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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 11/15/2011

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Java Magazine - November/December 2011 - by and for the Java Community Java Magazine is an essential source of knowledge about Java technology, the Java programming language, and Java-based applications for people who rely on them in their professional careers, or who aspire to. Enterprise 2.0 Conference: November 14-17 | Kellsey Ruppel "Oracle is proud to be a Gold sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 West Conference, November 14-17, 2011 in Santa Clara, CA. You will see the latest collaboration tools and technologies, and learn from thought leaders in Enterprise 2.0's comprehensive conference." The Return of Oracle Wikis: Bigger and Better | @oracletechnet The Oracle Wikis are back - this time, with Oracle SSO on top and powered by Atlassian's Confluence technology. These wikis offer quite a bit more functionality than the old platform. Cloud Migration Lifecycle | Tom Laszewski Laszewski breaks down the four steps in the Set Up Phase of the Cloud Migration lifecycle. Architecture all day. Oracle Technology Network Architect Day - Phoenix, AZ - Dec14 Spend the day with your peers learning from Oracle experts in engineered systems, cloud computing, Oracle Coherence, Oracle WebLogic, and more. Registration is free, but seating is limited. SOA all the Time; Architects in AZ; Clearing Info Integration Hurdles This week on the Architect Home Page on OTN. Live Webcast: New Innovations in Oracle Linux Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 Time: 9:00 AM PT / Noon ET Speakers: Chris Mason, Elena Zannoni. People in glass futures should throw stones | Nicholas Carr "Remember that Microsoft video on our glassy future? Or that one from Corning? Or that one from Toyota?" asks Carr. "What they all suggest, and assume, is that our rich natural 'interface' with the world will steadily wither away as we become more reliant on software mediation." Integration of SABSA Security Architecture Approaches with TOGAF ADM | Jeevak Kasarkod Jeevak Kasarkod's overview of a new paper from the OpenGroup and the SABSA institute "which delves into the incorporatation of risk management and security architecture approaches into a well established enterprise architecture methodology - TOGAF." Cloud Computing at the Tactical Edge | Grace Lewis - SEI Lewis describes the SEI's work with Cloudlets, " lightweight servers running one or more virtual machines (VMs), [that] allow soldiers in the field to offload resource-consumptive and battery-draining computations from their handheld devices to nearby cloudlets." Simplicity Is Good | James Morle "When designing cluster and storage networking for database platforms, keep the architecture simple and avoid the complexities of multi-tier topologies," says Morle. "Complexity is the enemy of availability." Mainframe as the cloud? Tom Laszewski There's nothing new about using the mainframe in the cloud, says Laszewski. Let Devoxx 2011 begin! | The Aquarium The Aquarium marks the kick-off of Devoxx 2011 with "a quick rundown of the Java EE and GlassFish side of things."

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• The Kids Are Alright. With Facebook and SMS. But Not Twitter

  - by ultan o'broin

  I delivered a lecture to business and technology freshmen (late teens, I reckon) in Trinity College Dublin recently. I spoke about user experience in enterprise applications, trends that UX pros need to be aware of such as social media, community support, mobile and tablet platforms and a bunch of nuances around those areas (data and device security, privacy, reputation, branding, and so on). It was all fairly high level stuff given the audience, and I included lots of colorful screenshots. Irish-related examples helped to get the message across. During the lecture I did a quick poll. “How many students here use Twitter?” Answer: None. “How many use Facebook?” All (pretty much). So what do these guys like to use instead of Twitter? Easy - text messaging (or SMS if you like). They all had phones. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised about Twitter, but it’s always great to have research validated by some guerilla UX research on the street. There’s already quite a bit of research about teen uptake (or lack) of Twitter, telling us young adults don’t tweet. Twitter is seen as something for er, older people. Affordable devices and data plans that allow students to text really quickly are also popular (BlackBerry, for example). Younger people just luuurve to text each other. A lot.  Facebook versus Twitter for younger folks? Well, we know the story. No contest. I would love to engage more with students like these. I’ll plan for it. It will also be interesting to see if Twitter becomes more important to them over time. There were a few other interesting observations about the lack of uptake of Foursquare, Gowalla and mobile apps like that. I  don’t think there’s a huge uptake in these kind of apps in Ireland anyway, but maybe students have different priorities anyway?   I’ll return to that another day. Technorati Tags: Gowalla,FourSquare,Twitter,UX,user experience,user assistance,Trinity College Dublin

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• SharpDX and game engines, back to zero?

  - by Baboon

  I'm a desktop developer (I mainly do WPF for a living) but I want to make games as a hobby. So a few months ago, I started reading blogs, gamedevSE, you name it. I understand in the C++ DirectX world, you have engines such as Unity3D with designers and whatnot, but as much as I'm ok to spend months understanding game development, I'd prefer to stay with my comfy C#. So I thought I'd develop my first games in /C#/DirectX through SharpDX But then, I can't use game engines anymore, since they're made for C++DirectX and not SharpDX. (ok, I could do P/Invokes but that defeats the purpose of SharpDX). I do know about XNA, and I also do know I can't publish to the marketplace with it (and quite frankly, I don't really want to learn an API that is in jeopardy). So how do you conceal writing games in C# and using existing game engines instead of reinventing the wheel? wait for ports? So I've found out the following: After doing the first tutorials of MOgre and digging around, it seems MOgre gives you the worse of both worlds: . You can't port it with Mono because it directly references a C++/CLI dll (Ogre) and C++/CLI isn't supported by Mono. And since it's not C++ itself, you can't make a pure build. Which, as far as I understand, means I'd be stuck on windows (and not even WinRT/Metro compatible), without capability of porting anything to mobiles or other OS (Mac/Linux). Even though it looks really nice to develop with MOgre, I'd like to learn something a little more open to future broadening. On the other hand, MonoGame seems to be a rewrite of XNA with SharpDX which sounds very promising: Mono allows me to easily port my games to other platforms, mobiles included. SharpDX allows me to access the latest DirectX versions XNA would be my first choice if only MS showed some hope for the future It really looks like MonoGame is nothing else than XNA on SharpDX. Axiom looks good too but I lack info on the subject (and pages with poor design don't give me a good feeling about an API...) XNA with SunBurn looks good: It should be portable to Mono (can anyone with experience give us feedback on that?), thus multi-platform. It's then marketplace-able since Mono itself is. Did I miss something or are 2) and 4) my best options (aside from the fact Mono doesn't support any XAML)?

