key mapping - Page 437 - Developer IT

How To Disconnect Non-Mapped UNC Path “Drives” in Windows

- by The Geek

Have you ever browsed over to another PC on your network using “network neighborhood”, and then connected to one of the file shares? Without a drive letter, how do you disconnect yourself once you’ve done so? Really confused as to what I’m talking about? Let’s walk through the process. First, imagine that you browse through and connect to a share, entering your username and password to gain access. The problem is that you stay connected, and there’s no visible way to disconnect yourself. If you try and shut down the other PC, you’ll receive a message that users are still connected. So let’s disconnect! Open up a command prompt, and then type in the following: net use This will give you a list of the connected drives, including the ones that aren’t actually mapped to a drive letter. To disconnect one of the connections, you can use the following command: net use /delete \\server\sharename For example, in this instance we’d disconnect like so: net use /delete \\192.168.1.205\root$ Now when you run the “net use” command again, you’ll see that you’ve been properly disconnected. If you wanted to actually connect to a share without mapping a drive letter, you can do the following: net use /user:Username \\server\sharename Password You could then just pop \\server\sharename into a Windows Explorer window and browse the files that way. Note that this technique should work exactly the same in any version of windows. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove "Map Network Drive" Menu Item from Windows Vista or XPDisable the Annoying "This page has an unspecified potential security risk" When Using Files on a Network ShareCopy Path of a File to the Clipboard in Windows 7 or VistaMap a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7Defrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In Windows TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily

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SQLAuthority News – Reliving TechEd with Vinod Kumar at Bangalore User Groups

- by pinaldave

TechEd India 2012 was held in Bangalore last March 21 to 23, 2012. Just like every year, this event is bigger, grander and inspiring. Here is my blog post reviewing the event SQLAuthority News – #TechEdIn – TechEd India 2012 Memories and Photos. For me this is family event – I get to meet my friends who are dear as my family. I like to call User Groups as family too. Family shares life’s personal happiness and experience – the same way User Group shares professional experiences and quite often UG members become just like family member. When I learned that follower user group together building up a unique event I was pretty excited to learn who is going to be speaker for the event. BDotNet.in – Bangalore .NET Usergroup BITPro.in – Bangalore ITPro Usergroup It was indeed joy when I learned that presenter will be Vinod Kumar, who is integral part of user groups and hardcore SQL Server enthusiast. Vinod Kumar is going to present on following two sessions which are both focused on internals of the Windows and SQL Server. Understanding Windows with SysInternals Tools – This session will cover various tools from usage of Memory, x86 architecture, x64, WOW mode, Page faults, Virtual Memory mapping, OOM scenario, Perf Tool, PAL tool, Logman and more. Peeling the Onion: SQL Server Internals Demystified – This session will cover advanced disk formats, SQL Server 2012 security changes, memory changes, indirect checkPoint and more. I am very excited as this time I will get opportunity to sit in front rows (as I will be reaching there to get best possible position) and learn. I am looking forward to the event and I hope you will join us as well. Event Details: Date: Saturday, April 7, 2012 (10:30am until 1:30pm) Venue: Microsoft, Domlur, Bangalore. Event Details: https://www.facebook.com/events/139444029517882/ This session is FREE for all and everybody and anybody can walk in. Community Blog Posts Here are few of the blog post written by the community on this subject. Vinod Kumar on Reliving #TechEdIn at Blr UG Manas Dash on Reliving TechEd India 2012 with Vinod Kumar Sudeepta Ganguly on SysInternals n SQLInternals with Vinod Kumar Lohith Re Live TechEd India 2012 with Vinod Kumar Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRw-p4mahLU Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL, Technology, Video

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SQL CLR Assembly Error 80131051 when late binding to a registered C# COM .dll

- by Shanubus

I must have hit an unusual one, because I can't find any reference to this specific failing anywhere... Scenario: I have a legacy SQL function used to transform(encrypt) data. This function is called from within many stored procedures used by multiple applications. I say this, because the obvious answer of 'just call it from your code' is not really an option (or at least one I'd prefer not explore). The legacy function used sp_OA with an ActiveX dll on SQL2000 to perform its work. The new function is targeted at SQL2008 x64. I am ditching the sp_OA call in favor of CLR assembly; and am getting rid of the ActiveX dll and using a COM+ .dll (3rd party) to perform the same work. This 3rd party COM+ is required to be used based on spec given to me, so can't get rid of this piece either. Problem: After multiple attempts at getting this to work I have eliminated the following approaches 1) Create a Sql Assembly to call the local COM+ directly -- Can't do this as it requires a reference to System.EnterpriseServices. Including this requires that a whole slew of unsupported assemblies be registered which I don't want. The COM+ requires it's methods to be accessed via an Interface, so my attempts at late binding to it directly have not been successful (late binding would allow me to drop the unsupported references). 2) Create a Sql Assembly which references a C# class library that then calls the COM+. -- Same issue as #1; since the referenced dll uses System.EnterpriseServices and will be added as a dependency when referenced in the Sql Assembly, again trying to load all the unsupported libraries 3) Create a Sql Assembly which late binds to an ActiveX COM dll that calls the COM+. -- Worked in my dev environment, but can't go to x64 in production with ActiveX dll's written in VB6 (not to mention I hate backtracking anyway)... again failure... I am now onto an approach that is almost working, with of course one last hangup. I now have -a Sql Assembly that late binds to a C# COM dll, eliminating the need for including System.EnterpriseServices and eliminating the need to reference the C# COM in the SqlAssembly itself. The C# COM does reference System.EnterpriseServices to call the COM+, but since I am late binding to it from the SqlAssembly, I bypass the need for Sql to actually load them as referenced assemblies. Works in debugger.. Works on my dev box when the SqlAssembly dll is referenced in a test console app and called directly Installs to Sql2008 just fine Executing the actual UDF works, but returns no data due to a failure reporting from the late bound dll! So the SqlAssembly is instanciated just fine. It actually fails on it's late binding to the C# COM, which is working from a test console app on the same machine. It appears to be a difference in behavior based on whether called from within the SQL UDF or not. Since it is working on the same box from my console app, I am assuming it's on the SQL side. My steps to install were. --Install the COM+ dll and ensure it can be called successfully (as from with in the console app) --Register the C# COM dll (which calls the COM+) and get it to the GAC (again proofed to be working from console app) --Create my Assymetric Key CREATE ASYMMETRIC KEY SqlCryptoKey FROM EXECUTABLE FILE = 'D:\SqlEx.dll' CREATE LOGIN SqlExLogin FROM ASYMMETRIC KEY SqlExKey GRANT UNSAFE ASSEMBLY TO SqlExLogin GO --Add the assembly CREATE ASSEMBLY SqlEx FROM 'D:\SqlEx.dll' WITH PERMISSION_SET = UNSAFE; GO --Create the function CREATE FUNCTION dbo.f_SqlEx( @clearText [nvarchar](512) ) RETURNS nvarchar(512) WITH EXECUTE AS CALLER AS EXTERNAL NAME SqlEx.[SqlEx.SqlEx].Ex GO With all that done, I can now call my function SELECT dbo.f_SqlEx('test') But get this error in the event log... Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {F69D6320-5884-323F-936A-7657946604BE} failed due to the following error: 80131051. I can't really provide direct code examples, due to internal security implications; but all the code itself seems to work, I am suspecting perms or something of the like... I just find it odd that I can't find any reference to error 80131051. If someone out there believe some 'indirect' code samples will help, I will be happy to provide. Any assistance is appreciated.

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Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

- by HCM-Oracle

By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.” Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals. In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense. In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable. But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk. There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires. Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence. Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development. 2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others. Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts. Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day) Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users. Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts. The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits. Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

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Azure WNS to Win8 - Push Notifications for Metro Apps

- by JoshReuben

Background The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 allows you to build a Windows Azure Cloud Service that can send Push Notifications to registered Metro apps via Windows Notification Service (WNS). Some configuration is required - you need to: Register the Metro app for Windows Live Application Management Provide Package SID & Client Secret to WNS Modify the Azure Cloud App cscfg file and the Metro app package.appxmanifest file to contain matching Metro package name, SID and client secret. The Mechanism: These notifications take the form of XAML Tile, Toast, Raw or Badge UI notifications. The core engine is provided via the WNS nuget recipe, which exposes an API for constructing payloads and posting notifications to WNS. An application receives push notifications by requesting a notification channel from WNS, which returns a channel URI that the application then registers with a cloud service. In the cloud service, A WnsAccessTokenProvider authenticates with WNS by providing its credentials, the package SID and secret key, and receives in return an access token that the provider caches and can reuse for multiple notification requests. The cloud service constructs a notification request by filling out a template class that contains the information that will be sent with the notification, including text and image references. Using the channel URI of a registered client, the cloud service can then send a notification whenever it has an update for the user. The package contains the NotificationSendUtils class for submitting notifications. The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 (WAT) provides the PNWorker sample pair of solutions - The Azure server side contains a WebRole & a WorkerRole. The WebRole allows submission of new push notifications into an Azure Queue which the WorkerRole extracts and processes. Further background resources: http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/ - Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Push%20Notification%20Worker%20Sample - WAT WNS sample setup http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Using%20the%20Windows%208%20Cloud%20Application%20Services%20Application – using Windows 8 with Cloud Application Services A bit of Configuration Register the Metro apps for Windows Live Application Management From the current app manifest of your metro app Publish tab, copy the Package Display Name and the Publisher From: https://manage.dev.live.com/Build/ Package name: <-- we need to change this Client secret: keep this Package Security Identifier (SID): keep this Verify the app here: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index - so this step is done "If you wish to send push notifications in your application, provide your Package Security Identifier (SID) and client secret to WNS." Provide Package SID & Client Secret to WNS http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465407.aspx - How to authenticate with WNS https://appdev.microsoft.com/StorePortals/en-us/Account/Signup/PurchaseSubscription - register app with dashboard - need registration code or register a new account & pay $170 shekels http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868184.aspx - Registering for a Windows Store developer account http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868187.aspx - Picking a Microsoft account for the Windows Store The WNS Nuget Recipe The WNS Recipe is a nuget package that provides an API for authenticating against WNS, constructing payloads and posting notifications to WNS. After installing this package, a WnsRecipe assembly is added to project references. To send notifications using WNS, first register the application at the Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect portal to obtain Package Security Identifier (SID) and a secret key that your cloud service uses to authenticate with WNS. An application receives push notifications by requesting a notification channel from WNS, which returns a channel URI that the application then registers with a cloud service. In the cloud service, the WnsAccessTokenProvider authenticates with WNS by providing its credentials, the package SID and secret key, and receives in return an access token that the provider caches and can reuse for multiple notification requests. The cloud service constructs a notification request by filling out a template class that contains the information that will be sent with the notification, including text and image references.Using the channel URI of a registered client, the cloud service can then send a notification whenever it has an update for the user. var provider = new WnsAccessTokenProvider(clientId, clientSecret); var notification = new ToastNotification(provider) { ToastType = ToastType.ToastText02, Text = new List<string> { "blah"} }; notification.Send(channelUri); the WNS Recipe is instrumented to write trace information via a trace listener – configuratively or programmatically from Application_Start(): WnsDiagnostics.Enable(); WnsDiagnostics.TraceSource.Listeners.Add(new DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener()); WnsDiagnostics.TraceSource.Switch.Level = SourceLevels.Verbose; The WAT PNWorker Sample The Azure server side contains a WebRole & a WorkerRole. The WebRole allows submission of new push notifications into an Azure Queue which the WorkerRole extracts and processes. Overview of Push Notification Worker Sample The toolkit includes a sample application based on the same solution structure as the one created by theWindows 8 Cloud Application Services project template. The sample demonstrates how to off-load the job of sending Windows Push Notifications using a Windows Azure worker role. You can find the source code in theSamples\PNWorker folder. This folder contains a full version of the sample application showing how to use Windows Push Notifications using ASP.NET Membership as the authentication mechanism. The sample contains two different solution files: WATWindows.Azure.sln: This solution must be opened with Visual Studio 2010 and contains the projects related to the Windows Azure web and worker roles. WATWindows.Client.sln: This solution must be opened with Visual Studio 11 and contains the Windows Metro style application project. Only Visual Studio 2010 supports Windows Azure cloud projects so you currently need to use this edition to launch the server application. This will change in a future release of the Windows Azure tools when support for Visual Studio 11 is enabled. Important: Setting up the PNWorker Sample Before running the PNWorker sample, you need to register the application and configure it: 1. Register the app: To register your application, go to the Windows Live Application Management site for Metro style apps at https://manage.dev.live.com/build and sign in with your Windows Live ID. In the Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect page, enter the following information. Package Display Name PNWorker.Sample Publisher CN=127.0.0.1, O=TESTING ONLY, OU=Windows Azure DevFabric 2. 3. Once you register the application, make a note of the values shown in the portal for Client Secret,Package Name and Package SID. 4. Configure the app - double-click the SetupSample.cmd file located inside the Samples\PNWorker folder to launch a tool that will guide you through the process of configuring the sample. setup runs a PowerShell script that requires running with administration privileges to allow the scripts to execute in your machine. When prompted, enter the Client Secret, Package Name, and Package Security Identifier you obtained previously and wait until the tool finishes configuring your sample. Running the PNWorker Sample To run this sample, you must run both the client and the server application projects. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 as an administrator. Open the WATWindows.Azure.sln solution. Set the start-up project of the solution as the cloud project. Run the app in the dev fabric to test. 2. Open Visual Studio 11 and open the WATWindows.Client.sln solution. Run the Metro client application. In the client application, click Reopen channel and send to server. à the application opens the channel and registers it with the cloud application, & the Output area shows the channel URI. 3. Refresh the WebRole's Push Notifications page to see the UI list the newly registered client. 4. Send notifications to the client application by clicking the Send Notification button. Setup 3 command files + 1 powershell script: SetupSample.cmd –> SetupWPNS.vbs –> SetupWPNS.cmd –> SetupWPNS.UpdateWPNSCredentialsInServiceConfiguration.ps1 appears to set PackageName – from manifest Client Id package security id (SID) – from registration Client Secret – from registration The following configs are modified: WATWindows\ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg WATWindows\ServiceConfiguration.Local.cscfg WATWindows.Client\package.appxmanifest WatWindows.Notifications A class library – it references the following WNS DLL: C:\WorkDev\CountdownValue\AzureToolkits\WATWindows8\Samples\PNWorker\packages\WnsRecipe.0.0.3.0\lib\net40\WnsRecipe.dll NotificationJobRequest A DataContract for triggering notifications: using System.Runtime.Serialization; using Microsoft.Windows.Samples.Notifications; [DataContract] [KnownType(typeof(WnsAccessTokenProvider))] public class NotificationJobRequest { [DataMember] public bool ProcessAsync { get; set; } [DataMember] public string Payload { get; set; } [DataMember] public string ChannelUrl { get; set; } [DataMember] public NotificationType NotificationType { get; set; } [DataMember] public IAccessTokenProvider AccessTokenProvider { get; set; } [DataMember] public NotificationSendOptions NotificationSendOptions{ get; set; } } Investigated these types: WnsAccessTokenProvider – a DataContract that contains the client Id and client secret NotificationType – an enum that can be: Tile, Toast, badge, Raw IAccessTokenProvider – get or reset the access token NotificationSendOptions – SecondsTTL, NotificationPriority (enum), isCache, isRequestForStatus, Tag There is also a NotificationJobSerializer class which basically wraps a DataContractSerializer serialization / deserialization of NotificationJobRequest The WNSNotificationJobProcessor class This class wraps the NotificationSendUtils API – it periodically extracts any NotificationJobRequest objects from a CloudQueue and submits them to WNS. The ProcessJobMessageRequest method – this is the punchline: it will deserialize a CloudQueueMessage into a NotificationJobRequest & send pass its contents to NotificationUtils to SendAsynchronously / SendSynchronously, (and then dequeue the message). public override void ProcessJobMessageRequest(CloudQueueMessage notificationJobMessageRequest) { Trace.WriteLine("Processing a new Notification Job Request", "Information"); NotificationJobRequest pushNotificationJob = NotificationJobSerializer.Deserialize(notificationJobMessageRequest.AsString); if (pushNotificationJob != null) { if (pushNotificationJob.ProcessAsync) { Trace.WriteLine("Sending the notification asynchronously", "Information"); NotificationSendUtils.SendAsynchronously( new Uri(pushNotificationJob.ChannelUrl), pushNotificationJob.AccessTokenProvider, pushNotificationJob.Payload, result => this.ProcessSendResult(pushNotificationJob, result), result => this.ProcessSendResultError(pushNotificationJob, result), pushNotificationJob.NotificationType, pushNotificationJob.NotificationSendOptions); } else { Trace.WriteLine("Sending the notification synchronously", "Information"); NotificationSendResult result = NotificationSendUtils.Send( new Uri(pushNotificationJob.ChannelUrl), pushNotificationJob.AccessTokenProvider, pushNotificationJob.Payload, pushNotificationJob.NotificationType, pushNotificationJob.NotificationSendOptions); this.ProcessSendResult(pushNotificationJob, result); } } else { Trace.WriteLine("Could not deserialize the notification job", "Error"); } this.queue.DeleteMessage(notificationJobMessageRequest); } Investigation of NotificationSendUtils class - This is the engine – it exposes Send and a SendAsyncronously overloads that take the following params from the NotificationJobRequest: Channel Uri AccessTokenProvider Payload NotificationType NotificationSendOptions WebRole WebRole is a large MVC project – it references WatWindows.Notifications as well as the following WNS DLL: \AzureToolkits\WATWindows8\Samples\PNWorker\packages\WnsRecipe.0.0.3.0\lib\net40\NotificationsExtensions.dll Controllers\PushNotificationController.cs Notification related namespaces: using Notifications; using NotificationsExtensions; using NotificationsExtensions.BadgeContent; using NotificationsExtensions.RawContent; using NotificationsExtensions.TileContent; using NotificationsExtensions.ToastContent; using Windows.Samples.Notifications; TokenProvider – initialized from the Azure RoleEnvironment: IAccessTokenProvider tokenProvider = new WnsAccessTokenProvider( RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("WNSPackageSID"), RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("WNSClientSecret")); SendNotification method – calls QueuePushMessage method to create and serialize a NotificationJobRequest and enqueue it in a CloudQueue [HttpPost] public ActionResult SendNotification( [ModelBinder(typeof(NotificationTemplateModelBinder))] INotificationContent notification, string channelUrl, NotificationPriority priority = NotificationPriority.Normal) { var payload = notification.GetContent(); var options = new NotificationSendOptions() { Priority = priority }; var notificationType = notification is IBadgeNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Badge : notification is IRawNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Raw : notification is ITileNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Tile : NotificationType.Toast; this.QueuePushMessage(payload, channelUrl, notificationType, options); object response = new { Status = "Queued for delivery to WNS" }; return this.Json(response); } GetSendTemplate method: Create the cshtml partial rendering based on the notification type [HttpPost] public ActionResult GetSendTemplate(NotificationTemplateViewModel templateOptions) { PartialViewResult result = null; switch (templateOptions.NotificationType) { case "Badge": templateOptions.BadgeGlyphValueContent = Enum.GetNames(typeof( GlyphValue)); ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions; result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType); break; case "Raw": ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions; result = PartialView("_Raw"); break; case "Toast": templateOptions.TileImages = this.blobClient.GetAllBlobsInContainer(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("TileImagesContainer")).OrderBy(i => i.FileName).ToList(); templateOptions.ToastAudioContent = Enum.GetNames(typeof( ToastAudioContent)); templateOptions.Priorities = Enum.GetNames(typeof( NotificationPriority)); ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions; result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType); break; case "Tile": templateOptions.TileImages = this.blobClient.GetAllBlobsInContainer(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("TileImagesContainer")).OrderBy(i => i.FileName).ToList(); ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions; result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType); break; } return result; } Investigated these types: ToastAudioContent – an enum of different Win8 sound effects for toast notifications GlyphValue – an enum of different Win8 icons for badge notifications · Infrastructure\NotificationTemplateModelBinder.cs WNS Namespace references using NotificationsExtensions.BadgeContent; using NotificationsExtensions.RawContent; using NotificationsExtensions.TileContent; using NotificationsExtensions.ToastContent; Various NotificationFactory derived types can server as bindable models in MVC for creating INotificationContent types. Default values are also set for IWideTileNotificationContent & IToastNotificationContent. Type factoryType = null; switch (notificationType) { case "Badge": factoryType = typeof(BadgeContentFactory); break; case "Tile": factoryType = typeof(TileContentFactory); break; case "Toast": factoryType = typeof(ToastContentFactory); break; case "Raw": factoryType = typeof(RawContentFactory); break; } Investigated these types: BadgeContentFactory – CreateBadgeGlyph, CreateBadgeNumeric (???) TileContentFactory – many notification content creation methods , apparently one for every tile layout type ToastContentFactory – many notification content creation methods , apparently one for every toast layout type RawContentFactory – passing strings WorkerRole WNS Namespace references using Notifications; using Notifications.WNS; using Windows.Samples.Notifications; OnStart() Method – on Worker Role startup, initialize the NotificationJobSerializer, the CloudQueue, and the WNSNotificationJobProcessor _notificationJobSerializer = new NotificationJobSerializer(); _cloudQueueClient = this.account.CreateCloudQueueClient(); _pushNotificationRequestsQueue = _cloudQueueClient.GetQueueReference(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("RequestQueueName")); _processor = new WNSNotificationJobProcessor(_notificationJobSerializer, _pushNotificationRequestsQueue); Run() Method – poll the Azure Queue for NotificationJobRequest messages & process them: while (true) { Trace.WriteLine("Checking for Messages", "Information"); try { Parallel.ForEach( this.pushNotificationRequestsQueue.GetMessages(this.batchSize), this.processor.ProcessJobMessageRequest); } catch (Exception e) { Trace.WriteLine(e.ToString(), "Error"); } Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("Sleeping for {0} seconds", this.pollIntervalMiliseconds / 1000)); Thread.Sleep(this.pollIntervalMiliseconds); } How I learned to appreciate Win8 There is really only one application architecture for Windows 8 apps: Metro client side and Azure backend – and that is a good thing. With WNS, tier integration is so automated that you don’t even have to leverage a HTTP push API such as SignalR. This is a pretty powerful development paradigm, and has changed the way I look at Windows 8 for RAD business apps. When I originally looked at Win8 and the WinRT API, my first opinion on Win8 dev was as follows – GOOD:WinRT, WRL, C++/CX, WinJS, XAML (& ease of Direct3D integration); BAD: low projected market penetration,.NET lobotomized (Only 8% of .NET 4.5 classes can be used in Win8 non-desktop apps - http://bit.ly/HRuJr7); UGLY:Metro pascal tiles! Perhaps my 80s teenage years gave me a punk reactionary sense of revulsion towards the Partridge Family 70s style that Metro UX seems to have appropriated: On second thought though, it simplifies UI dev to a single paradigm (although UX guys will need to change career) – you will not find an easier app dev environment. Speculation: If LightSwitch is going to support HTML5 client app generation, then its a safe guess to say that vnext will support Win8 Metro XAML - a much easier port from Silverlight XAML. Given the VS2012 LightSwitch integration as a thumbs up from the powers that be at MS, and given that Win8 C#/XAML Metro apps tend towards a streamlined 'golden straight-jacket' cookie cutter app dev style with an Azure back-end supporting Win8 push notifications... --> its easy to extrapolate than LightSwitch vnext could well be the Win8 Metro XAML to Azure RAD tool of choice! The hook is already there - :) Why else have the space next to the HTML Client box? This high level of application development abstraction will facilitate rapid app cookie-cutter architecture-infrastructure frameworks for wrapping any app. This will allow me to avoid too much XAML code-monkeying around & focus on my area of interest: Technical Computing.

