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• Oracle Data Integration 12c: Perspectives of Industry Experts, Customers and Partners

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 As you may have seen from our recent blog posts on Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c, we are very excited to share with you the great new features the 12c release brings to Oracle’s data integration solutions. And, fortunately we are not alone in this sentiment. Since the press announcement October 17th, which incorporates our customers' and experts' testimonials, we have seen positive comments in leading technology publications and social media as well. Here are some examples: In CIO and PCWorld you can find Joab Jackson’s article, Oracle Data Integrator 12c ready for real-time analysis, where wrote about the tight integration between Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate . He noted “Heeding the call from enterprise customers who clamor for more immediacy in their data-driven reports, Oracle has updated its data-integration software portfolio so that it can more rapidly deliver data to data warehouses and analysis applications.” Integration Developer News’ Vance McCarthy wrote the article Oracle Ships ‘Future Proofs’ Integration Tools for Traditional, Cloud, Big Data, Real-Time Projects and mentioned that “Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c sport a wide range of improvements to let devs more easily deliver data integration for cloud, analytics, big data and other new projects that leverage multiple datasets for business.“ InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen gave a great overview to several key features including the new flow-based UI in Oracle Data Integrator. Doug said “Oracle Data Integrator 12c introduces a complete makeover of the job-building experience, while real-time oriented GoldenGate 12c introduces performance gains “. In Database Trends and Applications’ article Oracle Strengthens Data Integration with Release of Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c highlighted the productivity aspect of the new solution with his remarks: “tight integration between Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c enables developers to leverage Oracle GoldenGate’s low overhead, real-time change data capture completely within the Oracle Data Integrator Studio without additional training”. We are also thrilled about what our customers and partners have to say about our products and the new release. And we are equally excited to share those perspectives with you in our upcoming launch video webcast on November 12th. SolarWorld Industries America’s Senior Database Manager, Russ Toyama will join our executives in our studio in Redwood Shores to discuss GoldenGate’s core benefits and the new release, while Surren Partharb, CTO of Strategic Technology Services for BT, and Mark Rittman, CTO of Rittman Mead, will provide their comments via the interviews conducted in the UK. This interactive panel discussion in the video webcast will unveil the new release with the expertise of our development executives and the great insight from our customers and partners. In addition, our product experts will be available online to answer chat questions. This is really a great opportunity to learn how Oracle's data integration offering has changed the integration and replication technology space with the new release, and established itself as the new leader. If you have not registered for this free event yet, you can do so via this link. We will run the live event at 8am PT/4pm GMT, followed by a replay of the event with live chat for Q&A  at 10am PT/6pm GMT. The replay will be available on-demand for those who register but cannot attend either session on November 12th. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Inside Red Gate - Experimenting In Public

  - by Simon Cooper

  Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem!

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• Acr.ExtDirect &ndash; Part 1 &ndash; Method Resolvers

  - by Allan Ritchie

  One of the most important things of any open source libraries in my opinion is to be as open as possible while avoiding having your library become invasive to your code/business model design.  I personally could never stand marking my business and/or data access code with attributes everywhere.  XML also isn’t really a fav with too many people these days since it comes with a startup performance hit and requires runtime compiling.  I find that there is a whole ton of communication libraries out there currently requiring this (ie. WCF, RIA, etc).  Even though Acr.ExtDirect comes with its own set of attributes, you can piggy-back the [ServiceContract] & [OperationContract] attributes from WCF if you choose.  It goes beyond that though, there are 2 others “out-of-the-box” implementations – Convention based & XML Configuration.    Convention – I don’t actually recommend using this one since it opens up all of your public instance methods to remote execution calls. XML Configuration – This isn’t so bad but requires you enter all of your methods and there operation types into the Castle XML configuration & as I said earlier, XML isn’t the fav these days.   So what are your options if you don’t like attributes, convention, or XML Configuration?  Well, Acr.ExtDirect has its own extension base to give the API a list of methods and components to make available for remote execution.  1: public interface IDirectMethodResolver { 2:   3: bool IsServiceType(ComponentModel model, Type type); 4: string GetNamespace(ComponentModel model); 5: string[] GetDirectMethodNames(ComponentModel model); 6: DirectMethodType GetMethodType(ComponentModel model, MethodInfo method); 7: }   Now to implement our own method resolver:   1: public class TestResolver : IDirectMethodResolver { 2:   3: #region IDirectMethodResolver Members 4:   5: /// <summary> 6: /// Determine if you are calling a service 7: /// </summary> 8: /// <param name="model"></param> 9: /// <param name="type"></param> 10: /// <returns></returns> 11: public bool IsServiceType(ComponentModel model, Type type) { 12: return (type.Namespace == "MyBLL.Data"); 13: } 14:   15: /// <summary> 16: /// Return the calling name for the client side 17: /// </summary> 18: /// <param name="model"></param> 19: /// <returns></returns> 20: public string GetNamespace(ComponentModel model) { 21: return model.Name; 22: } 23:   24: public string[] GetDirectMethodNames(ComponentModel model) { 25: switch (model.Name) { 26: case "Products" : 27: return new [] { 28: "GetProducts", 29: "LoadProduct", 30: "Save", 31: "Update" 32: }; 33:   34: case "Categories" : 35: return new [] { 36: "GetProducts" 37: }; 38:   39: default : 40: throw new ArgumentException("Invalid type"); 41: } 42: } 43:   44: public DirectMethodType GetMethodType(ComponentModel model, MethodInfo method) { 45: if (method.Name.StartsWith("Save") || method.Name.StartsWith("Update")) 46: return DirectMethodType.FormSubmit; 47: 48: else if (method.Name.StartsWith("Load")) 49: return DirectMethodType.FormLoad; 50:   51: else 52: return DirectMethodType.Direct; 53: } 54:   55: #endregion 56: }   And there you have it, your own custom method resolver.  Pretty easy and pretty open ended!

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• Replacing ASP.NET Forms Authentication with WIF Session Authentication (for the better)

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  ASP.NET Forms Authentication and WIF Session Authentication (which has *nothing* to do with ASP.NET sessions) are very similar. Both inspect incoming requests for a special cookie that contains identity information, if that cookie is present it gets validated and if that is successful, the identity information is made available to the application via HttpContext.User/Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The main difference between the two is the identity to cookie serialization engine that sits below. Whereas ForsmAuth can only store the name of the user and an additional UserData string. It is limited to a single cookie and hardcoded to protection via the machine key. WIF session authentication in turn has these additional features: Can serialize a complete ClaimsPrincipal (including claims) to the cookie(s). Has a cookie overflow mechanism when data gets too big. In total it can create up to 8 cookies (á 4 KB) per domain (not that I would recommend round tripping that much data). Supports server side caching (which is an extensible mechanism). Has an extensible mechanism for protection (DPAPI by default, RSA as an option for web farms, and machine key based protection is coming in .NET 4.5) So in other words – session authentication is the superior technology, and if done cleverly enough you can replace FormsAuth without any changes to your application code. The only features missing is the redirect mechanism to a login page and an easy to use API to set authentication cookies. But that’s easy to add ;) FormsSessionAuthenticationModule This module is a sub class of the standard WIF session module, adding the following features: Handling EndRequest to do the redirect on 401s to the login page configured for FormsAuth. Reads the FormsAuth cookie name, cookie domain, timeout and require SSL settings to configure the module accordingly. Implements sliding expiration if configured for FormsAuth. It also uses the same algorithm as FormsAuth to calculate when the cookie needs renewal. Implements caching of the principal on the server side (aka session mode) if configured in an AppSetting. Supports claims transformation via a ClaimsAuthenticationManager. As you can see, the whole module is designed to easily replace the FormsAuth mechanism. Simply set the authentication mode to None and register the module. In the spirit of the FormsAuthentication class, there is also now a SessionAuthentication class with the same methods and signatures (e.g. SetAuthCookie and SignOut). The rest of your application code should not be affected. In addition the session module looks for a HttpContext item called “NoRedirect”. If that exists, the redirect to the login page will *not* happen, instead the 401 is passed back to the client. Very useful if you are implementing services or web APIs where you want the actual status code to be preserved. A corresponding UnauthorizedResult is provided that gives you easy access to the context item. The download contains a sample app, the module and an inspector for session cookies and tokens. Let’s hope that in .NET 4.5 such a module comes out of the box. HTH

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• How to develop RPG Damage Formulas?

