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• Checksum Transformation

  The Checksum Transformation computes a hash value, the checksum, across one or more columns, returning the result in the Checksum output column. The transformation provides functionality similar to the T-SQL CHECKSUM function, but is encapsulated within SQL Server Integration Services, for use within the pipeline without code or a SQL Server connection. As featured in The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite from the Kimbal Group. Have a look at the book samples especially Sample package for custom SCD handling. All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, those selected are used to generate the checksum which is passed out through a single output column, Checksum. This does not restrict the number of columns available downstream from the transformation, as columns will always flow through a transformation. The Checksum output column is in addition to all existing columns within the pipeline buffer. The Checksum Transformation uses an algorithm based on the .Net framework GetHashCode method, it is not consistent with the T-SQL CHECKSUM() or BINARY_CHECKSUM() functions. The transformation does not support the following Integration Services data types, DT_NTEXT, DT_IMAGE and DT_BYTES. ChecksumAlgorithm Property There ChecksumAlgorithm property is defined with an enumeration. It was first added in v1.3.0, when the FrameworkChecksum was added. All previous algorithms are still supported for backward compatibility as ChecksumAlgorithm.Original (0). Original - Orginal checksum function, with known issues around column separators and null columns. This was deprecated in the first SQL Server 2005 RTM release. FrameworkChecksum - The hash function is based on the .NET Framework GetHash method for object types. This is based on the .NET Object.GetHashCode() method, which unfortunately differs between x86 and x64 systems. For that reason we now default to the CRC32 option. CRC32 - Using a standard 32-bit cyclic redundancy check (CRC), this provides a more open implementation. The component is provided as an MSI file, however to complete the installation, you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox by hand. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component?, just select Checksum from the SSIS Data Flow Items list in the Choose Toolbox Items window. Downloads The Checksum Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Checksum Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Checksum Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Checksum Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.27 – SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2010) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.27 – Fix for CRC-32 algorithm that inadvertently made it sort dependent. Fix for race condition which sometimes lead to the error Item has already been added. Key in dictionary: '79764919' . Fix for upgrade mappings between 2005 and 2008. (19 Oct 2010) Version 2.0.0.24 - SQL Server 2008 release. Introduces the new CRC-32 algorithm, which is consistent across x86 and x64.. The default algorithm is now CRC32. (29 Oct 2008) Version 2.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2008 pre-release. This version was released by mistake as part of the site migration, and had known issues. (20 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.5.0.43 – Fix for CRC-32 algorithm that inadvertently made it sort dependent. Fix for race condition which sometimes lead to the error Item has already been added. Key in dictionary: '79764919' . (19 Oct 2010) Version 1.5.0.16 - Introduces the new CRC-32 algorithm, which is consistent across x86 and x64. The default algorithm is now CRC32. (20 Oct 2008) Version 1.4.0.0 - Installer refresh only. (22 Dec 2007) Version 1.4.0.0 - Refresh for minor UI enhancements. (5 Mar 2006) Version 1.3.0.0 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. The checksum algorithm has changed to improve cardinality when calculating multiple column checksums. The original algorithm is still available for backward compatibility. Fixed custom UI bug with Output column name not persisting. (10 Nov 2005) Version 1.2.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 15 June CTP. A user interface is provided, as well as the ability to change the checksum output column name. (29 Aug 2005) Version 1.0.0 - Public Release (Beta). (30 Oct 2004) Screenshot

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• [XSL-FO] Characters from other than English languages

  - by Lukasz Kurylo

  My client have departments in Europe Central and East, so there is highly possibility that in the generated pdfs there will be at least in the people names and/or surnames some specific characters for the country language.   With the XSL-FO we can use some out-of-the box fonts, e.g. the default is Times. We can change it for specific block of text or the entire document to other like Helvetica or Arial. All will be good to the moment that we use only an english alphabet. If we want to add e.g. some characters from polish or bulgarian language, in the *.fo file:         <fo:block >                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">english: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">yellow</fo:inline>       </fo:block>       <fo:block>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">polish: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">zólty</fo:inline>       </fo:block>       <fo:block>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">russian: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">??????</fo:inline>       </fo:block>       <fo:block>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">bulgarian: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">????</fo:inline>       </fo:block>       <fo:block>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">english: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">yellow</fo:inline>       </fo:block>       <fo:block>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">polish: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold"  font-family="Arial">zólty</fo:inline>       </fo:block>       <fo:block>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">russian: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold" font-family="Arial">??????</fo:inline>       </fo:block>       <fo:block>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold">bulgarian: </fo:inline>                 <fo:inline font-weight="bold" font-family="Arial">????</fo:inline>       </fo:block>   The result can be diffrent from the expected depending on the selected font, e.g:                 As you can see Timer nor Arial work in this case.   The problem here is not related to XSL-FO, but rather to the renderer we are using. I have lost a lot of time to find a solution for the using by me XSL-FO –> PDF rendered to acquire these characters in my generated files. Fortunatelly all what have to be done it is to embed the font (or part of it) in the file(s) during rendering.   The renderer that I’m using it is an open source FO.NET.   For this one, the code to generate a pdf file looks that:   var fonet =  Fonet.FonetDriver.Make(); fonet.Render("source.fo", "result.pdf");   To emded the font in the pdf, we need to set the appropriate option to the driver:   fonet.Options = new Fonet.Render.Pdf.PdfRendererOptions() {       FontType = Fonet.Render.Pdf.FontType.Embed }; Right now, the pdf we get should look like this:               As you can see, the result for the Arial font looks exactly how it should, because this font has a characters included not only for the english language like the default Times, which we shouls avoid if we not generating a english-only documents.   This is worth to notice that in this situation the generated pdf file is quite large, it has more than 400 kb in size. This is of course because of embedding the entire font in it to make the document portable to systems, where the used font is not present. Instead on embedding the entire font, we can only embed the subset of used characters by changing the options to:   fonet.Options = new Fonet.Render.Pdf.PdfRendererOptions() {       FontType = Fonet.Render.Pdf.FontType.Subset };   Right now, this specific pdf is only 12 kb in size.

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• Session Report - Modern Software Development Anti-Patterns

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  In this standing-room-only session, building upon his 2011 JavaOne Rock Star “Diabolical Developer” session, Martijn Verburg, this time along with Ben Evans, identified and explored common “anti-patterns” – ways of doing things that keep developers from doing their best work. They emphasized the importance of social interaction and team communication, along with identifying certain psychological pitfalls that lead developers astray. Their emphasis was less on technical coding errors and more how to function well and to keep one’s focus on what really matters. They are the authors of the highly regarded The Well-Grounded Java Developer and are both movers and shakers in the London JUG community and on the Java Community Process. The large room was packed as they gave a fast-moving, witty presentation with lots of laughs and personal anecdotes. Below are a few of the anti-patterns they discussed.Anti-Pattern One: Conference-Driven DeliveryThe theme here is the belief that “Real pros hack code and write their slides minutes before their talks.” Their response to this anti-pattern is an expression popular in the military – PPPPPP, which stands for, “Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”“Communication is very important – probably more important than the code you write,” claimed Verburg. “The more you speak in front of large groups of people the easier it gets, but it’s always important to do dry runs, to present to smaller groups. And important to be members of user groups where you can give presentations. It’s a great place to practice speaking skills; to gain new skills; get new contacts, to network.”They encouraged attendees to record themselves and listen to themselves giving a presentation. They advised them to start with a spouse or friends if need be. Learning to communicate to a group, they argued, is essential to being a successful developer. The emphasis here is that software development is a team activity and good, clear, accessible communication is essential to the functioning of software teams. Anti-Pattern Two: Mortgage-Driven Development The main theme here was that, in a period of worldwide recession and economic stagnation, people are concerned about keeping their jobs. So there is a tendency for developers to treat knowledge as power and not share what they know about their systems with their colleagues, so when it comes time to fix a problem in production, they will be the only one who knows how to fix it – and will have made themselves an indispensable cog in a machine so you cannot be fired. So developers avoid documentation at all costs, or if documentation is required, put it on a USB chip and lock it in a lock box. As in the first anti-pattern, the idea here is that communicating well with your colleagues is essential and documentation is a key part of this. Social interactions are essential. Both Verburg and Evans insisted that increasingly, year by year, successful software development is more about communication than the technical aspects of the craft. Developers who understand this are the ones who will have the most success. Anti-Pattern Three: Distracted by Shiny – Always Use the Latest Technology to Stay AheadThe temptation here is to pick out some obscure framework, try a bit of Scala, HTML5, and Clojure, and always use the latest technology and upgrade to the latest point release of everything. Don’t worry if something works poorly because you are ahead of the curve. Verburg and Evans insisted that there need to be sound reasons for everything a developer does. Developers should not bring in something simply because for some reason they just feel like it or because it’s new. They recommended a site run by a developer named Matt Raible with excellent comparison spread sheets regarding Web frameworks and other apps. They praised it as a useful tool to help developers in their decision-making processes. They pointed out that good developers sometimes make bad choices out of boredom, to add shiny things to their CV, out of frustration with existing processes, or just from a lack of understanding. They pointed out that some code may stay in a business system for 15 or 20 years, but not all code is created equal and some may change after 3 or 6 months. Developers need to know where the code they are contributing fits in. What is its likely lifespan? Anti-Pattern Four: Design-Driven Design The anti-pattern: If you want to impress your colleagues and bosses, use design patents left, right, and center – MVC, Session Facades, SOA, etc. Or the UML modeling suite from IBM, back in the day… Generate super fast code. And the more jargon you can talk when in the vicinity of the manager the better.Verburg shared a true story about a time when he was interviewing a guy for a job and asked him what his previous work was. The interviewee said that he essentially took patterns and uses an approved book of Enterprise Architecture Patterns and applied them. Verburg was dumbstruck that someone could have a job in which they took patterns from a book and applied them. He pointed out that the idea that design is a separate activity is simply wrong. He repeated a saying that he uses, “You should pay your junior developers for the lines of code they write and the things they add; you should pay your senior developers for what they take away.”He explained that by encouraging people to take things away, the code base gets simpler and reflects the actual business use cases developers are trying to solve, as opposed to the framework that is being imposed. He told another true story about a project to decommission a very long system. 98% of the code was decommissioned and people got a nice bonus. But the 2% remained on the mainframe so the 98% reduction in code resulted in zero reduction in costs, because the entire mainframe was needed to run the 2% that was left. There is an incentive to get rid of source code and subsystems when they are no longer needed. The session continued with several more anti-patterns that were equally insightful.

