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  • How to attach turrets to tiles in a tile based game

    - by Joseph St. Pierre
    I am a flash developer, and I am building a Tower Defense game. The world is being built through tiles, and I have gotten that accomplished easily. I have also gotten level changes and enemy spawning down as well. However, I wish the player to be able to spawn turrets, and have those turrets be on specific tiles, based upon where the player placed it. Here is my code: stop(); colOffset = 50; rowOffset = 50; guns = []; placed = true; dead = 0; spawned = 0; level = 1; interval = 350 / level; amount = level * 20; counter = 0; numCol = 14; numRow = 10; tiles = []; k = 0; create = false; tileName = new Array("road","grass","end", "start"); board = new Array( new Array(1,1,1,1,3,1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1), new Array(1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,1,1), new Array(1,1,1,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1), new Array(1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,1), new Array(1,1,1,0,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,1), new Array(1,1,1,0,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,0,1), new Array(1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,1), new Array(1,1,0,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,0,1,1), new Array(1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,1,1,1), new Array(1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1) ); buildBoard(); function buildBoard(){ for ( col = 0; col < numCol; col++){ for ( row = 0; row < numRow; row++){ _root.attachMovie("tile", "tile_" + col + "_" + row, _root.getNextHighestDepth()); theTile = eval("tile_" + col + "_" + row); theTile._x = (col * 50); theTile._y = (row * 50); theTile.row = row; theTile.col = col; tileType = board[row][col]; theTile.gotoAndStop(tileName[tileType]); tiles.push(theTile); } } } init(); function init(){ onEnterFrame = function(){ counter += 1; if ( spawned < amount && counter > 50){ min= _root.attachMovie("minion","minion",_root.getNextHighestDepth()); min._x = tile_4_0._x + 25; min._y = tile_4_0._y + 25; min.health = 100; choose = Math.round(Math.random()); if ( choose == 0 ){ min.waypointX = [ tile_4_1._x +25, tile_3_1._x + 25, tile_3_2._x + 25, tile_3_6._x + 25, tile_2_6._x + 25, tile_2_8._x + 25, tile_8_8._x + 25, tile_8_9._x + 25, tile_10_9._x + 25, tile_10_7._x + 25, tile_11_7._x + 25, tile_11_6._x + 25, tile_12_6._x + 25, tile_12_4._x + 25, tile_11_4._x + 25, tile_11_2._x + 25, tile_10_2._x + 25, tile_10_0._x + 25]; min.waypointY = [ tile_4_1._y +25, tile_3_1._y + 25, tile_3_2._y + 25, tile_3_6._y + 25, tile_2_6._y + 25, tile_2_8._y + 25, tile_8_8._y + 25, tile_8_9._y + 25, tile_10_9._y + 25, tile_10_7._y + 25, tile_11_7._y + 25, tile_11_6._y + 25, tile_12_6._y + 25, tile_12_4._y + 25, tile_11_4._y + 25, tile_11_2._y + 25, tile_10_2._y + 25, tile_10_0._y + 25]; } else if ( choose == 1 ){ min.waypointX = [ tile_4_1._x +25, tile_3_1._x + 25, tile_3_2._x + 25, tile_3_3._x + 25, tile_5_3._x + 25, tile_5_4._x + 25, tile_7_4._x + 25, tile_7_5._x + 25, tile_8_5._x + 25, tile_8_8._x + 25, tile_8_9._x + 25, tile_10_9._x + 25, tile_10_7._x + 25, tile_11_7._x + 25, tile_11_6._x + 25, tile_12_6._x + 25, tile_12_4._x + 25, tile_11_4._x + 25, tile_11_2._x + 25, tile_10_2._x + 25, tile_10_0._x + 25 ]; min.waypointY = [ tile_4_1._y +25, tile_3_1._y + 25, tile_3_2._y + 25, tile_3_3._y + 25, tile_5_3._y + 25, tile_5_4._y + 25, tile_7_4._y + 25, tile_7_5._y + 25, tile_8_5._y + 25, tile_8_8._y + 25, tile_8_9._y + 25, tile_10_9._y + 25, tile_10_7._y + 25, tile_11_7._y + 25, tile_11_6._y + 25, tile_12_6._y + 25, tile_12_4._y + 25, tile_11_4._y + 25, tile_11_2._y + 25, tile_10_2._y + 25, tile_10_0._y + 25 ]; } min.i = 0; counter = 0; spawned += 1; min.onEnterFrame = function(){ dx = this.waypointX[this.i] - this._x; dy = this.waypointY[this.i] - this._y; radians = Math.atan2(dy,dx); degrees = radians * 180 / Math.PI; xspeed = Math.cos(radians); yspeed = Math.sin(radians); this._x += xspeed; this._y += yspeed; if( this._x == this.waypointX[this.i] && this._y == this.waypointY[this.i]){ this.i++; } if ( this._x == tile_10_0._x + 25 && this._y == tile_10_0._y + 25){ this.removeMovieClip(); dead += 1; } } } if ( dead >= amount ){ dead = 0; level += 1; amount = level * 20; spawned = 0; } } btnM.onRelease = function(){ create = true; } } game.onEnterFrame = function(){ } It is possible for me however to complete this task, but only once. I am able to make the turret, drag it over to a tile, and have it attach itself to the tile. No problem. The issue is, I cannot do these multiple times. Please Help.

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  • SSIS: Building SQL databases on-the-fly using concatenated SQL scripts

    - by DrJohn
    Over the years I have developed many techniques which help automate the whole SQL Server build process. In my current process, where I need to build entire OLAP data marts on-the-fly, I make regular use of a simple but very effective mechanism to concatenate all the SQL Scripts together from my SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) projects. This proves invaluable because in two clicks I can redeploy an entire SQL Server database with all tables, views, stored procedures etc. Indeed, I can also use the concatenated SQL scripts with SSIS to build SQL Server databases on-the-fly. You may be surprised to learn that I often redeploy the database several times per day, or even several times per hour, during the development process. This is because the deployment errors are logged and you can quickly see where SQL Scripts have object dependency errors. For example, after changing a table structure you may have forgotten to change any related views. The deployment log immediately points out all the objects which failed to build so you can fix and redeploy the database very quickly. The alternative approach (i.e. doing changes in the database directly using the SSMS UI) would require you to check all dependent objects before making changes. The chances are that you will miss something and wonder why your app returns the wrong data – a common problem caused by changing a table without re-creating dependent views. Using SQL Projects in SSMS A great many developers fail to make use of SQL Projects in SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). To me they are invaluable way of organizing your SQL Scripts. The screenshot below shows a typical SSMS solution made up of several projects – one project for tables, another for views etc. The key point is that the projects naturally fall into the right order in file system because of the project name. The number in the folder or file name ensures that the projects the SQL scripts are concatenated together in the order that they need to be executed. Hence the script filenames start with 100, 110 etc. Concatenating SQL Scripts To concatenate the SQL Scripts together into one file, I use notepad.exe to create a simple batch file (see example screenshot) which uses the TYPE command to write the content of the SQL Script files into a combined file. As the SQL Scripts are in several folders, I simply use several TYPE command multiple times and append the output together. If you are unfamiliar with batch files, you may not know that the angled bracket (>) means write output of the program into a file. Two angled brackets (>>) means append output of this program into a file. So the command-line DIR > filelist.txt would write the content of the DIR command into a file called filelist.txt. In the example shown above, the concatenated file is called SB_DDS.sql If, like me you place the concatenated file under source code control, then the source code control system will change the file's attribute to "read-only" which in turn would cause the TYPE command to fail. The ATTRIB command can be used to remove the read-only flag. Using SQLCmd to execute the concatenated file Now that the SQL Scripts are all in one big file, we can execute the script against a database using SQLCmd using another batch file as shown below: SQLCmd has numerous options, but the script shown above simply executes the SS_DDS.sql file against the SB_DDS_DB database on the local machine and logs the errors to a file called SB_DDS.log. So after executing the batch file you can simply check the error log to see if your database built without a hitch. If you have errors, then simply fix the source files, re-create the concatenated file and re-run the SQLCmd to rebuild the database. This two click operation allows you to quickly identify and fix errors in your entire database definition.Using SSIS to execute the concatenated file To execute the concatenated SQL script using SSIS, you simply drop an Execute SQL task into your package and set the database connection as normal and then select File Connection as the SQLSourceType (as shown below). Create a file connection to your concatenated SQL script and you are ready to go.   Tips and TricksAdd a new-line at end of every fileThe most common problem encountered with this approach is that the GO statement on the last line of one file is placed on the same line as the comment at the top of the next file by the TYPE command. The easy fix to this is to ensure all your files have a new-line at the end.Remove all USE database statementsThe SQLCmd identifies which database the script should be run against.  So you should remove all USE database commands from your scripts - otherwise you may get unintentional side effects!!Do the Create Database separatelyIf you are using SSIS to create the database as well as create the objects and populate the database, then invoke the CREATE DATABASE command against the master database using a separate package before calling the package that executes the concatenated SQL script.    

