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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #005

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 SQL SERVER – Cursor to Kill All Process in Database I indeed wrote this cursor and when I often look back, I wonder how naive I was to write this. The reason for writing this cursor was to free up my database from any existing connection so I can do database operation. This worked fine but there can be a potentially big issue if there was any important transaction was killed by this process. There is another way to to achieve the same thing where we can use ALTER syntax to take database in single user mode. Read more about that over here and here. 2007 Rules of Third Normal Form and Normalization Advantage – 3NF The rules of 3NF are mentioned here Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. Correct Syntax for Stored Procedure SP Sometime a simple question is the most important question. I often see in industry incorrectly written Stored Procedure. Few writes code after the most outer BEGIN…END and few writes code after the GO Statement. In this brief blog post, I have attempted to explain the same. 2008 Switch Between Result Pan and Query Pan – SQL Shortcut Many times when I am writing query I have to scroll the result displayed in the result set. Most of the developer uses the mouse to switch between and Query Pane and Result Pane. There are few developers who are crazy about Keyboard shortcuts. F6 is the keyword which can be used to switch between query pane and tabs of the result pane. Interesting Observation – Use of Index and Execution Plan Query Optimization is a complex game and it has its own rules. From the example in the article we have discovered that Query Optimizer does not use clustered index to retrieve data, sometime non clustered index provides optimal performance for retrieving Primary Key. When all the rows and columns are selected Primary Key should be used to select data as it provides optimal performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY If you pull up any application or system where there are more than 100 SQL Server Views are created – I am very confident that at one or two places you will notice the scenario wherein View the ORDER BY clause is used with TOP 100 PERCENT. SQL Server 2008 VIEW with ORDER BY clause does not throw an error; moreover, it does not acknowledge the presence of it as well. In this article we have taken three perfect examples and demonstrated which clause we should use when. Comma Separated Values (CSV) from Table Column A Very common question – How to create comma separated values from a table in the database? The answer is also very common if we use XML. Check out this article for quick learning on the same subject. Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide Though Azure portal has changed a quite bit since I wrote this article, the concept used in this article are not old. They are still valid and many of the functions are still working as mentioned in the article. I believe this one article will put you on the track to use Azure! Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution Earlier I have posted a small question on this blog and requested help from readers to participate here and provide a solution. The puzzle was to write a query that will return the size for each index that is on any particular table. We need a query that will return an additional column in the above listed query and it should contain the size of the index. This article presents two of the best solutions from the puzzle. 2010 Well, this week in 2010 was the week of puzzles as I posted three interesting puzzles. Till today I am noticing pretty good interesting in the puzzles. They are tricky but for sure brings a great value if you are a database developer for a long time. I suggest you go over this puzzles and their answers. Did you really know all of the answers? I am confident that reading following three blog post will for sure help you enhance the experience with T-SQL. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists 2011 DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012 Have you ever faced a situation where something does not work? When you try to fix it - you enjoy fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this was exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story, I want to candidly state that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. Now the disclaimer is over – I suggest you read the original story – you will love it! Get Directory Structure using Extended Stored Procedure xp_dirtree Here is the question to you – why would you do something in SQL Server where you can do the same task in command prompt much easily. Well, the answer is sometime there are real use cases when we have to do such thing. This is a similar example where I have demonstrated how in SQL Server 2012 we can use extended stored procedure to retrieve directory structure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• The last MVVM you'll ever need?

  - by Nuri Halperin

  As my MVC projects mature and grow, the need to have some omnipresent, ambient model properties quickly emerge. The application no longer has only one dynamic pieced of data on the page: A sidebar with a shopping cart, some news flash on the side – pretty common stuff. The rub is that a controller is invoked in context of a single intended request. The rest of the data, even though it could be just as dynamic, is expected to appear on it's own. There are many solutions to this scenario. MVVM prescribes creating elaborate objects which expose your new data as a property on some uber-object with more properties exposing the "side show" ambient data. The reason I don't love this approach is because it forces fairly acute awareness of the view, and soon enough you have many MVVM objects laying around, and views have to start doing null-checks in order to ensure you really supplied all the values before binding to them. Ick. Just as unattractive is the ViewData dictionary. It's not strongly typed, and in both this and the MVVM approach someone has to populate these properties – n'est pas? Where does that live? With MVC2, we get the formerly-futures  feature Html.RenderAction(). The feature allows you plant a line in a view, of the format: <% Html.RenderAction("SessionInterest", "Session"); %> While this syntax looks very clean, I can't help being bothered by it. MVC was touting a very strong separation of concerns, the Model taking on the role of the business logic, the controller handling route and performing minimal view-choosing operations and the views strictly focused on rendering out angled-bracket tags. The RenderAction() syntax has the view calling some controller and invoking it inline with it's runtime rendering. This – to my taste – embeds too much  knowledge of controllers into the view's code – which was allegedly forbidden.  The one way flow "Controller Receive Data –> Controller invoke Model –> Controller select view –> Controller Hand data to view" now gets a "View calls controller and gets it's own data" which is not so one-way anymore. Ick. I toyed with some other solutions a bit, including some base controllers, special view classes etc. My current favorite though is making use of the ExpandoObject and dynamic features with C# 4.0. If you follow Phil Haack or read a bit from David Heyden you can see the general picture emerging. The game changer is that using the new dynamic syntax, one can sprout properties on an object and make use of them in the view. Well that beats having a bunch of uni-purpose MVVM's any day! Rather than statically exposed properties, we'll just use the capability of adding members at runtime. Armed with new ideas and syntax, I went to work: First, I created a factory method to enrich the focuse object: public static class ModelExtension { public static dynamic Decorate(this Controller controller, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest(); result.TagUsage = CodeCampBL.TagUsage(); return result; } } This gives me a nice fluent way to have the controller add the rest of the ambient "side show" items (SessionInterest, TagUsage in this demo) and expose them all as the Model: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); dynamic result = this.Decorate(data); return View(result); } So now what remains is that my view knows to expect a dynamic object (rather than statically typed) so that the ASP.NET page compiler won't barf: <%@ Page Language="C#" Title="Ambient Demo" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Ambient.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<dynamic>" %> Notice the generic ViewPage<dynamic>. It doesn't work otherwise. In the page itself, Model.Value property contains the main data returned from the controller. The nice thing about this, is that the master page (Ambient.Master) also inherits from the generic ViewMasterPage<dynamic>. So rather than the page worrying about all this ambient stuff, the side bars and panels for ambient data all reside in a master page, and can be rendered using the RenderPartial() syntax: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest as Dictionary<string, int>); %> Note here that a cast is necessary. This is because although dynamic is magic, it can't figure out what type this property is, and wants you to give it a type so its binder can figure out the right property to bind to at runtime. I use as, you can cast if you like. So there we go – no violation of MVC, no explosion of MVVM models and voila – right? Well, I could not let this go without a tweak or two more. The first thing to improve, is that some views may not need all the properties. In that case, it would be a waste of resources to populate every property. The solution to this is simple: rather than exposing properties, I change d the factory method to expose lambdas - Func<T> really. So only if and when a view accesses a member of the dynamic object does it load the data. public static class ModelExtension { // take two.. lazy loading! public static dynamic LazyDecorate(this Controller c, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest()); result.TagUsage = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.TagUsage()); return result; } } Now that lazy loading is in place, there's really no reason not to hook up all and any possible ambient property. Go nuts! Add them all in – they won't get invoked unless used. This now requires changing the signature of usage on the ambient properties methods –adding some parenthesis to the master view: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest() as Dictionary<string, int>); %> And, of course, the controller needs to call LazyDecorate() rather than the old Decorate(). The final touch is to introduce a convenience method to the my Controller class , so that the tedium of calling Decorate() everywhere goes away. This is done quite simply by adding a bunch of methods, matching View(object), View(string,object) signatures of the Controller class: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); return AmbientView(data); } //these methods can reside in a base controller for the solution: public ViewResult AmbientView(dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(result); } public ViewResult AmbientView(string viewName, dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(viewName, result); } The call to AmbientView now replaces any call the View() that requires the ambient data. DRY sattisfied, lazy loading and no need to replace core pieces of the MVC pipeline. I call this a good MVC day. Enjoy!

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• Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• Juniper Strategy, LLC is hiring SharePoint Developers&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Isn’t everybody these days? It seems as though there are definitely more jobs than qualified devs these days, but yes, we are looking for a few good devs to help round out our burgeoning SharePoint team. Juniper Strategy is located in the DC area, however we will consider remote devs for the right fit. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a bright company that truly “gets it” when it comes to SharePoint, Project Management, and Information Assurance. We need like-minded people who “get it”, enjoy it, and who are looking for more than just a job. We have government and commercial opportunities as well as our own internal product that has a bright future of its own. Our immediate needs are for SharePoint .NET developers, but feel free to submit your resume for us to keep on file as it looks as though we’ll need several people in the coming months. Please email us your resume and salary requirements to [email protected] Below are our official job postings. Thanks for stopping by, we look forward to  hearing from you. Senior SharePoint .NET Developer Senior developer will focus on design and coding of custom, end-to-end business process solutions within the SharePoint framework. Senior developer with the ability to serve as a senior developer/mentor and manage day-to-day development tasks. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. For selected development path, prepare technical specification and build the solution. Assist project manager with defining development task schedule and level-of-effort. Lead technical solution deployment. Job Requirements Minimum of 7 years experience in agile development, with at least 3 years of SharePoint-related development experience (SPS, SharePoint 2007/2010, WSS2-4). Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Experience with using multiple data sources/repositories for database CRUD activities, including relational databases, SAP, Oracle e-Business. Experience with designing and deploying performance-based solutions in SharePoint for business processes that involve a very large number of records. Experience designing dynamic dashboards and mashups with data from multiple sources (internal to SharePoint as well as from external sources). Experience designing custom forms to facilitate user data entry, both with and without leveraging Forms Services. Experience building custom web part solutions. Experience with designing custom solutions for processing underlying business logic requirements including, but not limited to, SQL stored procedures, C#/ASP.Net workflows/event handlers (including timer jobs) to support multi-tiered decision trees and associated computations. Ability to create complex solution packages for deployment (e.g., feature-stapled site definitions). Must have impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal. Seeking a "tinkerer"; proactive with a thirst for knowledge (and a sense of humor). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. Applicants must pass a skills assessment test. MCP/MCTS or comparable certification preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable SharePoint Project Lead Define project task schedule, work breakdown structure and level-of-effort. Serve as principal liaison to the customer to manage deliverables and expectations. Day-to-day project and team management, including preparation and maintenance of project plans, budgets, and status reports. Prepare technical briefings and presentation decks, provide briefs to C-level stakeholders. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. The SharePoint Project Lead will be working with SharePoint architects and system owners to perform requirements/gap analysis and develop the underlying functional specifications. Once we have functional specifications as close to "final" as possible, the Project Lead will be responsible for preparation of the associated technical specification/development blueprint, along with assistance in preparing IV&V/test plan materials with support from other team members. This person will also be responsible for day-to-day management of "developers", but is also expected to engage in development directly as needed.  Job Requirements Minimum 8 years of technology project management across the software development life-cycle, with a minimum of 3 years of project management relating specifically to SharePoint (SPS 2003, SharePoint2007/2010) and/or Project Server. Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Ability to interact and collaborate effectively with team members and stakeholders of different skill sets, personalities and needs. General "development" skill set required is a fundamental understanding of MOSS 2007 Enterprise, SP1/SP2, from the top-level of skinning to the core of the SharePoint object model. Impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal, and a sense of humor are required. The projects will require being at a client site at least 50% of the time in Washington DC (NW DC) and Maryland (near Suitland). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. PMP certification, PgMP preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable

