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  • MERGE gives better OUTPUT options

    - by Rob Farley
    MERGE is very cool. There are a ton of useful things about it – mostly around the fact that you can implement a ton of change against a table all at once. This is great for data warehousing, handling changes made to relational databases by applications, all kinds of things. One of the more subtle things about MERGE is the power of the OUTPUT clause. Useful for logging.   If you’re not familiar with the OUTPUT clause, you really should be – it basically makes your DML (INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/MERGE) statement return data back to you. This is a great way of returning identity values from INSERT commands (so much better than SCOPE_IDENTITY() or the older (and worse) @@IDENTITY, because you can get lots of rows back). You can even use it to grab default values that are set using non-deterministic functions like NEWID() – things you couldn’t normally get back without running another query (or with a trigger, I guess, but that’s not pretty). That inserted table I referenced – that’s part of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that goes on with all DML changes. When you insert data, this internal table called inserted gets populated with rows, and then used to inflict the appropriate inserts on the various structures that store data (HoBTs – the Heaps or B-Trees used to store data as tables and indexes). When deleting, the deleted table gets populated. Updates get a matching row in both tables (although this doesn’t mean that an update is a delete followed by an inserted, it’s just the way it’s handled with these tables). These tables can be referenced by the OUTPUT clause, which can show you the before and after for any DML statement. Useful stuff. MERGE is slightly different though. With MERGE, you get a mix of entries. Your MERGE statement might be doing some INSERTs, some UPDATEs and some DELETEs. One of the most common examples of MERGE is to perform an UPSERT command, where data is updated if it already exists, or inserted if it’s new. And in a single operation too. Here, you can see the usefulness of the deleted and inserted tables, which clearly reflect the type of operation (but then again, MERGE lets you use an extra column called $action to show this). (Don’t worry about the fact that I turned on IDENTITY_INSERT, that’s just so that I could insert the values) One of the things I love about MERGE is that it feels almost cursor-like – the UPDATE bit feels like “WHERE CURRENT OF …”, and the INSERT bit feels like a single-row insert. And it is – but into the inserted and deleted tables. The operations to maintain the HoBTs are still done using the whole set of changes, which is very cool. And $action – very convenient. But as cool as $action is, that’s not the point of my post. If it were, I hope you’d all be disappointed, as you can’t really go near the MERGE statement without learning about it. The subtle thing that I love about MERGE with OUTPUT is that you can hook into more than just inserted and deleted. Did you notice in my earlier query that my source table had a ‘src’ field, that wasn’t used in the insert? Normally, this would be somewhat pointless to include in my source query. But with MERGE, I can put that in the OUTPUT clause. This is useful stuff, particularly when you’re needing to audit the changes. Suppose your query involved consolidating data from a number of sources, but you didn’t need to insert that into the actual table, just into a table for audit. This is now very doable, either using the INTO clause of OUTPUT, or surrounding the whole MERGE statement in brackets (parentheses if you’re American) and using a regular INSERT statement. This is also doable if you’re using MERGE to just do INSERTs. In case you hadn’t realised, you can use MERGE in place of an INSERT statement. It’s just like the UPSERT-style statement we’ve just seen, except that we want nothing to match. That’s easy to do, we just use ON 1=2. This is obviously more convoluted than a straight INSERT. And it’s slightly more effort for the database engine too. But, if you want the extra audit capabilities, the ability to hook into the other source columns is definitely useful. Oh, and before people ask if you can also hook into the target table’s columns... Yes, of course. That’s what deleted and inserted give you.

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  • VS2010 crashes when opening a vsp generated using VS 2012

    - by Tarun Arora
    I recently profiled some web applications using Visual Studio 2012, a vsp (Visual Studio Profile) file was generated as a result of the profiling session. I could successfully open the vsp file in Visual Studio 2012 as expected but when I tried to open the vsp file in Visual Studio 2010 the VS2010 IDE crashed. As a responsible citizen I raised bug # 762202 on Microsoft Connect site using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Client. Note – In case you didn’t already know, VSP generated in Visual Studio 2012 is not backward compatible. Please refer below for the steps to reproduce the issue and the resolution of the connect bug. 1. Behaviour and Steps to Reproduce the Issue Description I have generated a vsp file by using the Visual Studio 2012 Standalone profiler. When I try and open the vsp file in Visual Studio 2010 the IDE crashes. I understand that a vsp generated by using VS 2012 cannot be opened in VS 2010, but the IDE crashing is not the behaviour I would expect to see. Steps to Reproduce the Issue 1. Pick up the Stand lone profiler from the VS 2012 installation media. The folder has both x 64 and x86 installer, since the machine I am using is x64 bit. I have installed the x64 version of the standalone profiler. 2. I have configured the system path by setting the 'environment variable' path to where the profiler is installed. In my case this is, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Team Tools\Performance Tools 3. Created a new environment variable _NT_SYMBOL_PATH and set its value to CACHE*C:\SYMBOLSCACHE;SRV*C:\SYMBOLSCACHE*HTTP://MSDL.MICROSOFT.COM/DOWNLOAD/SYMBOLS;\\FOO\BUILD1234 4. Open up CMD as an administrator and run 'VSPerfASPNETCmd /tip http://localhost:56180/ /o:C:\Temp\SampleEISK.vsp' 5. This generates the following message on the cmd       Microsoft (R) VSPerf ASP.NET Command, Version 11.0.0.0     Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.     Configuring and attaching to ASP.NET process. Please wait.     Setting up profiling environment.     Starting monitor.     Launching ASP.NET service.     Attaching Monitor to process.     Launching Internet Explorer.     The profiler is attached to ASP.net. Please run your application scenario now.     Press Enter to stop data collection...   6. I perform certain actions and then I come back to the cmd and hit enter to shut down the profiling. Once I do this, the following message is written to the cmd, Press Enter to stop data collection... Profiling now shut down. Report file "C:\Temp\SampleEISK.vsp" was generated. Running VsPerfReport, packing symbols into the .VSP. Shutting down profiling and restarting ASP.NET. Please wait. Restarting w3wp.exe.   7. I look in the C:\Temp folder and I can see the SampleEISK.vsp file generated. I can successfully open this file in Visual Studio 2012. 8. When I am trying to open the vsp file in VS 2010 the VS 2010 IDE crashes. Kaboooom! What I would expect to happen I expect to receive a message "VS 2010 does not support the vsp file generated by VS 2012". What actually happened The VS 2010 IDE crashed 2. Resolution This is a valid bug! However, there isn’t much value in releasing a hotfix for this issue. Refer below to the resolution provided by the Visual Studio Profiler Team.  Thank you for taking the time to report this issue. We completely agree that Visual Studio 2010 should not crash. However in this particular case this is not a bug we are going to retroactively release a fix to 2010 for at this point. Given that a fix would not unblock the scenario of opening a 2012 created file on Visual Studio 2010, and there is not an active update channel for Visual Studio 2010 other than manually locating and installing hot fixes, we will not be fixing this particular issue. Best Regards, Visual Studio Profiler Team   Though it would be great to improve the behaviour however, this is not a defect that would stop you from progressing in any way. It’s important to note however that VSP files generated by Visual Studio 2012 are not backward compatible so you should refrain from opening these files in Visual Studio 2010.

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  • WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010: Tips for delaying the Visual Upgrade

    - by Kelly Jones
    My most recent project has been to migrate a bunch of sites from WSS 3.0 (SharePoint 2007) to SharePoint Server 2010.  The users are currently working with WSS 3.0 and Office 2003, so the new ribbon based UI in 2010 will be completely new.  My client wants to avoid the new SharePoint 2010 look and feel until they’ve had time to train their users, so we’ve been testing the upgrades by keeping them with the 2007 user interface. Permission to perform the Visual Upgrade One of the first things we noticed was the default permissions for who was allowed to switch the UI from 2007 to 2010.  By default, site collection administrators and site owners can do this.  Since we wanted to more tightly control the timing of the new UI, I added a few lines to the PowerShell script that we are using to perform the migration.  This script creates the web application, sets the User Policy, and then does a Mount-SPDatabase to attach the old 2007 content database to the 2010 farm.  I added the following steps after the Mount-SPDatabase step: #Remove the visual upgrade option for site owners # it remains for Site Collection administrators foreach ($sc in $WebApp.Sites){ foreach ($web in $sc.AllWebs){ #Visual Upgrade permissions for the site/subsite (web) $web.UIversionConfigurationEnabled = $false; $web.Update(); } } These script steps loop through each Site Collection in a particular web application ($WebApp) and then it loops through each subsite ($web) in the Site Collection ($sc) and disables the Site Owner’s permission to perform the Visual Upgrade. This is equivalent to going to the Site Collection administrator settings page –> Visual Upgrade and selecting “Hide Visual Upgrade”. Since only IT people have Site Collection administrator privileges, this will allow IT to control the timing of the new 2010 UI rollout. Newly created subsites Our next issue was brought to our attention by SharePoint Joel’s blog post last week (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=524 ).  In it, he lists some updates about the 2010 upgrade, and his fourth point was one that I hadn’t seen yet: 4. If a 2007 upgraded site has not been visually upgraded, the sites created underneath it will look like 2010 sites – While this is something I’ve been aware of, I think many don’t realize how this impacts common look and feel for master pages, and how it impacts good navigation and UI. As well depending on your patch level you may see hanging behavior in the list picker. The site and list creation Silverlight control in Internet Explorer is looking for resources that don’t exist in the galleries in the 2007 site, and hence it continues to spin and spin and eventually time out. The work around is to upgrade to SP1, or use Chrome or Firefox which won’t attempt to render the Silverlight control. When the root site collection is a 2007 site and has it’s set of galleries and the children are 2010 sites there is some strange behavior linked to the way that the galleries work and pull from the parent. Our production SharePoint 2010 Farm has SP1 installed, as well as the December 2011 Cumulative Update, so I think the “hanging behavior” he mentions won’t affect us. However, since we want to control the roll out of the UI, we are concerned that new subsites will have the 2010 look and feel, no matter what the parent site has. Ok, time to dust off my developer skills. I first looked into using feature stapling, but I couldn’t get that to work (although I’m pretty sure I had everything wired up correctly).  Then I stumbled upon SharePoint 2010’s web events – a great way to handle this. Using Visual Studio 2010, I created a new SharePoint project and added a Web Event Receiver: In the Event Receiver class, I used the WebProvisioned method to check if the parent site is a 2007 site (UIVersion = 3), and if so, then set the newly created site to 2007:   /// <summary> /// A site was provisioned. /// </summary> public override void WebProvisioned(SPWebEventProperties properties) { base.WebProvisioned(properties);   try { SPWeb curweb = properties.Web;   if (curweb.ParentWeb != null) {   //check if the parent website has the 2007 look and feel if (curweb.ParentWeb.UIVersion == 3) { //since parent site has 2007 look and feel // we'll apply that look and feel to the current web curweb.UIVersion = 3; curweb.Update(); } } } catch (Exception) { //TODO: Add logging for errors } }   This event is part of a Feature that is scoped to the Site Level (Site Collection).  I added a couple of lines to my migration PowerShell script to activate the Feature for any site collections that we migrate. Plan Going Forward The plan going forward is to perform the visual upgrade after the users for a particular site collection have gone through 2010 training. If we need to do several site collections at once, we’ll use a PowerShell script to loop through each site collection to update the sites to 2010.  If it’s just one or two, we’ll be using the “Update All Sites” button on the Visual Upgrade page for Site Collection Administrators. The custom code for newly created sites won’t need to be changed, since it relies on the UI version of the parent site.  If the parent is 2010, then the new site will look 2010.