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  • Detecting Duplicates Using Oracle Business Rules

    - by joeywong-Oracle
    Recently I was involved with a Business Process Management Proof of Concept (BPM PoC) where we wanted to show how customers could use Oracle Business Rules (OBR) to easily define some rules to detect certain conditions, such as duplicate account numbers, duplicate names, high transaction amounts, etc, in a set of transactions. Traditionally you would have to loop through the transactions and compare each transaction with each other to find matching conditions. This is not particularly nice as it relies on more traditional approaches (coding) and is not the most efficient way. OBR is a great place to house these types’ of rules as it allows users/developers to externalise the rules, in a simpler manner, externalising the rules from the message flows and allows users to change them when required. So I went ahead looking for some examples. After quite a bit of time spent Googling, I did not find much out in the blogosphere. In fact the best example was actually from...... wait for it...... Oracle Documentation! (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28271_01/user.1111/e10228/rules_start.htm#ASRUG228) However, if you followed the link there was not much explanation provided with the example. So the aim of this article is to provide a little more explanation to the example so that it can be better understood. Note: I won’t be covering the BPM parts in great detail. Use case: Payment instruction file is required to be processed. Before instruction file can be processed it needs to be approved by a business user. Before the approval process, it would be useful to run the payment instruction file through OBR to look for transactions of interest. The output of the OBR can then be used to flag the transactions for the approvers to investigate. Example BPM Process So let’s start defining the Business Rules Dictionary. For the input into our rules, we will be passing in an array of payments which contain some basic information for our demo purposes. Input to Business Rules And for our output we want to have an array of rule output messages. Note that the element I am using for the output is only for one rule message element and not an array. We will configure the Business Rules component later to return an array instead. Output from Business Rules Business Rule – Create Dictionary Fill in all the details and click OK. Open the Business Rules component and select Decision Functions from the side. Modify the Decision Function Configuration Select the decision function and click on the edit button (the pencil), don’t worry that JDeveloper indicates that there is an error with the decision function. Then click the Ouputs tab and make sure the checkbox under the List column is checked, this is to tell the Business Rules component that it should return an array of rule message elements. Updating the Decision Service Next we will define the actual rules. Click on Ruleset1 on the side and then the Create Rule in the IF/THEN Rule section. Creating new rule in ruleset Ok, this is where some detailed explanation is required. Remember that the input to this Business Rules dictionary is a list of payments, each of those payments were of the complex type PaymentType. Each of those payments in the Oracle Business Rules engine is treated as a fact in its working memory. Implemented rule So in the IF/THEN rule, the first task is to grab two PaymentType facts from the working memory and assign them to temporary variable names (payment1 and payment2 in our example). Matching facts Once we have them in the temporary variables, we can then start comparing them to each other. For our demonstration we want to find payments where the account numbers were the same but the account name was different. Suspicious payment instruction And to stop the rule from comparing the same facts to each other, over and over again, we have to include the last test. Stop rule from comparing endlessly And that’s it! No for loops, no need to keep track of what you have or have not compared, OBR handles all that for you because everything is done in its working memory. And once all the tests have been satisfied we need to assert a new fact for the output. Assert the output fact Save your Business Rules. Next step is to complete the data association in the BPM process. Pay extra care to use Copy List instead of the default Copy when doing data association at an array level. Input and output data association Deploy and test. Test data Rule matched Parting words: Ideally you would then use the output of the Business Rules component to then display/flag the transactions which triggered the rule so that the approver can investigate. Link: SOA Project Archive [Download]

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  • Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite

    - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)
    Many things have changed in the mobile space over the last few years. Here's an update on our strategy for mobile apps for the E-Business Suite. Mobile app strategy We're building our family of mobile apps for the E-Business Suite using Oracle Mobile Application Framework.  This framework allows us to write a single application that can be run on Apple iOS and Google Android platforms. Mobile apps for the E-Business Suite will share a common look-and-feel. The E-Business Suite is a suite of over 200 product modules spanning Financials, Supply Chain, Human Resources, and many other areas. Our mobile app strategy is to release standalone apps for specific product modules.  Our Oracle Timecards app, which allows users to create and submit timecards, is an example of a standalone app. Some common functions that span multiple product areas will have dedicated apps, too. An example of this is our Oracle Approvals app, which allows users to review and approve requests for expenses, requisitions, purchase orders, recruitment vacancies and offers, and more. You can read more about our Oracle Mobile Approvals app here: Now Available: Oracle Mobile Approvals for iOS Our goal is to support smaller screen (e.g. smartphones) as well as larger screens (e.g. tablets), with the smaller screen versions generally delivered first.  Where possible, we will deliver these as universal apps.  An example is our Oracle Mobile Field Service app, which allows field service technicians to remotely access customer, product, service request, and task-related information.  This app can run on a smartphone, while providing a richer experience for tablets. Deploying EBS mobile apps The mobile apps, themselves (i.e. client-side components) can be downloaded by end-users from the Apple iTunes today.  Android versions will be available from Google play. You can monitor this blog for Android-related updates. Where possible, our mobile apps should be deployable with a minimum of server-side changes.  These changes will generally involve a consolidated server-side patch for technology-stack components, and possibly a server-side patch for the functional product module. Updates to existing mobile apps may require new server-side components to enable all of the latest mobile functionality. All EBS product modules are certified for internal intranet deployments (i.e. used by employees within an organization's firewall).  Only a subset of EBS products such as iRecruitment are certified to be deployed externally (i.e. used by non-employees outside of an organization's firewall).  Today, many organizations running the E-Business Suite do not expose their EBS environment externally and all of the mobile apps that we're building are intended for internal employee use.  Recognizing this, our mobile apps are currently designed for users who are connected to the organization's intranet via VPN.  We expect that this may change in future updates to our mobile apps. Mobile apps and internationalization The initial releases of our mobile apps will be in English.  Later updates will include translations for all left-to-right languages supported by the E-Business Suite.  Right-to-left languages will not be translated. Customizing apps for enterprise deployments The current generation of mobile apps for Oracle E-Business Suite cannot be customized. We are evaluating options for limited customizations, including corporate branding with logos, corporate color schemes, and others. This is a potentially-complex area with many tricky implications for deployment and maintenance.  We would be interested in hearing your requirements for customizations in enterprise deployments.Prerequisites Apple iOS 7 and higher Android 4.1 (API level 16) and higher, with minimum CPU/memory configurations listed here EBS 12.1: EBS 12.1.3 Family Packs for the related product module EBS 12.2.3 References Oracle E-Business Suite Mobile Apps, Release 12.1 and 12.2 Documentation (Note 1641772.1) Oracle E-Business Suite Mobile Apps Administrator's Guide, Release 12.1 and 12.2 (Note 1642431.1) Related Articles Using Mobile Devices with Oracle E-Business Suite Apple iPads Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Now Available: Oracle Mobile Approvals for iOS 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 decision.  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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  • IRM Item Codes &ndash; what are they for?

    - by martin.abrahams
    A number of colleagues have been asking about IRM item codes recently – what are they for, when are they useful, how can you control them to meet some customer requirements? This is quite a big topic, but this article provides a few answers. An item code is part of the metadata of every sealed document – unless you define a custom metadata model. The item code is defined when a file is sealed, and usually defaults to a timestamp/filename combination. This time/name combo tends to make item codes unique for each new document, but actually item codes are not necessarily unique, as will become clear shortly. In most scenarios, item codes are not relevant to the evaluation of a user’s rights - the context name is the critical piece of metadata, as a user typically has a role that grants access to an entire classification of information regardless of item code. This is key to the simplicity and manageability of the Oracle IRM solution. Item codes are occasionally exposed to users in the UI, but most users probably never notice and never care. Nevertheless, here is one example of where you can see an item code – when you hover the mouse pointer over a sealed file. As you see, the item code for this freshly created file combines a timestamp with the file name. But what are item codes for? The first benefit of item codes is that they enable you to manage exceptions to the policy defined for a context. Thus, I might have access to all oracle – internal files - except for 2011_03_11 13:33:29 Board Minutes.sdocx. This simple mechanism enables Oracle IRM to provide file-by-file control where appropriate, whilst offering the scalability and manageability of classification-based control for the majority of users and content. You really don’t want to be managing each file individually, but never say never. Item codes can also be used for the opposite effect – to include a file in a user’s rights when their role would ordinarily deny access. So, you can assign a role that allows access only to specified item codes. For example, my role might say that I have access to precisely one file – the one shown above. So how are item codes set? In the vast majority of scenarios, item codes are set automatically as part of the sealing process. The sealing API uses the timestamp and filename as shown, and the user need not even realise that this has happened. This automatically creates item codes that are for all practical purposes unique - and that are also intelligible to users who might want to refer to them when viewing or assigning rights in the management UI. It is also possible for suitably authorised users and applications to set the item code manually or programmatically if required. Setting the item code manually using the IRM Desktop The manual process is a simple extension of the sealing task. An authorised user can select the Advanced… sealing option, and will see a dialog that offers the option to specify the item code. To see this option, the user’s role needs the Set Item Code right – you don’t want most users to give any thought at all to item codes, so by default the option is hidden. Setting the item code programmatically A more common scenario is that an application controls the item code programmatically. For example, a document management system that seals documents as part of a workflow might set the item code to match the document’s unique identifier in its repository. This offers the option to tie IRM rights evaluation directly to the security model defined in the document management system. Again, the sealing application needs to be authorised to Set Item Code. The Payslip Scenario To give a concrete example of how item codes might be used in a real world scenario, consider a Human Resources workflow such as a payslips. The goal might be to allow the HR team to have access to all payslips, but each employee to have access only to their own payslips. To enable this, you might have an IRM classification called Payslips. The HR team have a role in the normal way that allows access to all payslips. However, each employee would have an Item Reader role that only allows them to access files that have a particular item code – and that item code might match the employee’s payroll number. So, employee number 123123123 would have access to items with that code. This shows why item codes are not necessarily unique – you can deliberately set the same code on many files for ease of administration. The employees might have the right to unseal or print their payslip, so the solution acts as a secure delivery mechanism that allows payslips to be distributed via corporate email without any fear that they might be accessed by IT administrators, or forwarded accidentally to anyone other than the intended recipient. All that remains is to ensure that as each user’s payslip is sealed, it is assigned the correct item code – something that is easily managed by a simple IRM sealing application. Each month, an employee’s payslip is sealed with the same item code, so you do not need to keep amending the list of items that the user has access to – they have access to all documents that carry their employee code.