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• Video on Architecture and Code Quality using Visual Studio 2012&ndash;interview with Marcel de Vries and Terje Sandstrom by Adam Cogan

  - by terje

  Find the video HERE. Adam Cogan did a great Web TV interview with Marcel de Vries and myself on the topics of architecture and code quality.  It was real fun participating in this session.  Although we know each other from the MVP ALM community,  Marcel, Adam and I haven’t worked together before. It was very interesting to see how we agreed on so many terms, and how alike we where thinking.  The basics of ensuring you have a good architecture and how you could document it is one thing.  Also, the same agreement on the importance of having a high quality code base, and how we used the Visual Studio 2012 tools, and some others (NDepend for example)  to measure and ensure that the code quality was where it should be.  As the tools, methods and thinking popped up during the interview it was a lot of “Hey !  I do that too!”.  The tools are not only for “after the fact” work, but we use them during the coding.  That way the tools becomes an integrated part of our coding work, and helps us to find issues we may have overlooked.  The video has a bunch of call outs, pinpointing important things to remember. These are also listed on the corresponding web page. I haven’t seen that touch before, but really liked this way of doing it – it makes it much easier to spot the highlights.  Titus Maclaren and Raj Dhatt from SSW have done a terrific job producing this video.  And thanks to Lei Xu for doing the camera and recording job.  Thanks guys ! Also, if you are at TechEd Amsterdam 2012, go and listen to Adam Cogan in his session on “A modern architecture review: Using the new code review tools” Friday 29th, 10.15-11.30 and Marcel de Vries session on “Intellitrace, what is it and how can I use it to my benefit” Wednesday 27th, 5-6.15 The highlights points out some important practices.  I’ll elaborate on a few of them here: Add instructions on how to compile the solution.  You do this by adding a text file with instructions to the solution, and keep it under source control.  These instructions should contain what is needed on top of a standard install of Visual Studio.  I do a lot of code reviews, and more often that not, I am not even able to compile the program, because they have used some tool or library that needs to be installed.  The same applies to any new developer who enters into the team, so do this to increase your productivity when the team changes, or a team member switches computer. Don’t forget to document what you have to configure on the computer, the IIS being a common one. The more automatic you can do this, the better.  Use NuGet to get down libraries. When the text document gets more than say, half a page, with a bunch of different things to do, convert it into a powershell script instead.  The metrics warning levels.  These are very conservatively set by Microsoft.  You rarely see anything but green, and besides, you should have color scales for each of the metrics.  I have a blog post describing a more appropriate set of levels, based on both research work and industry “best practices”.  The essential limits are: Cyclomatic complexity and coupling:  Higher numbers are worse On method levels: Green :  From 0 to 10 Yellow:  From 10 to 20  (some say 15).   Acceptable, but have a look to see if there is something unneeded here. Red: From 20 to 40:   Action required, get these down. Bleeding Red: Above 40   This is the real red alert.  Immediate action!  (My invention, as people have asked what do I do when I have cyclomatic complexity of 150.  The only answer I could think of was: RUN! ) Maintainability index:  Lower numbers are worse, scale from 0 to 100. On method levels: Green:  60 to 100 Yellow:  40 – 60.    You will always have methods here too, accept the higher ones, take a look at those who are down to the lower limit.  Check up against the other metrics.) Red:  20 – 40:  Action required, fix these. Bleeding red:  Below 20.  Immediate action required. When doing metrics analysis, you should leave the generated code out.  You do this by adding attributes, unfortunately Microsoft has “forgotten” to add these to all their stuff, so you might have to add them to some of the code.  It most cases it can be done so that it is not overwritten by a new round of code generation.  Take a look a my blog post here for details on how to do that. Class level metrics might also be useful, at least for coupling and maintenance.  But it is much more difficult to set any fixed limits on those.  Any metric aggregations on higher level tend to be pretty useless, as the number of methods vary pretty much, and there are little science on what number of methods can be regarded as good or bad.  NDepend have a recommendation, but they say it may vary too.  And in these days of data binding, the number might be pretty high, as properties counts as methods.  However, if you take the worst case situations, classes with more than 20 methods are suspicious, and coupling and cyclomatic complexity go red above 20, so any classes with more than 20x20 = 400 for these measures should be checked over. In the video we mention the SOLID principles, coined by “Uncle Bob” (Richard Martin). One of them, the Dependency Inversion principle we discuss in the video.  It is important to note that this principle is NOT on whether you should use a Dependency Inversion Container or not, it is about how you design the interfaces and interactions between your classes.  The Dependency Inversion Container is just one technique which is based on this principle, but which main purpose is to isolate things you would like to change at runtime, for example if you implement a plug in architecture.  Overuse of a Dependency Inversion Container is however, NOT a good thing.  It should be used for a purpose and not as a general DI solution.  The general DI solution and thinking however is useful far beyond the DIC.   You should always “program to an abstraction”, and not to the concreteness.  We also talk a bit about the GRASP patterns, a term coined by Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and design patterns. GRASP patterns stand for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and describe fundamental principles of object design and responsibility assignment.  What I find great with these patterns is that they is another way to focus on the responsibility of a class.  One of the things I most often found that is broken in software designs, is that the class lack responsibility, and as a result there are a lot of classes mucking around in the internals of the other classes.  We also discuss the term “Code Smells”.  This term was invented by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler when they worked with Fowler’s “Refactoring” book. A code smell is a set of “bad” coding practices, which are the drivers behind a corresponding set of refactorings.  Here is a good list of the smells, and their corresponding refactor patterns. See also this.

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• Integrate Microsoft Translator into your ASP.Net application

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to explain how easily you can integrate the Microsoft translator API to your ASP.Net application. Why we need a translation API? Once you published a website, you are opening a channel to the global audience. So making the web content available only in one language doesn’t cover all your audience. Especially when you are offering products/services it is important to provide contents in multiple languages. Users will be more comfortable when they see the content in their native language. How to achieve this, hiring translators and translate the content to all your user’s languages will cost you lot of money, and it is not a one time job, you need to translate the contents on the go. What is the alternative, we need to look for machine translation. Thankfully there are some translator engines available that gives you API level access, so that automatically you can translate the content and display to the user. Microsoft Translator API is an excellent set of web service APIs that allows developers to use the machine translation technology in their own applications. The Microsoft Translator API is offered through Windows Azure market place. In order to access the data services published in Windows Azure market place, you need to have an account. The registration process is simple, and it is common for all the services offered through the market place. Last year I had written an article about Bing Search API, where I covered the registration process. You can refer the article here. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2012/07/04/integrate-bing-search-api-to-asp-net-application.aspx Once you registered with Windows market place, you will get your APP ID. Now you can visit the Microsoft Translator page and click on the sign up button. http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/microsofttranslator As you can see, there are several options available for you to subscribe. There is a free version available, great. Click on the sign up button under the package that suits you. Clicking on the sign up button will bring the sign up form, where you need to agree on the terms and conditions and go ahead. You need to have a windows live account in order to sign up for any service available in Windows Azure market place. Once you signed up successfully, you will receive the thank you page. You can download the C# class library from here so that the integration can be made without writing much code. The C# file name is TranslatorContainer.cs. At any point of time, you can visit https://datamarket.azure.com/account/datasets to see the applications you are subscribed to. Click on the Use link next to each service will give you the details of the application. You need to not the primary account key and URL of the service to use in your application. Now let us start our ASP.Net project. I have created an empty ASP.Net web application using Visual Studio 2010 and named it Translator Sample, any name could work. By default, the web application in solution explorer looks as follows. Now right click the project and select Add -> Existing Item and then browse to the TranslatorContainer.cs. Now let us create a page where user enter some data and perform the translation. I have added a new web form to the project with name Translate.aspx. I have placed one textbox control for user to type the text to translate, the dropdown list to select the target language, a label to display the translated text and a button to perform the translation. For the dropdown list I have selected some languages supported by Microsoft translator. You can get all the supported languages with their codes from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh456380.aspx The form looks as below in the design surface of Visual Studio. All the class libraries in the windows market place requires reference to System.Data.Services.Client, let us add the reference. You can find the documentation of how to use the downloaded class library from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg312154.aspx Let us evaluate the translatorContainer.cs file. You can refer the code and it is self-explanatory. Note the namespace name used (Microsoft), you need to add the namespace reference to your page. I have added the following event for the translate button. The code is self-explanatory. You are creating an object of TranslatorContainer class by passing the translation service URL. Now you need to set credentials for your Translator container object, which will be your account key. The TranslatorContainer support a method that accept a text input, source language and destination language and returns DataServiceQuery<Translation>. Let us see this working, I just ran the application and entered Good Morning in the Textbox. Selected target language and see the output as follows. It is easy to build great translator applications using Microsoft translator API, and there is a reasonable amount of translation you can perform in your application for free. For enterprises, you can subscribe to the appropriate package and make your application multi-lingual.

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• Upgrading to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2: Top Tips One Must Know

