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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 31, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 31, 2012Popular ReleasesAuto-LiMPoT: Auto-LiMPoT - v.1.1 - binary: Changelog: +Now patches updater-script with correct packager name and version number +Added option to choose position of java.exe manually if not found automaticallyExtended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.6.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's in the 1.6.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner Calculator CalculatorUpDown CheckListBox - Breaking Changes CheckComboBox - New Control ChildWindow CollectionEditor CollectionEditorDialog ColorCanvas ColorPicker DateTimePicker DateTimeUpDown DecimalUpDown DoubleUpDown DropDownButton IntegerUpDown Magnifier MaskedTextBox MessageBox MultiLineTex...ScriptIDE: Release 4.4: ...Media Companion: MC 3.434b Release: General This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. If there are no major problems, by the end of the week it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable! The latest mc_com.exe should be included too! TV Bug fix - crash when using XBMC scraper for TV episodes. Bug fix - episode count update when adding new episodes. Bug fix - crash when actors name was missing. Enhanced TV scrape progress text. Enhancements made to missing episodes display. Movies Bug fix - hide "Play Trailer" when multisaev...Better Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.831 Alpha: - A new release with: - many bugfixes - changed icon - added code for more failsafe registry usage on x64 systems - not needed regfix anymore - added ribbon shortcut keys - Other fixes Note: If you have problems opening system libraries, a suggestion was given to copy all of these libraries and then delete the originals. Thanks to Gaugamela for that! (see discussion here: 349015 ) Note2: I was upload again the setup due to missing file!XAML Dialect Comparer Tool: Beta 1: This is a first beta version of this tool (as shown at DevConncetions in Vegas, March 2012). Community participation and suggestions are appreciated.LINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.2.7: Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) New Align/Match extensions (1.0.2.6) Ready to use stable code with comprehensive unit tests and samples New Pivot extensions New Filter ExtensionsMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5: The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes, implements optimisations and adds key features. MonoGame now has the capability to use OpenGLES 2.0 on Android and iOS devices, meaning it now supports custom shaders across mobile and desktop platforms. Also included in this release are native orientation animations on iOS devices and better Orientation support for Android. There have also been a lot of bug fixes since t...callisto: callisto 2.0.23: Patched Script static class and peak user count bug fix.Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha 3: New in this release: Added components: Microcontroller Demultiplexer Flip & rotate components Open XML files from older versions of Circuit Diagram Text formatting for components New CDDX syntax Other fixesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.1 CMS (Beta): Beta build for testing - please report issues at issues.umbraco.org (Latest uploaded: 5.1.0.123) What's new in 5.1? The full list of changes is on our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page. It shows items complete for 5.1, and 5.1 includes items for 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 listed there too. Here's two headline acts: Members5.1 adds support for backoffice editing of Members. We support the pairing up of our content type system in Hive with regular ASP.NET Membership providers (we ship a def...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.2.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.2.11Code Changes 1. The project is now licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2. 2. User interface control and associated data access layer classes have been added to aid developers integrating 51Degrees.mobi into wider projects such as content management systems or web hosting management solutions. Use the following in a web form or user control to access these new UI components. <%@ Register Assembly="FiftyOne.Foundation" Namespace="...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 3.1: slight performance improvement (5% - 10%) new JsonException classPicturethrill: Version 2.3.28.0: Straightforward image selection. New clean UI look. Super stable. Simplified user experience.SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQL Monitor 4.2 alpha 16: 1. finally fixed problem with logic fault checking for temporary table name... I really mean finally ...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit ver 1.1: Added Design mode support.Harness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE: ON INSTALL PLEASE DON'T CHECK "Upgrade BBCode Extensions...". More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxNew ProjectsAlloCiné API: API AlloCiné v3 This is a library to use the API of AlloCiné. It covers the version 3 of the AlloCiné service as described here GroWiki API AlloCiné v3. The data-interchange format used behind the scene is JSON. Auto-LiMPoT: An automated tool to convert an N1 MIUI Rom to an AcerLiquid-compatible Rom.Azure Management API (via F#): This lib is a wrapper for Azure Management REST API. Can be used by .Net languages but adapted for F# (used asyncs and other). Supported operations: AffinityGroups (all), HostedServices (all), StorageServices (all), Azure Sql (all = manage server + firewall rules), AsyncOperationCraigsPack: This is a Light weight and Expandable library that helps search through craigslist ads but not bound to only one website. It includes interfaces and base classes to help create custom web providers for other specific websites. Written in c#Cygnus v3: Cygnus internal.DataHelperCS: Porject about DataHelper for rapid development and Simplist Architectur Model.Datewise Picture Arranger: Arranges/Renames pictures based on the date taken. d? án web: Ð? án môn phát tri?n ?ng d?ng webDrawbot: IRC Bot for /r/sketchdaily on reddit.FONIS prezenter: FONIS prezenter je aplikacija koja omogucava korisniku da odredenom kombinacijom sa tastature pozove odgovarajucu PowerPoint prezentaciju. Program je razvijen u C#. Za instaliranje i pokretanje ovog programa, potrebno je instalirati .NET Framework 4. Grammars: Grammars makes it easy to design regular, context-free and context-dependent grammars and apply various tools for parsing and language analysis. It is developed in C# and provides a BNF-like syntax with operator overloading and semantic rules as delegates, allowing you to design and code your grammar right in the middle of your C# code. It fleets with a fully-functional LR parser generator.iConference: Conference Management System.IQCare: IQCare is a Open Source, data capture and reporting system with patient management tools designed to measure patient outcomes. Having the ability to analyze data and then use the resulting analysis to provide improved care is the end goal of IQCare. IQCare has all of the key features needed to collect clean data and to do patient and facility analysis and reporting.Memory Management: General purpose memory management in C++ with policy-based architecture.Metro Style App Study Project: Metro Style App demos from QQ Group 95331609OpenNETCF CAB Installer SDK: The OpenNETCF CAB Installer SDK provides programmatic access to the extraction of CAB files under Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Windows Embedded Compact and Windows Embedded HandheldOrchard Private Content: Allows content items to be displayed by only users with roles that have permission.Pete Brown NETMF and Gadgeteer Code: Module drivers and other code for my .NET Micro Framework projects.QuanLyBanHang-Nhom100: Qu?n lý bán hàng - nhóm 100 Bùi vi?t sang Nguy?n van longRegeXml: This is about a Framework that allow you to transform a bunch of dirty data into a one and well formated XML.SSIS Row Number Component: This Rownumber component allows you to add a rownumber in the case your destination doesn't support auto-increment.Sunburn XNA advanced help custom samples: This project will include samples I do using sunburns engine. If you use it correctly it is a very powerful engine i found out. I will post samples for things that people have been trying to do in xna 4 and above with sunburn for awhile. THE webpage: gffgfgdhhgghdj91Transbin for anyone: Transbin makes it easier to contorl your computer anywhere.Wazzup module for DotNetNuke: Wazzup is a simple module for the DotNetNuke CMS to display the newest content added to your site. It leverage's DNN's search indexer and displays a simple link with publishing date and text summary. Developed in VB. Fits well into narrow vertical content areasWLCompus: WLCompusXNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed Book Source Code: C# Source Code and Assets from the XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed book. The code is released under the Ms-PL license.

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• Agile Like Jazz

  - by Jeff Certain

  (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

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• Emtel Knowledge Series - Q2/2014

  From Cyber Island to Smart Mauritius Cyber Island? Smart Mauritius? - What is Emtel talking about? "With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of "Smart Cities" has become an urgent necessity. "Smart Cities" refer to an urban transformation which, by using latest ICT technologies makes cities more efficient. Many Governments are setting out ambitious plans to build the cities of the future based on massive connectivity, high bandwidth communications, intelligent sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data. Various researches have shown four key enablers for smart city success - Government leadership, suitable technology infrastructure, solid public-private partnerships and engaged citizens. It is around these enabling factors that telecoms companies can play a vital role in assisting governments to deliver on the smart city vision." The Emtel Knowledge Series goes in compliance with Emtel's 25th anniversary celebrations throughout the year and the master of ceremony, Kim Andersen, mentioned that there will be more upcoming events on a quarterly base. As a representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) there was absolutely no hesitation to join in again. Following my visit to the first Emtel Knowledge Series workshop back in February this year, it was great to have another opportunity to meet and exchange with technology experts. But quite frankly what is it with those buzz words... As far as I remember and how it was mentioned "Cyber Island" is an old initiative from around 2005/2006 which has been refreshed in 2010. It implies the empowerment of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as an essential factor of growth by the government here in Mauritius. Actually, the first promotional period of Cyber Island brought me here but that's another story. The venue and its own problems Like last time the event was organised and held at the Conference Hall at Cyber Tower I in Ebene. As I've been working there for some years, I know about the frustrating situation of finding a proper parking. So, does Smart Island include better solutions for the search of parking spaces? Maybe, let's see whether I will be able to answer that question at the end of the article. Anyway, after circling around the tower almost two times, I finally got a decent space to put the car, without risking to get a ticket or damage actually. International speakers and their experience Once again, Emtel did a great job to get international expertise onto the stage to share their experience and vision on this kind of embarkment. Personally, I really appreciated the fact they were speakers of global reach and could provide own-experience knowledge. Johan Gott spoke about the fundamental change that the Swedish government ignited in order to move their society and workers' environment away from heavy industry towards a knowledge-based approach. Additionally, we spoke about the effort and transformation of New York City into a greener and more efficient Smart City. Given modern technology he also advised that any kind of available Big Data should be opened to the general public - this openness would provide a playground for anyone to garner new ideas and most probably solid solutions of which no one else thought about before. Emtel Knowledge Series on moving from Cyber Island to Smart Mauritus Later during the afternoon that exact statement regarding openness to and transparency of government-owned Big Data has been emphasised again by the Danish speaker Kim Andersen and his former colleague Mika Jantunen from Finland. Mika continued to underline the important role of the government to provide a solid foundation for a knowledge-based society and mentioned that Finnish citizens have a constitutional right to broadband connectivity. Next to free higher (tertiary) education Finland already produced a good number of innovations, among them are: First country to grant voting rights to women Free higher education Constitutional right to broadband connectivity Nokia Linux Angry Birds Sauna and others...  General access to internet via broadband and/or mobile connectivity is surely a key factor towards Smart Cities, or better said Smart Mauritius given the area dimensions and size of population. CTO Paul Valette gave the audience a brief overview of the essential role that Emtel will have to move Mauritius forward towards a knowledge-based and innovation-driven environment for its citizen. What I have seen looks really promising and with recently published information that Mauritians have 127% of mobile capacity - meaning more than 1 mobile, smartphone or tablet per person - it will be crucial to have the right infrastructure for these connected devices. How would it be possible to achieve a knowledge-based society? YouTube to the rescue!Seriously, gaining more knowledge will require to have fast access to educational course material as explained by Dr Kaviraj Sukon, General Director of the Open University of Mauritius. According to him a good number of high-profile universities in the world have opened their course libraries to the general public, among them EDX, Coursera and Open University. Nowadays, you're actually able and enabled to learn for and earn a BSc or even MSc certification on your own pace - no need to attend classed on campus. It was really impressive to see the number of available hours - more than enough for a life-long learning experience! {loadposition content_adsense} Networking in the name of MSCC As briefly mentioned above I was about to combine two approaches for this workshop. Of course, getting latest information and updates on Emtel services available, especially for my business here on the west coast of the island, but also to meet and greet new people for the MSCC. And I think it was very positive on both sides. Let me quickly describe some of the key aspects that happened during the day: Met with Arnaud Meslier and Kellie, both Microsoft to swap latest information on IT events. Hereby, I got an invite to Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 Dev Camp. Got in touch with Arvin Lockee, Emtel to check our options to meet with the data team, and seizing the opportunity to have a visiting tour at the Emtel Data Centre. Had a great chat with Avinash Meetoo, Knowledge 7, Kim Andersen and Mika Jantunen about the situation of teaching and learning in general and specifically in the private sector here in Mauritius. Additionally, a number of various other interesting chats... Once again, I'm catching up on a couple of business cards in order to provide more background information about the MSCC, and to create a better awareness of MSCC within the local IT businesses. There is more to come soon!  Resume of the day The number of attendees during this event has been doubled or even tripled this time. The whole organisation has been improved massively and the combination of presentation and summarizing panel discussions was better than during the previous workshop back in February. Overall, once again a well-organised workshop and I'm already looking forward to join the next workshop in Q3. Update End of July we finally managed to visit the Emtel Data Centre in Arsenal. It was an interesting opportunity for some of our MSCC members.

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• HTG Reviews the CODE Keyboard: Old School Construction Meets Modern Amenities

