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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – March 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity PeterPaul ? RT @JDeveloper: EJB 3 Deployment guide for WebLogic Server Version: 10.3.4.0 dlvr.it/1J5VcV Andrejus Baranovskis ?Open ADF PopUp on Page Load fb.me/1Rx9LP3oW Sten Vesterli ? RT @OracleBlogs: Using the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java on ADF Applications ow.ly/1hVKbB <- Neat! No more WS calls Java Buddy ?JavaFX 2.0: Example of MediaPlay java-buddy.blogspot.com/2012/03/javafx… Georges Saab Build improvements coming to #openJDK for #jdk8 mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/buil… NetBeans Team Share your #Java experience! JavaOne 2012 India call for papers: ow.ly/9xYg0 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 Screencasts & Videos – bit.ly/zmQjn2 chriscmuir ?G+: New blog post: ADF Runtimes vs WLS versions as of JDeveloper 11.1.1.6.0 – bit.ly/y8tkgJ Michael Heinrichs New article: Creating a Sprite Animation with JavaFX blog.netopyr.com/2012/03/09/cre… Oracle WebLogic ? #WebLogic Devcast Webinar Series for March: Enterprise Java Scale Out, JPA, Distributed Grid Data Cache bit.ly/zeUXEV #Coherence Andrejus Baranovskis ?Extending Application Module for ADF BC Proxy User DB Connection fb.me/Bj1hLUqm OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7 | Mark Nelson bit.ly/w7IroZ OTNArchBeat ? Java Champion Jonas Bonér Explains the Akka Platform bit.ly/x2GbXm Adam Bien ? (Java) FX Experience Tools–Feels Like Native Mac App: FX Experience Tools application comes with a native Mac O… bit.ly/waHF3H GlassFish ? GlassFish new recruit and Eclipse integration progress – bit.ly/y5eEkk JDeveloper & ADF Prototyping ADF Libraries dlvr.it/1Hhnw0 Eric Elzinga ?Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7, bit.ly/xkphFQ ADF EMG ? Working with ADF in Arabic, Hebrew or other right-to-left-written language? Oracle UX asks for your help. groups.google.com/forum/?fromgro… Java ? A simple #JavaFX Login Form with a TRON like effect ow.ly/9n9AG JDeveloper & ADF ? Logging in Oracle ADF Applications dlvr.it/1HZhcX OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Cloud Conference: dates and locations worldwide bit.ly/ywXydR UK Oracle User Group ? Simon Haslam, ACE Director present on #WebLogic for DBAs at #oug_ire2012 j.mp/zG6vz3 @oraclewebcenter @oracleace #dublin Steven Davelaar ? Working with ADF and not a member of ADF EMG? You miss lots of valuable info, join now! sites.google.com/site/oracleemg… Simon Haslam @MaciejGruszka: Oracle plans to provide Forms & Reports plug-in for OVAB next year to help deployment. #ukoug MW SIG GlassFish ? Introducing JSR 357: Social Media API – bit.ly/yC8vez JAX London ? Are you coming to Java EE workshops by @AdamBien at JAX Days? Save £100 by registering today. #jaxdays #javaee jaxdays.com WebLogic Community ?Welcome to our Munich WebLogic 12c Bootcamp in Munich! If you also want to attend a training register for the Community oracle.com/partners/goto/… chriscmuir ? My first webcast for Oracle! (be kind) Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object bit.ly/ArKija OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Weblogic Server 12c is available on Oracle Solaris 11 (SPARC and x86) bit.ly/xE3TLg JDeveloper & ADF ? Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object – YouTube dlvr.it/1H93Qr OTNArchBeat ? Application-Driven Virtualization with Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder | Ronen Kofman bit.ly/wF1C1N Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server Singleton Services ow.ly/1hOu4U Barbara Ann May ?@oracledevtools: New update: #NetBeans IDE 7.1.1, with support for #GlassFish 3.1.2 bit.ly/mOLcQd #java #developer OTNArchBeat ? Using Coherence with JDeveloper: bit.ly/AkoEQb WebLogic Community ? WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter February 2012 wp.me/p1LMIb-f3 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 – new Podcast episode : bit.ly/wc6oBE Frank Nimphius ?Cool! Open JDeveloper 11.1.1.5, go help–>check for updates. First thing shown is that 11.1.1.6 is available. Never miss a new release Adam Bien ?5 Minutes (Video) With Java EE …Or With NetBeans + GlassFish: This screencast covers a 5-minute development of a… bit.ly/xkOJMf WebLogic Community ? Free Oracle WebLogic Certification Application Grid Implementation Specialist wp.me/p1LMIb-eT OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Coherence: First Steps Using Clusters and Basic API Usage | Ricardo Ferreira bit.ly/yYQ3Wz GlassFish ? JMS 2.0 Early Draft is here – bit.ly/ygT1VN OTNArchBeat ? Exalogic Networking Part 2 | The Old Toxophilist bit.ly/xuYMIi OTNArchBeat ?New Release: GlassFish Server 3.1.2. Read All About It! | Paul Davies bit.ly/AtlGxo Oracle WebLogic ?OTN Virtual Developer Day: #WebLogic 12c & #Coherence ost-conference on-demand page live with bonus #Virtualbox lab – bit.ly/xUy6BJ Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server 11g (10.3.6) Documentation ow.ly/1hJgUB Lucas Jellema ? Just published an article on the AMIS blog: technology.amis.nl/2012/03/adf-11… ADF 11g – programmatically sorting rich table columns. Java Certification ? New Course! Learn how to create mobile applications using Java ME: bit.ly/xZj1Jh Simon Haslam ? @MaciejGruszka WebLogic 12c can run against 11g domain config without changes …and can rollback to 11. #ukoug MW SIG Justin Kestelyn ? Learn Advanced ADF, free and online bit.ly/wEKSRc WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress,WebLogic 12c

