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• Wireframing: A Day In the Life of UX Workshop at Oracle

  - by ultan o'broin

  The Oracle Applications User Experience team's Day in the Life (DITL) of User Experience (UX) event was run in Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ for Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OUAB) members. I was charged with putting together a wireframing session, together with Director of Financial Applications User Experience, Scott Robinson (@scottrobinson). Example of stunning new wireframing visuals we used on the DITL events. We put on a lively show, explaining the basics of wireframing, the concepts, what it is and isn't, considerations on wireframing tool choice, and then imparting some tips and best practices. But the real energy came when the OUAB customers and partners in the room were challenge to do some wireframing of their own. Wireframing is about bringing your business and product use cases to life in real UX visual terms, by creating a low-fidelity drawing to iterate and agree on in advance of prototyping and coding what is to be finally built and rolled out for users. All the best people wireframe. Leonardo da Vinci used "cartoons" on some great works, tracing outlines first and using red ochre or charcoal dropped through holes in the tracing parchment onto the canvas to outline the subject. (Image distributed under Wikimedia commons license) Wireframing an application's user experience design enables you to: Obtain stakeholder buy-in. Enable faster iteration of different designs. Determine the task flow navigation paths (in Oracle Fusion Applications navigation is linked with user roles). Develop a content strategy (readability, search engine optimization (SEO) of content, and so on) Lay out the pages, widgets, groups of features, and so on. Apply usability heuristics early (no replacement for usability testing, but a great way to do some heavy-lifting up front). Decide upstream which functional user experience design patterns to apply (out of the box solutions that expedite productivity). Assess which Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) or equivalent technology components can be used (again, developer productivity is enhanced downstream). We ran a lively hands-on exercise where teams wireframed a choice of application scenarios using the time-honored tools of pen and paper. Scott worked the floor like a pro, pointing out great use of features, best practices, innovations, and making sure that the whole concept of wireframing, the gestalt, transferred. "We need more buttons!" The cry of the energized. Not quite. The winning wireframe session (online shopping scenario) from the Applications UX DITL event shown. Great fun, great energy, and great teamwork were evident in the room. Naturally, there were prizes for the best wireframe. Well, actually, prizes were handed out to the other attendees too! An exciting, slightly different aspect to delivery of this session made the wireframing event one of the highlights of the day. And definitely, something we will repeat again when we get the chance. Thanks to everyone who attended, contributed, and helped organize.

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• Advice for how to handle company pride

  - by user17971

  We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles. I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one. Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular. I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms. Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot. When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it. This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications. Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits. fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc) My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system. Its not nearly doing all the things it should do. I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it. So what do I do now? The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do. Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it. How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice? Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it? How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.

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• PanelGridLayout - A Layout Revolution

  - by Duncan Mills

  With the most recent 11.1.2 patchset (11.1.2.3) there has been a lot of excitement around ADF Essentials (and rightly so), however, in all the fuss I didn't want an even more significant change to get missed - yes you read that correctly, a more significant change! I'm talking about the new panelGridLayout component, I can confidently say that this one of the most revolutionary components that we've introduced in 11g, even though it sounds rather boring. To be totally accurate, panelGrid was introduced in 11.1.2.2 but without any presence in the component palette or other design time support, so it was largely missed unless you read the release notes. However in this latest patchset it's finally front and center. Its time to explore - we (really) need to talk about layout.  Let's face it,with ADF Faces rich client, layout is a rather arcane pursuit, once you are a layout master, all bow before you, but it's more of an art than a science, and it is often, in fact, way too difficult to achieve what should (apparently) be a pretty simple. Here's a great example, it's a homework assignment I set for folks I'm teaching this stuff to:  The requirements for this layout are: The header is 80px high, the footer is 30px. These are both fixed.  The first section of the header containing the logo is 180px wide The logo is centered within the top left hand corner of the header  The title text is start aligned in the center zone of the header and will wrap if the browser window is narrowed. It should be aligned in the center of the vertical space  The about link is anchored to the right hand side of the browser with a 20px gap and again is center aligned vertically. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. The footer has a right aligned copyright statement, again middle aligned within a 30px high footer region and with a 20px buffer to the right hand edge. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. All remaining space is given to a central zone, which, in this case contains a panelSplitter. Expect that at some point in time you'll need a separate messages line in the center of the footer.  In the homework assigment I set I also stipulate that no inlineStyles can be used to control alignment or margins and no use of other taglibs (e.g. JSF HTML or Trinidad HTML). So, if we take this purist approach, that basic page layout (in my stock solution) requires 3 panelStretchLayouts, 5 panelGroupLayouts and 4 spacers - not including the spacer I use for the logo and the contents of the central zone splitter - phew! The point is that even a seemingly simple layout needs a bit of thinking about, particulatly when you consider strechting and browser re-size behavior. In fact, this little sample actually teaches you much of what you need to know to become vaguely competant at layouts in the framework. The underlying result of "the way things are" is that most of us reach for panelStretchLayout before even finishing the first sip of coffee as we embark on a new page design. In fact most pages you will see in any moderately complex ADF page will basically be nested panelStretchLayouts and panelGroupLayouts, sometimes many, many levels deep. So this is a problem, we've known this for some time and now we have a good solution. (I should point out that the oft-used Trinidad trh tags are not a particularly good solution as you're tie-ing yourself to an HTML table based layout in that case with a host of attendent issues in resize and bi-di behavior, but I digress.) So, tadaaa, I give to you panelGridLayout. PanelGrid, as the name suggests takes a grid like (dare I say slightly gridbag-like) approach to layout, dividing your layout into rows and colums with margins, sizing, stretch behaviour, colspans and rowspans all rolled in, all without the use of inlineStyle. As such, it provides for a much more powerful and consise way of defining a layout such as the one above that is actually simpler and much more logical to design. The basic building blocks are the panelGridLayout itself, gridRow and gridCell. Your content sits inside the cells inside the rows, all helpfully allowing both streching, valign and halign definitions without the need to nest further panelGroupLayouts. So much simpler!  If I break down the homework example above my nested comglomorate of 12 containers and spacers can be condensed down into a single panelGrid with 3 rows and 5 cell definitions (39 lines of source reduced to 24 in the case of the sample). What's more, the actual runtime representation in the browser DOM is much, much simpler, and clean, with basically one DIV per cell (Note that just because the panelGridLayout semantics looks like an HTML table does not mean that it's rendered that way!) . Another hidden benefit is the runtime cost. Because we can use a single layout to achieve much more complex geometries the client side layout code inside the browser is having to work a lot less. This will be a real benefit if your application needs to run on lower powered clients such as netbooks or tablets. So, it's time, if you're on 11.1.2.2 or above, to smile warmly at your panelStretchLayouts, wrap the blanket around it's knees and wheel it off to the Sunset Retirement Home for a well deserved rest. There's a new kid on the block and it wants to be your friend. 

