Search Results

Search found 40998 results on 1640 pages for 'setup project'.

Page 947/1640 | < Previous Page | 943 944 945 946 947 948 949 950 951 952 953 954  | Next Page >

• How to ...set up new Java environment - largely interfaces...

  - by Chris Kimpton

  Hi, Looks like I need to setup a new Java environment for some interfaces we need to build. Say our system is X and we need to interfaces to systems A, B and C. Then we will be writing interfaces X-A, X-B, X-C. Our system has a bus within it, so the publishing on our side will be to the bus and the interface processes will be taking from the bus and mapping to the destination system. Its for a vendor based system - so most of the core code we can't touch. Currently thinking we will have several processes, one per interface we need to do. The question is how to structure things. Several of the APIs we need to work with are Java based. We could go EJB, but prefer to keep it simple, one process per interface, so that we can restart them individually. Similarly SOA seems overkill, although I am probably mixing my thoughts about implementations of it compared to the concepts behind it... Currently thinking that something Spring based is the way to go. In true, "leverage a new tech if possible"-style, I am thinking maybe we can shoe horn some jruby into this, perhaps to make the APIs more readable, perhaps event-machine-like and to make the interface code more business-friendly, perhaps even storing the mapping code in the DB, as ruby snippets that get mixed in... but thats an aside... So, any comments/thoughts on the Spring approach - anything more up-to-date/relevant these days. EDIT: Looking a JRuby further, I am tempted to write it fully in JRuby... in which case do we need any frameworks at all, perhaps some gems to make things clearer... Thanks in advance, Chris

  Read the article

• Multiple gcc on Mac OS X

  - by snihalani

  I did a port install for gcc version 4.7.1 (MacPorts gcc47 4.7.1_2) I named the executable as g+ and placed it in one my $PATH. I use gcc 4.7.1 when I need c++11 standard. I haven't changed the original g++ so as not messup XCode. I am using eclipse-cdt and running the make all from the window. It's giving me: 20:12:40 **** Build of configuration Default for project 2804-hw2 **** make all g+ -c -Wall -std=c++11 main.cpp -o main.o make: g+: No such file or directory make: *** [main.o] Error 1 20:12:40 Build Finished (took 89ms) Here is my makefile CC=g+ CFLAGS=-c -Wall -std=c++11 LDFLAGS= SOURCES=main.cpp Vector3D.cpp OBJECTS=$(SOURCES:.cpp=.o) EXECUTABLE=exec all: $(SOURCES) $(EXECUTABLE) $(EXECUTABLE): $(OBJECTS) $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) $(OBJECTS) -o $@ .cpp.o: $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< -o $@ clean: rm $(EXECUTABLE) $(OBJECTS) How do I make eclipse detect my g+?

  Read the article

• Java Spotlight Episode 110: Arun Gupta on the Java EE 6 Pocket Guide @arungupta

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Interview with Arun Gupta on his new Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Getting Started with JavaFX2 and Scene Builder Using the New CSS Analyzer in JavaFX Scene Builder JavaOne Latin America Keynotes NetBeans Podcast #62 - NetBeans Community News with Geertjan and Tinu Request for Project Nashorn (Open Source) JEP 170: JDBC 4.2 Open Sourcing: decora-compiler JPA 2.1 Schema Generation WebSocket, Java EE 7, and GlassFish Events Dec 3-5, jDays, Göteborg, Sweden Dec 4-6, JavaOne Latin America, Sao Paolo, Brazil Dec 14-15, IndicThreads, Pune, India Feature InterviewArun Gupta is a Java EE & GlassFish Evangelist working at Oracle. Arun has over 14 years of experience in the software industry working in various technologies, Java(TM) platform, and several web-related technologies. In his current role, he works very closely to create and foster the community around Java EE & GlassFish. He has participated in several standard bodies and worked amicably with members from other companies. He has been with the Java EE team since it’s inception. And since then he has contibuted to all Java EE releases.He is a prolific blogger at http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta with over 1000 blog entries and frequent visitors from all over the world reaching up to 25,000 hits/day. His new Java EE 6 Pocket Guide is now available on O’Reily What’s Cool Videos: Getting Started with Java Embedded JavaFX: Leverageing Multicore Performance JavaFX on BeagleBoard State of the Lambda: Libraries Edition FOSDEM 2013 CFP now open! The return of the Shark

  Read the article

• Linux laptop encryption

  - by kaerast

  What are my options for encrypting the /home directories of my Ubuntu laptops? They are currently setup without any encryption and some have /home as a separate partition whilst others don't. Most of these laptops are single-user standalone laptops which are out on the road a lot. Is ecryptfs and the encrypted Private directory good enough or are there better, more secure, options? If somebody got hold of the laptop, how easy would it be for them to gain access to the encrypted files? Similar questions for encrypted lvm, truecrypt and any other solution I may not be aware of.

  Read the article

• As a C# developer, would you learn Java to develop for Android or use MonoDroid instead?

  - by Dan Tao

  I'd consider myself pretty well versed in C#. It's my language of choice at the moment, and it's where basically all my professional experience lies. Still, I'm puzzled by the existence of the MonoDroid project. My understanding has always been that C# and Java are very close. Like, if you know one, you can learn the other really quickly. So, as I've considered developing my first Android app, I just assumed I would familiarize myself with Java enough to get started and then just sort of learn as I go. Wouldn't this make more sense than using MonoDroid, which is likely to be less feature-rich than the Java Android SDK, and requires learning its own API (albeit a .NET API) anyway? I just feel like it would be better to learn a new language (and an extremely popular one at that) and get some experience in it—when it's so close to what you already know anyway—rather than stick with a technology you're experienced with, without gaining any more valuable skills. Maybe I'm grossly misrepresenting the average potential MonoDroid user. Maybe it's more for people who are experienced in Java and .NET and just prefer .NET. Or maybe (in fact it's likely) there are other factors I just haven't considered. I'm just wondering, why would you use MonoDroid instead of just developing for Android using Java?