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  • Oracle Fusion Middleware gives you Choice and Portability for Public and Private Cloud

    - by Michelle Kimihira
    Author: Margaret Lee, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware Cloud Computing allows customers to quickly develop and deploy applications in a shared environment.  The environment can span across hardward (IaaS), foundation layer software (PaaS), and end-user software (SaaS). Cloud Computing provides compelling benefits in terms of business agility and IT cost savings.  However, with complex, existing heterogeneous architectures, and concerns for security and manageability, enterprises are challenged to define their Cloud strategy.  For most enterprises, the solution is a hybrid of private and public cloud.  Fusion Middleware supports customers’ Cloud requirements through choice and portability. Fusion Middleware supports a variety of cloud development and deployment models:  Oracle [Public] Cloud; customer private cloud; hybrid of these two, and traditional dedicated, on-premise model Customers can develop applications in any of these models and deployed in another, providing the flexibility and portability they need Oracle Cloud is a public cloud offering.  Within Oracle Cloud, Fusion Middleware provides two key offerings include the Developer cloud service and Java cloud deployment service. Developer Cloud Service Simplify Development: Automated provisioned environment; pre-configured and integrated; web-based administration Deploy Automatically: Fully integrated with Oracle Cloud for Java deployment; workflow ensures build & test Collaborate & Manage: Fits any size team; integrated team source repository; continuous integration; task/defect tracking Integrated with all major IDEs: Oracle JDeveloper; NetBeans; Eclipse Java Cloud Service Java Cloud service provides flexible Java deployment environment for departmental applications and development, staging, QA, training, and demo environments.  It also supports customizations deployments for SaaS-based Fusion Applications customers.  Some key features of Java Cloud Service include: WebLogic Server on Exalogic, secure, highly available infrastructure Database Service & IDE Integration Open, Standard-based Deploy Web Apps, Web Services, REST Services Fully managed and supported by Oracle For more information, please visit Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud Java Service and Oracle Cloud Developer Service. If your enterprise prefers a private cloud, for reasons such as security, control, manageability, and complex integration that prevent your applications from being deployed on a public cloud, Fusion Middleware also provide you with the products and tools you need.  Sometimes called Private PaaS, private clouds have their predecessors in shared-services arrangements many large companies have been building in the past decade.  The difference, however, are in the scope of the services, and depth of their capabilities.  In terms of vertical stack depth, private clouds not only provide hardware and software infrastructure to run your applications, they also provide services such as integration and security, that your applications need.  Horizontally, private clouds provide monitoring, management, lifecycle, and charge back capabilities out-of-box that shared-services platforms did not have before. Oracle Fusion Middleware includes the complete stack of hardware and software for you to build private clouds: SOA suite and BPM suite to support systems integration and process flow between applications deployed on your private cloud and the rest of your organization Identity and Access Management suite to provide security, provisioning, and access services for applications deployed on your private cloud WebLogic Server to run your applications Enterprise Manager's Cloud Management pack to monitor, manage, upgrade applications running on your private cloud Exalogic or optimized Oracle-Sun hardware to build out your private cloud The most important key differentiator for Oracle's cloud solutions is portability, between private and public clouds.  This is unique to Oracle because portability requires the vendor to have product depth and breadth in both public cloud services and private cloud product offerings.  Most public cloud vendors cannot provide the infrastructure and tools customers need to build their own private clouds.  In reverse, traditional software tools vendors typically do not have the product and expertise breadth to build out and offer a public cloud.  Oracle can.  It is important for customers that the products and technologies  Oracle uses to build its public is the same set that it sells to customers for them to build private clouds.  Fundamentally, that enables skills reuse,  as well as application portability. For more information on Oracle PaaS offerings, please visit Oracle's product information page.    Resources Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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  • SSIS Reporting Pack v0.4 – Execution Report updated

    - by jamiet
    SSIS Reporting Pack is a suite of reports that I maintain at http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/ that provide visualisation over the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server 2012 and attempt to add value over the reports that ship in the box. Work on the reports has stalled (my last SSIS Reporting Pack blog post was on 4th September 2011) as I’ve had rather more important things going on my life of late however I have recently checked-in a fix that couldn’t really be delayed. I discovered a problem with the Execution report that was causing the report to effectively hang, it was caused by this bit of SQL hidden away in the report definition: [generated_executables] AS (   SELECT  [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]   FROM    (           SELECT  [execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_close_square] + 1)           ,       [parent_execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_open_square])           FROM    (                   SELECT  [execution_path]                   ,       [char_index_open_square] = CHARINDEX('[',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [char_index_close_square] = CHARINDEX(']',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [length_exec_path] = LEN([execution_path])                   FROM    [exec_stats] es                   WHERE   execution_path LIKE '%\[%]%'  ESCAPE '\'                   )AS [loop_iteration]           ) AS [new_executable]   GROUP   BY [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]) It was there because SSIS does not currently treat a loop iteration as an executable yet I figured there was still value in being able to view it as such – this SQL essentially “invents” new executables for those loop iterations; its what enabled the following visualisation: where each of the three iterations of a For Each Loop called “FEL Loop over top performing regions” appear in the report. Unfortunately, as I alluded, this could under certain circumstances (most likely when there were many loop iterations) cause the report to hang as it waited for the results to be constructed and returned. The change that I have made eradicates this generation of “fake” executables and thus produces this visualisation instead: Notice that the three “children” of the For Each Loop are no longer the three iterations but actually the task (“EPT Call Data Export Package”) contained within that For Each Loop. The problem here is of course that there is no longer a visual distinction between those three iterations; I have instead made the full execution path viewable via a tooltip:   If you preferred the “old” way of presenting this information and are happy to put up with the performance degradation then I have kept the old version of the report hanging around in the reporting pack as “execution loop with iterations” however none of the other reports link to it so you will have to browse to it manually if you want to use it. Please let me know if you ARE using it – I would be very interested to hear about your experiences.   The last change to make you aware of in the execution report is that by default I no longer show OnPreValidate or OnPostValidate messages as I consider them to be superfluous and only serve to clutter up the results. If you want to put them back, well, its open source so go right ahead!   The latest release of SSIS Reporting Pack that contains all of these changes is v0.4 and can be downloaded from http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/releases/view/88178   Feedback on all of the above changes would be very much appreciated. @Jamiet

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  • Implement Tree/Details With Taskflow Regions Using EJB

    - by Deepak Siddappa
    This article describes on Display Tree/Details using taskflow regions.Use Case DescriptionLet us take scenario where we need to display Tree/Details, left region contains category hierarchy with items listed in a tree structure (ex:- Region-Countries-Locations-Departments in tree format) and right region contains the Employees list.In detail, Here User may drills down through categories using a tree until Employees are listed. Clicking the tree node name displays Employee list in the adjacent pane related to particular tree node. Implementation StepsThe script for creating the tables and inserting the data required for this application CreateSchema.sql Lets create a Java EE Web Application with Entities based on Regions, Countries, Locations, Departments and Employees table. Create a Stateless Session Bean and data control for the Stateless Session Bean. Add the below code to the session bean and expose the method in local/remote interface and generate a data control for that.Note:- Here in the below code "em" is a EntityManager. public List<Employees> empFilteredByTreeNode(String treeNodeType, String paramValue) { String queryString = null; try { if (treeNodeType == "null") { queryString = "select * from Employees emp ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (Pattern.matches("[a-zA-Z]+[_]+[a-zA-Z]+[_]+[[0-9]+]+", treeNodeType)) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept\n" + "ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc\n" + "ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id JOIN countries cont\n" + "ON loc.country_id = cont.country_id JOIN regions reg\n" + "ON cont.region_id = reg.region_id and reg.region_name = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.contains("regionsFindAll_bc_countriesList_1")) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept \n" + "ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc \n" + "ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id JOIN countries cont \n" + "ON loc.country_id = cont.country_id and cont.country_name = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.contains("regionsFindAll_bc_locationsList_1")) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id and loc.city = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.trim().contains("regionsFindAll_bc_departmentsList_1")) { queryString = "select * from Employees emp INNER JOIN Departments dept ON emp.DEPARTMENT_ID = dept.DEPARTMENT_ID and dept.DEPARTMENT_NAME = '" + paramValue + "'"; } } catch (NullPointerException e) { System.out.println(e.getMessage()); } return em.createNativeQuery(queryString, Employees.class).getResultList(); } In the ViewController project, create two ADF taskflow with page Fragments and name them as FirstTaskflow and SecondTaskflow respectively. Open FirstTaskflow,from component palette drop view(Page Fragment) name it as TreeList.jsff. Open SeconfTaskflow, from component palette drop view(Page Fragment) name it as EmpList.jsff and create two paramters in its overview parameters tab as shown in below image. Open TreeList.jsff , from data control palette drop regionsFindAll->Tree as ADF Tree. In Edit Tree Binding dialog, for Tree Level Rules select the display attributes as follows:-model.Regions - regionNamemodel.Countries - countryNamemodel.Locations - citymodel.Departments - departmentName In structure panel, click on af:Tree - t1 and select selectionListener with edit property. Create a "TreeBean" managed bean with scope as "session" as shown in below Image. Create new method as getTreeNodeSelectedValue and click ok. Open TreeBean managed bean and add the below code: private String treeNodeType; private String paramValue; public void getTreeNodeSelectedValue(SelectionEvent selectionEvent) { RichTree tree = (RichTree)selectionEvent.getSource(); RowKeySet addedSet = selectionEvent.getAddedSet(); Iterator i = addedSet.iterator(); TreeModel model = (TreeModel)tree.getValue(); model.setRowKey(i.next()); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding node = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)tree.getRowData(); //oracle.jbo.Row Row rw = node.getRow(); Object selectedTreeNode = node.getAttribute(0); Object treeListType = node.getBindings(); String treeNodeType = treeListType.toString(); this.setParamValue(selectedTreeNode.toString()); this.setTreeNodeType(treeNodeType); } public void setTreeNodeType(String treeNodeType) { this.treeNodeType = treeNodeType; } public String getTreeNodeType() { return treeNodeType; } public void setParamValue(String paramValue) { this.paramValue = paramValue; } public String getParamValue() { return paramValue; }<br /> Open EmpList.jsff , from data control palette drop empFilteredByTreeNode->Employees->Table as ADF Read-only Table. After selecting the  Employees result set, in Edit Action Binding dialog window pass the pageFlowScope parameters as shown in below Image. In empList.jsff page, click Binding tab and click on Create Executable binding and select Invoke action and follow as shown in below image. Edit executeEmpFiltered invoke action properties and set the Refresh to ifNeeded, So when ever the page needs the method will be executed. Create Main.jspx page with page template as Oracle Three Column Layout. Drop FirstTaskflow as Region in start facet and drop SecondTaskflow as Region in center facet, Edit task Flow Binding dialog window pass the Input Paramters as shown in below Image. Run the Main.jspx, tree will be displayed in left region and emp details will displyaed on the right region. Click on the Americas in tree node, all emp related to the Americas related will be displayed. Click on Americas->United States of America->South San Francisco->Accounting, only employee belongs to the Accounting department will be displayed.

