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• SQL Server – SafePeak “Logon Trigger” Feature for Managing Data Access

  - by pinaldave

  Lately I received an interesting question about the abilities of SafePeak for SQL Server acceleration software: Q: “I would like to use SafePeak to make my CRM application faster. It is an application we bought from some vendor, after a while it became slow and we can’t reprogram it. SafePeak automated caching sounds like an easy and good solution for us. But, in my application there are many servers and different other applications services that address its main database, and some even change data, and I feel that there is a chance that some servers that during the connection process we may miss some. Is there a way to ensure that SafePeak will be aware of all connections to the SQL Server, so its cache will remain intact?” Interesting question, as I remember that SafePeak (http://www.safepeak.com/Product/SafePeak-Overview) likes that all traffic to the database will go thru it. I decided to check out the features of SafePeak latest version (2.1) and seek for an answer there. A: Indeed I found SafePeak has a feature they call “Logon Trigger” and is designed for that purpose. It is located in the user interface, under: Settings -> SQL instances management  ->  [your instance]  ->  [Logon Trigger] tab. From here you activate / deactivate it and control a white-list of enabled server IPs and Login names that SafePeak will ignore them. Click to Enlarge After activation of the “logon trigger” Safepeak server is notified by the SQL Server itself on each new opened connection. Safepeak monitors those connections and decides if there is something to do with them or not. On a typical installation SafePeak likes all application and users connections to go via SafePeak – this way it knows about data and schema updates immediately (real time). With activation of the safepeak “logon trigger”  a special CLR trigger is deployed on the SQL server and notifies Safepeak on any connection that has not arrived via SafePeak. In such cases Safepeak can act to clear and lock the cache or to ignore it. This feature enables to make sure SafePeak will be aware of all connections so SafePeak cache will maintain exactly correct all times. So even if a user, like a DBA will connect to the SQL Server not via SafePeak, SafePeak will know about it and take actions. The notification does not impact the work of that connection, the user or application still continue to do whatever they planned to do. Note: I found that activation of logon trigger in SafePeak requires that SafePeak SQL login will have the next permissions: 1) CONTROL SERVER; 2) VIEW SERVER STATE; 3) And the SQL Server instance is CLR enabled; Seeing SafePeak in action, I can say SafePeak brings fantastic resource for those who seek to get performance for SQL Server critical apps. SafePeak promises to accelerate SQL Server applications in just several hours of installation, automatic learning and some optimization configuration (no code changes!!!). If better application and database performance means better business to you – I suggest you to download and try SafePeak. The solution of SafePeak is indeed unique, and the questions I receive are very interesting. Have any more questions on SafePeak? Please leave your question as a comment and I will try to get an answer for you. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Creating an HttpHandler to handle request of your own extension

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I have already posted about http handler in details before some time here. Now let’s create an http handler which will handle my custom extension. For that we need to create a http handlers class which will implement Ihttphandler. As we are implementing IHttpHandler we need to implement one method called process request and another one is isReusable property. The process request function will handle all the request of my custom extension. so Here is the code for my http handler class. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; namespace Experiement { public class MyExtensionHandler:IHttpHandler { public MyExtensionHandler() { //Implement intialization here } bool IHttpHandler.IsReusable { get { return true; } } void IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { string excuttablepath = context.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath; if (excuttablepath.Contains("HelloWorld.dotnetjalps")) { Page page = new HelloWorld(); page.AppRelativeVirtualPath = context.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath; page.ProcessRequest(context); } } } } Here in above code you can see that in process request function I am getting current executable path and then I am processing that page. Now Lets create a page with extension .dotnetjalps and then we will process this page with above created http handler. so let’s create it. It will create a page like following. Now let’s write some thing in page load Event like following. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; namespace Experiement { public partial class HelloWorld : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World"); } } } Now we have to tell our web server that we want to process request from this .dotnetjalps extension through our custom http handler for that we need to add a tag in httphandler sections of web.config like following. <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> <httpHandlers> <add verb="*" path="*.dotnetjalps" type="Experiement.MyExtensionHandler,Experiement"/> </httpHandlers> </system.web> </configuration> That’s it now run that page into browser and it will execute like following in browser That’s you.. Isn’t it cool.. Stay tuned for more.. Happy programming.. Technorati Tags: HttpHandler,ASP.NET,Extension

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• Google TV Gets Bad Reception. Can Media Center Pull in the Signal?

  - by andrewbrust

  The news hit Monday morning that Google has decided to delay the release of its Google TV platform, and has asked its OEMs to delay any products that embed the software.  Coming just about two weeks prior to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Google’s timing is about the worst imaginable.  CES is where the platform should have had its coming out party, especially given all the anticipation that has built up since its initial announcement came 7 months ago. At last year’s CES, it seemed every consumer electronics company had fashioned its own software stack for Internet-based video programming and applications/widgets on its TVs, optical disc players and set top boxes.  In one case, I even saw two platforms on a single TV set (one provided by Yahoo and the other one native to the TV set). The whole point of Google TV was to solve this problem and offer a standard, embeddable platform.  But that won’t be happening, at least not for a while.  Google seems unable to get it together, and more proprietary approaches, like Apple TV, don’t seem to be setting the world of TV-Internet convergence on fire, either. It seems to me, that when it comes to building a “TV operating system,” Windows Media Center is still the best of a bad bunch.  But it won’t stay so for much longer without some changes.  Will Redmond pick up the ball that Google has fumbled?  I’m skeptical, but hopeful.  Regardless, here are some steps that could help Microsoft make the most of Google’s faux pas: Introduce a new Media Center version that uses XBox 360, rather than Windows 7 (or 8), as the platform.  TV platforms should be appliance-like, not PC-like.  Combine that notion with the runaway sales numbers for Xbox 360 Kinect, and the mass appeal it has delivered for Xbox, and the switch form Windows makes even more sense. As I have pointed out before, Microsoft’s Xbox implementation of its Mediaroom platform (announced and demoed at last year’s CES) gets Redmond 80% of the way toward this goal.  Nothing stops Microsoft from going the other 20%, other than its own apathy, which I hope has dissipated. Reverse the decision to remove Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server (WHS), and create deep integration between WHS and Media Center.  I have suggested this previously as well, but the recent announcement that Drive Extender would be dropped from WHS 2.0 creates the need for me to a) join the chorus of people urging Microsoft to reconsider and b) reiterate the importance of Media Center-WHS integration in the context of a Google compete scenario. Enable Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as a Media Center client.  This would tighten the integration loop already established between WP7, Xbox and Zune.  But it would also counter Echostar/DISH Network/Sling Media, strike a blow against Google/Android (and even Apple/iOS) and could be the final strike against TiVO. Bring the WP7 user interface to Media Center and Kinect-enable it.  This would further the integration discussed above and would be appropriate recognition of WP7’s Metro UI having been built on the heritage of the original Media Center itself.  And being able to run your DVR even if you can’t find the remote (or can’t see its buttons in the dark) could be a nifty gimmick. Microsoft can do this but its consumer-oriented organization, responsible for Xbox, Zune and WP7, has to take the reins here, or none of this will likely work.  There’s a significant chance that won’t happen, but I won’t let that stop me from hoping that it does and insisting that it must.  Honestly, this fight is Microsoft’s to lose.

