Search Results

Search found 14000 results on 560 pages for 'include guards'.

Page 486/560 | < Previous Page | 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493  | Next Page >

• SQL SERVER – Partition Parallelism Support in expressor 3.6

  - by pinaldave

  I am very excited to learn that there is a new version of expressor’s data integration platform coming out in March of this year.  It will be version 3.6, and I look forward to using it and telling everyone about it.  Let me describe a little bit more about what will be so great in expressor 3.6: Greatly enhanced user interface Parallel Processing Bulk Artifact Upgrading The User Interface First let me cover the most obvious enhancements. The expressor Studio user interface (UI) has had some significant work done. Kudos to the expressor Engineering team; the entire UI is a visual masterpiece that is very responsive and intuitive. The improvements are more than just eye candy; they provide significant productivity gains when developing expressor Dataflows. Operator shape icons now include a description that identifies the function of each operator, instead of having to guess at the function by the icon. Operator shapes and highlighting depict the current function and status: Disabled, enabled, complete, incomplete, and error. Each status displays an appropriate message in the message panel with correction suggestions. Floating or docking property panels provide descriptive tool tips for each property as well as auto resize when adjusting the canvas, without having to search Help or the need to scroll around to get access to the property. Progress and status indicators let you know when an operation is working. “No limit” canvas with snap-to-grid allows automatic sizing and accurate positioning when you have numerous operators in the Dataflow. The inline tool bar offers quick access to pan, zoom, fit and overview functions. Selecting multiple artifacts with a right click context allows you to easily manage your workspace more efficiently. Partitioning and Parallel Processing Partitioning allows each operator to process multiple subsets of records in parallel as opposed to processing all records that flow through that operator in a single sequential set. This capability allows the user to configure the expressor Dataflow to run in a way that most efficiently utilizes the resources of the hardware where the Dataflow is running. Partitions can exist in most individual operators. Using partitions increases the speed of an expressor data integration application, therefore improving performance and load times. With the expressor 3.6 Enterprise Edition, expressor simplifies enabling parallel processing by adding intuitive partition settings that are easy to configure. Bulk Artifact Upgrading Bulk Artifact Upgrading sounds a bit intimidating, but it actually is not and it is a welcome addition to expressor Studio. In past releases, users were prompted to confirm that they wanted to upgrade their individual artifacts only when opened. This was a cumbersome and repetitive process. Now with bulk artifact upgrading, a user can easily select what artifact or group of artifacts to upgrade all at once. As you can see, there are many new features and upgrade options that will prove to make expressor Studio quicker and more efficient.  I hope I’m not the only one who is excited about all these new upgrades, and that I you try expressor and share your experience with me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Some OBI EE Tricks and Tips in the Admin Tool By Gerry Langton

  - by hamsun

  How to set the log level from a Session variable Initialization block As we know it is normal to set the log level non-zero for a particular user when we wish to debug problems. However sometimes it is inconvenient to go into each user’s properties in the Admin tool and update the log level. So I am showing a method which allows the log level to be set for all users via a session initialization block. This is particularly useful for anyone wanting an alternative way to set the log level. The screen shots shown are using the OBIEE 11g SampleApp demo but are applicable to any environment. Open the appropriate rpd in on-line mode and navigate to Manage Variables. Select Session Initialization Blocks, right click in the white space and create a New Initialization Block. I called the Initialization block Set_Loglevel . Now click on ‘Edit Data Source’ to enter the SQL. Chose the ‘Use OBI EE Server’ option for the SQL. This means that the SQL provided must use tables which have been defined in the Physical layer of the RPD, and whilst there is no need to provide a connection pool you must work in On-Line mode. The SQL can access any of the RPD tables and is purely used to return a value of 2. The ‘Test’ button confirms that the SQL is valid. Next, click on the ‘Edit Data Target’ button to add the LOGLEVEL variable to the initialization block. Check the ‘Enable any user to set the value’ option so that this will work for any user. Click OK and the following message will display as LOGLEVEL is a system session variable: Click ‘Yes’. Click ‘OK’ to save the Initialization block. Then check in the On-LIne changes. To test that LOGLEVEL has been set, log in to OBIEE using an administrative login (e.g. weblogic) and reload server metadata, either from the Analysis editor or from Administration > Reload Files and Metadata link. Run a query then navigate to Administration > Manage Sessions and click ‘View Log’ for the query just issued (which should be approximately the last in the list). A log file should exist and with LOGLEVEL set to 2 should include both logical and physical sql. If more diagnostic information is required then set LOGLEVEL to a higher value. If logging is required only for a particular analysis then an alternative method can be used directly from the Analysis editor. Edit the analysis for which debugging is required and click on the Advanced tab. Scroll down to the Advanced SQL clauses section and enter the following in the Prefix box: SET VARIABLE LOGLEVEL = 2; Click the ‘Apply SQL’ button. The SET VARIABLE statement will now prefix the Analysis’s logical SQL. So that any time this analysis is run it will produce a log. You can find information about training for Oracle BI EE products here or in the OU Learning Paths. Please send me an email at [email protected] if you have any further questions. About the Author: Gerry Langton started at Siebel Systems in 1999 working as a technical instructor teaching both Siebel application development and also Siebel Analytics (which subsequently became Oracle BI EE). From 2006 Gerry has worked as Senior Principal Instructor within Oracle University specialising in Oracle BI EE, Oracle BI Publisher and Oracle Data Warehouse development for BI.

  Read the article

• St. Louis Day of .NET 2010

  - by Scott Spradlin

  Register now at http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/registration.aspx The Date This year's conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, August 20-21, 2010, at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, Missouri.  Sessions will begin at 8:00 a.m. and run through 4:30 p.m. on both days.  Registration and sign-in will open at 7:00 a.m. on Friday morning, and will run throughout the event. The Venue Based on the almost unanimous feedback from last year's event, we are very excited to bring our conference back to the Ameristar Conference Center. The Ameristar has worked with us to offer a great rate on their large suites, should you be traveling from out-of-town -- or are just interested in a night away from home.  Attendees can book a suite at a discounted rate of only $139/night, which is a substantial discount from their standard rates.  We encourage you take the opportunity to hang around, spend the night, and enjoy the social events and networking opportunities that we have planned. If you are interested in taking advantage of the discounted hotel rate, you can reserve your room online at Ameristar's Online Registration Site, using the special offer code: GDOTH10.  You can also call the hotel's reservation number at (636) 940-4301 and let them know you are attending the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 to receive your discounted rates. The Content All attendees will have access to over 80 technical sessions by many great regional and national technology experts, covering a wide range of .NET development topics.  In addition to refreshments throughout the event, all attendees will be provided with breakfast and lunch on both days of the conference. You will find sessions on many of the most current .NET development topics including: Visual Studio .NET 2010 Silverlight 4.0 Windows 7 Series Phone Development ASP.NET MVC DotNetNuke SharePoint 2010 Architecture Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) And much, much more... This year's event will also include many informal "Open Space" sessions where all attendees with similar interests can discuss current trends or issues they are facing in today's real-world development environments. Finally, all attendees are invited to a social networking event at the HOME Nightclub at the Ameristar, which will be held on the Friday evening of the conference. The Cost The cost of this year's conference is $200 per attendee.  However, for a limited time we are offering a $75 discount for early registrants. To take advantage of this discounted rate, you must register on our site prior to July 10, 2010.  We accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.  In addition, this year we allow for a single user of our site to easily register multiple attendees at once. To register, please visit the official St. Louis Day of .NET site at www.stldodn.com, and click on the "Registration" tab. For More Information And for the most up-to-the-minute information on the event, please follow us online: Twitter:  @stldodn Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/stldodn We strongly encourage you to share this email, as well as the attached flier, with your peers and colleagues, and anyone else you think might be interested in this exciting event. If you have any questions regarding registration, you can email us at [email protected] and we will be happy to address them. Sponsors We are extremely thankful to the many great sponsors who are partnering with us this year to help make the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 a huge success. (There are still sponsorship opportunities available. For complete information, visit the sponsor page on the web site.)

