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• Restore Your PC from Windows Home Server

  - by Mysticgeek

  If your computer crashes or you get a virus infection that makes it unrecoverable, doing a clean install can be a hassle, let alone getting your data back. If you’re backing up your computers to Windows Home Server, you can completely restore them to the last successful backup. Note: For this process to work you need to verify the PC you want to restore is connected to your network via Ethernet. If you have it connected wirelessly it won’t work. Restore a PC from Windows Home Server On the computer you want to restore, pop in the Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore disc and boot from it. If you don’t have one already made, you can easily make one following these instructions. We have also included the link to the restore disc below. Boot from the CD then select if your machine has 512MB or RAM or more. The disc will initialize… Then choose your language and keyboard settings. Hopefully if everything goes correctly, your network card will be detected and you can continue. However, if it doesn’t like in our example, click on the Show Details button. In the Detect Hardware screen click on the Install Drivers button. Now you will need to have a USB flash drive with the correct drivers on it. It has to be a flash drive or a floppy (if you happen to still have one of those) because you can’t take out the Restore CD. If you want to make sure you have the correct drivers on the USB flash drive, open the Windows Home Server Console on another computer on your network. In the Computers and Backup section right-click on the computer you want to restore and select View Backups. Select the backup you want to restore from and click the Open button in the Restore or view Files section. Now drag the entire contents of the folder named Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore to the USB flash drive. Back to the machine you’re trying to restore, insert the USB flash drive with the correct drivers and click the Scan button. Wait a few moments while the drivers are found then click Ok then Continue.   The Restore Computer Wizard starts up… Enter in your home server password and click Next. Select the computer you want to restore. If it isn’t selected by default you can pull it up from the dropdown list under Another Computer. Make certain you’re selecting the correct machine. Now select the backup you want to restore. In this example we only have one but chances are you’ll have several. If you have several backups to choose from, you might want to check out the details for them. Now you can select the disk from backup and and restore it to the destination volume. You might need to initialize a disk, change a drive letter, or other disk management tasks, if so, then click on Run Disk Manger. For example we want to change the destination drive letter to (C:).   After you’ve made all the changes to the destination disk you can continue with the restore process. If everything looks correct, confirm the restore configuration. If you need to make any changes at this point, you can still go back and make them. Now Windows Home Server will restore your drive. The amount of time it takes will vary depend on the amount of data you have to restore, network connection speed, and hardware. You are notified when the restore successfully completes. Click Finish and the PC will reboot and be restored and should be working correctly. All the updates, programs, and files will be back that were saved to the last successful backup. Anything you might have installed after that backup will be gone. If you have your computers set to backup every night, then hopefully it won’t be a big issue.   Conclusion Backing up the computers on your network to Windows Home Server is a valuable tool in your backup strategy. Sometimes you may only need to restore a couple files and we’ve covered how to restore them from backups on WHS and that works really well. If the unthinkable happens and you need to restore the entire computer, WHS makes that easy too.  Download Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore CD Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Files from Backups on Windows Home ServerCreate A Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore DiscGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerShare Ubuntu Home Directories using SambaInstalling Windows Home Server TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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• LLBLGen Pro v3.5 has been released!

  - by FransBouma

  Last weekend we released LLBLGen Pro v3.5! Below the list of what's new in this release. Of course, not everything is on this list, like the large amount of work we put in refactoring the runtime framework. The refactoring was necessary because our framework has two paradigms which are added to the framework at a different time, and from a design perspective in the wrong order (the paradigm we added first, SelfServicing, should have been built on top of Adapter, the other paradigm, which was added more than a year after the first released version). The refactoring made sure the framework re-uses more code across the two paradigms (they already shared a lot of code) and is better prepared for the future. We're not done yet, but refactoring a massive framework like ours without breaking interfaces and existing applications is ... a bit of a challenge ;) To celebrate the release of v3.5, we give every customer a 30% discount! Use the coupon code NR1ORM with your order :) The full list of what's new: Designer Rule based .NET Attribute definitions. It's now possible to specify a rule using fine-grained expressions with an attribute definition to define which elements of a given type will receive the attribute definition. Rules can be assigned to attribute definitions on the project level, to make it even easier to define attribute definitions in bulk for many elements in the project. More information... Revamped Project Settings dialog. Multiple project related properties and settings dialogs have been merged into a single dialog called Project Settings, which makes it easier to configure the various settings related to project elements. It also makes it easier to find features previously not used  by many (e.g. type conversions) More information... Home tab with Quick Start Guides. To make new users feel right at home, we added a home tab with quick start guides which guide you through four main use cases of the designer. System Type Converters. Many common conversions have been implemented by default in system type converters so users don't have to develop their own type converters anymore for these type conversions. Bulk Element Setting Manipulator. To change setting values for multiple project elements, it was a little cumbersome to do that without a lot of clicking and opening various editors. This dialog makes changing settings for multiple elements very easy. EDMX Importer. It's now possible to import entity model data information from an existing Entity Framework EDMX file. Other changes and fixes See for the full list of changes and fixes the online documentation. LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework WCF Data Services (OData) support has been added. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF Data Services application using the VS.NET tools for WCF Data Services. WCF Data Services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 to expose your domain model using OData. More information... New query specification and execution API: QuerySpec. QuerySpec is our new query specification and execution API as an alternative to Linq and our more low-level API. It's build, like our Linq provider, on top of our lower-level API. More information... SQL Server 2012 support. The SQL Server DQE allows paging using the new SQL Server 2012 style. More information... System Type converters. For a common set of types the LLBLGen Pro runtime framework contains built-in type conversions so you don't need to write your own type converters anymore. Public/NonPublic property support. It's now possible to mark a field / navigator as non-public which is reflected in the runtime framework as an internal/friend property instead of a public property. This way you can hide properties from the public interface of a generated class and still access it through code added to the generated code base. FULL JOIN support. It's now possible to perform FULL JOIN joins using the native query api and QuerySpec. It's left to the developer to check whether the used target database supports FULL (OUTER) JOINs. Using a FULL JOIN with entity fetches is not recommended, and should only be used when both participants in the join aren't the target of the fetch. Dependency Injection Tracing. It's now possible to enable tracing on dependency injection. Enable tracing at level '4' on the traceswitch 'ORMGeneral'. This will emit trace information about which instance of which type got an instance of type T injected into property P. Entity Instances in projections in Linq. It's now possible to return an entity instance in a custom Linq projection. It's now also possible to pass this instance to a method inside the query projection. Inheritance fully supported in this construct. Entity Framework support The Entity Framework has been updated in the recent year with code-first support and a new simpler context api: DbContext (with DbSet). The amount of code to generate is smaller and the context simpler. LLBLGen Pro v3.5 comes with support for DbContext and DbSet and generates code which utilizes these new classes. NHibernate support NHibernate v3.2+ built-in proxy factory factory support. By default the built-in ProxyFactoryFactory is selected. FluentNHibernate Session Manager uses 1.2 syntax. Fluent NHibernate mappings generate a SessionManager which uses the v1.2 syntax for the ProxyFactoryFactory location Optionally emit schema / catalog name in mappings Two settings have been added which allow the user to control whether the catalog name and/or schema name as known in the project in the designer is emitted into the mappings.

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• top Tweets SOA Partner Community – September 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity OracleBlogs ?Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration Dashboard http://ow.ly/1mcJvp SOA Community ?Lost in Translation &ndash; Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns &ndash; Mark Simpson, Griffiths-Waite @ SOA, Cloud & Service… ServiceTechSymposium Matthias Zieger, Accenture just added to the agenda to co-present: "Service Modeling & BPM Business Value Patterns" http://ow.ly/ddu7A ServiceTechSymposium ?Newly updated session title and abstract: "Big Data and its impact on SOA", by Demed L'Her, Oracle. http://ow.ly/diOq2 Deepak Arora ?To PaaS or SaaS - the latest discussions with customers using SOA Suite - what are your thoughts #soa #soacommunity SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community July 2012 - are you one of them? If yes please rt! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-august-2012/ … #soacommunity Sandor Nieuwenhuijs Checkout the BeNeLux Architectural Networking Event during Oracle Open World - meet your peers and the experts http://www.ddg-servicecenter.com/networkmanager/oow/architect/default.aspx … SOA Community ?top Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; August 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-uf SOA Community ?Follow SOA Community on facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community ?New Service to promote Your SOA & BPM events at http://oracle.com/events for SOA & BPM Specialized Partners Only! #soacommunity #opn #oracle Jan van Zoggel ?Hotel check, flight check, overview of sessions to visit check http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/soa-cloud-servicetech-symposium/ … I'm ready for SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium SOA Community SOA & BPM Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your SOA & BPM Events at http://oracle.com/events http://wp.me/p10C8u-sH SOA Community Call for content for the next community newsletter. Do you want to publish your success & best practice? Send it @soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community SOA Adoption in the Brazilian Ministry of Health - Case Study by Ricardo Puttini, University of Brasilia @ SOA, Cloud & Service… Jan van Zoggel ?Just registered for the 5th International SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium in London. Looking forward to it. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ OTNArchBeat ?Want to prepare for Oracle SOA Specialization? @t_winterberg offers a suggestion. http://pub.vitrue.com/5Hqu OTNArchBeat ?Oracle BPM enable BAM | @deltalounge http://pub.vitrue.com/BCwj SOA Community Presentations & Training material OFM Summer Camps & Impressions & Feedback http://wp.me/p10C8u-sF Emiel Paasschens Nice! Pdf document on how to use a #Oracle #SOA Suite Domain Value Map (DVM) in the OSB: http://bit.ly/RzyS9w #yam OracleBlogs ?Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL http://ow.ly/1m4lz7 demed ?Free VIP pass for @techsymp if you are in London Sep. 24-25. Be the first one to retweet this and I'll DM you details! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/speaker_bios.php?id=demed_lher … Jan van Zoggel blogpost: Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Oracle Coherence caching http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/osb-duplicate-message-with-coherence/ … OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Coherence | @jvzoggel http://pub.vitrue.com/ckY8 Oracle UPK & Tutor Synaptis and Oracle Present: Leveraging UPK Throughout the Project Lifecycle: Leveraging UPK throughout the Proj... http://bit.ly/OS2Rbg Rolando Carrasco ?New entry @ oracleradio http://bit.ly/SEvwwS @soacommunity @oracleace How to identify duplicated messages on Oracle SOA SUITE? SOA Community ?Business Driven Development (BDD) Demo Now Available! http://wp.me/p10C8u-sf OTNArchBeat ?Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterprise Linux | @lonnekedikmans http://pub.vitrue.com/BEyD OTNArchBeat ?Best practices for Oracle real-time data integration | Frank Ohlhorst http://pub.vitrue.com/1fH1 ServiceTechSymposium ?New OTN podcast featuring speakers Thomas Erl, Tim Hall and Demed L’Her just published. Tune into 1st 3 parts here: http://ow.ly/d1RRn OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud, and Service Technologies - Part 4 of 4 - Best selling SOA author Thomas Erl talks about the latest title... http://ow.ly/1m0txY SOA Community Win a free conference pass for the SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium &ndash; become a soacommunity facebook fan!… Lonneke Dikmans VENNSTER BLOG: Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterpris... http://blog.vennster.nl/2012/08/installing-oracle-soa-suite-10g-on.html?spref=tw … PeterPaul vande Beek published a blog on exporting Oracle #BPM metrics to a #DWH http://www.deltalounge.net/wpress/2012/08/export-oracle-bpm-metrics-to-a-data-warehouse/ … #soacommunity SOA Community ?Do you follow us on facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity C2B2 Consulting ?Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture by Steve Millidge, C2B2 Consulting @ SOA, Cloud &amp; Service … http://wp.me/p10C8u-sv via @soacommunity Gertjan van het Hof Storing SCA Metadata in the Oracle Metadata Services Repository http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/soa/fonnegra-storing-sca-metadata-1715004.html?msgid=3-6903117805 … arjankramer ?Encrypted OSB Service account passwords http://dlvr.it/20hbNV Richard van Tilborg BPM the Battle http://lnkd.in/yFAJaW OTNArchBeat Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL | @RahejaRajesh http://pub.vitrue.com/YDCD SOA Proactive ?Webcast: Introduction to SOA Human Workflow, 8/23, 10 AM EDT. Register @ http://bit.ly/Nx77sY Lucas Jellema ?Programmatically admnistration of OSB using JXM & MBeans. Interesting example is given in https://blogs.oracle.com/ateamsoab2b/entry/automatic_disabling_proxy_service_when … orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: Automatically Disable Proxy Service to avoid overloading OSB http://ow.ly/1lXGKV Atul_Kumar ?Oracle Enterprise Gateway – OEG 11gR1 (11.1.1.*) for beginners http://goo.gl/fb/EJboE Estafet Limited Advanced SOA Boot camp @soacommunity in Munich was excellent.@wlscommunity Learnt a lot and liked the format. SOA Community Oracle Fusion Applications Design Patterns Now Available For Developers by Ultan O'Broin http://wp.me/p10C8u-sd SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• On Contract Employment

