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  • Design a T-shirt for .NET Reflector Pro

    - by Laila
    Win a .NET Reflector Pro license, a box of Red Gate goodies, and a t-shirt printed with your design! Red Gate likes t-shirts. Each of our teams has one. In fact, each individual person has one, numbered according to when they joined the company: Red Gate's 1st, 2nd, and so on right up to Red Gate's 170th, with the slogan "More than just a number". Those t-shirts are important, chiefly because they remind the people wearing them that they are important. But that isn't enough. What really makes us great are the people who choose to use our tools. So we'd like to extend our tradition of t-shirts to include you and put the design of our next shirt entirely in your hands. We'd like you to come up with a witty slogan or create an inventive or simply beautiful t-shirt design for .NET Reflector Pro, our add-in for Visual Studio, which allows you to step into decompiled assemblies whilst debugging in Visual Studio. When you're done, post your masterpiece to Twitter with the hash tag #reflectortees, and @redgate will take a look! We'll pick the best design, and the winner will get a licensed copy of .NET Reflector Pro and a box of Red Gate goodies - not to mention a copy of their t-shirt. The winning design will go into production and be worn and given out at tradeshows, conferences, and user group events across the world, proudly bearing the name of their designer. We'll also pick three runners-up who will receive licenses for .NET Reflector Pro. Red Gate goodie box Interested? If you're up for the challenge, then we've got some resources to get you started. Inside the .zip file you'll find high-quality versions of the following: T-shirt templates: don't forget to design the front and the back! Different versions of the .NET Reflector Pro logo and Red Gate logo. Colour sheets to give you an easy reference to the Red Gate colours, including hex and RGB values. You can create and send us as many designs as you like, and each of them will be considered for the prize. To submit your designs, simply tweet including the competition hash tag, #reflectortees, and a link to somewhere we can see your design: either an image hosting site such as Twitpic, Flickr or Picasa, or a personal blog. You will need to create a Twitter account (which is free), if you don't already have one. You only have three limits: The background colour of the t-shirt should be one of our brand colours (red, light/dark grey or black), though you're welcome to use other colours in the rest of the design. You need to make use of either the .NET Reflector Pro logo OR the Red Gate logo (please keep them as they are) If you include any text or slogan, stick with just one or two colors for it. Apart from that, go wild. Go and do whatever it is you do when you get creative: whether you walk barefoot on the grass with a pencil and paper, sit cross-legged on a pile of cushions with a laptop, or simply close your eyes and float through a mist of ideas, now is your chance. Make sure you enjoy it. We're looking forward to seeing your creations. Terms and conditions 1. The closing date for entries is June 11th, 2010 (4 p.m. UK time). Red Gate Software Ltd reserves the right to extend the competition deadline at its discretion. If there is a revision, the revised date will be published on this blog and the date for announcing the results will be postponed accordingly. 2. The winning designer will be notified on June 14th, 2010 through Twitter. The winner must claim his/her prize by sending us a high-resolution image of their design via email (i.e. Illustrator EPS files or appropriate format, ideally at 300dpi). If the winner does not come forward within 3 days of the announcement, they will forfeit their prize and another winner will be selected from the runners-up. The names of the winner and runners-up will be posted on this blog by June 18th.  3. Entry is completed on the designer posting a link to their entry in a tweet with the correct hash tag, #reflectortees. 4. Red Gate Software needs to hold the rights to using the winning design in order to put the t-shirt into production. We will make sure that this is fine with the winner before we do so, but if you do not want us holding the rights to your design, please do not submit your designs. We reserve the right to slightly alter or adjust any artwork we decide to use (mainly to make it easier to print), but we will make sure we contact the winner for approval first. The winner will also need to allow us the use of his/her name for purposes of promoting your design. 5. Entries must be entirely your own original work and must not breach any copyright or third party rights. Red Gate Software Ltd will not be made partially or fully liable for any non-original work submitted by you. 6. This competition is free: you do not need to buy anything or be an existing customer to enter. 7. This competition is not open to employees of Red Gate Software Ltd, their families, or any other company directly connected with the administration of this promotion.

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  • Talend Enterprise Data Integration overperforms on Oracle SPARC T4

    - by Amir Javanshir
    The SPARC T microprocessor, released in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, and now continued at Oracle, has a good track record in parallel execution and multi-threaded performance. However it was less suited for pure single-threaded workloads. The new SPARC T4 processor is now filling that gap by offering a 5x better single-thread performance over previous generations. Following our long-term relationship with Talend, a fast growing ISV positioned by Gartner in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools”, we decided to test some of their integration components with the T4 chip, more precisely on a T4-1 system, in order to verify first hand if this new processor stands up to its promises. Several tests were performed, mainly focused on: Single-thread performance of the new SPARC T4 processor compared to an older SPARC T2+ processor Overall throughput of the SPARC T4-1 server using multiple threads The tests consisted in reading large amounts of data --ten's of gigabytes--, processing and writing them back to a file or an Oracle 11gR2 database table. They are CPU, memory and IO bound tests. Given the main focus of this project --CPU performance--, bottlenecks were removed as much as possible on the memory and IO sub-systems. When possible, the data to process was put into the ZFS filesystem cache, for instance. Also, two external storage devices were directly attached to the servers under test, each one divided in two ZFS pools for read and write operations. Multi-thread: Testing throughput on the Oracle T4-1 The tests were performed with different number of simultaneous threads (1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, 48 and 64) and using different storage devices: Flash, Fibre Channel storage, two stripped internal disks and one single internal disk. All storage devices used ZFS as filesystem and volume management. Each thread read a dedicated 1GB-large file containing 12.5M lines with the following structure: customerID;FirstName;LastName;StreetAddress;City;State;Zip;Cust_Status;Since_DT;Status_DT 1;Ronald;Reagan;South Highway;Santa Fe;Montana;98756;A;04-06-2006;09-08-2008 2;Theodore;Roosevelt;Timberlane Drive;Columbus;Louisiana;75677;A;10-05-2009;27-05-2008 3;Andrew;Madison;S Rustle St;Santa Fe;Arkansas;75677;A;29-04-2005;09-02-2008 4;Dwight;Adams;South Roosevelt Drive;Baton Rouge;Vermont;75677;A;15-02-2004;26-01-2007 […] The following graphs present the results of our tests: Unsurprisingly up to 16 threads, all files fit in the ZFS cache a.k.a L2ARC : once the cache is hot there is no performance difference depending on the underlying storage. From 16 threads upwards however, it is clear that IO becomes a bottleneck, having a good IO subsystem is thus key. Single-disk performance collapses whereas the Sun F5100 and ST6180 arrays allow the T4-1 to scale quite seamlessly. From 32 to 64 threads, the performance is almost constant with just a slow decline. For the database load tests, only the best IO configuration --using external storage devices-- were used, hosting the Oracle table spaces and redo log files. Using the Sun Storage F5100 array allows the T4-1 server to scale up to 48 parallel JVM processes before saturating the CPU. The final result is a staggering 646K lines per second insertion in an Oracle table using 48 parallel threads. Single-thread: Testing the single thread performance Seven different tests were performed on both servers. Given the fact that only one thread, thus one file was read, no IO bottleneck was involved, all data being served from the ZFS cache. Read File ? Filter ? Write File: Read file, filter data, write the filtered data in a new file. The filter is set on the “Status” column: only lines with status set to “A” are selected. This limits each output file to about 500 MB. Read File ? Load Database Table: Read file, insert into a single Oracle table. Average: Read file, compute the average of a numeric column, write the result in a new file. Division & Square Root: Read file, perform a division and square root on a numeric column, write the result data in a new file. Oracle DB Dump: Dump the content of an Oracle table (12.5M rows) into a CSV file. Transform: Read file, transform, write the result data in a new file. The transformations applied are: set the address column to upper case and add an extra column at the end, which is the concatenation of two columns. Sort: Read file, sort a numeric and alpha numeric column, write the result data in a new file. The following table and graph present the final results of the tests: Throughput unit is thousand lines per second processed (K lines/second). Improvement is the % of improvement between the T5140 and T4-1. Test T4-1 (Time s.) T5140 (Time s.) Improvement T4-1 (Throughput) T5140 (Throughput) Read/Filter/Write 125 806 645% 100 16 Read/Load Database 195 1111 570% 64 11 Average 96 557 580% 130 22 Division & Square Root 161 1054 655% 78 12 Oracle DB Dump 164 945 576% 76 13 Transform 159 1124 707% 79 11 Sort 251 1336 532% 50 9 The improvement of single-thread performance is quite dramatic: depending on the tests, the T4 is between 5.4 to 7 times faster than the T2+. It seems clear that the SPARC T4 processor has gone a long way filling the gap in single-thread performance, without sacrifying the multi-threaded capability as it still shows a very impressive scaling on heavy-duty multi-threaded jobs. Finally, as always at Oracle ISV Engineering, we are happy to help our ISV partners test their own applications on our platforms, so don't hesitate to contact us and let's see what the SPARC T4-based systems can do for your application! "As describe in this benchmark, Talend Enterprise Data Integration has overperformed on T4. I was generally happy to see that the T4 gave scaling opportunities for many scenarios like complex aggregations. Row by row insertion in Oracle DB is faster with more than 650,000 rows per seconds without using any bulk Oracle capabilities !" Cedric Carbone, Talend CTO.

