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  • SQL SERVER – Display Datetime in Specific Format – SQL in Sixty Seconds #033 – Video

    - by pinaldave
    A very common requirement of developers is to format datetime to their specific need. Every geographic location has different need of the date formats. Some countries follow the standard of mm/dd/yy and some countries as dd/mm/yy. The need of developer changes as geographic location changes. In SQL Server there are various functions to aid this requirement. There is function CAST, which developers have been using for a long time as well function CONVERT which is a more enhanced version of CAST. In the latest version of SQL Server 2012 a new function FORMAT is introduced as well. In this SQL in Sixty Seconds video we cover two different methods to display the datetime in specific format. 1) CONVERT function and 2) FORMAT function. Let me know what you think of this video. Here is the script which is used in the video: -- http://blog.SQLAuthority.com -- SQL Server 2000/2005/2008/2012 onwards -- Datetime SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE()) AS DateConvert; SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),10) AS DateConvert; SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),110) AS DateConvert; SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),5) AS DateConvert; SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),105) AS DateConvert; SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),113) AS DateConvert; SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),114) AS DateConvert; GO -- SQL Server 2012 onwards -- Various format of Datetime SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),113) AS DateConvert; SELECT FORMAT ( GETDATE(), 'dd mon yyyy HH:m:ss:mmm', 'en-US' ) AS DateConvert; SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),GETDATE(),114) AS DateConvert; SELECT FORMAT ( GETDATE(), 'HH:m:ss:mmm', 'en-US' ) AS DateConvert; GO -- Specific usage of Format function SELECT FORMAT(GETDATE(), N'"Current Time is "dddd MMMM dd, yyyy', 'en-US') AS CurrentTimeString; This video discusses CONVERT and FORMAT in simple manner but the subject is much deeper and there are lots of information to cover along with it. I strongly suggest that you go over related blog posts in next section as there are wealth of knowledge discussed there. Related Tips in SQL in Sixty Seconds: Get Date and Time From Current DateTime – SQL in Sixty Seconds #025 Retrieve – Select Only Date Part From DateTime – Best Practice Get Time in Hour:Minute Format from a Datetime – Get Date Part Only from Datetime DATE and TIME in SQL Server 2008 Function to Round Up Time to Nearest Minutes Interval Get Date Time in Any Format – UDF – User Defined Functions Retrieve – Select Only Date Part From DateTime – Best Practice – Part 2 Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2 Saturday Fun Puzzle with SQL Server DATETIME2 and CAST What would you like to see in the next SQL in Sixty Seconds video? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)   Filed under: Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video Tagged: Excel

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 28, 2010 -- #850

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Giorgetti Alessandro, Alexander Strauss, Mahesh Sabnis, Andrea Boschin, Maxim Goldin, Peter Torr, Wolf Schmidt, and Marlon Grech. Shoutout: Koen Zwikstra announced a SL4 update: Silverlight Spy 3.0.0.11 Adam Kinney posted a WTF Step by Step guide to installing Silverlight Tools David Makogon posted his materials from a presentation: RockNUG April 2010 Materials: Silverlight 4 From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight, M-V-VM ... and IoC - part 4 Giorgetti Alessandro isn't wasting any time... he's already gotten Part 4 of his MVVM, IoC, and Silverlight series up. He's discussing commanding. He gives some good external links and develops in his own direction as well. Application Partitioning with MEF, Silverlight and Windows Azure – Part II Alexander Strauss has the second and final part of his MEF/Silverlight/Azuer posts up, describing getting XAP information from Azure Blob storage. Simple Databinding and 3-D Features using Silverlight in Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Mahesh Sabnis has a post up combining DataBinding and 3D displays on WP7 ... good long tutorial and source. Keeping an ObservableCollection sorted with a method override Andrea Boschin details the reasons behind his need for having a sorted ObservableCollection, then hands over the code he used to do so. VS2010: Silverlight 4 profiling Maxim Goldin posted about profiling Silverlight 4 in VS2010. It's not overly straightforward but once you do it a couple times, not a big deal ... check out the comments as well. Peter Torr: Mock Location APIs from my Mix10 Talk A discussion came up on the insider's list this morning asking about Location Service in the emulator. Laurent Bugnion pointed us at Peter Torr's Mock Location from his MIX10 talk. Finding the "real" templates and generic.xaml in Silverlight core or library assemblies, by using .NET Reflector Wolf Schmidt at the Silverlight SDK has a post up about using .NET Reflector to rat around in Silverlight core or library assemblies. How does MEFedMVVM compose the catalogs and how can I override the behavior? – MEFedMVVM Part 4 Marlon Grech has Part 4 of his MEFedMVVM series up and this one is for advanced use of MEFedMVVM... where you're writing a composer and how that would be different for Silverlight and WPF... oh yeah, and what is a composer as well :) 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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  • SQL SERVER – 2011 – Introduction to SEQUENCE – Simple Example of SEQUENCE

    - by pinaldave
    SQL Server 2011 will contain one of the very interesting feature called SEQUENCE. I have waited for this feature for really long time. I am glad it is here finally. SEQUENCE allows you to define a single point of repository where SQL Server will maintain in memory counter. USE AdventureWorks2008R2 GO CREATE SEQUENCE [Seq] AS [int] START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY 1 MAXVALUE 20000 GO SEQUENCE is very interesting concept and I will write few blog post on this subject in future. Today we will see only working example of the same. Let us create a sequence. We can specify various values like start value, increment value as well maxvalue. -- First Run SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR Seq, c.CustomerID FROM Sales.Customer c GO -- Second Run SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR Seq, c.AccountNumber FROM Sales.Customer c GO Once the sequence is defined, it can be fetched using following method. Every single time new incremental value is provided, irrespective of sessions. Sequence will generate values till the max value specified. Once the max value is reached, query will stop and will return error message. Msg 11728, Level 16, State 1, Line 2 The sequence object ‘Seq’ has reached its minimum or maximum value. Restart the sequence object to allow new values to be generated. We can restart the sequence from any particular value and it will work fine. -- Restart the Sequence ALTER SEQUENCE [Seq] RESTART WITH 1 GO -- Sequence Restarted SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR Seq, c.CustomerID FROM Sales.Customer c GO Let us do final clean up. -- Clean Up DROP SEQUENCE [Seq] GO There are lots of things one can find useful about this feature. We will see that in future posts. Here is the complete code for easy reference. USE AdventureWorks2008R2 GO CREATE SEQUENCE [Seq] AS [int] START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY 1 MAXVALUE 20000 GO -- First Run SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR Seq, c.CustomerID FROM Sales.Customer c GO -- Second Run SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR Seq, c.AccountNumber FROM Sales.Customer c GO -- Restart the Sequence ALTER SEQUENCE [Seq] RESTART WITH 1 GO -- Sequence Restarted SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR Seq, c.CustomerID FROM Sales.Customer c GO -- Clean Up DROP SEQUENCE [Seq] GO Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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  • My thoughts on the future of the web with respect to flash, plugins, etc…