  Read the article

• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - Signature encodings

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've just joined this series, I highly recommend you read the previous posts in this series, starting here, or at least these posts, covering the CLR metadata tables. Before we look at custom attribute encoding, we first need to have a brief look at how signatures are encoded in an assembly in general. Signature types There are several types of signatures in an assembly, all of which share a common base representation, and are all stored as binary blobs in the #Blob heap, referenced by an offset from various metadata tables. The types of signatures are: Method definition and method reference signatures. Field signatures Property signatures Method local variables. These are referenced from the StandAloneSig table, which is then referenced by method body headers. Generic type specifications. These represent a particular instantiation of a generic type. Generic method specifications. Similarly, these represent a particular instantiation of a generic method. All these signatures share the same underlying mechanism to represent a type Representing a type All metadata signatures are based around the ELEMENT_TYPE structure. This assigns a number to each 'built-in' type in the framework; for example, Uint16 is 0x07, String is 0x0e, and Object is 0x1c. Byte codes are also used to indicate SzArrays, multi-dimensional arrays, custom types, and generic type and method variables. However, these require some further information. Firstly, custom types (ie not one of the built-in types). These require you to specify the 4-byte TypeDefOrRef coded token after the CLASS (0x12) or VALUETYPE (0x11) element type. This 4-byte value is stored in a compressed format before being written out to disk (for more excruciating details, you can refer to the CLI specification). SzArrays simply have the array item type after the SZARRAY byte (0x1d). Multidimensional arrays follow the ARRAY element type with a series of compressed integers indicating the number of dimensions, and the size and lower bound of each dimension. Generic variables are simply followed by the index of the generic variable they refer to. There are other additions as well, for example, a specific byte value indicates a method parameter passed by reference (BYREF), and other values indicating custom modifiers. Some examples... To demonstrate, here's a few examples and what the resulting blobs in the #Blob heap will look like. Each name in capitals corresponds to a particular byte value in the ELEMENT_TYPE or CALLCONV structure, and coded tokens to custom types are represented by the type name in curly brackets. A simple field: int intField; FIELD I4 A field of an array of a generic type parameter (assuming T is the first generic parameter of the containing type): T[] genArrayField FIELD SZARRAY VAR 0 An instance method signature (note how the number of parameters does not include the return type): instance string MyMethod(MyType, int&, bool[][]); HASTHIS DEFAULT 3 STRING CLASS {MyType} BYREF I4 SZARRAY SZARRAY BOOLEAN A generic type instantiation: MyGenericType<MyType, MyStruct> GENERICINST CLASS {MyGenericType} 2 CLASS {MyType} VALUETYPE {MyStruct} For more complicated examples, in the following C# type declaration: GenericType<T> : GenericBaseType<object[], T, GenericType<T>> { ... } the Extends field of the TypeDef for GenericType will point to a TypeSpec with the following blob: GENERICINST CLASS {GenericBaseType} 3 SZARRAY OBJECT VAR 0 GENERICINST CLASS {GenericType} 1 VAR 0 And a static generic method signature (generic parameters on types are referenced using VAR, generic parameters on methods using MVAR): TResult[] GenericMethod<TInput, TResult>( TInput, System.Converter<TInput, TOutput>); GENERIC 2 2 SZARRAY MVAR 1 MVAR 0 GENERICINST CLASS {System.Converter} 2 MVAR 0 MVAR 1 As you can see, complicated signatures are recursively built up out of quite simple building blocks to represent all the possible variations in a .NET assembly. Now we've looked at the basics of normal method signatures, in my next post I'll look at custom attribute application signatures, and how they are different to normal signatures.

  Read the article

• .Net Reflector 6.5 EAP now available

  - by CliveT

  With the release of CLR 4 being so close, we’ve been working hard on getting the new C# and VB language features implemented inside Reflector. The work isn’t complete yet, but we have some of the features working. Most importantly, there are going to be changes to the Reflector object model, and we though it would be useful for people to see the changes and have an opportunity to comment on them. Before going any further, we should tell you what the EAP contains that’s different from the released version. A number of bugs have been fixed, mainly bugs that were raised via the forum. This is slightly offset by the fact that this EAP hasn’t had a whole lot of testing and there may have been new bugs introduced during the development work we’ve been doing. The C# language writer has been changed to display in and out co- and contra-variance markers on interfaces and delegates, and to display default values for optional parameters in method definitions. We also concisely display values passed by reference into COM calls. However, we do not change callsites to display calls using named parameters; this looks like hard work to get right. The forthcoming version of the C# language introduces dynamic types and dynamic calls. The new version of Reflector should display a dynamic call rather than the generated C#: dynamic target = MyTestObject(); target.Hello("Mum"); We have a few bugs in this area where we are not casting to dynamic when necessary. These have been fixed on a branch and should make their way into the next EAP. To support the dynamic features, we’ve added the types IDynamicMethodReferenceExpression, IDynamicPropertyIndexerExpression, and IDynamicPropertyReferenceExpression to the object model. These types, based on the versions without “Dynamic” in the name, reflect the fact that we don’t have full information about the method that is going to be called, but only have its name (as a string). These interfaces are going to change – in an internal version, they have been extended to include information about which parameter positions use runtime types and which use compile time types. There’s also the interface, IDynamicVariableDeclaration, that can be used to determine if a particular variable is used at dynamic call sites as a target. A couple of these language changes have also been added to the Visual Basic language writer. The new features are exposed only when the optimization level is set to .NET 4. When the level is set this high, the other standard language writers will simply display a message to say that they do not handle such an optimization level. Reflector Pro now has 4.0 as an optional compilation target and we have done some work to get the pdb generation right for these new features. The EAP version of Reflector no longer installs the add-in on startup. The first time you run the EAP, it displays the integration options dialog. You can use the checkboxes to select the versions of Visual Studio into which you want to install the EAP version. Note that you can only have one version of Reflector Pro installed in Visual Studio; if you install into a Visual Studio that has another version installed, the previous version will be removed. Please try it out and send your feedback to the EAP forum.

  Read the article

• JDeveloper 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) - New Features on ADF Desktop Integration Explained

  - by juan.ruiz

  One of the areas that introduced many new features on the latest release (11.1.1.4.0)  of JDeveloper 11g R1 is ADF Desktop integration - in this article I’ll provide an overview of these new features. New ADF Desktop Integration Ribbon in Excel - After installing the ADF desktop integration add-in and depending on the mode in which you open the desktop integration workbook, the ADF Desktop integration ribbon for design time and runtime are displayed as a separate tab within Excel. In previous version the ADF Desktop integration environment used to be placed inside the add-ins tab. Above you can see both, design time ribbon as well as runtime ribbon. On the design time ribbon you can manage the workbook and worksheet properties, worksheet component properties, diagnostics, execution and publication of the workbook. The runtime version of the ribbon is totally customizable and represents what it used to be the runtime menu on the spreadsheet, in this ribbon you can include all the operations and actions that could be executed by the end user while working with the spreadsheet data. Diagnostics - A very important aspect for developers is how to debug or verify the interactions of the client with the server, for that ADF desktop integration has provided since day one a series of diagnostics tools. In this release the diagnostics tools are more visible and are really easy to configure. You can access the client console while testing the workbook, or you can simple dump all the messages to a log file – having the ability of setting the output level for both. Security - There are a number of enhancements on security but the one with more impact for developers is tha security now is optional when using ADF Desktop Integration. Until this version every time that you wanted to work with ADFdi it was a must that the application was previously secured. In this release security is optional which means that if you have previously defined security on your application, then you must secure the ADFdi servlet as explained in one of my previous (ADD LINK) posts. In the other hand, if but the time that you start working with ADFdi you have not defined security, you can test and publish your workbooks without adding security. Support for Continuous Integration - In this release we have added tooling for continuous integration building. in the ADF desktop integration space, the concept translates to adding functionality that developers can use to publish ADFdi workbooks as part of their entire application build. For that purpose, we have a publish tool that can be easily invoke from an ANT task such that all the design time workbooks are re-published into the latest version of the application building process. Key Column - At runtime, on any worksheet containing editable tables you will notice a new additional column called the key column. The purpose of this column is to make the end user aware that all rows on the table need to be selected at the time of sorting. The users cannot alter the value of this column. From the developers points of view there are no steps required in order to have the key column included into the worksheets. Installation and Creation of New Workbooks - Both use cases can be executed now directly from JDeveloper. As part of the Tools menu options the developer can install the ADF desktop integration designer. Also, creating new workbooks that previously was done through that convert tool shipped with JDeveloper is now automatic done from the New Gallery. Creating a new ADFdi workbook adds metadata information information to the Excel workbook so you can work in design time. Other Enhancements Support for Excel 2010 and the ADF components ready-only enabled don’t allow to change its value – the cell in Excel is automatically protected, this could cause confusion among customers of previous releases.