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• BPM Suite 11gR1 Released

  - by Manoj Das

  This morning (April 27th, 2010), Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 became available for download from OTN and eDelivery. If you have been following our plans in this area, you know that this is the release unifying BEA ALBPM product, which became Oracle BPM10gR3, with the Oracle stack. Some of the highlights of this release are: BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation Web based Process Composer for BPMN and Rules authoring Zero-code environment with full access to Oracle SOA Suite’s rich set of application and other adapters Process Spaces – Out-of-box integration with Web Center Suite Process Analytics – Native process cubes as well as integration with Oracle BAM You can learn more about this release from the documentation. Notes about downloading and installing Please note that Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 is delivered and installed as part of SOA 11.1.1.3.0, which is a sparse release (only incremental patch). To install: Download and install SOA 11.1.1.2.0, which is a full release (you can find the bits at the above location) Download and install SOA 11.1.1.3.0 During configure step (using the Fusion Middleware configuration wizard), use the Oracle Business Process Management template supplied with the SOA Suite11g (11.1.1.3.0) If you plan to use Process Spaces, also install Web Center 11.1.1.3.0, which also is delivered as a sparse release and needs to be installed on top of Web Center 11.1.1.2.0 Some early feedback We have been receiving very encouraging feedback on this release. Some quotes from partners are included below: “I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” Hajo Normann, SOA Architect - Oracle ACE Director - Co-Leader DOAG SIG SOA   "Reuse of components across the Oracle 11G Fusion Middleware stack, like for instance a Database Adapter, is essential. It improves stability and predictability of the solution. BPM just is one of the components plugging into the stack and reuses all other components." Mr. Leon Smiers, Oracle Solution Architect, Capgemini   “I had the opportunity to follow a hands-on workshop held by Clemens for Oracle partners and I was really impressed of the overall offering of BPM11g. BPM11g allows the execution of BPMN 2.0 processes, without having to transform/translate them first to BPEL in order to be executable. The fact that BPMN uses the same underlying service infrastructure of SOA Suite 11g has a lot of benefits for us already familiar with SOA Suite 11g. BPMN is just another SCA component within a SCA composite and can (re)use all the existing components like Rules, Human Workflow, Adapters and Mediator. I also like the fact that BPMN runs on the same service engine as BPEL. By that all known best practices for making a BPEL  process reliable are valid for BPMN processes as well. Last but not least, BPMN is integrated into the superior end-to-end tracing of SOA Suite 11g. With BPM11g, Oracle offers a very competitive product which will have a big effect on the IT market. Clemens and Jürgen: Thanks for the great workshop! I’m really looking forward to my first project using Oracle BPM11g!” Guido Schmutz, Technology Manager / Oracle ACE Director for Fusion Middleware and SOA, Company:  Trivadis Some earlier feedback were summarized in this post.

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• Convert a PDF eBook to ePub Format

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to read a PDF eBook on an eReader or mobile device, but aren’t happy with the performance? Here’s how you can convert your PDFs to the popular ePub format so you can easily read them on any device. PDFs are a popular format for eBooks since they render the same on any device and can preserve the exact layout of the print book.  However, this benefit is their major disadvantage on mobile devices, as you often have to zoom and pan back and forth to see everything on the page.  ePub files, on the other hand, are an increasingly popular option. They can reflow to fill your screen instead of sticking to a strict layout style.  With the free Calibre program, you can quickly convert your PDF eBooks to ePub format. Getting Started Download the Calibre installer (link below) for your operating system, and install as normal.  Calibre works on recent versions of Windows, OS X, and Linux.  The Calibre installer is very streamlined, so the install process was quite quick. Calibre is a great application for organizing your eBooks.  It can automatically sort your books by their metadata, and even display their covers in a Coverflow-style viewer. To add an eBook to your library, simply drag-and-drop the file into the Calibre window, or click Add books at the top.  Here you can choose to add all the books from a folder and more. Calibre will then add the book(s) to your library, import the associated metadata, and organize them in the catalog. Convert your Books Once you’ve imported your books into Calibre, it’s time to convert them to the format you want.  Select the book or books you want to convert, and click Convert E-books.  Select whether you want to convert them individually or bulk convert them. The convertor window has lots of options, so you can get your ePub book exactly like you want.  You can simply click Ok and go with the defaults, or you can tweak the settings. Do note that the conversion will only work successfully with PDFs that contain actual text.  Some PDFs are actually images scanned in from the original books; these will appear just like the PDF after the conversion, and won’t be any easier to read. On the first tab, you’ll notice that Calibri will repopulate most of the metadata fields with info from your PDF.  It will also use the first page of the PDF as the cover.  Edit any of the information that may be incorrect, and add any additional information you want associated with the book. If you want to convert your eBook to a different format other than ePub, Calibri’s got you covered, too.  On the top right, you can choose to output the converted eBook into a many different file formats, including the Kindle-friendly MOBI format. One other important settings page is the Structure Detection tab.  Here you can choose to have it remove headers and footers in the converted book, as well as automatically detect chapter breaks. Click Ok when you’ve finished choosing your settings and Calibre will convert the book.  This may take a few minutes, depending on the size of the PDF.  If the conversion seems to be taking too long, you can click Show job details for more information on the progress.   The conversion usually works good, but we did have one job freeze on us.  When we checked the job details, it indicated that the PDF was copy-protected.  Most PDF eBooks, however, worked fine. Now, back in the main Calibri window, select your book and save it to disk.  You can choose to save only the EPUB format, or you can select Save to disk to save all formats of the book to your computer. You can also view the ePub file directly in Calibri’s built-in eBook viewer.  This is the PDF book we converted, and it looks fairly good in the converted format.  It does have some odd line breaks and some misplaced numbers, but on the whole, the converted book is much easier to read, especially on small mobile devices.   Even images get included inline, so you shouldn’t be missing anything from the original eBook. Conclusion Calibri makes it simple to read your eBooks in any format you need. It is a project that is in constant development, and updates regularly adding better stability and features.  Whether you want to ready your PDF eBooks on a Sony Reader, Kindle, netbook or Smartphone, your books will now be more accessible than ever.  And with thousands of free PDF eBooks out there, you’ll be sure to always have something to read. If you’d like some Geeky PDF eBooks, Microsoft Press is offering a number of free PDF eBooks right now.  Check them out at this link (Account Required). Download the Calibre eBook program Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Format a String as Currency in C#Convert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 FormatShare OneNote 2010 Notebooks with OneNote 2007Install an RPM Package on Ubuntu LinuxConvert PDF Files to Word Documents and Other Formats TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos

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• SQL Server devs–what source control system do you use, if any? (answer and maybe win free stuff)