    - by joelvarty
    More than 10 years ago I was coding Java applets.  They were great at the time because I could reasonably expect them to run the same way in Netscape and Internet Explorer.  I could also reliably do asynchronous networking back to the server.  But then, Microsoft pulled their native Java runtime from Windows and Internet Explorer.  It got a lot harder to get applets running in people’s browsers. So I started writing ActiveX controls for IE and Java applets for Netscape. Then I switched to Flash, not for too long, but it was enough for me to see that it was a capable and curious implementation of animation, multimedia and script. I even wrote a few Silverlight controls, but then I stopped. I stepped back from all of the “richness” and “interactivity” and I thought about things like accessibility and SEO.  I wondered how my apps and sites might appear to the greater world.  I wondered how the developers I am working with, or who might be inheriting my code down the road, might interact with it. And I thought to myself, What the hell was I thinking? Those embedded controls are not what the web is about, and they run contrary to nearly all of the things that makes the web exciting and fosters innovation within and around.   Those plugins or controls, or whatever you want to refer to them as, are only stop-gaps that fill a hole in the basic HTML/Script/CSS specifications, and that’s all they should ever be used for.  Full stop.  Period.  For instance, I still make use of a nifty little flash control called SWFUpload because it lets me check file size before an upload starts.  I can do the same thing from a Silverlight control.  But rest assured, if I could do this from native javascript, I would in a second.  In fact, the only reason I chose SWFUpload over a ton of other alternatives is that it has a great javascript API so I can do (nearly) all of the UI in regular HTML.  And I ALWAYS provide a non-flash alternative for uploading, and for the rest of any website where the designer has insisted on some piece of creativity that requires flash (usually because the designer is also the flash developer, but that’s an aside…). The web is about openness, and about exposing that openness in such a way that it can be taken advantage of as a small part of a greater whole.  Sure we need security and authentication and ssl and all that stuff, but for me, its something more profound.  For me, the majority of what the web is, is about exposing something that delivers meaning.  What meaning can we derive from an <object> tag?   more later - joel

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  • Programming doesn&rsquo;t have to be Magic

    - by Wes McClure
    In the show LOST, the Swan Station had a button that “had to be pushed” every 100 minutes to avoid disaster.  Several characters in the show took it upon themselves to have faith and religiously push the button, resetting the clock and averting the unknown “disaster”.  There are striking similarities in this story to the code we write every day.  Here are some common ones that I encounter: “I don’t know what it does but the application doesn’t work without it” “I added that code because I saw it in other similar places, I didn’t understand it, but thought it was necessary.” (for consistency, or to make things “work”) “An error message recommended it” “I copied that code” (and didn’t look at what it was doing) “It was suggested in a forum online and it fixed my problem so I left it” In all of these cases we haven’t done our due diligence to understand what the code we are writing is actually doing.  In the rush to get things done it seems like we’re willing to push any button (add any line of code) just to get our desired result and move on.  All of the above explanations are common things we encounter, and are valid ways to work through a problem we have, but when we find a solution to a task we are working on (whether a bug or a feature), we should take a moment to reflect on what we don’t understand.  Remove what isn’t necessary, comprehend and simplify what is.  Why is it detrimental to commit code we don’t understand? Perpetuates unnecessary code If you copy code that isn’t necessary, someone else is more likely to do so, especially peers Perpetuates tech debt Adding unnecessary code leads to extra code that must be understood, maintained and eventually cleaned up in longer lived projects Tech debt begets tech debt as other developers copy or use this code as guidelines in similar situations Increases maintenance How do we know the code is simplified if we don’t understand it? Perpetuates a lack of ownership Makes it seem ok to commit anything so long as it “gets the job done” Perpetuates the notion that programming is magic If we don’t take the time to understand every line of code we add, then we are contributing to the notion that it is simply enough to make the code work, regardless of how. TLDR Don’t commit code that you don’t understand, take the time to understand it, simplify it and then commit it!

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  • Taking AIIM at Social

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Today we are pleased to have a guest post from Christian Finn (@cfinn).  Christian is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter and heads up the WebCenter evangelist team.Last week I had the privilege of speaking at AIIM’s new conference in San Francisco.  AIIM, for those of you not familiar with it, is a global community of information professionals and got its start with ECM and imaging long ago. With 65,000+ members, AIIM has now set about broadening its scope to focus more on the intersection between systems of record (think traditional ECM) and systems of engagement (think social solutions).  So AIIM’s conference is a natural place to be for WebCenter types like me, who have a foot in both of those worlds.AIIM used to have their name on a very large tradeshow, but have changed direction now to run a small, intimate conference.  The lineup of keynotes was terrific, including David Pogue of The New York Times, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, and Ted Schadler, author of Empowered among many thought-provoking and engaging speakers. (Note: Ted will soon be featured in our Social Business webcast series. Stay tuned.)John Mancini and his team at AIIM did a fabulous job running the event and the engagement from the 450 attendees was sustained over the two and a half days.  Our proudest moment was having three finalists up for AIIM awards including: San Joaquin County, CA, for a justice case management system using WebCenter Content and Oracle BPM; Medtronic and Fishbowl Solutions for their innovative iPad solutions on WebCenter Content, and the government of Louisville, Kentucky/Jefferson County for their accounts payable solution using WebCenter Content’s Image & Process Management.  The highlight of the awards night was San Joaquin winning the small organization award against some tough competition.In addition to the conversations sparked at the show, AIIM promoted the whitepapers their industry task forces have produced on the impact and opportunities created by systems of engagement and systems of record. The task forces were led by: Geoffrey Moore, the renowned high tech marketing guru and author of Crossing The Chasm; and Andrew McAfee, who coined the term and wrote the book, Enterprise 2.0. (Note: Andy will also be featured soon on the Social Business webcast series.)  These free papers make short, excellent reading and you can download them on the AIIM website: Moore highlights the changes to Enterprise IT that the social revolution will engender, and McAfee covers where and how organizations are finding value in using social techniques to foster innovation, to scale Q&A across the organization, and to connect sales and marketing for greater efficiency and effectiveness. Moore’s whitepaper is here and McAfee’s whitepapers are available here. For the benefit of those who did not get a chance to attend the AIIM conference, I’ll be posting the topics of my AIIM presentation, “Three Principles for Fixing Your Broken Organization,” here on the WebCenter blog over the rest of this week and next in a series of posts.  