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• Windows 8 and the future of Silverlight

  - by Laila

  After Steve Ballmer's indiscrete 'MisSpeak' about Windows 8, there has been a lot of speculation about the new operating system. We've now had a few glimpses, such as the demonstration of 'Mosh' at the D9 2011 conference, and the Youtube video, which showed a touch-centric new interface for apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript. This has caused acute anxiety to the programmers who have followed the recommended route of WPF, Silverlight and .NET, but it need not have caused quite so much panic since it was, in fact, just a thin layer to make Windows into an apparently mobile-friendly OS. More worryingly, the press-release from Microsoft was at pains to say that 'Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML', as if all thought of Silverlight, dominant in WP7, had been jettisoned. Ironically, this brave new 'happening' platform can all be done now in Windows 7 and an iPad, using Adobe Air, so it is hardly cutting-edge; in fact the tile interface had a sort of Retro-Zune Metro UI feel first seen in Media Centre, followed by Windows Phone 7, with any originality leached out of it by the corporate decision-making process. It was kinda weird seeing old Excel running alongside stodgily away amongst all the extreme paragliding videos. The ability to snap and resize concurrent apps might be a novelty on a tablet, but it is hardly so on a PC. It was at that moment that it struck me that here was a spreadsheet application that hadn't even made the leap to the .NET platform. Windows was once again trying to be all things to all men, whereas Apple had carefully separated Mac OS X development from iOS. The acrobatic feat of straddling all mobile and desktop devices with one OS is looking increasingly implausible. There is a world of difference between an operating system that facilitates business procedures and a one that drives a device for playing pop videos and your holiday photos. So where does this leave Silverlight? Pretty much where it was. Windows 8 will support it, and it will continue to be developed, but if these press-releases reflect the thinking within Microsoft, it is no longer seen as the strategic direction. However, Silverlight is still there and there will be a whole new set of developer APIs for building touch-centric apps. Jupiter, for example, is rumoured to involve an App store that provides new, Silverlight based "immersive" applications that are deployed as AppX packages. When the smoke clears, one suspects that the Javascript/HTML5 is merely an alternative development environment for Windows 8 to attract the legions of independent developers outside the .NET culture who are unlikely to ever take a shine to a more serious development environment such as WPF or Silverlight. Cheers, Laila

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• Investment scheme for a PC game the project

  - by Alex Kamen

  Good day everyone, I am working on a PC game project that has 3 phases planned, micro, macro and mmo versions [if confused, see a brief description at the bottom]. I have found a potential investor for the micro version of the game, but naturally, he requested a detailed plan of how the game will pay back. And the problem is that micro version itself is not supposed to be monetized much, other than some ads and limited in-game currency utilization. The idea is that with this combat demo already at hand, it should be possible to get a really large enough investment (millions of dollars) and use it to pay back the initial small one (thousands of dollars) and take the project into macro phase, which will really make profit. This way, everybody is going to win, provided that I can deliver the end-product. Yet while I am confident of that both the conception of the macro and the real game-play of the micro versions are going to be appealing, I don’t know how to obtain any guarantee of that I will be able to get funded once I have the prototype ready. And without that, I won’t receive the funds for the prototype in the first place! To summarize, my question is: how to figure out my future possibilities of getting funded once I have combat demo out, basically “whom to write to and what”. Ideally, I would like some sort of a preliminary agreement with a game publisher, something that would basically state “If the developer provides the product in time and in quality corresponding to the specifications given, the publisher guarantees to allocate funds for distribution and further development, thereby acquiring the right to X part of all future profits”. Does this sound sane? It’s just that I don’t want to sell all of my rights out straight away by taking a big outside investment while the project is in such early stage. I would appreciate if you would share your thoughts on this kind of scheme, and be sure to ask questions as I am sure I must have forgotten to mention a ton of important things, like the fact that initial funds are going to be spent on outsourcing (living in Siberia is really just great). [here’s a brief outline of what each version will feature] [micro] 1) turn based tactical combat rules 2) character development 3) arena/tournament system [macro] 4) ai-ruled dynamic interactive worlds 5) global map adventuring 6) strategic rpg + god simulator gameplay [mmo] 7) Persistent worlds system 8) Social structures system (“guilds/clans”) 9) god-simulation on the mmo scale P.S. Obviously, these features are incremental, so that mmo version has all 9.

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• 50 Billion Served: Java Embedded on Devices

  - by Tori Wieldt

  It doesn't matter if it is 50 billion or 24 billion, just suffice it to stay that there will be MANY connected devices in the year 2020. With just 24 billion devices, they will outnumber humans six to one! So as a developer, you don't want to ignore this opportunity. What if you could use your Java skills and deploy an app to a fraction of these devices (don't be greedy, how about just, say, 118,000 of them)? Fareed Suliman, Java ME Product Manager had lots of good news for Java Developers in his presentation Modernizing the Explosion of Advanced Microcontrollers with Embedded Java at ARM TechCon in Santa Clara, CA last week. "A radical architecture shift is underway in this space, from proprietary to standards-based," he explained.  He pointed out several advantages to using Embedded Java for devices: Java is a proven and open standard. Java provides connectivity, encryption, location, and web services APIs. You don't have to focus on and keep reinventing the plumbing below the JVM. Abstracting the software from the hardware allows you to repeat your app across many devices. Abstracting the software from the hardware allows allows parallel development so you can get your app done more quickly. You already know Java (or you can hire lots of Java talent). Java is a full ecosystem, with Java Embedded plugins for IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans. Java ME allows for in-field software upgrades. Suliman mentioned two ways developers can start using Java Embedded today:  Java ME Embedded Suite 7.0 Oracle Java Embedded Suite is a new packaged solution from Oracle (including Java DB, GlassFish for Embedded Suite, Jersey Web Services Framework, and Oracle Java SE Embedded 7 platform), created to provide value added services for collecting, managing, and transmitting data to embedded devices such as gateways and concentrators. Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 is designed and optimized to meet the unique requirements of small embedded, low power devices such as micro-controllers and other resource-constrained hardware without screens or user interfaces. Think tiny. Really tiny. And think big.  Read more about Java Embedded at the Oracle Technology Network, and read The Java Source blog Java Embedded Releases from September.