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  • To My 24 Year Old Self, Wherever You Are&hellip;

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    A decade is a milestone in one’s life, regardless of when it occurs. 2011 might seem like a weird year to mark a decade, but 2001 was a defining year for me. It marked my emergence into the technology industry, an unexpected loss of innocence, and triggered an ongoing struggle with faith and belief. Once you go through a valley, climbing the mountain and looking back over where you travelled, you can take in the entirety of the journey. Over the last 10 years I kept journals, and in this new year I took some time to review them. For those today that are me a decade ago, I share with you what I’ve gleamed from my experiences. Take it for what it’s worth, and safe travels on your own journeys through life. Life is a Performance-Based Sport Have confidence, believe you’re capable, but realize that life is a performance-based sport. Everything you get in life is based on whether you can show that you deserve it. Performance is also your best defense against personal attacks. Just make sure you know what standards you’re expected to hit and if people want to poke holes at you let them do the work of trying to find them. Sometimes performance won’t matter though. Good things will happen to bad people, and bad things to good people. What’s important is that you do the right things and ensure the good and bad even out in your own life. How you finish is just as important as how you start. Start strong, end strong. Respect is Your Most Prized Reward Respect is more important than status or ego. The formula is simple: Performing Well + Building Trust + Showing Dedication = Respect Focus on perfecting your craft and helping your team and respect will come. Life is a Team Sport Whatever aspect of your life, you can’t do it alone. You need to rely on the people around you and ensure you’re a positive aspect of their lives; even those that may be difficult or unpleasant. Avoid criticism and instead find ways to help colleagues and superiors better whatever environment you’re in (work, home, etc.). Don’t just highlight gaps and issues, but also come to the table with solutions. At the same time though, stand up for yourself and hold others accountable for the commitments they make to the team. A healthy team needs accountability. Give feedback early and often, and make it verbal. Issues should be dealt with immediately, and positives should be celebrated as they happen. Life is a Contact Sport Difficult moments will happen. Don’t run from them or shield yourself from experiencing them. Embrace them. They will further mold you and reveal who you will become. Find Your Tribe and Embrace Your Community We all need a tribe: a group of people that we gravitate to for support, guidance, wisdom, and friendship. Discover your tribe and immerse yourself in them. Don’t look for a non-existent tribe just to fill the need of belonging though that will leave you empty and bitter when they don’t meet your unrealistic expectations. Try to associate with people more experienced and more knowledgeable than you. You’ll always learn, and you’ll always remember you have much to learn. Put yourself out there, get involved with the community. Opportunities will present themselves. When we open ourselves up to be vulnerable, we also give others the chance to do the same. This helps us all to grow and help each other, it’s very important. And listen to your wife. (Easter *is* a romantic holiday btw, regardless of what you may think.) Don’t Believe Your Own Press Clippings (and by that I mean the ones you write) Until you have a track record of performance to refer to, any notions of grandeur are just that: notions. You lose your rookie status through trials and tribulations, not by the number of stamps in your passport. Be realistic about your own “experience and leadership” and be honest when you aren’t ready for something. And always remember: nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Don’t Let Assholes Get You Down The world isn’t evil, but there is evil in the world. Know the difference and don’t paint all people with the same brush. Do be wary of those that use personal beliefs to describe their business (i.e. “We’re a [religion] company”). What matters is the culture of the organization, and that will tell you the moral compass and what is truly valued. Don’t make someone or something a priority that only makes you an option. Life is unfair and enemies/opponents will succeed when you fail. Don’t waste your energy getting upset at this; the only one that will lose out is you. As mentioned earlier, nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Misc Ecclesiastes is bullshit. Everything is certainly *not* meaningless. Software development is about delivery, not the process. Having a great process means nothing if you don’t produce anything. Watch “The Weatherman” (“It’s not easy, but easy doesn’t enter into grownup life.”). Read Tony Dungee’s autobiography, even if you don’t like football, and even if you aren’t a Christian. Say no, don’t feel like you have to commit right away when someone asks you to.

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  • Migrating Core Data to new UIManagedDocument in iOS 5

    - by samerpaul
    I have an app that has been on the store since iOS 3.1, so there is a large install base out there that still uses Core Data loaded up in my AppDelegate. In the most recent set of updates, I raised the minimum version to 4.3 but still kept the same way of loading the data. Recently, I decided it's time to make the minimum version 5.1 (especially with 6 around the corner), so I wanted to start using the new fancy UIManagedDocument way of using Core Data. The issue with this though is that the old database file is still sitting in the iOS app, so there is no migrating to the new document. You have to basically subclass UIManagedDocument with a new model class, and override a couple of methods to do it for you. Here's a tutorial on what I did for my app TimeTag.  Step One: Add a new class file in Xcode and subclass "UIManagedDocument" Go ahead and also add a method to get the managedObjectModel out of this class. It should look like:   @interface TimeTagModel : UIManagedDocument   - (NSManagedObjectModel *)managedObjectModel;   @end   Step two: Writing the methods in the implementation file (.m) I first added a shortcut method for the applicationsDocumentDirectory, which returns the URL of the app directory.  - (NSURL *)applicationDocumentsDirectory {     return [[[NSFileManagerdefaultManager] URLsForDirectory:NSDocumentDirectoryinDomains:NSUserDomainMask] lastObject]; }   The next step was to pull the managedObjectModel file itself (.momd file). In my project, it's called "minimalTime". - (NSManagedObjectModel *)managedObjectModel {     NSString *path = [[NSBundlemainBundle] pathForResource:@"minimalTime"ofType:@"momd"];     NSURL *momURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path];     NSManagedObjectModel *managedObjectModel = [[NSManagedObjectModel alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:momURL];          return managedObjectModel; }   After that, I need to check for a legacy installation and migrate it to the new UIManagedDocument file instead. This is the overridden method: - (BOOL)configurePersistentStoreCoordinatorForURL:(NSURL *)storeURL ofType:(NSString *)fileType modelConfiguration:(NSString *)configuration storeOptions:(NSDictionary *)storeOptions error:(NSError **)error {     // If legacy store exists, copy it to the new location     NSURL *legacyPersistentStoreURL = [[self applicationDocumentsDirectory] URLByAppendingPathComponent:@"minimalTime.sqlite"];          NSFileManager* fileManager = [NSFileManagerdefaultManager];     if ([fileManager fileExistsAtPath:legacyPersistentStoreURL.path])     {         NSLog(@"Old db exists");         NSError* thisError = nil;         [fileManager replaceItemAtURL:storeURL withItemAtURL:legacyPersistentStoreURL backupItemName:niloptions:NSFileManagerItemReplacementUsingNewMetadataOnlyresultingItemURL:nilerror:&thisError];     }          return [superconfigurePersistentStoreCoordinatorForURL:storeURL ofType:fileType modelConfiguration:configuration storeOptions:storeOptions error:error]; }   Basically what's happening above is that it checks for the minimalTime.sqlite file inside the app's bundle on the iOS device.  If the file exists, it tells you inside the console, and then tells the fileManager to replace the storeURL (inside the method parameter) with the legacy URL. This basically gives your app access to all the existing data the user has generated (otherwise they would load into a blank app, which would be disastrous). It returns a YES if successful (by calling it's [super] method). Final step: Actually load this database Due to how my app works, I actually have to load the database at launch (instead of shortly after, which would be ideal). I call a method called loadDatabase, which looks like this: -(void)loadDatabase {     static dispatch_once_t onceToken;          // Only do this once!     dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{         // Get the URL         // The minimalTimeDB name is just something I call it         NSURL *url = [[selfapplicationDocumentsDirectory] URLByAppendingPathComponent:@"minimalTimeDB"];         // Init the TimeTagModel (our custom class we wrote above) with the URL         self.timeTagDB = [[TimeTagModel alloc] initWithFileURL:url];           // Setup the undo manager if it's nil         if (self.timeTagDB.undoManager == nil){             NSUndoManager *undoManager = [[NSUndoManager  alloc] init];             [self.timeTagDB setUndoManager:undoManager];         }                  // You have to actually check to see if it exists already (for some reason you can't just call "open it, and if it's not there, create it")         if ([[NSFileManagerdefaultManager] fileExistsAtPath:[url path]]) {             // If it does exist, try to open it, and if it doesn't open, let the user (or at least you) know!             [self.timeTagDB openWithCompletionHandler:^(BOOL success){                 if (!success) {                     // Handle the error.                     NSLog(@"Error opening up the database");                 }                 else{                     NSLog(@"Opened the file--it already existed");                     [self refreshData];                 }             }];         }         else {             // If it doesn't exist, you need to attempt to create it             [self.timeTagDBsaveToURL:url forSaveOperation:UIDocumentSaveForCreatingcompletionHandler:^(BOOL success){                 if (!success) {                     // Handle the error.                     NSLog(@"Error opening up the database");                 }                 else{                     NSLog(@"Created the file--it did not exist");                     [self refreshData];                 }             }];         }     }); }   If you're curious what refreshData looks like, it sends out a NSNotification that the database has been loaded: -(void)refreshData {     NSNotification* refreshNotification = [NSNotificationnotificationWithName:kNotificationCenterRefreshAllDatabaseData object:self.timeTagDB.managedObjectContext  userInfo:nil];     [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotification:refreshNotification];     }   The kNotificationCenterRefreshAllDatabaseData is just a constant I have defined elsewhere that keeps track of all the NSNotification names I use. I pass the managedObjectContext of the newly created file so that my view controllers can have access to it, and start passing it around to one another. The reason we do this as a Notification is because this is being run in the background, so we can't know exactly when it finishes. Make sure you design your app for this! Have some kind of loading indicator, or make sure your user can't attempt to create a record before the database actually exists, because it will crash the app.

