and the Oracle Database easily.

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  • Building Visual Studio Setup Projects with TFS 2010 Team Build

    - by Jakob Ehn
    One of the most common complaints from people starting to use Team Build is that is doesn’t support building Microsoft’s own Setup and Deployment project (*.vdproj). When creating a default build definition that compiles a solution containing a setup project, you’ll get the following warning: The project file "MyProject.vdproj" is not supported by MSBuild and cannot be built.   This is what the problem is all about. MSBuild, that is used for compiling your projects, does not understand the proprietary vdproj format defined by Microsoft quite some time ago. Unfortunately there is no sign that this will change in the near future, in fact the setup projects has barely changed at all since they were introduced. VS 2010 brings no new features or improvements hen it comes to the setup projects. VS 2010 does include a limited version of InstallShield which promises to be more MSBuild friendly and with more or less the same features as VS setup projects. I hope to get a closer look at this installer project type soon. But, how do we go about to build a Visual Studio setup project and produce an MSI as part of a Team Build process? Well, since only one application known to man understands the vdproj projects, we will have to installa copy of Visual Studio on the build server. Sad but true. After doing this, we use the Visual Studio command line interface (devenv) to perform the build. In this post I will show how to do this by using the InvokeProcess activity directly in a build workflow template. You’ll want to run build your setup projects after you have successfully compiled the projects.   Install Visual Studio 2010 on the build server(s)   Open your build process template /remember to branch or copy the xaml file before modifying it!)   Locate the Try to Compile the Project activity   Drop an instance of the InvokeProcess activity from the toolbox onto the designer, after the Run MSBuild for Project activity   Drop an instance of the WriteBuildMessage activity inside the Handle Standard Output section. Set the Importance property to Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildMessageImportance.High (NB: This is necessary if you want the output from devenv to show up in the build log when running the build with the default verbosity) Set the Message property to stdOutput   Drop an instance of the WriteBuildError activity to the Handle Error Output section Set the Message property to errOutput   Select the InvokeProcess activity and set the values of the parameters to:     The finished workflow should look like this:     This will generate the MSI files, but they won’t be copied to the drop location. This is because we are using devenv and not MSBuild, so we have to do this explicitly   Drop a Sequence activity somewhere after the Copy to Drop location activity.   Create a variable in the Sequence activity of type IEnumerable<String> and call it GeneratedInstallers   Drop a FindMatchingFiles activity in the sequence activity and set the properties to:     Drop a ForEach<String> activity after the FindMatchingFiles activity. Set the Value property to GeneratedInstallers   Drop an InvokeProcess activity inside the ForEach activity.  FileName: “xcopy.exe” Arguments: String.Format("""{0}"" ""{1}""", item, BuildDetail.DropLocation) The Sequence activity should look like this:     Save the build process template and check it in.   Run the build and verify that the MSI’s is built and copied to the drop location.   Note 1: One of the drawback of using devenv like this in a team build is that since all the output from the default compilations is placed in the Binaries folder, the outputs is not avaialable when devenv is invoked, which causes the whole solution to rebuild again. In TFS 2008, this was pretty simple to fix by using the CustomizableOutDir property. In TFS 2010, the same feature is not avaialble. Jim Lamb blogged about this recently, have a look at it if you have a problem with this: http://blogs.msdn.com/jimlamb/archive/2010/04/13/customizableoutdir-in-tfs-2010.aspx   Note 2: Although the above solution works, a better approach is to wrap this in a custom activity that you can use in your builds. I will come back to this in a future post.

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  • Introducing .NET 4.0 with Visual Studio 2010 by Alex Mackey - Book review

    - by Malisa L. Ncube
    Alex (http://simpleisbest.co.uk/) does a very good job in covering the new features of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. His focus is on the developers that have experience in development using previous versions of Visual Studio, more specifically Visual Studio 2008.     The following are my views towards his book. 1. Scope / Coverage Even as the book is labeled as introduction, it is covers a broad spectrum of technologies, features and references that are focused into helping a developer quickly decide what to use in the new .NET framework. a. Content The content included covers as much as possible the new additions that are included in the new .NET version 4.0. He shows the Visual Studio 2010 new features and quickly shows how to extend it using Managed Extensibility Framework. Some of my favorites are parallel debugging enhancements. The author delves into JQuery, which Microsoft has decided to support. Some of the very interesting content is on the out-of-band releases including ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure Silverlight 3 and WCF Data Services. b. What is not included? Windows Phone 7 Series. This was only talked about in the MIX10. The data may not have been available at the time of writing. Microsoft Pinpoint (Microsoft code name "Dallas") Windows Embedded development. c. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Visual Studio IDE and MEF Chapter 3: Language and Dynamic Changes Chapter 4: CLR and BCL Changes Chapter 5: Parallelization and Threading Enhancements Chapter 6: Windows Workflow Foundation 4 Chapter 7: Windows Communication Foundation Chapter 8: Entity Framework Chapter 9: WCF Data Services Chapter 10: ASPNET Chapter 11: Microsoft AJAX Library Chapter 12: jQuery Chapter 13: ASPNET MVC Chapter 14: Silverlight Introduction Chapter 15: WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 3.0 Chapter 16: Windows Azure 2. Depth Avoids getting into depth on the topics presented, to present the new concepts in assumption of the developer’s existing knowledge. Code samples are on book and exist mostly as snippets and very easy to follow. There are no downloadable examples. 3. Complexity The book is written in a very simple way and easy to follow. There are no irrelevant intimidating details. So it’s a book that you can grab and never put down until you’ve finished reading the entire book. 4. References The author includes reference links to blogs, Wikis and a lot of online resources including the MSDN documentation, which is a very convenient strategy to avoid flooding the reader with details which may not be of interest to them. Most sites do not use url routing and that is really not nice. There are notes from interviews between the author and people behind the new technologies, in which they explain what some specific areas that need clarifications and what their future views are in relation to the features they are working on. 5. Target The author targets experts that want to make a transition from .NET 3.5 to 4.0. Some obvious 3.5 features have been purposely excluded from the text 6. Overrall It is evident that the author has made extensive research into the breadth of what MS is working on, in relation to .NET and Visual Studio and has also been watching the online community. What I would like to see in the next edition are some details on OData protocol, Expression Blend 4 and Embedded development and Windows Phone development. I should say I’m one of the beneficiaries of this book. Excellent work Alex.   Technorati Tags: .NET,Book-Review,Visual Studio

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  • Silverlight Firestarter thoughts, and thanks to one and all!