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Synchronize Data between a Silverlight ListBox and a User Control

- by psheriff

One of the great things about XAML is the powerful data-binding capabilities. If you load up a list box with a collection of objects, you can display detail data about each object without writing any C# or VB.NET code. Take a look at Figure 1 that shows a collection of Product objects in a list box. When you click on a list box you bind the current Product object selected in the list box to a set of controls in a user control with just a very simple Binding statement in XAML. Figure 1: Synchronizing a ListBox to a User Control is easy with Data Binding Product and Products Classes To illustrate this data binding feature I am going to just create some local data instead of using a WCF service. The code below shows a Product class that has three properties, namely, ProductId, ProductName and Price. This class also has a constructor that takes 3 parameters and allows us to set the 3 properties in an instance of our Product class. C#public class Product{ public Product(int productId, string productName, decimal price) { ProductId = productId; ProductName = productName; Price = price; } public int ProductId { get; set; } public string ProductName { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; }} VBPublic Class Product Public Sub New(ByVal _productId As Integer, _ ByVal _productName As String, _ ByVal _price As Decimal) ProductId = _productId ProductName = _productName Price = _price End Sub Private mProductId As Integer Private mProductName As String Private mPrice As Decimal Public Property ProductId() As Integer Get Return mProductId End Get Set(ByVal value As Integer) mProductId = value End Set End Property Public Property ProductName() As String Get Return mProductName End Get Set(ByVal value As String) mProductName = value End Set End Property Public Property Price() As Decimal Get Return mPrice End Get Set(ByVal value As Decimal) mPrice = value End Set End PropertyEnd Class To fill up a list box you need a collection class of Product objects. The code below creates a generic collection class of Product objects. In the constructor of the Products class I have hard-coded five product objects and added them to the collection. In a real-world application you would get your data through a call to service to fill the list box, but for simplicity and just to illustrate the data binding, I am going to just hard code the data. C#public class Products : List<Product>{ public Products() { this.Add(new Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000)); this.Add(new Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000)); this.Add(new Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000)); this.Add(new Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20)); this.Add(new Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20)); }} VBPublic Class Products Inherits List(Of Product) Public Sub New() Me.Add(New Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000)) Me.Add(New Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000)) Me.Add(New Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000)) Me.Add(New Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20)) Me.Add(New Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20)) End SubEnd Class The Product Detail User Control Below is a user control (named ucProduct) that is used to display the product detail information seen in the bottom portion of Figure 1. This is very basic XAML that just creates a text block and a text box control for each of the three properties in the Product class. Notice the {Binding Path=[PropertyName]} on each of the text box controls. This means that if the DataContext property of this user control is set to an instance of a Product class, then the data in the properties of that Product object will be displayed in each of the text boxes. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.ucProduct" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top"> <Grid Margin="4"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition MinWidth="120" /> <ColumnDefinition /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBlock Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" Text="Product Id" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=ProductId}" /> <TextBlock Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="0" Text="Product Name" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=ProductName}" /> <TextBlock Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="0" Text="Price" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=Price}" /> </Grid></UserControl> Synchronize ListBox with User Control You are now ready to fill the list box with the collection class of Product objects and then bind the SelectedItem of the list box to the Product detail user control. The XAML below is the complete code for Figure 1. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Left"> <UserControl.Resources> <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" /> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Margin="4" Background="White"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <ListBox x:Name="lstData" Grid.Row="0" BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="1" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource productCollection}}" DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" /> <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail" Grid.Row="1" DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData, Path=SelectedItem}" /> </Grid></UserControl> The first step to making this happen is to reference the Silverlight project (SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS) where the Product and Products classes are located. I added this namespace and assigned it a namespace prefix of “src” as shown in the line below: xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS" Next, to use the data from an instance of the Products collection, you create a UserControl.Resources section in the XAML and add a tag that creates an instance of the Products class and assigns it a key of “productCollection”. <UserControl.Resources> <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" /> </UserControl.Resources> Next, you bind the list box to this productCollection object using the ItemsSource property. You bind the ItemsSource of the list box to the static resource named productCollection. You can then set the DisplayMemberPath attribute of the list box to any property of the Product class that you want. In the XAML below I used the ProductName property. <ListBox x:Name="lstData" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource productCollection}}" DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" /> You now need to create an instance of the ucProduct user contol below the list box. You do this by once again referencing the “src” namespace and typing in the name of the user control. You then set the DataContext property on this user control to a binding. The binding uses the ElementName attribute to bind to the list box name, in this case “lstData”. The Path of the data is SelectedItem. These two attributes together tell Silverlight to bind the DataContext to the selected item of the list box. That selected item is a Product object. So, once this is bound, the bindings on each text box in the user control are updated and display the current product information. <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail" DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData, Path=SelectedItem}" /> Summary Once you understand the basics of data binding in XAML, you eliminate a lot code that is otherwise needed to move data into controls and out of controls back into an object. Connecting two controls together is easy by just binding using the ElementName and Path properties of the Binding markup extension. Another good tip out of this blog is use user controls and set the DataContext of the user control to have all of the data on the user control update through the bindings. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "SL – Synchronize List Box Data with User Control" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".

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Databind gridview with LINQ

- by Anders Svensson

I have two database tables, one for Users of a web site, containing the fields "UserID", "Name" and the foreign key "PageID". And the other with the fields "PageID" (here the primary key), and "Url". I want to be able to show the data in a gridview with data from both tables, and I'd like to do it with databinding in the aspx page. I'm not sure how to do this, though, and I can't find any good examples of this particular situation. Here's what I have so far: <%@ Page Title="Home Page" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="LinqBinding._Default" %> <asp:Content ID="HeaderContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="HeadContent"> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="BodyContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent"> <h2> Testing LINQ </h2> <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" DataSourceID="LinqDataSourceUsers" AutoGenerateColumns="false"> <Columns> <asp:CommandField ShowSelectButton="True" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="UserID" HeaderText="UserID" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="PageID" HeaderText="PageID" /> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Pages"> <ItemTemplate <asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1" DataSourceID="LinqDataSourcePages" SelectedValue='<%#Bind("PageID") %>' DataTextField="Url" DataValueField="PageID" runat="server"> </asp:DropDownList> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> </asp:GridView> <asp:LinqDataSource ID="LinqDataSourcePages" runat="server" ContextTypeName="LinqBinding.UserDataContext" EntityTypeName="" TableName="Pages"> </asp:LinqDataSource> <asp:LinqDataSource ID="LinqDataSourceUsers" runat="server" ContextTypeName="LinqBinding.UserDataContext" EntityTypeName="" TableName="Users"> </asp:LinqDataSource> </asp:Content> But this only works in so far as it gets the user table into the gridview (that's not a problem), and I get the page data into the dropdown, but here's the problem: I of course get ALL the page data in there, not just the pages for each user on each row. So how do I put some sort of "where" constraint on dropdown for each row to only show the pages for the user in that row? (Also, to be honest I'm not sure I'm getting the foreign key relationship right, because I'm not too used to working with relationships). EDIT: I think I have set up the relationship incorrectly. I keep getting the message that "Pages" doesn't exist as a property on the User object. And I guess it can't since the relationship right now is one way. So I tried to create a many-to-many relationship. Again, my database knowledge is a bit limited, but I added a so called "junction table" with the fields UserID and PageID, same as the other tables' primary keys. I wasn't able to make both of these primary keys in the junction table though (which it looked like some people had in examples I've seen...but since it wasn't possible I guessed they shouldn't be). Anyway, I created a relationship from each table and created new LINQ classes from that. But then what do I do? I set the junction table as the Linq data source, since I guessed I had to do this to access both tables, but that doesn't work. Then it complains there is no Name property on that object. So how do I access the related tables? Here's what I have now with the many-to-many relationship: <%@ Page Title="Home Page" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="ManyToMany._Default" %> <asp:Content ID="HeaderContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="HeadContent"> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="BodyContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent"> <h2> Many to many LINQ </h2> <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" DataSourceID="LinqDataSource1" AutoGenerateColumns="false"> <Columns> <asp:CommandField ShowSelectButton="True" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="UserID" HeaderText="UserID" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="PageID" HeaderText="PageID" /> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Pages"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1" DataSource='<%#Eval("Pages") %>' SelectedValue='<%#Bind("PageID") %>' DataTextField="Url" DataValueField="PageID" runat="server"> </asp:DropDownList> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> </asp:GridView> <asp:LinqDataSource ID="LinqDataSource1" runat="server" ContextTypeName="ManyToMany.UserPageDataContext" EntityTypeName="" TableName="UserPages"> </asp:LinqDataSource> </asp:Content>

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Customer Experience Online Forum

- by Christie Flanagan

Missed Oracle’s Customer Experience Online Forum? Don’t worry. You can still catch the sessions at your convenience. Watch the Customer Experience Online Forum on demand to hear from Bruce Tempkin, a leading expert in customer experience, as well as other thought leaders and they delve into topics such as the ROI of customer experience and strategies for winning over customers. Simply register to gain access to these sessions and more: The Customer Experience RevolutionCustomer experience has become the most important and defensible differentiator for your business. The customer experience is a journey that transcends all customer touchpoints and stages of the customer lifecycle. Discover where you are in the journey, identify how to begin optimizing the experience you deliver your customers, and join the Revolution.The ROI of Customer ExperienceBruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner, Temkin GroupResearch of US and UK customers demonstrates a high correlation between a positive customer experience and loyalty. A successful customer interaction increases the willingness to buy more and to recommend your company. US companies can gain $380 million over three years by providing an optimized customer experience. This session will help companies determine the business impact that customer experience has on their specific business. Integrating Marketing and Loyalty to Deliver Great Customer ExperiencesNew devices and channels, such as mobile, social and web, are creating radical shifts in the customer buying process and the ways your company can reach and communicate with existing and potential customers. Learn how leading brands are using Oracle's marketing solutions to harness big data and better understand their customers, extend their marketing reach into social channels, and retain their high value customers through more rewarding customer experience.Where to Start Your Organization's RevolutionThe process of crafting a great customer experience starts with understanding customers and their goals. This session helps you to begin mapping a sound customer experience strategy, describing the intended experience and kinds of processes that create differentiation. The ROI of Customer Experience: A Tempkin Group Insight Report Did you know that customer experience leaders have more than a 16 percentage point advantage over customer experience laggards in consumers’ willingness to buy more, their reluctance to switch business away, and their likelihood to recommend? Did you know that even a modest increase in customer experience can translate into millions of dollars gained? Learn more about the ROI of customer experience in this free report.