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• VirtualBox appliance for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products

  - by chlander

  It's been quite awhile since we last blogged. This blog is written by Leif Lourie, a Curriculum Developer for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) products. For the last 8 years, Leif has worked as a Curriculum Developer for many of the telecom-oriented products that Oracle offers. He has been working in the telecom industry for about 25 years and has also worked as a software developer, project manager, and solutions architect. He is currently working on courseware for an upcoming release for one of the Service Delivery Platform products. Thanks to Leif not only for this blog, but for making the VM described in the blog available. Cheryl Lander, Oracle Communications InfoDev Senior Director To be able to download, install and test a product within a day is many times very important for people that are doing the primary evaluation of a software product. If it takes longer, it will require a bigger effort, like a proof-of-concept project with many people involved. Of course, if the product is chosen for a more thorough test, it will probably happen anyway, but then maybe with focus on integration instead of product features. We have a long tradition of creating complex software that is easy to install and test and we have often been praised for the ease of getting our products up and running. One key for this has been that there has always been an installer for Windows, as well as for the production environments that usually are Unix and Linux. And, the windows installer has, in most cases, been released for developing and testing purposes. Lately, this has changed. Our products are very seldom released for the Windows platform, at all. And even the Linux versions are almost always released for 64-bit systems. This is creating problems for many of the people that want to try out our products, since few have access to a 64-bit Linux system of the right platform. Most of us are using a laptop with Windows or Mac OS. Some of us are using Linux or Solaris, but probably a non certified distribution for the product you want to test. My job, among other things, is to develop hands-on practices for our products. For me, it is crucial to have access to environments for installing and using our products. For this reason I have been using virtual machines for many years.I have a ready-made base system, with the necessary tools installed for all the products I create hands-on practices for. Whenever I start working on hands-on practices for a new product or a new version, I just copy the base system and start working with a clean slate. This saves me a lot of time! Now, I would like to start saving time for my favorite student: You! If you are using our products and regularly test new versions you might benefit from the virtual machine that is now available on Oracle Technology Network: The Virtual Machine for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products. This virtual machine contains an installation of the 64-bit version of Oracle Enterprise Linux, version 6. It also has Oracle Database Express Edition (XE), Oracle Java and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse installed. By using Oracle VM VirtualBox you may use Windows, OS X, Linux or Solaris on your laptop. VirtualBox can be installed on top of any of these platforms and give you the ability to run virtual machines in your laptop. After downloading and starting the virtual machine you will also need to download the installation files for the product you want to test; for example Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper or Oracle Communications Online Mediation Controller. In some cases there are lessons and practices available for the products. The freely available courses are listed in Oracle Learning Library as a Collection of Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform Courses. As time goes by, we will make this list collection bigger. Also, the goal is to update the virtual machine about one to two times per year. So you will always be able to get a well maintained virtual machine for the Service Delivery Platform products from us. We Value Your Feedback If you would like to suggest improvements or report issues on any of the product documentation, curriculum, or training produced by the Oracle Communications Information Development team, you can use these channels: Email [email protected]. Post a comment on this blog. Thanks for reading!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 07, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 07, 2014Popular ReleasesSFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.3): Changelog: Retry Bugfix (Error Counter wurde nicht korrekt zurückgesetzt) Neue Einstellung: Retry Wartezeit ist nun EinstellbarLoad Runner - HTTP Pressure Test Tool: Load Runner 1.2: 1. added support for distributed load test (read documentation for details) 2. added detail documentationAspose for Apache POI: Aspose.Words vs Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Code Comparison for Features in Apache POI WP SDK and Aspose.Words What's New ?Following Examples: Working with Headers Working with Footers Access Ranges in Document Delete Ranges in Document Insert Before and After Ranges Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.babelua: 1.5.7.0: V1.5.7.0 - 2014.6.6Stability improvement: use "lua scripts folder" as lua search path when debugging;SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.033.007 Release 1: Fixed breaking changes in Space Engineers in latest update. Installation of this version will replace older version.Virto Commerce Enterprise Open Source eCommerce Platform (asp.net mvc): Virto Commerce 1.10: Virto Commerce Community Edition version 1.10. To install the SDK package, please refer to SDK getting started documentation To configure source code package, please refer to Source code getting started documentation This release includes bug fixes and improvements (including Commerce Manager localization and https support). More details about this release can be found on our blog at http://blog.virtocommerce.com.NPOI: NPOI 2.1: Assembly Version: 2.1.0 New Features a. XSSFSheet.CopySheet b. Excel2Html for XSSF c. insert picture in word 2007 d. Implement IfError function in formula engine Bug Fixes a. fix conditional formatting issue b. fix ctFont order issue c. fix vertical alignment issue in XSSF d. add IndexedColors to NPOI.SS.UserModel e. fix decimal point issue in non-English culture f. fix SetMargin issue in XSSF g.fix multiple images insert issue in XSSF h.fix rich text style missing issue in XSSF i. fix cell...51Degrees - Device Detection and Redirection: 3.1.2.3: Version 3.1 HighlightsDevice detection algorithm is over 100 times faster. Regular expressions and levenshtein distance calculations are no longer used. The device detection algorithm performance is no longer limited by the number of device combinations contained in the dataset. Two modes of operation are available: Memory – the detection data set is loaded into memory and there is no continuous connection to the source data file. Slower initialisation time but faster detection performanc...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.27.0: CodeMap now indicates the type name for all members Implemented running scripts 'as administrator'. Just add '//css_npp asadmin' to the script and run it as usual. 'Prepare script for distribution' now aggregates script dependency assemblies. Various improvements in CodeSnipptet, Autcompletion and MethodInfo interactions with each other. Added printing line number for the entries in CodeMap (subject of configuration value) Improved debugging step indication for classless scripts ...Kartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.6003: Bug fixes: Fixed issue where category could not be saved if parent categories not altered Updated split string function to 500 chars otherwise problems with attribute filtering in PowerPack Improvements: If a user has group pricing below that available through qty discounts, that will show in place of the qty discountClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.72.3: 70426e13c415 ClosedXML for .Net 4.0 now uses Open XML SDK 2.5 b9ef53a6654f Merge branch 'master' of https://git01.codeplex.com/forks/vbjay/closedxml 727714e86416 Fix range.Merge(Boolean) for .Net 3.5 eb1ed478e50e Make public range.Merge(Boolean checkIntersects) 6284cf3c3991 More performance improvements when saving.DNN Blog: 06.00.07: Highlights: Enhancement: Option to show management panel on child modules Fix: Changed SPROC and code to ensure the right people are notified of pending comments. (CP-24018) Fix: Fix to have notification actions authentication assume the right module id so these will work from the messaging center (CP-24019) Fix: Fix to issue in categories in a post that will not save when no categories and no tags selectedcsv2xlsx: Source code: Source code of applicationFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 4.0.0.0-beta5: This major release introduces a significant new feature the ability to search the UK Ordnance Survey 50k Gazetteer for small placenames that often don't appear on a modern Google Map. This means significant numbers of locations that were previously not found by Google Geocoding will now be found by using OS Geocoding. In addition I've added support for loading the Scottish 1930 Parish boundary maps, whilst slightly different from the parish boundaries in use in the 1800s that are familiar to...TEncoder: 4.0.0: --4.0.0 -Added: Video downloader -Added: Total progress will be updated more smoothly -Added: MP4Box progress will be shown -Added: A tool to create gif image from video -Added: An option to disable trimming -Added: Audio track option won't be used for mpeg sources as default -Fixed: Subtitle position wasn't used -Fixed: Duration info in the file list wasn't updated after trimming -Updated: FFMpegVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0d: Changes between 1.0c and 1.0d (03 June 2014) : Correct issue while creating hidden operating system. Minor fixes (look at git history for more details).Microsoft Web Protection Library: AntiXss Library 4.3.0: Download from nuget or the Microsoft Download Center This issue finally addresses the over zealous behaviour of the HTML Sanitizer which should now function as expected once again. HTML encoding has been changed to safelist a few more characters for webforms compatibility. This will be the last version of AntiXSS that contains a sanitizer. Any new releases will be encoding libraries only. We recommend you explore other sanitizer options, for example AntiSamy https://www.owasp.org/index....ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140602 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Tweetinvi 0.9.3.x: Timelines- Added all the parameters available from the Timeline Endpoints in Tweetinvi. - This is available for HomeTimeline, UserTimeline, MentionsTimeline // Simple query var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(); // Create a parameter for queries with specific parameters var timelineParameter = Timeline.CreateHomeTimelineRequestParameter(); timelineParameter.ExcludeReplies = true; timelineParameter.TrimUser = true; var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(timelineParameter); Tweetinvi 0.9.3.1...Sandcastle Help File Builder: Help File Builder and Tools v2014.5.31.0: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release completes removal of the branding transformations and implements the new VS2013 presentation style that utilizes the new lightweight website format. Several breaking cha...New Projects.NET Extended Framework: .NET Extended FrameworkActivity Diagram: This is an attempt to parse C# Operation source and convert them into UML Activity Diagrams. The development of a suitable diagram editor is the next priorityBango Payment Flow in-app payments: Bango Payment Flow in-app paymentsDeckEditor: ?????????????????????????????????。 ?????????、CSV????、???????????。demodjango: just a demo project to record how to using djangoExport Bugs: This application will export all the bugs in a current project from TFS. It also has the option to export all attachments in the current projectFantom - Expression Based Dynamic Language Manager: Easy Dynamic Language (over MSSQL) Management for Asp.Net Web Forms. Very easy create dynamic multi language Asp.Net web site.JIRAShell: Provides PowerShell cmdlets for working with JIRA.PipeUtil: PipeUtil is a library that simplifies use the feature PIPE windows. Has the capability of client and server with threads support.Post Deployment Smoke Tester: This tool enables you to easily carry out post deployment smoke tests against your installed deployments to determine if your environment is in a good state.Quan Ly Dang Ki Internet: quan ly dang ki internetToolKD: ToolKD console application designed to change the binary code for directories that are used KitchenDraw program. Wiki Parsing Service: A web service to Parse wiki mark-up to HTML and vice versaXBee-API for .NET: This is .NET library for communication with XBee/XBee-Pro series 1 (IEEE 802.15.4) and series 2 (ZB/ZigBee Pro) OEM RF Modules. XPinterest: XPinterestZSoft-CMS: the project is going to use a new approach other than regular modular cms es.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 19, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 19, 2012Popular ReleasesOrchard Project: Orchard 1.6 RC: RELEASE NOTES This is the Release Candidate version of Orchard 1.6. You should use this version to prepare your current developments to the upcoming final release, and report problems. Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.6 RC: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-6-Release-Notes Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you wil...Rawr: Rawr 5.0.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...TFS 2012 Server/service Setup for Demo: TfsDemo_1.0.0.2: Release 1.0.0.2 New Stuff Feature 1 - Now add team favorite queries using the Tfs demo setup application. Simply specify the name of the work item query in the demoConfig.xml file and let the application work its magic. Feature 2 - Exclude the sections you do not want to be run as part of the demo. Mark the sections you don't want to run during the demo with the attribute Run="false" in the demoConfig.xml. Bug Fix 1 - If the DemoConfig.xml contains users or email addresses in work item a...XamlImageConverter: Xaml Image Converter 3.2: VisualStudio Integration Installer is now a VSIX Extension.Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.1.1.0 - Sartha (BugFix): - Revered back the embedding of the 2x assemblies.Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2.1 - Visual Studio 2012: Welcome to the Branching and Merging Guide What is new? The Version Control specific discussions have been moved from the Branching and Merging Guide to the new Advanced Version Control Guide. The Branching and Merging Guide and the Advanced Version Control Guide have been ported to the new document style. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2012/10/17/alm-rangers-raising-the-quality-bar-for-documentation-part-2.aspx for more information. Quality-Bar Details Documentatio...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.5: Compatible with 1.05.Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 3.0 (BETA): This is a beta release of the up coming MonoGame 3.0. It contains an Installer which will install a binary release of MonoGame on windows boxes with the following platforms. Windows, Linux, Android and Windows 8. If you need to build for iOS or Mac you will need to get the source code at this time as the installers for those platforms are not available yet. The installer will also install a bunch of Project templates for Visual Studio 2010 , 2012 and MonoDevleop. For those of you wish...WPUtils: WPUtils 1.3: Blend SDK for Silverlight provides a HyperlinkAction which is missing in Blend SDK for Windows Phone. This release adds such an action which makes use of WebBrowserTask to show web page. You can also bind the hyperlink to your view model. NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.Windawesome: Windawesome v1.4.1 x64: Fixed switching of applications across monitors Changed window flashing API (fix your config files) Added NetworkMonitorWidget (thanks to weiwen) Any issues/recommendations/requests for future versions? This is the 64-bit version of the release. Be sure to use that if you are on a 64-bit Windows. Works with "Required DLLs v3".CODE Framework: 4.0.21017.0: See change log in the Documentation section for details.Global Stock Exchange (Hobby Project): Global Stock Exchange - Invst Banking (Hobby Proj): Initial VersionMagelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.1: Add support for .net 4.0 to Magelia.Webstore.Client and StarterSite version 2.1.254.3 Scheduler Import & Export feature (for Professional and Entreprise Editions) UTC datetime and timezone support .net 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 migration client magelia global refactoring release of a nugget package to help developers speed up development http://nuget.org/packages/Magelia.Webstore.Client optimization of the data update mechanism (a.k.a. "burst") Performance improvment of the d...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2.2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SqLite, HTML5 localStorage, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. What's new in JayData 1.2.2 For detailed release notes check the release notes. Revitalized IndexedDB providerNow you c...VFPX: FoxcodePlus: FoxcodePlus - Visual Studio like extensions to Visual FoxPro IntelliSense.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.8 Beta: fixed the icon for packages on the desktop fixed the install dialog closing right when it starts removed the link to "set up the sdk for me" as this is no longer supported. fixed bug where the device selection dialog would show, even if there was only one device connected. fixed toolbar from having "gap" between other toolbar removed main menu items that do not have any menus Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.0: Prva verzija ovog projekta, još je uvijek oznacena kao BETA - ovo znaci da su naša testiranja prošla uspješno :) No, kako mi ne proizvodimo neki software za blagajne, tako sve ovo nije niti isprobano u "realnim" uvjetima - svaka je sugestija, primjedba ili prijava bug-a je dobrodošla. Za sve ovo koristite, molimo, Discussions ili Issue Tracker. U ovom trenutku runtime binary je raspoloživ kao Any CPU za .NET verzije 2.0. Javite ukoliko trebaju i verzije buildane za 32-bit/64-bit kao i za .N...Squiggle - A free open source LAN Messenger: Squiggle 3.2 (Development): NOTE: This is development release and not recommended for production use. This release is mainly for enabling extensibility and interoperability with other platforms. Support for plugins Support for extensions Communication layer and protocol is platform independent (ZeroMQ, ProtocolBuffers) Bug fixes New /invite command Edit the sent message Disable update check NOTE: This is development release and not recommended for production use.NDatabase - C# Lightweight Object Database: NDatabase 2.0.1 Release: This release contains stable version of NDatabase C# Lightweight Object Database Content: binaries (dll + pdb) sources (sources, unit tests, samples) Changes: namespaces, dll name both are changed to NDatabase2 query API is changed. Now it is using generics in every possible place changing the way, how fields from class are stored - for now they are ordered by name which allows db on working well even if someone will change the order of fields in class definition (BREAKING CHANGE) A...AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...New Projects7COM0207 DIY Wedding Cake: DIY Wedding Cake SiteAnt: AntCms.ArduUtilityLibrary for Arduino: ArduUtilityLibrary (AUL) is a library to assist the development of Arduino based programsbelloscoursework: Coursework to create a a web 2.0 website that support content creation.Code Jumper: Code-Jumper allows you to navigate your code by displaying a map of your declarations on the side panel of your editor. Dean's Web Scripting & Content Creation Project: Web Scripting & Content Creation Project for MSc Computer Science at Herts University.Distributed System for Medical Providers: This is a draft circulated for medical supplies providerDockPanel Suite VS2012 Look: Dock Panel Suite Control C# Visual Studio 2012 Design LookEntity Framework Json Serializer: Solve the Circular Reference problem when using Entity Framework with Asp.NET MVC JsonResult.ExpressGrid: A javascript gridFimClient: Our library - Predica.FimCommunication - for talking to FIM (Forefront Identity Manager) web servicesGetDev.NET - Mvc Talk: Sample code for local user group talk about ASP.NET MVCHelp Desk: Sistema para teste do mvc 3HospitalManagementSystem: Summary This system is for -handle channeling -handle lab reportsjQuery Filedrop: In this demo I will demonstrate using HTML5 compatible browsers to drag and drop files and save the content into a SQL2012 database. JS DNN Task Manager: This is a DNN tutorial to create a task manager projectKinect - Finger and gesture recognition: Find fingertips and pointing direction, record and recognize finger gestures. All this with the depth stream from the Kinect sensor.MarkusUtility: Utilities used in other projectsMASSIVE DATA TRANSFER OPTIMIZATIONS: This is project is used find an efficient way to transfer the massive data via TCP/IP. Minesweeper by S. Joshi: A user-created version of Minesweeper.NETFOX CATAN: very goodPrestazioni e affidabilità: Progetto di prestazioni ed affidabilità del corso di informatica, università Ca' Foscari di VeneziaProyecto Mammut: Este es un proyecto cuyo objetivo es georeferenciar la oferta commercial de la ciudad de Manta,Ecuador mediante puntos de referencias basados en T. Público.Razor Exercise 1: Just an exercise....Sannel Helpers: Varies extension methods I have created.Service Pipeline: A simple library for implementing a service pipeline with your existing service contracts.Set Last Access: Simple console client which can scans folder tree and set LastAccess time by times of newest item in folderSharePoint Web Part Replacement: A set of classes and sample feature receiver used to replace web parts on a SharePoint site collection (SPSite). Sitecore Image Placeholder: Sitecore Image Placeholder module helps Content Editors by displaying placeholders with correct image size when field of type Image is empty.SlidePuzzle: A slide puzzle.StackAttack: StackAttack is a .NET client for use with the Stack Exchange API v2.1.testASPsite: Nothing of interesttestdd18102012git01: dtestdd18102012tfs02: stestddgit10182012git03: tTransform Manager Task for creating assets in Windows Azure Media Services: Task for Transform Manager that creates assets in Windows Azure Media Services and requests a stream locator. Used to push assets into the cloud for streaming.Trie for C#: Implementing the Trie structer in C#/.Netwsccm11aah: My Project for Web Scripting and Content Creation module submitted to Steve Bennet and Mariana Lilleywuggi: Wuggi is a simple website that focuses on its users input to enrich its content. Discussions and feedback are always welcomed on Wuggi.YahtzeePC: A Yahtzee emulator for the PC.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, September 29, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, September 29, 2012Popular ReleasesWindows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryPDF.NET: PDF.NET.Ver4.5-OpenSourceCode: PDF.NET Ver4.5 ????，????Web??????。 PDF.NET Ver4.5 Open Source Code,include a sample Web application project.D3 Loot Tracker: 1.4: Session name is displayed in the UI. Changes data directory for clickonce deployment so that sessions files are persisted between versions. Added a delete button in the sessions list window. Allow opening of the sessions local folder from the session list widow. Display the session name in the main window Ability to select which diablo process to hook up to when pressing new () function BUT only if multi-process support is selected in the generals settings tab menu. Session picker...WPUtils: WPUtils 1.2: Just fixed an issue related to isolated storage path for ChoosePhotoBehavior. Specifically CreateDirectory method only accepts relative path, but was given a "/photos/" path which would result in exception. Please make sure you have this fix if you are using ChoosePhotoBehavior! NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogFree Aspx Image Gallery: Free Aspx Image Gallery Release V1: This is first basic release of my free aspx image gallery project. It is free to use and modify by the user without any need of providing any credit to me.Simple Microsoft Excel Document Converter (Convert To XLS, XLSX, PDF, XPS): ExcelDocConverter 0.1 Beta: Initial Release Microsoft Excel Documents Converter. Microsoft Excel 1997-2003 (XLS) Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 (XLSX) Portable Document Format (PDF) Microsoft XPS Document (XPS) Difference between NET2.0 and NET3.5 This program uses .NET Framework runtime library to run. Basically, they are no differences. Only the runtime library version is different. For older computers, i.e. Windows XP, might not have .NET Framework 3.5 installed, then use NET2.0 in stead. But, some Windows XP SP2 mig...Chaos games: Chaos games: Small app for generating fractals using chaos games[ITFA GROUP] CODE GENER: Code Gener 3.0 Final (Professional for .NET): Code Gener 3.0 Final (Professional for .NET) ReleaseTumblen3: tumblen3 Version27Sep2012: updated: instagram viewerVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.16: Changelog for 2.2.16 (32bit and 64bit) Now a standalone remote client also available to control the Engine remotely. 1. Added support for remote connections for status and configuration. MCEBuddy now uses port 23332. The remote server name, remote server port and local server port can be updated from the MCEBuddy.conf file BUT the Service or GUI needs to be restarted (i.e. reboot or restart service or restart program) for it to take effect. Refer to documentation for more details http://mce...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.MVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.1: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. This release uses Entity Framework 5 for data access and Ninject 3 for dependency injection. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 6): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 5 Added separate samples download with .vsix dependencies instead of source dependencies Support for FreeWheel SmartXML ad responses Support for Smooth Streaming SDK DownloaderPlugins Support for VMAP and TTML polling for live scenarios Support for custom smooth streaming byte stream and scheme handlers Support for new play time and position tracking plugin Added IsLiveChanged event Added AdaptivePlugin.MaxBitrate property Add...New Projects1325: amosaidhauidhaudhawud1326: sefsefsfsfefAggravation: A computer version of the classic board game Aggravation. This was built in Silverlight 4, and makes use of Prism and Behaviors. bjyxl: A project for practice my exchallange.BombaJob-WP: Windows Phone app for BombaJob.bg website. Available at GitHub too - https://github.com/supudo/BombaJob-WPDNN Module Creator: DNN Module Creator allows you to simply and easily create custom DotNetNuke modules directly from within the DotNetNuke CMS environment.Knuth Bit Operations: C# implementation of most of the bit operations from Volume 4A of "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth.Machine Factory: Machine Factory is a PowerShell script module, which allows you to automate VHD-based deployment and configuration of virtual and physical machines.Neolog-WP: Neolog.bg official app for Windows Phone http://www.neolog.bg/Ngi.Scada: Ngi.ScadaPaging SharePoint ListItems using listitems position: This is a console application which will display the listitems in a paged manner using the SharePoint listitems position.Pentagon-XnaGamePrototype: Pentagon is a small prototype of a Xna and F# top-down shmup, made for an exam of the Master of Game Development in the University of Verona.Sharepoint sample - using feature upgrade: Sample demonstrating the use of SharePoint feature upgrades to add a new web part to existing pages, and add a new page to existing sites.Simple Permutations: A simple static class to provide easy to use extension methods to objects of type IEnumerable<T> which can generate Permutations and Combinations.SP SIN: SP SIN (from SharePoint Script/Style INjector) solves an age-old problem for developers and administrators; how to add script and style sheet resources to ShareTEST56: A simple Testtestproject0928: dfgdfgdThe Escape: The Escape is a 3D-First-Person Game written completely in XNA(C#).TreeViewWebPartForDocLib: ?????????????Web?????。 ????????????。?????、????????????????。Tube++: The one and only youtube HD player /downloader for your PC . Windows XP/ Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Window Server 2003 / Windows server 2008 / Windows Server 2012Unique SMS: This is a Unique School Management System Project.Who Is Watching Your Site: Who Is Watching Your Site is new!WinRTTriggers: WinRT Triggers - much like Expression triggers in Silverlight, but for WinRT Windows Store applications,