  - by jamiet

  Recently I noticed a tweet from notable SQL Server author and community dude-at-large Steve Jones in which he asked how many SQL Server developers were putting their SQL Server source code (i.e. DDL) under source control (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact tweet and Twitter’s search functionality is useless). The question surprised me slightly as I thought a more pertinent question would be “how many SQL Server developers are not using source control?” because I have been doing just that for many years now and I simply assumed that use of source control is a given in this day and age. Then I started thinking about it. “Perhaps I’m wrong” I pondered, “perhaps the SQL Server folks that do use source control in their day-to-day jobs are in the minority”. So, dear reader, I’m interested to know a little bit more about your use of source control. Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? Why did you make those particular software choices? Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? To encourage you to contribute I have five pairs of licenses for Red Gate SQL Source Control and Red Gate SQL Connect to give away to what I consider to be the five best replies (“best” is totally subjective of course but this is my blog so my decision is final ), if you want to be considered don’t forget to leave contact details; email address, Twitter handle or similar will do. To start you off and to perhaps get the brain cells whirring, here are my answers to the questions above: Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? As I think I’ve already said…yes. Always. If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? I move around a lot between many clients so it changes on a fairly regular basis; my current client uses Team Foundation Server (aka TFS) and as part of a separate project is trialing the use of Team Foundation Service. I have used SVN extensively in the past which I am a fan of (I generally prefer it to TFS) and am trying to get my head around Git by using it for ObjectStorageHelper. What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? On my current project, Team Explorer. In the past I have used Tortoise to connect to SVN. Why did you make those particular software choices? I generally use whatever the client uses and given that I work with SQL Server I find that the majority of my clients use TFS, I guess simply because they are Microsoft development shops. Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? Not an anecdote as such but I am going to share some frustrations about TFS. In many ways TFS is a great product because it integrates many separate functions (source control, work item tracking, build agents) into one whole and I’m firmly of the opinion that that is a good thing if for no reason other than being able to associate your check-ins with a work-item. However, like many people there are aspects to TFS source control that annoy me day-in, day-out. Chief among them has to be the fact that it uses a file’s read-only property to determine if a file should be checked-out or not and, if it determines that it should, it will happily do that check-out on your behalf without you even asking it to. I didn’t realise how ridiculous this was until I first used SVN about three years ago – with SVN you make any changes you wish and then use your source control client to determine which files have changed and thus be checked-in; the notion of “check-out” doesn’t even exist. That sounds like a small thing but you don’t realise how liberating it is until you actually start working that way. Hoping to hear some more anecdotes and opinions in the comments. Remember….free software is up for grabs! @jamiet 

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• Advice on learning programming languages and math.

  - by Joris Ooms

  I feel like I'm getting stuck lately when it comes to learning about programming-related things; I thought I'd ask a question here and write it all down in the hope to get some pointers/advice from people. Perhaps writing it down helps me put things in perspective for myself aswell. I study Interactive Multimedia Design. This course is based on two things: graphic design on one hand, and web development on the other hand. I have quite a decent knowledge of web-related languages (the usual HTML/JS/PHP) and I'll be getting a course on ASP.NET next year. In my free time, I have learnt how to work with CodeIgniter, aswell as some diving into Ruby (and Rails) and basic iOS programming. In my first year of college I also did a class on Java (19/20 on the end result). This grade doesn't really mean anything though; I have the basics of OOP down but Java-wise, we learnt next to nothing. Considering the time I have been programming in, for example, PHP.. I can't say I'm bad at it. I'm definitely not good or great at it, but I'm decent. My teachers tell me I have the programming thing down. They just tell me I should keep on learning. So that's what I do, and I try to take in as much as possible; however, sometimes I'm unsure where to start and I have this tendency to always doubt myself. Now, for the 'question'. I want to get into iOS programming. I know iOS programming boils down to programming in Cocoa Touch and Objective-C. I also know Obj-C is a superset of C. I have done a class on C a couple of years ago, but I failed miserably. I got stuck at pointers and never really understood them.. Until like a month ago. I suddenly 'got' it. I have been working through a book on Objective-C for a week or so now, and I understand the basics (I'm at like.. chapter 6 or so). However, I keep running into similar problems as the ones I had when I did the C class: I suck at math. No, really. I come from a Latin-Modern Languages background in high school and I had nearly no math classes back then. I wanted to study Computer Science, but I failed there because of the miserable state of my mathematics knowledge. I can't explain why I'm suddenly talking about math here though, because it isn't directly related to programming.. yet it is. For example, the examples in the book I'm reading now are about programming a fraction-calculator. All good, I can do the programming when I get the formulas down.. but it takes me a full day or more to actually get to that point. I also find it hard to come up with ideas for myself. I made one small iOS app the other day and it's just a button / label kind of thing. When I press the button, it generates a random number. That's really all I could come up with. Can you 'learn' that? It probably comes down to creativity, but evidently, I'm not too great at being creative. Are there any sites or resources out there that provide something like a basic list of things you can program when you're just starting out? Maybe I'm focusing on too many things at once. I want to keep my HTML/CSS at a decent level, while learning PHP and CodeIgniter, while diving into Ruby on Rails and learning Objective-C and the iOS SDK at the same time. I just want to be good at something, I guess. The problem is that I can't seem to be happy with my PHP stuff. I want more, something 'harder'; that's why I decided to pick up the iOS thing. Like I said, I have the basics down of a lot of different languages. I can program something simple in Java, in C, in Objective-C as of this week.. but it ends there. Mostly because I can't come up with ideas for more complex applications, and also because I just doubt myself: 'Oh, that's too complex, I can never do that'. And then it ends there. To conclude my rant, let me basically rephrase my questions into a 'tl;dr' part. A. I want to get into iOS programming and I have basic knowledge of C/Objective-C. However, I struggle to come up with ideas of my own and implement them and I also suck at math which is something that isn't directly related to, yet often needed while programming. What can I do? B. I have an interest in a lot of different programming languages and I can't stop reading/learning. However, I don't feel like I'm good in anything. Should I perhaps focus on just one language for a year or longer, or keep taking it all in at the same time and hope I'll finally get them all down? C. Are there any resources out there that provide basic ideas of things I can program? I'm thinking about 'simple' command-line applications here to help me while studying C/Obj-C away from the whole iPhone SDK. Like I said, the examples in my book are mainly math-based (fraction calculator) and it's kinda hard. :( Thanks a lot for reading my post. I didn't plan it to be this long but oh well. Thanks in advance for any answers.

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• How do I prove or disprove "god" objects are wrong?