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  • Top Questions and Answers for Pluging into Oracle Database as a Service

    - by David Swanger
    Yesterday we hosted a comprehensive online forum that shared a comprehensive path to help your organization design, deploy, and deliver a Database as a Service cloud. If you missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand by registering here. We received numerous questions.  Below are highlights of the most informative: DBaaS requires a lengthy and careful design efforts. What is the minimum requirements of setting up a scaled-down environment and test it out? You should have an OEM 12c environment for DBaaS administration and then a target database deployment platform that has the key characteristics of what your production environment will look like. This could be a single server or it could be a small pool of hosts if your production DBaaS will be larger and you want to test a more robust / real world configuration with Zones and Pools or DR capabilities for example. How does this benefit companies having their own data center? This allows companies to transform their internal IT to a service delivery model for the database. The benefits to the company are significant cost savings, improved business agility and reduced risk. The benefits to the consumers (internal) of services if much fast provisioning, and response to change in business requirements. From a deployment perspective, is DBaaS's job solely DBA's job? The best deployment model enables the DBA (or end-user) to control the entire process. All resources required to deploy the service are pre-provisioned, and there are no external dependencies (on network, storage, sysadmins teams). The service is created either via a self-service portal or by the DBA. The purpose of self service seems to be that the end user does not rely on the DBA. I just need to give him a template. He decides how much AMM he needs. Why shall I set it one by one. That doesn't seem to be the purpose of self service. Most customers we have worked with define a standardized service catalog, with a few (2 to 5) different classes of service. For each of these classes, there is a pre-defined deployment template, and the user has the ability to select from some pre-defined service sizes. The administrator only has to create this catalog once. Each user then simply selects from the options offered in the catalog.  Looking at DBaaS service definition, it seems to be no different from a service definition provided by a well defined DBA team. Why do you attribute it to DBaaS? There are a couple of perspectives. First, some organizations might already be operating with a high level of standardization and a higher level of maturity from an ITIL or Service Management perspective. Their journey to DBaaS could be shorter and their Service Definition will evolve less but they still might need to add capabilities such as Self Service and Metering/Chargeback. Other organizations are still operating in highly siloed environments with little automation and their formal Service Definition (if they have one) will be a lot less mature today. Therefore their future state DBaaS will look a lot different from their current state, as will their Service Definition. How database as a service impact or help with "Click to Compute" or deploying "Database in cloud infrastructure" DBaaS enables Click to Compute. Oracle DBaaS can be implemented using three architecture models: Oracle Multitenant 12c, native consolidation using Oracle Database and consolidation using virtualization in infrastructure cloud. As Deploy session showed, you get higher consolidating density and efficiency using Multitenant and higher isolation using infrastructure cloud. Depending upon your business needs, DBaaS can be implemented using any of these models. How exactly is the DBaaS different from the traditional db? Storage/OS/DB all together to 'transparently' provide service to applications? Will there be across-databases access by application/user. Some key differences are: 1) The services run on a shared platform. 2) The services can be rapidly provisioned (< 15 minutes). 3) The services are dynamic and can be relocated, grown, shrunk as needed to meet business needs without disruption and rapidly. 4) The user is able to provision the services directly from a standardized service catalog.. With 24x7x365 databases its difficult to find off peak hrs to do basic admin tasks such as gathering stats, running backups, batch jobs. How does pluggable database handle this and different needs/patching downtime of apps databases might be serving? You can gather stats in Oracle Multitenant the same way you had been in regular databases. Regarding patching/upgrading, Oracle Multitenant makes patch/upgrade very efficient in that you can pre-provision a new version/patched multitenant db in a different ORACLE_HOME and then unplug a PDB from its CDB and plug it into the newer/patched CDB in seconds.  Thanks for all the great questions!  If you'd like to learn more and missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand here.

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  • Lazy HTML attributes wrapping in Internet Explorer

    - by AGS777
    Having encountered this Internet Explorer (all versions) behavior several times previously, I eventually decided to share this most probably useless knowledge. Excuse my lengthy explanations because I am going to show the behavior along with a very simple case when one can come across it inadvertently. Let's say I want to implement some simple templating solution in JavaScript. I wrote an HTML template with an intention to bind data to it on the client side: Please note, that name of the “sys-template” class is just a coincidence. I do not use any ASP.NET AJAX code in this simple example. As you can see we need to replace placeholders (property name wrapped with curly braces) with actual data. Also, as you can see, many of the placeholders are situated within attribute values and it is where the danger lies. I am going to use <a /> element HTML as a template and replace each placeholder pattern with respective properties’ values with a little bit of jQuery like this: You can find complete code along with the contextFormat() method definition at the end of the post. Let’s assume that value for the name property (that we want to put in the title attribute) of the first data item is “first tooltip”. So it consists of two words. When the replacement occurred, title attribute should contain the “first tooltip” text which we are going to see as a tooltip for the <a /> element. But let’s run the sample code in Internet Explorer and check it out. What you’ll see is that only the first word of the supposed “title” attribute’s content is shown. So, were is the rest of my attribute and what happened? The answer is obvious once you see the result of jQuery(“.sys-template”).html() line for the given HTML markup. In IE you’ll get the following <A id={id} class={cssClass} title={name} href="{source}" myAttr="{attr}">Link to {source}</A> See any difference between this HTML and the one shown earlier? No? Then look carefully. While the original HTML of the <a /> element is well-formed and all the attributes are correctly quoted, when you take the same HTML back in Internet Explorer (it doesn’t matter whether you use html() method from jQuery library or IE’s innerHTML directly), you lose attributes’ quotes for some of the attributes. Then, after replacement, we’ll get following HTML for our first data item. I marked the attribute value in question with italic: <A id=1 class=first title=first tooltip href="first.html" myAttr="firstAttr">Link to first.html</A> Now you can easily imagine for yourself what happens when this HTML is inserted into the document and why we do not see the second (and any subsequent words if any) of our title attribute in the tooltip. There are still two important things to note. The first one (and it actually the reason why I named the post “lazy wrapping” is that if value of the HTML attribute does contains spaces in the original HTML, then it WILL be wrapped with quotation marks. For example, if I wrote following on my page (note the trailing space for the title attribute value) <a href="{source}" title="{name}  " id="{id}" myAttr="{attr}" class="{cssClass}">Link to {source}</a> then I would have my placeholder quoted correctly and the result of the replacement would render as expected: The second important thing to note is that there are exceptions for the lazy attributes wrapping rule in IE. As you can see href attribute value did not contain spaces exactly as all the other attributes with placeholders, but it was still returned correctly quoted Custom attribute myAttr is also quoted correctly when returned back from document, though its placeholder value does not contain spaces either. Now, on account of the highly unlikely probability that you found this information useful and need a solution to the problem the aforementioned behavior introduces for Internet Explorer browser, I can suggest a simple workaround – manually quote the mischievous attributes prior the placeholder pattern is replaced. Using the code of contextFormat() method shown below, you would need to add following line right before the return statement: result = result.replace(/=({([^}]+)})/g, '="$1"'); Below please find original sample code:

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  • Silverlight Reporting Application Part 3.5 - Prism Background and WCF RIA [Series Intermission]