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  • “Cloud Integration in Minutes” – True or False?

    - by Bruce Tierney
    The short answer is “yes”. Connecting on-premise and cloud applications “in minutes” is true…provided you only consider the connectivity subset of integration and have a small number of cloud integration touch points. At the recent Gartner AADI conference, 230 attendees filled up the Oracle session to get a more comprehensive answer to this question. During the session, titled “Simplifying Integration – The Cloud & Mobile Pre-requisite”, Oracle’s Tim Hall described cloud connectivity and then, equally importantly, the other essential and sometimes overlooked aspects of integration required to ensure a long term application and service integration strategy. To understand the challenges and opportunities faced by cloud integration, the session started off with a slide that describes how connectivity can quickly transition from simplicity to complexity as the number of applications and service vendor instances grows: Increased complexity puts increased demand on the integration platform As companies expand from on-premise applications into a hybrid on-premise/cloud infrastructure with support for mobile, cloud, and social, there is a new sense of urgency to implement a unified and comprehensive service integration platform. Without getting this unified platform in place, companies face increased complexity and cost managing a growing patchwork of niche integration toolsets as well as the disparate standards mandated by each SaaS vendor as shown in the image below: dddddddddddddddddddd Incomplete and overlapping offerings from a patchwork of niche vendors Also at Gartner AADI, Oracle SOA Suite customer Geeta Pyne, Director of Middleware at BMC presented their successful strategy on how BMC efficiently manages their cloud integration despite disparate requirements from each vendor. From one of Geeta’s slide: Interfaces are dictated by SaaS vendors; wide variety (SOAP, REST, Socket, HTTP/POX, SFTP); Flexibility of Oracle Service Bus/SOA Suite helps to support Every vendor has their way to handle Security; WS-Security, Custom Header; Support in Oracle Service Bus helps to adhere to disparate requirements At BMC, the flexibility of Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA Suite allowed them to support the wide variation in the functional requirements as mandated by their SaaS vendors. In contrast to the patchwork platform approach of escalating complexity from overlapping SaaS toolkits, Oracle’s strategy is to provide a unified platform to support disparate requirements from your SaaS vendors, on-premise apps, legacy apps, and more. Furthermore, Oracle SOA Suite includes the many aspects of comprehensive integration beyond basic connectivity including orchestration, analytics (BAM, events…), service virtualization and more in a single unified interface. Oracle SOA Suite – Unified and comprehensive To summarize, yes you can achieve “cloud integration in minutes” when considering the connectivity subset of integration but be sure to look for ways to simplify as you consider a more comprehensive view of integration beyond basic connectivity such as service virtualization, management, event processing and more. And finally, be sure your integration platform has the deep flexibility to handle the requirements of all your future SaaS applications…many of which are unknown to you now.

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  • Silverlight Cream for March 06, 2010 -- #808

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: András Velvárt, felix corke, Colin Eberhardt, Christopher Bennage, Gergely Orosz, Entity Spaces Team Blog, Mike Taulty(-2-), Jit Ghosh, and Jesse Liberty. Shoutouts: Jeremy Likness expands on the Silverlight Team's post Vancouver Olympics - How'd We Do That? Gavin Wignall has a post up Creating a 360 photograph of an object with Silverlight Photosynth From SilverlightCream.com: Transforming an Ugly Duckling into a Graceful Swan With Expression Blend and Silverlight - Part 2 Intro Animation András Velvárt has part 2 of his Transformation series up at SilverlightShow... he's taking the initro animation to a new length, allowing playback even... cool video tutorial! Free Silverlight 4 beta skin! felix corke has a Silerlight 4 theme up for us all to use. If you like a dark theme like Blend, you'll like this... I like it! Linq to Visual Tree Colin Eberhardt has a great tutorial up for using LINQ to query the WPF or Silverlight Visual Tree while retaining the tree structure. He also has links out to other techniques. XAML Attributes on Separate Lines Christopher Bennage has a post up showing how to easily get all your XAML attributes on separate lines using a VS menu option... I didn't know that! Using built-in, embedded and streamed fonts in Silverlight Gergely Orosz has a post up at ScottLogic going over Fonts in Silverlight -- built-in, embedded, or streamed, and examples with code. EntitySpaces 2010 Two Part Series on Silverlight and WCF Entity Spaces Team Blog has a pair of videos up on Entity Spaces 2010, WCF, and Silverlight. Part 1 is the intro and explanation, part 2 is a full-up app demonstrating it. MEF, Silverlight and the DeploymentCatalog In an attempt to respond fully to a query, Mike Taulty literally pushed the record button and took off on what became a tutorial video on building a real Silverlight app utilizing MEF. Silverlight 4, Experiment with Pluggable Navigation and a WCF Data Service Mike Taulty has an experiment detailed on his blog about pluggable navigation and Silverlight 4. He walks through the history of how we got to this point then takes on in an example... good external links too Enhancing Silverlight Video Experiences with Contextual Data This is a post on the MSDN Magazine site where Jit Ghosh has a great long post about not only Smooth Streaming with Silverlight, but also adding context data to your video. When Is It OK To Hack? Read what all Jesse Liberty gets involved in when he's trying to get something out the door and has to work around a problem. Just about as interesting are the comments ... check it out and leave your own! 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    MIX10

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  • Inflector for .NET

    - by srkirkland
    I was writing conventions for FluentNHibernate the other day and I ran into the need to pluralize a given string and immediately thought of the ruby on rails Inflector.  It turns out there is a .NET library out there also capable of doing word inflection, originally written (I believe) by Andrew Peters, though the link I had no longer works.  The entire Inflector class is only a little over 200 lines long and can be easily included into any project, and contains the Pluralize() method along with a few other helpful methods (like Singularize(), Camelize(), Capitalize(), etc). The Inflector class is available in its entirety from my github repository https://github.com/srkirkland/Inflector.  In addition to the Inflector.cs class I added tests for every single method available so you can gain an understanding of what each method does.  Also, if you are wondering about a specific test case feel free to fork my project and add your own test cases to ensure Inflector does what you expect. Here is an example of some test cases for pluralize: TestData.Add("quiz", "quizzes"); TestData.Add("perspective", "perspectives"); TestData.Add("ox", "oxen"); TestData.Add("buffalo", "buffaloes"); TestData.Add("tomato", "tomatoes"); TestData.Add("dwarf", "dwarves"); TestData.Add("elf", "elves"); TestData.Add("mouse", "mice");   TestData.Add("octopus", "octopi"); TestData.Add("vertex", "vertices"); TestData.Add("matrix", "matrices");   TestData.Add("rice", "rice"); TestData.Add("shoe", "shoes"); .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; } Pretty smart stuff.