    - by Dave Campbell
    A few metrics that of course got out of hand, but some may find interesting:   1/2 My share of the MVP of the Year award in February of 2009 with Laurent Bugnion 2 Number of degrees I hold: B.S., M.S. Electrical Engineering 3 Number of years in the U.S. Army 3.5 Number of years SilverlighCream has been posted 4 Number of times awarded MVP 6 Number of professional positions I've worked: Antenna Rigger, Boilermaker, Musician, Electronic Technician, Hardware Engineer, Software Engineer 16 Number of companies I've worked for during my career as an Engineer 19 Age at which I turned my first line of code 28 Age at which I hit the workforce as an Engineer 33 Number of years working as an Engineer 43 Number of years writing code 62 Number of years since instantiation 116 Number of tags to search SilverlightCream with 645 Number of blogs I view to find articles (at this moment) 664 Number of articles tagged wp7dev at SilverlightCream right now 700 Number of Twitter followers for WynApse 981 Number of individual bloggers in the SilverlightCream database 1002 Number of SilverlightCream blogposts 1100 Number of people live in Redmond for the Firestarter (I think) 1428 Number of total blogposts at GeeksWithBlogs (not counting this one) 4200 Number of Feedburner subscribers (approximately) 6500 Number of Twitter followers for SilverlightNews (approximately) 7087 Number of posts tagged and aggregated at SilverlightCream right now 13000 Number of people registered to watch the Firestarter online (I think) The overwhelming feeling I have returning from the Silverlight Firestarter: Priceless There is absolutely no way that I could personally thank everyone that over the last few years has held their hand out and offered me a step up to get to the point that Scott Guthrie called me out in his keynote. So I'm just going to hit the highlights here... Scott Guthrie Thanks for not only being the level you are at Microsoft, but for being so approachable, easy to talk to, willing to help everyone, and above all knowledgable. My first level manager at my last position asked if Visual Studio was a graphics program... and you step up to a laptop at a conference and type "File->New Program" ... 'nuff said... oh yeah, thanks for the shoutout! John Papa Thanks for being a good friend, ramroding the Firestarter, being a great guy to be around, and for the poster... holy crap is that cool. Tim Heuer Thanks for all you did as a great DE in Phoenix, and for helping out so many of us, of course being a great guy, and for the poster as well... I think you and John shared that task. In no order at all my buddy Michael Washington, Laurent Bugnion (the other half of the first Silverlight MVP of the Year) Tim Sneath, Mike Harsh, Chad Campbell and Bryant Likes (from back in the day), Adam Kinney, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Paries, Pete Brown, András Velvárt, David Kelly, Michael Palermo, Scott Cate, Erik Mork, and on and on... don't feel bad if your name didn't appear, I have simply too many supporters to name. Silverlight Firestarter Indeed All the people mentioned here, and all the MVPs knew Silverlight was NOT dead, but because of a very unfortunate circumstance, the popular media opinion became that. Consequently the Firestarter exploded from a laid-back event to a global conference. People worked their ass off getting bits ready and presentations using those bits. All to stem the flow of misinformation. All involved please accept my personal thanks for an absolutely awesome job. I had the priviledge of watching the 'prep' on Wednesday afternoon, and was blown away the first time I saw the 3D demo... and have been blown away every time I've seen it since. Not to mention all the other goodness in Silverlight 5. Yes I hit 1000 on my blog, but more importantly, all of you are blogging and using Silverlight, and Microsoft hit one completely out of the park... no... they knocked it out of the neighborhood with the Firestarter. It was amazing to be there for it, and it will be awesome to use the new bits as we get them. Keep reading, there's tons more to come with Silverlight and SilverlightCream following along behind. As usual, this old hacker is humbled to be allowed to play with all the cool kids... Thanks one and all for everything, and Stay in the 'Light

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  • Silverlight Cream for May 13, 2010 -- #861

