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• Silverlight Cream for June 01, 2010 -- #874

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Alan Beasley and Michael Washington, Miroslav Miroslavov, Max Paulousky, Teresa and Ronald Burger, Laurent Duveau, Tim Heuer, Jeff Brand, Mike Snow, and John Papa. Shoutouts: To pay homage to the Advanced Options button in Expression Blend, Adam Kinney posted: Expression Blend Advanced Options square wallpaper SilverLaw stood his drag and drop ripple on it's head for this one: Silver Soccer - A Case Study for the Flexible Surface Effect (Silverlight 4) From SilverlightCream.com: Expression Blend DataStore - A Powerful Tool For Designers Michael Washington dug into the documentation and with some Microsoft assistance has figured out how to use the SetDataStoreAction in SketchFlow... good tutorial and a game to demonstrate it's use. Windows Phone 7 View Model Style Video Player Alan Beasley and Michael Washington teamed up again to produce a ViewModel-Style Video Player for WP7 ... very nice interface I might add... very detailed tutorial and all the code... oh, and did you notice it uses MVVMLight... on WP7? ... just thought I'd mention that :) Navigation in 3D world of 2D objects In part 7 of the CompleteIT code explenation, Miroslav Miroslavov is discussing some of the very cool animation they did... 3D, moving camera... cool stuff! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Silverlight Applications. Part 2 Max Paulousky has part 2 of his Silverlight 4 and SEO series up. In part 2 he's discussing sitemaps and html content providing. He also has good links showing where to submit your sitemaps and information. Mousin’ down the PathListBox Teresa and Ronald Burger (not sure which) has a post up about the PathListBox and how they drew the path that they ended up using, and the code used to enable animation. Dynamically apply and change Theme with the Silverlight Toolkit We've all had fun playing with themes, but Laurent Duveau has an example up of letting your users change the theme at run-time. Microsoft Translator client library for Silverlight Tim Heuer has been playing with the Microsoft Translator for Silverlight and he has a "Works on My Machine" license on what he's making available .. but considering his access to resources... I'd say go for it :) Custom Per-Page Transitions in Windows Phone 7 Jeff Brand has a follow-on to his other WP7 post about page transitions and is now discussing per-page transitions Silverlight Tip of the Day #26 – Changing the Startup Class Mike Snow's latest 'tip' is a little more involved than a tip ... changing the startup class and actually removing (in his example), the page and app classes... code and xaml! I've seen this before but never explained as clean... fun stuff. Behaviors in Blend 4 (Silverlight TV #30) Episode 30 of Silverlight TV (now a tag at Silverlight Cream) finds John Papa talking to Adam Kinney about Behaviors in Blend 4... not only using them but creating a custom one. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Content Challenge: You Can Only Get it Here

  - by Mike Stiles

  Part of the content conundrum for brands is figuring out what kind of content customers would find cool, desirable, and relevant. The mere fact many brands have no idea what this content might be is, in itself, pretty alarming. You’d have to have a pretty thorough lack of involvement with and understanding of your customers to not know what they might like. But despite what should be a great awakening in which consumers are using every technology and trick in the book to shield themselves from ads and commercials, brand self-obsession continues as marketers concentrate on their message, their campaign, what they want to say, and what they want social users to do. When individuals conduct themselves in that same fashion on Facebook and Twitter, it gets tiresome and starts losing value pretty quickly. Their posts eventually get hidden. Conversely, friends who post things that consistently entertain or inform, with little self-marketing desperation involved, win the coveted “show all updates” setting. Of course brands are going to use social to market. It’s pretty much the point of having social in the marketing mix. And yes, people who follow a brand’s Twitter account or “Like” a brand’s Facebook Page implicitly state they want to know what’s going on with that brand’s products and services. But if you have a Facebook friend that assumes you want every one of her posts to be about what wine she likes (Mitsubishi’s current campaign is even based around weeding out pretentious Facebook friends, then running them over), then you know how it must feel for your fans and followers to get a sales pitch for your crackers or whatever you’re selling every single time. Is there such a thing as content that doesn’t sell but that still advances the brand and makes the consumer more involved and valuable? Of course. And perhaps there are no better companies than enterprise brands to do it. Enterprise organizations are large enough to go beyond a product and engage readers/viewers at higher, broader levels…communicating expertise across entire sectors, subjects and industries. You’re going from pitchman to news source, and getting full credit for it as the presenter. A recent GigaOM article pointed out the success a San Francisco-based startup called Crunchyroll is having. Their niche (and they proudly admit it’s a niche) is providing Japanese anime, Korean drama and Asian live action content to countries that can’t get it any other way via licensing deals. Shows are available in HD and on the same day they air in the host country. Crunchyroll not only gets 8 million viewers a month, they have 100,000 paying subscribers at $7-12/month. Got a point, Mike? I do happen to have one. Crunchyroll illustrates the content opportunity enterprise companies have…which is to determine your “area,” the interest graph of your customers, then provide content that speaks to and satisfies those interests that can’t be found anywhere else. At least not in the same style, or of the same quality, or with the same authority. Do what no one else is doing. Provide what no one else is providing in your sector. If underserved users are willing to pay monthly for access to awkwardly moving cartoon dragons, imagine the audience you could attract with free, useful, non-sales content in your customers’ area of interest. It’s an audience you’ll want in place when the time does come to put out that marketing message. A content challenge is better than a content conundrum any day.

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• Dissing Architects, or "What's wrong with the coffee?"

  - by Bob Rhubart

  In my conversations with people in architect roles, tales of animosity, disrespect, and outright hostility aren't uncommon. And it's clear that in more than a few organizations architects regularly face a tough uphill climb. For architects with the requisite combination of technical, organizational, and people skills, that rough treatment is grossly undeserved. But tales of unqualified people in positions up and down the IT food chain are also easy to come by. So what's the other side of the architect story? Are some architects tarnishing the role and making life miserable for their more qualified colleagues? The various quotes included below were culled from a variety of sources. The criticism is harsh, and the people behind these quotes clearly have issues with architects. Still, whether based on mere opinion or actual experience, the comments shed some light on behaviors that should raise red flags for anyone pursuing a career as an architect. If you're an architect, and you've ever noticed that your coffee tastes like window cleaner, or your car is repeatedly keyed, or no one ever holds the elevator for you, maybe you need to do a little soul searching... Those Who Can, Code; Those Who Can't, Architect | Joe Winchester [May 18, 2007] "At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect. He was drawn to the glamour of being able to come up with grandiose ideas - sweeping generalized designs, creating presentations to audiences of acronym addicts, writing esoteric academic papers, speaking at conferences attended by headless engineers on company expense accounts hungrily seeking out this year's grail, and creating e-mails with huge cc lists from people whose signature footer is more interesting than the content. I tried to re-orient him into actually doing some coding, to join a team that has a good product and keen users both of whom are pushing requirements forward, to no avail. Somehow the lure of being an architecture astronaut was too strong and I lost him to the dark side." Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You | Joel Spolsky [April 21, 2001] "It's very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't contribute to the bottom line. Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve." Non Coding Architects Suck | Richard Henderson [May 24, 2010] "If a guy with a badge saying 'system architect' looks blank on low-level issues then he is not an architect, he is a business-analyst who went on a course. He will probably wax lyrical on all things high-level and 'important.' He will produce lovely object hierarchies without a clue to implementation. He will have a moustache and play golf." Architects Play Golf | Sunir Shah [August 15, 2012] "Often arrogant architects are difficult to get a hold of during the implementation phase because they no longer feel the need to stick around. Especially around midnight when most of the poor sob [sic] developers are still banging away. After all, they've already solved the problem--the rest is just an implementation exercise." Engineer vs Architect(Part of a discussion on the IT Architect Network Group on LinkedIn) "[An] architect spends his time producing white papers full of acronyms he does not understand but that impress his boss [while the] engineer keeps his head down and does the actual job." Architects Don't Code | [Author Unknown] "Faulty belief: System Architects don't need to code anymore. They know what they are talking about by virtue of the fact that they are System Architects."

