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Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

- by ScottGu

Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure. Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account. This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it). The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service. You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal. Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it. This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog. You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects. We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them). You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data. We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs. You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud. You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog. For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery. You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog. For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level. So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites. This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier). Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications. Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy. Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer. Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure. The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio. For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template. When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property. When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser. This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio. You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance. To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end. Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting. You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!). Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center. Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions. They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services. Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support. It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services. This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services. I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it. Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks). Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings. This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass). Enabling this is now really easy. To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal. This will create a dialog like below. I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository. We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account. Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to. Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories. This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services. Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure. You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services. We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy. Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI. If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase. For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever: Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site. We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app. We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager. You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent. Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go. We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it. We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal. Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it. The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this. Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code. The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages. You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more). The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these. This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications. Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic. The multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure. This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total. To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview. Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit. For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS. Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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ODI 12c's Mapping Designer - Combining Flow Based and Expression Based Mapping

- by Madhu Nair

post by David Allan ODI is renowned for its declarative designer and minimal expression based paradigm. The new ODI 12c release has extended this even further to provide an extended declarative mapping designer. The ODI 12c mapper is a fusion of ODI's new declarative designer with the familiar flow based designer while retaining ODI’s key differentiators of: Minimal expression based definition, The ability to incrementally design an interface and to extract/load data from any combination of sources, and most importantly Backed by ODI’s extensible knowledge module framework. The declarative nature of the product has been extended to include an extensible library of common components that can be used to easily build simple to complex data integration solutions. Big usability improvements through consistent interactions of components and concepts all constructed around the familiar knowledge module framework provide the utmost flexibility. Here is a little taster: So what is a mapping? A mapping comprises of a logical design and at least one physical design, it may have many. A mapping can have many targets, of any technology and can be arbitrarily complex. You can build reusable mappings and use them in other mappings or other reusable mappings. In the example below all of the information from an Oracle bonus table and a bonus file are joined with an Oracle employees table before being written to a target. Some things that are cool include the one-click expression cross referencing so you can easily see what's used where within the design. The logical design in a mapping describes what you want to accomplish (see the animated GIF here illustrating how the above mapping was designed) . The physical design lets you configure how it is to be accomplished. So you could have one logical design that is realized as an initial load in one physical design and as an incremental load in another. In the physical design below we can customize how the mapping is accomplished by picking Knowledge Modules, in ODI 12c you can pick multiple nodes (on logical or physical) and see common properties. This is useful as we can quickly compare property values across objects - below we can see knowledge modules settings on the access points between execution units side by side, in the example one table is retrieved via database links and the other is an external table. In the logical design I had selected an append mode for the integration type, so by default the IKM on the target will choose the most suitable/default IKM - which in this case is an in-built Oracle Insert IKM (see image below). This supports insert and select hints for the Oracle database (the ANSI SQL Insert IKM does not support these), so by default you will get direct path inserts with Oracle on this statement. In ODI 12c, the mapper is just that, a mapper. Design your mapping, write to multiple targets, the targets can be in the same data server, in different data servers or in totally different technologies - it does not matter. ODI 12c will derive and generate a plan that you can use or customize with knowledge modules. Some of the use cases which are greatly simplified include multiple heterogeneous targets, multi target inserts for Oracle and writing of XML. Let's switch it up now and look at a slightly different example to illustrate expression reuse. In ODI you can define reusable expressions using user functions. These can be reused across mappings and the implementations specialized per technology. So you can have common expressions across Oracle, SQL Server, Hive etc. shielding the design from the physical aspects of the generated language. Another way to reuse is within a mapping itself. In ODI 12c expressions can be defined and reused within a mapping. Rather than replicating the expression text in larger expressions you can decompose into smaller snippets, below you can see UNIT_TAX AMOUNT has been defined and is used in two downstream target columns - its used in the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT plus its used in the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT (a recording of the calculation). You can see the columns that the expressions depend on (upstream) and the columns the expression is used in (downstream) highlighted within the mapper. Also multi selecting attributes is a convenient way to see what's being used where, below I have selected the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT in the target datastore and the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT in UNIT_CALC. You can now see many expressions at once now and understand much more at the once time without needlessly clicking around and memorizing information. Our mantra during development was to keep it simple and make the tool more powerful and do even more for the user. The development team was a fusion of many teams from Oracle Warehouse Builder, Sunopsis and BEA Aqualogic, debating and perfecting the mapper in ODI 12c. This was quite a project from supporting the capabilities of ODI in 11g to building the flow based mapping tool to support the future. I hope this was a useful insight, there is so much more to come on this topic, this is just a preview of much more that you will see of the mapper in ODI 12c.

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LLBLGen Pro v3.5 has been released!

- by FransBouma

Last weekend we released LLBLGen Pro v3.5! Below the list of what's new in this release. Of course, not everything is on this list, like the large amount of work we put in refactoring the runtime framework. The refactoring was necessary because our framework has two paradigms which are added to the framework at a different time, and from a design perspective in the wrong order (the paradigm we added first, SelfServicing, should have been built on top of Adapter, the other paradigm, which was added more than a year after the first released version). The refactoring made sure the framework re-uses more code across the two paradigms (they already shared a lot of code) and is better prepared for the future. We're not done yet, but refactoring a massive framework like ours without breaking interfaces and existing applications is ... a bit of a challenge ;) To celebrate the release of v3.5, we give every customer a 30% discount! Use the coupon code NR1ORM with your order :) The full list of what's new: Designer Rule based .NET Attribute definitions. It's now possible to specify a rule using fine-grained expressions with an attribute definition to define which elements of a given type will receive the attribute definition. Rules can be assigned to attribute definitions on the project level, to make it even easier to define attribute definitions in bulk for many elements in the project. More information... Revamped Project Settings dialog. Multiple project related properties and settings dialogs have been merged into a single dialog called Project Settings, which makes it easier to configure the various settings related to project elements. It also makes it easier to find features previously not used by many (e.g. type conversions) More information... Home tab with Quick Start Guides. To make new users feel right at home, we added a home tab with quick start guides which guide you through four main use cases of the designer. System Type Converters. Many common conversions have been implemented by default in system type converters so users don't have to develop their own type converters anymore for these type conversions. Bulk Element Setting Manipulator. To change setting values for multiple project elements, it was a little cumbersome to do that without a lot of clicking and opening various editors. This dialog makes changing settings for multiple elements very easy. EDMX Importer. It's now possible to import entity model data information from an existing Entity Framework EDMX file. Other changes and fixes See for the full list of changes and fixes the online documentation. LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework WCF Data Services (OData) support has been added. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF Data Services application using the VS.NET tools for WCF Data Services. WCF Data Services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 to expose your domain model using OData. More information... New query specification and execution API: QuerySpec. QuerySpec is our new query specification and execution API as an alternative to Linq and our more low-level API. It's build, like our Linq provider, on top of our lower-level API. More information... SQL Server 2012 support. The SQL Server DQE allows paging using the new SQL Server 2012 style. More information... System Type converters. For a common set of types the LLBLGen Pro runtime framework contains built-in type conversions so you don't need to write your own type converters anymore. Public/NonPublic property support. It's now possible to mark a field / navigator as non-public which is reflected in the runtime framework as an internal/friend property instead of a public property. This way you can hide properties from the public interface of a generated class and still access it through code added to the generated code base. FULL JOIN support. It's now possible to perform FULL JOIN joins using the native query api and QuerySpec. It's left to the developer to check whether the used target database supports FULL (OUTER) JOINs. Using a FULL JOIN with entity fetches is not recommended, and should only be used when both participants in the join aren't the target of the fetch. Dependency Injection Tracing. It's now possible to enable tracing on dependency injection. Enable tracing at level '4' on the traceswitch 'ORMGeneral'. This will emit trace information about which instance of which type got an instance of type T injected into property P. Entity Instances in projections in Linq. It's now possible to return an entity instance in a custom Linq projection. It's now also possible to pass this instance to a method inside the query projection. Inheritance fully supported in this construct. Entity Framework support The Entity Framework has been updated in the recent year with code-first support and a new simpler context api: DbContext (with DbSet). The amount of code to generate is smaller and the context simpler. LLBLGen Pro v3.5 comes with support for DbContext and DbSet and generates code which utilizes these new classes. NHibernate support NHibernate v3.2+ built-in proxy factory factory support. By default the built-in ProxyFactoryFactory is selected. FluentNHibernate Session Manager uses 1.2 syntax. Fluent NHibernate mappings generate a SessionManager which uses the v1.2 syntax for the ProxyFactoryFactory location Optionally emit schema / catalog name in mappings Two settings have been added which allow the user to control whether the catalog name and/or schema name as known in the project in the designer is emitted into the mappings.

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Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

- by Lewis Benge

One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

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Connection Pooling is Busted

- by MightyZot

A few weeks ago we started getting complaints about performance in an application that has performed very well for many years. The application is a n-tier application that uses ADODB with the SQLOLEDB provider to talk to a SQL Server database. Our object model is written in such a way that each public method validates security before performing requested actions, so there is a significant number of queries executed to get information about file cabinets, retrieve images, create workflows, etc. (PaperWise is a document management and workflow system.) A common factor for these customers is that they have remote offices connected via MPLS networks. Naturally, the first thing we looked at was the query performance in SQL Profiler. All of the queries were executing within expected timeframes, most of them were so fast that the duration in SQL Profiler was zero. After getting nowhere with SQL Profiler, the situation was escalated to me. I decided to take a peek with Process Monitor. Procmon revealed some “gaps” in the TCP/IP traffic. There were notable delays between send and receive pairs. The send and receive pairs themselves were quite snappy, but quite often there was a notable delay between a receive and the next send. You might expect some delay because, presumably, the application is doing some thinking in-between the pairs. But, comparing the procmon data at the remote locations with the procmon data for workstations on the local network showed that the remote workstations were significantly delayed. Procmon also showed a high number of disconnects. Wireshark traces showed that connections to the database were taking between 75ms and 150ms. Not only that, but connections to a file share containing images were taking 2 seconds! So, I asked about a trust. Sure enough there was a trust between two domains and the file share was on the second domain. Joining a remote workstation to the domain hosting the share containing images alleviated the time delay in accessing the file share. Removing the trust had no affect on the connections to the database. Microsoft Network Monitor includes filters that parse TDS packets. TDS is the protocol that SQL Server uses to communicate. There is a certificate exchange and some SSL that occurs during authentication. All of this was evident in the network traffic. After staring at the network traffic for a while, and examining packets, I decided to call it a night. On the way home that night, something about the traffic kept nagging at me. Then it dawned on me…at the beginning of the dance of packets between the client and the server all was well. Connection pooling was working and I could see multiple queries getting executed on the same connection and ethereal port. After a particular query, connecting to two different servers, I noticed that ADODB and SQLOLEDB started making repeated connections to the database on different ethereal ports. SQL Server would execute a single query and respond on a port, then open a new port and execute the next query. Connection pooling appeared to be broken. The next morning I wrote a test to confirm my hypothesis. Turns out that the sequence causing the connection nastiness goes something like this: Make a connection to the database. Open a result set that returns enough records to require multiple roundtrips to the server. For each result, query for some other data in the database (this will open a new implicit connection.) Close the inner result set and repeat for every item in the original result set. Close the original connection. Provided that the first result set returns enough data to require multiple roundtrips to the server, ADODB and SQLOLEDB will start making new connections to the database for each query executed in the loop. Originally, I thought this might be due to Microsoft’s denial of service (ddos) attack protection. After turning those features off to no avail, I eventually thought to switch my queries to client-side cursors instead of server-side cursors. Server-side cursors are the default, by the way. Voila! After switching to client-side cursors, the disconnects were gone and the above sequence yielded two connections as expected. While the real problem is the amount of time it takes to make connections over these MPLS networks (100ms on average), switching to client-side cursors made the problem go away. Believe it or not, this is actually documented by Microsoft, and rather difficult to find. (At least it was while we were trying to troubleshoot the problem!) So, if you’re noticing performance issues on slower networks, or networks with slower switching, take a look at the traffic in a tool like Microsoft Network Monitor. If you notice a high number of disconnects, and you’re using fire-hose or server-side cursors, then try switching to client-side cursors and you may see the problem go away. Most likely, Microsoft believes this to be appropriate behavior, because ADODB can’t guarantee that all of the data has been retrieved when you execute the inner queries. I’m not convinced, though, because the problem remains even after replacing all of the implicit connections with explicit connections and closing those connections in-between each of the inner queries. In that case, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why ADODB can’t use a single connection from the connection pool to make the additional queries, bringing the total number of connections to two. Instead ADO appears to make an assumption about the state of the connection. I’ve reported the behavior to Microsoft and am awaiting to hear from the appropriate team, so that I can demonstrate the problem. Maybe they can explain to us why this is appropriate behavior. :)