  Read the article

• Create and Track Your Own License Keys with PowerShell

  - by BuckWoody

  SQL Server used to have  cool little tool that would let you track your licenses. Microsoft didn’t use it to limit your system or anything, it was just a place on the server where you could put that this system used this license key. I miss those days – we don’t track that any more, and I want to make sure I’m up to date on my licensing, so I made my own. Now, there are a LOT of ways you could do this. You could add an extended property in SQL Server, add a table to a tracking database, use a text file, track it somewhere else, whatever. This is just the route I chose; if you want to use some other method, feel free. Just sharing here. Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk. And this is REALLY important. I include a disclaimer at the end of my scripts, but in this case you’re modifying your registry, and that could be EXTREMELY dangerous – only do this on a test server – and I’m just showing you how I did mine. It isn’t an endorsement or anything like that, and this is a “Buck Woody” thing, NOT a Microsoft thing. See this link first, and then you can read on. OK, here’s my script: # Track your own licenses # Write a New Key to be the License Location mkdir HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck   # Write the variables - one sets the type, the other sets the number, and the last one holds the key New-ItemProperty HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck -name "SQLServerLicenseType" -value "Processor" # Notice the Dword value here - this one is a number so it needs that. Keep this on one line! New-ItemProperty HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck -name "SQLServerLicenseNumber" -propertytype DWord -value 4 New-ItemProperty HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck -name "SQLServerLicenseKey" -value "ABCD1234"   # Read them all $LicenseKey = Get-Item HKCU:\Software\Buck $Licenses = Get-ItemProperty $LicenseKey.PSPath foreach ($License in $LicenseKey.Property) { $License + "=" + $Licenses.$License }   Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. Yes, there are always multiple ways to do things, and this script may not work in every situation, for everything. It’s just a script, people. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Free RAM disappears - Memory leak?

  - by Izzy

  On a fresh started system, free reports about 1.5G used RAM (8G RAM alltogether, Ubuntu 12.04 with lightdm and plasma desktop, one konsole window started). Having the apps running I use, it still consumes not more than 2G. However, having the system running for a couple of days, more and more of my free RAM disappears -- without showing up in the list of used apps: while smem --pie=name reports less than 20% used (and 80% being available), everything else says differently. free -m for example reports on about day 7: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 7013 446 0 178 997 -/+ buffers/cache: 5836 1623 Swap: 9536 296 9240 (so you can see, it's not the buffers or the cache). Today this finally ended with the system crashing completely: the windows manager being gone, apps "hanging in the air" (frameless) -- and a popup notifying me about "too many open files". Syslog reports: kernel: [856738.020829] VFS: file-max limit 752838 reached So I closed those applications I was able to close, and killed X using Ctrl-Alt-backspace. X tried to come up again after that with failsafeX, but was unable to do so as it could no longer detect its configuration. So I switched to a console using Ctrl-Alt-F2, captured all information I could think of (vmstat, free, smem, proc/meminfo, lsof, ps aux), and finally rebooted. X again came up with failsafeX; this time I told it to "recover from my backed-up configuration", then switched to a console and successfully used startx to bring up the graphical environment. I have no real clue to what is causing this issue -- though it must have to do either with X itself, or with some user processes running on X -- as after killing X, free -m output looked like this: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 2677 4781 0 62 419 -/+ buffers/cache: 2195 5263 Swap: 9536 59 9477 (~3.5GB being freed) -- to compare with the output after a fresh start: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 1483 5975 0 63 730 -/+ buffers/cache: 689 6769 Swap: 9536 0 9536 Two more helpful outputs are provided by memstat -u. Shortly before the crash: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 200 207 616 whoopsie 1 764 740 817 2300 colord 1 3200 836 894 2156 root 62 70404 352996 382260 569920 izzy 80 177508 1465416 1519266 1851840 After having X killed: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 184 188 356 izzy 1 1400 708 739 1080 whoopsie 1 848 668 826 1772 colord 1 3204 804 888 1728 root 62 54876 131708 149950 267860 And after a restart, back in X: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 212 217 628 whoopsie 1 0 1536 1880 5096 colord 1 0 3740 4217 7936 root 54 0 148668 180911 345132 izzy 47 0 370928 437562 915056 Edit: Just added two graphs from my monitoring system. Interesting to see: everytime when there's a "jump" in memory consumption, CPU peaks as well. Just found this right now -- and it reminds me of another indicator pointing to X itself: Often when returning to my machine and unlocking the screen, I found something doing heavvy work on my CPU. Checking with top, it always turned out to be /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch -background none. So after this long explanation, finally my questions: What could be the possible causes? How can I better identify involved processes/applications? What steps could be taken to avoid this behaviour -- short from rebooting the machine all X days? I was running 8.04 (Hardy) for about 5 years on my old machine, never having experienced the like (always more than 100 days uptime, before rebooting for e.g. kernel updates). This now is a complete new machine with a fresh install of 8.04. In case it matters, some specs: AMD A4-3400 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, using the open-source ati/radeon driver (so no fglrx installed), 8GB RAM, WDC WD1002FAEX-0 hdd (1TB), Asus F1A75-V Evo mainboard. Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit with KDE4/Plasma. Apps usually open more or less permanently include Evolution, Firefox, konsole (with Midnight Commander running inside, about 4 tabs), and LibreOffice -- plus occasionally Calibre, Gimp and Moneyplex (banking software I'm already using for almost 20 years now, in a version which did fine on Hardy).

  Read the article

• General Availability of Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in 12.1.0.1.0