    Taking a step back before I dive into the details and full-on coding fun, I wanted to once again respond to a comment on my last post to clear up some things in regards to how I'm setting up my project and some of the choices I've made. Aka, thanks Ben. :) Prism Project Setup For starters, I'm not the ideal use case for a Prism application. In most cases where you've got a one-man team, Prism can be overkill as it is more intended for large teams who are geographically dispersed or in applications that have a larger scale than my Recruiting application in which you'll greatly benefit from modularity, delayed loading of xaps, etc. What Prism offers, though, is a manner for handling UI, commands, and events with the idea that, through a modular approach in which no parts really need to know about one another, I can update this application bit by bit as hiring needs change or requirements differ between offices without having to worry that changing something in the Jobs module will break something in, say, the Scheduling module. All that being said, here's a look at how our project breakdown for Recruit (MVVM/Prism implementation) looks: This could be a little misleading though, as each of those modules is actually another project in the overall Recruit solution. As far as what the projects actually are, that looks a bit like this: Recruiting Solution Recruit (Shell up there) - Main Silverlight Application .Web - Default .Web application to host the Silverlight app Infrastructure - Silverlight Class Library Project Modules - Silverlight Class Library Projects Infrastructure &Modules The Infrastructure project is probably something you'll see to some degree in any composite application. In this application, it is going to contain custom commands (you'll see the joy of these in a post or two down the road), events, helper classes, and any custom classes I need to share between different modules. Think of this as a handy little crossroad between any parts of your application. Modules on the other hand are the bread and butter of this application. Besides the shell, which holds the UI skeleton, and the infrastructure, which holds all those shared goodies, the modules are self-contained bundles of functionality to handle different concerns. In my scenario, I need a way to look up and edit Jobs, Applicants, and Schedule interviews, a Notification module to handle telling the user when different things are happening (i.e., loading from database), and a Menu to control interaction and moving between different views. All modules are going to follow the following pattern: The module class will inherit from IModule and handle initialization and loading the correct view into the correct region, whereas the Views and ViewModels folders will contain paired Silverlight user controls and ViewModel class backings. WCF RIA Services Since we've got all the projects in a single solution, we did not have to go the route of creating a WCR RIA Services Class Library. Every module has it's WCF RIA link back to the main .Web project, so the single Linq-2-SQL (yes, I said Linq-2-SQL, but I'll soon be switching to OpenAccess due to the new visual designer) context I'm using there works nicely with the scope of my project. If I were going for completely separating this project out and doing different, dynamically loaded elements, I'd probably go for the separate class library. Hope that clears that up. In the future though, I will be using that in a project that I've got in the "when I've got enough time to work on this" pipeline, so we'll get into that eventually- and hopefully when WCF RIA is in full release! Why Not use Silverlight Navigation/Business Template? The short answer- I'm a creature of habit, and having used Silverlight for a few years now, I'm used to doing lots of things manually. :) Plus, starting with a blank slate of a project I'm able to set up things exactly as I want them to be. In this case, rather than the navigation frame we would see in one of the templates, the MainRegion/ContentControl is working as our main navigation window. In many cases I will use theSilverlight navigation template to start things off, however in this case I did not need those features so I opted out of using that. Next time when I actually hit post #4, we're going to get into the modules and starting to get functionality into this application. Next week is also release week for the Q1 2010 release, so be sure to check out our annualWebinar Week (I might be biased, but Wednesday is my favorite out of the group). Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • On Reflector Pricing

    - by Nick Harrison
    I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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  • Upgrading to Code Based Migrations EF 4.3.1 with Connector/Net 6.6

    - by GABMARTINEZ
    Entity Framework 4.3.1 includes a new feature called code first migrations.  We are adding support for this feature in our upcoming 6.6 release of Connector/Net.  In this walk-through we'll see the workflow of code-based migrations when you have an existing application and you would like to upgrade to this EF 4.3.1 version and use this approach, so you can keep track of the changes that you do to your database.   The first thing we need to do is add the new Entity Framework 4.3.1 package to our application. This should via the NuGet package manager.  You can read more about why EF is not part of the .NET framework here. Adding EF 4.3.1 to our existing application  Inside VS 2010 go to Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Package Manager Console, this will open the Power Shell Host Window where we can work with all the EF commands. In order to install this library to your existing application you should type Install-Package EntityFramework This will make some changes to your application. So Let's check them. In your .config file you'll see a  <configSections> which contains the version you have from EntityFramework and also was added the <entityFramework> section as shown below. This section is by default configured to use SQL Express which won't be necesary for this case. So you can comment it out or leave it empty. Also please make sure you're using the Connector/Net 6.6.x version which is the one that has this support as is shown in the previous image. At this point we face one issue; in order to be able to work with Migrations we need the __MigrationHistory table that we don't have yet since our Database was created with an older version. This table is used to keep track of the changes in our model. So we need to get it in our existing Database. Getting a Migration-History table into an existing database First thing we need to do to enable migrations in our existing application is to create our configuration class which will set up the MySqlClient Provider as our SQL Generator. So we have to add it with the following code: using System.Data.Entity.Migrations;     //add this at the top of your cs file public class Configuration : DbMigrationsConfiguration<NameOfYourDbContext>  //Make sure to use the name of your existing DBContext { public Configuration() { this.AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = false; //Set Automatic migrations to false since we'll be applying the migrations manually for this case. SetSqlGenerator("MySql.Data.MySqlClient", new MySql.Data.Entity.MySqlMigrationSqlGenerator());     }   }  This code will set up our configuration that we'll be using when executing all the migrations for our application. Once we have done this we can Build our application so we can check that everything is fine. Creating our Initial Migration Now let's add our Initial Migration. In Package Manager Console, execute "add-migration InitialCreate", you can use any other name but I like to set this as our initial create for future reference. After we run this command, some changes were done in our application: A new Migrations Folder was created. A new class migration call InitialCreate which in most of the cases should have empty Up and Down methods as long as your database is up to date with your Model. Since all your entities already exists, delete all duplicated code to create any entity which exists already in your Database if there is any. I found this easier when you don't have any pending updates to do to your database. Now we have our empty migration that will make no changes in our database and represents how are all the things at the begining of our migrations.  Finally, let's create our MigrationsHistory table. Optionally you can add SQL code to delete the edmdata table which is not needed anymore. public override void Up() { // Just make sure that you used 4.1 or later version         Sql("DROP TABLE EdmMetadata"); } From our Package Manager Console let's type: Update-database; If you like to see the operations made on each Update-database command you can use the flag -verbose after the Update-database. This will make two important changes.  It will execute the Up method in the initial migration which has no changes in the database. And second, and very important,  it will create the __MigrationHistory table necessary to keep track of your changes. And next time you make a change to your database it will compare the current model to the one stored in the Model Column of this table. Conclusion The important thing of this walk through is that we must create our initial migration before we start doing any changes to our model. This way we'll be adding the necessary __MigrationsHistory table to our existing database, so we can keep our database up to date with all the changes we do in our context model using migrations. Hope you have found this information useful. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments, also please check our forums here where we keep answering questions in general for the community.  Happy MySQL/Net Coding!

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  • Creating PHP Forms with show/hide functionality [migrated]

    - by ronquiq
    I want to create two reports and submit the report data to database by using two functions defined in a class: Here I have two buttons: "Create ES" and "Create RP". Rightnow, my forms are working fine, I can insert data successfully, but the problem was when I click on submit after filling the form data, the content is hiding and displays the fist div content "cs_content" and again I need to onclick to submit again. Could anyone give a solution for this. Requirement : When I click on "Create CS", I should be able to fill the form and submit data successfully with a message within "cs_content" and any form input errors, the errors should display within "cs_content". When I click on "Create RP", I should be able to fill the form and submit data successfully with a message within "rp_content" and any form input errors, the errors should display within "rp_content". home.php <?php require 'classes/class.report.php'; $report = new Report($db); ?> <html> <head> <script src="js/jqueryv1.10.2.js"></script> <script> $ (document).ready(function () { //$("#cs_content").show(); $('#cs').click(function () { $('#cs_content').fadeIn('slow'); $('#rp_content').hide(); }); $('#rp').click(function () { $('#rp_content').fadeIn('slow'); $('#cs_content').hide(); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <div class="container2"> <div style="margin:0px 0px;padding:3px 217px;overflow:hidden;"> <div id="cs" style="float:left;margin:0px 0px;padding:7px;"><input type="button" value="CREATE CS"></div> <div id="rp" style="float:left;margin:0px 0px;padding:7px;"><input type="button" value="CREATE RP"></div><br> </div> <div id="cs_content"> <?php $report->create_cs_report(); ?> </div> <div id="rp_content" style="display:none;"> <?php $report->create_rp_report(); ?> </div> </div> </body> </html> class.report.php <?php class Report { private $db; public function __construct($database){ $this->db = $database; } public function create_cs_report() { if (isset($_POST['create_es_report'])) { $report_name = htmlentities($_POST['report_name']); $from_address = htmlentities($_POST['from_address']); $subject = htmlentities($_POST['subject']); $reply_to = htmlentities($_POST['reply_to']); if (empty($_POST['report_name']) || empty($_POST['from_address']) || empty($_POST['subject']) || empty($_POST['reply_to'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">All fields are required.</span>'; } else { if (isset($_POST['report_name']) && empty($_POST['report_name'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Report Name is required</span>'; } else if (!ctype_alnum($_POST['report_name'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Report Name: Whitespace is not allowed, only alphabets and numbers are required</span>'; } if (isset($_POST['from_address']) && empty($_POST['from_address'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">From address is required</span>'; } else if (filter_var($_POST['from_address'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) === false) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Please enter a valid From address</span>'; } if (isset($_POST['subject']) && empty($_POST['subject'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Subject is required</span>'; } else if (!ctype_alnum($_POST['subject'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Subject: Whitespace is not allowed, only alphabets and numbers are required</span>'; } if (isset($_POST['reply_to']) && empty($_POST['reply_to'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Reply To is required</span>'; } else if (filter_var($_POST['reply_to'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) === false) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Please enter a valid Reply-To address</span>'; } } if (empty($errors) === true) { $query = $this->db->prepare("INSERT INTO report(report_name, from_address, subject, reply_to) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?) "); $query->bindValue(1, $report_name); $query->bindValue(2, $from_address); $query->bindValue(3, $subject); $query->bindValue(4, $reply_to); try { $query->execute(); } catch(PDOException $e) { die($e->getMessage()); } header('Location:home.php?success'); exit(); } } if (isset($_GET['success']) && empty($_GET['success'])) { header('Location:home.php'); echo '<span class="error">Report is succesfully created</span>'; } ?> <form action="" method="POST" accept-charset="UTF-8"> <div style="font-weight:bold;padding:17px 80px;text-decoration:underline;">Section A</div> <table class="create_report"> <tr><td><label>Report Name</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="report_name" required placeholder="Name of the report" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["report_name"])) echo $report_name; ?>" size="30" maxlength="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><label>From</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="from_address" required placeholder="From address" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["from_address"])) echo $from_address; ?>" size="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><label>Subject</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="subject" required placeholder="Subject" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["subject"])) echo $subject; ?>" size="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><label>Reply To</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="reply_to" required placeholder="Reply address" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["reply_to"])) echo $reply_to; ?>" size="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><input type="submit" value="create report" style="background:#8AC007;color:#080808;padding:6px;" name="create_es_report"></td></tr> </table> </form> <?php //IF THERE ARE ERRORS, THEY WOULD BE DISPLAY HERE if (empty($errors) === false) { echo '<div>' . implode('</p><p>', $errors) . '</div>'; } } public function create_rp_report() { if (isset($_POST['create_rp_report'])) { $report_name = htmlentities($_POST['report_name']); $to_address = htmlentities($_POST['to_address']); $subject = htmlentities($_POST['subject']); $reply_to = htmlentities($_POST['reply_to']); if (empty($_POST['report_name']) || empty($_POST['to_address']) || empty($_POST['subject']) || empty($_POST['reply_to'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">All fields are required.</span>'; } else { if (isset($_POST['report_name']) && empty($_POST['report_name'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Report Name is required</span>'; } else if (!ctype_alnum($_POST['report_name'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Report Name: Whitespace is not allowed, only alphabets and numbers are required</span>'; } if (isset($_POST['to_address']) && empty($_POST['to_address'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">to address is required</span>'; } else if (filter_var($_POST['to_address'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) === false) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Please enter a valid to address</span>'; } if (isset($_POST['subject']) && empty($_POST['subject'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Subject is required</span>'; } else if (!ctype_alnum($_POST['subject'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Subject: Whitespace is not allowed, only alphabets and numbers are required</span>'; } if (isset($_POST['reply_to']) && empty($_POST['reply_to'])) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Reply To is required</span>'; } else if (filter_var($_POST['reply_to'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) === false) { $errors[] = '<span class="error">Please enter a valid Reply-To address</span>'; } } if (empty($errors) === true) { $query = $this->db->prepare("INSERT INTO report(report_name, to_address, subject, reply_to) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?) "); $query->bindValue(1, $report_name); $query->bindValue(2, $to_address); $query->bindValue(3, $subject); $query->bindValue(4, $reply_to); try { $query->execute(); } catch(PDOException $e) { die($e->getMessage()); } header('Location:home.php?success'); exit(); } } if (isset($_GET['success']) && empty($_GET['success'])) { header('Location:home.php'); echo '<span class="error">Report is succesfully created</span>'; } ?> <form action="" method="POST" accept-charset="UTF-8"> <div style="font-weight:bold;padding:17px 80px;text-decoration:underline;">Section A</div> <table class="create_report"> <tr><td><label>Report Name</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="report_name" required placeholder="Name of the report" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["report_name"])) echo $report_name; ?>" size="30" maxlength="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><label>to</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="to_address" required placeholder="to address" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["to_address"])) echo $to_address; ?>" size="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><label>Subject</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="subject" required placeholder="Subject" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["subject"])) echo $subject; ?>" size="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><label>Reply To</label><span style="color:#A60000">*</span></td> <td><input type="text" name="reply_to" required placeholder="Reply address" value="<?php if(isset($_POST["reply_to"])) echo $reply_to; ?>" size="30"> </td></tr> <tr><td><input type="submit" value="create report" style="background:#8AC007;color:#080808;padding:6px;" name="create_rp_report"></td></tr> </table> </form> <?php //IF THERE ARE ERRORS, THEY WOULD BE DISPLAY HERE if (empty($errors) === false) { echo '<div>' . implode('</p><p>', $errors) . '</div>'; } } }//Report CLASS ENDS