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URL Rewrite – Protocol (http/https) in the Action

- by OWScott

IIS URL Rewrite supports server variables for pretty much every part of the URL and http header. However, there is one commonly used server variable that isn’t readily available. That’s the protocol—HTTP or HTTPS. You can easily check if a page request uses HTTP or HTTPS, but that only works in the conditions part of the rule. There isn’t a variable available to dynamically set the protocol in the action part of the rule. What I wish is that there would be a variable like {HTTP_PROTOCOL} which would have a value of ‘HTTP’ or ‘HTTPS’. There is a server variable called {HTTPS}, but the values of ‘on’ and ‘off’ aren’t practical in the action. You can also use {SERVER_PORT} or {SERVER_PORT_SECURE}, but again, they aren’t useful in the action. Let me illustrate. The following rule will redirect traffic for http(s)://localtest.me/ to http://www.localtest.me/. <rule name="Redirect to www"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> The problem is that it forces the request to HTTP even if the original request was for HTTPS. Interestingly enough, I planned to blog about this topic this week when I noticed in my twitter feed yesterday that Jeff Graves, a former colleague of mine, just wrote an excellent blog post about this very topic. He beat me to the punch by just a couple days. However, I figured I would still write my blog post on this topic. While his solution is a excellent one, I personally handle this another way most of the time. Plus, it’s a commonly asked question that isn’t documented well enough on the web yet, so having another article on the web won’t hurt. I can think of four different ways to handle this, and depending on your situation you may lean towards any of the four. Don’t let the choices overwhelm you though. Let’s keep it simple, Option 1 is what I use most of the time, Option 2 is what Jeff proposed and is the safest option, and Option 3 and Option 4 need only be considered if you have a more unique situation. All four options will work for most situations. Option 1 – CACHE_URL, single rule There is a server variable that has the protocol in it; {CACHE_URL}. This server variable contains the entire URL string (e.g. http://www.localtest.me:80/info.aspx?id=5) All we need to do is extract the HTTP or HTTPS and we’ll be set. This tends to be my preferred way to handle this situation. Indeed, Jeff did briefly mention this in his blog post: … you could use a condition on the CACHE_URL variable and a back reference in the rewritten URL. The problem there is that you then need to match all of the conditions which could be a problem if your rule depends on a logical “or” match for conditions. Thus the problem. If you have multiple conditions set to “Match Any” rather than “Match All” then this option won’t work. However, I find that 95% of all rules that I write use “Match All” and therefore, being the lazy administrator that I am I like this simple solution that only requires adding a single condition to a rule. The caveat is that if you use “Match Any” then you must consider one of the next two options. Enough with the preamble. Here’s how it works. Add a condition that checks for {CACHE_URL} with a pattern of “^(.+)://” like so: How you have a back-reference to the part before the ://, which is our treasured HTTP or HTTPS. In URL Rewrite 2.0 or greater you can check the “Track capture groups across conditions”, make that condition the first condition, and you have yourself a back-reference of {C:1}. The “Redirect to www” example with support for maintaining the protocol, will become: <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions trackAllCaptures="true"> <add input="{CACHE_URL}" pattern="^(.+)://" /> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{C:1}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> It’s not as easy as it would be if Microsoft gave us a built-in {HTTP_PROTOCOL} variable, but it’s pretty close. I also like this option since I often create rule examples for other people and this type of rule is portable since it’s self-contained within a single rule. Option 2 – Using a Rewrite Map For a safer rule that works for both “Match Any” and “Match All” situations, you can use the Rewrite Map solution that Jeff proposed. It’s a perfectly good solution with the only drawback being the ever so slight extra effort to set it up since you need to create a rewrite map before you create the rule. In other words, if you choose to use this as your sole method of handling the protocol, you’ll be safe. After you create a Rewrite Map called MapProtocol, you can use “{MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}” for the protocol within any rule action. Following is an example using a Rewrite Map. <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> </rules> <rewriteMaps> <rewriteMap name="MapProtocol"> <add key="on" value="https" /> <add key="off" value="http" /> </rewriteMap> </rewriteMaps> </rewrite> Option 3 – CACHE_URL, Multi-rule If you have many rules that will use the protocol, you can create your own server variable which can be used in subsequent rules. This option is no easier to set up than Option 2 above, but you can use it if you prefer the easier to remember syntax of {HTTP_PROTOCOL} vs. {MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}. The potential issue with this rule is that if you don’t have access to the server level (e.g. in a shared environment) then you cannot set server variables without permission. First, create a rule and place it at the top of the set of rules. You can create this at the server, site or subfolder level. However, if you create it at the site or subfolder level then the HTTP_PROTOCOL server variable needs to be approved at the server level. This can be achieved in IIS Manager by navigating to URL Rewrite at the server level, clicking on “View Server Variables” from the Actions pane, and added HTTP_PROTOCOL. If you create the rule at the server level then this step is not necessary. Following is an example of the first rule to create the HTTP_PROTOCOL and then a rule that uses it. The Create HTTP_PROTOCOL rule only needs to be created once on the server. <rule name="Create HTTP_PROTOCOL"> <match url=".*" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{CACHE_URL}" pattern="^(.+)://" /> </conditions> <serverVariables> <set name="HTTP_PROTOCOL" value="{C:1}" /> </serverVariables> <action type="None" /> </rule> <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{HTTP_PROTOCOL}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> Option 4 – Multi-rule Just to be complete I’ll include an example of how to achieve the same thing with multiple rules. I don’t see any reason to use it over the previous examples, but I’ll include an example anyway. Note that it will only work with the “Match All” setting for the conditions. <rule name="Redirect to www - http" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> <rule name="Redirect to www - https" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="on" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="https://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> Conclusion Above are four working examples of methods to call the protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) from the action of a URL Rewrite rule. You can use whichever method you most prefer. I’ve listed them in the order that I favor them, although I could see some people preferring Option 2 as their first choice. In any of the cases, hopefully you can use this as a reference for when you need to use the protocol in the rule’s action when writing your URL Rewrite rules. Further information: Viewing all Server Variable for a site. URL Parts available to URL Rewrite Rules Further URL Rewrite articles

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Big Data – What is Big Data – 3 Vs of Big Data – Volume, Velocity and Variety – Day 2 of 21

- by Pinal Dave

Data is forever. Think about it – it is indeed true. Are you using any application as it is which was built 10 years ago? Are you using any piece of hardware which was built 10 years ago? The answer is most certainly No. However, if I ask you – are you using any data which were captured 50 years ago, the answer is most certainly Yes. For example, look at the history of our nation. I am from India and we have documented history which goes back as over 1000s of year. Well, just look at our birthday data – atleast we are using it till today. Data never gets old and it is going to stay there forever. Application which interprets and analysis data got changed but the data remained in its purest format in most cases. As organizations have grown the data associated with them also grew exponentially and today there are lots of complexity to their data. Most of the big organizations have data in multiple applications and in different formats. The data is also spread out so much that it is hard to categorize with a single algorithm or logic. The mobile revolution which we are experimenting right now has completely changed how we capture the data and build intelligent systems. Big organizations are indeed facing challenges to keep all the data on a platform which give them a single consistent view of their data. This unique challenge to make sense of all the data coming in from different sources and deriving the useful actionable information out of is the revolution Big Data world is facing. Defining Big Data The 3Vs that define Big Data are Variety, Velocity and Volume. Volume We currently see the exponential growth in the data storage as the data is now more than text data. We can find data in the format of videos, musics and large images on our social media channels. It is very common to have Terabytes and Petabytes of the storage system for enterprises. As the database grows the applications and architecture built to support the data needs to be reevaluated quite often. Sometimes the same data is re-evaluated with multiple angles and even though the original data is the same the new found intelligence creates explosion of the data. The big volume indeed represents Big Data. Velocity The data growth and social media explosion have changed how we look at the data. There was a time when we used to believe that data of yesterday is recent. The matter of the fact newspapers is still following that logic. However, news channels and radios have changed how fast we receive the news. Today, people reply on social media to update them with the latest happening. On social media sometimes a few seconds old messages (a tweet, status updates etc.) is not something interests users. They often discard old messages and pay attention to recent updates. The data movement is now almost real time and the update window has reduced to fractions of the seconds. This high velocity data represent Big Data. Variety Data can be stored in multiple format. For example database, excel, csv, access or for the matter of the fact, it can be stored in a simple text file. Sometimes the data is not even in the traditional format as we assume, it may be in the form of video, SMS, pdf or something we might have not thought about it. It is the need of the organization to arrange it and make it meaningful. It will be easy to do so if we have data in the same format, however it is not the case most of the time. The real world have data in many different formats and that is the challenge we need to overcome with the Big Data. This variety of the data represent represent Big Data. Big Data in Simple Words Big Data is not just about lots of data, it is actually a concept providing an opportunity to find new insight into your existing data as well guidelines to capture and analysis your future data. It makes any business more agile and robust so it can adapt and overcome business challenges. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer discuss Evolution of Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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

- by [email protected]

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

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Running SSIS packages from C#