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• JCP.Next - Early Adopters of JCP 2.8

  - by Heather VanCura

  JCP.Next is a series of three JSRs (JSR 348, JSR 355 and JSR 358), to be defined through the JCP process itself, with the JCP Executive Committee serving as the Expert Group. The proposed JSRs will modify the JCP's processes  - the Process Document and Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA) and will apply to all new JSRs for all Java platforms.   The first - JCP.next.1, or more formally JSR 348, Towards a new version of the Java Community Process - was completed and put into effect in October 2011 as JCP 2.8. This focused on a small number of simple but important changes to make our process more transparent and to enable broader participation. We're already seeing the benefits of these changes as new and existing JSRs adopt the new requirements. The second - JSR 355, Executive Committee Merge, is also Final. You can read the JCP 2.9 Process Document .  As part of the JSR 355 Final Release, the JCP Executive Committee published revisions to the JCP Process Document (version 2.9) and the EC Standing Rules (version 2.2).  The changes went into effect following the 2012 EC Elections in November. The third JSR 358, A major revision of the Java Community Process was submitted in June 2012.  This JSR will modify the Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA) as well as the Process Document, and will tackle a large number of complex issues, many of them postponed from JSR 348. For these reasons, the JCP EC (acting as the Expert Group for this JSR), expects to spend a considerable amount of time working on. The JSPA is defined by the JCP as "a one-year, renewable agreement between the Member and Oracle. The success of the Java community depends upon an open and transparent JCP program.  JSR 358, A major revision of the Java Community Process, is now in process and can be followed on java.net. The following JSRs and Spec Leads were the early adopters of JCP 2.8, who voluntarily migrated their JSRs from JCP 2.x to JCP 2.8 or above.  More candidates for 2012 JCP Star Spec Leads! JSR 236, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (Anthony Lai/Oracle), migrated April 2012 JSR 308, Annotations on Java Types (Michael Ernst, Alex Buckley/Oracle), migrated September 2012 JSR 335, Lambda Expressions for the Java Programming Language (Brian Goetz/Oracle), migrated October 2012 JSR 337, Java SE 8 Release Contents (Mark Reinhold/Oracle) – EG Formation, migrated September 2012 JSR 338, Java Persistence 2.1 (Linda DeMichiel/Oracle), migrated January 2012 JSR 339, JAX-RS 2.0: The Java API for RESTful Web Services (Santiago Pericas-Geertsen, Marek Potociar/Oracle), migrated July 2012 JSR 340, Java Servlet 3.1 Specification (Shing Wai Chan, Rajiv Mordani/Oracle), migrated August 2012 JSR 341, Expression Language 3.0 (Kin-man Chung/Oracle), migrated August 2012 JSR 343, Java Message Service 2.0 (Nigel Deakin/Oracle), migrated March 2012 JSR 344, JavaServer Faces 2.2 (Ed Burns/Oracle), migrated September 2012 JSR 345, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.2 (Marina Vatkina/Oracle), migrated February 2012 JSR 346, Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE 1.1 (Pete Muir/RedHat) – migrated December 2011

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• SQLAuthority News – SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide – A Comprehensive Whitepaper – (454 pages – 9 MB)

  - by pinaldave

  Microsoft has just released SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide. This guide is very comprehensive and covers the subject of upgrade in-depth. This is indeed a helpful detailed white paper. Even writing a summary of this white paper would take over 100 pages. This further proves that SQL Server 2012 is quite an important release from Microsoft. This white paper discusses how to upgrade from SQL Server 2008/R2 to SQL Server 2012. I love how it starts with the most interesting and basic discussion of upgrade strategies: 1) In-place upgrades, 2) Side by side upgrade, 3) One-server, and 4) Two-server. This whitepaper is not just pure theory but is also an excellent source for some tips and tricks. Here is an example of a good tip from the paper: “If you want to upgrade just one database from a legacy instance of SQL Server and not upgrade the other databases on the server, use the side-by-side upgrade method instead of the in-place method.” There are so many trivia, tips and tricks that make creating the list seems humanly impossible given a short period of time. My friend Vinod Kumar, an SQL Server expert, wrote a very interesting article on SQL Server 2012 Upgrade before. In that article, Vinod addressed the most interesting and practical questions related to upgrades. He started with the fundamentals of how to start backup before upgrade and ended with fail-safe strategies after the upgrade is over. He covered end-to-end concepts in his blog posts in simple words in extremely precise statements. A successful upgrade uses a cycle of: planning, document process, testing, refine process, testing, planning upgrade window, execution, verifying of upgrade and opening for business. If you are at Vinod’s blog post, I suggest you go all the way down and collect the gold mine of most important links. I have bookmarked the blog by blogging about it and I suggest that you bookmark it as well with the way you prefer. Vinod Kumar’s blog post on SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide is a detailed resource that’s also available online for free. Each chapter was carefully crafted and explained in detail. Here is a quick list of the chapters included in the whitepaper. Before downloading the guide, beware of its size of 9 MB and 454 pages. Here’s the list of chapters: Chapter 1: Upgrade Planning and Deployment Chapter 2: Management Tools Chapter 3: Relational Databases Chapter 4: High Availability Chapter 5: Database Security Chapter 6: Full-Text Search Chapter 7: Service Broker Chapter 8: SQL Server Express Chapter 9: SQL Server Data Tools Chapter 10: Transact-SQL Queries Chapter 11: Spatial Data Chapter 12: XML and XQuery Chapter 13: CLR Chapter 14: SQL Server Management Objects Chapter 15: Business Intelligence Tools Chapter 16: Analysis Services Chapter 17: Integration Services Chapter 18: Reporting Services Chapter 19: Data Mining Chapter 20: Other Microsoft Applications and Platforms Appendix 1: Version and Edition Upgrade Paths Appendix 2: SQL Server 2012: Upgrade Planning Checklist Download SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide [454 pages and 9 MB] Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, DBA, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Today's Links (6/20/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Why your security sucks | Eric Knorr A conversation with InfoWorld security expert Roger Grimes reveals why the latest burst of attacks is just business as usual. JDev 11g R2 - ADF BC Dependency Diagram Feature | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovkis continues his exploration of JDeveloper 11g R2. Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror | Charles Newark-French "Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption," says Newark-French. "This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms." Vivek Kundra, a public servant who gets stuff done | Craig Newmark Craigslist founder Craig Newmark bids farewell to the nation's first CIO. Weblogic, QBrowser and topics | Eric Elzinga Elzinga says: "Besides using the Weblogic Console to add subscribers to our topics we can also use QBrowser to browse queues and topics on your Weblogic Server." Java EE talks at JAX Conf | Arun Gupta Arun Gupta shares links to several Java EE presentations taking place at this week's Jax Conference in San Jose, CA. Development gotchas and silver bullets | Andy Mulholland Mulholland explains why "Software development has to change to fit with new business practices!" Oracle is Proud Sponsor of Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011 | Troy Kitch Oracle will have a very strong presence at this year’s Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011 in Washington D.C., June 20-23. Database Web Service using Toplink DB Provider | Vishal Jain "With JDeveloper 11gR2 you can now create database based web services using JAX-WS Provider," says Jain. Sample Chapter: A Fusion Applications Technical Overview An excerpt from "Managing Oracle Fusion Applications" by Richard Bingham, published by Oracle Press, May 2011. White Paper: Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure This paper provides recommendations and best practices for optimizing virtualization infrastructures when deploying the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure. White paper: Oracle Optimized Solution for Lifecycle Content Management Authors Donna Harland and Nick Klosk illustrate how Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite and Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager work Oracle’s Sun hardware. Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011 Time: 4:30pm - 8:15pm ET - Note that Parking at 475 Sansome Closes at 8:30pm Location: Oracle Office,475 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA Google Map Speakers: Chris Akker, Solutions Engineer, F5 Paul Cleary, Application Architect, Oracle Alexey Ragozin, Independent Consultant Brian Oliver, Oracle