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• Manic Monday - More OpenWorld Solaris Sessions: Developers, Cloud, Customer Insights, Hardware Optimization

  - by Larry Wake

  We're overflowing with Monday sessions; literally more than one person can take in. Learn more about what's new in Oracle Solaris Studio, hear about the latest x86 and SPARC hardware optimizations, get some insights on cloud deployment strategies, and find out from your peers what they're doing with Oracle Solaris. If you're an OpenWorld attendee, go to to Schedule Builder to guarantee your space in any session or lab. See yesterday's blog post and the "Focus on Oracle Solaris" guide for even more sessions. Monday, October 1st: 10:45 AM - Maximizing Your SPARC T4 Oracle Solaris Application Performance(CON6382,  Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3) Hear how customers and commercial software partners have reached peak performance on SPARC T4 servers and engineered systems with Oracle Solaris Studio and its latest tools for analyzing, reporting, and improving runtime performance: Autoparallelizing, high-performance compilers Performance Analyzer (used to find performance hotspots) Thread Analyzer (to expose data races and deadlocks) Code Analyzer (used to discover latent memory corruption issues) 10:45 Cloud Formation: Implementing IaaS in Practice with Oracle Solaris(CON8787, Moscone South 302) Decisions, decisions--at the same time, we've got a session that covers why Oracle Solaris is the ideal OS for public or private clouds, IaaS or PaaS, with built-in features for elastic infrastructure, unrivaled security, superfast installation and deployment, nonstop availability, and crystal-clear observability. This session will include a customer study on how Oracle Solaris is used in the cloud today to implement the Oracle stack. 12:15 PM - Customer Insight: Oracle Solaris on Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, and SPARC SuperCluster(CON8760, Moscone South 270) Hear from customers what benefits they have realized from using the Oracle stack on Oracle Exadata and Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster and from using Oracle Solaris on those engineered systems, taking advantage of built-in lightweight OS virtualization (Zones), enterprise reliability and scale, and other key features. 1:45 PM - Case Study: Mobile Tornado Uses Oracle Technology for Better RAS and TCO?(CON4281, Moscone West 2005) Mobile Tornado develops and markets instant communication platforms, replacing traditional radio networks with cellular networks. Its critical concern is uptime. Find out how they've used Oracle Solaris, Netra SPARC T4, and Oracle Solaris Cluster, including Oracle Solaris ZFS and Zones, for their Oracle Database deployments to improve reliability and drive down cost. 3:15 PM - Technical Panel: Developing High Performance Applications on Oracle Solaris(CON7196, Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2) Engineers from the Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle Tuxedo development teams, and Oracle ISV Engineering discuss how they develop high-performance enterprise applications that take advantage of Oracle's SPARC and x86 servers, with Oracle Solaris Studio and new Oracle Solaris 11 features. Topics will include developer tools, parallel frameworks, best practices, and methodologies, as well as insights and case studies on parallelizing and optimizing application performance on Oracle Solaris. Bring your best questions! 3:15 PM -  x86 Power Management with Oracle Solaris: Current State, Opportunities, and Future(CON6271, Moscone West 2012) Another option for this time slot: learn about how Intel Xeon and Oracle Solaris work together to reduce server power consumption. This presentation addresses some of the recent power management improvements in Oracle Solaris, opportunities to further improve energy efficiency, and some future directions for Oracle Solaris power management.

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• Should I go back to college and graduate with a poor GPA or try to jump into an entry-level development position? [closed]

  - by jshin47

  I once attended a top-10 American university but I am currently not in school for several different reasons. Chief among them is that I did very poorly two semesters and even failed one of them (got two F's) which put me in automatic suspension. My major is not CS but math. I am in a pickle at the moment. After I was suspended I got a job at a niche IT company in the area. I am employed as something of an IT generalist; my primary responsibilities are Windows systems administration/networking but I also do some Android, iOS, and .NET development. I have released a few apps to the app store under my name and my company's name, and we have done work for a few big clients. I started working at my job about 1.5 years ago and I am somewhat happily employed but I do not see it as a long-term fit because it is a small company with little opportunity to advance. I would like to move out to California and particularly to the Bay Area to get a job at a more reputable or exciting company, even at a lower rate of pay, but I am not sure if I should do that or try to go back to school. If I went back to school, it would take 1-1.5 years to graduate and some $. Best case scenario I would graduate with a 2.9 or 3.0 GPA. It is a top-10 school, but that's a crappy GPA. If I do not go back to school, I will be a field where most people have degrees, without a degree. If anything goes wrong I could be really screwed as I feel I will get no respect without a degree. On the other hand I really would like to get started in the field and get more serious about developing good development practices, learning new languages/frameworks, and working with people who know a lot more than I so I can learn and grow as a developer and eventually do my own thing. Basically, I am wondering: Should I just go back to school? How much does the bad GPA / good school reputation weigh in? What about the fact that I am a Math major and not a CS major (have never taken a CS course)? Does my skill set as something of a generalist bode well for me finding work at a start up in the Bay Area? If not (2), should I hunker down and focus on producing a really good (or a few medicore) iOS apps? Android apps? etc... How would you look at someone who did great in HS, kind of goofed off in college and eventually quit, and got into development? Thanks for any thoughts or input.

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• How to deal with Warning : "Uncommittable transaction is detected at the end of the batch. The trans

  - by VishnuTiwariBlog

  Hi, If you are integrating with SQL Server and dealing with batch messages, you may encounter this problem. And this is evitable. The reason is the contention of resources. If your batch contains four messages and all the four messages have to be updated to SQL Server and then at the same time four process will contend for SQL server table and resources and the obvious result will be, few of your transaction will be left uncomitted and if you are not handling dehydration [not modifying the default property of the Dehydration] then your orchestration will dehydrate and will go for retry. If retry is set for every five minutes then after five minutes Port will send the message to the database. Reason for writing this post was as I did not want to see so many DEHYDRATED messages. And this was happening as Host Throttling was not set. Thus as soon as the BizTalk Process finds that SQL resources are unavailable it will go and dehydrate that process and process will go for retry. The contension of resources is unavoidable though we can fine tune the Dehydration setting. If you increase the time that an orchestration can be blocked at a subscription before being dehydrated, possibly you will give more time BizTalk Engine to handle to SQL resource availability. At least I solve the problem by fine tuning the Dehydration properties. Below is the section of config info which you need to add to the BTSNTsvc.exe.config.   <?xml version="1.0" ?> <configuration>        <configSections>               <section name="xlangs" type="Microsoft.XLANGs.BizTalk.CrossProcess.XmlSerializationConfigurationSectionHandler, Microsoft.XLANGs.BizTalk.CrossProcess" />        </configSections>        <runtime>               <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">                      <probing privatePath="BizTalk Assemblies;Developer Tools;Tracking" />               </assemblyBinding>        </runtime>        <xlangs>               <Configuration>                      <Dehydration MaxThreshold="1800" MinThreshold="1" ConstantThreshold="-1">                             <VirtualMemoryThrottlingCriteria OptimalUsage="900" MaximalUsage="1300" IsActive="true" />                             <PrivateMemoryThrottlingCriteria OptimalUsage="50" MaximalUsage="350" IsActive="true" />                             <PhysicalMemoryThrottlingCriteria OptimalUsage="50" MaximalUsage="350" IsActive="false" />                      </Dehydration>               </Configuration>        </xlangs> </configuration>