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• Windows for IoT, continued

  - by Valter Minute

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products.   *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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• Using Resources the Right Way

  - by BuckWoody

  It’s an interesting time in computing technology. At one point there was a dearth of information available for solving a given problem, or educating ourselves on broader topics so that we can solve problems in the future. With dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands of web sites and content available (for free, in many cases) from vendors, peers, even colleges and universities, it seems like there is actually too much information. Who has the time to absorb all this information and training? Even if you had the inclination, where to start? In fact, it seems so overwhelming that I often hear people saying that they can’t find the training they need, or that vendor X or Y “doesn’t help their users”. On questioning these folks, however, I often find that they – and sometimes I - haven’t put in the effort to learn what resources we have. That’s where blogs, like this one, can help. If you follow a blog, either by checking it often or perhaps subscribing to the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, you’ll be able to spread out the search or create a mental filter for the information you need. But it’s not enough just read a blog or a web page. The creators need real feedback – what doesn’t work, and what does. Yes, you’re allowed to tell a vendor or writer “This helped me because…” so that you reinforce the positives. To be sure, bring up what doesn’t work as well –  that’s fine. But be specific, and be constructive. You’d be surprised at how much it matters. I know for a fact at Microsoft we listen – there is a real live person that reads your comments. I’m sure this is true of other vendors, and I also know that most blog authors – yours truly most especially – wants to know what you think.   In this blog entry I’d to call your attention to three resources you have at your disposal, and how you can use them to help. I’ll try to bring up things like this from time to time that I find useful, and cover in them in more depth like this. Think of this as a synopsis of a longer set of resources that you can use to filter whether you want to research further, bookmark, or forward on to a circle of friends where you think it might help them.   Data Driven Design Concepts http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156154 I’ll start with a great site that walks you through the process of designing a solution from a data-first perspective. As you know, I believe all computing is merely re-arranging data. If you follow that logic as well, you’ll realize that whenever you create a solution, you should start at the data-end of the application. This resource helps you do that. Even if you don’t use the specific technologies the instructions use, the concepts hold for almost any other technology that deals with data. This should be a definite bookmark for a developer, DBA, or Data Architect. When I mentioned my admiration for this resource here at Microsoft, the team that created it contacted me and asked if I’d share an e-mail address to my readers so that you can comment on it. You’re guaranteed to be heard – you can suggest changes, talk about how useful – or not – it is, and so on. Here’s that address:  [email protected]   End-to-End Example of a complete Hybrid Application – with Live Demo https://azurestocktrader.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx I learn by example. I also like having ready-made, live, functional demos that show the completed solution at work. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how a complex, complete, hybrid application that bridges on-premises systems with cloud-based databases, code, functions and more, this is it. It’s a stock-trading simulator, and you can get everything from the design to the code itself, or you can just play with the application. It’s running on Windows Azure, the actual production servers we use for everything else. Using a Cloud-Based Service https://azureconfigweb.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx Along with that stock-trading application, you have a full demonstration and usable code sample of a web-based service available. If you’re a developer, this is a style of code you need to understand for everything from iPhone development to a full Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. So check out these resources. I’ll post more from time to time as I run across them. Hopefully they’ll be as useful to you as they are to me. Oh, and if you have a comment on any of the resources, let them know. And if you have any comments about these or any of my entries, feel free to post away. To quote a famous TV Show: “Hello Seattle – I’m listening…”

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• Loading XML file containing leading zeros with SSIS preserving the zeros

  - by Compudicted

  Visiting the MSDN SQL Server Integration Services Forum oftentimes I could see that people would pop up asking this question: “why I am not able to load an element from an XML file that contains zeros so the leading/trailing zeros would remain intact?”. I started to suspect that such a trivial and often-required operation perhaps is being misunderstood by the developer community. I would also like to add that the whole state of affairs surrounding the XML today is probably also going to be increasingly affected by a motion of people who dislike XML in general and many aspects of it as XSD and XSLT invoke a negative reaction at best. Nevertheless, XML is in wide use today and its importance as a bridge between diverse systems is ever increasing. Therefore, I deiced to write up an example of loading an arbitrary XML file that contains leading zeros in one of its elements using SSIS so the leading zeros would be preserved keeping in mind the goal on simplicity into a table in SQL Server database. To start off bring up your BIDS (running as admin) and add a new Data Flow Task (DFT). This DFT will serve as container to adding our XML processing elements (besides, the XML Source is not available anywhere else other than from within the DFT). Double-click your DFT and drag and drop the XMS Source component from the Tool Box’s Data Flow Sources. Now, let the fun begin! Being inspired by the upcoming Christmas I created a simple XML file with one set of data that contains an imaginary SSN number of Rudolph containing several leading zeros like 0000003. This file can be viewed here. To configure the XML Source of course it is quite intuitive to point it to our XML file, next what the XML source needs is either an embedded schema (XSD) or it can generate one for us. In lack of the one I opted to auto-generate it for me and I ended up with an XSD that looked like: <?xml version="1.0"?> <xs:schema attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xs:element name="XMasEvent"> <xs:complexType> <xs:sequence> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="CaseInfo"> <xs:complexType> <xs:sequence> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="ID" type="xs:unsignedByte" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="CreatedDate" type="xs:unsignedInt" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="LastName" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="FirstName" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="SSN" type="xs:unsignedByte" /> <!-- Becomes string -- > <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="DOB" type="xs:unsignedInt" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="Event" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="ClosedDate" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:schema> As an aside on the XML file: if your XML file does not contain the outer node (<XMasEvent>) then you may end up in a situation where you see just one field in the output. Now please note that the SSN element’s data type was chosen to be of unsignedByte (and this is for a reason). The reason is stemming from the fact all our figures in the element are digits, this is good, but this is not exactly what we need, because if we will attempt to load the data with this XSD then we are going to either get errors on the destination or most typically lose the leading zeros. So the next intuitive choice is to change the data type to string. Besides, if a SSIS package was already created based on this XSD and the data type change was done thereafter, one should re-set the metadata by right-clicking the XML Source and choosing “Advanced Editor” in which there is a refresh button at the bottom left which will do the trick. So far so good, we are ready to load our XML file, well actually yes, and no, in my experience typically some data conversion may be required. So depending on your data destination you may need to tweak the data types targeted. Let’s add a Data Conversion Task to our DFT. Your package should look like: To make the story short I only will cover the SSN field, so in my data source the target SQL Table has it as nchar(10) and we chose string in our XSD (yes, this is a big difference), under such circumstances the SSIS will complain. So will go and manipulate on the data type of SSN by making it Unicode String (DT_WSTR), World String per se. The conversion should look like: The peek at the Metadata: We are almost there, now all we need is to configure the destination. For simplicity I chose SQL Server Destination. The mapping is a breeze, F5 and I am able to insert my data into SQL Server now! Checking the zeros – they are all intact!

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• What Can We Learn About Software Security by Going to the Gym