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• What does your Python development workbench look like?

  - by Fabian Fagerholm

  First, a scene-setter to this question: Several questions on this site have to do with selection and comparison of Python IDEs. (The top one currently is What IDE to use for Python). In the answers you can see that many Python programmers use simple text editors, many use sophisticated text editors, and many use a variety of what I would call "actual" integrated development environments – a single program in which all development is done: managing project files, interfacing with a version control system, writing code, refactoring code, making build configurations, writing and executing tests, "drawing" GUIs, and so on. Through its GUI, an IDE supports different kinds of workflows to accomplish different tasks during the journey of writing a program or making changes to an existing one. The exact features vary, but a good IDE has sensible workflows and automates things to let the programmer concentrate on the creative parts of writing software. The non-IDE way of writing large programs relies on a collection of tools that are typically single-purpose; they do "one thing well" as per the Unix philosophy. This "non-integrated development environment" can be thought of as a workbench, supported by the OS and generic interaction through a text or graphical shell. The programmer creates workflows in their mind (or in a wiki?), automates parts and builds a personal workbench, often gradually and as experience accumulates. The learning curve is often steeper than with an IDE, but those who have taken the time to do this can often claim deeper understanding of their tools. (Whether they are better programmers is not part of this question.) With advanced editor-platforms like Emacs, the pieces can be integrated into a whole, while with simpler editors like gedit or TextMate, the shell/terminal is typically the "command center" to drive the workbench. Sometimes people extend an existing IDE to suit their needs. What does your Python development workbench look like? What workflows have you developed and how do they work? For the first question, please give the main "driving" program – the one that you use to control the rest (Emacs, shell, etc.) the "small tools" -- the programs you reach for when doing different tasks For the second question, please describe what the goal of the workflow is (eg. "set up a new project" or "doing initial code design" or "adding a feature" or "executing tests") what steps are in the workflow and what commands you run for each step (eg. in the shell or in Emacs) Also, please describe the context of your work: do you write small one-off scripts, do you do web development (with what framework?), do you write data-munching applications (what kind of data and for what purpose), do you do scientific computing, desktop apps, or something else? Note: A good answer addresses the perspectives above – it doesn't just list a bunch of tools. It will typically be a long answer, not a short one, and will take some thinking to produce; maybe even observing yourself working.

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• C# Domain-Driven Design Sample Released

  - by Artur Trosin

  In the post I want to declare that NDDD Sample application(s) is released and share the work with you. You can access it here: http://code.google.com/p/ndddsample. NDDDSample from functionality perspective matches DDDSample 1.1.0 which is based Java and on joint effort by Eric Evans' company Domain Language and the Swedish software consulting company Citerus. But because NDDDSample is based on .NET technologies those two implementations could not be matched directly. However concepts, practices, values, patterns, especially DDD, are cross-language and cross-platform :). Implementation of .NET version of the application was an interesting journey because now as .NET developer I better understand the differences positive and negative between these two platforms. Even there are those differences they can be overtaken, in many cases it was not so hard to match a java libs\framework with .NET during the implementation. Here is a list of technology stack: 1. .net 3.5 - framework 2. VS.NET 2008 - IDE 3. ASP.NET MVC2.0 - for administration and tracking UI 4. WCF - communication mechanism 5. NHibernate - ORM 6. Rhino Commons - Nhibernate session management, base classes for in memory unit tests 7. SqlLite - database 8. Windsor - inversion of control container 9. Windsor WCF facility - for better integration with NHibernate 10. MvcContrib - and in particular its Castle WindsorControllerFactory in order to enable IoC for controllers 11. WPF - for incident logging application 12. Moq - mocking lib used for unit tests 13. NUnit - unit testing framework 14. Log4net - logging framework 15. Cloud based on Azure SDK These are not the latest technologies, tools and libs for the moment but if there are someone thinks that it would be useful to migrate the sample to latest current technologies and versions please comment. Cloud version of the application is based on Azure emulated environment provided by the SDK, so it hasn't been tested on ‘real' Azure scenario (we just do not have access to it). Thanks to participants, Eugen Gorgan who was involved directly in development, Ruslan Rusu and Victor Lungu spend their free time to discuss .NET specific decisions, Eugen Navitaniuc helped with Java related questions. Also, big thank to Cornel Cretu, he designed a nice logo and helped with some browser incompatibility issues. Any review and feedback are welcome! Thank you, Artur Trosin