  Read the article

• Is this information about me as a programmer concise and good enough?

  - by Nick Rosencrantz

  I not only want you to review my resume but please tell me what you think Google means when they answered me: "We don't look at personal letters and we like your resume and we can recommend you internally but we need measurable experience. What is meant with "measurable" here? Do they mean like O(1) compared to O(n), selling an entire company, grades or what? This is what I sent: Curriculum vitae Nick Rosencrantz Competence: System development, web development Technical competence: Java, Javascript, HTML, XML, CSS, AJAX, PHP, SQL, Python Employments: 2012- Mobile Innovation AB System Developer IT consultant (Java programmer) 2011-2012 Bnano International Ltd System Developer Python programming in Google App Engine 2008-2009 Sweden Island AB System Developer Programming C++ and Java EE components 2003-2007 Studies Stockholm School of Economics During studies worked as network technician at Effnet AB 2000-2002 Jadestone AB System Developer System development in Java/J2EE. In 2001: KTH, Assistant. Teaching application server programming in Java Enterprise + weblogic + Informix. 1999-2000 Studies KTH 1996-1998 Spray.se System development, Researcher 1995-1995 Finance broker Backoffice work with financial instruments 1993-1994 Computer & Audio-Technical Systems AB Programming, sommer job Education/Courses: Stockholm School of Economics, Master of Science diploma, KTH, Computer Science undergraduate studies Languages Swedish, English, also some German and French Born 1973, Swedish citizen I also have a project-based CS which is several pages long but the above is about what I was aiming for in the beginning when I was looking for a job, now I have employment as an IT consultant in central Stockholm and I want to make my resume concise and also know what Google meant with their answer (It was a Swedish Google employee that via linkedin recruited from my Stockholm School of Economics groups since that is a small elite economics school where I took my M.Sc. and KTH is one of the largest universities in northern Europe so I sent her a link with my CV and she said she could promote me internally if I added "measurable experience" and I've been thinking for weeks what that may mean?

  Read the article

• How can I stop sysprep from interacting with boot on windows 7

  - by Grofit

  I have recently had a laptop sent back to supplier for fixing a mainboard fault. I got it back today and every time it boots up I am faced with: "Setup is preparing windows for first time use" Then once it gets to the desktop I get the sysprep dialog come up asking if I want OOBC or Audit actions. I can close it, but it just keeps coming back, and I cannot find any startup or boot actions, even downloaded autoruns, and that cannot find anything to do with it. Ideally I do not want to format/fdisk as I have just spent hours installing everything on the laptop and I have my primary C:/ which has all windows and at worst case I can get rid of that, but I have a secondary partition D:/ which has alot of stuff I cant lose as its work related and important. Also to make matters more difficult I do not have a windows 7 disk, it was just pre-installed and they dont provide a disk. Any help would be great!

  Read the article

• Webinar: NoSQL - Data Center Centric Application Enablement

  - by Charles Lamb

  NoSQL - Data Center Centric Application Enablement AUGUST 6 WEBINAR About the Webinar The growth of Datacenter infrastructure is trending out of bounds, along with the pace in user activity and data generation in this digital era. However, the nature of the typical application deployment within the data center is changing to accommodate new business needs. Those changes introduce complexities in application deployment architecture and design, which cascade into requirements for a new generation of database technology (NoSQL) destined to ease that complexity. This webcast will discuss the modern data centers data centric application, the complexities that must be dealt with and common architectures found to describe and prescribe new data center aware services. Well look at the practical issues in implementation and overview current state of art in NoSQL database technology solving the problems of data center awareness in application development. REGISTER NOW>> MORE INFORMATION >> NOTE! All attendees will be entered to win a guest pass to the NoSQL Now! 2013 Conference & Expo. About the Speaker Robert Greene, Oracle NoSQL Product Management Robert GreeneRobert Greene is a principle product manager / strategist for Oracle’s NoSQL Database technology. Prior to Oracle he was the V.P. Technology for a NoSQL Database company, Versant Corporation, where he set the strategy for alignment with Big Data technology trends resulting in the acquisition of the company by Actian Corp in 2012. Robert has been an active member of both commercial and open source initiatives in the NoSQL and Object Relational Mapping spaces for the past 18 years, developing software, leading project teams, authoring articles and presenting at major conferences on these topics. In his previous life, Robert was an electronic engineer developing first generation wireless, spread spectrum based security systems.

  Read the article

• Cyrus: How Do I Configure saslauthd For Authentication?