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Sigurd Snørteland, Jeff Prosise, DaveDev, Joe Zhou, Chris Eargle, John Papa(-2-, -3-), and David Anson(-2-). Shoutouts: In with the links I've listed below, Sigurd Snørteland also sent a link to this app he's working on which is actually pretty cool to see: ZuneLight. The code is not yet available. He also has a no-code demo of a Silverlight Media Center Pieter Voloshyn, Luiz Thadeu, and Jhun Iti have a very nice Silverlight image editor up: Thumba From SilverlightCream.com: WP7 - Silverlight on mobile Sigurd Snørteland submitted some links for me that have been translated to English from his blog. I hope the pages come out good because he's got a lot of good stuff on there. This one has a link to a presentation he did, and 4 projects you can load up in the emulator that he's converted to the phone: weather, worldclock, coverflow, and solitaire ... pretty cool... thanks for the links Sigurd! Understanding Page Orientation in Silverlight for Windows Phone Jeff Prosise has a really nice post up on page orientation in WP7 ... what it means to your app, how to detect it, and example code for what to do then... also love a quote by Jeff: "Silverlight for Windows Phone is the hottest thing since color TV" Why you should check out Expression Blend Behaviors when using Silverlight DaveDev has a post up describing Behaviors and why we should use them, plus tons of external links to resources, blogs, videos... all good stuff... Fiddler inspector for WCF Silverlight Polling Duplex and WCF RIA Joe Zhou announces and provides a link to a new Fiddler inspector that understands the framing in Polling Duplex and also raw binary xml and binary SOAP. Windows Phone Controls v0.7 Chris Eargle reports the release of Version 0.7 of the Windows Phone Controls project on CodePlex ... this includes a Pivot Control and a Panorama Control... both very nicely done. Binding to Silverlight ComboBox and Using SelectedValue, SelectedValuePath and DisplayMemberPath John Papa responds to a user question and put up a nice post about binding to a ComboBox and then go from the selected item to some other property ... code included No More Boxes! Exploring the PathListBox (Silverlight TV #25) Silverlight TV 25 went up on Tuesday ... thought it was going to be Thursday?? anyway ... John Papa and Adam Kinney are discussing the PathListBox and looking at some cool demos thereof. Exposing SOAP, OData, and JSON Endpoints for RIA Services (Silverlight TV 26) Since today IS Thursday, we have a new Silverlight TV, number 26, and John Papa is chatting with Deepesh Mohnani of the WCF RIA Services team about exposing all sorts of endpoints... should be something in there for everybody :) Workaround for a Silverlight data binding bug affecting various scenarios - including DataGrid+ContextMenu David Anson details the rabbit-trail he and others on the team followed in response to a problem reported via Twitter where the binding on a DataGrid seemed off by a row(!) ... weird but true, validated, and SL3/4 are bug-for-bug compatible with this too! ... But David wouldn't leave us there.. he also has a workaround. Sharing the code for a simple Silverlight 4 REST-based cloud-oriented file management app for Azure and S3 David Anson had an opportunity to build an app he's wanted to build for a while and shares it with us: Blobstore -- a small, lightweight Silverlight 4 application that acts as a basic front-end for the Windows Azure Simple Data Storage and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) -- and remember I said he shared the source :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Silverlight Cream for February 04, 2011 -- #1040

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Shawn Wildermuth, John Papa, Jesse Liberty(-2-), Mike Wolf, Matt Casto, Levente Mihály, Roy Dallal, Mark Monster, Andrea Boschin, and Oren Gal. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Accept and Cancel Buttons Behavior in Silverlight" Matt Casto WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Runtime Debugging" Mike Wolf Shoutouts: Al Pascual announced a get-together if you're going to be in Phoenix on February 10 (next Thursday)... I just can't tell what time it is from the page: Phoenix Dev Meet-Up From SilverlightCream.com: Ten Pet Peeves of WP7 Applications Check out Shawn Wildermuth's Top 10 annoyances when trying out any new app on the WP7... if you're a dev, you might want to keep these in mind. Silverlight TV 60: Checking Out the Zero Gravity Game, Now on Windows Phone 7 John Papa has Silverlight TV number 60 up and this one features Phoenix' own Ryan Plemons discussing the game Zero Gravity and some of the things he had to do to take the game to WP7 ... and the presentation looks as good from here as it did inside the studio :) The Full Stack: Entity Framework To Phone, The Server Side Jesse Liberty and Jon Galloway have Part 6 of their full-stack podcast up ... this is their exploration of MVC3, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WP7... pair programming indeed! Life Cycle: Page State Management Jesse Liberty also has episode 29 (can you believe that??) of his Windows Phone From Scratch series up ... he's continuing his previous LifeCycle discussion with Page State Management this time. Windows Phone 7 Runtime Debugging Mike Wolf is one of those guys that when he blogs, we should all pay attention, and this post is no exception... he has contributed a run-time diagnostics logger to the WP7Contrib project ... wow... too cool! Accept and Cancel Buttons Behavior in Silverlight Matt Casto has his blog back up and has a behavior up some intuitive UX on ChildWindows by being able to bind to a default or cancel button and have those events activated when the user hits Enter or Escape... very cool, Matt! A classic memory game: Part 3 - Porting the game to Windows Phone 7 Levente Mihály has Part 3 of his tutorial series up at SilverlightShow, and this go-around is porting his 'memory game' to WP7... and this is pretty all-encompassing... Blend for the UI, Performance, and Tombstoning... plus all the source. Silverlight Memory Leak, Part 1 Roy Dallal completely describes how he used a couple easily-downloadable tools to find the root cause of his memory problems with is Silvleright app. Lots of good investigative information. How to cancel the closing of your Silverlight application (in-browser and out-of-browser) Mark Monster revisits a two-year old post of his on cancelling the closing of a Silverlight app... and he's bringing that concept of warning the user the he's about to exit into the OOB situation as well. Windows Phone 7 - Part #3: Understanding navigation Also continuing his WP7 tutorial series on SilverlightShow, Andrea Boschin has part 3 up which is all about Navigation and preserving state... he also has a video on the page to help demonstrate the GoBack method. Multiple page printing in Silverlight 4 Oren Gal built a Silverlight app for last years' ESRI dev summit, and decided to upgrade it this year with functionality such as save/restore, selecting favorite sessions, and printing. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • What I've Gained from being a Presenter at Tech Events