  - by AnkurGupta

  Recently Oracle announced incremental release of Enterprise Manager 12c called Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 (EM12c R2) which includes several new exciting features (Press announcement). Right before the official release, we upgraded an internal production site from EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 and had an extremely pleasant experience. Let me share few key takeaways as well as few tips from this upgrade exercise. I - Why Should You Upgrade To Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 While an upgrade is usually recommended primarily to take benefit of the latest features (which is valid for this upgrade as well), I found several other compelling reasons purely from deployment perspective. Standardize your EM deployment:  Enterprise Manager comprises of several different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins, etc) and it might be possible that these are at varied patch levels in your environment. For instance, in case of an environment containing Bundle Patch 1 (customer announcement), there is a good chance that you may not have all the components up-to-date. There are two possible reasons. Bundle Patch 1 involved patching different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins) with multiple one-off patches which may not have been applied to all components yet. Bundle Patch 1 for different platforms were not released together. Which means you may not have got the chance to patch all the components on different platforms. Note: BP1 patches are not mandatory to upgrade to EM12c R2 release EM 12c R2 provides an excellent opportunity to standardize your Cloud Control environment (OMS, repository and agents) and plug-ins to latest versions in single shot. All platform releases are made available simultaneously: For the very first time in the history of EM release, all the platforms were released on day one itself, which means you do not need to wait for platform specific binaries for EM OMS or Agent to perform install or upgrades in a heterogeneous environment. Highly refined and automated process – Upgrade process is by far the smoothest and the cleanest as compared to previous releases of Enterprise manager. Following are the ones that stand out. Automatic Plug-in management – Plug-in upgrade along with new plug-in deployment is supported in upgrade installer wizard which means bulk of the updates to OMS and repository can be done in the same workflow. Saves time and minimizes user inputs. Plug-in Upgrade or Migrate Auto Update: While doing the OMS and repository upgrade, you can use Auto Update screen in Oracle Universal Installer to check for any updates/patches. That will help you to avoid the know issues and will make sure that your upgrade is successful. Allows mass upgrade of EM Agents – A new dedicated menu has been added in the EM console for agent upgrade. Agent upgrade workflow is extremely simple that requires agent name as the only input. ADM / JVMD Manager/Agent upgrade – complete process is supported via UI screens. EM12c R2 Upgrade Guide is much simpler to follow as compared to those for earlier releases. This is attributed to the simpler upgrade process. Robust and Performing Platform: EM12c R2 release not only includes several new features, but also provides a more stable platform which incorporates several fixes and enhancements in the Enterprise Manager framework. II - Few Tips To Remember In my last post (blog link) I shared few tips and tricks from my experience applying the Bundle Patch. Recently I upgraded the same site to EM 12c R2 and found few points that you must take note of, while planning this upgrade. The tips below are also applicable to EM 12c R1 environments that do not have Bundle Patch 1 patches applied. Verify the monitored application certification – Specific targets like E-Business Suite have not yet been certified as managed target in EM 12c R2. Therefore make sure to recheck the Enterprise Manager certification Matrix on My Oracle Support before planning the upgrade. Plan downtime – Because EM 12c R2 is an incremental release of EM 12c, for EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 upgrade supports only 1-system upgrade approach, which mean there will be downtime. OMS name change after upgrade – In case of multi OMS environments, additional OMS is renamed after upgrade, which has few implications when you upgrade JVMD and ADP agents on OMS. This is well documented in upgrade guide but make sure you read through all the notes. Upgrading BI Publisher– EM12c R2 is certified with BI Publisher 11.1.1.6.0 only. Therefore in case you are using EM 12c R1 which is integrated with BI Publisher 11.1.1.5.0, you must upgrade the BI Publisher to 11.1.1.6.0. Follow the steps from Advanced Installation and Configuration Guide here. Perform Post upgrade Tasks – Make sure to perform post upgrade steps mentioned in documentation here. These include critical changes that must be done right after upgrade to get the right configuration. For instance Database plug-in should be upgraded to Revision 3 (12.1.0.2.0 [u120804]). Delete old OMS Home – EM12c R1 to EM12c R2 is an out of place upgrade, which means it creates a new oracle home for OMS, plug-ins, etc. Therefore please ensure that You have sufficient extra space for new OMS before starting the upgrade process. You clean up the old OMS home after the upgrade process. Steps are available here. DO NOT remove the agent home on OMS host, because agent is upgraded in-place. If you have standby OMS setup then do look into the steps to upgrade the standby OMS from the upgrade guide before going ahead. Read the right documentation – Make sure to follow the Upgrade guide which provides the most comprehensive information on EM12c R2 upgrade process. Additionally you can refer other resources to get familiar with upgrade concepts. Recorded webcast - Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 Installation and Upgrade Overview Presentation - Understanding Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 Upgrade We are very excited about this latest release and will look forward to hear back any feedback from your upgrade experience!

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• WordPress SEO Plugins to make your Blog Search Engine Friendly

  - by Vaibhav

  WordPress is the most common blogging system in use today and its use as a CMS is also wide spread. With hundreds of millions of sites using wordpress, getting correct SEO for your WordPress based Blog or Site is very important. We get regular queries from people who want Search Engine Optimisation for their site or blog which is made using wordpress. Here is a list of 16 of the best WordPress Plug-ins That can help you achieve better rankings: All in one SEO Pack This is most popular plugin among all SEO plugins for WordPress. It is easy to use and is compatible with most of the WordPress plugins. It works as a complete package of SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizing search engines for your titles and avoiding duplicate content. You can also include META tags manually (Met title, Meta description and Met keywords) for all pages and post in your website. HeadSpace2 HeasSpace2 is available in different languages , you can manage a wide range of SEO Tasks related with meta data, you can tag your posts, Custom descriptions and titles. So your page can rank the created relevancy on Search engines and you can load different settings for different pages. Platinum SEO plugin Automatic 301 redirects permalink changes, META tags generation, avoids duplicate content, and does SEO optimization of post and page titles and a lots of other features. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin It’s a modified version of all-in-one SEO Pack. It has some unique feature over All-in-one SEO plugin, It generate titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords automatically when overrides are not present. Google XML Sitemaps Sitemaps Generated by this tool are supported by  Google,  Yahoo,  Bing, and Ask. We all know Sitemaps make indexing of web pages easier for web crawlers. Crawlers can retrieve complete structure of site and more information by sitemaps. They notify all major search engines about new posts every time you create a new post. Sitemap Generator You can generate highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress page. You can choose what to show and what not to show, you can list the items in your choice of orde. It supports pages and permalinks and multi-level categories. SEO Slugs They can generate more search engine friendly URLs for your site. Slugs are filename assigned to your post , this plugin removes all  common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘what’, ‘you’ from slug which are assigned automatically to your post. SEO Post Links This is a similar plugin to SEO Slug, it removes unnecessary keywords from slug to make it short and SEO friendly and you can fix the number of characters in your post. Automatic SEO links With this tool you can create auto linking in your post. You can use this tool for inter linking or external linking too. Just select your words, anchor text target URL nature of links ( Do fallow / No follow ). This plugin will replace the matches found in post, WP Backlinks A helpful plugin for link exchange , whenever any webmaster submits a link for link exchange, the plugin will spider webmasters site for reciprocal link, and if everything is found good , your link will be exchanged. SEO Title Tag You can optimize your Title  tags of  Word press blog through this plugin . You can also override the title tag with custom titles , mass editing and title tags for 404 pages which are the main feature of this plugin. 404 SEO plugin With this Plugin you can customize 404 page of your site; you can give customized error message and links to relevant pages of your site. Redirection A powerful plugins to manage 301 redirection and logs related with redirection, with this plugin you can track 404 errors and track the log of all redirected URLs , this plugin can redirect  post automatically when URL changes for that post. AddToAny This plugin helps your readers to share, save, email and bookmark your posts and pages. It supports more than a hundred social bookmarking , networking and sharing sites. SEO Friendly Images You can make SEO friendly images available on your site with the help of this tool. It updates images with proper titles and ALT tags. Robots Meta A plugin which prevents Search engines to index comments on your post, login and admin pages. It also allows to add tags for individual pages.

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• Silverlight for Windows Embedded Tutorial (step 5 and a bit of Windows Phone 7)

  - by Valter Minute

  If you haven’t spent the last week in the middle of the Sahara desert or traveling on a sled in the north pole area you should have heard something about the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series (or Windows Phone Series 7, or Windows Series Phone 7 or something like that). Even if you are in the middle of the desert or somewhere around the north pole you may have been reached by the news, since it seems that WP7S (using the full name will kill my available bandwidth!) is generating a lot of buzz in the development and IT communities. One of the most important aspects of this new platform is that it will be programmed using a new set of tools and frameworks, completely different from the ones used on older releases of Windows Mobile (or SmartPhone, or PocketPC or whatever…). WP7S applications can be developed using Silverlight or XNA. If you want to learn something more about WP7S development you can download the preview of Charles Petzold’s book about it: http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html Charles Petzold is also the author of “Programming Windows”, the first book I ever read about programming on Windows (it was Windows 3.0 at that time!). The fact that even I was able to learn how to develop Windows application is a proof of the quality of Petzold’s work. This book is up to his standards and the 150pages preview is already rich in technical contents without being boring or complicated to understand. I may be able to become a Windows Phone developer thanks to mr. Petzold. Mr. Petzold uses some nice samples to introduce the basic concepts of Silverlight development on WP7S. On this new platform you’ll use managed code to develop your application, so those samples can’t be ported on Windows CE R3 as they are, but I would like to take one of the first samples (called “SilverlightTapHello1”) and adapt it to Silverlight for Windows Embedded to show that even plain old native code can be used to develop “cool” user interfaces! The sample shows the standard WP7S title header and a textbox with an hello world message inside it. When the user touches the textbox, it will change its color. When the user touches the background (Grid) behind it, its default color (plain old White) will be restored. Let’s see how we can implement the same features on our embedded device! I took the XAML code of the sample (you can download the book samples here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/D/B/1DB49641-3956-41F1-BAFA-A021673C709E/CodeSamples_DRAFTPreview_ProgrammingWindowsPhone7Series.zip) and changed it a little bit to remove references to WP7S or managed runtime. If you compare the resulting files you will see that I was able to keep all the resources inside the App.xaml files and the structure of  MainPage.XAML almost intact. This is the Silverlight for Windows Embedded version of MainPage.XAML: <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightTapHello1.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:phoneNavigation="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="800" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}" FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}" Width="640" Height="480">   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions>   <!--TitleGrid is the name of the application and page title--> <Grid x:Name="TitleGrid" Grid.Row="0"> <TextBlock Text="SILVERLIGHT TAP HELLO #1" x:Name="textBlockPageTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle1Style}"/> <TextBlock Text="main page" x:Name="textBlockListTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle2Style}"/> </Grid>   <!--ContentGrid is empty. Place new content here--> <Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" MouseLeftButtonDown="ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <TextBlock x:Name="TextBlock" Text="Hello, Silverlight for Windows Embedded!" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Grid> </Grid> </UserControl> If you compare it to the WP7S sample (not reported here to avoid any copyright issue) you’ll notice that I had to replace the original phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage with UserControl as the root node. This make sense because there is not support for phone applications on CE 6. I also had to specify width and height of my main page (on the WP7S device this will be adjusted by the OS) and I had to replace the multi-touch event handler with the MouseLeftButtonDown event (no multitouch support for Windows CE R3, still). I also changed the hello message, of course. I used XAML2CPP to generate the boring part of our application and then added the initialization code to WinMain: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1;   HRESULT retcode;   IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1; XRXamlSource dictsrc;   dictsrc.SetResource(hInstance,TEXT("XAML"),IDR_XAML_App);   if (FAILED(retcode=app->LoadResourceDictionary(&dictsrc,NULL))) return -1;   MainPage page;   if (FAILED(page.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1;   UINT exitcode;   if (FAILED(page.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1;   return exitcode; }   You may have noticed that there is something different from the previous samples. I added the code to load a resource dictionary. Resources are an important feature of XAML that allows you to define some values that could be replaced inside any XAML file loaded by the runtime. You can use resources to define custom styles for your fonts, backgrounds, controls etc. and to support internationalization, by providing different strings for different languages. The rest of our WinMain isn’t that different. It creates an instances of our MainPage object and displays it. The MainPage class implements an event handler for the MouseLeftButtonDown event of the ContentGrid: class MainPage : public TMainPage<MainPage> { public:   HRESULT ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown(IXRDependencyObject* source,XRMouseButtonEventArgs* args) { HRESULT retcode; IXRSolidColorBrushPtr brush; IXRApplicationPtr app;   if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRSolidColorBrush,&brush))) return retcode;   COLORREF color=RGBA(0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff);   if (args->pOriginalSource==TextBlock) color=RGBA(rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,0xFF);   if (FAILED(retcode=brush->SetColor(color))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=TextBlock->SetForeground(brush))) return retcode; return S_OK; } }; As you can see this event is generated when a used clicks inside the grid or inside one of the objects it contains. Since our TextBlock is inside the grid, we don’t need to provide an event handler for its MouseLeftButtonDown event. We can just use the pOriginalSource member of the event arguments to check if the event was generated inside the textblock. If the event was generated inside the grid we create a white brush,if it’s inside the textblock we create some randomly colored brush. Notice that we need to use the RGBA macro to create colors, specifying also a transparency value for them. If we use the RGB macro the resulting color will have its Alpha channel set to zero and will be transparent. Using the SetForeground method we can change the color of our control. You can compare this to the managed code that you can find at page 40-41 of Petzold’s preview book and you’ll see that the native version isn’t much more complex than the managed one. As usual you can download the full code of the sample here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/SilverlightTapHello1.zip And remember to pre-order Charles Petzold’s “Programming Windows Phone 7 series”, I bet it will be a best-seller! Technorati Tags: Silverlight for Windows Embedded,Windows CE

