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• ASP.NET MVC 2 Released

  - by ScottGu

  I’m happy to announce that the final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for VS 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5.  You can download and install it from the following locations: Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download Center The final release of VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 will have ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in – so you won’t need an additional install in order to use ASP.NET MVC 2 with them.  ASP.NET MVC 2 We shipped ASP.NET MVC 1 a little less than a year ago.  Since then, almost 1 million developers have downloaded and used the final release, and its popularity has steadily grown month over month. ASP.NET MVC 2 is the next significant update of ASP.NET MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.NET MVC 1 – so all the knowledge, skills, code, and extensions you already have with ASP.NET MVC continue to work and apply going forward. Like the first release, we are also shipping the source code for ASP.NET MVC 2 under an OSI-compliant open-source license. ASP.NET MVC 2 can be installed side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 1 (meaning you can have some apps built with V1 and others built with V2 on the same machine).  We have instructions on how to update your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 apps to use ASP.NET MVC 2 using VS 2008 here.  Note that VS 2010 has an automated upgrade wizard that can automatically migrate your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 for you. ASP.NET MVC 2 Features ASP.NET MVC 2 adds a bunch of new capabilities and features.  I’ve started a blog series about some of the new features, and will be covering them in more depth in the weeks ahead.  Some of the new features and capabilities include: New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization Support for splitting up large applications into “Areas” Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction Lots of new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements Improved Visual Studio tooling support You can learn more about these features in the “What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2” document on the www.asp.net/mvc web-site.  We are going to be posting a lot of new tutorials and videos shortly on www.asp.net/mvc that cover all the features in ASP.NET MVC 2 release.  We will also post an updated end-to-end tutorial built entirely with ASP.NET MVC 2 (much like the NerdDinner tutorial that I wrote that covers ASP.NET MVC 1).  Summary The ASP.NET MVC team delivered regular V2 preview releases over the last year to get feedback on the feature set.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who tried out the previews and sent us suggestions/feedback/bug reports.  We hope you like the final release! Scott

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• Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

  - by Rick Strahl

  Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form.  If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via:       PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings  which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate:   This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence  for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Max Arderius

  Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is almost here! We're looking forward to updating you on our products, strategy, and roadmaps. This year, the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group (ATG) will participate in 25 speaker sessions, two Meet the Experts round-table discussions, five demoground booths and seven Special Interest Group meetings as guest speakers. We hope to see you at our sessions.  Please join us to hear the latest news and connect with senior ATG development staff. Here's a downloadable listing of all Applications Technology Group-related sessions with times and locations: FOCUS ON Oracle E-Business Suite - Applications Tools and Technology (PDF) General Sessions GEN8474 - Oracle E-Business Suite - Strategy, Update, and RoadmapCliff Godwin, SVP, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West 2002/2004 In this session, hear Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin deliver an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. This session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You’ll come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and will deliver in the future. GEN9173 - Optimize and Extend Oracle Applications - The Path to Oracle Fusion ApplicationsNadia Bendjedou, Oracle; Corre Curtice, Bhavish Madurai (CSC) Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3002/3004 One of the main objectives of this session is to help organizations build their IT roadmap for the next five years and be aligned with the Oracle Applications strategy in general and the Oracle Fusion Applications strategy in particular. Come hear about some of the common sense, practical steps you can take to optimize the performance of your Oracle Applications today and prepare your path to Oracle Fusion Applications for when your organization is ready to embrace them. Each step you take in adopting Oracle Fusion technology gets you partway to Oracle Fusion Applications. Conference Sessions CON9024 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and Roadmap Lisa Parekh, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a comprehensive overview of Oracle’s product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, and a review of capabilities on the product roadmap. This is the cornerstone session for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack. Come hear about the latest new usability enhancements of the user interface; systems administration and configuration management tools; security-related updates; and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. CON9021 - Oracle E-Business Suite Future Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2016  What’s coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This Oracle Development session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g) and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2). Topics include an architectural overview of the latest updates, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot cloning and automated “lights-out” cloning. Come learn how online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature) will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. CON9017 - Desktop Integration in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Padmaprabodh Ambale, Gustavo Jimenez, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This presentation covers the latest functional enhancements in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager, enhanced Microsoft Office support, and greater support for building custom desktop integration solutions. The session also presents tips and tricks for upgrading from Oracle Applications Desktop Integrator to Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager. CON9023 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and Roadmap Steven Chan, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016  Is your Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack up to date? Are you taking advantage of all the latest options and capabilities? This Oracle development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including elements such as database releases and options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop operating systems, browsers, JRE releases, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, business intelligence, Oracle Application Management Packs, security options, clouds, Oracle VM, and virtualization. The session also covers the most commonly asked questions about tech stack component support dates and upgrade implications. CON9028 - Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesSantiago Bastidas, Elke Phelps, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session features a survey of the best techniques sysadmins can use to minimize patching downtimes. It starts with an architectural-level review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the various tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in noninteractive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring systemwide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks, and more. An added bonus: hear about the upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite 12 online patching capabilities based on the groundbreaking Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature. CON9116 - Extending the Use of Oracle E-Business Suite with the Oracle Endeca PlatformOsama Elkady, Muhannad Obeidat, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2018 The Oracle Endeca platform includes a leading unstructured data correlation and analytics engine, together with a best-in class catalog search and guided navigation solution, to improve the productivity of all types of users in your enterprise. This development session focuses on the details behind the Oracle Endeca platform’s integration into Oracle E-Business Suite. It demonstrates how easily you can extend the use of the Oracle Endeca platform into other areas of Oracle E-Business Suite and how you can bring in your own data and build new Oracle Endeca applications for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON9005 - Oracle E-Business Suite Integration Best PracticesVeshaal Singh, Oracle, Jeffrey Hand, Zebra Technologies Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle is investing across applications and technologies to make the application integration experience easier for customers. Today Oracle has certified Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and provides a comprehensive set of integration technologies. Learn about Oracle’s integration offering across data- and process-centric integrations. These technologies can be used to address various application integration challenges and styles. In this session, you will get an understanding of how, when, and where you can leverage Oracle’s integration technologies to connect end-to-end business processes across your enterprise, including your Oracle Applications portfolio.  CON9026 - Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability EnhancementsPadmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session details the latest UI enhancements to Oracle Application Framework in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. Developers will get a detailed look at new features to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include new rich UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, REST interface, embedded widgets for analytics content, Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) task flows, third-party widgets, a look-ahead list of values, inline attachments, pop-ups, personalization and extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration, and mobile devices. CON8805 - Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to Release 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 3002/3004 Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 upgrade planning tips from Oracle’s support, consulting, development, and IT organizations. You’ll get specific cross-product advice on how to understand the factors that affect your project’s duration, decide on your project’s scope, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. CON9053 - Advanced Management of Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Enterprise ManagerAngelo Rosado, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 The task of managing and monitoring Oracle E-Business Suite environments can be very challenging. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only product on the market that is designed to monitor and manage all the different technologies that constitute Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including end user, midtier, configuration, host, and database management—to name just a few. Customers that have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager have experienced dramatic improvements in system visibility and diagnostic capability as well as administrator productivity. The purpose of this session is to highlight the key features and benefits of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8809 - Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Upgrade Best Practices: Technical InsightIsam Alyousfi, Udayan Parvate, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3011 This session is ideal for organizations thinking about upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. It covers the fundamentals of upgrading to Release 12.1, including the technology stack components and supported upgrade paths. Hear from Oracle Development about the set of best practices for patching in general and executing the Release 12.1 technical upgrade, with special considerations for minimizing your downtime. Also get to know about relatively recent upgrade resources. CON9032 - Upgrading Your Customizations of Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1Sara Woodhull, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016 Have you personalized Oracle Forms or Oracle Application Framework screens in Oracle E-Business Suite? Have you used mod_plsql in Release 11i? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment with other tools? The technical options for upgrading these customizations as part of your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade can be bewildering. Come to this Oracle development session to learn about selecting the best upgrade approach for your existing customizations. The session will help you understand customization scenarios and use cases, tools, and technologies to ensure that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users’ needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. CON9259 - Oracle E-Business Suite Internationalization and Multilingual FeaturesMaher Al-Nubani, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle E-Business Suite supports more countries, languages, and regions than ever. Come to this Oracle development session to get an overview of internationalization features and capabilities and see new Release 12 features such as calendar support for Hijra and Thai, new group separators, lightweight multilingual support (MLS) setup, new character sets such as AL32UTF, newly supported languages, Mac certifications, Oracle iSetup support for moving MLS setups, new file export options for Unicode, new MLS number spelling options, and more. CON7188 - Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA SuiteSrikant Subramaniam, Joe Huang, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3001 Follow your mobile customers, employees, and partners with Oracle Fusion Middleware. See how native iPhone and iPad applications can easily be built for Oracle E-Business Suite with the new Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA Suite. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, developers can quickly develop native applications for Apple iOS and other mobile platforms. The Oracle SOA Suite/Oracle ADF Mobile combination can execute business transactions on Oracle E-Business Suite. This session includes a demo in which a mobile user approves a business transaction in Oracle E-Business Suite and a demo of the tools used to build a native on-device solution. These concepts for mobile applications also apply to other Oracle applications.CON9029 - Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Slashing Downtimes with Online PatchingKevin Hudson, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle E-Business Suite will soon include online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature), which will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. This Oracle development session details how online patching works, with special attention to what’s happening at a database object level when database patches are applied to an Oracle E-Business Suite environment that’s still running. Come learn about the operational and system management implications for minimizing maintenance downtimes when applying database patches with this new technology and the related impact on customizations you might have built on top of Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8806 - Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1: Technical and Functional PanelAndrew Katz, Komori America Corporation; Sandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. ;Srini Chavali, Cummins Inc.; Amrita Mehrok, Nadia Bendjedou, Anne Carlson Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 In this panel discussion, Oracle experts, customers, and partners share their experiences in upgrading to the latest release of Oracle E-Business Suite, Release 12.1. The panelists cover aspects of a typical Release 12 upgrade, technical (upgrading the technical infrastructure) as well as functional (upgrading to the new financial infrastructure). Hear directly from the experts who either develop the product or support, implement, or upgrade it, and find out how to apply their lessons learned to your organization. CON9027 - Personalize and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite Applications with Rich MashupsGustavo Jimenez, Padmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers the use of several Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies to personalize and extend your existing Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies covered include Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Endeca applications, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition with Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle Application Framework applications. CON9036 - Advanced Oracle E-Business Suite Architectures: Maximum Availability, Security, and MoreElke Phelps, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session includes architecture diagrams and configuration instructions for building a maximum availability architecture (MAA) that will help you design a disaster recovery solution that fits the needs of your business. Database and application high-availability features it describes include Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Active Data Guard, load-balancing Web and forms services, parallel concurrent processing, and the use of Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata to provide a highly available environment. The session also covers the latest updates to systems management tools, AutoConfig, cloud computing, virtualization, and Oracle WebLogic Server and provides sneak previews of upcoming functionality. CON9047 - Efficiently Scaling Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Exadata and Oracle ExalogicIsam Alyousfi, Nishit Rao, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are designed from the ground up with optimizations in software and hardware to deliver superfast performance for mission-critical applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle E-Business Suite applications run three to eight times as fast on the Oracle Exadata/Oracle Exalogic platform in standard benchmark tests. Besides performance, customers benefit from simplified support, enhanced manageability, and the ability to consolidate multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Attend this session to understand best practices for Oracle E-Business Suite deployment on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata through customer case studies. Learn how adopting the Exa* platform increases efficiency, simplifies scaling, and boosts performance for peak loads. CON8716 - Web Services and SOA Integration Options for Oracle E-Business SuiteRekha Ayothi, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a deep dive into a subset of the Web services and SOA-related integration options available to Oracle E-Business Suite systems integrators. It offers a technical look at Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Application Adapters for Data Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, and other Web services options for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Systems integrators and developers will get an overview of the latest integration capabilities and technologies available out of the box with Oracle E-Business Suite and possibly a sneak preview of upcoming functionality and features. CON9030 - Recommendations for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance TuningIsam Alyousfi, Samer Barakat, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Need to squeeze more performance out of your existing servers? This packed Oracle development session summarizes practical tips and lessons learned from performance-tuning and benchmarking the world’s largest Oracle E-Business Suite environments. Apps sysadmins will learn concrete tips and techniques for identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks on all layers, with special attention to application- and database-tier servers. Learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Oracle Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues at the Java and JVM layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules. CON3429 - Using Oracle ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite: The Full Integration ViewSiva Puthurkattil, Lake County; Juan Camilo Ruiz, Sara Woodhull, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 3003 Oracle E-Business Suite delivers functionality for handling the core business of your organization. However, user requirements and new technologies are driving an emerging need to implement new types of user interfaces for these applications. This session provides an overview of how to use Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) to deliver cutting-edge Web 2.0 and mobile rich user interfaces that front existing Oracle E-Business Suite processes, and it also explores all the existing types of integration between the two worlds. CON9020 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Identity Management SolutionsSunil Ghosh, Elke Phelps, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Need to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite with Microsoft Windows Kerberos, Active Directory, CA Netegrity SiteMinder, or other third-party authentication systems? Want to understand your options when Oracle Premier Support for Oracle Single Sign-On ends in December 2011? This Oracle Development session covers the latest certified integrations with Oracle Access Manager 11g and Oracle Internet Directory 11g, which can be used individually or as bridges for integrating with third-party authentication solutions. The session presents an architectural overview of how Oracle Access Manager, its WebGate and AccessGate components, and Oracle Internet Directory work together, with implications for Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Portal, and other Oracle Fusion identity management products. CON9019 - Troubleshooting, Diagnosing, and Optimizing Oracle E-Business Suite TechnologyGustavo Jimenez, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers how you can proactively diagnose Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including extensions built with Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies such as Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) and Oracle WebCenter to catch potential issues in the middle tier before they become more serious. Topics include debugging, logging infrastructure, warning signs, performance tuning, information required when logging service requests, general JVM optimization, and an overall picture of all the moving parts that make it possible for Oracle E-Business Suite to isolate and fix problems. Also learn how Oracle Diagnostics Framework will help prevent downtime caused by failures. CON9031 - The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Secure Your Oracle E-Business Suite InstanceEric Bing, Erik Graversen, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Learn the top 10 things you can do to secure your applications and your sensitive data. This Oracle development session for system administrators and security professionals explores some of the most important and overlooked things you can do to secure your Oracle E-Business Suite instance. It also covers data masking and other mechanisms for protecting sensitive data. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Some of our most senior staff have been invited to participate on the following SIG meetings as guest speakers: SIG10525 - OAUG - Archive & Purge SIGBrian Bent - Pre-Sales Engineer, TierData, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3011 The Archive and Purge SIG is an organization in which users can share their experiences and solicit functional and technical advice on archiving and purging data in Oracle E-Business Suite. This session provides an opportunity for users to network and share best practices, tips, and tricks. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance, Archive & Purging - Q&A SessionIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10547 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business (EBS) Applications Technology SIGSrini Chavali - IT Director, Cummins Inc Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3018 The general purpose of the EBS Applications Technology SIG is to inform and educate its members about current and future components of the tech stack as they relate to Oracle E-Business Suite. Attend this meeting for networking and education and to share best practices. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Roadmap - Presentation and Q&ASteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10559 - OAUG - User Management SIGSusan Behn - VP of Oracle Delivery, Infosemantics, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3024 The E-Business Suite User Management SIG focuses on the components of user management that enable Oracle E-Business Suite users to define administrative functions and manage users’ access to functions and data based on roles within an organization—rather than the user’s individual identity—which is referred to as role-based access control (RBAC). This meeting includes an introduction to Oracle User Management that covers the Oracle User Management building blocks and presents an example of creating a security policy.Guest: Security and User Management - Q&A SessionEric Bing, Sr. Director, EBS Security, OracleSara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10515 - OAUG – Upgrade SIGBarbara Matthews - Consultant, On Call DBASandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM - Moscone West 3009 This Upgrade SIG session starts with a business meeting and then features a Q&A panel discussion on Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade topics. The session• Reviews Upgrade SIG goals and objectives• Provides answers, during the Q&A session, to questions related to Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades• Shares “real world” experiences, tips, and techniques for Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades to Release 12.1. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade - Q&A SessionAnne Carlson - Sr. Director, Oracle E-Business Suite Product Strategy, OracleUdayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, OracleSuzana Ferrari, Sr. Principal Consultant, OracleIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10552 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business Suite SIGDonna Rosentrater - Manager, Global Sourcing & Procurement Systems, TJX Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3020 The E-Business Suite SIG, affiliated with OAUG, supports Oracle E-Business Suite users through networking, education, and sharing of best practices. This SIG meeting will feature a general discussion of Oracle E-Business Suite product strategies in Release 12 and migration to Oracle Fusion Applications. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite - Q&A SessionJeanne Lowell, Vice President, EBS Product Strategy, OracleNadia Bendjedou, Sr. Director, Product Strategy, Oracle SIG10556 - OAUG - SysAdmin SIGRandy Giefer - Sr Systems and Security Architect, Solution Beacon, LLC Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3022 The SysAdmin SIG provides a forum in which OAUG members and participants can share updates, tips, and successful practices relating to system administration in an Oracle applications environment. The SysAdmin SIG strives to enable system administrators to become more effective and efficient in their jobs by providing them with access to people and information that can increase their system administration knowledge and experience. Attend this meeting to network, share best practices, and benefit from educational content. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching- Presentation and Q&AKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10553 - OAUG - Database SIGMichael Brown - Senior DBA, COLIBRI LTD LC Sunday, Sep 30, 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 3020 The OAUG Database SIG provides an opportunity for applications database administrators to learn from and share their experiences with supporting the various Oracle applications environments. This session will include a brief business meeting followed by a short presentation. It will end with an open discussion among the attendees about items of interest to those present. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance - Presentation and Q&AIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Meet the Experts We're planning two round-table discussions where you can review your questions with senior E-Business Suite ATG staff: MTE9648 - Meet the Experts for Oracle E-Business Suite: Planning Your Upgrade Jeanne Lowell - VP, EBS Product Strategy, Oracle John Abraham - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou - Sr. Director - Product Strategy, Oracle Anne Carlson - Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Udayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, Oracle Isam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade best practices. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. MTE9649 - Meet the Oracle E-Business Suite Tools and Technology Experts Lisa Parekh - Vice President, Technology Integration, Oracle Steven Chan - Sr. Director, Oracle Elke Phelps - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Max Arderius - Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite technology. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. Demos We have five booths in the exhibition demogrounds this year, where you can try ATG technologies firsthand and get your questions answered. Please stop by and meet our staff at the following locations: Advanced Architecture and Technology Stack for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-067) New User Productivity Capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite (W-065) End-to-End Management of Oracle E-Business Suite (W-063) Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Technical Upgrade Best Practices (W-066) SOA-Based Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-064)

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• Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here.  The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features.  Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.  You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach.  Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries.  ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server.  This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends.  We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project).  Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios).  We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation).  Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3.  This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4.  ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated.  This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model.  We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute  with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC.  This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications.  These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support).  The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project.  It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers).  You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing.  This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server.  The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site.  It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers.  You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner.  Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead.  Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3.  The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release.  MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes.  Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your  existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English.  We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days.  I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries).  You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.  The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects.  NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet.  The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others.  You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today.  We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.  You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server.  The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables.  SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4).  SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables.  Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2.  These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0.  Orchard is a free, open source, community based project.  It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard).  Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage).  Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.  WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development.  It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla).  Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites.  WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination.  It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer.  Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better.  A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Sending mail with Gmail Account using System.Net.Mail in ASP.NET