    - by MOSSLover
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MOSSLover/archive/2014/06/12/what-ive-gained-from-being-a-presenter-at-tech-events.aspxI know I fail at blogging lately.  As I've said before life happens and it gets in the way of best laid out plans.  I thought about creating some type of watch with some app that basically dictates using dragon naturally speaking to Wordpress, but alas no time and the write processing capabilities just don't exist yet.So to get to my point Alison Gianotto created this blog post: http://www.snipe.net/2014/06/why-you-should-stop-stalling-and-start-presenting/.  I like the message she has stated in this post and I want to share something personal.It was around 2007 that I was seriously looking into leaving the technology field altogether and going back to school.  I was calling places like Washington University in Saint Louis and University of Missouri Kansas City asking them how I could go about getting into some type of post graduate medical school program.  My entire high school career was based on Medical Explorers and somehow becoming a doctor.  I did not want to take my hobby and continue using it as a career mechanism.  I was unhappy, but I didn't realize why I was unhappy at the time.  It was really a lot of bad things involving the lack of self confidence and self esteem.  Overall I was not in a good place and it took me until 2011 to realize that I still was not in a good place in life.So in about April 2007 or so I started this blog that you guys have been reading or occasionally read.  I kind of started passively stalking people by reading their blogs in the SharePoint and .Net communities.  I also started listening to .Net Rocks & watching videos on their corresponding training for SharePoint, WCF, WF, and a bunch of other technologies.  I wanted more knowledge, so someone suggested I go to a user group.  I've told this story before about how I met Jeff Julian & John Alexander, so that point I will spare you the details.  You know how I got to my first user group presentation and how I started getting involved with events, so I'll also spare those details.The point I want to touch on is that I went out I started speaking and that path I took helped me gain the self confidence and self respect I needed.  When I first moved to NYC I couldn't even ride a subway by myself or walk alone without getting lost.  Now I feel like I can go out and solve any problem someone throws at me.  So you see what Alison states in her blog post is true and I am a great example to that point.  I stood in front of 800 or so people at SharePoint Conference in 2011 and spoke about a topic.  In 2007 I would have hidden or stuttered the entire time.  I have now spoken at over 70 events and user groups.  I am a top 25 influencer in my technology.  I was a most valued professional for years in a row in Microsoft SharePoint.  People are constantly trying to gain my time, so that they can pick my brain for solutions and other life problems.  I went from maybe five or six friends to over hundreds of friends in various cities across the globe.  I'm not saying it's an instant fame and it doesn't take a ton of work, but I have never looked back once at my life and regretted the choice I made in 2007.  It has lead me to a lot of other things in my life, including more positivity and happiness.  If anyone ever wants to contact me and pick my brain on a presentation go ahead.  If you want me to help you find the best meetup that suits you for that presentation I can try to help too (I might be a little more helpful in the Microsoft or iOS arenas though).  The best thing I can state is don't be scared just do it.  If you need an audience I can try to pencil it in my schedule.  I can't promise anything, but if you are in NYC I can at least try.

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  • Silverlight Cream for January 04, 2011 -- #1022

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Dennis Doomen, Doug Holland, Kunal Chowdhury, Sacha Barber, Paul Sheriff, Mike Snow(-2-), Peter Kuhn(-2-), and Mike Ormond. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically" Doug Holland Prism/Cinch: "PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region" Sacha Barber Shoutouts: Sacha Barber the author of Cinch asks for some advice from users: Cinch V2 : Question For The Reader Michael Crump introduces us to SnippetManager as a way to organize your Silverlight snippets... I'm thinking any snippet: A better way to organize your Silverlight Code Snippets. Andy Beaulieu announced an update of Physics Helper 4.2 using Farseer 3.2 ... check out the breaking changes though! Dennis Doomen blogged about a new release of his Fluent Assertions: A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions, with a blog post about it below From SilverlightCream.com: Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions Dennis Doomen release his latest Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and wrote up a big post about the new event monitoring syntax. Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically Doug Holland has a post up on MSDN blogs talking about searching the WP7 Marketplace programmatically... ya know you should be able to do it... here's how. Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part - 5) Kunal Chowdhury has Part 5 of a tutorial series on Lightswitch up at SilverlightShow... working with custom validation this time, and for the first time in this series so far actually writes some code! PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region Sacha Barber took time to look at Prism4/MEF and Cinch2 and found things to be fine then wrote a custom PRISM region adaptor that uses a TransitionalElement from the Microsoft Transitionals project... code available, blog post to come. Get Application Title from Windows Phone Paul Sheriff has a cool chunk of code up... getting the Application's title programmatically... and other attributes as well, if you were wondering why you might wanna do that. Detecting Users Win7 Mobile Theme Color Mike Snow has a couple as well... first up is how to detect your user's theme... obviously useful if you wanna match it. Selecting an Item in a ComboBox after Adding Items Second for Mike Snow is a general Silverlight issue... setting the selected item on a ComboBox after filling it... if you haven't stumbled across this yet, you will... A Simplified Grid Markup Reloaded Peter Kuhn has a pair of posts up since last time... this first is an extension of Colin Eberhardt's simplified Grid markup system, but it's only useful if you don't plan on using Blend... can we get a show of hands? :) Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample Next Peter Kuhn has some changes to the Bookshelf code, but more importantly has some excelling tips about shader effects, Effects on Visual Elements and how to make best use of all the above. Displaying HTML Content in Windows Phone 7 Mike Ormond has a WP7 post up describing problems a customer had early on displaying rich text and an attempt to use the WebBrowser control to pull it off and the problems that caused... check out the resultant code, and read the comments as well. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Employee Info Starter Kit: Project Mission

    - by Mohammad Ashraful Alam
    Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source ASP.NET project template that is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, it illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context. Employee Info Starter Kit is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule. where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. User Stories The user end functionalities of this starter kit are pretty simple and straight forward that are focused in to perform CRUD operation on employee records as described below. Creating a new employee record Read existing employee record Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Key Technology Areas ASP.NET 4.0 Entity Framework 4.0 T-4 Template Visual Studio 2010 Architectural Objective There is no universal architecture which can be considered as the best for all sorts of applications around the world. Based on requirements, constraints, environment, application architecture can differ from one to another. Trade-off factors are one of the important considerations while deciding a particular architectural solution. Employee Info Starter Kit is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. “Productivity” as the architectural objective typically also includes other trade-off factors as well as, such as testability, flexibility, performance etc. Fortunately Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 includes lots of great features that have been implemented cleverly in this project to reduce these trade-off factors in the minimum level. Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Not a Framework? Application frameworks are really great for productivity, some of which are really unavoidable in this modern age. However relying too many frameworks may overkill a project, as frameworks are typically designed to serve wide range of different usage and are less customizable or editable. On the other hand having implementation patterns can be useful for developers, as it enables them to adjust application on demand. Employee Info Starter Kit provides hundreds of “connected” snippets and implementation patterns to demonstrate problem solutions in actual production environment. It also includes Visual Studio T-4 templates that generate thousands lines of data access and business logic layer repetitive codes in literally few seconds on the fly, which are fully mock testable due to language support for partial methods and latest support for mock testing in Entity Framework. Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Different than Other Open-source Web Applications? Software development is one of the rapid growing industries around the globe, where the technology is being updated very frequently to adapt greater challenges over time. There are literally thousands of community web sites, blogs and forums that are dedicated to provide support to adapt new technologies. While some are really great to enable learning new technologies quickly, in most cases they are either too “simple and brief” to be used in real world scenarios or too “complex and detailed” which are typically focused to achieve a product goal (such as CMS, e-Commerce etc) from "end user" perspective and have a long duration learning curve with respect to the corresponding technology. Employee Info Starter Kit, as a web project, is basically "developer" oriented which actually considers a hybrid approach as “simple and detailed”, where a simple domain has been considered to intentionally illustrate most of the architectural and implementation challenges faced by web application developers so that anyone can dive into deep into the corresponding new technology or concept quickly. Roadmap Since its first release by 2008 in MSDN Code Gallery, Employee Info Starter Kit gained a huge popularity in ASP.NET community and had 1, 50,000+ downloads afterwards. Being encouraged with this great response, we have a strong commitment for the community to provide support for it with respect to latest technologies continuously. Currently hosted in Codeplex, this community driven project is planned to have a wide range of individual editions, each of which will be focused on a selected application architecture, framework or platform, such as ASP.NET Webform, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery Ajax (RIA), Silverlight (RIA), Azure Service Platform (Cloud), Visual Studio Automated Test etc. See here for full list of current and future editions.