  - by Nick

  I'm trying to get Cyrus IMAP (v 2.2 on Ubuntu 9.04) setup and working, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting the login working correctly. I've created a mailbox for my test user "nrahl": cm user/nrahl and then created a password: $ saslpasswd2 nrahl I'm attempting to connect to the mailbox using Thunderbird. I'm using the machine's LAN IP address as the host, and "nrahl" as the username. It connects to the server and prompts me for the password. When I enter it, I get "Login to server failed." in Thunderbird, and /var/log/mail.log shows: Apr 15 19:20:01 IMAP cyrus/imap[1930]: accepted connection Apr 15 19:20:09 IMAP cyrus/imap[1930]: badlogin: [192.168.5.21] plaintext nrahl SASL(-13): authentication failure: checkpass failed Part of /etc/imapd.conf with comments removed: sieveusehomedir: false sievedir: /var/spool/sieve #mailnotifier: zephyr #sievenotifier: zephyr #dracinterval: 0 #drachost: localhost hashimapspool: true allowplaintext: yes sasl_mech_list: PLAIN #allowapop: no #sasl_maximum_layer: 256 #loginrealms: example.com #virtdomains: userid #defaultdomain: sasl_pwcheck_method: saslauthd #sasl_auxprop_plugin: sasldb sasl_auto_transition: no UPDATE: When setting: sasl_pwcheck_method: alwaystrue in /etc/imapd.conf, login works correctly. So I'm assuming the issue is saslauthd related.

  Read the article

• Announcing: Great Improvements to Windows Azure Web Sites

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce some great improvements to the Windows Azure Web Sites capability we first introduced earlier this summer.  Today’s improvements include: a new low-cost shared mode scaling option, support for custom domains with shared and reserved mode web-sites using both CNAME and A-Records (the later enabling naked domains), continuous deployment support using both CodePlex and GitHub, and FastCGI extensibility.  All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately. New “Shared” Scaling Tier Windows Azure allows you to deploy and host up to 10 web-sites in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment. You can start out developing and testing web sites at no cost using this free shared mode, and it supports the ability to run web sites that serve up to 165MB/day of content (5GB/month).  All of the capabilities we introduced in June with this free tier remain the same with today’s update. Starting with today’s release, you can now elastically scale up your web-site beyond this capability using a new low-cost “shared” option (which we are introducing today) as well as using a “reserved instance” option (which we’ve supported since June).  Scaling to either of these modes is easy.  Simply click on the “scale” tab of your web-site within the Windows Azure Portal, choose the scaling option you want to use with it, and then click the “save” button.  Changes take only seconds to apply and do not require any code to be changed, nor the app to be redeployed: Below are some more details on the new “shared” option, as well as the existing “reserved” option: Shared Mode With today’s release we are introducing a new low-cost “shared” scaling mode for Windows Azure Web Sites.  A web-site running in shared mode is deployed in a shared/multi-tenant hosting environment.  Unlike the free tier, though, a web-site in shared mode has no quotas/upper-limit around the amount of bandwidth it can serve.  The first 5 GB/month of bandwidth you serve with a shared web-site is free, and then you pay the standard “pay as you go” Windows Azure outbound bandwidth rate for outbound bandwidth above 5 GB. A web-site running in shared mode also now supports the ability to map multiple custom DNS domain names, using both CNAMEs and A-records, to it.  The new A-record support we are introducing with today’s release provides the ability for you to support “naked domains” with your web-sites (e.g. http://microsoft.com in addition to http://www.microsoft.com).  We will also in the future enable SNI based SSL as a built-in feature with shared mode web-sites (this functionality isn’t supported with today’s release – but will be coming later this year to both the shared and reserved tiers). You pay for a shared mode web-site using the standard “pay as you go” model that we support with other features of Windows Azure (meaning no up-front costs, and you pay only for the hours that the feature is enabled).  A web-site running in shared mode costs only 1.3 cents/hr during the preview (so on average $9.36/month). Reserved Instance Mode In addition to running sites in shared mode, we also support scaling them to run within a reserved instance mode.  When running in reserved instance mode your sites are guaranteed to run isolated within your own Small, Medium or Large VM (meaning no other customers run within it).  You can run any number of web-sites within a VM, and there are no quotas on CPU or memory limits. You can run your sites using either a single reserved instance VM, or scale up to have multiple instances of them (e.g. 2 medium sized VMs, etc).  Scaling up or down is easy – just select the “reserved” instance VM within the “scale” tab of the Windows Azure Portal, choose the VM size you want, the number of instances of it you want to run, and then click save.  Changes take effect in seconds: Unlike shared mode, there is no per-site cost when running in reserved mode.  Instead you pay only for the reserved instance VMs you use – and you can run any number of web-sites you want within them at no extra cost (e.g. you could run a single site within a reserved instance VM or 100 web-sites within it for the same cost).  Reserved instance VMs start at 8 cents/hr for a small reserved VM.  Elastic Scale-up/down Windows Azure Web Sites allows you to scale-up or down your capacity within seconds.  