  - by user127817

  I'm developing a classical 2d RPG (in a similar vein to final fantasy) and I was wondering if anyone had some advice on how to do damage formulas/links to resources/examples? I'll explain my current setup. Hopefully I'm not overdoing it with this question, and I apologize if my questions is too large/broad My Characters stats are composed of the following: enum Stat { HP = 0, MP = 1, SP = 2, Strength = 3, Vitality = 4, Magic = 5, Spirit = 6, Skill = 7, Speed = 8, //Speed/Agility are the same thing Agility = 8, Evasion = 9, MgEvasion = 10, Accuracy = 11, Luck = 12, }; Vitality is basically defense to physical attacks and spirit is defense to magic attacks. All stats have fixed maximums (9999 for HP, 999 for MP/SP and 255 for the rest). With abilities, the maximums can be increased (99999 for HP, 9999 for HP/SP, 999 for the rest) with typical values (at level 100) before/after abilities+equipment+etc will be 8000/20,000 for HP, 800/2000 for SP/MP, 180/350 for other stats Late game Enemy HP will typically be in the lower millions (with a super boss having the maximum of ~12 million). I was wondering how do people actually develop proper damage formulas that scale correctly? For instance, based on this data, using the damage formulas for Final Fantasy X as a base looked very promising. A full reference here http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps2/197344-final-fantasy-x/faqs/31381 but as a quick example: Str = 127, 'Attack' command used, enemy Def = 34. 1. Physical Damage Calculation: Step 1 ------------------------------------- [{(Stat^3 ÷ 32) + 32} x DmCon ÷16] Step 2 ---------------------------------------- [{(127^3 ÷ 32) + 32} x 16 ÷ 16] Step 3 -------------------------------------- [{(2048383 ÷ 32) + 32} x 16 ÷ 16] Step 4 --------------------------------------------------- [{(64011) + 32} x 1] Step 5 -------------------------------------------------------- [{(64043 x 1)}] Step 6 ---------------------------------------------------- Base Damage = 64043 Step 7 ----------------------------------------- [{(Def - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 8 ------------------------------------------ [{(34 - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 9 ------------------------------------------------- [(-246)^2) ÷ 110] + 16 Step 10 ---------------------------------------------------- [60516 ÷ 110] + 16 Step 11 ------------------------------------------------------------ [550] + 16 Step 12 ---------------------------------------------------------- DefNum = 566 Step 13 ---------------------------------------------- [BaseDmg * DefNum ÷ 730] Step 14 --------------------------------------------------- [64043 * 566 ÷ 730] Step 15 ------------------------------------------------------ [36248338 ÷ 730] Step 16 ------------------------------------------------- Base Damage 2 = 49655 Step 17 ------------ Base Damage 2 * {730 - (Def * 51 - Def^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 18 ---------------------- 49655 * {730 - (34 * 51 - 34^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 19 ------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1734 - 1156 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 20 ------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1734 - 105) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 21 ------------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1629) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 22 --------------------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - 162} ÷ 730 Step 23 ----------------------------------------------------- 49655 * 568 ÷ 730 Step 24 -------------------------------------------------- Final Damage = 38635 I simply modified the dividers to include the attack rating of weapons and the armor rating of armor. Magic Damage is calculated as follows: Mag = 255, Ultima is used, enemy MDef = 1 Step 1 ----------------------------------- [DmCon * ([Stat^2 ÷ 6] + DmCon) ÷ 4] Step 2 ------------------------------------------ [70 * ([255^2 ÷ 6] + 70) ÷ 4] Step 3 ------------------------------------------ [70 * ([65025 ÷ 6] + 70) ÷ 4] Step 4 ------------------------------------------------ [70 * (10837 + 70) ÷ 4] Step 5 ----------------------------------------------------- [70 * (10907) ÷ 4] Step 6 ------------------------------------ Base Damage = 190872 [cut to 99999] Step 7 ---------------------------------------- [{(MDef - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 8 ------------------------------------------- [{(1 - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 9 ---------------------------------------------- [{(-279.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 10 -------------------------------------------------- [(78064) ÷ 110] + 16 Step 11 ------------------------------------------------------------ [709] + 16 Step 12 --------------------------------------------------------- MDefNum = 725 Step 13 --------------------------------------------- [BaseDmg * MDefNum ÷ 730] Step 14 --------------------------------------------------- [99999 * 725 ÷ 730] Step 15 ------------------------------------------------- Base Damage 2 = 99314 Step 16 ---------- Base Damage 2 * {730 - (MDef * 51 - MDef^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 17 ------------------------ 99314 * {730 - (1 * 51 - 1^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 18 ------------------------------ 99314 * {730 - (51 - 1 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 19 --------------------------------------- 99314 * {730 - (49) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 20 ----------------------------------------------------- 99314 * 725 ÷ 730 Step 21 -------------------------------------------------- Final Damage = 98633 The problem is that the formulas completely fall apart once stats start going above 255. In particular Defense values over 300 or so start generating really strange behavior. High Strength + Defense stats lead to massive negative values for instance. While I might be able to modify the formulas to work correctly for my use case, it'd probably be easier just to use a completely new formula. How do people actually develop damage formulas? I was considering opening excel and trying to build the formula that way (mapping Attack Stats vs. Defense Stats for instance) but I was wondering if there's an easier way? While I can't convey the full game mechanics of my game here, might someone be able to suggest a good starting place for building a damage formula? Thanks

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• Lost in Translation – Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns – Mark Simpson, Griffiths-Waite @ SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  ORACLE PROMOTIONAL DISCOUNT FOR EXCLUSIVE ORACLE DISCOUNT, ENTER PROMO CODE: DJMXZ370 For details please visit the registration page International SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium is a yearly event that features the top experts and authors from around the world, providing a series of keynotes, talks, demonstrations, and panels, as well as training and certification workshops - all dedicated to empowering IT professionals to realize modern service technologies and practices in the real world. Click here for a two-page printable conference overview (PDF). Speaker: Mark Simpson, Griffiths-Waite Mark has been specialising in Oracle technology for 13 years, the last 10 of these with Griffiths Waite. Mark leads our SOA technology practice (covering SOA, Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture). He is a much sought after presenter on the Oracle and SOA conference circuits, and a respected authority on these technologies. Mark has advised a host of UK leading organisations on the deployment of BPM / SOA solutions. Working closely with Oracle US Product Development Mark has contributed to Oracle's SOA Methodology and Oracle's SOA Maturity Model. Lost in Translation – Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns Learn how small misinterpretations of high-level design patterns can have large and costly project ramifications. Good SOA design benefits from the use of a reference architecture and standardised design patterns. However both of these concepts give an abstracted view of the intended solution, which needs to be interpreted to become realised. A reference implementation is important to demonstrate how key design guidelines can be implemented in the toolset of choice, but the main success factor is how these are used through the build and post live phases of the project. This session will introduce practical design patterns with supporting implementation examples that, if used correctly, will give long term benefit. We will highlight implementations where misinterpretations or misalignment from pattern aims have led to issues post implementation. The session will add depth to the pattern discussions you are already having enabling confidence in proceeding to the next level of realisation whilst considering how they may be implemented within your solution and chosen toolset. September 25, 2012 - 13:55 KEYNOTES & SPEAKERS More than 80 international subject matter experts will be speaking at the Symposium. Below are confirmed keynotes and speakers so far. Over 50% of the agenda has not yet been finalized. Many more speakers to come. View the partial program calendars on the Conference Agenda page. CONFERENCE THEMES & TRACKS Cloud Computing Architecture & Patterns New SOA & Service-Orientation Practices & Models Emerging Service Technology Innovation Service Modeling & Analysis Techniques Service Infrastructure & Virtualization Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture Business Planning for Cloud Computing Projects Real World Case Studies Semantic Web Technologies (with & without the Cloud) Governance Frameworks for SOA and/or Cloud Computing Projects Service Engineering & Service Programming Techniques Interactive Services & the Human Factor New REST & Web Services Tools & Techniques Oracle Specialized SOA & BPM Partners Oracle Specialized partners have proven their skills by certifications and customer references. To find a local Specialized partner please visit http://solutions.oracle.com SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Mark Simpson,Griffiths Waite,SOA Patterns,SOA Symposium,Thomas Erl,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Old School Wizardry Tip: Batch File Comments