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• From the Tips Box: Pre-installation Prep Work Makes Service Pack Upgrades Smoother

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Last month Microsoft rolled out Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and, like many SP releases, quite a few people are hanging back to see what happens. If you want to update but still error on the side of caution, reader Ron Troy  offers a step-by-step guide. Ron’s cautious approach does an excellent job minimizing the number of issues that could crop up in a Service Pack upgrade by doing a thorough job updating your driver sets and clearing out old junk before you roll out the update. Read on to see how he does it: Just wanted to pass on a suggestion for people worried about installing Service Packs.  I came up with a ‘method’ a couple years back that seems to work well. Run Windows / Microsoft Update to get all updates EXCEPT the Service Pack. Use Secunia PSI to find any other updates you need. Use CCleaner or the Windows disk cleanup tools to get rid of all the old garbage out there.  Make sure that you include old system updates. Obviously, back up anything you really care about.  An image backup can be real nice to have if things go wrong. Download the correct SP version from Microsoft.com; do not use Windows / Microsoft Update to get it.  Make sure you have the 64 bit version if that’s what you have installed on your PC. Make sure that EVERYTHING that affects the OS is up to date.  That includes all sorts of drivers, starting with video and audio.  And if you have an Intel chipset, use the Intel Driver Utility to update those drivers.  It’s very quick and easy.  For the video and audio drivers, some can be updated by Intel, some by utilities on the vendor web sites, and some you just have to figure out yourself.  But don’t be lazy here; old drivers and Windows Service Packs are a poor mix. If you have 3rd party software, check to see if they have any updates for you.  They might not say that they are for the Service Pack but you cut your risk of things not working if you do this. Shut off the Antivirus software (especially if 3rd party). Reboot, hitting F8 to get the SafeMode menu.  Choose SafeMode with Networking. Log into the Administrator account to ensure that you have the right to install the SP. Run the SP.  It won’t be very fancy this way.  Maybe 45 minutes later it will reboot and then finish configuring itself, finally letting you log in. Total installation time on most of my PC’s was about 1 hour but that followed hours of preparation on each. On a separate note, I recently got on the Nvidia web site and their utility told me I had a new driver available for my GeForce 8600M GS.  This laptop had come with Vista, now has Win 7 SP1.  I had a big surprise from this driver update; the Windows Experience Score on the graphics side went way up.  Kudo’s to Nvidia for doing a driver update that actually helps day to day usage.  And unlike ATI’s updates (which I need for my AGP based system), this update was fairly quick and very easy.  Also, Nvidia drivers have never, as I can recall, given me BSOD’s, many of which I’ve gotten from ATI (TDR errors).How to Enable Google Chrome’s Secret Gold IconHTG Explains: What’s the Difference Between the Windows 7 HomeGroups and XP-style Networking?Internet Explorer 9 Released: Here’s What You Need To Know

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• Home Energy Management & Automation with Windows Phone 7

  A number of people at Clarity are personally interested in home energy conservation and home automation. We feel that a mobile device is a great fit for bringing this idea to fruition. While this project is merely a concept and not directly associated with Microsofts Hohm web service, it provides a great model for communicating the concept. I wanted to take the idea a step further and combine saving energy in your home with the ability to track water usage and control your home devices. I designed an application that focuses on total home control and not just energy usage. Application Overview By monitoring home consumption in real time and with yearly projections users can pinpoint vampire devices, times of high or low consumption, and wasteful patterns of energy use. Energy usage meters indicate total current consumption as well as individual device consumption. Users can then use the information to take action, make adjustments, and change their consumption behaviors. The app can be used to automate certain systems like lighting, temperature, or alarms. Other features can be turned on an off at the touch of a toggle switch on your phone, away from home. Forget to turn off the TV or shut the garage door? No problem, you can do it from your phone. Through settings you can enable and disable features of the phone that apply to your home making it a completely customized and convenient experience. To be clear, this equates to more security, big environmental impact, and even bigger savings.   Design and User Interface  Since this panorama application is designed for win phone 7 devices, it complies with the UI Design and Interaction Guide for wp7. I developed the frame and page hierarchy from existing examples. The interface takes advantage of the interactive nature of touch screens with slider controls, pivot control views, and toggle switches to turn on and off devices (not shown in mockup). I followed recommendations for text based elements and adapted the tile notifications to display the most recent user activity. For example, the mockup indicates upon launching the app that the last thing you did was program the thermostat. This model is great for quick launching common user actions. One last design feature to point out is the technical reasons for supplying both light and dark themes for the app. Since this application is targeting energy consumption it only makes sense to consider the effect of the apps background color or image on the phones energy use. When displaying darker colors like black the OLED display may use less power, extending battery life. Other Considerations For now I left out options of wind and solar powered energy options because they are not available to everyone. Renewable energy sources and new technologies associated with them are definitely ideas to keep in mind for a next iteration. Another idea to explore for such an application would be to include a savings model similar to mint.com. In addition to general energy-saving recommendations the application could recommend customized ways to save based on your current utility providers and available options in your area. If your television or refrigerator is guilty of sucking a lot of energy then you may see recommendations for energy star products that could save you even more money! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Amazon Product Advertising API SOAP Namespace Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  About two months ago (twowards the end of February 2012 I think) Amazon decided to change the namespace of the Product Advertising API. The error that would come up was: <ItemSearchResponse > was not expected. If you've used the Amazon Product Advertising API you probably know that Amazon has made it a habit to break the services every few years or so and I guess last month was about the time for another one. Basically the service namespace of the document has been changed and responses from the service just failed outright even though the rest of the schema looks fine. Now I looked around for a while trying to find a recent update to the Product Advertising API - something semi-official looking but everything is dated around 2009. Really??? And it's not just .NET - the newest thing on the sample/APIs is dated early 2011 and a handful of 2010 samples. There are newer full APIs for the 'cloud' offerings, but the Product Advertising API apparently isn't part of that. After searching for quite a bit trying to trace this down myself and trying some of the newer samples (which also failed) I found an obscure forum post that describes the solution of getting past the namespace issue. FWIW, I've been using an old version of the Product Advertising API using the old Microsoft WSE3 services (pre-WCF), which provides some of the WS* security features required by the Amazon service. The fix for this code is to explicitly override the namespace declaration on each of the imported service method signatures. The old service namespace (at least on my build) was: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2009-03-31 and it should be changed to: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01 Change it on the class header:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapService("http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(Property[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(BrowseNode[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(TransactionItem[]))] public partial class AWSECommerceService : Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapClient { and on all method signatures:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapMethodAttribute("http://soap.amazon.com/ItemSearch")] [return: System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("ItemSearchResponse", Namespace="http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] public ItemSearchResponse ItemSearch(ItemSearch ItemSearch1) { Microsoft.Web.Services3.SoapEnvelope results = base.SendRequestResponse("ItemSearch", ItemSearch1); return ((ItemSearchResponse)(results.GetBodyObject(typeof(ItemSearchResponse), this.SoapServiceAttribute.TargetNamespace))); } It's easy to do with a Search and Replace on the above strings. Amazon Services <rant> FWIW, I've not been impressed by Amazon's service offerings. While the services work well, their documentation and tool support is absolutely horrendous. I was recently working with a customer on an old AWS application and their old API had been completely removed with a new API that wasn't even a close match. One old API call resulted in requiring three different APIs to perform the same functionality. We had to re-write the entire piece from scratch essentially. The documentation was downright wrong, and incomplete and so scattered it was next to impossible to follow. The examples weren't examples at all - they're mockups of real service calls with fake data that didn't even provide everything that was required to make same service calls work. Additionally there appears to be just about no public support from Amazon, only peer support which is sparse at best - and getting a hold of somebody at Amazon, even for pay seems to be mythical task. It's a terrible business model they have going. I can't see why anybody would put themselves through this sort of customer and development experience. Sad really, but an experience we see more and more these days. Nobody puts in the time to document anything anymore, leaving it to devs to figure this stuff out over and over again… </rant>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp  Web Services   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Ambient occlusion shader just shows models as all white