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  • AutoVue at the Oracle Asset Lifecycle Management Summit

    - by celine.beck
    I recently had the opportunity to attend and present the integration between AutoVue and Primavera P6 during the Oracle ALM Summit, which was held in March at Redwood Shores, on Oracle Headquarters grounds. The ALM Summit brought together over 300 Oracle maintenance practitioners who endured the foggy and rainy San Francisco weather to attend the 4th edition of this Oracle-driven conference. Attendees have roles in maintenance management and IT. Following a general session, Ralph Rio from ARC Advisory Group provided a very interesting keynote session discussing Asset Management directions, both in the short and long run. An interesting point that Ralph raised is that most organizations have done a good job at improving performance at the design / build, operate and maintain and portfolio management phases by leveraging solutions like Asset Lifecycle Management and Project & Portfolio management solutions; however, there seem to be room for improvement in between those phases, when information flows from one group to the other, during the data handover phase or when time comes to update / modify drawings to reflect the reality of physical assets. This is where AutoVue comes into play. By integrating with enterprise applications like content management systems, asset lifecycle management applications and project management solutions, AutoVue can be a real-process enabler, streamlining information flows from concept/design to decommissioning and ensuring that all project stakeholders have access to asset information and engineering data throughout the asset lifecycle. AutoVue's built-in digital annotation capabilities allows maintenance workers and technicians to report changes in configuration and visually capture the delta between as-built and as-maintained versions of asset documents. This information can then be easily handed over to engineers who can identify changes and incorporate these modifications into the drawings during the next round of document revisions. PPL Power Generation, an electric utilities headquarted in Allentown, Pennsylvania discussed this usage of AutoVue during an interesting Webcast around AutoVue's role in the Utilities space. After the keynote sessions, participants broke off into product-centric tracks around Oracle's Asset Lifecycle Management solutions (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards). The second day of the conference was the occasion for us to present the integration between AutoVue and Primavera P6 to the Maintenance Summit audience. The presentation was a great success and generated much discussion with partners and customers during breaks. People seemed highly interested in learning more about our plans for integrating AutoVue and Primavera P6 with Oracle's ALM solutions...stay tune for further information on the subject!

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  • Defining Discovery: Core Concepts

    - by Joe Lamantia
    Discovery tools have had a referencable working definition since at least 2001, when Ben Shneiderman published 'Inventing Discovery Tools: Combining Information Visualization with Data Mining'.  Dr. Shneiderman suggested the combination of the two distinct fields of data mining and information visualization could manifest as new category of tools for discovery, an understanding that remains essentially unaltered over ten years later.  An industry analyst report titled Visual Discovery Tools: Market Segmentation and Product Positioning from March of this year, for example, reads, "Visual discovery tools are designed for visual data exploration, analysis and lightweight data mining." Tools should follow from the activities people undertake (a foundational tenet of activity centered design), however, and Dr. Shneiderman does not in fact describe or define discovery activity or capability. As I read it, discovery is assumed to be the implied sum of the separate fields of visualization and data mining as they were then understood.  As a working definition that catalyzes a field of product prototyping, it's adequate in the short term.  In the long term, it makes the boundaries of discovery both derived and temporary, and leaves a substantial gap in the landscape of core concepts around discovery, making consensus on the nature of most aspects of discovery difficult or impossible to reach.  I think this definitional gap is a major reason that discovery is still an ambiguous product landscape. To help close that gap, I'm suggesting a few definitions of four core aspects of discovery.  These come out of our sustained research into discovery needs and practices, and have the goal of clarifying the relationship between discvoery and other analytical categories.  They are suggested, but should be internally coherent and consistent.   Discovery activity is: "Purposeful sense making activity that intends to arrive at new insights and understanding through exploration and analysis (and for these we have specific defintions as well) of all types and sources of data." Discovery capability is: "The ability of people and organizations to purposefully realize valuable insights that address the full spectrum of business questions and problems by engaging effectively with all types and sources of data." Discovery tools: "Enhance individual and organizational ability to realize novel insights by augmenting and accelerating human sense making to allow engagement with all types of data at all useful scales." Discovery environments: "Enable organizations to undertake effective discovery efforts for all business purposes and perspectives, in an empirical and cooperative fashion." Note: applicability to a world of Big data is assumed - thus the refs to all scales / types / sources - rather than stated explicitly.  I like that Big Data doesn't have to be written into this core set of definitions, b/c I think it's a transitional label - the new version of Web 2.0 - and goes away over time. References and Resources: Inventing Discovery Tools Visual Discovery Tools: Market Segmentation and Product Positioning Logic versus usage: the case for activity-centered design A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search and Discovery

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  • ORM Profiler v1.1 has been released!

    - by FransBouma
    We've released ORM Profiler v1.1, which has the following new features: Real time profiling A real time viewer (RTV) has been added, which gives insight in the activity as it is received by the client, in two views: a chronological connection overview and an activity graph overview. This RTV allows the user to directly record to a snapshot using record buttons, pause the view, mark a range to create a snapshot from that range, and view graphs about the # of connection open actions and # of commands per second. The RTV has a 'range' in which it keeps live data and auto-cleans data that's older than this range. Screenshot of the activity graphs part of the real-time viewer: Low-level activity tab A new tab has been added to the Application tabs: the Low-level activity tab. This tab shows the main activity as it has been received over the named pipe. It can help to get insight in the chronological activity without the grouping over connections, so multiple connections at the same time per thread are easier to spot. Clicking a command will sync the rest of the application tabs, clicking a row will show the details below the splitter bar, as it is done with the other application tabs as well. Default application name in interceptor When an empty string or null is passed for application name to the Initialize method of the interceptor, the AppDomain's friendly name is used instead. Copy call stack to clipboard A call stack viewed in a grid in various parts of the UI is now copyable to the clipboard by clicking a button. Enable/Disable interceptor from the config file It's now possible to enable/disable the interceptor Initialization from the application's config file, using: Code: <appSettings> <add key="ORMProfilerEnabled" value="true"/> </appSettings> if value is true, the interceptor's Initialize method will proceed. If the value is false, the interceptor's Initialize method will not proceed and initialization won't be performed, meaning no interception will take place. If the setting is absent, or misconfigured, the Initialize method will proceed as normal and perform the initialization. Stored procedure calls for select databases are now properly displayed as a call For the databases: SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Sybase ASA, Sybase ASE and Informix a stored procedure call is displayed as an execute/call statement and copy to clipboard works as-is. I'm especially happy with the new real-time profiling feature in ORM Profiler, which is the flagship feature for this release: it offers a completely new way to use the profiler, namely directly during debugging: you can immediately see what's going on without the necessity of a snapshot. The activity graph feature combined with the auto-cleanup of older data, allows you to keep the profiler open for a long period of time and see any spike of activity on the profiled application.