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  • Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Winners

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Now that OpenWorld 2012 has wrapped, I have time to tell you all about what happened. Maybe you recall that Noel (@noelportugal) and I were running a modified hackathon during the show, the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge. Without further ado, congratulations to Dimitri Gielis (@dgielis) and Martin Giffy D’Souza (@martindsouza) on their winning entry, an integration between Oracle APEX and Oracle Social Network that integrates feedback and bug submission with Oracle Social Network Conversations, allowing developers, end-users and project leaders to view and discuss the feedback on their APEX applications from within Oracle Social Network. Update: Bob Rhubart of OTN (@brhubart) interviewed Dimitri and Martin right after their big win. Money quote from Dimitri when asked what he’d buy with the $500 in Amazon gift cards, “Oracle Social Network.” Nice one. In their own words: In the developers perspective it’s important to get feedback soon, so after a first iteration and end-users start to test, they can give feedback of the application. Previously it stopped there, and it was up to the developer to communicate further with email, phone etc. With OSN every feedback and communication gets logged and other people can see the discussion immediately as well. For the end users perspective he can now communicate in a more efficient way to not only the developers, but also between themselves. Maybe many end-users (in different locations) would like to change some behaviour, by using OSN they can see the entry somebody put in with a screenshot and they can just start to chat about it. Some key technical end users can have lighten the tasks of the development team by looking at the feedback first and start to communicate with their peers. For the project manager he has now the ability to really see what communication has taken place in certain areas and can make decisions on that. Later, if things come up again, he can always go back in OSN and see what was said at that moment in time. Integrating OSN in the APEX applications enhances the user experience, makes the lives of the developers easier and gives a better overview to project managers. Incidentally, you may already know Dimitri and Martin, since both are Oracle Ace Directors. I ran into Martin at the Ace Director briefings Friday before the conference started, and at that point, he wasn’t sure he’d have time to enter the Challenge. After some coaxing, he and Dimitri agreed to give it a go and banged out their entry on Tuesday night, or more accurately, very early Wednesday morning, the day of the Challenge judging. I think they said it took them about four hours of hardcore coding to get it done, very much like a traditional hackathon, which is essentially a code sprint from idea to finished product. Here are some screenshots of the workflow they built. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } I love this idea, i.e. closing the loop between web developers and users, a very common pain point, and so did our judges. Speaking of, special thanks to our panel of three judges: Reggie Bradford (@reggiebradford), serial entrepreneur, founder of Vitrue and SVP of Cloud Product Development at Oracle Robert Hipps (@roberthipps), VP of Development for Oracle Social Network and my former boss Roland Smart (@rsmartx), VP of Social Marketing and the brains behind the Oracle Social Developer Community Finally, thanks to everyone who made this possible, including: The three other teams from HarQen (@harqen), TEAM Informatics (@teaminformatics) and Fishbowl Solutions (@fishbowle20) featuring Friend of the ‘Lab John Sim (@jrsim_uix), who finished and presented entries. I’ll be posting the details of their work this week. The one guy who finished an entry, but couldn’t make the judging, Bex Huff (@bex). Bex rallied from a hospitalization due to an allergic reaction during the show; he’s fine, don’t worry. I’ll post details of his work next week, too. The 40-plus people who registered to compete in the Challenge. Noel for all his hard work, sample code, and flying monkey target, more on that to come. The Oracle Social Network development team for supporting this event. Everyone in legal and the beta program office for their help. And finally, the Oracle Technology Network (@oracletechnet) for hosting the event and providing countless hours of operational and moral support. Sorry if I’ve missed some people, since this was a huge team effort. This event was a big success, and we plan to do similar events in the future. Stay tuned to this channel for more. 

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  • 7 Reasons for Abandonment in eCommerce and the need for Contextual Support by JP Saunders

    - by Tuula Fai
    Shopper confidence, or more accurately the lack thereof, is the bane of the online retailer. There are a number of questions that influence whether a shopper completes a transaction, and all of those attributes revolve around knowledge. What products are available? What products are on offer? What would be the cost of the transaction? What are my options for delivery? In general, most online businesses do a good job of answering basic questions around the products as the shopper engages in the online journey, navigating the product catalog and working through the checkout process. The needs that are harder to address for the shopper are those that are less concerned with product specifics and more concerned with deciding whether the transaction met their needs and delivered value. A recent study by the Baymard Institute [1] finds that more than 60% of ecommerce site visitors will abandon their shopping cart. The study also identifies seven reasons for abandonment out of the commerce process [2]. Most of those reasons come down to poor usability within the commerce experience. Distractions. External distractions within the shopper’s external environment (TV, Children, Pets, etc.) or distractions on the eCommerce page can drive shopper abandonment. Ideally, the selection and check-out process should be straightforward. One common distraction is to drive the shopper away from the task at hand through pop-ups or re-directs. The shopper engaging with support information in the checkout process should not be directed away from the page to consume support. Though confidence may improve, the distraction also means abandonment may increase. Poor Usability. When the experience gets more complicated, buyer’s remorse can set in. While knowledge drives confidence, a lack of understanding erodes it. Therefore it is important that the commerce process is streamlined. In some cases, the number of clicks to complete a purchase is lengthy and unavoidable. In these situations, it is vital to ensure that the complexity of your experience can be explained with contextual support to avoid abandonment. If you can illustrate the solution to a complex action while the user is engaged in that action and address customer frustrations with your checkout process before they arise, you can decrease abandonment. Fraud. The perception of potential fraud can be enough to deter a buyer. Does your site look credible? Can shoppers trust your brand? Providing answers on the security of your experience and the levels of protection applied to profile information may play as big a role in ensuring the sale, as does the support you provide on the product offerings and purchasing process. Does it fit? If it is a clothing item or oversized furniture item, another common form of abandonment is for the shopper to question whether the item can be worn by the intended user. Providing information on the sizing applied to clothing, physical dimensions, and limitations on delivery/returns of oversized items will also assist the sale. A photo alone of the item will help, as it answers some of those questions, but won’t assuage all customer concerns about sizing and fit. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want to buy. Prospective buyers might be browsing through your catalog to kill time, or just might not have the money to purchase the item! You are unlikely to provide any information in contextual support to increase the likelihood to buy if the shopper already has no intentions of doing so. The customer will still likely abandon. Ensuring that any questions are proactively answered as they browse through your site can only increase their likelihood to return and buy at a future date. Can’t Buy. Errors or complexity at checkout can be another major cause of abandonment. Good contextual support is unlikely to help with severe errors caused by technical issues on your site, but it will have a big impact on customers struggling with complexity in the checkout process and needing a question answered prior to completing the sale. Embedded support within the checkout process to patiently explain how to complete a task will help increase conversion rates. Additional Costs. Tax, shipping and other costs or duties can dramatically increase the cost of the purchase and when unexpected, can increase abandonment, particularly if they can’t be adequately explained. Again, a lack of knowledge erodes confidence in the purchase, and cost concerns in particular, erode the perception of your brand’s trustworthiness. Again, providing information on what costs are additive and why they are being levied can decrease the likelihood that the customer will abandon out of the experience. Knowledge drives confidence and confidence drives conversion. If you’d like to understand best practices in providing contextual customer support in eCommerce to provide your shoppers with confidence, download the Oracle Cloud Service and Oracle Commerce - Contextual Support in Commerce White Paper. This white paper discusses the process of adding customer support, including a suggested process for finding where knowledge has the most influence on your shoppers and practical step-by-step illustrations on how contextual self-service can be added to your online commerce experience. Resources: [1] http://baymard.com/checkout-usability [2] http://baymard.com/blog/cart-abandonment

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  • Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive

    - by pjohnson
    I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Workflow Activity Library project type - What's the point of this separate project type? So far I don't see much advantage to keeping your custom activities in a separate project. I prefer to have as few projects as needed (and no fewer). The Designer's Toolbox window seems to find your custom activities just fine no matter where they are, and the debugging experience doesn't seem to be any different. Designer Properties - This is about the designer, and not specific to WF, but nevertheless something that's hindered me a lot more in WF than in Windows Forms or elsewhere. The Properties window does a good job of showing you property values when you hover the mouse over the values. But they don't do the same to find out what a control's type is. So maybe if I named all my activities "x1" and "x2" instead of helpful self-documenting names like "listenForStatusUpdate", then I could easily see enough of the type to determine what it is, but any names longer than those and all I get of the type is "System.Workflow.Act" or "System.Workflow.Compone". Even hitting the dropdown doesn't expand any wider, like the debugger quick watch "smart tag" popups do when you scroll through members. The only way I've found around this in VS 2008 is to widen the Properties dialog, losing precious designer real estate, then shrink it back down when you're done to see what you were doing. Really? WF Designer - This is about the designer, and I believe is specific to WF. I should be able to edit the XML in a .xoml file, or drag and drop using the designer. With WPF (at least in VS 2010 Ultimate), these are side by side, and changes to one instantly update the other. With WF, I have to right-click on the .xoml file, choose Open With, and pick XML Editor to edit the text. It looks like this is one way where WF didn't get the same attention WPF got during .NET Fx 3.0 development. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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  • Record Screen Activity with CamStudio