  - by Nick Harrison

  There was a recent rash of car break-ins at the gym. Not an epidemic by any stretch, probably 4 or 5, but still... My gym used to allow you to hang your keys from a peg board at the front desk. This way you could come to the gym dressed to work out, lock your valuables in your car, and not have anything to worry about. Ignorance is bliss. The problem was that anyone who wanted to could go pick up your car keys, click the unlock button and find your car. Once there, they could rummage through your stuff and then walk back in and finish their workout as if nothing had happened. The people doing this were a little smatter then the average thief and would swipe some but not all of your cash leaving everything else in place. Most thieves would steal the whole car and be busted more quickly. The victims were unaware that anything had happened for several days. Fortunately, once the victims realized what had happened, the gym was still able to pull security tapes and find out who was misbehaving. All of the bad guys were busted, and everyone can now breathe a sigh of relieve. It is once again safe to go to the gym. Except there was still a fundamental problem. Putting your keys on a peg board by the front door is just asking for bad things to happen. One person got busted exploiting this security flaw. Others can still be exploiting it. In fact, others may well have been exploiting it and simply never got caught. How long would it take you to realize that $10 was missing from your wallet, if everything else was there? How would you even know when it went missing? Would you go to the front desk and even bother to ask them to review security tapes if you were only missing a small amount. Once highlighted, it is easy to see how commonly such vulnerability may have been exploited. So the gym did the very reasonable precaution of removing the peg board. To me the most shocking part of this story is the resulting uproar from gym members losing the convenient key peg. How dare they remove the trusted peg board? How can I work out now, I have to carry my keys from machine to machine? How can I enjoy my workout with this added inconvenience? This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and some people are still complaining. In light of the recent high profile hacking, there are a couple of parallels that can be drawn. Many web sites are riddled with vulnerabilities are crazy and easily exploitable as leaving your car keys by the front door while you work out. No one ever considered thanking the people who were swiping these keys for pointing out the vulnerability. Without a hesitation, they had their gym memberships revoked and are awaiting prosecution. The gym did recognize the vulnerability for what it is, and closed up that attack vector. What can we learn from this? Monitoring and logging will not prevent a crime but they will allow us to identify that a crime took place and may help track down who did it. Once we find a security weakness, we need to eliminate it. We may never identify and eliminate all security weaknesses, but we cannot allow well known vulnerabilities to persist in our system. In our case, we are not likely to meet resistance from end users. We are more likely to meet resistance from stake holders, product owners, keeper of schedules and budgets. We may meet resistance from integration partners, co workers, and third party vendors. Regardless of the source, we will see resistance, but the weakness needs to be dealt with. There is no need to glorify a cracker for bringing to light a security weakness. Regardless of their claimed motives, they are not heroes. There is also no point in wasting time defending weaknesses once they are identified. Deal with the weakness and move on. In may be embarrassing to find security weaknesses in our systems, but it is even more embarrassing to continue ignoring them. Even if it is unpopular, we need to seek out security weaknesses and eliminate them when we find them. http://www.sans.org has put together the Common Weakness Enumeration http://cwe.mitre.org/ which lists out common weaknesses. The site navigation takes a little getting used to, but there is a treasure trove here. Here is the detail page for SQL Injection. It clearly states how this can be exploited, in case anyone doubts that the weakness should be taken seriously, and more importantly how to mitigate the risk.

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  As more and more business is being conducted via online channels, engaging users and making them more productive and efficient though these online channels is becoming critical. These users could be customers, partners or employees and while the respective channels through which they interact might be different, these users do increasingly interact with your business through the Web, or mobile devices or now through various social mediums.  Businesses need a user engagement strategy and solution that allows them to deliver targeted and personalized content and applications to users through the various online mediums and touch points.  The customer experience today is made up of an ongoing set of interactions with organizations across many channels, online and offline.  The Direct channel (including sales reps, email and mail) is an important point of contact, as is the Contact Center.  Contact Centers rely on the phone as a means of interacting with customers, and also more now than ever, the Web as well.  However, the online organization is often managed separately from the Contact Center organization within a business. In-store is an important channel for retailers, offering Point-of-Service for human interactions, and Kiosks which enable self-service. Kiosks are a Web-enabled touch point but in-store kiosks are often managed by the head of retail operations, rather than the online organization.  And of course, the online channel, including customer interactions with an organization via digital means -- on the website, mobile websites, and social networking sites, has risen to paramount importance in recent years in the customer experience. Historically all of these channels have been managed separately. The result of all of this fragmentation is that the customer touch points with an organization are siloed.  Their interactions online are not known and respected in their dealings in-store.  Their calls to the contact center are not taken as input into what the website offers them when they arrive. Think of how many times you’ve fallen victim to this. Your experience with the company call center is different than the experience in-store. Your experience with the company website on your desktop computer is different than your experience on your iPad. I think you get the point. But the customer isn’t the only one we need to look at here, as employees and the IT organization have challenges as well when it comes to online engagement. There are many common tools and technologies that organizations have been using to try and engage users, whether it’s customers, employees or partners. Some have adopted different blog and wiki technologies (some hosted, some open source, sometimes embedded in platforms), to things like tagging, file sharing and content management, or composite applications for self-service applications and activity streams. Basically, there are so many different tools & technologies that each address different aspects of user engagement. Now, one of the challenges with this, is that if we look at each individual tool, typically just implementing for example a file sharing and basic collaboration solution, may meet the needs of the business user for one aspect of user engagement, but it may not be the best solution to engage with customers and partners, or it may not fit with IT standards such as integrating with their single sign on tools or their corporate website. Often, the scenario is that businesses are having to acquire multiple pieces and parts as well as build custom applications to meet their needs. Leaving customers and partners with a more fragmented way of interacting with the company. Every organization has some sort of enterprise balancing act between the needs of the business user and the needs and restrictions enforced by enterprise IT groups. As we’ve been discussing, we all know that the expectations for online engagement have changed since the days of the static, one-size fits all website. With these changes have come some very difficult organizational challenges as well. Today, as a business user, you want to engage with your customers, and your customers expect you to know who they are. They expect you to recall the details they’ve provided to you on your website, to your CSRs and to your sales people. They expect you to remember their purchases, their preferences and their problems. And they expect you to know who they are, equally well, across channels, including your web presence. This creates a host of challenges for today’s business users. Delivering targeted, relevant content online is now essential for converting prospects into customers and for engendering long term loyalty. Business users need the ability to leverage customer data from different sources to fuel their segmentation and targeting strategies and to easily set-up, manage and optimize online campaigns. Also critical, they need the ability to accomplish these things on-the-fly, at the speed of the marketplace, while making iterative improvements.  These changing expectations put a host of demands on the IT organization as well. The web presence must be able to scale to support the delivery of personalized and targeted content to thousands of site visitors without sacrificing performance. And integration between systems becomes more important as well, as organizations strive to obtain one view of the customer culled from WCM data, CRM data and more. So then, how do you solve these challenges and meet the growing demands of your users?  You need a solution that: Unifies every customer interaction across all channels Personalizes the products and content that interest the customer and to the device Delivers targeted promotions to the right customer Engages and improve employee productivity Provides self-service access to applications Includes embedded in-context social   So how then do you achieve this level of online engagement, complete customer experience and engage your employees? The answer: Oracle WebCenter. If you want to learn how to get there, we encourage you to attend this webcast on Thursday Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites, where we'll talk about how you are able to transform your portal experience and optimize online engagement -- making your portals more interactive and more engaging across multiple channels. Register today!

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• Introducing Oracle Multitenant

  - by OracleMultitenant

  0 0 1 1142 6510 Oracle Corporation 54 15 7637 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:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language:JA;} The First Database Designed for the Cloud Today Oracle announced the general availability (GA) of Oracle Database 12c, the first database designed for the Cloud. Oracle Multitenant, new with Oracle Database 12c, is a key component of this – a new architecture for consolidating databases and simplifying operations in the Cloud. With this, the inaugural post in the Multitenant blog, my goal is to start the conversation about Oracle Multitenant. We are very proud of this new architecture, which we view as a major advance for Oracle. Customers, partners and analysts who have had previews are very excited about its capabilities and its flexibility. This high level review of Oracle Multitenant will touch on our design considerations and how we re-architected our database for the cloud. I’ll briefly describe our new multitenant architecture and explain it’s key benefits. Finally I’ll mention some of the major use cases we see for Oracle Multitenant. Industry Trends We always start by talking to our customers about the pressures and challenges they’re facing and what trends they’re seeing in the industry. Some things don’t change. They face the same pressures and the same requirements as ever: Pressure to do more with less; be faster, leaner, cheaper, and deliver services 24/7. Big companies have achieved scale. Now they want to realize economies of scale. As ever, DBAs are faced with the challenges of patching and upgrading large numbers of databases, and provisioning new ones.  Requirements are familiar: Performance, scalability, reliability and high availability are non-negotiable. They need ever more security in this threatening climate. There’s no time to stop and retool with new applications. What’s new are the trends. These are the techniques to use to respond to these pressures within the constraints of the requirements. With the advent of cloud computing and availability of massively powerful servers – even engineered systems such as Exadata – our customers want to consolidate many applications into fewer larger servers. There’s a move to standardized services – even self-service. Consolidation Consolidation is not new; companies have tried various different approaches to consolidation of databases in the cloud. One approach is to partition a powerful server between several virtual machines, one per application. A downside of this is that you have the resource and management overheads of OS and RDBMS per VM – that is, per application. Another is that you have replaced physical sprawl with virtual sprawl and virtual sprawl is still expensive to manage. In the dedicated database model, we have a single physical server supporting multiple databases, one per application. So there’s a shared OS overhead, but RDBMS process and memory overhead are replicated per application. Let's think about our traditional Oracle Database architecture. Every time we create a database, be it a production database, a development or a test database, what do we do? We create a set of files, we allocate a bunch of memory for managing the data, and we kick off a series of background processes. This is replicated for every one of the databases that we create. As more and more databases are fired up, these replicated overheads quickly consume the available server resources and this limits the number of applications we can run on any given server. In Oracle Database 11g and earlier the highest degree of consolidation could be achieved by what we call schema consolidation. In this model we have one big server with one big database. Individual applications are installed in separate schemas or table-owners. Database overheads are shared between all applications, which affords maximum consolidation. The shortcomings are that application changes are often required. There is no tenant isolation. One bad apple can spoil the whole batch. New Architecture & Benefits In Oracle Database 12c, we have a new multitenant architecture, featuring pluggable databases. This delivers all the resource utilization advantages of schema consolidation with none of the downsides. There are two parts to the term “pluggable database”: "pluggable", which is new, and "database", which is familiar.  Before we get to the exciting new stuff let’s discuss what hasn’t changed. A pluggable database is a fully functional Oracle database. It’s not watered down in any way. From the perspective of an application or an end user it hasn’t changed at all. This is very important because it means that no application changes are required to adopt this new architecture. There are many thousands of applications built on Oracle databases and they are all ready to run on Oracle Multitenant. So we have these self-contained pluggable databases (PDBs), and as their name suggests, they are plugged into a multitenant container database (CDB). The CDB behaves as a single database from the operations point of view. Very much as we had with the schema consolidation model, we only have a single set of Oracle background processes and a single, shared database memory requirement. This gives us very high consolidation density, which affords maximum reduction in capital expenses (CapEx). By performing management operations at the CDB level – “managing many as one” – we can achieve great reductions in operating expenses (OpEx) as well, but we retain granular control where appropriate. Furthermore, the “pluggability” capability gives us portability and this adds a tremendous amount of agility. We can simply unplug a PDB from one CDB and plug it into another CDB, for example to move it from one SLA tier to another. I'll explore all these new capabilities in much more detail in a future posting.  Use Cases We can identify a number of use cases for Oracle Multitenant. Here are a few of the major ones. 0 0 1 113 650 Oracle Corporation 5 1 762 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:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language:JA;} Development / Testing where individual engineers need rapid provisioning and recycling of private copies of a few "master test databases" Consolidation of disparate applications using fewer, more powerful servers Software as a Service deploying separate copies of identical applications to individual tenants Database as a Service typically self-service provisioning of databases on the private cloud Application Distribution from ISV / Installation by Customer Eliminating many typical installation steps (create schema, import seed data, import application code PL/SQL…) - just plug in a PDB! High volume data distribution literally via disk drives in envelopes distributed by truck! - distribution of things like GIS or MDM master databases …various others! Benefits Previous approaches to consolidation have involved a trade-off between reductions in Capital Expenses (CapEx) and Operating Expenses (OpEx), and they’ve usually come at the expense of agility. With Oracle Multitenant you can have your cake and eat it: Minimize CapEx More Applications per server Minimize OpEx Manage many as one Standardized procedures and services Rapid provisioning Maximize Agility Cloning for development and testing Portability through pluggability Scalability with RAC Ease of Adoption Applications run unchanged It’s a pure deployment choice. Neither the database backend nor the application needs to be changed. In future postings I’ll explore various aspects in more detail. However, if you feel compelled to devour everything you can about Oracle Multitenant this very minute, have no fear. Visit the Multitenant page on OTN and explore the various resources we have available there. Among these, Oracle Distinguished Product Manager Bryn Llewellyn has written an excellent, thorough, and exhaustively detailed White Paper about Oracle Multitenant, which is available here.  Follow me  I tweet @OraclePDB #OracleMultitenant