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Fair Comments

- by Tony Davis

To what extent is good code self-documenting? In one of the most entertaining sessions I saw at the recent PASS summit, Jeremiah Peschka (blog | twitter) got a laugh out of a sleepy post-lunch audience with the following remark: "Some developers say good code is self-documenting; I say, get off my team" I silently applauded the sentiment. It's not that all comments are useful, but that I mistrust the basic premise that "my code is so clearly written, it doesn't need any comments". I've read many pieces describing the road to self-documenting code, and my problem with most of them is that they feed the myth that comments in code are a sign of weakness. They aren't; in fact, used correctly I'd say they are essential. Regardless of how far intelligent naming can get you in describing what the code does, or how well any accompanying unit tests can explain to your fellow developers why it works that way, it's no excuse not to document fully the public interfaces to your code. Maybe I just mixed with the wrong crowd while learning my favorite language, but when I open a stored procedure I lose the will even to read it unless I see a big Phil Factor- or Jeff Moden-style header summarizing in plain English what the code does, how it fits in to the broader application, and a usage example. This public interface describes the high-level process and should explain the role of the code, clearly, for fellow developers, language non-experts, and even any non-technical stake holders in the project. When you step into the body of the code, the low-level details, then I agree that the rules are somewhat different; especially when code is subject to frequent refactoring that can quickly render comments redundant or misleading. At their worst, here, inline comments are sticking plaster to cover up the scars caused by poor naming conventions, failure in clarity when mapping a complex domain into code, or just by not entirely understanding the problem (/ this is the clever part). If you design and refactor your code carefully so that it is as simple as possible, your functions do one thing only, you avoid having two completely different algorithms in the same piece of code, and your functions, classes and variables are intelligently named, then, yes, the need for inline comments should be minimal. And yet, even given this, I'd still argue that many languages (T-SQL certainly being one) just don't lend themselves to readability when performing even moderately-complex tasks. If the algorithm is complex, I still like to see the occasional helpful comment. Please, therefore, be as liberal as you see fit in the detail of the comments you apply to this editorial, for like code it is bound to increase its' clarity and usefulness. Cheers, Tony.

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The case of the phantom ADF developer (and other yarns)

- by Chris Muir

A few years of ADF experience means I see common mistakes made by different developers, some I regularly make myself. This post is designed to assist beginners to Oracle JDeveloper Application Development Framework (ADF) avoid a common ADF pitfall, the case of the phantom ADF developer [add Scooby-Doo music here]. ADF Business Components - triggers, default table values and instead of views. Oracle's JDeveloper tutorials help with the A-B-Cs of ADF development, typically built on the nice 'n safe demo schema provided by with the Oracle database such as the HR demo schema. However it's not too long until ADF beginners, having built up some confidence from learning with the tutorials and vanilla demo schemas, start building ADF Business Components based upon their own existing database schema objects. This is where unexpected problems can sneak in. The crime Developers may encounter a surprising error at runtime when editing a record they just created or updated and committed to the database, based on their own existing tables, namely the error: JBO-25014: Another user has changed the row with primary key oracle.jbo.Key[x] ...where X is the primary key value of the row at hand. In a production environment with multiple users this error may be legit, one of the other users has updated the row since you queried it. Yet in a development environment this error is just plain confusing. If developers are isolated in their own database, creating and editing records they know other users can't possibly be working with, or all the other developers have gone home for the day, how is this error possible? There are no other users? It must be the phantom ADF developer! [insert dramatic music here] The following picture is what you'll see in the Business Component Browser, and you'll receive a similar error message via an ADF Faces page: A false conclusion What can possibly cause this issue if it isn't our phantom ADF developer? Doesn't ADF BC implement record locking, locking database records when the row is modified in the ADF middle-tier by a user? How can our phantom ADF developer even take out a lock if this is the case? Maybe ADF has a bug, maybe ADF isn't implementing record locking at all? Shouldn't we see the error "JBO-26030: Failed to lock the record, another user holds the lock" as we attempt to modify the record, why do we see JBO-25014? : Let's verify that ADF is in fact issuing the correct SQL LOCK-FOR-UPDATE statement to the database. First we need to verify ADF's locking strategy. It is determined by the Application Module's jbo.locking.mode property. The default (as of JDev 11.1.1.4.0 if memory serves me correct) and recommended value is optimistic, and the other valid value is pessimistic. Next we need a mechanism to check that ADF is issuing the LOCK statements to the database. We could ask DBAs to monitor locks with OEM, but optimally we'd rather not involve overworked DBAs in this process, so instead we can use the ADF runtime setting –Djbo.debugoutput=console. At runtime this options turns on instrumentation within the ADF BC layer, which among a lot of extra detail displayed in the log window, will show the actual SQL statement issued to the database, including the LOCK statement we're looking to confirm. Setting our locking mode to pessimistic, opening the Business Components Browser of a JSF page allowing us to edit a record, say the CHARGEABLE field within a BOOKINGS record where BOOKING_NO = 1206, upon editing the record see among others the following log entries: [421] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[422] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[423] Where binding param 1: 1206 As can be seen on line 422, in fact a LOCK-FOR-UPDATE is indeed issued to the database. Later when we commit the record we see: [441] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[442] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 1 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[443] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[444] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[445] Update binding param 1: N[446] Where binding param 2: 1206[447] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [448] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [449] EntityCache close prepared statement ....and as a result the changes are saved to the database, and the lock is released. Let's see what happens when we use the optimistic locking mode, this time to change the same BOOKINGS record CHARGEABLE column again. As soon as we edit the record we see little activity in the logs, nothing to indicate any SQL statement, let alone a LOCK has been taken out on the row. However when we save our records by issuing a commit, the following is recorded in the logs: [509] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[510] OracleSQLBuilder Executing doEntitySelect on: BOOKINGS (true)[511] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[512] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[513] Where binding param 1: 1205[514] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 2 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[515] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[516] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[517] Update binding param 1: Y[518] Where binding param 2: 1205[519] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [520] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [521] EntityCache close prepared statement Again even though we're seeing the midtier delay the LOCK statement until commit time, it is in fact occurring on line 412, and released as part of the commit issued on line 419. Therefore with either optimistic or pessimistic locking a lock is indeed issued. Our conclusion at this point must be, unless there's the unlikely cause the LOCK statement is never really hitting the database, or the even less likely cause the database has a bug, then ADF does in fact take out a lock on the record before allowing the current user to update it. So there's no way our phantom ADF developer could even modify the record if he tried without at least someone receiving a lock error. Hmm, we can only conclude the locking mode is a red herring and not the true cause of our problem. Who is the phantom? At this point we'll need to conclude that the error message "JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is somehow legit, even though we don't understand yet what's causing it. This leads onto two further questions, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, and what's been changed anyway? To answer the first question, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, the Fusion Guide's section 4.10.11 How to Protect Against Losing Simultaneous Updated Data , that details the Entity Object Change-Indicator property, gives us the answer: At runtime the framework provides automatic "lost update" detection for entity objects to ensure that a user cannot unknowingly modify data that another user has updated and committed in the meantime. Typically, this check is performed by comparing the original values of each persistent entity attribute against the corresponding current column values in the database at the time the underlying row is locked. Before updating a row, the entity object verifies that the row to be updated is still consistent with the current state of the database. The guide further suggests to make this solution more efficient: You can make the lost update detection more efficient by identifying any attributes of your entity whose values you know will be updated whenever the entity is modified. Typical candidates include a version number column or an updated date column in the row.....To detect whether the row has been modified since the user queried it in the most efficient way, select the Change Indicator option to compare only the change-indicator attribute values. We now know that ADF BC doesn't use the locking mechanism at all to protect the current user against updates, but rather it keeps a copy of the original record fetched, separate to the user changed version of the record, and it compares the original record against the one in the database when the lock is taken out. If values don't match, be it the default compare-all-columns behaviour, or the more efficient Change Indicator mechanism, ADF BC will throw the JBO-25014 error. This leaves one last question. Now we know the mechanism under which ADF identifies a changed row, what we don't know is what's changed and who changed it? The real culprit What's changed? We know the record in the mid-tier has been changed by the user, however ADF doesn't use the changed record in the mid-tier to compare to the database record, but rather a copy of the original record before it was changed. This leaves us to conclude the database record has changed, but how and by who? There are three potential causes: Database triggers The database trigger among other uses, can be configured to fire PLSQL code on a database table insert, update or delete. In particular in an insert or update the trigger can override the value assigned to a particular column. The trigger execution is actioned by the database on behalf of the user initiating the insert or update action. Why this causes the issue specific to our ADF use, is when we insert or update a record in the database via ADF, ADF keeps a copy of the record written to the database. However the cached record is instantly out of date as the database triggers have modified the record that was actually written to the database. Thus when we update the record we just inserted or updated for a second time to the database, ADF compares its original copy of the record to that in the database, and it detects the record has been changed – giving us JBO-25014. This is probably the most common cause of this problem. Default values A second reason this issue can occur is another database feature, default column values. When creating a database table the schema designer can define default values for specific columns. For example a CREATED_BY column could be set to SYSDATE, or a flag column to Y or N. Default values are only used by the database when a user inserts a new record and the specific column is assigned NULL. The database in this case will overwrite the column with the default value. As per the database trigger section, it then becomes apparent why ADF chokes on this feature, though it can only specifically occur in an insert-commit-update-commit scenario, not the update-commit-update-commit scenario. Instead of trigger views I must admit I haven't double checked this scenario but it seems plausible, that of the Oracle database's instead of trigger view (sometimes referred to as instead of views). A view in the database is based on a query, and dependent on the queries complexity, may support insert, update and delete functionality to a limited degree. In order to support fully insertable, updateable and deletable views, Oracle introduced the instead of view, that gives the view designer the ability to not only define the view query, but a set of programmatic PLSQL triggers where the developer can define their own logic for inserts, updates and deletes. While this provides the database programmer a very powerful feature, it can cause issues for our ADF application. On inserting or updating a record in the instead of view, the record and it's data that goes in is not necessarily the data that comes out when ADF compares the records, as the view developer has the option to practically do anything with the incoming data, including throwing it away or pushing it to tables which aren't used by the view underlying query for fetching the data. Readers are at this point reminded that this article is specifically about how the JBO-25014 error occurs in the context of 1 developer on an isolated database. The article is not considering how the error occurs in a production environment where there are multiple users who can cause this error in a legitimate fashion. Assuming none of the above features are the cause of the problem, and optimistic locking is turned on (this error is not possible if pessimistic locking is the default mode *and* none of the previous causes are possible), JBO-25014 is quite feasible in a production ADF application if 2 users modify the same record. At this point under project timelines pressure, the obvious fix for developers is to drop both database triggers and default values from the underlying tables. However we must be careful that these legacy constructs aren't used and assumed to be in place by other legacy systems. Dropping the database triggers or default value that the existing Oracle Forms applications assumes and requires to be in place could cause unexpected behaviour and bugs in the Forms application. Proficient software engineers would recognize such a change may require a partial or full regression test of the existing legacy system, a potentially costly and timely exercise, not ideal. Solving the mystery once and for all Luckily ADF has built in functionality to deal with this issue, though it's not a surprise, as Oracle as the author of ADF also built the database, and are fully aware of the Oracle database's feature set. At the Entity Object attribute level, the Refresh After Insert and Refresh After Update properties. Simply selecting these instructs ADF BC after inserting or updating a record to the database, to expect the database to modify the said attributes, and read a copy of the changed attributes back into its cached mid-tier record. Thus next time the developer modifies the current record, the comparison between the mid-tier record and the database record match, and JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is no longer an issue. [Post edit - as per the comment from Oracle's Steven Davelaar below, as he correctly points out the above solution will not work for instead-of-triggers views as it relies on SQL RETURNING clause which is incompatible with this type of view] Alternatively you can set the Change Indicator on one of the attributes. This will work as long as the relating column for the attribute in the database itself isn't inadvertently updated. In turn you're possibly just masking the issue rather than solving it, because if another developer turns the Change Indicator back on the original issue will return.

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formula for replicating glTexGen in opengl es 2.0 glsl

- by visualjc

I also posted this on the main StackExchange, but this seems like a better place, but for give me for the double post if it shows up twice. I have been trying for several hours to implement a GLSL replacement for glTexGen with GL_OBJECT_LINEAR. For OpenGL ES 2.0. In Ogl GLSL there is the gl_TextureMatrix that makes this easier, but thats not available on OpenGL ES 2.0 / OpenGL ES Shader Language 1.0 Several sites have mentioned that this should be "easy" to do in a GLSL vert shader. But I just can not get it to work. My hunch is that I'm not setting the planes up correctly, or I'm missing something in my understanding. I've pored over the web. But most sites are talking about projected textures, I'm just looking to create UV's based on planar projection. The models are being built in Maya, have 50k polygons and the modeler is using planer mapping, but Maya will not export the UV's. So I'm trying to figure this out. I've looked at the glTexGen manpage information: g = p1xo + p2yo + p3zo + p4wo What is g? Is g the value of s in the texture2d call? I've looked at the site: http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_glTexGen Another size explains the same function: coord = P1*X + P2*Y + P3*Z + P4*W I don't get how coord (an UV vec2 in my mind) is equal to the dot product (a scalar value)? Same problem I had before with "g". What do I set the plane to be? In my opengl c++ 3.0 code, I set it to [0, 0, 1, 0] (basically unit z) and glTexGen works great. I'm still missing something. My vert shader looks basically like this: WVPMatrix = World View Project Matrix. POSITION is the model vertex position. varying vec4 kOutBaseTCoord; void main() { gl_Position = WVPMatrix * vec4(POSITION, 1.0); vec4 sPlane = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec4 tPlane = vec4(0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec4 rPlane = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec4 qPlane = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); kOutBaseTCoord.s = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), sPlane); kOutBaseTCoord.t = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), tPlane); //kOutBaseTCoord.r = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), rPlane); //kOutBaseTCoord.q = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), qPlane); } The frag shader precision mediump float; uniform sampler2D BaseSampler; varying mediump vec4 kOutBaseTCoord; void main() { //gl_FragColor = vec4(kOutBaseTCoord.st, 0.0, 1.0); gl_FragColor = texture2D(BaseSampler, kOutBaseTCoord.st); } I've tried texture2DProj in frag shader Here are some of the other links I've looked up http://www.gamedev.net/topic/407961-texgen-not-working-with-glsl-with-fixed-pipeline-is-ok/ Thank you in advance.