- by Piotr Rodak

Most of the developers and DBAs know about two ways of deploying packages: You can deploy them to database server and run them using SQL Server Agent job or you can deploy the packages to file system and run them using dtexec.exe utility. Both approaches have their pros and cons. However I would like to show you that there is a third way (sort of) that is often overlooked, and it can give you capabilities the ‘traditional’ approaches can’t. I have been working for a few years with applications that run packages from host applications that are implemented in .NET. As you know, SSIS provides programming model that you can use to implement more flexible solutions. SSIS applications are usually thought to be batch oriented, with fairly rigid architecture and processing model, with fixed timeframes when the packages are executed to process data. It doesn’t to be the case, you don’t have to limit yourself to batch oriented architecture. I have very good experiences with service oriented architectures processing large amounts of data. These applications are more complex than what I would like to show here, but the principle stays the same: you can execute packages as a service, on ad-hoc basis. You can also implement and schedule various signals, HTTP calls, file drops, time schedules, Tibco messages and other to run the packages. You can implement event handler that will trigger execution of SSIS when a certain event occurs in StreamInsight stream. This post is just a small example of how you can use the API and other features to create a service that can run SSIS packages on demand. I thought it might be a good idea to implement a restful service that would listen to requests and execute appropriate actions. As it turns out, it is trivial in C#. The application is implemented as console application for the ease of debugging and running. In reality, you might want to implement the application as Windows service. To begin, you have to reference namespace System.ServiceModel.Web and then add a few lines of code: Uri baseAddress = new Uri("http://localhost:8011/"); WebServiceHost svcHost = new WebServiceHost(typeof(PackRunner), baseAddress); try { svcHost.Open(); Console.WriteLine("Service is running"); Console.WriteLine("Press enter to stop the service."); Console.ReadLine(); svcHost.Close(); } catch (CommunicationException cex) { Console.WriteLine("An exception occurred: {0}", cex.Message); svcHost.Abort(); } The interesting lines are 3, 7 and 13. In line 3 you create a WebServiceHost object. In line 7 you start listening on the defined URL and then in line 13 you shut down the service. As you have noticed, the WebServiceHost constructor is accepting type of an object (here: PackRunner) that will be instantiated as singleton and subsequently used to process the requests. This is the class where you put your logic, but to tell WebServiceHost how to use it, the class must implement an interface which declares methods to be used by the host. The interface itself must be ornamented with attribute ServiceContract. [ServiceContract] public interface IPackRunner { [OperationContract] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "runpack?package={name}")] string RunPackage1(string name); [OperationContract] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "runpackwithparams?package={name}&rows={rows}")] string RunPackage2(string name, int rows); } Each method that is going to be used by WebServiceHost has to have attribute OperationContract, as well as WebGet or WebInvoke attribute. The detailed discussion of the available options is outside of scope of this post. I also recommend using more descriptive names to methods . Then, you have to provide the implementation of the interface: public class PackRunner : IPackRunner { ... There are two methods defined in this class. I think that since the full code is attached to the post, I will show only the more interesting method, the RunPackage2. /// <summary> /// Runs package and sets some of its variables. /// </summary> /// <param name="name">Name of the package</param> /// <param name="rows">Number of rows to export</param> /// <returns></returns> public string RunPackage2(string name, int rows) { try { string pkgLocation = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["PackagePath"]; pkgLocation = Path.Combine(pkgLocation, name.Replace("\"", "")); Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("Calling package {0} with parameter {1}.", name, rows); Application app = new Application(); Package pkg = app.LoadPackage(pkgLocation, null); pkg.Variables["User::ExportRows"].Value = rows; DTSExecResult pkgResults = pkg.Execute(); Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine(pkgResults.ToString()); if (pkgResults == DTSExecResult.Failure) { Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("Errors occured during execution of the package:"); foreach (DtsError er in pkg.Errors) Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", er.ErrorCode, er.Description); Console.WriteLine(); return "Errors occured during execution. Contact your support."; } Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine(); return "OK"; } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex); return ex.ToString(); } } The method accepts package name and number of rows to export. The packages are deployed to the file system. The path to the packages is configured in the application configuration file. This way, you can implement multiple services on the same machine, provided you also configure the URL for each instance appropriately. To run a package, you have to reference Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime namespace. This namespace is implemented in Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS.dll which in my case was installed in the folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\SDK\Assemblies”. Once you have done it, you can create an instance of Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Application as in line 18 in the above snippet. It may be a good idea to create the Application object in the constructor of the PackRunner class, to avoid necessity of recreating it each time the service is invoked. Then, in line 19 you see that an instance of Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Package is created. The method LoadPackage in its simplest form just takes package file name as the first parameter. Before you run the package, you can set its variables to certain values. This is a great way of configuring your packages without all the hassle with dtsConfig files. In the above code sample, variable “User:ExportRows” is set to value of the parameter “rows” of the method. Eventually, you execute the package. The method doesn’t throw exceptions, you have to test the result of execution yourself. If the execution wasn’t successful, you can examine collection of errors exposed by the package. These are the familiar errors you often see during development and debugging of the package. I you run the package from the code, you have opportunity to persist them or log them using your favourite logging framework. The package itself is very simple; it connects to my AdventureWorks database and saves number of rows specified in variable “User::ExportRows” to a file. You should know that before you run the package, you can change its connection strings, logging, events and many more. I attach solution with the test service, as well as a project with two test packages. To test the service, you have to run it and wait for the message saying that the host is started. Then, just type (or copy and paste) the below command to your browser. http://localhost:8011/runpackwithparams?package=%22ExportEmployees.dtsx%22&rows=12 When everything works fine, and you modified the package to point to your AdventureWorks database, you should see "OK” wrapped in xml: I stopped the database service to simulate invalid connection string situation. The output of the request is different now: And the service console window shows more information: As you see, implementing service oriented ETL framework is not a very difficult task. You have ability to configure the packages before you run them, you can implement logging that is consistent with the rest of your system. In application I have worked with we also have resource monitoring and execution control. We don’t allow to run more than certain number of packages to run simultaneously. This ensures we don’t strain the server and we use memory and CPUs efficiently. The attached zip file contains two projects. One is the package runner. It has to be executed with administrative privileges as it registers HTTP namespace. The other project contains two simple packages. This is really a cool thing, you should check it out!

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SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – 5 Videos from Joes 2 Pros Series – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433

- by pinaldave

Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Learning series is indeed fun. Joes 2 Pros series is written for beginners and who wants to build expertise for SQL Server programming and development from fundamental. In the beginning of the series author Rick Morelan is not shy to explain the simplest concept of how to open SQL Server Management Studio. Honestly the book starts with that much basic but as it progresses further Rick discussing about various advanced concepts from query tuning to Core Architecture. This five part series is written with keeping SQL Server Exam 70-433. Instead of just focusing on what will be there in exam, this series is focusing on learning the important concepts thoroughly. This book no way take short cut to explain any concepts and at times, will go beyond the topic at length. The best part is that all the books has many companion videos explaining the concepts and videos. Every Wednesday I like to post a video which explains something in quick few seconds. Today we will go over five videos which I posted in my earlier posts related to Joes 2 Pros series. Introduction to XML Data Type Methods – SQL in Sixty Seconds #015 The XML data type was first introduced with SQL Server 2005. This data type continues with SQL Server 2008 where expanded XML features are available, most notably is the power of the XQuery language to analyze and query the values contained in your XML instance. There are five XML data type methods available in SQL Server 2008: query() – Used to extract XML fragments from an XML data type. value() – Used to extract a single value from an XML document. exist() – Used to determine if a specified node exists. Returns 1 if yes and 0 if no. modify() – Updates XML data in an XML data type. node() – Shreds XML data into multiple rows (not covered in this blog post). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Error Actions – SQL in Sixty Seconds #014 Most people believe that when SQL Server encounters an error severity level 11 or higher the remaining SQL statements will not get executed. In addition, people also believe that if any error severity level of 11 or higher is hit inside an explicit transaction, then the whole statement will fail as a unit. While both of these beliefs are true 99% of the time, they are not true in all cases. It is these outlying cases that frequently cause unexpected results in your SQL code. To understand how to achieve consistent results you need to know the four ways SQL Error Actions can react to error severity levels 11-16: Statement Termination – The statement with the procedure fails but the code keeps on running to the next statement. Transactions are not affected. Scope Abortion – The current procedure, function or batch is aborted and the next calling scope keeps running. That is, if Stored Procedure A calls B and C, and B fails, then nothing in B runs but A continues to call C. @@Error is set but the procedure does not have a return value. Batch Termination – The entire client call is terminated. XACT_ABORT – (ON = The entire client call is terminated.) or (OFF = SQL Server will choose how to handle all errors.) [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – SQL in Sixty Seconds #013 Query hints specify that the indicated hints should be used throughout the query. Query hints affect all operators in the statement and are implemented using the OPTION clause. Cautionary Note: Because the SQL Server Query Optimizer typically selects the best execution plan for a query, it is highly recommended that hints be used as a last resort for experienced developers and database administrators to achieve the desired results. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Hierarchical Query – SQL in Sixty Seconds #012 A CTE can be thought of as a temporary result set and are similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. A CTE is generally considered to be more readable than a derived table and does not require the extra effort of declaring a Temp Table while providing the same benefits to the user. However; a CTE is more powerful than a derived table as it can also be self-referencing, or even referenced multiple times in the same query. A recursive CTE requires four elements in order to work properly: Anchor query (runs once and the results ‘seed’ the Recursive query) Recursive query (runs multiple times and is the criteria for the remaining results) UNION ALL statement to bind the Anchor and Recursive queries together. INNER JOIN statement to bind the Recursive query to the results of the CTE. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Server Security – SQL in Sixty Seconds #011 Let’s get some basic definitions down first. Take the workplace example where “Tom” needs “Read” access to the “Financial Folder”. What are the Securable, Principal, and Permissions from that last sentence? A Securable is a resource that someone might want to access (like the Financial Folder). A Principal is anything that might want to gain access to the securable (like Tom). A Permission is the level of access a principal has to a securable (like Read). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Please leave a comment explain which one was your favorite video as that will help me understand what works and what needs improvement. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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Oracle HRMS API – Update Employee

- by PRajkumar

API - hr_person_api.update_person Example -- Before Firing Update API -- Middle Name and Status is NULL lets update Middle Name and Status DECLARE -- Local Variables -- ----------------------- ln_object_version_number PER_ALL_PEOPLE_F.OBJECT_VERSION_NUMBER%TYPE := 7; lc_dt_ud_mode VARCHAR2(100) := NULL; ln_assignment_id PER_ALL_ASSIGNMENTS_F.ASSIGNMENT_ID%TYPE := 33564; lc_employee_number PER_ALL_PEOPLE_F.EMPLOYEE_NUMBER%TYPE := 'PRAJ_01'; -- Out Variables for Find Date Track Mode API -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- lb_correction BOOLEAN; lb_update BOOLEAN; lb_update_override BOOLEAN; lb_update_change_insert BOOLEAN; -- Out Variables for Update Employee API -- ----------------------------------------------------------- ld_effective_start_date DATE; ld_effective_end_date DATE; lc_full_name PER_ALL_PEOPLE_F.FULL_NAME%TYPE; ln_comment_id PER_ALL_PEOPLE_F.COMMENT_ID%TYPE; lb_name_combination_warning BOOLEAN; lb_assign_payroll_warning BOOLEAN; lb_orig_hire_warning BOOLEAN; BEGIN -- Find Date Track Mode -- -------------------------------- dt_api.find_dt_upd_modes ( -- Input Data Elements -- ------------------------------ p_effective_date => TO_DATE('29-JUN-2011'), p_base_table_name => 'PER_ALL_ASSIGNMENTS_F', p_base_key_column => 'ASSIGNMENT_ID', p_base_key_value => ln_assignment_id, -- Output data elements -- ------------------------------- p_correction => lb_correction, p_update => lb_update, p_update_override => lb_update_override, p_update_change_insert => lb_update_change_insert ); IF ( lb_update_override = TRUE OR lb_update_change_insert = TRUE ) THEN -- UPDATE_OVERRIDE -- --------------------------------- lc_dt_ud_mode := 'UPDATE_OVERRIDE'; END IF; IF ( lb_correction = TRUE ) THEN -- CORRECTION -- ---------------------- lc_dt_ud_mode := 'CORRECTION'; END IF; IF ( lb_update = TRUE ) THEN -- UPDATE -- -------------- lc_dt_ud_mode := 'UPDATE'; END IF; -- Update Employee API -- --------------------------------- hr_person_api.update_person ( -- Input Data Elements -- ------------------------------ p_effective_date => TO_DATE('29-JUN-2011'), p_datetrack_update_mode => lc_dt_ud_mode, p_person_id => 32979, p_middle_names => 'TEST', p_marital_status => 'M', -- Output Data Elements -- ---------------------------------- p_employee_number => lc_employee_number, p_object_version_number => ln_object_version_number, p_effective_start_date => ld_effective_start_date, p_effective_end_date => ld_effective_end_date, p_full_name => lc_full_name, p_comment_id => ln_comment_id, p_name_combination_warning => lb_name_combination_warning, p_assign_payroll_warning => lb_assign_payroll_warning, p_orig_hire_warning => lb_orig_hire_warning ); COMMIT; EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN ROLLBACK; dbms_output.put_line(SQLERRM); END; / SHOW ERR; After Firing Update Employee API -- Middle Name and Status