  - by kerry

  I am going to post about something I don’t post about a lot, the business side of development.  Scott at the antipimp does a good job of explaining how contracts work from a business perspective.  I am going to give a view from the ground. First, a little background on myself.  I have recently taken a 6 month contract after about 8 years of fulltime employment.  I have 2 kids, and a stay at home wife.  I took this contract opportunity because I wanted to try it on for size.  I have always wondered whether I would like doing contracts over fulltime employment.  So, in keeping with the theme of this blog I will write this down now so that I may reference it later. ALL jobs are temporary! Right now you may not realize it, most people simply ignore it, but EVERY job is temporary.  Everyone should be planning for life after the money stops coming in.  Sadly, most people do not.  Contracting pushes this issue to the forefront, making you deal with it.  After a month on a contract, I am happy to say that I am saving more than I ever saved in a fulltime position.  Hopefully, I will be ready in case of an extended window of unemployment between contracts. Networking I find it extremely gratifying getting to know people.  It is especially beneficial when moving to a new city.  What better way to go out and meet people in your field than to work a few contracts?  6 months of working beside someone and you get to know them pretty well.  This is one of my favorite aspects. Technical Agility Moving between IS shops takes (or molds you into) a flexible person.  You have to be able to go in and hit the ground running.  This means you need to be able to sit down and start work on a large codebase working in a language that you may or may not have that much experience in.  It is also an excellent way to learn new languages and broaden your technical skill set.  I took my current position to learn Ruby.  A month ago, I had only used it in passing, but now I am using it every day.  It’s a tragedy in this field when people start coding for the joy and love of coding, then become deeply entrenched in their companies methods and technologies that it becomes a just a job. Less Stress I am not talking about the kind of stress you get from a jackass boss.  I am talking about the kind of stress I (or others) experience about planning and future proofing your code.  Not saying I stay up at night worrying whether we have done it right, if that code I wrote today is going to bite me later, but it still creeps around in the dark recesses of my mind.  Careful though, I am not suggesting you write sloppy code; just defer any large architectural or design decisions to the ‘code owners’. Flexible Scheduling It makes me very happy to be able to cut out a few hours early on a Friday (provided the work is done) and start the weekend off early by going to the pool, or taking the kids to the park.  Contracting provides you this opportunity (mileage may vary).  Most of your fulltime brethren will not care, they will be jealous that they’re corporate policy prevents them from doing the same.  However, you must be mindful of situations where this is not appropriate, and don’t over do it.  You are there to work after all. Affirmation of Need Have you ever been stuck in a job where you thought you were underpaid?  Have you ever been in a position where you felt like there was not enough workload for you?  This is not a problem for contractors.  When you start a contract it is understood that you are needed, and the employer knows that you are happy with the terms. Contracting may not be for everyone.  But, if you develop a relationship with a good consulting firm, keep their clients happy, then they will keep you happy.  They want you to work almost as much as you do.  Just be sure and plan financially for any windows of unemployment.

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• Integrate BING API for Search inside ASP.Net web application

  - by sreejukg

  As you might already know, Bing is the Microsoft Search engine and is getting popular day by day. Bing offers APIs that can be integrated into your website to increase your website functionality. At this moment, there are two important APIs available. They are Bing Search API Bing Maps The Search API enables you to build applications that utilize Bing’s technology. The API allows you to search multiple source types such as web; images, video etc. and supports various output prototypes such as JSON, XML, and SOAP. Also you will be able to customize the search results as you wish for your public facing website. Bing Maps API allows you to build robust applications that use Bing Maps. In this article I am going to describe, how you can integrate Bing search into your website. In order to start using Bing, First you need to sign in to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingdeveloper/ using your windows live credentials. Click on the Sign in button, you will be asked to enter your windows live credentials. Once signed in you will be redirected to the Developer page. Here you can create applications and get AppID for each application. Since I am a first time user, I don’t have any applications added. Click on the Add button to add a new application. You will be asked to enter certain details about your application. The fields are straight forward, only thing you need to note is the website field, here you need to enter the website address from where you are going to use this application, and this field is optional too. Of course you need to agree on the terms and conditions and then click Save. Once you click on save, the application will be created and application ID will be available for your use. Now we got the APP Id. Basically Bing supports three protocols. They are JSON, XML and SOAP. JSON is useful if you want to call the search requests directly from the browser and use JavaScript to parse the results, thus JSON is the favorite choice for AJAX application. XML is the alternative for applications that does not support SOAP, e.g. flash/ Silverlight etc. SOAP is ideal for strongly typed languages and gives a request/response object model. In this article I am going to demonstrate how to search BING API using SOAP protocol from an ASP.Net application. For the purpose of this demonstration, I am going to create an ASP.Net project and implement the search functionality in an aspx page. Open Visual Studio, navigate to File-> New Project, select ASP.Net empty web application, I named the project as “BingSearchSample”. Add a Search.aspx page to the project, once added the solution explorer will looks similar to the following. Now you need to add a web reference to the SOAP service available from Bing. To do this, from the solution explorer, right click your project, select Add Service Reference. Now the new service reference dialog will appear. In the left bottom of the dialog, you can find advanced button, click on it. Now the service reference settings dialog will appear. In the bottom left, you can find Add Web Reference button, click on it. The add web reference dialog will appear now. Enter the URL as http://api.bing.net/search.wsdl?AppID=<YourAppIDHere>&version=2.2 (replace <yourAppIDHere> with the appID you have generated previously) and click on the button next to it. This will find the web service methods available. You can change the namespace suggested by Bing, but for the purpose of this demonstration I have accepted all the default settings. Click on the Add reference button once you are done. Now the web reference to Search service will be added your project. You can find this under solution explorer of your project. Now in the Search.aspx, that you previously created, place one textbox, button and a grid view. For the purpose of this demonstration, I have given the identifiers (ID) as txtSearch, btnSearch, gvSearch respectively. The idea is to search the text entered in the text box using Bing service and show the results in the grid view. In the design view, the search.aspx looks as follows. In the search.aspx.cs page, add a using statement that points to net.bing.api. I have added the following code for button click event handler. The code is very straight forward. It just calls the service with your AppID, a query to search and a source for searching. Let us run this page and see the output when I enter Microsoft in my textbox. If you want to search a specific site, you can include the site name in the query parameter. For e.g. the following query will search the word Microsoft from www.microsoft.com website. searchRequest.Query = “site:www.microsoft.com Microsoft”; The output of this query is as follows. Integrating BING search API to your website is easy and there is no limit on the customization of the interface you can do. There is no Bing branding required so I believe this is a great option for web developers when they plan for site search.

