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• The SmartAssembly Rearchitecture

  - by Simon Cooper

  You may have noticed that not a lot has happened to SmartAssembly in the past few months. However, the team has been very busy behind the scenes working on an entirely new version of SmartAssembly. SmartAssembly 6.5 Over the past few releases of SmartAssembly, the team had come to the realisation that the current 'architecture' - grown organically, way before RedGate bought it, from a simple name obfuscator over the years into a full-featured obfuscator and assembly instrumentation tool - was simply not up to the task. Not for what we wanted to do with it at the time, and not what we have planned for the future. Not only was it not up to what we wanted it to do, but it was severely limiting our development capabilities; long-standing bugs in the root architecture that couldn't be fixed, some rather...interesting...design decisions, and convoluted logic that increased the complexity of any bugfix or new feature tenfold. So, we set out to fix this. Earlier this year, a new engine was written on which SmartAssembly would be based. Over the following few months, each feature was ported over to the new engine and extensively tested by our existing unit and integration tests. The engine was linked into the existing UI (no easy task, due to the tight coupling between the UI and old engine), and existing RedGate products were tested on the new SmartAssembly to ensure the new engine acted in the same way. The result is SmartAssembly 6.5. The risks of a rearchitecture Are there risks to rearchitecting a product like SmartAssembly? Of course. There was a lot of undocumented behaviour in the old engine, and as part of the rearchitecture we had to find this behaviour, define it, and document it. In the process we found some behaviour of the old engine that simply did not make sense; hence the changes in pruning & obfuscation behaviour in the release notes. All the special edge cases we had to find, document, and re-implement. There was a chance that these special cases would not be found until near the end of the project, when everything is functionally complete and interacting together. By that stage, it would be hard to go back and change anything without a whole lot of extra work, delaying the release by months. We always knew this was a possibility; our initial estimate of the time required was '4 months, ± 4 months'. And that was including various mitigation strategies to reduce the likelihood of these issues being found right at the end. Fortunately, this worst-case did not happen. However, the rearchitecture did produce some benefits. As well as numerous bug fixes that we could not fix any other way, we've also added logging that lets you find out exactly why a particular field or property wasn't pruned or obfuscated. There's a new command line interface, we've tested it with WP7.1 and Silverlight 5, and we've added a new option to error reporting to improve the performance of instrumented apps by ~10%, at the cost of inaccurate line numbers in reports. So? What differences will I see? Largely none. SmartAssembly 6.5 produces the same output as SmartAssembly 6.2. The performance of 6.5 will be much faster for some users, and generally the same as 6.2 for the remaining. If you've encountered a bug with previous versions of SmartAssembly, I encourage you to try 6.5, as it has most likely been fixed in the rearchitecture. If you encounter a bug with 6.5, please do tell us; we'll be doing another release quite soon, so we'll aim to fix any issues caused by 6.5 in that release. Most importantly, the new architecture finally allows us to implement some Big Things with SmartAssembly we've been planning for many months; these will fundamentally change how you build, release and monitor your application. Stay tuned for further updates!

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• How To Build An Enterprise Application - Introduction

  - by Tuan Nguyen

  An enterprise application is a software which fulfills 4 core quality attributes: Reliability Flexibility Reusability Maintainability Reliability is the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specific period of time. Because there are no ways more than testing to make sure a system is reliability, we can exchange the term reliability with the term testability. Flexibility is the ability of changing a system's core features without violating unrelated features or components. Although flexibility can helps us to achieve interoperability easily but the opposite is not true. For example, a program might run on multiple platforms, contains logic for many scenarios but that wouldn't mean it was flexibility if it forces us rewrite code in all components when we just want to change some aspects of a feature it had. Reusability is the ability of sharing one or more system's components for another system. We should just open a component's reusability in the context in which it is used. For example, we write classes that implement UI logic and deliver them to only classes which implementing UI. Maintainability is the ability of adding or removing features to a system after it was released. Maintainability consists of many factors such as readability, analyzability, extensibility therein extensibility is critical. Maintainability requires us to write code that is longer and complexer than normal but it doesn't mean we introduce unneccessarily complex code. We always try to make our code clear and transparent to everyone. An application enterprise is built on an enterprise design which consists of two parts: low-level design and high-level design. At low-level design, it focuses on building loose-coupled classes or components. Particularly, it recommends: Each class or component undertakes only single responsibility (design based on unit test) Classes or components implement and work through interfaces (design based on contract) Dependency relationship between classes and components could be injected at run-time (design based on dependency) At high-level design, it focuses on architecting system into tiers and layers. Particularly, it recommends: Divide system into subsystems for deployment. Each subsytem is called a tier. Typical, an enterprise application would have 3 tiers as illustrated in the following figure: Arrange classes and components to logical containers called layers. Typical, an enterprise application would have 5 layers as illustrated in the following figure

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• Subterranean IL: Custom modifiers

  - by Simon Cooper

  In IL, volatile is an instruction prefix used to set a memory barrier at that instruction. However, in C#, volatile is applied to a field to indicate that all accesses on that field should be prefixed with volatile. As I mentioned in my previous post, this means that the field definition needs to store this information somehow, as such a field could be accessed from another assembly. However, IL does not have a concept of a 'volatile field'. How is this information stored? Attributes The standard way of solving this is to apply a VolatileAttribute or similar to the field; this extra metadata notifies the C# compiler that all loads and stores to that field should use the volatile prefix. However, there is a problem with this approach, namely, the .NET C++ compiler. C++ allows methods to be overloaded using properties, like volatile or const, on the parameters; this is perfectly legal C++: public ref class VolatileMethods { void Method(int *i) {} void Method(volatile int *i) {} } If volatile was specified using a custom attribute, then the VolatileMethods class wouldn't be compilable to IL, as there is nothing to differentiate the two methods from each other. This is where custom modifiers come in. Custom modifiers Custom modifiers are similar to custom attributes, but instead of being applied to an IL element separately to its declaration, they are embedded within the field or parameter's type signature itself. The VolatileMethods class would be compiled to the following IL: .class public VolatileMethods { .method public instance void Method(int32* i) {} .method public instance void Method( int32 modreq( [mscorlib]System.Runtime.CompilerServices.IsVolatile)* i) {} } The modreq([mscorlib]System.Runtime.CompilerServices.IsVolatile) is the custom modifier. This adds a TypeDef or TypeRef token to the signature of the field or parameter, and even though they are mostly ignored by the CLR when it's executing the program, this allows methods and fields to be overloaded in ways that wouldn't be allowed using attributes. Because the modifiers are part of the signature, they need to be fully specified when calling such a method in IL: call instance void Method( int32 modreq([mscorlib]System.Runtime.CompilerServices.IsVolatile)*) There are two ways of applying modifiers; modreq specifies required modifiers (like IsVolatile), and modopt specifies optional modifiers that can be ignored by compilers (like IsLong or IsConst). The type specified as the modifier argument are simple placeholders; if you have a look at the definitions of IsVolatile and IsLong they are completely empty. They exist solely to be referenced by a modifier. Custom modifiers are used extensively by the C++ compiler to specify concepts that aren't expressible in IL, but still need to be taken into account when calling method overloads. C++ and C# That's all very well and good, but how does this affect C#? Well, the C++ compiler uses modreq(IsVolatile) to specify volatility on both method parameters and fields, as it would be slightly odd to have the same concept represented using a modifier or attribute depending on what it was applied to. Once you've compiled your C++ project, it can then be referenced and used from C#, so the C# compiler has to recognise the modreq(IsVolatile) custom modifier applied to fields, and vice versa. So, even though you can't overload fields or parameters with volatile using C#, volatile needs to be expressed using a custom modifier rather than an attribute to guarentee correct interoperability and behaviour with any C++ dlls that happen to come along. Next up: a closer look at attributes, and how certain attributes compile in unexpected ways.