  - by user810030

  We are pleased to announce the General Availability of Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in 12.1.0.1.0, an integral part of Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. The combination of Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control and the Application Management Suite combines functionality that was available in the standalone Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle’s Real User Experience Insight product and the Configuration & Compliance capabilities to provide the most complete solution for managing Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The features that were available in the standalone management packs are now packaged into the Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in, which is now fully certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control. This latest plug-in extends Cloud Control with E-Business Suite specific system management capabilities and features enhanced change management support. This new release offers the following key enhancements: General: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Base Platform uptake: All components of the management suite are certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control. Security: Privilege Delegation: The Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in now extends Enterprise Manager’s privilege delegation through Sudo and PowerBroker to Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in host targets.  Privileges and Roles for Managing Oracle E-Business Suite: This release includes new ready-to-use target and resource privileges to monitor, manage, and perform Change Management functionality.  Cloning: Named Credentials Uptake in Cloning: The Clone module transactions now let users leverage the Named Credential feature introduced in Enterprise Manager 12c, thereby passing all the benefits of Named Credentials features in Enterprise Manager to the Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in users.  Smart Clone improvements: The new and improved Smart Clone UI supports the adding of "pre and post" custom steps to a copy of the ready-to-use cloning deployment procedure. Now a user can pass parameters to the custom steps through the interview screen of the UI as well as pass ready-to-use parameters to the custom steps.  Change Management Enhancements Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite provides a centralized view to monitor and orchestrate changes (both functional and technical) across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite systems. In this latest release, it provides even more control and flexibility in managing Oracle E-Business Suite changes. Customization Manager: Support for longer file names: Customization Manager now handles file names up to thirty characters in length.  Patch Manager: Queuing of Patch Manager Runs: This feature allows patch runs to queue up if Patch Manager detects a specific target is in a blackout state.  Multi-node system patching: The patch run interview has been enhanced to allow Enterprise Manager Administrator to choose which nodes adpatch will run on.  New AD Administration Options: The patch run interview has been extended to include AD Administration Options "Relink Application Programs", "Generate Product Jars Files", "Generate Report Files", and "Generate Form Files".  Release Technical Details Product documentation for the plug-in is available on My Oracle Support as note 1434392.1.  The Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in can be accessed in one of the following ways:  Fresh install  Enterprise Manager Store  Oracle Software Delivery Cloud Upgrades  Oracle Technology Network Please refer to the Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Guide for further details.  Related Software Component Oracle Real User Experience Insight 12.1.0.0.1  Product documentation is available on Oracle Technology Network in the "Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 1 (12.1) Documentation" set under the "Associated Document" tab. (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26370_01/index.htm)  Product may be downloaded individually from Oracle Technology Network software download page for Oracle Enterprise Manager under "Additional Enterprise Manager Downloads." (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/grid-control/downloads/index.html)  Product may also be downloaded individually from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. Select "Oracle Enterprise Manager" product pack, "Oracle Real User Experience Insight 12c Release 1 Media Pack for x8  Collateral Can be accessed on the Application Management Page on Oracle Technology Network

  Read the article

• Surviving MATLAB and R as a Hardcore Programmer

  - by dsimcha

  I love programming in languages that seem geared towards hardcore programmers. (My favorites are Python and D.) MATLAB is geared towards engineers and R is geared towards statisticians, and it seems like these languages were designed by people who aren't hardcore programmers and don't think like hardcore programmers. I always find them somewhat awkward to use, and to some extent I can't put my finger on why. Here are some issues I have managed to identify: (Both): The extreme emphasis on vectors and matrices to the extent that there are no true primitives. (Both): The difficulty of basic string manipulation. (Both): Lack of or awkwardness in support for basic data structures like hash tables and "real", i.e. type-parametric and nestable, arrays. (Both): They're really, really slow even by interpreted language standards, unless you bend over backwards to vectorize your code. (Both): They seem to not be designed to interact with the outside world. For example, both are fairly bulky programs that take a while to launch and seem to not be designed to make simple text filter programs easy to write. Furthermore, the lack of good string processing makes file I/O in anything but very standard forms near impossible. (Both): Object orientation seems to have a very bolted-on feel. Yes, you can do it, but it doesn't feel much more idiomatic than OO in C. (Both): No obvious, simple way to get a reference type. No pointers or class references. For example, I have no idea how you roll your own linked list in either of these languages. (MATLAB): You can't put multiple top level functions in a single file, encouraging very long functions and cut-and-paste coding. (MATLAB): Integers apparently don't exist as a first class type. (R): The basic builtin data structures seem way too high level and poorly documented, and never seem to do quite what I expect given my experience with similar but lower level data structures. (R): The documentation is spread all over the place and virtually impossible to browse or search. Even D, which is often knocked for bad documentation and is still fairly alpha-ish, is substantially better as far as I can tell. (R): At least as far as I'm aware, there's no good IDE for it. Again, even D, a fairly alpha-ish language with a small community, does better. In general, I also feel like MATLAB and R could be easily replaced by plain old libraries in more general-purpose langauges, if sufficiently comprehensive libraries existed. This is especially true in newer general purpose languages that include lots of features for library writers. Why do R and MATLAB seem so weird to me? Are there any other major issues that you've noticed that may make these languages come off as strange to hardcore programmers? When their use is necessary, what are some good survival tips? Edit: I'm seeing one issue from some of the answers I've gotten. I have a strong personal preference, when I analyze data, to have one script that incorporates the whole pipeline. This implies that a general purpose language needs to be used. I hate having to write a script to "clean up" the data and spit it out, then another to read it back in a completely different environment, etc. I find the friction of using MATLAB/R for some of my work and a completely different language with a completely different address space and way of thinking for the rest to be a huge source of friction. Furthermore, I know there are glue layers that exist, but they always seem to be horribly complicated and a source of friction.

  Read the article

• Deploying an SSL Application to Windows Azure &ndash; The Dark Secret

  - by ToStringTheory

  When working on an application that had been in production for some time, but was about to have a shopping cart added to it, the necessity for SSL certificates came up.  When ordering the certificates through the vendor, the certificate signing request (CSR) was generated through the providers (http://register.com) web interface, and within a day, we had our certificate. At first, I thought that the certification process would be the hard part…  Little did I know that my fun was just beginning… The Problem I’ll be honest, I had never really secured a site before with SSL.  This was a learning experience for me in the first place, but little did I know that I would be learning more than the simple procedure.  I understood a bit about SSL already, the mechanisms in how it works – the secure handshake, CA’s, chains, etc…  What I didn’t realize was the importance of the CSR in the whole process.  Apparently, when the CSR is created, a public key is created at the same time, as well as a private key that is stored locally on the PC that generated the request.  When the certificate comes back and you import it back into IIS (assuming you used IIS to generate the CSR), all of the information is combined together and the SSL certificate is added into your store. Since at the time the certificate had been ordered for our site, the selection to use the online interface to generate the CSR was chosen, the certificate came back to us in 5 separate files: A root certificate – (*.crt file) An intermediate certifcate – (*.crt file) Another intermediate certificate – (*.crt file) The SSL certificate for our site – (*.crt file) The private key for our certificate – (*.key file) Well, in case you don’t know much about Windows Azure and SSL certificates, the first thing you should learn is that certificates can only be uploaded to Azure if they are in a PFX package – securable by a password.  Also, in the case of our SSL certificate, you need to include the Private Key with the file.  As you can see, we didn’t have a PFX file to upload. If you don’t get the simple PFX from your hosting provider, but rather the multiple files, you will soon find out that the process has turned from something that should be simple – to one that borders on a circle of hell… Probably between the fifth and seventh somewhere… The Solution The solution is to take the files that make up the certificates chain and key, and combine them into a file that can be imported into your local computers store, as well as uploaded to Windows Azure.  I can not take the credit for this information, as I simply researched a while before finding out how to do this. Download the OpenSSL for Windows toolkit (Win32 OpenSSL v1.0.1c) Install the OpenSSL for Windows toolkit Download and move all of your certificate files to an easily accessible location (you'll be pointing to them in the command prompt, so I put them in a subdirectory of the OpenSSL installation) Open a command prompt Navigate to the folder where you installed OpenSSL Run the following command: openssl pkcs12 -export –out {outcert.pfx} –inkey {keyfile.key}      –in {sslcert.crt} –certfile {ca1.crt} –certfile (ca2.crt) From this command, you will get a file, outcert.pfx, with the sum total of your ssl certificate (sslcert.crt), private key {keyfile.key}, and as many CA/chain files as you need {ca1.crt, ca2.crt}. Taking this file, you can then import it into your own IIS in one operation, instead of importing each certificate individually.  You can also upload the PFX to Azure, and once you add the SSL certificate links to the cloud project in Visual Studio, your good to go! Conclusion When I first looked around for a solution to this problem, there were not many places online that had the information that I was looking for.  While what I ended up having to do may seem obvious, it isn’t for everyone, and I hope that this can at least help one developer out there solve the problem without hours of work!