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• Building InstallShield based Installers using Team Build 2010

  - by jehan

  Last few weeks, I have been working on Application Packaging stuff using all the widely used tools like InstallShield, WISE, WiX and Visual Studio Installer. So, I thought it would be good to post about how to Build the Installers developed using these tools with Team Build 2010. This post will focus on how to build the InstallShield generated packages using Team Build 2010. For the release of VS2010, Microsoft has partnered with Flexera who are the makers of InstallShield to create InstallShield Limited Edition, especially for the customers of Visual Studio. First Microsoft planned to release WiX (Windows Installer Xml) with VS2010, but later Microsoft dropped  WiX from VS2010 due to reasons which are best known to them and partnered with InstallShield for Limited Edition. It disappointed lot of people because InstallShield Limited Edition provides only few features of InstallShield and it may not feasable to build complex installer packages using this and it also requires License, where as WiX is an open source with no license costs and it has proved efficient in building most complex packages. Only the last three features are available in InstallShield Limited Edition from the total features offered by InstallShield as shown in below list.                                                                                            Feature Limited Edition for Visual Studio 2010 Standalone Build System Maintain a clean build machine by using only the part of InstallShield that compiles the installations. InstallShield Best Practices Validation Suite Avoid common installation issues. Try and Die Functionality RCreate a fully functional trial version of your product. InstallShield Repackager Create Windows Installer setups from any legacy installation. Multilingual Support Present installation text in up to 35 languages. Microsoft App-V™ Support Deploy your applications as App-V virtual packages that run without conflict. Industry-Standard InstallScript Achieve maximum flexibility in your installations. Dialog Editor Modify the layout of existing end-user dialogs, create new custom dialogs, and more. Patch Creation Build updates and patches for your products. Setup Prerequisite Editor Easily control prerequisite restart behavior and source locations. String Editor View Control the localizable text strings displayed at run time with this spreadsheet-like table. Text File Changes View Configure search-and-replace actions for content in text files to be modified at run time. Virtual Machine Detection Block your installations from running on virtual machines. Unicode Support Improve multi-language installation development. Support for 64-Bit COM Extraction Extract COM data from a 64-bit COM server. Windows Installer Installation Chaining Add MSI packages to your main installation and chain them together. XML Support Save time by quickly testing XML configuration changes to installation projects. Billboard Support for Custom Branding Display Adobe Flash billboards and other graphic files during the install process. SaaS Support (IIS 7 and SSL Technologies) Easily deploy Windows-based Web applications. Project Assistant Jumpstart a project by using a simplified set of views. Support for Digital Signatures Save time by digitally signing all your files at build time. Easily Run Custom Actions Schedule a custom action to run at precisely the right moment in your installation. Installation Prerequisites Check for and install prerequisites before your installation is executed. To create a InstallShield project in Visual Studio and Build it using Team Build 2010, first you have to add the InstallShield Project template  to your Solution file. If you want to use InstallShield Limited edition you can add it from FileàNewà project àother Project Types àSetup and Deploymentà InstallShield LE and if you are using other versions of InstallShield, then you have to add it from  from FileàNewà project àInstallShield Projects. Here, I’m using  InstallShield 2011 Premier edition as I already have it Installed. I have created a simple package for TailSpin Application which has a Feature called Web, few components and a IIS Web Site for  TailSpin application.   Before started working on this, I thought I may need to build the package by calling invoke process activity in build process template or have to create a new custom activity. But, it got build without any changes to build process template. But, it was failing with below error message. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2011\InstallShield.targets (68): The "InstallShield.Tasks.InstallShield" task could not be loaded from the assembly C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2010Limited\InstallShield.Tasks.dll. Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files(x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2011\InstallShield.Tasks.dll' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. Confirm that the <UsingTask> declaration is correct, that the assembly and all its dependencies are available, and that the task contains a public class that implements Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITask. This error is due to 64-bit build machine which I’m using. This issue will be replicable if you are queuing a build on a 64-bit build machine. To avoid this you have to ensure that you configured the build definition for your InstallShield project to load the InstallShield.Tasks.dll file (which is a 32-bit file); otherwise, you will encounter this build error informing you that the InstallShield.Tasks.dll file could not be loaded. To select the 32-bit version of MSBuild, click the Process tab of your build definition in Team Explorer. Then, under the Advanced node, find the MSBuild Platform setting, and select x86. Note that if you are using a 32-bit build machine, you can select either Auto or x86 for the MSBuild Platform setting.  Once I did above changes, the build got successful.

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• The way I think about Diagnostic tools

  - by Daniel Moth

  Every software has issues, or as we like to call them "bugs". That is not a discussion point, just a mere fact. It follows that an important skill for developers is to be able to diagnose issues in their code. Of course we need to advance our tools and techniques so we can prevent bugs getting into the code (e.g. unit testing), but beyond designing great software, diagnosing bugs is an equally important skill. To diagnose issues, the most important assets are good techniques, skill, experience, and maybe talent. What also helps is having good diagnostic tools and what helps further is knowing all the features that they offer and how to use them. The following classification is how I like to think of diagnostics. Note that like with any attempt to bucketize anything, you run into overlapping areas and blurry lines. Nevertheless, I will continue sharing my generalizations ;-) It is important to identify at the outset if you are dealing with a performance or a correctness issue. If you have a performance issue, use a profiler. I hear people saying "I am using the debugger to debug a performance issue", and that is fine, but do know that a dedicated profiler is the tool for that job. Just because you don't need them all the time and typically they cost more plus you are not as familiar with them as you are with the debugger, doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in one and instead try to exclusively use the wrong tool for the job. Visual Studio has a profiler and a concurrency visualizer (for profiling multi-threaded apps). If you have a correctness issue, then you have several options - that's next :-) This is how I think of identifying a correctness issue Do you want a tool to find the issue for you at design time? The compiler is such a tool - it gives you an exact list of errors. Compilers now also offer warnings, which is their way of saying "this may be an error, but I am not smart enough to know for sure". There are also static analysis tools, which go a step further than the compiler in identifying issues in your code, sometimes with the aid of code annotations and other times just by pointing them at your raw source. An example is FxCop and much more in Visual Studio 11 Code Analysis. Do you want a tool to find the issue for you with code execution? Just like static tools, there are also dynamic analysis tools that instead of statically analyzing your code, they analyze what your code does dynamically at runtime. Whether you have to setup some unit tests to invoke your code at runtime, or have to manually run your app (and interact with it) under the tool, or have to use a script to execute your binary under the tool… that varies. The result is still a list of issues for you to address after the analysis is complete or a pause of the execution when the first issue is encountered. If a code path was not taken, no analysis for it will exist, obviously. An example is the GPU Race detection tool that I'll be talking about on the C++ AMP team blog. Another example is the MSR concurrency CHESS tool. Do you want you to find the issue at design time using a tool? Perform a code walkthrough on your own or with colleagues. There are code review tools that go beyond just diffing sources, and they help you with that aspect too. For example, there is a new one in Visual Studio 11 and searching with my favorite search engine yielded this article based on the Developer Preview. Do you want you to find the issue with code execution? Use a debugger - let’s break this down further next. This is how I think of debugging: There is post mortem debugging. That means your code has executed and you did something in order to examine what happened during its execution. This can vary from manual printf and other tracing statements to trace events (e.g. ETW) to taking dumps. In all cases, you are left with some artifact that you examine after the fact (after code execution) to discern what took place hoping it will help you find the bug. Learn how to debug dump files in Visual Studio. There is live debugging. I will elaborate on this in a separate post, but this is where you inspect the state of your program during its execution, and try to find what the problem is. More from me in a separate post on live debugging. There is a hybrid of live plus post-mortem debugging. This is for example what tools like IntelliTrace offer. If you are a tools vendor interested in the diagnostics space, it helps to understand where in the above classification your tool excels, where its primary strength is, so you can market it as such. Then it helps to see which of the other areas above your tool touches on, and how you can make it even better there. Finally, see what areas your tool doesn't help at all with, and evaluate whether it should or continue to stay clear. Even though the classification helps us think about this space, the reality is that the best tools are either extremely excellent in only one of this areas, or more often very good across a number of them. Another approach is to offer a toolset covering all areas, with appropriate integration and hand off points from one to the other. Anyway, with that brain dump out of the way, in follow-up posts I will dive into live debugging, and specifically live debugging in Visual Studio - stay tuned if that interests you. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network

  Even though IPv6 might not be that important within your local network it might be good to get yourself into shape, and be able to provide some details of your infrastructure automatically to your network clients. This is the second article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. IPv6 addresses for everyone (in your network) Okay, after setting up the configuration of your local system, it might be interesting to enable all your machines in your network to use IPv6. There are two options to solve this kind of requirement... Either you're busy like a bee and you go around to configure each and every system manually, or you're more the lazy and effective type of network administrator and you prefer to work with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Obviously, I'm of the second type. Enabling dynamic IPv6 address assignments can be done with a new or an existing instance of a DHCPd. In case of Ubuntu-based installation this might be isc-dhcp-server. The isc-dhcp-server allows address pooling for IP and IPv6 within the same package, you just have to run to independent daemons for each protocol version. First, check whether isc-dhcp-server is already installed and maybe running your machine like so: $ service isc-dhcp-server6 status In case, that the service is unknown, you have to install it like so: $ sudo apt-get install isc-dhcp-server Please bear in mind that there is no designated installation package for IPv6. Okay, next you have to create a separate configuration file for IPv6 address pooling and network parameters called /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf. This file is not automatically provided by the package, compared to IPv4. Again, use your favourite editor and put the following lines: $ sudo nano /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf authoritative;default-lease-time 14400; max-lease-time 86400;log-facility local7;subnet6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 {    option dhcp6.name-servers 2001:4860:4860::8888, 2001:4860:4860::8844;    option dhcp6.domain-search "ios.mu";    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::100 2001:db8:bad:a55::199;    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 temporary;} Next, save the file and start the daemon as a foreground process to see whether it is going to listen to requests or not, like so: $ sudo /usr/sbin/dhcpd -6 -d -cf /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf eth0 The parameters are explained quickly as -6 we want to run as a DHCPv6 server, -d we are sending log messages to the standard error descriptor (so you should monitor your /var/log/syslog file, too), and we explicitely want to use our newly created configuration file (-cf). You might also use the command switch -t to test the configuration file prior to running the server. In my case, I ended up with a couple of complaints by the server, especially reporting that the necessary lease file wouldn't exist. So, ensure that the lease file for your IPv6 address assignments is present: $ sudo touch /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases$ sudo chown dhcpd:dhcpd /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases Now, you should be good to go. Stop your foreground process and try to run the DHCPv6 server as a service on your system: $ sudo service isc-dhcp-server6 startisc-dhcp-server6 start/running, process 15883 Check your log file /var/log/syslog for any kind of problems. Refer to the man-pages of isc-dhcp-server and you might check out Chapter 22.6 of Peter Bieringer's IPv6 Howto. The instructions regarding DHCPv6 on the Ubuntu Wiki are not as complete as expected and it might not be as helpful as this article or Peter's HOWTO. But see for yourself. Does the client get an IPv6 address? Running a DHCPv6 server on your local network surely comes in handy but it has to work properly. The following paragraphs describe briefly how to check the IPv6 configuration of your clients, Linux - ifconfig or ip command First, you have enable IPv6 on your Linux by specifying the necessary directives in the /etc/network/interfaces file, like so: $ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces iface eth1 inet6 dhcp Note: Your network device might be eth0 - please don't just copy my configuration lines. Then, either restart your network subsystem, or enable the device manually using the dhclient command with IPv6 switch, like so: $ sudo dhclient -6 You would either use the ifconfig or (if installed) the ip command to check the configuration of your network device like so: $ sudo ifconfig eth1eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1d:09:5d:8d:98            inet addr:192.168.160.147  Bcast:192.168.160.255  Mask:255.255.255.0          inet6 addr: 2001:db8:bad:a55::193/64 Scope:Global          inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe5d:8d98/64 Scope:Link          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1 Looks good, the client has an IPv6 assignment. Now, let's see whether DNS information has been provided, too. $ less /etc/resolv.conf # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTENnameserver 2001:4860:4860::8888nameserver 2001:4860:4860::8844nameserver 192.168.1.2nameserver 127.0.1.1search ios.mu Nicely done. Windows - netsh Per description on TechNet the netsh is defined as following: "Netsh is a command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network configuration of a computer that is currently running. Netsh also provides a scripting feature that allows you to run a group of commands in batch mode against a specified computer. Netsh can also save a configuration script in a text file for archival purposes or to help you configure other servers." And even though TechNet states that it applies to Windows Server (only), it is also available on Windows client operating systems, like Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. In order to get or even set information related to IPv6 protocol, we have to switch the netsh interface context prior to our queries. Open a command prompt in Windows and run the following statements: C:\Users\joki>netshnetsh>interface ipv6netsh interface ipv6>show interfaces Select the device index from the Idx column to get more details about the IPv6 address and DNS server information (here: I'm going to use my WiFi device with device index 11), like so: netsh interface ipv6>show address 11 Okay, address information has been provided. Now, let's check the details about DNS and resolving host names: netsh interface ipv6> show dnsservers 11 Okay, that looks good already. Our Windows client has a valid IPv6 address lease with lifetime information and details about the configured DNS servers. Talking about DNS server... Your clients should be able to connect to your network servers via IPv6 using hostnames instead of IPv6 addresses. Please read on about how to enable a local named with IPv6.