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  • Silverlight Cream for November 08, 2011 -- #1165

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Brian Noyes, Michael Crump, WindowsPhoneGeek, Erno de Weerd, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Sumit Dutta, Asim Sajjad, Dhananjay Kumar, Kunal Chowdhury, and Beth Massi. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Working with Prism 4 Part 1: Getting Started" Brian Noyes WP7: "Getting Started with the Coding4Fun toolkit Tile Control" WindowsPhoneGeek LightSwitch: "How to Connect to and Diagram your SQL Express Database in Visual Studio LightSwitch" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com: Working with Prism 4 Part 1: Getting Started Brian Noyes has a series starting at SilverlightShow about Prism 4 ... this is the first one, so a good time to jump in and pick up on an intro and basic info about Prism plus building your first Prism app. 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 5 of 10) Michael Crump has Part 5 of his 10-part Silverlight 5 investigation up at SilverlightShow talking about all the various text features added in Silverlight 5 Beta: Text Tracking and Leading, Linked and MultiColumn, OpenType, etc. Getting Started with the Coding4Fun toolkit Tile Control WindowsPhoneGeek takes on the Tile control from the Coding4Fun toolkit... as usual, great tutorial... diagrams, code, explanation Using AppHarbor, Bitbucket and Mercurial with ASP.NET and Silverlight – Part 2 CouchDB, Cloudant and Hammock Erno de Weerd has Part 2 of his trilogy and he's trying to beat David Anson for the long title record :) ... in this episode, he's adding in cloud storage to the mix in a 35-step tutorial. Background Audio Jesse Liberty's talking about background Audio... and no not the Muzak in the elevator (do they still have that?) ... he's tlking about the WP7.1 BackgroundAudioPlayer Using the ToggleSwitch in WinRT/Metro (for C#) Derik Whittaker shows off the ToggleSwitch for WinRT/Metro... not a lot to be said about it, but he says it all :) Part 19 - Windows Phone 7 - Access Phone Contacts Sumit Dutta has Part 19! of his WP7 series up... talking today about getting a phone number from the directory using the PhoneNumberChooserTask ContextMenu using MVVM Asim Sajjad shows how to make the Context Menu ViewModel friendly in this short tutorial. Code to make call in Windows Phone 7 Dhananjay Kumar's latest WP7 post is explaining how to make a call programmatically using the PhoneCallTask launcher. Silverlight Page Navigation Framework - Basic Concept Kunal Chowdhury has a 3-part tutorial series on Silverlight Navigation up. This is the first in the series, and he hits the basics... what constitutes a Page, and how to get started with the navigation framework. How to Connect to and Diagram your SQL Express Database in Visual Studio LightSwitch Beth Massi's latest LightSwitch post is on using the Data Designer to easily crete and model database tables... during development this is in SQL Express, but can be deployed to most SQL server db you like 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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  • Technology Selection for a dynamic product

    - by Kuntal Shah
    We are building a product for Procurement Domain in JAVA. Following are the main technical requirements. Platform Independent Database Independent Browser Independent In functional requirements the product is very dynamic in nature. The main reason being the procurement process around the world is different from client to client. Briefly we need to have a dynamic workflow engine and a dynamic template engine. The workflow engine by which we can define any kind of workflows and the template engine allows us to define any kind of data structures and based on definition it can get the user input through workflow. We have been developing this product for almost 2 years. It has been a long time till we can get down with the dynamics of requirements. Till now we have developed a basic workflow and template engine and which is in use at one of the client. We have been using following technologies. GWT-Ext (Front End Framework) Hibernate (Database Layer) In between we have faced some issues with GWT-Ext (mainly browser compatibility) and database optimization due to sub classing in hibernate. For resolving GWT-Ext issue, which a dying community so we decided to move to SmartGWT. In SmartGWT we faced issues related to loading and now we are able to finalize that GWT 2.3 will be the way to go as the library is rich and performance is upto the mark. We are able to almost finalize GWT-Spring based front and middle layer. In hibernate, we found main issues with sub-classing due to that it was throwing astronomical queries and sometimes it would stop firing any queries for 5-10 seconds or may be around 30 seconds and then resume again. Few days back I came to one article related to ORM. I am a traditional .Net SQL developer and I have always worked with relational database. Reading through this article, I also found it relating to the issues I face. I am still not completely convinced of using hibernate and this article just supported my opinion. Following are the questions for which I am looking for an answer. Should we be going with Hibernate in case of dynamic database requirements and the load of the data will be heavy in future? How can we partition the data, how we can efficiently join the data, how we can optimize the queries? If the answer is no then how do we achieve database independence? Is our choice related to GWT and Spring proper or do we need to change that too? Should we use any other key value pair database if the data is dynamic in nature and it is very difficult to make it relational?

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  • Is SugarCRM really adequate for custom development?

    - by dukeofgaming
    I used SugarCRM for a project about two years ago, I ran into errors from the very installation, having to hack the actual installation file to deploy the software in the server... and other erros that I can't recall now. Two years after, I'm picking it up for a project once again... oh dear, I'm feeling like I should have developed the whole thing from scratch myself. Some examples: I couldn't install it in the server (again)... I had to install it locally, then copy the files and database over to the server and manually edit the config file. Constantly getting deployment errors from the module builder... one reason is SugarCRM keeps creating a record in the upgrade_history table for a file that does not exist, I keep deleting such record and it keeps coming back corrupt. I get other deployment errors, but have not figured them out... then I have to rollback all files and database to try again. I deleted a custom module with relationships, the relationships stayed in the other modules and cannot be deleted anymore, PHP warnings all over the place. Quick create for custom modules does not appear, hack needed. Its whole cache directory is a joke, permanent data/files are stored there. The module builder interface disappears required fields. Edit the wrong thing, module builder won't deploy again... then pray Quick Repair and/or Rebuild Relationships do the trick. My impression of SugarCRM now is that, regardless of its pretty exterior and apparent functionality, it is a very low quality piece of software. This even scared me more: http://amplicate.com/hate/sugarcrm; a quote: I wis this info had been available when I tried to implement it 2 years ago... I searched high and low and the only info I found was positive. Yes, it's a piece of crap. The community edition was full of bugs... nothing worked. Essentially I got fired for implementing it. I'm glad though, because now I work for myself, am much happier and make more money... so, I should really thank SugarCRM for sucking so much I guess! I figured that perhaps some of you have had similar experiences, and have either sticked with SugarCRM or moved on to another solution. I'm very interested in knowing what your resolutions were -or your current situations are- to make up my own mind, since the project I'm working on is long term and I'm feeling SugarCRM will be more an obstacle than an aid. Thanks in advance.