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  There’s nothing quite as satisfying as the smooth and crisp action of a well built keyboard. If you’re tired of  mushy keys and cheap feeling keyboards, a well-constructed mechanical keyboard is a welcome respite from the $10 keyboard that came with your computer. Read on as we put the CODE mechanical keyboard through the paces. What is the CODE Keyboard? The CODE keyboard is a collaboration between manufacturer WASD Keyboards and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (the guy behind the Stack Exchange network and Discourse forum software). Atwood’s focus was incorporating the best of traditional mechanical keyboards and the best of modern keyboard usability improvements. In his own words: The world is awash in terrible, crappy, no name how-cheap-can-we-make-it keyboards. There are a few dozen better mechanical keyboard options out there. I’ve owned and used at least six different expensive mechanical keyboards, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them, either: they didn’t have backlighting, were ugly, had terrible design, or were missing basic functions like media keys. That’s why I originally contacted Weyman Kwong of WASD Keyboards way back in early 2012. I told him that the state of keyboards was unacceptable to me as a geek, and I proposed a partnership wherein I was willing to work with him to do whatever it takes to produce a truly great mechanical keyboard. Even the ardent skeptic who questions whether Atwood has indeed created a truly great mechanical keyboard certainly can’t argue with the position he starts from: there are so many agonizingly crappy keyboards out there. Even worse, in our opinion, is that unless you’re a typist of a certain vintage there’s a good chance you’ve never actually typed on a really nice keyboard. Those that didn’t start using computers until the mid-to-late 1990s most likely have always typed on modern mushy-key keyboards and never known the joy of typing on a really responsive and crisp mechanical keyboard. Is our preference for and love of mechanical keyboards shining through here? Good. We’re not even going to try and hide it. So where does the CODE keyboard stack up in pantheon of keyboards? Read on as we walk you through the simple setup and our experience using the CODE. Setting Up the CODE Keyboard Although the setup of the CODE keyboard is essentially plug and play, there are two distinct setup steps that you likely haven’t had to perform on a previous keyboard. Both highlight the degree of care put into the keyboard and the amount of customization available. Inside the box you’ll find the keyboard, a micro USB cable, a USB-to-PS2 adapter, and a tool which you may be unfamiliar with: a key puller. We’ll return to the key puller in a moment. Unlike the majority of keyboards on the market, the cord isn’t permanently affixed to the keyboard. What does this mean for you? Aside from the obvious need to plug it in yourself, it makes it dead simple to repair your own keyboard cord if it gets attacked by a pet, mangled in a mechanism on your desk, or otherwise damaged. It also makes it easy to take advantage of the cable routing channels in on the underside of the keyboard to  route your cable exactly where you want it. While we’re staring at the underside of the keyboard, check out those beefy rubber feet. By peripherals standards they’re huge (and there is six instead of the usual four). Once you plunk the keyboard down where you want it, it might as well be glued down the rubber feet work so well. After you’ve secured the cable and adjusted it to your liking, there is one more task  before plug the keyboard into the computer. On the bottom left-hand side of the keyboard, you’ll find a small recess in the plastic with some dip switches inside: The dip switches are there to switch hardware functions for various operating systems, keyboard layouts, and to enable/disable function keys. By toggling the dip switches you can change the keyboard from QWERTY mode to Dvorak mode and Colemak mode, the two most popular alternative keyboard configurations. You can also use the switches to enable Mac-functionality (for Command/Option keys). One of our favorite little toggles is the SW3 dip switch: you can disable the Caps Lock key; goodbye accidentally pressing Caps when you mean to press Shift. You can review the entire dip switch configuration chart here. The quick-start for Windows users is simple: double check that all the switches are in the off position (as seen in the photo above) and then simply toggle SW6 on to enable the media and backlighting function keys (this turns the menu key on the keyboard into a function key as typically found on laptop keyboards). After adjusting the dip switches to your liking, plug the keyboard into an open USB port on your computer (or into your PS/2 port using the included adapter). Design, Layout, and Backlighting The CODE keyboard comes in two flavors, a traditional 87-key layout (no number pad) and a traditional 104-key layout (number pad on the right hand side). We identify the layout as traditional because, despite some modern trapping and sneaky shortcuts, the actual form factor of the keyboard from the shape of the keys to the spacing and position is as classic as it comes. You won’t have to learn a new keyboard layout and spend weeks conditioning yourself to a smaller than normal backspace key or a PgUp/PgDn pair in an unconventional location. Just because the keyboard is very conventional in layout, however, doesn’t mean you’ll be missing modern amenities like media-control keys. The following additional functions are hidden in the F11, F12, Pause button, and the 2×6 grid formed by the Insert and Delete rows: keyboard illumination brightness, keyboard illumination on/off, mute, and then the typical play/pause, forward/backward, stop, and volume +/- in Insert and Delete rows, respectively. While we weren’t sure what we’d think of the function-key system at first (especially after retiring a Microsoft Sidewinder keyboard with a huge and easily accessible volume knob on it), it took less than a day for us to adapt to using the Fn key, located next to the right Ctrl key, to adjust our media playback on the fly. Keyboard backlighting is a largely hit-or-miss undertaking but the CODE keyboard nails it. Not only does it have pleasant and easily adjustable through-the-keys lighting but the key switches the keys themselves are attached to are mounted to a steel plate with white paint. Enough of the light reflects off the interior cavity of the keys and then diffuses across the white plate to provide nice even illumination in between the keys. Highlighting the steel plate beneath the keys brings us to the actual construction of the keyboard. It’s rock solid. The 87-key model, the one we tested, is 2.0 pounds. The 104-key is nearly a half pound heavier at 2.42 pounds. Between the steel plate, the extra-thick PCB board beneath the steel plate, and the thick ABS plastic housing, the keyboard has very solid feel to it. Combine that heft with the previously mentioned thick rubber feet and you have a tank-like keyboard that won’t budge a millimeter during normal use. Examining The Keys This is the section of the review the hardcore typists and keyboard ninjas have been waiting for. We’ve looked at the layout of the keyboard, we’ve looked at the general construction of it, but what about the actual keys? There are a wide variety of keyboard construction techniques but the vast majority of modern keyboards use a rubber-dome construction. The key is floated in a plastic frame over a rubber membrane that has a little rubber dome for each key. The press of the physical key compresses the rubber dome downwards and a little bit of conductive material on the inside of the dome’s apex connects with the circuit board. Despite the near ubiquity of the design, many people dislike it. The principal complaint is that dome keyboards require a complete compression to register a keystroke; keyboard designers and enthusiasts refer to this as “bottoming out”. In other words, the register the “b” key, you need to completely press that key down. As such it slows you down and requires additional pressure and movement that, over the course of tens of thousands of keystrokes, adds up to a whole lot of wasted time and fatigue. The CODE keyboard features key switches manufactured by Cherry, a company that has manufactured key switches since the 1960s. Specifically the CODE features Cherry MX Clear switches. These switches feature the same classic design of the other Cherry switches (such as the MX Blue and Brown switch lineups) but they are significantly quieter (yes this is a mechanical keyboard, but no, your neighbors won’t think you’re firing off a machine gun) as they lack the audible click found in most Cherry switches. This isn’t to say that they keyboard doesn’t have a nice audible key press sound when the key is fully depressed, but that the key mechanism isn’t doesn’t create a loud click sound when triggered. One of the great features of the Cherry MX clear is a tactile “bump” that indicates the key has been compressed enough to register the stroke. For touch typists the very subtle tactile feedback is a great indicator that you can move on to the next stroke and provides a welcome speed boost. Even if you’re not trying to break any word-per-minute records, that little bump when pressing the key is satisfying. The Cherry key switches, in addition to providing a much more pleasant typing experience, are also significantly more durable than dome-style key switch. Rubber dome switch membrane keyboards are typically rated for 5-10 million contacts whereas the Cherry mechanical switches are rated for 50 million contacts. You’d have to write the next War and Peace  and follow that up with A Tale of Two Cities: Zombie Edition, and then turn around and transcribe them both into a dozen different languages to even begin putting a tiny dent in the lifecycle of this keyboard. So what do the switches look like under the classicly styled keys? You can take a look yourself with the included key puller. Slide the loop between the keys and then gently beneath the key you wish to remove: Wiggle the key puller gently back and forth while exerting a gentle upward pressure to pop the key off; You can repeat the process for every key, if you ever find yourself needing to extract piles of cat hair, Cheeto dust, or other foreign objects from your keyboard. There it is, the naked switch, the source of that wonderful crisp action with the tactile bump on each keystroke. The last feature worthy of a mention is the N-key rollover functionality of the keyboard. This is a feature you simply won’t find on non-mechanical keyboards and even gaming keyboards typically only have any sort of key roller on the high-frequency keys like WASD. So what is N-key rollover and why do you care? On a typical mass-produced rubber-dome keyboard you cannot simultaneously press more than two keys as the third one doesn’t register. PS/2 keyboards allow for unlimited rollover (in other words you can’t out type the keyboard as all of your keystrokes, no matter how fast, will register); if you use the CODE keyboard with the PS/2 adapter you gain this ability. If you don’t use the PS/2 adapter and use the native USB, you still get 6-key rollover (and the CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT don’t count towards the 6) so realistically you still won’t be able to out type the computer as even the more finger twisting keyboard combos and high speed typing will still fall well within the 6-key rollover. The rollover absolutely doesn’t matter if you’re a slow hunt-and-peck typist, but if you’ve read this far into a keyboard review there’s a good chance that you’re a serious typist and that kind of quality construction and high-number key rollover is a fantastic feature.  The Good, The Bad, and the Verdict We’ve put the CODE keyboard through the paces, we’ve played games with it, typed articles with it, left lengthy comments on Reddit, and otherwise used and abused it like we would any other keyboard. The Good: The construction is rock solid. In an emergency, we’re confident we could use the keyboard as a blunt weapon (and then resume using it later in the day with no ill effect on the keyboard). The Cherry switches are an absolute pleasure to type on; the Clear variety found in the CODE keyboard offer a really nice middle-ground between the gun-shot clack of a louder mechanical switch and the quietness of a lesser-quality dome keyboard without sacrificing quality. Touch typists will love the subtle tactile bump feedback. Dip switch system makes it very easy for users on different systems and with different keyboard layout needs to switch between operating system and keyboard layouts. If you’re investing a chunk of change in a keyboard it’s nice to know you can take it with you to a different operating system or “upgrade” it to a new layout if you decide to take up Dvorak-style typing. The backlighting is perfect. You can adjust it from a barely-visible glow to a blazing light-up-the-room brightness. Whatever your intesity preference, the white-coated steel backplate does a great job diffusing the light between the keys. You can easily remove the keys for cleaning (or to rearrange the letters to support a new keyboard layout). The weight of the unit combined with the extra thick rubber feet keep it planted exactly where you place it on the desk. The Bad: While you’re getting your money’s worth, the $150 price tag is a shock when compared to the $20-60 price tags you find on lower-end keyboards. People used to large dedicated media keys independent of the traditional key layout (such as the large buttons and volume controls found on many modern keyboards) might be off put by the Fn-key style media controls on the CODE. The Verdict: The keyboard is clearly and heavily influenced by the needs of serious typists. Whether you’re a programmer, transcriptionist, or just somebody that wants to leave the lengthiest article comments the Internet has ever seen, the CODE keyboard offers a rock solid typing experience. Yes, $150 isn’t pocket change, but the quality of the CODE keyboard is so high and the typing experience is so enjoyable, you’re easily getting ten times the value you’d get out of purchasing a lesser keyboard. Even compared to other mechanical keyboards on the market, like the Das Keyboard, you’re still getting more for your money as other mechanical keyboards don’t come with the lovely-to-type-on Cherry MX Clear switches, back lighting, and hardware-based operating system keyboard layout switching. If it’s in your budget to upgrade your keyboard (especially if you’ve been slogging along with a low-end rubber-dome keyboard) there’s no good reason to not pickup a CODE keyboard. Key animation courtesy of Geekhack.org user Lethal Squirrel.       

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• Using a WPF ListView as a DataGrid

  - by psheriff

  Many people like to view data in a grid format of rows and columns. WPF did not come with a data grid control that automatically creates rows and columns for you based on the object you pass it. However, the WPF Toolkit can be downloaded from CodePlex.com that does contain a DataGrid control. This DataGrid gives you the ability to pass it a DataTable or a Collection class and it will automatically figure out the columns or properties and create all the columns for you and display the data.The DataGrid control also supports editing and many other features that you might not always need. This means that the DataGrid does take a little more time to render the data. If you want to just display data (see Figure 1) in a grid format, then a ListView works quite well for this task. Of course, you will need to create the columns for the ListView, but with just a little generic code, you can create the columns on the fly just like the WPF Toolkit’s DataGrid. Figure 1: A List of Data using a ListView A Simple ListView ControlThe XAML below is what you would use to create the ListView shown in Figure 1. However, the problem with using XAML is you have to pre-define the columns. You cannot re-use this ListView except for “Product” data. <ListView x:Name="lstData"          ItemsSource="{Binding}">  <ListView.View>    <GridView>      <GridViewColumn Header="Product ID"                      Width="Auto"               DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Path=ProductId}" />      <GridViewColumn Header="Product Name"                      Width="Auto"               DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Path=ProductName}" />      <GridViewColumn Header="Price"                      Width="Auto"               DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Path=Price}" />    </GridView>  </ListView.View></ListView> So, instead of creating the GridViewColumn’s in XAML, let’s learn to create them in code to create any amount of columns in a ListView. Create GridViewColumn’s From Data TableTo display multiple columns in a ListView control you need to set its View property to a GridView collection object. You add GridViewColumn objects to the GridView collection and assign the GridView to the View property. Each GridViewColumn object needs to be bound to a column or property name of the object that the ListView will be bound to. An ADO.NET DataTable object contains a collection of columns, and these columns have a ColumnName property which you use to bind to the GridViewColumn objects. Listing 1 shows a sample of reading and XML file into a DataSet object. After reading the data a GridView object is created. You can then loop through the DataTable columns collection and create a GridViewColumn object for each column in the DataTable. Notice the DisplayMemberBinding property is set to a new Binding to the ColumnName in the DataTable. C#private void FirstSample(){  // Read the data  DataSet ds = new DataSet();  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() + @"\Xml\Product.xml");    // Create the GridView  GridView gv = new GridView();   // Create the GridView Columns  foreach (DataColumn item in ds.Tables[0].Columns)  {    GridViewColumn gvc = new GridViewColumn();    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding(item.ColumnName);    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName;    gvc.Width = Double.NaN;    gv.Columns.Add(gvc);  }   // Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = gv;  // Display the Data  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables[0];} VB.NETPrivate Sub FirstSample()  ' Read the data  Dim ds As New DataSet()  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() & "\Xml\Product.xml")   ' Create the GridView  Dim gv As New GridView()   ' Create the GridView Columns  For Each item As DataColumn In ds.Tables(0).Columns    Dim gvc As New GridViewColumn()    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = New Binding(item.ColumnName)    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName    gvc.Width = [Double].NaN    gv.Columns.Add(gvc)  Next   ' Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = gv  ' Display the Data  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables(0)End SubListing 1: Loop through the DataTable columns collection to create GridViewColumn objects A Generic Method for Creating a GridViewInstead of having to write the code shown in Listing 1 for each ListView you wish to create, you can create a generic method that given any DataTable will return a GridView column collection. Listing 2 shows how you can simplify the code in Listing 1 by setting up a class called WPFListViewCommon and create a method called CreateGridViewColumns that returns your GridView. C#private void DataTableSample(){  // Read the data  DataSet ds = new DataSet();  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() + @"\Xml\Product.xml");   // Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View =      WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns(ds.Tables[0]);  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables[0];} VB.NETPrivate Sub DataTableSample()  ' Read the data  Dim ds As New DataSet()  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() & "\Xml\Product.xml")   ' Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = _      WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns(ds.Tables(0))  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables(0)End SubListing 2: Call a generic method to create GridViewColumns. The CreateGridViewColumns MethodThe CreateGridViewColumns method will take a DataTable as a parameter and create a GridView object with a GridViewColumn object in its collection for each column in your DataTable. C#public static GridView CreateGridViewColumns(DataTable dt){  // Create the GridView  GridView gv = new GridView();  gv.AllowsColumnReorder = true;   // Create the GridView Columns  foreach (DataColumn item in dt.Columns)  {    GridViewColumn gvc = new GridViewColumn();    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding(item.ColumnName);    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName;    gvc.Width = Double.NaN;    gv.Columns.Add(gvc);  }   return gv;} VB.NETPublic Shared Function CreateGridViewColumns _  (ByVal dt As DataTable) As GridView  ' Create the GridView  Dim gv As New GridView()  gv.AllowsColumnReorder = True   ' Create the GridView Columns  For Each item As DataColumn In dt.Columns    Dim gvc As New GridViewColumn()    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = New Binding(item.ColumnName)    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName    gvc.Width = [Double].NaN    gv.Columns.Add(gvc)  Next   Return gvEnd FunctionListing 3: The CreateGridViewColumns method takes a DataTable and creates GridViewColumn objects in a GridView. By separating this method out into a class you can call this method anytime you want to create a ListView with a collection of columns from a DataTable. SummaryIn this blog you learned how to create a ListView that acts like a DataGrid. You are able to use a DataTable as both the source of the data, and for creating the columns for the ListView. In the next blog entry you will learn how to use the same technique, but for Collection classes. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "WPF ListView as a DataGrid" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".

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• WPF ListView as a DataGrid – Part 2

  - by psheriff

  In my last blog post I showed you how to create GridViewColumn objects on the fly from the meta-data in a DataTable. By doing this you can create columns for a ListView at runtime instead of having to pre-define each ListView for each different DataTable. Well, many of us use collections of our classes and it would be nice to be able to do the same thing for our collection classes as well. This blog post will show you one approach for using collection classes as the source of the data for your ListView.  Figure 1: A List of Data using a ListView Load Property NamesYou could use reflection to gather the property names in your class, however there are two things wrong with this approach. First, reflection is too slow, and second you may not want to display all your properties from your class in the ListView. Instead of reflection you could just create your own custom collection class of PropertyHeader objects. Each PropertyHeader object will contain a property name and a header text value at a minimum. You could add a width property if you wanted as well. All you need to do is to create a collection of property header objects where each object represents one column in your ListView. Below is a simple example: PropertyHeaders coll = new PropertyHeaders(); coll.Add(new PropertyHeader("ProductId", "Product ID"));coll.Add(new PropertyHeader("ProductName", "Product Name"));coll.Add(new PropertyHeader("Price", "Price")); Once you have this collection created, you could pass this collection to a method that would create the GridViewColumn objects based on the information in this collection. Below is the full code for the PropertyHeader class. Besides the PropertyName and Header properties, there is a constructor that will allow you to set both properties when the object is created. C#public class PropertyHeader{  public PropertyHeader()  {  }   public PropertyHeader(string propertyName, string headerText)  {    PropertyName = propertyName;    HeaderText = headerText;  }   public string PropertyName { get; set; }  public string HeaderText { get; set; }} VB.NETPublic Class PropertyHeader  Public Sub New()  End Sub   Public Sub New(ByVal propName As String, ByVal header As String)    PropertyName = propName    HeaderText = header  End Sub   Private mPropertyName As String  Private mHeaderText As String   Public Property PropertyName() As String    Get      Return mPropertyName    End Get    Set(ByVal value As String)      mPropertyName = value    End Set  End Property   Public Property HeaderText() As String    Get      Return mHeaderText    End Get    Set(ByVal value As String)      mHeaderText = value    End Set  End PropertyEnd Class You can use a Generic List class to create a collection of PropertyHeader objects as shown in the following code. C#public class PropertyHeaders : List<PropertyHeader>{} VB.NETPublic Class PropertyHeaders  Inherits List(Of PropertyHeader)End Class Create Property Header Objects You need to create a method somewhere that will create and return a collection of PropertyHeader objects that will represent the columns you wish to add to your ListView prior to binding your collection class to that ListView. Below is a sample method called GetProperties that builds a list of PropertyHeader objects with properties and headers for a Product object. C#public PropertyHeaders GetProperties(){  PropertyHeaders coll = new PropertyHeaders();   coll.Add(new PropertyHeader("ProductId", "Product ID"));  coll.Add(new PropertyHeader("ProductName", "Product Name"));  coll.Add(new PropertyHeader("Price", "Price"));   return coll;} VB.NETPublic Function GetProperties() As PropertyHeaders  Dim coll As New PropertyHeaders()   coll.Add(New PropertyHeader("ProductId", "Product ID"))  coll.Add(New PropertyHeader("ProductName", "Product Name"))  coll.Add(New PropertyHeader("Price", "Price"))   Return collEnd Function WPFListViewCommon Class Now that you have a collection of PropertyHeader objects you need a method that will create a GridView and a collection of GridViewColumn objects based on this PropertyHeader collection. Below is a static/Shared method that you might put into a class called WPFListViewCommon. C#public static GridView CreateGridViewColumns(  PropertyHeaders properties){  GridView gv;  GridViewColumn gvc;   // Create the GridView  gv = new GridView();  gv.AllowsColumnReorder = true;   // Create the GridView Columns  foreach (PropertyHeader item in properties)  {    gvc = new GridViewColumn();    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding(item.PropertyName);    gvc.Header = item.HeaderText;    gvc.Width = Double.NaN;    gv.Columns.Add(gvc);  }   return gv;} VB.NETPublic Shared Function CreateGridViewColumns( _    ByVal properties As PropertyHeaders) As GridView  Dim gv As GridView  Dim gvc As GridViewColumn   ' Create the GridView  gv = New GridView()  gv.AllowsColumnReorder = True   ' Create the GridView Columns  For Each item As PropertyHeader In properties    gvc = New GridViewColumn()    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = New Binding(item.PropertyName)    gvc.Header = item.HeaderText    gvc.Width = [Double].NaN    gv.Columns.Add(gvc)  Next   Return gvEnd Function Build the Product Screen To build the window shown in Figure 1, you might write code like the following: C#private void CollectionSample(){  Product prod = new Product();   // Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns(       prod.GetProperties());  lstData.DataContext = prod.GetProducts();} VB.NETPrivate Sub CollectionSample()  Dim prod As New Product()   ' Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns( _       prod.GetProperties())  lstData.DataContext = prod.GetProducts()End Sub The Product class contains a method called GetProperties that returns a PropertyHeaders collection. You pass this collection to the WPFListViewCommon’s CreateGridViewColumns method and it will create a GridView for the ListView. When you then feed the DataContext property of the ListView the Product collection the appropriate columns have already been created and data bound. Summary In this blog you learned how to create a ListView that acts like a DataGrid using a collection class. While it does take a little code to do this, it is an alternative to creating each GridViewColumn in XAML. This gives you a lot of flexibility. You could even read in the property names and header text from an XML file for a truly configurable ListView. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "WPF ListView as a DataGrid – Part 2" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".  