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Databind a datagrid header combobox from ViewModel

- by Mike

I've got a Datagrid with a column defined as this: <Custom:DataGridTextColumn HeaderStyle="{StaticResource ComboBoxHeader}" Width="Auto" Header="Type" Binding="{Binding Path=Type}" IsReadOnly="True" /> The ComboBoxHeader style is defined in a resource dictionary as this: <Style x:Key="ComboBoxHeader" TargetType="{x:Type my:DataGridColumnHeader}"> <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type my:DataGridColumnHeader}"> <ControlTemplate.Resources> <Storyboard x:Key="ShowFilterControl"> <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="filterComboBox" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Visibility)"> <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="{x:Static Visibility.Visible}"/> <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00.5000000" Value="{x:Static Visibility.Visible}"/> </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> <ColorAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="filterComboBox" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Panel.Background).(SolidColorBrush.Color)"> <SplineColorKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="Transparent"/> <SplineColorKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00.5000000" Value="White"/> </ColorAnimationUsingKeyFrames> </Storyboard> <Storyboard x:Key="HideFilterControl"> <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="filterComboBox" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Visibility)"> <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00.4000000" Value="{x:Static Visibility.Collapsed}"/> </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> <ColorAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="filterComboBox" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.OpacityMask).(SolidColorBrush.Color)"> <SplineColorKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="Black"/> <SplineColorKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00.4000000" Value="#00000000"/> </ColorAnimationUsingKeyFrames> </Storyboard> </ControlTemplate.Resources> <my:DataGridHeaderBorder x:Name="dataGridHeaderBorder" Margin="0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Height="31" IsClickable="{TemplateBinding CanUserSort}" IsHovered="{TemplateBinding IsMouseOver}" IsPressed="{TemplateBinding IsPressed}" SeparatorBrush="{TemplateBinding SeparatorBrush}" SeparatorVisibility="{TemplateBinding SeparatorVisibility}" SortDirection="{TemplateBinding SortDirection}" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}" Padding="{TemplateBinding Padding}" Grid.ColumnSpan="1"> <Grid x:Name="grid" Width="Auto" Height="Auto" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5"> <Grid.RenderTransform> <TransformGroup> <ScaleTransform/> <SkewTransform/> <RotateTransform/> <TranslateTransform/> </TransformGroup> </Grid.RenderTransform> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ContentPresenter x:Name="contentPresenter" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" ContentStringFormat="{TemplateBinding ContentStringFormat}" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding ContentTemplate}"> <ContentPresenter.Content> <MultiBinding Converter="{StaticResource headerConverter}"> <MultiBinding.Bindings> <Binding ElementName="filterComboBox" Path="Text" /> <Binding RelativeSource="{RelativeSource TemplatedParent}" Path="Content" /> </MultiBinding.Bindings> </MultiBinding> </ContentPresenter.Content> </ContentPresenter> <ComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Types}" x:Name="filterComboBox" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Right" MinWidth="20" Height="Auto" OpacityMask="Black" Visibility="Collapsed" Text="" Grid.Column="0" Grid.ColumnSpan="1"/> </Grid> </my:DataGridHeaderBorder> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsMouseOver" Value="True"> <Trigger.EnterActions> <BeginStoryboard x:Name="ShowFilterControl_BeginStoryboard" Storyboard="{StaticResource ShowFilterControl}"/> <StopStoryboard BeginStoryboardName="HideFilterControl_BeginShowFilterControl"/> </Trigger.EnterActions> <Trigger.ExitActions> <BeginStoryboard x:Name="HideFilterControl_BeginShowFilterControl" Storyboard="{StaticResource HideFilterControl}"/> <StopStoryboard BeginStoryboardName="ShowFilterControl_BeginStoryboard"/> </Trigger.ExitActions> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> <Setter Property="Background"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0"> <GradientStop Color="#FF0067AD" Offset="1"/> <GradientStop Color="#FF003355" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#FF78A8C9" Offset="0"/> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="White"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0"> <GradientStop Color="#D8000000" Offset="0.664"/> <GradientStop Color="#7F003355" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> <Setter Property="FontWeight" Value="Bold"/> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="1,1,1,0"/> <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="5,0"/> </Style> As you can see, I'm trying to databind the combobox's ItemsSource to Types, but this doesn't work. The list is in my ViewModel that is being applied to my page, how would I specify in this style that is in my resource dictionary that I want to bind to a source in my viewmodel.

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Oracle Data Integrator 11.1.1.5 Complex Files as Sources and Targets

- by Alex Kotopoulis

Overview ODI 11.1.1.5 adds the new Complex File technology for use with file sources and targets. The goal is to read or write file structures that are too complex to be parsed using the existing ODI File technology. This includes: Different record types in one list that use different parsing rules Hierarchical lists, for example customers with nested orders Parsing instructions in the file data, such as delimiter types, field lengths, type identifiers Complex headers such as multiple header lines or parseable information in header Skipping of lines Conditional or choice fields Similar to the ODI File and XML File technologies, the complex file parsing is done through a JDBC driver that exposes the flat file as relational table structures. Complex files are mapped to one or more table structures, as opposed to the (simple) file technology, which always has a one-to-one relationship between file and table. The resulting set of tables follows the same concept as the ODI XML driver, table rows have additional PK-FK relationships to express hierarchy as well as order values to maintain the file order in the resulting table. The parsing instruction format used for complex files is the nXSD (native XSD) format that is already in use with Oracle BPEL. This format extends the XML Schema standard by adding additional parsing instructions to each element. Using nXSD parsing technology, the native file is converted into an internal XML format. It is important to understand that the XML is streamed to improve performance; there is no size limitation of the native file based on memory size, the XML data is never fully materialized. The internal XML is then converted to relational schema using the same mapping rules as the ODI XML driver. How to Create an nXSD file Complex file models depend on the nXSD schema for the given file. This nXSD file has to be created using a text editor or the Native Format Builder Wizard that is part of Oracle BPEL. BPEL is included in the ODI Suite, but not in standalone ODI Enterprise Edition. The nXSD format extends the standard XSD format through nxsd attributes. NXSD is a valid XML Schema, since the XSD standard allows extra attributes with their own namespaces. The following is a sample NXSD schema: <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:nxsd="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/nxsd" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns:tns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/demoSchema/csv" targetNamespace="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/demoSchema/csv" attributeFormDefault="unqualified" nxsd:encoding="US-ASCII" nxsd:stream="chars" nxsd:version="NXSD"> <xsd:element name="Root"> <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="Header"> <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="Branch" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy=","/> <xsd:element name="ListDate" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="${eol}"/> </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType> <xsd:element name="Customer" maxOccurs="unbounded"> <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="Name" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy=","/> <xsd:element name="Street" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="," /> <xsd:element name="City" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="${eol}" /> </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The nXSD schema annotates elements to describe their position and delimiters within the flat text file. The schema above uses almost exclusively the nxsd:terminatedBy instruction to look for the next terminator chars. There are various constructs in nXSD to parse fixed length fields, look ahead in the document for string occurences, perform conditional logic, use variables to remember state, and many more. nXSD files can either be written manually using an XML Schema Editor or created using the Native Format Builder Wizard. Both Native Format Builder Wizard as well as the nXSD language are described in the Application Server Adapter Users Guide. The way to start the Native Format Builder in BPEL is to create a new File Adapter; in step 8 of the Adapter Configuration Wizard a new Schema for Native Format can be created: The Native Format Builder guides through a number of steps to generate the nXSD based on a sample native file. If the format is complex, it is often a good idea to “approximate” it with a similar simple format and then add the complex components manually. The resulting *.xsd file can be copied and used as the format for ODI, other BPEL constructs such as the file adapter definition are not relevant for ODI. Using this technique it is also possible to parse the same file format in SOA Suite and ODI, for example using SOA for small real-time messages, and ODI for large batches. This nXSD schema in this example describes a file with a header row containing data and 3 string fields per row delimited by commas, for example: Redwood City Downtown Branch, 06/01/2011 Ebeneezer Scrooge, Sandy Lane, Atherton Tiny Tim, Winton Terrace, Menlo Park The ODI Complex File JDBC driver exposes the file structure through a set of relational tables with PK-FK relationships. The tables for this example are: Table ROOT (1 row): ROOTPK Primary Key for root element SNPSFILENAME Name of the file SNPSFILEPATH Path of the file SNPSLOADDATE Date of load Table HEADER (1 row): ROOTFK Foreign Key to ROOT record ROWORDER Order of row in native document BRANCH Data BRANCHORDER Order of Branch within row LISTDATE Data LISTDATEORDER Order of ListDate within row Table ADDRESS (2 rows): ROOTFK Foreign Key to ROOT record ROWORDER Order of row in native document NAME Data NAMEORDER Oder of Name within row STREET Data STREETORDER Order of Street within row CITY Data CITYORDER Order of City within row Every table has PK and/or FK fields to reflect the document hierarchy through relationships. In this example this is trivial since the HEADER and all CUSTOMER records point back to the PK of ROOT. Deeper nested documents require this to identify parent elements. All tables also have a ROWORDER field to define the order of rows, as well as order fields for each column, in case the order of columns varies in the original document and needs to be maintained. If order is not relevant, these fields can be ignored. How to Create an Complex File Data Server in ODI After creating the nXSD file and a test data file, and storing it on the local file system accessible to ODI, you can go to the ODI Topology Navigator to create a Data Server and Physical Schema under the Complex File technology. This technology follows the conventions of other ODI technologies and is very similar to the XML technology. The parsing settings such as the source native file, the nXSD schema file, the root element, as well as the external database can be set in the JDBC URL: The use of an external database defined by dbprops is optional, but is strongly recommended for production use. Ideally, the staging database should be used for this. Also, when using a complex file exclusively for read purposes, it is recommended to use the ro=true property to ensure the file is not unnecessarily synchronized back from the database when the connection is closed. A data file is always required to be present at the filename path during design-time. Without this file, operations like testing the connection, reading the model data, or reverse engineering the model will fail. All properties of the Complex File JDBC Driver are documented in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Connectivity and Knowledge Modules Guide for Oracle Data Integrator in Appendix C: Oracle Data Integrator Driver for Complex Files Reference. David Allan has created a great viewlet Complex File Processing - 0 to 60 which shows the creation of a Complex File data server as well as a model based on this server. How to Create Models based on an Complex File Schema Once physical schema and logical schema have been created, the Complex File can be used to create a Model as if it were based on a database. When reverse-engineering the Model, data stores(tables) for each XSD element of complex type will be created. Use of complex files as sources is straightforward; when using them as targets it has to be made sure that all dependent tables have matching PK-FK pairs; the same applies to the XML driver as well. Debugging and Error Handling There are different ways to test an nXSD file. The Native Format Builder Wizard can be used even if the nXSD wasn’t created in it; it will show issues related to the schema and/or test data. In ODI, the nXSD will be parsed and run against the existing test XML file when testing a connection in the Dataserver. If either the nXSD has an error or the data is non-compliant to the schema, an error will be displayed. Sample error message: Error while reading native data. [Line=1, Col=5] Not enough data available in the input, when trying to read data of length "19" for "element with name D1" from the specified position, using "style" as "fixedLength" and "length" as "". Ensure that there is enough data from the specified position in the input. Complex File FAQ Is the size of the native file limited by available memory? No, since the native data is streamed through the driver, only the available space in the staging database limits the size of the data. There are limits on individual field sizes, though; a single large object field needs to fit in memory. Should I always use the complex file driver instead of the file driver in ODI now? No, use the file technology for all simple file parsing tasks, for example any fixed-length or delimited files that just have one row format and can be mapped into a simple table. Because of its narrow assumptions the ODI file driver is easy to configure within ODI and can stream file data without writing it into a database. The complex file driver should be used whenever the use case cannot be handled through the file driver. Are we generating XML out of flat files before we write it into a database? We don’t materialize any XML as part of parsing a flat file, either in memory or on disk. The data produced by the XML parser is streamed in Java objects that just use XSD-derived nXSD schema as its type system. We use the nXSD schema because is the standard for describing complex flat file metadata in Oracle Fusion Middleware, and enables users to share schemas across products. Is the nXSD file interchangeable with SOA Suite? Yes, ODI can use the same nXSD files as SOA Suite, allowing mixed use cases with the same data format. Can I start the Native Format Builder from the ODI Studio? No, the Native Format Builder has to be started from a JDeveloper with BPEL instance. You can get BPEL as part of the SOA Suite bundle. Users without SOA Suite can manually develop nXSD files using XSD editors. When is the database data written back to the native file? Data is synchronized using the SYNCHRONIZE and CREATE FILE commands, and when the JDBC connection is closed. It is recommended to set the ro or read_only property to true when a file is exclusively used for reading so that no unnecessary write-backs occur. Is the nXSD metadata part of the ODI Master or Work Repository? No, the data server definition in the master repository only contains the JDBC URL with file paths; the nXSD files have to be accessible on the file systems where the JDBC driver is executed during production, either by copying or by using a network file system. Where can I find sample nXSD files? The Application Server Adapter Users Guide contains nXSD samples for various different use cases.

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Live Debugging

- by Daniel Moth

Based on my classification of diagnostics, you should know what live debugging is NOT about - at least according to me :-) and in this post I'll share how I think of live debugging. These are the (outer) steps to live debugging Get the debugger in the picture. Control program execution. Inspect state. Iterate between 2 and 3 as necessary. Stop debugging (and potentially start new iteration going back to step 1). Step 1 has two options: start with the debugger attached, or execute your binary separately and attach the debugger later. You might say there is a 3rd option, where the app notifies you that there is an issue, referred to as JIT debugging. However, that is just a variation of the attach because that is when you start the debugging session: when you attach. I'll be covering in future posts how this step works in Visual Studio. Step 2 is about pausing (or breaking) your app so that it makes no progress and remains "frozen". A sub-variation is to pause only parts of its execution, or in other words to freeze individual threads. I'll be covering in future posts the various ways you can perform this step in Visual Studio. Step 3, is about seeing what the state of your program is when you have paused it. Typically it involves comparing the state you are finding, with a mental picture of what you thought the state would be. Or simply checking invariants about the intended state of the app, with the actual state of the app. I'll be covering in future posts the various ways you can perform this step in Visual Studio. Step 4 is necessary if you need to inspect more state - rinse and repeat. Self-explanatory, and will be covered as part of steps 2 & 3. Step 5 is the most straightforward, with 3 options: Detach the debugger; terminate your binary though the normal way that it terminates (e.g. close the main window); and, terminate the debugging session through your debugger with a result that it terminates the execution of your program too. In a future post I'll cover the ways you can detach or terminate the debugger in Visual Studio. I found an old picture I used to use to map the steps above on Visual Studio 2010. It is basically the Debug menu with colored rectangles around each menu mapping the menu to one of the first 3 steps (step 5 was merged with step 1 for that slide). Here it is in case it helps: Stay tuned for more... Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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Free eBook with SQL Server performance tips and nuggets

- by Claire Brooking

I’ve often found that the kind of tips that turn out to be helpful are the ones that encourage me to make a small step outside of a routine. No dramatic changes – just a quick suggestion that changes an approach. As a languages student at university, one of the best I spotted came from outside the lecture halls and ended up saving me time (and lots of huffing and puffing) – the use of a rainbow of sticky notes for well-used pages and letter categories in my dictionary. Simple, but armed with a heavy dictionary that could double up as a step stool, those markers were surprisingly handy. When the Simple-Talk editors told me about a book they were planning that would give a series of tips for developers on how to improve database performance, we all agreed it needed to contain a good range of pointers for big-hitter performance topics. But we wanted to include some of the smaller, time-saving nuggets too. We hope we’ve struck a good balance. The 45 Database Performance Tips eBook covers different tips to help you avoid code that saps performance, whether that’s the ‘gotchas’ to be aware of when using Object to Relational Mapping (ORM) tools, or what to be aware of for indexes, database design, and T-SQL. The eBook is also available to download with SQL Prompt from Red Gate. We often hear that it’s the productivity-boosting side of SQL Prompt that makes it useful for everyday coding. So when a member of the SQL Prompt team mentioned an idea to make the most of tab history, a new feature in SQL Prompt 6 for SQL Server Management Studio, we were intrigued. Now SQL Prompt can save tabs we have been working on in SSMS as a way to maintain an active template for queries we often recycle. When we need to reuse the same code again, we search for our saved tab (and we can also customize its name to speed up the search) to get started. We hope you find the eBook helpful, and as always on Simple-Talk, we’d love to hear from you too. If you have a performance tip for SQL Server you’d like to share, email Melanie on the Simple-Talk team ([email protected]) and we’ll publish a collection in a follow-up post.