    - by Asian Angel
    Sometimes a visual demonstration works much better than a list of instructions. If you need to make a demo video for family and/or friends then you might want to have a look at CamStudio. Using CamStudio To get properly set up you will need to install two different files (the main program followed by the codec). Once that is done you are ready to get started. When you start the program you will see a surprisingly small window. Notice the highlighted Record to text…it serves as a visual indicator for the video type selected for recording. Before you start creating a video it would be a good idea to look through some of the settings. The first one to look at is the region or area that you want to record. Next you will want to look through the video options since these will affect the quality and final size of your video files. The default setting for quality is 70…adjust that to the level that best suits your needs. Note: For our example we maxed out the various video settings for best quality. On our system Microsoft Video 1 was listed as the default compressor but as you can see there were other options available. You can configure the settings for the compressor you want to use if desired. Keep in mind that each compressor will have unique settings of their own, so if you change it, be certain to go back and check. We decided to use the CamStudio Lossless Codec for our example (it gave the best results while trying the software). Going back to the main window you can toggle back and forth between .avi and .swf output using the last button. Once you are satisfied with the settings click on the red record button to start. If you need to pause while recording or stop recording click on the system tray icon and select the appropriate command. When you are finished recording, you will be presented with the save file window. Browse for the desired save location and name your new file. Once you have saved the file the movie player window will automatically open so that you view your new video. Our sample video shown here is at 50% of original size so may look slightly “gritty”. The detail was much better at 100%. If you decide to record and save as .swf the process will be identical to recording in .avi format until the movie player window opens. At that time the conversion process from .avi to .swf will begin. When complete you will have a new flash video and html file that goes with it. Depending on which browser you have set as default, you may run into a small problem when the preview for your new .swf file tries to open. There is a small bug in the generated html file. You can use this work-around or… Just open the .swf file directly in your favorite browser. Conclusion CamStudio may not produce the highest quality videos, but it’s free and does a very nice job nonetheless. If you are working on a tight budget or only need to make an occasional video then CamStudio is a very sensible choice. Links Download CamStudio Stable Version & CamStudio Codec *Download links are approximately half-way down the page. Download CamStudio Stable Version & CamStudio Codec at SourceForge *Beta version also available here. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get the Classic Style Network Activity Indicator Back in Windows 7How To Copy a DVD with VLC 1.0ALLCapture 3.0 [Review]Listen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureGeek Reviews: Play And Record Internet Radio With Screamer Radio TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate

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  • Backup Your Windows Home Server Off-Site with Asus Webstorage

    - by Mysticgeek
    Windows Home Server lets you backup machines on your network easily. But what about backing up the server data? Today we take a look at ASUS WebStorage for Windows Home Server, which provides you with secure off-site backup for WHS. To use the ASUS WebStorage service you’ll need to sign up for a free account. It offers 1GB of free storage, then you can purchase an unlimited backup package for $39.99 for a year subscription. Note: They also offer online storage for individual PCs as well. Install ASUS WebStorage for WHS Browse to your shared folders on the server and open the Add-Ins folder and copy over the WHSConnectorSetup2.2.4.088.msi file (link below) then close out of the folder. Now launch Windows Home Server Console from one of the computers on your network, click Settings, then Add-ins. Under Available Add-ins click the Available tab and you’ll see the Asus WebStorage installer file we just copied over. Click the Install button. Installation kicks off and when it’s complete, you’ll need to close out of the console and reconnect. Using ASUS WebStorage WHS Connector  When you reconnect to WHS Console, scroll over to the ASUS WebStorage icon and click on Settings. Now log into your ASUS account… Now select the folders you want to backup to the WebStorage service. Select the radio button next to Enable to initialize the backup process… The backup process begins. You can change which folders are backed up simply by disabling the backup process, uncheck the folder(s), then enable the backup again. ASUS WebStorage Site After you have files backed up to the ASUS site, log into your account, and your presented with an overview of the amount of storage you’re using. It also shows what type of files are taking certain amounts of space.   You can browse through your backed up files and folders. It allows you to share and sync backed up data as well. Navigate to the file you want and you can easily download it by clicking on it, or share it out by clicking the share link below it. If you choose to share it, you’re provided with a link to the file to send out to other users.   Conclusion Users of Windows Home Server have been looking for an inexpensive cloud backup solution for quite some time. There are services such as JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala…etc. These services probably do a better job, but can start getting expensive once you start uploading a GBs of data. Another disappointment of ASUS WebStorage is you can only backup your WHS shares (from what we’ve been able to determine), it’s an “all or nothing” type of thing. You cannot go in and select individual files and folders. The initial upload speeds can be a bit slow as well, although that might have something to do with limited upload speeds on the DSL connection we used to test it. Retrieving your data from the ASUS site is a breeze though, and all the data files are organized quite well. The WHS Addin is very easy to install and use. If you’re looking for an off-site solution to backup your WHS data, you can test out ASUS WebStorage for free with a 1GB limit. This is good for testing the service and it might be exactly what you’re looking for. Other users may want a more advanced solution like KeepVault or CloudBerry…which is a front end for Amazon S3 storage. Download ASUS WebStorage WHS Addin Other WHS Offsite Backup Solutions CloudBerry, JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Files from Backups on Windows Home ServerGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerCreate A Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore DiscRemove a Network Computer from Windows Home ServerShare Ubuntu Home Directories using Samba TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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  • Extending Blend for Visual Studio 2013

    - by Chris Skardon
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/cskardon/archive/2013/11/01/extending-blend-for-visual-studio-2013.aspxSo, I got a comment yesterday on my post about Extending Blend 4 and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 asking if I knew how to get it working for Blend for Visual Studio 2013.. My initial thoughts were, just change the location to get the blend dlls from Visual Studio 11.0 to 12.0 and you’re all set, so I went to do that, only to discover that the dlls I normally reference, well – they don’t exist. So… I’ve made a presumption that the actual process of using MEF etc is still the same. I was wrong. So, the route to discovery – required DotPeek and opening a few of blends dlls.. Browsing through the Blend install directory (./Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0/Blend/) I notice the .addin files: So I decide to peek into the SketchFlow dll, then promptly remember SketchFlow is quite a big thing, and hunting through there is not ideal, luckily there is another dll using an .addin file, ‘Microsoft.Expression.Importers.Host’, so we’ll go for that instead. We can see it’s still using the ‘IPackage’ formula, but where is that sucker? Well, we just press F12 on the ‘IPackage’ bit and DotPeek takes us there, with a very handy comment at the top: // Type: Microsoft.Expression.Framework.IPackage // Assembly: Microsoft.Expression.Framework, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a // MVID: E092EA54-4941-463C-BD74-283FD36478E2 // Assembly location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend\Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll Now we know where the IPackage interface is defined, so let’s just try writing a control. Last time I did a separate dll for the control, this time I’m not, but it still works if you want to do it that way. Let’s build a control! STEP 1 Create a new WPF application Naming doesn’t matter any more! I have gone with ‘Hello2013’ (see what I did there?) STEP 2 Delete: App.Config App.xaml MainWindow.xaml We won’t be needing them STEP 3 Change your application to be a Class Library instead. (You might also want to delete the ‘vshost’ stuff in your output directory now, as they only exist for hosting the WPF app, and just cause clutter) STEP 4 Add a reference to the ‘Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll’ (which you can find in ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend’ – that’s Program Files (x86) if you’re on an x64 machine!). STEP 5 Add a User Control, I’m going with ‘Hello2013Control’, and following from last time, it’s just a TextBlock in a Grid: <UserControl x:Class="Hello2013.Hello2013Control" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="300"> <Grid> <TextBlock>Hello Blend for VS 2013</TextBlock> </Grid> </UserControl> STEP 6 Add a class to load the package – I’ve called it – yes you guessed – Hello2013Package, which will look like this: namespace Hello2013 { using Microsoft.Expression.Framework; using Microsoft.Expression.Framework.UserInterface; public class Hello2013Package : IPackage { private Hello2013Control _hello2013Control; private IWindowService _windowService; public void Load(IServices services) { _windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); Initialize(); } private void Initialize() { _hello2013Control = new Hello2013Control(); if (_windowService.PaletteRegistry["HelloPanel"] == null) _windowService.RegisterPalette("HelloPanel", _hello2013Control, "Hello Window"); } public void Unload(){} } } You might note that compared to the 2012 version we’re no longer [Exporting(typeof(IPackage))]. The file you create in STEP 7 covers this for us. STEP 7 Add a new file called: ‘<PROJECT_OUTPUT_NAME>.addin’ – in reality you can call it anything and it’ll still read it in just fine, it’s just nicer if it all matches up, so I have ‘Hello2013.addin’. Content wise, we need to have: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <AddIn AssemblyFile="Hello2013.dll" /> obviously, replacing ‘Hello2013.dll’ with whatever your dll is called. STEP 8 We set the ‘addin’ file to be copied to the output directory: STEP 9 Build! STEP 10 Go to your output directory (./bin/debug) and copy the 3 files (Hello2013.dll, Hello2013.pdb, Hello2013.addin) and then paste into the ‘Addins’ folder in your Blend directory (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend\Addins) STEP 11 Start Blend for Visual Studio 2013 STEP 12 Go to the ‘Window’ menu and select ‘Hello Window’ STEP 13 Marvel at your new control! Feel free to email me / comment with any problems!