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• Setting up a new Silverlight 4 Project with WCF RIA Services

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Many of my clients are actively using Silverlight 4 and RIA Services to build powerful line of business applications.  Getting things set up correctly is critical to being to being able to take full advantage of the RIA services plumbing and when developers struggle with the setup they tend to shy away from the solution as a whole.  I’m a big proponent of RIA services and wanted to take the opportunity to share some of my experiences in setting up these types of projects.  In late 2010 I presented a RIA Services Master Class here in St. Louis, MO through my firm (ArchitectNow) and the information shared in this post was promised during that presentation. One other thing I want to mention before diving in is the existence of a number of other great posts on this subject.  I’ve learned a lot from many of them and wanted to call out a few of them.  The purpose of my post is to point out some of the gotchas that people get caught up on in the process but I would still encourage you to do as much additional research as you can to find the perfect setup for your needs. Here are a few additional blog posts and articles you should check out on the subject: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee707351(VS.91).aspx http://adam-thompson.com/post/2010/07/03/Getting-Started-with-WCF-RIA-Services-for-Silverlight-4.aspx Technologies I don’t intend for this post to turn into a full WCF RIA Services tutorial but I did want to point out what technologies we will be using: Visual Studio.NET 2010 Silverlight 4.0 WCF RIA Services for Visual Studio 2010 Entity Framework 4.0 I also wanted to point out that the screenshots came from my personal development box which has a number of additional plug-ins and frameworks loaded so a few of the screenshots might not match 100% with what you see on your own machines. If you do not have Visual Studio 2010 you can download the express version from http://www.microsoft.com/express.  The Silverlight 4.0 tools and the WCF RIA Services components are installed via the Web Platform Installer (http://www.microsoft.com/web/download). Also, the examples given in this post are done in C#…sorry to you VB folks but the concepts are 100% identical. Setting up anew RIA Services Project This section will provide a step-by-step walkthrough of setting up a new RIA services project using a shared DLL for server side code and a simple Entity Framework model for data access.  All projects are created with the consistent ArchitectNow.RIAServices filename prefix and default namespace.  This would be modified to match your companies standards. First, open Visual Studio and open the new project window via File->New->Project.  In the New Project window, select the Silverlight folder in the Installed Templates section on the left and select “Silverlight Application” as your project type.  Verify your solution name and location are set appropriately.  Note that the project name we specified in the example below ends with .Client.  This indicates the name which will be given to our Silverlight project. I consider Silverlight a client-side technology and thus use this name to reflect that.  Click Ok to continue. During the creation on a new Silverlight 4 project you will be prompted with the following dialog to create a new web ASP.NET web project to host your Silverlight content.  As we are demonstrating the setup of a WCF RIA Services infrastructure, make sure the “Enable WCF RIA Services” option is checked and click OK.  Obviously, there are some other options here which have an effect on your solution and you are welcome to look around.  For our example we are going to leave the ASP.NET Web Application Project selected.  If you are interested in having your Silverlight project hosted in an MVC 2 application or a Web Site project these options are available as well.  Also, whichever web project type you select, the name can be modified here as well.  Note that it defaults to the same name as your Silverlight project with the addition of a .Web suffix. At this point, your full Silverlight 4 project and host ASP.NET Web Application should be created and will now display in your Visual Studio solution explorer as part of a single Visual Studio solution as follows: Now we want to add our WCF RIA Services projects to this same solution.  To do so, right-click on the Solution node in the solution explorer and select Add->New Project.  In the New Project dialog again select the Silverlight folder under the Visual C# node on the left and, in the main area of the screen, select the WCF RIA Services Class Library project template as shown below.  Make sure your project name is set appropriately as well.  For the sample below, we will name the project “ArchitectNow.RIAServices.Server.Entities”.   The .Server.Entities suffix we use is meant to simply indicate that this particular project will contain our WCF RIA Services entity classes (as you will see below).  Click OK to continue. Once you have created the WCF RIA Services Class Library specified above, Visual Studio will automatically add TWO projects to your solution.  The first will be an project called .Server.Entities (using our naming conventions) and the other will have the same name with a .Web extension.  The full solution (with all 4 projects) is shown in the image below.  The .Entities project will essentially remain empty and is actually a Silverlight 4 class library that will contain generated RIA Services domain objects.  It will be referenced by our front-end Silverlight project and thus allow for simplified sharing of code between the client and the server.   The .Entities.Web project is a .NET 4.0 class library into which we will put our data access code (via Entity Framework).  This is our server side code and business logic and the RIA Services plumbing will maintain a link between this project and the front end.  Specific entities such as our domain objects and other code we set to be shared will be copied automatically into the .Entities project to be used in both the front end and the back end. At this point, we want to do a little cleanup of the projects in our solution and we will do so by deleting the “Class1.cs” class from both the .Entities project and the .Entities.Web project.  (Has anyone ever intentionally named a class “Class1”?) Next, we need to configure a few references to make RIA Services work.  THIS IS A KEY STEP THAT CAUSES MANY HEADACHES FOR DEVELOPERS NEW TO THIS INFRASTRUCTURE! Using the Add References dialog in Visual Studio, add a project reference from the *.Client project (our Silverlight 4 client) to the *.Entities project (our RIA Services class library).  Next, again using the Add References dialog in Visual Studio, add a project reference from the *.Client.Web project (our ASP.NET host project) to the *.Entities.Web project (our back-end data services DLL).  To get to the Add References dialog, simply right-click on the project you with to add a reference to in the Visual Studio solution explorer and select “Add Reference” from the resulting context menu.  You will want to make sure these references are added as “Project” references to simplify your future debugging.  To reiterate the reference direction using the project names we have utilized in this example thus far:  .Client references .Entities and .Client.Web reference .Entities.Web.  If you have opted for a different naming convention, then the Silverlight project must reference the RIA Services Silverlight class library and the ASP.NET host project must reference the server-side class library. Next, we are going to add a new Entity Framework data model to our data services project (.Entities.Web).  We will do this by right clicking on this project (ArchitectNow.Server.Entities.Web in the above diagram) and selecting Add->New Project.  In the New Project dialog we will select ADO.NET Entity Data Model as in the following diagram.  For now we will call this simply SampleDataModel.edmx and click OK. It is worth pointing out that WCF RIA Services is in no way tied to the Entity Framework as a means of accessing data and any data access technology is supported (as long as the server side implementation maps to the RIA Services pattern which is a topic beyond the scope of this post).  We are using EF to quickly demonstrate the RIA Services concepts and setup infrastructure, as such, I am not providing a database schema with this post but am instead connecting to a small sample database on my local machine.  The following diagram shows a simple EF Data Model with two tables that I reverse engineered from a local data store.   If you are putting together your own solution, feel free to reverse engineer a few tables from any local database to which you have access. At this point, once you have an EF data model generated as an EDMX into your .Entites.Web project YOU MUST BUILD YOUR SOLUTION.  I know it seems strange to call that out but it important that the solution be built at this point for the next step to be successful.  Obviously, if you have any build errors, these must be addressed at this point. At this point we will add a RIA Services Domain Service to our .Entities.Web project (our server side code).  We will need to right-click on the .Entities.Web project and select Add->New Item.  In the Add New Item dialog, select Domain Service Class and verify the name of your new Domain Service is correct (ours is called SampleService.cs in the image below).  Next, click "Add”. After clicking “Add” to include the Domain Service Class in the selected project, you will be presented with the following dialog.  In it, you can choose which entities from the selected EDMX to include in your services and if they should be allowed to be edited (i.e. inserted, updated, or deleted) via this service.  If the “Available DataContext/ObjectContext classes” dropdown is empty, this indicates you have not yes successfully built your project after adding your EDMX.  I would also recommend verifying that the “Generate associated classes for metadata” option is selected.  Once you have selected the appropriate options, click “OK”. Once you have added the domain service class to the .Entities.Web project, the resulting solution should look similar to the following: Note that in the solution you now have a SampleDataModel.edmx which represents your EF data mapping to your database and a SampleService.cs which will contain a large amount of generated RIA Services code which RIA Services utilizes to access this data from the Silverlight front-end.  You will put all your server side data access code and logic into the SampleService.cs class.  The SampleService.metadata.cs class is for decorating the generated domain objects with attributes from the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace for validation purposes. FINAL AND KEY CONFIGURATION STEP!  One key step that causes significant headache to developers configuring RIA Services for the first time is the fact that, when we added the EDMX to the .Entities.Web project for our EF data access, a connection string was generated and placed within a newly generated App.Context file within that project.  While we didn’t point it out at the time you can see it in the image above.  This connection string will be required for the EF data model to successfully locate it’s data.  Also, when we added the Domain Service class to the .Entities.Web project, a number of RIA Services configuration options were added to the same App.Config file.   Unfortunately, when we ultimately begin to utilize the RIA Services infrastructure, our Silverlight UI will be making RIA services calls through the ASP.NET host project (i.e. .Client.Web).  This host project has a reference to the .Entities.Web project which actually contains the code so all will pass through correctly EXCEPT the fact that the host project will utilize it’s own Web.Config for any configuration settings.  For this reason we must now merge all the sections of the App.Config file in the .Entities.Web project into the Web.Config file in the .Client.Web project.  I know this is a bit tedious and I wish there were a simpler solution but it is required for our RIA Services Domain Service to be made available to the front end Silverlight project.  Much of this manual merge can be achieved by simply cutting and pasting from App.Config into Web.Config.  Unfortunately, the <system.webServer> section will exist in both and the contents of this section will need to be manually merged.  Fortunately, this is a step that needs to be taken only once per solution.  As you add additional data structures and Domain Services methods to the server no additional changes will be necessary to the Web.Config. Next Steps At this point, we have walked through the basic setup of a simple RIA services solution.  Unfortunately, there is still a lot to know about RIA services and we have not even begun to take advantage of the plumbing which we just configured (meaning we haven’t even made a single RIA services call).  I plan on posting a few more introductory posts over the next few weeks to take us to this step.  If you have any questions on the content in this post feel free to reach out to me via this Blog and I’ll gladly point you in (hopefully) the right direction. Resources Prior to closing out this post, I wanted to share a number or resources to help you get started with RIA services.  While I plan on posting more on the subject, I didn’t invent any of this stuff and wanted to give credit to the following areas for helping me put a lot of these pieces into place.   The books and online resources below will go a long way to making you extremely productive with RIA services in the shortest time possible.  The only thing required of you is the dedication to take advantage of the resources available. Books Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4 http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Business-Applications-Silverlight-4/dp/1430272074/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1291048751&sr=8-2 Silverlight 4 in Action http://www.amazon.com/Silverlight-4-Action-Pete-Brown/dp/1935182374/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291048751&sr=8-1 Pro Silverlight for the Enterprise (Books for Professionals by Professionals) http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Silverlight-Enterprise-Books-Professionals/dp/1430218673/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1291048751&sr=8-3 Web Content RIA Services http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/RobBagby/NET-RIA-Services-in-5-Minutes http://silverlight.net/riaservices/ http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/net-ria-services-intro/ http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/ria-services-support-visual-studio-2010/ http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/SL4BusinessModule2/SL4LOB_02_01_RIAServices http://www.myvbprof.com/MainSite/index.aspx#/zSL4_RIA_01 http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/egibson/silverlight-firestarter-ria-services http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee707336%28v=VS.91%29.aspx Silverlight www.silverlight.net http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/silverlight4trainingcourse.aspx http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/silverlighttv