This allows you to deploy a site using the shared mode option to begin with, and then dynamically scale up to the reserved mode option only when you need to – without you having to change any code or redeploy your application. If your site traffic starts to drop off, you can scale back down the number of reserved instances you are using, or scale down to the shared mode tier – all within seconds and without having to change code, redeploy, or adjust DNS mappings.  You can also use the “Dashboard” view within the Windows Azure Portal to easily monitor your site’s load in real-time (it shows not only requests/sec and bandwidth but also stats like CPU and memory usage). Because of Windows Azure’s “pay as you go” pricing model, you only pay for the compute capacity you use in a given hour.  So if your site is running most of the month in shared mode (at 1.3 cents/hr), but there is a weekend when it gets really popular and you decide to scale it up into reserved mode to have it run in your own dedicated VM (at 8 cents/hr), you only have to pay the additional pennies/hr for the hours it is running in the reserved mode.  There is no upfront cost you need to pay to enable this, and once you scale back down to shared mode you return to the 1.3 cents/hr rate.  This makes it super flexible and cost effective. Improved Custom Domain Support Web sites running in either “shared” or “reserved” mode support the ability to associate custom host names to them (e.g. www.mysitename.com).  You can associate multiple custom domains to each Windows Azure Web Site.  With today’s release we are introducing support for A-Records (a big ask by many users). With the A-Record support, you can now associate ‘naked’ domains to your Windows Azure Web Sites – meaning instead of having to use www.mysitename.com you can instead just have mysitename.com (with no sub-name prefix).  Because you can map multiple domains to a single site, you can optionally enable both a www and naked domain for a site (and then use a URL rewrite rule/redirect to avoid SEO problems). We’ve also enhanced the UI for managing custom domains within the Windows Azure Portal as part of today’s release.  Clicking the “Manage Domains” button in the tray at the bottom of the portal now brings up custom UI that makes it easy to manage/configure them: As part of this update we’ve also made it significantly smoother/easier to validate ownership of custom domains, and made it easier to switch existing sites/domains to Windows Azure Web Sites with no downtime. Continuous Deployment Support with Git and CodePlex or GitHub One of the more popular features we released earlier this summer was support for publishing web sites directly to Windows Azure using source control systems like TFS and Git.  This provides a really powerful way to manage your application deployments using source control.  It is really easy to enable this from a website’s dashboard page: The TFS option we shipped earlier this summer provides a very rich continuous deployment solution that enables you to automate builds and run unit tests every time you check in your web-site, and then if they are successful automatically publish to Azure. With today’s release we are expanding our Git support to also enable continuous deployment scenarios and integrate with projects hosted on CodePlex and GitHub.  This support is enabled with all web-sites (including those using the “free” scaling mode). Starting today, when you choose the “Set up Git publishing” link on a website’s “Dashboard” page you’ll see two additional options show up when Git based publishing is enabled for the web-site: You can click on either the “Deploy from my CodePlex project” link or “Deploy from my GitHub project” link to walkthrough a simple workflow to configure a connection between your website and a source repository you host on CodePlex or GitHub.  Once this connection is established, CodePlex or GitHub will automatically notify Windows Azure every time a checkin occurs.  This will then cause Windows Azure to pull the source and compile/deploy the new version of your app automatically.  The below two videos walkthrough how easy this is to enable this workflow and deploy both an initial app and then make a change to it: Enabling Continuous Deployment with Windows Azure Websites and CodePlex (2 minutes) Enabling Continuous Deployment with Windows Azure Websites and GitHub (2 minutes) This approach enables a really clean continuous deployment workflow, and makes it much easier to support a team development environment using Git: Note: today’s release supports establishing connections with public GitHub/CodePlex repositories.  Support for private repositories will be enabled in a few weeks. Support for multiple branches Previously, we only supported deploying from the git ‘master’ branch.  Often, though, developers want to deploy from alternate branches (e.g. a staging or future branch). This is now a supported scenario – both with standalone git based projects, as well as ones linked to CodePlex or GitHub.  This enables a variety of useful scenarios.  For example, you can now have two web-sites - a “live” and “staging” version – both linked to the same repository on CodePlex or GitHub.  You can configure one of the web-sites to always pull whatever is in the master branch, and the other to pull what is in the staging branch.  This enables a really clean way to enable final testing of your site before it goes live. This 1 minute video demonstrates how to configure which branch to use with a web-site. Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming in the weeks ahead – including support for the recent Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 releases (we will enable new web and worker role images with Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 next month).  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as these new features become available. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• Code Generation and IDE vs writing per Hand