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• NetBeans IDE 7.3 Knows Null

  - by Geertjan

  What's the difference between these two methods, "test1" and "test2"? public int test1(String str) {     return str.length(); } public int test2(String str) {     if (str == null) {         System.err.println("Passed null!.");         //forgotten return;     }     return str.length(); } The difference, or at least, the difference that is relevant for this blog entry, is that whoever wrote "test2" apparently thinks that the variable "str" may be null, though did not provide a null check. In NetBeans IDE 7.3, you see this hint for "test2", but no hint for "test1", since in that case we don't know anything about the developer's intention for the variable and providing a hint in that case would flood the source code with too many false positives:  Annotations are supported in understanding how a piece of code is intended to be used. If method return types use @Nullable, @NullAllowed, @CheckForNull, the value is considered to be "strongly possible to be null", as well as if the variable is tested to be null, as shown above. When using @NotNull, @NonNull, @Nonnull, the value is considered to be non-null. (The exact FQNs of the annotations are ignored, only simple names are checked.) Here are examples showing where the hints are displayed for the non-null hints (the "strongly possible to be null" hints are not shown below, though you can see one of them in the screenshot above), together with a comment showing what is shown when you hover over the hint: There isn't a "one size fits all" refactoring for these various instances relating to null checks, hence you can't do an automated refactoring across your code base via tools in NetBeans IDE, as shown yesterday for class member reordering across code bases. However, you can, instead, go to Source | Inspect and then do a scan throughout a scope (e.g., current file/package/project or combinations of these or all open projects) for class elements that the IDE identifies as potentially having a problem in this area: Thanks to Jan Lahoda, who reports that this currently also works in NetBeans IDE 7.3 dev builds for fields but that may need to be disabled since right now too many false positives are returned, for help with the info above and any misunderstandings are my own fault!

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• How to Overcome or fix MIXED_DML_OPERATION error in Salesforce APEX without future method ?

  - by sathya

  How to Overcome or fix MIXED_DML_OPERATION error in Salesforce APEX without future method ?MIXED_DML_OPERATION :-one of the worst issues we have ever faced :)While trying to perform DML operation on a setup object and non-setup object in a single action you will face this error.Following are the solutions I tried and the final one worked out :-1. perform the 1st objects DML on normal apex method. Then Call the 2nd objects DML through a future method.    Drawback :- You cant get a response from the future method as its context is different and because its executing asynchronously and that its static.2. Tried the following option but it didnt work :-    1. perform the dml operation on the normal apex method.    2. tried calling the 2nd dml from trigger thinking that it would be in a different context. But it didnt work.    3. Some suggestions were given in some blogs that we could try System.runas()   Unfortunately that works only for test class.   4. Finally achieved it with response synchronously through the following solution :-    a. Created 2 apex:commandbuttons :-        1. <apex:commandButton value="Save and Send Activation Email" action="{!CreateContact}"  rerender="junkpanel" oncomplete="callSimulateUserSave()">            Note :- Oncomplete will not work if you dont have a rerender attribute. So just try refreshing a junk panel.        2. <apex:commandButton value="SimulateUserSave" id="SimulateUserSave" action="{!SaveUser}"  style="display:none;margin-left:5px;"/>        Have a junk panel as well just for rerendering  :-        <apex:outputPanel id="junkpanel"></apex:outputPanel>    b. Created this javascript function which is called from first button's oncomplete and clicks the second button :-                function callSimulateUserSave()                {                    // Specify the id of the button that needs to be clicked. This id is based on the Apex Component Hierarchy.                    // You will not get this value if you dont have the id attribute in the button which needs to be clicked from javascript                    // If you have any doubt in getting this value. Just hover over the button using Chrome developer tools to get the id.                    // But it will show like theForm:SimulateUserSave but you need to replace the colon with a dot here.                    // Note :- I have given display:none in the style of the second button to make sure that, it is not visible for the user.                    var mybtn=document.getElementById('{!$Component.theForm.SimulateUserSave}');                                    mybtn.click();                }    c. Apex Methods CreateContact and SaveUser are the pagereference methods which contains the code to create contact and user respectively.       After inserting the user inside the second apex method you can just set some public Properties in the page,        for ex:- created userid to get the user details and display in the page to show the acknowledgement to the users that the User is created.

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• At $20/month Windows Azure host my website with 99.97% uptime

  - by Gopinath

  Couple of years ago a reliable and decent performing Windows hosting was not affordable to many enthusiastic developers who want to try a startup idea or build a hobby site. I tried to start an ASP.NET website few years ago to provide services like – Mobile Tracing, Vehicle Tracing. But due to high cost of Windows hosting I developed those services using PHP (not an easy task for .NET developer) and hosted on them Linux servers.  But with recent evolution of Windows Azure, hosting ASP.NET websites on highly reliable servers is affordable. Today anyone can host a high responsive and available ASP.NET website for just $20/month using Windows Azure. My website coziie.com is running on Windows Azure and serves close to quarter millions visitors a month with 99.97% of uptime and most of the page load times are less than 3 seconds. All I spend to run this website is just around $20, if you translate it to India rupees its roughly Rs.1000. The web sever of coziie.com is powered by a single Extra Small Web role instance and the backend is powered by a SQL Azure instance. Azure is quite impressive to provide 99.97% of uptime. Response times during peak are around 3 seconds and on nomarl loads it is around 1.5 seconds. Here is the report of uptime provided by Royal Pingdom over last one year For just $20/month Windows Azure takes care of the following apart from hosting Patches up Windows OS to the latest version Upgrades ASP.NET to the latest version – coziie.com is running on ASP.NET MVC 3 and soon I’ll upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 Hosts data on latest and best version Sql Server database SQL Azure maintains 3 copies of database and automatically recovers in case of server failures and disasters. I never worry about database backups/restore. Provides staging environment for deploying applications for testing purpose and move them to production – I upgrade  twice a month on average With Windows Azure I no longer focus on server maintenance or data backups. They are taken up by Microsoft team and I just focus on building my website. Wish there is a low cost Linux version of Windows Azure so that I can stop worrying about server maintenance of this blog!! If you are looking for a Windows hosting, look no further than Windows Azure. If you find $20/month is a bit expensive to start with you may explore Azure Website (sort of shared hosted environment) which is free to start with and as your traffic grows you can move to paid hosting.