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  • Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer

    - by Elton Stoneman
    This is the second in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Part 2 is nice and easy. From Part 1 we exposed our service over the Azure Service Bus Relay using the netTcpRelayBinding and verified we could set up our network to listen for relayed messages. Assuming we want to consume that service in .NET from an environment which is fairly unrestricted for us, but quite restricted for attackers, we can use netTcpRelay and shared secret authentication. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the consumer can run .NET in full trust the environment does not restrict use of external DLLs the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the service does not need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is So for example, the consumer is an ASP.NET website sitting in a cloud VM or Azure worker role, where we can keep the shared secret in web.config and we don't need to flow any identity through to the on-premise service. The service doesn't care who the consumer or end-user is - say it's a reference data service that provides a list of vehicle manufacturers. Provided you can authenticate with ACS and have access to Service Bus endpoint, you can use the service and it doesn't care who you are. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using netTcpRelay. The code for Part 2 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 2 Authenticating and authorizing with ACS In this scenario the consumer is a server in a controlled environment, so we can use a shared secret to authenticate with ACS, assuming that there is governance around the environment and the codebase which will prevent the identity being compromised. From the provider's side, we will create a dedicated service identity for this consumer, so we can lock down their permissions. The provider controls the identity, so the consumer's rights can be revoked. We'll add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS , just as we did for the serviceProvider identity in Part 1. I've named the identity fullTrustConsumer. We then need to add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus (see Part 1 for a walkthrough creating Service Idenitities): Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: fullTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send This sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. Adding a Service Reference The Part 2 sample client code is ready to go, but if you want to replicate the steps, you’re going to add a WSDL reference, add a reference to Microsoft.ServiceBus and sort out the ServiceModel config. In Part 1 we exposed metadata for our service, so we can browse to the WSDL locally at: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc?wsdl If you add a Service Reference to that in a new project you'll get a confused config section with a customBinding, and a set of unrecognized policy assertions in the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2009/05/servicebus/connect. If you NuGet the ASB package (“windowsazure.servicebus”) first and add the service reference - you'll get the same messy config. Either way, the WSDL should have downloaded and you should have the proxy code generated. You can delete the customBinding entries and copy your config from the service's web.config (this is already done in the sample project in Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient), specifying details for the client:     <client>       <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                 behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret"                 binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                 contract="FormatService.IFormatService" />     </client>     <behaviors>       <endpointBehaviors>         <behavior name="SharedSecret">           <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">             <clientCredentials>               <sharedSecret issuerName="fullTrustConsumer"                             issuerSecret="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/>             </clientCredentials>           </transportClientEndpointBehavior>         </behavior>       </endpointBehaviors>     </behaviors>   The proxy is straight WCF territory, and the same client can run against Azure Service Bus through any relay binding, or directly to the local network service using any WCF binding - the contract is exactly the same. The code is simple, standard WCF stuff: using (var client = new FormatService.FormatServiceClient()) { outputString = client.ReverseString(inputString); } Running the sample First, update Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml with your service bus namespace, and your service identity credentials for the netTcpClient and the provider:   <!-- ACS credentials for the full trust consumer (Part2): -->   <netTcpClient identityName="fullTrustConsumer"                 symmetricKey="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/> Then rebuild the solution and verify the unit tests work. If they’re green, your service is listening through Azure. Check out the client by navigating to http://localhost:53835/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient. Enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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  • IndyTechFest Recap

    - by Johnm
    The sun had yet to raise above the horizon on Saturday, May 22nd and I was traveling toward the location of the 2010 IndyTechFest. In my freshly awaken, and pre-coffee, state I reflected on the months that preceded this day and how quickly they slipped away. The big day had finally come and the morning dew glistened with a unique brightness that morning. What is this all about? For those who are unfamiliar with IndyTechFest, it is a regional conference held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA) and the Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server (IndyPASS).  The event presents multiple tracks and sessions covering subjects such as Business Intelligence,  Database Administration, .NET Development, SharePoint Development, Windows Mobile Development as well as non-Microsoft topics such as Lean and MongoDB. This year's event was the third hosting of IndyTechFest. No man is an island No event such as IndyTechFest is executed by a single person. My fellow co-founders, with their highly complementary skill sets and philanthropy make the process very enjoyable. Our amazing volunteers and their aid were indispensible. The generous financial support of our sponsors that made the event and fabulous prizes possible. The spectacular line up of speakers who came from near and far to donate their time and knowledge. Our beloved attendees who sacrificed the first sunny Saturday in weeks to expand their skill sets and network with their peers. We are deeply appreciative. Challenges in preparation With the preparation of any event comes challenges. It is these challenges that makes the process of planning an event so interesting. This year's largest challenge was the location of the event. In the past two years IndyTechFest was held at the Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Center in Indianapolis. This facility has been the hub of the Indy technical community for many years. As the big day drew near, the facility's availability came into question due to some recent changes that had occurred with those who operated the facility. We began our search for an alternative option. Thankfully, the Marriott Indianapolis East was available, was very spacious and willing to work within the range of our budget. Within days of our event, the decision to move proved to be wise since the prior location had begun renovations to the interior. Whew! Always trust your gut. Every day it's getting better At the ending of each year, we huddle together, review the evaluations and identify an area in which the event could improve. This year's big opportunity for improvement resided in the prize give-away portion at the end of the day. In the 2008 event, admittedly, this portion was rather chaotic, rushed and disorganized. This year, we broke the drawing into two sections, of which each attendee received two tickets. The first ticket was a drawing for the mountain of books that were given away. The second ticket was a drawing for the big prizes, the 2 Xboxes, 3 laptops and iPad. We peppered the ticket drawings with gift card raffles and tossing t-shirts into the audience. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again Each year of IndyTechFest, we have offered a means for ad-hoc sessions or discussion groups to pop-up. To our disappointment it was something that never quite took off. We have always believed that this unique type of session was valuable and wanted to figure out a way to make it work for this year. A special thanks to Alan Stevens, who took on and facilitated the "open space" track and made it an official success. Share with your tweety When the attendee badges were designed we decided to place an emphasis on the attendee's Twitter account as well as the events hash-tag (#IndyTechFest) to encourage some real-time buzz during the day. At the host table we displayed a Twitter feed for all to enjoy. It was quite successful and encouraging use of social media. My badge was missing my Twitter account since it was recently changed. For those who care to follow my rather sparse tweets, my address is @johnnydata. Man, this is one long blog post! All in all it was a very successful event. It is always great to see new faces and meet old friends. The planning for the 2011 IndyTechFest will kick off very soon. We have more capacity for future growth and a truck full of great ideas. Stay tuned!

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  • Must-see sessions at TCUK11

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

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 18, 2010 -- #1012

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Mark Monster, Kevin Dockx, Jeremy Likness(-2-,-3-), Timmy Kokke, Den Delimarsky, Mike Snow, Samuel Jack(-2-), and Renuka Prasad(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes" Mark Monster WP7: "Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7" Renuka Prasad Shoutouts: SilverlightGal sent me the link to The Silverlight Dossier ... I think it's a pretty good start... additions I'd like to see are ways to submit to the various areas. Michael Crump put up a contest that runs from now to January 1st... Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!... pretty cool, Michael! If you visit WynApse.com, you'll see I have a subscription to LearnVisualStudio.net... and now they have posted a batch of WP7 videos... 64 of them to be exact... wow!: New video series From SilverlightCream.com: Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes Mark Monster has a great post up about triggering Storyboard on ViewModel changes using the DataTrigger from Blend... cool stuff, and you can also do GoToStateAction or other actions or build yourowndang Trigger Action... fun awaits! ... sorry it took a while to post, Mark... been a tad overloaded here! Working with the Silverlight Rich Text Box control Kevin Dockx has had a post up for a while at SilverlightShow where he takes a good look at the RichText control and it's various capabilities, including source so you can give it a dance yourself. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 3: Custom Panel and Listbox Jeremy Likness's part 3 of his Personal Web Page lessons learned is covering the tres-cool 3D Panel he did... and he's got it all explained out... building from scratch via a custom panel and a Listbox control... A Silverlight MVVM Feed Reader from Scratch in 30 Minutes Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial showing building an MVVM/Silverlight feedreader in 30 minutes ... plus a couple mods that he noticed after the fact... beat that HTML5 :) Jounce Part 8: Raising Property Changed In Jeremy Likness's latest post, he has number 8 in his series on his MVVM platform, Jounce. This time he's explaining the property changed notification, has a very cool way of doing it, and some interesting comments from readers. Dependency Injection, MVVM, Ninject and Silverlight Timmy Kokke has a great tutorial up with associated demo project on Dependency Injection in MVVM and Silverlight. Some hidden features in the Windows Phone 7 emulator Den Delimarsky shows how to get some of the hidden features on your WP7 emulator like the Call History, Call Settings, and Details about the numbers. Playing sound effects on Windows Phone 7 Mike Snow's latest tip is playing sound effects on your WP7 ... a little bit of XNA here and there, and badabing, badaboom, you got sound! Day 3 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack has a couple more posts up about his 'Build a WP7 game in 3 Days' challenge... first up is Day 3 from 8:50 to 22:30 ... wow... long day! ... but he's got something good going now... some good external links also Day 3.5 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack's 3rd day ended with another half-day added on to put on some finishing touches... again, some good external links... and he finished with this Say hello to Simon Squared, my 3.5 day old WP7 Game Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has a bunch of material up that I've not been aware of (how did that happen, people??) ... here's the first of a couple of his posts on Code Project ... a very nice tutorial on the Push Notification process... great diagrams and external links. Windows Phone 7 – Toast Notification Using Windows Azure Cloud Service Renuka Prasad has another WP7 post on CodeProject... this one on Toast Notification... and he's using Azure and WCF all rolled into it as well... great diagrams, descriptions and all the code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Global Perspective: Oracle AppAdvantage Does its Stage Debut in the UK