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ORACLE RIGHTNOW DYNAMIC AGENT DESKTOP CLOUD SERVICE - Putting the Dynamite into Dynamic Agent Desktop

- by Andreea Vaduva

Untitled Document There’s a mountain of evidence to prove that a great contact centre experience results in happy, profitable and loyal customers. The very best Contact Centres are those with high first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. But how many companies really believe they are the best? And how many believe that they can be? We know that with the right tools, companies can aspire to greatness – and achieve it. Core to this is ensuring their agents have the best tools that give them the right information at the right time, so they can focus on the customer and provide a personalised, professional and efficient service. Today there are multiple channels through which customers can communicate with you; phone, web, chat, social to name a few but regardless of how they communicate, customers expect a seamless, quality experience. Most contact centre agents need to switch between lots of different systems to locate the right information. This hampers their productivity, frustrates both the agent and the customer and increases call handling times. With this in mind, Oracle RightNow has designed and refined a suite of add-ins to optimize the Agent Desktop. Each is designed to simplify and adapt the agent experience for any given situation and unify the customer experience across your media channels. Let’s take a brief look at some of the most useful tools available and see how they make a difference. Contextual Workspaces: The screen where agents do their job. Agents don’t want to be slowed down by busy screens, scrolling through endless tabs or links to find what they’re looking for. They want quick, accurate and easy. Contextual Workspaces are fully configurable and through workspace rules apply if, then, else logic to display only the information the agent needs for the issue at hand . Assigned at the Profile level, different levels of agent, from a novice to the most experienced, get a screen that is relevant to their role and responsibilities and ensures their job is done quickly and efficiently the first time round. Agent Scripting: Sometimes, agents need to deliver difficult or sensitive messages while maximising the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. After all, contact centres are now increasingly viewed as revenue generators. Containing sophisticated branching logic, scripting helps agents to capture the right level of information and guides the agent step by step, ensuring no mistakes, inconsistencies or missed opportunities. Guided Assistance: This is typically used to solve common troubleshooting issues, displaying a series of question and answer sets in a decision-tree structure. This means agents avoid having to bookmark favourites or rely on written notes. Agents find particular value in these guides - to quickly craft chat and email responses. What’s more, by publishing guides in answers on support pages customers, can resolve issues themselves, without needing to contact your agents. And b ecause it can also accelerate agent ramp-up time, it ensures that even novice agents can solve customer problems like an expert. Desktop Workflow: Take a step back and look at the full customer interaction of your agents. It probably spans multiple systems and multiple tasks. With Desktop Workflows you control the design workflows that span the full customer interaction from start to finish. As sequences of decisions and actions, workflows are unique in that they can create or modify different records and provide automation behind the scenes. This means your agents can save time and provide better quality of service by having the tools they need and the relevant information as required. And doing this boosts satisfaction among your customers, your agents and you – so win, win, win! I have highlighted above some of the tools which can be used to optimise the desktop; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. In approaching your design, it’s important to understand why and how your customers contact you in the first place. Once you have this list of “whys” and “hows”, you can design effective policies and procedures to handle each category of problem, and then implement the right agent desktop user interface to support them. This will avoid duplication and wasted effort. Five Top Tips to take away: Start by working out “why” and “how” customers are contacting you. Implement a clean and relevant agent desktop to support your agents. If your workspaces are getting complicated consider using Desktop Workflow to streamline the interaction. Enhance your Knowledgebase with Guides. Agents can access them proactively and can be published on your web pages for customers to help themselves. Script any complex, critical or sensitive interactions to ensure consistency and accuracy. Desktop optimization is an ongoing process so continue to monitor and incorporate feedback from your agents and your customers to keep your Contact Centre successful. Want to learn more? Having attending the 3-day Oracle RightNow Customer Service Administration class your next step is to attend the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Design and 2-day Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration class. Here you’ll learn not only how to leverage the Agent Desktop tools but also how to optimise your self-service pages to enhance your customers’ web experience. Useful resources: Review the Best Practice Guide Review the tune-up guide About the Author: Angela Chandler joined Oracle University as a Senior Instructor through the RightNow Customer Experience Acquisition. Her other areas of expertise include Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management. She currently delivers the following Oracle RightNow courses in the classroom and as a Live Virtual Class: RightNow Customer Service Administration (3 days) RightNow Customer Portal Design and Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration (2 days) RightNow Analytics (2 days) Rightnow Chat Cloud Service Administration (2 days)

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SQL SERVER – What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1

- by Pinal Dave

This is the first part of the series Incremental Statistics. Here is the index of the complete series. What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1 Simple Example of Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 2 DMV to Identify Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 3 Statistics are considered one of the most important aspects of SQL Server Performance Tuning. You might have often heard the phrase, with related to performance tuning. “Update Statistics before you take any other steps to tune performance”. Honestly, I have said above statement many times and many times, I have personally updated statistics before I start to do any performance tuning exercise. You may agree or disagree to the point, but there is no denial that Statistics play an extremely vital role in the performance tuning. SQL Server 2014 has a new feature called Incremental Statistics. I have been playing with this feature for quite a while and I find that very interesting. After spending some time with this feature, I decided to write about this subject over here. New in SQL Server 2014 – Incremental Statistics Well, it seems like lots of people wants to start using SQL Server 2014′s new feature of Incremetnal Statistics. However, let us understand what actually this feature does and how it can help. I will try to simplify this feature first before I start working on the demo code. Code for all versions of SQL Server Here is the code which you can execute on all versions of SQL Server and it will update the statistics of your table. The keyword which you should pay attention is WITH FULLSCAN. It will scan the entire table and build brand new statistics for you which your SQL Server Performance Tuning engine can use for better estimation of your execution plan. UPDATE STATISTICS TableName(StatisticsName) WITH FULLSCAN Who should learn about this? Why? If you are using partitions in your database, you should consider about implementing this feature. Otherwise, this feature is pretty much not applicable to you. Well, if you are using single partition and your table data is in a single place, you still have to update your statistics the same way you have been doing. If you are using multiple partitions, this may be a very useful feature for you. In most cases, users have multiple partitions because they have lots of data in their table. Each partition will have data which belongs to itself. Now it is very common that each partition are populated separately in SQL Server. Real World Example For example, if your table contains data which is related to sales, you will have plenty of entries in your table. It will be a good idea to divide the partition into multiple filegroups for example, you can divide this table into 3 semesters or 4 quarters or even 12 months. Let us assume that we have divided our table into 12 different partitions. Now for the month of January, our first partition will be populated and for the month of February our second partition will be populated. Now assume, that you have plenty of the data in your first and second partition. Now the month of March has just started and your third partition has started to populate. Due to some reason, if you want to update your statistics, what will you do? In SQL Server 2012 and earlier version You will just use the code of WITH FULLSCAN and update the entire table. That means even though you have only data in third partition you will still update the entire table. This will be VERY resource intensive process as you will be updating the statistics of the partition 1 and 2 where data has not changed at all. In SQL Server 2014 You will just update the partition of Partition 3. There is a special syntax where you can now specify which partition you want to update now. The impact of this is that it is smartly merging the new data with old statistics and update the entire statistics without doing FULLSCAN of your entire table. This has a huge impact on performance. Remember that the new feature in SQL Server 2014 does not change anything besides the capability to update a single partition. However, there is one feature which is indeed attractive. Previously, when table data were changed 20% at that time, statistics update were triggered. However, now the same threshold is applicable to a single partition. That means if your partition faces 20% data, change it will also trigger partition level statistics update which, when merged to your final statistics will give you better performance. In summary If you are not using a partition, this feature is not applicable to you. If you are using a partition, this feature can be very helpful to you. Tomorrow: We will see working code of SQL Server 2014 Incremental Statistics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Statistics, Statistics

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NoSQL Java API for MySQL Cluster: Questions & Answers

- by Mat Keep

The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster, and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability. Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs. First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers. ClusterJ and Cluster JPA ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used by JDO, JPA, and Hibernate. A simple API gives users extremely high performance for common operations: insert, delete, update, and query. ClusterJPA works with ClusterJ to extend functionality, including - Persistent classes - Relationships - Joins in queries - Lazy loading - Table and index creation from object model By eliminating data transformations via SQL, users get lower data access latency and higher throughput. In addition, Java developers have a more natural programming method to directly manage their data, with a complete, feature-rich solution for Object/Relational Mapping. As a result, the development of Java applications is simplified with faster development cycles resulting in accelerated time to market for new services. MySQL Cluster offers multiple NoSQL APIs alongside Java: - Memcached for a persistent, high performance, write-scalable Key/Value store, - HTTP/REST via an Apache module - C++ via the NDB API for the lowest absolute latency. Developers can use SQL as well as NoSQL APIs for access to the same data set via multiple query patterns – from simple Primary Key lookups or inserts to complex cross-shard JOINs using Adaptive Query Localization Marrying NoSQL and SQL access to an ACID-compliant database offers developers a number of benefits. MySQL Cluster’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture with auto-sharding and real time performance makes it a great fit for workloads requiring high volume OLTP. Users also get the added flexibility of being able to run real-time analytics across the same OLTP data set for real-time business insight. OK – hopefully you now have a better idea of why ClusterJ and JPA are available. Now, for the Q&A. Q & A Q. Why would I use Connector/J vs. ClusterJ? A. Partly it's a question of whether you prefer to work with SQL (Connector/J) or objects (ClusterJ). Performance of ClusterJ will be better as there is no need to pass through the MySQL Server. A ClusterJ operation can only act on a single table (e.g. no joins) - ClusterJPA extends that capability Q. Can I mix different APIs (ie ClusterJ, Connector/J) in our application for different query types? A. Yes. You can mix and match all of the API types, SQL, JDBC, ODBC, ClusterJ, Memcached, REST, C++. They all access the exact same data in the data nodes. Update through one API and new data is instantly visible to all of the others. Q. How many TCP connections would a SessionFactory instance create for a cluster of 8 data nodes? A. SessionFactory has a connection to the mgmd (management node) but otherwise is just a vehicle to create Sessions. Without using connection pooling, a SessionFactory will have one connection open with each data node. Using optional connection pooling allows multiple connections from the SessionFactory to increase throughput. Q. Can you give details of how Cluster J optimizes sharding to enhance performance of distributed query processing? A. Each data node in a cluster runs a Transaction Coordinator (TC), which begins and ends the transaction, but also serves as a resource to operate on the result rows. While an API node (such as a ClusterJ process) can send queries to any TC/data node, there are performance gains if the TC is where most of the result data is stored. ClusterJ computes the shard (partition) key to choose the data node where the row resides as the TC. Q. What happens if we perform two primary key lookups within the same transaction? Are they sent to the data node in one transaction? A. ClusterJ will send identical PK lookups to the same data node. Q. How is distributed query processing handled by MySQL Cluster ? A. If the data is split between data nodes then all of the information will be transparently combined and passed back to the application. The session will connect to a data node - typically by hashing the primary key - which then interacts with its neighboring nodes to collect the data needed to fulfil the query. Q. Can I use Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster A. Support for Foreign Keys is included in the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access release Summary The NoSQL Java APIs are packaged with MySQL Cluster, available for download here so feel free to take them for a spin today! Key Resources MySQL Cluster on-line demo MySQL ClusterJ and JPA On-demand webinar MySQL ClusterJ and JPA documentation MySQL ClusterJ and JPA whitepaper and tutorial