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• Social Targeting: Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Are you the kind of person that tries to sell Clay Aiken CD’s outside Warped Tour concert venues? Then you don’t think a lot about targeting your messages to the right audience. For your communication to pack the biggest punch it can, you need to know where to throw it. And a recent study on social demographics might help you see social targeting in a whole new light. Pingdom’s annual survey of social network demographics shows us first of all that there is no gender difference between Facebook and Twitter. Both are 40% male, 60% female. If you’re looking for locales that lean heavily male, that would be Slashdot, Hacker News and Stack Overflow. The women are dominating Pinterest, Goodreads and Blogger. So what about age? 55% of tweeters are 35 and up, compared with 63% at Pinterest, 65% at Facebook and 70% at LinkedIn. As you can tell, LinkedIn supports the oldest user base, with the average member being 44. The average age at Facebook is 51, and it’s 37 at Twitter. If you want to aim younger, have you met Orkut yet? 83% of its users are under 35. The next sites in order as great candidates for the young market are deviantART, Hacker News, Hi5, Github, and Reddit. I know, other than Reddit, many of you might be saying “who?” But the list could offer an opportunity to look at the vast social world beyond Facebook, Twitter and Google+ (which Pingdom did not include in the survey at all due to a lack of accessible data). As for the average age of social users overall: 26% are 25-34 25% are 35-44 19% are 45-54 16% are 18-24  6% are 55-64  5% are 0-17  and 2% are 65 Now you know where you stand on the “cutting edge” scale for a person your age. You’re welcome. Certainly such demographics are a moving target and need to be watched and reassessed on a regular basis to make sure you’re moving in step with the people you want to talk to. For instance, since Pingdom’s survey last year, the age of the average Facebook user has gone up 2 years, while the age of the average Twitter user has gone down 2 years. With the targeting and analytics tools available on today’s social management platforms, there’s little need to market in the dark. Otherwise, good luck with those Clay CD’s.

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• Now Shipping! NetAdvantage for .NET 2010 Volume 3!

  The new NetAdvantage Ultimate includes all four Line of Business user interface control sets for ASP .NET, Windows Forms, WPF and Silverlight plus two advanced Data Visualization UI control sets for WPF and Silverlight. With six NetAdvantage products in one robust package, Infragistics® gives you hundreds of controls and infinite development possibilities. Unified XAML Product Strategy-Share Code, Get More Controls In the 10.3 release, Infragistics continues to deliver code parity between the XAML platforms, WPF and Silverlight. In the line of business toolsets, Infragistics introduces the new xamSchedule™, full-featured, Outlook® 2010-style schedule controls, and the new xamDataTree™, a data bound tree view that comfortably handles tens of thousands of tree nodes. Mimicking our Silverlight Drag and Drop Framework, the WPF Drag and Drop Framework CTP empowers you to add your own rich touches to your applications. Track Users' Behaviors New to all NetAdvantage Silverlight controls is the Infragistics Analytics Framework (IGAF), which empowers you to track user behavior in RIAs running on Silverlight 4. Building on the Microsoft® Silverlight Analytics Framework, with IGAF you can analyze the user's behaviors to ensure the experience you want to deliver. NetAdvantage for Windows Forms--New Office® 2010 Ribbon and Application Menu 2010 Create new experiences with Windows Forms. Now with Office 2010 styling, NetAdvantage for Windows Forms has new features such as Microsoft® Office 2010 ribbon and enhanced Infragistics.Excel to export the contents of the high performance WinGrid™ into Microsoft Excel® 2010. The new Windows Message Support enables Infragistics standalone editor controls to process numerous Windows® OS messages, allowing them to respond just like native controls to changes in the Windows environment. Create Faster Web 2.0 Experiences with NetAdvantage for ASP .NET Infragistics continues to push the envelope to deliver the fastest ASP .NET WebForms controls available on the market. Our lightning fast ASP .NET grids are now enhanced with XPS/PDF Exporting and Summary Rows. This release also includes support for jQuery Templating (as a CTP) within our WebDataGrid™ and WebDataTree™ controls allowing you to quickly cut down overall page size. Deliver Business Intelligence with Power, Flexibility and the Office 2010 Experience NetAdvantage for WPF Data Visualization and NetAdvantage for Silverlight Data Visualization help you deliver flexible, powerful and usable end user experiences in Business Intelligence applications. Both suites include the Pivot Grid that delivers the full power of online analytical processing (OLAP) to present multi-dimensional data, sliced and diced in cross-tabulated form for end users to drill down into, interact with and easily extract meaning from the data. Mapping Made Easy 10.3 marks the official release of the WPF Data Visualization xamMap™ control to map anything and everything from geographic to geo-spacial mapping data. Map layers allow you to add successive levels of detail, navigational panes for panning in all directions, color swatch panes that facilitate value scales like Choropleth shading, and scale panes allowing users to zoom-in and out. Both toolsets introduce the first of many relationship maps! With the xamOrgChart™ CTP you can map out organizational charts of up to 50K employees, competitive brackets (think World Cup) and any other relational, organizational map your application needs. http://www.infragistics.com span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• SQLAuthority News – I am Presenting 2 Sessions at TechEd India

  - by pinaldave

  TechED is the event which I am always excited about. It is one of the largest technology in India. Microsoft Tech Ed India 2011 is the premier technical education and networking event for tech professionals interested in learning, connecting and exploring a broad set of current and soon-to-be released Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms and services. I am going to speak at the TechED on two very interesting and advanced subjects. Venue: The LaLiT Ashok Kumara Krupa High Grounds Bangalore – 560001, Karnataka, India Sessions Date: March 25, 2011 Understanding SQL Server Behavioral Pattern – SQL Server Extended Events Date and Time: March 25, 2011 12:00 PM to 01:00 PM History repeats itself! SQL Server 2008 has introduced a very powerful, yet very minimal reoccurring feature called Extended Events. This advanced session will teach experienced administrators’ capabilities that were not possible before. From T-SQL error to CPU bottleneck, error login to deadlocks –Extended Event can detect it for you. Understanding the pattern of events can prevent future mistakes. SQL Server Waits and Queues – Your Gateway to Perf. Troubleshooting Date and Time: March 25, 2011 04:15 PM to 05:15 PM Just like a horoscope, SQL Server Waits and Queues can reveal your past, explain your present and predict your future. SQL Server Performance Tuning uses the Waits and Queues as a proven method to identify the best opportunities to improve performance. A glance at Wait Types can tell where there is a bottleneck. Learn how to identify bottlenecks and potential resolutions in this fast paced, advanced performance tuning session. My session will be on the third day of the event and I am very sure that everybody will be in groove to learn new interesting subjects. I will have few give-away during and at the end of the session. I will not tell you what I will have but it will be for sure something you will love to have. Please make a point and reserve above time slots to attend my session. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Extended Events