  Read the article

• Today's Links (6/30/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  James Gosling Says He Doesn't Care About Java But here's the rest of the story: "What I really care about is the Java Virtual Machine as a concept," says Gosling, "because that is the thing that ties it all together; it's the thing that makes Java the language possible; it's the thing that makes things work on all kinds of different platforms; and it makes all kinds of languages able to coexist." Virtual Developer Day: SOA Accelerate Your Development with Oracle SOA Suite. Learn how in this FREE on-line workshop with Hands-on labs July 12th 9 am to 1:30 PM PST" July 12th 9 am to 1:30 PM PST Podcast: Toronto Architect Day Panel Discussion Part 3 (of 4) is now available, in which the panel (including Oracle ACE Director Cary Millsap and InfoQ editor and co-founder Floyd Marinescu) discusses public vs private cloud as the best strategy for small businesses and start-ups. WebLogic Weekly for June 27th, 2011 | James Bayer Bayer shares the latest resources for those with WebLogic on the brain. Griffiths Waite at Oracle Open World | Mark Simpson Oracle ACE Director Mark Simpson share information on the presentations he's scheduled to give at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco 2011. Kscope Solid Service Bus Implementations Peter Paul van de Beek's Kscope11 presentation "is aimed at supporting architects and especially developers to choose the right integration infrastructure for a job." Migration To Java EE 6 With Spring 3 - ...Could Become "Interesting" | Adam Bien "Put simply, big data implies datasets so large they can't normally be processed using a standard transactional database," says David Dorf. "The term 'noSQL' is often used in this context as well." Book Review: "Designing With the Mind In Mind" | Abhinav Agarwal According to Abhinav Agarwal, Jeff Johnson's new book is about "the theory of how the mind perceives information, of how humans understand what they read, and how our eyes are attuned to paying attention to not just what's happening in front of us but also at the periphery of our vision." BPM 11g Advanced Workshop | Martien van den Akker Martien van den Akker shares his thoughts on both the workshop he recently attended and on the Oracle BPM 11g product. Fusion Applications - What You Need To Know: Product Families | Floyd Teter "Fusion Applications are organized into seven groups of related products called Product Families," observes Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter. "While the product features are organized according to the Business Process Model and can cross the boundaries of product families, the product family groupings are an easy way to wrap your mind around Fusion Apps." Grid Control: Refreshing Weblogic Domains | Dave Best Dave Best shares tips for avoiding problems when using grid control to centrally manage/monitor your environment. Webcast: Oracle to Announce Datanomic Integration Plans The combination of Datanomic technology and the previous acquisition of Silver Creek Systems will deliver a complete, integrated and best-of-breed solution for Data Quality. Learn about Oracle’s strategy and product plans and how the new products acquired from Datanomic will impact your organization. July 19, 2011, 8:00am PT / 11:00am ET. Speakers include Michael Weingartner (Vice President, Product Development, Oracle), Martin Boyd (Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle), and Dain Hansen (Director, Product Marketing, Fusion Middleware, Oracle).

  Read the article

• Sharing configuration settings between Windows Azure roles

  - by theo.spears

  If you are working on a medium-large Windows Azure project it's likely it will involve more than one role, for example separate web and worker roles. Unfortunately although all the windows azure configuration settings are stored in a single cscfg file, there is no way to share configuration settings between multiple roles. This means you have to duplicate common settings like connection strings across all your roles. There is an open Connect issue about this topic, but Microsoft have not said when they will fix it. In the mean time I've put together a dirty dirty hack cunning workaround that creates a fake role containing your shared configuration settings, and copies it to all roles as part of the build process. Here's how you set it up: 1. Download the zip file attached to this post, and unzip it into the folder containing your Azure project (not your solution folder). 2. Edit your csdef and cscfg files to include the placeholder project ServiceDefinition.csdef<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="AzureSpendNotifier" http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition%22"http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="GLOBAL"> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="ExampleSetting" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </WorkerRole> <WorkerRole name="MyWorker"> <ConfigurationSettings> </ConfigurationSettings> </WorkerRole> <WebRole name="MyWeb"> <Sites> <Site name="Web"> <Bindings> <Binding name="WebEndpoint" endpointName="WebEndpoint" /> </Bindings> </Site> </Sites> <ConfigurationSettings> </ConfigurationSettings> </WebRole> </ServiceDefinition> ServiceConfiguration.cscfg<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="AzureSpendNotifier" xmlns=http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="GLOBAL"> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="ExampleSetting" value="Hello World" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Instances count="1" /> </Role> <Role name="MyWorker"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> <Role name="MyWeb"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> It is important that all your roles contain a ConfigurationSettings entry in both cscfg and csdef files, even if it's empty- otherwise the shared configuration settings will not be inserted. 3. Open your azure deployment (.ccproj) project in notepad, and add the highlighted line below: ... <Import Project="$(CloudExtensionsDir)Microsoft.CloudService.targets" /> <Import Project="globalsettings/globalsettings.targets" /> </Project> It is important you add this below the Microsoft.CloudService.targets import line, as it replaces some of the rules defined in that file. Visual studio will prompt you to reload the project, say yes. At this point you will have a new Azure role called 'GLOBAL' with settings you can edit through the visual studio properties panel as normal. This role will never be deployed, but any settings you add to it will be copied to all your other roles when deployed or tested locally within visual studio.

  Read the article

• Webcast Q&A: Demystifying External Authorization

  - by B Shashikumar

  Thanks to everyone who joined us on our webcast with SANS Institute on "Demystifying External Authorization". Also a special thanks to Tanya Baccam from SANS for sharing her experiences reviewing Oracle Entitlements Server. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay of the webcast here.  Here is a compilation of the slides that were used on today's webcast.  SANS Institute Product Review: Oracle Entitlements Server We have captured the Q&A from the webcast for those who couldn't attend. Q: Is Oracle ADF integrated with Oracle Entitlements Server (OES) ? A:  In Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and later, Oracle ADF, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle SOA Suite and other middleware products are all built on Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS). OPSS privodes many security functions like authentication, audit, credential stores, token validaiton, etc. OES is the authorization solution underlying OPSS. And OES 11g unifies different authorization mechanisms including Java2/ABAC/RBAC.  Q: Which portal frameworks support the use of OES policies for portal entitlement decisions? A:  Many portals including Oracle WebCenter 11g  run natively on top of OES. The authorization engine in WebCenter is OES. Besides, OES offers out of the box integration with Microsoft SharePoint. So SharePoint sites, sub sites, web parts, navigation items, document access control can all be secured with OES. Several other portals have also been secured with OES ex: IBM websphere portal Q:  How do we enforce Seperation of Duties (SoD) rules using OES (also how does that integrate with a product like OIA) ? A:  A product like OIM or OIA can be used to set up and govern SoD policies. OES enforces these policies at run time. Role mapping policies in OES can assign roles dynamically to users under certain conditions. So this makes it simple to enforce SoD policies inside an application at runtime. Q:  Our web application has objects like buttons, text fields, drop down lists etc. is there any ”autodiscovery” capability that allows me to use/see those web page objects so you can start building policies over those objects? or how does it work? A:  There ae few different options with OES. When you build an app, and make authorization calls with the app in the test environment, you can put OES in discovery mode and have OES register those authorization calls and decisions. Instead of doing  this after the fact, an application like Oracle iFlex has built-in UI controls where when the app is running, a script can intercept authorization calls and migrate those over to OES. And in Oracle ADF, a lot of resources are protected so pages, task flows and other resources be registered without OES knowing about them. Q: Does current Oracle Fusion application use OES ? The documentation does not seem to indicate it. A:  The current version of Fusion Apps is using a preview version of OES. Soon it will be repalced with OES 11g.  Q: Can OES secure mobile apps? A: Absolutely. Nowadays users are bringing their own devices such as a a smartphone or tablet to work. With the Oracle IDM platform, we can tie identity context into the access management stack. With OES we can make use of context to enforce authorization for users accessing apps from mobile devices. For example: we can take into account different elements like authentication scheme, location, device type etc and tie all that information into an authorization decision.  Q:  Does Oracle Entitlements Server (OES) have an ESAPI implementation? A:  OES is an authorization solution. ESAPI/OWASP is something we include in our platform security solution for all oracle products, not specifically in OES Q:  ESAPI has an authorization API. Can I use that API to access OES? A:  If the API supports an interface / sspi model that can be configured to invoke an external authz system through some mechanism then yes