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Deploying Data Mining Models using Model Export and Import, Part 2

- by [email protected]

In my last post, Deploying Data Mining Models using Model Export and Import, we explored using DBMS_DATA_MINING.EXPORT_MODEL and DBMS_DATA_MINING.IMPORT_MODEL to enable moving a model from one system to another. In this post, we'll look at two distributed scenarios that make use of this capability and a tip for easily moving models from one machine to another using only Oracle Database, not an external file transport mechanism, such as FTP. The first scenario, consider a company with geographically distributed business units, each collecting and managing their data locally for the products they sell. Each business unit has in-house data analysts that build models to predict which products to recommend to customers in their space. A central telemarketing business unit also uses these models to score new customers locally using data collected over the phone. Since the models recommend different products, each customer is scored using each model. This is depicted in Figure 1.Figure 1: Target instance importing multiple remote models for local scoring In the second scenario, consider multiple hospitals that collect data on patients with certain types of cancer. The data collection is standardized, so each hospital collects the same patient demographic and other health / tumor data, along with the clinical diagnosis. Instead of each hospital building it's own models, the data is pooled at a central data analysis lab where a predictive model is built. Once completed, the model is distributed to hospitals, clinics, and doctor offices who can score patient data locally.Figure 2: Multiple target instances importing the same model from a source instance for local scoring Since this blog focuses on model export and import, we'll only discuss what is necessary to move a model from one database to another. Here, we use the package DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER, which can move files between Oracle databases. The script is fairly straightforward, but requires setting up a database link and directory objects. We saw how to create directory objects in the previous post. To create a database link to the source database from the target, we can use, for example: create database link SOURCE1_LINK connect to <schema> identified by <password> using 'SOURCE1'; Note that 'SOURCE1' refers to the service name of the remote database entry in your tnsnames.ora file. From SQL*Plus, first connect to the remote database and export the model. Note that the model_file_name does not include the .dmp extension. This is because export_model appends "01" to this name. Next, connect to the local database and invoke DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER.GET_FILE and import the model. Note that "01" is eliminated in the target system file name. connect <source_schema>/<password>@SOURCE1_LINK; BEGIN DBMS_DATA_MINING.EXPORT_MODEL ('EXPORT_FILE_NAME' || '.dmp', 'MY_SOURCE_DIR_OBJECT', 'name =''MY_MINING_MODEL'''); END; connect <target_schema>/<password>; BEGIN DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER.GET_FILE ('MY_SOURCE_DIR_OBJECT', 'EXPORT_FILE_NAME' || '01.dmp', 'SOURCE1_LINK', 'MY_TARGET_DIR_OBJECT', 'EXPORT_FILE_NAME' || '.dmp' ); DBMS_DATA_MINING.IMPORT_MODEL ('EXPORT_FILE_NAME' || '.dmp', 'MY_TARGET_DIR_OBJECT'); END; To clean up afterward, you may want to drop the exported .dmp file at the source and the transferred file at the target. For example, utl_file.fremove('&directory_name', '&model_file_name' || '.dmp');

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 23, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 23, 2011Popular ReleasesMiniTwitter: 1.70: MiniTwitter 1.70 ???? ?? ????? xAuth ?? OAuth ??????? 1.70 ??????????????????????????。 ???????????????? Twitter ? Web ??????????、PIN ????????????????????。??????????????????、???????????????????????????。Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.7b: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.7b. Bug fixes: - BROKEN PLUGIN by upgrading SkyDriveServiceClient version 2.0.1b. Please do not forget to express your opinion of the plugin by rating it! Donate (EUR)SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 2.0.1b (RELOADED): SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly has been RELOADED in version 2.0.1b as a REAL API. It supports the followings: - Creating root and sub folders - Uploading and downloading files - Renaming and deleting folders and files Bug fixes: - BROKEN API (issue 6834) Please do not forget to express your opinion of the assembly by rating it! Donate (EUR)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query v1.0.0.59794: This release includes the following enhancements: Added a Most Recently Used file list Added Row counts to the query (per tab) and table view windows Added the Command Timeout option, only valid for MSSQL for now - see options If you have no idea what this thing is make sure you check out http://pksoftware.net/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction. 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To get started, be sure to check out our installation documentation. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please take a look at ...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: All-In-One Code Framework 2011-06-19: Alternatively, you can install Sample Browser or Sample Browser VS extension, and download the code samples from Sample Browser. Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for Windows Azure Sample Description Owner CSAzureStartupTask The sample demonstrates using the startup tasks to install the prerequisites or to modify configuration settings for your environment in Windows Azure Rafe Wu ...IronPython: 2.7.1 Beta 1: This is the first beta release of IronPython 2.7. Like IronPython 54498, this release requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4. This release will replace any existing IronPython installation. The highlights of this release are: Updated the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2. Add the ast, csv, and unicodedata modules. Fixed several bugs. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio are disabled by default. See http://pytools.codeplex.com for the next generation of Python Visual Studio support. See...Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.40: This is a RTW release which adds new features to v5.0.26 RTW. Support for multiple FacebookMediaObjects in one request. Allow FacebookMediaObjects in batch requests. Removes support for Cassini WebServer (visual studio inbuilt web server). Better support for unit testing and mocking. updated SimpleJson to v0.6 Refer to CHANGES.txt for details. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Multiple file uploads in Batch Requests Faceb...Candescent NUI: Candescent NUI (7774): This is the binary version of the source code in change set 7774.EffectControls-Silverlight controls with animation effects: EffectControls: EffectControlsNLog - Advanced .NET Logging: NLog 2.0 Release Candidate: Release notes for NLog 2.0 RC can be found at http://nlog-project.org/nlog-2-rc-release-notesNew ProjectsA SharePoint Client Object Model Demo in Silverlight: This demo shows how to utilize the SharePoint 2010 Foundation's Client Object Model within a Silverlight application.Azure SDK Extentions (ja): Azure SDK Tools ????????VS??????????????????。 ??????????????????、????????????????。Bango Apple iOS Application Analytics SDK: Bango application analytics is an analytics solution for mobile applications. This SDK provides a framework you can use in your application to add analytics capabilities to your mobile applications. It's developed in Object C and targets the Apple iOS operating system. Binsembler: Binsembler allows assembler programmers to easily import files into their source code, so that they'll no longer have to use external flash memory just for a few bytes of data. The project is developed in C#.DataTool: Liver.DTEMICHAG: This project contains the .NET Microframework solution for the EMIC Home Automation Gateway (EMICHAG). This project created within the co-funded research project called HOMEPLANE (http://homeplane.org/). html5_stady: html5 DemoJavaScript Web Resource Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: JavaScript Web Resource Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 helps CRM developers to extract javascript web resources to disk, maintain them and import changes back to CRM database. You will no longer have to perform mutliple clicks operation to update you js web resourcesKiefer SharePoint 2010 Templates: The Kiefer Consulting SharePoint 2010 Site Templates allow you to quickly create SharePoint sites pre-configured to meet specific business needs. These sites use only out of the box SharePoint Foundation 2010 features and will run on SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 365.KxFrame: KxFrame is intended to be free, easy-to-use, rapid business application framework. How many times were you starting to develop application from scratch? And every time you say to yourself: "Just this time, next time I'll make some framework"? It's over now! Lets make business application framework together and enjoy creating applications faster than ever.Made In Hell: Small console game. Just a training in code writings.Merula SmartPages: When you want to remember your data in an ASP.NET site after a postback, you will have to use Session or ViewState to remember your data. It’s a lot work to use Session and ViewStates, I just want to declare variables like in a desktop application. So I created a library called Merula SmartPages. This library will remember the properties and variables of your page. MVC ASPX to Razor View Converter: So this project will convert your MVC ASPX pages you worked so hard to make into cshtml files. You simply drop the exe into the folder and it works. I hope you enjoy, thanks! Netduino Utilities: Netduino classes I use with various odds of hardware I have. Hope it's useful ;-) NetEssentialsBugtrackerProject: Bug tracker for telerikPin My Site: Site to help demonstrate pinning capabilities of IE9Python3 ????: Python3 ????RDI Open CTe: RDI Open CTeRDI Open SPED (Contábil): RDI Open SPED (Contábil)RDI Open SPED (Fiscal): RDI Open SPED (Fiscal)sbc: sbcSimply Helpdesk UserControl: Simply Helpdesk is a user control that allows people to embed a helpdesk directly into their active projects. It is design to be as simple as possible, Minimal configuration is required to get it up and running.SQL Server HowTo: Short T-SQL scripts for difficult tasks from everyday job of programmers and database administrators. Also contains links to external resources with such useful information.Stashy: Stash data simply. Stashy is a Micro-NoSql framework. Stashy is a tiny interface, plus four reference implementations, for adding data storage and retrieval to all your .net types. Drop a single stashy class into your application then you can save and load the lot. storeBags01: hacer pedido de bolsos maletas y morrales compra de bolsos y maletas storebags UMTS Net: Program optimizes deployment of UMTS devicesvAddins - A little different addins framework: vAddins transforms C# and VB into powerful scripting languages for making addins or scripts. With this, you no longer need to open Visual Studio or other IDEs, reference assemblies, write the code and then built, move and test... Now you only have to write the code and test!Visual Studio Tags: A Visual Studio extension for tagging your source code files, and then explore your files using the tags.Window Phone Private Media Library: Windows Phone application to protect your media files from unauthorized eyes using your phone.Windows Touch/Mouse/TUIO Multi-touch Gesture recognizer & Trainer: This projects based on Single point Gesture recognizer paper of http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/uist-07.1.pdf of unistrokes alphabets. The project expand capabilities to allow multi-touch gestures. C# library for rapid use. Mono Client. And C++ Client.WPF, Silverlight PDF viewer: WPF, Silverlight PDF viewer