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  Any web application is in complete without mail functionality you should have to write send mail functionality. Like if there is shopping cart application for example then when a order created on the shopping cart you need to send an email to administrator of website for Order notification and for customer you need to send an email of receipt of order. So any web application is not complete without sending email. This post is also all about sending email. In post I will explain that how we can send emails from our Gmail Account without purchasing any smtp server etc. There are some limitations for sending email from Gmail Account. Please note following things. Gmail will have fixed number of quota for sending emails per day. So you can not send more then that emails for the day. Your from email address always will be your account email address which you are using for sending email. You can not send an email to unlimited numbers of people. Gmail ant spamming policy will restrict this. Gmail provide both Popup and SMTP settings both should be active in your account where you testing. You can enable that via clicking on setting link in gmail account and go to Forwarding and POP/Imap. So if you are using mail functionality for limited emails then Gmail is Best option. But if you are sending thousand of email daily then it will not be Good Idea. Here is the code for sending mail from Gmail Account. using System.Net.Mail; namespace Experiement { public partial class WebForm1 : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender,System.EventArgs e) { MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage(new MailAddress("[email protected]") ,new MailAddress("[email protected]")); mailMessage.Subject = "Sending mail through gmail account"; mailMessage.IsBodyHtml = true; mailMessage.Body = "<B>Sending mail thorugh gmail from asp.net</B>"; System.Net.NetworkCredential networkCredentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("[email protected]", "yourpassword"); SmtpClient smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); smtpClient.EnableSsl = true; smtpClient.UseDefaultCredentials = false; smtpClient.Credentials = networkCredentials; smtpClient.Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; smtpClient.Port = 587; smtpClient.Send(mailMessage); Response.Write("Mail Successfully sent"); } } } That’s run this application and you will get like below in your account. Technorati Tags: Gmail,System.NET.Mail,ASP.NET

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• Enhance GIMP’s Image Editing Power with Gimp Paint Studio

  - by Asian Angel

  Does your GIMP installation need a little super-charging? Using Gimp Paint Studio you can add a wonderful set of brushes, tools, and more to GIMP and take your work up to the next level. For our example we chose to install the beta version of Gimp Paint Studio on Ubuntu 10.10. Once you download the .zip file and unzip it, all that you need to do is manually transfer the contents shown here to the appropriate GIMP folders on your system. You can see the location of the destination folders here on our system… Note: Make certain to make a back-up copy of the “sessionrc and toolrc files” before you transfer Gimp Paint Studio into your installation (in case you would like to or need to revert back to the originals later). When you finish transferring the files start GIMP up and get ready to have fun. And if your experience is like ours then you should see a noticeable difference in window size and arrangement from the default settings. Here are some samples of the exceptional artwork done by Ramon Miranda and Mozart Couto using Gimp Paint Studio. Really impressive! Artwork by Ramon Miranda & Mozart Couto. Watch the introduction video and see Gimp Paint Studio in action. Download Gimp Paint Studio for Linux, Windows, and Mac [Gimp Paint Studio Homepage] *Keep in mind that there are stable and beta releases available, so choose the version that you are most comfortable with using. View the Installation Guides for Gimp Paint Studio *Page contains wonderful “video and written” versions for adding/installing Gimp Paint Studio to your system. Gimp Paint Studio Video Tutorials Library Visit the Gimp Paint Studio Gallery Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) Enhance GIMP’s Image Editing Power with Gimp Paint Studio Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Moving Your Tabs to the Side in Firefox Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles – An Awesome Game for Linux and Windows How Star Wars Changed the World [Infographic] Tabs Visual Manager Adds Thumbnailed Tab Switching to Chrome Daisies and Rye Swaying in the Summer Wind Wallpaper

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• Ask the Readers: Do You Use the Command Line?

  - by Asian Angel

  Most people have heard of it but not everyone is familiar or comfortable with how to use this bastion of geekdom. This week we would like to know if you use the command line or not. The command line…the bastion of ultimate geekery in many peoples’ eyes. You often hear people referring to doing things using the command line, so there must be something to it, right? For some people using the command line is the best, most efficient, and easiest way to do things on their systems. These are the people that many of us wish we were like. Next you have those who are proficient at using the command line but do not rely on it for everything they do on their systems. Then there are people who know how to perform some tasks or hacks using the command line but may not be as comfortable or knowledgeable as they wish to be using it. Moving on you find those who are interested in learning how to use the command line and just need a small push to get started.  Perhaps you feel too intimidated to learn it and just need the right opportunity to come along. And maybe you do not care one way or the other so long as you get done what you want to do on your system. Or you may prefer to simply use a graphical interface since that is quicker and easier for you (along with being familiar). You can find the whole range of people when it comes to using the command line… This week we would like to know if you use the command line or not. What command line category do you fit into? Power user? Casual usage? Totally lost? Let us know in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 7: Design and Typography Fun and Colorful Firefox Theme for Windows 7 Happy Snow Bears Theme for Chrome and Iron [Holiday] Download Full Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun Game for Free Scorched Cometary Planet Wallpaper Quick Fix: Add the RSS Button Back to the Firefox Awesome Bar Dropbox Desktop Client 1.0.0 RC for Windows, Linux, and Mac Released

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• View Maps and Get Directions in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Every so often we all need to look at a map for reference purposes or to get directions. If you are looking for a great quick reference app then join us as we look at the Mini Google Maps extension for Google Chrome. Mini Google Maps in Action While this may look like a rather basic map extension there is more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Here is the default view when you open Mini Google Maps for the first time. Things that we really liked about this extension were: Three different aerial views available (Map, Satellite, & Terrain) Three different viewing sizes available (and the extension remembers your chosen size) The ability to get directions in combination with a map We decided to try each of the viewing sizes available…here you can see the “Medium Setting”. Notice that the scale stays the same but you get more territory included to view. Then the “Large Setting”…which we infinitely preferred to the others. Once again look at the amount of territory included by default…very nice. Switching over to the “Satellite View”… Followed by the “Terrain View”. For our first example we decided to peek at Vancouver, British Columbia. After zooming out a little bit we had a very nice looking map. For the next test we asked for directions from Vancouver to Toronto. Both the directions and map turned out very well. And just for fun we looked up Paris, France with the “Satellite View”. Conclusion If you find yourself needing to view a map or get directions often then the Mini Google Maps extension will be a very useful tool for you. Links Download the Mini Google Maps extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007Stupid Geek Tricks: Browse the Web from OutlookView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way 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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• JavaScript Data Binding Frameworks

  - by dwahlin

  Data binding is where it’s at now days when it comes to building client-centric Web applications. Developers experienced with desktop frameworks like WPF or web frameworks like ASP.NET, Silverlight, or others are used to being able to take model objects containing data and bind them to UI controls quickly and easily. When moving to client-side Web development the data binding story hasn’t been great since neither HTML nor JavaScript natively support data binding. This means that you have to write code to place data in a control and write code to extract it. Although it’s certainly feasible to do it from scratch (many of us have done it this way for years), it’s definitely tedious and not exactly the best solution when it comes to maintenance and re-use. Over the last few years several different script libraries have been released to simply the process of binding data to HTML controls. In fact, the subject of data binding is becoming so popular that it seems like a new script library is being released nearly every week. Many of the libraries provide MVC/MVVM pattern support in client-side JavaScript apps and some even integrate directly with server frameworks like Node.js. Here’s a quick list of a few of the available libraries that support data binding (if you like any others please add a comment and I’ll try to keep the list updated): AngularJS MVC framework for data binding (although closely follows the MVVM pattern). Backbone.js MVC framework with support for models, key/value binding, custom events, and more. Derby Provides a real-time environment that runs in the browser an in Node.js. The library supports data binding and templates. Ember Provides support for templates that automatically update as data changes. JsViews Data binding framework that provides “interactive data-driven views built on top of JsRender templates”. jQXB Expression Binder Lightweight jQuery plugin that supports bi-directional data binding support. KnockoutJS MVVM framework with robust support for data binding. For an excellent look at using KnockoutJS check out John Papa’s course on Pluralsight. Meteor End to end framework that uses Node.js on the server and provides support for data binding on  the client. Simpli5 JavaScript framework that provides support for two-way data binding. WinRT with HTML5/JavaScript If you’re building Windows 8 applications using HTML5 and JavaScript there’s built-in support for data binding in the WinJS library.   I won’t have time to write about each of these frameworks, but in the next post I’m going to talk about my (current) favorite when it comes to client-side JavaScript data binding libraries which is AngularJS. AngularJS provides an extremely clean way – in my opinion - to extend HTML syntax to support data binding while keeping model objects (the objects that hold the data) free from custom framework method calls or other weirdness. While I’m writing up the next post, feel free to visit the AngularJS developer guide if you’d like additional details about the API and want to get started using it.

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• IIS 7&rsquo;s Sneaky Secret to Get COM-InterOp to Run

  - by David Hoerster

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/DavidHoerster/archive/2013/06/17/iis-7rsquos-sneaky-secret-to-get-com-interop-to-run.aspxIf you’re like me, you don’t really do a lot with COM components these days.  For me, I’ve been ‘lucky’ to stay in the managed world for the past 6 or 7 years. Until last week. I’m running a project to upgrade a web interface to an older COM-based application.  The old web interface is all classic ASP and lots of tables, in-line styles and a bunch of other late 90’s and early 2000’s goodies.  So in addition to updating the UI to be more modern looking and responsive, I decided to give the server side an update, too.  So I built some COM-InterOp DLL’s (easily through VS2012’s Add Reference feature…nothing new here) and built a test console line app to make sure the COM DLL’s were actually built according to the COM spec.  There’s a document management system that I’m thinking of whose COM DLLs were not proper COM DLLs and crashed and burned every time .NET tried to call them through a COM-InterOp layer. Anyway, my test app worked like a champ and I felt confident that I could build a nice façade around the COM DLL’s and wrap some functionality internally and only expose to my users/clients what they really needed. So I did this, built some tests and also built a test web app to make sure everything worked great.  It did.  It ran fine in IIS Express via Visual Studio 2012, and the timings were very close to the pure Classic ASP calls, so there wasn’t much overhead involved going through the COM-InterOp layer. You know where this is going, don’t you? So I deployed my test app to a DEV server running IIS 7.5.  When I went to my first test page that called the COM-InterOp layer, I got this pretty message: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {81C08CAE-1453-11D4-BEBC-00500457076D} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). It worked as a console app and while running under IIS Express, so it must be permissions, right?  I gave every account I could think of all sorts of COM+ rights and nothing, nada, zilch! Then I came across this question on Experts Exchange, and at the bottom of the page, someone mentioned that the app pool should be running to allow 32-bit apps to run.  Oh yeah, my machine is 64-bit; these COM DLL’s I’m using are old and are definitely 32-bit.  I didn’t check for that and didn’t even think about that.  But I went ahead and looked at the app pool that my web site was running under and what did I see?  Yep, select your app pool in IIS 7.x, click on Advanced Settings and check for “Enable 32-bit Applications”. I went ahead and set it to True and my test application suddenly worked. Hope this helps somebody out there from pulling out your hair.