  Read the article

• Expanding the Partner Ecosystem with Third-Party Plug-ins

  - by Joe Diemer

  Oracle Enterprise Manager’s extensibility capabilities are designed to allow customers and partners to adapt Enterprise Manager for management of heterogeneous environments with Plug-ins and Connectors.  Third-party developers continue to take advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager’s Extensibility Development Kit (EDK) to build plug-ins to Enterprise Manager 12c, such as F5’s BIG IP Plug-in and Entuity’s Eye of the Storm Network Management Plug-In.  Partners can also validate their plug-ins through the Oracle Validated Integration (OVI) program, which assures customers that the plug-in has been tested and is functionally and technically sound, is designed in a reliable and standardized manner, and operates and performs as documented.   Two very recent examples of partners which have beta versions of their plug-ins are Blue Medora's VMware vSphere plug-in and the NetApp Storage plug-in.  VMware vSphere Plug-in by Blue Medora Blue Medora, an Oracle Partner Network (OPN) “Gold” member, which just announced that it is now signing up customers to try a beta version of their new VMware vSphere plug-in for Enterprise Manager 12c.  According to Blue Medora, the vSphere plug-in monitors critical VMware metrics (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, etc) at the Host, VM, Cluster and Resource Pool levels.  It has minimal performance impact via an “agentless” approach that requires no installation directly on VMware servers.  It has discovery capabilities for VMware Datacenters, ESX Hosts, Clusters, Virtual Machines, and Datastores.  It offers integration of native VMware Events into Enterprise Manager, and it provides over 300 VMware-related health, availability, performance, and configuration metrics.  It comes with more than 30 out-of-the-box pre-defined thresholds and can manage VMware via a series of jobs split between cluster, host and VM target types.The company reports that the Enterprise Manager 12c plug-in supports vSphere versions 4.0, 4.5 and 5.0.  Platforms supported include Linux 64-bit, Windows, AIX and Solaris SPARC and x86.  Information about the plug-in, including how to sign up for the beta, is available at their web site at http://bluemedora.com after selecting the "Products" tab. NetApp Storage Plug-in NetApp believes the combination of storage system monitoring with comprehensive management of Oracle systems with Enterprise Manager will help customers reduce the cost and complexity of managing applications that rely on NetApp storage and Oracle technologies.  So, NetApp built a plug-in and reports that it has comprehensive availability and performance information for NetApp storage systems.  Using the plug-in, Oracle Enterprise Manager customers with NetApp storage solutions can track the association between databases and storage components and thereby respond to faults and IO performance bottlenecks quickly. With the latest configuration management capabilities, one can also perform drift analysis to make sure all storage systems are configured as per established gold standards. The company is also now signing up beta customers, which can be done at the NetApp Communities site at https://communities.netapp.com/groups/netapp-storage-system-plug-in-for-oem12c-beta. Learn More about Enterprise Manager Extensibility More plug-ins from other partners are soon to come, which I'll be reporting on them here.  To learn more about Enterprise Manager and how customers and partners can build plug-ins using the EDK to manage a multi-vendor data center, go to http://oracle.com/enterprisemanager in the Heterogeneous Management solution area.  The site also lists the plug-ins available with information on how to obtain them.  More info about the Oracle Validated Integration program can be found at the OPN Enterprise Manager Knowledge Zone in the "Develop" tab.

  Read the article

• #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.

  Read the article

• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: Fishbowl Solutions

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Today, I give you the final entry in the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge, held last week during OpenWorld. This one comes from Friend of the ‘Lab and Fishbowl Solutions (@fishbowle20) hacker, John Sim (@jrsim_uix), whom you might remember from his XBox Kinect demo at COLLABORATE 12 (presentation slides and abstract) hacks and other exploits with WebCenter. We put this challenge together specifically for developers like John, who like to experiment with new tools and push the envelope of what’s possible and build cool things, and as you can see from his entry John did just that, mashing together Google Maps and Oracle Social Network into a mobile app built with PhoneGap that uses the device’s camera and GPS to keep teams on the move in touch. He calls it a Mobile GeoTagging Solution, but I think Avengers Assemble! would have equally descriptive, given that was obviously his inspiration. Here’s his description of the mobile app: My proposed solution was to design and simplify GeoLocation mapping, and automate updates for users and teams on the move; who don’t have access to a laptop or want to take their ipads out – but allow them to make quick updates to OSN and upload photos taken from their mobile device – there and then. As part of this; the plan was to include a rules engine that could be configured by the user to allow the device to automatically update and post messages when they arrived at a set location(s). Inspiration for this came from on{x} – automate your life. Unfortunately, John didn’t make it to the conference to show off his hard work in person, but luckily, he had a colleague from Fishbowl and a video to showcase his work.    Here are some shots of John’s mobile app for your viewing pleasure: John’s thinking is sound. Geolocation is usually relegated to consumer use cases, thanks to services like foursquare, but distributed teams working on projects out in the world definitely need a way to stay in contact. Consider a construction job. Different contractors all converge on a single location, and time is money. Rather than calling or texting each other and risking a distracted driving accident, an app like John’s allows everyone on the job to see exactly where the other contractors are. Using his GPS rules, they could easily be notified about how close each is to the site, definitely useful when you have a flooring contractor sitting idle, waiting for an electrician to finish the wiring. The best part is that the project manager or general contractor could stay updated on all the action (or inaction) using Oracle Social Network, either sitting at a desk using the browser app or desktop client or on the go, using one of the native mobile apps built for Oracle Social Network. I can see this being used by insurance adjusters too, and really any team that, erm, assembles at a given spot. Of course, it’s also useful for meeting at the pub after the day’s work is done. Beyond people, this solution could also be implemented for physical objects that are in route to a destination. Say you’re a customer waiting on rail shipment or a package delivery. You could track your valuable’s whereabouts easily as they report their progress via checkins. If they deviated from the GPS rules, you’d be notified. You might even be able to get a picture into Oracle Social Network with some light hacking. Thanks to John and his colleagues at Fishbowl for participating in our challenge. We hope everyone had a good experience. Make sure to check out John’s blog post on his work and the experience using Oracle Social Network. Although this is the final, official entry we had, tomorrow, I’ll show you the work of someone who finished code, but wasn’t able to make the judging event. Stay tuned.

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• Using Teleriks new LINQ implementation to connect to MySQL

  Last week Telerik released a new LINQ implementation that is simple to use and produces domain models very fast. Built on top of the enterprise grade OpenAccess ORM, you can connect to any database that OpenAccess can connect to such as: SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Azure, VistaDB, etc. Today I will show you how to build a domain model using MySQL as your back end. To get started, you have to download MySQL 5.x and the MySQL Workbench and also, as my colleague Alexander Filipov at Telerik reminded me, make sure you install the MySQL .NET Connector, which is available here.  I like to use Northwind, ok it gives me the warm and fuzzies, so I ran a script to produce Northwind on my MySQL server. There are many ways you can get Northwind on your MySQL database, here is a helpful blog to get your started. I also manipulated the first record to indicate that I am in MySQL and gave a look via the MySQL Workbench. Ok, time to build our model! Start up the Domain Model wizard by right clicking on the project in Visual Studio (I have a Web project) and select Add|New Item and choose Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model from the new item list. When the wizard comes up, choose MySQL as your back end and enter in the name of your saved MySQL connection. If you dont have a saved MySQL connection set up in Visual Studio, click on New Connection and enter in the proper connection information. *Note, this is where you need to have the MySQL .NET connector installed. After you set your connection to the MySQL database server, you have to choose which tables to include in your model. Just for fun, I will choose all of them. Give your model a name, like NorthwindEntities and click finish. That is it. Now lets consume the model with ASP .net. I created a simple page that also has a GridView on it. On my page load I wrote this code, by now it should look very familiar, a simple LINQ query filtering customers by country (Germany) and binding the results to the grid.  1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: if (!IsPostBack) 4: { 5: //a reference to the data context 6: NorthwindEntities dat = new NorthwindEntities(); 7: //LINQ Statement 8: var result = from c in dat.Customers 9: where c.Country == "Germany" 10: select c; 11: //Databinding to the Gridview 12: GridView1.DataSource = result; 13: GridView1.DataBind(); 14: } 15: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre{ font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/}.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }.csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em;}.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } F5 produces the following. Tomorrow Ill show how to take the same model and create an Astoria/OData data feed. Technorati Tags: MySQL 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.