  - by dvds414

  Okay so I have this shader for ambient occlusion. It loads to world correctly, but it just shows all the models as being white. I do not know why. I am just running the shader while the model is rendering, is that correct? or do I need to make a render target or something? If so then how? I'm using C++. Here is my shader: float sampleRadius; float distanceScale; float4x4 xProjection; float4x4 xView; float4x4 xWorld; float3 cornerFustrum; struct VS_OUTPUT { float4 pos : POSITION; float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 viewDirection : TEXCOORD1; }; VS_OUTPUT VertexShaderFunction( float4 Position : POSITION, float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0) { VS_OUTPUT Out = (VS_OUTPUT)0; float4 WorldPosition = mul(Position, xWorld); float4 ViewPosition = mul(WorldPosition, xView); Out.pos = mul(ViewPosition, xProjection); Position.xy = sign(Position.xy); Out.TexCoord = (float2(Position.x, -Position.y) + float2( 1.0f, 1.0f ) ) * 0.5f; float3 corner = float3(-cornerFustrum.x * Position.x, cornerFustrum.y * Position.y, cornerFustrum.z); Out.viewDirection = corner; return Out; } texture depthTexture; texture randomTexture; sampler2D depthSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <depthTexture>; ADDRESSU = CLAMP; ADDRESSV = CLAMP; MAGFILTER = LINEAR; MINFILTER = LINEAR; }; sampler2D RandNormal = sampler_state { Texture = <randomTexture>; ADDRESSU = WRAP; ADDRESSV = WRAP; MAGFILTER = LINEAR; MINFILTER = LINEAR; }; float4 PixelShaderFunction(VS_OUTPUT IN) : COLOR0 { float4 samples[16] = { float4(0.355512, -0.709318, -0.102371, 0.0 ), float4(0.534186, 0.71511, -0.115167, 0.0 ), float4(-0.87866, 0.157139, -0.115167, 0.0 ), float4(0.140679, -0.475516, -0.0639818, 0.0 ), float4(-0.0796121, 0.158842, -0.677075, 0.0 ), float4(-0.0759516, -0.101676, -0.483625, 0.0 ), float4(0.12493, -0.0223423, -0.483625, 0.0 ), float4(-0.0720074, 0.243395, -0.967251, 0.0 ), float4(-0.207641, 0.414286, 0.187755, 0.0 ), float4(-0.277332, -0.371262, 0.187755, 0.0 ), float4(0.63864, -0.114214, 0.262857, 0.0 ), float4(-0.184051, 0.622119, 0.262857, 0.0 ), float4(0.110007, -0.219486, 0.435574, 0.0 ), float4(0.235085, 0.314707, 0.696918, 0.0 ), float4(-0.290012, 0.0518654, 0.522688, 0.0 ), float4(0.0975089, -0.329594, 0.609803, 0.0 ) }; IN.TexCoord.x += 1.0/1600.0; IN.TexCoord.y += 1.0/1200.0; normalize (IN.viewDirection); float depth = tex2D(depthSampler, IN.TexCoord).a; float3 se = depth * IN.viewDirection; float3 randNormal = tex2D( RandNormal, IN.TexCoord * 200.0 ).rgb; float3 normal = tex2D(depthSampler, IN.TexCoord).rgb; float finalColor = 0.0f; for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) { float3 ray = reflect(samples[i].xyz,randNormal) * sampleRadius; //if (dot(ray, normal) < 0) // ray += normal * sampleRadius; float4 sample = float4(se + ray, 1.0f); float4 ss = mul(sample, xProjection); float2 sampleTexCoord = 0.5f * ss.xy/ss.w + float2(0.5f, 0.5f); sampleTexCoord.x += 1.0/1600.0; sampleTexCoord.y += 1.0/1200.0; float sampleDepth = tex2D(depthSampler, sampleTexCoord).a; if (sampleDepth == 1.0) { finalColor ++; } else { float occlusion = distanceScale* max(sampleDepth - depth, 0.0f); finalColor += 1.0f / (1.0f + occlusion * occlusion * 0.1); } } return float4(finalColor/16, finalColor/16, finalColor/16, 1.0f); } technique SSAO { pass P0 { VertexShader = compile vs_3_0 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_3_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } }

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• Oracle Database 12 c Training and Certification: What’s in it for Me?

  - by KJones

  Oracle Database 12c has officially launched! Through Oracle University, our expert instructors can introduce you to the features and functions of this new Oracle Database 12c product. Through training courses and certification exam prep seminars, you can build up your database knowledge and apply this knowledge to advance your career. Already an Oracle Database Expert? Why Oracle Database 12c Training is still a Good Idea Oracle is the industry leader for database technology and takes the release of new products very seriously. We continue to listen to customer needs and add features and functionality to address those needs. Oracle Database 12c is no exception. The following areas have been greatly enhanced and should be considered for your additional training or certification: • Database for Cloud Computing • Compression and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) • Improved Performance & Scalability • Extreme Availability • Security Defense in Depth • Manageability Oracle Certified Database Administrators Reap Career Rewards Becoming an expert user of database technology through Oracle University's certification program widens your skill set to demonstrate your expertise implementing the most advanced database technology available. By doing so, you'll make yourself a more marketable employee and candidate in the job market.  Reasons to Become an Oracle Certified Database Administrator of Oracle Database 12c: • The new Oracle Database 12c certifications emphasize more advanced skills that align with industry standards, resulting in an even more valuable credential for customers and partners. • The Oracle Certified Associate (OCA) for Oracle Database 12c centers upon certification objectives that measure IT professionals' day-to-day skills, along with your ability to manage challenges. • Building upon all of the competencies incorporated into Oracle's Database 12c OCA certification, the Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) for Oracle Database 12c certification includes advanced knowledge and skills required of top-performing database administrators. • The Oracle Certified Master (OCM) for Oracle Database 12c - a very challenging and elite top-level certification - certifies the most highly skilled and experienced database experts. • Oracle offers 12c upgrade paths for existing Oracle Certified Professionals (OCP) and Oracle Certified Masters (OCM). Database 12c Training and Certification: Built with Your Input When creating Oracle Database 12c training courses and certifications, we wanted to know which tasks are most important in a DBA's day-to-day work. Instead of assuming what those tasks might be, we decided to develop a job task analysis survey for DBAs. The response rate from DBAs from around the world was overwhelming! The survey focused on the following key database areas: • DBA Core Essentials • Database Storage • High Availability • Scalability • Networking • Security • Very Large Database Administration • Distributed Databases After conducting this survey, we took this specific feedback and used it to help mold the new Oracle Database 12c training and certification curriculum. The benefit to you? You now have access to Oracle Database 12c courses and certification exams that were created with your specific on-the-job tasks in mind. Explore Oracle Database 12c Training & Certification Today Investing in Oracle Database 12c training courses and certifications will help you develop a great deal of knowledge, experience and expertise. Explore our portfolio of offerings to determine which skills you need as a DBA to get up-to-speed on Oracle Database 12c technology. Questions or comments about the new Oracle Database 12c offerings? Let us know in the comments below. - Diana Gray, Principle Curriculum Product Manager and Raza Siddiqui, Senior Principle Curriculum Product Manager

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• Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