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• European e-government Action Plan all about interoperability

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  Yesterday, the European Commission released its European eGovernment Action Plan for 2011-2015. The plan includes measures on providing deeper user empowerment, enhancing the Internal Market, more efficiency and effectiveness of public administrations, and putting in place pre-conditions for developing e-government. The Good - Defines interoperability very clearly. Calls interoperability "a pre-condition for cross-border eGovernment services" (a very strong formulation) and says interoperability "is supported by open specifications". - Uses the terminology "open specifications" which, let's face it, is pretty close to "open standards" which is the term the rest of the world would use. - Confirms that Member States are fully committed to the political priorities of the Malmö Declaration (which was all about open standards) including the very strong action: by 2013: All Member States will have incorporated the political priorities of the Malmö Declaration in their national strategies. Such tight Action Plan integration between Commission and Member State priorities has seldom been attempted before, particularly not in a field where European legal competence is virtually non-existent. What we see now, is the subtle force of soft power rather than the rough force of regulation. In this case, it is the Member States who want Europe to take the lead. Very refreshing! Some quotes that show the commitment to interoperability and open specifications: "The emergence of innovative technologies such as "service-oriented architectures" (SOA), or "clouds" of services,  together with more open specifications which allow for greater sharing, re-use and interoperability reinforce the ability of ICT to play a key role in this quest for effficiency in the public sector." (p.4) "Interoperability is supported through open specifications" (p.13) 2.4.1. Open Specifications and Interoperability (p.13 has a whole section dedicated to this important topic. Open specifications and interoperability are nearly 100% interrelated): "Interoperability is the ability of systems and machines to exchange, process and correctly interpret information. It is more than just a technical challenge, as it also involves legal, organisational and semantic aspects of handling  data" (p.13) "standards and  open platforms offer opportunities for more cost-effective use of resources and delivery of services" (p.13). The Bad Shies away from defining open standards, or even open specifications, the EU's preferred term for the key enabler of interoperability. Verdict 90/100, a very respectable score.

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• “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on GDSE and also on the regular Stackoverflow site, and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? (* With the exception of Flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with Flash, but I'm worried that Flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.) For simple & short games the Newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "OK, I'm going to download and play that"?

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• Implement Negascout Algorithm with stack

  - by Dan

  I'm not familiar with how these stack exchange accounts work so if this is double posting I apologize. I asked the same thing on stackoverflow. I have added an AI routine to a game I am working on using the Negascout algorithm. It works great, but when I set a higher maximum depth it can take a few seconds to complete. The problem is it blocks the main thread, and the framework I am using does not have a way to deal with multi-threading properly across platforms. So I am trying to change this routine from recursively calling itself, to just managing a stack (vector) so that I can progress through the routine at a controlled pace and not lock up the application while the AI is thinking. I am getting hung up on the second recursive call in the loop. It relies on a returned value from the first call, so I don't know how to add these to a stack. My Working c++ Recursive Code: MoveScore abNegascout(vector<vector<char> > &board, int ply, int alpha, int beta, char piece) { if (ply==mMaxPly) { return MoveScore(evaluation.evaluateBoard(board, piece, oppPiece)); } int currentScore; int bestScore = -INFINITY; MoveCoord bestMove; int adaptiveBeta = beta; vector<MoveCoord> moveList = evaluation.genPriorityMoves(board, piece, findValidMove(board, piece, false)); if (moveList.empty()) { return MoveScore(bestScore); } bestMove = moveList[0]; for(int i=0;i<moveList.size();i++) { MoveCoord move = moveList[i]; vector<vector<char> > newBoard; newBoard.insert( newBoard.end(), board.begin(), board.end() ); effectMove(newBoard, piece, move.getRow(), move.getCol()); // First Call ****** MoveScore current = abNegascout(newBoard, ply+1, -adaptiveBeta, -max(alpha,bestScore), oppPiece); currentScore = - current.getScore(); if (currentScore>bestScore){ if (adaptiveBeta == beta || ply>=(mMaxPly-2)){ bestScore = currentScore; bestMove = move; }else { // Second Call ****** current = abNegascout(newBoard, ply+1, -beta, -currentScore, oppPiece); bestScore = - current.getScore(); bestMove = move; } if(bestScore>=beta){ return MoveScore(bestMove,bestScore); } adaptiveBeta = max(alpha, bestScore) + 1; } } return MoveScore(bestMove,bestScore); } If someone can please help by explaining how to get this to work with a simple stack. Example code would be much appreciated. While c++ would be perfect, any language that demonstrates how would be great. Thank You.

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• Recap: Oracle at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit

  - by kimberly.billings

  Getting to Vegas was no fun. As anyone who lives in the Bay Area knows, the SF airport shuts down one runway when it rains, causing major havoc. So rain, rain, rain on Sunday meant delay, delay, delay at the airport. Needless to say, my 6:30 pm flight didn't land in Vegas until 3:00 am! But the travel pains were worth it. There was a lot to be learned at the Gartner BI Summit this year, and the uptick in attendance was reflected in strong booth traffic and engaging conversations in the Oracle booth. Oracle customer, Dawn Conant, Director, Business Intelligence at Beckman Coulter, generated a lot of interest in her presentation about migrating from Business Objects to Oracle Business Intelligence, Enterprise Edition with Oracle Database 11g. Dawn's story was a very relatable one, as many of the attendees had plans for similar projects. One of the most interesting Gartner-led sessions compared BI/DW megavendors, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. According to Gartner analyst Rita Sallam, these megavendors control about two-thirds of the BI market. Sallem attributes this in part to the fact that organizations are expanding their definitions of BI to also include analytics and performance management. In doing so, they require greater integration of BI applications with a broader set of applications and middleware. In a related session, a panel of Gartner analysts compared the Magic Quadrants for BI Platforms; CPM; Data Quality; Data Integration Tools; and Data Warehouses. Oracle is a leader in all of the Magic Quadrants in which it participates and has the most complete stack including hardware and software, according to Donald Feinberg. Feinberg also commented that in situations with VLDW and solid mixed workloads, Oracle Exadata is making a big difference! var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-13185312-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