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• Dropped impression 25 days after restructure

  - by Hamid

  Our website is a non English property related website (moshaver.com) which is similar to rightmove.co.uk. On September 2012 our website was adversely affected by Panda causing our Google incoming clicks to drop from around 3000 clicks to less than a thousand. We were hoping that Google will eventually realize that we are not a spam website and things will get better. However, in August 2013 we were almost sure that we needed to do something, so we started to restructure our web content. We used the canonical tag to remove our search results and point to our listing pages, using the noindex tag to remove it from our listing pages which does not have any properties at the moment. We also changed title tags to more friendly ones, in addition to other changes. Our changes were effective on 10th August. As shown in the graph taken from Google Analytics Search Engine Optimization section, these changes has resulted in an increase in the number of times Google displayed our results in its search results. Our impressions almost doubled starting 15th August. However, as the graph shows, our CTR dropped from this date from around 15% to 8%. This might have been because of our changed title tags (so people were less likely to click on them), or it might be normal for increased impressions. This situation has continued up until 10th September, when our impressions decreased dramatically to less than a thousand. This is almost 30% of our original impressions (before website restructure) and 15% of the new impressions. At the same time our impressions has increased dramatically to around 50%. I have two theories for this increase. The first one is that these statistics are less accurate for lower impressions. The second one is that Google is now only displaying our results for queries directly related to our website (our name, our url), and not for general terms, such as "apartments in a specific city". The second theory also explains the dramatic decrease in impression as well. After digging the analytic data a little more, I constructed the following table. It displays the breakdown of our impressions, clicks and ctr in different Google products (web and image) and in total. What I understand from this table is that, most of our increased impressions after restructure were on the image search section. I don't think users of search would be looking for content in our website. Furthermore, it shows that the drop in our web search ctr, is as dramatic of the overall ctr (-30% in compare to -60%) . I thought posting it here might help you understand the situation better. Is it possible that Google has tested our new structure for 25 days, and then decided to decrease our impressions because of the the new low CTR? Or should we look for another factor? If this is the case, how long does it usually take for Google to give us another chance? It has been one month since our impressions has dropped.

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• Best of OTN - Week of Oct 21st

  - by CassandraClark-OTN

  This week's Best of OTN, for you, the best devs, dba's, sysadmins and architects out there!  In these weekly posts the OTN team will highlight the top content from each community; Architect, Database, Systems and Java.  Since we'll be publishing this on Fridays, we'll also mix in a little fun! Architect Community Top Content- The Road Ahead for WebLogic 12c | Edwin BiemondOracle ACE Edwin Biemond shares his thoughts on announced new features in Oracle WebLogic 12.1.3 & 12.1.4 and compares those upcoming releases to Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2. A Roadmap for SOA Development and Delivery | Mark NelsonDo you know the way to S-O-A? Mark Nelson does. His latest blog post, part of an ongoing series, will help to keep you from getting lost along the way. Updated ODI Statement of Direction | Robert SchweighardtHeads up Oracle Data Integrator fans! A new statement of product direction document is available, offering an overview of the strategic product plans for Oracle’s data integration products for bulk data movement and transformation, specifically Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). Bob Rhubart, Architect Community Manager Friday Funny - "Some people approach every problem with an open mouth." — Adlai E. Stevenson (October 23, 1835 – June 14, 1914) 23rd Vice President of the United States Database Community Top Content - Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox)Heard all the chatter about Oracle VirtualBox? Over 1 million downloads per week and look: pre-built virtual appliances designed specifically for developers. Video: Big Data, or BIG DATA?Oracle Ace Director Ben Prusinski explains the differences.?? Webcast Series - Developing Applications in Oracle's Public CloudTime to get started on developing and deploying cloud applications by moving to the cloud. Good friend Gene Eun from Oracle's Cloud team posted this two-part Webcast series that has an overview and demonstration of the Oracle Database Cloud Service. Check out the demos on how to migrate your data to the cloud, extend your application with interactive reporting, and create and access RESTful Web services. Registration required, but so worth it! Laura Ramsey, Database Community Manager Friday Funny - Systems Community Top Content - Video: What Kind of Scalability is Better, Horizontal or Vertical?Rick Ramsey asks the question "Is Oracle's approach to large vertically scaled servers at odds with today's trend of combining lots and lots of small, low-cost servers systems with networking to build a cloud, or is it a better approach?" Michael Palmeter, Director of Solaris Product Management, and Renato Ribeiro, Director Product Management for SPARC Servers, discuss.Video: An Engineer Takes a Minute to Explain CloudBart Smaalders, long-time Oracle Solaris core engineer, takes a minute to explain cloud from a sysadmin point of view. ?Hands-On Lab: How to Deploy and Manage a Private IaaS Cloud Soup to nuts. This lab shows you how to set up and manage a private cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c in an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model. You will first configure the IaaS cloud as the cloud administrator and then deploy guest virtual machines (VMs) as a self-service user. Rick Ramsey, Systems Community Manager Friday Funny - Video: Drunk Airline Pilot - Dean Martin - Foster Brooks Java Community Top Content - Video: NightHacking Interview with James GoslingJames Gosling, the Father of Java, discusses robotics, Java and how to keep his autonomous WaveGliders in the ocean for weeks at a time. Live from Hawaii.  Video: Raspberry Pi Developer Challenge: Remote Controller A developer who knew nothing about Java Embedded or Raspberry Pi shows how he can now control a robot with his phone. The project was built during the Java Embedded Challenge for Raspberry Pi at JavaOne 2013.Java EE 7 Certification Survey - Participants NeededHelp us define how to server your training and certification needs for Java EE 7. Tori Wieldt, Java Community Manager Friday Funny - Programmers have a strong sensitivity to Yak's pheromone. Causes irresistible desire to shave said Yak. Thanks, @rickasaurus! To follow and take part in the conversation follow/like etc. at one or all of the resources below -  OTN TechBlog The Java Source Blog The OTN Garage Blog The OTN ArchBeat Blog @oracletechnet @java @OTN_Garage @OTNArchBeat @OracleDBDev OTN I Love Java OTN Garage OTN ArchBeat Oracle DB Dev OTN Java

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• Thoughts on my new template language/HTML generator?