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  • Mocking property sets

    - by mehfuzh
    In this post, i will be showing how you can mock property sets with your expected values or even action using JustMock. To begin, we have a sample interface: public interface IFoo {     int Value { get; set; } } Now,  we can create a mock that will throw on any call other than the one expected, generally its a strict mock and we can do it like: bool expected = false;  var foo = Mock.Create<IFoo>(BehaviorMode.Strict);  Mock.ArrangeSet(() => { foo.Value = 1; }).DoInstead(() => expected  = true);    foo.Value = 1;    Assert.True(expected); Here , the method for running though our expectation for set is Mock.ArrangeSet , where we can directly set our expectations or can even set matchers into it like: var foo = Mock.Create<IFoo>(BehaviorMode.Strict);   Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo.Value = Arg.Matches<int>(x => x > 3));   foo.Value = 4; foo.Value = 5;   Assert.Throws<MockException>(() => foo.Value = 3);   In the example, any set for value not satisfying matcher expression will throw an MockException as this is a strict mock but what will be the case for loose mocks, where we also have to assert it. Here, let’s take an interface with an indexed property. Indexers are treated in the same way as properties, as with basic indexers let you access your class if it were an array. public interface IFooIndexed {     string this[int key] { get; set; } } We want to  setup a value for a particular index,  we then will pass that mock to some implementer where it will be actually called. Once done, we want to assert that if it has been invoked properly. var foo = Mock.Create<IFooIndexed>();   Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo[0] = "ping");   foo[0] = "ping";   Mock.AssertSet(() => foo[0] = "ping"); In the above example, both the values are user defined, it might happen that we want to make it more dynamic, In this example, i set it up for set with any value and finally checked if it is set with the one i am looking for. var foo = Mock.Create<IFooIndexed>();   Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo[0] = Arg.Any<string>());   foo[0] = "ping";   Mock.AssertSet(() => foo[0] = Arg.Matches<string>(x => string.Compare("ping", x) == 0)); This is more or less of mocking user sets , but we can further have it to throw exception or even do our own task for a particular set , like : Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo.MyProperty = 10).Throws(new ArgumentException()); Or  bool expected = false;  var foo = Mock.Create<IFoo>(BehaviorMode.Strict);  Mock.ArrangeSet(() => { foo.Value = 1; }).DoInstead(() => expected  = true);    foo.Value = 1;    Assert.True(expected); Or call the original setter , in this example it will throw an NotImplementedExpectation var foo = Mock.Create<FooAbstract>(BehaviorMode.Strict); Mock.ArrangeSet(() => { foo.Value = 1; }).CallOriginal(); Assert.Throws<NotImplementedException>(() => { foo.Value = 1; });   Finally, try all these, find issues, post them to forum and make it work for you :-). Hope that helps,

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  • Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite

    - by Carlos Chang
    Crosspost from the mobile apps blog.  TL;DR Oracle E-Business Suite is now building mobile apps with Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF). Believe it! Build iOS and Android apps with once code base and get it done! By Steven Chan (Oracle Development)  Many things have changed in the mobile space over the last few years. Here's an update on our strategy for mobile apps for the E-Business Suite. Mobile app strategy We're building our family of mobile apps for the E-Business Suite using Oracle Mobile Application Framework.  This framework allows us to write a single application that can be run on Apple iOS and Google Android platforms. Mobile apps for the E-Business Suite will share a common look-and-feel. The E-Business Suite is a suite of over 200 product modules spanning Financials, Supply Chain, Human Resources, and many other areas. Our mobile app strategy is to release standalone apps for specific product modules.  Our Oracle Timecards app, which allows users to create and submit timecards, is an example of a standalone app. Some common functions that span multiple product areas will have dedicated apps, too. An example of this is ourOracle Approvals app, which allows users to review and approve requests for expenses, requisitions, purchase orders, recruitment vacancies and offers, and more. You can read more about our Oracle Mobile Approvals app here: Now Available: Oracle Mobile Approvals for iOS Our goal is to support smaller screen (e.g. smartphones) as well as larger screens (e.g. tablets), with the smaller screen versions generally delivered first.  Where possible, we will deliver these as universal apps.  An example is our Oracle Mobile Field Service app, which allows field service technicians to remotely access customer, product, service request, and task-related information.  This app can run on a smartphone, while providing a richer experience for tablets. Deploying EBS mobile apps The mobile apps, themselves (i.e. client-side components) can be downloaded by end-users from the Apple iTunes today.  Android versions will be available from Google play. You can monitor this blog for Android-related updates. Where possible, our mobile apps should be deployable with a minimum of server-side changes.  These changes will generally involve a consolidated server-side patch for technology-stack components, and possibly a server-side patch for the functional product module. Updates to existing mobile apps may require new server-side components to enable all of the latest mobile functionality. All EBS product modules are certified for internal intranet deployments (i.e. used by employees within an organization's firewall).  Only a subset of EBS products such as iRecruitment are certified to be deployed externally (i.e. used by non-employees outside of an organization's firewall).  Today, many organizations running the E-Business Suite do not expose their EBS environment externally and all of the mobile apps that we're building are intended for internal employee use.  Recognizing this, our mobile apps are currently designed for users who are connected to the organization's intranet via VPN.  We expect that this may change in future updates to our mobile apps. Mobile apps and internationalization The initial releases of our mobile apps will be in English.  Later updates will include translations for all left-to-right languages supported by the E-Business Suite.  Right-to-left languages will not be translated. Customizing apps for enterprise deployments The current generation of mobile apps for Oracle E-Business Suite cannot be customized. We are evaluating options for limited customizations, including corporate branding with logos, corporate color schemes, and others. This is a potentially-complex area with many tricky implications for deployment and maintenance.  We would be interested in hearing your requirements for customizations in enterprise deployments.Prerequisites Apple iOS 7 and higher Android 4.1 (API level 16) and higher, with minimum CPU/memory configurations listed here EBS 12.1: EBS 12.1.3 Family Packs for the related product module EBS 12.2.3 References Oracle E-Business Suite Mobile Apps, Release 12.1 and 12.2 Documentation (Note 1641772.1) Oracle E-Business Suite Mobile Apps Administrator's Guide, Release 12.1 and 12.2 (Note 1642431.1) Follow @OracleMobile on Twitter Oracle Mobile Blog is here. 

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  • How Estimates Became Quotes

    - by Lee Brandt
    It’s our fault. Well, not completely, but we haven’t helped the situation any. All of what follows comes from my own experiences which, from talking to lots of other developers about it, seems to be pretty much par for the course. Where We Started When we first started estimating, we estimated pretty clearly. We would try to imagine something we’d done that was similar to the project being estimated and we’d toss it about in our heads a bit and see how much bigger or smaller we thought this new thing was, and add or subtract accordingly. We wouldn’t spend too much time on it, because we wanted to get to writing the software. Eventually, we’d come across some huge problem that there was now way we could’ve known about ahead of time. Either we didn’t see this thing or, we didn’t realize that this particular version of a problem would be so… problematic. We usually call this “not knowing what we don’t know”. It’s unavoidable. We just can’t know. Until we wade in and start putting some code together, there are just some things we won’t know… and some things we don’t even know that we don’t know. Y’know? So what happens? We go over budget. Project managers scream and dance the dance of the stressed-out project manager, and there is nothing we can do (or could’ve done) about it. We didn’t know. We thought about it for a bit and we didn’t see this herculean task sitting in the middle of our nice quiet project, and it has bitten us in the rear end. We now know how to handle this in the future, though. We will take some more time to pick around the requirements and discover all those things we don’t know. We’ll do some prototyping, we’ll read some blogs about similar projects, we’ll really grill the customer with questions during the requirements gathering phase. We’ll keeping asking “what else?” until the shove us down the stairs. We’ll take our time and uncover it all. We Learned, But Good The next time comes, and you know what happens? We do it. We grill the customer for weeks and prototype and read and research and we estimate everything down to the last button on the last form. Know what that gets us? It gets us three months of wasted time, and our estimate will still be off. Possibly off by a factor of four. WTF, mate? No way we could be surprised by something! We uncovered every particle. We turned every stone. How is it we still came across unknowns? Because we STILL didn’t know what we didn’t know. How could we? We didn’t know to ask. The worst part is, we’ve now convinced the product that this is NOT an estimate. It is a solid number based on massive research and an endless number of questions that they answered. There is absolutely now way you don’t know everything there is to know about this project now. No way there is anything you haven’t uncovered. And their faith in that “Esti-Quote” goes through the roof. When the project goes over this time, they might even begin to question whether or not you know what you’re doing. Who could blame them? You drilled them for weeks about every little thing, and when they complained about all the questions, you told them you wanted to uncover everything so there would be no surprises. SO we set them up to faile Guess, Then Plan We had a chance. At the beginning we could have just said, “That’s just a gut-feeling estimate, based on my past experience with similar projects. There could still be surprises.” If we spend SOME time doing SOME discovery and then bounce that against our own past experiences, we can come up with a fairly healthy estimate. We can then help the product owner understand that an estimate is a guess. Sure, it’s an educated guess, but it is still a guess. If we get it right it will be almost completely luck. Then, we help them to plan the development by taking that guess (yes, they still need the guess for planning purposes) and start measuring early and often to see if we still think we are right. We should adjust the estimate and alert the product owner as soon as we see problems (bad news does not age well) and we should be able to see any problems immediately if we are constantly measuring our pace. In lean software, we start with that guess and begin measuring cycle times immediately. Then we can make projections based on those cycle times and compare them to our estimate. This constant feedback is the best way to ensure that there are no surprises at the END of the project. There sill still be surprises, but we’ll see them sooner and have a better understanding of how they will affect our overall timeline. What do you think?

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  • Checksum Transformation

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

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  • Mapping Repeating Sequence Groups in BizTalk