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• Big Data – Is Big Data Relevant to me? – Big Data Questionnaires – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions of SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I think the series from Pinal is a good one for anyone planning to start on Big Data journey from the basics. In my daily customer interactions this buzz of “Big Data” always comes up, I react generally saying – “Sir, do you really have a ‘Big Data’ problem or do you have a big Data problem?” Generally, there is a silence in the air when I ask this question. Data is everywhere in organizations – be it big data, small data, all data and for few it is bad data which is same as no data :). Wow, don’t discount me as someone who opposes “Big Data”, I am a big supporter as much as I am a critic of the abuse of this term by the people. In this post, I wanted to let my mind flow so that you can also think in the direction I want you to see these concepts. In any case, this is not an exhaustive dump of what is in my mind – but you will surely get the drift how I am going to question Big Data terms from customers!!! Is Big Data Relevant to me? Many of my customers talk to me like blank whiteboard with no idea – “why Big Data”. They want to jump into the bandwagon of technology and they want to decipher insights from their unexplored data a.k.a. unstructured data with structured data. So what are these industry scenario’s that come to mind? Here are some of them: Financials Fraud detection: Banks and Credit cards are monitoring your spending habits on real-time basis. Customer Segmentation: applies in every industry from Banking to Retail to Aviation to Utility and others where they deal with end customer who consume their products and services. Customer Sentiment Analysis: Responding to negative brand perception on social or amplify the positive perception. Sales and Marketing Campaign: Understand the impact and get closer to customer delight. Call Center Analysis: attempt to take unstructured voice recordings and analyze them for content and sentiment. Medical Reduce Re-admissions: How to build a proactive follow-up engagements with patients. Patient Monitoring: How to track Inpatient, Out-Patient, Emergency Visits, Intensive Care Units etc. Preventive Care: Disease identification and Risk stratification is a very crucial business function for medical. Claims fraud detection: There is no precise dollars that one can put here, but this is a big thing for the medical field. Retail Customer Sentiment Analysis, Customer Care Centers, Campaign Management. Supply Chain Analysis: Every sensors and RFID data can be tracked for warehouse space optimization. Location based marketing: Based on where a check-in happens retail stores can be optimize their marketing. Telecom Price optimization and Plans, Finding Customer churn, Customer loyalty programs Call Detail Record (CDR) Analysis, Network optimizations, User Location analysis Customer Behavior Analysis Insurance Fraud Detection & Analysis, Pricing based on customer Sentiment Analysis, Loyalty Management Agents Analysis, Customer Value Management This list can go on to other areas like Utility, Manufacturing, Travel, ITES etc. So as you can see, there are obviously interesting use cases for each of these industry verticals. These are just representative list. Where to start? A lot of times I try to quiz customers on a number of dimensions before starting a Big Data conversation. Are you getting the data you need the way you want it and in a timely manner? Can you get in and analyze the data you need? How quickly is IT to respond to your BI Requests? How easily can you get at the data that you need to run your business/department/project? How are you currently measuring your business? Can you get the data you need to react WITHIN THE QUARTER to impact behaviors to meet your numbers or is it always “rear-view mirror?” How are you measuring: The Brand Customer Sentiment Your Competition Your Pricing Your performance Supply Chain Efficiencies Predictive product / service positioning What are your key challenges of driving collaboration across your global business?  What the challenges in innovation? What challenges are you facing in getting more information out of your data? Note: Garbage-in is Garbage-out. Hold good for all reporting / analytics requirements Big Data POCs? A number of customers get into the realm of setting a small team to work on Big Data – well it is a great start from an understanding point of view, but I tend to ask a number of other questions to such customers. Some of these common questions are: To what degree is your advanced analytics (natural language processing, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics and classification) paired with your Big Data’s efforts? Do you have dedicated resources exploring the possibilities of advanced analytics in Big Data for your business line? Do you plan to employ machine learning technology while doing Advanced Analytics? How is Social Media being monitored in your organization? What is your ability to scale in terms of storage and processing power? Do you have a system in place to sort incoming data in near real time by potential value, data quality, and use frequency? Do you use event-driven architecture to manage incoming data? Do you have specialized data services that can accommodate different formats, security, and the management requirements of multiple data sources? Is your organization currently using or considering in-memory analytics? To what degree are you able to correlate data from your Big Data infrastructure with that from your enterprise data warehouse? Have you extended the role of Data Stewards to include ownership of big data components? Do you prioritize data quality based on the source system (that is Facebook/Twitter data has lower quality thresholds than radio frequency identification (RFID) for a tracking system)? Do your retention policies consider the different legal responsibilities for storing Big Data for a specific amount of time? Do Data Scientists work in close collaboration with Data Stewards to ensure data quality? How is access to attributes of Big Data being given out in the organization? Are roles related to Big Data (Advanced Analyst, Data Scientist) clearly defined? How involved is risk management in the Big Data governance process? Is there a set of documented policies regarding Big Data governance? Is there an enforcement mechanism or approach to ensure that policies are followed? Who is the key sponsor for your Big Data governance program? (The CIO is best) Do you have defined policies surrounding the use of social media data for potential employees and customers, as well as the use of customer Geo-location data? How accessible are complex analytic routines to your user base? What is the level of involvement with outside vendors and third parties in regard to the planning and execution of Big Data projects? What programming technologies are utilized by your data warehouse/BI staff when working with Big Data? These are some of the important questions I ask each customer who is actively evaluating Big Data trends for their organizations. These questions give you a sense of direction where to start, what to use, how to secure, how to analyze and more. Sign off Any Big data is analysis is incomplete without a compelling story. The best way to understand this is to watch Hans Rosling – Gapminder (2:17 to 6:06) videos about the third world myths. Don’t get overwhelmed with the Big Data buzz word, the destination to what your data speaks is important. In this blog post, we did not particularly look at any Big Data technologies. This is a set of questionnaire one needs to keep in mind as they embark their journey of Big Data. I did write some of the basics in my blog: Big Data – Big Hype yet Big Opportunity. Do let me know if these questions make sense?  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• RSS feeds in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  When we added RSS to Orchard, we wanted to make it easy for any module to expose any contents as a feed. We also wanted the rendering of the feed to be handled by Orchard in order to minimize the amount of work from the module developer. A typical example of such feed exposition is of course blog feeds. We have an IFeedManager interface for which you can get the built-in implementation through dependency injection. Look at the BlogController constructor for an example: public BlogController( IOrchardServices services, IBlogService blogService, IBlogSlugConstraint blogSlugConstraint, IFeedManager feedManager, RouteCollection routeCollection) { If you look a little further in that same controller, in the Item action, you’ll see a call to the Register method of the feed manager: _feedManager.Register(blog); This in reality is a call into an extension method that is specialized for blogs, but we could have made the two calls to the actual generic Register directly in the action instead, that is just an implementation detail: feedManager.Register(blog.Name, "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "containerid", blog.Id } }); feedManager.Register(blog.Name + " - Comments", "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "commentedoncontainer", blog.Id } }); What those two effective calls are doing is to register two feeds: one for the blog itself and one for the comments on the blog. For each call, the name of the feed is provided, then we have the type of feed (“rss”) and some values to be injected into the generic RSS route that will be used later to route the feed to the right providers. This is all you have to do to expose a new feed. If you’re only interested in exposing feeds, you can stop right there. If on the other hand you want to know what happens after that under the hood, carry on. What happens after that is that the feedmanager will take care of formatting the link tag for the feed (see FeedManager.GetRegisteredLinks). The GetRegisteredLinks method itself will be called from a specialized filter, FeedFilter. FeedFilter is an MVC filter and the event we’re interested in hooking into is OnResultExecuting, which happens after the controller action has returned an ActionResult and just before MVC executes that action result. In other words, our feed registration has already been called but the view is not yet rendered. Here’s the code for OnResultExecuting: model.Zones.AddAction("head:after", html => html.ViewContext.Writer.Write( _feedManager.GetRegisteredLinks(html))); This is another piece of code whose execution is differed. It is saying that whenever comes time to render the “head” zone, this code should be called right after. The code itself is rendering the link tags. As a result of all that, here’s what can be found in an Orchard blog’s head section: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"     title="Tales from the Evil Empire"     href="/rss?containerid=5" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"     title="Tales from the Evil Empire - Comments"     href="/rss?commentedoncontainer=5" /> The generic action that these two feeds point to is Index on FeedController. That controller has three important dependencies: an IFeedBuilderProvider, an IFeedQueryProvider and an IFeedItemProvider. Different implementations of these interfaces can provide different formats of feeds, such as RSS and Atom. The Match method enables each of the competing providers to provide a priority for themselves based on arbitrary criteria that can be found on the FeedContext. This means that a provider can be selected based not only on the desired format, but also on the nature of the objects being exposed as a feed or on something even more arbitrary such as the destination device (you could imagine for example giving shorter text only excerpts of posts on mobile devices, and full HTML on desktop). The key here is extensibility and dynamic competition and collaboration from unknown and loosely coupled parts. You’ll find this pattern pretty much everywhere in the Orchard architecture. The RssFeedBuilder implementation of IFeedBuilderProvider is also a regular controller with a Process action that builds a RssResult, which is itself a thin ActionResult wrapper around an XDocument. Let’s get back to the FeedController’s Index action. After having called into each known feed builder to get its priority on the currently requested feed, it will select the one with the highest priority. The next thing it needs to do is to actually fetch the data for the feed. This again is a collaborative effort from a priori unknown providers, the implementations of IFeedQueryProvider. There are several implementations by default in Orchard, the choice of which is again done through a Match method. ContainerFeedQuery for example chimes in when a “containerid” parameter is found in the context (see URL in the link tag above): public FeedQueryMatch Match(FeedContext context) { var containerIdValue = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("containerid"); if (containerIdValue == null) return null; return new FeedQueryMatch { FeedQuery = this, Priority = -5 }; } The actual work is done in the Execute method, which finds the right container content item in the Orchard database and adds elements for each of them. In other words, the feed query provider knows how to retrieve the list of content items to add to the feed. The last step is to translate each of the content items into feed entries, which is done by implementations of IFeedItemBuilder. There is no Match method this time. Instead, all providers are called with the collection of items (or more accurately with the FeedContext, but this contains the list of items, which is what’s relevant in most cases). Each provider can then choose to pick those items that it knows how to treat and transform them into the format requested. This enables the construction of heterogeneous feeds that expose content items of various types into a single feed. That will be extremely important when you’ll want to expose a single feed for all your site. So here are feeds in Orchard in a nutshell. The main point here is that there is a fair number of components involved, with some complexity in implementation in order to allow for extreme flexibility, but the part that you use to expose a new feed is extremely simple and light: declare that you want your content exposed as a feed and you’re done. There are cases where you’ll have to dive in and provide new implementations for some or all of the interfaces involved, but that requirement will only arise as needed. For example, you might need to create a new feed item builder to include your custom content type but that effort will be extremely focused on the specialized task at hand. The rest of the system won’t need to change. So what do you think?

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• Chock-full of Identity Customers at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Tanu Sood

    Oracle Openworld (OOW) 2012 kicks off this coming Sunday. Oracle OpenWorld is known to bring in Oracle customers, organizations big and small, from all over the world. And, Identity Management is no exception. If you are looking to catch up with Oracle Identity Management customers, hear first-hand about their implementation experiences and discuss industry trends, business drivers, solutions and more at OOW, here are some sessions we recommend you attend: Monday, October 1, 2012 CON9405: Trends in Identity Management 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Moscone West 3003 Subject matter experts from Kaiser Permanente and SuperValu share the stage with Amit Jasuja, Snior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security to discuss how the latest advances in Identity Management are helping customers address emerging requirements for securely enabling cloud, social and mobile environments. CON9492: Simplifying your Identity Management Implementation 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Implementation experts from British Telecom, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC participate in a panel to discuss best practices, key strategies and lessons learned based on their own experiences. Attendees will hear first-hand what they can do to streamline and simplify their identity management implementation framework for a quick return-on-investment and maximum efficiency. CON9444: Modernized and Complete Access Management 4:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 We have come a long way from the days of web single sign-on addressing the core business requirements. Today, as technology and business evolves, organizations are seeking new capabilities like federation, token services, fine grained authorizations, web fraud prevention and strong authentication. This session will explore the emerging requirements for access management, what a complete solution is like, complemented with real-world customer case studies from ETS, Kaiser Permanente and TURKCELL and product demonstrations. Tuesday, October 2, 2012 CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 With more than 5 billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to encourage more and more user self service, business users are now primary end users for identity management installations.  Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? How do you externalize such entitlements to allow dynamic changes without having to touch the application code? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption.  Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience.  This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. Thursday, October 4, 2012 CON9662: Securing Oracle Applications with the Oracle Enterprise Identity Management Platform 2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Oracle Enterprise identity Management solutions are designed to secure access and simplify compliance to Oracle Applications.  Whether you are an EBS customer looking to upgrade from Oracle Single Sign-on or a Fusion Application customer seeking to leverage the Identity instance as an enterprise security platform, this session with Qualcomm and Oracle will help you understand how to get the most out of your investment. And here’s the complete listing of all the Identity Management sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.

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• Algorithmia Source Code released on CodePlex

  - by FransBouma

  Following the release of our BCL Extensions Library on CodePlex, we have now released the source-code of Algorithmia on CodePlex! Algorithmia is an algorithm and data-structures library for .NET 3.5 or higher and is one of the pillars LLBLGen Pro v3's designer is built on. The library contains many data-structures and algorithms, and the source-code is well documented and commented, often with links to official descriptions and papers of the algorithms and data-structures implemented. The source-code is shared using Mercurial on CodePlex and is licensed under the friendly BSD2 license. User documentation is not available at the moment but will be added soon. One of the main design goals of Algorithmia was to create a library which contains implementations of well-known algorithms which weren't already implemented in .NET itself. This way, more developers out there can enjoy the results of many years of what the field of Computer Science research has delivered. Some algorithms and datastructures are known in .NET but are re-implemented because the implementation in .NET isn't efficient for many situations or lacks features. An example is the linked list in .NET: it doesn't have an O(1) concat operation, as every node refers to the containing LinkedList object it's stored in. This is bad for algorithms which rely on O(1) concat operations, like the Fibonacci heap implementation in Algorithmia. Algorithmia therefore contains a linked list with an O(1) concat feature. The following functionality is available in Algorithmia: Command, Command management. This system is usable to build a fully undo/redo aware system by building your object graph using command-aware classes. The Command pattern is implemented using a system which allows transparent undo-redo and command grouping so you can use it to make a class undo/redo aware and set properties, use its contents without using commands at all. The Commands namespace is the namespace to start. Classes you'd want to look at are CommandifiedMember, CommandifiedList and KeyedCommandifiedList. See the CommandQueueTests in the test project for examples. Graphs, Graph algorithms. Algorithmia contains a sophisticated graph class hierarchy and algorithms implemented onto them: non-directed and directed graphs, as well as a subgraph view class, which can be used to create a view onto an existing graph class which can be self-maintaining. Algorithms include transitive closure, topological sorting and others. A feature rich depth-first search (DFS) crawler is available so DFS based algorithms can be implemented quickly. All graph classes are undo/redo aware, as they can be set to be 'commandified'. When a graph is 'commandified' it will do its housekeeping through commands, which makes it fully undo-redo aware, so you can remove, add and manipulate the graph and undo/redo the activity automatically without any extra code. If you define the properties of the class you set as the vertex type using CommandifiedMember, you can manipulate the properties of vertices and the graph contents with full undo/redo functionality without any extra code. Heaps. Heaps are data-structures which have the largest or smallest item stored in them always as the 'root'. Extracting the root from the heap makes the heap determine the next in line to be the 'maximum' or 'minimum' (max-heap vs. min-heap, all heaps in Algorithmia can do both). Algorithmia contains various heaps, among them an implementation of the Fibonacci heap, one of the most efficient heap datastructures known today, especially when you want to merge different instances into one. Priority queues. Priority queues are specializations of heaps. Algorithmia contains a couple of them. Sorting. What's an algorithm library without sort algorithms? Algorithmia implements a couple of sort algorithms which sort the data in-place. This aspect is important in situations where you want to sort the elements in a buffer/list/ICollection in-place, so all data stays in the data-structure it already is stored in. PropertyBag. It re-implements Tony Allowatt's original idea in .NET 3.5 specific syntax, which is to have a generic property bag and to be able to build an object in code at runtime which can be bound to a property grid for editing. This is handy for when you have data / settings stored in XML or other format, and want to create an editable form of it without creating many editors. IEditableObject/IDataErrorInfo implementations. It contains default implementations for IEditableObject and IDataErrorInfo (EditableObjectDataContainer for IEditableObject and ErrorContainer for IDataErrorInfo), which make it very easy to implement these interfaces (just a few lines of code) without having to worry about bookkeeping during databinding. They work seamlessly with CommandifiedMember as well, so your undo/redo aware code can use them out of the box. EventThrottler. It contains an event throttler, which can be used to filter out duplicate events in an event stream coming into an observer from an event. This can greatly enhance performance in your UI without needing to do anything other than hooking it up so it's placed between the event source and your real handler. If your UI is flooded with events from data-structures observed by your UI or a middle tier, you can use this class to filter out duplicates to avoid redundant updates to UI elements or to avoid having observers choke on many redundant events. Small, handy stuff. A MultiValueDictionary, which can store multiple unique values per key, instead of one with the default Dictionary, and is also merge-aware so you can merge two into one. A Pair class, to quickly group two elements together. Multiple interfaces for helping with building a de-coupled, observer based system, and some utility extension methods for the defined data-structures. We regularly update the library with new code. If you have ideas for new algorithms or want to share your contribution, feel free to discuss it on the project's Discussions page or send us a pull request. Enjoy!