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 02, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 02, 2010New ProjectsAE.Remoting: An alternative means of remoting for .NET to allow for intuitive usage and easy implementation into existing code.animated-smoke-modeling: This is an implementation or a demo of our method to model animated smokes. ASP.NET Google Maps: Extensible and easy to use, this is ASP.NET Google Maps Control. Drag & Drop and is ready to go. You can configure map style, add a PushPin using t...CartPatches able to see: CartPatches able to see youCodemix Cms: Codemix CmsDo the right thing - The Simple TodoManager: A simple Todo Manager which lets you focus on your daily most important tasks/todos. So do the right thing.....at your home, in your office, in you...Fast Console: Fast Console is a simple xml programming language. This may be a really good starting language as there are printing, variables and as soon as poss...Graphing Calculator in Silverlight: This was initially an effort to port a WPF graphing calculator written by Bob Brown (Microsoft) into Silverlight but soon after it became necessary...InformationVSTS: This application allows you to have all informations on VSTS installed. It also lets you know the server of BUILD and project.La Ranisima: La Ranisima is an open source "Space Invaders" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard. This cross-platfo...La villa del seis: La villa del seis is a multiplatform point-and-click graphical adventure. Also, you can play it like a text adventure (interactive fiction) on a te...LParse: LParse is a monadic parser combinator library, similar to Haskell’s Parsec. It allows you create parsers on C# language. All parsers are first-clas...Manage Recents File/Project VS2005/2008: Clear Recents Files and Projects, and Clear Broken Links of Recents Files and Projects for VS2005 and VS2008. Developed in Visual Studio 2008 SP...Mavention: Mavention makes SharePoint work for you.MixMail: MixMailMixScrum: mixScrumMixTemplate: MixTemplate.NepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool: This is a simple program designed to help people to study regular expressions.Pruebas: Pruebas is an open source game mix of text adventure and RPG written in Microsoft QBasic (under MS-DOS 6.22) that uses keyboard. Runs natively unde...Python Design by Contract: Simple to use invariants, pre- and postconditions which use some of the new metaprogramming features in Python 3.Rubik Cube's 3D Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution: Rubik Cube's Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution is a 3D presentation of Rubik Cube in range of up to 7x7x7 size with full functionality and an anima...Seminarka: Seminarka - ko treba znat šta je zna!SENAC 2010 - Projeto Integrador 2 (Material de Apoio): Material utilizado para apoiar os alunos da disciplina de Projeto integrador 2. O tema são sistemas web utilizando ASP.NET, com C# e banco de da...SENAC CG2010: Contém código apresentado em sala de aula para a disciplina de CG, 5ºBSI NoturnoSistema de facturación: Sistema de facturación desarrollado en C# para la clase de programación 3.SmartFront - WPF and Silverlight Toolkit: SmartFront is a framework piece which allow to quickly building Smart Client application in WPF and in Silverlight. This framework uses existing s...Solar 1: This is the ASP.NET MVC engine based on Oxite and used for 32planets.net.TemporalSQL: SQL Patterns - tables, queries, and functions - to design a temporal database. TFunkOrderSystem: The Funkalistic Blueprint and Items order management systemTribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache is a simple dictionary cache (persistent dictionary) written in C# which is easy to implement and use.tstProject: Testing ProjectUDC indexes parser: UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) indexes parserWebAssert: A test assertion library to assist in writing automated tests against websites. Allows for assertion of HTML validity, etc. Initially has support f...Words Via Subtitle: Words Via Subtitle makes it easier for English Learners to learn new words that appears in TV shows or movies. You'll no longer have to look up the...x5s - a cross site scripting (XSS) testing tool: x5s aims to be a specialized testing tool which assists penetration testers in finding cross-site scripting hot-spots. By auto-injecting token valu...XNA Shooter Engine: The XNA Shooter Engine is a game engine for XNA designed specifically with first-person-shooter-style games in mind. It's being developed for an as...我的开发集: for my study .net csharpNew ReleasesAppFabric Caching Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Admin Tool 1.1: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Test On:Win 7 (64x) Note: Must run as Administrator !!!ASP.NET Google Maps: ASP.NET Google Maps 0.1b: Project Description Extensible and easy to use, this is ASP.NET Bing Maps Control. Drag & Drop and is ready to go. You can configure map style, add...AutoFixture: Version 1.0.9 (RC1): This is Release Candidate 1 of AutoFixture 1.1. This release contains no known bugs. Compared to AutoFixture 1.0, it fixes some bugs that were dis...Camlex.NET: Camlex.NET 2.0: Camlex.NET 2.0 release New features Search by field id Support for native System.Guid type for values Search by lookup id and lookup value D...CloudCache - Distributed Cache Tier with Azure: v1.0.0.1: New Release on April 1st 2010 No this is not April fools a new release has made it's way out. Below are the changes: Removed dependency on Azure S...DigitallyCreated Utilities: DigitallyCreated Utilities v1.0.1: This release is the v1.0.1 version of DigitallyCreated Utilities. This update is highly recommended for all users of v1.0.0 as it fixes a critical ...Fast Console: Fast Console Alpha: Fast Console is an easy to use and learn programming language. Code example is found in the file TestFile.xml When you've written your code just sa...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.6 beta Released: Hi, This release contains following enhancements. * Zooming feature has been enhanced with the new functionality of ZoomRectangle. Now, users...Graphing Calculator in Silverlight: 1.0.1: Graphing Calculator for Silverlight is written entirely in C# and is based on the Silverlight 3 release. I will soon release the full documentation...Home Access Plus+: v3.2.0.1: v3.2.0.1 Release Change Log: Fixed: Issue with & ampersand File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb ~/Scripts/viewmode.jsIcarus Scene Engine: Icarus Professional 2 Alpha 2 v 1.10.329.913: Alpha release 2 of Icarus Professional. This release includes: IcarusX: The ActiveX-based browser control for rendering IPX projects online. Icaru...Line Counter: 1.5.2: The Line Counter is a tool to calculate lines of your code files. The tool was written in .NET 2.0. Line Counter 1.5.2 Added General Code Counter ...ManagedCv: ManagedCv v0.0.0.1: Win32Mavention: Mavention Simple Menu: SharePoint 2010 ships with a menu control that allows you to render a site menu using semantic markup. Using the Mavention Simple Menu you can do t...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.10.57200: Fixed uploading.com links detection; Fixed downloading from uploading.com; Fixed downloading from load.to; Fixed detecting incompatible sources;MixMail: V1: MixMailMixTemplate: v1: releaseMvcPager: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 compiled assembly files and demo projectsMvcPager: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 2.0: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 2.0 compiled assembly and demo projectsMvcUnity - ASP.NET MVC Dependency Injection: 2.1 Source Code: Drop 2.1 Source CodeNepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool: NepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool v0.1 alpha: This is the first version of this application. If you find any bug, please contact me at http://www.nepomucenobr.com.brNepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool: NepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool v0.1 source-code: This is the first version of this application. If you find any bug, please contact me at http://www.nepomucenobr.com.brocculo: occulo 0.2 binaries: Release build binaries instead of debug, should now work for other users. Fixed bit rotation and output filename bugs.occulo: occulo 0.2 source: Second source release. See binary release for changes.Python Design by Contract: v0.1: This is the inital release. I think it is working fine.SharePoint Labs: SPLab5002A-FRA-Level200: SPLab5002A-FRA-Level200 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to modify CAML schema to have IntelliSense on Feature's GUID. Lab Language : French ...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5003A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5003A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to manually create a Feature, how to brand a Feature and how to incorporate ressourc...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5004A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5004A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to create a Feature within Visual Studio, how to brand it, how to incorporate ressou...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5005A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5005A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to create a Feature within Visual Studio, how to brand it, how to incorporate ressou...SSIS ReportGeneratorTask: Version 1.53: Some bugfixes to version 1.52 beta Server Report properties can be displayed. Snapshots can be created. Screenshots of the planned version 1.53 ca...TemporalSQL: April 2010: Initial set of prototypes demonstrating temporal patterns, queries, and functions in SQL ServerTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.0.1: TortoiseHg 1.0.1 is a bug fix release. We recommend all users upgrade to this release. http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/wiki/ReleaseNotes#t...Tribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache Alpha: Functional Alpha Release - Do not use in productionTS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.21.15.0: Changelog Added class "ServerListItemBase" which is used in the new method "GetServerListShort" of QueryRunner class. (Change of Beta 21) Added ...UDC indexes parser: Runtime Binary Alpha 1: First alpha versionVisual Studio DSite: Text To Binary (Visual C++ 2008): A simple c program that can convert text to binary. Source code only.x5s - a cross site scripting (XSS) testing tool: x5s 1.0 beta: PLACEHOLDER (coming soon)XNA Shooter Engine: GDK Tools 0.1.0.0: This is a small, very early release of the GDK Tools. The only included tool is Input Map Editor.XPath Visualizer: XPathVisualizer v1.2: Last updated 1 April 2010. This is not a joke! includes new features: Ctrl-S shortcut key for Saving the XML file Ctrl-F shortcut for re-form...すとれおじさん(仮): すとれおじさん β 0.01: とりあえず公開のバージョンです。 中途半端な機能がいっぱいあります。Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrGraffiti CMSBase Class LibrariesjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationN2 CMSLINQ to TwitterManaged Extensibility FrameworkFarseer Physics Engine

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• Do’s and Don’ts Building SharePoint Applications

  - by Bil Simser

  SharePoint is a great platform for building quick LOB applications. Simple things from employee time trackers to server and software inventory to full blown Help Desks can be crafted up using SharePoint from just customizing Lists. No programming necessary. However there are a few tricks I’ve painfully learned over the years that you can use for your own solutions. DO What’s In A Name? When you create a new list, column, or view you’ll commonly name it something like “Expense Reports”. However this has the ugly effect of creating a url to the list as “Expense%20Reports”. Or worse, an internal field name of “Expense_x0x0020_Reports” which is not only cryptic but hard to remember when you’re trying to find the column by internal name. While “Expense Reports 2011” is user friendly, “ExpenseReports2011” is not (unless you’re a programmer). So that’s not the solution. Well, not entirely. Instead when you create your column or list or view use the scrunched up name (I can’t think of the technical term for it right now) of “ExpenseReports2011”, “WomenAtTheOfficeThatAreMen” or “KoalaMeatIsGoodWhenBroiled”. After you’ve created it, go back and change the name to the more friendly “Silly Expense Reports That Nobody Reads”. The original internal name will be the url and code friendly one without spaces while the one used on data entry forms and view headers will be the human version. Smart Columns When building a view include columns that make sense. By default when you add a column the “Add to default view” is checked. Resist the urge to be lazy and leave it checked. Uncheck that puppy and decide consciously what columns should be included in the view. Pick columns that make sense to what the user is trying to do. This means you have to talk to the user. Yes, I know. That can be trying at times and even painful. Go ahead, talk to them. You might learn something. Find out what’s important to them and why. If they’re doing something repetitively as part of their job, try to make their life easier by including what’s most important to them. Do they really need to see the Created *and* Modified date of a document or do they just need the title and author? You’ll only find out after talking to them (or getting them drunk in a bar and leaving them in the back alley handcuffed to a garbage bin, don’t ask). Gotta Keep it Separated Hey, views are there for a reason. Use them. While “All Items” is a fine way to present a list of well, all items, it’s hardly sufficient to present a list of servers built before the Y2K bug hit. You’ll be scrolling the list for hours finally arriving at Page 387 of 12,591 and cursing that SharePoint guy for convincing you that putting your hardware into a list would be of any use to anyone. Next to collecting the data, presenting it is just as important. Views are often overlooked and many times ignored or misused. They’re the way you can slice and dice the data up so that you’re not trying to consume 3,000 years of human evolution on a single web page. Remember views can be filtered so feel free to create a view for each status or one for each operating system or one for each species of Information Worker you might be putting in that list or document library. Not only will it reduce the number of items someone sees at one time, it’ll also make the information that much more relevant. Also remember that each view is a separate page. Use it in navigation by creating a menu on the Quick Launch to each view. The discoverability of the Views menu isn’t overly obvious and if you violate the rule of columns (see Horizontally Scrolling below) the view menu doesn’t even show up until you shuffle the scroll bar to the left. Navigation links, big giant buttons, a screaming flashing “CLICK ME NOW” will help your users find their way. Sort It! Views are great so we’re building nice, rich views for the user. Awesomesauce. However sort is not very discoverable by the user. For example when you’re looking at a view how do you know if it’s ascending or descending and what is it sorted on. Maybe it’s sorted using two fields so what’s that all about? Help your users by letting them know the information they’re looking at is sorted. Maybe you name the view something appropriate like “Bogus Expense Claims Sorted By Deadbeats”. If you use the naming strategy just make sure you keep the name consistent with the description. In the previous example their better be a Deadbeat column so I can see the sort in action. Having a “Loser” column, while equally correct, is a little obtuse to the average Information Worker. Remember, they usually don’t use acronyms and even if they knew how to, it’s not immediately obvious to them that’s what you’re trying to convey. Another option is to simply drop a Content Editor Web Part above the list and explain exactly the view they’re looking at. Each view is it’s own page so one CEWP won’t be used across the board. Be descriptive in what the user is seeing but try to keep it brief. Dumping the first chapter of I, Claudius might be informative to the data but can gobble up screen real estate and miss the point of having the list. DO NOT Useless Attachments The attachments column is, in a word, useless. For the most part. Sure it indicates there’s an attachment on the list item but in the grand scheme of things that’s not overly informative. Maybe it is and by all means, if it makes sense to you include it. Colour it. Make it shine and stand like the Return of Clippy on every SharePoint list. Without it being functional it can be boring. EndUserSharePoint.com has an article to make the son of Clippy that much more useful so feel free to head over and check out this blog post by Paul Grenier on the task (Warning code ahead! Danger Will Robinson!) In any case, I would suggest you remove it from your views. Again if it’s important then include it but consider the jQuery solution above to make it functional. It’s added by default to views and one of things that people forget to clean up. Horizontal Scrolling Screen real estate is premium so building a list that contains 8,000 columns and stretches horizontally across 15 screens probably isn’t the most user friendly experience. Most users can’t figure out how to scroll vertically let alone horizontally so don’t make it even that more confusing for them. Take the Steve Krug approach in your view designs and try not to make the user think. Again views are your friend. Consider splitting up the data into views where one view contains 10 columns and other view contains the other 10. Okay, maybe your information doesn’t work that way but humans can only process 7 pieces of data at a time, 10 at most (then their heads explode and you don’t want to clean that mess up, especially on a Friday night before the big dance). It drives me batshit crazy when I see a view with 80 columns of data. I often ask the user “So what do you do with all this information”. The response is usually “With this data [the first 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to fire everyone, and with this data [the next 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to set the building on fire and collect the insurance”. It’s at that point I show them how to create two new views “People Who Are About To Get The Axe” and “Beach Time For The Executives”. Again, talk to your users and try to reason with them on cutting down the number of columns they see at once. Vertical Scrolling Another big faux pas I find is the use of multi-line comment fields in views. It’s not so bad when you have a statement like this in your view: “I really like, oh my god, thought I was going to scream when I saw this turtle then I decided what I was going to have for dinner and frankly I hate having to work late so when I was talking to the customer I thought, oh my god, what if the customer has turtles and then it appeared to me that I really was hungry so I'm going to have lunch now.” It’s fine if that’s the only column along with two or three others, but once you slap those 20 columns of data into the list, the comment field wraps and forms a new multi-page novel that takes up your entire screen. Do everyone a favour and just avoid adding the column to views. Train the user to just click through to the item if they need to see the contents. Duplicate Information Duplication is never good. Views and great as you can group data together. For example create a view of project status reports grouped by author. Then you can see what project manager is being a dip and not submitting their report. However if you group by author do you really need the Created By field as well in the view? Or if the view is grouped by Project then Author do you need both. Horizontal real estate is always at a premium so try not to clutter up the view with duplicate data like this. Oh  yeah, if you’re scratching your head saying “But Bil, if I don’t include the Project name in the view and I have a lot of items then how do I know which one I’m looking at”. That’s a hint that your grouping is too vague or you have too much data in the view based on that criteria. Filter it down a notch, create some views, and try to keep the group down to a single screen where you can see the group header at the top of the page. Again it’s just managing the information you have. Redundant, See Redundant This partially relates to duplicate information and smart columns but basically remember to not include the obvious in a view. Remember, don’t make me think. If you’ve gone to the trouble (and it was a lot of trouble wasn’t it?) to create separate views of your data by creating a “September Zombie Brain Sales”, “October Zombie Brain Sales”, etc. then please for the love of all that is holy do not include the Month and Product columns in your view. Similarly if you create a “My” view of anything (“My Favourite Brands of Spandex”, “My Co-Workers I Find The Urge To Disinfect”) then again, do not include the owner or author field (or whatever field you use to identify “My”). That’s just silly. Hope that helps! Happy customizing!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 27, 2010New ProjectsBinding Navigator: Clone of WinForms BindingNavigator that is able to work with any type of DataSource. For full functionality it requires the DataSource to implement...DEWD: DEWD is an Umbraco 4.0 extension used to edit sequential data such as rows in a SQL server database table. It's meant to allow developers to quickl...Eletronic Invoice Extensions: A simple DLL to use against XSD and validate a XML.EssionCalendar: EssionCal EssionCalExpression Encoder Batch Processor: Importing your videotapes into Windows is easy with the built-in utilities, but if your importer does not encode to your desired format, you need t...Feedback Form: Feedback application makes it easier for attendees who attend an seminar/event and event organizers. Organizers of the event will no longer need to...Find in Start Menu: Find in Start MenuIE8 Web Slices Pack: IE8 Web Slices Pack is a package of 5 types of web slices ready to be customized via a mini-CMS for your web site or for your custom IE8 installer....KafTK: Iskakov AzamatMicrosoft Dynamics NAV text export splitter: Utility for splitting Microsoft Dynamics NAV object exports (in text format) into files that each contain a single object. MultiPoint Vote: Voting is more innovative and catchy through this MultiPoint application. Using MultiPoint SDK 1.5 and Visual C#, this prototype emphasizes the cap...NebDotNet: NebDotNetnsim: Some simulation issues.OpenLight Group Common Lib: This project is a set of classes commonly used across OpenLight Group projects.pstsdk.net: .NET port of PST File Format SDK: pstsdk.net makes it easier for .NET developers to access the PST file format. This is a direct C# port of the PST File Format SDK project which is ...RavenMVC: A NoSQL Demo App using RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC 2.Remics: Remics is a toolkit for reverse engineering tools. Open source (MIT license). The goal of Remics is enabling developers (or researchers) quickly...RIA Services to Legacy DAL Integration Library: RIA Services to Legacy DAL Integration LibrarySharePoint List Adapters for SSIS: SSIS source and destination components to access SharePoint lists using basic authenticationSql Query Modelling Language: This project library creates simple Sql queries.Thumb nail creator and image resizer: a user control to create thubnails and resize images for displayTK: study projectViperWorks Ignition: Ignition is application framework for WinForms and WPF business applications. Built in webservice generation, reporting and rapid application devel...XNA Image Reflector: XNA Image Reflector allows you to add Web 2.0-like reflections to images in a few clicksXNArkanoid: XNArkanoid is a Windows Phone 7 remake of the classic Taito´s Arkanoid. It´s developed in C#, using XNA Framework v4.0.New ReleasesAcies: Acies - Alpha Build 0.0.5: First alpha release. Requires Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867a2a-e249...Ajax Toolkit for ASP.NET MVC: Ajax Toolkit for ASP.NET MVC v20100527: change array datasource to json datasource allow lowercaseAttribute Builder: Attribute Builder 1.0: Attribute Builder 1.0Support for parameter-less constructors, constructors with parameters and object initialization with field and property assign...Binding Navigator: TTBindingNavigator preview: First binary release. Only control without samples.Bojinx: Bojinx Core V4.5.15: Bugs fixed: Clean up in the event handler Added more disposal features to better clean up contexts on unload. Optimized command processing fur...CBM-Command: Version 1.0 - 2010-05-26: Release Notes - 2010-05-26 - Version 1.0New Features None Changes Fixed bug where you could move to an unopened panel Fixed bug where you could ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V03: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V04: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V05: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V06: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V07: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. This release solves...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V08: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release solves ...Dot Game: Dot Game Network version: Now, you can play over network.EpsiRisk: EPSI RISK V1: First Stable Version of EpsiRISK ! Enjoy !Event Scavenger: Viewer 3.3.0: Added grouping functionality to Viewer. Group expanding/collapsing only supported under Windows Vista/7 and onwards. Viewer version set to 3.3.0.FAST for Sharepoint MOSS 2010 Query Tool: Version 1.0: Full Release Added sorting Added custom trim duplicates Added UI improvements Added ignore certificate errorsFoursquare for Windows Phone 7: Foursquare 2010.05.26.01: Foursquare 2010.05.26.01 Updates: Corrected issue with isPrivate, sendToTwitter, and sendToFacebookHobbyBrew Mobile: Beta 3: ATTENZIONE notifica nuove versioni via email disponibile (leggi in fondo)! Supporto alla rotazione dello schermo: Malti e Luppoli si affiancano or...IE8 Web Slices Pack: IE8 Web Slices Pack v2.0: This release of the Web Slices Pack supports 5 different Web Slices and a mini CMS to administer the info in the Web Slices.manx: manx data 1.0: Initial dump of data. This is a raw SQL dump script that deletes all existing data and inserts the initial dataset as received from Paul Williams....Microsoft Web Protection Library: WPL May CTP: This preview of the Web Protection Library includes AntiXSS - an updated Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library removes some bugs and is now usable in ...MultiPoint Vote: MultiPoint Vote v.1: MultiPoint Vote v1 Features This accepts user inputs: number of participants, poll/survey title and the list of options A text file containing th...NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.26.001: Changes since the last build:2010-05-25 19:21:49 Jarek Kowalski Reordered parameters of AsynchronousAction<T> 2010-05-25 19:16:02 Jarek Kowalski N...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Class Libraries, version 1.0.1.124: The NodeXL class libraries can be used to display network graphs in .NET applications. To include a NodeXL network graph in a WPF desktop or Windo...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.124: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis is a minor re...OpenExpressApp let business people build application: OpenExpressApp for .Net4: 从.Net3.5 SP1 升级到.Net4 ,升级主要内容: 1. 解决了一些内存泄露问题 2. 修改了一些bug 3. 进行了部分代码重构 4. 使用MEF替代了PrismRavenMVC: RavenMVC 0.1: A NoSQL demo app in ASP.NET MVC using RavenDB.SharePoint List Adapters for SSIS: Initial Release: Contains the raw assemblies necessary to use the SharePoint list adapters with basic authentication. See the read me file for details on using in ...Sql Query Modelling Language: Sql Qml V1: This is first versionThumb nail creator and image resizer: ThumbnailCreator 1.0: This is the very first release I built it for my self so it a bit rough but i thought others might fint it usefulluptime.exe: uptime.exe v1.1: Changed the calculation of the uptime. It's now based on the LastbootUpTime value obtained from WMI.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30526.0: Automatic drop of latest buildViperWorks Ignition: Test: TestXmlCodeEditor: Release 0.91 Alpha: Release 0.91 AlphaXNA Image Reflector: XNA Image Reflector v 1.1: This release has been compiled with XNA Game Studio 3.1, so you will need to download the XNA Runtime 3.1 in order to run it.Xna.Extend: Xna Extend (Ver 0.0.1 beta): This is the betas, betas, beta, test version (Version 0.0.1 beta). It includes only the input and audio components. If you experience any errors, o...XNArkanoid: XNArkanoid v 0.2b: XNArkanoid v 0.2. Initial beta releaseMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active ProjectsAStar.netpatterns & practices – Enterprise Librarypatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceSqlServerExtensionsMono.AddinsBlogEngine.NETCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMRawrCodeReviewGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & Presentation