    - by Paul Petrov
    Repeating sequence groups can often be seen in real life XML documents. It happens when certain sequence of elements repeats in the instance document. Here’s fairly abstract example of schema definition that contains sequence group: <xs:schemaxmlns:b="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003"            xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"            xmlns="NS-Schema1"            targetNamespace="NS-Schema1" >  <xs:elementname="RepeatingSequenceGroups">     <xs:complexType>       <xs:sequencemaxOccurs="1"minOccurs="0">         <xs:sequencemaxOccurs="unbounded">           <xs:elementname="A"type="xs:string" />           <xs:elementname="B"type="xs:string" />           <xs:elementname="C"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0" />         </xs:sequence>       </xs:sequence>     </xs:complexType>  </xs:element> </xs:schema> And here’s corresponding XML instance document: <ns0:RepeatingSequenceGroupsxmlns:ns0="NS-Schema1">  <A>A1</A>  <B>B1</B>  <C>C1</C>  <A>A2</A>  <B>B2</B>  <A>A3</A>  <B>B3</B>  <C>C3</C> </ns0:RepeatingSequenceGroups> As you can see elements A, B, and C are children of anonymous xs:sequence element which in turn can be repeated N times. Let’s say we need do simple mapping to the schema with similar structure but with different element names: <ns0:Destinationxmlns:ns0="NS-Schema2">  <Alpha>A1</Alpha>  <Beta>B1</Beta>  <Gamma>C1</Gamma>  <Alpha>A2</Alpha>  <Beta>B2</Beta>  <Gamma>C2</Gamma> </ns0:Destination> The basic map for such typical task would look pretty straightforward: If we test this map without any modification it will produce following result: <ns0:Destinationxmlns:ns0="NS-Schema2">  <Alpha>A1</Alpha>  <Alpha>A2</Alpha>  <Alpha>A3</Alpha>  <Beta>B1</Beta>  <Beta>B2</Beta>  <Beta>B3</Beta>  <Gamma>C1</Gamma>  <Gamma>C3</Gamma> </ns0:Destination> The original order of the elements inside sequence is lost and that’s not what we want. Default behavior of the BizTalk 2009 and 2010 Map Editor is to generate compatible map with older versions that did not have ability to preserve sequence order. To enable this feature simply open map file (*.btm) in text/xml editor and find attribute PreserveSequenceOrder of the root <mapsource> element. Set its value to Yes and re-test the map: <ns0:Destinationxmlns:ns0="NS-Schema2">  <Alpha>A1</Alpha>  <Beta>B1</Beta>  <Gamma>C1</Gamma>  <Alpha>A2</Alpha>  <Beta>B2</Beta>  <Alpha>A3</Alpha>  <Beta>B3</Beta>  <Gamma>C3</Gamma> </ns0:Destination> The result is as expected – all corresponding elements are in the same order as in the source document. Under the hood it is achieved by using one common xsl:for-each statement that pulls all elements in original order (rather than using individual for-each statement per element name in default mode) and xsl:if statements to test current element in the loop:  <xsl:templatematch="/s0:RepeatingSequenceGroups">     <ns0:Destination>       <xsl:for-eachselect="A|B|C">         <xsl:iftest="local-name()='A'">           <Alpha>             <xsl:value-ofselect="./text()" />           </Alpha>         </xsl:if>         <xsl:iftest="local-name()='B'">           <Beta>             <xsl:value-ofselect="./text()" />           </Beta>         </xsl:if>         <xsl:iftest="local-name()='C'">           <Gamma>             <xsl:value-ofselect="./text()" />           </Gamma>         </xsl:if>       </xsl:for-each>     </ns0:Destination>  </xsl:template> BizTalk Map editor became smarter so learn and use this lesser known feature of XSLT 2.0 in your maps and XSL stylesheets.

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  • SSIS Reporting Pack v0.4 – Execution Report updated

    - by jamiet
    SSIS Reporting Pack is a suite of reports that I maintain at http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/ that provide visualisation over the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server 2012 and attempt to add value over the reports that ship in the box. Work on the reports has stalled (my last SSIS Reporting Pack blog post was on 4th September 2011) as I’ve had rather more important things going on my life of late however I have recently checked-in a fix that couldn’t really be delayed. I discovered a problem with the Execution report that was causing the report to effectively hang, it was caused by this bit of SQL hidden away in the report definition: [generated_executables] AS (   SELECT  [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]   FROM    (           SELECT  [execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_close_square] + 1)           ,       [parent_execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_open_square])           FROM    (                   SELECT  [execution_path]                   ,       [char_index_open_square] = CHARINDEX('[',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [char_index_close_square] = CHARINDEX(']',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [length_exec_path] = LEN([execution_path])                   FROM    [exec_stats] es                   WHERE   execution_path LIKE '%\[%]%'  ESCAPE '\'                   )AS [loop_iteration]           ) AS [new_executable]   GROUP   BY [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]) It was there because SSIS does not currently treat a loop iteration as an executable yet I figured there was still value in being able to view it as such – this SQL essentially “invents” new executables for those loop iterations; its what enabled the following visualisation: where each of the three iterations of a For Each Loop called “FEL Loop over top performing regions” appear in the report. Unfortunately, as I alluded, this could under certain circumstances (most likely when there were many loop iterations) cause the report to hang as it waited for the results to be constructed and returned. The change that I have made eradicates this generation of “fake” executables and thus produces this visualisation instead: Notice that the three “children” of the For Each Loop are no longer the three iterations but actually the task (“EPT Call Data Export Package”) contained within that For Each Loop. The problem here is of course that there is no longer a visual distinction between those three iterations; I have instead made the full execution path viewable via a tooltip:   If you preferred the “old” way of presenting this information and are happy to put up with the performance degradation then I have kept the old version of the report hanging around in the reporting pack as “execution loop with iterations” however none of the other reports link to it so you will have to browse to it manually if you want to use it. Please let me know if you ARE using it – I would be very interested to hear about your experiences.   The last change to make you aware of in the execution report is that by default I no longer show OnPreValidate or OnPostValidate messages as I consider them to be superfluous and only serve to clutter up the results. If you want to put them back, well, its open source so go right ahead!   The latest release of SSIS Reporting Pack that contains all of these changes is v0.4 and can be downloaded from http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/releases/view/88178   Feedback on all of the above changes would be very much appreciated. @Jamiet

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  • SQL ADO.NET shortcut extensions (old school!)

    - by Jeff
    As much as I love me some ORM's (I've used LINQ to SQL quite a bit, and for the MSDN/TechNet Profile and Forums we're using NHibernate more and more), there are times when it's appropriate, and in some ways more simple, to just throw up so old school ADO.NET connections, commands, readers and such. It still feels like a pain though to new up all the stuff, make sure it's closed, blah blah blah. It's pretty much the least favorite task of writing data access code. To minimize the pain, I have a set of extension methods that I like to use that drastically reduce the code you have to write. Here they are... public static void Using(this SqlConnection connection, Action<SqlConnection> action) {     connection.Open();     action(connection);     connection.Close(); } public static SqlCommand Command(this SqlConnection connection, string sql){    var command = new SqlCommand(sql, connection);    return command;}public static SqlCommand AddParameter(this SqlCommand command, string parameterName, object value){    command.Parameters.AddWithValue(parameterName, value);    return command;}public static object ExecuteAndReturnIdentity(this SqlCommand command){    if (command.Connection == null)        throw new Exception("SqlCommand has no connection.");    command.ExecuteNonQuery();    command.Parameters.Clear();    command.CommandText = "SELECT @@IDENTITY";    var result = command.ExecuteScalar();    return result;}public static SqlDataReader ReadOne(this SqlDataReader reader, Action<SqlDataReader> action){    if (reader.Read())        action(reader);    reader.Close();    return reader;}public static SqlDataReader ReadAll(this SqlDataReader reader, Action<SqlDataReader> action){    while (reader.Read())        action(reader);    reader.Close();    return reader;} It has been awhile since I've really revisited these, so you will likely find opportunity for further optimization. The bottom line here is that you can chain together a bunch of these methods to make a much more concise database call, in terms of the code on your screen, anyway. Here are some examples: public Dictionary<string, string> Get(){    var dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();    _sqlHelper.GetConnection().Using(connection =>        connection.Command("SELECT Setting, [Value] FROM Settings")            .ExecuteReader()            .ReadAll(r => dictionary.Add(r.GetString(0), r.GetString(1))));    return dictionary;} or... public void ChangeName(User user, string newName){    _sqlHelper.GetConnection().Using(connection =>         connection.Command("UPDATE Users SET Name = @Name WHERE UserID = @UserID")            .AddParameter("@Name", newName)            .AddParameter("@UserID", user.UserID)            .ExecuteNonQuery());} The _sqlHelper.GetConnection() is just some other code that gets a connection object for you. You might have an even cleaner way to take that step out entirely. This looks more fluent, and the real magic sauce for me is the reader bits where you can put any kind of arbitrary method in there to iterate over the results.

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  • Defaulting the HLSL Vertex and Pixel Shader Levels to Feature Level 9_1 in VS 2012

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    I love Visual Studio 2012. But this is not a post about that. This is a post about tweaking one particular parameter that I’ve found a bit annoying. Disclaimer: You will be modifying important MSBuild files. If you screw up you will break your build tools. And maybe your computer will catch fire. I’m not responsible. No warranties or guaranties of any sort. This info is provided “as is”. By default, if you add a new vertex shader or pixel shader item to a project, it will be set to build with shader profile 4.0_level_9_3. If you need 9_3 functionality, this is all well and good. But (especially for Windows Store apps) you really want to target the lowest shader profile possible so that your game will run on as many computers as possible. So it’s a good idea to default to 9_1. To do this you could add in new HLSL files via “Add->New Item->Visual C++->HLSL->______ Shader File (.hlsl)” and then edit the shader files’ properties to set them manually to use 9_1 via “Properties->HLSL Compiler->General->Shader Model”. This is fine unless you forget to do this once and then submit your game with 9_3 shaders instead of 9_1 shaders to the Windows Store or to some other game store. Then you’d wind up with either rejection or angry “this doesn’t work on my computer! ripoff!” messages. There’s another option though. In “Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VC\HLSL\1033\VertexShader” (note the path might vary slightly for you if you are using a 32-bit system or have a non-ENU version of Visual Studio 2012) you will find a “VertexShader.vstemplate” file. If you open this file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad++), then inside the CustomParameters tag within the TemplateContent tag you should see a CustomParameter tag for the ShaderType, i.e.: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/> On a new line, we are going to add another CustomParameter tag to the CustomParameters tag. It will look like this: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/> such that we now have:     <CustomParameters>       <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/>       <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/>     </CustomParameters> You can then save the file (you will need to be an Administrator or have Administrator access). Back in the 1033 directory (or whatever the number is for your language), go into the “PixelShader” directory. Edit the “PixelShader.vstemplate” file and make the same change (note that this time $ShaderType$ is “Pixel” not “Vertex”; you shouldn’t be changing that line anyway, but if you were to just copy and replace the above four lines then you will wind up creating pixel shaders that the HLSL compiler would try to compile as vertex shaders, with all sort of weird errors as a result). Once you’ve added the $ShaderModel$ line to “PixelShader.vstemplate” and have saved it, everything should be done. Since Feature Level 9_1 and 9_3 don’t support any of the other shader types, those are set to default to their appropriate minimums already (Compute and Geometry are set to “4.0” and Domain and Hull are set to “5.0”, which are their respective minimums (though not all 4.0 cards support Compute shaders; they were an optional feature added with DirectX 10.1 and only became required for DirectX 11 hardware). In case you are wondering where these magic values come from, you can find them all in the “fxc.xml” file in the “\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.CPP\v4.0\V110\1033” directory (or whatever your language number is; 1033 is ENU and various other product languages have their own respective numbers (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964664.aspx ) such that Japanese is 1041 (for example), though for all I know MSBuild tasks might be 1033 for everyone). If, like me, you installed VS 2012 to a drive other than the C:\ drive, you will find the vstemplate files in the drive to which you installed VS 2012 (D:\ in my case) but you will find the fxc.xml file on the C:\ drive. You should not edit fxc.xml. You will almost definitely break things by doing that; it’s just something you can look through to see all the other options that the FXC task takes such that you could, if needed, add further CustomParameter tags if you wanted to default to other supported options. I haven’t tried any others though so I don’t have any advice on how to set them.