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• Learn About Oracle’s Strategy for a Simple, Modern User Experience at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Applications User Experience

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience If you’re interested in what the best possible user experience looks like, you’ll want to hear what Oracle’s Applications User Experience team is planning for OpenWorld 2012, Sept. 30-Oct. 4 in San Francisco. This year, we will talk Fusion, Fusion, Fusion. We were among the first to show Oracle Fusion Applications in the last couple of years, and we’ll be showing it again this year so you can see what Oracle is planning for the next generation of enterprise applications. Attend our sessions to learn more about the user experience strategy in which Oracle is investing. Simplicity is the driving force behind the demos that we are unveiling now, which you can see at OpenWorld. We want to create opportunities for productivity and efficiency, and deliver enterprise data across devices to help you do your work in the way best suited to your job and needs, said Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Oracle Applications User Experience. You can see the new look for Fusion Applications at a general session led by Ashley at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3. You’ll also have the chance to learn more about tailoring in Oracle Fusion Applications, and gain a new understanding of the investment in the user experience behind Fusion Applications at our sessions (see session information below). Inside the Oracle Applications User Experience team’s on-site lab at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. Head to the demogrounds to see new demos from the Applications User Experience team, including the new look for Fusion Applications and what we’re building for mobile platforms. Take a spin on our eye tracker, a very cool tool that we use to research the usability of a particular design. Visit the Usable Apps OpenWorld page to find out where our demopods will be located. We are also recruiting participants for our on-site lab, in which we gather feedback on new user experience designs, and taking reservations for a charter bus that will bring you to Oracle headquarters for a lab tour Thursday, Oct. 4, or Friday, Oct. 5. Tours leave at 10 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. You’ll see more of our newest designs at the lab tour, and some of our research tools in action. Can’t participate in a customer feedback session or take a lab tour this time around? Visit Usable Apps to participate or book a tour another time. For more information on any OpenWorld sessions, check the content catalog – also available at www.oracle.com/openworld. For information on Applications User Experience (Apps UX) sessions and activities, go to the Usable Apps OpenWorld page. APPS UX OPENWORLD SESSIONS Oracle’s Roadmap to a Simple, Modern User Experience Presenter: Jeremy Ashley, Vice President Applications User Experience, Oracle; with Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Consulting; Basheer Khan, Innowave; and Edward Roske, InterRelSession ID: CON9467Date: Wednesday, Oct. 3 Time: 3:30 - 4:30 p.m.Location: Moscone West - 3002/3004 Jeremy Ashley Oracle Fusion Applications: Transforming Insight into Action Presenters: Killian Evers and Kristin Desmond, OracleSession ID: CON8718Date: Thursday, Oct. 4Time: 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.Location: Moscone West - 2008 “FRIENDS OF UX” OPENWORLD SESSIONS Sessions by the Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OUAB) members: Advances in Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance Manager  Presenters: Koen Delaure, KPMG Advisory NV, and Oracle Usability Advisory Board member; Russell Stohr, Oracle Session ID: CON9389Date: Tuesday, Oct. 2Time: 1:15 - 2:15 p.m.Location: Palace Hotel - Concert Optimize Oracle E-Busines Suite Procure-to-Pay: Cut Inefficiences/Fraud with Oracle GRC Apps Presenters: Koen Delaure, KPMG Advisory NV, and Solveig Wagner, Seadrill Management AS, both Oracle Usability Advisory Board members; and Swarnali Bag, OracleSession ID: CON9401Date: Monday, Oct. 1Time: 12:15 - 1:15 p.m.Location: Intercontinental - Sutter Showcase of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Mobility Presenters: Jon Wells, Westmoreland Coal Co., Oracle Usability Advisory Board member; Rob Mills and Liz Davson, Town of Oakville; Keith Sholes and Louise Farner, Oracle Session ID: CON9123Date: Tuesday, Oct. 2Time: 1:15 - 2:15 p.m.Location: InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B Sessions by the Fusion User Experience Adovcates (FXA) Usability and Features of Oracle Fusion Applications, Built upon Oracle Fusion Middleware Presenters: Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Consulting and Oracle Usability Advisory Board member; John King, King Training ResourcesSession ID: UGF10371Date: Sunday, Sept. 30Time: 11 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. Location: Moscone West – 2010 Ten Things to Love About Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management  Presenter: Floyd Teter, EiS TechnologiesSession ID: CON6021Date: Tuesday, Oct. 2Time: 10:15 - 11:15 a.m.Location: Moscone West – 2003

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Architecting Data Warehouse – Niraj Bhatt

  - by pinaldave

  Niraj Bhatt works as an Enterprise Architect for a Fortune 500 company and has an innate passion for building / studying software systems. He is a top rated speaker at various technical forums including Tech·Ed, MCT Summit, Developer Summit, and Virtual Tech Days, among others. Having run a successful startup for four years Niraj enjoys working on – IT innovations that can impact an enterprise bottom line, streamlining IT budgets through IT consolidation, architecture and integration of systems, performance tuning, and review of enterprise applications. He has received Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET, Connected Systems and most recently on Windows Azure. When he is away from his laptop, you will find him taking deep dives in automobiles, pottery, rafting, photography, cooking and financial statements though not necessarily in that order. He is also a manager/speaker at BDOTNET, Asia’s largest .NET user group. Here is the guest post by Niraj Bhatt. As data in your applications grows it’s the database that usually becomes a bottleneck. It’s hard to scale a relational DB and the preferred approach for large scale applications is to create separate databases for writes and reads. These databases are referred as transactional database and reporting database. Though there are tools / techniques which can allow you to create snapshot of your transactional database for reporting purpose, sometimes they don’t quite fit the reporting requirements of an enterprise. These requirements typically are data analytics, effective schema (for an Information worker to self-service herself), historical data, better performance (flat data, no joins) etc. This is where a need for data warehouse or an OLAP system arises. A Key point to remember is a data warehouse is mostly a relational database. It’s built on top of same concepts like Tables, Rows, Columns, Primary keys, Foreign Keys, etc. Before we talk about how data warehouses are typically structured let’s understand key components that can create a data flow between OLTP systems and OLAP systems. There are 3 major areas to it: a) OLTP system should be capable of tracking its changes as all these changes should go back to data warehouse for historical recording. For e.g. if an OLTP transaction moves a customer from silver to gold category, OLTP system needs to ensure that this change is tracked and send to data warehouse for reporting purpose. A report in context could be how many customers divided by geographies moved from sliver to gold category. In data warehouse terminology this process is called Change Data Capture. There are quite a few systems that leverage database triggers to move these changes to corresponding tracking tables. There are also out of box features provided by some databases e.g. SQL Server 2008 offers Change Data Capture and Change Tracking for addressing such requirements. b) After we make the OLTP system capable of tracking its changes we need to provision a batch process that can run periodically and takes these changes from OLTP system and dump them into data warehouse. There are many tools out there that can help you fill this gap – SQL Server Integration Services happens to be one of them. c) So we have an OLTP system that knows how to track its changes, we have jobs that run periodically to move these changes to warehouse. The question though remains is how warehouse will record these changes? This structural change in data warehouse arena is often covered under something called Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD). While we will talk about dimensions in a while, SCD can be applied to pure relational tables too. SCD enables a database structure to capture historical data. This would create multiple records for a given entity in relational database and data warehouses prefer having their own primary key, often known as surrogate key. As I mentioned a data warehouse is just a relational database but industry often attributes a specific schema style to data warehouses. These styles are Star Schema or Snowflake Schema. The motivation behind these styles is to create a flat database structure (as opposed to normalized one), which is easy to understand / use, easy to query and easy to slice / dice. Star schema is a database structure made up of dimensions and facts. Facts are generally the numbers (sales, quantity, etc.) that you want to slice and dice. Fact tables have these numbers and have references (foreign keys) to set of tables that provide context around those facts. E.g. if you have recorded 10,000 USD as sales that number would go in a sales fact table and could have foreign keys attached to it that refers to the sales agent responsible for sale and to time table which contains the dates between which that sale was made. These agent and time tables are called dimensions which provide context to the numbers stored in fact tables. This schema structure of fact being at center surrounded by dimensions is called Star schema. A similar structure with difference of dimension tables being normalized is called a Snowflake schema. This relational structure of facts and dimensions serves as an input for another analysis structure called Cube. Though physically Cube is a special structure supported by commercial databases like SQL Server Analysis Services, logically it’s a multidimensional structure where dimensions define the sides of cube and facts define the content. Facts are often called as Measures inside a cube. Dimensions often tend to form a hierarchy. E.g. Product may be broken into categories and categories in turn to individual items. Category and Items are often referred as Levels and their constituents as Members with their overall structure called as Hierarchy. Measures are rolled up as per dimensional hierarchy. These rolled up measures are called Aggregates. Now this may seem like an overwhelming vocabulary to deal with but don’t worry it will sink in as you start working with Cubes and others. Let’s see few other terms that we would run into while talking about data warehouses. ODS or an Operational Data Store is a frequently misused term. There would be few users in your organization that want to report on most current data and can’t afford to miss a single transaction for their report. Then there is another set of users that typically don’t care how current the data is. Mostly senior level executives who are interesting in trending, mining, forecasting, strategizing, etc. don’t care for that one specific transaction. This is where an ODS can come in handy. ODS can use the same star schema and the OLAP cubes we saw earlier. The only difference is that the data inside an ODS would be short lived, i.e. for few months and ODS would sync with OLTP system every few minutes. Data warehouse can periodically sync with ODS either daily or weekly depending on business drivers. Data marts are another frequently talked about topic in data warehousing. They are subject-specific data warehouse. Data warehouses that try to span over an enterprise are normally too big to scope, build, manage, track, etc. Hence they are often scaled down to something called Data mart that supports a specific segment of business like sales, marketing, or support. Data marts too, are often designed using star schema model discussed earlier. Industry is divided when it comes to use of data marts. Some experts prefer having data marts along with a central data warehouse. Data warehouse here acts as information staging and distribution hub with spokes being data marts connected via data feeds serving summarized data. Others eliminate the need for a centralized data warehouse citing that most users want to report on detailed data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• ISO Files to USB &ndash; The Cheap and Easy Way