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• Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners 2012: ADF & Fusion Development

  - by Dana Singleterry

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards honor customers for their cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. The awards were presented during Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and following winners are for the category of ADF & Fusion Development. Micros – an OPN Platinum partner – has been working closely with Oracle product management teams in applying industry best practices in the development of their solutions. Their current application suite for the hospitality industry was built on Oracle Forms and the Oracle database running on MS Windows. The next generation of this suite is being developed and released in modules that are now based on Oracle FMW (including ADF) 11g technologies and Oracle Database 11g all running on Oracle Linux. The primary driver was that of modernization and hence the reason Oracle ADF was selected to provide a rich UI for business processes that could be served up through traditional methods or through mobile devices globally. SOA Suite & ADF allowed for loosely-coupled services that could evolve with the needs of the business. Micros's application innovations includes the use of business application portlets that have been published from ADF Faces Task Flows generated using WebCenter portlet libraries  & Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) with multi-layered customizations using Oracle WebCenter Composer. PCS (Marfin Egnatia Bank of Greece) – PCS Wealth Management is a WM Software Solution, which captures and automates the WM business processes allowing Service Providers to allocate enough time and effort into Customer Service and Investment Strategies, under Advisory or Execution-Only Services. The Product is built upon the latest Web Technologies and ensures Best Practices covering all functional expectations, meeting local regulatory requirements and discovering successful opportunities for the WM Customers' Portfolios. The new unified Wealth Management system offers an unparalleled User Interface taking full advantage of the user friendly ADF Faces Components to a great extent, all serving Private Banking purposes. The application offers a true Account Officer Cockpit with shallow navigation, one-click access to informed decisions and a perfect customer service. ADF Grids and Pivots, the Data Visualization Components, as well as the Calendar and Map Components are cleverly used to help the user eliminate the usage of Excel, Outlook and other systems. PCS's application is unique in the way it leverages the ADF Faces data visualization components to create a truly attractive and insightful dashboard for their application. PCS Wealth Management Demo Qualcomm – Qualcomm, a $17B per year company, designs and sells semiconductor products for wireless telecommunications, mobile and computing markets. In addition, Qualcomm companies provide various hardware and software products to facilitate the design, development and deployment of phones and the applications that run on them. Qualcomm’s challenge has been to not only develop and deploy new business system functions to keep pace with customer demand, but also to provide a customer collaboration capability that is sufficiently robust, easy to use, and flexible to meet emerging and future needs. Qualcomm has taken successful steps in building and deploying the customer engagement platform Ieveraging various Oracle technologies including Fusion Middleware (ADF, SOA, OBIEE) and their proven ERP foundation of EBS and 11g databases. The new platform delivers a more unified and “seamless” business solution with a consistent, modern “look and feel” all based on standard business processes which facilitate efficient collaboration with Qualcomm and its customers. The look and feel leverages ADF in innovative ways and includes hover over navigation, custom pagination components, and skinning. Qualcomm has exposed a services layer that provides significant functionality including order-to-ship, quote-to-order, customer on-boarding and contract validation. Qualcomm's creative designs leverage Oracle's SOA Suite to integrate with Oracle EBS and desperate applications to provide a rich user interface through the use use of Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components providing a self-service solution to their customers.

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• The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

  - by Gene Eun

  The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

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• Benefits of PerformancePoint Services Using SharePoint Server 2010

  - by Wayne

  What is PerformancePoint Services? Most of the time it happens that the metrics that make up your key performance indicators are not simple values from a data source. In SharePoint Server 2007 PerformancePoint Services, you could create two kinds of KPI metrics: Simple single value metrics from any supported data source or Complex multiple value metrics from a single Analysis Services data source using MDX. Now things are even easier with Performance Point Services in SharePoint 2010. Let us check what is it? PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2010 is a performance management service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business. By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, scorecards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs), PerformancePoint Services can help everyone across an organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives and strategy. Scorecards, dashboards, and KPIs help drive accountability. Integrated analytics help employees move quickly from monitoring information to analyzing it and, when appropriate, sharing it throughout the organization. Prior to the addition of PerformancePoint Services to SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 functioned as a standalone server. Now PerformancePoint functionality is available as an integrated part of the SharePoint Server Enterprise license, as is the case with Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The popular features of earlier versions of PerformancePoint Services are preserved along with numerous enhancements and additional functionality. New PerformancePoint Services features PerformancePoint Services now can utilize SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. Dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. New features and enhancements of SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services • With PerformancePoint Services, functioning as a service in SharePoint Server, dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. The new architecture also takes advantage of SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. You also can include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts with other SharePoint Server Web Parts on the same page. The new architecture also streamlines security models that simplify access to report data. • The Decomposition Tree is a new visualization report type available in PerformancePoint Services. You can use it to quickly and visually break down higher-level data values from a multi-dimensional data set to understand the driving forces behind those values. The Decomposition Tree is available in scorecards and analytic reports and ultimately in dashboards. • You can access more detailed business information with improved scorecards. Scorecards have been enhanced to make it easy for you to drill down and quickly access more detailed information. PerformancePoint scorecards also offer more flexible layout options, dynamic hierarchies, and calculated KPI features. Using this enhanced functionality, you can now create custom metrics that use multiple data sources. You can also sort, filter, and view variances between actual and target values to help you identify concerns or risks. • Better Time Intelligence filtering capabilities that you can use to create and use dynamic time filters that are always up to date. Other improved filters improve the ability for dashboard users to quickly focus in on information that is most relevant. • Ability to include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts together with other PerformancePoint Services Web parts on the same page. • Easier to author and publish dashboard items by using Dashboard Designer. • SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 support. • Increased support for accessibility compliance in individual reports and scorecards. • The KPI Details report is a new report type that displays contextually relevant information about KPIs, metrics, rows, columns, and cells within a scorecard. The KPI Details report works as a Web part that links to a scorecard or individual KPI to show relevant metadata to the end user in SharePoint Server. This Web part can be added to PerformancePoint dashboards or any SharePoint Server page. • Create analytics reports to better understand underlying business forces behind the results. Analytic reports have been enhanced to support value filtering, new chart types, and server-based conditional formatting. To conclude, PerformancePoint Services, by becoming tightly integrated with SharePoint Server 2010, takes advantage of many enterprise-level SharePoint Server 2010 features. Unfortunately, SharePoint Foundation 2010 doesn’t include this feature. There are still many choices in SharePoint family of products that include SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server 2007 and associated free SharePoint web parts and templates.

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• Class Loading Deadlocks

  - by tomas.nilsson

  Mattis follows up on his previous post with one more expose on Class Loading Deadlocks As I wrote in a previous post, the class loading mechanism in Java is very powerful. There are many advanced techniques you can use, and when used wrongly you can get into all sorts of trouble. But one of the sneakiest deadlocks you can run into when it comes to class loading doesn't require any home made class loaders or anything. All you need is classes depending on each other, and some bad luck. First of all, here are some basic facts about class loading: 1) If a thread needs to use a class that is not yet loaded, it will try to load that class 2) If another thread is already loading the class, the first thread will wait for the other thread to finish the loading 3) During the loading of a class, one thing that happens is that the <clinit method of a class is being run 4) The <clinit method initializes all static fields, and runs any static blocks in the class. Take the following class for example: class Foo { static Bar bar = new Bar(); static { System.out.println("Loading Foo"); } } The first time a thread needs to use the Foo class, the class will be initialized. The <clinit method will run, creating a new Bar object and printing "Loading Foo" But what happens if the Bar object has never been used before either? Well, then we will need to load that class as well, calling the Bar <clinit method as we go. Can you start to see the potential problem here? A hint is in fact #2 above. What if another thread is currently loading class Bar? The thread loading class Foo will have to wait for that thread to finish loading. But what happens if the <clinit method of class Bar tries to initialize a Foo object? That thread will have to wait for the first thread, and there we have the deadlock. Thread one is waiting for thread two to initialize class Bar, thread two is waiting for thread one to initialize class Foo. All that is needed for a class loading deadlock is static cross dependencies between two classes (and a multi threaded environment): class Foo { static Bar b = new Bar(); } class Bar { static Foo f = new Foo(); } If two threads cause these classes to be loaded at exactly the same time, we will have a deadlock. So, how do you avoid this? Well, one way is of course to not have these circular (static) dependencies. On the other hand, it can be very hard to detect these, and sometimes your design may depend on it. What you can do in that case is to make sure that the classes are first loaded single threadedly, for example during an initialization phase of your application. The following program shows this kind of deadlock. To help bad luck on the way, I added a one second sleep in the static block of the classes to trigger the unlucky timing. Notice that if you uncomment the "//Foo f = new Foo();" line in the main method, the class will be loaded single threadedly, and the program will terminate as it should. public class ClassLoadingDeadlock { // Start two threads. The first will instansiate a Foo object, // the second one will instansiate a Bar object. public static void main(String[] arg) { // Uncomment next line to stop the deadlock // Foo f = new Foo(); new Thread(new FooUser()).start(); new Thread(new BarUser()).start(); } } class FooUser implements Runnable { public void run() { System.out.println("FooUser causing class Foo to be loaded"); Foo f = new Foo(); System.out.println("FooUser done"); } } class BarUser implements Runnable { public void run() { System.out.println("BarUser causing class Bar to be loaded"); Bar b = new Bar(); System.out.println("BarUser done"); } } class Foo { static { // We are deadlock prone even without this sleep... // The sleep just makes us more deterministic try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch(InterruptedException e) {} } static Bar b = new Bar(); } class Bar { static { try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch(InterruptedException e) {} } static Foo f = new Foo(); }