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  • To refund or not to refund this client?

    - by Mahalia Samuels
    I'd really appreciate your advice on an ongoing project. I presented my client with a proposal and design samples which he approved, and he paid in full instead of the 50% upfront deposit as I'd given him a generous discount. He was then slow in furnishing me with some of the content, but once we did, he expected the website to be finished immediately which was not possible. Because he needed it done urgently, we agreed to try to get it done about 10 working days after the content was provided, but the developer who was helping me let me down. The next week, I completed the website myself and uploaded it to the server on a Friday afternoon. He then calls and texts me on following Sunday while I'm at church to say it's not online (there was probably a problem with his browser). The next morning, I received an email from him demanding a full refund within two days because he couldn't see the website (even though it was live, and I tested it on multiple browsers, a different computer and my phone), and he called me shouting at me because he couldn't access it. Finally when he was able to access it, he was unhappy with a certain detail regarding the slideshow which I began fixing and which was done the next day. He then referred me to another website and said he wanted it to look similar but not identical to it in terms of the layout. He also now wanted to add more features which were not in the original design. I got a designer to work on a new design which I sent to him for review, which if approved would be completed by 15 October, and he approved it last Thursday. He then called me yesterday to say that he wanted to change the design - he only approved it out of impatience. He now wants the website to be more similar to the other website he referred me to and he wants it done before the 15th! Then, he says to me that other people have done websites for him in three days - website's he's complained to me about for lacking dimension because they were just premium themes, whereas we'd designed and coded from scratch. I'm thinking of finishing the website but refunding him in full (or at least the refundable 50%) less domain registration and other non-refundable amounts, just to avoid further escalation of this matter and having him call me next week and say he wants to change it again. These are the applicable terms and conditions as laid out in the agreement: Total amount due for this project is Amount A. Client shall pay Consultant a deposit of Amount B (50% of total amount due for project) in advance before any work commences on the Project. The balance is due within 7 working days of completion of project. Deposit is non-refundable. Should client opt to host elsewhere, applicable transferral fee of Amount C will apply. Estimated project completion time frame is 14 to 30 days from the date Client furnishes Consultant with Brief and all other required media and data, provided that Client has made payment to secure the project. Consultant will make every effort to meet agreed upon due dates. The Client should be aware that failure to submit required information or materials, or last minute changes and excessive changes may cause subsequent delays. Client delays could result in significant delays in delivery of finished work. Major changes in client input or direction or brief will be charged at normal rates. Any work the Client wishes Consultant to create, which is not specified in the attached Proposal will be considered an additional service. Client agrees to pay Consultant for any additional expenses or additional services not included in the attached quotation and proposal if requested by the Client. Web design credit in the name of the Consultant, and link to Consultant’s website shall be placed on the footer of the final Website. Either party may terminate this Agreement by giving 7 days written notice to the other of such termination. In the event that Work is postponed or terminated at the request of the Client, Consultant shall have the right to bill pro rata at full rates for work completed through the date of that request, while reserving all rights under this Agreement. If additional payment is due, this shall be payable within seven days of the Client's written notification to stop work. In the event of termination, the Client shall also pay any expenses incurred by Consultant and the Consultant shall own all rights to the Work. Advice please?

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  • Subterranean IL: The ThreadLocal type

    - by Simon Cooper
    I came across ThreadLocal<T> while I was researching ConcurrentBag. To look at it, it doesn't really make much sense. What's all those extra Cn classes doing in there? Why is there a GenericHolder<T,U,V,W> class? What's going on? However, digging deeper, it's a rather ingenious solution to a tricky problem. Thread statics Declaring that a variable is thread static, that is, values assigned and read from the field is specific to the thread doing the reading, is quite easy in .NET: [ThreadStatic] private static string s_ThreadStaticField; ThreadStaticAttribute is not a pseudo-custom attribute; it is compiled as a normal attribute, but the CLR has in-built magic, activated by that attribute, to redirect accesses to the field based on the executing thread's identity. TheadStaticAttribute provides a simple solution when you want to use a single field as thread-static. What if you want to create an arbitary number of thread static variables at runtime? Thread-static fields can only be declared, and are fixed, at compile time. Prior to .NET 4, you only had one solution - thread local data slots. This is a lesser-known function of Thread that has existed since .NET 1.1: LocalDataStoreSlot threadSlot = Thread.AllocateNamedDataSlot("slot1"); string value = "foo"; Thread.SetData(threadSlot, value); string gettedValue = (string)Thread.GetData(threadSlot); Each instance of LocalStoreDataSlot mediates access to a single slot, and each slot acts like a separate thread-static field. As you can see, using thread data slots is quite cumbersome. You need to keep track of LocalDataStoreSlot objects, it's not obvious how instances of LocalDataStoreSlot correspond to individual thread-static variables, and it's not type safe. It's also relatively slow and complicated; the internal implementation consists of a whole series of classes hanging off a single thread-static field in Thread itself, using various arrays, lists, and locks for synchronization. ThreadLocal<T> is far simpler and easier to use. ThreadLocal ThreadLocal provides an abstraction around thread-static fields that allows it to be used just like any other class; it can be used as a replacement for a thread-static field, it can be used in a List<ThreadLocal<T>>, you can create as many as you need at runtime. So what does it do? It can't just have an instance-specific thread-static field, because thread-static fields have to be declared as static, and so shared between all instances of the declaring type. There's something else going on here. The values stored in instances of ThreadLocal<T> are stored in instantiations of the GenericHolder<T,U,V,W> class, which contains a single ThreadStatic field (s_value) to store the actual value. This class is then instantiated with various combinations of the Cn types for generic arguments. In .NET, each separate instantiation of a generic type has its own static state. For example, GenericHolder<int,C0,C1,C2> has a completely separate s_value field to GenericHolder<int,C1,C14,C1>. This feature is (ab)used by ThreadLocal to emulate instance thread-static fields. Every time an instance of ThreadLocal is constructed, it is assigned a unique number from the static s_currentTypeId field using Interlocked.Increment, in the FindNextTypeIndex method. The hexadecimal representation of that number then defines the specific Cn types that instantiates the GenericHolder class. That instantiation is therefore 'owned' by that instance of ThreadLocal. This gives each instance of ThreadLocal its own ThreadStatic field through a specific unique instantiation of the GenericHolder class. Although GenericHolder has four type variables, the first one is always instantiated to the type stored in the ThreadLocal<T>. This gives three free type variables, each of which can be instantiated to one of 16 types (C0 to C15). This puts an upper limit of 4096 (163) on the number of ThreadLocal<T> instances that can be created for each value of T. That is, there can be a maximum of 4096 instances of ThreadLocal<string>, and separately a maximum of 4096 instances of ThreadLocal<object>, etc. However, there is an upper limit of 16384 enforced on the total number of ThreadLocal instances in the AppDomain. This is to stop too much memory being used by thousands of instantiations of GenericHolder<T,U,V,W>, as once a type is loaded into an AppDomain it cannot be unloaded, and will continue to sit there taking up memory until the AppDomain is unloaded. The total number of ThreadLocal instances created is tracked by the ThreadLocalGlobalCounter class. So what happens when either limit is reached? Firstly, to try and stop this limit being reached, it recycles GenericHolder type indexes of ThreadLocal instances that get disposed using the s_availableIndices concurrent stack. This allows GenericHolder instantiations of disposed ThreadLocal instances to be re-used. But if there aren't any available instantiations, then ThreadLocal falls back on a standard thread local slot using TLSHolder. This makes it very important to dispose of your ThreadLocal instances if you'll be using lots of them, so the type instantiations can be recycled. The previous way of creating arbitary thread-static variables, thread data slots, was slow, clunky, and hard to use. In comparison, ThreadLocal can be used just like any other type, and each instance appears from the outside to be a non-static thread-static variable. It does this by using the CLR type system to assign each instance of ThreadLocal its own instantiated type containing a thread-static field, and so delegating a lot of the bookkeeping that thread data slots had to do to the CLR type system itself! That's a very clever use of the CLR type system.