  - by RonGarlit

  (DISCLAIMER: Yes there are lots of more elegant ISO software beside the free Microsoft one I’m about to show. But free is free and it has been tested and works for me for making advance bootable USB drives. That is another story. Look up Windows 8 Developer Preview for that one on BING.) For those of use that work with new technology all the time we accumulate a lot of ISO files and have to burn them to CD/DVD’s quite often. But we now have machines without burner in the corporate environment. We have personally Netbooks and light wait highly mobile laptops that do not have DVD burner. USB ports are all the rage and now we have USB 3.0 which is way faster than the 2.0 we are used to. Just looking at the technology, space saving and the cost issues alone is a reason to buy these answer to the DVD’s. So what is special about USB 2.0 and USB 3.0? USB 2 has a maximum speed of 480 Mbps... (That is Megabits per SECOND!!) Now look at the storage that we have with USB thumb drives that are now up to 64 GB in size, cell phone and PDAs that have a lots of internal storage built in well above the 16 Gig range. At the MAX USB 2.0 speed of 480 Mbps a full transfer of data in between devices can take a long time. Time is money right. Every back up a iPhone? Don’t get me started. So at least the engineers have been planning ahead with USB 3.0 which offers a maximum transfer speed of 4.8 Gbps... (That is Giga bits per SECOND!!) That speed is almost 10 times faster than USB 2.0 …. We don’t need to do the math on that one do we? But for now I'm thrilled with USB 2.0 and the fact I can get these little 4 Gig USB drives for $4.00 each at Staples on sale. Well that is a no brainer don’t you think. But what can you do with them to replace that DVD. Simply and cheaply put………. THIS! First let’s get an ISO file like the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate DVD ISO from MSDN to demonstrate with. I develop on several computers so this is a good choice for me. So we downloaded the ISO file and put it in a folder somewhere like this. Next we go download to the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool site and read about the tool. http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool And click this like to get the tool and install it. Once it is installed you go to the Start, Programs menu, Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool folder. And then click the tool to open it up. As you will see it is a sweet, simple tool that was originally designed to put the ISO for Windows 7 which is designed to be bootable on a USB or DVD for us geeks to play with. It is now being used for the Windows 8 Developer Preview by many developers for that for the same purpose it was built for in the past. But for now we will use it to put a NON Bootable ISO on a USB. Hey it does the job and I’m reusing a left over program. Why buy the fancy one or a free trial and clutter up my machine. We will click the BROWSE button and navigate to where we put our ISO file we want to put on the USB drive. Obviously we are going to click NEXT and continue to select a USB Device (you can guess what the DVD button is for). Next we select the USB that we have plugged into one of our laptops USB ports. Then we click the BEGIN COPYING button and the first thing the program does is format our USB drive. Then it starts copying out files out of the ISO and constructing the USB as if it was a DVD. So now that the files are copying to the drive I’m going to warn you. We will error out here. This program was design for bootable ISO’s of which this one is NOT. No problem because what fails it the writing of the bootable data to the drive that isn’t there. No biggie…. Forget the STARTOVER button is even there and click the dialog’s CLOSE button and exit the program. Now go to Windows Explorer and navigate to the USB Device. You can now access everything and even add stuff to the drive. But for me I want to keep this drive for one purpose and that is to install VS2010 on various machines. So the only stuff I’ll add to this is a folder of notes on things on visual studio that I might want to put on other machines I’m installing VS2010 on to. So that is it. Have a nice day! The Ron

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• PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of  Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

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• JMaghreb 2012 Trip Report

  - by arungupta

  JMaghreb is the inaugural Java conference organized by Morocco JUG. It is the biggest Java conference in Maghreb (5 countries in North West Africa). Oracle was the exclusive platinum sponsor with several others. The registrations had to be closed at 1412 for the free conference and several folks were already on the waiting list. Rabat with 531 registrations and Casablanca with 426 were the top cities. Some statistics ... 850+ attendees over 2 days, 500+ every day 30 sessions were delivered by 18 speakers from 10 different countries 10 sessions in French and 20 in English 6 of the speakers spoke at JavaOne 2012 8 will be at Devoxx Attendees from 5 different countries and 57 cities in Morocco 40.9% qualified them as professional and rest as students Topics ranged from HTML5, Java EE 7, ADF, JavaFX, MySQL, JCP, Vaadin, Android, Community, JCP Java EE 6 hands-on lab was sold out within 7 minutes and JavaFX in 12 minutes I gave the keynote along with Simon Ritter which was basically a recap of the Strategy and Technical keynotes presented at JavaOne 2012. An informal survey during the keynote showed the following numbers: 25% using NetBeans, 90% on Eclipse, 3 on JDeveloper, 1 on IntelliJ About 10 subscribers to free online Java magazine. This digital magazine is a comprehensive source of information for everything Java - subscribe for free!! About 10-15% using Java SE 7. Download JDK 7 and get started today! Even JDK 8 builds have been available for a while now. My second talk explained the core concepts of WebSocket and how JSR 356 is providing a standard API to build WebSocket-driven applications in Java EE 7. TOTD #183 explains how you can easily get started with WebSocket in GlassFish 4. The complete slide deck is available: Next day started with a community keynote by Sonya Barry. Some of us live the life of JCP, JSR, EG, EC, RI, etc every day, but not every body is. To address that, Sonya prepared an excellent introductory presentation providing an explanation of these terms and how java.net infrastructure supports Java development. The registration for the lab showed there is a definite demand for these technologies in this part of the world. I delivered the Java EE 6 hands-on lab to a packed room of about 120 attendees. Most of the attendees were able to progress and follow the lab instructions. Some of the attendees did not have a laptop but were taking extensive notes on paper notepads. Several attendees were already using Java EE 6 in their projects and typically they are the ones asking deep dive questions. Also gave out three copies of my recently released Java EE 6 Pocket Guide and new GlassFish t-shirts. Definitely feels happy to coach ~120 more Java developers learn standards-based enterprise Java programming. I also participated in a JCP BoF along with Werner, Sonya, and Badr. Adotp-a-JSR, java.net infrastructure, how to file a JSR, what is an RI, and other similar topics were discussed in a candid manner. You can follow @JMaghrebConf or check out their facebook page. java.net published a timely conversation with Badr El Houari - the fearless leader of the Morocco JUG team. Did you know that Morocco JUG stood for JCP EC elections (ADD LINK) ? Even though they did not get elected but did fairly well. Now some sample tweets from #JMaghreb ... #JMaghreb is over. Impressive for a first edition! Thanks @badrelhouari and all the @MoroccoJUG team ! Since you @speakjava : System.out.println("Thank you so much dear Tech Evangelist ! The JavaFX was pretty amazing !!! "); #JMaghreb @YounesVendetta @arungupta @JMaghrebConf Right ! hope he will be back to morocco again and again .. :) @Alji_ @arungupta @JMaghrebConf That dude is a genius ;) Put it on your wall :p @arungupta rocking Java EE 6 at @JMaghrebConf #Java #JavaEE #JMaghreb http://t.co/isl0Iq5p @sonyabarry you are an awesome speaker ;-) #JMaghreb rich more than 550 attendees in day one. Expecting more tomorrow! ongratulations @badrelhouari the organisation was great! The talks were pretty interesting, and the turnout was surprising at #JMaghreb! #JMaghreb is truly awesome... The speakers are unbelievable ! #JavaFX... Just amazing #JMaghreb Charmed by the talk about #javaFX ( nodes architecture, MVC, Lazy loading, binding... ) gotta start using it intead of SWT. #JMaghreb JavaFX is killing JFreeChart. It supports Charts a lot of kind of them ... #JMaghreb The british man is back #JMaghreb I do like him!! #JMaghreb @arungupta rocking @JMaghrebConf. pic.twitter.com/CNohA3PE @arungupta Great talk about the future of Java EE (JEE 7 & JEE 8) Thank you. #JMaghreb JEE7 more mooore power , leeess less code !! #JMaghreb They are simplifying the existing API for Java Message Service 2.0 #JMaghreb good to know , the more the code is simplified the better ! The Glassdoor guy #arungupta is doing it RIGHT ! #JMaghreb Great presentation of The Future of the Java Platform: Java EE 7, Java SE 8 & Beyond #jMaghreb @arungupta is a great Guy apparently #JMaghreb On a personal front, the hotel (Soiftel Jardin des Roses) was pretty nice and the location was perfect. There was a 1.8 mile loop dirt trail right next to it so I managed to squeeze some runs before my upcoming marathon. Also enjoyed some great Moroccan cuisine - Couscous, Tajine, mint tea, and moroccan salad. Visit to Kasbah of the Udayas, Hassan II (one of the tallest mosque in the world), and eating in a restaurant in a kasbah are some of the exciting local experiences. Now some pictures from the event (and around the city) ... And the complete album: Many thanks to Badr, Faisal, and rest of the team for organizing a great conference. They are already thinking about how to improve the content, logisitics, and flow for the next year. I'm certainly looking forward to JMaghreb 2.0 :-)

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 08, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 08, 2010New ProjectsBackUpAnyWhere: BackUpAnyWhereCustomFormbyEndUser: 在项目开发中，经常遇到不同的用户对同一报表有不同要求的情况，有时甚至用户需要从头生成一个报表，在以前可能使用第三方的开发工具来实现。在SQL Server2005中，通过使用Reporting Services可以使最终用户不通过编码，只要了解数据结构就能自行编辑报表。本例使用Adventur...DbExecutor - linq based database executor: IEnumerable based database reader. (linq like primitive sql executor)DeepZoomRenderingPack: A collection of libraries and plug-ins architecture that turns various files (like PDF, PS, etc.) into a "Visual" representation that the DeepZoom ...DotNetNuke Russian Language packs: DNNRussianLP - DotNetNuke Russian Language pack. F# Refactor: Deisgned to bring Code Refactoring capabilities to the F# Language in Visual Studio 2010. Invocando WebService e Site HTTP dinamicamente com HTTPWebRequest C#: Invocando Site HTTP e WebService dinamicamente com HTTPWebRequest Passando o SoapAction e Envelope XML Escrito em C# www.biztalkbrasil.c...Jitbit WYSWYG BBCode Editor: "Jitbit WYSIWYG-BBCode" is a browser-based JavaScript-powered WYSIWYG BBCode editorMRDS Services for Phidgets: MRDS (Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio) Services for Phidgets provides additional services for Phidgets sensors and controllers that are not inc...MSBuild Addin: This tool is a simple addin for VisualStudio 2008 used in association with Microsoft MSBuild. It allows you to run MSBuild directly inside Visual S...NISHIL-BizTalk Custom Eventlog Functiod: While testing our maps at times when it fails we cant trace it because we don’t know what the output of the functiods are. Normally in a single ma...Northest GNSG: Supinfo B3C Paris Northest University project. Galego, Neveu, Simon, Geissmann.Oily: Composite application project for oil parameters. It's developed in C#Outlook.Utility: The MSDN article Outlook Customization for Integrating with Enterprise Applications at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa479345 has quite a...Particle Plot Pivot: Scan select particle physics experiment web sites for plots and generate a Pivot display for easy browsing.project tca: project tca - translating chat application. Satisfyr: A new way of performing assertions on tests so that they remain agnostic to the underlying test framework, and leverage .NET built-in lambda syntax.sejce2008: jce se course wiki and projects linksSGB Controls: SGB Controls is a set of standard .net controls that include a number of enhancements to make life easier for the developer. These controls incl...Syringe: Syringe is a lightweight service container and dependency injection library designed for use with ASP.NET MVC2. Supported features: Dependency inj...topicbox: topicboxUr-Index: Ur-Index makes it a lot easier to create onomastic indexes for books in pdf format.VietGeeks ZohoDocApis: Implement .NET Zoho Document Apis library to help developer can intergrate Zoho Docs easy with their websitesWebometrics Dashboard: Webometrics Dashboardwebpress: It is a WebBased CMS and Blog platform.WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar: WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar makes it easy for WPF developers to use pen input in TabletPC or UMPC applications. The WPF InkCanvas control has drawing, e...WS-TMS: WS GISG HTT TMSNew ReleasesBatterySaver: Version 1.0: Fixed battery increase/decrease events not firing Fixed memory corruption error Added working set trimming (used very sparingly) Fixed poorly rende...Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.65: Added in Transactions, Subscription Re-activation, and finally XML documentation (which has been missing in the previous releases).DbExecutor - linq based database executor: DbExecutor ver.1.0.0.1: renameDotNetNuke Russian Language packs: Russian Language Pack for DotNetNuke 04.09.02: Russian Language Pack for DotNetNuke 04.09.02Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6.3: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.6.3), with general improvements. It has an installer that will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My ...Invocando WebService e Site HTTP dinamicamente com HTTPWebRequest C#: Código projeto CallSiteHTTP: Código escrito em C#.NET 2.0 - VS2005 Contem: Solution completa(código e executável) XML de configuração - Config.xml ...Jitbit WYSWYG BBCode Editor: Main package: Contains the JS-file, CSS-file and a sample.Live Writer Picasa Plugin: Live Writer Picasa Plugin 1.1.0: Changelog Communication with Picasa Web Albums is done directly via HTTP now (v1.0.0 used Google's GData .NET Libraries) The plugin can search fo...MRDS Services for Phidgets: Phidgets for RDS 2008 R3: First Beta Release This ZIP file contains a web page called Readme_CodePlex.html that explains how to install the RDS Phidgets services for RDS 200...MSBuild Addin: MsBuildAddin-v1.0.0: Initial versionMSBuild Addin: MsBuildAddin-v1.0.0-src.zip: Initial versionOutlook.Utility: Outlook.Utility v1: I have used most of the code in previous projects and seems to be quite stable. Of course the point of open sourcing this is so this project is use...Scrum Dashboard: Scrum Dashboard v3 Alpha 1: Scrum Dashboard v3 is targeting .NET 4, TFS 2010 and the brand new Scrum for Team System v3 process templates. Most of the code has been rewritten ...SharePoint Labs: SPLab4004A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4004A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the 4th best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab La...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5012A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5012A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to provision a new welcome page (how to change and rename the default.aspx page) on ...Shweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with Pex: Shweet Source Code: Although the latest version pex and moles used with this project is not available, we thought it would be useful to provide a download to the source.Syringe: Syringe 1.0: Features Dependency injection on properties of services in container Dependency injection on constructors of services in container ASP.Net Mvc ...Text to HTML: 0.4.1.0: Cambios de la versiónOptimización del código de exportación reduciendo el código. Cambio en el icono de exportación. Añadido menú Seleccionar t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 23: Build 23 Fix: Executing "Blame" through the Solution Explorer on a file opens TortoiseMerge rather than TortoiseBlame. Build 22 (beta) New: Visua...WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar: WPF Ink Canvas Toolbar 1.0: First release - included custom colour selectionMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with Pexpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryAcadsysAutoPocoIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNcqrs Framework - The CQRS framework for .NETFarseer Physics Engine