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  • NetBeans, JSF, and MySQL Primary Keys using AUTO_INCREMENT

    - by MarkH
    I recently had the opportunity to spin up a small web application using JSF and MySQL. Having developed JSF apps with Oracle Database back-ends before and possessing some small familiarity with MySQL (sans JSF), I thought this would be a cakewalk. Things did go pretty smoothly...but there was one little "gotcha" that took more time than the few seconds it really warranted. The Problem Every DBMS has its own way of automatically generating primary keys, and each has its pros and cons. For the Oracle Database, you use a sequence and point your Java classes to it using annotations that look something like this: @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator="POC_ID_SEQ") @SequenceGenerator(name="POC_ID_SEQ", sequenceName="POC_ID_SEQ", allocationSize=1) Between creating the actual sequence in the database and making sure you have your annotations right (watch those typos!), it seems a bit cumbersome. But it typically "just works", without fuss. Enter MySQL. Designating an integer-based field as PRIMARY KEY and using the keyword AUTO_INCREMENT makes the same task seem much simpler. And it is, mostly. But while NetBeans cranks out a superb "first cut" for a basic JSF CRUD app, there are a couple of small things you'll need to bring to the mix in order to be able to actually (C)reate records. The (RUD) performs fine out of the gate. The Solution Omitting all design considerations and activity (!), here is the basic sequence of events I followed to create, then resolve, the JSF/MySQL "Primary Key Perfect Storm": Fire up NetBeans. Create JSF project. Create Entity Classes from Database. Create JSF Pages from Entity Classes. Test run. Try to create record and hit error. It's a simple fix, but one that was fun to find in its completeness. :-) Even though you've told it what to do for a primary key, a MySQL table requires a gentle nudge to actually generate that new key value. Two things are needed to make the magic happen. First, you need to ensure the following annotation is in place in your Java entity classes: @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) All well and good, but the real key is this: in your controller class(es), you'll have a create() function that looks something like this, minus the comment line and the setId() call in bold red type:     public String create() {         try {             // Assign 0 to ID for MySQL to properly auto_increment the primary key.             current.setId(0);             getFacade().create(current);             JsfUtil.addSuccessMessage(ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("CategoryCreated"));             return prepareCreate();         } catch (Exception e) {             JsfUtil.addErrorMessage(e, ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("PersistenceErrorOccured"));             return null;         }     } Setting the current object's primary key attribute to zero (0) prior to saving it tells MySQL to get the next available value and assign it to that record's key field. Short and simple…but not inherently obvious if you've never used that particular combination of NetBeans/JSF/MySQL before. Hope this helps! All the best, Mark

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  • EM CLI, diving in and beyond!

    - by Maureen Byrne
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Doing more in less time… Isn’t that what we all strive to do? With this in mind, I put together two screen watches on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c command line interface, or EM CLI as it is also known. There is a wealth of information on any topic that you choose to read about, from manual pages to coding documents…might I even say blog posts? In our busy lives it is so nice to just sit back with a short video, watch and learn enough to dive in. Doing more in less time, is the essence of EM CLI. It enables you to script fundamental and complex administrative tasks in an elegant way, thanks to the Jython scripting language. Repetitive tasks can be scripted and reused again and again. Sure, a Graphical User Interface provides a more intuitive step by step approach to tasks, and it provides a way of quickly becoming familiar with a product and its many features, and it is definitely the way to go when viewing performance data and historical trending…but for repetitive and complex tasks, scripting is the way to go! Lets us take the everyday task of creating an administrator. Using EM CLI in interactive mode the command could look like this.. emcli>create_user(name='jan.doe', type='EXTERNAL_USER') This command creates an administrator called jan.doe which is an externally authenticated user, possibly LDAP or SSO, defined by the EXTERNAL_USER tag. The create_user procedure takes many arguments; see the documentation for more information. Now, where EM CLI really shines and shows power is in creating multiple users. Regardless of the number, tens or thousands, the effort is the same. With the use of a standard programming construct, a loop, you can place your create_user() procedure within it. Using a loop allows you to iterate through a previously created list, creating new users until the list is complete. Using EM CLI in Script mode, your Jython loop would look something like this… for user in list_of_users:       create_user(name=user, expire=’true’, password=’welcome123’) This Jython code snippet iterates through a previously defined list of names, list_of_users, and iterates through the list, taking each name, user in this case, and creates an administrator sets the password to welcome123, but forces the user to reset it when they first login. This is only one of over four hundred procedures created to expose Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c functionality in a powerful and programmatic way. It is a few months since we released EM CLI with scripting option. We are seeing many users adapt to this fun and powerful way of using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. What are the first steps? Watch these screen watches, and dive in. The first screen watch steps you through where and how to download and install and how to run your first few commands. The Second screen watch steps you through a few scripts. Next time, I am going to show you the basic building blocks to writing a Jython script to perform Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c administrative tasks. Join this growing group of EM CLI users…. Dive in! Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • C#/.NET Little Wonders: Getting Caller Information

    - by James Michael Hare
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2013/07/25/c.net-little-wonders-getting-caller-information.aspx Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. There are times when it is desirable to know who called the method or property you are currently executing.  Some applications of this could include logging libraries, or possibly even something more advanced that may server up different objects depending on who called the method. In the past, we mostly relied on the System.Diagnostics namespace and its classes such as StackTrace and StackFrame to see who our caller was, but now in C# 5, we can also get much of this data at compile-time. Determining the caller using the stack One of the ways of doing this is to examine the call stack.  The classes that allow you to examine the call stack have been around for a long time and can give you a very deep view of the calling chain all the way back to the beginning for the thread that has called you. You can get caller information by either instantiating the StackTrace class (which will give you the complete stack trace, much like you see when an exception is generated), or by using StackFrame which gets a single frame of the stack trace.  Both involve examining the call stack, which is a non-trivial task, so care should be done not to do this in a performance-intensive situation. For our simple example let's say we are going to recreate the wheel and construct our own logging framework.  Perhaps we wish to create a simple method Log which will log the string-ified form of an object and some information about the caller.  We could easily do this as follows: 1: static void Log(object message) 2: { 3: // frame 1, true for source info 4: StackFrame frame = new StackFrame(1, true); 5: var method = frame.GetMethod(); 6: var fileName = frame.GetFileName(); 7: var lineNumber = frame.GetFileLineNumber(); 8: 9: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 10: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 11: fileName, lineNumber, method.Name, message); 12: } So, what we are doing here is grabbing the 2nd stack frame (the 1st is our current method) using a 2nd argument of true to specify we want source information (if available) and then taking the information from the frame.  This works fine, and if we tested it out by calling from a file such as this: 1: // File c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs 2:  3: public class CallerInfo 4: { 5: Log("Hello Logger!"); 6: } We'd see this: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! This works well, and in fact CallStack and StackFrame are still the best ways to examine deeper into the call stack.  But if you only want to get information on the caller of your method, there is another option… Determining the caller at compile-time In C# 5 (.NET 4.5) they added some attributes that can be supplied to optional parameters on a method to receive caller information.  These attributes can only be applied to methods with optional parameters with explicit defaults.  Then, as the compiler determines who is calling your method with these attributes, it will fill in the values at compile-time. These are the currently supported attributes available in the  System.Runtime.CompilerServices namespace": CallerFilePathAttribute – The path and name of the file that is calling your method. CallerLineNumberAttribute – The line number in the file where your method is being called. CallerMemberName – The member that is calling your method. So let’s take a look at how our Log method would look using these attributes instead: 1: static int Log(object message, 2: [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", 3: [CallerFilePath] string fileName = "", 4: [CallerLineNumber] int lineNumber = 0) 5: { 6: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 7: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 8: fileName, lineNumber, memberName, message); 9: } Again, calling this from our sample Main would give us the same result: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! However, though this seems the same, there are a few key differences. First of all, there are only 3 supported attributes (at this time) that give you the file path, line number, and calling member.  Thus, it does not give you as rich of detail as a StackFrame (which can give you the calling type as well and deeper frames, for example).  Also, these are supported through optional parameters, which means we could call our new Log method like this: 1: // They're defaults, why not fill 'em in 2: Log("My message.", "Some member", "Some file", -13); In addition, since these attributes require optional parameters, they cannot be used in properties, only in methods. These caveats aside, they do let you get similar information inside of methods at a much greater speed!  How much greater?  Well lets crank through 1,000,000 iterations of each.  instead of logging to console, I’ll return the formatted string length of each.  Doing this, we get: 1: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with StackTrace: 5096 ms 2: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with Attributes: 196 ms So you see, using the attributes is much, much faster!  Nearly 25x faster in fact.  Summary There are a few ways to get caller information for a method.  The StackFrame allows you to get a comprehensive set of information spanning the whole call stack, but at a heavier cost.  On the other hand, the attributes allow you to quickly get at caller information baked in at compile-time, but to do so you need to create optional parameters in your methods to support it. Technorati Tags: Little Wonders,CSharp,C#,.NET,StackFrame,CallStack,CallerFilePathAttribute,CallerLineNumberAttribute,CallerMemberName

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  • Educause Top-Ten IT Issues - the most change in a decade or more