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 27, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 27, 2012Popular ReleasesVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.16: Changelog for 2.2.16 (32bit and 64bit) Now a standalone remote client also available to control the Engine remotely. 1. Added support for remote connections for status and configuration. MCEBuddy now uses port 23332. The remote server name, remote server port and local server port can be updated from the MCEBuddy.conf file BUT the Service or GUI needs to be restarted (i.e. reboot or restart service or restart program) for it to take effect. Refer to documentation for more details http://mce...LoLHQ - Personal League of Legends Assistant: LoLHQ v1.0: LoLHQ version 1.0 (full, portable) Instructions: - Download - Extract - Run LoLHQ.exe - If needed, specify League of Legends installation path.D3 Loot Tracker: 1.3.1 (patch): - Magic find value will now display properly and includes follower value. - ILevel of legendary items will now display properly.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demoSSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource: Version 1.1 Alpha 2: The component uses now the Google API V2.4 including the management API.Ext Spec: Ext Spec 1.0.0: Completed remaining tasks: 7 12 17The GLMET Project: Sound Recorder: --WinRtBehaviors: V1.0.2: Includes simple Blend SupportMVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.1: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. This release uses Entity Framework 5 for data access and Ninject 3 for dependency injection. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!Simple PM - Project Management Simplified !: Simple Pm v1 - Aplha (Re-released): INSTALLATION GUIDE 1. Run the web setup, which will install the web app to IIS. 2. Make sure you select your application pool to "ASP.NET v4.0" during the installation. 3. Create a database named "SimplePm" 4. Run the attached database script on this database. 5. Change the database username and password in connection strings defined as SimplePmEntities and ApplicationServices from the Web.config file 6. Thats its ! Simple Pm are ready to go ! For any installation assistance feel free to c...menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.JSLint for Visual Studio 2010: 1.4.0: VS2012 support is alphaBlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 6): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 5 Added separate samples download with .vsix dependencies instead of source dependencies Support for FreeWheel SmartXML ad responses Support for Smooth Streaming SDK DownloaderPlugins Support for VMAP and TTML polling for live scenarios Support for custom smooth streaming byte stream and scheme handlers Support for new play time and position tracking plugin Added IsLiveChanged event Added AdaptivePlugin.MaxBitrate property Add...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.8: Version: 2.5.0.8 (Milestone 8): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete WAF: Mark the class DataModel as serializable. InfoMan: Minor improvements. InfoMan: Add unit tests for all modules. Othe...LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.12.9.20: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionToolbars on text note dialog are more flexible now. You can select font face, size, color, and background of text you are typing. RAM now can be initialized to one of the following: random va...New ProjectsAltairis Binary Store Provider: Altairis Binary Store is provider based system for storing arbitrary binary data either in file system or in Azure Blob Storage.Azure Diagnostic Log Viewer: This tool helps in viewing logs written in azure diagnostics log tables. <MORE DETAILS COMING SOON>bluequiz: Là d? án giúp các cá nhân, t? ch?c, tru?ng h?c, t? ch?c thi tr?c nghi?m tr?c tuy?n và qu?n lý di?m m?t cách d? dàng hon.Detect User Geo location: Detect site visitor geo location Detect geo location of the site visitors by html5 geolocation (first) or ipinfodb.com(second choice). Educards: Educational cards.EuWangSSO: SSO (single sign-on) solutionFree Aspx Image Gallery: This is first basic release of my free aspx image gallery project. It is free to use and modify by the user without any need of providing any credit to me.GEFe: GEFeguohai's project: a open source project!ISMOT - Async Helper: This is a wrapper library for Microsoft's Async Library (CTP). Using this library greatly facilitates async calls in Silverlight and Windows Phone projects.LoLHQ - Personal League of Legends Assistant: LoLHQ - Personal League of Legends Assistant Check detailed ELO ratings and statistics of your teammates. Personalize counter-pick lists, view Champions detailsMNK-HKM addon: Special thanks to: Kill Us Or Die TryingPCV_CLINIC: my project PCV_ClinicRemote Commands: Program which allow to control computer sending e-mails with commands.Resource File Comparer: Resource File Comparer is a quick utility to help compare the availability of required resource strings in all resource files for an application.Rich Client Template: The new Rich Client Template for Visual Studio 2012Simple Microsoft Excel Document Converter (Convert To XLS, XLSX, PDF, XPS): This library is based on Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel. This library can convert Excel documents to PDF or XPS in C#.TCC News: testeTesPro: ???The Eggbert Chronicles: The Eggbert Chronicles, a 2.5D platformer built in Unity and created using Javascript and C#.Tombola XNA: Gioco della tombola utilizzando XNA.Tools and Company: "Tools and Company" is a DLL which contains a set of useful and generic classes and functions in C# language. I use this DLL in my different other C# projects.TradeIt: :)usermade: user made websiteWIT Sync Manager 2010: Enables you to synchronize virtually all aspects of work item types and related artifacts across collections and projects in TFS 2010.xebictetris: Xebic Tetris Web Testxmwms: xmwmsXNA for Windows 8(Windows RT).: Officially there is no support for XNA Game Studio in Windows 8(WinRT). So this is a light weight XNA Framework made using the .NET 4.5 and Metro Style APIs and????????????? ?????????: ???????? ?????? ?? ???????? ?????????????? ??????????

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• 7-Eleven Improves the Digital Guest Experience With 10-Minute Application Provisioning

  - by MichaelM-Oracle

  By Vishal Mehra - Director, Cloud Computing, Oracle Consulting Making the Cloud Journey Matter There’s much more to cloud computing than cutting costs and closing data centers. In fact, cloud computing is fast becoming the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age. Oracle Consulting Services contributes to our customers’ cloud journey by accelerating application provisioning and rapidly deploying enterprise solutions. By blending flexibility with standardization, our Middleware as a Service (MWaaS) offering is ensuring the success of many cloud initiatives. 10-Minute Application Provisioning Times at 7-Eleven As a case in point, 7-Eleven recently highlighted the scope, scale, and results of a cloud-powered environment. The world’s largest convenience store chain is rolling out a Digital Guest Experience (DGE) program across 8,500 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Everyday, 7-Eleven connects with tens of millions of customers through point-of-sale terminals, web sites, and mobile apps. Promoting customer loyalty, targeting promotions, downloading digital coupons, and accepting digital payments are all part of the roadmap for a comprehensive and rewarding customer experience. And what about the time required for deploying successive versions of this mission-critical solution? Ron Clanton, 7-Eleven's DGE Program Manager, Information Technology reported at Oracle Open World, " We are now able to provision new environments in less than 10 minutes. This includes the complete SOA Suite on Exalogic, and Enterprise Manager managing both the SOA Suite, Exalogic, and our Exadata databases ." OCS understands the complex nature of innovative solutions and has processes and expertise to help clients like 7-Eleven rapidly develop technology that enhances the customer experience with little more than the click of a button. OCS understood that the 7-Eleven roadmap required careful planning, agile development, and a cloud-capable environment to move fast and perform at enterprise scale. Business Agility Today’s business-savvy technology leaders face competing priorities as they confront the digital disruptions of the mobile revolution and next-generation enterprise applications. To support an innovation agenda, IT is required to balance competing priorities between development and operations groups. Standardization and consolidation of computing resources are the keys to success. With our operational and technical expertise promoting business agility, Oracle Consulting's deep Middleware as a Service experience can make a significant difference to our clients by empowering enterprise IT organizations with the computing environment they seek to keep up with the pace of change that digitally driven business units expect. Depending on the needs of the organization, this environment runs within a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Through on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, IT delivers the standard tools and methods for developing, integrating, deploying, and scaling next-generation applications. Gold profiles of predefined configurations eliminate the version mismatches among databases, application servers, and SOA suite components, delivered both by Oracle and other enterprise ISVs. These computing resources are well defined in business terms, enabling users to select what they need from a service catalog. Striking the Balance between Development and Operations As a result, development groups have the flexibility to choose among a menu of available services with descriptions of standard business functions, service level guarantees, and costs. Faced with the consumerization of enterprise IT, they can deliver the innovative customer experiences that seamlessly integrate with underlying enterprise applications and services. This cloud-powered development and testing environment accelerates release cycles to ensure agile development and rapid deployments. At the same time, the operations group is relying on certified stacks and frameworks, tuned to predefined environments and patterns. Operators can maintain a high level of security, and continue best practices for applications/systems monitoring and management. Moreover, faced with the challenges of delivering on service level agreements (SLAs) with the business units, operators can ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of the infrastructure. The elasticity of a cloud-computing environment – the ability to rapidly add virtual machines and storage in response to computing demands -- makes a difference for hardware utilization and efficiency. Contending with Continuous Change What does it take to succeed on the promise of the cloud? As the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age, IT must face not only the technical transformations but also the organizational challenges of the cloud. Standardizing key technologies, resources, and services through cloud computing is only one part of the cloud journey. Managing relationships among multiple department and projects over time – developing the management, governance, and monitoring capabilities within IT – is an often unmentioned but all too important second part. In fact, IT must have the organizational agility to contend with continuous change. This is where a skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. With a lifecycle services approach to delivering innovative business solutions, Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help enterprise customers succeed on their cloud journeys as well as other converging mega trends .