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Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small. For setting up the Areas to run Multiple projects under one solution see my post on When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects and for an explanation of branching see Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams. Update 17th May 2010 – We are currently trialling running a single Sprint branch to improve our history. Whenever I setup a new Team Project I implement the basic version control structure. I put “readme.txt” files in the folder structure explaining the different levels, and a solution file called “[Client].[Product].sln” located at “$/[Client]/[Product]/DEV/Main” within version control. Developers should add any projects you need to create to that solution in the format “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly]” and they will automatically be picked up and built automatically when you setup Automated Builds using Team Foundation Build. All test projects need to be done using MSTest to get proper IDE and Team Foundation Build integration out-of-the-box and be named for the assembly that it is testing with a naming convention of “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly].Tests” Here is a description of the folder layout; this content should be replicated in readme files under version control in the relevant locations so that even developers new to the project can see how to do it. Figure: The Team Project level - at this level there should be a folder for each the products that you are building if you are using Areas correctly in TFS 2010. You should try very hard to avoided spaces as these things always end up in a URL eventually e.g. "Code Auditor" should be "CodeAuditor". Figure: Product Level - At this level there should be only 3 folders (DEV, RELESE and SAFE) all of which should be in capitals. These folders represent the three stages of your application production line. Each of them may contain multiple branches but this format leaves all of your branches at the same level. Figure: The DEV folder is where all of the Development branches reside. The DEV folder will contain the "Main" branch and all feature branches is they are being used. The DEV designation specifies that all code in every branch under this folder has not been released or made ready for release. And feature branches MUST merge (Forward Integrate) from Main and stabilise prior to merging (Reverse Integration) back down into Main and being decommissioned. Figure: In the Feature branching scenario only merges are allowed onto Main, no development can be done there. Once we have a mature product it is important that new features being developed in parallel are kept separate. This would most likely be used if we had more than one Scrum team working on a single product. Figure: when we are ready to do a release of our software we will create a release branch that is then stabilised prior to deployment. This protects the serviceability of of our released code allowing developers to fix bugs and re-release an existing version. Figure: All bugs found on a release are fixed on the release. All bugs found in a release are fixed on the release and a new deployment is created. After the deployment is created the bug fixes are then merged (Reverse Integration) into the Main branch. We do this so that we separate out our development from our production ready code. Figure: SAFE or RTM is a read only record of what you actually released. Labels are not immutable so are useless in this circumstance. When we have completed stabilisation of the release branch and we are ready to deploy to production we create a read-only copy of the code for reference. In some cases this could be a regulatory concern, but in most cases it protects the company building the product from legal entanglements based on what you did or did not release. Figure: This allows us to reference any particular version of our application that was ever shipped. In addition I am an advocate of having a single solution with all the Project folders directly under the “Trunk”/”Main” folder and using the full name for the project folders.. Figure: The ideal solution If you must have multiple solutions, because you need to use more than one version of Visual Studio, name the solutions “[Client].[Product][VSVersion].sln” and have it reside in the same folder as the other solution. This makes it easier for Automated build and improves the discoverability of your code and its dependencies. Send me your feedback! Technorati Tags: VS ALM,VSTS Developing,VS 2010,VS 2008,TFS 2010,TFS 2008,TFBS

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Closing the gap between strategy and execution with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

- by manan.goel(at)oracle.com

Wikipedia defines strategy as a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An example of this is General Electric's acquisitions and divestiture strategy (plan) designed to propel GE to number 1 or 2 place (goal) in every business segment that it operated in. Execution on the other hand can be defined as the actions taken to getting things done. In GE's case execution will be steps followed for mergers/acquisitions or divestiture. Business press has written extensively about the importance of both strategy and execution in achieving desired business objectives. Perhaps the quote from Thomas Edison says it best - "vision without execution is hallucination". Conversely, it can be said that "execution without vision" is well may be "wishful thinking". Research overwhelmingly point towards the wide gap between strategy and execution. According to a published study, 49% of surveyed executives perceive a gap between their organizations' ability to develop and communicate sound strategies and their ability to implement those strategies. Further, of these respondents, 64% don't have full confidence that their companies will be able to close the gap. Having established the severity and importance of the problem let's talk about the reasons for the strategy-execution gap. The common reasons include: - Lack of clearly defined goals - Lack of consistent measure of success - Lack of ownership - Lack of alignment - Lack of communication - Lack of proper execution - Lack of monitoring There are multiple approaches to solving the problem including organizational development practices, technology enablement etc. In most cases a combination of approaches is required to achieve the desired result. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll focus on technology. Imagine an integrated closed loop technology platform that automates the entire management cycle from defining strategy to assigning ownership to communicating goals to achieving alignment to collaboration to taking actions to monitoring progress and achieving mid course corrections. Besides, for best ROI and lowest TCO such a system should also have characteristics like: Complete - Full functionality - Rich end user access Open - Any data source - Any business application - Any technology stack Integrated - Common metadata - Common security - Common system management From a capabilities perspective the system should provide the following capabilities: Define - Strategy - Objectives - Ownership - KPI's Communicate - Pervasive - Collaborative - Role based - Secure Execute - Integrated - Intuitive - Secure - Ubiquitous Monitor - Multiple styles and formats - Exception based - Push & Pull Having talked about the business problem and outlined the blueprint for a technology solution, let's talk about how Oracle Business Intelligence 11g can help. Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive business intelligence solution for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards. Oracle's best in class BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation that provides a unified end user experience and features a Common Enterprise Information Model, with common security, query request generation and optimization, and system management. The BI platform is · Complete - meaning it delivers all modes and styles of BI including reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards with a rich end user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, alerts and notifications, search and mobile access. · Open - meaning the BI platform integrates with any data source, ETL tool, business application, application server, security infrastructure, portal technology as well as any ODBC compliant third party analytical tool. The suite accesses data from multiple heterogeneous sources--including popular relational and multidimensional data sources and major ERP and CRM applications from Oracle and SAP. · Integrated - meaning the BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation built on an open, standards based service oriented architecture. The platform features a common enterprise information model, common security model and a common configuration, deployment and systems management framework. To summarize, Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive, integrated BI platform that lets you define strategy, identify objectives, assign ownership, define KPI's, collaborate, take action, monitor, report and do course corrections all form a single interface and a single system. The platform's integrated metadata model and task based design ensures that the entire workflow from defining strategy to execution to monitoring is completely integrated delivering end to end visibility, transparency and agility. Click here to learn more about Oracle BI 11g.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 20, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 20, 2012Popular ReleasesApex: Apex 1.4: Apex 1.4Apex 1.4 provides a framework for rapid MVVM development. Download Apex 1.4 to get the core binaries, Visual Studio Extensions, Project Templates, Samples and Documentation. The 1.4 Release provides a vast number of enhancements via the Apex Broker. The Apex Broker is an object that can be used to retrieve models, get the view for a view model and more, much like an IoC container. The new Zune Style application templates for WPF and Silverlight give a great starting point for makin...Auto Proxy Configuration: V 1.0: This tool consists of a windows application that allows you to define a proxy server for each DNSDomain and a windows service that matches the DNSDomain to the database and set the proxy accordingly.51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.6.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.6.111. Altered the GetIsCrawler method in MobileCapabilities.cs to return null if no value for IsCrawler is provided. Previously the method returned false breaking values provided via the BrowserCap file. 2. Enhanced Xml/Reader.cs to reduce the number of byte objects created when decompressing zipped XML files. 3. Altered Location.cs GetUrl method to remove replacement string tags {0} from the new url if no values were found to replace them...NShader - HLSL - GLSL - CG - Shader Syntax Highlighter AddIn for Visual Studio: NShader 1.3 - VS2010 + VS2012: This is a small maintenance release to support new VS2012 as well as VS2010. This release is also fixing the issue The "Comment Selection" include the first line after the selection If the new NShader version doesn't highlight your shader, you can try to: Remove the registry entry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\FontAndColors\Cache Remove all lines using "fx" or "hlsl" in file C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Micr...asp.net membership: v1.0 Membership Management: Abmemunit is a Membership Management Project where developer can use their learning purposes of various issues related to ASP.NET, MVC, ASP.NET membership, Entity Framework, Code First, Ajax, Unit Test, IOC Container, Repository, and Service etc. Though it is a very simple project and all of these topics are used in an easy manner gathering from various big projects, it can easily understand. User End Functional Specification The functionalities of this project are very simple and straight...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 4.0: Up to 2.5x performance improvement in stringify operations Up to 1.7x performance improvement in parse operations Improved error messages when parsing invalid JSON strings Extended support to .Net 2.0, .Net 3.5, .Net 4.0, Silverlight 4, Windows Phone, Windows 8 metro apps and Xbox JSON namespace changed to ComputerBeacon.Json namespaceXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0: System Requirements OS Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Server Internet Information Service 7.0 or above .NET Framework .NET Framework 4.0 WCF Activation feature HTTP Activation Non-HTTP Activation for net.pipe/net.tcp WCF bindings ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC 3.0 Database Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Additional Deployment Configuration Started Windows Process Activation service Start...ASP.NET REST Services Framework: Release 1.3 - Standard version: The REST-services Framework v1.3 has important functional changes allowing to use complex data types as service call parameters. Such can be mapped to form or query string variables or the HTTP Message Body. This is especially useful when REST-style service URLs with POST or PUT HTTP method is used. Beginning from v1.1 the REST-services Framework is compatible with ASP.NET Routing model as well with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) principle. These two are often important when buildin...NanoMVVM: a lightweight wpf MVVM framework: v0.10 stable beta: v0.10 Minor fixes to ui and code, added error example to async commands, separated project into various releases (mainly into logical wholes), removed expression blend satellite assembliesCrashReporter.NET : Exception reporting library for C# and VB.NET: CrashReporter.NET 1.1: Added screenshot support that takes screenshot of user's desktop on application crash and provides option to include screenshot with crash report. Added Windows version in crash reports. Added email field and exception type field in crash report dialog. Added exception type in crash reports. Added screenshot tab that shows crash screenshot.MFCMAPI: June 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1034 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5.1: Release Notes The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5.1 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes and minor updates. Recent additions include project templates for iOS and MacOS. The MonoDevelop.MonoGame AddIn also works on Linux. We have removed the dependency on the thirdparty GamePad library to allow MonoGame to be included in the debian/ubuntu repositories. There have been a major bug fix to ensure textures are disposed of correctly as well as some ...????: ????2.0.2: 1、???????????。 2、DJ???????10?，?????????10?。 3、??.NET 4.5(Windows 8)????????????。 4、???????????。 5、??????????????。 6、???Windows 8????。 7、?????2.0.1???????????????。 8、??DJ?????????。Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 5 Preview 1 (6.17.2012): Azure Storage Explorer verison 5 is in development, and Preview 1 provides an early look at the new user interface and some of the new features. Here's what's new in v5 Preview 1: New UI, similar to the new Windows Azure HTML5 portal Support for configuring and viewing storage account logging Support for configuring and viewing storage account monitoring Uses the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK libraries Bug fixesCodename 'Chrometro': Developer Preview: Welcome to the Codename 'Chrometro' Developer Preview! This is the very first public preview of the app. Please note that this is a highly primitive build and the app is not even half of what it is meant to be. The Developer Preview sports the following: 1) An easy to use application setup. 2) The Assistant which simplifies your task of customization. 3) The partially complete Metro UI. 4) A variety of settings 5) A partially complete web browsing experience To get started, download the Ins...Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): Release 92560: Prerequisites Visual Studio 2010 - Any version including Express. Express users must also install Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell runtime VMWare - Cosmos can run on real hardware as well as other virtualization environments but our default debug setup is configured for VMWare. VMWare Player (Free). or Workstation VMWare VIX API 1.11AutoUpdaterdotNET : Autoupdate for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.1: Release Notes New feature added that allows user to select remind later interval.Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script: Install AdventureWorks2008 OLTP database from script The AdventureWorks database can be created by running the instawdb.sql DDL script contained in the AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script.zip file. The instawdb.sql script depends on two path environment variables: SqlSamplesDatabasePath and SqlSamplesSourceDataPath. The SqlSamplesDatabasePath environment variable is set to the default Microsoft ® SQL Server 2008 path. You will need to change the SqlSamplesSourceDataPath environment variable to th...WipeTouch, a jQuery touch plugin: 1.2.0: Changes since 1.1.0: New: wipeMove event, triggered while moving the mouse/finger. New: added "source" to the result object. Bug fix: sometimes vertical wipe events would not trigger correctly. Bug fix: improved tapToClick handler. General code refactoring. Windows Phone 7 is not supported, yet! Its behaviour is completely broken and would require some special tricks to make it work. Maybe in the future...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3026 (June 2012): Fixes: round( 0.0 ) local TimeZone name TimeZone search compiling multi-script-assemblies PhpString serialization DocDocument::loadHTMLFile() token_get_all() parse_url()New ProjectsAMPlebrot: Sample code for Microsoft AMP including a auto-zooming Mandlebrot set browser and various random number generator implementations.Aquasoft ISZR web services Proxy: Knihovna pro pripojení k Informacnímu Systému Základních Registru (ISZR).Article Authoring Add-in for Word (NLM JATS): Use Microsoft Word to create, edit, save, and upload journal articles in the NLM Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) DTDBetter Calculator: Scientific calculator with support for user variables and full expression evaluation.Cosmos Image Converter (CIC) GUI: CIC Gui is a program developed for COSMOS (http://cosmos.codeplex.com/) that processes an image and creates code compatible with COSMOS for you.CSNN: ?????? ?????? ????????? ???????????? ???????????? ????????? ????, ??????????? ????????? ????????? ? ??????????? ???????? ?? ????????.Cuddy Chat Server Client: Small Chat Server & Client - basierend auf C# mit SocketsdemoASP: asp.net mvcEspera: Espera is a portable music player, specialized for partys. It is written in C# with WPF as frontend technology.ExamEvaluator: Utility to create excelspreadsheets that can be used to evaluate the results of an exam. (Dutch only for now)FTToolkit for WinRT: FTToolkit for WinRT is the Windows RT Version of FTToolkit. The framework is designed for using in Metro Style Apps on Windows 8HydroServer Lite: HydroServer Lite is a lightweight version of the CUAHSI HydroServer written in PHP. It can be run on any webhosting service that supports PHP and MySQL. ImmunityBusterWP7: We will let you know about this soon...JavaVM for small microcontrollers: uJavaVM is a Java virtual machine for small microcontrollers written in portable C. The project is organized to support multiple microcontroller platforms. Jaw-Breaker: Hello,JIMS: Jangids Inventory Management SystemLee's Simple HTA Template: A SIMPLE HTA that can be used in various scripts and OSD. Very Minimal, intended to be used a starting template.Log4netExtensions: Log4net extensions for none static classMedical information Management System: The Medical Information Management System (MIMS) is a comprehensive solution for the various stakeholders in Medical Industry in the Nigeria.Minimap XNA game component for TemporalWars Indie Game Engine: This Minimap XNA Component is designed to show unit movement, structures placed in the game world, and take direct orders (Windows Platform). MusicCreator: This is a program that make sounds. Just open a sound and add into the program. then press the record button and the sound will be recorded.Osnova CMS: Osnova CMS, content management frameworkPicBin: PicBin is like PasteBin only that it is for pics. The Project uses .NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4 and HTML5.PowerShell scripts to enable and disable tracing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: These are PowerShell scripts (files). There are 2 scripts in the zip file "CRM2011EnableDisableTrace.zip".PrepareQuery for MVC: ??????????? ??? ASP.NET MVC. Central.Linq.Mvc ?????? ?????????? ??? Central.Linq, ??????? ????????? ??????????? ???????????? ??????? ?? ?????? ?? ??????.Proggy: This will be a code-driven CMS for .NET developers. If I ever get the time to finish it.QuickSL: SL????， ??：??????、??????。 ?UI???????Temporal-Wars XNA Indie Game Engine: Temporal Wars 3D Engine includes a full suite of WYSIWG tools designed for rapid creation of your game world. Created for myself (Ben), now available for FREE.VIPER: VIPER RuntimeWeibo API library: Sina Weibo API library is NOT based on OAuth, but it is much more powerful in operating weibo activities via program. Major usage: 1. Rebot 2. Archive content