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  • A Forming Repository of Script Samples for Automating Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

    - by Jialiang
    Compared with Windows Server 2008/R2 that provides about 230 cmdlets, Windows Server 2012 beats that by a factor of over 10 shipping ~ 2,430 cmdlets.  You can automate almost every aspect of the server.   The new PowerShell 3.0, like Windows Server 2012, has a ton of new features.  In this automation script-centric move, Microsoft All-In-One Script Framework (AIOSF) is ready to support IT Pros with many new services and offerings coming this year.  We sincerely hope that the IT community will benefit from the effort. Here is the first one among our new services and offerings:  The team is preparing a large set of Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 script samples based on frequently asked IT tasks that we collect in TechNet forums and support calls to Microsoft.   Because the script topics come from frequently asked IT tasks, we hope that these script samples can be helpful to many IT Pros worldwide.   With the General Availability of Windows Server 2012, we release the first three Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 script samples today.    Get Network Adapter Properties in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 (PowerShell) http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Get-Network-Adapter-37c5a913 Description: This script could be used to get network adapter properties and advanced properties in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. It combines the outputs of Get-NetAdapter and Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty. It can generate a report of network adapter configuration settings. Use Scenarios: In a real world, IT Administrators are required to check the configuration of network adapters after the deployment of new servers. One typical example is the duplex setting of network adapters. Also, IT administrators need to maintain a server list which contains network adapter configuration settings in a regular basis. Before Windows Server 2012, IT administrators often feel difficulties to handle these tasks. Acknowledgement: Thanks Greg Gu from AIOSF for collecting this script topic, and writing the script sample.  Thanks James Adams (Microsoft Premier Field Engineer) for reviewing the script sample and ensuring its quality.   How to batch create virtual machines in Windows Server 2012 (PowerShell) http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/How-to-batch-create-9efd1811 Description: This PowerShell Script illustrates how to batch create multiple virtual machines based on comma delimited file by using PowerShell 3.0 in Windows Server 2012. Use Scenarios: IT admin requires to batch creating virtual machines in Windows Server 2012, although they can use few commands due to the lack of programming knowledge. Although it’s a set of Hyper-V command-lets within Windows PowerShell, IT Admins are reluctant to use them except simple a command which is widely used. Acknowledgement: Thanks Anders Wang from AIOSF for collecting this script topic and writing the script sample.  Thanks Christopher Norris for reviewing the script sample and ensuring its quality before publishing.   Remove Windows Store Apps in Windows 8 (PowerShell) http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Remove-Windows-Store-Apps-a00ef4a4 Description: This script can be used to remove multiple Windows Store Apps from a user account in Windows 8. It provides a list of installed Windows Store applications. You can specify the application IDs, and remove them all at once. Use Scenarios: 1. In Windows 8, you can remove a single Windows Store App by right-clicking the tile in the Start menu and choosing the uninstall command.  However, no command is provided for removing multiple Windows Store Apps all at once. If you want to do so, you can use this script sample. 2. Sometimes Windows Store Apps may crash in Windows 8.  Even though you can successfully uninstall and reinstall the App, the application may still crash after the reinstallation.  In this situation, you can use this example script to remove these Windows Store Apps cleanly. Acknowledgement: Thanks Edward Qi from AIOSF for collecting the script idea and composing the script sample.  Thanks James Adams (Microsoft Premier Field Engineer) for reviewing the script sample and ensuring its quality.   This is just the beginning, and more and more script samples are coming.  You can follow our blog (http://blogs.technet.com/b/onescript) to get the latest customer-driven script samples for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