  - by jkauffman

  Johnny, the Endangered Keyboard-Driven Windows User Some of my proudest, obscure Windows tricks are losing their relevance. I know I’m not alone. Keyboard shortcuts are going the way of the dodo. I used to induce fearful awe by slapping Ctrl+Shift+Esc in front of the lowly, pedestrian Windows users. No windows key on the keyboard? No problem: Ctrl+Esc. No menu key on the keyboard: Shift+F10. I am also firmly planted in the habit of closing windows with the Alt+Space menu (Alt+Space, C); and I harbor a brooding, slow=growing list of programs that fail to support this correctly (that means you, Paint.NET). Every time a new version of windows comes out, the support for some of these minor time-saving habits get pared out. Will I complain publicly? Nope, I know my old ways should be axed to conserve precious design energy. In fact, I disapprove of fierce un-intuitiveness for the sake of alleged productivity. Like vim, for example. If you approach a program after being away for 5 years, having to recall encyclopedic knowledge is a flaw. The RTFM disciples have lost. Anyway, some of the items in my arsenal of goofy time-saving tricks are still relevant today. I wanted to draw attention to one that’s stood the test of time. Remember Batch Files? Yes, it’s true, batch files are fading faster than the world of print. But they're not dead yet. I still run into some situations where I opt to use batch files. They are still relevant for build processes, or just various development workflow tools. Sure, there’s powershell, but there’s that stupid Set-ExecutionPolicy speed bump standing in your way; can you really spare the time to A) hunt down that setting on all machines affected and/or B) make futile efforts to convince your coworkers/boss that the hassle was worth it? When possible, I prefer the batch file wild card. And whenever I return to batch files, I end up researching some of the unintuitive aspects such as parameters, quote handling, and ERRORLEVEL. But I never have to remember to use “REM” for comment lines, because there’s a cleaner way to do them! Double Colon For Eye-Friendly Comments Here is a very simple batch file, with pretty much minimal content: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL REM This is a comment ECHO This batch file doesn’t do much If you code on a daily basis, this may be more suitable to your eyes: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL :: This is a comment ECHO This batch file doesn’t do much Works great! I imagine I find it preferable due to the similarity to comments in other situations: // or ;  or # I’ve often make visual pseudo-line breaks in my code, and this colon-based syntax works wonders: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL :: Do stuff ECHO Doing Stuff :::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :: Do more stuff ECHO This batch file doesn’t do much Not only is it more readable, but there’s a slight performance benefit. The batch file engine sees this as an invalid line label and immediately reads the following line. Use that fact to your advantage if this trick leads you into heated nerd debate. Two Pitfalls to Avoid Be aware of that there are a couple situations where this hack will fail you. It most likely won’t be a problem unless you’re getting really sophisticated with your batch files. Pitfall #1: Inline comments @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL IF EXIST C:\SomeFile.txt GOTO END ::This will fail :END Unfortunately, this fails. You can only have whitespace to the left of your comments. Pitfall #2: Code Blocks @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL IF EXIST C:\SomeFile.txt (         :: This will fail         ECHO HELLO ) Code blocks, such as if statements and for loops, cannot contain these comments. This is ultimately due to the fact that entire code blocks are processed as a single line. I originally learned this from Rob van der Woude’s site. He goes into more depth about the behavior of the pitfalls as well, if you are interested in further details. I hope this trick earns you serious geek rep!

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• Use Your Favorite Wallpapers in Windows 7 Starter Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  If you have Windows 7 Starter Edition installed on your netbook, the default wallpaper can get old. If you are tired of looking at the default wallpaper, then join us today as we look at changing it with Oceanis Change Background Windows 7. Special Notes This information is quoted directly from the website and needs to be kept in mind when using Oceanis Change Background Windows 7: If the Oceanis Change Background Windows 7 program no longer works properly after installing some Windows Updates, then uninstall and reinstall the Oceanis Change Background Windows 7 program to have it run properly again. If you ever do an in-place upgrade to another higher level edition of Windows 7 in the future, then be sure to uninstall this Oceanis Change Background Windows 7 program first to avoid incompatibility issues with it in the new edition of Windows 7. It was designed to only work in Windows 7 Starter edition. Before There it is…the default wallpaper everyone with the Starter Edition gets stuck with. Some people may not mind it, but if you are one of the people who really wants something different then get ready to rejoice. After The install file for Oceanis is contained in a zip file so you will need to unzip it to get started. The install process is quick and simple but you will need to do a system restart afterwards. Once you have restarted your computer this is what your screen will look like…do not panic and think that this is all there is to it. This is just the Starter Screen and can be easily changed… Note: Oceanis will auto-start with Windows each time. Using either the Desktop Icon or the Start Menu Entry, open up the Oceanis Main Window. You will see the set of four default wallpapers shown here. At this point the best thing to do is browse for the appropriate folder where you have all of those wonderful new wallpapers just waiting to be used. Note: We found Stretch to be the best Picture Position setting on our system. For our example we had three ready and waiting. We decided to try out the Wallpaper Slideshow feature first. We chose a time frame and saved our changes. Here are our three wallpapers as they switched through. This can be much more interesting than the default wallpaper. There was only one quirk that we encountered while using the Slideshow Setting. On occasion if we minimized a non-maximized window there would be a leftover partial image in place of the window. Our suggestion? Go with one wallpaper at a time and the settings shown below. These are the settings that we had terrific luck with…Only one picture selected, Picture Position = Stretch, & Change Picture Every = Every Day. Using these settings, the Starter Edition acted just like any of the other editions with regard to wallpaper management. Conclusion If you have grown tired of looking at the default wallpaper in Windows 7 Starter Edition then you will certainly appreciate what Oceanis Change Background Windows 7 can do to fix that problem. For more ways to customize your Windows 7 Started Edition, be sure to to check out how to personalize Windows 7 Starter. Links Download Oceanis Change Background Windows 7 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Windows 7 Welcome Screen Taking Forever? Here’s the Fix (Maybe)Awesome Desktop Wallpapers: The Windows 7 EditionHow To Customize Wallpaper in Windows 7 Starter EditionDesktop Fun: Starship Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Underwater Theme Wallpapers 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 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day

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• SQL – Business Intelligence: Derive Data or Information?

  - by Pinal Dave

  We all know the value of information in our lives. Whether it’s a personal decision or a business initiated one, people need it. But the question is: who is to make the distinction between data and information? We all come across a whole lot of data daily, that may be significant or not. We filter what’s required and forget about the rest. Information is filtered and distilled data. Filtering and distillation can also alter its actual meaning and natural state. Therefore, in this blog we discover some ways to ensure that we’re using business intelligence derived from the right information for making critical management decisions. Four key questions managers must ask themselves before making a decision: 1. Am I working with data or information? 2. What is it’s context? 3. How recent is it? 4. How was it derived or what is the source? The first question is probably the most important. You must know what you’re dealing with here. If you see use of adjectives and conclusions drawn, it’s information. Not raw data. You very next concern must be whether this is guised to present a particular viewpoint or perspective. It makes a lot of difference if you take a decision based on someone’s propaganda to distort real facts. Therefore, the context and the intentions of the distillation process must be clear to you. The next consideration is whether data is recent enough to hold any value. Since it has a very short shelf life, you must ensure that its context and value is not lost out of time. The last and the most important consideration is how was it derived in the first place. The observer effect is what calls the shots here. The source can change the context to a great extent if the collection methodology  and purpose is not clear. Gathering intelligence for decision making requires users to be keen observers and not take the information provided on its face value alone. These probing questions will allow you to make sure that you’re working with clean and accurate data devoid of any influence or manipulations. Only then can you be sure of deriving true business intelligence for your organization. BI technology is also a great way to ensure accuracy of reports. SQL BI Platform  provides advanced tools and techniques for all your BI needs and concerns. Koenig Solutions offers this course along with a host of other Business Intelligence and IT courses on all latest technologies available in the market today. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Attachments in Oracle BPM 11g – Create a BPM Process Instance by passing an Attachment

  - by Venugopal Mangipudi

  Problem Statement: On a recent engagement I had  a requirement where we needed to create BPM instances using a message start event. The challenge was that the instance needed to be created after polling a file location and attaching the picked up file (pdf) as an attachment to the instance. Proposed Solution: I was contemplating using process API to accomplish this,but came up with a solution which involves a BPEL process to pickup the file and send a notification to the BPM process by passing the attachment as a payload. The following are some of the brief steps that were used to build the solution: BPM Process to receive an attachment as part of the payload: The BPM Process is a very simple process which has a Message Start event that accepts the attachment as an argument and a Simple User Task that the user can use to view the attachment (as part of the OOTB attachment panel). The Input payload is based on AttachmentPayload.xsd.  The 3 key elements of the the payload are: <xsd:element name="filename" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="mimetype" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="content" type="xsd:base64Binary"/> A screenshot of the Human task data assignment that need to performed to attach the file is provided here. Once the process and the UI project (default generated UI) are deployed to the SOA server, copy the wsdl location of the process service (from EM). This WSDL would be used in the BPEL project to create the Instances in the BPM process after a file is polled. BPEL Process to Poll for File and create instances in the BPM process: For the BPEL process a File adapter was configured as a Read service (File Streaming option and keeping the Schema as Opaque). Once a location and the file pattern to poll are provided the Readservice Partner Link was wired to Invoke the BPEL Process. Also, using the BPM Process WSDL, we can create the Webservice reference and can invoke the start operation. Before we do the assignment for the Invoke operation, a global variable should be created to hold the value of the fileName of the file. The mapping to the global variable can be done on the Receive activity properties (jca.file.FileName).  So for the assign operation before we invoke the BPM process service, we can get the content of the file from the receive input variable and the fileName from the jca.file.FileName property. The mimetype needs to be hard coded to the mime-type of the file: application/pdf (I am still researching ways to derive the mime type as it is not available as part of the jca.file properties).  The screenshot of the BPEL process can be found here and the Assign activity can be found here. The project source can be found at the following location. A sample pdf file to test the project and a screenshot of the BPM Human task screen after the successful creation of the instance can be found here. References: [1] https://blogs.oracle.com/fmwinaction/entry/oracle_bpm_adding_an_attachment