  - by sytycs

  I have been programming for about a year now. Pretty soon I realized that I need a great Tool for writing code and learned Vim. I was happy with C and Ruby and never liked the idea of an IDE. Which was encouraged by a lot of reading about programming.[1] However I started with (my first) Java Project. In a CS Course we were using Visual Paradigm and encouraged to let the program generate our code from a class diagram. I did not like that Idea because: Our class diagram was buggy. Students more experienced in Java said they would write the code per hand. I had never written any Java before and would not understand a lot of the generated code. So I took a different approach and wrote all methods per Hand (getter and Setter included). My Team-members have written their parts (partly generated by VP) in an IDE and I was "forced" to use it too. I realized they had generated equal amounts of code in a shorter amount of time and did not spend a lot of time setting their CLASSPATH and writing scripts for compiling that son of a b***. Additionally we had to implement a GUI and I dont see how we could have done that in a sane matter in Vim. So here is my Problem: I fell in love with Vim and the Unix way. But it looks like for getting this job done (on time) the IDE/Code generation approach is superior. Do you have equal experiences? Is Java by the nature of the language just more suitable for an IDE/Code generated approach? Or am I lacking the knowledge to produce equal amounts of code "per Hand"? [1] http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/eclipse.html

  Read the article

• Installing SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7

  - by smisner

  Many people like me want (or need) to do their business intelligence development work on a laptop. As someone who frequently speaks at various events or teaches classes on all subjects related to the Microsoft business intelligence stack, I need a way to run multiple server products on my laptop with reasonable performance. Once upon a time, that requirement meant only that I had to load the current version of SQL Server and the client tools of choice. In today's post, I'll review my latest experience with trying to make the newly released Microsoft BI products work with a Windows 7 operating system. The entrance of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 into the BI stack complicated matters and I started using Virtual Server to establish a "suitable" environment. As part of the team that delivered a lot of education as part of the Yukon pre-launch activities (that would be SQL Server 2005 for the uninitiated), I was working with four - yes, four - virtual servers. That was a pretty brutal workload for a 2GB laptop, which worked if I was very, very careful. It could also be a finicky and unreliable configuration as I learned to my dismay at one TechEd session several years ago when I had to reboot a very carefully cached set of servers just minutes before my session started. Although it worked, it came back to life very, very slowly much to the displeasure of the audience. They couldn't possibly have been less pleased than me. At that moment, I resolved to get the beefiest environment I could afford and consolidate to a single virtual server. Enter the 4GB 64-bit laptop to preserve my sanity and my livelihood. Likewise, for SQL Server 2008, I managed to keep everything within a single virtual server and I could function reasonably well with this approach. Now we have SQL Server 2008 R2 plus Office SharePoint Server 2010. That means a 64-bit operating system. Period. That means no more Virtual Server. That means I must use Hyper-V or another alternative. I've heard alternatives exist, but my few dabbles in this area did not yield positive results. It might have been just me having issues rather than any failure of those technologies to adequately support the requirements. My first run at working with the new BI stack configuration was to set up a 64-bit 4GB laptop with a dual-boot to run Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. However, I was generally not happy with running Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop. For one, I couldn't put it into sleep mode, which is helpful if I want to prepare for a presentation beforehand and then walk to the podium without the need to hold my laptop in its open state along the way (my strategy at the TechEd session long, long ago). Secondly, it was finicky with projectors. I had issues from time to time and while I always eventually got it to work, I didn't appreciate those nerve-wracking moments wondering whether this would be the time that it wouldn't work. Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was possible to load SharePoint 2010 in a Windows 7 which piqued my interest. I had just acquired a new laptop running Windows 7 64-bit, and thought surely running the BI stack natively on my laptop must be better than running Hyper-V. (I have not tried booting to Hyper-V VHD yet, but that's on my list of things to try so the jury of one is still out on this approach.) Recently, I had to build up a server with the RTM versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Sharepoint Server 2010 and decided to follow suit on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop. The process is slightly different, but I'm happy to report that it IS possible, although I had some fits and starts along the way. DISCLAIMER: These products are NOT intended to be run in production mode on the Windows 7 operating system. The configuration described in this post is strictly for development or learning purposes and not supported by Microsoft. If you have trouble, you will NOT get help from them. I might be able to help, but I provide no guarantees of my ability or availablity to help. I won't provide the step-by-step instructions in this post as there are other resources that provide these details, but I will provide an overview of my approach, point you to the relevant resources, describe some of the problems I encountered, and explain how I addressed those problems to achieve my desired goal. Because my goal was not simply to set up SharePoint Server 2010 on my laptop, but specifically PowerPivot for SharePoint, I started out by referring to the installation instructions at the PowerPiovt-Info site, but mainly to confirm that I was performing steps in the proper sequence. I didn't perform the steps in Part 1 because those steps are applicable only to a server operating system which I am not running on my laptop. Then, the instructions in Part 2, won't work exactly as written for the same reason. Instead, I followed the instructions on MSDN, Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. In general, I found the following differences in installation steps from the steps at PowerPivot-Info: You must copy the SharePoint installation media to the local drive so that you can edit the config.xml to allow installation on a Windows client. You also have to manually install the prerequisites. The instructions provides links to each item that you must manually install and provides a command-line instruction to execute which enables required Windows features. I will digress for a moment to save you some grief in the sequence of steps to perform. I discovered later that a missing step in the MSDN instructions is to install the November CTP Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. When I went to test my SharePoint site (I believe I tested after I had a successful PowerPivot installation), I ran into the following error: Could not load file or assembly 'RSSharePointSoapProxy, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. I was rather surprised that Reporting Services was required. Then I found an article by Alan le Marquand, Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010,that instructed readers to install the November add-in. My first reaction was, "Really?!?" But I confirmed it in another TechNet article on hardware and software requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. It doesn't refer explicitly to the November CTP but following the link took me there. (Interestingly, I retested today and there's no longer any reference to the November CTP. Here's the link to download the latest and greatest Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies 2010.) You don't need to download the add-in anymore if you're doing a regular server-based installation of SharePoint because it installs as part of the prerequisites automatically. When it was time to start the installation of SharePoint, I deviated from the MSDN instructions and from the PowerPivot-Info instructions: On the Choose the installation you want page of the installation wizard, I chose Server Farm. On the Server Type page, I chose Complete. At the end of the installation, I did not run the configuration wizard. Returning to the PowerPivot-Info instructions, I tried to follow the instructions in Part 3 which describe installing SQL Server 2008 R2 with the PowerPivot option. These instructions tell you to choose the New Server option on the Setup Role page where you add PowerPivot for SharePoint. However, I ran into problems with this approach and got installation errors at the end. It wasn't until much later as I was investigating an error that I encountered Dave Wickert's post that installing PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7 is unsupported. Uh oh. But he did want to hear about it if anyone succeeded, so I decided to take the plunge. Perseverance paid off, and I can happily inform Dave that it does work so far. I haven't tested absolutely everything with PowerPivot for SharePoint but have successfully deployed a workbook and viewed the PowerPivot Management Dashboard. I have not yet tested the data refresh feature, but I have installed. Continue reading to see how I accomplished my objective. I unintalled SQL Server 2008 R2 and started again. I had different problems which I don't recollect now. However, I uninstalled again and approached installation from a different angle and my next attempt succeeded. The downside of this approach is that you must do all of the things yourself that are done automatically when you install PowerPivot as a new server. Here are the steps that I followed: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 to get a database engine instance installed. Run the SharePoint configuration wizard to set up the SharePoint databases. In Central Administration, create a Web application using classic mode authentication as per a TechNet article on PowerPivot Authentication and Authorization. Then I followed the steps I found at How to: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint on an Existing SharePoint Server. Especially important to note - you must launch setup by using Run as administrator. I did not have to manually deploy the PowerPivot solution as the instructions specify, but it's good to know about this step because it tells you where to look in Central Administration to confirm a successful deployment. I did spot some incorrect steps in the instructions (at the time of this writing) in How To: Configure Stored Credentials for PowerPivot Data Refresh. Specifically, in the section entitled Step 1: Create a target application and set the credentials, both steps 10 and 12 are incorrect. They tell you to provide an actual Windows user name and password on the page where you are simply defining the prompts for your application in the Secure Store Service. To add the Windows user name and password that you want to associate with the application - after you have successfully created the target application - you select the target application and then click Set credentials in the ribbon. Lastly, I followed the instructions at How to: Install Office Data Connectivity Components on a PowerPivot server. However, I have yet to test this in my current environment. I did have several stops and starts throughout this process and edited those out to spare you from reading non-essential information. I believe the explanation I have provided here accurately reflect the steps I followed to produce a working configuration. If you follow these steps and get a different result, please let me know so that together we can work through the issue and correct these instructions. I'm sure there are many other folks in the Microsoft BI community that will appreciate the ability to set up the BI stack in a Windows 7 environment for development or learning purposes. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• rsyslog - regex trouble