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• A Look Back at 2010 Predictions

  - by David Dorf

  Now is the time of year people make their predictions for next year, but before I start thinking about 2011 it's worth a look back to see how my predictions for 2010 fared. 1. Borders and Blockbuster bite the dust. I would have never predicted a strong brand such as Circuit City could die, but now I know it can happen to anyone. Borders has lost the battle with Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster has lost to Netflix. And just to be sure, Amazon put an extra nail in each coffin. Borders received additional investment from Bennett LeBow to keep it afloat, but the stock is down around $1.25 with no profits in sight. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy back in September. 2. Every retailer finally has a page on Facebook... but very few figure out how to keep fans engaged. Retailer postings become noise, and fans start to unsubscribe. Twitter goes in the same direction. A few standout retailers will figure out how to use social media, and the rest will remain dumbfounded. Most retailers are on the Facebook bandwagon, and their fan bases seem to be increasing thanks to promotions like The Gap's logo redesign, Lowes' black Friday sneak peak, and Walmart's Crowd Savers. There are several examples of f-commerce advancements, including some interesting integrations from Amazon.3. Smartphones consolidate and grow. More and more people will step-up to smartphones, most of which will choose iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones. Other smartphones will vanish, and networks will start to strain. But retailers will finally embrace mobile as the next big channel. Retail marketing departments will build mobile apps without the help of their IT department, and eventually they will get into a bind. Android has been on a tear lately stealing market share from Blackberry. Palm and Microsoft are trending down, and Apple is holding steady. Smartphone sales are up 15% and expected to continue. Retailers understand the importance of mobile, and some innovative applications have been produced this year. 4. Google helps the little guys. Google will push its Favorite Places project to help give exposure to small retailers and restaurants. They will enable small retailers to act like big ones by providing storefronts, detailed product information, and coupons for consumers. Google will find a way to bring augmented reality to the masses. I can't say I've seen much new from Google regarding Favorite Places, but they've continued to push local product search. From the PC or smartphone, consumers can search for products and see which nearby stores have it stock. Oracle Retail even productized an integration to Google to support this effort. I suppose if Google ever buys Groupon then it will bring them even closer to local shopping. Google talked about augmented humanity, but that has nothing to do with augmented reality. 5. Steve Jobs Is Bugs Bunny and Steve Ballmer is Elmer Fudd. (OK, I stole that headline from an InformationWeek article. I couldn't resist.) Both Apple and Microsoft will continue to open new stores, but only Apple will show real growth. POSReady 2009 (formerly WEPOS) will continue to share the POS market with Linux. The iPhone and iPod will continue to capture market share, but there won't be an Apple tablet. There won't be an Apple tablet? What was I thinking? While Apple has well over 300 stores, there are less than 10 Microsoft stores. Initial impressions show that even though Microsoft is locating its store near Apple Stores, they are not converting customers, with shoppers citing a lack of assortment and high prices. 6. Consolidation of e-commerce software providers. Software vendors in the areas of search, reviews, online call-centers, payments, and e-commerce will consolidate, partly driven by the success of m-commerce and SaaS. Amazon will find someone else to buy, and eBay will continue to lose momentum. Consolidation of e-commerce providers continued with IBM acquiring Sterling Commerce and CoreMetrics, and Oracle recently announcing the acquisition of ATG. Amazon grabbed Zappos, Woot, and Diapers.com to continue its dominance of online selling. While eBay's Marketplace growth may have slowed, its PayPal division is doing quite well, fueled in part by demand for mobile payments. 7. Book publishers mirror music labels. Just as the iPod brought digital downloads to the masses, the Kindle and Nook will power the e-book revolution. Books will continue to use DRM for a few more years before following the path of music. Publishers will try to preserve the margins of hardbacks by associating e-book releases with paperbacks. Amazon has done a good job providing e-reader clients for smartphones, PCs, and tablets. Competition from Barnes & Noble has forced Amazon to support book loaning, and both companies are making it easier for people to publish ebooks (with or without DRM). Progress is slow but steady. 8. NFC makes inroads, RFID treads water. Near Field Communications start to appear in mobile phones, and retailers beta test its use for payments and loyalty programs. RFID tag costs come down a bit, but not enough to spur accelerated adoption.Nokia announced plans to offer NFC-enabled phones in 2011, and rumors are swirling about NFC in the upcoming iPhone.  I think NFC is heading in the right direction, and I've heard more interest from retailers about specialized uses for RFID.9. Digital Signage goes the way of augmented reality. People use their camera phones to leave geo-tagged notes all over cities, rating stores and restaurants, and "painting" graffiti. But people get tired of holding their phones in front of their faces, so AR glasses are offered in much the same way bluetooth headsets emerged. Retailers experiement with in-store advertising using AR. Several retailers like Pizza Hut, Benetton, and Target have experimented with AR but its still somewhat of a gimmick used by marketing.  I think this prediction is a year or two too early. 10. JDA flip-flops again. After announcing their embracing of the .Net architecture, then switching to J2EE after the Manugistics acquisition, JDA will finally decide to standardize on Apple's Objective C. Everything will be ported to the iPhone and be available on the AppStore. After all, there's not much left to try. This was, of course, a joke but the sentiment is still valid.  JDA seems more supply-chain focused than retail focused, which is a an outcrop if their i2 acquisition.  Of the 10 predictions, I'm going to say I got 6 somewhat correct.  (Don't you just love grading your own paper?)  Soon I'll post my predictions for 2011 so be on the lookout.  Until then here's one more prediction:  Va Tech beats Stanford in the Orange Bowl -- count on it!

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• September Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) Regional Events:

  - by Mandy Ho

  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} September 5, 2012 – Denver, CO Oracle 11g Database Upgrade Seminar Join Roy Swonger, Senior Director of software development at Oracle to learn about upgrading to Oracle Database 11g. Topics include: All the required preparatory steps Database upgrade strategies Post-upgrade performance analysis Helpful tips and common pitfalls to watch out for http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=152242&src=7598177&src=7598177&Act=4 September 6, 2012 – Salt Lake City, UT Fall Symposium 2012 Plan to join us for our annual fall event on Sept 6. They day will be filled with learning and networking with tracks focused on Applications, APEX, BI, Development and DBA Topics. This event is free for UTOUG members to attend, but please register. http://www.utoug.org/apex/f?p=972:2:6686308836668467::::P2_EVENT_ID:121 September 6, 2012 – Portland, OR Oracle’s Hands on Workshop Series focused on providing Defense-in-Depth Solutions to secure data at the source, reduce risk and simplify compliance The Oracle Database Security Workshop is a one-day hands-on session for IT Managers, IT Security Architects and Oracle DBAs who are looking for solutions to address their information protection, privacy, and accountability challenges within their Oracle database environment. Most security programs offered today fail toadequately address database security. Customers continue to be challenged tosecure information against loss and protect the integrity of sensitiveinformation like critical financial data, personally identifiable information(PII) and credit card data for PCI compliance. http://nwoug.org/content.aspx?page_id=87&club_id=165905&item_id=241082 September 11, 2012 – Montreal, QC APEXposed! For APEX aficionados – join ODTUG in Montreal, September 11-12 for APEXposed! Topics will include Dynamic Actions, Plug-ins, Tuning, and Building Mobile Apps. The cost is $399 US and early registration ends August 15th. For more information: http://www.odtugapextraining.com  September 11, 2012 – Philadelphia, PA Big Data & What are we still doing wrong with Tom Kyte Tom Kyte is a Senior Technical Architect in Oracle's Server Technology Division. Tom is the Tom behind the AskTom column in Oracle Magazine and is also the author of Expert Oracle Database Architecture (Apress, 2005/2009) among other books Abstract: Big Data The term "big data" draws a lot of attention, but behind the hype there's a simple story. For decades, companies have been making business decisions based on transactional data stored in relational databases. However, beyond that critical data is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. This presentation will take a look at what Big Data is and means - and Oracle's strategy for handling it Abstract: What are we still doing wrong? I've given many best practices presentations in the last 10 years. I've given many worst practices presentations in the last 10 years. I've seen some things change over the last ten years and many other things stay exactly the same. In this talk - we'll be taking a look at the good and the bad - what we do right and what we continue to do wrong over and over again. We'll look at why "Why" is probably the right initial answer to most any question. We'll look at how we get to "Know what we Know", and why that can be both a help and a hindrance. We'll peek at "Best Practices" and tie them into what I term "Worst Practices". In short, a talk on the good and the bad. 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/f?p=207:27:3669516430980563::NO September 12, 2012- New York, NY NYOUG Fall General Meeting “Trends in Database Administration and Why the Future of Database Administration is the Vdba” http://www.nyoug.org/upcoming_events.htm#General_Meeting1 September 21, 2012 – Cleveland, OH Oracle Database 11g for Developers: What You need to know or Oracle Database 11g New Features for Developers Attendees are introduced to the new and improved features of Oracle 11g (both Oracle 11g R1 and Oracle 11g R2) that directly impact application development. Special emphasis is placed on features that reduce development time, make development simpler, improve performance, or speed deployment. Specific topics include: New SQL functions, virtual columns, result caching, XML improvements, pivot statements, JDBC improvements, and PL/SQL enhancements such as compound triggers. http://www.neooug.org/ September 24, 2012 – Ottawa, ON Introduction to Oracle Spatial The free Oracle Locator functionality, and the Oracle Spatial option which dramatically extends Locator, are very useful, but poorly understood capabilities of the database. In the afternoon we will extend into additional areas selected from: storage and performance; answering business problems with spatial queries; using Oracle Maps in OBIEE; an overview and capabilities of Oracle Topology; under the covers with GeoCoding. 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} http://www.oug-ottawa.org/pls/htmldb/f?p=327:27:4209274028390246::NO

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• Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

  Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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• AdvancedFormatProvider: Making string.format do more