  - by Ralph

  I guess I should have pre-faced this with: Yes, I know there is no need for a new templating language, but I want to make a new one anyway, because I'm a fool. That aside, how can I improve my language: Let's start with an example: using "html5" using "extratags" html { head { title "Ordering Notice" jsinclude "jquery.js" } body { h1 "Ordering Notice" p "Dear @name," p "Thanks for placing your order with @company. It's scheduled to ship on {@ship_date|dateformat}." p "Here are the items you've ordered:" table { tr { th "name" th "price" } for(@item in @item_list) { tr { td @item.name td @item.price } } } if(@ordered_warranty) p "Your warranty information will be included in the packaging." p(class="footer") { "Sincerely," br @company } } } The "using" keyword indicates which tags to use. "html5" might include all the html5 standard tags, but your tags names wouldn't have to be based on their HTML counter-parts at all if you didn't want to. The "extratags" library for example might add an extra tag, called "jsinclude" which gets replaced with something like <script type="text/javascript" src="@content"></script> Tags can be optionally be followed by an opening brace. They will automatically be closed at the closing brace. If no brace is used, they will be closed after taking one element. Variables are prefixed with the @ symbol. They may be used inside double-quoted strings. I think I'll use single-quotes to indicate "no variable substitution" like PHP does. Filter functions can be applied to variables like @variable|filter. Arguments can be passed to the filter @variable|filter:@arg1,arg2="y" Attributes can be passed to tags by including them in (), like p(class="classname"). You will also be able to include partial templates like: for(@item in @item_list) include("item_partial", item=@item) Something like that I'm thinking. The first argument will be the name of the template file, and subsequent ones will be named arguments where @item gets the variable name "item" inside that template. I also want to have a collection version like RoR has, so you don't even have to write the loop. Thoughts on this and exact syntax would be helpful :) Some questions: Which symbol should I use to prefix variables? @ (like Razor), $ (like PHP), or something else? Should the @ symbol be necessary in "for" and "if" statements? It's kind of implied that those are variables. Tags and controls (like if,for) presently have the exact same syntax. Should I do something to differentiate the two? If so, what? This would make it more clear that the "tag" isn't behaving like just a normal tag that will get replaced with content, but controls the flow. Also, it would allow name-reuse. Do you like the attribute syntax? (round brackets) How should I do template inheritance/layouts? In Django, the first line of the file has to include the layout file, and then you delimit blocks of code which get stuffed into that layout. In CakePHP, it's kind of backwards, you specify the layout in the controller.view function, the layout gets a special $content_for_layout variable, and then the entire template gets stuffed into that, and you don't need to delimit any blocks of code. I guess Django's is a little more powerful because you can have multiple code blocks, but it makes your templates more verbose... trying to decide what approach to take Filtered variables inside quotes: "xxx {@var|filter} yyy" "xxx @{var|filter} yyy" "xxx @var|filter yyy" i.e, @ inside, @ outside, or no braces at all. I think no-braces might cause problems, especially when you try adding arguments, like @var|filter:arg="x", then the quotes would get confused. But perhaps a braceless version could work for when there are no quotes...? Still, which option for braces, first or second? I think the first one might be better because then we're consistent... the @ is always nudged up against the variable. I'll add more questions in a few minutes, once I get some feedback.

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• Twice as long and half as long

  - by PointsToShare

  We are in a project and we hit some snags. What’s a snag? An activity that takes longer than expected. Actually it takes longer than the time assigned to it by an over pressed PM who accepts an impossible time table and tries his best to make it possible, but I digress (again!).  So we have snags and we also have the opposite. Let’s call these “cinches”. The question is: how does a combination of snags and cinches affect the project timeline? Well, there is no simple answer. It depends on the projects dependencies as we see in the PERT chart. If all the snags are in the critical path and all the cinches are elsewhere then the cinches don’t help at all. In fact any snag in the critical path will delay the project.  Conversely, a cinch in the critical path will expedite it. A snag outside the critical path might be serious enough to even change the critical path. Thus without the PERT chart, we cannot really tell. Still there is a principle involved – Time and speed are non-linear! Twice as long adds a full unit, half as long only takes ½ unit away. Let’s just investigate a simple project. It consists of two activities – S and C - each estimated to take a week. Alas, S is a snag and really needs twice the time allotted and – a sigh of relief – C is a cinch and will take half the time allotted, so everything is Hun-key-dory, or is it?  Even here the PERT chart is important. We have 2 cases: 1: S depends on C (or vice versa) as in when the two activities are assigned to one employee. Here the estimated time was 1 + 1 and the actual time was 2 + ½ and we are ½ week late or 25% late. 2: S and C are done in parallel. Here the estimated time was 1, but the actual time is 2 – we are a whole week or 100% late. Let’s change the equation a little. S need 1.5 and C needs .5 so in case 1, we have the loss fully compensated by the gain, but in case 2 we are still behind. There are cases where this really makes no difference. This is when the critical path is not affected and we have enough slack in the other paths to counteract the difference between its snags and cinches – Let’s call this difference DSC. So if the slack is greater than DSC the project will not suffer. Conclusion: There is no general rule about snags and cinches. We need to examine each case within its project, still as we saw in the 4 examples above; the snag is generally more powerful than the cinch. Long live Murphy! That’s All Folks

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• The theory of evolution applied to software

  - by Michel Grootjans

  I recently realized the many parallels you can draw between the theory of evolution and evolving software. Evolution is not the proverbial million monkeys typing on a million typewriters, where one of them comes up with the complete works of Shakespeare. We would have noticed by now, since the proverbial monkeys are now blogging on the Internet ;-) One of the main ideas of the theory of evolution is the balance between random mutations and natural selection. Random mutations happen all the time: millions of mutations over millions of years. Most of them are totally useless. Some of them are beneficial to the evolved species. Natural selection favors the beneficially mutated species. Less beneficial mutations die off. The mutated rabbit doesn't have to be faster than the fox. It just has to be faster than the other rabbits.   Theory of evolution Evolving software Random mutations happen all the time. Most of these mutations are so bad, the new species dies off, or cannot reproduce. Developers write new code all the time. New ideas come up during the act of writing software. The really bad ones don't get past the stage of idea. The bad ones don't get committed to source control. Natural selection favors the beneficial mutated species Good ideas and new code gets discussed in group during informal peer review. Less than good code gets refactored. Enhanced code makes it more readable, maintainable... A good set of traits makes the species superior to others. It becomes widespread A good design tends to make it easier to add new features, easier to understand the current implementations, easier to optimize for performance...thus superior. The best designs get carried over from project to project. They appear in blogs, articles and books about principles, patterns and practices.   Of course the act of writing software is deliberate. This can hardly be called random mutations. Though it sometimes might seem that code evolves through a will of its own ;-) Does this mean that evolving software (evolution) is better than a big design up front (creationism)? Not necessarily. It's a false idea to think that a project starts from scratch and everything evolves from there. Everyone carries his experience of what works and what doesn't. Up front design is necessary, but is best kept simple and minimal, just enough to get you started. Let the good experiences and ideas help to drive the process, whether they come from you or from others, from past experience or from the most junior developer on your team. Once again, balance is the keyword. Balance design up front with evolution on a daily basis. How do you know what balance is right? Through your own experience of what worked and what didn't (here's evolution again). Notes: The evolution of software can quickly degenerate without discipline. TDD is a discipline that leaves little to chance on that part. Write your test to describe the new behavior. Write just enough code to make it behave as specified. Refactor to evolve the code to a higher standard. The responsibility of good design rests continuously on each developers' shoulders. Promiscuous pair programming helps quickly spreading the design to the whole team.

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• Oracle is #1 in Life Sciences!