    - by Tanu Sood
    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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Global Perspective is a monthly series that brings experiences, business needs and real-world use cases from regions across the globe. This month’s feature is a follow-up from last month’s Global Perspective note from a well known ACE Director based in EMEA. My first contribution to this blog was before Oracle Open World and I was quite excited about where this initiative would take me in my understanding of the value of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Rimi Bewtra from the Oracle AppAdvantage team came as promised to the Oracle ACE Director briefings and explained what this initiative was all about and I then asked the directors to take part in the new survey. The story was really well received and then at the SOA advisory board that many of these ACE Directors already take part in there was a further discussion on how this initiative will help customers understand the benefits of adoption. A few days later Rick Beers launched the program at a lunch of invited customer executives which included one from Pella who talked about their projects (a quick recap on that here). I wasn’t able to stay for the whole event but what really interested me was that these executives who understood the technology but where looking for how they could use them to drive their businesses. Lots of ideas were bubbling up in my head about how we can use this in user groups to help our members, and the timing was fantastic as just three weeks later we had UKOUG_Apps13, our flagship Applications conference in the UK. We had independently working with Oracle marketing in the UK on an initiative called Apps Transformation to help our members look beyond just the application they use today. We have had a Fusion community page but felt the options open are now much wider than Fusion Applications, there are acquired applications, social, mobility and of course the underlying technology, Oracle Fusion Middleware. I was really pleased to be allowed to give the Oracle AppAdvantage story as a session in our conference and we are planning a special Apps Transformation event in March where I hope the Oracle AppAdvantage team will take part and we will have the results of the survey to discuss. But, life also came full circle for me. In my first post, I talked about Andrew Sutherland and his original theory that Oracle Fusion Middleware adoption had technical drivers. Well, Andrew was a speaker at our event and he gave a potted, tech-talk free update on Oracle Open World. Andrew talked about the Prevailing Technology Winds, and what is driving this today and he talked about that in the past it was the move from simply automating processes (ERP etc), through the altering of those processes (SOA) and onto consolidation. The next drivers are around the need to predict, both faster and more accurately; how to better exploit the information that we have available. He went on to talk about The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – harnessing these forces of change with Oracle technology. Gartner really likes this concept and if you want to know more you can get their paper here. All this has made me think, and I hope it will make you too. Technology can help us drive our businesses better and understanding your needs can be the first step on your journey, which was the theme of our event in the UK. I spoke to a number of the delegates and I hope to share some of their stories in later posts. If you have a story to share, the survey is at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P335DD3 About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Debra has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Leader and then Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts Editor’s Note: Debra has kindly agreed to share her musings and experience in a monthly column on the Fusion Middleware blog so do stay tuned…

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  • Oracle participe au Forum MDM - 24 octobre 2013

    - by Louisa Aggoune
    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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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:"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;} Dédié aux Directions Générales, Fonctionnelles et Informatiques ce 2ème Forum MDM (Master Data Management) a pour objectif de présenter les dernières nouveautés et le savoir-faire des acteurs majeurs du marché sous la forme d'ateliers. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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:"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, sponsor de l'évènement, vous convie sur son stand et à son atelier: Oracle MDM et qualité des données au service de la gouvernance de vos données internes et externes ou comment enrichir et fédérer votre patrimoine informationnel avec le Social data, Big Data, Cloud data … De nombreux retours d’expérience concrets vous seront également délivrés lors de cette matinée, à travers les témoignages de : - Philippe Kirady, CARDIF, Directeur expertise métier et process- Michelle Martin, SOLVAY, Directrice Data Management- Thierry Chamfrault, TECHNIP, Directeur Qualité et méthodes IT- Manuel Amorim, LE PARISIEN, Responsable Audience et Fidélisation Département Numérique- Jean-Michel Collomb, Architecte d’entreprise, AMADEUS Global Business ServicesVous avez des problématiques de :- Gouvernance des données- Qualité des données- Référentiels de données, produits, clients, fournisseurs, RH 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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:"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;} Lieu : Jeudi 24 Octobre 2013, de 8h30 à 13h30 - Centre de Conférences Paris Victoire - 52, rue de la Victoire - 75009 Paris Inscription: Par retour d'email à 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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:"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;} [email protected] ou [email protected]

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  • Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore

    - by sathya
    Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore   I was really excited on attending the day 1 of Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Bangalore. This is the first Teched that am attending. The event was really fun filled with lot of knowledge sharing sessions and lots of goodies and gifts by the partners Initially the Event Started by Murthy's Session. He explained about the Developers relating to the 5 elements of nature (Pancha Boothaas) 1. Fire - Passion 2. Wave (Water) - Catch the right wave which we need to apply. 3. Earth - Connections and lots of opportunities around the world 4. Air -  Its whatever we breathe. Developers.. Without them nothing is possible. they are like the air 5. Sky - Cloud based applications   Next the Keynote and the announcement of Visual Studio by SomaSegar. List of things that he delivered his speech on : 1. Announcement of Visual Studio 2010 2. Announcement of .NET 4.0 3. Announcement of Silverlight later this week 4. What is the current Trend? Microsoft has done a research with many developers across the globe and have got the following feedback from the users. Get Lost (interrupted) - When we do some work and somebody is calling or interrepting by someother way we lose track of what we were doing and we need to do from the start Falling Behind- Technology gets updated  phenomenally over a period of time and developers always have a scenario like they are not in the state of the art technology and they always have a doubt whether they are staying updated. Lack of Collobaration - When a Manager asks a person what the team members have done and some might be done and some might not be and finally all are into a state like we dont know where we are. So they have addressed these 3 points in the VS 2010 by the following features : Get Lost - Some cool features which could overcome this. We have some Graphical interface. which could show what we have done and where we are. Some Zoom features in the code level. Falling Behind - Everything is based on .NET language base. 2010 has been built in such a way that if developers know the native language that's enough for building good applications. Lack of Collobaration - Some Dashboard Features which would show where exactly the project is. And a graphical user interface is shown on clicking which it directly drills down even to the code level. 5. An overview on all new features in VS 2010. 6. Some good demos of new features in VS 2010 by Polita and one more girl. Some of the new features included : 1. Team Explorer 2. Zoom in Code 3. Ribbon Development 4. Development in Single Platform for Windows Phone, XBox, Zune, Azure, Web Based and Windows based applications 5. Sequence Diagram Generation directly from code 6. Dashboards to show project status 7. Javascript and JQuery intellisense 8. Native support for JQuery 9. Packaging feature while deploying. 10. Generation of different versions of web.config like Web.Config.Production, Web.Config.Staging, etc. 11. IntelliTrace - Eliminating the "Not Reproducible" statement. 12. Automated User Interface Testing. At last in the closing of the day we had a great event called Demo Extravaganza, where lot of cool projects that were launched by Microsoft and also the projects that are under research were also shown. I got a lot of info about Bing today. BING really rocks!!! It has the following : 1. Visual Search 2. Product based search. For each product different menu filters were provided to make an advanced search 3. BING Maps was awesome!! It zoomed in to the street level and we can assume that we are the persons who are walking or running on the road and we can see the real objects like buildings moving by our side. 4. PhotoSynth was used in BING to show up all the images taken around the globe in a 3D format. 5. Formula - If we give some formula it automatically gives the value for the variable or derivation of expression Also some info about some kool touch apps which does an authentication and computation of Teched Attendee's Points that they have scored and the sessions attended. One guy won an XBOX in lucky draw as a gift. There were lot of Partner Stalls like Accenture,Intel,Citrix,MicroFocus,Telerik,infragistics,Sapient etc. Some Offers were provided for us like 50% off on Certifications, 1 free Elearning Course, etc. Stay tuned!! Wil update you on other events too..