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• Example WLST Script to Obtain JDBC and JTA MBean Values

  - by Daniel Mortimer

  Introduction Following on from the blog entry "Get an Offline or Online WebLogic Domain Summary Using WLST!", I have had a request to create a smaller example which only collects a selection of JDBC (System Resource) and JTA configuration and runtime MBeans values. So, here it is. Download Sample Script You can grab the sample script by clicking here. Instructions to Run: 1. After download, extract the zip to the machine hosting the WebLogic environment. You should have three directories along with a readme.txt output Sample_Output scripts 2. In the scripts directory, find the start wrapper script startWLSTJDBCSummarizer.sh (Unix) or startWLSTJDBCSummarizer.cmd (MS Windows). Open the appropriate file in an editor and change the environment variable settings to suit your system. Example - startWLSTDomainSummarizer.cmd set WL_HOME=D:\product\FMW11g\wlserver_10.3 set DOMAIN_HOME=D:\product\FMW11g\user_projects\domains\MyDomain set WLST_OUTPUT_PATH=D:\WLSTDomainSummarizer\output\ set WLST_OUTPUT_FILE=WLST_JDBC_Summary_Via_MBeans.html call "%WL_HOME%\common\bin\wlst.cmd" WLS_JDBC_Summary_Online.py Note: The WLST_OUTPUT_PATH directory value must have a trailing slash. If there is no trailing slash, the script will error and not continue.  3. Run the shell / command line wrapper script. It should launch WLST and kick off "WLS_JDBC_Summary_Online.py". This will hit you with some prompts e.g. Is your domain Admin Server up and running and do you have the connection details? (Y /N ): Y Enter connection URL to Admin Server e.g t3://mymachine.acme.com:7001 : t3://localhost:7001 Enter weblogic username: weblogic Enter weblogic username password (function prompt 1): welcome1 (Note: the value typed in for password will not be echoed back to the console). 4. If the scripts run successfully, you should get a HTML summary in the specified output directory. See example screenshots below: Screenshot 1 - JDBC System Resource Tab Page  Screenshot 2 - JTA Tab Page 5. For the HTML to render correctly, ensure the .js and .css files provided (review the output directory created by the zip file extraction) are accessible. For example, to view the HTML locally (without using a web server), place the HTML output, jquery-ui.js, spry.js and wlstsummarizer.css in the same directory. Disclaimer This is a sample script. I have tested it against WebLogic Server 10.3.6 domains on MS Windows and Unix.  I cannot guarantee that the script will run error free or produce the expected output on your system. If you have any feedback add a comment to the blog. I will endeavour to fix any problems with my WLST code. Credits JQuery: http://jquery.com/ Spry (Adobe) : https://github.com/adobe/Spryhttp://www.red-team-design.com/cool-headings-with-pseudo-elements

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• Using BPEL Performance Statistics to Diagnose Performance Bottlenecks

  - by fip

  Tuning performance of Oracle SOA 11G applications could be challenging. Because SOA is a platform for you to build composite applications that connect many applications and "services", when the overall performance is slow, the bottlenecks could be anywhere in the system: the applications/services that SOA connects to, the infrastructure database, or the SOA server itself.How to quickly identify the bottleneck becomes crucial in tuning the overall performance. Fortunately, the BPEL engine in Oracle SOA 11G (and 10G, for that matter) collects BPEL Engine Performance Statistics, which show the latencies of low level BPEL engine activities. The BPEL engine performance statistics can make it a bit easier for you to identify the performance bottleneck. Although the BPEL engine performance statistics are always available, the access to and interpretation of them are somewhat obscure in the early and current (PS5) 11G versions. This blog attempts to offer instructions that help you to enable, retrieve and interpret the performance statistics, before the future versions provides a more pleasant user experience. Overview of BPEL Engine Performance Statistics  SOA BPEL has a feature of collecting some performance statistics and store them in memory. One MBean attribute, StatLastN, configures the size of the memory buffer to store the statistics. This memory buffer is a "moving window", in a way that old statistics will be flushed out by the new if the amount of data exceeds the buffer size. Since the buffer size is limited by StatLastN, impacts of statistics collection on performance is minimal. By default StatLastN=-1, which means no collection of performance data. Once the statistics are collected in the memory buffer, they can be retrieved via another MBean oracle.as.soainfra.bpel:Location=[Server Name],name=BPELEngine,type=BPELEngine.> My friend in Oracle SOA development wrote this simple 'bpelstat' web app that looks up and retrieves the performance data from the MBean and displays it in a human readable form. It does not have beautiful UI but it is fairly useful. Although in Oracle SOA 11.1.1.5 onwards the same statistics can be viewed via a more elegant UI under "request break down" at EM -> SOA Infrastructure -> Service Engines -> BPEL -> Statistics, some unsophisticated minds like mine may still prefer the simplicity of the 'bpelstat' JSP. One thing that simple JSP does do well is that you can save the page and send it to someone to further analyze Follows are the instructions of how to install and invoke the BPEL statistic JSP. My friend in SOA Development will soon blog about interpreting the statistics. Stay tuned. Step1: Enable BPEL Engine Statistics for Each SOA Servers via Enterprise Manager First st you need to set the StatLastN to some number as a way to enable the collection of BPEL Engine Performance Statistics EM Console -> soa-infra(Server Name) -> SOA Infrastructure -> SOA Administration -> BPEL Properties Click on "More BPEL Configuration Properties" Click on attribute "StatLastN", set its value to some integer number. Typically you want to set it 1000 or more. Step 2: Download and Deploy bpelstat.war File to Admin Server, Note: the WAR file contains a JSP that does NOT have any security restriction. You do NOT want to keep in your production server for a long time as it is a security hazard. Deactivate the war once you are done. Download the bpelstat.war to your local PC At WebLogic Console, Go to Deployments -> Install Click on the "upload your file(s)" Click the "Browse" button to upload the deployment to Admin Server Accept the uploaded file as the path, click next Check the default option "Install this deployment as an application" Check "AdminServer" as the target server Finish the rest of the deployment with default settings Console -> Deployments Check the box next to "bpelstat" application Click on the "Start" button. It will change the state of the app from "prepared" to "active" Step 3: Invoke the BPEL Statistic Tool The BPELStat tool merely call the MBean of BPEL server and collects and display the in-memory performance statics. You usually want to do that after some peak loads. Go to http://<admin-server-host>:<admin-server-port>/bpelstat Enter the correct admin hostname, port, username and password Enter the SOA Server Name from which you want to collect the performance statistics. For example, SOA_MS1, etc. Click Submit Keep doing the same for all SOA servers. Step 3: Interpret the BPEL Engine Statistics You will see a few categories of BPEL Statistics from the JSP Page. First it starts with the overall latency of BPEL processes, grouped by synchronous and asynchronous processes. Then it provides the further break down of the measurements through the life time of a BPEL request, which is called the "request break down". 1. Overall latency of BPEL processes The top of the page shows that the elapse time of executing the synchronous process TestSyncBPELProcess from the composite TestComposite averages at about 1543.21ms, while the elapse time of executing the asynchronous process TestAsyncBPELProcess from the composite TestComposite2 averages at about 1765.43ms. The maximum and minimum latency were also shown. Synchronous process statistics <statistics>     <stats key="default/TestComposite!2.0.2-ScopedJMSOSB*soa_bfba2527-a9ba-41a7-95c5-87e49c32f4ff/TestSyncBPELProcess" min="1234" max="4567" average="1543.21" count="1000">     </stats> </statistics> Asynchronous process statistics <statistics>     <stats key="default/TestComposite2!2.0.2-ScopedJMSOSB*soa_bfba2527-a9ba-41a7-95c5-87e49c32f4ff/TestAsyncBPELProcess" min="2234" max="3234" average="1765.43" count="1000">     </stats> </statistics> 2. Request break down Under the overall latency categorized by synchronous and asynchronous processes is the "Request breakdown". Organized by statistic keys, the Request breakdown gives finer grain performance statistics through the life time of the BPEL requests.It uses indention to show the hierarchy of the statistics. Request breakdown <statistics>     <stats key="eng-composite-request" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="0">         <stats key="eng-single-request" min="22" max="606" average="258.43" count="277">             <stats key="populate-context" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="248"> Please note that in SOA 11.1.1.6, the statistics under Request breakdown is aggregated together cross all the BPEL processes based on statistic keys. It does not differentiate between BPEL processes. If two BPEL processes happen to have the statistic that share same statistic key, the statistics from two BPEL processes will be aggregated together. Keep this in mind when we go through more details below. 2.1 BPEL process activity latencies A very useful measurement in the Request Breakdown is the performance statistics of the BPEL activities you put in your BPEL processes: Assign, Invoke, Receive, etc. The names of the measurement in the JSP page directly come from the names to assign to each BPEL activity. These measurements are under the statistic key "actual-perform" Example 1:  Follows is the measurement for BPEL activity "AssignInvokeCreditProvider_Input", which looks like the Assign activity in a BPEL process that assign an input variable before passing it to the invocation:                                <stats key="AssignInvokeCreditProvider_Input" min="1" max="8" average="1.9" count="153">                                     <stats key="sensor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="1" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="sensor-send-variable-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="monitor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                 </stats> Note: because as previously mentioned that the statistics cross all BPEL processes are aggregated together based on statistic keys, if two BPEL processes happen to name their Invoke activity the same name, they will show up at one measurement (i.e. statistic key). Example 2: Follows is the measurement of BPEL activity called "InvokeCreditProvider". You can not only see that by average it takes 3.31ms to finish this call (pretty fast) but also you can see from the further break down that most of this 3.31 ms was spent on the "invoke-service".                                  <stats key="InvokeCreditProvider" min="1" max="13" average="3.31" count="153">                                     <stats key="initiate-correlation-set-again" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="invoke-service" min="1" max="13" average="3.08" count="153">                                         <stats key="prep-call" min="0" max="1" average="0.04" count="153">                                         </stats>                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="initiate-correlation-set" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="sensor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="sensor-send-variable-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="monitor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="update-audit-trail" min="0" max="2" average="0.03" count="153">                                     </stats>                                 </stats> 2.2 BPEL engine activity latency Another type of measurements under Request breakdown are the latencies of underlying system level engine activities. These activities are not directly tied to a particular BPEL process or process activity, but they are critical factors in the overall engine performance. These activities include the latency of saving asynchronous requests to database, and latency of process dehydration. My friend Malkit Bhasin is working on providing more information on interpreting the statistics on engine activities on his blog (https://blogs.oracle.com/malkit/). I will update this blog once the information becomes available. Update on 2012-10-02: My friend Malkit Bhasin has published the detail interpretation of the BPEL service engine statistics at his blog http://malkit.blogspot.com/2012/09/oracle-bpel-engine-soa-suite.html.