  - by Michael Snow

  Guest post today by: John Klinke, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle WebCenter Content 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Based on the announcement last week at EMC World about Documentum for Life Sciences, it looks like EMC is starting to have regrets about pulling out of the life sciences space over the last few years. Certainly their content management customers and partners in life sciences have noticed their retreat. Many of them are now talking to us about WebCenter Content since they’ve seen the writing on the wall regarding Documentum’s decline, including falling revenue, shrinking investment, departure of key executives, and EMC’s auditing of existing customers. While EMC has been neglecting the life sciences industry over the last few years, Oracle has been increasing its investment and commitment by providing best-of-breed solutions to enable pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech and CRO companies to improve productivity and drive innovation. As a result, according to IDC Health Insights, Oracle is #1 in life sciences. From research and development through clinical development and manufacturing to sales and marketing, Oracle provides the solutions that life sciences companies depend on to accelerate R&D, expedite clinical trials, and speed time to market. Specifically for Oracle WebCenter, our life sciences business is booming thanks to our comprehensive offerings led by Oracle WebCenter Content, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant enterprise content management platform. Unlike Documentum, WebCenter Content is all about keeping the cost of ownership low - through simplicity, flexibility, and out-of-the-box integrations. WebCenter Content is a single, comprehensive ECM platform that can handle all your content management needs, from controlled documents to digital asset management, records management and document imaging and capture. And it is much more flexible, letting you do configuration changes instead of customizations to meet your business needs. It also saves you money by being pre-integrated with the rest of the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology stack and with leading enterprise applications like Siebel (including Siebel CTMS), Primavera, E-Business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft. So if you think EMC’s announcement last week was too little and too late, I’m happy to report that Oracle is here to help. Back in October, we announced our Move Off Documentum offer, which provides a 100% trade-in credit for your Documentum licenses when you purchase Oracle WebCenter, and the good news is, this offer is still available for a limited time. So stop maintaining Documentum and start innovating with Oracle WebCenter. For more details see www.oracle.com/moveoff/documentum.

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• forEach and Facelets - a bugfarm just waiting for harvest

  - by Duncan Mills

  An issue that I've encountered before and saw again today seems worthy of a little write-up. It's all to do with a subtle yet highly important difference in behaviour between JSF 2 running with JSP and running on Facelets (.jsf pages). The incident I saw today can be seen as a report on the ADF EMG bugzilla (Issue 53) and in a blog posting by Ulrich Gerkmann-Bartels who reported the issue to the EMG. Ulrich's issue nicely shows how tricky this particular gochya can be. On the surface, the problem is squarely the fault of MDS but underneath MDS is, in fact, innocent. To summarize the problem in a simpler testcase than Ulrich's example, here's a simple fragment of code: <af:forEach var="item" items="#{itemList.items}"> <af:commandLink id="cl1" text="#{item.label}" action="#{item.doAction}"  partialSubmit="true"/> </af:forEach> Looks innocent enough right? We see a bunch of links printed out, great. The issue here though is the id attribute. Logically you can kind of see the problem. The forEach loop is creating (presumably) multiple instances of the commandLink, but only one id is specified - cl1. We know that IDs have to be unique within a JSF component tree, so that must be a bad thing?  The problem is that JSF under JSP implements some hacks when the component tree is generated to transparently fix this problem for you. Behind the scenes it ensures that each instance really does have a unique id. Really nice of it to do so, thank you very much. However, (you could see this coming), the same is not true when running with Facelets  (this is under 11.1.2.n)  in that case, what you put for the id is what you get, and JSF does not mess around in the background for you. So you end up with a component tree that contains duplicate ids which are only created at runtime.  So subtle chaos can ensue.  The symptoms are wide and varied, from something pretty obscure such as the combination Ulrich uncovered, to something as frustrating as your ActionListener just not being triggered. And yes I've wasted hours on just such an issue.  The Solution  Once you're aware of this one it's really simple to fix it, there are two options: Remove the id attribute on components that will cause some kind of submission within the forEach loop altogether and let JSF do the right thing in generating them. Then you'll be assured of uniqueness. Use the var attribute of the loop to generate a unique id for each child instance.  for example in the above case: <af:commandLink id="cl1_#{item.index}" ... />.  So one to watch out for in your upgrades to JSF 2 and one perhaps, for your coding standards today to prepare you for. For completeness, here's the reference to the underlying JSF issue that's at the heart of this: JAVASERVERFACES-1527

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• Spotlight on an office - Denmark

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  Hi, my name is Michael. I work as an Intern at the Danish office in Ballerup. My job is a part-time position beside my bachelor study in International Business at Copenhagen Business School. I joined Oracle end of February last year, and what a thrilling ride it has been! Last year, when I was offered the position, there was no doubt that I wanted to go for it. Back then, I only had little idea about Oracle as a company and what kind of exciting assignments lay ahead of me. My main role is internal communications, i.e. editor of a monthly employee’s news letter; Newszone. It is an interesting task, since it requires that I am updated on the different activities that take place within the Oracle Denmark office. I try to bring interesting articles, which are relevant and interesting news to my colleagues and it allows me to interact with many different persons at the office and to learn from their experience, which give me great inspiration and ideas for the magazine. Besides being the editor of Newszone, I also make sure that other communication flow freely at the Oracle Denmark office. I do this through our LCD screen channels. I update the internal channel with the latest information and important messages for employees, and on the external channel I circulate marketing videos featuring Oracle products and customer reference stories. In addition to this, I have the responsibility acting as a content manager of the Local Communication Denmark site on MyOracle (UCM). These are more or less my usual work assignments. On top of these I take care of various ad hoc assignments such as updating the GCM database, renew newspaper subscriptions etc. The Oracle Denmark office Being part of the local employees club I also assist with arranging social events outside working hours – e.g. evenings at the theater or cinema or by attending many of the sportsactivities;such as our running club, cycling club, food club and book club. These activities have indeed helped me grow my personal network within Oracle.  The office is packed with engaging, high-paced and motivated people who manage to take time off to spend a day attending Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, one of them being GVD (Global Volunteer Day) with approximately 40 employees attending. This proofs some of the social responsible aspects of Oracle. I was positively surprised on how the office (named O-Zone) is designed. The office is designed into three distinct zones, namely Call zone, Project and Dialogue zone and Quiet zone, having different working environments for different job roles. The other thing which I like is that you do not have your own desk, which means you get to sit next to different people every day, getting new ideas and inspiration as well as getting to know more people in the organization you work in. To sum up: If you are considering pursuing an intern or a career after graduation in Oracle, do it! You will not regret it. It has given me many relevant practical experiences beside my study, and I am sure many great experiences will await you too.   Want to know more about the current vacancies in Denmark? Check http://campus.oracle.com for all of our vacancies.

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• WebLogic Server–Use the Execution Context ID in Applications–Lessons From Hansel and Gretel