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• Love and Hate Outlook autocomplete, Outlook 2010/Exchange 2010

  - by Kay Sellenrode

  I think that almost every Exchange admin can concur with me that the Outlook autocomplete cache is one of those things you love but at the same time also hate. Users mostly love this function, except when it fails.Luckily since Outlook 2010 things got a little better and we got rid of the dreaded nk2 files.Outlook 2010 now includes a folder named "Suggested Contacts", all users you send an email to and that don't already have an contact object are saved in this suggested contacts folder.A lot of people thought this folder is also the source for the autocomplete cache, which would make it somewhat easy to manage, I wish the solution was that easy.Badly enough separate from the suggested contacts, outlook still maintains a cache for the autocomplete function. Let us say you run in to the following situation: John works for company A and is a popular contact for almost everyone in your organization.Now John quit his job at Company A and moved to Company B.Luckily John maintains your company as customer, but his email address is now changed from companyA.com to companyB.comSince you don't want to do any business with Company A anymore, you want to make sure none of your users accidentally mail to his old address.Now this is where the real fun starts, cause almost all of your 1000 users have mailed at least once with John.Resulting in the fact that every user has John most probably listed in their autocomplete cache.  I have run into sort like situations multiple times with several customers, which is always a pain.And of course this blog post is the result of one of those issues once again.I knew that with the Suggested contacts we could do more than previously, but still never spent time on it before.But today I thought lets nail this now and forever!!  Ok let's start of that things are different for every combination of outlook and exchange.I explain the procedure for Exchange 2010 SP1+ in combination with Outlook 2010.At first we want to get rid of all contact objects that contain [email protected] do this we need to be assigned to the RBAC role "Mailbox Import Export", which can be done through the Exchange Control panel.In my test environment I assigned this role to the Organization admins, but in real life you might want to add it to a custom role. Open the Exchange control panel by logging in to the ecp url, in my case https://ITFEX.itf.local/ECP, and make sure you selected your organization as management scope.Browse to Roles & Auditing, and open the properties for the organization management role group.click on the Add button to add a new role to the Organization Management role group, select the Mailbox Import Export role and click on add and OK to add it to the role.  Once you have assigned that role to your account you can open the Exchange Management Shell and execute the following command: Get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox –targetmailbox "your.account" –targetfolder searchanddelete –loglevel full –logonly –searchquery "kind:contact AND [email protected]" This command will create a list with all mailboxes and any contacts that were found with an email address that contains [email protected], this list is then posted in the mailbox you specified at your.account in the folder searchanddelete.Now examine the report that was created and posted in the mailbox to see if it matches what you think it should match.My results looked like this:  When you're confident that the search includes all references and no false positives you can execute almost the same command, but this time with an delete action instead of the logonly. Get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox –targetmailbox "your.account" –targetfolder searchanddelete –loglevel full –DeleteContent –searchquery "kind:contact AND [email protected]" Now most people would think this would remove the contact object from the suggested contacts, resulting in a removal from the autocomplete list.Sad but not true, to clean up the autocomplete list start Outlook with the command: "outlook /cleanautocompletecache" This will result in an empty cache, but luckily this is rebuild based on the suggested contacts, which now doesn't include the [email protected] contact anymore.

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• Xsigo and Oracle's Storage

  - by Philippe Deverchère

  Xsigo, a virtual network infrastructure provider, has recently been acquired by Oracle. Following this acquisition, one might ask ourselves why it is important to Oracle and how Oracle's storage is going to benefit on the long term from this virtualized infrastructure layer. Well, the first thing to understand is that Virtual Networking addresses both network and storage connectivity. Oracle Virtual Networking, as the Xsigo technology is now called, connects any server to any network and storage, so this is not just about connecting servers to the Internet or Intranet. It is also for a large part connecting servers to NAS and SAN storage. Connecting servers to storage has become increasingly complex in the past few years because of the strong emergence of virtualization at the Operating System level. 50% of enterprise workloads are now virtualized, up from 18% in 2009, resulting in a strong consolidation of various applications in a high density server footprint. At the same time, server I/O capability increased 8x in the last 8 years. All this has pushed IT administrators to multiply the number of I/O connections in the back-end of their physical servers, resulting in a messy and very hard to manage networking infrastructure. Here is a typical view of a rack back-end when no virtual networking is used. We consider that today: - 75% of users have ten or more Ethernet ports per server - 85% of users have two or more SAN ports per server - 58% have had to add connectivity to a server specifically for VMs - 65% consider cable reduction a priority The average is 12 or more ports per server, resulting in an extremely complex infrastructure to manage. What Oracle wants to achieve with its Oracle Virtual Networking offering is pretty simple. The objective is to eliminate the complexity through a dramatic reduction of cabling between servers and storage/networks. It is also to provide a software based management system so that any server can be connected to any network or any storage, on demand, and without physical intervention on the infrastructure. At the end of the day, the picture on the left shows what one wants to get for the back-end of customer's racks: just a couple of connections on each physical server to provide a simple, agile and fast network infrastructure for both storage and networking access. This is exactly what the Oracle Virtual Networking solution does. It transforms a complex, error-prone, difficult to manage and expensive networking infrastructure into a simple, high performance and agile solution for the data center. Practically speaking, and for the sake of simplicity, imagine that each server just hosts a minimal number of physical InfiniBand HCAs (Host Channel Adapter) with two links (for redundancy) onto the Oracle Fabric Interconnect director. Using the Oracle Fabric Manager software, you'll then be able to create virtual NICs and HBAs (called vNIC and vHBA) that will be seen by the servers as standard NICs and HBAs and associate them to networks and storage systems which are physically connected to the back-end of the director through standard Fibre Channel and Ethernet GbE/10GbE ports. In addition to this incredibly simple "at-a-click" connectivity capability, the Oracle Virtual Networking solution offers powerful features such as network isolation, Quality of Service, advanced performance monitoring and non-disruptive reconfiguration, migration and scalability of networking infrastructure. So let's go back now to our initial question: why is Oracle Virtual Networking especially important to Oracle's storage solutions? After all, one could connect any storage in the back-end of the Oracle Fabric Interconnect directors, right? The answer is pretty simple: since Oracle owns both the virtualized networking infrastructure and the storage (ZFS-SA, Pillar Axiom and tape), it is possible to imagine several ways in the future to add value when it comes to connect storage to a virtualized storage network: enhanced storage capabilities, converged management between storage and network, improved diagnostic capabilities and optimized integration resulting in higher performance and unique features/functions. Of course, all this is not going to be done overnight, and future will tell us is which evolutions come first. But there is little doubt that the integration of Xsigo within Oracle is going to create opportunities for Oracle's storage!