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• New Worklist features on 12.1.3

  - by Vijay Shanmugam

  Following new Worklist features are available on E-Business Suite 12.1.3 via Patch 13646173. Ability to view comments on top of a notification If an action is performed on a notification such as Reassign, Request for Information or Provide Information, the recipient of the notification will see who performed the last action and the associated comment on top of the notification. Reassigning a request for information notification If an approver requests more information on a notification from it's submitter, the submitter now has two options Answer Request for More Information Transfer Request for More Information If the submitter thinks the requested information can be provided by another user, he/she can transfer the request to the other user. Please note that only Transfer is supported for Request for More Information. Once transferred, the submitter cannot access the notification and provide the requested information. Use actual sent date when reassigning a notification The Sent field in notification header always showed the date on which the notification was first created. If the notification was later reassigned, the Sent date was not updated to show the last action date. This caused problems in following scenario Approval notification was sent to JACK on 01-JAN-2012 JACK waited for 10 days before reassigning to JILL on 10-JAN-2012 JILL does not see the notification as sent on 10-JAN-2012, instead sees it as sent on 01-JAN-2012 Although the notification was originally created on 01-JAN-2012, it was sent to JILL only on 10-JAN-2012 The enhancement now shows the correct sent date in Worklist and Notification Details page. Figure 1 - Depicts all the above 3 features Related Action History for response required notification So far it was possible to embed Action History of an response-required notification into another FYI notification using #RELATED_HISTORY attribute (Please refer to Workflow Developer Guide for details about this attribute). The enhancement now enables developers to embed Action History of one response-required notification into another response-required notification. To embed Action History of one response-required notification into another, create message attribute #RELATED_HISTORY. To this attribute set a value during run-time in the following format. {TITLE}[ITEM_TYPE:ITEM_KEY]PROCESS_NAME:ACTIVITY_LABEL_NAMEThe TITLE, ITEM_TYPE and ITEM_KEY are optional values. TITLE is used as Related Action History header title. If TITLE is not present, then a default title "Related Action History" is shown. If ITEM_TYPE is present and ITEM_KEY is not, For Example: {TITLE}[ITEM_TYPE]PROCESS_NAME:ACTIVITY_LABEL_NAME , the Related Action History is populated from parent item type of the current item. If both ITEM_TYPE and ITEM_KEY is present, For Example: {TITLE}[ITEM_TYPE:ITEM_KEY]PROCESS_NAME:ACTIVITY_LABEL_NAME , the Related Action History is populated from that specific instance activity. Figure 2 - Depicts Related Action History feature

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• But what version is the database now?

  - by BuckWoody

  When you upgrade your system to SQL Server 2008 R2, you’ll know that the instance is at that version by using the standard commands like SELECT @@VERSION or EXEC xp_msver. My system came back with this info when I typed those: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (RTM) - 10.50.1600.1 (Intel X86)   Apr  2 2010 15:53:02   Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation  Developer Edition on Windows NT 6.0 <X86> (Build 6002: Service Pack 2) (Hypervisor) Index Name Internal_Value Character_Value 1 ProductName NULL Microsoft SQL Server 2 ProductVersion 655410 10.50.1600.1 3 Language 1033 English (United States) 4 Platform NULL NT INTEL X86 5 Comments NULL SQL 6 CompanyName NULL Microsoft Corporation 7 FileDescription NULL SQL Server Windows NT 8 FileVersion NULL 2009.0100.1600.01 ((KJ_RTM).100402-1540 ) 9 InternalName NULL SQLSERVR 10 LegalCopyright NULL Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved. 11 LegalTrademarks NULL Microsoft SQL Server is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. 12 OriginalFilename NULL SQLSERVR.EXE 13 PrivateBuild NULL NULL 14 SpecialBuild 104857601 NULL 15 WindowsVersion 393347078 6.0 (6002) 16 ProcessorCount 1 1 17 ProcessorActiveMask 1 1 18 ProcessorType 586 PROCESSOR_INTEL_PENTIUM 19 PhysicalMemory 2047 2047 (2146934784) 20 Product ID NULL NULL   But a database properties are separate from the Instance. After an upgrade, you always want to make sure that the compatibility options (which have much to do with how NULLs and other objects are treated) is at what you expect. For the most part, as long as the application can handle it, I set my compatibility levels to the latest version. For SQL Server 2008, that was “10.0” or “10”. You can do this with the ALTER DATABASE command or you can just right-click the database and select “Properties” and then “Database Options” in SQL Server Management Studio. To check the database compatibility level, I use this query: SELECT name, cmptlevel FROM sys.sysdatabases When I did that this morning I saw that the databases (all of them) were at 10.0 – not 10.5 like the Instance. That’s expected – we didn’t revise the database format up with the Instance for this particular release. Didn’t want to catch you by surprise on that. While your databases should be at the “proper” level for your situation, you can’t rely on the compatibility level to indicate the Instance level. More info on the ALTER DATABASE command in SQL Server 2008 R2 is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510680(SQL.105).aspx Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• AVIO Academy - ADF w/Oracle BPM

  - by BPMWarrior

  Oracle Platinum Partner AVIO Consulting is excited to announce the launch of the industry’s first ADF with Oracle BPM developer training program.  This training program is for any prospects or customers that could benefit from a better understanding of Oracle ADF and Oracle BPM.    Visit the AVIO Academy website for an in-depth description of the new ADF with Oracle BPM Workshop .     What it is: ·         Industry’s first ADF with Oracle BPM training program ·         3-day workshop showcasing application development using ADF with Oracle BPM Suite   Training Purpose: Teaches developers how to use Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) with the Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Suite.  The workshop is the only one of its kind on the market today.  During the course, students gain a better understanding of Oracle ADF, and the nuances of making it work with Oracle BPM.   Course Overview This course in AVIO’s BPM series, consists of 11 hands-on lessons designed specifically for developers.   It provides a comprehensive overview of ADF and Oracle BPM concepts, and step-by-step easy to follow instructions for creating and integrating ADF user interfaces with Oracle BPM processes.  Students leave the workshop with the working versions of the projects they build for their future reference.  Rather than just frantically clicking through the lessons, concepts are thoroughly explained and demonstrated.  Students leave understanding the best practices AVIO established during years of developing ADF solutions for Oracle BPM and SOA.   AVIO Academy This new workshop is offered through AVIO Academy, the only program with curriculum specifically developed for the most recent version of the Oracle BPM Suite. The academy specializes in hands-on role based training that uses an organization’s own processes for a more practical learning experience.   Visit the AVIO Academy website for an in-depth description of the new ADF with Oracle BPM Workshop. If you have any questions please contact Brandon Dean at [email protected]