  - by james.bayer

  I learned a neat trick this week.  Don’t let your breadcrumbs go to waste like Hansel and Gretel did!  Keep track of the code path, logs and errors for each request as they flow through the system.  Earlier this week an OTN forum post in the WLS – General category by Oracle Ace John Stegeman asked a question how to retrieve the Execution Context ID so that it could be used on an error page that a user could provide to a help desk or use to check with application administrators so they could look up what went wrong.  What is the Execution Context ID (ECID)?  Fusion Middleware injects an ECID as a request enters the system and it says with the request as it flows from Oracle HTTP Server to Oracle Web Cache to multiple WebLogic Servers to the Oracle Database. It’s a way to uniquely identify a request across tiers.  According to the documentation it’s: The value of the ECID is a unique identifier that can be used to correlate individual events as being part of the same request execution flow. For example, events that are identified as being related to a particular request typically have the same ECID value.  The format of the ECID string itself is determined by an internal mechanism that is subject to change; therefore, you should not have or place any dependencies on that format. The novel idea that I see John had was to extend this concept beyond the diagnostic information that is captured by Fusion Middleware.  Why not also use this identifier in your logs and errors so you can correlate even more information together!  Your logging might already identify the user, so why not identify the request so you filter down even more.  All you need to do inside of WebLogic Server to get ahold of this information is invoke DiagnosticConextHelper: weblogic.diagnostics.context.DiagnosticContextHelper.getContextId() This class has other helpful methods to see other values tracked by the diagnostics framework too.  This way I can see even more detail and get information across tiers. In performance profiling, this can be very handy to track down where time is being spent in code.  I’ve blogged and made videos about this before.  JRockit Flight Recorder can use the WLDF Diagnostic Volume in WLS 10.3.3+ to automatically capture and correlate lots of helpful information for each request without installing any special agents and with the out-of-the-box JRockit and WLS settings!  You can see here how information is displayed in JRockit Flight Recorder about a single request as it calls a Servlet, which calls an EJB, which gets a DB connection, which starts a transaction, etc.  You can get timings around everything and even see the SQL that is used. http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/web.1111/e13714/using_flightrecorder.htm#WLDFC480 Recent versions of the WLS console also are able to visualize this data too, so it works with other JVMs besides JRockit when you turn on WLDF instrumentation. I wrote a little sample application that verified to myself that the ECID did actually cross JVM boundaries.  I invoked a Servlet in one JVM, which acted as an EJB client to Stateless Session Bean running in another JVM.  Each call returned the same ECID.  You need to turn on WLDF Instrumentation for this to work otherwise the framework returns null.  I’m glad John put me on to this API as I have some interesting ideas on how to correlate some information together.

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• What is the SharePoint Action Framework and Why do I need it ?

  - by SAF

  For those out there that are a little curious as to whether SAF is any use to your organisation, please read this FAQ.  What is SAF ? SAF is free to use. SAF is the "SharePoint Action Framework", it was built by myself and Hugo (plus a few others along the way). SAF is written entirely in C# code available from : http://saf.codeplex.com.   SAF is a way to automate SharePoint configuration changes. An Action is a command/class/task/script written in C# that performs a unit of execution against SharePoint such as "CreateWeb"  or "AddLookupColumn". A SAF Macro is collection of one or more Actions. SAF Macro can be run from Msbuild, a Feature, StsAdm or common plain old .Net code. Parameters can be passed to a Macro at run-time from a variety of sources such as "Environment Variable", "*.config", "Msbuild Properties", Feature Properties, command line args, .net code. SAF emits lots of trace statements at run-time, these can be viewed using "DebugView". One Action can pass parameters to another Action. Parameters can be set using Expression Syntax such as "DateTime.Now".  You should consider SAF is you suffer from one of the following symptoms... "Our developers write lots of code to deploy changes at release time - it's always rushed" "I don't want my developers shelling out to Powershell or Stsadm from a Feature". "We have loads of Console applications now, I have lost track of where they are, or what they do" "We seem to be writing similar scripts against SharePoint in lots of ways, testing is hard". "My scripts often have lots of errors - they are done at the last minute". "When something goes wrong - I have no idea what went wrong or how to solve it". "Our Features get stuck and bomb out half way through - there no way to roll them back". "We have tons of Features now - I can't keep track". "We deploy Features to run one-off tasks" "We have a library of reusable scripts, but, we can only run it in one way, sometimes we want to run it from MSbuild and a Feature". "I want to automate the deployment of changes to our development environment". "I would like to run a housekeeping task on a scheduled basis"   So I like the sound of SAF - what's the problems ?  Realistically, there are few things that need to be considered: Someone on your team will need to spend a day or 2 understanding SAF and deciding exactly how you want to use it. I would suggest a Tech Lead, SysAdm or SP Architect will need to download it, try out the examples, look through the unit tests. Ask us questions. Although, SAF can be downloaded and set to go in a few minutes, you will still need to address issues such as - "Do you want to execute your Macros in MsBuild or from a Feature ?" You will need to decide who is going to do your deployments - is it each developer to themself, or do you require a dedicated Build Manager ? As most environments (Dev, QA, Live etc) require different settings (e.g. Urls, Database names, accounts etc), you will more than likely want to define these and set a properties file up for each environment. (These can then be injected into Saf at run-time). There may be no Action to solve your particular problem. If this is the case, suggest it to us - we can try and write it, or write it yourself. It's very easy to write a new Action - we have an approach to easily unit test it, document it and author it. For example, I wrote one to deploy  a WSP in 2 hours the other day. Alternatively, Saf can also call Stsadm commands and Powershell scripts.   Anyway, I do hope this helps! If you still need help, or a quick start, we can also offer consultancy around SAF. If you want to know more give us a call or drop an email to [email protected]

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• #iPad at One Week: A Great Device Made with a Heavy Hand

  - by andrewbrust

  I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food. And the verdict? Honestly? I think it's a great device and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The screen is bright and vibrant. I am surprisingly fast and accurate when I type on it. The touch screen's responsiveness is nearly flawless. The software, including a number of third party applications, include pleasing animations and use of color that make it fun to get work done. And speaking of work, the Exchange integration is, dare I say it, robust. Not as full-featured as on a PC or Windows Mobile device, but still offering core functionality and, so far at least, without bugs. The UI is intuitive, not just to me, but also to my 5 1/2 year old, and also to my nearly-3-year-old son. They picked it up and, with just just a few pointers from me, they almost immediately knew what to do, whether they were looking at photos (and swiping/flicking along as they did so), using a drawing program, playing a game, or watching YouTube videos. The younger of the two of them even tried to get up on a chair and grab the thing today. He dropped it, from about 4 feet off the ground. And it's still fine. (Meanwhile, I'll be keeping it on a higher shelf.) I cannot fully describe yet what makes this form factor and this product so appealing. Maybe it's that it's an always-on device. Maybe it's just being able to hold such a nice, relatively large display so close. Maybe it's the design sensibility, that seems to pervade throughout the app ecosystem. Or maybe it's that one's fingers, and not pens or mice, are the software's preferred input device. Whatever the attraction, it's strong. And no matter how much I tend to root for Microsoft and against Apple, Cupertino has, in my mind, scored big, Can Microsoft compete? Yes, but not with the Windows 7 standard UI (nor with individual OEMs’ own UIs on top). I hope Microsoft builds a variant of the Windows Phone 7 specifically for tablet devices. And I hope they make it clear that all developers, and programming languages, are welcome to the platform. Once that’s established, the OEMs have to build great hardware with fast, responsive touch screens, under Microsoft's watchful eye. That may be the hardest part of getting this right. No matter what, Microsoft's got a fight on its hands. I don't know if it can count on winning that fight, either. But Silverlight and Live Tiles could certainly help. And so can treating developers like adults.  Apple seems intent on treating their devs like kids, and then giving the kids a curfew.  For that, dev-friendly Microsoft may one day give thanks.

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• Professional Developers, may I join you?