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• emo-framework in android move on collision of sprites with physics

  - by KaHeL

  I'm developing my first ever game for Android where I'm still learning about using of framework. To begin I made two sprites of ball where one ball is movable by dragging and another one is just standing on it's place on load. Now I've already added the collision listener for both sprites and as tested it's working properly. Now what I need to learn is on how can I add physics on both sprites where when they collide the standing sprite will move based on the physics and bounce around the screen. It would be best if you teach it to me step by step since I'm a little slow on this. Here's my nut so far: local stage = emo.Stage(); class Okay_1 { sprite = null; spriteok = null; dragStart = false; angle = 0; // Called when the stage is loaded function onLoad() { print("Level_1 is loaded!"); // Create new sprite and load 'f1.png' sprite = emo.Sprite("f1.png"); sprite.moveCenter(stage.getWindowWidth() * 0.5, stage.getWindowHeight() * 0.5); sprite.load(); spriteok = emo.Sprite("okay.png") spriteok.setWidth(100); spriteok.setHeight(100); spriteok.load(); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (spriteok.contains(100, 100)) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (spriteok.collidesWith(sprite)) { print("collides!"); } } function onMotionEvent(ev) { if (ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_DOWN) { // Moves the sprite at the position of motion event angle = sprite.getAngle(); sprite.remove(); sprite = emo.Sprite("f2.png"); sprite.load(); sprite.rotate(angle); sprite.moveCenter(ev.getX(), ev.getY()); sprite.rotate(sprite.getAngle()+10); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (sprite.contains(sprite.getWidth(), sprite.getHeight())) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (sprite.collidesWith(spriteok)) { print("collides!"); } dragStart = true; }else if (ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_MOVE) { if (dragStart) { // Moves the sprite at the position of motion event sprite.moveCenter(ev.getX(), ev.getY()); sprite.rotate(sprite.getAngle()+10); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (sprite.contains(sprite.getWidth(), sprite.getHeight())) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (sprite.collidesWith(spriteok)) { print("collides!"); } } }else if (ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_UP || ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_CANCEL) { if (dragStart) { // change block color to red dragStart = false; angle = sprite.getAngle(); sprite.remove(); sprite = emo.Sprite("f1.png"); sprite.load(); sprite.moveCenter(ev.getX(), ev.getY()); sprite.rotate(angle); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (sprite.contains(sprite.getWidth(), sprite.getHeight())) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (sprite.collidesWith(spriteok)) { print("collides!"); } } } } // Called when the stage is disposed function onDispose() { sprite.remove(); // Remove the sprite print("Level_1 is disposed!"); } } function emo::onLoad() { emo.Stage().load(Okay_1()); }

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• Improve Playback Using Enhancements in Windows Media Player 12

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for ways to improve the playback of your media in Windows Media Player 12? We’ll show you how to do that by using the enhancements in WMP 12. If you are in Library mode, you’ll need to click the icon at the lower right to switch to Now Playing mode. Right-click anywhere in Media Player while in Now Playing mode, select Enhancements, and select any of the available options.   You can switch between the individual enhancements by clicking the right and left buttons at the top left.   Crossfading and Auto Volume Leveling The Auto Volume Leveling setting is just a simple toggle on and off. If your MP3 or WMA files have volume leveling information values.   You can automatically add volume leveling information values to all files you add to your library by switching to Library view, going to Tools > Options, and selecting Add volume leveling information values for new files on the Library tab. Click OK when finished.   Crossfading will gradually decrease the volume of the song that is ending (fade out) and increase volume of the song that is beginning. Click Turn on Crossfading and then click and drag the slider left or right change the amount of overlap between tracks. Graphic Equalizer The graphic equalizer is toggled on and off by clicking Turn on / Turn off at the top left. You can select pre-defined equalizer settings by music genre by clicking the Default list. The radio buttons on the left allow you to move the sliders individually, in a loose group or a tight group. You can always return to the default settings by clicking Reset. Play Speed Settings Choose a pre-defined settings by clicking Slow, Normal, or Fast. Uncheck the Snap slider to common speeds the move the slider right and left to your desired speed. If nothing else, these settings provide a little fun and amusement. Quiet Mode Quiet mode will level out any sharp volume highs and lows within a single track. Simply toggle the setting on or off and select whether you prefer Medium difference or Little difference by selecting one of the radio buttons. SRS WOW effects SRS WOW effects enhance low-frequency and stereo sound performance. Click Turn on to enable the TruBass and WOW Effect sliders. You can also optimize for your speaker type. Click to switch between Regular, Large, and Headphones. Video Settings Video Settings allow you to adjust the Hue, Brightness, Saturation, and Contrast.   You can also adjust the zoom settings by clicking Select video zoom settings.   Dolby Digital Settings Choose between Normal, Night, and Theater settings to adjust the audio for Dolby Digital content. This setting will only effect media with Dolby Digital sound. Looking for more ways to improve your media experience in WMP 12? Check out how to update metadata and cover art and how to share media with other Windows 7 computers on your home network. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxHow To Rip a Music CD in Windows 7 Media CenterStream Media from Windows 7 to XP with VLC Media PlayerInstalling Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox 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 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor

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• Silverlight Cream for February 21, 2011 -- #1049

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rob Eisenberg(-2-), Gill Cleeren, Colin Eberhardt, Alex van Beek, Ishai Hachlili, Ollie Riches, Kevin Dockx, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), and John Papa. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight 4: Creating useful base classes for your views and viewmodels with PRISM 4" Alex van Beek WP7: "Google Sky on Windows Phone 7" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: My friends at SilverlightShow have their top 5 for last week posted: SilverlightShow for Feb 14 - 20, 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: Rob Eisenberg MVVMs Us with Caliburn.Micro! Rob Eisenberg chats with Carl and Richard on .NET Rocks episode 638 about Caliburn.Micro which takes Convention-over-Configuration further, utilizing naming conventions to handle a large number of data binding, validation and other action-based characteristics in your app. Two Caliburn Releases in One Day! Rob Eisenberg also announced that release candidates for both Caliburn 2.0 and Caliburn.Micro 1.0 are now available. Check out the docs and get the bits. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 6) Gill Cleeren has Part 6 of his series on getting ready for the Silverlight Exam up at SilverlightShow.... this time out, Gill is discussing app startup, localization, and using resource dictionaries, just to name a few things. Google Sky on Windows Phone 7 Colin Eberhardt has a very cool WP7 app described where he's using Google Sky as the tile source for Bing Maps, and then has a list of 110 Messier Objects.. interesting astronomical objects that you can look at... all with source! Silverlight 4: Creating useful base classes for your views and viewmodels with PRISM 4 Alex van Beek has some Prism4/Unity MVVM goodness up with this discussion of a login module using View and ViewModel base classes. Windows Phone 7 and WCF REST – Authentication Solutions Ishai Hachlili sent me this link to his post about WCF REST web service and authentication for WP7, and he offers up 2 solutions... from the looks of this, I'm also putting his blog on my watch list WP7Contrib: Isolated Storage Cache Provider Ollie Riches has a complete explanation and code example of using the IsolatedStorageCacheProvider in their WP7Contrib library. Using a ChannelFactory in Silverlight, part two: binary cows & new-born calves Kevin Dockx follows-up his post on Channel Factories with this part 2, expanding the knowledge-base into usin parameters and custom binding with binary encoding, both from reader suggestions. All about UriMapping in WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has a post up about URI mappings in WP7 ... what it is, how to enable it in code behind or XAML, then using it either with a hyperlink button or via the NavigationService class... all with code. Passing WP7 Memory Consumption requirements with the Coding4Fun MemoryCounter tool WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is a tutorial on the use of the Memory Counter control from the Coding4Fun toolkit and WP7 Memory consumption. Getting Started With Linq Jesse Liberty gets into LINQ in his Episode 33 of his WP7 'From Scratch' series... looks like a good LINQ starting point, and he's going to be doing a series on it. Linq with Objects In his second post on LINQ, Jesse Liberty is looking at creating a Linq query against a collection of objects... always good stuff, Jesse! Silverlight TV Silverlight TV 62: The Silverlight 5 Triad Unplugged John Papa is joined by Sam George, Larry Olson, and Vijay Devetha (the Silverlight Triad) on this Silverlight TV episode 62 to discuss how the team works together, and hey... they're hiring! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Optimization and Saving/Loading

  - by MrPlosion1243

  I'm developing a 2D tile based game and I have a few questions regarding it. First I would like to know if this is the correct way to structure my Tile class: namespace TileGame.Engine { public enum TileType { Air, Stone } class Tile { TileType type; bool collidable; static Tile air = new Tile(TileType.Air); static Tile stone = new Tile(TileType.Stone); public Tile(TileType type) { this.type = type; collidable = true; } } } With this method I just say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone and this seems right to me but I'm not a very experienced coder and would like assistance. Now the reason I doubt this so much is because I like everything to be as optimized as possible and there is a major flaw in this that I need help overcoming. It has to do with saving and loading... well more on loading actually. The way it's done relies on the principle of casting an enumeration into a byte which gives you the corresponding number where its declared in the enumeration. Each TileType is cast as a byte and written out to a file. So TileType.Air would appear as 0 and TileType.Stone would appear as 1 in the file (well in byte form obviously). Loading in the file is alot different though because I can't just loop through all the bytes in the file cast them as a TileType and assign it: for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { world[y, x].Type = (TileType)byteReader.ReadByte(); } } This just wont work presumably because I have to actually say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone as apposed to world[y, x].Type = TileType.Stone. In order to be able to say that I need a gigantic switch case statement (I only have 2 tiles but you could imagine what it would look like with hundreds): Tile tile; for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { switch(byteReader.ReadByte()){ case 0: tile = Tile.Air; break; case 1: tile = Tile.Stone; break; } world[y, x] = tile; } } Now you can see how unoptimized this is and I don't know what to do. I would really just like to cast the byte as a TileType and use that but as said before I have to say world[y, x] = Tile.whatever and TileType can't be used this way. So what should I do? I would imagine I need to restructure my Tile class to fit the requirements but I don't know how I would do that. Please help! Thanks.