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  • Real-world SignalR example, ditching ghetto long polling

    - by Jeff
    One of the highlights of BUILD last week was the announcement that SignalR, a framework for real-time client to server (or cloud, if you will) communication, would be a real supported thing now with the weight of Microsoft behind it. Love the open source flava! If you aren’t familiar with SignalR, watch this BUILD session with PM Damian Edwards and dev David Fowler. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll be in a happy place within the first ten minutes. If you skip to the end, you’ll see that they plan to ship this as a real first version by the end of the year. Insert slow clap here. Writing a few lines of code to move around a box from one browser to the next is a way cool demo, but how about something real-world? When learning new things, I find it difficult to be abstract, and I like real stuff. So I thought about what was in my tool box and the decided to port my crappy long-polling “there are new posts” feature of POP Forums to use SignalR. A few versions back, I added a feature where a button would light up while you were pecking out a reply if someone else made a post in the interim. It kind of saves you from that awkward moment where someone else posts some snark before you. While I was proud of the feature, I hated the implementation. When you clicked the reply button, it started polling an MVC URL asking if the last post you had matched the last one the server, and it did it every second and a half until you either replied or the server told you there was a new post, at which point it would display that button. The code was not glam: // in the reply setup PopForums.replyInterval = setInterval("PopForums.pollForNewPosts(" + topicID + ")", 1500); // called from the reply setup and the handler that fetches more posts PopForums.pollForNewPosts = function (topicID) { $.ajax({ url: PopForums.areaPath + "/Forum/IsLastPostInTopic/" + topicID, type: "GET", dataType: "text", data: "lastPostID=" + PopForums.currentTopicState.lastVisiblePost, success: function (result) { var lastPostLoaded = result.toLowerCase() == "true"; if (lastPostLoaded) { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "hidden"); } else { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "visible"); clearInterval(PopForums.replyInterval); } }, error: function () { } }); }; What’s going on here is the creation of an interval timer to keep calling the server and bugging it about new posts, and setting the visibility of a button appropriately. It looks like this if you’re monitoring requests in FireBug: Gross. The SignalR approach was to call a message broker when a reply was made, and have that broker call back to the listening clients, via a SingalR hub, to let them know about the new post. It seemed weird at first, but the server-side hub’s only method is to add the caller to a group, so new post notifications only go to callers viewing the topic where a new post was made. Beyond that, it’s important to remember that the hub is also the means to calling methods at the client end. Starting at the server side, here’s the hub: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Hubs; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public class Topics : Hub { public void ListenTo(int topicID) { Groups.Add(Context.ConnectionId, topicID.ToString()); } } } Have I mentioned how awesomely not complicated this is? The hub acts as the channel between the server and the client, and you’ll see how JavaScript calls the above method in a moment. Next, the broker class and its associated interface: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR; using Topic = PopForums.Models.Topic; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public interface IBroker { void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID); } public class Broker : IBroker { public void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID) { var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>(); context.Clients.Group(topic.TopicID.ToString()).notifyNewPosts(lasPostID); } } } The NotifyNewPosts method uses the static GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>() method to get a reference to the hub, and then makes a call to clients in the group matched by the topic ID. It’s calling the notifyNewPosts method on the client. The TopicService class, which handles the reply data from the MVC controller, has an instance of the broker new’d up by dependency injection, so it took literally one line of code in the reply action method to get things moving. _broker.NotifyNewPosts(topic, post.PostID); The JavaScript side of things wasn’t much harder. When you click the reply button (or quote button), the reply window opens up and fires up a connection to the hub: var hub = $.connection.topics; hub.client.notifyNewPosts = function (lastPostID) { PopForums.setReplyMorePosts(lastPostID); }; $.connection.hub.start().done(function () { hub.server.listenTo(topicID); }); The important part to look at here is the creation of the notifyNewPosts function. That’s the method that is called from the server in the Broker class above. Conversely, once the connection is done, the script calls the listenTo method on the server, letting it know that this particular connection is listening for new posts on this specific topic ID. This whole experiment enables a lot of ideas that would make the forum more Facebook-like, letting you know when stuff is going on around you.

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  • JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

    - by arungupta
    The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

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  • JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

    - by arungupta
    The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

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  • How to setup SyntaxHighlighter with GeeksWithBlogs in about 10 minutes.

    - by mbcrump
    SyntaxHighlighter is a fully functional self-contained code syntax highlighter developed in JavaScript. Below is a sample of what it looks like in your blog. class Test { static void Main() { System.Console.WriteLine("Sample SyntaxHighlighter"); } } This tutorial will help you setup SyntaxHighlighter with GeeksWithBlogs.net in about 10 minutes. Even though this guide is specifically for GWB, you can use it on any other hosting provider that does not allow you to upload custom CSS/JavaScript. It is recommended that if you are using LiveWriter to go ahead and download Code Snippet with SyntaxHighlighter Support to integrate this functionality within Live Writer. 1) Log into GWB and select Options->Configure Now under the Custom CSS insert the following code at the top of the textbox: @import url("http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shCore.css"); @import url("http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shThemeDefault.css"); Please note that you can change the default theme by changing the shThemeDefault.css to one listed below: shThemeDefault.css shThemeDjango.css shThemeEmacs.css shThemeFadeToGrey.css shThemeMidnight.css shThemeRDark.css 2) Under the Static News/Announcements insert the following code at the top: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shCore.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script language='javascript'> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/clipboard.swf'; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> Please note that this will only give you support for Java, JavaScript and C Sharp. If you want more languages like Ruby and SQL. Then add the proper tags listed below. The reason that I didn’t add them is because I do not want to load languages that I will not be blogging about. <link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shCore.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shThemeDefault.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shCore.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPhp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPython.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushRuby.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushVb.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPerl.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script language='javascript'> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/clipboard.swf'; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> 3) Now install Code Snippet with SyntaxHighlighter Support and launch Windows Live Writer. Click on the PreCode Snippet plugin add copy/paste your code into the windows. Make sure you select “PRE” and the Language that you are using. It should look similar to the following screenshot.  After you finish editing the post, hit publish and your code should look nice and neat like the example shown earlier.

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  • How to get paid and figure out if I want to keep this client [migrated]

    - by Heiner Fawkes
    I have a client who is not paying on time, but it looks like the specifics don't match similar questions on this SE site. I got a call from a client I did website work for years ago. I had not done this kind of work for many years and frankly I'm not sure I want to now, but nevertheless about a month ago I agreed to bring his website, SEO, social media, and overall marketing for his small business up to speed. Why? He has told me many times how I'm the most honest, most well-informed contractor he's had experience with. And I personally kind of like him too. So I started working on an hourly basis. I sent one very small invoice and got paid. Then we talked a whole lot about all sorts of feature he would like me to implement. I started that work, and sent a second invoice on the first of the month (one of my two stated billing days). I didn't get paid. On every invoice it states that I charge a whopping ten percent per week late. I sent many voicemails and emails asking to please let me know what's going on with payment, and didn't get replies. Then the 15th of the month rolled around (which I stated initially as one of my invoicing dates). Since I hadn't been paid for the last invoice, I simply didn't send him an invoice at that time but emailed him and said that I will combine it with the next scheduled invoice for this reason (probably a bad idea I realize). Eventually he sent a portion of the invoice payment. I emailed back to let him know that he's three weeks late and what the remaining balance is. Finally we got in touch via phone. He basically told me that he thought I hadn't done all of the work I said I did. He looked at the page source code and it didn't look complete to him. I explained why his perception would be different and what work I had done as specified. He accepted this and said that part of the reason he didn't pay in full is that he's been swamped with personal family stuff, and part of the reason is that he didn't think I did all the work. That struck me as pretty weird. He also expressed concern that he has no idea now how much all the changes he has asked for are going to cost. And once again, he told me how honest and high-quality my services are compared to others he has dealt with. He also said he would pay me more (but not all) of the now three weeks overdue invoice that day. I didn't receive any payment. Basically this is how the client relationship strikes me: He's not good at communication. He's very busy and English isn't his first language. He almost never replies to emails but phone calls are fine. He's asked me to avoid emails for communication and I've asked him to please use email. He might not have enough money to afford all the things he has asked for. But so far I have been working for an hourly fee (which is quite high). He also has started paying monthly for hosting and social media services from me. What seems very abnormal is for a client to be so overdue on payments and to actually withhold payment of an invoice without any communication because he didn't think the work was done. I told him that I will send dollar estimates of each module of remaining work so that we can decide which ones are the highest priority if he cannot afford them all. I also reiterated that in the future if he has doubts about the work or an inability to pay, he must contact me immediately to say so. I basically plan to state the following to him: I would like to work for him and help his business. I also have sympathy for his recent family difficulties. I am happy to figure out payment plans that would work better for him, but first I need to be paid in full for all outstanding invoices, especially given that I skipped one of them just to be nice. The most crucial thing I need is communication about any problems with my work or his ability to pay. Once again, he heeds to pay in full immediately before we negotiate anything else. Does the above seem like an appropriate communication? Is anything missing from it? Is anything I'm doing here really abnormal?