    - by user739873
    The Education IT Issue Panel has released the 2012 top-ten issues facing higher education IT leadership, and instead of the customary reshuffling of the same deck, the issues reflect much of the tumult and dynamism facing higher education generally.  I find it interesting (and encouraging) that at the top of this year's list is "Updating IT Professionals' Skills and Roles to Accommodate Emerging Technologies and Changing IT Management and Service Delivery Models."  This reflects, in my view, the realization that higher education IT must change in order to fully realize the potential for transforming the institution, and therefore it's people must learn new skills, understand and accept new ways of solving problems, and not be tied down by past practices or institutional inertia. What follows in the remaining 9 top issues all speak, in some form or fashion, to the need for dramatic change, but not just in the areas of "funding IT" (code for cost containment or reduction), but rather the need to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the institution through the use of technology—leveraging the wave of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to the institution's advantage, rather than viewing it as a threat and a problem to be contained. Although it's #10 of 10, IT Governance (and establishment and implementation of the governance model throughout the institution) is key to effectively acting upon many of the preceding issues in this year's list.  In the majority of cases, technology exists to meet the needs and requirements to effectively address many of the challenges outlined in top-ten issues list. Which brings me to my next point. Although I try not to sound too much like an Oracle commercial in these (all too infrequent) blog posts, I can't help but point out how much confluence there is between several of the top issues this year and what my colleagues and I have been evangelizing for some time. Starting from the bottom of the list up: 1) I'm gratified that research and the IT challenges it presents has made the cut.  Big Data (or Large Data as it's phased in the report) is rapidly going to overwhelm much of what exists today even at our most prepared and well-equipped research universities.  Combine large data with the significantly more stringent requirements around data preservation, archiving, sharing, curation, etc. coming from granting agencies like NSF, and you have the brewing storm that could result in a lot of "one-off" solutions to a problem that could very well be addressed collectively and "at scale."   2) Transformative effects of IT – while I see more and more examples of this, there is still much more that can be achieved. My experience tells me that culture (as the report indicates or at least poses the question) gets in the way more than technology not being up to task.  We spend too much time on "context" and not "core," and get lost in the weeds on the journey to truly transforming the institution with technology. 3) Analytics as a key element in improving various institutional outcomes.  In our work around Student Success, we see predictive "academic" analytics as essential to getting in front of the Student Success issue, regardless of how an institution or collections of institutions defines success.  Analytics must be part of the fabric of the key academic enterprise applications, not a bolt-on.  We will spend a significant amount of time on this topic during our semi-annual Education Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month. 4) Cloud strategy for the broad range of applications in the academic enterprise.  Some of the recent work by Casey Green at the Campus Computing Survey would seem to indicate that there is movement in this area but mostly in what has been termed "below the campus" application areas such as collaboration tools, recruiting, and alumni relations.  It's time to get serious about sourcing elements of mature applications like student information systems, HR, Finance, etc. leveraging a model other than traditional on-campus custom. I've only selected a few areas of the list to highlight, but the unifying theme here (and this is where I run the risk of sounding like an Oracle commercial) is that these lofty goals cry out for partners that can bring economies of scale to bear on the problems married with a deep understanding of the nuances unique to higher education.  In a recent piece in Educause Review on Student Information Systems, the author points out that "best of breed is back". Unfortunately I am compelled to point out that best of breed is a large part of the reason we have made as little progress as we have as an industry in advancing some of the causes outlined above.  Don't confuse "integrated" and "full stack" for vendor lock-in.  The best-of-breed market forces that Ron points to ensure that solutions have to be "integratable" or they don't survive in the marketplace. However, by leveraging the efficiencies afforded by adopting solutions that are pre-integrated (and possibly metered out as a service) allows us to shed unnecessary costs – as difficult as these decisions are to make and to drive throughout the organization. Cole

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  • SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #004

    - by pinaldave
    Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 Auto Generate Script to Delete Deprecated Fields in Current Database In early career everytime I have to drop a column, I had hard time doing it because I was scared what if that column was needed somewhere in the code. Due to this fear I never dropped any column. I just renamed the column. If the column which I renamed was needed afterwards it was very easy to rename it back again. However, it is not recommended to keep the deleted column renamed in the database. At every interval I used to drop the columns which was prefixed with specific word. This script is 6 years old but still works. Give it a look, I am open for improvements. 2007 Shrinking Truncate Log File – Log Full – Part 2 Shrinking database or mdf file is indeed bad thing and it creates lots of problems. However, once in a while there is legit requirement to shrink the log file – a very rare one. In the rare occasion shrinking or truncating the log file may be the only solution. However, one should make sure to take backup before and after the truncate or shrink as in case of a disaster they can be very useful. Remember that truncating log file will break the log chain and while restore it can create major issue. Anyway, use this feature with caution. 2008 Simple Use of Cursor to Print All Stored Procedures of Database Including Schema This is a very interesting requirement I used to face in my early career days, I needed to print all the Stored procedures of my database. Interesting enough I had written a cursor to do so. Today when I look back at this stored procedure, I believe there will be a much cleaner way to do the same task, however, I still use this SP quite often when I have to document all the stored procedures of my database. Interesting Observation about Order of Resultset without ORDER BY In industry many developers avoid using ORDER BY clause to display the result in particular order thinking that Index is enforcing the order. In this interesting example, I demonstrate that without using ORDER BY, same table and similar query can return different results. Query optimizer always returns results using any method which is optimized for performance. The learning is There is no order unless ORDER BY is used. 2009 Size of Index Table – A Puzzle to Find Index Size for Each Index on Table I asked this puzzle earlier where I asked how to find the Index size for each of the tables. The puzzle was very well received and lots of interesting answers were received. To answer this question I have written following blog posts. I suggest this weekend you try to solve this problem and see if you can come up with a better solution. If not, well here are the solutions. Solution 1 | Solution 2 | Solution 3 Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. The SQL Server Query optimizer is a very smart tool and it makes a better selection of execution plan. Suggesting hints to the Query Optimizer should be attempted when absolutely necessary and by experienced developers who know exactly what they are doing (or in development as a way to experiment and learn). Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY I have seen developers and DBAs using TOP very causally when they have to use the ORDER BY clause. Theoretically, there is no need of ORDER BY in the view at all. All the ordering should be done outside the view and view should just have the SELECT statement in it. It was quite common that to save this extra typing by including ordering inside of the view. At several instances developers want a complete resultset and for the same they include TOP 100 PERCENT along with ORDER BY, assuming that this will simulate the SELECT statement with ORDER BY. 2010 SQLPASS Nov 8-11, 2010-Seattle – An Alternative Look at Experience In year 2010 I attended most prestigious SQL Server event SQLPASS between Nov 8-11, 2010 at Seattle. I have only one expression for the event - Best Summit Ever. Instead of writing about my usual routine or the event, I wrote about the interesting things I did and how I felt about it! When I go back and read it, I feel that this is the best event I attended in year 2010. Change Database Access to Single User Mode Using SSMS Image says all. 2011 SQL Server 2012 has introduced new analytic functions. These functions were long awaited and I am glad that they are now here. Before when any of this function was needed, people used to write long T-SQL code to simulate these functions. But now there’s no need of doing so. Having available native function also helps performance as well readability. Function SQLAuthority MSDN CUME_DIST CUME_DIST CUME_DIST FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LEAD LEAD LEAD LAG LAG LAG PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Myths about Coding Craftsmanship part 2

    - by tom
    Myth 3: The source of all bad code is inept developers and stupid people When you review code is this what you assume?  Shame on you.  You are probably making assumptions in your code if you are assuming so much already.  Bad code can be the result of any number of causes including but not limited to using dated techniques (like boxing when generics are available), not following standards (“look how he does the spacing between arguments!” or “did he really just name that variable ‘bln_Hello_Cats’?”), being redundant, using properties, methods, or objects in a novel way (like switching on button.Text between “Hello World” and “Hello World “ //clever use of space character… sigh), not following the SOLID principals, hacking around assumptions made in earlier iterations / hacking in features that should be worked into the overall design.  The first two issues, while annoying are pretty easy to spot and can be fixed so easily.  If your coding team is made up of experienced professionals who are passionate about staying current then these shouldn’t be happening.  If you work with a variety of skills, backgrounds, and experience then there will be some of this stuff going on.  If you have an opportunity to mentor such a developer who is receptive to constructive criticism don’t be a jerk; help them and the codebase will improve.  A little patience can improve the codebase, your work environment, and even your perspective. The novelty and redundancy I have encountered has often been the use of creativity when language knowledge was perceived as unavailable or too time consuming.  When developers learn on the job you get a lot of this.  Rather than going to MSDN developers will use what they know.  Depending on the constraints of their assignment hacking together what they know may seem quite practical.  This was not stupid though I often wonder how much time is actually “saved” by hacking.  These issues are often harder to untangle if we ever do.  They can also grow out of control as we write hack after hack to make it work and get back to some development that is satisfying. Hacking upon an existing hack is what I call “feeding the monster”.  Code monsters are anti-patterns and hacks gone wild.  The reason code monsters continue to get bigger is that they keep growing in scope, touching more and more of the application.  This is not the result of dumb developers. It is probably the result of avoiding design, not taking the time to understand the problems or anticipate or communicate the vision of the product.  If our developers don’t understand the purpose of a feature or product how do we expect potential customers to do so? Forethought and organization are often what is missing from bad code.  Developers who do not use the SOLID principals should be encouraged to learn these principals and be given guidance on how to apply them.  The time “saved” by giving hackers room to hack will be made up for and then some. Not as technical debt but as shoddy work that if not replaced will be struggled with again and again.  Bad code is not the result of dumb developers (usually) it is the result of trying to do too much without the proper resources and neglecting the right thing that needs doing with the first thoughtless thing that comes into our heads. Object oriented code is all about relationships between objects.  Coders who believe their coworkers are all fools tend to write objects that are difficult to work with, not eager to explain themselves, and perform erratically and irrationally.  If you constantly find you are surrounded by idiots you may want to ask yourself if you are being unreasonable, if you are being closed minded, of if you have chosen the right profession.  Opening your mind up to the idea that you probably work with rational, well-intentioned people will probably make you a better coder and it might even make you less grumpy.  If you are surrounded by jerks who do not engage in the exchange of ideas who do not care about their customers or the durability of the code you are building together then I suggest you find a new place to work.  Myth 4: Customers don’t care about “beautiful” code Craftsmanship is customer focused because it means that the job was done right, the product will withstand the abuse, modifications, and scrutiny of our customers.  Users can appreciate a predictable timeline for a release, a product delivered on time and on budget, a feature set that does not interfere with the task(s) it is supporting, quick turnarounds on exception messages, self healing issues, and less issues.  These are all hindered by skimping on craftsmanship.  When we write data access and when we write reusable code.   What do you think?  Does bad code come primarily from low IQ individuals?  Do customers care about beautiful code?