  - by benmccann

  I'm trying to setup the logentries service. If a log entry has a token in it then I would like to send it to api.logentries.com:10000. The token is a guid in the format aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee. Right now I'm doing: # If there's a logentries token then send it directly to logentries :msg, regex, ".*[a-z0-9]{8}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{12}.*" & @@api.logentries.com:10000 I checked the rsyslog debug logs and my regex is not matching, but I can't figure out why or how to fix it: 5245.961161378:7fb79b514700: Filter: check for property 'msg' (value ' fb1c507f-2ede-4d7f-a140-2bd8d56e133 - application - [play-akka.actor.default-dispatcher-1] - Found user: 4fb11ea5e4b00a1aeebe2800') regex '.*[a-z0-9]{8}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{12}.*': FALSE

  Read the article

• Database Connectivity Test with UDL File

  - by Ben Griswold

  I bounced around between projects a lot last week.  What each project had in common was the need to validate at least one SQL connection.  Whether you have SQL tools like SSMS installed or not, this is a very easy task if you are aware of the UDL (Universal Data Link) files.  Create a new file and name it anything as long as it has the .udl extension. Open the file, choose a provider: Click Next >> or navigate to the Connection Tab to provide connection information.  Once you provide server and login credentials, the database list will populate.  At this point, you know the connection is valid. but go ahead and click the Test Connection button anyway. On the final tab, you can provide extra connection information like Application Name which can come in handy.  The All tab is beneficial if you want to build a valid connection string to include in your own applications.  If you save the file and then open in Notepad, you’ll find that said connection string: Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=False;Initial Catalog=master;Data Source=(local);Application Name=TestApp I hope this tip helps save you some time.  How do you test if you don’t have SSMS installed?

  Read the article

• Exchange 2003 resource scheduling with mixed client versions

  - by Daniel Lucas

  We run Exchange 2003, but have a mix of Outlook 2003/2007/2010 in the environment. We have three rooms that need to be configured as resources. Some observations we've made with resource scheduling/booking are: Outlook 2010 users have trouble with the native Exchange 2003 resource scheduling method and require direct booking to be configured via registry Outlook 2007 users are unable to use direct booking (is this accurate?) Outlook 2003 users can only use the native Exchange 2003 resource scheduling method (is this accurate?) Direct booking cannot be combined with the auto-accept agent What is the correct way to setup resource scheduling in a mixed environment like this? Thanks, Daniel

  Read the article

• Ruby on Rails - Belongs_to and Active Admin not creating foreign ID

  - by Milo

  I have the following setup: class Category < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :products end class Product < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :category has_attached_file :photo, :styles => { :medium => "300x300>", :thumb => "200x200>" } validates_attachment_content_type :photo, :content_type => /\Aimage\/.*\Z/ end ActiveAdmin.register Product do permit_params :title, :price, :slideshow, :photo, :category form do |f| f.inputs "Product Details" do f.input :title f.input :category f.input :price f.input :slideshow f.input :photo, :required => false, :as => :file end f.actions end show do |ad| attributes_table do row :title row :category row :photo do image_tag(ad.photo.url(:medium)) end end end index do column :id column :title column :category column :price do |product| number_to_currency product.price end actions end class ProductController < ApplicationController def create @product = Product.create(params[:id]) end end Every time I make a product item in activeadmin the category comes up empty. It wont populate the column category_id for the product. It just leaves it empty. What am I doing wrong?

  Read the article

• Web authentication using LDAP and Apache?

  - by Stephen R

  I am working on a project of setting up a web administered inventory database for my work (or if they don't want it then i'll enjoy learning about it) and hit the problem of allowing only authorized users to access the website (In its testing/development phase, I allow all people to navigate to the website to add entries to the database and query it). I am trying to make it so only particular users in the domain (Active Directory) are allowed to access the website after they are queried about their credentials. I read that Apache (I am using a LAMP server) has a means of asking visitors to the website to provide LDAP credentials in order to gain access to the site, but I wasn't sure if that was exactly what I was looking for. If anyone has experience in the LDAP configurations for Apache that I mentioned or any other means of securely authenticating with websites I would greatly appreciate advice or a direction to go Thank you!