  Read the article

• Browser Specific Extensions of HttpClient

  - by imran_ku07

          Introduction:                     REpresentational State Transfer (REST) causing/leaving a great impact on service/API development because it offers a way to access a service without requiring any specific library by embracing HTTP and its features. ASP.NET Web API makes it very easy to quickly build RESTful HTTP services. These HTTP services can be consumed by a variety of clients including browsers, devices, machines, etc. With .NET Framework 4.5, we can use HttpClient class to consume/send/receive RESTful HTTP services(for .NET Framework 4.0, HttpClient class is shipped as part of ASP.NET Web API). The HttpClient class provides a bunch of helper methods(for example, DeleteAsync, PostAsync, GetStringAsync, etc.) to consume a HTTP service very easily. ASP.NET Web API added some more extension methods(for example, PutAsJsonAsync, PutAsXmlAsync, etc) into HttpClient class to further simplify the usage. In addition, HttpClient is also an ideal choice for writing integration test for a RESTful HTTP service. Since a browser is a main client of any RESTful API, it is also important to test the HTTP service on a variety of browsers. RESTful service embraces HTTP headers and different browsers send different HTTP headers. So, I have created a package that will add overloads(with an additional Browser parameter) for almost all the helper methods of HttpClient class. In this article, I will show you how to use this package.           Description:                     Create/open your test project and install ImranB.SystemNetHttp.HttpClientExtensions NuGet package. Then, add this using statement on your class, using ImranB.SystemNetHttp;                     Then, you can start using any HttpClient helper method which include the additional Browser parameter. For example,  var client = new HttpClient(myserver); var task = client.GetAsync("http://domain/myapi", Browser.Chrome); task.Wait(); var response = task.Result; .                     Here is the definition  of Browser, public enum Browser { Firefox = 0, Chrome = 1, IE10 = 2, IE9 = 3, IE8 = 4, IE7 = 5, IE6 = 6, Safari = 7, Opera = 8, Maxthon = 9, }                     These extension methods will make it very easy to write browser specific integration test. It will also help HTTP service consumer to mimic the request sending behavior of a browser. This package source is available on github. So, you can grab the source and add some additional behavior on the top of these extensions.         Summary:                     Testing a REST API is an important aspect of service development and today, testing with a browser is crucial. In this article, I showed how to write integration test that will mimic the browser request sending behavior. I also showed an example. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.

  Read the article

• Weird SSIS Configuration Error

  - by Christopher House

  I ran into an interesting SSIS issue that I thought I'd share in hopes that it may save someone from bruising their head after repeatedly banging it on the desk like I did.  I was trying to setup what I believe is referred to as "indirect configuration" in SSIS.  This is where you store your configuration in some repository like a database or a file, then store the location of that repository in an environment variable and use that to configure the connection to your configuration repository.  In my specific situation, I was using a SQL database.  I had this all working, but for reasons I'll not bore you with, I had to move my SSIS development to a new VM last week.  When I got my new VM, I set about creating a new package.  I finished up development on the package and started setting up configuration.  I created an OLE DB connection that pointed to my configuration table then went through the configuration wizard to have the connection string for this connection set through my environment variable.  I then went through the wizard to set another property through a value stored in the configuration table.  When I got to the point where you select the connection, my connection wasn't in the list: As you can see in the screen capture above, the ConfigurationDb connection isn't in the list of available SQL connections in the configuration wizard.  Strange.  I canceled out of the wizard, went to the properties for ConfigurationDb, tested the connection and it was successful.  I went back to the wizard again and this time ConfigurationDb was there.  I completed the wizard then went to test my package.  Unfortunately the package wouldn't run, I got the following error: Unfortunately, googling for this error code didn't help much as none of the results appears related to package configuration.  I did notice that when I went back through the package configuration and tried to edit a previously saved config entry,  I was getting the following error: I checked the connection string I had stored in my environment variable and noticed that indeed, it did not have a provider name.  I didn't recall having included one on my previous VM, but I figured I'd include it just to see what happened.  That made no difference at all.  After a day and a half of trying to figure out what the problem was, I'm pleased to report that through extensive trial and error, I have resolved the error. As it turns out, the person who setup this new VM for me named the server SQLSERVER2008.  This meant my configuration connection string was: Initial Catalog=SSISConfigDb;Data Source=SQLSERVER2008;Integrated Security=SSPI; Just for the heck of it, I tried changing it to: Initial Catalog=SSISConfigDb;Data Source=(local);Integrated Security=SSPI; That did the trick!  As soon as I restarted BIDS, I was able to run the package with no errors at all.  Crazy.  So, the moral of the story is, don't name your server SQLSERVER2008 if you want SSIS configuration to work when using SQL as your config store.

  Read the article

• SOA Community Newsletter May 2014

  - by JuergenKress

  Registration for the Fusion Middleware Summer Camps 2014 is open – Register asap for one of our bootcamps August 4th – 8th 2014 in Lisbon. Please read details and pre-requisitions careful before you register. We expect that like in the past, the conference will be booked out soon! If you can’t make it to Lisbon attend our SOA Suite 11c free on-demand Bootcamp or  Managing the Complexity of IoT online trainings. With more than 5000 customers, SOA Suite Achieves Significant Customer Adoption and Industry Recognition.Thanks to all our SOA Specialized partners for making our joins SOA customers successful! As a summary of the Industrial SOA series we published the Podcast Show Notes: SOA and Cloud - Where's This Relationship Going? Make sure you use the Oracle Demo Systems for your customer presentations. The demo systems are hosted by Oracle and include complete scenarios based on the latest Middleware version like the new B2B SOA Suite Demo System! For local presentations without fast internet use the SOA/BPM 11.1.1.7.1 Virtual Machine and Case Management Sample. At our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required) you can get new IoT presentations for Location Based Offers for Banking & Whitepaper and online Webcast & Utility presentation. In this newsletter you will find many articles about OSB: OSB 11g – A Hands-on Tutorial & Using Split-Joins in OSB Services for parallel processing of messages & OSB, Service Callouts and OQL & Working with Oracle Security Token Service. Thanks for sharing all the additional SOA articles within the community: How to configure Oracle SOA/BPM task auto release & Controlling BPEL process flow at runtime & Upgrading to Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS6 (11.1.1.7)? Do this. & BPEL and BPM's performance monitoring using DMS & SOA 11g - Create RESTful Service In Oracle SOA & Wrong timezone causes TopLink warning in SOA suite. Highlight of the BPM and ACM section is the IDC BPM vendor report. The new bundle Patch including the ACM UI is now available. If you want to learn more about ACM, get the ACM training material at our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). A great demo for your next BPM presentation is the BPM iPad app. It’s simpleMobile BPM is Not An Option. It’s a Necessity. Thanks for sharing all the additional BPM articles within the community: BPM update adds Case Management Web Interface and REST APIs & Implementing deadline functionality with Oracle Adaptive Case Management & BPM 11g Timeout Heuristics & Humantask Assignment: Names and Expressions Assignment via Rules. In our last section Architecture, it is all about design. Usability is a key factor for customer satisfaction, worth to spend some time and read the Simplified User Experience Design Patterns eBook. Great blueprint for your project! See you in Lisbon! To read the newsletter please visit www.tinyurl.com/soaNewsMay2014 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: newsletter,SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• Pages in IE render differently when served through the ASP.NET Development server and Production Ser