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• Transparent Technology from Amazon

  - by David Dorf

  Amazon has been making some interesting moves again, this time in the augmented humanity area.  Augmented humanity is about helping humans overcome their shortcomings using technology.  Putting a powerful smartphone in your pocket helps you in many ways like navigating streets, communicating with far off friends, and accessing information.  But the interface for smartphones is somewhat limiting and unnatural, so companies have been looking for ways to make the technology more transparent and therefore easier to use. When Apple helped us drop the stylus, we took a giant leap forward in simplicity.  Using touchscreens with intuitive gestures was part of the iPhone's original appeal.  People don't want to know that technology is there -- they just want the benefits.  So what's the next leap beyond the touchscreen to make smartphones even easier to use? Two natural ways we interact with the world around us is by using sight and voice.  Google and Apple have been using both in their mobile platforms for limited uses cases.  Nobody actually wants to type a text message, so why not just speak it?  Any if you want more information about a book, why not just snap a picture of the cover?  That's much more accurate than trying to key the title and/or author. So what's Amazon been doing?  First, Amazon released a new iPhone app called Flow that allows iPhone users to see information about products in context.  Yes, its an augmented reality app that uses the phone's camera to view products, and overlays data about the products on the screen.  For the most part it requires the barcode to be visible to correctly identify the product, but I believe it can also recognize certain logos as well.  Download the app and try it out but don't expect perfection.  Its good enough to demonstrate the concept, but its far from accurate enough.  (MobileBeat did a pretty good review.)  Extrapolate to the future and we might just have a heads-up display in our eyeglasses. The second interesting area is voice response, for which Siri is getting lots of attention.  Amazon may have purchased a voice recognition company called Yap, although the deal is not confirmed.  But it would make perfect sense, especially with the Kindle Fire in Amazon's lineup. I believe over the next 3-5 years the way in which we interact with smartphones will mature, and they will become more transparent yet more important to our daily lives.  This will, of course, impact the way we shop, making information more readily accessible than it already is.  Amazon seems to be positioning itself to be at the forefront of this trend, so we should be watching them carefully.

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• Class Design -- Multiple Calls from One Method or One Call from Multiple Methods?

  - by Andrew

  I've been working on some code recently that interfaces with a CMS we use and it's presented me with a question on class design that I think is applicable in a number of situations. Essentially, what I am doing is extracting information from the CMS and transforming this information into objects that I can use programatically for other purposes. This consists of two steps: Retrieve the data from the CMS (we have a DAL that I use, so this is essentially just specifying what data from the CMS I want--no connection logic or anything like that) Map the parsed data to my own [C#] objects There are basically two ways I can approach this: One call from multiple methods public void MainMethodWhereIDoStuff() { IEnumerable<MyObject> myObjects = GetMyObjects(); // Do other stuff with myObjects } private static IEnumerable<MyObject> GetMyObjects() { IEnumerable<CmsDataItem> cmsDataItems = GetCmsDataItems(); List<MyObject> mappedObjects = new List<MyObject>(); // do stuff to map the CmsDataItems to MyObjects return mappedObjects; } private static IEnumerable<CmsDataItem> GetCmsDataItems() { List<CmsDataItem> cmsDataItems = new List<CmsDataItem>(); // do stuff to get the CmsDataItems I want return cmsDataItems; } Multiple calls from one method public void MainMethodWhereIDoStuff() { IEnumerable<CmsDataItem> cmsDataItems = GetCmsDataItems(); IEnumerable<MyObject> myObjects = GetMyObjects(cmsDataItems); // do stuff with myObjects } private static IEnumerable<MyObject> GetMyObjects(IEnumerable<CmsDataItem> itemsToMap) { // ... } private static IEnumerable<CmsDataItem> GetCmsDataItems() { // ... } I am tempted to say that the latter is better than the former, as GetMyObjects does not depend on GetCmsDataItems, and it is explicit in the calling method the steps that are executed to retrieve the objects (I'm concerned that the first approach is kind of an object-oriented version of spaghetti code). On the other hand, the two helper methods are never going to be used outside of the class, so I'm not sure if it really matters whether one depends on the other. Furthermore, I like the fact that in the first approach the objects can be retrieved from one line-- most likely anyone working with the main method doesn't care how the objects are retrieved, they just need to retrieve the objects, and the "daisy chained" helper methods hide the exact steps needed to retrieve them (in practice, I actually have a few more methods but am still able to retrieve the object collection I want in one line). Is one of these methods right and the other wrong? Or is it simply a matter of preference or context dependent?

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for December 6, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Above and Beyond with the A-Team Maybe it's the coffee… If you follow this blog you've probably noticed that I regularly feature posts from members of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture team, otherwise known as the A-Team. One of those bloggers, someone identified only as "fip" who writes on the A-Team SOA blog, went above and beyond on Dec 4, publishing a total of four substantial technical posts in a single day, each one worth a look: Retrieve Performance Data from SOA Infrastructure Database Configure Oracle SOA JMSAdatper to Work with WLS JMS Topics How to Achieve OC4J RMI Load Balancing Using BPEL Performance Statistics to Diagnose Performance Bottlenecks Web Service Example - Part 3: Asynchronous | The Oracle ADF Mobile Blog Part 3 in this series from the Oracle ADF Mobile blog looks at "firing the web service asynchronously and then filling in the UI when it completes." Denis says, "This can be useful when you have data on the device in a local store and want to show that to the user while the application uses lazy loading from a web service to load more data." ADF Mobile - Implementing Reusable Mobile Architecture | Andrejus Baranovskis "Reusability was always a strong part of ADF," says Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. "The same high reusability level is supported now in ADF Mobile." The objective of this post is "to prove technically that [the] reusable architecture concept works for ADF Mobile." Basic is Best | Eric Stephens "The world we live in and enterprises we strive to transform with enterprise architecture are complicated organisms, much like the human body," says Oracle Enterprise Architect Eric Stephens. "But sometimes a simple solution is the best approach...Whatever level of abstraction you are working at, less is more." Selling Federal Enterprise Architecture | Ted McLaughlan "EA must be 'sold' directly to the communities that matter from a coordinated, proactive messaging perspective that takes BOTH the Program-level value drivers AND the broader Agency mission and IT maturity context into consideration, " explains Ted McLaughlan. And that's true for any organization. Avoiding the "I'm Spartacus" Scenario in SOA | Ben Wilcock "This ‘SOA Spartacus’ scenario usually occurs quite soon after SOA is articulated as the primary strategic direction of the programme," says Ben Wilcock, "but before the organisation’s SOA capability is mature enough to understand what is meant by SOA, and how it should be designed and delivered." In such cases, perhaps the "A" in SOA is missing, no? Thought for the Day "It makes me feel guilty that anybody should have such a good time doing what they are supposed to do." — Charles Eames (1907–1978) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Script For Detecting Availability of XMLHttp in Internet Explorer