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• When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

  - by Phil Factor

  You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT.  In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion.  Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs.  Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years.  In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times.  Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk.  The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization.  Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers).  He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan.  The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide  emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company.  When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project.  Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was  beyond belief.  Then  the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close.  With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain  puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage.  The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks.  Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home.  She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back.  A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

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• WPF Login Verification Using Active Directory

  - by psheriff

  Back in October of 2009 I created a WPF login screen (Figure 1) that just showed how to create the layout for a login screen. That one sample is probably the most downloaded sample we have. So in this blog post, I thought I would update that screen and also hook it up to show how to authenticate your user against Active Directory. Figure 1: Original WPF Login Screen I have updated not only the code behind for this login screen, but also the look and feel as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: An Updated WPF Login Screen The UI To create the UI for this login screen you can refer to my October of 2009 blog post to see how to create the borderless window. You can then look at the sample code to see how I created the linear gradient brush for the background. There are just a few differences in this screen compared to the old version. First, I changed the key image and instead of using words for the Cancel and Login buttons, I used some icons. Secondly I added a text box to hold the Domain name that you wish to authenticate against. This text box is automatically filled in if you are connected to a network. In the Window_Loaded event procedure of the winLogin window you can retrieve the user’s domain name from the Environment.UserDomainName property. For example: txtDomain.Text = Environment.UserDomainName The ADHelper Class Instead of coding the call to authenticate the user directly in the login screen I created an ADHelper class. This will make it easier if you want to add additional AD calls in the future. The ADHelper class contains just one method at this time called AuthenticateUser. This method authenticates a user name and password against the specified domain. The login screen will gather the credentials from the user such as their user name and password, and also the domain name to authenticate against. To use this ADHelper class you will need to add a reference to the System.DirectoryServices.dll in .NET. The AuthenticateUser Method In order to authenticate a user against your Active Directory you will need to supply a valid LDAP path string to the constructor of the DirectoryEntry class. The LDAP path string will be in the format LDAP://DomainName. You will also pass in the user name and password to the constructor of the DirectoryEntry class as well. With a DirectoryEntry object populated with this LDAP path string, the user name and password you will now pass this object to the constructor of a DirectorySearcher object. You then perform the FindOne method on the DirectorySearcher object. If the DirectorySearcher object returns a SearchResult then the credentials supplied are valid. If the credentials are not valid on the Active Directory then an exception is thrown. C#public bool AuthenticateUser(string domainName, string userName,  string password){  bool ret = false;   try  {    DirectoryEntry de = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + domainName,                                           userName, password);    DirectorySearcher dsearch = new DirectorySearcher(de);    SearchResult results = null;     results = dsearch.FindOne();     ret = true;  }  catch  {    ret = false;  }   return ret;} Visual Basic Public Function AuthenticateUser(ByVal domainName As String, _ ByVal userName As String, ByVal password As String) As Boolean  Dim ret As Boolean = False   Try    Dim de As New DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" & domainName, _                                 userName, password)    Dim dsearch As New DirectorySearcher(de)    Dim results As SearchResult = Nothing     results = dsearch.FindOne()     ret = True  Catch    ret = False  End Try   Return retEnd Function In the Click event procedure under the Login button you will find the following code that will validate the credentials that the user types into the login window. C#private void btnLogin_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){  ADHelper ad = new ADHelper();   if(ad.AuthenticateUser(txtDomain.Text,         txtUserName.Text, txtPassword.Password))    DialogResult = true;  else    MessageBox.Show("Unable to Authenticate Using the                      Supplied Credentials");} Visual BasicPrivate Sub btnLogin_Click(ByVal sender As Object, _ ByVal e As RoutedEventArgs)  Dim ad As New ADHelper()   If ad.AuthenticateUser(txtDomain.Text, txtUserName.Text, _                         txtPassword.Password) Then    DialogResult = True  Else    MessageBox.Show("Unable to Authenticate Using the                      Supplied Credentials")  End IfEnd Sub Displaying the Login Screen At some point when your application launches, you will need to display your login screen modally. Below is the code that you would call to display the login form (named winLogin in my sample application). This code is called from the main application form, and thus the owner of the login screen is set to “this”. You then call the ShowDialog method on the login screen to have this form displayed modally. After the user clicks on one of the two buttons you need to check to see what the DialogResult property was set to. The DialogResult property is a nullable type and thus you first need to check to see if the value has been set. C# private void DisplayLoginScreen(){  winLogin win = new winLogin();   win.Owner = this;  win.ShowDialog();  if (win.DialogResult.HasValue && win.DialogResult.Value)    MessageBox.Show("User Logged In");  else    this.Close();} Visual Basic Private Sub DisplayLoginScreen()  Dim win As New winLogin()   win.Owner = Me  win.ShowDialog()  If win.DialogResult.HasValue And win.DialogResult.Value Then    MessageBox.Show("User Logged In")  Else    Me.Close()  End IfEnd Sub Summary Creating a nice looking login screen is fairly simple to do in WPF. Using the Active Directory services from a WPF application should make your desktop programming task easier as you do not need to create your own user authentication system. I hope this article gave you some ideas on how to create a login screen in WPF. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code for this blog entry at my website: http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Click on Tips & Tricks, then select 'WPF Login Verification Using Active Directory' from the drop down list. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Solaris X86 64-bit Assembly Programming

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 64-bit Assembly Programming This is a simple example on writing, compiling, and debugging Solaris 64-bit x86 assembly language with a C program. This is also referred to as "AMD64" assembly. The term "AMD64" is used in an inclusive sense to refer to all X86 64-bit processors, whether AMD Opteron family or Intel 64 processor family. Both run Solaris x86. I'm keeping this example simple mainly to illustrate how everything comes together—compiler, assembler, linker, and debugger when using assembly language. The example I'm using here is a C program that calls an assembly language program passing a C string. The assembly language program takes the C string and calls printf() with it to print the string. AMD64 Register Usage But first let's review the use of AMD64 registers. AMD64 has several 64-bit registers, some special purpose (such as the stack pointer) and others general purpose. By convention, Solaris follows the AMD64 ABI in register usage, which is the same used by Linux, but different from Microsoft Windows in usage (such as which registers are used to pass parameters). This blog will only discuss conventions for Linux and Solaris. The following chart shows how AMD64 registers are used. The first six parameters to a function are passed through registers. If there's more than six parameters, parameter 7 and above are pushed on the stack before calling the function. The stack is also used to save temporary "stack" variables for use by a function. 64-bit Register Usage %rip Instruction Pointer points to the current instruction %rsp Stack Pointer %rbp Frame Pointer (saved stack pointer pointing to parameters on stack) %rdi Function Parameter 1 %rsi Function Parameter 2 %rdx Function Parameter 3 %rcx Function Parameter 4 %r8 Function Parameter 5 %r9 Function Parameter 6 %rax Function return value %r10, %r11 Temporary registers (need not be saved before used) %rbx, %r12, %r13, %r14, %r15 Temporary registers, but must be saved before use and restored before returning from the current function (usually with the push and pop instructions). 32-, 16-, and 8-bit registers To access the lower 32-, 16-, or 8-bits of a 64-bit register use the following: 64-bit register Least significant 32-bits Least significant 16-bits Least significant 8-bits %rax%eax%ax%al %rbx%ebx%bx%bl %rcx%ecx%cx%cl %rdx%edx%dx%dl %rsi%esi%si%sil %rdi%edi%di%axl %rbp%ebp%bp%bp %rsp%esp%sp%spl %r9%r9d%r9w%r9b %r10%r10d%r10w%r10b %r11%r11d%r11w%r11b %r12%r12d%r12w%r12b %r13%r13d%r13w%r13b %r14%r14d%r14w%r14b %r15%r15d%r15w%r15b %r16%r16d%r16w%r16b There's other registers present, such as the 64-bit %mm registers, 128-bit %xmm registers, 256-bit %ymm registers, and 512-bit %zmm registers. Except for %mm registers, these registers may not present on older AMD64 processors. Assembly Source The following is the source for a C program, helloas1.c, that calls an assembly function, hello_asm(). $ cat helloas1.c extern void hello_asm(char *s); int main(void) { hello_asm("Hello, World!"); } The assembly function called above, hello_asm(), is defined below. $ cat helloas2.s /* * helloas2.s * To build: * cc -m64 -o helloas2-cpp.s -D_ASM -E helloas2.s * cc -m64 -c -o helloas2.o helloas2-cpp.s */ #if defined(lint) || defined(__lint) /* ARGSUSED */ void hello_asm(char *s) { } #else /* lint */ #include <sys/asm_linkage.h> .extern printf ENTRY_NP(hello_asm) // Setup printf parameters on stack mov %rdi, %rsi // P2 (%rsi) is string variable lea .printf_string, %rdi // P1 (%rdi) is printf format string call printf ret SET_SIZE(hello_asm) // Read-only data .text .align 16 .type .printf_string, @object .printf_string: .ascii "The string is: %s.\n\0" #endif /* lint || __lint */ In the assembly source above, the C skeleton code under "#if defined(lint)" is optionally used for lint to check the interfaces with your C program--very useful to catch nasty interface bugs. The "asm_linkage.h" file includes some handy macros useful for assembly, such as ENTRY_NP(), used to define a program entry point, and SET_SIZE(), used to set the function size in the symbol table. The function hello_asm calls C function printf() by passing two parameters, Parameter 1 (P1) is a printf format string, and P2 is a string variable. The function begins by moving %rdi, which contains Parameter 1 (P1) passed hello_asm, to printf()'s P2, %rsi. Then it sets printf's P1, the format string, by loading the address the address of the format string in %rdi, P1. Finally it calls printf. After returning from printf, the hello_asm function returns itself. Larger, more complex assembly functions usually do more setup than the example above. If a function is returning a value, it would set %rax to the return value. Also, it's typical for a function to save the %rbp and %rsp registers of the calling function and to restore these registers before returning. %rsp contains the stack pointer and %rbp contains the frame pointer. Here is the typical function setup and return sequence for a function: ENTRY_NP(sample_assembly_function) push %rbp // save frame pointer on stack mov %rsp, %rbp // save stack pointer in frame pointer xor %rax, %r4ax // set function return value to 0. mov %rbp, %rsp // restore stack pointer pop %rbp // restore frame pointer ret // return to calling function SET_SIZE(sample_assembly_function) Compiling and Running Assembly Use the Solaris cc command to compile both C and assembly source, and to pre-process assembly source. You can also use GNU gcc instead of cc to compile, if you prefer. The "-m64" option tells the compiler to compile in 64-bit address mode (instead of 32-bit). $ cc -m64 -o helloas2-cpp.s -D_ASM -E helloas2.s $ cc -m64 -c -o helloas2.o helloas2-cpp.s $ cc -m64 -c helloas1.c $ cc -m64 -o hello-asm helloas1.o helloas2.o $ file hello-asm helloas1.o helloas2.o hello-asm: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1 [SSE FXSR FPU], dynamically linked, not stripped helloas1.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 helloas2.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 $ hello-asm The string is: Hello, World!. Debugging Assembly with MDB MDB is the Solaris system debugger. It can also be used to debug user programs, including assembly and C. The following example runs the above program, hello-asm, under control of the debugger. In the example below I load the program, set a breakpoint at the assembly function hello_asm, display the registers and the first parameter, step through the assembly function, and continue execution. $ mdb hello-asm # Start the debugger > hello_asm:b # Set a breakpoint > ::run # Run the program under the debugger mdb: stop at hello_asm mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm: movq %rdi,%rsi > $C # display function stack ffff80ffbffff6e0 hello_asm() ffff80ffbffff6f0 0x400adc() > $r # display registers %rax = 0x0000000000000000 %r8 = 0x0000000000000000 %rbx = 0xffff80ffbf7f8e70 %r9 = 0x0000000000000000 %rcx = 0x0000000000000000 %r10 = 0x0000000000000000 %rdx = 0xffff80ffbffff718 %r11 = 0xffff80ffbf537db8 %rsi = 0xffff80ffbffff708 %r12 = 0x0000000000000000 %rdi = 0x0000000000400cf8 %r13 = 0x0000000000000000 %r14 = 0x0000000000000000 %r15 = 0x0000000000000000 %cs = 0x0053 %fs = 0x0000 %gs = 0x0000 %ds = 0x0000 %es = 0x0000 %ss = 0x004b %rip = 0x0000000000400c70 hello_asm %rbp = 0xffff80ffbffff6e0 %rsp = 0xffff80ffbffff6c8 %rflags = 0x00000282 id=0 vip=0 vif=0 ac=0 vm=0 rf=0 nt=0 iopl=0x0 status=<of,df,IF,tf,SF,zf,af,pf,cf> %gsbase = 0x0000000000000000 %fsbase = 0xffff80ffbf782a40 %trapno = 0x3 %err = 0x0 > ::dis # disassemble the current instructions hello_asm: movq %rdi,%rsi hello_asm+3: leaq 0x400c90,%rdi hello_asm+0xb: call -0x220 <PLT:printf> hello_asm+0x10: ret 0x400c81: nop 0x400c85: nop 0x400c88: nop 0x400c8c: nop 0x400c90: pushq %rsp 0x400c91: pushq $0x74732065 0x400c96: jb +0x69 <0x400d01> > 0x0000000000400cf8/S # %rdi contains Parameter 1 0x400cf8: Hello, World! > [ # Step and execute 1 instruction mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm+3: leaq 0x400c90,%rdi > [ mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm+0xb: call -0x220 <PLT:printf> > [ The string is: Hello, World!. mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm+0x10: ret > [ mdb: target stopped at: main+0x19: movl $0x0,-0x4(%rbp) > :c # continue program execution mdb: target has terminated > $q # quit the MDB debugger $ In the example above, at the start of function hello_asm(), I display the stack contents with "$C", display the registers contents with "$r", then disassemble the current function with "::dis". The first function parameter, which is a C string, is passed by reference with the string address in %rdi (see the register usage chart above). The address is 0x400cf8, so I print the value of the string with the "/S" MDB command: "0x0000000000400cf8/S". I can also print the contents at an address in several other formats. Here's a few popular formats. For more, see the mdb(1) man page for details. address/S C string address/C ASCII character (1 byte) address/E unsigned decimal (8 bytes) address/U unsigned decimal (4 bytes) address/D signed decimal (4 bytes) address/J hexadecimal (8 bytes) address/X hexadecimal (4 bytes) address/B hexadecimal (1 bytes) address/K pointer in hexadecimal (4 or 8 bytes) address/I disassembled instruction Finally, I step through each machine instruction with the "[" command, which steps over functions. If I wanted to enter a function, I would use the "]" command. Then I continue program execution with ":c", which continues until the program terminates. MDB Basic Cheat Sheet Here's a brief cheat sheet of some of the more common MDB commands useful for assembly debugging. There's an entire set of macros and more powerful commands, especially some for debugging the Solaris kernel, but that's beyond the scope of this example. $C Display function stack with pointers $c Display function stack $e Display external function names $v Display non-zero variables and registers $r Display registers ::fpregs Display floating point (or "media" registers). Includes %st, %xmm, and %ymm registers. ::status Display program status ::run Run the program (followed by optional command line parameters) $q Quit the debugger address:b Set a breakpoint address:d Delete a breakpoint $b Display breakpoints :c Continue program execution after a breakpoint [ Step 1 instruction, but step over function calls ] Step 1 instruction address::dis Disassemble instructions at an address ::events Display events Further Information "Assembly Language Techniques for Oracle Solaris on x86 Platforms" by Paul Lowik (2004). Good tutorial on Solaris x86 optimization with assembly. The Solaris Operating System on x86 Platforms An excellent, detailed tutorial on X86 architecture, with Solaris specifics. By an ex-Sun employee, Frank Hofmann (2005). "AMD64 ABI Features", Solaris 64-bit Developer's Guide contains rules on data types and register usage for Intel 64/AMD64-class processors. (available at docs.oracle.com) Solaris X86 Assembly Language Reference Manual (available at docs.oracle.com) SPARC Assembly Language Reference Manual (available at docs.oracle.com) System V Application Binary Interface (2003) defines the AMD64 ABI for UNIX-class operating systems, including Solaris, Linux, and BSD. Google for it—the original website is gone. cc(1), gcc(1), and mdb(1) man pages.