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• Oracle Tutor: Installing Is Not Implementing or Why CIO's should care about End User Adoption

  - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com

  Eighteen months ago I showed Tutor and UPK Productive Day One overview to a CIO friend of mine. He works in a manufacturing business which had been recently purchased by a global conglomerate. He had a major implementation coming up, but said that the corporate team would be coming in to handle the project. I asked about their end user training approach, but it was unclear to him at the time. We were in touch over the course of the implementation project. The major activities were data conversion, how-to workshops, General Ledger realignment, and report definition. The message was "Here's how we do it at corporate, and here's how you are going to do it." In short, it was an application software installation. The corporate team had experience and confidence and the effort through go-live was smooth. Some weeks after cutover, problems with customer orders began to surface. Orders could not be fulfilled in a timely fashion. The problem got worse, and the corporate emergency team was called in. After many days of analysis, the issue was tracked down and resolved, but by then there were weeks of backorders, and their customer base was impacted in a significant way. It took three months of constant handholding of customers by the sales force for good will to be reestablished, and this itself diminished a new product sales push. I learned of these results in a recent conversation with the CIO. I asked him what the solution to the problem was, and he replied that it was twofold. The first component was a lack of understanding by customer service reps about how a particular data item in order entry was to be filled in, resulting in discrepant order data. The second component was that product planners were using this data, along with data from other sources, to fill in a spreadsheet based on the abandoned system. This spreadsheet was the primary input for planning data. The result of these two inaccuracies was that key parts were not being ordered to effectively meet demand and the lead time for finished goods was pushed out by weeks. I reminded him about the Productive Day One approach, and it's focus on methodology and tools for end user training. A more collaborative solution workshop would have identified proper applications use in the new environment. Using UPK to document correct transaction entry would have provided effective guidelines to the CSRs for data entry. Using Oracle Tutor to document the manual tasks would have eliminated the use of an out of date spreadsheet. As we talked this over, he said, "I wish I knew when I started what I know now." Effective end user adoption is the most critical and most overlooked success factor in applications implementations. When the switch is thrown at go-live, employees need to know how to use the new systems to do their jobs. Their jobs are made up of manual steps and systems steps which must be performed in the right order for the implementing organization to operate smoothly. Use Tutor to document the manual policies and procedures, use UPK to document the systems tasks, and develop this documentation in conjunction with a solution workshop. This is the path to develop effective end user training material for a smooth implementation. Learn More For more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum. Chuck Jones, Product Manager, Oracle Tutor and BPM

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - Signature encodings

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've just joined this series, I highly recommend you read the previous posts in this series, starting here, or at least these posts, covering the CLR metadata tables. Before we look at custom attribute encoding, we first need to have a brief look at how signatures are encoded in an assembly in general. Signature types There are several types of signatures in an assembly, all of which share a common base representation, and are all stored as binary blobs in the #Blob heap, referenced by an offset from various metadata tables. The types of signatures are: Method definition and method reference signatures. Field signatures Property signatures Method local variables. These are referenced from the StandAloneSig table, which is then referenced by method body headers. Generic type specifications. These represent a particular instantiation of a generic type. Generic method specifications. Similarly, these represent a particular instantiation of a generic method. All these signatures share the same underlying mechanism to represent a type Representing a type All metadata signatures are based around the ELEMENT_TYPE structure. This assigns a number to each 'built-in' type in the framework; for example, Uint16 is 0x07, String is 0x0e, and Object is 0x1c. Byte codes are also used to indicate SzArrays, multi-dimensional arrays, custom types, and generic type and method variables. However, these require some further information. Firstly, custom types (ie not one of the built-in types). These require you to specify the 4-byte TypeDefOrRef coded token after the CLASS (0x12) or VALUETYPE (0x11) element type. This 4-byte value is stored in a compressed format before being written out to disk (for more excruciating details, you can refer to the CLI specification). SzArrays simply have the array item type after the SZARRAY byte (0x1d). Multidimensional arrays follow the ARRAY element type with a series of compressed integers indicating the number of dimensions, and the size and lower bound of each dimension. Generic variables are simply followed by the index of the generic variable they refer to. There are other additions as well, for example, a specific byte value indicates a method parameter passed by reference (BYREF), and other values indicating custom modifiers. Some examples... To demonstrate, here's a few examples and what the resulting blobs in the #Blob heap will look like. Each name in capitals corresponds to a particular byte value in the ELEMENT_TYPE or CALLCONV structure, and coded tokens to custom types are represented by the type name in curly brackets. A simple field: int intField; FIELD I4 A field of an array of a generic type parameter (assuming T is the first generic parameter of the containing type): T[] genArrayField FIELD SZARRAY VAR 0 An instance method signature (note how the number of parameters does not include the return type): instance string MyMethod(MyType, int&, bool[][]); HASTHIS DEFAULT 3 STRING CLASS {MyType} BYREF I4 SZARRAY SZARRAY BOOLEAN A generic type instantiation: MyGenericType<MyType, MyStruct> GENERICINST CLASS {MyGenericType} 2 CLASS {MyType} VALUETYPE {MyStruct} For more complicated examples, in the following C# type declaration: GenericType<T> : GenericBaseType<object[], T, GenericType<T>> { ... } the Extends field of the TypeDef for GenericType will point to a TypeSpec with the following blob: GENERICINST CLASS {GenericBaseType} 3 SZARRAY OBJECT VAR 0 GENERICINST CLASS {GenericType} 1 VAR 0 And a static generic method signature (generic parameters on types are referenced using VAR, generic parameters on methods using MVAR): TResult[] GenericMethod<TInput, TResult>( TInput, System.Converter<TInput, TOutput>); GENERIC 2 2 SZARRAY MVAR 1 MVAR 0 GENERICINST CLASS {System.Converter} 2 MVAR 0 MVAR 1 As you can see, complicated signatures are recursively built up out of quite simple building blocks to represent all the possible variations in a .NET assembly. Now we've looked at the basics of normal method signatures, in my next post I'll look at custom attribute application signatures, and how they are different to normal signatures.

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• St. Louis Day of .NET 2010

  - by Scott Spradlin

  Register now at http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/registration.aspx The Date This year's conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, August 20-21, 2010, at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, Missouri.  Sessions will begin at 8:00 a.m. and run through 4:30 p.m. on both days.  Registration and sign-in will open at 7:00 a.m. on Friday morning, and will run throughout the event. The Venue Based on the almost unanimous feedback from last year's event, we are very excited to bring our conference back to the Ameristar Conference Center. The Ameristar has worked with us to offer a great rate on their large suites, should you be traveling from out-of-town -- or are just interested in a night away from home.  Attendees can book a suite at a discounted rate of only $139/night, which is a substantial discount from their standard rates.  We encourage you take the opportunity to hang around, spend the night, and enjoy the social events and networking opportunities that we have planned. If you are interested in taking advantage of the discounted hotel rate, you can reserve your room online at Ameristar's Online Registration Site, using the special offer code: GDOTH10.  You can also call the hotel's reservation number at (636) 940-4301 and let them know you are attending the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 to receive your discounted rates. The Content All attendees will have access to over 80 technical sessions by many great regional and national technology experts, covering a wide range of .NET development topics.  In addition to refreshments throughout the event, all attendees will be provided with breakfast and lunch on both days of the conference. You will find sessions on many of the most current .NET development topics including: Visual Studio .NET 2010 Silverlight 4.0 Windows 7 Series Phone Development ASP.NET MVC DotNetNuke SharePoint 2010 Architecture Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) And much, much more... This year's event will also include many informal "Open Space" sessions where all attendees with similar interests can discuss current trends or issues they are facing in today's real-world development environments. Finally, all attendees are invited to a social networking event at the HOME Nightclub at the Ameristar, which will be held on the Friday evening of the conference. The Cost The cost of this year's conference is $200 per attendee.  However, for a limited time we are offering a $75 discount for early registrants. To take advantage of this discounted rate, you must register on our site prior to July 10, 2010.  We accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.  In addition, this year we allow for a single user of our site to easily register multiple attendees at once. To register, please visit the official St. Louis Day of .NET site at www.stldodn.com, and click on the "Registration" tab. For More Information And for the most up-to-the-minute information on the event, please follow us online: Twitter:  @stldodn Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/stldodn We strongly encourage you to share this email, as well as the attached flier, with your peers and colleagues, and anyone else you think might be interested in this exciting event. If you have any questions regarding registration, you can email us at [email protected] and we will be happy to address them. Sponsors We are extremely thankful to the many great sponsors who are partnering with us this year to help make the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 a huge success. (There are still sponsorship opportunities available. For complete information, visit the sponsor page on the web site.)