  Read the article

• Partner Webcast - Oracle SOA Suite 12c: Connect 4 Cloud, Mobile, IoT with On-premise

  - by Thanos Terentes Printzios

  The pace of new business projects continues to grow from increasing customer self-service to seamlessly connecting all your back office and in-the-field applications. At the same time increased integration complexity may seem inevitable as organizations are suddenly faced with the requirement to support three new integration challenges:  » Cloud Integration - integrate with the cloud, rapidly integrate a growing list of cloud applications with existing applications » Mobile Integration - the urgency to mobile-enable existing applications » IoT Integration - begin development on the latest trend of connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices to your existing infrastructure. Oracle SOA Suite 12c, the latest version of the industry’s most complete and unified application integration and SOA solution, aims to simplify, accelerate and optimize integrations. Oracle SOA Suite 12c and its associated products, Oracle Managed File Transfer, Oracle Cloud and Application Adapters, B2B and healthcare integration, offer the industry’s most highly integrated platform for solving the increased integration challenges. Oracle SOA Suite 12c is a complete, integrated and best-of-breed platform. It enables next generation integration capabilities through: · A unified toolset for the development of services and composite applications.· A standards-based platform that is service enabled and easily consumable by modern web applications, allowing enterprises to quickly and easily adapt to changes in their business and IT environments.· Greater visibility, controls and analytics to govern how services and processes are deployed, reused and changed across their entire lifecycle. Join us to find out more about the new features of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and how it enables you to reduce time to market for new project integration and to reduce integration cost and complexity. Oracle SOA Suite is the ability to simplify by integrating the disparate requirements of cloud, mobile, and IoT devices with existing on-premise applications. Agenda: Oracle SOA Suite 12c new Features Cloud Integration Mobile Enablement Internet of Things (IoT) Summary - Q&A Delivery Format This FREE online LIVE eSeminar will be delivered over the Web. Registrations received less than 24hours prior to start time may not receive confirmation to attend. Presenter: Heba Fouad – FMW Specialist, Technology Adoption, ECEMEA Partner Business Development Date: Thursday, August 28th, 10pm CEST (8am UTC/11am EEST)Duration: 1 hour Register Here For any questions please contact us at partner.imc-AT-beehiveonline.oracle-DOT-com

  Read the article

• Email sent from server with rDNS & SPF being blocked by Hotmail

  - by Canadaka

  I have been unable to send email to users on hotmail or other Microsoft email servers for some time. Its been a major headache trying to find out why and how to fix the issue. The emails being sent that are blocked from my domain canadaka.net. I use Google Aps to host my regular email serverice for my @canadaka.net email addresses. I can sent email from my desktop or gmail to a hotmail without any problem. But any email sent from my server on behalf of canadaka.net is blocked, not even arriving in the junk email. The IP that the emails are being sent from is the same IP that my site is hosted on: 66.199.162.177 This IP is new to me since August 2010, I had a different IP for the previous 3-4 years. This IP is not on any credible spam lists http://www.anti-abuse.org/multi-rbl-check-results/?host=66.199.162.177 The one list spamcannibal.org my IP is listed on seems to be out of my control, says "no reverse DNS, MX host should have rDNS - RFC1912 2.1". But since I use Google for my email hosting, I don't have control over setting up RDNS for all the MX records. I do have Reverse DNS setup for my IP though, it resolves to "mail.canadaka.net". I have signed up for SNDS and was approved. My ip says "All of the specified IPs have normal status." Sender Score: 100 https://www.senderscore.org/lookup.php?lookup=66.199.162.177&ipLookup.x=55&ipLookup.y=14 My Mcafee threat level seems fine I have a TXT SPF record setup, I am currently using xname.org as my DNS, and they don't have a field for SPF, but their FAQ says to add the SPF info as a TXT entry. v=spf1 a include:_spf.google.com ~all Some "SPF checking" tools ive used detect that my domain has a valid SPF, but others don't. Like Microsoft's SPF wizard, i think this is because its specifically looking for an SPF record and not in the TXT. "No SPF Record Found. A and MX Records Available". From my home I can run "nslookup -type=TXT canadaka.net" and it returns: Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 Non-authoritative answer: canadaka.net text = "v=spf1 a include:_spf.google.com ~all" One strange thing I found is i'm unable to ping hotmail.com or msn.com or do a "telnet mail.hotmail.com 25". I am able to ping gmail.com and many other domains I tried. I tried changing my DNS servers to Google's Public DNS and did a ipconfig /flushdns but that had no effect. I am however able to connect with telnet to mx1.hotmail.com This is what the email headers look like when I send to a Google email server and I receive the email with no troubles. You can see that SPF is passing. Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.146.168.12 with SMTP id q12cs91243yae; Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:01:49 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.43.48.7 with SMTP id uu7mr4292541icb.68.1298858509242; Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:01:49 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: Received: from canadaka.net ([66.199.162.177]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id uh9si8493137icb.127.2011.02.27.18.01.45; Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:01:48 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 66.199.162.177 as permitted sender) client-ip=66.199.162.177; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 66.199.162.177 as permitted sender) [email protected] Message-Id: <[email protected] Received: from coruscant ([127.0.0.1]:12907) by canadaka.net with [XMail 1.27 ESMTP Server] id for from ; Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:01:29 -0800 Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:01:29 -0800 Subject: Test To: [email protected] From: XXXX Reply-To: [email protected] X-Mailer: PHP/5.2.13 I can send to gmail and other email services fine. I don't know what i'm doing wrong! UPDATE 1 I have been removed from hotmails IP block and am now able to send emails to hotmail, but they are all going directly to the JUNK folder. UPDATE 2 I used Telnet to send a test message to port25.com, seems my SPF is not being detected. Result: neutral (SPF-Result: None) canadaka.net. SPF (no records) canadaka.net. TXT (no records) I do have a TXT record, its been there for years, I did change it a week ago. Other sites that allow you to check your SPF detect it, but some others like Microsofts Wizard doesn't. This iw what my SPF record in my xname.org DNS file looks like: canadaka.net. 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 a include:_spf.google.com ~all" I did have a nameserver as my 4th option that doens't have the TXT records since it doens't support it. So I removed it from the list and instead added wtfdns.com as my 4th adn 5th nameservers, which does support TXT.