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• Data Integration 12c Raising the Big Data Roof at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS Mincho";} Author: Dain Hansen, Director, Oracle It was an exciting OpenWorld 2013 for us in the Data Integration track. Our theme this year was all about ‘being future ready’ - previewing one of our biggest releases this year: Oracle Data Integration 12c. Just this week we followed up with this preview by announcing the general availability of 12c release for Oracle’s key data integration products: Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. The new release delivers extreme performance, increase IT productivity, and simplify deployment, while helping IT organizations to keep pace with new data-oriented technology trends including cloud computing, big data analytics, real-time business intelligence. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS Mincho";} Mark Hurd's keynote on day one set the tone for the Data Integration sessions. Mark focused on big data analytics and the changing consumer expectations. Especially real-time insight is a key theme for Oracle overall and data integration products. In Mark Hurd's keynote we heard from key customers, such as Airbus and Thomson Reuters, how real-time analysis of operational data including machine data creates value, in some cases even saves lives. Thomas Kurian gave a deeper look into Oracle's big data and fast data solutions. In the initial lead Data Integration track session - Brad Adelberg, VP of Development, presented Oracle’s Data Integration 12c product strategy based on key trends from the initial OpenWorld keynotes. Brad talked about how Oracle's data integration products address the new data integration requirements that evolved with cloud computing, big data, and changing consumer expectations and how they set the key themes in our products’ road map. Brad explained why and how fast-time to value, high-performance and future-ready solutions is the top focus areas for product development. If you were not able to attend OpenWorld or this session I recommend reading the white paper: Five New Data Integration Requirements and How to Meet them with Oracle Data Integration, which provides an in-depth look into how Oracle addresses the new trends in the DI market. Following Brad’s session, Nick Wagner provided in depth review of Oracle GoldenGate’s latest features and roadmap. Nick discussed how Oracle GoldenGate’s tight integration with Oracle Database sets the product apart from the competition. We also heard that heterogeneity of the product is still a major focus for GoldenGate’s development and there will be more news on that front when there is a major release. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS Mincho";} After GoldenGate’s product strategy session, Denis Gray from the PM team presented Oracle Data Integrator’s product strategy session, talking about the latest and greatest on ODI. Another good session was delivered by long-time GoldenGate users, Comcast.  Jason Hurd and Amit Patel of Comcast talked about the various use cases they deploy Oracle GoldenGate throughout their enterprise, from database upgrades, feeding reporting systems, to active-active database synchronization.  The Comcast team shared many good tips on how to use GoldenGate for both zero downtime upgrades and active-active replication with conflict management requirement. One of our other important goals we had this year for the Data Integration track at OpenWorld was hearing from our customers. We ended day 1 on just that, with a wonderful award ceremony for Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation. The ceremony was held in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Congratulations to Royal Bank of Scotland and Yalumba Wine Company, the winners in the Data Integration category. You can find more information on the award and the winners in our previous blog post: 2013 Oracle Excellence Awards for Fusion Middleware Innovation… Selected for their innovation use of Oracle’s Data Integration products; the winners for the Data Integration Category are Royal Bank of Scotland and The Yalumba Wine Company. Congratulations!!! Royal Bank of Scotland’s Market and International Banking division provides clients across the globe with seamless trading and competitive pricing, underpinned by a deep knowledge of risk management across the full spectrum of financial products. They handle millions of transactions daily to keep the lifeblood of their clients’ businesses flowing – whether through payment management solutions or through bespoke trade finance solutions. Royal Bank of Scotland is leveraging Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator along with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the Oracle Database for a variety of solutions. Mainly, Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator are used to feed their data warehouse – providing a real-time data integration solution that feeds transactional data to their analytics system in minutes to enable improved decision making with timely, accurate data for their business users. Oracle Data Integrator’s in-database transformation capabilities and its ability to integrate with Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data capture is the foundation of this implementation. This solution makes it such that changes happening in the analytics systems are available the same day they are deployed on the operational system with 100% data quality guaranteed. Additionally, the solution has helped to reduce their operational database size from 150GB to 10GB. Impressive! Now what if I told you this solution was built in 3 months and had a less than 6 month return on investment? That’s outstanding! The Yalumba Wine Company is situated in the Barossa Valley of Australia. It is the oldest family owned winery in Australia with a unique way of aging their wines in specially crafted 100 liter barrels. Did you know that “Yalumba” is Aboriginal for “all the land around”? The Yalumba Wine Company is growing rapidly, and was in need of introducing a more modern standard to the existing manufacturing processes to meet globalization demands, overall time-to-market, and better operational efficiency objectives of product development. The Yalumba Wine Company worked with a partner, Bristlecone to develop a unique solution whereby Oracle Data Integrator is leveraged to pull data from Salesforce.com and JD Edwards, in addition to their other pre-existing source systems, for consumption into their data warehouse. They have emphasized the overall ease of developing integration workflows with Oracle Data Integrator. The solution has brought better visibility for the business users, shorter data loading and transformation performance to their data warehouse with rapid incorporation of new data sources, and a solid future-proof foundation for their organization. Moving forward, they plan on leveraging more from Oracle’s Data Integration portfolio. Terrific! In addition to these two customers on Tuesday we featured many other important Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate customers. On Tuesday the GoldenGate panel included: Land O’Lakes, Smuckers, and Veolia Water. Besides giving us yummy nutrition and healthy water, these companies have another aspect in common. They all use GoldenGate to boost their ERP application. Please read the recap by Irem Radzik. On Wednesday, the ODI Panel included: Barry Ralston and Ryan Weber of Infinity Insurance, Paul Stracke of Paychex Inc., and Ian Wall of Vertex Pharmaceuticals for a session filled with interesting projects, use cases and approaches to leveraging Oracle Data Integrator. Please read the recap by Sandrine Riley for more. Thanks to everyone who joined with us and we hope to stay connected! To hear more about our Data Integration12c products join us in an upcoming webcast to learn more. Follow us www.twitter.com/ORCLGoldenGate or goto our website at www.oracle.com/goto/dataintegration

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• 'Content' is NOT 'Text' in XAML

  - by psheriff

  One of the key concepts in XAML is that the Content property of a XAML control like a Button or ComboBoxItem does not have to contain just textual data. In fact, Content can be almost any other XAML that you want. To illustrate here is a simple example of how to spruce up your Button controls in Silverlight. Here is some very simple XAML that consists of two Button controls within a StackPanel on a Silverlight User Control. <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          HorizontalAlignment="Left"          Content="Home" />  <Button Name="btnLog"          HorizontalAlignment="Left"          Content="Logs" /></StackPanel> The XAML listed above will produce a Silverlight control within a Browser that looks like Figure 1.   Figure 1: Normal button controls are quite boring. With just a little bit of refactoring to move the button attributes into Styles, we can make the buttons look a little better. I am a big believer in Styles, so I typically create a Resources section within my user control where I can factor out the common attribute settings for a particular set of controls. Here is a Resources section that I added to my Silverlight user control. <UserControl.Resources>  <Style TargetType="Button"         x:Key="NormalButton">    <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"            Value="Left" />    <Setter Property="MinWidth"            Value="50" />    <Setter Property="Margin"            Value="10" />  </Style></UserControl.Resources> Now back in the XAML within the Grid control I update the Button controls to use the Style attribute and have each button use the Static Resource called NormalButton. <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}"          Content="Home" />  <Button Name="btnLog"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}"          Content="Logs" /></StackPanel> With the additional attributes set in the Resources section on the Button, the above XAML will now display the two buttons as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Use Resources to Make Buttons More Consistent Now let’s re-design these buttons even more. Instead of using words for each button, let’s replace the Content property to use a picture. As they say… a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s take advantage of that. Modify each of the Button controls and eliminate the Content attribute and instead, insert an <Image> control with the <Button> and the </Button> tags. Add a ToolTip to still display the words you had before in the Content and you will now have better looking buttons, as shown in Figure 3.   Figure 3: Using pictures instead of words can be an effective method of communication The XAML to produce Figure 3 is shown in the following listing: <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Home"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"            Source="Images/Home.jpg" />  </Button>  <Button Name="btnLog"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Logs"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"            Source="Images/Log.jpg" />  </Button></StackPanel> You will also need to add the following XAML to the User Control’s Resources section. <Style TargetType="Image"        x:Key="NormalImage">  <Setter Property="Width"          Value="50" /></Style> Add Multiple Controls to Content Now, since the Content can be whatever we want, you could also modify the Content of each button to be a StackPanel control. Then you can have an image and text within the button. <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Home"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <StackPanel>      <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"              Source="Images/Home.jpg" />      <TextBlock Text="Home"                  Style="{StaticResource NormalTextBlock}" />    </StackPanel>  </Button>  <Button Name="btnLog"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Logs"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <StackPanel>      <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"              Source="Images/Log.jpg" />      <TextBlock Text="Logs"                  Style="{StaticResource NormalTextBlock}" />    </StackPanel>  </Button></StackPanel> You will need to add one more resource for the TextBlock control too. <Style TargetType="TextBlock"        x:Key="NormalTextBlock">  <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"          Value="Center" /></Style> All of the above will now produce the following:   Figure 4: Add multiple controls to the content to make your buttons even more interesting. Summary While this is a simple example, you can see how XAML Content has great flexibility. You could add a MediaElement control as the content of a Button and play a video within the Button. Not that you would necessarily do this, but it does work. What is nice about adding different content within the Button control is you still get the Click event and other attributes of a button, but it does necessarily look like a normal button. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled "Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1."

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 23, 2010Popular ReleasesSilverlight and WP7 Exception Handling and Logging building block: first version: Zipped full source code.Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.8.2 Beta: New in this release: - Update titles after language change - Tool tips for name/title - Transfer DVD to a specific image file - Download titles from wiitdb.com - Save Settings geometry - Titles and Cover language global in settings - Convert Files (images) to another format - Format WBFS partition - Create WBFS file - WIT path configurable in settings - Save last path in Files/Load - Sort game lists - Save column width - Sequenz of columns changeable - Set indicated columns in settings - Bus...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 2: Preview 2 ChangesIntroduced support for .NET Framework 2.0 Supported Platforms: .NET 2.0, .NET 3.5 SP1, .NET 4.0 Client Profile, Windows Phone 7 Twitter API coverage: accounts blocks direct messages favorites friendships notifications saved searches timelines tweets users Preview 1 ChangesIntroduced support for OAuth Echo Supported Platforms: .NET 4.0, Windows Phone 7 Twitter API coverage: timelines tweets Version 2.0 Overview / RoadmapMajor rewrite for simplic...SQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 1.3: 1. change sys.sysprocesses to DMV: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187997.aspx select * from sys.dm_exec_connections select * from sys.dm_exec_requests select * from sys.dm_exec_sessions 2. adjust columns to fit without scrollingMiniTwitter: 1.60: MiniTwitter 1.60 ???? ?? Twitter ?????????????????????????????? ??????????????????、?????????????????? ?????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.1: Fixed 'Generate entire world image', wasn't working. Improved Java detection for biome support. Biomes button is automatically unchecked if Java cannot be found in either the path environment variable or the Windows Registry. Fixed problem where Height + and - buttons would change the height more than one each click. Added keyboard shortcuts for navigation controls. You can now press and hold navigation buttons to continuously pan/zoom.VFPX: FoxBarcode v.0.11: FoxBarcode v.0.11 - Released 2010.11.22 FoxBarcode is a 100% Visual FoxPro class that provides a tool for generating images with different bar code symbologies to be used in VFP forms and reports, or exported to other applications. Its use and distribution is free for all Visual FoxPro Community. Whats is new? Added a third parameter to the BarcodeImage() method Fixed some minor bugs History FoxBarcode v.0.10 - Released 2010.11.19 - 85 Downloads Project page: FoxBarcodeDotNetAge -a lightweight Mvc jQuery CMS: DotNetAge 1.1.0.5: What is new in DotNetAge 1.1.0.5 ?Document Library features and template added. Resolve issues of templates Improving publishing service performance Opml support added. What is new in DotNetAge 1.1 ? D.N.A Core updatesImprove runtime performance , more stabilize. The DNA core objects model added. Personalization features added that allows users create the personal website, manage their resources, store personal data DynamicUIFixed the PageManager could not move page node bug. ...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.3.1 and demos: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form and Pager tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6DotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-21-2010: This release introduces the following Fixed bugs related to dispose, which caused issues when reordering layers in the legend Fixed bugs related to assigning categories where NULL values are in the fields New fast-acting resize using a bitmap "prediction" of what the final resize content will look like. ImageData.ReadBlock, ImageData.WriteBlock These allow direct file access for reading or writing a rectangular window. Bitmaps are used for holding the values. Removed the need to stor...Sincorde Silverlight Library: 2010 - November: Silverlight 4 Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Expression dependencies removed Design-Time bug fixedMDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.24.6966: Fixed Updater; Fixed minor bugs;WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.1: Version: 2.0.0.1 (Milestone 1): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ....NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.01: Added new extensions for - object.CountLoopsToNull Added new extensions for DateTime: - DateTime.IsWeekend - DateTime.AddWeeks Added new extensions for string: - string.Repeat - string.IsNumeric - string.ExtractDigits - string.ConcatWith - string.ToGuid - string.ToGuidSave Added new extensions for Exception: - Exception.GetOriginalException Added new extensions for Stream: - Stream.Write (overload) And other new methods ... Release as of dotnetpro 01/2011Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-11-19: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Prism Training Kit: Prism Training Kit 4.0: Release NotesThis is an updated version of the Prism training Kit that targets Prism 4.0 and added labs for some of the new features of Prism 4.0. This release consists of a Training Kit with Labs on the following topics Modularity Dependency Injection Bootstrapper UI Composition Communication MEF Navigation Note: Take into account that this is a Beta version. If you find any bugs please report them in the Issue Tracker PrerequisitesVisual Studio 2010 Microsoft Word 2...Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 2.2: Starting with version 2.0, the translator encountered a major redesign that uses MEF based plugins and .net 4.0. I've also fixed some bugs and added support for translating subtitles that can show up in video media players. Version 2.1 shows the context menu 'Translate' in Windows Explorer on right click. Version 2.2 has links to start the media file with its associated subtitle. Download the zip file and expand it in a temporary location on your local disk. At a minimum , you should uninstal...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.4 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.4 with few bug fixes: * Multi-line Labels were getting clipped while exploding last DataPoint in Funnel and Pyramid chart. * ClosestPlotDistance property in Axis was not behaving as expected. * In DateTime Axis, Chart threw exception on mouse click over PlotArea if there were no DataPoints present in Chart. * ToolTip was not disappearing while changing the DataSource property of the DataSeries at real-time. * Chart threw exception ...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008R2 SR1: Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 (SR1)This release is dedicated to the sample databases that ship for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2. See Database Prerequisites for SQL Server 2008R2 for feature configurations required for installing the sample databases. See Installing SQL Server 2008R2 Databases for step by step installation instructions. The SR1 release contains minor bug fixes to the installer used to create the sample databases. There are no changes to the databases them...VidCoder: 0.7.2: Fixed duplicated subtitles when running multiple encodes off of the same title.New ProjectsAlien Terminator: Alien TerminatorArchWeb 2.0: ArchWeb è un'applicazione che unita al sito web permette di gestire documenti aziendali e mail preimpostate. ArchWeb supporta file di qualsiasi estensione (di dimensini variabili fino a 1.5 GB), tutti i tipi di documenti del pacchetto Microsoft Office o del pacchetto Adobe.Azure Table Sync Lib: Developing custom sync providers for Windows Azure Table Storage to support the following sync scenarios 1. Azure Table <-> SQL Server 2. Azure Table <-> SQL CE 3. Azure Table <-> SQL AzureColecaoFilmes: Prova de conceito usando DDD, ASP.NET MVC 3, NHibernate, Fluent Nhibernate e Ninject.Coleotrack: Coleotrack: ASP.NET MVC Issue Tracking.dmgbois: Personal repo.DNN Social Bookmark: DotNetNuke plugin for adding social media components.docNET: docNET grew out of my own battles creating system documentation from inline comments in code files. Using the XML documentation file as base to generate documentation in different formats. As I'm kinda biased towards my own needs I'm starting from C#/ASP.NET => web output. Event Trivia: A Silverlight trivia application which can be played in between sessions at an event. It has been used at PDC09, PDC10 and MIX10 so far. Written by Pete Brown at Microsoft.F# MathProvider: F# Math Provider wrappers native Blas+Lapack runtimes for F# users to perform linear algebra easily. Frets Terminator: Frets TerminatorGurfing projects: Few summaryHexa.xText: Hexa.xText is a .Net command line tool to extract text from source files for later translation, just like the GNU xgettext does. Extracted text are placed inside po files that must be compiled into satellite assemblies through the included PO2Assembly MSBuild task.Hold Popup for Touch: Hold Popup offers an optional solution to get an event while having pressed a mouse button or have a touchdown over time. Instead of handling everything by yourself (such as timer for holding or handling events), hold popup handles all itself. Developed in .Net 4.0 for WPF.HumanResourceManagementSystem: Project NIIT MMS901 - Quater 5 Human Resource Management System People Management ModuleLive Messenger: Live Messenger is a Windows Live Messenger module for DNNMtechSystem: MultipointMouse Technology Education ChainNerdOnRails.ActiveQuery: an object-relational mapper for url-parameter written in .net for .netPHMS: Publishing House Management SystemRabbitEars: Thread safe event driven message notification for RabbitMQ using the .net API. Implmenet in vb.net project is a Visual Studio 2010 solution with two project the RabbitEars project and a demo windows form to allow users to test drive RabbitMQScreen Snapshot Manager: Screen Snapshot Manager is a desktop winforms application, which runs in background, and keeps taking snapshots of current screen after every 30 seconds for tracking purpose. :)SharePoint 2010 Workflow Actions IntelliSense: This project hosts a SharePoint 2010 Workflow Actions Schema file to assist developers in building Workflow Actions File for SharePoint Designer. Show Reader for MSDN Shows: Show Reader is a viewer for MSDN Shows based on .NET Framweork. In a single Window you can view your favorite shows with transcripts. Moreover, in the same window you can browse Microsoft web-sites where you can find Shows about .NET technologies, like the .NET Show, Channel9 and MSDN TV. ShowReader is available in two editions. A Windows Forms edition, written in Visual Basic 2005 and a Windows Presentation Foundation, written in Visual Basic 2008 It was developed by the Italian developer ...Subtitles Matcher: WPF application using prism and MEF automaticlly find and download subtitles for you media fileTweakSP2010: "Because SharePoint 2010 needs some Tweak'n" SharePoint Administration and Development extensions.TweetsSaver: ?????????zlibnet - c# zlib wrapper library: zlibnet - c# zlib wrapper library Features: -zip -unzip -compression/decompression stream -fast, since using the unmanaged zlib library -64bit support ZupSch: ZupSch is a little cms for student