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• Soft lockup after upgrade - cannot install from live CD

  - by nbm

  I dual-boot MacIntel Core 2 duo. nVidia graphics. Ran upgrade from ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 (64 bit). On restart ran into {numbers} Bug: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [swapper/0:1] Tried loading earlier kernel: same problem Tried re-installing ubuntu from a liveCD that has worked in the past: version 13.04. Same problem. Tried re-partitioning hard drive using Mac OS X disk utility and then installing ubuntu 14.04LTS from liveCD. Same problem. Not possible to verify liveCD disk (creates same "soft lockup" bug.) Tried installing from the liveCD with version 13.04 that I know works (that's how I got Ubuntu on this machine in the first place.) Same problem. I know this is not a hardware problem as OS X works just fine, I am using it right now on the same machine. I have been using various versions of Ubuntu for 2 years. Things I cannot do: Open a terminal Verify CD image Start ubuntu from CD (same soft lockup problem) This problem is similar to some other questions, none of which have been satisfactorily answered: Ubuntu 14.04 soft lockup on Vostro 3500 Cannot do fresh install of Ubuntu 13.04 while booting from DVD: "soft lockup" bug Live CD stalls when installing Ubuntu 13.10 UPDATE 6/11/14: Following some much-appreciated advice from bain (see below) I burned a 12.04LTS disk and started with kernel parameters: noapic, no1apic, acpi=off, nomodeset, elevator=deadline, and clocksource=jiffies. With all of these parameters I was able to load the 12.04LTS CD ("Try without installing"). It worked fine. However, as soon as I tried to install Ubuntu from the CD, my wired ethernet (eth0) connection would hang. There are already various askubuntu questions and bug reports about this problem, none of which had answers for me. (E.g., dhclient eth0 does nothing, none of the various reset commands does anything, manually setting IP &etc does nothing. I could reliably kill the ethernet connection by clicking "install ubuntu" every single time.) I could go ahead and install 12.04 without an internet connection, but the install would freeze after mostly completing (I tried several times.) There were some relevant error messages in the details of the install output script that, IIRC, had to do with searching for missing files and not being able to access eth0 (internet) to get them. To be honest I gave up at that point and I'm not sure I wrote those down. If I find some notes I will post them. At this point I no longer have Ubuntu on my system. I wiped the partitions and am using exclusively OS X. I am leaving this question in case it helps anyone else with similar problems. I love open source and I love Linux, and the next machine I get I will probably just build from Arch. At the moment I miss repositories and a lot of other things about Ubuntu, but the OS X terminal is 'nix, I can pretty much use all the open source apps I like, and while I am not a fan of the Apple software it gets the job done for me. Unlike Ubuntu, which can't even install. I realize this isn't necessarily a place for a soapbox speech, but when I first installed 12.04 several years ago there were already people in the community complaining that Canonical was going too "commercial". But I loved it. Several years later and all I've seen is Canonical adding more not-so-useful bells and whistles to Ubuntu while continually failing to fix basic problems on upgrades. With a dual-boot (and sometimes triple-boot) system it always took me some tweaking to get an upgrade to work, and to some extent that is okay. But at this point I feel like Canonical ought to just put a price tag on Ubuntu. All I see is more commercialism and advertising and product tie-ins, and ongoing problems do not get fixed. I am a big fan of open-source, not-for profit enterprise. I am also a big fan of for-profit enterprise, which certainly has its place and usefulness. I am not a fan of companies who pretend to be in favor of open source but really are just out to make a buck, and IMNSHO that is what Canonical has become. This is a great community and I wish you all the best, but my next install of Linux will not be Ubuntu.

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• eSTEP Newsletter for October 2013 now available

  - by uwes

  Dear Partners,We would like to let you know that the October'13 issue of our Newsletter is now available.The issue contains information on the following topics: Oracle Open World Summary Oracle Cloud: Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Database and Middleware Oracle Applications and Software as a Service Oracle Industries Oracle Partners and the "Internet of Things" JavaOne News MySQL News Corporate News Create Your HR Strategic Vision at Oracle HCM World Oracle Database Protection Redefined A Preview: Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance Oracle closed Tekelec acquisition Congratulations to ORACLE TEAM USA! Tech sectionARC M6 Oracle's SPARC M6 Oracle SuperCluster M6-32 - Oracle’s Most Scalable Engineered System Oracle Multitenant on SPARC Servers and Oracle Solaris Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition: Plug into the Cloud Oracle In-Memory Database Cache Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance New Benchmark-Results published (Sept. 2013) Video Interview: Elasticity, the Biggest Challenge Facing Data Centers Today Tech blog Announcing New Sun Storage 2500-M2 Drives SPARC Product Line Update ZFS RAID Calculator v6 What ships with ODA X3-2? Tech Article: Oracle Multitenant on SPARC Servers and Oracle Solaris New release of Sun Rack II capacity calculator available Announcing: Oracle Solaris Cluster Product Bulletin, September 2013 Learning & events Planned TechCasts Quarterly Partner Update Live Webcast: Simplify and Accelerate Oracle Database deployment with Oracle VM Templates Join us for OTN's Virtual Developer Day - Harnessing the Power of Oracle WebLogic and Oracle Coherence.Learn from OOW 2013 what is going on in Virtualization How to Implementing Early Arriving Facts in ODI, Part I and Part II: Proof of Concept Overview Multi-Factor Authentication in Oracle WebLogic Using multi-factor authentication to protect web applications deployed on Oracle WebLogic. If Virtualization Is Free, It Can't Be Any Good—Right? Looking beyond System/HW SOA and User Interfaces Overcoming the challenges to developing user interfaces in a service oriented References Vodafone Romania Improves Business Agility and Customer Satisfaction, with 10x Faster Business Intelligence Delivery and 12x Faster Processing Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Captures 47% Market Share in a Competitive Market, Thanks to 24/7 Availability Home Credit and Finance Bank Accelerates Getting New Banking Products to Market Extra A Conversation with Java Champion Johan VosYou can find the Newsletter on our portal under eSTEP News ---> Latest Newsletter. You will need to provide your email address and the pin below to get access. Link to the portal is shown below.URL: http://launch.oracle.com/PIN: eSTEP_2011Previous published Newsletters can be found under the Archived Newsletters section and more useful information under the Events, Download and Links tab. Feel free to explore and any feedback is appreciated to help us improve the service and information we deliver.Thanks and best regards,Partner HW Enablement EMEA

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• Headaches using distributed version control for traditional teams?