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• Cross-platform independent development

  - by Joe Wreschnig

  Some years ago, if you wrote in C and some subset of C++ and used a sufficient number of platform abstractions (via SDL or whatever), you could run on every platform an indie could get on - Linux, Windows, Mac OS of various versions, obscure stuff like BeOS, and the open consoles like the GP2X and post-death Dreamcast. If you got a contract for a closed platform at some point, you could port your game to that platform with "minimal" code changes as well. Today, indie developers must use XNA to get on the Xbox 360 (and upcoming Windows phone); must not use XNA to work anywhere else but Windows; until recently had to use Java on Android; Flash doesn't run on phones, HTML5 doesn't work on IE. Unlike e.g. DirectX vs. OpenGL or Windows vs. Unix, these are changes to the core language you write your code in and can't be papered over without, basically, writing a compiler. You can move some game logic into scripts and include an interpreter - except when you can't, because the iPhone SDK doesn't allow it, and performance suffers because no one allows JIT. So what can you do if you want a really cross-platform portable game, or even just a significant body of engine and logic code? Is this not a problem because the platforms have fundamentally diverged - it's just plain not worthwhile to try to target both an iPhone and the Xbox 360 with any shared code because such a game would be bad? (I find this very unlikely. I can easily see wanting to share a game between a Windows Mobile phone and an Android, or an Xbox 360 and an iPad.) Are interfaces so high-level now that porting time is negligible? (I might believe this for business applications, but not for games with strict performance requirements.) Is this going to become more pronounced in the future? Is the split going to be, somewhat scarily, still down vendor lines? Will we all rely on high-level middleware like Flash or Unity to get anything cross-platform done? tl;dr - Is porting a problem, is it going to be a bigger problem in the future, and if so how do we solve it?

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• Oracle WebCenter: Social Networking & Collaboration

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter provides unprecedented Social Networking and Collaboration.We recently talked with Carin Chan, Principal Product Manager at Oracle, around the topic of Social Networking and Collaboration. In today’s work environment, employees have come to expect social and collaborative services to augment their work environment. Whether it is to post a blog or to poll fellow coworkers, employees expect and demand access to highly integrated, collaborative work environments that allow them to quickly contribute at work -- whether it is to make informed decisions, contribute on projects, or share knowledge.Social and collaborative services from Oracle WebCenter add an immeasurable amount of value to achieving a modern user experience. Oracle WebCenter Services provides rich and comprehensive social computing services that include services such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence, activity streams and graphs, and polls/surveys that offer employees access to rich collaborative services to work efficiently.Employees can create pages or spaces that mix and match collaborative services while bringing in data from other applications to share with groups, teams, or organizations. These out of the box social and collaborative services include: People Connections and Activity Streams enable users to quickly assemble and visualize their social business networks and track user activities.Activity Graphs tracks all user activities in real-time and gathers intelligence about these users, their connections and the way they use information to make educated recommendations and provide on the spot information discovery.Wikis and blogs enable the community authoring of documents and sharing of ideas and also allow for the gathering of feedback and comments on those ideas.Tags and links allow users to easily mark, connect and share information with others.RSS feeds are available to track new or changed information related to discussion forums, processes or activities in an Oracle WebCenter environment.Discussion forums enable sharing of group knowledge and easy creation of communities around specific topics.Announcements allow you to manage and publish important news to your user base.Instant Messaging and Presence enable real-time awareness and communication with available users in the context of a business task.Web and Voice Conferencing enables real-time communication with internal and external business users.Lists provide a way to manage list data directly on the web as well as export and import it from and to Microsoft Excel.Oracle WebCenter Analytics provides comprehensive reporting metrics on activity and content usage within portals or composite applications.Activity Streams allow you to track activities and visualize your business networks.While being able to integrate into your portal deployment, these services are also integrated into how users are already working. This includes integration with software such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office and mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone. These services are just a tip of the iceberg regarding social and collaborative services that Oracle WebCenter has to offer your employees. Be sure to keep checking back this week for in future posts, we’ll delve deeper into a few of these collaborative services and discuss how a combination of collaborative services offer a better portal deployment to empower business users. Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, social, activity streams, blogs, wikis

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• Silverlight Cream for April 22, 2010 -- #844

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Miroslav Miroslavov, David Anson, Mike Snow, Jason Alderman, Denis Gladkikh, John Papa, Adam Kinney, and CrocusGirl. Shoutout: Mike Snow is moving his blog to Silverlight Tips of The Day... his first is a repeat of number 110 of the last list, but you'll want to bookmark the page. Falling in the 'too cool not to mention' category... Pete Brown posted another MIX10 interview: New Channel 9 Video: Josh Blake on NaturalShow Multi-touch in WPF Adam Kinney announced that the Upgrade to Expression Studio v4 for free – now in writing! From SilverlightCream.com: Visuals staring at the mouse cursor Miroslav Miroslavov at SilverlightShow has a first part post up on the design of the CompleteIT site... going through the 'follow the mouse' effect that is so cool on the main page... with source. Today's DataVisualizationDemos release includes new demos showing off stacked series behavior Falling squarly into the category of "when does he sleep"... David Anson has another Visualization post up today... adding a stacked series and Text-to-Chat sample. Silverlight: Unable to start Debugging. The Silverlight managed debugging package isn’t installed. Mike Snow has a tip up about what to do if you get an "Unable to start debugging" box when you crank up VS ... not a great solution, but it's a solution. Introducing Pillbox for Windows Phone The folks at Veracity definitely have way too much fun with technology :) ... check out the WP7 app that Jason Alderman blogged about... he has a link out to another page with screenshots... oh, AND the code... Export data to Excel from Silverlight/WPF DataGrid Denis Gladkikh demonstrates using COM Interop to export to Excel from both WPF and Silverlight. He discusses isses he had and has all the source for both platforms available. Silverlight TV 21: Silverlight 4 - A Customer's Perspective John Papa has Silverlight TV number 21 up and he's chatting with Franck Jeannin of Ormetis, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade, and Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems, all presenters in the Keynote at DevConnections. Avatar Mosaic -Experimenting with the Artefact Animator Adam Kinney spent enough time with Artefact Animator to put up a lengthy post about it including his project. Artefact Animator itself is available on CodePlex, and Adam has the link... this looks like good stuff. Windows Phone 7 Design Notes – Part2: Metro + Adrian Frutiger CrocusGirl continues her WP7 Metro discussion with a great long post on background she's researched and some of her own work with typography... a great read. 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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• Game development: “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  Heyo, I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on gamedev and also on the regular stackoverflow and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). For simple & short games the newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "ok, I'm going to download and play that"? Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? Thanks! (* With the exception of flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have these downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with flash, but I'm worried that flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.)