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• MDX using EXISTING, AGGREGATE, CROSSJOIN and WHERE

  - by James Rogers

  It is a well-published approach to using the EXISTING function to decode AGGREGATE members and nested sub-query filters.  Mosha wrote a good blog on it here and a more recent one here.  The use of EXISTING in these scenarios is very useful and sometimes the only option when dealing with multi-select filters.  However, there are some limitations I have run across when using the EXISTING function against an AGGREGATE member:   The AGGREGATE member must be assigned to the Dimension.Hierarchy being detected by the EXISTING function in the calculated measure. The AGGREGATE member cannot contain a crossjoin from any other dimension or hierarchy or EXISTING will not be able to detect the members in the AGGREGATE member.   Take the following query (from Adventure Works DW 2008):   With   member [Week Count] as 'count(existing([Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members))'    member [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[CM] as 'AGGREGATE({[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[47]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[48]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[49]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[50]&[2004]})'   select   {[Week Count]} on columns from   [Adventure Works]     where   [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[CM]   Here we are attempting to count the existing fiscal weeks in slicer.  This is useful to get a per-week average for another member. Many applications generate queries in this manner (such as Oracle OBIEE).  This query returns the correct result of (4) weeks. Now let's put a twist in it.  What if the querying application submits the query in the following manner:   With   member [Week Count] as 'count(existing([Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members))'    member [Customer].[Customer Geography].[CM] as 'AGGREGATE({[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[47]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[48]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[49]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[50]&[2004]})'   select   {[Week Count]} on columns from   [Adventure Works]     where   [Customer].[Customer Geography].[CM]   Here we are attempting to count the existing fiscal weeks in slicer.  However, the AGGREGATE member is built on a different dimension (in name) than the one EXISTING is trying to detect.  In this case the query returns (174) which is the total number of [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members defined in the dimension.   Now another twist, the AGGREGATE member will be named appropriately and contain the hierarchy we are trying to detect with EXISTING but it will be cross-joined with another hierarchy:   With   member [Week Count] as 'count(existing([Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members))'    member [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[CM] as 'AGGREGATE({[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[47]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[48]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[49]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[50]&[2004]}*    {[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[Australia],[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[United States]})'  select   {[Week Count]} on columns from   [Adventure Works]    where   [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[CM]   Once again, we are attempting to count the existing fiscal weeks in slicer.  Again, in this case the query returns (174) which is the total number of [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members defined in the dimension. However, in 2008 R2 this query returns the correct result of 4 and additionally , the following will return the count of existing countries as well (2):   With   member [Week Count] as 'count(existing([Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members))'   member [Country Count] as 'count(existing([Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].members))'  member [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[CM] as 'AGGREGATE({[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[47]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[48]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[49]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[50]&[2004]}*    {[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[Australia],[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[United States]})'  select   {[Week Count]} on columns from   [Adventure Works]    where   [Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[CM]   2008 R2 seems to work as long as the AGGREGATE member is on at least one of the hierarchies attempting to be detected (i.e. [Date].[Fiscal Weeks] or [Customer].[Customer Geography]). If not, it seems that the engine cannot find a "point of entry" into the aggregate member and ignores it for calculated members.   One way around this would be to put the sets from the AGGREGATE member explicitly in the WHERE clause (slicer).  I realize this is only supported in SSAS 2005 and 2008.  However, after talking with Chris Webb (his blog is here and I highly recommend following his efforts and musings) it is a far more efficient way to filter/slice a query:   With   member [Week Count] as 'count(existing([Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members))'    select   {[Week Count]} on columns from   [Adventure Works]    where   ({[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[47]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[48]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[49]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[50]&[2004]}   ,{[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[Australia],[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[United States]})   This query returns the correct result of (4) weeks.  Additionally, we can count the cross-join members of the two hierarchies in the slicer:   With   member [Week Count] as 'count(existing([Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].members)*existing([Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].members))'    select   {[Week Count]} on columns from   [Adventure Works]    where   ({[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[47]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[48]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[49]&[2004],[Date].[Fiscal Weeks].[Fiscal Week].&[50]&[2004]}   ,{[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[Australia],[Customer].[Customer Geography].[Country].&[United States]})   We get the correct number of (8) here.

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• GitHub Integration in Windows Azure Web Site

  - by Shaun

  Microsoft had just announced an update for Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). There are four major features added in WAWS which are free scaling mode, GitHub integration, custom domain and multi branches. Since I ‘m working in Node.js and I would like to have my code in GitHub and deployed automatically to my Windows Azure Web Site once I sync my code, this feature is a big good news to me.   It’s very simple to establish the GitHub integration in WAWS. First we need a clean WAWS. In its dashboard page click “Set up Git publishing”. Currently WAWS doesn’t support to change the publish setting. So if you have an existing WAWS which published by TFS or local Git then you have to create a new WAWS and set the Git publishing. Then in the deployment page we can see now WAWS supports three Git publishing modes: - Push my local files to Windows Azure: In this mode we will create a new Git repository on local machine and commit, publish our code to Windows Azure through Git command or some GUI. - Deploy from my GitHub project: In this mode we will have a Git repository created on GitHub. Once we publish our code to GitHub Windows Azure will download the code and trigger a new deployment. - Deploy from my CodePlex project: Similar as the previous one but our code would be in CodePlex repository.   Now let’s back to GitHub and create a new publish repository. Currently WAWS GitHub integration only support for public repositories. The private repositories support will be available in several weeks. We can manage our repositories in GitHub website. But as a windows geek I prefer the GUI tool. So I opened the GitHub for Windows, login with my GitHub account and select the “github” category, click the “add” button to create a new repository on GitHub. You can download the GitHub for Windows here. I specified the repository name, description, local repository, do not check the “Keep this code private”. After few seconds it will create a new repository on GitHub and associate it to my local machine in that folder. We can find this new repository in GitHub website. And in GitHub for Windows we can also find the local repository by selecting the “local” category.   Next, we need to associate this repository with our WAWS. Back to windows developer portal, open the “Deploy from my GitHub project” in the deployment page and click the “Authorize Windows Azure” link. It will bring up a new windows on GitHub which let me allow the Windows Azure application can access your repositories. After we clicked “Allow”, windows azure will retrieve all my GitHub public repositories and let me select which one I want to integrate to this WAWS. I selected the one I had just created in GitHub for Windows. So that’s all. We had completed the GitHub integration configuration. Now let’s have a try. In GitHub for Windows, right click on this local repository and click “open in explorer”. Then I added a simple HTML file. 1: <html> 2: <head> 3: </head> 4: <body> 5: <h1> 6: I came from GitHub, WOW! 7: </h1> 8: </body> 9: </html> Save it and back to GitHub for Windows, commit this change and publish. This will upload our changes to GitHub, and Windows Azure will detect this update and trigger a new deployment. If we went back to azure developer portal we can find the new deployment. And our commit message will be shown as the deployment description as well. And here is the page deployed to WAWS.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• How I do VCS

  - by Wes McClure

  After years of dabbling with different version control systems and techniques, I wanted to share some of what I like and dislike in a few blog posts.  To start this out, I want to talk about how I use VCS in a team environment.  These come in a series of tips or best practices that I try to follow.  Note: This list is subject to change in the future. Always use some form of version control for all aspects of software development. Development is an evolution.  Looking back at where we were is an invaluable asset in that process.  This includes data schemas and documentation. Reverting / reapplying changes is absolutely critical for efficient development. The tools I use: Code: Hg (preferred), SVN Database: TSqlMigrations Documents: Sometimes in code repository, also SharePoint with versioning Always tag a commit (changeset) with comments This is a quick way to describe to someone else (or your future self) what the changeset entails. Be brief but courteous. One or two sentences about the task, not the actual changes. Use precommit hooks or setup the central repository to reject changes without comments. Link changesets to documentation If your project management system integrates with version control, or has a way to externally reference stories, tasks etc then leave a reference in the commit.  This helps locate more information about the commit and/or related changesets. It’s best to have a precommit hook or system that requires this information, otherwise it’s easy to forget. Ability to work offline is required, including commits and history Yes this requires a DVCS locally but doesn’t require the central repository to be a DVCS.  I prefer to use either Git or Hg but if it isn’t possible to migrate the central repository, it’s still possible for a developer to push / pull changes to that repository from a local Hg or Git repository. Never lock resources (files) in a central repository… Rude! We have merge tools for a reason, merging sucked a long time ago, it doesn’t anymore… stop locking files! This is unproductive, rude and annoying to other team members. Always review everything in your commit. Never ever commit a set of files without reviewing the changes in each. Never add a file without asking yourself, deep down inside, does this belong? If you leave to make changes during a review, start the review over when you come back.  Never assume you didn’t touch a file, double check. This is another reason why you want to avoid large, infrequent commits. Requirements for tools Quickly show pending changes for the entire repository. Default action for a resource with pending changes is a diff. Pluggable diff & merge tool Produce a unified diff or a diff of all changes.  This is helpful to bulk review changes instead of opening each file. The central repository is not your own personal dump yard.  Breaking this rule is a sure fire way to get the F bomb dropped in front of your name, multiple times. If you turn on Visual Studio’s commit on closing studio option, I will personally break your fingers. By the way, the person(s) in charge of this feature should be fired and never be allowed near programming, ever again. Commit (integrate) to the central repository / branch frequently I try to do this before leaving each day, especially without a DVCS.  One never knows when they might need to work from remote the following day. Never commit commented out code If it isn’t needed anymore, delete it! If you aren’t sure if it might be useful in the future, delete it! This is why we have history. If you don’t know why it’s commented out, figure it out and then either uncomment it or delete it. Don’t commit build artifacts, user preferences and temporary files. Build artifacts do not belong in VCS, everything in them is present in the code. (ie: bin\*, obj\*, *.dll, *.exe) User preferences are your settings, stop overriding my preferences files! (ie: *.suo and *.user files) Most tools allow you to ignore certain files and Hg/Git allow you to version this as an ignore file.  Set this up as a first step when creating a new repository! Be polite when merging unresolved conflicts. Count to 10, cuss, grab a stress ball and realize it’s not a big deal.  Actually, it’s an opportunity to let you know that someone else is working in the same area and you might want to communicate with them. Following the other rules, especially committing frequently, will reduce the likelihood of this. Suck it up, we all have to deal with this unintended consequence at times.  Just be careful and GET FAMILIAR with your merge tool.  It’s really not as scary as you think.  I personally prefer KDiff3 as its merging capabilities rock. Don’t blindly merge and then blindly commit your changes, this is rude and unprofessional.  Make sure you understand why the conflict occurred and which parts of the code you want to keep.  Apply scrutiny when you commit a manual merge: review the diff! Make sure you test the changes (build and run automated tests) Become intimate with your version control system and the tools you use with it. Avoid trial and error as much as is possible, sit down and test the tool out, read some tutorials etc.  Create test repositories and walk through common scenarios. Find the most efficient way to do your work.  These tools will be used repetitively, so inefficiencies will add up. Sometimes this involves a mix of tools, both GUI and CLI. I like a combination of both Tortoise Hg and hg cli to get the job efficiently. Always tag releases Create a way to find a given release, whether this be in comments or an explicit tag / branch.  This should be readily discoverable. Create release branches to patch bugs and then merge the changes back to other development branch(es). If using feature branches, strive for periodic integrations. Feature branches often cause forked code that becomes irreconcilable.  Strive to re-integrate somewhat frequently with the branch this code will ultimately be merged into.  This will avoid merge conflicts in the future. Feature branches are best when they are mutually exclusive of active development in other branches. Use and abuse local commits , at least one per task in a story. This builds a trail of changes in your local repository that can be pushed to a central repository when the story is complete. Never commit a broken build or failing tests to the central repository. It’s ok for a local commit to break the build and/or tests.  In fact, I encourage this if it helps group the changes more logically.  This is one of the main reasons I got excited about DVCS, when I wanted more than one changeset for a set of pending changes but some files could be grouped into both changesets (like solution file / project file changes). If you have more than a dozen outstanding changed resources, there should probably be more than one commit involved. Exceptions when maintaining code bases that require shotgun surgery, in this case, it’s a design smell :) Don’t version sensitive information Especially usernames / passwords   There is one area I haven’t found a solution I like yet: versioning 3rd party libraries and/or code.  I really dislike keeping any assemblies in the repository, but seems to be a common practice for external libraries.  Please feel free to share your ideas about this below.    -Wes