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• How do I get FEATURE_LEVEL_9_3 to work with shaders in Direct3D11?

  - by Dominic

  Currently I'm going through some tutorials and learning DX11 on a DX10 machine (though I just ordered a new DX11 compatible computer) by means of setting the D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_ setting to 10_0 and switching the vertex and pixel shader versions in D3DX11CompileFromFile to "vs_4_0" and "ps_4_0" respectively. This works fine as I'm not using any DX11-only features yet. I'd like to make it compatible with DX9.0c, which naively I thought I could do by changing the feature level setting to 9_3 or something and taking the vertex/pixel shader versions down to 3 or 2. However, no matter what I change the vertex/pixel shader versions to, it always fails when I try to call D3DX11CompileFromFile to compile the vertex/pixel shader files when I have D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_3 enabled. Maybe this is due to the the vertex/pixel shader files themselves being incompatible for the lower vertex/pixel shader versions, but I'm not expert enough to say. My shader files are listed below: Vertex shader: cbuffer MatrixBuffer { matrix worldMatrix; matrix viewMatrix; matrix projectionMatrix; }; struct VertexInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; }; PixelInputType LightVertexShader(VertexInputType input) { PixelInputType output; // Change the position vector to be 4 units for proper matrix calculations. input.position.w = 1.0f; // Calculate the position of the vertex against the world, view, and projection matrices. output.position = mul(input.position, worldMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, viewMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, projectionMatrix); // Store the texture coordinates for the pixel shader. output.tex = input.tex; // Calculate the normal vector against the world matrix only. output.normal = mul(input.normal, (float3x3)worldMatrix); // Normalize the normal vector. output.normal = normalize(output.normal); return output; } Pixel Shader: Texture2D shaderTexture; SamplerState SampleType; cbuffer LightBuffer { float4 ambientColor; float4 diffuseColor; float3 lightDirection; float padding; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; }; float4 LightPixelShader(PixelInputType input) : SV_TARGET { float4 textureColor; float3 lightDir; float lightIntensity; float4 color; // Sample the pixel color from the texture using the sampler at this texture coordinate location. textureColor = shaderTexture.Sample(SampleType, input.tex); // Set the default output color to the ambient light value for all pixels. color = ambientColor; // Invert the light direction for calculations. lightDir = -lightDirection; // Calculate the amount of light on this pixel. lightIntensity = saturate(dot(input.normal, lightDir)); if(lightIntensity > 0.0f) { // Determine the final diffuse color based on the diffuse color and the amount of light intensity. color += (diffuseColor * lightIntensity); } // Saturate the final light color. color = saturate(color); // Multiply the texture pixel and the final diffuse color to get the final pixel color result. color = color * textureColor; return color; }

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• Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

  - by Etienne Tremblay

  I’d like to thank Packt for providing me with a review version of Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices eBook. In fairness I also know the author Peter having seen him speak at DevTeach on many occasions.  I started by looking at the table of content to see what this book was about, knowing that “best practices” is a real misnomer I wanted to see what they were.  I really like the fact that he starts the book by really saying they are not really best practices but actually recommend practices.  As a Team Foundation Server user I found that chapter 2 was more for the open source crowd and I really skimmed it.  The portion on Branching was well documented, although I’m not a fan of the testing branch myself, but the rest was right on. The section on merge remote changes (bring the outside to you) paradigm is really important and was touched on. Chapter 3 has good solid practices on low level constructs like generics and exceptions. Chapter 4 dives into architectural practices like decoupling, distributed architecture and data based architecture.  DTOs and ORMs are touched on briefly as is NoSQL. Chapter 5 is about deployment and is really a great primer on all the “packaging” technologies like Visual Studio Setup and Deployment (depreciated in 2012), Click Once and WIX the major player outside of commercial solutions.  This is a nice section on how to move from VSSD to WIX this is going to be important in the coming years due to the fact that VS 2012 doesn’t support VSSD. In chapter 6 we dive into automated testing practices, including test coverage, mocking, TDD, SpecDD and Continuous Testing.  Peter covers all those concepts really nicely albeit succinctly. Being a book on recommended practices I find this is really good. I really enjoyed chapter 7 that gave me a lot of great tips to enhance my Visual Studio “experience”.  Tips on organizing projects where good.  Also even though I knew about configurations I like that he put that in there so you can move all your settings to another machine, a lot of people don’t know about that. Quick find and Resharper are also briefly covered.  He touches on macros (depreciated in 2012).  Finally he touches on Continuous Integration a very important concept in today’s ALM landscape. Chapter 8 is all about Parallelization, threads, Async, division of labor, reactive extensions.  All those concepts are touched on and again generalized approaches to those modern problems are giving.       Chapter 9 goes into distributed apps, the most used and accepted practice in the industry for .NET projects the chapter tackles concepts like Scalability, Messaging and Cloud (the flavor of the month of distributed apps, although I think this will stick ;-)).  He also looks a protocols TCP/UDP and how to debug distributed apps.  He touches on logging and health monitoring. Chapter 10 tackles recommended practices for web services starting with implementing WCF services, which goes into all sort of goodness like how to host in IIS or self-host.  How to manual test WCF services, also a section on authentication and authorization.  ASP.NET Web services are also touched on in that chapter All in all a good read, nice tips and accepted practices.  I like the conciseness of the subjects and Peter touches on a lot of things in this book and uses a lot of the current technologies flavors to explain the concepts.   Cheers, ET

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• Performing an upgrade from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010

  - by Enrique Lima

  I recently had to go through the process of migrating a TFS 2008 SP1 to a TFS 2010 environment. I will go into the details of the tasks that I went through, but first I want to explain why I define it as a migration and not an upgrade. When this environment was setup, based on support and limitations for TFS 2008, we used a 32 bit platform for the TFS Application Tier and Build Servers.  The Data Tier, since we were installing SP1 for TFS 2008, was done as a 64 bit installation.  We knew at that point that TFS 2010 was in the picture so that served as further motivation to make that a 64bit install of SQL Server.  The SQL Server at that point was a single instance (Default) installation too.  We had a pretty good strategy in place for backups of the databases supporting the environment (and this made the migration so much smoother), so we were pretty familiar with the databases and the purpose they serve. I am sure many of you that have gone through a TFS 2008 installation have encountered challenges and trials.  And likely even more so if you, like me, needed to configure your deployment for SSL.  So, frankly I was a little concerned about the process of migrating.  They say practice makes perfect, and this environment I worked on is in some way my brain child, so I was not ready nor willing for this to be a failure or something that would impact my client’s work. Prior to going through the migration process, we did the install of the environment.  The Data Tier was the same, with a new Named instance in place to host the 2010 install.  The Application Tier was in place too, and we did the DefaultCollection configuration to test and validate all components were in place as they should. Anyway, on to the tasks for the migration (thanks to Martin Hinselwood for his very thorough documentation): Close access to TFS 2008, you want to make sure all code is checked in and ready to go.  We stated a difference of 8 hours between code lock and the start of migration to give time for any unexpected delay.  How do we close access?  Stop IIS. Backup your databases.  Which ones? TfsActivityLogging TfsBuild TfsIntegration TfsVersionControl TfsWorkItemTracking TfsWorkItemTrackingAttachments Restore the databases to the new Named Instance (make sure you keep the same names) Now comes the fun part! The actual import/migration of the databases.  A couple of things happen here. The TfsIntegration database will be scanned, the other databases will be checked to validate they exist.  Those databases will go through a process of data being extracted and transferred to the TfsVersionControl database to then be renamed to Tfs_<Collection>. You will be using a tool called tfsconfig and the option import. This tool is located in the TFS 2010 installation path (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools),  the command to use is as follows:    tfsconfig import /sqlinstance:<instance> /collectionName:<name> /confirmed Where <instance> is going to be the SQL Server instance where you restored the databases to.  <name> is the name you will give the collection. And to explain /confirmed, well this means you have done a backup of the databases, why?  well remember you are going to merge the databases you restored when you execute the tfsconfig import command. The process will go through about 200 tasks, once it completes go to Team Foundation Server Administration Console and validate your imported databases and contents. We’ll keep this manageable, so the next post is about how to complete that implementation with the SSL configuration.