  - by J Cooper

  Though I use and like DVCS for my personal projects, and can totally see how it makes managing contributions to your project from others easier (e.g. your typical Github scenario), it seems like for a "traditional" team there could be some problems over the centralized approach employed by solutions like TFS, Perforce, etc. (By "traditional" I mean a team of developers in an office working on one project that no one person "owns", with potentially everyone touching the same code.) A couple of these problems I've foreseen on my own, but please chime in with other considerations. In a traditional system, when you try to check your change in to the server, if someone else has previously checked in a conflicting change then you are forced to merge before you can check yours in. In the DVCS model, each developer checks in their changes locally and at some point pushes to some other repo. That repo then has a branch of that file that 2 people changed. It seems that now someone must be put in charge of dealing with that situation. A designated person on the team might not have sufficient knowledge of the entire codebase to be able to handle merging all conflicts. So now an extra step has been added where someone has to approach one of those developers, tell him to pull and do the merge and then push again (or you have to build an infrastructure that automates that task). Furthermore, since DVCS tends to make working locally so convenient, it is probable that developers could accumulate a few changes in their local repos before pushing, making such conflicts more common and more complicated. Obviously if everyone on the team only works on different areas of the code, this isn't an issue. But I'm curious about the case where everyone is working on the same code. It seems like the centralized model forces conflicts to be dealt with quickly and frequently, minimizing the need to do large, painful merges or have anyone "police" the main repo. So for those of you who do use a DVCS with your team in your office, how do you handle such cases? Do you find your daily (or more likely, weekly) workflow affected negatively? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of before recommending a DVCS at my workplace?

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• How to manage a Closed Source High-Risk Project?

  - by abel

  I am currently planning to develop a J2EE website and wish to bring in 1 developer and 1 web designer to assist me. The project is a financial app with a niche market. I plan to keep the source closed . However, I fear that my would-be employees could easily copy the codebase and use it /sell it to a third party especially when they switch jobs. The app development will take 4-6months and perhaps more and I may have to bring in people after the app goes live. How do I keep the source to myself. Are there techniques companies use to guard their source. I foresee disabling pendrives and dvd writers on my development machines, but uploading data or attaching the code in one's mail would still be possible. My question is incomplete. But programmers who have been in my situation, please advice. How should I go about this? Building a team, maintaining code-secrecy,etc. I am looking forward to sign a secrecy contract with the employees if needed too. (Please add relevant tags) Update Thank you for all the answers. I certainly won't be disabling all USB ports and DVD writers now. But I think I should be logging activity(How exactly should I do that?) I am wary of scalpers who would join and then run off with the existing code. I haven't met any, but I have been advised to be wary of them. I would include a secrecy clause, but given this is a startup with almost no funding and in a highly competitive business niche with bigger players in the field, I doubt I would be able to detect or pursue any scalpers. How do I hire people I trust, when I don't know them personally. Their resume will be helpful but otherwise trust will develop only with time. But finally even if they do run away with the code, it is service that matters after the sale is made. So I am not really worried for the long term.

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• How employable am I as a programmer?

  - by dsimcha

  I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in computational biology and am starting to think about what I want to do after graduate school. I feel like I've accumulated a lot of programming skills while in grad school, but taken a very non-traditional path to learning all this stuff. I'm wondering whether I would have an easy time getting hired as a programmer and could fall back on that if I can't find a good job directly in my field, and if so whether I would qualify for a more prestigious position than "code monkey". Things I Have Going For Me Approximately 4 years of experience programming as part of my research. I believe I have a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals that I could pick up new languages and technologies pretty fast, and could demonstrate this in an interview. Good math and statistics skills. An extensive portfolio of open source work (and the knowledge that working on these projects implies): I wrote a statistics library in D, mostly from scratch. I wrote a parallelism library (parallel map, reduce, foreach, task parallelism, pipelining, etc.) that is currently in review for adoption by the D standard library. I wrote a 2D plotting library for D against the GTK Cairo backend. I currently use it for most of the figures I make for my research. I've contributed several major performance optimizations to the D garbage collector. (Most of these were low-hanging fruit, but it still shows my knowledge of low-level issues like memory management, pointers and bit twiddling.) I've contributed lots of miscellaneous bug fixes to the D standard library and could show the change logs to prove it. (This demonstrates my ability read other people's code.) Things I Have Going Against Me Most of my programming experience is in D and Python. I have very little to virtually no experience in the more established, "enterprise-y" languages like Java, C# and C++, though I have learned a decent amount about these languages from small, one-off projects and discussions about language design in the D community. In general I have absolutely no knowledge of "enterprise-y" technlogies. I've never used a framework before, possibly because most reusable code for scientific work and for D tends to call itself a "library" instead. I have virtually no formal computer science/software engineering training. Almost all of my knowledge comes from talking to programming geek friends, reading blogs, forums, StackOverflow, etc. I have zero professional experience with the official title of "developer", "software engineer", or something similar.

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• Are we ready for the Cloud computing era?

  - by andrewkatumba

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} "Elite?" developer circles are abuzz with the notion of Cloud computing . The increasing bandwidth, the desire for faster and leaner operations and ofcourse the need for outsourcing non core it related business requirements e.g wordprocessing, spreadsheets, data backups. In strolls Chrome OS (am sure other similar OSes will join with their own wagons for us to jump on), offering just that, internet based services(more like a repository of), quick efficient and "reliable" and for the most part cheap and often time even free! And we all go rhapsodic!  It boils down to the age old dilemma, "if the cops are so busy protecting us then who will protect them" (even the folks back at Hollywood keep us reminded)! Who is going to ensure that these internet based services do not go down(either intentionally or by some malicious third party) leading to a multinational colossal disaster .At the risk of sounding pessimistic,  IT IS NOT AN ISSUE OF TRUST, this is but a mere case of Murphy's Law!  What then? Should the "cloud" be trusted to this extent at this time?  This is an era where challenges are rapidly solved with lightning promptness to "beat the competition", my hope is that our solutions are not just creating problems that we may not be able to solve!  Keeping my ear on the Ground.