  - by honestduane

  Problem Summary: Long story short, I inherited a code base and an development team I am not allowed to replace and the use of God Objects is a big issue. Going forward, I want to have us re-factor things but I am getting push-back from the teams who want to do everything with God Objects "because its easier" and this means I would not be allowed to re-factor. I pushed back citing my years of dev experience, that I'm the new boss who was hired to know these things, etc, and so did the third party offshore companies account sales rep, and this is now at the executive level and my meeting is tomorrow and I want to go in with a lot of technical ammo to advocate best practices because I feel it will be cheaper in the long run (And I personally feel that is what the third party is worried about) for the company. My issue is from a technical level, I know its good long term but I'm having trouble with the ultra short term and 6 months term, and while its something I "know" I cant prove it with references and cited resources outside of one person (Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob), as that is what I am being asked to do as I have been told having data from one person and only one person (Robert C Martin) is not good enough of an argument. Question: What are some resources I can cite directly (Title, year published, page number, quote) by well known experts in the field that explicitly say this use of "God" Objects/Classes/Systems is bad (or good, since we are looking for the most technically valid solution)? Research I have already done: I have a number of books here and I have searched their indexes for the use of the words "god object" and "god class". I found that oddly its almost never used and the copy of the GoF book I have for example, never uses it (At least according to the index in front of me) but I have found it in 2 books per the below, but I want more I can use. I checked the Wikipedia page for "God Object" and its currently a stub with little reference links so although I personally agree with that it says, It doesn't have much I can use in an environment where personal experience is not considered valid. The book cited is also considered too old to be valid by the people I am debating these technical points with as the argument they are making is that "it was once thought to be bad but nobody could prove it, and now modern software says "god" objects are good to use". I personally believe that this statement is incorrect, but I want to prove the truth, whatever it is. In Robert C Martin's "Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#" (ISBN: 0-13-185725-8, hardcover) where on page 266 it states "Everybody knows that god classes are a bad idea. We don't want to concentrate all the intelligence of a system into a single object or a single function. One of the goals of OOD is the partitioning and distribution of behavior into many classes and many function." -- And then goes on to say sometimes its better to use God Classes anyway sometimes (Citing micro-controllers as an example). In Robert C Martin's "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" page 136 (And only this page) talks about the "God class" and calls it out as a prime example of a violation of the "classes should be small" rule he uses to promote the Single Responsibility Principle" starting on on page 138. The problem I have is all my references and citations come from the same person (Robert C. Martin), and am from the same single person/source. I am being told that because he is just one guy, my desire to not use "God Classes" is invalid and not accepted as a standard best practice in the software industry. Is this true? Am I doing things wrong from a technical perspective by trying to keep to the teaching of Uncle Bob? God Objects and Object Oriented Programming and Design: The more I think of this the more I think this is more something you learn when you study OOP and its never explicitly called out; Its implicit to good design is my thinking (Feel free to correct me, please, as I want to learn), The problem is I "know" this, but but not everybody does, so in this case its not considered a valid argument because I am effectively calling it out as universal truth when in fact most people are statistically ignorant of it since statistically most people are not programmers. Conclusion: I am at a loss on what to search for to get the best additional results to cite, since they are making a technical claim and I want to know the truth and be able to prove it with citations like a real engineer/scientist, even if I am biased against god objects due to my personal experience with code that used them. Any assistance or citations would be deeply appreciated.

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• List of Commonly Used Value Types in XNA Games

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). Of concern to XNA programmers is the fact that it runs automatically after a fixed amount of GC-managed memory has been allocated (currently 1MB on both systems). Many beginning XNA programmers are unaware of what constitutes GC-managed memory, though. So here’s a quick overview. In .NET, there are two different “types” of types: value types and reference types. Only reference types are managed by the garbage collector. Value types are not managed by the garbage collector and are instead managed in other ways that are implementation dependent. For purposes of XNA programming, the important point is that they are not managed by the GC and thus do not, by themselves, increment that internal 1 MB allocation counter. (n.b. Structs are value types. If you have a struct that has a reference type as a member, then that reference type, when instantiated, will still be allocated in the GC-managed memory and will thus count against the 1 MB allocation counter. Putting it in a struct doesn’t change the fact that it gets allocated on the GC heap, but the struct itself is created outside of the GC’s purview). Both value types and reference types use the keyword ‘new’ to allocate a new instance of them. Sometimes this keyword is hidden by a method which creates new instances for you, e.g. XmlReader.Create. But the important thing to determine is whether or not you are dealing with a value types or a reference type. If it’s a value type, you can use the ‘new’ keyword to allocate new instances of that type without incrementing the GC allocation counter (except as above where it’s a struct with a reference type in it that is allocated by the constructor, but there are no .NET Framework or XNA Framework value types that do this so it would have to be a struct you created or that was in some third-party library you were using for that to even become an issue). The following is a list of most all of value types you are likely to use in a generic XNA game: AudioCategory (used with XACT; not available on WP7) AvatarExpression (Xbox 360 only, but exposed on Windows to ease Xbox development) bool BoundingBox BoundingSphere byte char Color DateTime decimal double any enum (System.Enum itself is a class, but all enums are value types such that there are no GC allocations for enums) float GamePadButtons GamePadCapabilities GamePadDPad GamePadState GamePadThumbSticks GamePadTriggers GestureSample int IntPtr (rarely but occasionally used in XNA) KeyboardState long Matrix MouseState nullable structs (anytime you see, e.g. int? something, that ‘?’ denotes a nullable struct, also called a nullable type) Plane Point Quaternion Ray Rectangle RenderTargetBinding sbyte (though I’ve never seen it used since most people would just use a short) short TimeSpan TouchCollection TouchLocation TouchPanelCapabilities uint ulong ushort Vector2 Vector3 Vector4 VertexBufferBinding VertexElement VertexPositionColor VertexPositionColorTexture VertexPositionNormalTexture VertexPositionTexture Viewport So there you have it. That’s not quite a complete list, mind you. For example: There are various structs in the .NET framework you might make use of. I left out everything from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.PackedVector namespace, since everything in there ventures into the realm of advanced XNA programming anyway (n.b. every single instantiable thing in that namespace is a struct and thus a value type; there are also two interfaces but interfaces cannot be instantiated at all and thus don’t figure in to this discussion). There are so many enums you’re likely to use (PlayerIndex, SpriteSortMode, SpriteEffects, SurfaceFormat, etc.) that including them would’ve flooded the list and reduced its utility. So I went with “any enum” and trust that you can figure out what the enums are (and it’s rare to use ‘new’ with an enum anyway). That list also doesn’t include any of the pre-defined static instances of some of the classes (e.g. BlendState.AlphaBlend, BlendState.Opaque, etc.) which are already allocated such that using them doesn’t cause any new allocations and therefore doesn’t increase that 1 MB counter. That list also has a few misleading things. VertexElement, VertexPositionColor, and all the other vertex types are structs. But you’re only likely to ever use them as an array (for use with VertexBuffer or DynamicVertexBuffer), and all arrays are reference types (even arrays of value types such as VertexPositionColor[ ] or int[ ]). * So that’s it for now. The note below may be a bit confusing (it deals with how the GC works and how arrays are managed in .NET). If so, you can probably safely ignore it for now but feel free to ask any questions regardless. * Arrays of value types (where the value type doesn’t contain any reference type members) are much faster for the GC to examine than arrays of reference types, so there is a definite benefit to using arrays of value types where it makes sense. But creating arrays of value types does cause the GC’s allocation counter to increase. Indeed, allocating a large array of a value type is one of the quickest ways to increment the allocation counter since a .NET array is a sequential block of memory. An array of reference types is just a sequential block of references (typically 4 bytes each) while an array of value types is a sequential block of instances of that type. So for an array of Vector3s it would be 12 bytes each since each float is 4 bytes and there are 3 in a Vector3; for an array of VertexPositionNormalTexture structs it would typically be 32 bytes each since it has two Vector3s and a Vector2. (Note that there are a few additional bytes taken up in the creation of an array, typically 12 but sometimes 16 or possibly even more, which depend on the implementation details of the array type on the particular platform the code is running on).