  - by rajbk

  You see differences in the way IE renders your web application locally on the ASP.NET Development server compared to your production server. Comparing the response from both servers including response headers and CSS show no difference. The issue may occur because of a setting in IE. In IE, go to Tools –> Compatibility ViewSettings. The checkbox “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” turned on forces IE8 to display the web application content in a way similar to how Internet Explorer 7 handles standards mode web pages. Since your local web server is considered to be in the intranet zone, IE uses “Compatibility View” to render your pages. While you could uncheck this setting in or propagate the change to all developers through group policy settings, a different way is described below. To force IE to mimic the behavior of a certain version of IE when rendering the pages, you use the meta element  to include a “X-UA-Compatible” http-equiv header in  your web page or have it sent as part of the header by adding it to your web.config file. The values are listed below: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=4"> <!-- IE5 mode --> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7.5"> <!-- IE7 mode --> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=100"> <!-- IE8 mode --> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=a"> <!-- IE5 mode --> This value can also be set in web.config like so: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <configuration> <system.webServer> <httpProtocol> <customHeaders> <clear /> <add name="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=EmulateIE7" /> </customHeaders> </httpProtocol> </system.webServer> </configuration> The setting can added in the IIS metabase as described here. Similarly, you can do the same in Apache by adding the directive in httpd.conf <Location /store> Header set X-UA-Compatible “IE=EmulateIE7” </Location> Even though it can be done on a site level, I recommend you do it on a per application level to avoid confusing the developer. References Defining Document Compatibility Implementing the META Switch on IIS Implementing the META Switch on Apache

  Read the article

• Launching Ops Center 12c

  - by user12601629

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is most ambitious version of the Ops Center tooling that we've ever released. I think that make it appropriate that we launched it in grand style! When it became clear we were going to be complete with the 12c final release about this time of year, the marketing team proposed that we roll the launch of 12c into Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo.  I thought that sounded like a fine idea!  You see, I have always loved Japan.  I even studied a bit of Japanese language back in school. OpenWorld Tokyo was an outstanding even this year.  It was held in Roppongi, one of the most stylish districts in Tokyo. And, to make things even better, the Sakura (cherry blossoms) were blooming.  If you've never been in Japan for cherry blossom season, it's a must see!  Here are a couple of pics for you. Here is a picture from Roppongi, near the conference.  Here's a picture near the Imperial Palace.  A couple of friends from the local sales team took me here before my flight out. So, now back to the product launch! We choose to launch the product in John Fowler's "Engineered Systems" keynote address.  It made perfect sense because of the close ties of Ops Center to the Systems portfolio of products.  It was a packed house for the keynote.  Here's a picture I took just before we started -- there were also hundreds more people in "overflow" rooms in other parts of the venue. Here's a picture of me on stage during the launch. While there are countless new features in Ops Center 12c that customers will love, I had to limit myself to discussing just three. Mission Critical Clouds Solaris 11 Engineered Systems So, what does Mission Critical Cloud mean?  It means we've expanded EM's cloud capabilities in a couple of key areas. First, we've expanded the "self service provisioning" capabilities we have to include SPARC -- not just x86.  Now you can build clouds of Solaris Zones with ease!  Second, we've much more deeply integrated high-end storage and network management into the cloud layers.  These may our IaaS story is now much more powerful! For Solaris 11, we didn't simply port our monitoring agent to S11.  That would have been easy, but also boring! We support S11 deeply.  Full access to the power of the IPS packaging system, the new virtualized networking stack, new Zones features, the Auto Install framework.  If you're ready to try Solaris 11 then Ops Center is ready for you. Last is on the area of Engineered Systems.  These combinations of hardware and software are fast and powerful. However, we're also on a mission to make them ever easier to manage.  We've made major strides with Ops Center 12c. Manage these systems as racks, not individual components.  The new capabilities for the new engineered systems like Exalogic and SPARC SuperCluster and striking. You can read more here: Oracle Unveils Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c So, I'll wrap this up with one final bit of fun. One of my friends from the Oracle marketing department found a super cool place to get dinner.  It's a restaurant called Gonpachi. It turns out this is the place that inspired the scene in the Quentin Taratino movie Kill Bill where Uma Thurman fights 88 Ninjas.  Here is a picture I snapped while we were there. It was surely a good time. Check it out next time you're in Tokyo.

  Read the article

• How to Build Services from Legacy Applications

  - by Chris Falter

  The SOA consultants invaded the executive suite at your company or agency, preached the true religion, and converted the unbelievers. Now by divine imperative you must convert your legacy applications into a suite of reusable services.  But as usual, you lack the time and resources that you need in order to develop the services properly.  So you googled or bing’ed, found this blog post, and began crying in gratitude.  Yes, as the title implies, I am going to reveal my easy, 3-step, works-every-time process for converting silos of legacy applications into the inventory of services your CIO has been dreaming about.  So just close your eyes and count to 3 … now open them … and here it is…. Not. While wishful thinking is too often the coin of the IT realm, even the most naive practitioner knows that converting legacy applications into reusable services requires more than a magic wand.  The reason is simple: if your starting point is your legacy applications, then you will simply be bolting a web service technology layer on top of your legacy API.  And that legacy API is built in the image of the silo applications.  Enter the wide gate of the legacy API, follow the broad path of generating service interfaces from existing code, and you will arrive at the siloed enterprise destruction that you thought you were escaping. The Straight and Narrow Path This past week I had the opportunity to learn how the FBI Criminal Justice Information Systems department has been transitioning from silo applications to a service inventory.  Lafe Hutcheson, IT Specialist in the architecture group and fellow attendee at an SOA Architect Certification Workshop, was my guide.  Lafe has survived the chaos of an SOA initiative, so it is not surprising that he was able to return from a US Army deployment to Kabul, Afghanistan with nary a scratch.  According to Lafe, building their service inventory is a three-phase process: Model a business process.  This requires intense collaboration between the IT and business wings of the organization, of course.  The FBI uses IBM Websphere tools to model the process with BPMN. Identify candidate services to facilitate the business process. Convert the BPMN to an executable BPEL orchestration, model and develop the services, and use a BPEL engine to run the process.  The FBI uses ActiveVOS for orchestration services. The 12 Step Program to End Your Legacy API Addiction Thomas Erl has documented a process for building a web service inventory that is quite similar to the FBI process. Erl’s process adds a technology architecture definition phase, which allows for the technology environment to influence the inventory blueprint.  For example, if you are using an enterprise service bus, you will probably not need to build your own utility services for logging or intermediate routing.  Erl also lists a service-oriented analysis phase that highlights the 12-step process of applying the principles of service orientation to modeling your services.  Erl depicts the modeling of a service inventory as an iterative process: model a business process, define the relevant technology architecture, define the service inventory blueprint, analyze the services, then model another business process, rinse and repeat.  (Astute readers will note that Erl’s diagram, restricted to analysis and modeling process, does not include the implementation phase that concludes the FBI service development methodology.) The service-oriented analysis phase is where you find the 12 steps that will free you from your legacy API addiction. In a nutshell, you identify the steps in the process that need services; identify the different types of services (agnostic entity services, service compositions, and utility services) that are required; apply service-orientation principles; and normalize the inventory into cohesive service models. Rather than discuss each of the 12 steps individually, I will close by simply referring my readers to Erl’s explanation.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493  | Next Page >