  - by Michael Stephenson

  In this post I'd like to talk about an architecture scenario we had recently and how we were able to utilise NServiceBus to help us address this problem. Scenario Cognos is a reporting system used by one of my clients. A while back we developed a web service façade to allow line of business applications to be able to access reports from Cognos to support their various functions. The service was intended to provide access to reports which were quick running reports or pre-generated reports which could be accessed real-time on demand. One of the key aims of the web service was to provide a simple generic interface to allow applications to get any report without needing to worry about the complex .net SDK for Cognos. The web service also supported multi-hop kerberos delegation so that report data could be accesses under the context of the end user. This service was working well for a period of time. The Problem The problem we encountered was that reports were now also required to be available to batch processes. The original design was optimised for low latency so users would enjoy a positive experience, however when the batch processes started to request 250+ concurrent reports over an extended period of time you can begin to imagine the sorts of problems that come into play. The key problems this new scenario caused are: Users may be affected and the latency of on demand reports was significantly slower The Cognos infrastructure was not scaled sufficiently to be able to cope with these long peaks of load From a cost perspective it just isn't feasible to scale the Cognos infrastructure to be able to handle the load when it is only for a couple of hour window each night. We really needed to introduce a second pattern for accessing this service which would support high through-put scenarios. We also had little control over the batch process in terms of being able to throttle its load. We could however make some changes to the way it accessed the reports. The Approach My idea was to introduce a throttling mechanism between the Web Service Façade and Cognos. This would allow the batch processes to push reports requests hard at the web service which we were confident the web service can handle. The web service would then queue these requests and process them behind the scenes and make a call back to the batch application to provide the report once it had been accessed. In terms of technology we had some limitations because we were not able to use WCF or IIS7 where the MSMQ-Activated WCF services could have helped, but we did have MSMQ as an option and I thought NServiceBus could do just the job to help us here. The flow of how this would work was as follows: The batch applications would send a request for a report to the web service The web service uses NServiceBus to send the message to a Queue The NServiceBus Generic Host is running as a windows service with a message handler which subscribes to these messages The message handler gets the message, accesses the report from Cognos The message handler calls back to the original batch application, this is decoupled because the calling application provides a call back url The report gets into the batch application and is processed as normal This approach looks something like the below diagram: The key points are an application wanting to take advantage of the batch driven reports needs to do the following: Implement our call back contract Make a call to the service providing a call back url Provide a correlation ID so it knows how to tie each response back to its request What does NServiceBus offer in this solution So this scenario is not the typical messaging service bus type of solution people implement with NServiceBus, but it did offer the following: Simplified interaction with MSMQ Offered the ability to configure the number of processes working through the queue so we could find a balance between load on Cognos versus the applications end to end processing time NServiceBus offers retries and a way to manage failed messages NServiceBus offers a high availability setup The simple thing is that NServiceBus gave us the platform to build the solution on. We just implemented a message handler which functionally processed a message and we could rely on NServiceBus to do all of the hard work around managing the queues and all of the lower level things that would have took ages to write to any kind of robust level. Conclusion With this approach we were able to deal with a fairly significant performance issue with out too much rework. Hopefully this write up gives people some insight into ideas on how to leverage the excellent NServiceBus framework to help solve integration and high through-put scenarios.

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• Pie Charts Just Don't Work When Comparing Data - Number 10 of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie

  - by Tony Wolfram

  When comparing data, which is what a pie chart is for, people have a hard time judging the angles and areas of the multiple pie slices in order to calculate how much bigger one slice is than the others. Pie Charts Don't Work A slice of pie is good for serving up a portion of desert. It's not good for making a judgement about how big the slice is, what percentage of 100 it is, or how it compares to other slices. People have trouble comparing angles and areas to each other. Controlled studies show that people will overestimate the percentage that a pie slice area represents. This is because we have trouble calculating the area based on the space between the two angles that define the slice. This picture shows how a pie chart is useless in determing the largest value when you have to compare pie slices.   You can't compare angles and slice areas to each other. Human perception and cognition is poor when viewing angles and areas and trying to make a mental comparison. Pie charts overload the working memory, forcing the person to make complicated calculations, and at the same time make a decision based on those comparisons. What's the point of showing a pie chart when you want to compare data, except to say, "well, the slices are almost the same, but I'm not really sure which one is bigger, or by how much, or what order they are from largest to smallest. But the colors sure are pretty. Plus, I like round things. Oh,was I suppose to make some important business decision? Sorry." Bad Choices and Bad Decisions Interaction Designers, Graphic Artists, Report Builders, Software Developers, and Executives have all made the decision to use pie charts in their reports, software applications, and dashboards. It was a bad decision. It was a poor choice. There are always better options and choices, yet the designer still made the decision to use a pie chart. I'll expore why people make such poor choices in my upcoming blog entires. (Hint: It has more to do with emotions than with analytical thinking.) I've outlined my opinions and arguments about the evils of using pie charts in "Countdown of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie Chart." Each of my next 10 blog entries will support these arguments with illustrations, examples, and references to studies. But my goal is not to continuously and endlessly rage against the evils of using pie charts. This blog is not about pie charts. This blog is about understanding why designers choose to use a pie chart. Why, when give better alternatives, and acknowledging the shortcomings of pie charts, do designers over and over again still freely choose to place a pie chart in a report? As an extra treat and parting shot, check out the nice pie chart that Wikipedia uses to illustrate the United States population by state.   Remember, somebody chose to use this pie chart, with all its glorious colors, and post it on Wikipedia for all the world to see. My next blog will give you a better alternative for displaying comparable data - the sorted bar chart.

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• Multiplayer / Networking options for a 2D game with physics

  - by lahmas

  Summary: My 50% finished 2D sidescroller with Box2D as physics engine should have multiplayer support in the final version. However, the current code is just a singleplayer game. What should I do now? And more important, how should I implement multiplayer and combine it with singleplayer? Is it a bad idea to code the singleplayer mode separated from multiplayer mode (like Notch did it with Minecraft)? The performance in singleplayer should be as good as possible (Simulating physics with using a loopback server to implement singleplayer mode would be a problem there) Full background / questions: I'm working on a relatively large 2D game project in C++, with physics as a core element of it. (I use Box2D for that) The finished game should have full multiplayer support, however I made the mistake that I didn't plan the networking part properly and basically worked on a singleplayer game until now. I thought that multiplayer support could be added to the almost finished singleplayer game in a relatively easy and clear way, but apparently, from what I have read this is wrong. I even read that a multiplayer game should be programmed as one from the beginning, with the singleplayer mode actually just consisting of hosting an invisible local server and connecting to it via loopback. (I found out that most FPS game engines do it that way, an example would be Source) So here I am, with my half finished 2D sidescroller game, and I don't really know how to go on. Simply continueing to work on the singleplayer / client seems useless to me now, as I'd have to recode and refactor even more later. First, a general question to anybody who possibly found himself in a situation like this: How should I proceed? Then, the more specific one - I have been trying to find out how I can approach the networking part for my game: (Possible solutions:) Invisible / loopback server for singleplayer This would have the advantage that there basically is no difference between singleplayer and multiplayer mode. Not much additional code would be needed. A big disadvantage: Performance and other limitations in singleplayer. There would be two physics simulations running. One for the client and one for the loopback server. Even if you work around by providing a direct path for the data from the loopback server, through direct communcation by the threads for example, the singleplayer would be limited. This is a problem because people should be allowed to play around with masses of objects at once. Separated singleplayer / Multiplayer mode There would be no server involved in singleplayer mode. I'm not really sure how this would work. But at least I think that there would be a lot of additional work, because all of the singleplayer features would have to be re-implemented or glued to multiplayer mode. Multiplayer mode as a module for singleplayer This is merely a quick thought I had. Multiplayer could consist of a singleplayer game, with an additional networking module loaded and connected to a server, which sends and receives data and updates the singleplayer world. In the retrospective, I regret not having planned the multiplayer mode earlier. I'm really stuck at this point and I hope that somebody here is able to help me!

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• Regular Expressions Cookbook Is in The Money—Win a Copy

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  %COOKBOOKFRAME%You may have heard some people say that most book authors never get any royalties. That’s not true because most authors get an advance royalty that is paid before the book is published. That’s the author’s main incentive for writing the book, at least as far as money is concerned. (If money is your main concern, don’t write books.) What is true is that most authors never see any money beyond the advance royalty. Royalty rates are very low. A 10% royalty of the publisher’s price is considered normal. The publisher’s price is usually 45% of the retail price. So if you pay full price in a bookstore, the author gets 4.5% of your money. If there’s more than one author, they split the royalty. It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that a book needs to sell quite a few copies for the royalty to add up to a meaningful amount of money. But Steven and I must have done something right. Regular Expressions Cookbook is in the money. My royalty statement for the 3rd quartier of 2009, which is the 2nd quarter that the book was on the market, came with a check. I actually received it last month but didn’t get around to blogging about. The amount of the check is insignificant. The point is that the balance is no longer negative. I’m taking this opportunity to pat myself and my co-author on the back. To celebrate the occassion O’Reilly has offered to sponsor a give-away of five (5) copies of Regular Expressions Cookbook. These are the rules of the game: You must post a comment to this blog article including your actual name and actual email address. Names are published, email addresses are not. Comments are moderated by myself (Jan Goyvaerts). If I consider a comment to be offensive or spam it will not be published and not be eligible for any prize. If you don’t know what to say in the comment, just wish me a happy 100000nd birthday, so I don’t have to feel so bad about entering the 6-bit era. Each person commenting has only one chance to win, regardless of the number of comments posted. O’Reilly will be provided with the names and email addresses of the winners (and those email addresses only) in order to arrange delivery. Each winner can choose to receive a printed copy or ebook (DRM-free PDF). If you choose the printed book, O’Reilly pays for shipping to anywhere in the world but not for any duties or taxes your country may impose on books imported from the USA. If you choose the ebook, you’ll need to create an O’Reilly account that is then granted access to the PDF download. You can make your choice after you’ve won, so it doesn’t influence your chance of winning. Contest ends 28 February 2010, GMT+7 (Thai time). Chosen by five calls to Random(78)+1 in Delphi 2010, the winners are: 48: Xiaozu 45: David Chisholm 19: Miquel Burns 33: Aaron Rice 17: David Laing Thanks to everybody who participated. The winners have been notified by email on how to collect their prize.