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  • Network Solutions Gold VIP Program

    - by GGBlogger
    Today I received an email advising me “Congratulations! You have been selected for the Network Solutions Gold VIP Program” Now I get a bunch of messages from Network Solutions because a long time ago I chose them as my registrar. I usually just save these to my Outlook Network Solutions folder and move on. This time my wife was in the room and I chuckled and said something about “Network Solutions has made me a Gold VIP member.” She said “So what does that mean?” Prompted by that I scrolled down the page to look at my “perks". Let’s see – Special pricing, 1 year free Web Forwarding, 1 hour of free support… etc etc until I hit “Enrollment in SafeRenew* SafeRenew* simplifies your renewal process. It protects your domain name registrations and corresponding services in the event you forget or are unable to renew on time. I’m thinking “Now ain’t that neat” I don’t use auto renew anyway and never have. Then I continued reading: Beginning June 24th, 2012 your domains* (that’s 10 days away) will automatically renew. To ensure continuation of service, please be certain you have a valid credit card on file. If you do not wish for your services to be automatically renewed, please click here to log into account manager and opt out of the SafeRenew™ service. Whoa Network Solutions is going to start spending my money without so much as a by your leave sir!!! I don’t bloody think so and how truly magnanimous of them I can “click here” to opt out of what I didn’t opt in for. Talk about furious! I still am. Now the kicker is: if my wife hadn’t been curious and if I’d had a working credit card on file I wouldn’t have know this until one of my unwanted domain names auto renewed. Of course I was told “Oh – we’d have refunded your money” to which I say bull. In my view Networks Solutions is guilty of a crime of some sort. They DO NOT have a right to spend my money without asking!!!!! So watch out folks.

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  • Have you really fixed that problem?

    - by DavidWimbush
    The day before yesterday I saw our main live server's CPU go up to constantly 100% with just the occasional short drop to a lower level. The exact opposite of what you'd want to see. We're log shipping every 15 minutes and part of that involves calling WinRAR to compress the log backups before copying them over. (We're on SQL2005 so there's no native compression and we have bandwidth issues with the connection to our remote site.) I realised the log shipping jobs were taking about 10 minutes and that most of that was spent shipping a 'live' reporting database that is completely rebuilt every 20 minutes. (I'm just trying to keep this stuff alive until I can improve it.) We can rebuild this database in minutes if we have to fail over so I disabled log shipping of that database. The log shipping went down to less than 2 minutes and I went off to the SQL Social evening in London feeling quite pleased with myself. It was a great evening - fun, educational and thought-provoking. Thanks to Simon Sabin & co for laying that on, and thanks too to the guests for making the effort when they must have been pretty worn out after doing DevWeek all day first. The next morning I came down to earth with a bump: CPU still at 100%. WTF? I looked in the activity monitor but it was confusing because some sessions have been running for a long time so it's not a good guide what's using the CPU now. I tried the standard reports showing queries by CPU (average and total) but they only show the top 10 so they just show my big overnight archiving and data cleaning stuff. But the Profiler showed it was four queries used by our new website usage tracking system. Four simple indexes later the CPU was back where it should be: about 20% with occasional short spikes. So the moral is: even when you're convinced you've found the cause and fixed the problem, you HAVE to go back and confirm that the problem has gone. And, yes, I have checked the CPU again today and it's still looking sweet.

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  • HTML5/JS - Choppy Game Loop

    - by Rikonator
    I have been experimenting with HTML5/JS, trying to create a simple game when I hit a wall. My choice of game loop is too choppy to be actually of any use in a game. I'm trying for a fixed time step loop, rendering only when required. I simply use a requestAnimationFrame to run Game.update which finds the elapsed time since the last update, and calls State.update to update and render the current state. State.prototype.update = function(ms) { this.ticks += ms; var updates = 0; while(this.ticks >= State.DELTA_TIME && updates < State.MAX_UPDATES) { this.updateState(); this.updateFrameTicks += State.DELTA_TIME; this.updateFrames++; if(this.updateFrameTicks >= 1000) { this.ups = this.updateFrames; this.updateFrames = 0; this.updateFrameTicks -= 1000; } this.ticks -= State.DELTA_TIME; updates++; } if(updates > 0) { this.renderFrameTicks += updates*State.DELTA_TIME; this.renderFrames++; if(this.renderFrameTicks >= 1000) { this.rps = this.renderFrames; this.renderFrames = 0; this.renderFrameTicks -= 1000; } this.renderState(updates*State.DELTA_TIME); } }; But this strategy does not work very well. This is the result: http://jsbin.com/ukosuc/1 (Edit). As it is apparent, the 'game' has fits of lag, and when you tab out for a long period and come back, the 'game' behaves unexpectedly - updates faster than intended. This is either a problem due to something about game loops that I don't quite understand yet, or a problem due to implementation which I can't pinpoint. I haven't been able to solve this problem despite attempting several variations using setTimeout and requestAnimationFrame. (One such example is http://jsbin.com/eyarod/1/edit). Some help and insight would really be appreciated!