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Creating the Business Card Request InfoPath Form

- by JKenderdine

Business Card Request Demo Files Back in January I spoke at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach about InfoPath forms and Web Part deployment. Below is some of the information and details regarding the form I created for the session. There are many blogs and Microsoft articles on how to create a basic form so I won’t repeat that information here. This blog will just explain a few of the options I chose when creating the solutions for SPS Virginia Beach. The above link contains the zipped package files of the two InfoPath forms(no code solution and coded solution), the list template for the Location list I used, and the PowerPoint deck. If you plan to use these templates, you will need to update the forms to work within your own environments (change data connections, code links, etc.). Also, you must have the SharePoint Enterprise version, with InfoPath Services configured in order to use the Web Browser enabled forms. So what are the requirements for this template? Business Card Request Form Template Design Plan: Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site Submitted directly to form library The base form was created using the blank template. The table and rows were added using Insert tab and selecting Custom Table. The use of tables is a great way to make sure everything lines up. You do have to split the tables from time to time. If you’ve ever split cells and then tried to re-align one to find that you impacted the others, you know why. Here is what the base form looks like in InfoPath. Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements You will notice I also used Sections within the form. These show or hide depending on options selected or whether or not fields are blank. This is a great way to prevent your users from feeling overwhelmed with a large form (this one wouldn’t apply). Although not used in this one, you can also use various views with a tab interface. I’ll show that in another post. Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Utilizing rules you can load data when the form initiates (Data tab, Form Load). Anything you can automate is always appreciated by the user as that is data they don’t have to enter. For example, loading their user id or other user information on load: Always keep in mind though how much data you load and the method for loading that data (through rules, code, etc.). They have an impact on form performance. The form will take longer to load if you bring in a ton of data from external sources. Laura Rogers has a great blog post on using the User Information List to load user information. If the user has logged into SharePoint, then this can be used quite effectively and without a huge performance hit. What I have found is that using the User Profile service via code behind or the Web Service “GetUserProfileByName” (as above) can take more time to load the user data. Just food for thought. You must add the data connection in order for the above rules to work. You can connect to the data connection through the Data tab, Data Connections or select Manage Data Connections link which appears under the main data source. The data connections can be SharePoint lists or libraries, SQL data tables, XML files, etc. Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. You can also create multiple views for the users to enhance their experience. Once they’ve entered the information and submitted their request for business cards, they don’t really need to see the main data input screen any more. They just need to view what they entered. From the Page Design tab, select New View and give the view a name. To review the existing views, click the down arrow under View: The ReviewView shows just what the user needs and nothing more: Once you have everything configured, the form should be tested within a Test SharePoint environment before final deployment to production. This validates you don’t have any rules or code that could impact the server negatively. Submitted directly to form library You will need to know the form library that you will be submitting to when publishing the template. Configure the Submit data connection to connect to this library. There is already one configured in the sample, but it will need to be updated to your environment prior to publishing. The Design template is different from the Published template. While both have the .XSN extension, the published template contains all the “package” information for the form. The published form is what is loaded into Central Admin, not the design template. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site In Central Admin, under General Settings, select Manage Form Templates. Upload the published form template and Activate it to a site collection. Now it is available as a content type to select in the form library. Some documentation on publishing form templates: Technet – Manage administrator approved form templates And that’s all our base requirements. Hope this helps to give a good start.

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The Sound of Two Toilets Flushing: Constructive Criticism for Virgin Atlantic Complaints Department

- by Geertjan

I recently had the experience of flying from London to Johannesburg and back with Virgin Atlantic. The good news was that it was the cheapest flight available and that the take off and landing were absolutely perfect. Hence I really have no reason to complain. Instead, I'd like to offer some constructive criticism which hopefully Richard Branson will find sometime while googling his name. Or maybe someone from the Virgin Atlantic Complaints Department will find it, whatever, just want to put this information out there. Arrangement of restroom facilities. Maybe next time you design an airplane, consider not putting your toilets at a right angle right next to your rows of seats. Being able to reach, without even needing to stretch your arm, from your seat to close, yet again, a toilet door that someone, someone obviously sitting very far from the toilets, carelessly forgot to close is not an indicator of quality interior design. Have you noticed how all other airplanes have their toilets in a cubicle separated from the rows of seats? On those airplanes, people sitting in the seats near the toilets are not constantly being woken up throughout the night whenever someone enters/exits the toilet, whenever the light in the toilet is suddenly switched on, and whenever one of the toilets flushes. Bonus points for Virgin Atlantic passengers in the seats adjoining the toilets is when multiple toilets are flushed simultaneously and multiple passengers enter/exit them at the same time, a bit like an unasked for low budget musical of suddenly illuminated grumpy people in crumpled clothes. What joy that brings at 3 AM is hard to describe. Seats with extra leg room. You know how other airplanes have the seats with the extra leg room? You know what those seats tend to have? Extra leg room. It's really interesting how Virgin Atlantic's seats with extra leg room actually have no extra leg room at all. It should have been a give away, the fact that these special seats are found in the same rows as the standard seats, rather than on the cusp of real glory which is where most airlines put their extra leg room seats, with the only actual difference being that they have a slightly different color. Had you called them "seats with a different color" (i.e., almost not quite green, rather than something vaguely hinting at blue), at least I'd have known what I was getting. Picture the joy at 3 AM, rudely awakened from nightmarish slumber, partly grateful to have been released from a grayish dream of faceless zombies resembling one or two of those in a recent toilet line, by multiple adjoining toilets flushing simultaneously, while you're sitting in a seat with extra leg room that has exactly as much leg room as the seats in neighboring rows. You then have a choice of things to be sincerely annoyed about. Food from the '80's. In the '80's, airplane food came in soggy containers and even breakfast, the most important meal of the day, was a sad heap of vaguely gray colors. The culinary highlight tended to be a squashed tomato, which must have been mashed to a pulp with a brick prior to being regurgitated by a small furry animal, and there was also always a piece of immensely horrid pumpkin, as well as a slice of spongy something you'd never seen before. Sausages and mash at 6 AM on an airplane was always a heavy lump of horribleness. Thankfully, all airlines throughout the world changed from this puke inducing strategy around 1987 sometime. Not Virgin Atlantic, of course. The fatty sausages and mash are still there, bringing you flashbacks to Duran Duran, which is what you were listening to (on your walkman) the last time you saw it in an airplane. Even the golden oldie "squashed tomato attached by slime to three wet peas" is on the menu. How wonderful to have all this in a cramped seat with a long row of early morning bleariness lined up for the toilets, right at your side, bumping into your elbow, groggily, one by one, one after another, more and more, fumble-open-door-silence-flush-fumble-open-door, and on and on, while you tentatively push your fork through a soggy pile of colorless mush, fighting the urge to throw up on the stinky socks of whatever nightmarish zombie is bumping into your elbow at the time. But, then again, the plane landed without a hitch, in fact, extremely smoothly, so I'm certainly not blaming the pilots.