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 22, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 22, 2012Popular ReleasesStackBuilder: StackBuilder 1.0.11.0: +Added Box/Case analysis...VidCoder: 1.4.7 Beta: Added view modes to the Preview window. Now you can see the image in 1:1 or in "Corners" mode to show a close-up of cropping results. Added the ability to set a custom completion sound. Gave the encoding settings command bar a more distinctive background color and extended it to the whole width of the window. Added the preview button to the command bar. Rearranged UI in Video tab and added back the section headers. Added the "Most" choice for the advanced x264 analysis option. Updat...ServiceMon - Extensible Real-time, Service Monitoring Utility for Windows: ServiceMon Release 1.2.0.58: Auto-uploaded from build serverImapX 2: ImapX 2.0.0.6: An updated release of the ImapX 2 library, containing many bugfixes for both, the library and the sample application.WiX Toolset: WiX v3.7 RC: WiX v3.7 RC (3.7.1119.0) provides feature complete Bundle update and reference tracking plus several bug fixes. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/11/20/WiX-v3.7-Release-Candidate-availablePicturethrill: Version 2.11.20.0: Fixed up Bing image provider on Windows 8Excel AddIn to reset the last worksheet cell: XSFormatCleaner.xla: Modified the commandbar code to use CommandBar IDs instead of English names.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 11: New feature - Added ITraceWriter, MemoryTraceWriter, DiagnosticsTraceWriter New feature - Added StringEscapeHandling with options to escape HTML and non-ASCII characters New feature - Added non-generic JToken.ToObject methods New feature - Deserialize ISet<T> properties as HashSet<T> New feature - Added implicit conversions for Uri, TimeSpan, Guid New feature - Missing byte, char, Guid, TimeSpan and Uri explicit conversion operators added to JToken New feature - Special case...EntitiesToDTOs - Entity Framework DTO Generator: EntitiesToDTOs.v3.0: DTOs and Assemblers can be generated inside project folders! Choose the types you want to generate! Support for Visual Studio 2012 !!! Support for new Entity Framework EDMX (format used by VS2012) ! Support for Enum Types! Optional automatic check for updates! Added the following methods to Assemblers! IEnumerable<DTO>.ToEntities() : ICollection<Entity> IEnumerable<Entity>.ToDTOs() : ICollection<DTO> Indicate class identifier for DTOs and Assemblers! Cleaner Assemblers code....mojoPortal: 2.3.9.4: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2394-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...DotNetNuke® Store: 03.01.07: What's New in this release? IMPORTANT: this version requires DotNetNuke 04.06.02 or higher! DO NOT REPORT BUGS HERE IN THE ISSUE TRACKER, INSTEAD USE THE DotNetNuke Store Forum! Bugs corrected: - Replaced some hard coded references to the default address provider classes by the corresponding interfaces to allow the creation of another address provider with a different name. New Features: - Added the 'pickup' delivery option at checkout. - Added the 'no delivery' option in the Store Admin ...Bundle Transformer - a modular extension for ASP.NET Web Optimization Framework: Bundle Transformer 1.6.10: Version: 1.6.10 Published: 11/18/2012 Now almost all of the Bundle Transformer's assemblies is signed (except BundleTransformer.Yui.dll); In BundleTransformer.SassAndScss the SassAndCoffee.Ruby library was replaced by my own implementation of the Sass- and SCSS-compiler (based on code of the SassAndCoffee.Ruby library version 2.0.2.0); In BundleTransformer.CoffeeScript added support of CoffeeScript version 1.4.0-3; In BundleTransformer.TypeScript added support of TypeScript version 0....ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.0: +2012-11-18 v3.2.0 -?????????????????SelectedValueArray????????（◇?◆:）。 -???????????????????RecoverPropertiesFromJObject????（〓?〓、????、??、Vian_Pan）。 -????????????，?????????????，???SelectedValueArray???????（sam.chang）。 -??Alert.Show???????????（swtseaman）。 -???????????????，??Icon??IconUrl????（swtseaman）。 -?????????TimePicker（??）。 -?????????，??/res.axd?css=blue.css&v=1。 -????????，?????????????，???????。 -????MenuCheckBox（???????）。 -?RadioButton??AutoPostBack??。 -???????FCKEditor?????????...BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.2: Please read our release notes for BugNET 1.2: http://blog.bugnetproject.com/bugnet-1-2-has-been-released Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 2.2.0: Changes: Layer group visibility is now applied to all layers within the group. This greatly improves the visual fidelity of complex PSD files that have hidden layer groups. Layer group names are prefixed so that users can get an indication of the layer group hierarchy. (Paint.NET has a flat list of layers, so the hierarchy is flattened out on load.) The progress bar now reports status when saving PSD files, instead of showing an indeterminate rolling bar. Performance improvement of 1...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1116.7): [IMPROVED] Detailed error message descriptions for FaultException [FIX] Fixed bug in rule CrmOfflineAccessStateRule which had incorrect State attribute name [FIX] Fixed bug in rule EntityPropertyRule which was missing PropertyValue attribute [FIX] Current connection information was not displayed in status bar while refreshing list of entitiesSuper Metroid Randomizer: Super Metroid Randomizer v5: v5 -Added command line functionality for automation purposes. -Implented Krankdud's change to randomize the Etecoon's item. NOTE: this version will not accept seeds from a previous version. The seed format has changed by necessity. v4 -Started putting version numbers at the top of the form. -Added a warning when suitless Maridia is required in a parsed seed. v3 -Changed seed to only generate filename-legal characters. Using old seeds will still work exactly the same. -Files can now be saved...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight, WP7 and WinRT/Metro made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.4: Changes This version includes many bug fixes across all platforms, improvements to nuget support and...the biggest news of all...full support for both WinRT and WP8. Download Contents Debug and Release Assemblies Samples Readme.txt License.txt Packages Available on Nuget Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly. Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view. Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro invers...DirectX Tool Kit: November 15, 2012: November 15, 2012 Added support for WIC2 when available on Windows 8 and Windows 7 with KB 2670838 Cleaned up warning level 4 warningsDotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.05: Major Highlights Updated the system so that it supports nested folders in the App_Code folder Updated the Global Error Handling so that when errors within the global.asax handler happen, they are caught and shown in a page displaying the original HTTP error code Fixed issue that stopped users from specifying Link URLs that open on a new window Security FixesFixed issue in the Member Directory module that could show members to non authenticated users Fixed issue in the Lists modul...New Projects1122case1325: It is a codeplex project1122case1327: Never be so greedy Accommodation Portal: This is a skeleton web site for holiday home owners, who wishes to rent their holiday accommodations to visitors from around the world. Analog Clock: This is project contains analog clock made in win forms.Android Socket Plus: ????Android??????。???????Android???????Socket???，?????????（?PC?Windows????????）??????Socket???，??，????????????；??????????????Socket???，??????????????Socket???。Bancosol: PFCBig Data Twitter Demo: This demo analyzes tweets in real-time, even including a dashboard. The tweets are also archived in Azure DB/Blob and Hadoop where Excel can be used for BI!Cloud For Science: This project serves as issue tracker for C4S components, and is used by participants of the C4S project. cwt: cwtDiary Application for Elementary Student: A Simple Diary Application Made for Elementary Student. Dice Dreams: Dice Dreams Dice Dreams is a dice game , the player must get 1.000.000 point to win, you start with 100.000 point. Dynamic Entity Framework Filtering: Generates linq to Entity Framework Queries by examining the EF data model, thus allowing for code reduction for queries to commonly requested entities.EazyErp: Enterprise Resource Planning System of Vf AsiaGoPlay: Tooke - add a project description here...HMyBlog: myblogHumanitarian Toolbox: This project is the publication site for bits built by the Humanitarian Toolbox ( http://humanitariantoolbox.net/).Impulse Media Player: Impulse Media Player is the ultimate media player for WindowsInspiration.Web: Description: A simple (but entertaining) ASP.NET MVC (C#) project to suggest random code names for projects. Intended audience: People who need a name (any name) to get started with their projects. Application written during Webcamp Singapore (4th Jun 2010 - 5th Jun 2010).iPictureUploader: Simple tool to upload images onto WEB and share via blogs/forums/etc lugionline: test projectMosaic Snake 3D: A clone of the popular Snake game for Windows 8. It contains a simple 3D engine based on SharpDX and is completely written in C# and Xaml.Outage Display: A simple web-based outage displayPrestaShop free Electronic Brown Shop Template - ModuleBazaar: Check out Latest and Best Featured PrestaShop Templates, Modules Magento Extensions, Opencart Extensions, Clone scripts from ModuleBazaarRackspace Cloud Files Manager: A simple Rackspace Cloud Files manager for static websitesRoll The Dice: Roll The Dice is a simple game developed by Erika Enggar Savitri and Queen Anugerah Aguslia who are currently studying Information System at Ma Chung UniversityRussian IDM: Russian IDM is free IdM solutionshootout: Comparing the speed of different languages and the constructs available within those languagessmart messaging connector: Sending fax from a PrintDocument or a file. Sending broadcast fax. Managing (Pause/Resume/Restart) current fax job. Managing configuration of the fax serverTeen Diary: Teen Diary Software - FREEWARE SOFTWARE. - SIMPLE, LIGHTWEIGHT, PORTABLE, COMPATIBLE. - made from .NET FRAMEWORK languange with XML data. Tekapo: Tekapo is a wizard style application that will help you manage your digital photos. Most digital cameras will store images as JPEG files. Information about the camera and how the camera has taken the photo is placed into the JPEG file along with the image data. One of the pieces of information stored is the date and time that the photo was taken. Tekapo uses the picture taken date to organise the photos.The Byte Kitchen's Open Sources: This project is related to The Byte Kitchen Blog (at thebytekitchen.com). It typically deals with Windows 8 apps, DirectX, and the Kinect for Windows.TheDiary: daily-self journalWCFsample: WCFsampleXNA Game Editor: This project will has familiar features like Unity Engine Editor.

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• Running 32 bit assembly code on a 64 bit Linux & 64 bit Processor : Explain the anomaly.

  - by claws

  Hello, I'm in an interesting problem.I forgot I'm using 64bit machine & OS and wrote a 32 bit assembly code. I don't know how to write 64 bit code. This is the x86 32-bit assembly code for Gnu Assembler (AT&T syntax) on Linux. //hello.S #include <asm/unistd.h> #include <syscall.h> #define STDOUT 1 .data hellostr: .ascii "hello wolrd\n"; helloend: .text .globl _start _start: movl $(SYS_write) , %eax //ssize_t write(int fd, const void *buf, size_t count); movl $(STDOUT) , %ebx movl $hellostr , %ecx movl $(helloend-hellostr) , %edx int $0x80 movl $(SYS_exit), %eax //void _exit(int status); xorl %ebx, %ebx int $0x80 ret Now, This code should run fine on a 32bit processor & 32 bit OS right? As we know 64 bit processors are backward compatible with 32 bit processors. So, that also wouldn't be a problem. The problem arises because of differences in system calls & call mechanism in 64-bit OS & 32-bit OS. I don't know why but they changed the system call numbers between 32-bit linux & 64-bit linux. asm/unistd_32.h defines: #define __NR_write 4 #define __NR_exit 1 asm/unistd_64.h defines: #define __NR_write 1 #define __NR_exit 60 Anyway using Macros instead of direct numbers is paid off. Its ensuring correct system call numbers. when I assemble & link & run the program. $cpp hello.S hello.s //pre-processor $as hello.s -o hello.o //assemble $ld hello.o // linker : converting relocatable to executable Its not printing helloworld. In gdb its showing: Program exited with code 01. I don't know how to debug in gdb. using tutorial I tried to debug it and execute instruction by instruction checking registers at each step. its always showing me "program exited with 01". It would be great if some on could show me how to debug this. (gdb) break _start Note: breakpoint -10 also set at pc 0x4000b0. Breakpoint 8 at 0x4000b0 (gdb) start Function "main" not defined. Make breakpoint pending on future shared library load? (y or [n]) y Temporary breakpoint 9 (main) pending. Starting program: /home/claws/helloworld Program exited with code 01. (gdb) info breakpoints Num Type Disp Enb Address What 8 breakpoint keep y 0x00000000004000b0 <_start> 9 breakpoint del y <PENDING> main I tried running strace. This is its output: execve("./helloworld", ["./helloworld"], [/* 39 vars */]) = 0 write(0, NULL, 12 <unfinished ... exit status 1> Explain the parameters of write(0, NULL, 12) system call in the output of strace? What exactly is happening? I want to know the reason why exactly its exiting with exitstatus=1? Can some one please show me how to debug this program using gdb? Why did they change the system call numbers? Kindly change this program appropriately so that it can run correctly on this machine. EDIT: After reading Paul R's answer. I checked my files claws@claws-desktop:~$ file ./hello.o ./hello.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped claws@claws-desktop:~$ file ./hello ./hello: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped All of my questions still hold true. What exactly is happening in this case? Can someone please answer my questions and provide an x86-64 version of this code?