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  • The Enterprise is a Curmudgeon

    - by John K. Hines
    Working in an enterprise environment is a unique challenge.  There's a lot more to software development than developing software.  A project lead or Scrum Master has to manage personalities and intra-team politics, has to manage accomplishing the task at hand while creating the opportunities and a reputation for handling desirable future work, has to create a competent, happy team that actually delivers while being careful not to burn bridges or hurt feelings outside the team.  Which makes me feel surprised to read advice like: " The enterprise should figure out what is likely to work best for itself and try to use it." - Ken Schwaber, The Enterprise and Scrum. The enterprises I have experience with are fundamentally unable to be self-reflective.  It's like asking a Roman gladiator if he'd like to carve out a little space in the arena for some silent meditation.  I'm currently wondering how compatible Scrum is with the top-down hierarchy of life in a large organization.  Specifically, manufacturing-mindset, fixed-release, harmony-valuing large organizations.  Now I understand why Agile can be a better fit for companies without much organizational inertia. Recently I've talked with nearly two dozen software professionals and their managers about Scrum and Agile.  I've become convinced that a developer, team, organization, or enterprise can be Agile without using Scrum.  But I'm not sure about what process would be the best fit, in general, for an enterprise that wants to become Agile.  It's possible I should read more than just the introduction to Ken's book. I do feel prepared to answer some of the questions I had asked in a previous post: How can Agile practices (including but not limited to Scrum) be adopted in situations where the highest-placed managers in a company demand software within extremely aggressive deadlines? Answer: In a very limited capacity at the individual level.  The situation here is that the senior management of this company values any software release more than it values developer well-being, end-user experience, or software quality.  Only if the developing organization is given an immediate refactoring opportunity does this sort of development make sense to a person who values sustainable software.   How can Agile practices be adopted by teams that do not perform a continuous cycle of new development, such as those whose sole purpose is to reproduce and debug customer issues? Answer: It depends.  For Scrum in particular, I don't believe Scrum is meant to manage unpredictable work.  While you can easily adopt XP practices for bug fixing, the project-management aspects of Scrum require some predictability.  My question here was meant toward those who want to apply Scrum to non-development teams.  In some cases it works, in others it does not. How can a team measure if its development efforts are both Agile and employ sound engineering practices? Answer: I'm currently leaning toward measuring these independently.  The Agile Principles are a terrific way to measure if a software team is agile.  Sound engineering practices are those practices which help developers meet the principles.  I think Scrum is being mistakenly applied as an engineering practice when it is essentially a project management practice.  In my opinion, XP and Lean are examples of good engineering practices. How can Agile be explained in an accurate way that describes its benefits to sceptical developers and/or revenue-focused non-developers? Answer: Agile techniques will result in higher-quality, lower-cost software development.  This comes primarily from finding defects earlier in the development cycle.  If there are individual developers who do not want to collaborate, write unit tests, or refactor, then these are simply developers who are either working in an area where adding these techniques will not add value (i.e. they are an expert) or they are a developer who is satisfied with the status quo.  In the first case they should be left alone.  In the second case, the results of Agile should be demonstrated by other developers who are willing to receive recognition for their efforts.  It all comes down to individuals, doesn't it?  If you're working in an organization whose Agile adoption consists exclusively of Scrum, consider ways to form individual Agile teams to demonstrate its benefits.  These can even be virtual teams that span people across org-chart boundaries.  Once you can measure real value, whether it's Scrum, Lean, or something else, people will follow.  Even the curmudgeons.

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  • A Basic Thread

    - by Joe Mayo
    Most of the programs written are single-threaded, meaning that they run on the main execution thread. For various reasons such as performance, scalability, and/or responsiveness additional threads can be useful. .NET has extensive threading support, from the basic threads introduced in v1.0 to the Task Parallel Library (TPL) introduced in v4.0. To get started with threads, it's helpful to begin with the basics; starting a Thread. Why Do I Care? The scenario I'll use for needing to use a thread is writing to a file.  Sometimes, writing to a file takes a while and you don't want your user interface to lock up until the file write is done. In other words, you want the application to be responsive to the user. How Would I Go About It? The solution is to launch a new thread that performs the file write, allowing the main thread to return to the user right away.  Whenever the file writing thread completes, it will let the user know.  In the meantime, the user is free to interact with the program for other tasks. The following examples demonstrate how to do this. Show Me the Code? The code we'll use to work with threads is in the System.Threading namespace, so you'll need the following using directive at the top of the file: using System.Threading; When you run code on a thread, the code is specified via a method.  Here's the code that will execute on the thread: private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written."); } The call to Thread.Sleep(1000) delays thread execution. The parameter is specified in milliseconds, and 1000 means that this will cause the program to sleep for approximately 1 second.  This method happens to be static, but that's just part of this example, which you'll see is launched from the static Main method.  A thread could be instance or static.  Notice that the method does not have parameters and does not have a return type. As you know, the way to refer to a method is via a delegate.  There is a delegate named ThreadStart in System.Threading that refers to a method without parameters or return type, shown below: ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); I'll show you the whole program below, but the ThreadStart instance above goes in the Main method. The thread uses the ThreadStart instance, fileWriterHandlerDelegate, to specify the method to execute on the thread: Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); As shown above, the argument type for the Thread constructor is the ThreadStart delegate type. The fileWriterHandlerDelegate argument is an instance of the ThreadStart delegate type. This creates an instance of a thread and what code will execute, but the new thread instance, fileWriter, isn't running yet. You have to explicitly start it, like this: fileWriter.Start(); Now, the code in the WriteFile method is executing on a separate thread. Meanwhile, the main thread that started the fileWriter thread continues on it's own.  You have two threads running at the same time. Okay, I'm Starting to Get Glassy Eyed. How Does it All Fit Together? The example below is the whole program, pulling all the previous bits together. It's followed by its output and an explanation. using System; using System.Threading; namespace BasicThread { class Program { static void Main() { ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); Console.WriteLine("Starting FileWriter"); fileWriter.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Called FileWriter"); Console.ReadKey(); } private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written"); } } } And here's the output: Starting FileWriter Called FileWriter File Written So, Why are the Printouts Backwards? The output above corresponds to Console.Writeline statements in the program, with the second and third seemingly reversed. In a single-threaded program, "File Written" would print before "Called FileWriter". However, this is a multi-threaded (2 or more threads) program.  In multi-threading, you can't make any assumptions about when a given thread will run.  In this case, I added the Sleep statement to the WriteFile method to greatly increase the chances that the message from the main thread will print first. Without the Thread.Sleep, you could run this on a system with multiple cores and/or multiple processors and potentially get different results each time. Interesting Tangent but What Should I Get Out of All This? Going back to the main point, launching the WriteFile method on a separate thread made the program more responsive.  The file writing logic ran for a while, but the main thread returned to the user, as demonstrated by the print out of "Called FileWriter".  When the file write finished, it let the user know via another print statement. This was a very efficient use of CPU resources that made for a more pleasant user experience. Joe

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  • Visual Tree Enumeration

    - by codingbloke
    I feel compelled to post this blog because I find I’m repeatedly posting this same code in silverlight and windows-phone-7 answers in Stackoverflow. One common task that we feel we need to do is burrow into the visual tree in a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application (actually more recently I found myself doing this in WPF as well).  This allows access to details that aren’t exposed directly by some controls.  A good example of this sort of requirement is found in the “Restoring exact scroll position of a listbox in Windows Phone 7”  question on stackoverflow.  This required that the scroll position of the scroll viewer internal to a listbox be accessed. A caveat One caveat here is that we should seriously challenge the need for this burrowing since it may indicate that there is a design problem.  Burrowing into the visual tree or indeed burrowing out to containing ancestors could represent significant coupling between module boundaries and that generally isn’t a good idea. Why isn’t this idea just not cast aside as a no-no?  Well the whole concept of a “Templated Control”, which are in extensive use in these applications, opens the coupling between the content of the visual tree and the internal code of a control.   For example, I can completely change the appearance and positioning of elements that make up a ComboBox.  The ComboBox control relies on specific template parts having set names of a specified type being present in my template.  Rightly or wrongly this does kind of give license to writing code that has similar coupling. Hasn’t this been done already? Yes it has.  There are number of blogs already out there with similar solutions.  In fact if you are using Silverlight toolkit the VisualTreeExtensions class already provides this feature.  However I prefer my specific code because of the simplicity principle I hold to.  Only write the minimum code necessary to give all the features needed.  In this case I add just two extension methods Ancestors and Descendents, note I don’t bother with “Get” or “Visual” prefixes.  Also I haven’t added Parent or Children methods nor additional “AndSelf” methods because all but Children is achievable with the addition of some other Linq methods.  I decided to give Descendents an additional overload for depth hence a depth of 1 is equivalent to Children but this overload is a little more flexible than simply Children. So here is the code:- VisualTreeEnumeration public static class VisualTreeEnumeration {     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root, int depth)     {         int count = VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(root);         for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)         {             var child = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(root, i);             yield return child;             if (depth > 0)             {                 foreach (var descendent in Descendents(child, --depth))                     yield return descendent;             }         }     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root)     {         return Descendents(root, Int32.MaxValue);     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Ancestors(this DependencyObject root)     {         DependencyObject current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(root);         while (current != null)         {             yield return current;             current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(current);         }     } }   Usage examples The following are some examples of how to combine the above extension methods with Linq to generate the other axis scenarios that tree traversal code might require. Missing Axis Scenarios var parent = control.Ancestors().Take(1).FirstOrDefault(); var children = control.Descendents(1); var previousSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).TakeWhile(c => c != control)); var followingSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).SkipWhile(c => c != control).Skip(1)); var ancestorsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Ancestors()); var descendentsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Descendents()); You might ask why I don’t just include these in the VisualTreeEnumerator.  I don’t on the principle of only including code that is actually needed.  If you find that one or more of the above  is needed in your code then go ahead and create additional methods.  One of the downsides to Extension methods is that they can make finding the method you actually want in intellisense harder. Here are some real world usage scenarios for these methods:- Real World Scenarios //Gets the internal scrollviewer of a ListBox ScrollViewer sv = someListBox.Descendents().OfType<ScrollViewer>().FirstOrDefault(); // Get all text boxes in current UserControl:- var textBoxes = this.Descendents().OfType<TextBox>(); // All UIElement direct children of the layout root grid:- var topLevelElements = LayoutRoot.Descendents(0).OfType<UIElement>(); // Find the containing `ListBoxItem` for a UIElement:- var container = elem.Ancestors().OfType<ListBoxItem>().FirstOrDefault(); // Seek a button with the name "PinkElephants" even if outside of the current Namescope:- var pinkElephantsButton = this.Descendents()     .OfType<Button>()     .FirstOrDefault(b => b.Name == "PinkElephants"); //Clear all checkboxes with the name "Selector" in a Treeview foreach (CheckBox checkBox in elem.Descendents()     .OfType<CheckBox>().Where(c => c.Name == "Selector")) {     checkBox.IsChecked = false; }   The last couple of examples above demonstrate a common requirement of finding controls that have a specific name.  FindName will often not find these controls because they exist in a different namescope. Hope you find this useful, if not I’m just glad to be able to link to this blog in future stackoverflow answers.

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