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• Dynamic Unpivot : SSIS Nugget

  - by jamiet

  A question on the SSIS forum earlier today asked: I need to dynamically unpivot some set of columns in my source file. Every month there is one new column and its set of Values. I want to unpivot it without editing my SSIS packages that is deployed Let’s be clear about what we mean by Unpivot. It is a normalisation technique that basically converts columns into rows. By way of example it converts something like this: AccountCode Jan Feb Mar AC1 100.00 150.00 125.00 AC2 45.00 75.50 90.00 into something like this: AccountCode Month Amount AC1 Jan 100.00 AC1 Feb 150.00 AC1 Mar 125.00 AC2 Jan 45.00 AC2 Feb 75.50 AC2 Mar 90.00 The Unpivot transformation in SSIS is perfectly capable of carrying out the operation defined in this example however in the case outlined in the aforementioned forum thread the problem was a little bit different. I interpreted it to mean that the number of columns could change and in that scenario the Unpivot transformation (and indeed the SSIS dataflow in general) is rendered useless because it expects that the number of columns will not change from what is specified at design-time. There is a workaround however. Assuming all of the columns that CAN exist will appear at the end of the rows, we can (1) import all of the columns in the file as just a single column, (2) use a script component to loop over all the values in that “column” and (3) output each one as a column all of its own. Let’s go over that in a bit more detail.   I’ve prepared a data file that shows some data that we want to unpivot which shows some customers and their mythical shopping lists (it has column names in the first row): We use a Flat File Connection Manager to specify the format of our data file to SSIS: and a Flat File Source Adapter to put it into the dataflow (no need a for a screenshot of that one – its very basic). Notice that the values that we want to unpivot all exist in a column called [Groceries]. Now onto the script component where the real work goes on, although the code is pretty simple: Here I show a screenshot of this executing along with some data viewers. As you can see we have successfully pulled out all of the values into a row all of their own thus accomplishing the Dynamic Unpivot that the forum poster was after. If you want to run the demo for yourself then I have uploaded the demo package and source file up to my SkyDrive: http://cid-550f681dad532637.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20100529/Dynamic%20Unpivot.zip Simply extract the two files into a folder, make sure the Connection Manager is pointing to the file, and execute! Hope this is useful. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• The Importance of a Security Assessment - by Michael Terra, Oracle

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Today's Blog was written by Michael Terra, who was the Subject Matter Expert for the recently announced Oracle Online Security Assessment. You can take the Online Assessment here: Take the Online Assessment Over the past decade, IT Security has become a recognized and respected Business discipline.  Several factors have contributed to IT Security becoming a core business and organizational enabler including, but not limited to, increased external threats and increased regulatory pressure. Security is also viewed as a key enabler for strategic corporate activities such as mergers and acquisitions.Now, the challenge for senior security professionals is to develop an ongoing dialogue within their organizations about the importance of information security and how it can impact their organization's strategic objectives/mission. The importance of conducting regular “Security Assessments” across the IT and physical infrastructure has become increasingly important. Security standards and frameworks, such as the international standard ISO 27001, are increasingly being adopted by organizations and their business partners as proof of their security posture and “Security Assessments” are a great way to ensure a continued alignment to these frameworks.Oracle offers a number of different security assessment covering a broad range of technologies. Some of these are short engagements conducted for free with our strategic customers and partners. Others are longer term paid engagements delivered by Oracle Consulting Services or one of our partners. The goal of a security assessment, (also known as a security audit or security review), is to ensure that necessary security controls are integrated into the design and implementation of a project, application or technology.  A properly completed security assessment should provide documentation outlining any security gaps that exist in an infrastructure and the associated risks for those gaps. With that knowledge, an organization can choose to either mitigate, transfer, avoid or accept the risk. One example of an Oracle offering is a Security Readiness Assessment:The Oracle Security Readiness Assessment is a practical security architecture review focused on aligning an organization’s enterprise security architecture to their business principals and strategic objectives. The service will establish a multi-phase security architecture roadmap focused on supporting new and existing business initiatives.Offering OverviewThe Security Readiness Assessment will: Define an organization’s current security posture and provide a roadmap to a desired future state architecture by mapping  security solutions to business goals Incorporate commonly accepted security architecture concepts to streamline an organization’s security vision from strategy to implementation Define the people, process and technology implications of the desired future state architecture The objective is to deliver cohesive, best practice security architectures spanning multiple domains that are unique and specific to the context of your organization. Offering DetailsThe Oracle Security Readiness Assessment is a multi-stage process with a dedicated Oracle Security team supporting your organization.  During the course of this free engagement, the team will focus on the following: Review your current business operating model and supporting IT security structures and processes Partner with your organization to establish a future state security architecture leveraging Oracle’s reference architectures, capability maps, and best practices Provide guidance and recommendations on governance practices for the rollout and adoption of your future state security architecture Create an initial business case for the adoption of the future state security architecture If you are interested in finding out more, ask your Sales Consultant or Account Manager for details.

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• Create and use a Button class on AS3.0

  - by Madcowe

  I am currently working on a game and it is all going well. On the shop screen there are several buttons that affect the player's stats for when the player restarts the game. The button's names (with a text on the left), however, are rather cryptic and it's hard to figure out what they do unless you test or something. So the solution I came up with, is to create an InfoBox with an InfoText inside so that when the cursor is over the button it appears with the description, cost and etc. This I managed to do too however, the way I was about to do it would mean that I had to create 3 event listeners per button (CLICK, ROLL_OVER, ROLL_OUT) and, obviously, 3 functions connected to each event listener. Now, I don't mind much about having 1 event listener per button, for the click, but since the other events are just to make a box appear and disappear as well as display some text, I thought it was way too much of a mess of code. What I tried to do: I created a new class called InfoBoxButton, and this is the class' code: package { import flash.display.SimpleButton; import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.ui.Mouse; import flash.events.MouseEvent; public class InfoBoxButton extends SimpleButton { public var description:String; public var infoBox:InfoBox; public function InfoBoxButton(description) { this.addEventListener( MouseEvent.ROLL_OVER, displayInfoText, false, 0, true); this.addEventListener( MouseEvent.ROLL_OUT, hideInfoText, false, 0, true); } private function displayInfoText() { infoBox.infoText.text = description; infoBox.visible = true; } private function hideInfoText() { infoBox.infoText.text = ""; infoBox.visible = false; } } } But now I don't have an idea how to associate it with the button, I have tried this: public var SoonButton:InfoBoxButton = new InfoBoxButton("This is merely a test"); The SoonButton is a button I made on the shopscreen, SoonButton is it's instance name, but I can't think of a way of associating one button to the other... I have been fiddling with the code for like 3 hours yesterday and no luck... can anyone give me some pointers on how I should go about doing it?

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• What Every Developer Should Know About MSI Components