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Using Deployment Manager

- by Jess Nickson

One of the teams at Red Gate has been working very hard on a new product: Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager is a free tool that lets you deploy updates to .NET apps, services and databases through a central dashboard. Deployment Manager has been out for a while, but I must admit that even though I work in the same building, until now I hadn’t even looked at it. My job at Red Gate is to develop and maintain some of our community sites, which involves carrying out regular deployments. One of the projects I have to deploy on a fairly regular basis requires me to send my changes to our build server, TeamCity. The output is a Zip file of the build. I then have to go and find this file, copy it across to the staging machine, extract it, and copy some of the sub-folders to other places. In order to keep track of what builds are running, I need to rename the folders accordingly. However, even after all that, I still need to go and update the site and its applications in IIS to point at these new builds. Oh, and then, I have to repeat the process when I deploy on production. Did I mention the multiple configuration files that then need updating as well? Manually? The whole process can take well over half an hour. I’m ready to try out a new process. Deployment Manager is designed to massively simplify the deployment processes from what could be lots of manual copying of files, managing of configuration files, and database upgrades down to a few clicks. It’s a big promise, but I decided to try out this new tool on one of the smaller ASP.NET sites at Red Gate, Format SQL (the result of a Red Gate Down Tools week). I wanted to add some new functionality, but given it was a new site with no set way of doing things, I was reluctant to have to manually copy files around servers. I decided to use this opportunity as a chance to set the site up on Deployment Manager and check out its functionality. What follows is a guide on how to get set up with Deployment Manager, a brief overview of its features, and what I thought of the experience. To follow along with the instructions that follow, you’ll first need to download Deployment Manager from Red Gate. It has a free ‘Starter Edition’ which allows you to create up to 5 projects and agents (machines you deploy to), so it’s really easy to get up and running with a fully-featured version. The Initial Set Up After installing the product and setting it up using the administration tool it provides, I launched Deployment Manager by going to the URL and port I had set it to run on. This loads up the main dashboard. The dashboard does a good job of guiding me through the process of getting started, beginning with a prompt to create some environments. 1. Setting up Environments The dashboard informed me that I needed to add new ‘Environments’, which are essentially ways of grouping the machines you want to deploy to. The environments that get added will show up on the main dashboard. I set up two such environments for this project: ‘staging’ and ‘live’. 2. Add Target Machines Once I had created the environments, I was ready to add ‘target machine’s to them, which are the actual machines that the deployment will occur on. To enable me to deploy to a new machine, I needed to download and install an Agent on it. The ‘Add target machine’ form on the ‘Environments’ page helpfully provides a link for downloading an Agent. Once the agent has been installed, it is just a case of copying the server key to the agent, and the agent key to the server, to link them up. 3. Run Health Check If, after adding your new target machine, the ‘Status’ flags an error, it is possible that the Agent and Server keys have not been entered correctly on both Deployment Manager and the Agent service. You can ‘Check Health’, which will give you more information on any issues. It is probably worth running this regardless of what status the ‘Environments’ dashboard is claiming, just to be on the safe side. 4. Add Projects Going back to the main Dashboard tab at this point, I found that it was telling me that I needed to set up a new project. I clicked the ‘project’ link to get started, gave my new project a name and clicked ‘Create’. I was then redirected to the ‘Steps’ page for the project under the Projects tab. 5. Package Steps The ‘Steps’ page was fairly empty when it first loaded. Adding a ‘step’ allowed me to specify what packages I wanted to grab for the deployment. This part requires a NuGet package feed to be set up, which is where Deployment Manager will look for the packages. At Red Gate, we already have one set up, so I just needed to tell Deployment Manager about it. Don’t worry; there is a nice guide included on how to go about doing all of this on the ‘Package Feeds’ page in ‘Settings’, if you need any help with setting these bits up. At Red Gate we use a build server, TeamCity, which is capable of publishing built projects to the NuGet feed we use. This makes the workflow for Format SQL relatively simple: when I commit a change to the project, the build server is configured to grab those changes, build the project, and spit out a new NuGet package to the Red Gate NuGet package feed. My ‘package step’, therefore, is set up to look for this package on our feed. The final part of package step was simply specifying which machines from what environments I wanted to be able to deploy the project to. Format SQL Now the main Dashboard showed my new project and environment in a rather empty looking grid. Clicking on my project presented me with a nice little message telling me that I am now ready to create my first release! Create a release Next I clicked on the ‘Create release’ button in the Projects tab. If your feeds and package step(s) were set up correctly, then Deployment Manager will automatically grab the latest version of the NuGet package that you want to deploy. As you can see here, it was able to pick up the latest build for Format SQL and all I needed to do was enter a version number and description of the release. As you can see underneath ‘Version number’, it keeps track of what version the previous release was given. Clicking ‘Create’ created the release and redirected me to a summary of it where I could check the details before deploying. I clicked ‘Deploy this release’ and chose the environment I wanted to deploy to and…that’s it. Deployment Manager went off and deployed it for me. Once I clicked ‘Deploy release’, Deployment Manager started to automatically update and provide continuing feedback about the process. If any errors do arise, then I can expand the results to see where it went wrong. That’s it, I’m done! Keep in mind, if you hit errors with the deployment itself then it is possible to view the log output to try and determine where these occurred. You can keep expanding the logs to narrow down the problem. The screenshot below is not from my Format SQL deployment, but I thought I’d post one to demonstrate the logging output available. Features One of the best bits of Deployment Manager for me is the ability to very, very easily deploy the same release to multiple machines. Deploying this same release to production was just a case of selecting the deployment and choosing the ‘live’ environment as the place to deploy to. Following on from this is the fact that, as Deployment Manager keeps track of all of your releases, it is extremely easy to roll back to a previous release if anything goes pear-shaped! You can view all your previous releases and select one to re-deploy. I needed this feature more than once when differences in my production and staging machines lead to some odd behavior. Another option is to use the TeamCity integration available. This enables you to set Deployment Manager up so that it will automatically create releases and deploy these to an environment directly from TeamCity, meaning that you can always see the latest version up and running without having to do anything. Machine Specific Deployments ‘What about custom configuration files?’ I hear you shout. Certainly, it was one of my concerns. Our setup on the staging machine is not in line with that on production. What this means is that, should we deploy the same configuration to both, one of them is going to break. Thankfully, it turns out that Deployment Manager can deal with this. Given I had environments ‘staging’ and ‘live’, and that staging used the project’s web.config file, while production (‘live’) required the config file to undergo some transformations, I simply added a web.live.config file in the project, so that it would be included as part of the NuGet package. In this file, I wrote the XML document transformations I needed and Deployment Manager took care of the rest. Another option is to set up ‘variables’ for your project, which allow you to specify key-value pairs for your configuration file, and which environment to apply them to. You’ll find Variables as a full left-hand submenu within the ‘Projects’ tab. These features will definitely be of interest if you have a large number of environments! There are still many other features that I didn’t get a chance to play around with like running PowerShell scripts for more personalised deployments. Maybe next time! Also, let’s not forget that my use case in this article is a very simple one – deploying a single package. I don’t believe that all projects will be equally as simple, but I already appreciate how much easier Deployment Manager could make my life. I look forward to the possibility of moving our other sites over to Deployment Manager in the near future. Conclusion In this article I have described the steps involved in setting up and configuring an instance of Deployment Manager, creating a new automated deployment process, and using this to actually carry out a deployment. I’ve tried to mention some of the features I found particularly useful, such as error logging, easy release management allowing you to deploy the same release multiple times, and configuration file transformations. If I had to point out one issue, then it would be that the releases are immutable, which from a development point of view makes sense. However, this causes confusion where I have to create a new release to deploy to a newly set up environment – I cannot simply deploy an old release onto a new environment, the whole release needs to be recreated. I really liked how easy it was to get going with the product. Setting up Format SQL and making a first deployment took very little time. Especially when you compare it to how long it takes me to manually deploy the other site, as I described earlier. I liked how it let me know what I needed to do next, with little messages flagging up that I needed to ‘create environments’ or ‘add some deployment steps’ before I could continue. I found the dashboard incredibly convenient. As the number of projects and environments increase, it might become awkward to try and search them and find out what state they are in. Instead, the dashboard handily keeps track of the latest deployments of each project and lets you know what version is running on each of the environments, and when that deployment occurred. Finally, do you remember my complaint about having to rename folders so that I could keep track of what build they came from? This is yet another thing that Deployment Manager takes care of for you. Each release is put into its own directory, which takes the name of whatever version number that release has, though these can be customised if necessary. If you’d like to take a look at Deployment Manager for yourself, then you can download it here.

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T-SQL Dynamic SQL and Temp Tables

- by George

It looks like #temptables created using dynamic SQL via the EXECUTE string method have a different scope and can't be referenced by "fixed" SQLs in the same stored procedure. However, I can reference a temp table created by a dynamic SQL statement in a subsequence dynamic SQL but it seems that a stored procedure does not return a query result to a calling client unless the SQL is fixed. A simple 2 table scenario: I have 2 tables. Let's call them Orders and Items. Order has a Primary key of OrderId and Items has a Primary Key of ItemId. Items.OrderId is the foreign key to identify the parent Order. An Order can have 1 to n Items. I want to be able to provide a very flexible "query builder" type interface to the user to allow the user to select what Items he want to see. The filter criteria can be based on fields from the Items table and/or from the parent Order table. If an Item meets the filter condition including and condition on the parent Order if one exists, the Item should be return in the query as well as the parent Order. Usually, I suppose, most people would construct a join between the Item table and the parent Order tables. I would like to perform 2 separate queries instead. One to return all of the qualifying Items and the other to return all of the distinct parent Orders. The reason is two fold and you may or may not agree. The first reason is that I need to query all of the columns in the parent Order table and if I did a single query to join the Orders table to the Items table, I would be repoeating the Order information multiple times. Since there are typically a large number of items per Order, I'd like to avoid this because it would result in much more data being transfered to a fat client. Instead, as mentioned, I would like to return the two tables individually in a dataset and use the two tables within to populate a custom Order and child Items client objects. (I don't know enough about LINQ or Entity Framework yet. I build my objects by hand). The second reason I would like to return two tables instead of one is because I already have another procedure that returns all of the Items for a given OrderId along with the parent Order and I would like to use the same 2-table approach so that I could reuse the client code to populate my custom Order and Client objects from the 2 datatables returned. What I was hoping to do was this: Construct a dynamic SQL string on the Client which joins the orders table to the Items table and filters appropriate on each table as specified by the custom filter created on the Winform fat-client app. The SQL build on the client would have looked something like this: TempSQL = " INSERT INTO #ItemsToQuery OrderId, ItemsId FROM Orders, Items WHERE Orders.OrderID = Items.OrderId AND /* Some unpredictable Order filters go here */ AND /* Some unpredictable Items filters go here */ " Then, I would call a stored procedure, CREATE PROCEDURE GetItemsAndOrders(@tempSql as text) Execute (@tempSQL) --to create the #ItemsToQuery table SELECT * FROM Items WHERE Items.ItemId IN (SELECT ItemId FROM #ItemsToQuery) SELECT * FROM Orders WHERE Orders.OrderId IN (SELECT DISTINCT OrderId FROM #ItemsToQuery) The problem with this approach is that #ItemsToQuery table, since it was created by dynamic SQL, is inaccessible from the following 2 static SQLs and if I change the static SQLs to dynamic, no results are passed back to the fat client. 3 around come to mind but I'm look for a better one: 1) The first SQL could be performed by executing the dynamically constructed SQL from the client. The results could then be passed as a table to a modified version of the above stored procedure. I am familiar with passing table data as XML. If I did this, the stored proc could then insert the data into a temporary table using a static SQL that, because it was created by dynamic SQL, could then be queried without issue. (I could also investigate into passing the new Table type param instead of XML.) However, I would like to avoid passing up potentially large lists to a stored procedure. 2) I could perform all the queries from the client. The first would be something like this: SELECT Items.* FROM Orders, Items WHERE Order.OrderId = Items.OrderId AND (dynamic filter) SELECT Orders.* FROM Orders, Items WHERE Order.OrderId = Items.OrderId AND (dynamic filter) This still provides me with the ability to reuse my client sided object-population code because the Orders and Items continue to be returned in two different tables. I have a feeling to, that I might have some options using a Table data type within my stored proc, but that is also new to me and I would appreciate a little bit of spoon feeding on that one. If you even scanned this far in what I wrote, I am surprised, but if so, I woul dappreciate any of your thoughts on how to accomplish this best.

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how to use 3D map Actionscript class in mxml file for display map.