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• Speakers, Please Check Your Time

  - by AjarnMark

  Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a 10 minute speech. He replied "Two weeks". He was then asked how long it would take for a 1 hour speech. "One week", he replied. 2 hour speech? "I'm ready right now," he replied.  Whether that is a true story or an urban legend, I don’t really know, but either way, it is a poignant reminder for all speakers, and particularly apropos this week leading up to the PASS Community Summit. (Cross-posted to the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog #PASSProfDev.) What’s the point of that story?  Simply this…if you have plenty of time to do your presentation, you don’t need to prepare much because it is easy to throw in more and more material to stretch out to your allotted time.  But if you are on a tight time constraint, then it will take significant preparation to distill your talk down to only the essential points. I have attended seven of the last eight North American Summit events, and every one of them has been fantastic.  The speakers are great, the material is timely and relevant, and the networking opportunities are awesome.  And every year, there is one little thing that just bugs me…speakers going over their allotted time.  Why does it bother me so?  Well, if you look at a typical schedule for a Summit, you’ll see that there are six or more sessions going on at the same time, and only 15 minutes to move from one to another.  If you’re trying to maximize your training dollar by attending something during every session time slot, and you don’t want to be the last guy trying to squeeze into the middle of the row, then those 15 minutes can be critical.  All the more so if you need to stop and use the bathroom or if you have to hike to the opposite end of the convention center.  It is really a bad position to find yourself having to choose between learning the last key points of Speaker A who is going over time, and getting over to Speaker B on time so you don’t miss her key opening remarks. And frankly, I think it is just rude.  Yes, the speakers are the function, after all they are bringing the content that the rest of us are paying to learn.  But it is also an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at a conference like this, and no one speaker is so important that the conference would be a disaster without him.  Speakers know when they submit their abstract, long before the conference, how much time they will have.  It has been the same pattern at the Summit for at least the last eight years.  Program Sessions are 75 minutes long.  Some speakers who have a good track record, and meet other qualifying criteria, are extended an invitation to present a Spotlight Session which is 90 minutes (a 20% increase).  So there really is no excuse.  It’s not like you were promised a 2-hour segment and then discovered when you got here that it was only 75 minutes.  In fact, it’s not like PASS advertised 90-minute sessions for everyone and then a select few were cut back to only 75.  As a speaker, you know well before you get here which type of session you are doing and how long it is, so as a professional, you should plan accordingly. Now you might think that this only happens to rookies, but I’ll tell you that some of the worst offenders are big-name veterans who draw huge attendance numbers for their sessions.  Some attendees blow this off as, “Hey, it’s so-and-so, and I’d stay here for hours and listen to him/her talk.”  To which I would reply, “Then they should have submitted for a pre- or post-conference day-long seminar instead, but don’t try to squeeze your day-long talk into a 90-minute session.”  Now I don’t really believe that these speakers are being malicious or just selfishly trying to extend their time in the spotlight.  I think that most of them are merely being undisciplined and did not trim their presentation sufficiently, or allowed themselves to get off-track (often in a generous attempt to help someone in the audience with a question or problem that really should have been noted for further discussion after the session). So here is my recommendation…my plea, even.  TRIM THE FAT!  Now.  Before it’s too late.  Before you even get on the airplane, take a long, hard look at your presentation and eliminate some of the points that you originally thought you had to make, but in reality are not truly crucial to your main topic.  Delete a few slides.  Test your demos and have them already scripted rather than typing them during your talk.  It is better to cut out too much and end up with plenty of time at the end for Questions & Answers.  And you can always keep some notes on the stuff that you cut out so that you could fill it back in at the end as bonus material if you really do end up with a whole bunch of time on your hands.  But I don’t think you will.  And if you do, that will look even better to the audience as it will look like you’re giving them something extra that not every audience gets.  And they will thank you for that.

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• Microsoft and Application Architectures

  Microsoft has dealt with several kinds of application architectures to include but not limited to desktop applications, web applications, operating systems, relational database systems, windows services, and web services. Because of the size and market share of Microsoft, virtually every modern language works with or around a Microsoft product. Some of the languages include: Visual Basic, VB.Net, C#, C++, C, ASP.net, ASP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java and XML. From my experience, Microsoft strives to maintain an n-tier application standard where an application is comprised of multiple layers that perform specific functions, for example: presentation layer, business layer, data access layer are three general layers that just about every formally structured application contains. The presentation layer contains anything to do with displaying information to the screen and how it appears on the screen. The business layer is the middle man between the presentation layer and data access layer and transforms data from the data access layer in to useable information to be stored later or sent to an output device through the presentation layer. The data access layer does as its name implies, it allows the business layer to access data from a data source like MS SQL Server, XML, or another data source. One of my favorite technologies that Microsoft has come out with recently is the .Net Framework. This framework allows developers to code an application in multiple languages and compiles them in to one intermediate language called the Common Language Runtime (CLR). This allows VB and C# developers to work seamlessly together as if they were working in the same project. The only real disadvantage to using the .Net Framework is that it only natively runs on Microsoft operating systems. However, Microsoft does control a majority of the operating systems currently installed on modern computers and servers, especially with personal home computers. Given that the Microsoft .Net Framework is so flexible it is an ideal for business to develop applications around it as long as they wanted to commit to using Microsoft technologies and operating systems in the future. I have been a professional developer for about 9+ years now and have seen the .net framework work flawlessly in just about every instance I have used it. In addition, I have used it to develop web applications, mobile phone applications, desktop applications, web service applications, and windows service applications to name a few.

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• What are the differences between abstract classes, interfaces, and when to use them

  - by user66662

  Recently I have started to wrap my head around OOP, and I am now to the point where the more I read about the differences between Abstract classes and Interfaces the more confused I become. So far, neither can be instantiated. Interfaces are more or less structural blueprints that determine the skeleton and abstracts are different by being able to partially develop code. I would like to learn more about these through my specific situation. Here is a link to my first question if you would like a little more background information: What is a good design model for my new class? Here are two classes I created: class Ad { $title; $description $price; function get_data($website){ } function validate_price(){ } } class calendar_event { $title; $description $start_date; function get_data($website){ //guts } function validate_dates(){ //guts } } So, as you can see these classes are almost identical. Not shown here, but there are other functions, like get_zip(), save_to_database() that are common across my classes. I have also added other classes Cars and Pets which have all the common methods and of course properties specific to those objects (mileage, weight, for example). Now I have violated the DRY principle and I am managing and changing the same code across multiple files. I intend on having more classes like boats, horses, or whatever. So is this where I would use an interface or abstract class? From what I understand about abstract classes I would use a super class as a template with all of the common elements built into the abstract class, and then add only the items specifically needed in future classes. For example: abstract class content { $title; $description function get_data($website){ } function common_function2() { } function common_function3() { } } class calendar_event extends content { $start_date; function validate_dates(){ } } Or would I use an interface and, because these are so similar, create a structure that each of the subclasses are forced to use for integrity reasons, and leave it up to the end developer who fleshes out that class to be responsible for each of the details of even the common functions. my thinking there is that some 'common' functions may need to be tweaked in the future for the needs of their specific class. Despite all that above, if you believe I am misunderstanding the what and why of abstracts and interfaces altogether, by all means let a valid answer to be stop thinking in this direction and suggest the proper way to move forward! Thanks!

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