  - by Duncan Mills

  Having the XMLHttpRequest API available is key to any ADF Faces Rich Client application. Unfortunately, it is possible for users to switch off this option in Internet Explorer as a Security setting. Without XMLHttpRequest available, your ADF Faces application will simply not work correctly, but rather than giving the user a bad user experience wouldn't it be nicer to tell them that they need to make some changes in order to use the application?  Thanks to Blake Sullivan in the ADF Faces team we now have a little script that can do just this. The script is available from https://samplecode.oracle.com here - The attached file browserCheck.js is what you'll need to add to your project.The best way to use this script is to make changes to whatever template you are using for the entry points to your application. If you're not currently using template then you'll have to make the same change in each of your JSPX pages. Save the browserCheck.js file into a /js/ directory under your HTML root within your UI project (e.g. ViewController)In the template or page, select the <af:document> object in the Structure window. From the right mouse (context) menu choose Facet and select the metaContainer facet.Switch to the source code view and locate the metaContainer facet. Then insert the following lines (I've included the facet tag for clarity but you'll already have that):      <f:facet name="metaContainer">        <af:resource type="javascript"                      source="/js/browserCheck.js"/>        <af:resource type="javascript">           xmlhttpNativeCheck(                     "help/howToConfigureYourBrowser.html");        </af:resource>      </f:facet>Note that the argument to the xmlhttpNativeCheck function is a page that you want to show to the user if they need to change their browser configuration. So build this page in the appropriate place as well. You can also just call the function without any arguments e.g. xmlhttpNativeCheck(); in which case it will pop up default instructions for the user to follow, but not redirect to any other page.

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• Best practices for logging and tracing in .NET

  - by Levidad

  I've been reading a lot about tracing and logging, trying to find some golden rule for best practices in the matter, but there isn't any. People say that good programmers produce good tracing, but put it that way and it has to come from experience. I've also read similar questions in here and through the internet and they are not really the same thing I am asking or do not have a satisfying answer, maybe because the questions lack some detail. So, folks say that tracing should sort of replicate the experience of debugging the application in cases where you can't attach a debugger. It should provide enough context so that you can see which path is taken at each control point in the application. Going deeper, you can even distinguish between tracing and event logging, in that "event logging is different from tracing in that it captures major states rather than detailed flow of control". Now, say I want to do my tracing and logging using only the standard .NET classes, those in the System.Diagnostics namespace. I figured that the TraceSource class is better for the job than the static Trace class, because I want to differentiate among the trace levels and using the TraceSource class I can pass in a parameter informing the event type, while using the Trace class I must use Trace.WriteLineIf and then verify things like SourceSwitch.TraceInformation and SourceSwitch.TraceErrors, and it doesn't even have properties like TraceVerbose or TraceStart. With all that in mind, would you consider a good practice to do as follows: Trace a "Start" event when begining a method, which should represent a single logical operation or a pipeline, along with a string representation of the parameter values passed in to the method. Trace an "Information" event when inserting an item into the database. Trace an "Information" event when taking one path or another in an important if/else statement. Trace a "Critical" or "Error" in a catch block depending on weather this is a recoverable error. Trace a "Stop" event when finishing the execution of the method. And also, please clarify when best to trace Verbose and Warning event types. If you have examples of code with nice trace/logging and are willing to share, that would be excelent. Note: I've found some good information here, but still not what I am looking for: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff714589.aspx Thanks in advance!

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• Creating the Completely Customized World Just for YOU

  - by divya.malik

  OK so not a customized world, but do you know what goes into creating that customized web store front for you? How do you get those additional offers from vendors when you call in for service or when you are browsing a storefront. This is what is has been happening behind the scenes.  When a customer calls in a contact center for service, at the end of the conversation, they are offered a new product, or service. But what just transpired was that the CRM system that was in place had routed the call to the right agent, the agent got the pop up screen with the customer information, and the call request  was handled. Then came the decision point to cross-sell and up-sell, The agent got some recommended offers that were created based on analyzed data (this data had been put into a data warehouse, modeled, profiled and rules were implemented e.g.. People with profile X like product Y).  But with this system, what happens is that analytics can be applied to a very small subset. Now comes Real Time Decisioning (RTD), this helps companies make optimal decisions in the context of transactional systems. It enables companies to improve business processes with real time intelligence on every single transaction. RTD is like a service plug-in that you put at the back of your transactional systems and that you  ping to get a recommendation.  It listens to business process flows and data moving through the process, getting all that data, processes all that you can do with that data, and gives out out various offers. It takes a process centric view of analytics rather than just a data centric view. It continuously observes and learns from ever-changing customer behavior and applies those insights to providing real-time decisions and recommendations at any customer touch point. At Oracle we define Real Time Decisioning as “ The solution that addresses a business issue faced by all organizations : how to make accurate decisions, using the most up to date information, in real time…consistently and in large volumes”. Here is a video on recommendation engines that are benefiting from real time decisioning today and see how it is helping online vendors.

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• SQL Server PowerShell Provider follows the Version of PowerShell on the Host and other errata

  - by BuckWoody

  There may be some misunderstanding on how the PowerShell Provider for SQL Server works. I’ve written an article or two explaining that you can use PowerShell with SQL Server, without having the SQL Server 2008 (or higher) provider around. After all, PowerShell just uses .NET, and SQL Server “Server Management Objects” or SMO listen to that interface as well. In SQL Server 2008 and higher we created a “MiniShell” for PowerShell that gives you the ability to treat a SQL Server Instance as a drive (called a “Provider” or path or drive) and a few commands (called command-lets). Using these two simple constructs you can move around SQL Server quickly and work with the objects it holds. I read the other day where someone stated that we had “re-compiled” PowerShell, so that you would have version 1.0 from SQL Server and 2.0 on your new server. Not so! Drop to a SQLPS prompt and a PowerShell prompt and type this in each: $PSVersionTable They should return the same value. You can think of a MiniShell as simply a compiled “profile” that gives you those providers and command-lets automatically – that’s all. In fact, you can load the SMO libraries yourself without the SQL Server 2008 Provider anywhere in sight. I do this all the time, since the MiniShell also has other restrictions. Also remember that if you run a PowerShell script as a SQL Agent Job step type (in 2008 and higher) that you’re running under the context of the account that starts Agent – I think most folks know this, but it’s good to keep in mind. There’s a re-written section of Books Online that goes over working with this very nicely – also covers the question “How to I connect to another server using the SQL Server PowerShell Provider” (hint: It’s just CD) and “How do I load all the SMO stuff if I don’t want to use the Provider” and more. Be sure and check out the note at the bottom that explains the firewall exceptions you’ll need to enable to CD to that remote server. Here’s that link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281947.aspx Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Thoughts on C# Extension Methods