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await, WhenAll, WaitAll, oh my!!

- by cibrax

If you are dealing with asynchronous work in .NET, you might know that the Task class has become the main driver for wrapping asynchronous calls. Although this class was officially introduced in .NET 4.0, the programming model for consuming tasks was much more simplified in C# 5.0 in .NET 4.5 with the addition of the new async/await keywords. In a nutshell, you can use these keywords to make asynchronous calls as if they were sequential, and avoiding in that way any fork or callback in the code. The compiler takes care of the rest. I was yesterday writing some code for making multiple asynchronous calls to backend services in parallel. The code looked as follow, var allResults = new List<Result>(); foreach(var provider in providers) { var results = await provider.GetResults(); allResults.AddRange(results); } return allResults; You see, I was using the await keyword to make multiple calls in parallel. Something I did not consider was the overhead this code implied after being compiled. I started an interesting discussion with some smart folks in twitter. One of them, Tugberk Ugurlu, had the brilliant idea of actually write some code to make a performance comparison with another approach using Task.WhenAll. There are two additional methods you can use to wait for the results of multiple calls in parallel, WhenAll and WaitAll. WhenAll creates a new task and waits for results in that new task, so it does not block the calling thread. WaitAll, on the other hand, blocks the calling thread. This is the code Tugberk initially wrote, and I modified afterwards to also show the results of WaitAll. class Program { private static Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] funcs = new Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] { async (watch) => { watch.Start(); await Task.Delay(1000); Console.WriteLine("1000 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(1500); Console.WriteLine("1500 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(2000); Console.WriteLine("2000 one has been completed."); watch.Stop(); Console.WriteLine(watch.ElapsedMilliseconds + "ms has been elapsed."); } }; static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Await in loop work starts..."); DoWorkAsync().ContinueWith(task => { Console.WriteLine("Parallel work starts..."); DoWorkInParallelAsync().ContinueWith(t => { Console.WriteLine("WaitAll work starts..."); WaitForAll(); }); }); Console.ReadLine(); } static async Task DoWorkAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); foreach (var func in funcs) { await func(watch); } } static async Task DoWorkInParallelAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); await Task.WhenAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } static void WaitForAll() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); Task.WaitAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } } After running this code, the results were very concluding. Await in loop work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 4532ms has been elapsed. Parallel work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2007ms has been elapsed. WaitAll work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2009ms has been elapsed. The await keyword in a loop does not really make the calls in parallel.

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Silverlight Relay Commands

- by George Evjen

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I am fairly new at Silverlight development and I usually have an issue that needs research every day. Which I enjoy, since I like the idea of going into a day knowing that I am going to learn something new. The issue that I am currently working on centers around relay commands. I have a pretty good handle on Relay Commands and how we use them within our applications. <Button Command="{Binding ButtonCommand}" CommandParameter="NewRecruit" Content="New Recruit" /> Here in our xaml we have a button. The button has a Command and a CommandParameter. The command binds to the ButtonCommand that we have in our ViewModel RelayCommand _buttonCommand; /// <summary> /// Gets the button command. /// </summary> /// <value>The button command.</value> public RelayCommand ButtonCommand { get { if (_buttonCommand == null) { _buttonCommand = new RelayCommand( x => x != null && x.ToString().Length > 0 && CheckCommandAvailable(x.ToString()), x => ExecuteCommand(x.ToString())); } return _buttonCommand; } } In our relay command we then do some checks with a lambda expression. We check if the command parameter is null, is the length greater than 0 and we have a CheckCommandAvailable method that will tell us if the button is even enabled. After we check on these three items we then pass the command parameter to an action method. This is all pretty straight forward, the issue that we solved a few days ago centered around having a control that needed to use a Relay Command and this control was a nested control and was using a different DataContext. The example below illustrates how we handled this scenario. In our xaml usercontrol we had to set a name to this control. <Controls3:RadTileViewItem x:Class="RecruitStatusTileView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:Controls1="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls" xmlns:Controls2="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input" xmlns:Controls3="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="400" d:DesignWidth="800" Header="{Binding Title,Mode=TwoWay}" MinimizedHeight="100" x:Name="StatusView"> Here we are using a telerik RadTileViewItem. We set the name of this control to “StatusView”. In our button control we set our command parameters and commands different than the example above. <HyperlinkButton Content="{Binding BigBoardButtonText, Mode=TwoWay}" CommandParameter="{Binding 'Position.PositionName'}" Command="{Binding ElementName=StatusView, Path=DataContext.BigBoardCommand, Mode=TwoWay}" /> This hyperlink button lives in a ListBox control and this listbox has an ItemSource of PositionSelectors. The Command Parameter is binding to the Position.Position property of that PositionSelectors object. This again is pretty straight forward again. What gets a bit tricky is the Command property in the hyperlink. It is binding to the element name we created in the user control (StatusView) Because this hyperlink is in a listbox and is in the item template it doesn’t have a direct handle on the DataContext that the RadTileViewItem has so we have to make sure it does. We do that by binding to the element name of status view then set the path to DataContext.BigBoardCommand. BigBoardCommand is the name of the RelayCommand in the view model. private RelayCommand _bigBoardCommand = null; /// <summary> /// Gets the big board command. /// </summary> /// <value>The big board command.</value> public RelayCommand BigBoardCommand { get { if (_bigBoardCommand == null) { _bigBoardCommand = new RelayCommand(x => true, x => AddToBigBoard(x.ToString())); } return _bigBoardCommand; } } From there we check for true again and then call the action and pass in the parameter that we had as the command parameter. What we are working on now is a bit trickier than this second example. In the above example we are only creating this TileViewItem with this name “StatusView” once. In another part of our application we are generating multiple TileViewItems, so we cannot set the name in the control as we cant have multiple controls with the same name. When we run the application we get an error that reads that the value is out of expected range. My searching has led me to think we cannot have multiple controls with the same name. This is today’s problem and Ill post the solution to this once it is found.

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Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 8 – Wireless Networking

- by MarkPearl

After reading this section you should be able to Explain how nodes exchange wireless signals Identify potential obstacles to successful transmission and their repercussions, such as interference and reflection Understand WLAN architecture Specify the characteristics of popular WLAN transmission methods including 802.11 a/b/g/n Install and configure wireless access points and their clients Describe wireless MAN and WAN technologies, including 802.16 and satellite communications The Wireless Spectrum All wireless signals are carried through the air by electromagnetic waves. The wireless spectrum is a continuum of the electromagnetic waves used for data and voice communication. The wireless spectrum falls between 9KHZ and 300 GHZ. Characteristics of Wireless Transmission Antennas Each type of wireless service requires an antenna specifically designed for that service. The service’s specification determine the antenna’s power output, frequency, and radiation pattern. A directional antenna issues wireless signals along a single direction. An omnidirectional antenna issues and receives wireless signals with equal strength and clarity in all directions The geographical area that an antenna or wireless system can reach is known as its range Signal Propagation LOS (line of sight) uses the least amount of energy and results in the reception of the clearest possible signal. When there is an obstacle in the way, the signal may… pass through the object or be obsrobed by the object or may be subject to reflection, diffraction or scattering. Reflection – waves encounter an object and bounces off it. Diffraction – signal splits into secondary waves when it encounters an obstruction Scattering – is the diffusion or the reflection in multiple different directions of a signal Signal Degradation Fading occurs as a signal hits various objects. Because of fading, the strength of the signal that reaches the receiver is lower than the transmitted signal strength. The further a signal moves from its source, the weaker it gets (this is called attenuation) Signals are also affected by noise – the electromagnetic interference) Interference can distort and weaken a wireless signal in the same way that noise distorts and weakens a wired signal. Frequency Ranges Older wireless devices used the 2.4 GHZ band to send and receive signals. This had 11 communication channels that are unlicensed. Newer wireless devices can also use the 5 GHZ band which has 24 unlicensed bands Narrowband, Broadband, and Spread Spectrum Signals Narrowband – a transmitter concentrates the signal energy at a single frequency or in a very small range of frequencies Broadband – uses a relatively wide band of the wireless spectrum and offers higher throughputs than narrowband technologies The use of multiple frequencies to transmit a signal is known as spread-spectrum technology. In other words a signal never stays continuously within one frequency range during its transmission. One specific implementation of spread spectrum is FHSS (frequency hoping spread spectrum). Another type is known as DSS (direct sequence spread spectrum) Fixed vs. Mobile Each type of wireless communication falls into one of two categories Fixed – the location of the transmitted and receiver do not move (results in energy saved because weaker signal strength is possible with directional antennas) Mobile – the location can change WLAN (Wireless LAN) Architecture There are two main types of arrangements Adhoc – data is sent directly between devices – good for small local devices Infrastructure mode – a wireless access point is placed centrally, that all devices connect with 802.11 WLANs The most popular wireless standards used on contemporary LANs are those developed by IEEE’s 802.11 committee. Over the years several distinct standards related to wireless networking have been released. Four of the best known standards are also referred to as Wi-Fi. They are…. 802.11b 802.11a 802.11g 802.11n These four standards share many characteristics. i.e. All 4 use half duplex signalling Follow the same access method Access Method 802.11 standards specify the use of CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) to access a shared medium. Using CSMA/CA before a station begins to send data on an 802.11 network, it checks for existing wireless transmissions. If the source node detects no transmission activity on the network, it waits a brief period of time and then sends its transmission. If the source does detect activity, it waits a brief period of time before checking again. The destination node receives the transmission and, after verifying its accuracy, issues an acknowledgement (ACT) packet to the source. If the source receives the ACK it assumes the transmission was successful, – if it does not receive an ACK it assumes the transmission failed and sends it again. Association Two types of scanning… Active – station transmits a special frame, known as a prove, on all available channels within its frequency range. When an access point finds the probe frame, it issues a probe response. Passive – wireless station listens on all channels within its frequency range for a special signal, known as a beacon frame, issued from an access point – the beacon frame contains information necessary to connect to the point. Re-association occurs when a mobile user moves out of one access point’s range and into the range of another. Frames Read page 378 – 381 about frames and specific 802.11 protocols Bluetooth Networks Sony Ericson originally invented the Bluetooth technology in the early 1990s. In 1998 other manufacturers joined Ericsson in the Special Interest Group (SIG) whose aim was to refine and standardize the technology. Bluetooth was designed to be used on small networks composed of personal communications devices. It has become popular wireless technology for communicating among cellular telephones, phone headsets, etc. Wireless WANs and Internet Access Refer to pages 396 – 402 of the textbook for details.

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High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

- by BuckWoody

Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case). All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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