- by nemade-vipin

hello friends, I have created the application in which I have to use 3D map Action Script class in mxml file to display a map in form. that is in tab navigator last tab. My ActionScript 3D map class is(FlyingDirections):- package src.SBTSCoreObject { import src.SBTSCoreObject.JSONDecoder; import com.google.maps.InfoWindowOptions; import com.google.maps.LatLng; import com.google.maps.LatLngBounds; import com.google.maps.Map3D; import com.google.maps.MapEvent; import com.google.maps.MapOptions; import com.google.maps.MapType; import com.google.maps.MapUtil; import com.google.maps.View; import com.google.maps.controls.NavigationControl; import com.google.maps.geom.Attitude; import com.google.maps.interfaces.IPolyline; import com.google.maps.overlays.Marker; import com.google.maps.overlays.MarkerOptions; import com.google.maps.services.Directions; import com.google.maps.services.DirectionsEvent; import com.google.maps.services.Route; import flash.display.Bitmap; import flash.display.DisplayObject; import flash.display.DisplayObjectContainer; import flash.display.Loader; import flash.display.LoaderInfo; import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.events.Event; import flash.events.IOErrorEvent; import flash.events.MouseEvent; import flash.events.TimerEvent; import flash.filters.DropShadowFilter; import flash.geom.Point; import flash.net.URLLoader; import flash.net.URLRequest; import flash.net.navigateToURL; import flash.text.TextField; import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize; import flash.text.TextFormat; import flash.utils.Timer; import flash.utils.getTimer; public class FlyingDirections extends Map3D { /** * Panoramio home page. */ private static const PANORAMIO_HOME:String = "http://www.panoramio.com/"; /** * The icon for the car. */ [Embed("assets/car-icon-24px.png")] private static const Car:Class; /** * The Panoramio icon. */ [Embed("assets/iw_panoramio.png")] private static const PanoramioIcon:Class; /** * We animate a zoom in to the start the route before the car starts * to move. This constant sets the time in seconds over which this * zoom occurs. */ private static const LEAD_IN_DURATION:Number = 3; /** * Duration of the trip in seconds. */ private static const TRIP_DURATION:Number = 40; /** * Constants that define the geometry of the Panoramio image markers. */ private static const BORDER_T:Number = 3; private static const BORDER_L:Number = 10; private static const BORDER_R:Number = 10; private static const BORDER_B:Number = 3; private static const GAP_T:Number = 2; private static const GAP_B:Number = 1; private static const IMAGE_SCALE:Number = 1; /** * Trajectory that the camera follows over time. Each element is an object * containing properties used to generate parameter values for flyTo(..). * fraction = 0 corresponds to the start of the trip; fraction = 1 * correspondsto the end of the trip. */ private var FLY_TRAJECTORY:Array = [ { fraction: 0, zoom: 6, attitude: new Attitude(0, 0, 0) }, { fraction: 0.2, zoom: 8.5, attitude: new Attitude(30, 30, 0) }, { fraction: 0.5, zoom: 9, attitude: new Attitude(30, 40, 0) }, { fraction: 1, zoom: 8, attitude: new Attitude(50, 50, 0) }, { fraction: 1.1, zoom: 8, attitude: new Attitude(130, 50, 0) }, { fraction: 1.2, zoom: 8, attitude: new Attitude(220, 50, 0) }, ]; /** * Number of panaramio photos for which we load data. We'll select a * subset of these approximately evenly spaced along the route. */ private static const NUM_GEOTAGGED_PHOTOS:int = 50; /** * Number of panaramio photos that we actually show. */ private static const NUM_SHOWN_PHOTOS:int = 7; /** * Scaling between real trip time and animation time. */ private static const SCALE_TIME:Number = 0.001; /** * getTimer() value at the instant that we start the trip. If this is 0 then * we have not yet started the car moving. */ private var startTimer:int = 0; /** * The current route. */ private var route:Route; /** * The polyline for the route. */ private var polyline:IPolyline; /** * The car marker. */ private var marker:Marker; /** * The cumulative duration in seconds over each step in the route. * cumulativeStepDuration[0] is 0; cumulativeStepDuration[1] adds the * duration of step 0; cumulativeStepDuration[2] adds the duration * of step 1; etc. */ private var cumulativeStepDuration:/*Number*/Array = []; /** * The cumulative distance in metres over each vertex in the route polyline. * cumulativeVertexDistance[0] is 0; cumulativeVertexDistance[1] adds the * distance to vertex 1; cumulativeVertexDistance[2] adds the distance to * vertex 2; etc. */ private var cumulativeVertexDistance:Array; /** * Array of photos loaded from Panoramio. This array has the same format as * the 'photos' property within the JSON returned by the Panoramio API * (see http://www.panoramio.com/api/), with additional properties added to * individual photo elements to hold the loader structures that fetch * the actual images. */ private var photos:Array = []; /** * Array of polyline vertices, where each element is in world coordinates. * Several computations can be faster if we can use world coordinates * instead of LatLng coordinates. */ private var worldPoly:/*Point*/Array; /** * Whether the start button has been pressed. */ private var startButtonPressed:Boolean = false; /** * Saved event from onDirectionsSuccess call. */ private var directionsSuccessEvent:DirectionsEvent = null; /** * Start button. */ private var startButton:Sprite; /** * Alpha value used for the Panoramio image markers. */ private var markerAlpha:Number = 0; /** * Index of the current driving direction step. Used to update the * info window content each time we progress to a new step. */ private var currentStepIndex:int = -1; /** * The fly directions map constructor. * * @constructor */ public function FlyingDirections() { key="ABQIAAAA7QUChpcnvnmXxsjC7s1fCxQGj0PqsCtxKvarsoS-iqLdqZSKfxTd7Xf-2rEc_PC9o8IsJde80Wnj4g"; super(); addEventListener(MapEvent.MAP_PREINITIALIZE, onMapPreinitialize); addEventListener(MapEvent.MAP_READY, onMapReady); } /** * Handles map preintialize. Initializes the map center and zoom level. * * @param event The map event. */ private function onMapPreinitialize(event:MapEvent):void { setInitOptions(new MapOptions({ center: new LatLng(-26.1, 135.1), zoom: 4, viewMode: View.VIEWMODE_PERSPECTIVE, mapType:MapType.PHYSICAL_MAP_TYPE })); } /** * Handles map ready and looks up directions. * * @param event The map event. */ private function onMapReady(event:MapEvent):void { enableScrollWheelZoom(); enableContinuousZoom(); addControl(new NavigationControl()); // The driving animation will be updated on every frame. addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, enterFrame); addStartButton(); // We start the directions loading now, so that we're ready to go when // the user hits the start button. var directions:Directions = new Directions(); directions.addEventListener( DirectionsEvent.DIRECTIONS_SUCCESS, onDirectionsSuccess); directions.addEventListener( DirectionsEvent.DIRECTIONS_FAILURE, onDirectionsFailure); directions.load("48 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont, NSW to Byron Bay, NSW"); } /** * Adds a big blue start button. */ private function addStartButton():void { startButton = new Sprite(); startButton.buttonMode = true; startButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onStartClick); startButton.graphics.beginFill(0x1871ce); startButton.graphics.drawRoundRect(0, 0, 150, 100, 10, 10); startButton.graphics.endFill(); var startField:TextField = new TextField(); startField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT; startField.defaultTextFormat = new TextFormat("_sans", 20, 0xffffff, true); startField.text = "Start!"; startButton.addChild(startField); startField.x = 0.5 * (startButton.width - startField.width); startField.y = 0.5 * (startButton.height - startField.height); startButton.filters = [ new DropShadowFilter() ]; var container:DisplayObjectContainer = getDisplayObject() as DisplayObjectContainer; container.addChild(startButton); startButton.x = 0.5 * (container.width - startButton.width); startButton.y = 0.5 * (container.height - startButton.height); var panoField:TextField = new TextField(); panoField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT; panoField.defaultTextFormat = new TextFormat("_sans", 11, 0x000000, true); panoField.text = "Photos provided by Panoramio are under the copyright of their owners."; container.addChild(panoField); panoField.x = container.width - panoField.width - 5; panoField.y = 5; } /** * Handles directions success. Starts flying the route if everything * is ready. * * @param event The directions event. */ private function onDirectionsSuccess(event:DirectionsEvent):void { directionsSuccessEvent = event; flyRouteIfReady(); } /** * Handles click on the start button. Starts flying the route if everything * is ready. */ private function onStartClick(event:MouseEvent):void { startButton.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onStartClick); var container:DisplayObjectContainer = getDisplayObject() as DisplayObjectContainer; container.removeChild(startButton); startButtonPressed = true; flyRouteIfReady(); } /** * If we have loaded the directions and the start button has been pressed * start flying the directions route. */ private function flyRouteIfReady():void { if (!directionsSuccessEvent || !startButtonPressed) { return; } var directions:Directions = directionsSuccessEvent.directions; // Extract the route. route = directions.getRoute(0); // Draws the polyline showing the route. polyline = directions.createPolyline(); addOverlay(directions.createPolyline()); // Creates a car marker that is moved along the route. var car:DisplayObject = new Car(); marker = new Marker(route.startGeocode.point, new MarkerOptions({ icon: car, iconOffset: new Point(-car.width / 2, -car.height) })); addOverlay(marker); transformPolyToWorld(); createCumulativeArrays(); // Load Panoramio data for the region covered by the route. loadPanoramioData(directions.bounds); var duration:Number = route.duration; // Start a timer that will trigger the car moving after the lead in time. var leadInTimer:Timer = new Timer(LEAD_IN_DURATION * 1000, 1); leadInTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onLeadInDone); leadInTimer.start(); var flyTime:Number = -LEAD_IN_DURATION; // Set up the camera flight trajectory. for each (var flyStep:Object in FLY_TRAJECTORY) { var time:Number = flyStep.fraction * duration; var center:LatLng = latLngAt(time); var scaledTime:Number = time * SCALE_TIME; var zoom:Number = flyStep.zoom; var attitude:Attitude = flyStep.attitude; var elapsed:Number = scaledTime - flyTime; flyTime = scaledTime; flyTo(center, zoom, attitude, elapsed); } } /** * Loads Panoramio data for the route bounds. We load data about more photos * than we need, then select a subset lying along the route. * @param bounds Bounds within which to fetch images. */ private function loadPanoramioData(bounds:LatLngBounds):void { var params:Object = { order: "popularity", set: "full", from: "0", to: NUM_GEOTAGGED_PHOTOS.toString(10), size: "small", minx: bounds.getWest(), miny: bounds.getSouth(), maxx: bounds.getEast(), maxy: bounds.getNorth() }; var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(); var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest( "http://www.panoramio.com/map/get_panoramas.php?" + paramsToString(params)); loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onPanoramioDataLoaded); loader.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onPanoramioDataFailed); loader.load(request); } /** * Transforms the route polyline to world coordinates. */ private function transformPolyToWorld():void { var numVertices:int = polyline.getVertexCount(); worldPoly = new Array(numVertices); for (var i:int = 0; i < numVertices; ++i) { var vertex:LatLng = polyline.getVertex(i); worldPoly[i] = fromLatLngToPoint(vertex, 0); } } /** * Returns the time at which the route approaches closest to the * given point. * @param world Point in world coordinates. * @return Route time at which the closest approach occurs. */ private function getTimeOfClosestApproach(world:Point):Number { var minDistSqr:Number = Number.MAX_VALUE; var numVertices:int = worldPoly.length; var x:Number = world.x; var y:Number = world.y; var minVertex:int = 0; for (var i:int = 0; i < numVertices; ++i) { var dx:Number = worldPoly[i].x - x; var dy:Number = worldPoly[i].y - y; var distSqr:Number = dx * dx + dy * dy; if (distSqr < minDistSqr) { minDistSqr = distSqr; minVertex = i; } } return cumulativeVertexDistance[minVertex]; } /** * Returns the array index of the first element that compares greater than * the given value. * @param ordered Ordered array of elements. * @param value Value to use for comparison. * @return Array index of the first element that compares greater than * the given value. */ private function upperBound(ordered:Array, value:Number, first:int=0, last:int=-1):int { if (last < 0) { last = ordered.length; } var count:int = last - first; var index:int; while (count > 0) { var step:int = count >> 1; index = first + step; if (value >= ordered[index]) { first = index + 1; count -= step - 1; } else { count = step; } } return first; } /** * Selects up to a given number of photos approximately evenly spaced along * the route. * @param ordered Array of photos, each of which is an object with * a property 'closestTime'. * @param number Number of photos to select. */ private function selectEvenlySpacedPhotos(ordered:Array, number:int):Array { var start:Number = cumulativeVertexDistance[0]; var end:Number = cumulativeVertexDistance[cumulativeVertexDistance.length - 2]; var closestTimes:Array = []; for each (var photo:Object in ordered) { closestTimes.push(photo.closestTime); } var selectedPhotos:Array = []; for (var i:int = 0; i < number; ++i) { var idealTime:Number = start + ((end - start) * (i + 0.5) / number); var index:int = upperBound(closestTimes, idealTime); if (index < 1) { index = 0; } else if (index >= ordered.length) { index = ordered.length - 1; } else { var errorToPrev:Number = Math.abs(idealTime - closestTimes[index - 1]); var errorToNext:Number = Math.abs(idealTime - closestTimes[index]); if (errorToPrev < errorToNext) { --index; } } selectedPhotos.push(ordered[index]); } return selectedPhotos; } /** * Handles completion of loading the Panoramio index data. Selects from the * returned photo indices a subset of those that lie along the route and * initiates load of each of these. * @param event Load completion event. */ private function onPanoramioDataLoaded(event:Event):void { var loader:URLLoader = event.target as URLLoader; var decoder:JSONDecoder = new JSONDecoder(loader.data as String); var allPhotos:Array = decoder.getValue().photos; for each (var photo:Object in allPhotos) { var latLng:LatLng = new LatLng(photo.latitude, photo.longitude); photo.closestTime = getTimeOfClosestApproach(fromLatLngToPoint(latLng, 0)); } allPhotos.sortOn("closestTime", Array.NUMERIC); photos = selectEvenlySpacedPhotos(allPhotos, NUM_SHOWN_PHOTOS); for each (photo in photos) { var photoLoader:Loader = new Loader(); // The images aren't on panoramio.com: we can't acquire pixel access // using "new LoaderContext(true)". photoLoader.load( new URLRequest(photo.photo_file_url)); photo.loader = photoLoader; // Save the loader info: we use this to find the original element when // the load completes. photo.loaderInfo = photoLoader.contentLoaderInfo; photoLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener( Event.COMPLETE, onPhotoLoaded); } } /** * Creates a MouseEvent listener function that will navigate to the given * URL in a new window. * @param url URL to which to navigate. */ private function createOnClickUrlOpener(url:String):Function { return function(event:MouseEvent):void { navigateToURL(new URLRequest(url)); }; } /** * Handles completion of loading an individual Panoramio image. * Adds a custom marker that displays the image. Initially this is made * invisible so that it can be faded in as needed. * @param event Load completion event. */ private function onPhotoLoaded(event:Event):void { var loaderInfo:LoaderInfo = event.target as LoaderInfo; // We need to find which photo element this image corresponds to. for each (var photo:Object in photos) { if (loaderInfo == photo.loaderInfo) { var imageMarker:Sprite = createImageMarker(photo.loader, photo.owner_name, photo.owner_url); var options:MarkerOptions = new MarkerOptions({ icon: imageMarker, hasShadow: true, iconAlignment: MarkerOptions.ALIGN_BOTTOM | MarkerOptions.ALIGN_LEFT }); var latLng:LatLng = new LatLng(photo.latitude, photo.longitude); var marker:Marker = new Marker(latLng, options); photo.marker = marker; addOverlay(marker); // A hack: we add the actual image after the overlay has been added, // which creates the shadow, so that the shadow is valid even if we // don't have security privileges to generate the shadow from the // image. marker.foreground.visible = false; marker.shadow.alpha = 0; var imageHolder:Sprite = new Sprite(); imageHolder.addChild(photo.loader); imageHolder.buttonMode = true; imageHolder.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, createOnClickUrlOpener(photo.photo_url)); imageMarker.addChild(imageHolder); return; } } trace("An image was loaded which could not be found in the photo array."); } /** * Creates a custom marker showing an image. */ private function createImageMarker(child:DisplayObject, ownerName:String, ownerUrl:String):Sprite { var content:Sprite = new Sprite(); var panoramioIcon:Bitmap = new PanoramioIcon(); var iconHolder:Sprite = new Sprite(); iconHolder.addChild(panoramioIcon); iconHolder.buttonMode = true; iconHolder.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onPanoramioIconClick); panoramioIcon.x = BORDER_L; panoramioIcon.y = BORDER_T; content.addChild(iconHolder); // NOTE: we add the image as a child only after we've added the marker // to the map. Currently the API requires this if it's to generate the // shadow for unprivileged content. // Shrink the image, so that it doesn't obcure too much screen space. // Ideally, we'd subsample, but we don't have pixel level access. child.scaleX = IMAGE_SCALE; child.scaleY = IMAGE_SCALE; var imageW:Number = child.width; var imageH:Number = child.height; child.x = BORDER_L + 30; child.y = BORDER_T + iconHolder.height + GAP_T; var authorField:TextField = new TextField(); authorField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT; authorField.defaultTextFormat = new TextFormat("_sans", 12); authorField.text = "author:"; content.addChild(authorField); authorField.x = BORDER_L; authorField.y = BORDER_T + iconHolder.height + GAP_T + imageH + GAP_B; var ownerField:TextField = new TextField(); ownerField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT; var textFormat:TextFormat = new TextFormat("_sans", 14, 0x0e5f9a); ownerField.defaultTextFormat = textFormat; ownerField.htmlText = "<a href=\"" + ownerUrl + "\" target=\"_blank\">" + ownerName + "</a>"; content.addChild(ownerField); ownerField.x = BORDER_L + authorField.width; ownerField.y = BORDER_T + iconHolder.height + GAP_T + imageH + GAP_B; var totalW:Number = BORDER_L + Math.max(imageW, ownerField.width + authorField.width) + BORDER_R; var totalH:Number = BORDER_T + iconHolder.height + GAP_T + imageH + GAP_B + ownerField.height + BORDER_B; content.graphics.beginFill(0xffffff); content.graphics.drawRoundRect(0, 0, totalW, totalH, 10, 10); content.graphics.endFill(); var marker:Sprite = new Sprite(); marker.addChild(content); content.x = 30; content.y = 0; marker.graphics.lineStyle(); marker.graphics.beginFill(0xff0000); marker.graphics.drawCircle(0, totalH + 30, 3); marker.graphics.endFill(); marker.graphics.lineStyle(2, 0xffffff); marker.graphics.moveTo(30 + 10, totalH - 10); marker.graphics.lineTo(0, totalH + 30); return marker; } /** * Handles click on the Panoramio icon. */ private function onPanoramioIconClick(event:MouseEvent):void { navigateToURL(new URLRequest(PANORAMIO_HOME)); } /** * Handles failure of a Panoramio image load. */ private function onPanoramioDataFailed(event:IOErrorEvent):void { trace("Load of image failed: " + event); } /** * Returns a string containing cgi query parameters. * @param Associative array mapping query parameter key to value. * @return String containing cgi query parameters. */ private static function paramsToString(params:Object):String { var result:String = ""; var separator:String = ""; for (var key:String in params) { result += separator + encodeURIComponent(key) + "=" + encodeURIComponent(params[key]); separator = "&"; } return result; } /** * Called once the lead-in flight is done. Starts the car driving along * the route and starts a timer to begin fade in of the Panoramio * images in 1.5 seconds. */ private function onLeadInDone(event:Event):void { // Set startTimer non-zero so that the car starts to move. startTimer = getTimer(); // Start a timer that will fade in the Panoramio images. var fadeInTimer:Timer = new Timer(1500, 1); fadeInTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onFadeInTimer); fadeInTimer.start(); } /** * Handles the fade in timer's TIMER event. Sets markerAlpha above zero * which causes the frame enter handler to fade in the markers. */ private function onFadeInTimer(event:Event):void { markerAlpha = 0.01; } /** * The end time of the flight. */ private function get endTime():Number { if (!cumulativeStepDuration || cumulativeStepDuration.length == 0) { return startTimer; } return startTimer + cumulativeStepDuration[cumulativeStepDuration.length - 1]; } /** * Creates the cumulative arrays, cumulativeStepDuration and * cumulativeVertexDistance. */ private function createCumulativeArrays():void { cumulativeStepDuration = new Array(route.numSteps + 1); cumulativeVertexDistance = new Array(polyline.getVertexCount() + 1); var polylineTotal:Number = 0; var total:Number = 0; var numVertices:int = polyline.getVertexCount(); for (var stepIndex:int = 0; stepIndex < route.numSteps; ++stepIndex) { cumulativeStepDuration[stepIndex] = total; total += route.getStep(stepIndex).duration; var startVertex:int = stepIndex >= 0 ? route.getStep(stepIndex).polylineIndex : 0; var endVertex:int = stepIndex < (route.numSteps - 1) ? route.getStep(stepIndex + 1).polylineIndex : numVertices; var duration:Number = route.getStep(stepIndex).duration; var stepVertices:int = endVertex - startVertex; var latLng:LatLng = polyline.getVertex(startVertex); for (var vertex:int = startVertex; vertex < endVertex; ++vertex) { cumulativeVertexDistance[vertex] = polylineTotal; if (vertex < numVertices - 1) { var nextLatLng:LatLng = polyline.getVertex(vertex + 1); polylineTotal += nextLatLng.distanceFrom(latLng); } latLng = nextLatLng; } } cumulativeStepDuration[stepIndex] = total; } /** * Opens the info window above the car icon that details the given * step of the driving directions. * @param stepIndex Index of the current step. */ private function openInfoForStep(stepIndex:int):void { // Sets the content of the info window. var content:String; if (stepIndex >= route.numSteps) { content = "<b>" + route.endGeocode.address + "</b>" + "<br /><br />" + route.summaryHtml; } else { content = "<b>" + stepIndex + ".</b> " + route.getStep(stepIndex).descriptionHtml; } marker.openInfoWindow(new InfoWindowOptions({ contentHTML: content })); } /** * Displays the driving directions step appropriate for the given time. * Opens the info window showing the step instructions each time we * progress to a new step. * @param time Time for which to display the step. */ private function displayStepAt(time:Number):void { var stepIndex:int = upperBound(cumulativeStepDuration, time) - 1; var minStepIndex:int = 0; var maxStepIndex:int = route.numSteps - 1; if (stepIndex >= 0 && stepIndex <= maxStepIndex && currentStepIndex != stepIndex) { openInfoForStep(stepIndex); currentStepIndex = stepIndex; } } /** * Returns the LatLng at which the car should be positioned at the given * time. * @param time Time for which LatLng should be found. * @return LatLng. */ private function latLngAt(time:Number):LatLng { var stepIndex:int = upperBound(cumulativeStepDuration, time) - 1; var minStepIndex:int = 0; var maxStepIndex:int = route.numSteps - 1; if (stepIndex < minStepIndex) { return route.startGeocode.point; } else if (stepIndex > maxStepIndex) { return route.endGeocode.point; } var stepStart:Number = cumulativeStepDuration[stepIndex]; var stepEnd:Number = cumulativeStepDuration[stepIndex + 1]; var stepFraction:Number = (time - stepStart) / (stepEnd - stepStart); var startVertex:int = route.getStep(stepIndex).polylineIndex; var endVertex:int = (stepIndex + 1) < route.numSteps ? route.getStep(stepIndex + 1).polylineIndex : polyline.getVertexCount(); var stepVertices:int = endVertex - startVertex; var stepLeng