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 5): Query Snapshots

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've emailed us about a bug you've encountered with the EAP or beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, we probably asked you to send us a query snapshot of your databases. Here, I explain what a query snapshot is, and how it helps us fix your bug. Problem 1: Debugging users' bug reports When we started the Schema Compare project, we knew we were going to get problems with users' databases - configurations we hadn't considered, features that weren't installed, unicode issues, wierd dependencies... With SQL Compare, users are generally happy to send us a database backup that we can restore using a single RESTORE DATABASE command on our test servers and immediately reproduce the problem. Oracle, on the other hand, would be a lot more tricky. As Oracle generally has a 1-to-1 mapping between instances and databases, any databases users sent would have to be restored to their own instance. Furthermore, the number of steps required to get a properly working database, and the size of most oracle databases, made it infeasible to ask every customer who came across a bug during our beta program to send us their databases. We also knew that there would be lots of issues with data security that would make it hard to get backups. So we needed an easier way to be able to debug customers issues and sort out what strange schema data Oracle was returning. Problem 2: Test execution time Another issue we knew we would have to solve was the execution time of the tests we would produce for the Schema Compare engine. Our initial prototype showed that querying the data dictionary for schema information was going to be slow (at least 15 seconds per database), and this is generally proportional to the size of the database. If you're running thousands of tests on the same databases, each one registering separate schemas, not only would the tests would take hours and hours to run, but the test servers would be hammered senseless. The solution To solve these, we needed to be able to populate the schema of a database without actually connecting to it. Well, the IDataReader interface is the primary way we read data from an Oracle server. The data dictionary queries we use return their data in terms of simple strings and numbers, which we then process and reconstruct into an object model, and the results of these queries are identical for identical schemas. So, we can record the raw results of the queries once, and then replay these results to construct the same object model as many times as required without needing to actually connect to the original database. This is what query snapshots do. They are binary files containing the raw unprocessed data we get back from the oracle server for all the queries we run on the data dictionary to get schema information. The core of the query snapshot generation takes the results of the IDataReader we get from running queries on Oracle, and passes the row data to a BinaryWriter that writes it straight to a file. The query snapshot can then be replayed to create the same object model; when the results of a specific query is needed by the population code, we can simply read the binary data stored in the file on disk and present it through an IDataReader wrapper. This is far faster than querying the server over the network, and allows us to run tests in a reasonable time. They also allow us to easily debug a customers problem; using a simple snapshot generation program, users can generate a query snapshot that could be sent along with a bug report that we can immediately replay on our machines to let us debug the issue, rather than having to obtain database backups and restore databases to test systems. There are also far fewer problems with data security; query snapshots only contain schema information, which is generally less sensitive than table data. Query snapshots implementation However, actually implementing such a feature did have a couple of 'gotchas' to it. My second blog post detailed the development of the dependencies algorithm we use to ensure we get all the dependencies in the database, and that algorithm uses data from both databases to find all the needed objects - what database you're comparing to affects what objects get populated from both databases. We get information on these additional objects using an appropriate WHERE clause on all the population queries. So, in order to accurately replay the results of querying the live database, the query snapshot needs to be a snapshot of a comparison of two databases, not just populating a single database. Furthermore, although the code population queries (eg querying all_tab_cols to get column information) can simply be passed straight from the IDataReader to the BinaryWriter, we need to hook into and run the live dependencies algorithm while we're creating the snapshot to ensure we get the same WHERE clauses, and the same query results, as if we were populating straight from a live system. We also need to store the results of the dependencies queries themselves, as the resulting dependency graph is stored within the OracleDatabase object that is produced, and is later used to help order actions in synchronization scripts. This is significantly helped by the dependencies algorithm being a deterministic algorithm - given the same input, it will always return the same output. Therefore, when we're replaying a query snapshot, and processing dependency information, we simply have to return the results of the queries in the order we got them from the live database, rather than trying to calculate the contents of all_dependencies on the fly. Query snapshots are a significant feature in Schema Compare that really helps us to debug problems with the tool, as well as making our testers happier. Although not really user-visible, they are very useful to the development team to help us fix bugs in the product much faster than we otherwise would be able to.

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• Documentation Changes in Solaris 11.1

  - by alanc

  One of the first places you can see Solaris 11.1 changes are in the docs, which have now been posted in the Solaris 11.1 Library on docs.oracle.com. I spent a good deal of time reviewing documentation for this release, and thought some would be interesting to blog about, but didn't review all the changes (not by a long shot), and am not going to cover all the changes here, so there's plenty left for you to discover on your own. Just comparing the Solaris 11.1 Library list of docs against the Solaris 11 list will show a lot of reorganization and refactoring of the doc set, especially in the system administration guides. Hopefully the new break down will make it easier to get straight to the sections you need when a task is at hand. Packaging System Unfortunately, the excellent in-depth guide for how to build packages for the new Image Packaging System (IPS) in Solaris 11 wasn't done in time to make the initial Solaris 11 doc set. An interim version was published shortly after release, in PDF form on the OTN IPS page. For Solaris 11.1 it was included in the doc set, as Packaging and Delivering Software With the Image Packaging System in Oracle Solaris 11.1, so should be easier to find, and easier to share links to specific pages the HTML version. Beyond just how to build a package, it includes details on how Solaris is packaged, and how package updates work, which may be useful to all system administrators who deal with Solaris 11 upgrades & installations. The Adding and Updating Oracle Solaris 11.1 Software Packages was also extended, including new sections on Relaxing Version Constraints Specified by Incorporations and Locking Packages to a Specified Version that may be of interest to those who want to keep the Solaris 11 versions of certain packages when they upgrade, such as the couple of packages that had functionality removed by an (unusual for an update release) End of Feature process in the 11.1 release. Also added in this release is a document containing the lists of all the packages in each of the major package groups in Solaris 11.1 (solaris-desktop, solaris-large-server, and solaris-small-server). While you can simply get the contents of those groups from the package repository, either via the web interface or the pkg command line, the documentation puts them in handy tables for easier side-by-side comparison, or viewing the lists before you've installed the system to pick which one you want to initially install. X Window System We've not had good X11 coverage in the online Solaris docs in a while, mostly relying on the man pages, and upstream X.Org docs. In this release, we've integrated some X coverage into the Solaris 11.1 Desktop Adminstrator's Guide, including sections on installing fonts for fontconfig or legacy X11 clients, X server configuration, and setting up remote access via X11 or VNC. Of course we continue to work on improving the docs, including a lot of contributions to the upstream docs all OS'es share (more about that another time). Security One of the things Oracle likes to do for its products is to publish security guides for administrators & developers to know how to build systems that meet their security needs. For Solaris, we started this with Solaris 11, providing a guide for sysadmins to find where the security relevant configuration options were documented. The Solaris 11.1 Security Guidelines extend this to cover new security features, such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Read-Only Zones, as well as adding additional guidelines for existing features, such as how to limit the size of tmpfs filesystems, to avoid users driving the system into swap thrashing situations. For developers, the corresponding document is the Developer's Guide to Oracle Solaris 11 Security, which has been the source for years for documentation of security-relevant Solaris API's such as PAM, GSS-API, and the Solaris Cryptographic Framework. For Solaris 11.1, a new appendix was added to start providing Secure Coding Guidelines for Developers, leveraging the CERT Secure Coding Standards and OWASP guidelines to provide the base recommendations for common programming languages and their standard API's. Solaris specific secure programming guidance was added via links to other documentation in the product doc set. In parallel, we updated the Solaris C Libary Functions security considerations list with details of Solaris 11 enhancements such as FD_CLOEXEC flags, additional *at() functions, and new stdio functions such as asprintf() and getline(). A number of code examples throughout the Solaris 11.1 doc set were updated to follow these recommendations, changing unbounded strcpy() calls to strlcpy(), sprintf() to snprintf(), etc. so that developers following our examples start out with safer code. The Writing Device Drivers guide even had the appendix updated to list which of these utility functions, like snprintf() and strlcpy(), are now available via the Kernel DDI. Little Things Of course all the big new features got documented, and some major efforts were put into refactoring and renovation, but there were also a lot of smaller things that got fixed as well in the nearly a year between the Solaris 11 and 11.1 doc releases - again too many to list here, but a random sampling of the ones I know about & found interesting or useful: The Privileges section of the DTrace Guide now gives users a pointer to find out how to set up DTrace privileges for non-global zones and what limitations are in place there. A new section on Recommended iSCSI Configuration Practices was added to the iSCSI configuration section when it moved into the SAN Configuration and Multipathing administration guide. The Managing System Power Services section contains an expanded explanation of the various tunables for power management in Solaris 11.1. The sample dcmd sources in /usr/demo/mdb were updated to include ::help output, so that developers like myself who follow the examples don't forget to include it (until a helpful code reviewer pointed it out while reviewing the mdb module changes for Xorg 1.12). The README file in that directory was updated to show the correct paths for installing both kernel & userspace modules, including the 64-bit variants.

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• Impressions and Reactions from Alliance 2012

  - by user739873

  Alliance 2012 has come to a conclusion.  What strikes me about every Alliance conference is the amazing amount of collaboration and cooperation I see across higher education in the sharing of best practices around the entire Oracle PeopleSoft software suite, not just the student information system (Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions).  In addition to the vibrant U.S. organization, it's gratifying to see the growth in the international attendance again this year, with an EMEA HEUG organizing to complement the existing groups in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the U.K.  Their first meeting is planned for London in October, and I suspect they'll be surprised at the amount of interest and attendance. In my discussions with higher education IT and functional leadership at Alliance there were a number of instances where concern was expressed about Oracle's commitment to higher education as an industry, primarily because of a lack of perceived innovation in the applications that Oracle develops for this market. Here I think perception and reality are far apart, and I'd like to explain why I believe this to be true. First let me start with what I think drives this perception. Predominately it's in two areas. The first area is the user interface, both for students and faculty that interact with the system as "customers", and for those employees of the institution (faculty, staff, and sometimes students as well) that use the system in some kind of administrative role. Because the UI hasn't changed all that much from the PeopleSoft days, individuals perceive this as a dead product with little innovation and therefore Oracle isn't investing. The second area is around the integration of the higher education suite of applications (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) and the rest of the Oracle software assets. Whether grown organically or acquired, there is an impressive array of middleware and other software products that could be leveraged much more significantly by the higher education applications than is currently the case today. This is also perceived as lack of investment. Let me address these two points.  First the UI.  More is being done here than ever before, and the PAG and other groups where this was discussed at Alliance 2012 were more numerous than I've seen in any past meeting. Whether it's Oracle development leveraging web services or some extremely early but very promising work leveraging the recent Endeca acquisition (see some cool examples here) there are a lot of resources aimed at this issue.  There are also some amazing prototypes being developed by our UX (user experience team) that will eventually make their way into the higher education applications realm - they had an impressive setup at Alliance.  Hopefully many of you that attended found this group. If not, the senior leader for that team Jeremy Ashley will be a significant contributor of content to our summer Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington in June. In the area of integration with other elements of the Oracle stack, this is also an area of focus for the company and my team.  We're making this a priority especially in the areas of identity management and security, leveraging WebCenter more effectively for content, imaging, and mobility, and driving towards the ultimate objective of WebLogic Suite as our platform for SOA, links to learning management systems (SAIP), and content. There is also much work around business intelligence centering on OBI applications. But at the end of the day we get enormous value from the HEUG (higher education user group) and the various subgroups formed as a part of this community that help us align and prioritize our investments, whether it's around better integration with other Oracle products or integration with partner offerings.  It's one of the healthiest, mutually beneficial relationships between customers and an Education IT concern that exists on the globe. And I can't avoid mentioning that this kind of relationship between higher education and the corporate IT community that can truly address the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, institutional excellence (which starts with IT) and student success.  It's not (in my opinion) going to be solved through community source - cost and complexity only increase in that model and in the end higher education doesn't ultimately focus on core competencies: educating, developing, and researching.  While I agree with some of what Michael A. McRobbie wrote in his EDUCAUSE Review article (Information Technology: A View from Both Sides of the President’s Desk), I take strong issue with his assertion that the "the IT marketplace is just the opposite of long-term stability...."  Sure there has been healthy, creative destruction in the past 2-3 decades, but this has had the effect of, in the aggregate, benefiting education with greater efficiency, more innovation and increased stability as larger, more financially secure firms acquire and develop integrated solutions. Cole