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  • Unity DontDestroyOnLoad causing scenes to stay open

    - by jkrebsbach
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jkrebsbach/archive/2014/08/11/unity-dontdestroyonload-causing-scenes-to-stay-open.aspxMy Unity project has a class (ClientSettings) where most of the game state & management properties are stored.  Among these are some utility functions that derive from MonoBehavior.  However, between every scene this object was getting recreated and I was losing all sorts of useful data.  I learned that with DontDestroyOnLoad, I can persist this entity between scenes.  Super.Persisting information between scenesThe problem with adding DontDestroyOnLoad to my "ClientSettings" was suddenly my previous scene would stay alive, and continue to execute its update routines.  An important part of the documentation helps shed light to my issues:"If the object is a component or game object then its entire transform hierarchy will not be destroyed either."My ClientSettings script was attached to the main camera on my first scene.  Because of this, the Main Camera was part of the hierarchy of the component, and therefore was also not able to destroy when switching scenes.  Now the first scene's main camera Update routine continues to execute after the second scene is running - causing me to have some very nasty bugs.Suddenly I wasn't sure how I should be creating a persistent entity - so I created a new sandbox project and tested different approaches until I found one that works:In the main scene: Create an empty Game Object:  "GameManager" - and attach the ClientSettings script to this game object.  Set any properties to the clientsettings script as appropriate.Create a prefab, using the GameManager.Remove the Game Object from the main scene.In the Main Camera, I created a script:  Main Script.  This is my primary script for the main scene.<code> public GameObject[] prefabs; private ClientSettings _clientSettings; // Use this for initialization void Start () { GameObject res = (GameObject)Instantiate(prefabs[0]); }</code>Now go back out to scene view, and add the new GameManager prefab to the prefabs collection of MainScript.When the main scene loads, the GameManager is set up, but is not part of the main scene's hierarchy, so the two are no longer tied up together.Now in our second scene, we have a script - SecondScript - and we can get a reference to the ClientSettings we created in the previous scene like so:<code>private ConnectionSettings _clientSettings; // Use this for initialization void Start () { _clientSettings = FindObjectOfType<ConnectionSettings> (); }</code>And the scenes can start and finish without creating strange long-running scene side effects.

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  • How to bill a client for frequently-interrupted time

    - by Greg
    I find that when I'm working on hourly-billable projects (in particular, those that are research/design/architecture-oriented as opposed to straight coding) that I'm easily distracted by any number of things (email, grab a drink (loss of focus, but nature happens), link off the webpage I was reading, wandering mind (easy when the job calls for a lot of thinking), etc.) This results in very fragmented time, far too incremental IMO to accurately track with a timeclock, and some time very gray. I frequently end up billing for only some fraction of the elapsed time I spent in order to feel fair, but sometimes it takes a really long time to put in an 8-hour day. By contrast, when I've worked for salary I've not worried about whether I'm actively working at any given minute, I just get the job done, and I've never had anything but stellar reviews/feedback from past salaried employers, so I think I get the job done well. I personally believe in an 80/20 cycle: I get 80% of my work done during an inspired 20% of my time. But I have to screw around the other 80% of the time in order to get that first 20%. So the question: what billing/time-tracking policy can I adopt in order to be fair to my hourly customers without having to write off my own less-productive 80% that a salaried employer is willing to overlook in light of the complete package? Note: This question is not about how to be more productive or focused. It's about how to work around whatever salient limitations that I have in a way that's both fair to me and to my customers. Update: A little clarification (to pre-emptively stop some righteous indignation): I currently have a half dozen different project/client groups. It's not a great situation and I'm working at reducing it down to two, but that's my current reality. It's very easy to get off on a thread related to a different project than the one I'm clocking, and I'm not always conscious of it at the time. [I did not intend the question to mean that I was off playing games or making personal calls, etc., and have adjusted wording above to be clearer. Most of the time. I am only human, and sometimes the mind does force you to take a break! :-)]

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  • How to handle "circular dependency" in dependency injection

    - by Roel
    The title says "Circular Dependency", but it is not the correct wording, because to me the design seems solid. However, consider the following scenario, where the blue parts are given from external partner, and orange is my own implementation. Also assume there is more then one ConcreteMain, but I want to use a specific one. (In reality, each class has some more dependencies, but I tried to simplify it here) I would like to instanciate all of this with Depency Injection (Unity), but I obviously get a StackOverflowException on the following code, because Runner tries to instantiate ConcreteMain, and ConcreteMain needs a Runner. IUnityContainer ioc = new UnityContainer(); ioc.RegisterType<IMain, ConcreteMain>() .RegisterType<IMainCallback, Runner>(); var runner = ioc.Resolve<Runner>(); How can I avouid this? Is there any way to structure this so that I can use it with DI? The scenario I'm doing now is setting everything up manually, but that puts a hard dependency on ConcreteMain in the class which instantiates it. This is what i'm trying to avoid (with Unity registrations in configuration). All source code below (very simplified example!); public class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { IUnityContainer ioc = new UnityContainer(); ioc.RegisterType<IMain, ConcreteMain>() .RegisterType<IMainCallback, Runner>(); var runner = ioc.Resolve<Runner>(); Console.WriteLine("invoking runner..."); runner.DoSomethingAwesome(); Console.ReadLine(); } } public class Runner : IMainCallback { private readonly IMain mainServer; public Runner(IMain mainServer) { this.mainServer = mainServer; } public void DoSomethingAwesome() { Console.WriteLine("trying to do something awesome"); mainServer.DoSomething(); } public void SomethingIsDone(object something) { Console.WriteLine("hey look, something is finally done."); } } public interface IMain { void DoSomething(); } public interface IMainCallback { void SomethingIsDone(object something); } public abstract class AbstractMain : IMain { protected readonly IMainCallback callback; protected AbstractMain(IMainCallback callback) { this.callback = callback; } public abstract void DoSomething(); } public class ConcreteMain : AbstractMain { public ConcreteMain(IMainCallback callback) : base(callback){} public override void DoSomething() { Console.WriteLine("starting to do something..."); var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>{ Thread.Sleep(5000);/*very long running task*/ }); task.ContinueWith(t => callback.SomethingIsDone(true)); } }

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  • Changing Focus on my Blog