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Blackjack game reshuffling problem-edited

- by Jam

I am trying to make a blackjack game where before each new round, the program checks to make sure that the deck has 7 cards per player. And if it doesn't, the deck clears, repopulates, and reshuffles. I have most of the problem down, but for some reason at the start of every deal it reshuffles the deck more than once, and I can't figure out why. Help, please. Here's what I have so far: (P.S. the imported cards and games modules aren't part of the problem, I'm fairly sure my problem lies in the deal() function of my BJ_Deck class.) import cards, games class BJ_Card(cards.Card): """ A Blackjack Card. """ ACE_VALUE = 1 def get_value(self): if self.is_face_up: value = BJ_Card.RANKS.index(self.rank) + 1 if value > 10: value = 10 else: value = None return value value = property(get_value) class BJ_Deck(cards.Deck): """ A Blackjack Deck. """ def populate(self): for suit in BJ_Card.SUITS: for rank in BJ_Card.RANKS: self.cards.append(BJ_Card(rank, suit)) def deal(self, hands, per_hand=1): for rounds in range(per_hand): if len(self.cards)>=7*(len(hands)): print "Reshuffling the deck." self.cards=[] self.populate() self.shuffle() for hand in hands: top_card=self.cards[0] self.give(top_card, hand) class BJ_Hand(cards.Hand): """ A Blackjack Hand. """ def __init__(self, name): super(BJ_Hand, self).__init__() self.name = name def __str__(self): rep = self.name + ":\t" + super(BJ_Hand, self).__str__() if self.total: rep += "(" + str(self.total) + ")" return rep def get_total(self): # if a card in the hand has value of None, then total is None for card in self.cards: if not card.value: return None # add up card values, treat each Ace as 1 total = 0 for card in self.cards: total += card.value # determine if hand contains an Ace contains_ace = False for card in self.cards: if card.value == BJ_Card.ACE_VALUE: contains_ace = True # if hand contains Ace and total is low enough, treat Ace as 11 if contains_ace and total <= 11: # add only 10 since we've already added 1 for the Ace total += 10 return total total = property(get_total) def is_busted(self): return self.total > 21 class BJ_Player(BJ_Hand): """ A Blackjack Player. """ def is_hitting(self): response = games.ask_yes_no("\n" + self.name + ", do you want a hit? (Y/N): ") return response == "y" def bust(self): print self.name, "busts." self.lose() def lose(self): print self.name, "loses." def win(self): print self.name, "wins." def push(self): print self.name, "pushes." class BJ_Dealer(BJ_Hand): """ A Blackjack Dealer. """ def is_hitting(self): return self.total < 17 def bust(self): print self.name, "busts." def flip_first_card(self): first_card = self.cards[0] first_card.flip() class BJ_Game(object): """ A Blackjack Game. """ def __init__(self, names): self.players = [] for name in names: player = BJ_Player(name) self.players.append(player) self.dealer = BJ_Dealer("Dealer") self.deck = BJ_Deck() self.deck.populate() self.deck.shuffle() def get_still_playing(self): remaining = [] for player in self.players: if not player.is_busted(): remaining.append(player) return remaining # list of players still playing (not busted) this round still_playing = property(get_still_playing) def __additional_cards(self, player): while not player.is_busted() and player.is_hitting(): self.deck.deal([player]) print player if player.is_busted(): player.bust() def play(self): # deal initial 2 cards to everyone self.deck.deal(self.players + [self.dealer], per_hand = 2) self.dealer.flip_first_card() # hide dealer's first card for player in self.players: print player print self.dealer # deal additional cards to players for player in self.players: self.__additional_cards(player) self.dealer.flip_first_card() # reveal dealer's first if not self.still_playing: # since all players have busted, just show the dealer's hand print self.dealer else: # deal additional cards to dealer print self.dealer self.__additional_cards(self.dealer) if self.dealer.is_busted(): # everyone still playing wins for player in self.still_playing: player.win() else: # compare each player still playing to dealer for player in self.still_playing: if player.total > self.dealer.total: player.win() elif player.total < self.dealer.total: player.lose() else: player.push() # remove everyone's cards for player in self.players: player.clear() self.dealer.clear() def main(): print "\t\tWelcome to Blackjack!\n" names = [] number = games.ask_number("How many players? (1 - 7): ", low = 1, high = 8) for i in range(number): name = raw_input("Enter player name: ") names.append(name) print game = BJ_Game(names) again = None while again != "n": game.play() again = games.ask_yes_no("\nDo you want to play again?: ") main() raw_input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit.") Since someone decided to call this 'psychic-debugging', I'll go ahead and tell you what the modules are then. Here's the cards module: class Card(object): """ A playing card. """ RANKS = ["A", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "J", "Q", "K"] SUITS = ["c", "d", "h", "s"] def __init__(self, rank, suit, face_up = True): self.rank = rank self.suit = suit self.is_face_up = face_up def __str__(self): if self.is_face_up: rep = self.rank + self.suit else: rep = "XX" return rep def flip(self): self.is_face_up = not self.is_face_up class Hand(object): """ A hand of playing cards. """ def init(self): self.cards = [] def __str__(self): if self.cards: rep = "" for card in self.cards: rep += str(card) + "\t" else: rep = "<empty>" return rep def clear(self): self.cards = [] def add(self, card): self.cards.append(card) def give(self, card, other_hand): self.cards.remove(card) other_hand.add(card) class Deck(Hand): """ A deck of playing cards. """ def populate(self): for suit in Card.SUITS: for rank in Card.RANKS: self.add(Card(rank, suit)) def shuffle(self): import random random.shuffle(self.cards) def deal(self, hands, per_hand = 1): for rounds in range(per_hand): for hand in hands: if self.cards: top_card = self.cards[0] self.give(top_card, hand) else: print "Can't continue deal. Out of cards!" if name == "main": print "This is a module with classes for playing cards." raw_input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit.") And here's the games module: class Player(object): """ A player for a game. """ def __init__(self, name, score = 0): self.name = name self.score = score def __str__(self): rep = self.name + ":\t" + str(self.score) return rep def ask_yes_no(question): """Ask a yes or no question.""" response = None while response not in ("y", "n"): response = raw_input(question).lower() return response def ask_number(question, low, high): """Ask for a number within a range.""" response = None while response not in range(low, high): response = int(raw_input(question)) return response if name == "main": print "You ran this module directly (and did not 'import' it)." raw_input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit.")

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Windows Azure: Major Updates for Mobile Backend Development