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• Spolskism or Twitterism: A Doctor writes...

  - by Phil Factor

  "I never realized I had a problem. I just 'twittered' because it was a social thing to do. All my mates were doing it. It made me feel good to have 'followers'; it bolstered my self-esteem. Of course, you don't think of the long-term effects on your work and on the way you think. There's no denying that it impairs your judgment…" Yes, this story is typical. Hundreds of people are waking up to the long term effects of twittering, and seeking help. Dave, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporter… "I started using Twitter at work. Just a few minutes now and then, throughout the day. A lot of my colleagues were doing it and I thought 'Well, that's cool; it must be part of what I should be doing at work'. Soon, I was avidly reading every twitter that came my way, and counting the minutes between my own twitters. I tried to kid myself that it was all about professional development and getting other people to help you with work-related problems, but in truth I had become addicted to the buzz of the social network. The worse thing was that it made me seem busy even when I was really just frittering my time away. Inevitably, I started to get behind with my real work." Experts have identified the syndrome and given it a name: 'Twitterism', sometimes referred to as 'Spolskism', after the person who first drew attention to the pernicious damage to well-being that the practice caused, and who had the courage to take the pledge of rejecting it. According to one expert… "The occasional Twitter does little harm to the participant, and can be an adaptive way of dealing with stress. Unfortunately, it rarely stops there. The addictive qualities of the practice have put a strain on the caring professions who are faced with a flood of people making that first bold step to seeking help". Dave is one of those now seeking help for his addiction… "I had lost touch with reality. Even though I twittered my work colleagues constantly, I found I actually spoke to them less and less. Even when out socializing, I would frequently disengage from the conversation, in order to twitter. I stopped blogging. I stopped responding to emails; the only way to reach me was through the world of Twitter. Unfortunately, my denial about the harm that twittering was doing to me, my friends, and my work-colleagues was so strong that I truly couldn't see that I had a problem." Like other addictions, the help and support of others who are 'taking the cure' is important. There is a common bond between those who have 'been through hell and back' and are once more able to experience the joys of actually conversing and socializing, rather than the false comfort of solitary 'twittering'. Complete abstinence is essential to the cure. Most of those who risk even an occasional twitter face a headlong slide back into 'binge' twittering. Tom, another twitterer who has managed to kick the habit explains… "My twittering addiction now seems more like a bad dream. You get to work, and switch on the PC. You say to yourself, just open up the browser, just for a minute, just to see what people are saying on Twitter. The next thing you know, half the day has gone by. The worst thing is that when you're addicted, you get good at covering up the habit; I spent so much time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard, people just assumed I was working hard.I know that I must never forget what it was like then, and what it's like now that I've kicked the habit. I now have more time for productive work and a real social life." Like many addictions, Spolskism has its most detrimental effects on family, friends and workmates, rather than the addict. So often nowadays, we hear the sad stories of Twitter-Widows; tales of long lonely evenings spent whilst their partners are engrossed in their twittering into their 'mobiles' or indulging in their solitary spolskistic habits in privacy, under cover of 'having to do work at home'. Workmates suffer too, when the addicts even take their laptops or mobiles into meetings in order to 'twitter' with their fellow obsessives, even stooping to complain to their followers how boring the meeting is. No; The best advice is to leave twittering to the birds. You know it makes sense.

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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• Server Controls in ASP.NET MVC without ViewState

  - by imran_ku07

    Introduction :           ASP.NET Web Forms provides a development environment just like GUI or windows application and try to hide statelessness nature of HTTP protocol. For accomplishing this target, Web Forms uses ViewState (a hidden field) to remove the gap between HTTP statelessness and GUI applications. But the problem with this technique is that ViewState size which grows quickly and also go back and forth with every request, as a result it will degrade application performance. In this article i will try to use existing ASP.NET server controls without ViewState.   Description :           When you add a server control which needs viewstate, in the presentation view in ASP.NET MVC application without a form tag, for example,            <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>            It will shows the following exception,            Control 'TextBox1' of type 'TextBox' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server             When you place this textbox inside a form tag with runat=server, this will add the following ViewState even when you disable ViewState by using EnableViewState="false"            <input type="hidden" value="/wEPDwUJMjgzMDgzOTgzZGQ6u9CwikhHEW39ObrHyLTPFSboPA==" id="__VIEWSTATE" name="__VIEWSTATE"/>             The solution to this problem is to use the RenderControl method of server control which is simply renders HTML without any ViewState hidden field.         <% TextBox txt = new TextBox();          txt.Text = "abc";          StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();          System.IO.StringWriter textwriter = new System.IO.StringWriter(sb);          HtmlTextWriter htmlwriter = new HtmlTextWriter(textwriter);          txt.RenderControl(htmlwriter);  %>        <%= sb.ToString() %>             This will render <input type="text" > without any View State. This technique become very useful when you are using rich server controls like GridView. For example, let's say you have List of Recalls in Model.Recalls, then you will show your tabular data as,     <%  GridView gv = new GridView();          gv.AutoGenerateColumns = true;          gv.DataSource = Model.Recalls;          gv.DataBind();         StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();         System.IO.StringWriter textwriter = new System.IO.StringWriter(sb);         HtmlTextWriter htmlwriter = new HtmlTextWriter(textwriter);         gv.RenderControl(htmlwriter);%>            <%= sb.ToString() %>             This code might looks odd in your presentation view. A more better approach is to create a HTML Helper method which contains the above code. Summary :        In some cases you might needs to use existing ASP.NET Web Forms server controls but also dislikes ViewState. In this article i try to solve this gap by using the RenderControl method of Control class. Hopefully you enjoyed and become ready to create HTML helpers for many of the existing server controls.