  - by Ben

  I currently work in technical support for a software/hardware company and for the most part it's a good job, but it's feeling more and more like I'm getting 'stuck' here. No raises in the 5 years I've been here, and lately there seems to be more hiring from the outside than promotion from within. The work I do is more technical than end-user support, as we deal primarily with our field technicians who have a little more technical skill than the general user base. As a result I get into much more technical support issues... often tracking down bugs in our software, finding performance bottlenecks in our database schema, etc. The work I'm most proud of are the development projects I've come up with on my own, and worked on during lunch breaks and slow periods in Support. Over the years I've written a number of useful utilities for the company. Diagnostic type applications that several departments use and appreciate. These include apps that simulate our various hardware devices, log file analysis, time-saving utilities for our work processes, etc. My best projects have been the hardware simulation programs, which are the type of thing we probably wouldn't have put a full-time developer on had anyone thought to do it, but they've ended up being popular and useful enough to be used by development, QA, R&D, and Support. They allow us to interface our software with simulated hardware, rather than clutter up our work areas with bulky, hard to acquire equipment. Since starting here my life has moved forward (married, kid, one more on the way), but it feels like my career has not. I still earn what I earned walking in the door my first day. Company budget is tight, bonuses have gone down, and no raises or cost of living / inflation adjustments either. As the sole source of income for my family I feel I need to do more, and I'd like to have a more active role in creating something at work, not just cleaning up other people's mistakes. I enjoy technical work, and I think development is the next logical step in my career. I'd like to bring some "legitimacy" to my part-time development work, and make myself a more skilled and valuable employee. Ultimately if this can help me better support my family, that would be ideal. Can I make the jump to professional developer? I have an engineering degree, but no formal education in computer science. I write WinForms apps using the .NET framework, do some freelance web development, have volunteered to write software for a nonprofit, and have started experimenting with programming microcontrollers. I enjoy learning new things in the limited free time I have available. I think I have the aptitude to take on a development role, even in an 'apprentice' capacity if such an option is possible. Have any of you moved into development like this? Do any of you developers have any advice or cautionary tales? Are there better career options I haven't thought of? I welcome any and all related comments and thank you in advance for posting them.

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• My First Iteration Zero

  - by onefloridacoder

  I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog.  It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned.  It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.  The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level.  Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.  You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with.  Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces. Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me.  He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread.  The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application.  Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together.  So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor. I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design. One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box.  The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.    One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do.  At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently.  Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.  I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.    So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010  TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.

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• HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration.

  - by darrenm

  Since we released hardware crypto acceleration for SPARC T4 and Intel AES-NI support we have had a common question come up: 'How do I test without the hardware crypto acceleration?'. Initially this came up just for development use so developers can do unit testing on a machine that has hardware offload but still cover the code paths for a machine that doesn't (our integration and release testing would run on all supported types of hardware anyway).  I've also seen it asked in a customer context too so that we can show that there is a performance gain from the hardware crypto acceleration, (not just the fact that SPARC T4 much faster performing processor than T3) and measure what it is for their application. With SPARC T2/T3 we could easily disable the hardware crypto offload by running 'cryptoadm disable provider=n2cp/0'.  We can't do that with SPARC T4 or with Intel AES-NI because in both of those classes of processor the encryption doesn't require a device driver instead it is unprivileged user land callable instructions. Turns out there is away to do this by using features of the Solaris runtime loader (ld.so.1). First I need to expose a little bit of implementation detail about how the Solaris Cryptographic Framework is implemented in Solaris 11.  One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine.  The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax() and make the choice itself.  We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so, and the unfortunately misnamed due to historical reasons libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run.  To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present.  For SPARC T4 that would be: export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" and for Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes" This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly.  It also works for the Oracle DB and Java JCE.  However does not work for the default enabled OpenSSL "t4" or "aes-ni" engines (unfortunately) because they do explicit calls to getisax() themselves rather than using multiple ELF cap sections. However we can still use OpenSSL to demonstrate this by explicitly selecting "pkcs11" engine  using only a single process and thread.  $ openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 54170.81k 187416.00k 489725.70k 805445.63k 1018880.00k $ LD_HWCAP="-aes" openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 29376.37k 58328.13k 79031.55k 86738.26k 89191.77k We can clearly see the difference this makes in the case where AES offload to the SPARC T4 was disabled. The "t4" engine is faster than the pkcs11 one because there is less overhead (again on a SPARC T4-1 using only a single process/thread - using -multi you will get even bigger numbers). $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 85526.61k 89298.84k 91970.30k 92662.78k 92842.67k Yet another cool feature of the Solaris linker/loader, thanks Rod and Ali. Note these above openssl speed output is not intended to show the actual performance of any particular benchmark just that there is a significant improvement from using hardware acceleration on SPARC T4. For cryptographic performance benchmarks see the http://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/ postings.

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• 45 minutes to talk about C# [closed]

  - by Philip

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

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• SharePoint Saturday DC

  - by Mark Rackley

  Wow… did you see this thing? 927 attendees? An exhibition hall full of vendors? 94 speakers? 100 sessions?? Insane is a word that comes to mind… SharePoint Saturday DC was definitely epic as far as SharePoint Saturdays go. I got to catch up with a lot of friends and make some new ones.  Met a couple of fans of the blog (hello ladies…;))  Did you know that people actually read this thing? I guess that means I need to stop putting so much garbage on here and more content. I’ll get right on that as soon as I find out how to add 6 hours to each day. Anyway, once again I did my “Wrapping Your Head Around the SharePoint Beast” session.  I tweaked it even more from Huntsville and presented to a packed room with some people sitting on the floor and standing in the aisles. It was a great crowd, very interactive and they seemed interested at least. Thank you guys so much for attending and please feel free to tell me of any suggestions you have to make the presentation better.  This is one of the presentations that will probably never die. Everyone beginning SharePoint development needs a good introduction and starting point. My goal is to make this THE session to see on the subject. So, a little interesting data about my class. Half of the room was brand new to SharePoint and only one person was using 2010. That tells me that this session still has legs and that 2007 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  I know my organization will be using 2007 for at least a couple more years. Oh yeah… the slide deck?  Here it is: SharePoint Saturday DC Slide Deck So, SharePoint Saturday was truly tremendous and if you weren’t there you missed out. @meetdux, @usher, and the rest of their crew did a spectacular job. You guys rock and are a huge asset to the community. Thanks for allowing me to speak. What’s up next for me?  I’m so glad you asked…. SHAREPOINT SATURDAY OZARKS IS JUNE 12TH! Although SharePoint Saturday Ozarks on June 12 in Harrison Arkansas will be a much more intimate event than DC, it promises to be a most memorable event. We’ve got over 30 speakers and sessions, some cool stuff to give away, and we’re going floating down the Buffalo River on the 13th. Let’s see you do THAT in DC.  :) Anyway, I hope to see you there and I would truly appreciate any help you can do to help publicize the event. We just got internet here in the hills and most people here are still looking for the “any” key….

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• Heading out to Dallas GiveCamp 2011

  - by dotgeek

  The day has finally arrived for twelve local charities here in the Dallas area, when they’ll get some help from various local Developers with their website initiative needs at this years Dallas GiveCamp. I’m really looking forward to helping out at this year event and what I hope will be the start of many more GiveCamps to follow. Similar to Habitat for Humanity, where people gather to help build and improve homes for people in need, GiveCamp brings together programmers and equips them with the virtual tools they need to build and improve their existing websites. Tonight is when things will kickoff for this weekends events and teams will start working on their various projects. The building continues on through the night then and all the way through until Sunday afternoon. The end goal for the teams and charities is to have a completed and working website for each charity to begin using and turn over all the production code and digital assets to them. None of this would be possible with out the great sponsors we have returning once again and their donations of various products to help these charities out with their projects, like Telerik's CMS product Sitefinity 4.0, paired with a year of hosting from Verio to mention just a few of them. Just like the skilled builders who might help train volunteers in the use of a nail gun in building a house. Training is also available here on site for the Developers and these local Charities. Giving them all the skills in how to manage and use these products, from site development and then into actual production is a key to the success of this weekends event.     Tonight's training sessions will kick off with a real treat from Giovanni Gallucci, as he speaks about Social Media for NPOs and then later Gabe Sumner from Telerik will begin a training session on Sitefinity for Developers. These training sessions will continue through out the weekend with .Net Nuke and Mojo Portal sessions also planned as well. If you’re a developer and would like to help out in the future, then check in your area and with your local User Groups to find out if you already have a GiveCamp near you to help out. If you don’t have one available, then consider starting up a local GiveCamp and then you too can help Code it Forward. About GiveCamp GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend. During GiveCamp, developers are welcome to go home in the evenings or camp out all weekend long. There are usually food and drink provided at the event. There are sometimes even game systems set up for when you and your need a little break! Overall, it’s a great opportunity for people to work together, developing new friendships, and doing something important for their community. At GiveCamp, there is an expectation of “What Happens at GiveCamp, Stays at GiveCamp”. Therefore, all source code must be turned over to the charities at the end of the weekend (developers cannot ask for payment) and the charities are responsible for maintaining the code moving forward (charities cannot expect the developers to maintain the codebase).