  - by Damon

  I'm not a huge fan of extension methods.  When they first came out, I remember seeing a method on an object that was fairly useful, but when I went to use it another piece of code that method wasn't available.  Turns out it was an extension method and I hadn't included the appropriate assembly and imports statement in my code to use it.  I remember being a bit confused at first about how the heck that could happen (hey, extension methods were new, cut me some slack) and it took a bit of time to track down exactly what it was that I needed to include to get that method back.  I just imagined a new developer trying to figure out why a method was missing and fruitlessly searching on MSDN for a method that didn't exist and it just didn't sit well with me. I am of the opinion that if you have an object, then you shouldn't have to include additional assemblies to get additional instance level methods out of that object.  That opinion applies to namespaces as well - I do not like it when the contents of a namespace are split out into multiple assemblies.  I prefer to have static utility classes instead of extension methods to keep things nicely packaged into a cohesive unit.  It also makes it abundantly clear where utility methods are used in code.  I will concede, however, that it can make code a bit more verbose and lengthy.  There is always a trade-off. Some people harp on extension methods because it breaks the tenants of object oriented development and allows you to add methods to sealed classes.  Whatever.  Extension methods are just utility methods that you can tack onto an object after the fact.  Extension methods do not give you any more access to an object than the developer of that object allows, so I say that those who cry OO foul on extension methods really don't have much of an argument on which to stand.  In fact, I have to concede that my dislike of them is really more about style than anything of great substance. One interesting thing that I found regarding extension methods is that you can call them on null objects. Take a look at this extension method: namespace ExtensionMethods {   public static class StringUtility   {     public static int WordCount(this string str)     {       if(str == null) return 0;       return str.Split(new char[] { ' ', '.', '?' },         StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Length;     }   }   } Notice that the extension method checks to see if the incoming string parameter is null.  I was worried that the runtime would perform a check on the object instance to make sure it was not null before calling an extension method, but that is apparently not the case.  So, if you call the following code it runs just fine. string s = null; int words = s.WordCount(); I am a big fan of things working, but this seems to go against everything I've come to know about instance level methods.  However, an extension method is really a static method masquerading as an instance-level method, so I suppose it would be far more frustrating if it failed since there is really no reason it shouldn't succeed. Although I'm not a fan of extension methods, I will say that if you ever find yourself at an impasse with a die-hard fan of either the utility class or extension method approach, then there is a common ground.  Extension methods are defined in static classes, and you call them from those static classes as well as directly from the objects they extend.  So if you build your utility classes using extension methods, then you can have it your way and they can have it theirs. 

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• Social Analytics and the Customer

  - by David Dorf

  Many successful retailers put the customer at the center of everything they do, so its important that the customer is modeled correctly across all their systems.  The path to omni-channel starts and ends with the customer so at ARTS, our next big project is focused on ensuring a consistent representation of customers across our transactional data model, datawarehouse model, and XML schemas.  Further, we've started a new whitepaper that describes how Big Data and Social Media Analytics should be leveraged by retailers to add and additional level of customer insight. Let's start by taking a closer look at the meaning of social analytics.  Here's my definition: Social Analytics, in the retail context, describes the analysis of data obtained from social media sources in an effort to better comprehend and interact with the community of consumers.  This discipline seeks to understand what’s being said by the community about brands and products (“monitoring”), as well as understand the behaviors of those in the community (“profiling”).  The results are used to enforce the brand image, improve product decisions, and better focus marketing, all of which lead to increased sales. To help illustrate the facets of social analytics, I drew the diagram below which was originally published by Retail Touchpoints. There are lots of tools on the market that allow retailers to monitor social media for brand and product mentions.  These include analysis of sentiment, reach, share of voice, engagement, etc.  When your brand is mentioned, good or bad, its an opportunity to engage with the customer and possibly lead to a sale.  Because products are not always unique, its much more difficult to monitor product mentions, but detecting product trends early can help a retailer make better merchandising decisions, especially in fashion. Once a retailer understands what's being said, the next step is learn more about who's saying it.  That involves profiling customers beyond simple demographics to understand their motivations.  Much can be learned from patterns, and even more when customers voluntarily share their data.  Knowing that a customer is passionate about, for example, mountain biking allows the retailer to make relevant offers on helmets, ask for opinions on hydration, and help spread marketing messages. Social analytics has many facets that benefit retailers, some of which are easy but many of which are hard.  Its important for the CMO and CIO to work closely together to plan for these capabilities and monitor the maturity of tools on the market.  This is an area that will separate winners from losers.

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• Building ATLAS (and later Octave w/ ATLAS)