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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by RedAndTheCommunity

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I'd spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it's not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I'm very confident in my skills, but I'm also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn't bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won't bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I'd made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. "Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top." There's only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don't let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom'n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don't make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you're more of a winner than you think. If you're too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you're the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you're probably an Exceptional DBA. It's time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As 'Red Green' says, "We're all in this together and I'm pullin' for ya". --Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• Backing up my Windows Home Server to the Cloud&hellip;

  - by eddraper

  Ok, here’s my scenario: Windows Home Server with a little over 3TB of storage.  This includes many years of our home network’s PC backups, music, videos, etcetera. I’d like to get a backup off-site, and the existing APIs and apps such as CloudBerry Labs WHS Backup service are making it easy.  Now, all it’s down to is vendor and the cost of the actual storage.   So,  I thought I’d take a lazy Saturday morning and do some research on this and get the ball rolling.  What I discovered stunned me…   First off, the pricing for just about everything was loaded with complexity.  I learned that it wasn’t just about storage… it was about network usage, requests, sites, replication, and on and on. I really don’t see this as rocket science.  I have a disk image.  I want to put it in the cloud.  I’m not going to be be using it but once daily for incremental backups.  Sounds like a common scenario.  Yes, if “things get real” and my server goes down, I will need to bring down a lot of data and utilize a fair amount of vendor infrastructure.  However, this may never happen.  Offsite storage is an insurance policy.   The complexity of the cost structures, perhaps by design, create an environment where it’s incredibly hard to model bottom line costs and compare vendor all-up pricing.  As it is a “lazy Saturday morning,” I’m not in the mood for such antics and I decide to shirk the endeavor entirely.  Thus, I decided to simply fire up calc.exe and do some a simple arithmetic model based on price per GB.  I shuddered at the results.  Certainly something was wrong… did I misplace a decimal point?  Then I discovered CloudBerry’s own calculator.   Nope, I hadn’t misplaced those decimals after all.  Check it out (pricing based on 3174 GB):   Amazon S3 $398.00 per month $4761 per year Azure $396.75 per month $4761 per year Google $380.88 per month $4570.56 per year   Conclusion: Rampant crack smoking at vendors.  Seriously.  Out. Of. Their. Minds. Now, to Amazon’s credit, vision, and outright common sense, they had one offering which directly addresses my scenario:   Amazon Glacier $31.74 per month $380.88 per year   hmmm… It’s on the table.  Let’s see what it would cost to just buy some drives, an enclosure and cart them over to a friend’s house.   2 x 2TB Drives from NewEgg.com $199.99   Enclosure $39.99     $239.98   Carting data to back and forth to friend’s within walking distance pain   Leave drive unplugged at friend’s $0 for electricity   Possible data loss No way I can come and go every day.     I think I’ll think on this a bit more…

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• Observations From The Corner of a Starbucks

  - by Chris Williams

  I’ve spent the last 3 days sitting in a Starbucks for 4-8 hours at a time. As a result, I’ve observed a lot of interesting behavior and people (most of whom were uninteresting themselves.) One of the things I’ve noticed is that most people don’t sit down. They come in, get their drink and go. The ones that do sit down, stay much longer than it takes to consume their drink. The drink is just an incidental purchase. Certainly not the reason they are here. Most of the people who sit also have laptops. Probably around 75%. Only a few have kids (with them) but the ones that do, have very small kids. Toddlers or younger. Of all the “campers” only a small percentage are wearing headphone, presumably because A) external noise doesn’t bother them or B) they aren’t working on anything important. My buddy George falls into category A, but he grew up in a house full of people. Silence freaks him out far more than noise. My brother and I, on the other hand, were both only children and don’t handle noisy distractions well. He needs it quiet (like a tomb) and I need music. Go figure… I can listen to Britney Spears mixed with Apoptygma Berzerk and Anthrax and crank out 30 pages, but if your toddler is banging his spoon on the table, you’re getting a dirty look… unless I have music, then all is right with the world. Anyway, enough about me. Most of the people who come in as a group are smiling when they enter. Half as many are smiling when they leave. People who come in alone typically aren’t smiling at all. The average age, over the last three days seems to be early 30s… with a couple of senior citizens and teenagers at either end of the curve. The teenagers almost never stay. They have better stuff to do on a nice day. The senior citizens are split nearly evenly between campers and in&outs. Most of the non-solo campers have 1 person with a laptop, while the other reads the paper or a book. Some campers bring multiple laptops… but only really look at one of them. This Starbucks has a drive through. The line is almost never more than 2-3 cars long but apparently a lot of the in&out people would rather come in and stand in line behind (up to) 5 people. The music in here sucks. My musical tastes can best be described as eclectic to bad, but I can still get work done (see above.) I find the music in this particular Starbucks to be discordant and jarring. At this Starbucks, the coffee lingo is apparently something that is meant to occur between employees only. The nice lady at the counter can handle orders in plain English and translate them to Baristaspeak (Baristese?) quite efficiently. If you order in Baristaspeak however, she will look confused and repeat your order back to you in plain English to confirm you actually meant what you said. Then she will say it in Baristaspeak to the lady making your drink. Nobody in this Starbucks (other than the Baristas) makes eye-contact… at least not with me. Of course that may be indicative of a separate issue. ;)

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• Type Casting variables in PHP: Is there a practical example?

  - by Stephen

  PHP, as most of us know, has weak typing. For those who don't, PHP.net says: PHP does not require (or support) explicit type definition in variable declaration; a variable's type is determined by the context in which the variable is used. Love it or hate it, PHP re-casts variables on-the-fly. So, the following code is valid: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; var_dump($value); // int(20) PHP also alows you to explicitly cast a variable, like so: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; $value = (string)$value; var_dump($value); // string(2) "20" That's all cool... but, for the life of me, I cannot conceive of a practical reason for doing this. I don't have a problem with strong typing in languages that support it, like Java. That's fine, and I completely understand it. Also, I'm aware of—and fully understand the usefulness of—type hinting in function parameters. The problem I have with type casting is explained by the above quote. If PHP can swap types at-will, it can do so even after you force cast a type; and it can do so on-the-fly when you need a certain type in an operation. That makes the following valid: $var = "10"; $value = (int)$var; $value = $value . ' TaDa!'; var_dump($value); // string(8) "10 TaDa!" So what's the point? Can anyone show me a practical application or example of type casting—one that would fail if type casting were not involved? I ask this here instead of SO because I figure practicality is too subjective. Edit in response to Chris' comment Take this theoretical example of a world where user-defined type casting makes sense in PHP: You force cast variable $foo as int -- (int)$foo. You attempt to store a string value in the variable $foo. PHP throws an exception!! <--- That would make sense. Suddenly the reason for user defined type casting exists! The fact that PHP will switch things around as needed makes the point of user defined type casting vague. For example, the following two code samples are equivalent: // example 1 $foo = 0; $foo = (string)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo; // example 2 $foo = 0; $foo = (int)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo; UPDATE Guess who found himself using typecasting in a practical environment? Yours Truly. The requirement was to display money values on a website for a restaurant menu. The design of the site required that trailing zeros be trimmed, so that the display looked something like the following: Menu Item 1 .............. $ 4 Menu Item 2 .............. $ 7.5 Menu Item 3 .............. $ 3 The best way I found to do that wast to cast the variable as a float: $price = '7.50'; // a string from the database layer. echo 'Menu Item 2 .............. $ ' . (float)$price; PHP trims the float's trailing zeros, and then recasts the float as a string for concatenation.