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  • Xobni Plus for Outlook [Review]

    - by The Geek
    Overview Xobni Plus is an addin that will bring a sidebar to Outlook which allows you to search through your inbox and contacts a lot easier. It provides the ability to search and keep track of your favorite social networks. Searching with Xobni is a lot more powerful than the default search feature in Outlook. It let’s you drill down your searches to conversations, email, links, and attachments. It now supports Outlook 2010 both 32 & 64-bit versions. Installation & Setup Installation is easy following the wizard. After completing the wizard you can tell you’re friends on Facebook and Twitter that you are now using it. You can also decide to join their Product Improvement Program if you want. After installation when you open Outlook, Xobni appears as a sidebar on the right side. Don’t worry about it always being in the way, as you can hide it if you need more room for other Outlook functions. After Xobni free is installed, you can upgrade to the Plus version at any time. A new window will open up and you can use your Credit Card, PayPal, or redeem a code if you have one. Features & Use Where to begin with the amount of features available in Xobni Plus? It really has an amazing amount of cool features. Of course you’ll have all of the features of the Free Version which we previously covered…and a lot more. After Xobni is installed you’ll notice a section for it on the Ribbon. From here you can search Xobni, show or hide the Sidebar, and change other options. It allows you to easily keep up with various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn… Check out email analytics and contact ranks. Click on the Files Exchanged tab to search for specific attachments. Quickly search links exchanged with your contacts. Hover over a link to get a preview of what it entails. It gives you the ability to index all of your Yahoo mail as well, without the need for purchasing Yahoo Plus! Then your Yahoo messages appear in the Xobni sidebar. When you select a contact you can see related messages from you Yahoo account. Easily index all of your mail…including Yahoo mail for better organization and faster search results. There are several options you can select to change the way Xobni works. From setting up your Yahoo email, Indexing options, and much more. Additional Features of Xobni Plus Advanced Search Capabilities – Filter results, Boolean & Phrase Search, Ability to search Appointments & Tasks, Advanced Search Builder Search unlimited PST data files Xobni contacts in the compose screen Find links exchanged with your contacts View calendar appointments One year premium tech support No Ads! Performance We ran Xobni Plus on Outlook 2010 32-bit on a Dual-Core AMD Athlon system with 4GB of RAM and found it to run quite smoothly. However, we did notice it would sometimes slow down launching Outlook, especially if other apps are running at the same time. Product Support When you buy a license for Xobni Plus you get a full year of premium tech support. They provide a Questions and Answers page on their site where you can run a search query and answers appear instantly. You can contact support directly as a Plus member through their web form and they advise the turn around time is 2 business days. However, when we tested it, we received a response within 24 hours. They also provide FAQ, Community forum, and you can download the Owners Manual in PDF format from the support page. Conclusion Xobni Plus is a very powerful addin for Outlook and includes a lot more features that we didn’t cover in this review. You can download Xobni free edition which includes an 8 day free trial of the Plus version. This provides a good way to start getting familiar with it. Then upgrade to Xobni Plus at any time for $29.95. Once you get started, you’ll find the sidebar is nicely laid out and intuitive to use. If you live out of Outlook during the day, Xobni Plus is a great addition for fast and powerful searches. It provides an easy way to keep all of your contacts and messages well organized and easy to find. Xobni Plus works with XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32 & 64-bit editions) Outlook 2003, 2007 and both 32 & 64-bit editions of Outlook 2010. Download Xobni Plus Download Xobni Free Edition Rating Installation: 8 Ease of Use: 8 Features: 9 Performance: 8 Product Support: 8 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Xobni Free Powers Up Outlook’s Search and ContactsCreate an Email Template in Outlook 2003Add Social Elements to Your Gmail Contacts with RapportiveChange Outlook Startup FolderClear Outlook Searches and MRU (Most Recently Used) Lists 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 10 Superb Firefox Wallpapers OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides

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  • Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part II)

    I would now like to expand a little on what I stumbled through in part I of my Visual Studio 2010 post and touch on a few other features of VS 2010.  Specifically, I want to generate some code based off of an Entity Framework model and tie it up to an actual data source.  Im not going to take the easy way and tie to a SQL Server data source, though, I will tie it to an XML data file instead.  Why?  Well, why not?  This is purely for learning, there are probably much better ways to get strongly-typed classes around XML but it will force us to go down a path less travelled and maybe learn a few things along the way.  Once we get this XML data and the means to interact with it, I will revisit data binding to this data in a WPF form and see if I cant get reading, adding, deleting, and updating working smoothly with minimal code.  To begin, I will use what was learned in the first part of this blog topic and draw out a data model for the MFL (My Football League) - I dont want the NFL to come down and sue me for using their name in this totally football-related article.  The data model looks as follows, with Teams having Players, and Players having a position and statistics for each season they played: Note that when making the associations between these entities, I was given the option to create the foreign key but I only chose to select this option for the association between Player and Position.  The reason for this is that I am picturing the XML that will contain this data to look somewhat like this: <MFL> <Position/> <Position/> <Position/> <Team>     <Player>         <Statistic/>     </Player> </Team> </MFL> Statistic will be under its associated Player node, and Player will be under its associated Team node no need to have an Id to reference it if we know it will always fall under its parent.  Position, however, is more of a lookup value that will not have any hierarchical relationship to the player.  In fact, the Position data itself may be in a completely different xml file (something Id like to play around with), so in any case, a player will need to reference the position by its Id. So now that we have a simple data model laid out, I would like to generate two things based on it:  A class for each entity with properties corresponding to each entity property An IO class with methods to get data for each entity, either all instances, by Id or by parent. Now my experience with code generation in the past has consisted of writing up little apps that use the code dom directly to regenerate code on demand (or using tools like CodeSmith).  Surely, there has got to be a more fun way to do this given that we are using the Entity Framework which already has built-in code generation for SQL Server support.  Lets start with that built-in stuff to give us a base to work off of.  Right click anywhere in the canvas of our model and select Add Code Generation Item: So just adding that code item seemed to do quite a bit towards what I was intending: It apparently generated a class for each entity, but also a whole ton more.  I mean a TON more.  Way too much complicated code was generated now that code is likely to be a black box anyway so it shouldnt matter, but we need to understand how to make this work the way we want it to work, so lets get ready to do some stumbling through that text template (tt) file. When I open the .tt file that was generated, right off the bat I realize there is going to be trouble there is no color coding, no intellisense no nothing!  That is going to make stumbling through more like groping blindly in the dark while handcuffed and hopping on one foot, which was one of the alternate titles I was considering for this blog.  Thankfully, the community comes to my rescue and I wont have to cast my mind back to the glory days of coding in VI (look it up, kids).  Using the Extension Manager (Available under the Tools menu), I did a quick search for tt editor in the Online Gallery and quickly found the Tangible T4 Editor: Downloading and installing this was a breeze, and after doing so I got some color coding and intellisense while editing the tt files.  If you will be doing any customizing of tt files, I highly recommend installing this extension.  Next, well see if that is enough help for us to tweak that tt file to do the kind of code generation that we wantDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 5): Query Snapshots

    - by Simon Cooper
    If you've emailed us about a bug you've encountered with the EAP or beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, we probably asked you to send us a query snapshot of your databases. Here, I explain what a query snapshot is, and how it helps us fix your bug. Problem 1: Debugging users' bug reports When we started the Schema Compare project, we knew we were going to get problems with users' databases - configurations we hadn't considered, features that weren't installed, unicode issues, wierd dependencies... With SQL Compare, users are generally happy to send us a database backup that we can restore using a single RESTORE DATABASE command on our test servers and immediately reproduce the problem. Oracle, on the other hand, would be a lot more tricky. As Oracle generally has a 1-to-1 mapping between instances and databases, any databases users sent would have to be restored to their own instance. Furthermore, the number of steps required to get a properly working database, and the size of most oracle databases, made it infeasible to ask every customer who came across a bug during our beta program to send us their databases. We also knew that there would be lots of issues with data security that would make it hard to get backups. So we needed an easier way to be able to debug customers issues and sort out what strange schema data Oracle was returning. Problem 2: Test execution time Another issue we knew we would have to solve was the execution time of the tests we would produce for the Schema Compare engine. Our initial prototype showed that querying the data dictionary for schema information was going to be slow (at least 15 seconds per database), and this is generally proportional to the size of the database. If you're running thousands of tests on the same databases, each one registering separate schemas, not only would the tests would take hours and hours to run, but the test servers would be hammered senseless. The solution To solve these, we needed to be able to populate the schema of a database without actually connecting to it. Well, the IDataReader interface is the primary way we read data from an Oracle server. The data dictionary queries we use return their data in terms of simple strings and numbers, which we then process and reconstruct into an object model, and the results of these queries are identical for identical schemas. So, we can record the raw results of the queries once, and then replay these results to construct the same object model as many times as required without needing to actually connect to the original database. This is what query snapshots do. They are binary files containing the raw unprocessed data we get back from the oracle server for all the queries we run on the data dictionary to get schema information. The core of the query snapshot generation takes the results of the IDataReader we get from running queries on Oracle, and passes the row data to a BinaryWriter that writes it straight to a file. The query snapshot can then be replayed to create the same object model; when the results of a specific query is needed by the population code, we can simply read the binary data stored in the file on disk and present it through an IDataReader wrapper. This is far faster than querying the server over the network, and allows us to run tests in a reasonable time. They also allow us to easily debug a customers problem; using a simple snapshot generation program, users can generate a query snapshot that could be sent along with a bug report that we can immediately replay on our machines to let us debug the issue, rather than having to obtain database backups and restore databases to test systems. There are also far fewer problems with data security; query snapshots only contain schema information, which is generally less sensitive than table data. Query snapshots implementation However, actually implementing such a feature did have a couple of 'gotchas' to it. My second blog post detailed the development of the dependencies algorithm we use to ensure we get all the dependencies in the database, and that algorithm uses data from both databases to find all the needed objects - what database you're comparing to affects what objects get populated from both databases. We get information on these additional objects using an appropriate WHERE clause on all the population queries. So, in order to accurately replay the results of querying the live database, the query snapshot needs to be a snapshot of a comparison of two databases, not just populating a single database. Furthermore, although the code population queries (eg querying all_tab_cols to get column information) can simply be passed straight from the IDataReader to the BinaryWriter, we need to hook into and run the live dependencies algorithm while we're creating the snapshot to ensure we get the same WHERE clauses, and the same query results, as if we were populating straight from a live system. We also need to store the results of the dependencies queries themselves, as the resulting dependency graph is stored within the OracleDatabase object that is produced, and is later used to help order actions in synchronization scripts. This is significantly helped by the dependencies algorithm being a deterministic algorithm - given the same input, it will always return the same output. Therefore, when we're replaying a query snapshot, and processing dependency information, we simply have to return the results of the queries in the order we got them from the live database, rather than trying to calculate the contents of all_dependencies on the fly. Query snapshots are a significant feature in Schema Compare that really helps us to debug problems with the tool, as well as making our testers happier. Although not really user-visible, they are very useful to the development team to help us fix bugs in the product much faster than we otherwise would be able to.