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• Querying Visual Studio project files using T-SQL and Powershell

  - by jamiet

  Earlier today I had a need to get some information out of a Visual Studio project file and in this blog post I’m going to share a couple of ways of going about that because I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only person that ever wants to do this. The specific problem I was trying to solve was finding out how many objects in my database project (i.e. in my .dbproj file) had any warnings suppressed but the techniques discussed below will work pretty well for any Visual Studio project file because every such file is simply an XML document, hence it can be queried by anything that can query XML documents. Ever heard the phrase “when all you’ve got is hammer everything looks like a nail”? Well that’s me with querying stuff – if I can write SQL then I’m writing SQL. Here’s a little noddy database project I put together for demo purposes: Two views and a stored procedure, nothing fancy. I suppressed warnings for [View1] & [Procedure1] and hence the pertinent part my project file looks like this:   <ItemGroup>    <Build Include="Schema Objects\Schemas\dbo\Views\View1.view.sql">      <SubType>Code</SubType>      <SuppressWarnings>4151,3276</SuppressWarnings>    </Build>    <Build Include="Schema Objects\Schemas\dbo\Views\View2.view.sql">      <SubType>Code</SubType>    </Build>    <Build Include="Schema Objects\Schemas\dbo\Programmability\Stored Procedures\Procedure1.proc.sql">      <SubType>Code</SubType>      <SuppressWarnings>4151</SuppressWarnings>    </Build>  </ItemGroup>  <ItemGroup> Note the <SuppressWarnings> elements – those are the bits of information that I am after. With a lot of help from folks on the SQL Server XML forum  I came up with the following query that nailed what I was after. It reads the contents of the .dbproj file into a variable of type XML and then shreds it using T-SQL’s XML data type methods: DECLARE @xml XML; SELECT @xml = CAST(pkgblob.BulkColumn AS XML) FROM   OPENROWSET(BULK 'C:\temp\QueryingProjectFileDemo\QueryingProjectFileDemo.dbproj' -- <-Change this path!                    ,single_blob) AS pkgblob                    ;WITH XMLNAMESPACES( 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003' AS ns) SELECT  REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(ObjectPath),0,CHARINDEX('\',REVERSE(ObjectPath)))) AS [ObjectName]        ,[SuppressedWarnings] FROM   (        SELECT  build.query('.') AS [_node]        ,       build.value('ns:SuppressWarnings[1]','nvarchar(100)') AS [SuppressedWarnings]        ,       build.value('@Include','nvarchar(1000)') AS [ObjectPath]        FROM    @xml.nodes('//ns:Build[ns:SuppressWarnings]') AS R(build)        )q And here’s the output: And that’s it – an easy way of discovering which warnings have been suppressed and for which objects in your database projects. I won’t bother going over the code as it is fairly self-explanatory – peruse it at your leisure.   Once I had the SQL above I figured I’d share it around a little in case it was ever useful to anyone else; hence I’m writing this blog post and I also posted it on the Visual Studio Database Development Tools forum at FYI: Discover which objects have had warnings suppressed. Luckily Kevin Goode saw the thread and he posted a different solution to the same problem, one that uses Powershell. The advantage of Kevin’s Powershell approach is that it is easy to analyse many .dbproj files at the same time. Below is Kevin’s code which I have tweaked ever so slightly so that it produces the same results as my SQL script (I just want any object that had had a warning suppressed whereas Kevin was querying specifically for warning 4151):   cd 'C:\Temp\QueryingProjectFileDemo\' cls $projects = ls -r -i *.dbproj Foreach($project in $projects) { $xml = new-object System.Xml.XmlDocument $xml.set_PreserveWhiteSpace( $true ) $xml.Load($project) #$xpath = @{Start="/e:Project/e:ItemGroup/e:Build[e:SuppressWarnings=4151]/@Include"} #$xpath = @{Start="/e:Project/e:ItemGroup/e:Build[contains(e:SuppressWarnings,'4151')]/@Include"} $xpath = @{Start="/e:Project/e:ItemGroup/e:Build[e:SuppressWarnings]/@Include"} $ns = @{ e = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" } $xml | Select-Xml -XPath $xpath.Start -Namespace $ns |Select -Expand Node | Select -expand Value } and here’s the output: Nice reusable Powershell and SQL scripts – not bad for an evening’s work. Thank you to Kevin for allowing me to share his code. Don’t forget that these techniques can easily be adapted to query any Visual Studio project file, they’re only XML documents after all! Doubtless many people out there already have code for doing this but nonetheless here is another offering to the great script library in the sky. Have fun! @Jamiet

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• Profit's COLLABORATE 10 Session Selections

  - by Aaron Lazenby

  COLLABORATE 2010 is a mere 11 days away (thanks for the reminder @ocp_advisor). Every year I publish my a list of the sessions I think reflect some of the more interesting people/trends in enterprise IT. I should be at all of these sessions, so drop by for a chat--I'll be the guy tapping out emails on my iPad... Monday, April 19 9:15 a.m. - Keynote: Transforming Customer Value, Delivering Highest Customer Service Location: Keynote Hall I never miss Charles Phillips when he speaks--it's one of the best opportunities to get an update on Oracle product developments and strategy. And there's certainly occasion for an update: this will be Phillips' first big presentation since the Oracle + Sun Strategy Update in late January. Phillips is appearing with Oracle Executive Vice President of Development Thomas Kurian which means there should be some excellent information about how customers are using Oracle's complete software and hardware stack to address enterprise IT challenges. The session should provide some excellent context for the rest of the week's session...don't miss it. 10:45 a.m. - Oracle Fusion Applications: Functional Overview Location: South Seas FI met Basheer Khan at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver and have followed his work ever since. He's a former member of the OAUG Board of Directors, an Oracle ACE, and a charismatic enterprise IT expert. Having worked with the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, Basheer should have some fascinating insights to share about the features and interface of Oracle's Fusine Applications. This session, along with Nadia Bendjedou's "10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation Applications" (on Tuesday, April 20 8:00 a.m. in room 3662) should give attendees the update they need about Oracle's next-generation applications.   1:15p.m. - E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud Location: South Seas HI did my first full-fledged cloud computing coverage at last year's COLLABORATE show (check out my interview with Oracle's Bill Hodak), where I first learned about Amazon's EC2 offering. I've since talked with several people who have provisioned server space on Amazon's cloud with great results. So I'm looking forward to watching the audience configure an instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite release 12 on the cloud while Chuck Edwards from Blue Gecko drives. This session should take some of the mist and vapor out of the cloud conversation.2:30 p.m. - "Zero Sign-on" to EBS - Enabling 96000 Users to Login to EBS Without User Maintenance Location: South Seas HI'll be sitting tight in South Seas H for the next session on Monday where Doug Pepka, a ten-year veteran of communications giant Comcast, will be walking attendees through a massive single sign-on (SSO) project across the enterprise. I'm working on a story about SSO for the August issue of Profit, so this session has real practical value to me. Plus the proliferation of user account logins--both personal and professional--makes this a critical usability/change management issue for IT leaders planning for successful long-term IT implementations.   Tuesday 8:00 am  - Information Architecture for Men in Kilts Location: SURF AGetting to a 8:00 a.m. presentation is a tall order in Las Vegas, but presenter Billy Cripe will make it worth your effort. Not only is the title of this session great, but the content should appeal to any IT strategist looking to push the limits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Cripe is a product management director of Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management at Oracle, author of Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0, and a prolific blogger--he knows how information architecture is critical to and enterprise 2.0 implementation.    10:30a.m. - Oracle Virtualization: From Desktop to Data Center Location: REEF FData center virtualization is still one of the best ways to reduce the cost of running enterprise IT. With the addition of Sun products, Oracle has the industry's most comprehensive virtualization portfolio. I must admit, I'm no expert in this subject. So I'm looking forward to Monica Kumar's presentation so I can get up to speed.   Wednesday 8:00 a.m. - The Art of the Steal Location: Mandalay Bay Ballroom JMany will know Frank Abagnale from Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Catch Me if You Can." The one-time con man and international fugitive who swindled $2.5 million in forged checks went on to help U.S. federal officials investigate fraud cases. Now the CEO of Abagnale and Associates, he has become an invaluable source to the business world on the subject of fraud and fraud protection. With identity theft and digital fraud still on the rise, this session should be an entertaining, and sobering, education on the threats facing businesses and customers around the world. A great way to start Wednesday.1:00 p.m. - Google Wave: Will it replace e-mail as we know it today? Location: SURF EBy many assessments (my own included), Google Wave is a bit of an open collaboration failure. It may seem like an odd reason for me to be excited about this session, but I'm looking forward to the chance to revisit the technology. Also, this is a great case study in connecting free, available Internet tools to existing enterprise computing environments--an issue that IT strategists must contend with as workers spreads out and choose their own productivity tools.  