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  • St. Louis ALT.NET

    - by Brian Schroer
    I’m a huge fan of the St. Louis .NET User Group and a regular attendee of their meetings, but always wished there was a local group that discussed more advanced .NET topics. (That’s not a criticism of the group - I appreciate that they want to server developers with a broad range of skill levels). That’s why I was thrilled when Nicholas Cloud started a St. Louis ALT.NET group in 2010. Here’s the “about us” statement from the group’s web site: The ALT.NET community is a loosely coupled, highly cohesive group of like-minded individuals who believe that the best developers do not align themselves with platforms and languages, but with principles and ideas. In 2007, David Laribee created the term "ALT.NET" to explain this "alternative" view of the Microsoft development universe--a view that challenged the "Microsoft-only" approach to software development. He distilled his thoughts into four key developer characteristics which form the basis of the ALT.NET philosophy: You're the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc. You're not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It's the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles (e.g. Resharper.) The St. Louis ALT.NET meetup group is a place where .NET developers can learn, share, and critique approaches to software development on the .NET stack. We cater to the highest common denominator, not the lowest, and want to help all St. Louis .NET developers achieve a superior level of software craftsmanship. I don’t see a lot of ALT.NET talk in blogs these days. The movement was harmed early on by the negative attitudes of some of its early leaders, including jerk moves like the Entity Framework “vote of no confidence”, but I do see occasional mentions of local groups like the St. Louis one. I think ALT.NET has been successful at bringing some of its ideas into the .NET world, including heavily influencing ASP.NET MVC and raising the general level of software craftsmanship for developers working on the Microsoft stack. The ideas and ideals live on, they’re just not branded as “this is ALT.NET!” In the past 18 months, St. Louis ALT.NET meetups have discussed topics like: NHibernate F# and other functional languages AOP CoffeeScript “How Ruby Is Making Me a Stronger C# Developer” Using rake for builds CQRS .NET dynamic programming micro web frameworks – Nancy & Jessica Git ALT.NET doesn’t mean (to me, anyway) “alternatives to .NET”, but “alternatives for .NET”. We look at how things are done in Ruby and other languages/platforms, but always with the idea “What can I learn from this to take back to my “day job” with .NET?”. Meetings are held at 7PM on the fourth Wednesday of each month at the offices of Professional Employment Group. PEG is located at 999 Executive Parkway (Suite 100 – lower level) in Creve Coeur (South of Olive off of Mason Road - Here's a map). Food is not supplied (sorry if you’re a big fan of the Papa John’s Crust-Lovers’ Pizza that’s a staple of user group meetings), but attendees are encouraged to come early and bring/share beer, so that’s cool. Thanks to Nick for organizing, and to Professional Employment Group for lending their offices. Please visit the meetup site for more information.

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  • HPCM 11.1.2.x - Outline Optimisation for Calculation Performance

    - by Jane Story
    When an HPCM application is first created, it is likely that you will want to carry out some optimisation on the HPCM application’s Essbase outline in order to improve calculation execution times. There are several things that you may wish to consider. Because at least one dense dimension for an application is required to deploy from HPCM to Essbase, “Measures” and “AllocationType”, as the only required dimensions in an HPCM application, are created dense by default. However, for optimisation reasons, you may wish to consider changing this default dense/sparse configuration. In general, calculation scripts in HPCM execute best when they are targeting destinations with one or more dense dimensions. Therefore, consider your largest target stage i.e. the stage with the most assignment destinations and choose that as a dense dimension. When optimising an outline in this way, it is not possible to have a dense dimension in every target stage and so testing with the dense/sparse settings in every stage is the key to finding the best configuration for each individual application. It is not possible to change the dense/sparse setting of individual cloned dimensions from EPMA. When a dimension that is to be repeated in multiple stages, and therefore cloned, is defined in EPMA, every instance of that dimension has the same storage setting. However, such manual changes may not be preserved in all cases. Please see below for full explanation. However, once the application has been deployed from EPMA to HPCM and from HPCM to Essbase, it is possible to make the dense/sparse changes to a cloned dimension directly in Essbase. This can be done by editing the properties of the outline in Essbase Administration Services (EAS) and manually changing the dense/sparse settings of individual dimensions. There are two methods of deployment from HPCM to Essbase from 11.1.2.1. There is a “replace” deploy method and an “update” deploy method: “Replace” will delete the Essbase application and replace it. If this method is chosen, then any changes made directly on the Essbase outline will be lost. If you use the update deploy method (with or without archiving and reloading data), then the Essbase outline, including any manual changes you have made (i.e. changes to dense/sparse settings of the cloned dimensions), will be preserved. Notes If you are using the calculation optimisation technique mentioned in a previous blog to calculate multiple POVs (https://blogs.oracle.com/pa/entry/hpcm_11_1_2_optimising) and you are calculating all members of that POV dimension (e.g. all months in the Period dimension) then you could consider making that dimension dense. Always review Block sizes after all changes! The maximum block size recommended in the Essbase Database Administrator’s Guide is 100k for 32 bit Essbase and 200k for 64 bit Essbase. However, calculations may perform better with a larger than recommended block size provided that sufficient memory is available on the Essbase server. Test different configurations to determine the most optimal solution for your HPCM application. Please note that this blog article covers HPCM outline optimisation only. Additional performance tuning can be achieved by methodically testing database settings i.e data cache, index cache and/or commit block settings. For more information on Essbase tuning best practices, please review these items in the Essbase Database Administrators Guide. For additional information on the commit block setting, please see the previous PA blog article https://blogs.oracle.com/pa/entry/essbase_11_1_2_commit

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  • Windows Azure Recipe: Mobile Computing