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  • How to Implement Single Sign-On between Websites

    - by hmloo
    Introduction Single sign-on (SSO) is a way to control access to multiple related but independent systems, a user only needs to log in once and gains access to all other systems. a lot of commercial systems that provide Single sign-on solution and you can also choose some open source solutions like Opensso, CAS etc. both of them use centralized authentication and provide more robust authentication mechanism, but if each system has its own authentication mechanism, how do we provide a seamless transition between them. Here I will show you the case. How it Works The method we’ll use is based on a secret key shared between the sites. Origin site has a method to build up a hashed authentication token with some other parameters and redirect the user to the target site. variables Status Description ssoEncode required hash(ssoSharedSecret + , + ssoTime + , + ssoUserName) ssoTime required timestamp with format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS used to prevent playback attacks ssoUserName required unique username; required when a user is logged in Note : The variables will be sent via POST for security reasons Building a Single Sign-On Solution Origin Site has function to 1. Create the URL for your Request. 2. Generate required authentication parameters 3. Redirect to target site. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string postbackUrl = "http://www.targetsite.com/sso.aspx"; string ssoTime = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss"); string ssoUserName = User.Identity.Name; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string ssoHash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); string value = string.Format("{0}:{1},{2}", ssoHash,ssoTime, ssoUserName); Response.Clear(); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.Append("<html>"); sb.AppendFormat(@"<body onload='document.forms[""form""].submit()'>"); sb.AppendFormat("<form name='form' action='{0}' method='post'>", postbackUrl); sb.AppendFormat("<input type='hidden' name='t' value='{0}'>", value); sb.Append("</form>"); sb.Append("</body>"); sb.Append("</html>"); Response.Write(sb.ToString()); Response.End(); } } Target Site has function to 1. Get authentication parameters. 2. Validate the parameters with shared secret. 3. If the user is valid, then do authenticate and redirect to target page. 4. If the user is invalid, then show errors and return. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { Response.Redirect("~/Default.aspx"); } } if (Request.Params.Get("t") != null) { string ticket = Request.Params.Get("t"); char[] delimiters = new char[] { ':', ',' }; string[] ssoVariable = ticket.Split(delimiters, StringSplitOptions.None); string ssoHash = ssoVariable[0]; string ssoTime = ssoVariable[1]; string ssoUserName = ssoVariable[2]; DateTime appTime = DateTime.MinValue; int offsetTime = 60; // get this from config or similar try { appTime = DateTime.ParseExact(ssoTime, "yyyyMMddHHmmss", null); } catch { //show error return; } if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } bool isValid = false; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string hash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); if (string.Compare(ssoHash, hash, true) == 0) { if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } else { isValid = true; } } if (isValid) { //Do authenticate; } else { //show error return; } } else { //show error } } } Summary This is a very simple and basic SSO solution, and its main advantage is its simplicity, only needs to add a single page to do SSO authentication, do not need to modify the existing system infrastructure.

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  • PanelGridLayout - A Layout Revolution

    - by Duncan Mills
    With the most recent 11.1.2 patchset (11.1.2.3) there has been a lot of excitement around ADF Essentials (and rightly so), however, in all the fuss I didn't want an even more significant change to get missed - yes you read that correctly, a more significant change! I'm talking about the new panelGridLayout component, I can confidently say that this one of the most revolutionary components that we've introduced in 11g, even though it sounds rather boring. To be totally accurate, panelGrid was introduced in 11.1.2.2 but without any presence in the component palette or other design time support, so it was largely missed unless you read the release notes. However in this latest patchset it's finally front and center. Its time to explore - we (really) need to talk about layout.  Let's face it,with ADF Faces rich client, layout is a rather arcane pursuit, once you are a layout master, all bow before you, but it's more of an art than a science, and it is often, in fact, way too difficult to achieve what should (apparently) be a pretty simple. Here's a great example, it's a homework assignment I set for folks I'm teaching this stuff to:  The requirements for this layout are: The header is 80px high, the footer is 30px. These are both fixed.  The first section of the header containing the logo is 180px wide The logo is centered within the top left hand corner of the header  The title text is start aligned in the center zone of the header and will wrap if the browser window is narrowed. It should be aligned in the center of the vertical space  The about link is anchored to the right hand side of the browser with a 20px gap and again is center aligned vertically. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. The footer has a right aligned copyright statement, again middle aligned within a 30px high footer region and with a 20px buffer to the right hand edge. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. All remaining space is given to a central zone, which, in this case contains a panelSplitter. Expect that at some point in time you'll need a separate messages line in the center of the footer.  In the homework assigment I set I also stipulate that no inlineStyles can be used to control alignment or margins and no use of other taglibs (e.g. JSF HTML or Trinidad HTML). So, if we take this purist approach, that basic page layout (in my stock solution) requires 3 panelStretchLayouts, 5 panelGroupLayouts and 4 spacers - not including the spacer I use for the logo and the contents of the central zone splitter - phew! The point is that even a seemingly simple layout needs a bit of thinking about, particulatly when you consider strechting and browser re-size behavior. In fact, this little sample actually teaches you much of what you need to know to become vaguely competant at layouts in the framework. The underlying result of "the way things are" is that most of us reach for panelStretchLayout before even finishing the first sip of coffee as we embark on a new page design. In fact most pages you will see in any moderately complex ADF page will basically be nested panelStretchLayouts and panelGroupLayouts, sometimes many, many levels deep. So this is a problem, we've known this for some time and now we have a good solution. (I should point out that the oft-used Trinidad trh tags are not a particularly good solution as you're tie-ing yourself to an HTML table based layout in that case with a host of attendent issues in resize and bi-di behavior, but I digress.) So, tadaaa, I give to you panelGridLayout. PanelGrid, as the name suggests takes a grid like (dare I say slightly gridbag-like) approach to layout, dividing your layout into rows and colums with margins, sizing, stretch behaviour, colspans and rowspans all rolled in, all without the use of inlineStyle. As such, it provides for a much more powerful and consise way of defining a layout such as the one above that is actually simpler and much more logical to design. The basic building blocks are the panelGridLayout itself, gridRow and gridCell. Your content sits inside the cells inside the rows, all helpfully allowing both streching, valign and halign definitions without the need to nest further panelGroupLayouts. So much simpler!  If I break down the homework example above my nested comglomorate of 12 containers and spacers can be condensed down into a single panelGrid with 3 rows and 5 cell definitions (39 lines of source reduced to 24 in the case of the sample). What's more, the actual runtime representation in the browser DOM is much, much simpler, and clean, with basically one DIV per cell (Note that just because the panelGridLayout semantics looks like an HTML table does not mean that it's rendered that way!) . Another hidden benefit is the runtime cost. Because we can use a single layout to achieve much more complex geometries the client side layout code inside the browser is having to work a lot less. This will be a real benefit if your application needs to run on lower powered clients such as netbooks or tablets. So, it's time, if you're on 11.1.2.2 or above, to smile warmly at your panelStretchLayouts, wrap the blanket around it's knees and wheel it off to the Sunset Retirement Home for a well deserved rest. There's a new kid on the block and it wants to be your friend. 