  - by David Parks

  I'm trying to set up ATLAS (so I can later compile octave with ATLAS support). If I'm correct, I still need to build this manually due to the environment specific optimizations. I do see a package for ATLAS, but it looks like it's using the cross platform generic build options (e.g. "it'll be slow"). So, running the configure script as described in the docs seems to go poorly. As a java developer I never do well at making heads or tails of errors in these build processes. Am I missing dependencies (if so is there any documentation on what I need)? allusers@vbubuntu:~/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu$ ../configure -b 64 -D c -DPentiumCPS=3000 --with-netlib-lapack-tarfile=/home/allusers/Downloads/lapack-3.5.0.tgz make: `xconfig' is up to date. ./xconfig -d s /home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu/../ -d b /home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu -b 64 -D c -DPentiumCPS=3000 -Si lapackref 1 OS configured as Linux (1) Assembly configured as GAS_x8664 (2) Vector ISA Extension configured as SSE3 (6,448) ERROR: enum fam=3, chip=2, mach=0 make[3]: *** [atlas_run] Error 44 make[2]: *** [IRunArchInfo_x86] Error 2 Architecture configured as Corei1 (25) ERROR: enum fam=3, chip=2, mach=0 make[3]: *** [atlas_run] Error 44 make[2]: *** [IRunArchInfo_x86] Error 2 Clock rate configured as 2350Mhz ERROR: enum fam=3, chip=2, mach=0 make[3]: *** [atlas_run] Error 44 make[2]: *** [IRunArchInfo_x86] Error 2 Maximum number of threads configured as 4 Parallel make command configured as '$(MAKE) -j 4' ERROR: enum fam=3, chip=2, mach=0 make[3]: *** [atlas_run] Error 44 make[2]: *** [IRunArchInfo_x86] Error 2 Cannot detect CPU throttling. rm -f config1.out make atlas_run atldir=/home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu exe=xprobe_comp redir=config1.out \ args="-v 0 -o atlconf.txt -O 1 -A 25 -Si nof77 0 -V 448 -b 64 -d b /home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu" make[1]: Entering directory `/home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu' cd /home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu ; ./xprobe_comp -v 0 -o atlconf.txt -O 1 -A 25 -Si nof77 0 -V 448 -b 64 -d b /home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu > config1.out make[2]: gfortran: Command not found make[2]: *** [IRunF77Comp] Error 127 make[2]: g77: Command not found make[2]: *** [IRunF77Comp] Error 127 make[2]: f77: Command not found make[2]: *** [IRunF77Comp] Error 127 Unable to find usable compiler for F77; abortingMake sure compilers are in your path, and specify good compilers to configure (see INSTALL.txt or 'configure --help' for details)make[1]: *** [atlas_run] Error 8 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu' make: *** [IRun_comp] Error 2 ERROR 512 IN SYSCMND: 'make IRun_comp args="-v 0 -o atlconf.txt -O 1 -A 25 -Si nof77 0 -V 448 -b 64"' mkdir src bin tune interfaces mkdir: cannot create directory ‘src’: File exists mkdir: cannot create directory ‘bin’: File exists mkdir: cannot create directory ‘tune’: File exists mkdir: cannot create directory ‘interfaces’: File exists make: *** [make_subdirs] Error 1 make -f Make.top startup make[1]: Entering directory `/home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu' Make.top:1: Make.inc: No such file or directory Make.top:325: warning: overriding commands for target `/AtlasTest' Make.top:76: warning: ignoring old commands for target `/AtlasTest' make[1]: *** No rule to make target `Make.inc'. Stop. make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/allusers/Downloads/atlas3.10.1/build_vbubuntu' make: *** [startup] Error 2 mv: cannot move ‘lapack-3.5.0’ to ‘../reference/lapack-3.5.0’: Directory not empty mv: cannot stat ‘lib/Makefile’: No such file or directory ../configure: 450: ../configure: cannot create lib/Makefile: Directory nonexistent ../configure: 451: ../configure: cannot create lib/Makefile: Directory nonexistent ../configure: 452: ../configure: cannot create lib/Makefile: Directory nonexistent ../configure: 453: ../configure: cannot create lib/Makefile: Directory nonexistent ../configure: 509: ../configure: cannot create lib/Makefile: Directory nonexistent DONE configure

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• Star rating not showing in rich snippets

  - by Danny R

  We've recently been doing a lot of work on our site's SEO (www.betterthanreviews.com). We recently did a push to update the rich snippets breadcrumb, meta description, and star rating. After giving Google some time to index the site, it has updated the breadcrumbs and meta descriptions for our review pages, but the stars are still not showing. This is currently how it appears on a Google search (link to the actual page: http://www.betterthanreviews.com/home-security/livewatch): This is what the Rich Snippets is supposed to look like, and how it appears in Google's testing tool: More context: As seen in our html, we are using schema.org language. We initially were using schema.org/Corporation for the site, but we now have the page labeled as schema.org/HomeAndConstructionBusiness because Google will not show star ratings for the Corporation language. However, in our Webmaster Tools, the Structured Data is still showing the Corporation language, which could be a potential issue. Here is a look at some of the coding that we used. But it can be looked at closer by inspecting the element: <div class="aggregate-rating" itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating"> <div class="review row_fluid" itemprop="review" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"> <div class="row_fluid rating" itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating"> <meta content="4.5" itemprop="ratingValue" title="4.5 out of 5 stars" class="star-rating-readonly"> <meta content="2013-12-05" itemprop="datePublished"> <p class="review-headline" itemprop="headline">Way better than my previous system</p> <div> <p class="reviewer" itemprop="author">Scott H. </p> <span class="bullet">•</span> <p class="created_at">2 months ago</p> <p class="content" itemprop="description">I love it! The experience I have had so far is extremely positive. I had another alarm system before and I didn't like it but this one is really nice. I am telling everybody about it.</p> </div> </div> Any suggestions for how to fix this?

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• Brightness Crash and Fan issues in 12.04.1

  - by S.A. McIntosh

  I would just like to state beforehand that I am a total novice in using Ubuntu when it comes to the more complex issues. So I thought it would be best to finally come here and ask for help before being re-directed or closed out for a solution. I have already looked high and low on this board for one but nothing came up for my particular case, so I might as well take a shot asking for the first time here. This is what I have at the moment: -Dell Insprion 1764 w/ 64-bit Intel i5 Core -Dual Boot: Windows 7/Ubuntu 12.04.1 32-bit (from 12.04 install) -Unity shell -Linux kernel: 3.2.0-32 generic-pae ...and this is my fglrxinfo: OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series OpenGL version string: 4.2.11627 Compatibility Profile Context The one issue I have with using Ubuntu is brightness. With the driver in every time I use the slider in the brightness and lock settings or use the keyboard function, it freezes, goes black and comes up with a scrambled colors page like this in the video. So I have looked all over this board and the web for answers looking for a solution that might have an answer. This is what I have done so far to fix this: -First Solution: Looking around, I found this small fix using terminal: sudo gedit /etc/rc.local followed by adding this into "rc.local" echo # > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness This works rarely with the graphics driver still in and I often get lucky say during restart but reboot would only snap back the brightness at max. -Second Solution Simply remove the graphics driver while leaving the solution of first behind. This solves the issue but results in having the monitor flicker and flash at startup which in itself is not a problem to me but maybe not so good for monitor health. Also it causes the fan to speed up throughout the session and render any program that needs the driver useless. -Third Solution This is the most obvious. Just simply use the brightness on AMD Catalyst Control Center software that came with the driver, and I can say that it's form of brightness is HORRIBLE compared to the actual settings. Which leads up to where I am now, back to the driver to stop the fan speed-up and seems that the only solution to the brightness crash is to use the keyboard-controlled brightness at the login screen NOT the desktop if I want the issued effect but will just snap at max bright again if I restart. Fan speed problem is dealt with but now run the risk of crashing my computer if I so much touch the brightness settings. Speaking of which I found this on launchpad and it seems that the issue has been going far since June of 2012. Any help, redirect link or reference would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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• BPM ADF Task forms. Checking whether the current user is in a BPM Swimlane