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• Start/Stop Window Service from ASP.NET page

  - by kaushalparik27

  Last week, I needed to complete one task on which I am going to blog about in this entry. The task is "Create a control panel like webpage to control (Start/Stop) Window Services which are part of my solution installed on computer where the main application is hosted". Here are the important points to accomplish:[1] You need to add System.ServiceProcess reference in your application. This namespace holds ServiceController Class to access the window service.[2] You need to check the status of the window services before you explicitly start or stop it.[3] By default, IIS application runs under ASP.NET account which doesn't have access rights permission to window service. So, Very Important part of the solution is: Impersonation. You need to impersonate the application/part of the code with the User Credentials which is having proper rights and permission to access the window service. If you try to access window service it will generate "access denied" error.The alternatives are: You can either impersonate whole application by adding Identity tag in web.cofig as:        <identity impersonate="true" userName="" password=""/>This tag will be under System.Web section. the "userName" and "password" will be the credentials of the user which is having rights to access the window service. But, this would not be a wise and good solution; because you may not impersonate whole website like this just to have access window service (which is going to be a small part of code).Second alternative is: Only impersonate part of code where you need to access the window service to start or stop it. I opted this one. But, to be fair; I am really unaware of the code part for impersonation. So, I just googled it and injected the code in my solution in a separate class file named as "Impersonate" with required static methods. In Impersonate class; impersonateValidUser() is the method to impersonate a part of code and undoImpersonation() is the method to undo the impersonation. Below is one example:  You need to provide domain name (which is "." if you are working on your home computer), username and password of appropriate user to impersonate.[4] Here, it is very important to note that: You need to have to store the Access Credentials (username and password) which you are going to user for impersonation; to some secured and encrypted format. I have used Machinekey Encryption to store the value encrypted value inside database.[5] So now; The real part is to start or stop a window service. You are almost done; because ServiceController class has simple Start() and Stop() methods to start or stop a window service. A ServiceController class has parametrized constructor that takes name of the service as parameter.Code to Start the window service: Code to Stop the window service: Isn't that too easy! ServiceController made it easy :) I have attached a working example with this post here to start/stop "SQLBrowser" service where you need to provide proper credentials who have permission to access to window service.  hope it would helps./.

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• They may block off Howard Street—but Oracle OpenWorld is a two-way street.

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 by Jim Lein, Sr. Director, Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies “Engineered to Inform and Inspire”—that’s the theme of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. In early October, tens of thousands of attendees will descend on the streets of San Francisco because they share one thing in common: the desire to learn more about Oracle. You might think that’s the way we, Oracle employees, look at this event—as just another opportunity for attendees to learn about what we do. But it’s really a two way street. Every year I’m amazed by how informed and inspired I am by our customers and their companies. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow. As part of the Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies team I get to talk with our partners and business leaders at growing companies almost every day, usually via phone. Oracle OpenWorld presents the perfect opportunity to meet some of them in person, in an informal setting, and in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The stories our customers tell me about their businesses provide vivid examples of how they have overcome the challenges of managing increasingly complex global operations and growing during uncertain economic conditions. It’s no secret that my favorite session at Oracle OpenWorld (besides Larry Ellison’s keynotes and the Customer Appreciation Event, of course) is the Oracle Accelerate Customer Panel. This year we’re featuring executives from three companies who deployed Oracle ERP rapidly to support their company’s growth: Chris Powell, VP and Corporate Controller of Beats by Dr. Dre, a California based designer and manufacturer of premium headphones (sorry, no free samples), Iñaki Zuazo, CIO of Industrias Juno, a building materials provider based in Spain, Kamran Moosa, Project Coordinator for Spartan Engineering, a provider of engineering and construction support services for an LPG storage project in Texas, and That’s a pretty diverse lineup and it will be interesting to hear the perspectives of both IT and financial project stakeholders. The session, “Oracle Accelerate Customer Case Studies: Rapid Deployment of Oracle Applications”, is at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, October 3, in the Concert room at the Palace Hotel. Oracle loves our hometown of San Francisco and it’s a great place to host Oracle OpenWorld. It’s now San Francisco’s largest conference and the city closes off Howard Street to better accommodate the attendees. Some Bay Area commuters may be inconvenienced for a few days by this closure but the conference brings about $100 million into the local economy. Now that’s a two-way street. More Oracle Accelerate at Oracle OpenWorld “Faster, Better, Cheaper Application Deployment with Oracle Business Accelerators”, Monday, October 1st, 10:45 a.m., Moscone West Room 3016 “Oracle Accelerate and Oracle Business Accelerators for Midsize Companies”, (partners only), Wednesday, October 3, 10:15 a.m., Marriott – Golden Gate B Visit the Oracle Accelerate and Oracle Business Accelerator Kiosk in the Moscone West Exhibit Grounds Download the Focus On Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies Focus document /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• BYOD is not a fashion statement; it’s an architectural shift - by Indus Khaitan

  - by Greg Jensen

  Ten years ago, if you asked a CIO, “how mobile is your enterprise?”. The answer would be, “100%, we give Blackberry to all our employees.”Few things have changed since then: 1.    Smartphone form-factors have matured, especially after the launch of iPhone. 2.    Rapid growth of productivity applications and services that enable creation and consumption of digital content 3.    Pervasive mobile data connectivityThere are two threads emerging from the change. Users are rapidly mingling their personas of an individual as well as an employee. In the first second, posting a picture of a fancy dinner on Facebook, to creating an expense report for the same meal on the mobile device. Irrespective of the dual persona, a user’s personal and corporate lives intermingle freely on a single hardware and more often than not, it’s an employees personal smartphone being used for everything. A BYOD program enables IT to “control” an employee owned device, while enabling productivity. More often than not the objective of BYOD programs are financial; instead of the organization, an employee pays for it.  More than a fancy device, BYOD initiatives have become sort of fashion statement, of corporate productivity, of letting employees be in-charge and a show of corporate empathy to not force an archaic form-factor in a world of new device launches every month. BYOD is no longer a means of effectively moving expense dollars and support costs. It does not matter who owns the device, it has to be protected.  BYOD brings an architectural shift.  BYOD is an architecture, which assumes that every device is vulnerable, not just what your employees have brought but what organizations have purchased for their employees. It's an architecture, which forces us to rethink how to provide productivity without comprising security.Why assume that every device is vulnerable? Mobile operating systems are rapidly evolving with leading upgrade announcement every other month. It is impossible for IT to catch-up. More than that, user’s are savvier than earlier.  While IT could install locks at the doors to prevent intruders, it may degrade productivity—which incentivizes user’s to bypass restrictions. A rapidly evolving mobile ecosystem have moving parts which are vulnerable. Hence, creating a mobile security platform, which uses the fundamental blocks of BYOD architecture such as identity defragmentation, IT control and data isolation, ensures that the sprawl of corporate data is contained. In the next post, we’ll dig deeper into the BYOD architecture. Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• Silverlight Cream for March 23, 2010 -- #818