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  • ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

    - by Sherry LaMonica
    Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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  • Adaptive Layout for ADF Faces on Tablets

    - by Shay Shmeltzer
    In the 11.1.16 version of Oracle ADF we started adding specific features to the ADF Faces components so they'll work better on iPad tablets. In this entry I'm going to highlight some new capabilities that we have added to the 11.1.2.3 release. (note if you are still on the 11.1.1.* branch - you'll need to wait for 11.1.1.7 to get the features discussed here). The two key additions in the 11.1.2.3 version compared to the 11.1.1.6 features for iPad support include: pagination for tables and adaptive flow layout. The pagination for table is self explanatory, basically since iPad don't support scroll bars, we automatically switch the table component to render with a pagination toolbar that allow you to scroll set of records or directly jump to a specific set. See the image below. The adaptive flow layout takes a bit more explanation. On regular desktops the UI that you usually build for ADF Faces screens is going to use stretch layout - meaning that it stretches to fill the whole area of the browser window. If you resize the browser windoe, the ADF Faces page resizes with it. If your browser window is too small, scroll bars will appear to allow you to scroll to areas that are "hidden". However on an iPad, this is probably not the type of layout you want - you would rather have a flow layout that eliminates scroll bars and instead allows you to scroll down the page. Basically your want the page to be sized based on its content, rather then based on the browser window size. In ADF Faces terminology this can be done with the dimensionsFrom property set to "children". And here comes the tricky part, since in the past(and also today) when you create an ADF Faces page and add a stretchable component to it, the dimensionsFrom property is set to parent by default. This will be true to other layout components you'll add as well. At this point you might be wondering "Does this mean I'll need to go to each of the layout components in my page and modify the dimensionsFrom property value to be children?" ADF Faces to the rescue... To eliminate the need to do this tedious manual changes, we introduced a new web.xml parameter "oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS" You'll basically add the following to your web.xml <context-param>    <description>      This parameter controls the default value for component geometry on the page.      Supported values are:        legacy - component attributes use the default values as specified for the attributes                 in the tag documentation (default value)        auto   - component attributes use the correct default value given the value of their                 parent component. For example, with this setting, the panelStretchLayout                 will use "auto" as the default value for its "dimensionsFrom" attribute                 instead of "parent".    </description>    <param-name>oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS</param-name>    <param-value>auto</param-value>  </context-param> Once you set this parameter, you only need to set the dimensionsFrom attribute for the top level layout component on your page, and the rest of the components will adjust accordingly. One trick that you can use, and that is used in the demo below, is to have the dimensionsFrom property depend on the type of client that access your application. This way you can switch between stretch or flow layout based on the device accessing your application. For example I use the following in my page: <af:panelStretchLayout topHeight="70px" startWidth="0px" endWidth="0px"                                       dimensionsFrom="#{adfFacesContext.agent.capabilities['touchScreen'] eq 'none'  ? 'parent' : 'children' }"> Which results in a flow layout for iPads and a stretch layout for regular browsers. Check out the result in the below demo: &amp;lt;span id=&amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;

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  • Stepping outside Visual Studio IDE [Part 1 of 2] with Eclipse

    - by mbcrump
    “If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress." – Barack Obama In my quest to become a better programmer, I’ve decided to start the process of learning Java. I will be primary using the Eclipse Language IDE. I will not bore you with the history just what is needed for a .NET developer to get up and running. I will provide links, screenshots and a few brief code tutorials. Links to documentation. The Official Eclipse FAQ’s Links to binaries. Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers the Galileo Package (based on Eclipse 3.5 SR2)  Sun Developer Network – Java Eclipse officially recommends Java version 5 (also known as 1.5), although many Eclipse users use the newer version 6 (1.6). That's it, nothing more is required except to compile and run java. Installation Unzip the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers and double click the file named Eclipse.exe. You will probably want to create a link for it on your desktop. Once, it’s installed and launched you will have to select a workspace. Just accept the defaults and you will see the following: Lets go ahead and write a simple program. To write a "Hello World" program follow these steps: Start Eclipse. Create a new Java Project: File->New->Project. Select "Java" in the category list. Select "Java Project" in the project list. Click "Next". Enter a project name into the Project name field, for example, "HW Project". Click "Finish" Allow it to open the Java perspective Create a new Java class: Click the "Create a Java Class" button in the toolbar. (This is the icon below "Run" and "Window" with a tooltip that says "New Java Class.") Enter "HW" into the Name field. Click the checkbox indicating that you would like Eclipse to create a "public static void main(String[] args)" method. Click "Finish". A Java editor for HW.java will open. In the main method enter the following line.      System.out.println("This is my first java program and btw Hello World"); Save using ctrl-s. This automatically compiles HW.java. Click the "Run" button in the toolbar (looks like a VCR play button). You will be prompted to create a Launch configuration. Select "Java Application" and click "New". Click "Run" to run the Hello World program. The console will open and display "This is my first java program and btw Hello World". You now have your first java program, lets go ahead and make an applet. Since you already have the HW.java open, click inside the window and remove all code. Now copy/paste the following code snippet. Java Code Snippet for an applet. 1: import java.applet.Applet; 2: import java.awt.Graphics; 3: import java.awt.Color; 4:  5: @SuppressWarnings("serial") 6: public class HelloWorld extends Applet{ 7:  8: String text = "I'm a simple applet"; 9:  10: public void init() { 11: text = "I'm a simple applet"; 12: setBackground(Color.GREEN); 13: } 14:  15: public void start() { 16: System.out.println("starting..."); 17: } 18:  19: public void stop() { 20: System.out.println("stopping..."); 21: } 22:  23: public void destroy() { 24: System.out.println("preparing to unload..."); 25: } 26:  27: public void paint(Graphics g){ 28: System.out.println("Paint"); 29: g.setColor(Color.blue); 30: g.drawRect(0, 0, 31: getSize().width -1, 32: getSize().height -1); 33: g.setColor(Color.black); 34: g.drawString(text, 15, 25); 35: } 36: } The Eclipse IDE should look like Click "Run" to run the Hello World applet. Now, lets test our new java applet. So, navigate over to your workspace for example: “C:\Users\mbcrump\workspace\HW Project\bin” and you should see 2 files. HW.class java.policy.applet Create a HTML page with the following code: 1: <HTML> 2: <BODY> 3: <APPLET CODE=HW.class WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=100> 4: </APPLET> 5: </BODY> 6: </HTML> Open, the HTML page in Firefox or IE and you will see your applet running.  I hope this brief look at the Eclipse IDE helps someone get acquainted with Java Development. Even if your full time gig is with .NET, it will not hurt to have another language in your tool belt. As always, I welcome any suggestions or comments.

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  • Using Definition of Done to Drive Agile Maturity

    - by Dylan Smith
    I’ve been an Agile Coach at a lot of different clients over the years, and I want to share an approach I use to help them adopt and mature over time. It’s important to realize that “Agile” is not a black/white yes/no thing. Teams can be varying degrees of agile. I think of this as their agile maturity level. When I coach teams I want them to start out being a little agile, and get more agile as they mature. The approach I teach them is to use the definition of done as a technique to continuously improve their agile maturity over time. We’re probably all familiar with the concept of “Done Done” that represents what *actually* being done a feature means. Not just when a developer says he’s done right after he writes that last line of code that makes the feature kind-of work. Done Done means the coding is done, it’s been tested, installers and deployment packages have been created, user manuals have been updated, architecture docs have been updated, etc. To enable teams to internalize the concept of “Done Done”, they usually get together and come up with their Definition of Done (DoD) that defines all the activities that need to be completed before a feature is considered Done Done. The Done Done technique typically is applied only to features (aka User Stories). What I do is extend this to apply to several concepts such as User Stories, Sprints, Releases (and sometimes Check-Ins). During project kick-off I’ll usually sit down with the team and go through an exercise of creating DoD’s for each of these concepts (Stories/Sprints/Releases). We’ll usually start by just brainstorming a bunch of activities that could end up in these various DoD’s. Here’s some examples: Code Reviews StyleCop FxCop User Manuals Updated Architecture Docs Updated Tested by QA Tested by UAT Installers Created Support Knowledge Base Updated Deployment Instructions (for Ops) written Automated Unit Tests Run Automated Integration Tests Run Then we start by arranging these activities into the place they occur today (e.g. Do you do UAT testing only once per release? every sprint? every feature?). If the team was previously Waterfall most of these activities probably end up in the Release DoD. An extremely mature agile team would probably have most of these activities in the DoD for the User Stories (because an extremely mature agile team will probably do continuous deployment and release every story). So what we need to do as a team, is work to move these activities from their current home (Release DoD) down into the Sprint DoD and eventually into the User Story DoD (and maybe into the lower-level Check-In DoD if we decide to use that). We don’t have to move them all down to User Story immediately, but as a team we figure out what we think we’re capable of moving down to the Sprint cycle, and Story cycle immediately, and that becomes our starting DoD’s. Over time the team makes an effort to continue moving activities down from Release->Sprint->Story as they become more agile and more mature. I try to encourage them to envision a world in which they deploy to production as each User Story is completed. They would need to be updating User Manuals, creating installers, doing UAT testing (typical Release cycle activities) on every single User Story. They may never actually reach that point, but they should envision that, and strive to keep driving the activities down closer to the User Story cycle s they mature. This is a great technique to give a team an easy-to-follow roadmap to mature their agile practices over time. Sure there’s other aspects to maturity outside of this, but it’s a great technique, that’s easy to visualize, to drive agility into the team. Just keep moving those activities (aka “gates”) down the board from Release->Sprint->Story. I’ll try to give an example of what a recent client of mine had for their DoD’s (this is from memory, so probably not 100% accurate): Release Create/Update deployment Instructions For Ops Instructional Videos Updated Run manual regression test suite UAT Testing In this case that meant deploying to an environment shared across the enterprise that mirrored production and asking other business groups to test their own apps to ensure we didn’t break anything outside our system Sprint Deploy to UAT Environment But not necessarily actually request UAT testing occur User Guides updated Sprint Features Video Created In this case we decided to create a video each sprint showing off the progress (video version of Sprint Demo) User Story Manual Test scripts developed and run Tested by BA Deployed in shared QA environment Using automated deployment process Peer Code Review Code Check-In Compiled (warning-free) Passes StyleCop Passes FxCop Create installer packages Run Automated Tests Run Automated Integration Tests PS – One of my clients had a great question when we went through this activity. They said that if a Sprint is by definition done when the end-date rolls around (time-boxed), isn’t a DoD on a sprint meaningless – it’s done on the end-date regardless of whether those other activities are complete or not? My answer is that while that statement is true – the sprint is done regardless when the end date rolls around – if the DoD activities haven’t been completed I would consider the Sprint a failure (similar to not completing what was committed/planned – failure may be too strong a word but you get the idea). In the Retrospective that will become an agenda item to discuss and understand why we weren’t able to complete the activities we agreed would need to be completed each Sprint.

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  • What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

    - by Louis Davidson
    If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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  • High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

    - by BuckWoody
    Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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  • What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

    - by Jacek Ziabicki
    Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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