  - by Christopher Karl Chan

  @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --Focus So this blog entry will focus on BPM Swimlane roles and users from a ADF context. So we have an ADF Task Details Form and we are in the process of making it richer and dynamic in functionality. A common requirement could be to dynamically show different areas based on the user logged into the workspace. Perhaps even we want to know even what swim-lane role the user belongs to. It is is a little bit harder to achieve then one thinks unless you know the trick. The Challenge The tricky part here is that the ADF Task Details Form is in fact part of a separate J2EE application to the main workspace. So if you try to use Java or Expression Language to get the logged in user you will only find anonymous and none of the BPM Roles you will be expecting. So what to do? The Magic First add the BC4J Security library to your view project. Then Restart JDeveloper. Now find the web.xml file in the view project of your ADF Task Details Application and look for the JpsFilter section. Then add in the following section. <init-param> <param-name>application.name</param-name> <param-value>OracleBPMProcessRolesApp</param-value></init-param> This will link your application to that of the BPM workspace. Then in your dynamic part of your ADF form you can now check whether the user logged into the BPM Workspace belongs in a BPM swim-lane in any BPM process. The best way to do this is by using expression language in the JSF page itself. Here I am simply changing the rendered flag to either true or false and thereby hiding or showing a section. Perhaps you are re-using the same form for a task in an approver swim-lane and ordinary user swimlane. So we only want the approver to see this field. So call the built in function to check if the user is a member of the BPM swim-lane role. The name of the role must be of the syntax BPMProject.RoleName <af:outputText value="This will only be rendered when the user is part of the BPM Swimlane Role rendered="#{securityContext.userInRole['BPMProjectName.Rolename']}"/> Now you must redeploy your ADF Task Form project Now (in the image above) the text will ONLY get rendered in the Task Details Form only if the user logged into the workspace is a member of the swimlane Unsecure of the BPM project SimpleTask

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• links for 2011-02-08

  - by Bob Rhubart

  When It Comes to Data Integration, Oracle Is the Right Choice (tags: ping.fm) When It Comes to Data Integration, Oracle Is the Right Choice (tags: ping.fm) Webcast: Webcast: Deploy Oracle VM Templates for Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Applications. Feb 15. Event Date: 02/15/2011 9:00am PT / Noon ET. Featured Speakers: Adam Hawley (Oracle Senior Director, Product Management, Virtualization), Ivo Dujmovic (Oracle Director, Technology Integration), Greg Kelly (Oracle Product Strategy Manager - PeopleTools). (tags: oracle virtualization peoplesoft) Webcast: Managing Oracle Exadata with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. Ask Oracle experts questions and learn firsthand how to efficiently manage all stages of Oracle Exadata’s lifecycle, from testing to deployment. (tags: oracle exalogic enterprisemanager) Arthur Cole: Winning the Consolidated Data Center Future | ITBusinessEdge.com "According to InformationWeek, the amount of data under management is increasing by about 20 percent per year, with some organizations having to deal with 50 percent or more. That means capacity needs to double every two or three years." - Arthur Cole (tags: dataconsolidation enterprisearchitecture) Transformation of Product Management in Telecommunications for Rapid Launch of Next Generation Products (Telecommunications Architecture Corner) Raul Goycoolea's post examines "how enterprise product management enabled by PLM-based product catalogue solutions helps to launch next generation products rapidly in the context of the Telecommunication Industry." (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture) Richard Veryard on Architecture: What is an EA vendor? "Even some people who insist that enterprise architecture shouldn't be thought of as merely software architecture seem to think that 'tools' only means 'software tools.'" - Richard Veryard (tags: enterprisearchitecture) MDM for Tax Authorities (Oracle Master Data Management) "Tax Authorities face a multitude of IT challenges," says David Butler. "Compounding these issues is the fact that the IT architectures in operation at most revenue and collections agencies are very complex." (tags: oracle otn MDM ITarchitecture) Bernard Golden: How Cloud Computing Changes IT Staffs | CIO.com | CIO.com "Enterprise architects become more important" tops Bernard's list of changes. (tags: cloudcomputing staffing cio enterprisearchitecture) Martijn Linssen: Social Enterprise Magic Quadrant "Revolutions usually go wrong, where evolutions usually go right." - Martijn Linssen (tags: socialcomputing enterprise2.0) Why Do IT Roles Fail? | CIO "The roles that come up most often are the ones that are not directly building or maintaining systems. These include architecture, planning, vendor management, relationship management, PMO, and security." - Marc Cecere (tags: softwarearchitecture technologyroles) We're Hiring! - Server and Desktop Virtualization Product Management (Oracle's Virtualization Blog) Adam Hawley with information on an opportunity for qualified job seekers. (tags: oracle otn employment virtualization)

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• How to recover from finite-state-machine breakdown?

  - by Earl Grey

  My question may seems very scientific but I think it's a common problem and seasoned developers and programmers hopefully will have some advice to avoid the problem I mention in title. Btw., what I describe bellow is a real problem I am trying to proactively solve in my iOS project, I want to avoid it at all cost. By finite state machine I mean this I have a UI with a few buttons, several session states relevant to that UI and what this UI represents, I have some data which values are partly displayed in the UI, I receive and handle some external triggers (represented by callbacks from sensors). I made state diagrams to better map the relevant scenarios that are desirable and alowable in that UI and application. As I slowly implement the code, the app starts to behave more and more like it should. However, I am not very confident that it is robust enough. My doubts come from watching my own thinking and implementation process as it goes. I was confident that I had everything covered, but it was enough to make a few brute tests in the UI and I quickly realized that there are still gaps in the behavior ..I patched them. However, as each component depends and behaves based on input from some other component, a certain input from user or some external source trigers a chain of events, state changes..etc. I have several components and each behave like this Trigger received on input - trigger and its sender analyzed - output something (a message, a state change) based on analysis The problem is, this is not completely selfcontained, and my components (a database item, a session state, some button's state)...COULD be changed, influenced, deleted, or otherwise modified, outside the scope of the event-chain or desirable scenario. (phone crashes, battery is empty phone turn of suddenly) This will introduce a nonvalid situation into the system, from which the system potentially COULD NOT BE ABLE to recover. I see this (althought people do not realize this is the problem) in many of my competitors apps that are on apple store, customers write things like this "I added three documents, and after going there and there, i cannot open them, even if a see them." or "I recorded videos everyday, but after recording a too log video, I cannot turn of captions on them.., and the button for captions doesn't work".. These are just shortened examples, customers often describe it in more detail..from the descriptions and behavior described in them, I assume that the particular app has a FSM breakdown. So the ultimate question is how can I avoid this, and how to protect the system from blocking itself? EDIT I am talking in the context of one viewcontroller's view on the phone, I mean one part of the application. I Understand the MVC pattern, I have separate modules for distinct functionality..everything I describe is relevant to one canvas on the UI.

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• How can story and gameplay be artfully merged?