  - by Alois Kraus

  Hopefully nothing. But if you have to do more than simple XCopy deployment and you need to support updates, upgrades and perhaps side by side scenarios there is no way around MSI. You can create Msi files with a Visual Studio Setup project which is severely limited or you can use the Windows Installer Toolset. I cannot talk about WIX with my German colleagues because WIX has a very special meaning. It is funny to always use the long name when I talk about deployment possibilities. Alternatively you can buy commercial tools which help you to author Msi files but I am not sure how good they are. Given enough pain with existing solutions you can also learn the MSI Apis and create your own packaging solution. If I were you I would use either a commercial visual tool when you do easy deployments or use the free Windows Installer Toolset. Once you know the WIX schema you can create well formed wix xml files easily with any editor. Then you can “compile” from the wxs files your Msi package. Recently I had the “pleasure” to get my hands dirty with C++ (again) and the MSI technology. Installation is a complex topic but after several month of digging into arcane MSI issues I can safely say that there should exist an easier way to install and update files as today. I am not alone with this statement as John Robbins (creator of the cool tool Paraffin) states: “.. It's a brittle and scary API in Windows …”. To help other people struggling with installation issues I present you the advice I (and others) found useful and what will happen if you ignore this advice. What is a MSI file? A MSI file is basically a database with tables which reference each other to control how your un/installation should work. The basic idea is that you declare via these tables what you want to install and MSI controls the how to get your stuff onto or off your machine. Your “stuff” consists usually of files, registry keys, shortcuts and environment variables. Therefore the most important tables are File, Registry, Environment and Shortcut table which define what will be un/installed. The key to master MSI is that every resource (file, registry key ,…) is associated with a MSI component. The actual payload consists of compressed files in the CAB format which can either be embedded into the MSI file or reside beside the MSI file or in a subdirectory below it. To examine MSI files you need Orca a free MSI editor provided by MS. There is also another free editor called Super Orca which does support diffs between MSI and it does not lock the MSI files. But since Orca comes with a shell extension I tend to use only Orca because it is so easy to right click on a MSI file and open it with this tool. How Do I Install It? Double click it. This does work for fresh installations as well as major upgrades. Updates need to be installed via the command line via msiexec /i <msi> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus   This tells the installer to reinstall all already installed features (new features will NOT be installed). The reinstallmode letters do force an overwrite of the old cached package in the %WINDIR%\Installer folder. All files, shortcuts and registry keys are redeployed if they are missing or need to be replaced with a newer version. When things did go really wrong and you want to overwrite everything unconditionally use REINSTALLMODE=vamus. How To Enable MSI Logs? You can download a MSI from Microsoft which installs some registry keys to enable full MSI logging. The log files can be found in your %TEMP% folder and are called MSIxxxx.log. Alternatively you can add to your msiexec command line the option msiexec …. /l*vx <LogFileName> Personally I find it rather strange that * does not mean full logging. To really get all logs I need to add v and x which is documented in the msiexec help but I still find this behavior unintuitive. What are MSI components? The whole MSI logic is bound to the concept of MSI components. Nearly every msi table has a Component column which binds an installable resource to a component. Below are the screenshots of the FeatureComponents and Component table of an example MSI. The Feature table defines basically the feature hierarchy.  To find out what belongs to a feature you need to look at the FeatureComponents table where for each feature the components are listed which will be installed when a feature is installed. The MSI components are defined in the  Component table. This table has as first column the component name and as second column the component id which is a GUID. All resources you want to install belong to a MSI component. Therefore nearly all MSI tables have a Component_ column which contains the component name. If you look e.g. a the File table you see that every file belongs to a component which is true for all other tables which install resources. The component table is the glue between all other tables which contain the resources you want to install. So far so easy. Why is MSI then so complex? Most MSI problems arise from the fact that you did violate a MSI component rule in one or the other way. When you install a feature the reference count for all components belonging to this feature will increase by one. If your component is installed by more than one feature it will get a higher refcount. When you uninstall a feature its refcount will drop by one. Interesting things happen if the component reference count reaches zero: Then all associated resources will be deleted. That looks like a reasonable thing and it is. What it makes complex are the strange component rules you have to follow. Below are some important component rules from the Tao of the Windows Installer … Rule 16: Follow Component Rules Components are a very important part of the Installer technology. They are the means whereby the Installer manages the resources that make up your application. The SDK provides the following guidelines for creating components in your package: Never create two components that install a resource under the same name and target location. If a resource must be duplicated in multiple components, change its name or target location in each component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Two components must not have the same key path file. This is a consequence of the previous rule. The key path value points to a particular file or folder belonging to the component that the installer uses to detect the component. If two components had the same key path file, the installer would be unable to distinguish which component is installed. Two components however may share a key path folder. Do not create a version of a component that is incompatible with all previous versions of the component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Do not create components containing resources that will need to be installed into more than one directory on the user’s system. The installer installs all of the resources in a component into the same directory. It is not possible to install some resources into subdirectories. Do not include more than one COM server per component. If a component contains a COM server, this must be the key path for the component. Do not specify more than one file per component as a target for the Start menu or a Desktop shortcut. … And these rules do not even talk about component ids, update packages and upgrades which you need to understand as well. Lets suppose you install two MSIs (MSI1 and MSI2) which have the same ComponentId but different component names. Both do install the same file. What will happen when you uninstall MSI2?   Hm the file should stay there. But the component names are different. Yes and yes. But MSI uses not use the component name as key for the refcount. Instead the ComponentId column of the Component table which contains a GUID is used as identifier under which the refcount is stored. The components Comp1 and Comp2 are identical from the MSI perspective. After the installation of both MSIs the Component with the Id {100000….} has a refcount of two. After uninstallation of one MSI there is still a refcount of one which drops to zero just as expected when we uninstall the last msi. Then the file which was the same for both MSIs is deleted. You should remember that MSI keeps a refcount across MSIs for components with the same component id. MSI does manage components not the resources you did install. The resources associated with a component are then and only then deleted when the refcount of the component reaches zero.   The dependencies between features, components and resources can be described as relations. m,k are numbers >= 1, n can be 0. Inside a MSI the following relations are valid Feature    1  –> n Components Component    1 –> m Features Component      1  –>  k Resources These relations express that one feature can install several components and features can share components between them. Every (meaningful) component will install at least one resource which means that its name (primary key to stay in database speak) does occur in some other table in the Component column as value which installs some resource. Lets make it clear with an example. We want to install with the feature MainFeature some files a registry key and a shortcut. We can then create components Comp1..3 which are referenced by the resources defined in the corresponding tables.   Feature Component Registry File Shortcuts MainFeature Comp1 RegistryKey1     MainFeature Comp2   File.txt   MainFeature Comp3   File2.txt Shortcut to File2.txt   It is illegal that the same resource is part of more than one component since this would break the refcount mechanism. Lets illustrate this:            Feature ComponentId Resource Reference Count Feature1 {1000-…} File1.txt 1 Feature2 {2000-….} File1.txt 1 The installation part works well but what happens when you uninstall Feature2? Component {20000…} gets a refcount of zero where MSI deletes all resources belonging to this component. In this case File1.txt will be deleted. But Feature1 still has another component {10000…} with a refcount of one which means that the file was deleted too early. You just have ruined your installation. To fix it you then need to click on the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs to let MSI reinstall any missing registry keys, files or shortcuts. The vigilant reader might has noticed that there is more in the Component table. Beside its name and GUID it has also an installation directory, attributes and a KeyPath. The KeyPath is a reference to a file or registry key which is used to detect if the component is already installed. This becomes important when you repair or uninstall a component. To find out if the component is already installed MSI checks if the registry key or file referenced by the KeyPath property does exist. When it does not exist it assumes that it was either already uninstalled (can lead to problems during uninstall) or that it is already installed and all is fine. Why is this detail so important? Lets put all files into one component. The KeyPath should be then one of the files of your component to check if it was installed or not. When your installation becomes corrupt because a file was deleted you cannot repair it with the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs because MSI checks the component integrity via the Resource referenced by its KeyPath. As long as you did not delete the KeyPath file MSI thinks all resources with your component are installed and never executes any repair action. You get even more trouble when you try to remove files during an upgrade (you cannot remove files during an update) from your super component which contains all files. The only way out and therefore best practice is to assign for every resource you want to install an extra component. This ensures painless updatability and repairs and you have much less effort to remove specific files during an upgrade. In effect you get this best practice relation Feature 1  –> n Components Component   1  –>  1 Resources MSI Component Rules Rule 1 – One component per resource Every resource you want to install (file, registry key, value, environment value, shortcut, directory, …) must get its own component which does never change between versions as long as the install location is the same. Penalty If you add more than one resources to a component you will break the repair capability of MSI because the KeyPath is used to check if the component needs repair. MSI ComponentId Files MSI 1.0 {1000} File1-5 MSI 2.0 {2000} File2-5 You want to remove File1 in version 2.0 of your MSI. Since you want to keep the other files you create a new component and add them there. MSI will delete all files if the component refcount of {1000} drops to zero. The files you want to keep are added to the new component {2000}. Ok that does work if your upgrade does uninstall the old MSI first. This will cause the refcount of all previously installed components to reach zero which means that all files present in version 1.0 are deleted. But there is a faster way to perform your upgrade by first installing your new MSI and then remove the old one.  If you choose this upgrade path then you will loose File1-5 after your upgrade and not only File1 as intended by your new component design.   Rule 2 – Only add, never remove resources from a component If you did follow rule 1 you will not need Rule 2. You can add in a patch more resources to one component. That is ok. But you can never remove anything from it. There are tricky ways around that but I do not want to encourage bad component design. Penalty Lets assume you have 2 MSI files which install under the same component one file   MSI1 MSI2 {1000} - ComponentId {1000} – ComponentId File1.txt File2.txt   When you install and uninstall both MSIs you will end up with an installation where either File1 or File2 will be left. Why? It seems that MSI does not store the resources associated with each component in its internal database. Instead Windows will simply query the MSI that is currently uninstalled for all resources belonging to this component. Since it will find only one file and not two it will only uninstall one file. That is the main reason why you never can remove resources from a component!   Rule 3 Never Remove A Component From an Update MSI. This is the same as if you change the GUID of a component by accident for your new update package. The resulting update package will not contain all components from the previously installed package. Penalty When you remove a component from a feature MSI will set the feature state during update to Advertised and log a warning message into its log file when you did enable MSI logging. SELMGR: ComponentId '{2DCEA1BA-3E27-E222-484C-D0D66AEA4F62}' is registered to feature 'xxxxxxx, but is not present in the Component table.  Removal of components from a feature is not supported! MSI (c) (24:44) [07:53:13:436]: SELMGR: Removal of a component from a feature is not supported Advertised means that MSI treats all components of this feature as not installed. As a consequence during uninstall nothing will be removed since it is not installed! This is not only bad because uninstall does no longer work but this feature will also not get the required patches. All other features which have followed component versioning rules for update packages will be updated but the one faulty feature will not. This results in very hard to find bugs why an update was only partially successful. Things got better with Windows Installer 4.5 but you cannot rely on that nobody will use an older installer. It is a good idea to add to your update msiexec call MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES=1 which will abort the installation if you did violate this rule.