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• Team Leaders & Authors - Manage and Report Workflow using "Print an Outline" in UPK

  - by [email protected]

  Did you know you can "print an outline?" You can print any outline or portion of an outline. Why might you want to "print an outline" in UPK... Have you ever wondered how many topics you have recorded, how many of your topics are ready for review, or even better, how many topics are complete! Do you need to report your project status to management? Maybe you just like to have a copy of your outline to refer to during development. Included in this output is the outline structure as well as the layout defined in the Details View of the Outline Editor. To print an outline, you must open either a module or section in the Outline Editor. A set of default data columns is automatically included in the output; however, you can configure which columns you want to appear in the report by switching to the Details view and customizing the columns. (To learn more about customizing your columns refer to the Add and Remove Columns section of the Content Development.pdf guide) To print an outline from the Outline Editor: 1. Open a module or section document in the Outline Editor. 2. Expand the documents to display the details that you want included in the report. 3. On the File menu, choose Print and use the toolbar icons to print, view, or save the report to a file. Personally, I opt to save my outline in Microsoft Excel. Using the delivered features of Microsoft Excel you can add columns of information, such as development notes, to your outline or you can graph and chart your Project status. As mentioned above you can configure what columns you want to appear in the outline. When utilizing the Print an Outline feature in conjunction with the Managing Workflow features of the UPK Multi-user instance you as a Team Lead or Author can better report project status. Read more about Managing Workflow below. Managing Workflow: The Properties toolpane contains special properties that allow authors to track document status or State as well as assign Document Ownership. Assign Content State The State property is an editable property for communicating the status of a document. This is particularly helpful when collaborating with other authors in a development team. Authors can assign a state to documents from the master list defined by the administrator. The default list of States includes (blank), Not Started, Draft, In Review, and Final. Administrators can customize the list by adding, deleting or renaming the values. To assign a State value to a document: 1. Make sure you are working online. 2. Display the Properties toolpane. 3. Select the document(s) to which you want to assign a state. Note: You can select multiple documents using the standard Windows selection keys (CTRL+click and SHIFT+click). 4. In the Workflow category, click in the State cell. 5. Select a value from the list. Assign Document Ownership In many enterprises, multiple authors often work together developing content in a team environment. Team leaders typically handle large projects by assigning specific development responsibilities to authors. The Owner property allows team leaders and authors to assign documents to themselves and other authors to track who is responsible for a specific document. You view and change document assignments for a document using the Owner property in the Properties toolpane. To assign a document owner: 1. Make sure you are working online. 2. On the View menu, choose Properties. 3. Select the document(s) to which you want to assign document responsibility. Note: You can select multiple documents using the standard Windows selection keys (CTRL+click and SHIFT+click). 4. In the Workflow category, click in the Owner cell. 5. Select a name from the list. Is anyone out there already using this feature? Share your ideas with the group. Those of you new to this feature, give it a test drive and let us know what you think. - Kathryn Lustenberger, Oracle UPK & Tutor Outbound Product Management

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010New ProjectsAlter gear SQL index Management: SQL Index management displays a list of indexes available for the chosen database and allows you to select an individual / group of indexes to be r...ASP League Ladder System: An ASP ladder / league system for online gaming league or real life leagues also.Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator is a software suite to promote computer aided strategy planning. Sports team can visualize their strategy usin...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Simple syntax hightlighting VSX add-in for Boo language in Visual Studio 2010.easySan: easySan zur einfachen Mitgliedsverwaltung im BRKFsUnit: FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog is a simple to use, component based 2D framework for XNA game development. At present it is very early in development and as such is f...miniTodo: WPFでMVVMの練習にてきとうに作ったTODOアプリ 実用は無理です。My Common Library on .NET with CSharp: My Common Library on .NET with CSharp, it conclude database assecc, encrypt string, data caching, StringUtility, thank you for your view.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Ever thought about creating HUGE FILES for future use but felt bad for the wasted memory? Well, SPARSE FILES are the ANSWER! This FSUTIL SPARSE CO...Open SOA Platform: A centralized system for administering applications throught a SOA Enterprise Service Bus: Runtime environment (PROD, DEV, ...) , application and s...P-DBMS: Network and Database ProjectPraiseSight: PraiseSight is supposed to become a practical tool for churches to catalog an present their songs, lyrics and presentations on a beamer. The soluti...Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend is a sample frontend for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 and MDT 2010 Zero Touch. S3Appender (Appender for Log4Net that Uses Amazon S3 For Storing Log Files): The S3Appender is a log4net appender that stores log events in either a MemoryStream or FileStream and sends them to S3 based on time intervals and...sEmit: sEmit (sms emitter) is an application written in C# which was built to send text messages. The project was founded in May 2009 by cansik. It works ...Silverlight RIA Tools: A tool set that generates a full RIA Solutions in Silverlightthommo cannon: Cannon for shooting down ThommosTianjin Polytechnic University Online Judge: Online Judge System Built on Microsoft technologies. Vision & Scope: A distributed OJ Solution on Windows and Cloud. Technologies used or planed...Tinare: Tinare is an byte encryption and decryption alogrithm. The input key is a string password.TinyPlug: Small Plugin Manager, written in C# Allows a project to define supported interfaces, and at runtime add plugins which support (inherit) these in...Utility niconv helps to convert text from one encoding to another: .NET implementation of GUN iconv console converter utility. The niconv program converts text from one encoding to another encoding. In the future r...WareFeed - Software Business Analytics: WareFeed is a simple but effective Software Business Analytics tool written in PHP and compatible others languages such as .NET, Java or Python. It...Y36API1: Semestralni projekt na Y36APINew ReleasesAlter gear SQL index Management: Setup 1.0.0: setup for first alpha releaseASP League Ladder System: ASPLeagueRelease_0_4_1: Release v 0.41Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Version 1.0 InstallerAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10e: Version 1.10e will be the final iteration of version 1 development. Version 2 will begin adding switches and options. Pleae email your suggestio...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Boo syntax VS 2010 - alpha: First release TODO: Multiline comments!Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.6: Updated library, using Metered Components and updated Product information.Composer: V1.0.326.1000 Alpha: Initial Alpha release. Should be stable, with minor issues.CoNatural Components: CoNatural Components 1.6: Code fixes: Created helper classes to generate source code for type mapper/materializer. Fixed issue in optimized type materializer when loading ...CRM External View: 1.2: New Features in v1.2 release Password protected views. No more using Web Data Access role from v1. Filtering capabilities Caching for performan...Designit Video Embed Package: Release 1.1.0 beta1: You can now either have the video embeded directly in the template or have a preview in template that opens the video in a lightbox window.FsUnit: FsUnit 0.9.0 for NUnit: This release is for F# 2.0 and NUnit 2.5+.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog 0.0.1: Laughing Dog - Alpla - v 0.0.1 First released version of the Laughing Dog framework.LiveUpload to Facebook: LiveUpload to Facebook 3.2: Version 3.2Become a fan on Facebook! Features Quickly and easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Win...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi March 26: This version adds the Join feature for creating a new "featureset" with attributes that are joined with attributes from a Excel data label named 'D...Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor: Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor 1.2.2: This edition supports: Newer and older editions of Birdstep Technology's EasyConnect HUAWEI Mobile Partner MWConn User defined location for s...Multiplayer Quiz: Release 1_6_351_0: A beta release of the next version. Please leave any errors in discussions or comments.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Fsutil sparse file native code - c sharp wrapper: Project Description A C# code wrapping a native code-Sparse files1 The code is about SPARSE files- the abillity to create huge files (for future us...Nice Libraries: 1.30 build 50325.01: Release 1.30 build 50325.01Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend binaries v1.0: This is the first public release of the Pretty Good Frontend binariesPylor: Pylor 0.1 alpha: This is the very first published version. I hope I can put a sample project soon.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.1 refresh: There was a typo or two in the sample batch file. Corrected now.Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.3: 0.8.1 introduced the ability to advance to the next episode. In 0.8.2 a bug was found that if episode number is less then 10, then the preceding 0...RapidWebDev - .NET Enterprise Software Development Infrastructure: RapidWebDev 1.52: RapidWebDev is an infrastructure helps to develop enterprise software solutions in Microsoft .NET easily and productively. This is the release vers...thommo cannon: game: gamethommo cannon: setup: setupthommo cannon: test: testTinare: Tinare DLL: Tinare DLL is a dynamic-link library written in C# which provides the functions to encrypt and decrypt a byte stream with tinare.WeatherBar: WeatherBar 2.1 [No Installation]: Minor changes to release 2.0 (http://weatherbar.codeplex.com/releases/view/42490). Fixed the bug that caused an exception to be thrown if the user...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightLINQ to TwitterTable2ClassFluent Ribbon Control SuiteNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• Weekend With #iPad