  - by NauticalMile

  Let me give some context. Three of my friends and I have a pretty good game idea cooking. It's based off of a prototype I made that's evolving into a cool game mechanic. The mechanic itself is a toy that's fun on its own, but we haven't designed any puzzles around it yet. We have a design document going, and we are answering a lot of questions about what's in the game. It's become clear early on that everyone (including myself) likes the characters and the story a lot. Considering what our favorite games are, this is unsurprising. A story driven game makes sense to me. I like the emphasis that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year-Door, Portal 2, and Tomb Raider place on story, and I imagine our game will have a similar feel (lots of dialogue, plot twists, lovable characters). However, one team member raised this point in the design doc: I am feeling like [fleshing out the story] is our biggest hurdle right now for making more design decisions - like more specific decisions about levels etc. Is this true? I am uncertain about working on the story extensively before gameplay, and my uneasiness was reinforced when I read this question about story vs. gameplay. What I want to say is: "Let's continue to work on the story, but also start brainstorming and prototyping abstract puzzles and combat sequences, and we'll creatively match them together later." Is this a reasonable approach? If so, how much of the development of these elements should be done independently? Should I try and create a whole bunch of puzzles while my other teammates focus on story and aesthetics? Then when we have a lot of story and game 'chunks' we can match them with eachother to build something meaningful. Or should we focus on iterating individual levels as distinct units where puzzles, story, etc... are designed together? Or maybe we need to put our excitement about the story on hold and just focus on gameplay. Is there another approach to design that we can take? Am I missing something crucial? I have discussed story and gameplay because they seem the most likely to be at odds with each other, but we also have to consider user interface, music, art direction, etc... Can we design these independently as well?

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• Career Advice: finding challenging work in software and web development

  - by dianovich

  Having left my physics degree early, I started out in the realm of web design / front end web development and was able to get work quite quickly. I moved on to spend a chunk of my time on servers and gained experience with frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal, then the likes of Codeigniter and CakePHP and became comfortable in Debian-based and RHEL/CentOS environments. I ventured in to iOS development and published a couple of native apps to the app store too! I have started to spend a good deal of my time writing Python and have invested a little time in Django. The problem is, I still spend a fair chunk of my time doing more front end web development (writing markup and CSS for site themes, design-lead JavaScript, small applications for which application architecture and software engineering are relatively unimportant or too time consuming to invest in) in my job. What I want to do is really exercise the systematic/logical portion of my brain and tackle challenging problems on a daily basis. I want to have to care about big-oh running times, modularity in software, DRY, performance tuning and development methodologies. I want to work for a firm whose clients say: "Yes, these things are important to us and we'll pay you to get them right." But it is difficult: I have no formal training and am potentially becoming a jack of all trades. Not that being a jack of many trades is necessarily a bad thing, but the scope of work I find myself involved in is far too broad. And, there are only so many hours in a day outside of work! My question is: where do I go from here? I am starting to work on a few open source projects and have started to publish content to my blog. But this isn't likely to make it past the recruitment consultants and HR departments of many-a-firm. And I do not, for example, work in a team that practices agile methodologies, so how do I get work in such a team to gain experience? While I have been responsible for implementing version control and some solid working practices into our current environment, there is only so far I can go in this context. What would convince you that i'm worth taking a risk? What would convince you that i'll have caught up the other guys in your employ in next to no time?

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for September 9-15, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most-viewed items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of September 9-15, 2017. 15 Lessons from 15 Years as a Software Architect | Ingo Rammer In this presentation from the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen, Ingo Rammer shares 15 tips regarding people, complexity and technology that he learned doing software architecture for 15 years. Attend OTN Architect Day – by Architects, for Architects – October 25 You won't need 3D glasses to take in these live presentations (8 sessions, two tracks) on Cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems. And the ticket price is: Zero. Nothing. Absolutely free. Register now for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles , 8555 Beverly Boulevard , Los Angeles, CA 90048. Cloud API and service designers, stop thinking small | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld "The focus must shift away from fine-grained APIs that provide some type of primitive service, such as pushing data to a block of storage or perhaps making a request to a cloud-rooted database," says InfoWorld's David Linthicum. "To go beyond primitives, you must understand how these services should be used in a much larger architectural context. In other words, you need to understand how businesses will employ these services to form real workplace solutions—inside and outside the enterprise." Adding a runtime picker to a taskflow parameter in WebCenter | Yannick Ongena Oracle ACE Yannick Ongena shows how to create an Oracle WebCenter popup to allow users to "select items or do more complex things." Oracle IAM 11g R2 docs are now available "One of the great things about the new doc set is the inclusion of ePub files," says Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Chris Johnson. "This means that if you have an iPad you can load up the doc library onto that and read the docs on the couch." Setting up a local Yum Server using the Exalogic ZFS Storage Appliance | Donald A concise technical post from the man named Donald. What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2? | The Fat Bloke Sings "One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's," says The Fat Bloke. "Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends." The new VirtualBox release, a year in the making, addresses the needs of these users, he explains. Configuring Oracle Business Intelligence 11g MDS XML Source Control Management with Git Version Control | Christian Screen Oracle ACE Christian Screen developed this tutorial for those interested in learning how to configure the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g (11.1.1.6) metadata repository for development using the new MDS XML source control management functionality. Identity and Access Management at Oracle Open World 2012 | Brian Eidelman Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Brian Eideleman highlights three Oracle Openworld sessions that will put Identity and Access Management in the spotlight, and shares a link to the "Focus On: Identity Management" document, a comprehensive listing of Openworld activities also dealing with IM. Starting and stopping WebLogic automatically using Upstart | Chris Johnson "In Ubuntu, RedHat and Oracle Linux there's a new flavor of init called Upstart that all the kids are using," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Chris Johnson. "It's the new hotness when it comes to making programs into daemons and wiring them to start and stop at appropriate times." Thought for the Day "The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it." — Pamela Zave Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Build-time dependency resolving coming to Entity Framework. Now, how about those BI tools too?

  - by jamiet

  Three months ago I wrote a blog post entitled Some thoughts on Visual Studio database references and how they should be used for SQL Server BI where I shared some thoughts on a feature available to database developers in Visual Studio 2010 that I would love to see added to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS) and Reporting Services (SSRS). In there I said: Over the past few weeks I have been making heavy use of the Database tools in Visual Studio 2010 and one of the features that has most impressed me has been database references.   Database references allow you to have stored procedures in your database project that refer to objects (tables, views, stored procedures etc…) that exist in other database projects and hence when you build your database project it is able to resolve those references.   It occurred to me that similar functionality would be incredibly useful for SQL Server Integration Services(SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS) & Reporting Services (SSRS) projects. After all reports, packages and data source views are rife with references to database objects – why shouldn’t we be able to have design-time dependency checking in our BI projects the same way that database and .Net developers do? In that blog post I shared links to three Connect submissions where I requested this feature be added to SSIS, SSAS & SSRS. In addition I also submitted a request that the feature be extended to .Net projects so that any reference to a database object in a .Net assembly can be resolved at build time. That Connect submission is at [Entity FX] Use database references to constrain the EDM and overnight it received this comment from Microsoft: We have been working on this feature for a while and and will be available soon This is really good news - it improves the Microsoft developer ecosystem by ensuring invalid references to database references get caught at build time (ideally as part of a Continuous integration build) rather than run time. [Hopefully it might nip this code-first nonsense in the bud too (Ooo...way to incite flame comments :) ) ]. If you want to see this feature in action then check out a video from Teched Europe last month entitled SQL Server Developer Tools Code-named "Juneau" where it is demo'd by Lance Delano and Tim Laverty.   The point of this blog post though is not just to draw attention to this forthcoming feature for .Net developers, it is to ask you to petition Microsoft to get this feature added to SSIS/SSAS/SSRS too. After all, we already know (from the video above) that the feature is coming to this new code-name Juneau development environment plus we also know that Juneau will be the development environment for SSIS/SSAS/SSRS as well - is it really much of a stretch to expect the BI tools to have access to this great feature too? I don't think so and if you agree with me then I urge you to vote and add a comment to the Connection submissions that are requesting this feature. They are at: [SSAS] Declare Object Dependancies [SSRS] Declare Object Dependancies [SSIS] Declare Object Dependancies (Update, Apparently someone at Microsoft has deemed it necassary to set this to private and I am not able to change it back even though I submitted it. You can still vote on the other two though.) Let's close that SQL Developer Gap!   @Jamiet    