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• Open Data, Government and Transparency

  - by Tori Wieldt

  A new track at TDC (The Developer's Conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil) is titled Open Data. It deals with open data, government and transparency. Saturday will be a "transparency hacker day" where developers are invited to create applications using open data from the Brazilian government.  Alexandre Gomes, co-lead of the track, says "I want to inspire developers to become "Civic hackers:" developers who create apps to make society better." It is a chance for developers to do well and do good. There are many opportunities for developers, including monitoring government expenditures and getting citizens involved via social networks. The open data movement is growing worldwide. One initiative, the Open Government Partnership, is working to make government data easier to find and access. Making this data easily available means that with the right applications, it will be easier for people to make decisions and suggestions about government policies based on detailed information. Last April, the Open Government Partnership held its annual meeting in Brasilia, the capitol of Brazil. It was a great success showcasing the innovative work being done in open data by governments, civil societies and individuals around the world. For example, Bulgaria now publishes daily data on budget spending for all public institutions. Alexandre Gomes Explains Open Data At TDC, the Open Data track will include a presentation of examples of successful open data projects, an introduction to the semantic web, how to handle big data sets, techniques of data visualization, and how to design APIs.The other track lead is Christian Moryah Miranda, a systems analyst for the Brazilian Government's Ministry of Planning. "The Brazilian government wholeheartedly supports this effort. In order to make our data available to the public, it forces us to be more consistent with our data across ministries, and that's a good step forward for us," he said. He explained the government knows they cannot achieve everything they would like without help from the public. "It is not the government versus the people, rather citizens are partners with the government, and together we can achieve great things!" Miranda exclaimed. Saturday at TDC will be a "transparency hacker day" where developers will be invited to create applications using open data from the Brazilian government. Attendees are invited to pitch their ideas, work in small groups, and present their project at the end of the conference. "For example," Gomes said, "the Brazilian government just released the salaries of all government employees and I can't wait to see what developers can do with that." Resources Open Government Partnership  U.S. Government Open Data ProjectBrazilian Government Open Data ProjectU.K. Government Open Data Project 2012 International Open Government Data Conference 

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• Oracle Service Registry 11gR1 Support for Oracle Fusion Middleware/SOA Suite 11g PatchSet 2

  - by Dave Berry

  As you might be aware, a few days back we released Patchset 2 (PS2) for several products in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 stack including WebLogic Server and SOA Suite. Though there was no patchset released for Oracle Service Registry (OSR) 11g, being an integral part of Fusion Middleware & SOA, OSR 11g R1 ( 11.1.1.2 ) is fully certified with this release. Below is some recommended reading before installing OSR 11g with the new PS2 : OSR 11g R1 & SOA Suite 11g PS2 in a Shared WebLogic Domain If you intend to deploy OSR 11g in the same domain as the SOA Suite 11g, the primary recommendation is to install OSR 11g in its own Managed Server within the same Weblogic Domain as the SOA Suite, as the following diagram depicts : An important pre-requisite for this setup is to apply Patch 9499508, after installation. It basically replaces a registry library - wasp.jar - in the registry application deployed on your server, so as to enable co-deployment of OSR 11g & SOA Suite 11g in the same WLS Domain. The patch fixes a java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraint violation that appears in your OSR system log and is now available for download. The second, equally important, pre-requisite is to modify the setDomainEnv.sh/.cmd file for your WebLogic Domain to conditionally set the CLASSPATH so that the oracle.soa.fabric.jar library is not included in it for the Managed Server(s) hosting OSR 11g. Both these pre-requisites and other OSR 11g Topology Best Practices are covered in detail in the new Knowledge Base article Oracle Service Registry 11g Topology : Best Practices. Architecting an OSR 11g High Availability Setup Typically you would want to create a High Availability (HA) OSR 11g setup, especially on your production system. The following illustrates the recommended topology. The article, Hands-on Guide to Creating an Oracle Service Registry 11g High-Availability Setup on Oracle WebLogic Server 11g on OTN provides step-by-step instructions for creating such an active-active HA setup of multiple OSR 11g nodes with a Load Balancer in an Oracle WebLogic Server cluster environment. Additional Info The OSR Home Page on OTN is the hub for OSR and is regularly updated with latest information, articles, white papers etc. For further reading, this FAQ answers some common questions on OSR. The OSR Certification Matrix lists the Application Servers, Databases, Artifact Storage Tools, Web Browsers, IDEs, etc... that OSR 11g is certified against. If you hit any problems during OSR 11g installation, design time or runtime, the first place to look into is the logs. To find more details about which logs to check when & where, take a look at Where to find Oracle Service Registry Logs? Finally, if you have any questions or problems, there are various ways to reach us - on the SOA Governance forum on OTN, on the Community Forums or by contacting Oracle Support. Yogesh Sontakke and Dave Berry

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• Unstructured Data - The future of Data Administration

  Some have claimed that there is a problem with the way data is currently managed using the relational paradigm do to the rise of unstructured data in modern business. PCMag.com defines unstructured data as data that does not reside in a fixed location. They further explain that unstructured data refers to data in a free text form that is not bound to any specific structure. With the rise of unstructured data in the form of emails, spread sheets, images and documents the critics have a right to argue that the relational paradigm is not as effective as the object oriented data paradigm in managing this type of data. The relational paradigm relies heavily on structure and relationships in and between items of data. This type of paradigm works best in a relation database management system like Microsoft SQL, MySQL, and Oracle because data is forced to conform to a structure in the form of tables and relations can be derived from the existence of one or more tables. These critics also claim that database administrators have not kept up with reality because their primary focus in regards to data administration deals with structured data and the relational paradigm. The relational paradigm was developed in the 1970’s as a way to improve data management when compared to standard flat files. Little has changed since then, and modern database administrators need to know more than just how to handle structured data. That is why critics claim that today’s data professionals do not have the proper skills in order to store and maintain data for modern systems when compared to the skills of system designers, programmers , software engineers, and data designers  due to the industry trend of object oriented design and development. I think that they are wrong. I do not disagree that the industry is moving toward an object oriented approach to development with the potential to use more of an object oriented approach to data.   However, I think that it is business itself that is limiting database administrators from changing how data is stored because of the potential costs, and impact that might occur by altering any part of stored data. Furthermore, database administrators like all technology workers constantly are trying to improve their technical skills in order to excel in their job, so I think that accusing data professional is not just when the root cause of the lack of innovation is controlled by business, and it is business that will suffer for their inability to keep up with technology. One way for database professionals to better prepare for the future of database management is start working with data in the form of objects and so that they can extract data from the objects so that the stored information within objects can be used in relation to the data stored in a using the relational paradigm. Furthermore, I think the use of pattern matching will increase with the increased use of unstructured data because object can be selected, filtered and altered based on the existence of a pattern found within an object.

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• A couple of nice features when using OracleTextSearch

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  If you have your UCM/URM instance configured to use the Oracle 11g database as the search engine, you can be using OracleTextSearch as the search definition. OracleTextSearch uses the advanced features of Oracle Text for indexing and searching. This includes the ability to specify metadata fields to be optimized for the search index, fast rebuilding, and index optimization. If you are on 10g of UCM, then you'll need to load the OracleTextSearch component that is available in the CS10gR35UpdateBundle component on the support site (patch #6907073). If you are on 11g, no component is needed. Then you specify the search indexer name with the configuration flag of SearchIndexerEngineName=OracleTextSearch. Please see the docs for other configuration settings and setup instructions. So I thought I would highlight a couple of other unique features available with OracleTextSearch. The first is the Drill Down feature. This feature allows you to specify specific metadata fields that will break down the results of that field based on the total results. So in the above graphic, you can see how it broke down the extensions and gives a count for each. Then you just need to click on that link to then drill into that result. This setting is perfect for option list fields and ones with a distinct set of values possible. By default, it will use the fields Type, Security Group, and Account (if enabled). But you can also specify your own fields. In 10g, you can use the following configuration entry: DrillDownFields=xWebsiteObjectType,dExtension,dSecurityGroup,dDocType And in 11g, you can specify it through the Configuration Manager applet. Simply click on the Advanced Search Design, highlight the field to filter, click Edit, and check 'Is a filter category'. The other feature you get with OracleTextSearch are search snippets. These snippets show the occurrence of the search term in context of their usage. This is very similar to how Google displays its results. If you are on 10g, this is enabled by default. If you are on 11g, you need to turn on the feature. The following configuration entry will enable it: OracleTextDisableSearchSnippet=false Once enabled, you can add the snippets to your search results. Go to Change View -> Customize and add a new search result view. In the Available Fields in the Special section, select Snippet and move it to the Main or Additional Information. If you want to include the snippets with the Classic results, you can add the idoc variable of <$srfDocSnippet$> to display them. One caveat is that this can effect search performance on large collections. So plan the infrastructure accordingly.

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• BI Publisher at Collaborate 2010

  - by mike.donohue

  Noelle and I are heading to Collaborate 2010 next week. There are over two dozen sessions on BI Publisher including a Hands On Lab (see below). Very excited to see what our customers and partners will be presenting and how they are using BI Publisher to get better reports and reduce costs. My only regret is that many sessions are scheduled at the same time so I won't get to see all of them. Noelle and I will be presenting the following: Monday, April 19 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Introduction to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Session: 227 Location: Reef F By: Mike 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm The Reporting Platform for Applications: Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Session: 73170 Location: South Seas Ballroom J By: Noelle 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Hands On Lab (1) Session: 217 Location: Palm D By: Noelle and Mike Tuesday, April 20 8:00 am - 9:00 am Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Best Practices Session: 218 Location: Palm D By: Noelle and Mike We will also be at the BI Technology demo pod in the exhibt hall so please stop by and say hello. All BI Publisher related Sessions Sunday, April 18 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm Customizing your Invoices in a Flash! 3:00 pm - 3:50 pm BI Publisher SIG Meeting - Part 1 4:00 pm - 4:50 pm BI Publisher SIG Meeting - Part 2 Monday, April 19 8:00 am - 9:00 am XML Publisher and FSG for Beginners 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Introduction to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm The Reporting Platform for Applications: Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Bay Ballroom A What it Takes to Make Your Business Intelligence Implementation a Success 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm XML Publisher-More Than Just Form Letters 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Reporting and Batch Discussions presented by Technology SIG 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm Hands On Lab: Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (1) Tuesday, April 20 8:00 am - 9:00 am Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Best Practices 8:00 am - 9:00 am Creating XML Publisher Documents with PeopleCode 10:30 am - 11:30 am Moving to BI Publisher, Now What? Automated Fax and Email from Oracle EBS 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Smart Reporting in Oracle Financials Release 12.1 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Custom Check Printing Framework using XML Publisher 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm BI Publisher and Oracle BI for JD Edwards Wednesday, April 21 8:00 am - 9:00 am XML Publisher Tips for PeopleTools 10:30 am - 11:30 am JD Edwards World - Technical Upgrade Considerations 10:30 am - 11:30 am Data Visualization Best Practices: Know how to design and improve your BI & EPM reports, dashboards, and queries 10:30 am - 11:30 am Oracle BIEE End-to-End 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Empower JD Edwards Users with Oracle BI Publisher for Ad Hoc Reporting 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm BIP and JD Edwards World - Good Stuff! 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm Proven Strategies for Increasing ROI with PeopleSoft HCM 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm Using Oracle BI Delivers to Send Reports to JD Edwards Users Thursday, April 22 9:45 am - 10:45 am PeopleSoft Recruiting Enhancements You Can Use 9:45 am - 10:45 am Reducing Cost with Oracle's BI Publisher Note (1) the Hands On Lab was not showing in the joint scheduler as of this posting but, it is definitely ON.