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• CacheAdapter 2.4 – Bug fixes and minor functional update

  - by Glav

  Note: If you are unfamiliar with the CacheAdapter library and what it does, you can read all about its awesome ability to utilise memory, Asp.Net Web, Windows Azure AppFabric and memcached caching implementations via a single unified, simple to use API from here and here.. The CacheAdapter library is receiving an update to version 2.4 and is currently available on Nuget here. Update: The CacheAdapter has actualy just had a minor revision to 2.4.1. This significantly increases the performance and reliability in memcached scenario under more extreme loads. General to moderate usage wont see any noticeable difference though. Bugs This latest version fixes a big that is only present in the memcached implementation and is only seen in rare, intermittent times (making i particularly hard to find). The bug is where a cache node would be removed from the farm when errors in deserialization of cached objects would occur due to serialised data not being read from the stream in entirety. The code also contains enhancements to better surface serialization exceptions to aid in the debugging process. This is also specifically targeted at the memcached implementation. This is important when moving from something like memory or Asp.Web caching mechanisms to memcached where the serialization rules are not as lenient. There are a few other minor bug fixes, code cleanup and a little refactoring. Minor feature addition In addition to this bug fix, many people have asked for a single setting to either enable or disable the cache.In this version, you can disable the cache by setting the IsCacheEnabled flag to false in the application configuration file. Something like the example below: <Glav.CacheAdapter.MainConfig> <setting name="CacheToUse" serializeAs="String"> <value>memcached</value> </setting> <setting name="DistributedCacheServers" serializeAs="String"> <value>localhost:11211</value> </setting> <setting name="IsCacheEnabled" serializeAs="String"> <value>False</value> </setting> </Glav.CacheAdapter.MainConfig> Your reasons to use this feature may vary (perhaps some performance testing or problem diagnosis). At any rate, disabling the cache will cause every attempt to retrieve data from the cache, resulting in a cache miss and returning null. If you are using the ICacheProvider with the delegate/Func<T> syntax to populate the cache, this delegate method will get executed every single time. For example, when the cache is disabled, the following delegate/Func<T> code will be executed every time: var data1 = cacheProvider.Get<SomeData>("cache-key", DateTime.Now.AddHours(1), () => { // With the cache disabled, this data access code is executed every attempt to // get this data via the CacheProvider. var someData = new SomeData() { SomeText = "cache example1", SomeNumber = 1 }; return someData; }); One final note: If you access the cache directly via the ICache instance, instead of the higher level ICacheProvider API, you bypass this setting and still access the underlying cache implementation. Only the ICacheProvider instance observes the IsCacheEnabled setting. Thanks to those individuals who have used this library and provided feedback. Ifyou have any suggestions or ideas, please submit them to the issue register on bitbucket (which is where you can grab all the source code from too)

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• How do I use setFilmSize in panda3d to achieve the correct view?

  - by lhk

  I'm working with Panda3d and recently switched my game to isometric rendering. I moved the virtual camera accordingly and set an orthographic lens. Then I implemented the classes "Map" and "Canvas". A canvas is a dynamically generated mesh: a flat quad. I'm using it to render the ingame graphics. Since the game itself is still set in a 3d coordinate system I'm planning to rely on these canvases to draw sprites. I could have named this class "Tile" but as I'd like to use it for non-tile sketches (enemies, environment) as well I thought canvas would describe it's function better. Map does exactly what it's name suggests. Its constructor receives the number of rows and columns and then creates a standard isometric map. It uses the canvas class for tiles. I'm planning to write a map importer that reads a file to create maps on the fly. Here's the canvas implementation: class Canvas: def __init__(self, texture, vertical=False, width=1,height=1): # create the mesh format=GeomVertexFormat.getV3t2() format = GeomVertexFormat.registerFormat(format) vdata=GeomVertexData("node-vertices", format, Geom.UHStatic) vertex = GeomVertexWriter(vdata, 'vertex') texcoord = GeomVertexWriter(vdata, 'texcoord') # add the vertices for a flat quad vertex.addData3f(1, 0, 0) texcoord.addData2f(1, 0) vertex.addData3f(1, 1, 0) texcoord.addData2f(1, 1) vertex.addData3f(0, 1, 0) texcoord.addData2f(0, 1) vertex.addData3f(0, 0, 0) texcoord.addData2f(0, 0) prim = GeomTriangles(Geom.UHStatic) prim.addVertices(0, 1, 2) prim.addVertices(2, 3, 0) self.geom = Geom(vdata) self.geom.addPrimitive(prim) self.node = GeomNode('node') self.node.addGeom(self.geom) # this is the handle for the canvas self.nodePath=NodePath(self.node) self.nodePath.setSx(width) self.nodePath.setSy(height) if vertical: self.nodePath.setP(90) # the most important part: "Drawing" the image self.texture=loader.loadTexture(""+texture+".png") self.nodePath.setTexture(self.texture) Now the code for the Map class class Map: def __init__(self,rows,columns,size): self.grid=[] for i in range(rows): self.grid.append([]) for j in range(columns): # create a canvas for the tile. For testing the texture is preset tile=Canvas(texture="../assets/textures/flat_concrete",width=size,height=size) x=(i-1)*size y=(j-1)*size # set the tile up for rendering tile.nodePath.reparentTo(render) tile.nodePath.setX(x) tile.nodePath.setY(y) # and store it for later access self.grid[i].append(tile) And finally the usage def loadMap(self): self.map=Map(10, 10, 1) this function is called within the constructor of the World class. The instantiation of world is the entry point to the execution. The code is pretty straightforward and runs good. Sadly the output is not as expected: Please note: The problem is not the white rectangle, it's my player object. The problem is that although the map should have equal width and height it's stretched weirdly. With orthographic rendering I expected the map to be a perfect square. What did I do wrong ? UPDATE: I've changed the viewport. This is how I set up the orthographic camera: lens = OrthographicLens() lens.setFilmSize(40, 20) base.cam.node().setLens(lens) You can change the "aspect" by modifying the parameters of setFilmSize. I don't know exactly how they are related to window size and screen resolution but after testing a little the values above seem to work for me. Now everything is rendered correctly as long as I don't resize the window. Every change of the window's size as well as switching to fullscreen destroys the correct rendering. I know that implementing a listener for resize events is not in the scope of this question. However I wonder why I need to make the Film's height two times bigger than its width. My window is quadratic ! Can you tell me how to find out correct setting for the FilmSize ? UPDATE 2: I can imagine that it's hard to envision the behaviour of the game. At first glance the obvious solution is to pass the window's width and height in pixels to setFilmSize. There are two problems with that approach. The parameters for setFilmSize are ingame units. You'll get a way to big view if you pass the pixel size For some strange reason the image is distorted if you pass equal values for width and height. Here's the output for setFilmSize(800,800) You'll have to stress your eyes but you'll see what I mean