  - by plblum

  When I have an integer that I want to format within the String.Format() and ToString(format) methods, I’m always forgetting the format symbol to use with it. That’s probably because its not very intuitive. Use {0:N0} if you want it with group (thousands) separators. text = String.Format("{0:N0}", 1000); // returns "1,000"   int value1 = 1000; text = value1.ToString("N0"); Use {0:D} or {0:G} if you want it without group separators. text = String.Format("{0:D}", 1000); // returns "1000"   int value2 = 1000; text2 = value2.ToString("D"); The {0:D} is especially confusing because Microsoft gives the token the name “Decimal”. I thought it reasonable to have a new format symbol for String.Format, "I" for integer, and the ability to tell it whether it shows the group separators. Along the same lines, why not expand the format symbols for currency ({0:C}) and percent ({0:P}) to let you omit the currency or percent symbol, omit the group separator, and even to drop the decimal part when the value is equal to the whole number? My solution is an open source project called AdvancedFormatProvider, a group of classes that provide the new format symbols, continue to support the rest of the native symbols and makes it easy to plug in additional format symbols. Please visit https://github.com/plblum/AdvancedFormatProvider to learn about it in detail and explore how its implemented. The rest of this post will explore some of the concepts it takes to expand String.Format() and ToString(format). AdvancedFormatProvider benefits: Supports {0:I} token for integers. It offers the {0:I-,} option to omit the group separator. Supports {0:C} token with several options. {0:C-$} omits the currency symbol. {0:C-,} omits group separators, and {0:C-0} hides the decimal part when the value would show “.00”. For example, 1000.0 becomes “$1000” while 1000.12 becomes “$1000.12”. Supports {0:P} token with several options. {0:P-%} omits the percent symbol. {0:P-,} omits group separators, and {0:P-0} hides the decimal part when the value would show “.00”. For example, 1 becomes “100 %” while 1.1223 becomes “112.23 %”. Provides a plug in framework that lets you create new formatters to handle specific format symbols. You register them globally so you can just pass the AdvancedFormatProvider object into String.Format and ToString(format) without having to figure out which plug ins to add. text = String.Format(AdvancedFormatProvider.Current, "{0:I}", 1000); // returns "1,000" text2 = String.Format(AdvancedFormatProvider.Current, "{0:I-,}", 1000); // returns "1000" text3 = String.Format(AdvancedFormatProvider.Current, "{0:C-$-,}", 1000.0); // returns "1000.00" The IFormatProvider parameter Microsoft has made String.Format() and ToString(format) format expandable. They each take an additional parameter that takes an object that implements System.IFormatProvider. This interface has a single member, the GetFormat() method, which returns an object that knows how to convert the format symbol and value into the desired string. There are already a number of web-based resources to teach you about IFormatProvider and the companion interface ICustomFormatter. I’ll defer to them if you want to dig more into the topic. The only thing I want to point out is what I think are implementation considerations. Why GetFormat() always tests for ICustomFormatter When you see examples of implementing IFormatProviders, the GetFormat() method always tests the parameter against the ICustomFormatter type. Why is that? public object GetFormat(Type formatType) { if (formatType == typeof(ICustomFormatter)) return this; else return null; } The value of formatType is already predetermined by the .net framework. String.Format() uses the StringBuilder.AppendFormat() method to parse the string, extracting the tokens and calling GetFormat() with the ICustomFormatter type. (The .net framework also calls GetFormat() with the types of System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo and System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo but these are exclusive to how the System.Globalization.CultureInfo class handles its implementation of IFormatProvider.) Your code replaces instead of expands I would have expected the caller to pass in the format string to GetFormat() to allow your code to determine if it handles the request. My vision would be to return null when the format string is not supported. The caller would iterate through IFormatProviders until it finds one that handles the format string. Unfortunatley that is not the case. The reason you write GetFormat() as above is because the caller is expecting an object that handles all formatting cases. You are effectively supposed to write enough code in your formatter to handle your new cases and call .net functions (like String.Format() and ToString(format)) to handle the original cases. Its not hard to support the native functions from within your ICustomFormatter.Format function. Just test the format string to see if it applies to you. If not, call String.Format() with a token using the format passed in. public string Format(string format, object arg, IFormatProvider formatProvider) { if (format.StartsWith("I")) { // handle "I" formatter } else return String.Format(formatProvider, "{0:" + format + "}", arg); } Formatters are only used by explicit request Each time you write a custom formatter (implementer of ICustomFormatter), it is not used unless you explicitly passed an IFormatProvider object that supports your formatter into String.Format() or ToString(). This has several disadvantages: Suppose you have several ICustomFormatters. In order to have all available to String.Format() and ToString(format), you have to merge their code and create an IFormatProvider to return an instance of your new class. You have to remember to utilize the IFormatProvider parameter. Its easy to overlook, especially when you have existing code that calls String.Format() without using it. Some APIs may call String.Format() themselves. If those APIs do not offer an IFormatProvider parameter, your ICustomFormatter will not be available to them. The AdvancedFormatProvider solves the first two of these problems by providing a plug-in architecture.

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• Juniper Strategy, LLC is hiring SharePoint Developers&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Isn’t everybody these days? It seems as though there are definitely more jobs than qualified devs these days, but yes, we are looking for a few good devs to help round out our burgeoning SharePoint team. Juniper Strategy is located in the DC area, however we will consider remote devs for the right fit. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a bright company that truly “gets it” when it comes to SharePoint, Project Management, and Information Assurance. We need like-minded people who “get it”, enjoy it, and who are looking for more than just a job. We have government and commercial opportunities as well as our own internal product that has a bright future of its own. Our immediate needs are for SharePoint .NET developers, but feel free to submit your resume for us to keep on file as it looks as though we’ll need several people in the coming months. Please email us your resume and salary requirements to [email protected] Below are our official job postings. Thanks for stopping by, we look forward to  hearing from you. Senior SharePoint .NET Developer Senior developer will focus on design and coding of custom, end-to-end business process solutions within the SharePoint framework. Senior developer with the ability to serve as a senior developer/mentor and manage day-to-day development tasks. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. For selected development path, prepare technical specification and build the solution. Assist project manager with defining development task schedule and level-of-effort. Lead technical solution deployment. Job Requirements Minimum of 7 years experience in agile development, with at least 3 years of SharePoint-related development experience (SPS, SharePoint 2007/2010, WSS2-4). Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Experience with using multiple data sources/repositories for database CRUD activities, including relational databases, SAP, Oracle e-Business. Experience with designing and deploying performance-based solutions in SharePoint for business processes that involve a very large number of records. Experience designing dynamic dashboards and mashups with data from multiple sources (internal to SharePoint as well as from external sources). Experience designing custom forms to facilitate user data entry, both with and without leveraging Forms Services. Experience building custom web part solutions. Experience with designing custom solutions for processing underlying business logic requirements including, but not limited to, SQL stored procedures, C#/ASP.Net workflows/event handlers (including timer jobs) to support multi-tiered decision trees and associated computations. Ability to create complex solution packages for deployment (e.g., feature-stapled site definitions). Must have impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal. Seeking a "tinkerer"; proactive with a thirst for knowledge (and a sense of humor). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. Applicants must pass a skills assessment test. MCP/MCTS or comparable certification preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable SharePoint Project Lead Define project task schedule, work breakdown structure and level-of-effort. Serve as principal liaison to the customer to manage deliverables and expectations. Day-to-day project and team management, including preparation and maintenance of project plans, budgets, and status reports. Prepare technical briefings and presentation decks, provide briefs to C-level stakeholders. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. The SharePoint Project Lead will be working with SharePoint architects and system owners to perform requirements/gap analysis and develop the underlying functional specifications. Once we have functional specifications as close to "final" as possible, the Project Lead will be responsible for preparation of the associated technical specification/development blueprint, along with assistance in preparing IV&V/test plan materials with support from other team members. This person will also be responsible for day-to-day management of "developers", but is also expected to engage in development directly as needed.  Job Requirements Minimum 8 years of technology project management across the software development life-cycle, with a minimum of 3 years of project management relating specifically to SharePoint (SPS 2003, SharePoint2007/2010) and/or Project Server. Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Ability to interact and collaborate effectively with team members and stakeholders of different skill sets, personalities and needs. General "development" skill set required is a fundamental understanding of MOSS 2007 Enterprise, SP1/SP2, from the top-level of skinning to the core of the SharePoint object model. Impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal, and a sense of humor are required. The projects will require being at a client site at least 50% of the time in Washington DC (NW DC) and Maryland (near Suitland). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. PMP certification, PgMP preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable

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• Integrate Microsoft Translator into your ASP.Net application

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to explain how easily you can integrate the Microsoft translator API to your ASP.Net application. Why we need a translation API? Once you published a website, you are opening a channel to the global audience. So making the web content available only in one language doesn’t cover all your audience. Especially when you are offering products/services it is important to provide contents in multiple languages. Users will be more comfortable when they see the content in their native language. How to achieve this, hiring translators and translate the content to all your user’s languages will cost you lot of money, and it is not a one time job, you need to translate the contents on the go. What is the alternative, we need to look for machine translation. Thankfully there are some translator engines available that gives you API level access, so that automatically you can translate the content and display to the user. Microsoft Translator API is an excellent set of web service APIs that allows developers to use the machine translation technology in their own applications. The Microsoft Translator API is offered through Windows Azure market place. In order to access the data services published in Windows Azure market place, you need to have an account. The registration process is simple, and it is common for all the services offered through the market place. Last year I had written an article about Bing Search API, where I covered the registration process. You can refer the article here. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2012/07/04/integrate-bing-search-api-to-asp-net-application.aspx Once you registered with Windows market place, you will get your APP ID. Now you can visit the Microsoft Translator page and click on the sign up button. http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/microsofttranslator As you can see, there are several options available for you to subscribe. There is a free version available, great. Click on the sign up button under the package that suits you. Clicking on the sign up button will bring the sign up form, where you need to agree on the terms and conditions and go ahead. You need to have a windows live account in order to sign up for any service available in Windows Azure market place. Once you signed up successfully, you will receive the thank you page. You can download the C# class library from here so that the integration can be made without writing much code. The C# file name is TranslatorContainer.cs. At any point of time, you can visit https://datamarket.azure.com/account/datasets to see the applications you are subscribed to. Click on the Use link next to each service will give you the details of the application. You need to not the primary account key and URL of the service to use in your application. Now let us start our ASP.Net project. I have created an empty ASP.Net web application using Visual Studio 2010 and named it Translator Sample, any name could work. By default, the web application in solution explorer looks as follows. Now right click the project and select Add -> Existing Item and then browse to the TranslatorContainer.cs. Now let us create a page where user enter some data and perform the translation. I have added a new web form to the project with name Translate.aspx. I have placed one textbox control for user to type the text to translate, the dropdown list to select the target language, a label to display the translated text and a button to perform the translation. For the dropdown list I have selected some languages supported by Microsoft translator. You can get all the supported languages with their codes from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh456380.aspx The form looks as below in the design surface of Visual Studio. All the class libraries in the windows market place requires reference to System.Data.Services.Client, let us add the reference. You can find the documentation of how to use the downloaded class library from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg312154.aspx Let us evaluate the translatorContainer.cs file. You can refer the code and it is self-explanatory. Note the namespace name used (Microsoft), you need to add the namespace reference to your page. I have added the following event for the translate button. The code is self-explanatory. You are creating an object of TranslatorContainer class by passing the translation service URL. Now you need to set credentials for your Translator container object, which will be your account key. The TranslatorContainer support a method that accept a text input, source language and destination language and returns DataServiceQuery<Translation>. Let us see this working, I just ran the application and entered Good Morning in the Textbox. Selected target language and see the output as follows. It is easy to build great translator applications using Microsoft translator API, and there is a reasonable amount of translation you can perform in your application for free. For enterprises, you can subscribe to the appropriate package and make your application multi-lingual.