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• 45 minutes to talk about C# [closed]

  - by Philip

  I have the opportunity to give a 45 minute talk on C# in the theory of programming languages class I'm taking. The college teaches Java almost exclusively, so that's what all the students are most familiar with. (There's a little C, assembly, Prolog and LISP as well.) I decide what to talk about. It seems to me the best approach is to focus on a few of the big, obvious differences between C# and Java. I don't intend it to be a recommendation to use C# -- there are reasons to use each, mostly because of their ecosystems. So I want to focus on C# as a language. I don't want to go too fast and end up listing a whole bunch of features without showing their usefulness. My current plan is this: Functions as first class objects. This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest differences between C# and Java. The professor briefly mentioned this notion and showed a LISP example, but many of the students have probably never used it. I can show real world examples where it's made my code more readable. Lambda expressions as concise syntax for anonymous functions. Obviously with examples to show how this is useful. The real hit-home examples will be at the end when it's combined with the rest. I don't see an advantage to first showing the old delegate syntax and then replacing it with lambdas -- most of us won't have ever seen delegates anyway so it would just be confusing. The yield keyword and how it's different from returning an array. I have the impression that a lot of C# developers aren't familiar with how to use this. It will likely be very foreign to Java developers. I have some examples from my own work where it was really useful, such as iterating over a tree traversal, or iterating over neighbors in a graph where the neighbors aren't stored in memory. In both cases, doing it in Java would likely mean returning a complete list -- with yield I can stop iterating if I find what I want early on, without using memory for superfluous lists or arrays. Extension methods as a way to write implementation on interfaces. We'll all be familiar with how interfaces don't allow method implementation, and how this leads to code duplication. I'll show a specific example of this and how the extension method can solve the problem. Demonstrate how the above can be combined by implementing some simple Linq methods and using them. Where, Select, First, maybe more depending on how much time is left. Ideas on which ones might 'hit home' the best? There are other things I could talk about such as generics, value types, properties and more. I haven't yet though of good ways to incorporate these. In the case of generics and value types, the advantages might not be obvious or as relevant. Properties are obviously useful, particularly since we're taught strict JavaBeans here, but I don't know if I could integrate it with the "path to Linq" discussion above without it feeling tacked on. So I'm looking for thoughts on how to talk about C#, and what to talk about. Even minor details. I'm sure there are more experienced C# developers than me here who have good insight about what's really important in the language, and what would miss the point.

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• Is there a better term than "smoothness" or "granularity" to describe this language feature?

  - by Chris

  One of the best things about programming is the abundance of different languages. There are general purpose languages like C++ and Java, as well as little languages like XSLT and AWK. When comparing languages, people often use things like speed, power, expressiveness, and portability as the important distinguishing features. There is one characteristic of languages I consider to be important that, so far, I haven't heard [or been able to come up with] a good term for: how well a language scales from writing tiny programs to writing huge programs. Some languages make it easy and painless to write programs that only require a few lines of code, e.g. task automation. But those languages often don't have enough power to solve large problems, e.g. GUI programming. Conversely, languages that are powerful enough for big problems often require far too much overhead for small problems. This characteristic is important because problems that look small at first frequently grow in scope in unexpected ways. If a programmer chooses a language appropriate only for small tasks, scope changes can require rewriting code from scratch in a new language. And if the programmer chooses a language with lots of overhead and friction to solve a problem that stays small, it will be harder for other people to use and understand than necessary. Rewriting code that works fine is the single most wasteful thing a programmer can do with their time, but using a bazooka to kill a mosquito instead of a flyswatter isn't good either. Here are some of the ways this characteristic presents itself. Can be used interactively - there is some environment where programmers can enter commands one by one Requires no more than one file - neither project files nor makefiles are required for running in batch mode Can easily split code across multiple files - files can refeence each other, or there is some support for modules Has good support for data structures - supports structures like arrays, lists, and especially classes Supports a wide variety of features - features like networking, serialization, XML, and database connectivity are supported by standard libraries Here's my take on how C#, Python, and shell scripting measure up. Python scores highest. Feature C# Python shell scripting --------------- --------- --------- --------------- Interactive poor strong strong One file poor strong strong Multiple files strong strong moderate Data structures strong strong poor Features strong strong strong Is there a term that captures this idea? If not, what term should I use? Here are some candidates. Scalability - already used to decribe language performance, so it's not a good idea to overload it in the context of language syntax Granularity - expresses the idea of being good just for big tasks versus being good for big and small tasks, but doesn't express anything about data structures Smoothness - expresses the idea of low friction, but doesn't express anything about strength of data structures or features Note: Some of these properties are more correctly described as belonging to a compiler or IDE than the language itself. Please consider these tools collectively as the language environment. My question is about how easy or difficult languages are to use, which depends on the environment as well as the language.

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• Web Experience Management: Segmentation & Targeting - Chalk Talk with John

  - by Michael Snow

  Today's post comes from our WebCenter friend, John Brunswick.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Having trouble getting your arms around the differences between Web Content Management (WCM) and Web Experience Management (WEM)?  Told through story, the video below outlines the differences in an easy to understand manner. By following the journey of Mr. and Mrs. Smith on their adventure to find the best amusement park in two neighboring towns, we can clearly see what an impact context and relevancy play in our decision making within online channels.  Just as when we search to connect with the best products and services for our needs, the Smiths have their grandchildren coming to visit next week and finding the best park is essential to guarantee a great family vacation.  One town effectively Segments and Targets visitors to enhance their experience, reducing the effort needed to learn about their park. Have a look below to join the Smiths in their search.    Learn MORE about how you might measure up: Deliver Engaging Digital Experiences Drive Digital Marketing SuccessAccess Free Assessment Tool

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