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  • Simple Scripting for your Exalogic Storage

    - by Trond Strømme
    As part of my job in Oracle ACS (Advanced Customer Services) I'm handling lots of different systems and customers. Among the recent systems I worked with have been Oracle's Exalogic engineered systems. One of the things I'd never had much exposure to as a system developer/architect/middleware guy/Java dude has been storage; outside of consuming it for my photography needs.. Well, I'm always ready for a new challenge... I'd downloaded the 7000 series storage simulator when it was released in the good old Sun days, found it fun and instructive to play around with, but as I never touched storage in any way (besides consuming it..) I forgot about it. A couple of years ago when I started working with Exalogic engineered systems it again came into light as an invaluable learning and testing tool for the embedded storage in an Exalogic;  Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage 7320 Appliance.  aaaanyway... I've been "booted" into a part-time role as the interim storage/system admin/middleware/Java guy for a client and found I needed to create the occasional report or summary or whatever.. of what's using the storage in the 7320 (as default configured for an Exalogic, 40T of disk in a mirrored configuration, yielding 18T of actual space.) Reading the nice documentation and some articles on the Oracle Technology Network I saw great possibilities with the embedded ECMAScript3/JavaScript engine in the 7000 series.  In my personal opinion anyone who's dealing with Exalogic administration, or exposed to any of the 7000 series of storage appliances and servers that Oracle offers should have a VirtualBox instance of it kicking around. For development and testing it's a fantastic tool. (It can save you from explaining (most) of the embarrassing FAILS you can do if you test something in a production system to your management...) So download, and install.  A small sidestep, if after firing up the 7000 series simulator in VirtualBox you've forgotten what it's IP address is, the following will sort you out if you log in directly via the running VirtualBox VM. So in my case I can ssh to 192.168.56.101 or point a browser to https://192.168.56.101:215 to log into the storage appliance. One simple way of executing a script on the 7320 is to ssh to the device and redirecting a file with the script in it to ssh. ssh [email protected] < myscript.js One question I got from my client and the people who will take over the systems was: "how can we see the quotas and allocations for all projects/shares in one easy go so we don't have to go navigating around in the BUI for all the hundreds of shares the 7320 is hosting just to check if anything is running dry?" Easy! JavaScript time, VirtualBox and emacs! //NOTE! this script is available 'as is' It has ben run on a couple of 7320's, (running 2010.08.17.3.0,1-1.25 & // 2011.04.24.1.0,1-1.8) a 7420 and the VB image, but I personally //offer no guarantee whatsoever that it won't make your server topple, catch fire or in any way go pear shaped.. //run at your own risk or learn from my code and or mistakes.. script run('cd /'); run('shares'); //get all projects: proj = list(); function spaceToGig(bytes){ return bytes/1073741824; //convert bytes to GB } function fullInPercent(quota, space_data){ tmp = (space_data/quota)*100; return tmp; } //print header, slightly good looking printf(" %s/%-15s %8s(GB) %7s(GB) %5s(GB) %7s(GB) %3s\n","Project", "Share","Quota","Ref", "Snap", "Total","%full"); printf("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n") //for each project, get all shares. check for quota and calculate percentage and human readable figures.. for (i=0;i<proj.length;i++){ run('select ' + proj[i]); //get all shares for a project var pshares = list(); //for each share get quota properties for (j=0;j<pshares.length;j++){ run('select ' + pshares[j]); quota = get('quota'); //properties associated with a share or inherited from a project spaceData = get('space_data'); spaceSnap = get('space_snapshots'); spaceTotal = get('space_total'); if(quota>0){ //has quota printf(" %s/%-15s \t%4.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%5.2f%%\n",proj[i], pshares[j],spaceToGig(quota),spaceToGig(spaceData),spaceToGig(spaceSnap),spaceToGig(spaceTotal),fullInPercent(quota,spaceTotal)); }else{ //no quota printf(" %s/%-15s \t%8s\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%s\n",proj[i],pshares[j], "N/A", spaceToGig(spaceData),spaceToGig(spaceSnap),spaceToGig(spaceTotal),"N/A"); } run('cd ..'); } run('done'); } The resulting output should look something like this: Project/Share Quota(GB) Ref(GB) Snap(GB) Total(GB) %full ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ACSExalogicSystem/domains N/A 0.04GB 0.00GB 0.04GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/logs N/A 0.01GB 0.00GB 0.01GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/nodemgrs N/A 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/stores N/A 0.04GB 0.00GB 0.04GB N/A ***_dev/FMW_***_1 133GB 4.24GB 0.01GB 4.25GB 3.19% ***_dev/FMW_***_2 N/A 4.25GB 0.01GB 4.26GB N/A ***_dev/applications 10GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00% ***_dev/domains 50GB 10.75GB 3.55GB 14.30GB 28.61% ***_dev/logs 20GB 0.32GB 0.01GB 0.33GB 1.66% ***_dev/softwaredepot 20GB 4.15GB 0.00GB 4.15GB 20.73% ***_dev/stores 20GB 0.01GB 0.00GB 0.01GB 0.05% ###_dev/FMW_###_1 400GB 17.63GB 0.12GB 17.75GB 4.44% ###_dev/applications N/A 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB N/A ###_dev/domains 120GB 14.21GB 5.53GB 19.74GB 16.45% ###_dev/logs 15GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00% ###_dev/softwaredepot 250GB 73.55GB 0.02GB 73.57GB 29.43% …snip My apologies if the output is a bit mis-aligned here and there, I only bothered making it look good, not perfect :/ I also removed some of the project names (*,#)

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  • Java EE and GlassFish Server Roadmap Update

    - by John Clingan
    2013 has been a stellar year for both the Java EE and GlassFish Server communities. On June 12, Oracle and its partners announced the release of Java EE 7, which delivers on three major themes – HTML5, developer productivity, and meeting enterprise demands. The online event attracted over 10,000 views in the first two days! During the online event, Oracle also announced the availability of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4, the world's first Java EE 7 compatible application server. The primary role of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition has been, and continues to be, driving adoption of the latest release of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition. Oracle also announced the Java EE 7 SDK, which bundles GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4, as a Java EE 7 learning aid. Last, Oracle publicly announced the Java EE 7 reference implementation based on GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4. Java EE is a popular platform, as evidenced by the 20+ Java EE 6 compatible implementations available to choose from. After the launch of Java EE 7 and GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4, we began planning the Java EE 8 roadmap, which was covered during the JavaOne Strategy Keynote. To summarize, there is a lot of interest in improving on HTML5 support, Cloud, and investigating NoSQL support. We received a lot of great feedback from the community and customers on what they would like to see in Java EE 8. As we approached JavaOne 2013, we started planning the GlassFish Server roadmap. What we announced at JavaOne was that GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 is scheduled for 2014. Here is an update to that roadmap. GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 is scheduled for 2014 We are planning updates as needed to GlassFish Server Open Source Edition, which is commercially unsupported As we head towards Java EE 8: The trunk will eventually transition to GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5 as a Java EE 8 implementation The Java EE 8 Reference Implementation will be derived from GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5. This replicates what has been done in past Java EE and GlassFish Server releases. Oracle will no longer release future major releases of Oracle GlassFish Server with commercial support – specifically Oracle GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java EE 7 support will not be released. Commercial Java EE 7 support will be provided from WebLogic Server. Oracle GlassFish Server will not be releasing a 4.x commercial version Expanding on that last bullet, new and existing Oracle GlassFish Server 2.1.x and 3.1.x commercial customers will continue to be supported according to the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. Oracle recommends that existing commercial Oracle GlassFish Server customers begin planning to move to Oracle WebLogic Server, which is a natural technical and license migration path forward: Applications developed to Java EE standards can be deployed to both GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server have implementation-specific deployment descriptor interoperability (here and here). GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server share quite a bit of code, so there are quite a bit of configuration and (extended) feature similarities. Shared code includes JPA, JAX-RS, WebSockets (pre JSR 356 in both cases), CDI, Bean Validation, JAX-WS, JAXB, and WS-AT. Both Oracle GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server 12c support Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Coherence, Oracle Directory Server, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Database, Oracle Enterprise Manager and are entitled to support for the underlying Oracle JDK. To summarize, Oracle is committed to the future of Java EE.  Java EE 7 has been released and planning for Java EE 8 has begun. GlassFish Server Open Source Edition continues to be the strategic foundation for Java EE reference implementation going forward. And for developers, updates will be delivered as needed to continue to deliver a great developer experience for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. We are planning for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5 as the foundation for the Java EE 8 reference implementation, as well as bundling GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5 in a Java EE 8 SDK, which is the most popular distribution of GlassFish. This will allow GlassFish releases to be more focused on the Java EE platform and community-driven requirements. We continue to encourage community contributions, bug reports, participation on the GlassFish forum, etc. Going forward, Oracle WebLogic Server will be the single strategic commercially supported application server from Oracle. Disclaimer: The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract.It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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  • My Codemash 2011 Retrospective