  Read the article

• Enabling Multiple Monitor Support from Terminal Services/Remote Desktop over Citrix

  - by Nicolas Webb

  Our Remote Desktop/Terminal Services solution where I work relies on Citrix for machines not connected via the VPN. We're using Citrix Xen server (I'm pretty sure) and I'm going to try to connect to a Windows 7 Host (my work computer) and I think the RDC client runs on a Win2003 host (exposed via Citrix). Is it possible to take advantage of Windows 7 multiple monitor support for RDC with this setup? Would I need to try getting my Citrix guys to have a different host machine for the RDC (Win2008, or Win7?)? I'm probably going to connect using the OS X Citrix client, but I'd be willing to BootCamp/Fusion up a Windows instance to work remotely, as well. I really want to be able to use multiple monitors remotely. It does "span" multiple montiors currently (I have a 3000x1024 desktop, for example) but I'd rather it be "true" multiple monitor instead of one giant desktop, if possible.

  Read the article

• Setting up fail2ban to ban failed phpMyAdmin login attempts

  - by Michael Robinson

  We've been using fail2ban to block failed ssh attempts. I would like to setup the same thing for phpMyAdmin as well. As phpMyAdmin doesn't log authentication attempts to a file (that I know of), I'm unsure of how best to go about this. Does a plugin / config exist that makes phpMyAdmin log authentication attempts to a file? Or is there some other place I should look for such an activity log? Ideally I will be able to find a solution that involved modifying fail2ban config only, as I have to configure fail2ban with the same options on multiple servers, and would prefer not to also modify the various phpMyAdmin installations on said servers.

  Read the article

• Future of BizTalk

  - by Vamsi Krishna

  The future of BizTalk- The last TechEd Conference was a very important one from BizTalk perspective. Microsoft will continue innovating BizTalk and releasing BizTalk versions for “for next few years to come”. So, all the investments that clients have made so far will continue giving returns. Three flavors of BizTalk: BizTalk On-Premise, BizTalk as IaaS and BizTalk as PaaS (Azure Service Bus).Windows Azure IaaS and How It WorksDate: June 12, 2012Speakers: Corey SandersThis session covers the significant investments that Microsoft is making in our Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and how it http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/AZR201 TechEd provided two sessions around BizTalk futures:http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012AZR 207: Application Integration Futures - The Road Map and What's Next on Windows Azure http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/AZR207AZR211: Building Integration Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk On-Premises and on Windows Azurehttp://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/AZR211Here is are some highlights from the two sessions at TechEd. Bala Sriram, Director of Development for BizTalk provided the introduction at the road map session and covered some key points around BizTalk:More then 12,000 Customers 79% of BizTalk users have already adopted BizTalk Server 2010 BizTalk Server will be released for “years to come” after this release. I.e. There will be more releases of BizTalk after BizTalk 2010 R2. BizTalk 2010 R2 will be releasing 6 months after Windows 8 New Azure (Cloud-based) BizTalk scenarios will be available in IaaS and PaaS BizTalk Server on-premises, IaaS, and PaaS are complimentary and designed to work together BizTalk Investments will be taken forward The second session was mainly around drilling in and demonstrating the up and coming capabilities in BizTalk Server on-premise, IaaS, and PaaS:BizTalk IaaS: Users will be able to bring their own or choose from a Azure IaaS template to quickly provision BizTalk Server virtual machines (VHDs) BizTalk Server 2010 R2: Native adapter to connect to Azure Service Bus Queues, Topics and Relay. Native send port adapter for REST. Demonstrated this in connecting to Salesforce to get and update Salesforce information. ESB Toolkit will be incorporate are part of product and setup BizTalk PaaS: HTTP, FTP, Service Bus, LOB Application connectivity XML and Flat File processing Message properties Transformation, Archiving, Tracking Content based routing

  Read the article

• Server Application Unavailable ?

  - by suryasasidhar

  hi, i am a developer and i developed the web application(asp.net). It is working in my local server fine when i take new domain and upload the site in to that domain i am getting this error hi, After completion of my project. I placed in online the default page is coming but when i click on any link button it is giving this error can you help me. m3connect.in is url of my site and error is Server Application Unavailable The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable. Please hit the "Refresh" button in your web browser to retry your request. Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur.

  Read the article

• Manually start scheduled launchd job

  - by Pascal

  On our Mac OS X (10.6) Server we have setup several backup scripts that are controlled by launchd and launched at specific times. For this we have defined StartCalendarInterval and this all works very well. Now it happens that I would like to start one of these jobs out of schedule, but this does not start the job (but also does not give an error/warning): sudo launchctl start org.job-label The manpage of launchtl states that start is intended to test on-demand jobs, no word of scheduled jobs. Is there a way to kickstart scheduled jobs?

  Read the article

• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 943 944 945 946 947 948 949 950 951 952 953 954  | Next Page >