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    I try to limit these types of blog posts – the ones where I communicate some change as if I have a loyal subscriber base that will be somehow affected. Still, I think its of worth if for nothing else than to document for myself an acknowledgement that my career is evolving. For the last who knows how long, I’ve had this as my banner: It’s funny how technology focuses change over time. 3.5 – 4 years ago I was wanting to immerse myself in BizTalk. Then I shifted, focussing on Silverlight. I even started a short-lived Silverlight user group here in Winnipeg that had, IMO, one of the *best* UG logos ever (do a Google search for the old school Winnipeg Jets logo if you don’t catch the reference)… And even how I identified myself – as a Developer – isn’t really accurate anymore as I’ve shifted more into an architect/analyst role at Online Business Systems as well as getting much more involved in business development. So I’m switching the focus of this blog a bit. Nothing too great, but you’ll find my posts aren’t necessarily tied to a technology or platform. Instead I’ll be focussing on current passions and interests. Solution Architecture Before a line of code is written, a solution is envisioned. The process of performing solution analysis and architecture is an intriguing process that encompasses negotiation and interpersonal skills as much as technical knowledge. Business & Entrepreneurship Creating things, building things, and working with others – business is fascinating and exciting! Entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship, are growing trends that I’ve been exploring over the last few years through my conference (www.prairiedevcon.com) and within Online. Microsoft At Online one of my roles is “Microsoft Practice Lead” and my entire career has been built around the Microsoft stack of technologies. That focus won’t change here on my blog, and there’s tonnes of exciting new products and technologies coming out of Redmond. Adoption This is a very personal subject that’s extremely close to my heart. I’m not talking about technology adoption, I’m talking about human adoption. Almost three years ago we adopted our first daughter, Sadie, and two years ago we adopted our second daughter, Skylar; an amazing new chapter in my life as I became a “parent”. Adoption is very much misunderstood, and many people have questions about it. Hopefully I can shed some light into our experiences and provide some guidance for those that are looking into it. So come along with me as I start chronicling the next phase of my career and life.

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  • NoSQL is not about object databases

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    NoSQL as a movement is an interesting beast. I kinda like that it’s negatively defined (I happen to belong myself to at least one other such a-community). It’s not in its roots about proposing one specific new silver bullet to kill an old problem. it’s about challenging the consensus. Actually, blindly and systematically replacing relational databases with object databases would just replace one set of issues with another. No, the point is to recognize that relational databases are not a universal answer -although they have been used as one for so long- and recognize instead that there’s a whole spectrum of data storage solutions out there. Why is it so hard to recognize, by the way? You are already using some of those other data storage solutions every day. Let me cite a few: The file system Active Directory XML / JSON documents The Web e-mail Logs Excel files EXIF blobs in your photos Relational databases And yes, object databases It’s just a fact of modern life. Notice by the way that most of the data that you use every day is unstructured and thus mostly unsuitable for relational storage. It really is more a matter of recognizing it: you are already doing NoSQL. So what happens when for any reason you need to simultaneously query two or more of these heterogeneous data stores? Well, you build an index of sorts combining them, and that’s what you query instead. Of course, there’s not much distance to travel from that to realizing that querying is better done when completely separated from storage. So why am I writing about this today? Well, that’s something I’ve been giving lots of thought, on and off, over the last ten years. When I built my first CMS all that time ago, one of the main problems my customers were facing was to manage and make sense of the mountain of unstructured data that was constituting most of their business. The central entity of that system was the file system because we were dealing with lots of Word documents, PDFs, OCR’d articles, photos and static web pages. We could have stored all that in SQL Server. It would have worked. Ew. I’m so glad we didn’t. Today, I’m working on Orchard (another CMS ;). It’s a pretty young project but already one of the questions we get the most is how to integrate existing data. One of the ideas I’ll be trying hard to sell to the rest of the team in the next few months is to completely split the querying from the storage. Not only does this provide great opportunities for performance optimizations, it gives you homogeneous access to heterogeneous and existing data sources. For free.

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  • Android app to remote control Samsung Smart TVs

    - by Gopinath
    Smart TV Remote is an unofficial Android app that lets you control Samsung Smart TVs connected over a local WiFi network. This app comes very handy when you want to control your TV which is not in line of sight of your TV remote control or just want to use your mobile phone/tablet to control the TV. Setting up a TV  is very easy using auto scan feature . Once the TV is setup, you are all set to start using the app as a remote control. A traditional remote controls makes use of infra red technology and it needs to be in the line of sight of the TV receiver to work. But this app make use of WiFi technology which give it flexibility of controlling the TV as long as the mobile & TV is connected to WiFi network. It just works even if the TV is behind a wall. The App provides very easy to use options to switch between channels and separate remotes with media controls, smart hub features and a numeric key pad if you want to navigate to a channel through its number. The App also provides a home screen widget with volume controls and channel navigation options. I use  this App to control Samsung E Series Smart Tv at home and it works very well. I’m impressed by the ease at which it allows to setup a TV, support for multiple TVs, controlling the TV though I’m not in the line of sight and using volume buttons of smart phone to control volume of TV. What’s annoying and missing with the app As advertised the app works very well in controlling Samsung TVs (B-, C-, D- E-, and F-Series) except it is very painful to move mouse pointer while browsing web on TV. When you try to move mouse pointer using the App, it mouse painfully slow especially. I gave us using the app to control mouse pointer after trying couple of times. I installed this App thinking that it may help me browse web on Smart TVs, especially a key board support to type web urls. App does not supports entering text either while browsing web or searching through Smart TV apps like YouTube, App Store etc. Developers of this App never advertised keyboard support so no complaints about this. But it would be very helpful if the developers allow this app use as a keyboard and rescue me from the pain of typing text using TV Remote control. Overall this is a very nice app and worth trying out – Download Smart TV Remote from Google Play

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  • Playing NSF music in FMOD.net

    - by Tesserex
    So, as the title says, I want to be able to play NSF files using FMOD, because my project already uses FMOD and I'd rather not replace it. This will involve figuring out how existing players and emulators work and porting it. I haven't yet found an existing player that uses FMOD. My starting point is the MyNes source from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mynes/. There are two big steps between here and what I'm looking for. MyNes plays from a ROM, not NSF. So, I have to rip out the APU and get it to play NSF files. The MyNes APU uses SlimDX, so I have to convert that to FMOD.NET. I am really stuck about how to go about either of these, because I'm not that familiar with audio formats and it's hard finding resources online. So here are a few questions: From what I can tell from the NSF spec at http://kevtris.org/nes/nsfspec.txt, it's just contains the relevant memory section of the ROM, plus the header. If anyone can verify or correct this that would be great. The emulator APU uses data from the rest of the emulator to play, including things like cycle counts. I'm not sure what replaces this in a standalone player. Can't I just load all the music data at once into a stream and play it? Joining #1 and #2, does the header data from the NSF substitute for some of the ROM data in the emulator code? Using FMOD, will I be following the usercreatedsound example for loading a stream? And does this format count as PCM? Specifically MyNes says PCM8. Any tips on loading / playing the stream in FMOD are appreciated. As an aside, I don't really understand the loading / playing sections of the spec I linked at all. It seems to apply to 6502 systems / emulators only and not to my situation. I know it's a long shot for anyone here to have enough experience in this area to help, but anything you can provide is definitely appreciated. A link to an existing .NET library that does this would be even better, but I don't believe one exists.

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