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• Mind Reading with the Raspberry Pi

  - by speakjava

  Mind Reading With The Raspberry Pi At JavaOne in San Francisco I did a session entitled "Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert? Java and the Raspberry Pi".  As part of this I showed some demonstrations of things I'd done using Java on the Raspberry Pi.  This is the first part of a series of blog entries that will cover all the different aspects of these demonstrations. A while ago I had bought a MindWave headset from Neurosky.  I was particularly interested to see how this worked as I had had the opportunity to visit Neurosky several years ago when they were still developing this technology.  At that time the 'headset' consisted of a headband (very much in the Bjorn Borg style) with a sensor attached and some wiring that clearly wasn't quite production ready.  The commercial version is very simple and easy to use: there are two sensors, one which rests on the skin of your forehead, the other is a small clip that attaches to your earlobe. Typical EEG sensors used in hospitals require lots of sensors and they all need copious amounts of conductive gel to ensure the electrical signals are picked up.  Part of Neurosky's innovation is the development of this simple dry-sensor technology.  Having put on the sensor and turned it on (it powers off a single AAA size battery) it collects data and transmits it to a USB dongle plugged into a PC, or in my case a Raspberry Pi. From a hacking perspective the USB dongle is ideal because it does not require any special drivers for any complex, low level USB communication.  Instead it appears as a simple serial device, which on the Raspberry Pi is accessed as /dev/ttyUSB0.  Neurosky have published details of the command protocol.  In addition, the MindSet protocol document, including sample code for parsing the data from the headset, can be found here. To get everything working on the Raspberry Pi using Java the first thing was to get serial communications going.  Back in the dim distant past there was the Java Comm API.  Sadly this has grown a bit dusty over the years, but there is a more modern open source project that provides compatible and enhanced functionality, RXTXComm.  This can be installed easily on the Pi using sudo apt-get install librxtx-java.  Next I wrote a library that would send commands to the MindWave headset via the serial port dongle and read back data being sent from the headset.  The design is pretty simple, I used an event based system so that code using the library could register listeners for different types of events from the headset.  You can download a complete NetBeans project for this here.  This includes javadoc API documentation that should make it obvious how to use it (incidentally, this will work on platforms other than Linux.  I've tested it on Windows without any issues, just by changing the device name to something like COM4). To test this I wrote a simple application that would connect to the headset and then print the attention and meditation values as they were received from the headset.  Again, you can download the NetBeans project for that here. Oracle recently released a developer preview of JavaFX on ARM which will run on the Raspberry Pi.  I thought it would be cool to write a graphical front end for the MindWave data that could take advantage of the built in charts of JavaFX.  Yet another NetBeans project is available here.  Screen shots of the app, which uses a very nice dial from the JFxtras project, are shown below. I probably should add labels for the EEG data so the user knows which is the low alpha, mid gamma waves and so on.  Given that I'm not a neurologist I suspect that it won't increase my understanding of what the (rather random looking) traces mean. In the next blog I'll explain how I connected a LEGO motor to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi and then used my mind to control the motor!

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• The SmartAssembly Rearchitecture

  - by Simon Cooper

  You may have noticed that not a lot has happened to SmartAssembly in the past few months. However, the team has been very busy behind the scenes working on an entirely new version of SmartAssembly. SmartAssembly 6.5 Over the past few releases of SmartAssembly, the team had come to the realisation that the current 'architecture' - grown organically, way before RedGate bought it, from a simple name obfuscator over the years into a full-featured obfuscator and assembly instrumentation tool - was simply not up to the task. Not for what we wanted to do with it at the time, and not what we have planned for the future. Not only was it not up to what we wanted it to do, but it was severely limiting our development capabilities; long-standing bugs in the root architecture that couldn't be fixed, some rather...interesting...design decisions, and convoluted logic that increased the complexity of any bugfix or new feature tenfold. So, we set out to fix this. Earlier this year, a new engine was written on which SmartAssembly would be based. Over the following few months, each feature was ported over to the new engine and extensively tested by our existing unit and integration tests. The engine was linked into the existing UI (no easy task, due to the tight coupling between the UI and old engine), and existing RedGate products were tested on the new SmartAssembly to ensure the new engine acted in the same way. The result is SmartAssembly 6.5. The risks of a rearchitecture Are there risks to rearchitecting a product like SmartAssembly? Of course. There was a lot of undocumented behaviour in the old engine, and as part of the rearchitecture we had to find this behaviour, define it, and document it. In the process we found some behaviour of the old engine that simply did not make sense; hence the changes in pruning & obfuscation behaviour in the release notes. All the special edge cases we had to find, document, and re-implement. There was a chance that these special cases would not be found until near the end of the project, when everything is functionally complete and interacting together. By that stage, it would be hard to go back and change anything without a whole lot of extra work, delaying the release by months. We always knew this was a possibility; our initial estimate of the time required was '4 months, ± 4 months'. And that was including various mitigation strategies to reduce the likelihood of these issues being found right at the end. Fortunately, this worst-case did not happen. However, the rearchitecture did produce some benefits. As well as numerous bug fixes that we could not fix any other way, we've also added logging that lets you find out exactly why a particular field or property wasn't pruned or obfuscated. There's a new command line interface, we've tested it with WP7.1 and Silverlight 5, and we've added a new option to error reporting to improve the performance of instrumented apps by ~10%, at the cost of inaccurate line numbers in reports. So? What differences will I see? Largely none. SmartAssembly 6.5 produces the same output as SmartAssembly 6.2. The performance of 6.5 will be much faster for some users, and generally the same as 6.2 for the remaining. If you've encountered a bug with previous versions of SmartAssembly, I encourage you to try 6.5, as it has most likely been fixed in the rearchitecture. If you encounter a bug with 6.5, please do tell us; we'll be doing another release quite soon, so we'll aim to fix any issues caused by 6.5 in that release. Most importantly, the new architecture finally allows us to implement some Big Things with SmartAssembly we've been planning for many months; these will fundamentally change how you build, release and monitor your application. Stay tuned for further updates!

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• When to use Aspect Oriented Architecture (AOA/AOD)

  When is it appropriate to use aspect oriented architecture? I think the only honest answer to this question is that it depends on the context for which the question is being asked. There really are no hard and fast rules regarding the selection of an architectural model(s) for a project because each model provides good and bad benefits. Every system is built with a unique requirements and constraints. This context will dictate when to use one type of architecture over another or in conjunction with others. To me aspect oriented architecture models should be a sub-phase in the architectural modeling and design process especially when creating enterprise level models. Personally, I like to use this approach to create a base architectural model that is defined by non-functional requirements and system quality attributes.   This general model can then be used as a starting point for additional models because it is targets all of the business key quality attributes required by the system.Aspect oriented architecture is a method for modeling non-functional requirements and quality attributes of a system known as aspects. These models do not deal directly with specific functionality. They do categorize functionality of the system. This approach allows a system to be created with a strong emphasis on separating system concerns into individual components. These cross cutting components enables a systems to create with compartmentalization in regards to non-functional requirements or quality attributes.  This allows for the reduction in code because an each component maintains an aspect of a system that can be called by other aspects. This approach also allows for a much cleaner and smaller code base during the implementation and support of a system. Additionally, enabling developers to develop systems based on aspect-oriented design projects will be completed faster and will be more reliable because existing components can be shared across a system; thus, the time needed to create and test the functionality is reduced.   Example of an effective use of Aspect Oriented ArchitectureIn my experiences, aspect oriented architecture can be very effective with large or more complex systems. Typically, these types of systems have a large number of concerns so the act of defining them is very beneficial for reducing the system’s complexity because components can be developed to address each concern while exposing functionality to the other system components. The benefits to using the aspect oriented approach as the starting point for a system is that it promotes communication between IT and the business due to the fact that the aspect oriented models are quality attributes focused so not much technical understanding is needed to understand the model.An example of this can be in developing a new intranet website. Common Intranet Concerns: Error Handling Security Logging Notifications Database connectivity Example of a not as effective use of Aspect Oriented ArchitectureAgain in my experiences, aspect oriented architecture is not as effective with small or less complex systems in comparison.  There is no need to model concerns for a system that has a limited amount of them because the added overhead would not be justified for the actual benefits of creating the aspect oriented architecture model.  Furthermore, these types of projects typically have a reduced time schedule and a limited budget.  The creation of the Aspect oriented models would increase the overhead of a project and thus increase the time needed to implement the system. An example of this is seen by creating a small application to poll a network share for new files and then FTP them to a new location.  The two primary concerns for this project is to monitor a network drive and FTP files to a new location.  There is no need to create an aspect model for this system because there will never be a need to share functionality amongst either of these concerns.  To add to my point, this system is so small that it could be created with just a few classes so the added layer of componentizing the concerns would be complete overkill for this situation. References:Brichau, Johan; D'Hondt, Theo. (2006) Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) - An Introduction. Retreived from: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~jbrichau/courses/introductionToAOSD.pdf

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