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Jeremy Likness, Mark Tucker, Christian Schormann, Page Brooks, Brad Abrams(-2-), Jeff Wilcox, Unnir, Bea Stollnitz, John Papa and Adam Kinney, and Bill Reiss(-2-). Shoutouts: Ashish Shetty posted his material from his MIX10 presentation: Stepping outside the browser with Silverlight 4 Not Silverlight, but dang useful, Karl Shifflett posted a Visual Studio 2010 XAML Editor IntelliSense Presenter Extension Yavor Georgiev posted his MIX10 material: Two samples from today's MIX talk From SilverlightCream.com: GroupBox Sketching Control for WPF applications Using Blend Max Paulousky creates a GroupBox control for SketchFlow for WPF. He includes a link to an example of doing the same for Silverlight. Sequential Asynchronous Workflows in Silverlight using Coroutines Jeremy Likness' latest post begann with a post on the Silverlight.net forum and Rob Eisenburg's MVVM presentation from MIX10 resulting in the use of Wintellect's PowerThreading library (downloadable), and Coroutines. Windows Phone 7 UI Templates Mark Tucker has been putting a lot of thought into WP7 apps and produced 5 templates for building apps, downloadable in PowerPoint format. He's also looking to discuss this concept. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part I Christian Schormann has a great tutorial up about Expression Blend 4 and path layout ... this is lots of great info, and it's only part 1! Custom Splash Screen for Windows Phone Page Brooks makes very quick work of showing how to add a splash screen to your WP7 app... very nice, Page! Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing Data from Entity Framework Brad Abrams next post in the series is is on pulling your data from wherever it lives, and uses a DomainService to shape it for your Silverlight app. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Consuming Data in the Silverlight Client Brad Abrams then discusses consuming that data in a Silverlight app. Not much code involvement at all.. great ROI :) Building Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 applications on a .NET 3.5 build machine Jeff Wilcox talks about building Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4B both on a .NET 3.5 machine. He then adds in the Toolkit, and even WCF RIA Services. Expression Blend 4 - XAML generation tweaks Unnir demonstrates a few changes to Expression Blend 4 that produce more compact XAML. He's also asking for other examples you'd like to see tightened up. How can I sort a hierarchy? Bea Stollnitz posts plausible solutions to sorting data items at each level of a hierarchical UI, with descriptions of why they don't work, followed by the real deal... Silverlight and WPF. Silverlight Training Course (Silverlight 4) John Papa and Adam Kinney have posted a huge body of work to get us up-to-speed on Silverlight 4 -- a WhitePaper, hands-on labs, and an 8-unit course with 25 accompanying videos... geez... Silverlight game development on Windows Phone 7 Bill Reiss has a post up discussing game development on WP7 in general and then discusses his SilverSprite library, with a link to it. XNA or Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 game development? Bill Reiss next discusses the advantage of using Silverlight or XNA for your WP7 game development, and who better to discuss both? 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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• Intel I217LM ethernet controller not detected by Ubuntu 12.04LTS

  - by Alexandr Kurilin

  My last installation of Ubuntu 12.04 on a machine using an ASUS Q87M-E motherboard with an Intel I217LM Ethernet controller has failed to detect the ethernet card. The only thing displayed by ifconfig -a is the loopback. I double-checked in the BIOS, and the controller should be online. $ rfkill list all 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no $ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell DRAM Controller (rev 06) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell PCI Express x16 Controller (rev 06) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06) 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell HD Audio Controller (rev 06) 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:16.3 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point KT Controller (rev 04) 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Device 153a (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point HD Audio Controller (rev 04) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point LPC Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point 6-Port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Lynx Point SMBus Controller (rev 04) $ lsmod Module Size Used by vesafb 13844 1 snd_hda_codec_realtek 224173 1 arc4 12529 2 joydev 17693 0 usbhid 47238 0 hid 99636 1 usbhid rfcomm 47604 0 rt73usb 31735 0 crc_itu_t 12707 1 rt73usb rt2x00usb 20808 1 rt73usb rt2x00lib 55326 2 rt73usb,rt2x00usb mac80211 506862 2 rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib cfg80211 205774 2 rt2x00lib,mac80211 eeepc_wmi 13109 0 bnep 18281 2 asus_wmi 24456 1 eeepc_wmi sparse_keymap 13890 1 asus_wmi psmouse 97485 0 bluetooth 180153 10 rfcomm,bnep ppdev 17113 0 snd_hda_intel 33719 6 snd_hda_codec 127706 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel snd_seq_midi 13324 0 snd_hwdep 17764 1 snd_hda_codec snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi serio_raw 13211 0 snd_pcm 97275 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61929 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq parport_pc 32866 1 snd 79041 21 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_rawmidi,snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device video 19651 0 soundcore 15091 1 snd wmi 19256 1 asus_wmi snd_page_alloc 18529 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm mac_hid 13253 0 lp 17799 0 parport 46562 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp $ ifconfig lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:1091 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1091 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:80048 (80.0 KB) TX bytes:80048 (80.0 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:fd:07:91:a8:b9 inet addr:172.16.42.4 Bcast:172.16.42.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::2fd:7ff:fe91:a8b9/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:56644 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:36417 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:85270918 (85.2 MB) TX bytes:3413849 (3.4 MB) additionally, running sudo lshw -C network returns: *-network UNCLAIMED description: Ethernet Controller [...] I'm pretty stumped at this point. This doesn't sound like a very uncommon ethernet controller and I figured it would be picked up by the system. Does anybody have advice for how to deal with this? Anything specific I should look into to figure out what could be causing this? Edit: It seems that following the guide on the Intel e1000e drivers page allowed the card to start working. Is this a real fix or is there a better way?

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• CRMIT’s HIGH VALUE CRM++ PLUGINS FOR CRM On DEMAND

  - by Soumo Das

  Customer satisfaction and experience being the two most considerable factors, these days businesses are on the lookout for automation tools that are world class, agile and keep quality at its core. CRMIT has developed such tools using cutting edge technologies and abstracting industry best practices and R&D.  Self Service Portal  With customers being so meticulous about regular updates and reliable access to their data, administrators just cannot think of walking a thin line. Surviving without a resource that provides a track of customer requirements for services available 24 x 7 can severely affect the productivity. In such a scenario, CRMIT’s Self Service Portal (SSP) is the best solution. This not only tracks the required customer data, but also allows companies to stay in tune with their employees, vendors and stakeholders.   One can directly sign up to become a CRMOD contact and SSP user. One need not use the database, as operations and interactions are d at run time. This is a fully configurable solution that tracks results periodically, thus making it easy for end users. It also offers better security and data visibility that enables users to progress smoothly. Quote and Order Management   When dealing with quotes, contracts and orders becomes complicated, only Quote & Order Management can work as a one-stop solution. CRMIT offers this great tool for managing all this information and for taking care of customer orders and service requirements.  This CRM On Demand plug-in allows one to create a new quote or copy the existing one. Products can be directly added from the product list of CRMOD and the pricing is calculated automatically. Quote can be generated and mailed to the external users in PDF, HTML and XLS formats. This not only allows management of quotes in an enhanced manner, but also supports various billing and tax calculation features that make work effortless.    Report Scheduler  When it comes to analyzing and providing statistics of various business processes currently running in an organization, one cannot depend on manual updates, which sometimes may be inaccurate or even delayed. CRMIT provides a SaaS based powerful solution - Report Scheduler - that allows CRM users to schedule reports as per the frequencies and then receive them as email attachments at the scheduled time.   With this powerful tool, administrators can control the report scheduler for assigning specific reports to specific users. After that, users can login and schedule any assigned report for viewing at particular intervals on monthly, weekly or daily basis. Additionally, users can also copy the mail to external users and can choose the preferred format. The best part is that sharing business data with third party become easy with this and for viewing reports, users need not log into their CRMOD account.  CRM On Demand Offline Solution CRM On-Demand Offline is another great CRM++ extension that allows one to work in both online and offline modes. Synchronizing both the modes is absolutely easy and offers ease while working. CRM OD offline works as an automation tool that not only improves efficiency, but also works as a backup in most cases. It is readily available as a windows application installer and requires users to be online only while validating and synchronizing. The best part is that working in the offline mode also works as a backup. 