    - by Greg Malcolm
    I just got back from Codemash yesterday, and still on an adrenaline buzz. Here's my take on this years encounter: The Awesome Nearly everybody in one place Codemash is the ultimate place to catch up with community friends. This is my 3rd year visiting and I've got to know a great number of very cool people through various conferences, Give Camps and other community events. I'm finding more and more that Codemash is the best place to catch up with everybody regardless of technology interest or location. Of course I always make a whole bunch more friends while I'm there! Yay! Open Spaced I found the open spaces didn't work so well last year. This year things went a lot smoother and the topics were engaging and fresh. While I miss Alan Steven's approach of running it like an agile project, it was very cool to see that it evolving. Laptops were often cracked open, not just once but frequently! For example: Jasmine - Paired on a javascript kata using the Jasmine javascript test runner J - Sat in on a J demo from local J enthusiast, Tracy Harms Watir - More pairing, this time using Ruby with the watir-webdriver through cucumber. I'd mostly forgotten that Cucumber runs just fine without Rails. It made a change to do without. The other spaces were engaging too, but I think that's enough for that topic. Javascript Shenanigans I've already mentioned that I attended a Jasmine kata session. Jasmine is close to my heart right now every since I discovered it while on the hunt for a decent Javascript testing framework for a javascript koans project earlier this year. Well, it also got covered in the Java Precompiler and Pillar's vendor session, which was great to see. Node.js was also a reoccurring theme. Node.js in a nutshell? It's an extremely scalable Event based I/O server which runs on Javascript. I'd already encountered through a Startup Weekend project and have been noticing increasing interest of late. After encountering more node.js driven excitement from my peers at codemash I absolutely had to attend the open space on it. At least 20 people turned up and by the end we had some answers, a whole ton of new questions and an impromptu user group in the form of a twitter channel (#nodemash). I have no idea where this is going to go or how big it is going to become, but if it can cross the chasm into the enterprise it could become huge... Scala Koans I'm a bit of a Koans addict, and I really need more exposure to functional languages so I gave the Scala Koans precompiler a try. Great fun! I'm really glad I attended because I found I had a whole ton of questions. Currently the koans are available here, and the answers are here. Opportunities While we're on the subject can we change the subject now? Hai Gregory, You really need to keep the drinking for later in the day. I mean seriously, you're 34 and you still do this every single time! Sure, you made it to Chad Fowler keynote ok, but you looking a rather pale weren't you? Also might have been nice to attend 'Netflicks in the Cloud' instead of 'Sleeping It Off For People Who Should Know Better'. Kthxbye PS: Stop talking to yourself Not that I entirely regret it, I've had some of my greatest insights through late night drunken conversations at the CodeMash bar. Just might be nice to reign it in a little and get something out of the next morning too. Diversity This is something that is in the back of my mind because of conversations at Codemash as well as throughout the year; I'm realizing more and more how discouraging the IT profession is for women. I notice in the community there has been a lot of attention paid to stamping out harrasment, which is good, but there also seems to be a massive PR issue. I really don't have any solutions, but I figure it can't hurt to pay more attention to whats going on... And in Other News I now have a picture of Chad Fowler giving me more cowbell! Sadly I managed to lose the cowbell later on. Hopefully it's gone to a Better Place. The Womack Family Band joined in with the musicians jam this year. There's my cowbell again! Why must you hide from me? I also finally went in the water for the first time in all the I've been coming to codemash. Why did I wait so long?!?

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  • Taking a Flying Leap

    - by Lance Shaw
    Yesterday, I went skydiving with three of my children.  It was thrilling, scary, invigorating and exciting. While there is obvious risk involved, the reward and feeling of success was well worth it. You might already be wondering what skydiving would have to with WebCenter, so let me explain. Implementing a skydiving program and becoming an instructor does not happen overnight.  It does not happen with the purchase of the needed technology. Not one of us would go out, buy a parachute, the harnesses, helmet and all the gear and be able to convince anyone that we are now ready to be a skydiving instructor. The fact is that obtaining the technology is merely a small piece of the overall process and so is the case with managing content in your company. You don't just buy the right software (Oracle WebCenter Content) and go to your boss and declare information management success. There is planning, research and effort that goes into deploying software of any kind and especially when it is as mission-critical to the success of your business as Enterprise Content Management. To become a certified skydiving instructor takes at least 3 years of commitment and often longer. In the United States, candidates must complete over 500 solo jumps of their own over a minimum of 36 months and then must complete additional rigorous training under observation.  When you consider the amount of time and effort involved, it's not unlike getting a college degree and anyone that has trusted their lives to one of these instructors will no doubt appreciate their dedication to the curriculum.  Implementing an ECM system won't take that long, but it certainly requires commitment, analysis and consideration. But guess what?  Humans are involved and that means that mistakes can happen and that rules change.  This struck me while reading an excellent post on darkreading.com by Glenn S. Phillips entitled "Mission Impossible: 4 Reasons Compliance is Impossible".  His over-arching point was that with information management and security, environments change and people are involved meaning the work is never done.  He stated that you can never claim your compliance efforts are complete because of the following reasons. People are involved.  And lets face it, some are more trustworthy than others. Change is Constant. There is always some new technology coming along that is disruptive. Consumer grade cloud file sharing and sync tools come to mind here. Compliance is interpreted, not defined.  Laws and the judges that read them are always on the move. Technology is a tool, not a complete solution. There is no magic pill. The skydiving analogy holds true here as well.  Ultimately, a single person packs your parachute.  For obvious reasons, you prefer that this person be trustworthy but there are no absolute guarantees of a 100% error-free scenario.  Weather and wind conditions are never a constant and the best-laid plans for a great day of skydiving are easily disrupted by forces outside of your control.  Rules and regulations vary by location and may be updated at any time and as I mentioned early on, even the best technology on its own will only get you started. The good news is that, like skydiving, with the right technology, the right planning, the right team and a proper understanding of the rules and regulations that govern your industry, your ECM deployment can be a great success.  Failure to plan for any of the 4 factors that Glenn outlined in his article will certainly put your deployment and maybe even your company at risk, so consider them carefully. As a final aside, for those of you who consider skydiving an incredibly dangerous and risky pastime, consider this comparative statistic.  In 2012, the U.S. Parachute Association recorded 19 fatal skydiving accidents in the U.S. out of roughly 3.1 million jumps.  That’s 0.006 fatalities per 1,000 jumps. By comparison, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that there were 34,080 deaths due to car accidents in 2012.  Based on the percentages, one could argue that it is safer to jump out of a plane than to drive to the airport where the skydiving will take place. While the way you manage, secure, classify, control, retain and dispose of company files may not carry as much risk as driving or skydiving, it certainly carries risk for the organization when not planned and deployed appropriately.  Consider all the factors involved in your organization as you make your content management plans.  For additional areas of consideration, be sure to download our free whitepaper on the topic entitled "The Top 10 Criteria for Choosing an ECM System" which is available for download here.

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  • Writing an ASP.Net Web based TFS Client

    - by Glav
    So one of the things I needed to do was write an ASP.Net MVC based application for our senior execs to manage a set of arbitrary attributes against stories, bugs etc to be able to attribute whether the item was related to Research and Development, and if so, what kind. We are using TFS Azure and don’t have the option of custom templates. I have decided on using a string based field within the template that is not very visible and which we don’t use to write a small set of custom which will determine the research and development association. However, this string munging on the field is not very user friendly so we need a simple tool that can display attributes against items in a simple dropdown list or something similar. Enter a custom web app that accesses our TFS items in Azure (Note: We are also using Visual Studio 2012) Now TFS Azure uses your Live ID and it is not really possible to easily do this in a server based app where no interaction is available. Even if you capture the Live ID credentials yourself and try to submit them to TFS Azure, it wont work. Bottom line is that it is not straightforward nor obvious what you have to do. In fact, it is a real pain to find and there are some answers out there which don’t appear to be answers at all given they didn’t work in my scenario. So for anyone else who wants to do this, here is a simple breakdown on what you have to do: Go here and get the “TFS Service Credential Viewer”. Install it, run it and connect to your TFS instance in azure and create a service account. Note the username and password exactly as it presents it to you. This is the magic identity that will allow unattended, programmatic access. Without this step, don’t bother trying to do anything else. In your MVC app, reference the following assemblies from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0”: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.DataStoreLoader.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Common.dll If hosting this in Internet Information Server, for the application pool this app runs under, you will need to enable 32 Bit support. You also have to allow the TFS client assemblies to store a cache of files on your system. If you don’t do this, you will authenticate fine, but then get an exception saying that it is unable to access the cache at some directory path when you query work items. You can set this up by adding the following to your web.config, in the <appSettings> element as shown below: <appSettings> <!-- Add reference to TFS Client Cache --> <add key="WorkItemTrackingCacheRoot" value="C:\windows\temp" /> </appSettings> With all that in place, you can write the following code: var token = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SimpleWebTokenCredential("{you-service-account-name", "{your-service-acct-password}"); var clientCreds = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TfsClientCredentials(token); var currentCollection = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(“https://{yourdomain}.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection”), clientCreds); TfsConfigurationServercurrentCollection.EnsureAuthenticated(); In the above code, not the URL contains the “defaultcollection” at the end of the URL. Obviously replace {yourdomain} with whatever is defined for your TFS in Azure instance. In addition, make sure the service user account and password that was generated in the first step is substituted in here. Note: If something is not right, the “EnsureAuthenticated()” call will throw an exception with the message being you are not authorised. If you forget the “defaultcollection” on the URL, it will still fail but with a message saying you are not authorised. That is, a similar but different exception message. And that is it. You can then query the collection using something like: var service = currentCollection.GetService<WorkItemStore>(); var proj = service.Projects[0]; var allQueries = proj.StoredQueries; for (int qcnt = 0; qcnt < allQueries.Count; qcnt++) {     var query = allQueries[qcnt];     var queryDesc = string.format(“Query found named: {0}”,query.Name); } You get the idea. If you search around, you will find references to the ServiceIdentityCredentialProvider which is referenced in this article. I had no luck with this method and it all looked too hard since it required an extra KB article and other magic sauce. So I hope that helps. This article certainly would have helped me save a boat load of time and frustration.

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