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• Which techniques to study?

  - by Djentleman

  Just to give you some background info, I'm studying a programming major at a tertiary level and am in my third year, so I'm not a newbie off the street. However, I am still quite new to game programming as a subset of programming. One of my personal projects for next semester is to design and create a 2D platformer game with emphasis on procedural generation and "neato" effects (think metroidvania). I've written up a list of some techniques to help me improve my personal skills (using XNA for the time being). The list is as follows: QuadTrees: Build a basic program in XNA that moves basic 2D sprites (circles and squares) around a set path and speed and changes their colour when they collide. Add functionality to add and delete objects of different sizes (select a direction and speed when adding and just drag and drop them in). Particles: Build a basic program in XNA in which you can select different colours and create particle effects of those colours on screen by clicking and dragging the mouse around (simple particles emerging from where the mouse is clicked). Add functionality where you can change the amount of particles to be drawn and the speed at which they travel and when they expire. Possibly implement gravity and wind after part 3 is complete. Physics: Build a basic program in XNA where you have a ball in a set 2D environment, a wind slider, and a gravity slider (can go to negative for reverse gravity). You can click to drag the ball around and release to throw it and, depending on what you do, the ball interacts with the environment. Implement other shapes afterwards. Random 2D terrain generation: Build a basic program in XNA that randomly generates terrain (including hills, caves, etc) created from 2D tiles. Add functionality that draws the tiles from a tileset and places different tiles depending on where they lie on the y-axis (dirt on top, then rock, then lava, etc). Randomised objects: Build a basic program in XNA that, when a button is clicked, displays a randomised item sprite based on parameters (type, colour, etc) with the images pulled from tilesets. Add the ability to save the item as an object, which stores it in a side-pane where it can be selected for viewing. Movement: Build a basic program in XNA where you can move an object around in an environment (tile-based) with a camera that pans with it. No gravity. Implement gravity and wind, allow the character to jump and fall with some basic platforms. So my question is this: Are there any other commonly used techniques that I should research, and can I get some suggestions as to the effectiveness of the techniques I've chosen to work on (e.g., don't do QuadTree stuff because [insert reason here], or, do [insert technique here] before you start working on particles because [insert reason here])? I hope this is clear enough and please let me know if I can further clarify anything!

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• How to design a scalable notification system?

  - by Trent

  I need to write a notification system manager. Here is my requirements: I need to be able to send a Notification on different platforms, which may be totally different (for exemple, I need to be able to send either an SMS or an E-mail). Sometimes the notification may be the same for all recipients for a given platform, but sometimes it may be a notification per recipients (or several) per platform. Each notification can contain platform specific payload (for exemple an MMS can contains a sound or an image). The system need to be scalable, I need to be able to send a very large amount of notification without crashing either the application or the server. It is a two step process, first a customer may type a message and choose a platform to send to, and the notification(s) should be created to be processed either real-time either later. Then the system needs to send the notification to the platform provider. For now, I end up with some though but I don't know how scalable it will be or if it is a good design. I've though of the following objects (in a pseudo language): a generic Notification object: class Notification { String $message; Payload $payload; Collection<Recipient> $recipients; } The problem with the following objects is what if I've 1.000.000 recipients ? Even if the Recipient object is very small, it'll take too much memory. I could also create one Notification per recipient, but some platform providers requires me to send it in batch, meaning I need to define one Notification with several Recipients. Each created notification could be stored in a persistent storage like a DB or Redis. Would it be a good it to aggregate this later to make sure it is scalable? On the second step, I need to process this notification. But how could I distinguish the notification to the right platform provider? Should I use an object like MMSNotification extending an abstract Notification? or something like Notification.setType('MMS')? To allow to process a lot of notification at the same time, I think a messaging queue system like RabbitMQ may be the right tool. Is it? It would allow me to queue a lot of notification and have several worker to pop notification and process them. But what if I need to batch the recipients as seen above? Then I imagine a NotificationProcessor object for which I could I add NotificationHandler each NotificationHandler would be in charge to connect the platform provider and perform notification. I can also use an EventManager to allow pluggable behavior. Any feedbacks or ideas? Thanks for giving your time. Note: I'm used to work in PHP and it is likely the language of my choice.

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• Book Review (Book 11) - Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for April 2012 was: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform. I was traveling at the end of last month so I’m a bit late posting this review here. Why I chose this book: I actually know a few of the authors on this book, so when they told me about it I wanted to check it out. The premise of the book is exactly as it states in the title - to learn how to solve a problem using products from Microsoft. What I learned: I liked the book - a lot. They've arranged the content in a "Solution Decision Framework", that presents a few elements to help you identify a need and then propose alternate solutions to solve them, and then the rationale for the choice. But the payoff is that the authors then walk through the solution they implement and what they ran into doing it. I really liked this approach. It's not a huge book, but one I've referred to again since I've read it. It's fairly comprehensive, and includes server-oriented products, not things like Microsoft Office or other client-side tools. In fact, I would LOVE to have a work like this for Open Source and other vendors as well - would make for a great library for a Systems Architect. This one is unashamedly aimed at the Microsoft products, and even if I didn't work here, I'd be fine with that. As I said, it would be interesting to see some books on other platforms like this, but I haven't run across something that presents other systems in quite this way. And that brings up an interesting point - This book is aimed at folks who create solutions within an organization. It's not aimed at Administrators, DBA's, Developers or the like, although I think all of those audiences could benefit from reading it. The solutions are made up, and not to a huge level of depth - nor should they be. It's a great exercise in thinking these kinds of things through in a structured way. The information is a bit dated, especially for Windows and SQL Azure. While the general concepts hold, the cloud platform from Microsoft is evolving so quickly that any printed book finds it hard to keep up with the improvements. I do have one quibble with the text - the chapters are a bit uneven. This is always a danger with multiple authors, but it shows up in a couple of chapters. I winced at one of the chapters that tried to take a more conversational, humorous style. This kind of academic work doesn't lend itself to that style. I recommend you get the book - and use it. I hope they keep it updated - I'll be a frequent customer. :)  