- by ScottGu

This week we released some great updates to Windows Azure that make it significantly easier to develop mobile applications that use the cloud. These new capabilities include: Mobile Services: Custom API support Mobile Services: Git Source Control support Mobile Services: Node.js NPM Module support Mobile Services: A .NET API via NuGet Mobile Services and Web Sites: Free 20MB SQL Database Option for Mobile Services and Web Sites Mobile Notification Hubs: Android Broadcast Push Notification Support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Mobile Services: Custom APIs, Git Source Control, and NuGet Windows Azure Mobile Services provides the ability to easily stand up a mobile backend that can be used to support your Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and HTML5 client applications. Starting with the first preview we supported the ability to easily extend your data backend logic with server side scripting that executes as part of client-side CRUD operations against your cloud back data tables. With today’s update we are extending this support even further and introducing the ability for you to also create and expose Custom APIs from your Mobile Service backend, and easily publish them to your Mobile clients without having to associate them with a data table. This capability enables a whole set of new scenarios – including the ability to work with data sources other than SQL Databases (for example: Table Services or MongoDB), broker calls to 3rd party APIs, integrate with Windows Azure Queues or Service Bus, work with custom non-JSON payloads (e.g. Windows Periodic Notifications), route client requests to services back on-premises (e.g. with the new Windows Azure BizTalk Services), or simply implement functionality that doesn’t correspond to a database operation. The custom APIs can be written in server-side JavaScript (using Node.js) and can use Node’s NPM packages. We will also be adding support for custom APIs written using .NET in the future as well. Creating a Custom API Adding a custom API to an existing Mobile Service is super easy. Using the Windows Azure Management Portal you can now simply click the new “API” tab with your Mobile Service, and then click the “Create a Custom API” button to create a new Custom API within it: Give the API whatever name you want to expose, and then choose the security permissions you’d like to apply to the HTTP methods you expose within it. You can easily lock down the HTTP verbs to your Custom API to be available to anyone, only those who have a valid application key, only authenticated users, or administrators. Mobile Services will then enforce these permissions without you having to write any code: When you click the ok button you’ll see the new API show up in the API list. Selecting it will enable you to edit the default script that contains some placeholder functionality: Today’s release enables Custom APIs to be written using Node.js (we will support writing Custom APIs in .NET as well in a future release), and the Custom API programming model follows the Node.js convention for modules, which is to export functions to handle HTTP requests. The default script above exposes functionality for an HTTP POST request. To support a GET, simply change the export statement accordingly. Below is an example of some code for reading and returning data from Windows Azure Table Storage using the Azure Node API: After saving the changes, you can now call this API from any Mobile Service client application (including Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS, Android or HTML5 with CORS). Below is the code for how you could invoke the API asynchronously from a Windows Store application using .NET and the new InvokeApiAsync method, and data-bind the results to control within your XAML: private async void RefreshTodoItems() { var results = await App.MobileService.InvokeApiAsync<List<TodoItem>>("todos", HttpMethod.Get, parameters: null); ListItems.ItemsSource = new ObservableCollection<TodoItem>(results); } Integrating authentication and authorization with Custom APIs is really easy with Mobile Services. Just like with data requests, custom API requests enjoy the same built-in authentication and authorization support of Mobile Services (including integration with Microsoft ID, Google, Facebook and Twitter authentication providers), and it also enables you to easily integrate your Custom API code with other Mobile Service capabilities like push notifications, logging, SQL, etc. Check out our new tutorials to learn more about to use new Custom API support, and starting adding them to your app today. Mobile Services: Git Source Control Support Today’s Mobile Services update also enables source control integration with Git. The new source control support provides a Git repository as part your Mobile Service, and it includes all of your existing Mobile Service scripts and permissions. You can clone that git repository on your local machine, make changes to any of your scripts, and then easily deploy the mobile service to production using Git. This enables a really great developer workflow that works on any developer machine (Windows, Mac and Linux). To use the new support, navigate to the dashboard for your mobile service and select the Set up source control link: If this is your first time enabling Git within Windows Azure, you will be prompted to enter the credentials you want to use to access the repository: Once you configure this, you can switch to the configure tab of your Mobile Service and you will see a Git URL you can use to use your repository: You can use this URL to clone the repository locally from your favorite command line: > git clone https://scottgutodo.scm.azure-mobile.net/ScottGuToDo.git Below is the directory structure of the repository: As you can see, the repository contains a service folder with several subfolders. Custom API scripts and associated permissions appear under the api folder as .js and .json files respectively (the .json files persist a JSON representation of the security settings for your endpoints). Similarly, table scripts and table permissions appear as .js and .json files, but since table scripts are separate per CRUD operation, they follow the naming convention of <tablename>.<operationname>.js. Finally, scheduled job scripts appear in the scheduler folder, and the shared folder is provided as a convenient location for you to store code shared by multiple scripts and a few miscellaneous things such as the APNS feedback script. Lets modify the table script todos.js file so that we have slightly better error handling when an exception occurs when we query our Table service: todos.js tableService.queryEntities(query, function(error, todoItems){ if (error) { console.error("Error querying table: " + error); response.send(500); } else { response.send(200, todoItems); } }); Save these changes, and now back in the command line prompt commit the changes and push them to the Mobile Services: > git add . > git commit –m "better error handling in todos.js" > git push Once deployment of the changes is complete, they will take effect immediately, and you will also see the changes be reflected in the portal: With the new Source Control feature, we’re making it really easy for you to edit your mobile service locally and push changes in an atomic fashion without sacrificing ease of use in the Windows Azure Portal. Mobile Services: NPM Module Support The new Mobile Services source control support also allows you to add any Node.js module you need in the scripts beyond the fixed set provided by Mobile Services. For example, you can easily switch to use Mongo instead of Windows Azure table in our example above. Set up Mongo DB by either purchasing a MongoLab subscription (which provides MongoDB as a Service) via the Windows Azure Store or set it up yourself on a Virtual Machine (either Windows or Linux). Then go the service folder of your local git repository and run the following command: > npm install mongoose This will add the Mongoose module to your Mobile Service scripts. After that you can use and reference the Mongoose module in your custom API scripts to access your Mongo database: var mongoose = require('mongoose'); var schema = mongoose.Schema({ text: String, completed: Boolean }); exports.get = function (request, response) { mongoose.connect('<your Mongo connection string> '); TodoItemModel = mongoose.model('todoitem', schema); TodoItemModel.find(function (err, items) { if (err) { console.log('error:' + err); return response.send(500); } response.send(200, items); }); }; Don’t forget to push your changes to your mobile service once you are done > git add . > git commit –m "Switched to use Mongo Labs" > git push Now our Mobile Service app is using Mongo DB! Note, with today’s update usage of custom Node.js modules is limited to Custom API scripts only. We will enable it in all scripts (including data and custom CRON tasks) shortly. New Mobile Services NuGet package, including .NET 4.5 support A few months ago we announced a new pre-release version of the Mobile Services client SDK based on portable class libraries (PCL). Today, we are excited to announce that this new library is now a stable .NET client SDK for mobile services and is no longer a pre-release package. Today’s update includes full support for Windows Store, Windows Phone 7.x, and .NET 4.5, which allows developers to use Mobile Services from ASP.NET or WPF applications. You can install and use this package today via NuGet. Mobile Services and Web Sites: Free 20MB Database for Mobile Services and Web Sites Starting today, every customer of Windows Azure gets one Free 20MB database to use for 12 months free (for both dev/test and production) with Web Sites and Mobile Services. When creating a Mobile Service or a Web Site, simply chose the new “Create a new Free 20MB database” option to take advantage of it: You can use this free SQL Database together with the 10 free Web Sites and 10 free Mobile Services you get with your Windows Azure subscription, or from any other Windows Azure VM or Cloud Service. Notification Hubs: Android Broadcast Push Notification Support Earlier this year, we introduced a new capability in Windows Azure for sending broadcast push notifications at high scale: Notification Hubs. In the initial preview of Notification Hubs you could use this support with both iOS and Windows devices. Today we’re excited to announce new Notification Hubs support for sending push notifications to Android devices as well. Push notifications are a vital component of mobile applications. They are critical not only in consumer apps, where they are used to increase app engagement and usage, but also in enterprise apps where up-to-date information increases employee responsiveness to business events. You can use Notification Hubs to send push notifications to devices from any type of app (a Mobile Service, Web Site, Cloud Service or Virtual Machine). Notification Hubs provide you with the following capabilities: Cross-platform Push Notifications Support. Notification Hubs provide a common API to send push notifications to iOS, Android, or Windows Store at once. Your app can send notifications in platform specific formats or in a platform-independent way. Efficient Multicast. Notification Hubs are optimized to enable push notification broadcast to thousands or millions of devices with low latency. Your server back-end can fire one message into a Notification Hub, and millions of push notifications can automatically be delivered to your users. Devices and apps can specify a number of per-user tags when registering with a Notification Hub. These tags do not need to be pre-provisioned or disposed, and provide a very easy way to send filtered notifications to an infinite number of users/devices with a single API call. Extreme Scale. Notification Hubs enable you to reach millions of devices without you having to re-architect or shard your application. The pub/sub routing mechanism allows you to broadcast notifications in a super-efficient way. This makes it incredibly easy to route and deliver notification messages to millions of users without having to build your own routing infrastructure. Usable from any Backend App. Notification Hubs can be easily integrated into any back-end server app, whether it is a Mobile Service, a Web Site, a Cloud Service or an IAAS VM. It is easy to configure Notification Hubs to send push notifications to Android. Create a new Notification Hub within the Windows Azure Management Portal (New->App Services->Service Bus->Notification Hub): Then register for Google Cloud Messaging using https://code.google.com/apis/console and obtain your API key, then simply paste that key on the Configure tab of your Notification Hub management page under the Google Cloud Messaging Settings: Then just add code to the OnCreate method of your Android app’s MainActivity class to register the device with Notification Hubs: gcm = GoogleCloudMessaging.getInstance(this); String connectionString = "<your listen access connection string>"; hub = new NotificationHub("<your notification hub name>", connectionString, this); String regid = gcm.register(SENDER_ID); hub.register(regid, "myTag"); Now you can broadcast notification from your .NET backend (or Node, Java, or PHP) to any Windows Store, Android, or iOS device registered for “myTag” tag via a single API call (you can literally broadcast messages to millions of clients you have registered with just one API call): var hubClient = NotificationHubClient.CreateClientFromConnectionString( “<your connection string with full access>”, "<your notification hub name>"); hubClient.SendGcmNativeNotification("{ 'data' : {'msg' : 'Hello from Windows Azure!' } }", "myTag”); Notification Hubs provide an extremely scalable, cross-platform, push notification infrastructure that enables you to efficiently route push notification messages to millions of mobile users and devices. It will make enabling your push notification logic significantly simpler and more scalable, and allow you to build even better apps with it. Learn more about Notification Hubs here on MSDN . Summary The above features are now live and available to start using immediately (note: some of the services are still in preview). If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today. 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 11g - Dynamic and Flexible Code Generation

- by David Allan

ODI supports conditional branching at execution time in its code generation framework. This is a little used, little known, but very powerful capability - this let's one piece of template code behave dynamically based on a runtime variable's value for example. Generally knowledge module's are free of any variable dependency. Using variable's within a knowledge module for this kind of dynamic capability is a valid use case - definitely in the highly specialized area. The example I will illustrate is much simpler - how to define a filter (based on mapping here) that may or may not be included depending on whether at runtime a certain value is defined for a variable. I define a variable V_COND, if I set this variable's value to 1, then I will include the filter condition 'EMP.SAL > 1' otherwise I will just use '1=1' as the filter condition. I use ODIs substitution tags using a special tag '<$' which is processed just prior to execution in the runtime code - so this code is included in the ODI scenario code and it is processed after variables are substituted (unlike the '<?' tag). So the lines below are not equal ... <$ if ( "#V_COND".equals("1") ) { $> EMP.SAL > 1 <$ } else { $> 1 = 1 <$ } $> <? if ( "#V_COND".equals("1") ) { ?> EMP.SAL > 1 <? } else { ?> 1 = 1 <? } ?> When the <? code is evaluated the code is executed without variable substitution - so we do not get the desired semantics, must use the <$ code. You can see the jython (java) code in red is the conditional if statement that drives whether the 'EMP.SAL > 1' or '1=1' is included in the generated code. For this illustration you need at least the ODI 11.1.1.6 release - with the vanilla 11.1.1.5 release it didn't work for me (may be patches?). As I mentioned, normally KMs don't have dependencies on variables - since any users must then have these variables defined etc. but it does afford a lot of runtime flexibility if such capabilities are required - something to keep in mind, definitely.

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Adding Attributes to Generated Classes

ASP.NET MVC 2 adds support for data annotations, implemented via attributes on your model classes. Depending on your design, you may be using an OR/M tool like Entity Framework or LINQ-to-SQL to generate your entity classes, and you may further be using these entities directly as your Model. This is fairly common, and alleviates the need to do mapping between POCO domain objects and such entities (though there are certainly pros and cons to using such entities directly). As an example, the current version of the NerdDinner application (available on CodePlex at nerddinner.codeplex.com) uses Entity Framework for its model. Thus, there is a NerdDinner.edmx file in the project, and a generated NerdDinner.Models.Dinner class. Fortunately, these generated classes are marked as partial, so you can extend their behavior via your own partial class in a separate file. However, if for instance the generated Dinner class has a property Title of type string, you cant then add your own Title of type string for the purpose of adding data annotations to it, like this: public partial class Dinner { [Required] public string Title { get;set; } } This will result in a compilation error, because the generated Dinner class already contains a definition of Title. How then can we add attributes to this generated code? Do we need to go into the T4 template and add a special case that says if were generated a Dinner class and it has a Title property, add this attribute? Ick. MetadataType to the Rescue The MetadataType attribute can be used to define a type which contains attributes (metadata) for a given class. It is applied to the class you want to add metadata to (Dinner), and it refers to a totally separate class to which youre free to add whatever methods and properties you like. Using this attribute, our partial Dinner class might look like this: [MetadataType(typeof(Dinner_Validation))] public partial class Dinner {} public class Dinner_Validation { [Required] public string Title { get; set; } } In this case the Dinner_Validation class is public, but if you were concerned about muddying your API with such classes, it could instead have been created as a private class within Dinner. Having the validation attributes specified in their own class (with no other responsibilities) complies with the Single Responsibility Principle and makes it easy for you to test that the validation rules you expect are in place via these annotations/attributes. Thanks to Julie Lerman for her help with this. Right after she showed me how to do this, I realized it was also already being done in the project I was working on. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Slow Start For Passbook

- by David Dorf

Like many others, I pre-ordered my iPhone 5 then downloaded iOS 6 to my antiquated iPhone 4. I decided the downgrade in mapping capabilities was worth access to Passbook, Apple's wallet of sorts that holds loyalty cards, tickets, and coupons. To my disappointment, Passbook didn't work. When it goes to the iTunes Store, it can't connect. After a little research, I read that you can change the date on the iPhone to the future (I did March 2013), and then it will connect. A list of apps that support Passbook are shown, some of which were already on my iPhone and others that required downloading. Even when I put the date back on "automatic," things continued to work. Not sure why. Anyway, even once I got into iTunes and made sure I had some of the apps downloaded, it wasn't clear what the next step was (gimme a break, its Friday afternoon). Every time I opened Passbook, it sent me to the "Apps for Passbook" page on iTunes. I tried downloading one of the suggested apps that I didn't already have (Walgreens). The app's icon has a "new" stripe across the icon. I launched it and it said it had Passbook integration. So I needed to login or signup with the loyalty program. After figuring out what my username and password already was, it then offered to add the loyalty card to Passbook, which I accepted. Now when I flip over to Passbook, I can see the loyalty card there. I guess I need to go into each app to "push" cards into Passbook. People seem to be using it. Twenty-four hours after iOS 6 was released, Sephora had 20,000 users of Passbook. Starbucks says they'll be integrated to Passbook by the end of the month, and Target is already offering coupons via Passbook. After a few more retailers get on board, Apple may not need to consider NFC.

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SQL SERVER – Concurrancy Problems and their Relationship with Isolation Level

- by pinaldave

Concurrency is simply put capability of the machine to support two or more transactions working with the same data at the same time. This usually comes up with data is being modified, as during the retrieval of the data this is not the issue. Most of the concurrency problems can be avoided by SQL Locks. There are four types of concurrency problems visible in the normal programming. 1) Lost Update – This problem occurs when there are two transactions involved and both are unaware of each other. The transaction which occurs later overwrites the transactions created by the earlier update. 2) Dirty Reads – This problem occurs when a transactions selects data that isn’t committed by another transaction leading to read the data which may not exists when transactions are over. Example: Transaction 1 changes the row. Transaction 2 changes the row. Transaction 1 rolls back the changes. Transaction 2 has selected the row which does not exist. 3) Nonrepeatable Reads – This problem occurs when two SELECT statements of the same data results in different values because another transactions has updated the data between the two SELECT statements. Example: Transaction 1 selects a row, which is later on updated by Transaction 2. When Transaction A later on selects the row it gets different value. 4) Phantom Reads – This problem occurs when UPDATE/DELETE is happening on one set of data and INSERT/UPDATE is happening on the same set of data leading inconsistent data in earlier transaction when both the transactions are over. Example: Transaction 1 is deleting 10 rows which are marked as deleting rows, during the same time Transaction 2 inserts row marked as deleted. When Transaction 1 is done deleting rows, there will be still rows marked to be deleted. When two or more transactions are updating the data, concurrency is the biggest issue. I commonly see people toying around with isolation level or locking hints (e.g. NOLOCK) etc, which can very well compromise your data integrity leading to much larger issue in future. Here is the quick mapping of the isolation level with concurrency problems: Isolation Dirty Reads Lost Update Nonrepeatable Reads Phantom Reads Read Uncommitted Yes Yes Yes Yes Read Committed No Yes Yes Yes Repeatable Read No No No Yes Snapshot No No No No Serializable No No No No I hope this 400 word small article gives some quick understanding on concurrency issues and their relation to isolation level. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Congratulations to the 2012 Oracle Spatial Award Winners!

- by Mandy Ho

I just returned from the 2012 Location Intelligence and Oracle Spatial User conference in Washington, DC, held by Directions Magazine. It was a great conference with presentations from across the country and globe, networking with Oracle Spatial users and meeting new customers and partners. As part of the yearly event, Oracle recognizes special customers and partners for their contributions to advancing mainstream solutions using geospatial technology. This was the 8th year that Oracle has recognized innovative, industry leaders. The awards were given in three categories: Education/Research, Innovator and Partnership. Here's a little on each of the award winners. Education and Research Award Winner: Technical University of Berlin The Institute for Geodesy and Geoinformation Science of the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) was selected for its leading research work in mapping of urban and regional space onto virtual 3D-city and landscape models, and use of Oracle Spatial, including 3D Vector and Georaster type support, as the data management platform. Innovator Award Winner: Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Istanbul is the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe. One of their greatest challenges is organizing efficient public transportation for citizens and visitors. There are 15 types of transportations organized by 8 different agencies. To solve this problem, the Directorate of GIS of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality has created a multi-model itinerary system to help citizens in their decision process for using public transport or their private cars. They choose to use Oracle Spatial Network Model as the solution in our system together with Java and SOAP web services. Partnership Award Winners: CSoft Group and OSCARS. The Partnership award is given to the ISV or integrator who have demonstrated outstanding achievements in partnering with Oracle on the development side, in taking solutions to market. CSoft Group- the largest Russion integrator and consultancy provider in CAD and GIS. CSoft was selected by the Oracle Spatial product development organization for the key role in delivering geospatial solutions based on Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware to the Russian market. OSCARS - Provides consulting/training in France, Belgium and Luxembourg. With only 3 full time staff, they have achieved significant success with leading edge customer implementations leveraging the latest Oracle Spatial/MapViewer technologies, and delivering training throughout Europe. Finally, we also awarded two Special Recognition awards for two partners that helped contribute to the Oracle Partner Network Spatial Specialization. These two partners provided insight and technical expertise from a partner perspective to help launch the new certification program for Oracle Spatial Technologies. Award Winners: ThinkHuddle and OSCARS For more pictures on the conference and the awards, visit our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/OracleDatabase

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