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• Review&ndash;Build Android and iOS apps in Visual Studio with Nomad

  - by Bill Osuch

  Nomad is a Visual Studio extension that allows you build apps for both Android and iOS platforms in Visual Studio using HTML5. There is no need to switch between .Net, Java and Objective-C to target different platforms - write your code once in HTML5 and build for all common mobile platforms and tablets. You have access to the native hardware functions (such as camera and GPS) through the PhoneGap library, UI libraries such as jQuery mobile allow you to create an impressive UI with minimal work. Nomad is still in an early access beta stage, so the documentation is a bit sparse. In fact, the only documentation is a simple series of steps on how to install the plug-in, set up a project, build and deploy it. You're going to want to be a least a little familiar with the PhoneGap library and jQuery mobile to really tap into the power of this. The sample project included with the download shows you just how simple it is to create projects in Visual Studio. The sample solution comes with an index.html file containing the HTML5 code, the Cordova (PhoneGap) library, jQuery libraries, and a JQuery style sheet: The html file is pretty straightforward. If you haven't experimented with JQuery mobile before, some of the attributes (such as data-role) might be new to you, but some quick Googling will fill in everything you need to know. The first part of the file builds a simple (but attractive) list with some links in it: The second part of the file is where things get interesting and it taps into the PhoneGap library. For instance, it gets the geolocation position by calling position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitude: ...and then displays it in a simple span: Building is pretty simple, at least for Android (I'm not an iOS developer so I didn't look at that feature) - just configure the display name, version number, and package ID. There's no need to specify Android version; Nomad supports 2.2 and later. Enter these bits of information, click the new "Build for Android" button (not the regular Visual Studio Build link...) and you get a dialog box saying that your code is being built by their cloud build service (so no building while away from a WiFi signal apparently). After a couple minutes you wind up with a .apk file that can be copied over to your device. Applications built with Nomad for Android currently use a temporary certificate, so you can test the app on your devices but you cannot publish them in the Google Play Store (yet). And I love the "success" dialog box: Since Nomad is still in Beta, no pricing plans have been announced yet, so I'll be curious to see if this becomes a cost-effective solution to mobile app development. If it is, I may even be tempted to spring for the $99 iOS membership fee! In the meantime, I plan to work on porting some of my apps over to it and seeing how they work. My only quibble at this time is the lack of a centralized documentation location - I'd like to at least see which (if any) features of JQuery and PhoneGap are limited or not supported. Also, some notes on targeting different Android screen sizes would be nice, but it's relatively easy to find jQuery examples out on the InterWebs. Oh well, trial and error! You can download the Nomad extension for Visual Studio by going to their web site: www.vsnomad.com. Technorati Tags: Android, Nomad

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• Math with Timestamp

  - by Knut Vatsendvik

  table.sql { border-width: 1px; border-spacing: 2px; border-style: dashed; border-color: #0023ff; border-collapse: separate; background-color: white; } table.sql th { border-width: 1px; padding: 1px; border-style: none; border-color: gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; } table.sql td { border-width: 1px; padding: 3px; border-style: none; border-color: gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; } .sql-keyword { color: #0000cd; background-color: inherit; } .sql-result { color: #458b74; background-color: inherit; } Got this little SQL quiz from a colleague.  How to add or subtract exactly 1 second from a Timestamp?  Sounded simple enough at first blink, but was a bit trickier than expected. If the data type had been a Date, we knew that we could add or subtract days, minutes or seconds using + or – sysdate + 1 to add one day sysdate - (1 / 24) to subtract one hour sysdate + (1 / 86400) to add one second Would the same arithmetic work with Timestamp as with Date? Let’s test it out with the following query SELECT   systimestamp , systimestamp + (1 / 86400) FROM dual; ---------- 03.05.2010 22.11.50,240887 +02:00 03.05.2010 The first result line shows us the system time down to fractions of seconds. The second result line shows the result as Date (as used for date calculation) meaning now that the granularity is reduced down to a second.   By using the PL/SQL dump() function, we can confirm this with the following query SELECT   dump(systimestamp) , dump(systimestamp + (1 / 86400)) FROM dual; ---------- Typ=188 Len=20: 218,7,5,4,8,53,9,0,200,46,89,20,2,0,5,0,0,0,0,0 Typ=13 Len=8: 218,7,5,4,10,53,10,0 Where typ=13 is a runtime representation for Date. So how can we increase the precision to include fractions of second? After investigating it a bit, we found out that the interval data type INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND could be used with the result of addition or subtraction being a Timestamp. Let’s try again our first query again, now using the interval data type. SELECT systimestamp,    systimestamp + INTERVAL '0 00:00:01.0' DAY TO SECOND(1) FROM dual; ---------- 03.05.2010 22.58.32,723659000 +02:00 03.05.2010 22.58.33,723659000 +02:00 Yes, it worked! To finish the story, here is one example showing how to specify an interval of 2 days, 6 hours, 30 minutes, 4 seconds and 111 thousands of a second. INTERVAL ‘2 6:30:4.111’ DAY TO SECOND(3)

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• Essential Links for the SharePoint Client Side Developer

  - by Mark Rackley

  Front End Developer? Client Side Developer? Middle Tier??? I’m covering all my bases.  Regardless, I’m sick and tired of Googling with Bing when I forget where information that I need often is located. I was getting ready to bookmark some of them when it hit me… “Hey Mark… (I don’t actually refer to myself in the third person), Why don’t you put the links in a blog so that it looks like you are being helpful!” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go back to some of my old blogs to remember how I did something. Seriously people, you need to start a blog, it’s the best way to remember how the frick you got something to work… and it looks like you are being helpful when in reality you are just forgetful.  So… where was I? Oh yeah.. essential information that I’ve needed from time to time when I was not using Visual Studio. All of this info has come in handy from time to time. Know about these things and keep them in your tool belt, it’s amazing the stuff you can accomplish with just knowing where to look. What Why SPServices Widely used library written by Marc Anderson used to call SharePoint Web Services with jQuery jQuery For SPServices and other cool stuff Easy Tabs Essential tool for quick page enhancements. This widely used too from Christophe Humbert groups multiple web parts into one tabbed display. Very quick and easy way to get oohs and ahs from End Users. Convert Calculated Columns to HTML Also from Christophe, I use this script all the time to convert html in my calculated columns to actually display as html and not with the tags. Unlocking the Mysteries of Data View Web Part XSL Tags This blog series from Marc Anderson makes it very easy to understand what’s going on with all those weird xsl tags in your data view web parts. Essential to make those things do what you want them to do. Creating Parent / Child list relationships (2007) Creating Parent / Child list relationships (2010) By far my most viewed blog posts (tens and tens of thousands).  I have posts for both 2007 and 2010 that walk you through automatically setting the lookup id on a list to its “parent”. Set SharePoint Form fields using Query String Variables Also widely read, this one walks you through taking a variable from your Query String and set a form field to that value.   Hmmm… I KNOW there are more, but I’m tired and drawing a blank.  I’ll try to add them when I remember them (or need them again and think “Oh, I forgot to add that one”) But it’s a start, and please feel free to add your own in the comments… So, it’s YOUR turn to be helpful. What little tip or trick do you find yourself using ALL the time that you think everyone should know about??

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