  - by andrewbrust

  Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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• Thank You for a Great Welcome for Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Yesterday morning we had two launch webcasts for Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2. I had the pleasure to present, as well as moderate the Q&A panels in both of these webcasts. Both events had hundreds of live attendees, sending us over 150 questions. Even though we left 30 minutes for Q&A, it was not nearly enough time to address for all the insightful questions our audience sent. Our product management team and I really appreciate the interaction we had yesterday and we are starting to respond back with outstanding questions today. Oracle GoldenGate’s new release launch also had great welcome from the media. You can find the links for various articles on the new release below: ITBusinessEdge Oracle Embraces Cross-Platform Data Integration Information Week: Oracle Real-Time Advance Taps Compressed Data Integration Developer News, Oracle GoldenGate Adds Deeper Oracle Integration, Extends Real-Time Performance CIO, Oracle GoldenGate Buddies Up with Sibling Software DBTA, Real-Time Data Integration: Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 Now Available CBR Oracle unveils GoldenGate 11g Release 2 real-time data integration application In this blog, I want to address some of the frequently asked questions that came up during the webcasts. You can find the top questions and their answers along with related resources below. We will continue to address frequently asked questions via future blogs. Q: Will the new Integrated Capture for Oracle Database replace the Classic Capture? If not, which one do I use when? A: No, Classic Capture will be around for long time. Core platform specific features, bug fixes, and patches will be available for both Capture processes.Oracle Database specific features will be only available in the Integrated Capture. The Integrated Capture for Oracle Database is an option for users that need to capture data from compressed tables or need support for XML data types, XA on RAC. Users who don’t leverage these features should continue to use our Classic Capture. For more information on Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 I recommend to check out the White paper: Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 New Features as well as other technical white papers we have on OTN.                                                         For those of you coming to OpenWorld, please attend the related session: Extracting Data in Oracle GoldenGate Integrated Capture Mode, Monday Oct 1st 1:45pm Moscone South – 102 to learn more about this new feature. Q: What is new in Conflict Detection and Resolution? And how does it work? A: There are now pre-built functions to identify the conditions under which an error occurs and how to handle the record when the condition occurs. Error conditions handled include inserts into a target table where the row already exists, updates or deletes to target table rows that exist, but the original source data (before columns) do not match the existing data in the target row, and updates or deletes where the row does not exist in the target database table.Foreach of these conditions a method to handle the error is specified.  Please check out our recent blog on this topic and the White paper: Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 New Features white paper.  Also, for those attending OpenWorld please attend the session: Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active-  Wednesday Oct 3rd  3:30pm Mascone 3000 Q: Does Oracle GoldenGate Veridata and the Management Pack require additional licenses, or is it incorporated with the GoldenGate license? A: Oracle GoldenGate Veridata and Oracle Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate are additional products and require separate licenses. Please check out Oracle's price list here. Q: Does GoldenGate - Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in require additional license? A: Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in is included in the Oracle Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate license, which is separate from Oracle GoldenGate license. There is no separate license for the Enterprise Manager Plug-in by itself. Oracle GoldenGate Monitor, Oracle GoldenGate Director, and Enterprise Manager Plug-in are included in the Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate license. Please check out Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate data sheet for more info on this product bundle. Q: Is Oracle GoldenGate replacing Oracle Streams product? A: Oracle GoldenGate is the strategic data replication product. Therefore, Oracle Streams will continue to be supported, but will not be actively enhanced. Rather, the best elements of Oracle Streams will be added to Oracle GoldenGate. Conflict management is one of them and with the latest release Oracle GoldenGate has a more advanced conflict management offering. Current customers depending on Oracle Streams will continue to be fully supported. Q: How is Oracle GoldenGate different than Oracle Data Integrator? A: Oracle Data Integrator is designed for fast bulk data movement and transformation between heterogeneous systems, while GoldenGate is designed for real-time movement of transactions between heterogeneous systems. These two products are completely complementary where GoldenGate provides low-impact real-time change data capture and delivery to a staging area on the target. And Oracle Data Integrator transforms this data and loads the DW tables. In fact, Oracle Data Integrator integrates with GoldenGate to use GoldenGate’s Capture process as one option for its CDC mechanism. We have several customers that deployed GoldenGate and ODI together to feed real-time data to their data warehousing solutions. Please also check out Oracle Data Integrator Changed Data Capture with Oracle GoldenGate Data Sheet (PDF). Thank you again very much for welcoming Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 and stay in touch with us for more exciting news, updates, and events.

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Control Adapters

  - by Ricardo Peres

  All ASP.NET controls from version 2.0 can be associated with a control adapter. A control adapter is a class that inherits from ControlAdapter and it has the chance to interact with the control(s) it is targeting so as to change some of its properties or alter its output. I talked about control adapters before and they really a cool feature. The ControlAdapter class exposes virtual methods for some well known lifecycle events, OnInit, OnLoad, OnPreRender and OnUnload that closely match their Control counterparts, but are fired before them. Because the control adapter has a reference to its target Control, it can cast it to its concrete class and do something with it before its lifecycle events are actually fired. The adapter is also notified before the control is rendered (BeginRender), after their children are renderes (RenderChildren) and after itself is rendered (Render): this way the adapter can modify the control’s output. Control adapters may be specified for any class inheriting from Control, including abstract classes, web server controls and even pages. You can, for example, specify a control adapter for the WebControl and UserControl classes, but, curiously, not for Control itself. When specifying a control adapter for a page, it must inherit from PageAdapter instead of ControlAdapter. The adapter for a control, if specified, can be found on the protected Adapter property, and for a page, on the PageAdapter property. The first use of control adapters that came to my attention was for changing the output of standard ASP.NET web controls so that they were more based on CSS and less on HTML tables: it was the CSS Friendly Control Adapters project, now available at http://code.google.com/p/aspnetcontroladapters/. They are interesting because you specify them in one location and they apply anywhere a control of the target type is created. Mind you, it applies to controls declared on markup as well as controls created by code with the new operator. So, how do you use control adapters? The most usual way is through a browser definition file. In it, you specify a set of control adapters and their target controls, for a given browser. This browser definition file is a XML file with extension .Browser, and can either be global (%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\vXXXX\Config\Browsers) or local to the web application, in which case, it must be placed inside the App_Browsers folder at the root of the web site. It looks like this: 1: <browsers> 2: <browser refID="Default"> 3: <controlAdapters> 4: <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox" adapterType="MyNamespace.TextBoxAdapter, MyAssembly" /> 5: </controlAdapters> 6: </browser> 7: </browsers> A browser definition file targets a specific browser, so you can have different definitions for Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, as well as for specific version of each of those (like IE8, Firefox3). Alternatively, if you set the target to Default, it will apply to all. The reason to pick a specific browser and version might be, for example, in order to circumvent some limitation present in that specific version, so that on markup you don’t need to be concerned with that. Another option is through the the current Browser object of the request: 1: this.Context.Request.Browser.Adapters.Add(typeof(TextBox).FullName, typeof(TextBoxAdapter).FullName); This must go very early on the page lifecycle, for example, on the OnPreInit event, or even on Application_Start. You have to specify the full class name for both the target control and the adapter. Of course, you have to do this for every request, because it won’t be persisted. As an example, you may know that the classic TextBox control renders an HTML input tag if its TextMode is set to SingleLine and a textarea if set to MultiLine. Because the textarea has no notion of maximum length, unlike the input, something must be done in order to enforce this. Here’s a simple suggestion: 1: public class TextBoxControlAdapter : ControlAdapter 2: { 3: protected TextBox Target 4: { 5: get 6: { 7: return (this.Control as TextBox); 8: } 9: } 10:  11: protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) 12: { 13: if ((this.Target.MaxLength > 0) && (this.Target.TextMode == TextBoxMode.MultiLine)) 14: { 15: if (this.Target.Page.ClientScript.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered("TextBox_KeyUp") == false) 16: { 17: if (this.Target.Page.ClientScript.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered(this.Target.Page.GetType(), "TextBox_KeyUp") == false) 18: { 19: String script = String.Concat("function TextBox_KeyUp(sender) { if (sender.value.length > ", this.Target.MaxLength, ") { sender.value = sender.value.substr(0, ", this.Target.MaxLength, "); } }\n"); 20:  21: this.Target.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this.Target.Page.GetType(), "TextBox_KeyUp", script, true); 22: } 23:  24: this.Target.Attributes["onkeyup"] = "TextBox_KeyUp(this)"; 25: } 26: } 27: 28: base.OnLoad(e); 29: } 30: } What it does is, for every TextBox control, if it is set for multi line and has a defined maximum length, it injects some JavaScript that will filter out any content that exceeds this maximum length. This will occur for any TextBox that you may have on your site, or any class that inherits from it. You can use any of the previous options to register this adapter. Stay tuned for more ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility tips!

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• Identity R2 - Experts Podcast Series

  - by Tanu Sood

  To follow up on the Identity Management R2 launch, a series of podcasts were recorded with subject matter experts from customer organizations, our partners and Oracle’s PM team to discuss key trends, R2 capabilities, implementation best practices and more. Below is a roll-up of the podcast series that is available on Fusion Middleware radio. R2 Podcasts:   ·         Designing the Next-Generation Identity Platform Vadim Lander, Oracle Highlights: Common architecture model, integration, interoperability and the driving factors behind R2 innovation IT Departments are shifting their Identity Management strategy to be able to support mobile, cloud and social applications. Oracle has anticipated this shift and has built a product roadmap to take advantage of this focus. Join Vadim as he discusses the design strategy behind the latest 11gR2 release and talks about how IDM services have to evolve to meet this new challenge.   ·         BETA Customer Perspective on R2 Ravi Meduri, Kaiser Permanente Highlights: R2 scalability and high availability In this podcast Ravi discusses the new features in 11gR2 that he is most interested in, including High Availability options for Access Management, multi-datacenter architecture, and what it was like working with the Oracle product team during the BETA program.   ·         Partner Perspective on R2 Rex Thexton, PricewaterhouseCoopers Highlights: Usability Enhancements for Users and Administrators A lot of new usability features went into the 11gR2 release making this the most business friendly IDM release to date. In this podcast Rex Thexton, Managing Director from PwC, talks about some of the new UI changes for both end users and administrators, and also about the new connector creation framework.   Access Request Updates in R2 Marc Boroditsky, Oracle Highlights: Access request User Interface innovations A lot of changes have been made to the Access Request user interface in the latest version of Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. A real focus has been put on making the request process more business user friendly, and a lot of new customization capability has been added for the IT administrators. Hear Marc discuss the updated UI, and explain how administrators will be able to customize OIM to meet their company's requirements   ·         Oracle Optimized System for Oracle Unified Directory (OOS4OUD) Nick Kloski, Oracle Highlights: New Optimized System configuration for Unified Directory One of the new features in 11gR2 is the availability of an Optimized System configuration for Oracle Unified Directory. Oracle engineers installed the OUD software onto off the shelf hardware and then created a performance tuned configuration. Join us as we talk to Nick Kloski, Infrastructure Solutions Manager, all about the testing process and the resulting performance metrics.   Privileged Account Management Mark Wilcox, Oracle Highlights: Oracle Privileged Account Manager key capabilities, use cases The new release of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 includes the capability to manage privileged accounts. Privileged accounts, if compromised, create a risk for fraud in the enterprise and as a result controlling access to privileged accounts is critical. Hear what Mark Wilcox, Principal Product Manager of Oracle Privileged Account Manager has to say about the capabilities of the offering in this podcast.   ·         Browser-based User Interface (UI) Customization Clayton Donley, Oracle Highlights: Benefits of Durable UI Configuration framework Business users need user interfaces that are not only friendly but also easily customizable. However the downside of any customization project is the cost and complexity involved in developing, testing, deploying and managing custom code. In this podcast, we examine how a new capability in Oracle Identity Management around browser based UI customization can reduce costs and complexity of customization while simplifying self service integration with corporate portal strategies.   ·         Simplifying Mobile and Social Sign-On Dan Killmer, Oracle Highlights: Secure mobile sign-on and consumption of social identities with Oracle Access Management The proliferation of mobile devices has spurred a new trend where employees tend to bring their own mobile devices to work and access corporate applications the same way they would access from a desktop or laptop. In this podcast, we examine how Oracle's latest innovation in Identity Management around Mobile and Social Sign On can simplify security and access management challenges posed by the widespread adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. ·         Enabling Your Business with IDM R2 Scott Bonnell, Oracle Highlights: Self service, mobile access, personalization Gone are the days when Identity Management was just about stopping unauthorized users in their tracks. Identity Management if done right, can also enable your business. Join Scott Bonnell as he discusses how the IDM 11gR2 release enables the enterprise by providing self service, personalization and mobile access to corporate resources.

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