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• Toggle visibility of DIV based on Dropdown

  - by user1869787

  I have never used Javascript before, only HTML and CSS. I am attempting to have my information show only when selected from my drop down. I don't know any Javascript so any help would be overly appreciated. This is my html so far: <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>Gone Fishin'</title> <link href="finale.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> </head> <div id="wrapper"> <div id="nav"> <ul> <li><a href="Index.html">About Us</a></li> <li><a href="Species.html">List by Species</a></li> <li><a href="County.html">List by County</a></li> <li><a href="apply.html">Reservations</a></li> </ul> </div> <body> <div id="content"> <p>ontent</p> <fieldset> <legend>Choose your Target</legend> <select name="option" id="options"> <option value=""></option> <option value="1">American Shad</option> <option value="2">Black Crappie</option> <option value="3">Bluegill</option> <option value="4">Brook Trout</option> <option value="5">Brown Trout</option> <option value="6">Carp</option> <option value="7">Chain Pickerel</option> <option value="8">Channel Catfish</option> <option value="9">Flathead Catfish</option> <option value="10">Largemouth Bass</option> <option value="11">Muskellunge</option> <option value="12">Norhtern Pike</option> <option value="13">Pumkpinseed</option> <option value="14">Rainbow Trout</option> <option value="15">Readbreast Sunfish</option> <option value="16">Rock Bass</option> <option value="17">Sauger</option> <option value="18">Saugeye</option> <option value="19">Smallmouth Bass</option> <option value="20">Steelhead</option> <option value="21">Striped Bass</option> <option value="22">Walleye</option> <option value="23">White Bass</option> <option value="24">White Crappie</option> <option value="25">White Perch</option> <option value="26">Yellow Perch</option> </select> <div id="option"> <div id="1" style="display: block">Test 1</div> <div id="2">Test 2</div> <div id="3">Test 3</div> <div id="4">Test 4</div> <div id="5">Test 5</div> </div> </fieldset> </div> </body> </div> </html> And this is my CSS: @charset "utf-8"; /* CSS Document */ /*General Styles*/ * {font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;} #wrapper {width:85%; margin:auto; background-color:#00CC00;} /*End of General Styles*/ /* nav div styles */ #nav {background-color:#FF0000; text-align:center;} #nav ul li {display:inline-block; background-color: #67e667; border:5px dashed; width: 90px text-align:center;} #nav ul li a:link {background-color:#a60000; width: 90px;} #nav ul li a:visited {background-color: #009999;} #nav ul li a:hover {background-color: #a64b00;} /* end nav styles */ /* content div styles*/ #content {padding: 5px;} #option {display:none;} /*end content styles*/ /*start form styles*/ fieldset {background-color:#ff7400; color:white} label {display:inline-block; width: 150px; float:left; margin-right: 3px;} #form li{margin-bottom:10px;} #dtg li{margin-bottom:5px;} Thank you for any help received

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• Adding data (not only text) to a multi column ListView (WPF)

  - by user811804

  I am working on a WPF application in C# (.NET 4.0) where I have a ListView with a GridView that has two columns. I dynamically want to add rows (in code). My dilemma is that only the first column will have regular text added to it. The second column will have an object that includes a multi column Grid with TextBlocks. (see link http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/803/listview.png/) If I do what you would normally do when you want to enter text in all columns (ie. DisplayMemberBinding) all I get in the second column is the text "System.Windows.Grid", which obviously isn't what I want. For reference if I just try to add the Grid object (with the TextBlocks) with the code listView1.Items.Add(grid1) (not using DisplayMemberBinding) the object gets added to the second column only (with the first column being blank) and not how it normally works with text where the same text ends up in all columns. I hope my question is detailed enough and any help with this would be much appreciated. EDIT: I have tried the following code, howeever every time I click the button to add a new row every single row gets updated with the same datatemplate. (ie. the second column always shows the same data on every row.) xaml: <Window x:Class="TEST.MainWindow" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Name="AAA" Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525" Loaded="Window_Loaded"> <Grid Name="grid1"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="374*" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="129*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button Content="Button" Height="23" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="21,12,0,0" Name="button1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="75" Grid.Column="1" Click="button1_Click" /> </Grid> code: public partial class MainWindow : Window { ListView listView1 = new ListView(); GridViewColumn viewCol2 = new GridViewColumn(); public MainWindow() { InitializeComponent(); Style style = new Style(typeof(ListViewItem)); style.Setters.Add(new Setter(ListViewItem.HorizontalContentAlignmentProperty, HorizontalAlignment.Stretch)); listView1.ItemContainerStyle = style; GridView gridView1 = new GridView(); listView1.View = gridView1; GridViewColumn viewCol1 = new GridViewColumn(); viewCol1.Header = "Option"; gridView1.Columns.Add(viewCol1); viewCol2.Header = "Value"; gridView1.Columns.Add(viewCol2); grid1.Children.Add(listView1); viewCol1.DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding("Option"); } private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { } private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { DataTemplate dataTemplate = new DataTemplate(); FrameworkElementFactory spFactory = new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(Grid)); Random random = new Random(); int cols = random.Next(1, 6); int full = 100; for (int i = 0; i < cols; i++) { FrameworkElementFactory col1 = new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(ColumnDefinition)); int partWidth = random.Next(0, full); full -= partWidth; col1.SetValue(ColumnDefinition.WidthProperty, new GridLength(partWidth, GridUnitType.Star)); spFactory.AppendChild(col1); } if (full > 0) { FrameworkElementFactory col1 = new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(ColumnDefinition)); col1.SetValue(ColumnDefinition.WidthProperty, new GridLength(full, GridUnitType.Star)); spFactory.AppendChild(col1); } for (int i = 0; i < cols; i++) { FrameworkElementFactory text1 = new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(TextBlock)); SolidColorBrush sb1 = new SolidColorBrush(); switch (i) { case 0: sb1.Color = Colors.Blue; break; case 1: sb1.Color = Colors.Red; break; case 2: sb1.Color = Colors.Yellow; break; case 3: sb1.Color = Colors.Green; break; case 4: sb1.Color = Colors.Purple; break; case 5: sb1.Color = Colors.Pink; break; case 6: sb1.Color = Colors.Brown; break; } text1.SetValue(TextBlock.BackgroundProperty, sb1); text1.SetValue(Grid.ColumnProperty, i); spFactory.AppendChild(text1); } if (full > 0) { FrameworkElementFactory text1 = new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(TextBlock)); SolidColorBrush sb1 = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black); text1.SetValue(TextBlock.BackgroundProperty, sb1); text1.SetValue(Grid.ColumnProperty, cols); spFactory.AppendChild(text1); } dataTemplate.VisualTree = spFactory; viewCol2.CellTemplate = dataTemplate; int rows = listView1.Items.Count + 1; listView1.Items.Add(new { Option = "Row " + rows }); } }

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• google link for the RGBA library?

  - by Navruk

  I want google link for the RGBA library <script type='text/javascript' src='jquery.color-RGBa-patch.js'></script> This file contains /* * jQuery Color Animations */ (function(jQuery){ // We override the animation for all of these color styles jQuery.each(['backgroundColor', 'borderBottomColor', 'borderLeftColor', 'borderRightColor', 'borderTopColor', 'color', 'outlineColor'], function(i,attr){ jQuery.fx.step[attr] = function(fx){ if ( fx.colorFunction == undefined || fx.state == 0 ) { fx.start = getColor( fx.elem, attr ); fx.end = getRGB( fx.end ); if ( fx.start == undefined ) { fx.start = [ 255,255,255,0 ]; } else { if ( fx.start[3] == undefined ) // if alpha channel is not spotted fx.start[3] = 1; // assume it is fully opaque if ( fx.start[3] == 0 ) // if alpha is present and fully transparent fx.start[0] = fx.start[1] = fx.start[2] = 255; // assume starting with white } if ( fx.end[3] == undefined ) // if alpha channel is not spotted fx.end[3] = 1; // assume it is fully opaque fx.colorFunction = ( fx.start[3] == 1 && fx.end[3] == 1 ? calcRGB : calcRGBa ); } fx.elem.style[attr] = fx.colorFunction(); } }); var calcRGB = function() { return 'rgb(' + Math.max(Math.min( parseInt((this.pos * (this.end[0] - this.start[0])) + this.start[0]), 255), 0) + ',' + Math.max(Math.min( parseInt((this.pos * (this.end[1] - this.start[1])) + this.start[1]), 255), 0) + ',' + Math.max(Math.min( parseInt((this.pos * (this.end[2] - this.start[2])) + this.start[2]), 255), 0) + ')'; }; var calcRGBa = function() { return 'rgba(' + Math.max(Math.min( parseInt((this.pos * (this.end[0] - this.start[0])) + this.start[0]), 255), 0) + ',' + Math.max(Math.min( parseInt((this.pos * (this.end[1] - this.start[1])) + this.start[1]), 255), 0) + ',' + Math.max(Math.min( parseInt((this.pos * (this.end[2] - this.start[2])) + this.start[2]), 255), 0) + ',' + Math.max(Math.min( parseFloat((this.pos * (this.end[3] - this.start[3])) + this.start[3]), 1), 0) + ')'; }; // Color Conversion functions from highlightFade // By Blair Mitchelmore // http://jquery.offput.ca/highlightFade/ // Parse strings looking for color tuples [255,255,255] function getRGB(color) { var result; // Check if we're already dealing with an array of colors if ( color && color.constructor == Array && color.length >= 3 ) return color; // Look for rgb(num,num,num) if (result = /rgba?\(\s*([0-9]{1,3})\s*,\s*([0-9]{1,3})\s*,\s*([0-9]{1,3})\s*,?\s*((?:[0-9](?:\.[0-9]+)?)?)\s*\)/.exec(color)) return [ parseInt(result[1]), parseInt(result[2]), parseInt(result[3]), parseFloat(result[4]||1) ]; // Look for rgb(num%,num%,num%) if (result = /rgba?\(\s*([0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?)\%\s*,\s*([0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?)\%\s*,\s*([0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?)\%\s*,?\s*((?:[0-9](?:\.[0-9]+)?)?)\s*\)/.exec(color)) return [parseFloat(result[1])*2.55, parseFloat(result[2])*2.55, parseFloat(result[3])*2.55, parseFloat(result[4]||1)]; // Look for #a0b1c2 if (result = /#([a-fA-F0-9]{2})([a-fA-F0-9]{2})([a-fA-F0-9]{2})/.exec(color)) return [parseInt(result[1],16), parseInt(result[2],16), parseInt(result[3],16)]; // Look for #fff if (result = /#([a-fA-F0-9])([a-fA-F0-9])([a-fA-F0-9])/.exec(color)) return [parseInt(result[1]+result[1],16), parseInt(result[2]+result[2],16), parseInt(result[3]+result[3],16)]; // Otherwise, we're most likely dealing with a named color var colorName = jQuery.trim(color).toLowerCase(); if ( colors[colorName] != undefined ) return colors[colorName]; return [ 255, 255, 255, 0 ]; } function getColor(elem, attr) { var color; do { color = jQuery.curCSS(elem, attr); // Keep going until we find an element that has color, or we hit the body if ( color != '' && color != 'transparent' || jQuery.nodeName(elem, "body") ) break; attr = "backgroundColor"; } while ( elem = elem.parentNode ); return getRGB(color); }; // Some named colors to work with // From Interface by Stefan Petre // http://interface.eyecon.ro/ var colors = { aqua:[0,255,255], azure:[240,255,255], beige:[245,245,220], black:[0,0,0], blue:[0,0,255], brown:[165,42,42], cyan:[0,255,255], darkblue:[0,0,139], darkcyan:[0,139,139], darkgrey:[169,169,169], darkgreen:[0,100,0], darkkhaki:[189,183,107], darkmagenta:[139,0,139], darkolivegreen:[85,107,47], darkorange:[255,140,0], darkorchid:[153,50,204], darkred:[139,0,0], darksalmon:[233,150,122], darkviolet:[148,0,211], fuchsia:[255,0,255], gold:[255,215,0], green:[0,128,0], indigo:[75,0,130], khaki:[240,230,140], lightblue:[173,216,230], lightcyan:[224,255,255], lightgreen:[144,238,144], lightgrey:[211,211,211], lightpink:[255,182,193], lightyellow:[255,255,224], lime:[0,255,0], magenta:[255,0,255], maroon:[128,0,0], navy:[0,0,128], olive:[128,128,0], orange:[255,165,0], pink:[255,192,203], purple:[128,0,128], violet:[128,0,128], red:[255,0,0], silver:[192,192,192], white:[255,255,255], yellow:[255,255,0] }; })(jQuery);

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• Javascript game with css position

  - by newb125505

  I am trying to make a very simple helicopter game in javascript and I'm currently using css positions to move the objects. but I wanted to know if there was a better/other method for moving objects (divs) when a user is pressing a button here's a code i've got so far.. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Game 2 helicopter</title> <script type="text/javascript"> function num(x){ return parseInt(x.replace(/([^0-9]+)/g,'')); } function getPos(x, y){ var inum=Math.floor(Math.random()*(y+1-x)) + x; inum=inum; return inum; } function setTop(x,y){ x.style.top = y+'px'; } function setBot(x,y){ x.style.bottom = y+'px'; } function setLeft(x,y){ x.style.left = y+'px'; } function setRight(x,y){ x.style.right = y+'px'; } function getTop(x){ return num(x.style.top); } function getBot(x){ return num(x.style.bottom); } function getLeft(x){ return num(x.style.left); } function getRight(x){ return num(x.style.right); } function moveLeft(x,y){ var heli = document.getElementById('heli'); var obj = document.getElementById('obj'); var poss = [20,120,350,400]; var r_pos = getPos(1,4); var rand_pos = poss[r_pos]; xleft = getLeft(x)-y; if(xleft>0){ xleft=xleft; } else{ xleft=800; setTop(x,rand_pos); } setLeft(x,xleft); setTimeout(function(){moveLeft(x,y)},10); checkGame(heli,obj); } var heli; var obj; function checkGame(x,y){ var obj_right = getLeft(x) + 100; var yt = getTop(y); var yb = (getTop(y)+100); if(getTop(x) >= yt && getTop(x) <= yb && obj_right==getLeft(y)){ endGame(); } } function func(){ var x = document.getElementById('heli'); var y = document.getElementById('obj'); alert(getTop(x)+' '+getTop(y)+' '+(getTop(y)+200)); } function startGame(e){ document.getElementById('park').style.display='block'; document.getElementById('newgame').style.display='none'; heli = document.getElementById('heli'); obj = document.getElementById('obj'); hp = heli.style.top; op = obj.style.top; setTop(heli,20); setLeft(heli,20); setLeft(obj,800); setTop(obj,20); moveLeft(obj,5); } function newGameLoad(){ document.getElementById('park').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('newgame').style.display='block'; } function gamePos(e){ heli = document.getElementById('heli'); obj = document.getElementById('obj'); var keynum; var keychar; var numcheck; if(window.event){ // IE keynum = e.keyCode; } else if(e.which){ // Netscape/Firefox/Opera keynum = e.which; } keychar = String.fromCharCode(keynum); // up=38 down=40 left=37 right=39 /*if(keynum==37){ //left tl=tl-20; db.style.left = tl + 'px'; } if(keynum==39){ //right //stopPos(); tl=tl+20; db.style.left = tl + 'px'; }*/ curb = getTop(heli); if(keynum==38){ //top setTop(heli,curb-10); //alert(curb+10); } if(keynum==40){ //bottom setTop(heli,curb+10); //alert(curb-10); } } function endGame(){ clearTimeout(); newGameLoad(); } </script> <style type="text/css"> .play{position:absolute;color:#fff;} #heli{background:url(http://classroomclipart.com/images/gallery/Clipart/Transportation/Helicopter/TN_00-helicopter2.jpg);width:150px;height:59px;} #obj{background:red;width:20px;height:200px;} .park{height:550px;border:5px solid brown;border-left:none;border-right:none;} #newgame{display:none;} </style> </head> <body onload="startGame();" onkeydown="gamePos(event);"> <div class="park" id="park"> <div id="heli" class="play"></div> <div id="obj" class="play"></div> </div> <input type="button" id="newgame" style="position:absolute;top:25%;left:25%;" onclick="startGame();" value="New Game" /> </body> </html>

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• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Max Arderius

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

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. 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

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