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• MySQL Connect Only 10 Days Away - Focus on InnoDB Sessions

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Time flies and MySQL Connect is only 10 days away! You can check out the full program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Mat recently blogged about the MySQL Cluster sessions you’ll have the opportunity to attend, and below are those focused on InnoDB. Remember you can plan your schedule with Schedule Builder. Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: 10 Things You Should Know About InnoDB—Calvin Sun, Oracle InnoDB is the default storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL as of MySQL Release 5.5. It provides the standard ACID-compliant transactions, row-level locking, multiversion concurrency control, and referential integrity. InnoDB also implements several innovative technologies to improve its performance and reliability. This presentation gives a brief history of InnoDB; its main features; and some recent enhancements for better performance, scalability, and availability. Saturday, 5.30 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: Demystified MySQL/InnoDB Performance Tuning—Dimitri Kravtchuk, Oracle This session covers performance tuning with MySQL and the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL and explains the main improvements made in MySQL Release 5.5 and Release 5.6. Which setting for which workload? Which value will be better for my system? How can I avoid potential bottlenecks from the beginning? Do I need a purge thread? Is it true that InnoDB doesn't need thread concurrency anymore? These and many other questions are asked by DBAs and developers. Things are changing quickly and constantly, and there is no “silver bullet.” But understanding the configuration setting’s impact is already a huge step in performance improvement. Bring your ideas and problems to share them with others—the discussion is open, just moderated by a speaker. Sunday, 10.15 am, Room Golden Gate 4: Better Availability with InnoDB Online Operations—Calvin Sun, Oracle Many top Web properties rely on Oracle’s MySQL as a critical piece of infrastructure for serving millions of users. Database availability has become increasingly important. One way to enhance availability is to give users full access to the database during data definition language (DDL) operations. The online DDL operations in recent MySQL releases offer users the flexibility to perform schema changes while having full access to the database—that is, with minimal delay of operations on a table and without rebuilding the entire table. These enhancements provide better responsiveness and availability in busy production environments. This session covers these improvements in the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL for online DDL operations such as add index, drop foreign key, and rename column. Sunday, 11.45 am, Room Golden Gate 7: Developing High-Throughput Services with NoSQL APIs to InnoDB and MySQL Cluster—Andrew Morgan and John Duncan, Oracle Ever-increasing performance demands of Web-based services have generated significant interest in providing NoSQL access methods to MySQL (MySQL Cluster and the InnoDB storage engine of MySQL), enabling users to maintain all the advantages of their existing relational databases while providing blazing-fast performance for simple queries. Get the best of both worlds: persistence; consistency; rich SQL queries; high availability; scalability; and simple, flexible APIs and schemas for agile development. This session describes the memcached connectors and examines some use cases for how MySQL and memcached fit together in application architectures. It does the same for the newest MySQL Cluster native connector, an easy-to-use, fully asynchronous connector for Node.js. Sunday, 1.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: InnoDB Performance Tuning—Inaam Rana, Oracle The InnoDB storage engine has always been highly efficient and includes many unique architectural elements to ensure high performance and scalability. In MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, InnoDB includes many new features that take better advantage of recent advances in operating systems and hardware platforms than previous releases did. This session describes unique InnoDB architectural elements for performance, new features, and how to tune InnoDB to achieve better performance. Sunday, 4.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: InnoDB Compression for OLTP—Nizameddin Ordulu, Facebook and Inaam Rana, Oracle Data compression is an important capability of the InnoDB storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL. Compressed tables reduce the size of the database on disk, resulting in fewer reads and writes and better throughput by reducing the I/O workload. Facebook pushes the limit of InnoDB compression and has made several enhancements to InnoDB, making this technology ready for online transaction processing (OLTP). In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of InnoDB compression. You will also learn the enhancements the Facebook team has made to improve InnoDB compression, such as reducing compression failures, not logging compressed page images, and allowing changes of compression level. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

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• BizTalk Envelopes explained