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• SQLAuthority News – Top 5 Latest Microsoft Certifications of 2013 – Guest Post

  - by Pinal Dave

  With the IT job market getting more and more competent by the day, certifications are a must for anyone who wishes to get a strong foothold in the industry. Microsoft community comes up with regular updates and enhancements in its existing products to keep up with the rapidly evolving requirements of the ICT industry. We bring you a list of five latest Microsoft certifications that you must consider acquiring this year. MCSE: SharePoint Learn all about Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft SharePoint 2013, which brings an advanced set of features to the fore in this latest version. It introduces new capabilities for business intelligence, social media, branding, search, identity management, mobile device among other features. Enjoy a great user experience with sharing and collaboration in community forum, within a pixel-perfect SharePoint website. Data connectivity and business intelligence tools allow users to process and access data, analyze reports, share and collaborate with each other more conveniently. Microsoft Specialist: Microsoft Project 2013 The only project management system that works seamlessly with other applications and cloud solutions of Microsoft, MS Project 2013 offers more than what meets the eye.  It provides for easier management and monitoring of projects so that users can ensure timely delivery while improving the productivity significantly. So keep all your projects on track and collaborate with your team like never before with this enhanced release! This one’s a must for all project managers. MCSE Messaging Another one of Microsoft gems is its messaging environment which has also launched the latest release Microsoft Exchange Server 2013. Messaging administrators can take up this training and validate their expertise in Unified Messaging, Exchange Online, PowerShell and Virtualization strategies, through MCSE Messaging certification in Exchange Server. If you wish to enhance productivity and data security of your organization while being flexible and extremely efficient, this is the right certification for you. MCSE Communication An enterprise can function optimally on the strength of its information flow and communication systems. With Lync Server 2013, you can introduce a whole new world of unified communications which consists of audio/video conferencing, dial-in, Persistent Chat, instant chat, and EDGE services in your organization. Utilize IT to serve and support business objectives by mastering this UC technology with this latest MCSE Communication course on using Microsoft Lync Server 2013. MCSE: SQL Server 2012 BI Platform The decision making process is largely influenced by underlying enterprise information used by the management for business intelligence. Therefore, a robust business intelligence platform that anchors enterprise IT and transform it to operational efficiencies is the need of the hour. SQL Server 2012 BI Platform certification helps professionals implement, manage and maintain a BI database infrastructure effectively. IT professionals with BI skills are highly sought after these days. MCSD: Windows Store Apps A Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer certification in Windows Store Apps validates your potential in designing interactive apps. Learn The Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using HTML5 and JavaScript and establish yourself as an ace developer capable of creating fast and fluid Metro style apps for Windows 8 that are accessible on a variety of devices. You can also go ahead and Learn Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using C# mode if you’re already familiar and working with C# programming language. Hence the developers are free to choose their own favorite development stream which opens doors for them to get ready for the latest and exciting application development platform called Windows store apps. Software developers with these skills are in great demand in the industry today. In order to continue being competitive in your respective fields, it is imperative that IT personnel update their knowledge on a regular basis. Certifications are a means to achieve this goal. Not considered to be an optional pre-requisite anymore, major IT certifications such as these are now essential to stay afloat in a cut-throat industry where technologies change on a daily basis. This blog is written by Aruneet Anand of Koenig Solutions. Koenig Solutions does training for all of the above courses. For more information, visit the website. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Microsoft Certifications

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• Guest (and occasional co-host) on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast

  - by Jon Galloway

  I was a recent guest on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast talking about the latest Visual Studio, ASP.NET and Azure releases. Download / Listen: Yet Another Podcast #75–Jon Galloway on ASP.NET/ MVC/ Azure Co-hosted shows: Jesse's been inviting me to co-host shows and I told him I'd show up when I was available. It's a nice change to be a drive-by co-host on a show (compared with the work that goes into organizing / editing / typing show notes for Herding Code shows). My main focus is on Herding Code, but it's nice to pop in and talk to Jesse's excellent guests when it works out. Some shows I've co-hosted over the past year: Yet Another Podcast #76–Glenn Block on Node.js & Technology in China Yet Another Podcast  #73 - Adam Kinney on developing for Windows 8 with HTML5 Yet Another Podcast #64 - John Papa & Javascript Yet Another Podcast #60 - Steve Sanderson and John Papa on Knockout.js Yet Another Podcast #54–Damian Edwards on ASP.NET Yet Another Podcast #53–Scott Hanselman on Blogging Yet Another Podcast #52–Peter Torr on Windows Phone Multitasking Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond And some more on the way that haven't been released yet. Some of these I'm pretty quiet, on others I get wacky and hassle the guests because, hey, not my podcast so not my problem. Show notes from the ASP.NET / MVC / Azure show: What was just released Visual Studio 2012 Web Developer features ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Strongly Typed data controls Data access via command methods Similar Binding syntax to ASP.NET MVC Some context: Damian Edwards and WebFormsMVP Two questions from Jesse: Q: Are you making this harder or more complicated for Web Forms developers? Short answer: Nothing's removed, it's just a new option History of SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource Q: If I'm using some MVC patterns, why not just move to MVC? Short answer: This works really well in hybrid applications, doesn't require a rewrite Allows sharing models, validation, other code between Web Forms and MVC ASP.NET MVC Adaptive Rendering (oh, also, this is in Web Forms 4.5 as well) Display Modes Mobile project template using jQuery Mobile OAuth login to allow Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. login Jon (and friends') MVC 4 book on the way: Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 Windows 8 development Jesse and Jon announce they're working on a new book: Pro Windows 8 Development with XAML and C# Jon and Jesse agree that it's nice to be able to write Windows 8 applications using the same skills they picked up for Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone development. Compare / contrast ASP.NET MVC and Windows 8 development Q: Does ASP.NET and HTML5 development overlap? Jon thinks they overlap in the MVC world because you're writing HTML views without controls Jon describes how his web development career moved from a preoccupation with server code to a focus on user interaction, which occurs in the browser Jon mentions his NDC Oslo presentation on Learning To Love HTML as Beautiful Code Q: How do you apply C# / XAML or HTML5 skills to Windows 8 development? Q: If I'm a XAML programmer, what's the learning curve on getting up to speed on ASP.NET MVC? Jon describes the difference in application lifecycle and state management Jon says it's nice that web development is really interactive compared to application development Q: Can you learn MVC by reading a book? Or is it a lot bigger than that? What is Azure, and why would I use it? Jon describes the traditional Azure platform mode and how Azure Web Sites fits in Q: Why wouldn't Jesse host his blog on Azure Web Sites? Domain names on Azure Web Sites File hosting options Q: Is Azure just another host? How is it different from any of the other shared hosting options? A: Azure gives you the ability to scale up or down whenever you want A: Other services are available if or when you want them

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• Teeing Off With Chris Leone at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Kathryn Perry

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Chris Leone, Senior Vice President, Oracle Applications Development Monday morning in downtown San Francisco - lots of sunshine, plenty of traffic, and sidewalks chocked full of people with fresh faces and blister free feet. Let the week of Oracle OpenWorld begin! For a great Applications start, Chris Leone packed the house with his Fusion Applications overview session - he covered strategy, scope, roadmaps, and customer successes. Fusion Apps, the world's best SaaS suite, is built on 100 percent standards. Chris talked about its information driven user experience, its innovative design, and the choice of deployment. People can run Fusion in the cloud, in a managed / hosted environment, or on premise -- or they can use a combination of these three models. About seventy percent of our customers go with SaaS. Release 5 of Fusion Apps will become available soon. The cadence of releases will be three times a year. The key drivers are to accelerate business success (no rip and replace) and to simplify business processes. Chris told the audience that organic Fusion is the centerpiece of our cloud solutions, rounded out with acquired offerings such as Taleo Recruiting and RightNow Customer Service. From the cloud solutions, customers can expect real time and predictive BI, social capabilities, choice of deployment, and more productivity because of a next generation UX called FUSE. Chris's demo showed a super easy, new UI that touts self service navigation. We'll blog about FUSE in the very near future. Chris said the next 365 days of Fusion Apps would include more localization, more industries, more power, more mobile, and more configurability. The audience was challenged to think hard about how Fusion could be part of their three-to-five year plans. Chris set up a great opportunity for you to follow up with your customers as they explore the possibilities.

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