    - by Clint Edmonson
    A while back, mashups were all the rage. The idea was to compose solutions that provided aggregation and integration across applications and services to make information more available, useful, and personal. Mashups ushered in the era of Web 2.0 in all it’s socially connected goodness. They taught us that to be successful, we needed to add web service APIs to our web applications. Web and client based mashups met with great success and have evolved even further with the introduction of the internet connected smartphone. Nothing is more available, useful, or personal than our smartphones. The current generation of cloud connected mobile computing mashups allow our mobilized workforces to receive, process, and react to information from disparate sources faster than ever before. Drivers Integration Reach Time to market Solution Here’s a sketch of a prototypical mobile computing solution using Windows Azure: Ingredients Web Role – with the phone running a dedicated client application, the web role is responsible for serving up backend web services that implement the solution’s core connected functionality. Database – used to store core operational and workflow data for the solution’s web services. Access Control – this service is used to authenticate and manage users identity, roles, and groups, possibly in conjunction with 3rd identity providers such as Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. Worker Role – this role is used to handle the orchestration of long-running, complex, asynchronous operations. While much of the integration and interaction with other services can be handled directly by the mobile client application, it’s possible that the backend may need to integrate with 3rd party services as well. Offloading this work to a worker role better distributes computing resources and keeps the web roles focused on direct client interaction. Queues – these provide reliable, persistent messaging between applications and processes. They are an absolute necessity once asynchronous processing is involved. Queues facilitate the flow of distributed events and allow a solution to send push notifications back to mobile devices at appropriate times. Training & Resources These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and resources where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS The Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to access Windows Azure storage services from native iOS applications. The toolkit can be used for both iPhone and iPad applications, developed using Objective-C and XCode. Windows Azure Toolkit for Android The Windows Azure Toolkit for Android is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to work with Windows Azure from native Android applications. The toolkit can be used for native Android applications developed using Eclipse and the Android SDK. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 76: Pro Java FX2 - A Definative Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet An interview with the authors of Pro Java FX2: A Definative Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Angela Caicedo has created 3 new Java FX screen cast videos on java UTube channel: Part 1: Building your First Java FX Application with Netbeans 7.1, Part 2: Building your First Java FX Application with Netbeans 7.1, and Getting Started with Scene Builder.  Events March 26-29, EclipseCon, Reston, USA March 27, Virtual Developer Days - Java (Asia Pacific (English)),9:30 am to 2:00pm IST / 12:00pm to 4.30pm SGT  / 3.00pm - 7.30pm AEDT April 4-5, JavaOne Japan, Tokyo, Japan April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India Feature InterviewPro JavaFX 2: A Definitive Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology is available from Amazon.com in either paperback or on the Kindle.James L. (Jim) Weaver is a Java and JavaFX developer, author, and speaker with a passion for helping rich-client Java and JavaFX become preferred technologies for new application development. Books that Jim has authored include Inside Java, Beginning J2EE, and Pro JavaFX Platform, with the latter being updated to cover JavaFX 2.0. His professional background includes 15 years as a systems architect at EDS, and the same number of years as an independent developer. Jim is an international speaker at software technology conferences, including the JavaOne conferences in San Francisco and São Paulo. Jim blogs at http://javafxpert.com, tweets @javafxpert. Weiqi Gao is a principal software engineer with Object Computing, Inc., in St. Louis, MO. He has more than 18 years of software development experience and has been using Java technology since 1998. He is interested in programming languages, object-oriented systems, distributed computing, and graphical user interfaces. He is a presenter and a member of the steering committee of the St. Louis Java Users Group. Weiqi holds a PhD in mathematics. Stephen Chin is chief agile methodologist at GXS and a technical expert in client UI technologies. He is lead author on the Pro Android Flash title and coauthored the Pro JavaFX Platform title, which is the leading technical reference for JavaFX. In addition, Stephen runs the very successful Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group, which has hundreds of members and tens of thousands of online viewers. Finally, he is a Java Champion, chair of the OSCON Java conference, and an internationally recognized speaker featured at Devoxx, Codemash, AnDevCon, Jazoon, and JavaOne, where he received a Rock Star Award. Stephen can be followed on twitter @steveonjava and reached via his blog: http://steveonjava.com.Dean Iverson has been writing software professionally for more than 15 years. He is employed by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, where he is a rich client application developer. He also has a small software consultancy called Pleasing Software Solutions, which he cofounded with his wife. Johan Vos started to work with Java in 1995. As part of the Blackdown team, he helped port Java to Linux. With LodgON, the company he cofounded, he has been mainly working on Java-based solutions for social networking software. Because he can't make a choice between embedded development and enterprise development, his main focus is on end-to-end Java, combining the strengths of backend systems and embedded devices. His favorite technologies are currently Java EE/Glassfish at the backend and JavaFX at the frontend. Johan's blog can be followed at http://blogs.lodgon.com/johan, he tweets at http://twitter.com/johanvos. Mail Bag What’s Cool Gerrit Grunwald's SteelSeries FX Experience Tools Canned Animations ComboBox

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  • How to move complete SharePoint Server 2007 from one box to another

    - by DipeshBhanani
    It was time of my first onsite client assignment on SharePoint. Client had one server production environment. They wanted to upgrade the topology with completely new SharePoint Farm of three servers. So, the task was to move whole MOSS 2007 stuff to the new server environment without impacting data. The last three scary words “… without impacting data…” were actually putting pressure on my head. Moreover SSP was required to move because additional information has been added for users apart from AD import.   I thought I had to do only backup and restore. It appeared pretty easy at first thought. Just because of these damn scary words, I thought to check out on internet for guidance related to this scenario. I couldn’t get anything except general guidance of moving server on Microsoft TechNet site. I promised myself for starting blogs with this post if I would be successful in this task. Well, I took long time to write this but finally made it. I hope it will be useful to all guys looking for SharePoint server movement.   Before beginning restoration, make sure that, there is no difference in versions of SharePoint at source and destination server. Also check whether the state of SharePoint Installation at the time of backup and restore is same or not. (E.g. SharePoint related service packs and patches if any)   The main tasks of the server movement are as follow:   Backup all the databases Install and configure SharePoint on new environment Deploy all solution (WSP Files) globally to destination server- for installing features attached to the solutions Install all the custom features Deploy/Copy custom pages/files which are added to the “12Hive” folder later Restore SSP Restore My Site Restore other web application   Tasks 3 to 5 are for making sure that we have configured the environment well enough for the web application to be restored successfully. The main and complex task was restoring SSP. I have started restoring SSP through Central Admin. After a while, the restoration status was updated to “unsuccessful”. “Damn it, what went wrong?” I thought looking at the error detail down the page. I couldn’t remember the error message but I had corrected and restored it again.   Actually once you fail restoring SSP, until and unless you don’t clean all related stuff well, your restoration will be failed again and again. I wanted to find the actual reason. So cleaned, restored, cleaned, restored… I had tried almost 5-6 times and finally, I succeeded. I had realized how pleasant it is, to see the word “Successful” on the screen. Without wasting your much time to read, let me write all the detailed steps of restoring SSP:   Delete the SSP through following STSADM command. stsadm -o deletessp -title <SSP name> -deletedatabases -force e.g.: stsadm -o deletessp -title SharedServices1 -deletedatabases –force Check and delete the web application associated with SSP if it exists. Remove Link from Check and remove “Alternate Access Mapping” associated with SSP if it exists. Check and delete IIS site as well as application pool associated with SSP if it exists. Stop following services: ·         Office SharePoint Server Search ·         Windows SharePoint Services Search ·         Windows SharePoint Services Help Search Delete all the databases associated/related to SSP from SQL Server. Reset IIS. Start again following services: ·         Office SharePoint Server Search ·         Windows SharePoint Services Search ·         Windows SharePoint Services Help Search Restore the new SSP.   After the SSP restoration, all other stuffs had completed very smoothly without any more issues. I did few modifications to sites for change of server name and finally, the new environment was ready.