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• The Proper Use of the VM Role in Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in 2010 we announced an addition to the Computational Roles in Windows Azure, called the VM Role. This new feature allows a great deal of control over the applications you write, but some have confused it with our full infrastructure offering in Windows Hyper-V. There is a proper architecture pattern for both of them. Virtualization Virtualization is the process of taking all of the hardware of a physical computer and replicating it in software alone. This means that a single computer can “host” or run several “virtual” computers. These virtual computers can run anywhere - including at a vendor’s location. Some companies refer to this as Cloud Computing since the hardware is operated and maintained elsewhere. IaaS The more detailed definition of this type of computing is called Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) since it removes the need for you to maintain hardware at your organization. The operating system, drivers, and all the other software required to run an application are still under your control and your responsibility to license, patch, and scale. Microsoft has an offering in this space called Hyper-V, that runs on the Windows operating system. Combined with a hardware hosting vendor and the System Center software to create and deploy Virtual Machines (a process referred to as provisioning), you can create a Cloud environment with full control over all aspects of the machine, including multiple operating systems if you like. Hosting machines and provisioning them at your own buildings is sometimes called a Private Cloud, and hosting them somewhere else is often called a Public Cloud. State-ful and Stateless Programming This paradigm does not create a new, scalable way of computing. It simply moves the hardware away. The reason is that when you limit the Cloud efforts to a Virtual Machine, you are in effect limiting the computing resources to what that single system can provide. This is because much of the software developed in this environment maintains “state” - and that requires a little explanation. “State-ful programming” means that all parts of the computing environment stay connected to each other throughout a compute cycle. The system expects the memory, CPU, storage and network to remain in the same state from the beginning of the process to the end. You can think of this as a telephone conversation - you expect that the other person picks up the phone, listens to you, and talks back all in a single unit of time. In “Stateless” computing the system is designed to allow the different parts of the code to run independently of each other. You can think of this like an e-mail exchange. You compose an e-mail from your system (it has the state when you’re doing that) and then you walk away for a bit to make some coffee. A few minutes later you click the “send” button (the network has the state) and you go to a meeting. The server receives the message and stores it on a mail program’s database (the mail server has the state now) and continues working on other mail. Finally, the other party logs on to their mail client and reads the mail (the other user has the state) and responds to it and so on. These events might be separated by milliseconds or even days, but the system continues to operate. The entire process doesn’t maintain the state, each component does. This is the exact concept behind coding for Windows Azure. The stateless programming model allows amazing rates of scale, since the message (think of the e-mail) can be broken apart by multiple programs and worked on in parallel (like when the e-mail goes to hundreds of users), and only the order of re-assembling the work is important to consider. For the exact same reason, if the system makes copies of those running programs as Windows Azure does, you have built-in redundancy and recovery. It’s just built into the design. The Difference Between Infrastructure Designs and Platform Designs When you simply take a physical server running software and virtualize it either privately or publicly, you haven’t done anything to allow the code to scale or have recovery. That all has to be handled by adding more code and more Virtual Machines that have a slight lag in maintaining the running state of the system. Add more machines and you get more lag, so the scale is limited. This is the primary limitation with IaaS. It’s also not as easy to deploy these VM’s, and more importantly, you’re often charged on a longer basis to remove them. your agility in IaaS is more limited. Windows Azure is a Platform - meaning that you get objects you can code against. The code you write runs on multiple nodes with multiple copies, and it all works because of the magic of Stateless programming. you don’t worry, or even care, about what is running underneath. It could be Windows (and it is in fact a type of Windows Server), Linux, or anything else - but that' isn’t what you want to manage, monitor, maintain or license. You don’t want to deploy an operating system - you want to deploy an application. You want your code to run, and you don’t care how it does that. Another benefit to PaaS is that you can ask for hundreds or thousands of new nodes of computing power - there’s no provisioning, it just happens. And you can stop using them quicker - and the base code for your application does not have to change to make this happen. Windows Azure Roles and Their Use If you need your code to have a user interface, in Visual Studio you add a Web Role to your project, and if the code needs to do work that doesn’t involve a user interface you can add a Worker Role. They are just containers that act a certain way. I’ll provide more detail on those later. Note: That’s a general description, so it’s not entirely accurate, but it’s accurate enough for this discussion. So now we’re back to that VM Role. Because of the name, some have mistakenly thought that you can take a Virtual Machine running, say Linux, and deploy it to Windows Azure using this Role. But you can’t. That’s not what it is designed for at all. If you do need that kind of deployment, you should look into Hyper-V and System Center to create the Private or Public Infrastructure as a Service. What the VM Role is actually designed to do is to allow you to have a great deal of control over the system where your code will run. Let’s take an example. You’ve heard about Windows Azure, and Platform programming. You’re convinced it’s the right way to code. But you have a lot of things you’ve written in another way at your company. Re-writing all of your code to take advantage of Windows Azure will take a long time. Or perhaps you have a certain version of Apache Web Server that you need for your code to work. In both cases, you think you can (or already have) code the the software to be “Stateless”, you just need more control over the place where the code runs. That’s the place where a VM Role makes sense. Recap Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.

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• Best of Breed vs. Suite – Oracle’s SaaS Delivers Both

  - by yaldahhakim

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size: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;} The debate of which is better: “best of breed” business applications vs. an integrated suite is certainly not a new conversation. This has been argued between IT vendors and CIOs for years. It’s also important to clarify that “best of breed” does not necessarily translate into being the richest functionality; rather it’s often about just having the best fit solution to solve a specific business problem or need. So what does cloud have to do with the niche vs. suite debate? Consuming business applications in a cloud or SaaS deployment model can change the best of breed vs. suite discussion - if the cloud is done right. It’s having your cake and eating it too only better: you don’t have to gather all the ingredients or wait to bake your cake, and you can adjust how big of slice you take. Before you eat, it’s worth pausing to recall much of what we learned about IT over the last decade. These basic IT principles still hold true even though the financial model has changed from buying to renting. In other words, what’s under the technology hood still matters. Architecture and development methodologies like building an application based on open standards so it works with other systems - is still important. Data and information silos, complex integrations, and proprietary technologies that lock you in, are still bad. While some may argue that IT no longer matters with cloud, the opposite is actually true. If anything cloud can help return IT back to its rightful place as key strategic asset vs. a liability on the balance sheet. The “I” in CIO was never meant to stand for “integration” yet it’s amazing how much time and money is poured into these types of initiatives for most organizations each year. Rather the “I” needs to stand for “innovation”. This is where Oracle SaaS can uniquely help. Oracle’s application strategy has not really changed over the years. It’s always been about bringing the best and richest functionality across the enterprise to our customers while leveraging a common, standards-based, and enterprise-grade platform. So not jut best fit, but the best capabilities based on the input of thousands of enterprise customers across the globe. Oracle invests billions in R&D every year to add new capabilities to the broadest cloud portfolio in the industry, spanning across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. And where it makes sense, Oracle combines key strategic acquisitions to complement organic functionality. The result is best of breed delivered in a suite. Again this is not something new. The game changer now with cloud is that it impacts HOW Oracle customers adopt the richest, most modern applications across the business – and continue on getting it. Consuming oracle applications in the cloud means you can adopt new capabilities and updates very quickly and easily. There’s no hardware to buy or software to manage. Oracle does it for you. Low upfront costs and an OpEx financial model is the easy part. Oracle Cloud Applications take it a big step further. For organizations that demand having the latest and richest functionality and accelerating the time to value from their IT investment, Oracle Cloud is the right path. It’s about holistically changing the “hows” and the “whys” of the organization by leveraging transformational innovations like social, mobile, and big data in a consistent and more powerful way. Not just about sales force automation or talent management. These technologies should impact all parts of the company and Oracle Cloud is the enterprise-grade delivery vehicle. Oracle SaaS helps break down barriers of adoption and is eases the headache of upgrades, investing in new supporting hardware, or adding internal expertise to manage it all. With Oracle Cloud, customers can get best of breed capabilities in either a full suite model or a la carte. And because it’s entirely built on open standards, it’s built to co-exist with existing IT investments. Updates can be automatic or delayed based on a customer’s requirements. And it’s complete – a full suite of cross pillar functionality. Even better, if you don’t like it, need more or less, just turn the dial up or down. Just like your utility bill, you pay for what you use, and can consume more or less power whenever you need it. Lower cost, lower investment risk, without compromising on functionality, security, or performance. Technology still matters in the cloud. So our cloud customers also like that when they adopt our cloud applications, they also get the best underlying technology, from the middleware and database platform down to infrastructure and Oracle’s engineered systems. Therefore it’s not just the greatest and latest in application functionality, but everything underneath that makes it work is also the latest and greatest. The best of breed technology stack powering best of breed business applications, and all delivered in a subscription based model. The best of both worlds. Yep, that’s the idea.

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• The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

  - by Gene Eun

  The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

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• jQuery Selector Tester and Cheat Sheet

  - by SGWellens

  I've always appreciated these tools: Expresso and XPath Builder. They make designing regular expressions and XPath selectors almost fun! Did I say fun? I meant less painful. Being able to paste/load text and then interactively play with the search criteria is infinitely better than the code/compile/run/test cycle. It's faster and you get a much better feel for how the expressions work. So, I decided to make my own interactive tool to test jQuery selectors:  jQuery Selector Tester.   Here's a sneak peek: Note: There are some existing tools you may like better: http://www.woods.iki.fi/interactive-jquery-tester.html http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/trysel.asp?filename=trysel_basic&jqsel=p.intro,%23choose My tool is different: It is one page. You can save it and run it locally without a Web Server. It shows the results as a list of iterated objects instead of highlighted html. A cheat sheet is on the same page as the tester which is handy. I couldn't upload an .htm or .html file to this site so I hosted it on my personal site here: jQuery Selector Tester. Design Highlights: To make the interactive search work, I added a hidden div to the page: <!--Hidden div holds DOM elements for jQuery to search--><div id="HiddenDiv" style="display: none"></div> When ready to search, the searchable html text is copied into the hidden div…this renders the DOM tree in the hidden div: // get the html to search, insert it to the hidden divvar Html = $("#TextAreaHTML").val();$("#HiddenDiv").html(Html); When doing a search, I modify the search pattern to look only in the HiddenDiv. To do that, I put a space between the patterns.  The space is the Ancestor operator (see the Cheat Sheet): // modify search string to only search in our// hidden div and do the searchvar SearchString = "#HiddenDiv " + SearchPattern;try{    var $FoundItems = $(SearchString);}   Big Fat Stinking Faux Pas: I was about to publish this article when I made a big mistake: I tested the tool with Mozilla FireFox. It blowed up…it blowed up real good. In the past I’ve only had to target IE so this was quite a revelation. When I started to learn JavaScript, I was disgusted to see all the browser dependent code. Who wants to spend their time testing against different browsers and versions of browsers? Adding a bunch of ‘if-else’ code is a tedious and thankless task. I avoided client code as much as I could. Then jQuery came along and all was good. It was browser independent and freed us from the tedium of worrying about version N of the Acme browser. Right? Wrong! I had used outerHTML to display the selected elements. The problem is Mozilla FireFox doesn’t implement outerHTML. I replaced this: // encode the html markupvar OuterHtml = $('<div/>').text(this.outerHTML).html(); With this: // encode the html markupvar Html = $('<div>').append(this).html();var OuterHtml = $('<div/>').text(Html).html(); Another problem was that Mozilla FireFox doesn’t implement srcElement. I replaced this: var Row = e.srcElement.parentNode;  With this: var Row = e.target.parentNode; Another problem was the indexing. The browsers have different ways of indexing. I replaced this: // this cell has the search pattern  var Cell = Row.childNodes[1];   // put the pattern in the search box and search                    $("#TextSearchPattern").val(Cell.innerText);  With this: // get the correct cell and the text in the cell// place the text in the seach box and serachvar Cell = $(Row).find("TD:nth-child(2)");var CellText = Cell.text();$("#TextSearchPattern").val(CellText);   So much for the myth of browser independence. Was I overly optimistic and gullible? I don’t think so. And when I get my millions from the deposed Nigerian prince I sent money to, you’ll see that having faith is not futile. Notes: My goal was to have a single standalone file. I tried to keep the features and CSS to a minimum–adding only enough to make it useful and visually pleasing. When testing, I often thought there was a problem with the jQuery selector. Invariable it was invalid html code. If your results aren't what you expect, don't assume it's the jQuery selector pattern: The html may be invalid. To help in development and testing, I added a double-click handler to the rows in the Cheat Sheet table. If you double-click a row, the search pattern is put in the search box, a search is performed and the page is scrolled so you can see the results. I left the test html and code in the page. If you are using a CDN (non-local) version of the jQuery libraray, the designer in Visual Studio becomes extremely slow.  That's why there are two version of the library in the header and one is commented out. For reference, here is the jQuery documentation on selectors: http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/ Here is a much more comprehensive list of CSS selectors (which jQuery uses): http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html I hope someone finds this useful. Steve WellensCodeProject

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