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• Resources such as libraries, engines and frameworks to make Javacript-based MMORTS? [closed]

  - by hhh

  I am looking for resources outlined to make a MMORTS with Javascript as the client-side, probably just a simple canvas for the frontend. The guy in the video here mentions that JavaScript is one of the most misunderstood language -- and I do believe that. I think one can make quite cool games with it in the future. So I am now proactively looking for resources and perhaps some ideas. My first idea contained Node.js, C and NetBSD/bozohttpd (or the-4-7-chars' *ix-thing with green-logo -thing, move the q here) but I acknowledge my beginner -style approach -- this issue is broad and not only for one person to make it all-the-time-improved project! So I think perfect for community to tinker. Some games and examples possibly easy to make into MMORTS BrowserQuest here under MPL 2.0 and its content licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (source here) [proprietary] LoU here and built with JS/Qooxdoo/c#/Windows-Server/ISS/etc, source. MY ANSWER BEGINS HERE TO BE MOVED BELOW, REQUIRING RE-OPENING. PLEASE, VOTE TO OPEN IT -- HELP US TO TINKER! My answer Generic Is there an MMO-related research body? Although about Android, certain things also appropriate with JS -game: Are there any 2D gaming libraries/frameworks/engines for Android? Why is it so hard to develop a MMO? Browser based MMO Architecture MMO architecture - Highly Scalable with Reporting capabilities What are the Elements of an MMO Game? Is this the right architecture for our MMORPG mobile game? Looking for architectures to develop massive multiplayer game server Information on seamless MMO server architecture Game-mechanics (search) Question sounding like about LoU: What are the different ways to balance an online multiplayer game where user spend different amounts of time online? Building an instance system What are the different ways to balance an online multiplayer game where user spend different amounts of time online? Hosting is it possible to make a MMO starting with scalable hosting? Should I keep login server apart from game server? MMO techniques, algorithms and resources for keeping bandwidth low? MMO Proxy Server Javascript and Client-based things What do I need to do a MMORTS in JavaScript with small amount of Developers? How to update the monsters in my MMO server using Node.js and Socket.IO Are there any good html 5 mmo design tutorials? Networking Loadbalancing Questions Something about TCP, routers, NAT, etc: How do I start writing an MMO game server? Who does the AI calculations in an MMO? They need someone more knowledgable to work with, a lot of cases where the same words mean different things. Data Structures What data structure should I use for a Diablo/WoW-style talent tree? Game Engine Need an engine for MMO mockup Helper sites http://www.gamedev.net/page/index.html

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• Silverlight Cream for April 02, 2010 -- #828

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Robert Kozak, Kathleen Dollard, Avi Pilosof, Nokola, Jeff Wilcox, David Anson, Timmy Kokke, Tim Greenfield, and Josh Smith. Shoutout: SmartyP has additional info up on his WP7 Pivot app: Preview of My Current Windows Phone 7 Pivot Work From SilverlightCream.com: A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part I Phil Middlemiss is starting a tutorial series on building a new theme for Silverlight, in this first one we define some gradients and color resources... good stuff Phil Intercepting INotifyPropertyChanged This is Robert Kozak's first post on this blog, but it's a good one about INotifyPropertyChanged and MVVM and has a solution in the post with lots of code and discussion. How do I Display Data of Complex Bound Criteria in Horizontal Lists in Silverlight? Kathleen Dollard's latest article in Visual Studio magazine is in answer to a question about displaying a list of complex bound criteria including data, child data, and photos, and displaying them horizontally one at a time. Very nice-looking result, and all the code. Windows Phone: Frame/Page navigation and transitions using the TransitioningContentControl Avi Pilosof discusses the built-in (boring) navigation on WP7, and then shows using the TransitionContentControl from the Toolkit to apply transitions to the navigation. EasyPainter: Cloud Turbulence and Particle Buzz Nokola returns with a couple more effects for EasyPainter: Cloud Turbulence and Particle Buzz ... check out the example screenshots, then go grab the code. Property change notifications for multithreaded Silverlight applications Jeff Wilcox is discussing the need for getting change notifications to always happen on the UI thread in multi-threaded apps... great diagrams to see what's going on. Tip: The default value of a DependencyProperty is shared by all instances of the class that registers it David Anson has a tip up about setting the default value of a DependencyProperty, and the consequence that may have depending upon the type. Building a “real” extension for Expression Blend Timmy Kokke's code is WPF, but the subject is near and dear to us all, Timmy has a real-world Expression Blend extension up... a search for controls in the Objects and Timelines pane ... and even if that doesn't interest you... it's the source to a Blend extension! XPath support in Silverlight 4 + XPathPad Tim Greenfield not only talks about XPath in SL4RC, but he has produced a tool, XPathPad, and provided the source... if you've used XPath, you either are a higher thinker than me(not a big stretch), or you need this :) Using a Service Locator to Work with MessageBoxes in an MVVM Application Josh Smith posted about a question that comes up a lot: showing a messagebox from a ViewModel object. This might not work for custom message boxes or unit testing. This post covers the Unit Testing aspect. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• The Sitemap Paradox

  - by Jeff Atwood

  We use a sitemap on Stack Overflow, but I have mixed feelings about it. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. Based on our two years' experience with sitemaps, there's something fundamentally paradoxical about the sitemap: Sitemaps are intended for sites that are hard to crawl properly. If Google can't successfully crawl your site to find a link, but is able to find it in the sitemap it gives the sitemap link no weight and will not index it! That's the sitemap paradox -- if your site isn't being properly crawled (for whatever reason), using a sitemap will not help you! Google goes out of their way to make no sitemap guarantees: "We cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index" citation "We don't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. For example, we won't crawl or index image URLs contained in your Sitemap." citation "submitting a Sitemap doesn't guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results" citation Given that links found in sitemaps are merely recommendations, whereas links found on your own website proper are considered canonical ... it seems the only logical thing to do is avoid having a sitemap and make damn sure that Google and any other search engine can properly spider your site using the plain old standard web pages everyone else sees. By the time you have done that, and are getting spidered nice and thoroughly so Google can see that your own site links to these pages, and would be willing to crawl the links -- uh, why do we need a sitemap, again? The sitemap can be actively harmful, because it distracts you from ensuring that search engine spiders are able to successfully crawl your whole site. "Oh, it doesn't matter if the crawler can see it, we'll just slap those links in the sitemap!" Reality is quite the opposite in our experience. That seems more than a little ironic considering sitemaps were intended for sites that have a very deep collection of links or complex UI that may be hard to spider. In our experience, the sitemap does not help, because if Google can't find the link on your site proper, it won't index it from the sitemap anyway. We've seen this proven time and time again with Stack Overflow questions. Am I wrong? Do sitemaps make sense, and we're somehow just using them incorrectly?

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• Learn about MySQL with the Authentic MySQL for Beginners course

  - by Antoinette O'Sullivan

  Learn about the MySQL Server and other MySQL products by taking the authentic MySQL for Beginners course. This course covers all the basics from MySQL download and installation, to relational database concepts and database design. This course is your first step to becoming a MySQL administrator. You can take this course through one of the following delivery types: Training-on-Demand: Start the class from your desk, at your base and within 24 hrs of registering. Read Ben Krug on Day 3 of his experience taking the MySQL for Beginners course Training-on-Demand option. Live-Virtual Class: Attend this live class from your own office - no travel required. Choose from a selection of events on the schedule to suit different timezones. Delivery languages include English and German. In-Class event: Attend this class in an education center. Events already on the schedule include:  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Mechelen, Belgium  14 January 2013  English  London, England  5 March 2013  English  Hamburg, Germany  25 March 2013  German  Munich, Germany  3 June 2013  German  Budapest, Hungary  5 February 2013  Hungary  Milan, Italy  11 February 2013  Italian  Rome, Italy  4 March 2013  Italian  Riga, Latvia  18 February 2013  Latvian  Amsterdam, Netherlands  21 May 2013  Dutch  Nieuwegein, Netherlands  18 February 2013  Dutch  Warsaw, Poland  18 February 2013  Polish  Lisbon, Portugal  25 March 2013  European Portugese  Porto, Portugal  25 March 2013  European Portugese  Barcelona, Spain  11 February 2013  Spanish  Madrid, Spain  22 April 2013  Spanish  Nairobi, Kenya  14 January 2013  English  Capetown, South Africa  22 July 2013  English  Pretoria, South Africa  22 April 2013  English  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  28 January 2013  English  Ottawa, Canada  25 March 2013  English  Toronto, Canada  25 March 2013  English  Montreal, Canada 25 March 2013   English Mexico City, Mexico  14 January 2013   Spanish  San Pedro Garza Garcia, Mexico  5 February 2013  Spanish  Sao Paolo, Brazil  29 January 2013  Brazilian Portugese For more information on this or other courses on the authentic MySQL Curriculum, go to http://oracle.com/education/mysql. Note, many organizations deploy both Oracle Database and MySQL side by side to serve different needs, and as a database professional you can find training courses on both topics at Oracle University! Check out the upcoming Oracle Database training courses and MySQL training courses. Even if you're only managing Oracle Databases at this point of time, getting familiar with MySQL will broaden your career path with growing job demand.

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