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  • Implementing Search for BlogReader Windows 8 Sample

    - by Harish Ranganathan
    The BlogReader sample is an excellent place to start speeding up your Windows 8 development skills.  The tutorial is available here and the complete source code is available here Create a project called WindowsBlogReader and create pages for ItemsPage.xaml, SplitPage.xaml and DetailPage.xaml and copy the corresponding code blocks from the sample listed above. Created a class file FeedData.cs and copy the code.  Finally, create a class DateConverter.cs and copy the code associated with it. With that you should be able to build and run the project.  There seems to be one issue in the sample feeds listed that the first week (feed1) doesn’t seem to expose it.  So you can skip that and use the second feed as first feed.  You will end up with one feed less but it works. I had demonstrated this in the recent TechDays at Chennai.  How we can use the Search Contract and implement Search for within the Blog Titles. First off, we need to declare that the App will be using Search Contract, in the Package.appmanifest file Next, we would need a handle of the Search Contract when user types on the search window in Charms Menu. If you had completed the code sample from the link above, you would have ItemsPage.xaml and ItemsPage.xaml.cs.  Open the ItemsPage.xaml.cs. Import the namespaces using System.Collections.ObjectModel and System.Linq. in the ItemsPage() constructor, right after this.InitializeComponent(); add the following code Windows.ApplicationModel.Search.SearchPane.GetForCurrentView().QuerySubmitted += ItemsPage_QuerySubmitted; This event is fired when users open up the Search Panel from Charms Menu, type something and hit enter. We need to handle this event declared in the delegate.  For that we need to pull the FeedDataSource instantiation to the root of the class to make it global. So, add the following as the first line within the partial class FeedDataSource feedDataSource; Also, modify the LoadState method, as follows:- protected override void LoadState(Object navigationParameter, Dictionary<String, Object> pageState)        {            feedDataSource = (FeedDataSource)App.Current.Resources["feedDataSource"];            if (feedDataSource != null)            {                this.DefaultViewModel["Items"] = feedDataSource.Feeds;            }        } Next is to implement the ItemsPage_QuerySubmitted method void ItemsPage_QuerySubmitted(Windows.ApplicationModel.Search.SearchPane sender, Windows.ApplicationModel.Search.SearchPaneQuerySubmittedEventArgs args)         {             this.DefaultViewModel["Items"] = from dynamic item in feedDataSource.Feeds                                              where                                              item.Title.Contains(args.QueryText)                                              select item;         } As you can see we are almost using the same defaultviewmodel with the change that we are using a linq query to do a search on feeds which has the Title that matches QueryText. With this we are ready to run the app. Run the App.  Hit the Charms Menu with Windows + C key combination and type a text to search within the blog. You can see that it filters the Blogs which has the matching text. We can modify the above Linq query to do a search for the Text in other attributes like description, actual blog content etc., I have uploaded the complete code since the original WindowsBlogReader Code is not available for download.  You can download it from here note:  this code is provided as-is without any warranties.  Cheers!!!

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  • The theory of evolution applied to software

    - by Michel Grootjans
    I recently realized the many parallels you can draw between the theory of evolution and evolving software. Evolution is not the proverbial million monkeys typing on a million typewriters, where one of them comes up with the complete works of Shakespeare. We would have noticed by now, since the proverbial monkeys are now blogging on the Internet ;-) One of the main ideas of the theory of evolution is the balance between random mutations and natural selection. Random mutations happen all the time: millions of mutations over millions of years. Most of them are totally useless. Some of them are beneficial to the evolved species. Natural selection favors the beneficially mutated species. Less beneficial mutations die off. The mutated rabbit doesn't have to be faster than the fox. It just has to be faster than the other rabbits.   Theory of evolution Evolving software Random mutations happen all the time. Most of these mutations are so bad, the new species dies off, or cannot reproduce. Developers write new code all the time. New ideas come up during the act of writing software. The really bad ones don't get past the stage of idea. The bad ones don't get committed to source control. Natural selection favors the beneficial mutated species Good ideas and new code gets discussed in group during informal peer review. Less than good code gets refactored. Enhanced code makes it more readable, maintainable... A good set of traits makes the species superior to others. It becomes widespread A good design tends to make it easier to add new features, easier to understand the current implementations, easier to optimize for performance...thus superior. The best designs get carried over from project to project. They appear in blogs, articles and books about principles, patterns and practices.   Of course the act of writing software is deliberate. This can hardly be called random mutations. Though it sometimes might seem that code evolves through a will of its own ;-) Does this mean that evolving software (evolution) is better than a big design up front (creationism)? Not necessarily. It's a false idea to think that a project starts from scratch and everything evolves from there. Everyone carries his experience of what works and what doesn't. Up front design is necessary, but is best kept simple and minimal, just enough to get you started. Let the good experiences and ideas help to drive the process, whether they come from you or from others, from past experience or from the most junior developer on your team. Once again, balance is the keyword. Balance design up front with evolution on a daily basis. How do you know what balance is right? Through your own experience of what worked and what didn't (here's evolution again). Notes: The evolution of software can quickly degenerate without discipline. TDD is a discipline that leaves little to chance on that part. Write your test to describe the new behavior. Write just enough code to make it behave as specified. Refactor to evolve the code to a higher standard. The responsibility of good design rests continuously on each developers' shoulders. Promiscuous pair programming helps quickly spreading the design to the whole team.

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