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• What Counts for a DBA: Humility

  - by drsql

  In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the  application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do.   Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

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• Pirates, Treasure Chests and Architectural Mapping

  Pirate 1: Why do pirates create treasure maps? Pirate 2: I do not know.Pirate 1: So they can find their gold. Yes, that was a bad joke, but it does illustrate a point. Pirates are known for drawing treasure maps to their most prized possession. These documents detail the decisions pirates made in order to hide and find their chests of gold. The map allows them to trace the steps they took originally to hide their treasure so that they may return. As software engineers, programmers, and architects we need to treat software implementations much like our treasure chest. Why is software like a treasure chest? It cost money, time,  and resources to develop (Usually) It can make or save money, time, and resources (Hopefully) If we operate under the assumption that software is like a treasure chest then wouldn’t make sense to document the steps, rationale, concerns, and decisions about how it was designed? Pirates are notorious for documenting where they hide their treasure.  Shouldn’t we as creators of software do the same? By documenting our design decisions and rationale behind them will help others be able to understand and maintain implemented systems. This can only be done if the design decisions are correctly mapped to its corresponding implementation. This allows for architectural decisions to be traced from the conceptual model, architectural design and finally to the implementation. Mapping gives software professional a method to trace the reason why specific areas of code were developed verses other options. Just like the pirates we need to able to trace our steps from the start of a project to its implementation,  so that we will understand why specific choices were chosen. The traceability of a software implementation that actually maps back to its originating design decisions is invaluable for ensuring that architectural drifting and erosion does not take place. The drifting and erosion is prevented by allowing others to understand the rational of why an implementation was created in a specific manor or methodology The process of mapping distinct design concerns/decisions to the location of its implemented is called traceability. In this context traceability is defined as method for connecting distinctive software artifacts. This process allows architectural design models and decisions to be directly connected with its physical implementation. The process of mapping architectural design concerns to a software implementation can be very complex. However, most design decision can be placed in  a few generalized categories. Commonly Mapped Design Decisions Design Rationale Components and Connectors Interfaces Behaviors/Properties Design rational is one of the hardest categories to map directly to an implementation. Typically this rational is mapped or document in code via comments. These comments consist of general design decisions and reasoning because they do not directly refer to a specific part of an application. They typically focus more on the higher level concerns. Components and connectors can directly be mapped to architectural concerns. Typically concerns subdivide an application in to distinct functional areas. These functional areas then can map directly back to their originating concerns.Interfaces can be mapped back to design concerns in one of two ways. Interfaces that pertain to specific function definitions can be directly mapped back to its originating concern(s). However, more complicated interfaces require additional analysis to ensure that the proper mappings are created. Depending on the complexity some Behaviors\Properties can be translated directly into a generic implementation structure that is ready for business logic. In addition, some behaviors can be translated directly in to an actual implementation depending on the complexity and architectural tools used. Mapping design concerns to an implementation is a lot of work to maintain, but is doable. In order to ensure that concerns are mapped correctly and that an implementation correctly reflects its design concerns then one of two standard approaches are usually used. All Changes Come From ArchitectureBy forcing all application changes to come through the architectural model prior to implementation then the existing mappings will be used to locate where in the implementation changes need to occur. Allow Changes From Implementation Or Architecture By allowing changes to come from the implementation and/or the architecture then the other area must be kept in sync. This methodology is more complex compared to the previous approach.  One reason to justify the added complexity for an application is due to the fact that this approach tends to detect and prevent architectural drift and erosion. Additionally, this approach is usually maintained via software because of the complexity. Reference:Taylor, R. N., Medvidovic, N., & Dashofy, E. M. (2009). Software architecture: Foundations, theory, and practice Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons  

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• Why Executives Need Enterprise Project Portfolio Management: 3 Key Considerations to Drive Value Across the Organization

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} By: Guy Barlow, Oracle Primavera Industry Strategy Director Over the last few years there has been a tremendous shift – some would say tectonic in nature – that has brought project management to the forefront of executive attention. Many factors have been driving this growing awareness, most notably, the global financial crisis, heightened regulatory environments and a need to more effectively operationalize corporate strategy. Executives in India are no exception. In fact, given the phenomenal rate of progress of the country, top of mind for all executives (whether in finance, operations, IT, etc.) is the need to build capacity, ramp-up production and ensure that the right resources are in place to capture growth opportunities. This applies across all industries from asset-intensive – like oil & gas, utilities and mining – to traditional manufacturing and the public sector, including services-based sectors such as the financial, telecom and life sciences segments are also part of the mix. However, compounding matters is a complex, interplay between projects – big and small, complex and simple – as companies expand and grow both domestically and internationally. So, having a standardized, enterprise wide solution for project portfolio management is natural. Failing to do so is akin to having two ERP systems, one to manage “large” invoices and one to manage “small” invoices. It makes no sense and provides no enterprise wide visibility. Therefore, it is imperative for executives to understand the full range of their business commitments, the benefit to the company, current performance and associated course corrections if needed. Irrespective of industry and regardless of the use case (e.g., building a power plant, launching a new financial service or developing a new automobile) company leaders need to approach the value of enterprise project portfolio management via 3 critical areas: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} 1. Greater Financial Discipline – Improve financial rigor and results through better governance and control is an imperative given today’s financial uncertainty and greater investment scrutiny. For example, as India plans a US$1 trillion investment in the country’s infrastructure how do companies ensure costs are managed? How do you control cash flow? Can you easily report this to stakeholders? 2. Improved Operational Excellence – Increase efficiency and reduce costs through robust collaboration and integration. Upwards of 66% of cost variances are driven by poor supplier collaboration. As you execute initiatives do you have visibility into the performance of your supply base? How are they integrated into the broader program plan? 3. Enhanced Risk Mitigation – Manage and react to uncertainty through improved transparency and contingency planning. What happens if you’re faced with a skills shortage? How do you plan and account for geo-political or weather related events? In summary, projects are not just the delivery of a product or service to a customer inside a predetermined schedule; they often form a contractual and even moral obligation to shareholders and stakeholders alike. Hence the intimate connection between executives and projects, with the latter providing executives with the platform to demonstrate that their organization has the capabilities and competencies needed to meet and, whenever possible, exceed their customer commitments. Effectively developing and operationalizing corporate strategy is the hallmark of successful executives and enterprise project and portfolio management allows them to achieve this goal. Article was first published for Manage India, an e-newsletter, PMI India.

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• Lessons learnt in implementing Scrum in a Large Organization that has traditional values

  - by MarkPearl

  I recently had the experience of being involved in a “test” scrum implementation in a large organization that was used to a traditional project management approach. Here are some lessons that I learnt from it. Don’t let the Project Manager be the Product Owner First lesson learnt is to identify the correct product owner – in this instance the product manager assumed the role of the product owner which was a mistake. The product owner is the one who has the most to loose if the project fails. With a methodology that advocates removing the role of the project manager from the process then it is not in the interests of the person who is employed as a project manager to be the product owner – in fact they have the most to gain should the project fail. Know the time commitments of team members to the Project Second lesson learnt is to get a firm time commitment of the members on a team for the sprint and to hold them to it. In this project instance many of the issues we faced were with team members having to double up on supporting existing projects/systems and the scrum project. In many situations they just didn’t get round to doing any work on the scrum project for several days while they tried to meet other commitments. Initially this was not made transparent to the team – in stand up team members would say that had done some work but would be very vague on how much time they had actually spent using the blackhole of their other legacy projects as an excuse – putting up a time burn down chart made time allocations transparent and easy to hold the team to. In addition, how can you plan for a sprint without knowing the actual time available of the members – when I mean actual time, the exercise of getting them to go through all their appointments and lunch times and breaks and removing them from their time commitment helps get you to a realistic time that they can dedicate. Make sure you meet your minimum team sizes In a recent post I wrote about the difference between a partnership and a team. If you are going to do scrum in a large organization make sure you have a minimum team size of at least 3 developers. My experience with larger organizations is that people have a tendency to be sick more, take more leave and generally not be around – if you have a team size of two it is so easy to loose momentum on the project – the more people you have in the team (up to about 9) the more the momentum the project will have when people are not around. Swapping from one methodology to another can seem as waste to the customer It sounds bad, but most customers don’t care what methodology you use. Often they have bought into the “big plan upfront”. If you can, avoid taking a project on midstream from a traditional approach unless the customer has not bought into the process – with this particular project they had a detailed upfront planning breakaway with the customer using the traditional approach and then before the project started we moved onto a scrum implementation – this seemed as waste to the customer. We should have managed the customers expectation properly. Don’t play the role of the scrum master if you can’t be the scrum master With this particular implementation I was the “scrum master”. But all I did was go through the process of the formal meetings of scrum – I attended stand up, retrospectives and planning – but I was not hands on the ground. I was not performing the most important role of removing blockages – and by the end of the project there were a number of blockages “cropping up”. What could have been a better approach was to take someone on the team and train them to be the scrum master and be present to coach them. Alternatively actually be on the team on a fulltime basis and be the scrum master. By just going through the meetings of scrum didn’t mean we were doing scrum. So we failed with this one, if you fail look at it from an agile perspective As this particular project drew to a close and it became more and more apparent that it was not going to succeed the failure of it became depressing. Emotions were expressed by various people on the team that we not encouraging and enforced the failure. Embracing the failure and looking at it for what it is instead of taking it as the end of the world can change how you grow from the experience. Acknowledging that it failed and then focussing on learning from why and how to avoid the failure in the future can change how you feel emotionally about the team, the project and the organization.

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• Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

  For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

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• Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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