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• The Social Business Thought Leaders - Ray Wang

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  It seems both consumers and businesses are at the peak of the social hype. Overwhelmed by social media channels, platforms, and processes both in their private and professional life, many early adopters are starting to feel the social fatigue. Mirroring what happened with email and web sites during the late 1990's - early 2000's, more and more managers are looking to move from ubiquitous social media tactics to the most appropriate business use case and processes. This step becomes even more important considering the year over year contraction in IT budgets and the consequent need to maximize return on every dollar spent in new technologies. Ray Wang, CEO and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, suggests engagement through collaborative technologies both as a conceptual model and a transformational tool for enterprises to reap business value. Without participation - the reasoning goes - there is no value and good technology alone is not enough to guarantee employee and customer adoption. Enterprise gamification is a new lever to succeed with Social Business by directing a critical mass of participation towards desired outcomes. What kind of outcomes? A recent study from Constellation Research (see 2012 Q1 Gamification Early Adopters Best Practices) highlights how Marketing, Customer Service and HR are leading the pack with gamification in processes such as: Sustaining long term customer loyalty (76.4%) Improving response in campaign to lead (74.5%) Right channeling incidents for resolution in social media (67.3%) Growing the number service and support incidents resolved by the community (63.6%) Improving employee referral rates and effective recruiting (43.6%) Driving on-boarding success with new hires (20%) More than simply adding badges, points and leaderboards to existing processes, enterprise gamification should be holistically embedded into employee and customer experience to stimulate specific behaviors. According to Ray Wang this can be done at three core levels: Measurable actions. The behaviors we want to facilitate consist of granular actions (i.e likes, comments, posts, recommendations, etc) and more complex actions (i.e projects, initiatives, programmes) attributed to individuals, groups and/or external actors  Reputation. The reputation an individual has earned through his actions is a key factor in building motivation among others and it is determined by its identity, social standing status and competitiveness Incentives or the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that motivate behaviors and drive actions Listen to Ray Wang's video-interview to learn more about the dynamics that are shaping the future of collaboration and how gamification can help organizations attain new levels of engagement.

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• How To Build An Enterprise Application - Introduction

  - by Tuan Nguyen

  An enterprise application is a software which fulfills 4 core quality attributes: Reliability Flexibility Reusability Maintainability Reliability is the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specific period of time. Because there are no ways more than testing to make sure a system is reliability, we can exchange the term reliability with the term testability. Flexibility is the ability of changing a system's core features without violating unrelated features or components. Although flexibility can helps us to achieve interoperability easily but the opposite is not true. For example, a program might run on multiple platforms, contains logic for many scenarios but that wouldn't mean it was flexibility if it forces us rewrite code in all components when we just want to change some aspects of a feature it had. Reusability is the ability of sharing one or more system's components for another system. We should just open a component's reusability in the context in which it is used. For example, we write classes that implement UI logic and deliver them to only classes which implementing UI. Maintainability is the ability of adding or removing features to a system after it was released. Maintainability consists of many factors such as readability, analyzability, extensibility therein extensibility is critical. Maintainability requires us to write code that is longer and complexer than normal but it doesn't mean we introduce unneccessarily complex code. We always try to make our code clear and transparent to everyone. An application enterprise is built on an enterprise design which consists of two parts: low-level design and high-level design. At low-level design, it focuses on building loose-coupled classes or components. Particularly, it recommends: Each class or component undertakes only single responsibility (design based on unit test) Classes or components implement and work through interfaces (design based on contract) Dependency relationship between classes and components could be injected at run-time (design based on dependency) At high-level design, it focuses on architecting system into tiers and layers. Particularly, it recommends: Divide system into subsystems for deployment. Each subsytem is called a tier. Typical, an enterprise application would have 3 tiers as illustrated in the following figure: Arrange classes and components to logical containers called layers. Typical, an enterprise application would have 5 layers as illustrated in the following figure

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• Visual Studio 2010 plus Help Index : have your cake and eat it too

  - by Adrian Hara

  Although the team's intentions might have been good, the new help system in Visual Studio 2010  is a huge step backwards (more like a cannonball-shot-kind-of-leap really) from the one we all know (and love?) in Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 (and heck, even VS6). Its biggest problem, from my point of view, is the total and complete lack of the Help Index feature: you know...the thing where you just go and type in what you're looking for and it filters down the list of results automatically. For me this was the number one productivity feature in the "old" help system, allowing me to find stuff very quickly. Number two is that it's entirely web based and runs, by default, in the browser. So imagine, when you press F1, a new tab opens in your default browser pointing to the help entry. While this is wrong in many ways, it's also extremely annoying, cleaning up tabs in the browser becomes a chore which represents a serious productivity hit. These and many other problems were discussed extensively (and rather vocally) on connect but it seems MS seemed to ignore it and opt to release the new help system anyway, with the promise that more features will be added in a later release. Again, it kind of amazes me that they chose to ship a product with LESS features that the previous one and, what's worse, missing KEY features, just so it's "standards based" and "extensible". To be honest, I couldn't care less about the help system's implementation, I just want it to be usable and I would've thought that by now the software community and especially MS would've learned this lesson. In the end, what kind of saddens me is that MS regards these basic features as ones for the "power help user". I mean, come on! I mean a) it's not like my aunt's using Visual Studio 2010 and she represents the regular user, b) all software developers are, by definition, power users and c) it's a freakin help, not rocket science! As you can tell, I'm pretty pissed. Even more so because I really feel that the VS2010 & co. release really is a great one, with a lot of effort going into the various platforms and frameworks, most (if not all) of them being really REALLY good products. And then they go and screw up the help! How lame is that?!   Anyway, it's not all gloom-and-doom. Luckily there is a desktop app which presents a UI over the new help system that's very close to what was there in VS2008, by Robert Chandler (to which I hereby declare eternal gratitude). It still has some minor issues but I'll take it over the browser version of the help any day. It's free, pretty quick (on my machine ;)) and nicely usable. So, if you hate the new help system (passionately) like I do, download H3Viewer now.

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