  - by Robert Kokuti

  Recently I've been trying to get some order into an ESB-BizTalk pub/sub scenario, and decided to wrap the payload into standardized envelopes. I have used envelopes before in a 'light weight' fashion, and I found that they can be quite useful and powerful if used systematically. Here is what I learned. The Theory In my experience, Envelopes are often underutilised in a BizTalk solution, and quite often their full potential is not well understood. Here I try to simplify the theory behind the Envelopes within BizTalk.   Envelopes can be used to attach additional data to the ‘real’ data (payload). This additional data can contain all routing and processing information, and allows treating the business data as a ‘black box’, possibly compressed and/or encrypted etc. The point here is that the infrastructure does not need to know anything about the business data content, just as a post man does not need to know the letter within the envelope. BizTalk has built-in support for envelopes through the XMLDisassembler and XMLAssembler pipeline components (these are part of the XMLReceive and XMLSend default pipelines). These components, among other things, perform the following: XMLDisassembler Extracts the payload from the envelope into the Message Body Copies data from the envelope into the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Typically, once the envelope is through the XMLDisassembler, the payload is submitted into the Messagebox, and the rest of the envelope data are copied into the context of the submitted message. The XMLDisassembler uses the Property Schemas, referenced by the Envelope Schema, to determine the name of the promoted Message Context element.   XMLAssembler Wraps the Message Body inside the specified envelope schema Populates the envelope values from the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Notice that there are no requirements to use the receiving envelope schema when sending. The sent message can be wrapped within any suitable envelope, regardless whether the message was originally received within an envelope or not. However, by sharing Property Schemas between Envelopes, it is possible to pass values from the incoming envelope to the outgoing envelope via the Message Context. The Practice Creating the Envelope Add a new Schema to the BizTalk project:   Envelopes are defined as schemas, with the <Schema> Envelope property set to Yes, and the root node’s Body XPath property pointing to the node which contains the payload. Typically, you’d create an envelope structure similar to this: Click on the <Schema> node and set the Envelope property to Yes. Then, click on the Envelope node, and set the Body XPath property pointing to the ‘Body’ node:   The ‘Body’ node is a Child Element, and its Data Structure Type is set to xs:anyType.  This allows the Body node to carry any payload data. The XMLReceive pipeline will submit the data found in the Body node, while the XMLSend pipeline will copy the message into the Body node, before sending to the destination. Promoting Properties Once you defined the envelope, you may want to promote the envelope data (anything other than the Body) as Property Fields, in order to preserve their value in the message context. Anything not promoted will be lost when the XMLDisassembler extracts the payload from the Body. Typically, this means you promote everything in the Header node. Property promotion uses associated Property Schemas. These are special BizTalk schemas which have a flat field structure. Property Schemas define the name of the promoted values in the Message Context, by combining the Property Schema’s Namespace and the individual Field names. It is worth being systematic when it comes to naming your schemas, their namespace and type name. A coherent method will make your life easier when it comes to referencing the schemas during development, and managing subscriptions (filters) in BizTalk Administration. I developed a fairly coherent naming convention which I’ll probably share in another article. Because the property schema must be flat, I recommend creating one for each level in the envelope header hierarchy. Property schemas are very useful in passing data between incoming as outgoing envelopes. As I mentioned earlier, in/out envelopes do not have to be the same, but you can use the same property schema when you promote the outgoing envelope fields as you used for the incoming schema.  As you can reference many property schemas for field promotion, you can pick data from a variety of sources when you define your outgoing envelope. For example, the outgoing envelope can carry some of the incoming envelope’s promoted values, plus some values from the standard BizTalk message context, like the AdapterReceiveCompleteTime property from the BizTalk message-tracking properties. The values you promote for the outgoing envelope will be automatically populated from the Message Context by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. Using the Envelope Receiving Enveloped messages are automatically recognized by the XMLReceive pipeline, or any other custom pipeline which includes the XMLDisassembler component. The Body Path node will become the Message Body, while the rest of the envelope values will be added to the Message context, as defined by the Property Shemas referenced by the Envelope Schema. Sending The Send Port’s filter expression can use the promoted properties from the incoming envelope. If you want to enclose the sent message within an envelope, the Send Port XMLAssembler component must be configured with the fully qualified envelope name:   One way of obtaining the fully qualified envelope name is copy it off from the envelope schema property page: The full envelope schema name is constructed as <Name>, <Assembly> The outgoing envelope is populated by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. The Message Body is copied to the specified envelope’s Body Path node, while the rest of the envelope fields are populated from the Message Context, according to the Property Schemas associated with the Envelope Schema. That’s all for now, happy enveloping!

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• SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – 5 Videos from Joes 2 Pros Series – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433

  - by pinaldave

  Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Learning series is indeed fun. Joes 2 Pros series is written for beginners and who wants to build expertise for SQL Server programming and development from fundamental. In the beginning of the series author Rick Morelan is not shy to explain the simplest concept of how to open SQL Server Management Studio. Honestly the book starts with that much basic but as it progresses further Rick discussing about various advanced concepts from query tuning to Core Architecture. This five part series is written with keeping SQL Server Exam 70-433. Instead of just focusing on what will be there in exam, this series is focusing on learning the important concepts thoroughly. This book no way take short cut to explain any concepts and at times, will go beyond the topic at length. The best part is that all the books has many companion videos explaining the concepts and videos. Every Wednesday I like to post a video which explains something in quick few seconds. Today we will go over five videos which I posted in my earlier posts related to Joes 2 Pros series. Introduction to XML Data Type Methods – SQL in Sixty Seconds #015 The XML data type was first introduced with SQL Server 2005. This data type continues with SQL Server 2008 where expanded XML features are available, most notably is the power of the XQuery language to analyze and query the values contained in your XML instance. There are five XML data type methods available in SQL Server 2008: query() – Used to extract XML fragments from an XML data type. value() – Used to extract a single value from an XML document. exist() – Used to determine if a specified node exists. Returns 1 if yes and 0 if no. modify() – Updates XML data in an XML data type. node() – Shreds XML data into multiple rows (not covered in this blog post). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Error Actions – SQL in Sixty Seconds #014 Most people believe that when SQL Server encounters an error severity level 11 or higher the remaining SQL statements will not get executed. In addition, people also believe that if any error severity level of 11 or higher is hit inside an explicit transaction, then the whole statement will fail as a unit. While both of these beliefs are true 99% of the time, they are not true in all cases. It is these outlying cases that frequently cause unexpected results in your SQL code. To understand how to achieve consistent results you need to know the four ways SQL Error Actions can react to error severity levels 11-16: Statement Termination – The statement with the procedure fails but the code keeps on running to the next statement. Transactions are not affected. Scope Abortion – The current procedure, function or batch is aborted and the next calling scope keeps running. That is, if Stored Procedure A calls B and C, and B fails, then nothing in B runs but A continues to call C. @@Error is set but the procedure does not have a return value. Batch Termination – The entire client call is terminated. XACT_ABORT – (ON = The entire client call is terminated.) or (OFF = SQL Server will choose how to handle all errors.) [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – SQL in Sixty Seconds #013 Query hints specify that the indicated hints should be used throughout the query. Query hints affect all operators in the statement and are implemented using the OPTION clause. Cautionary Note: Because the SQL Server Query Optimizer typically selects the best execution plan for a query, it is highly recommended that hints be used as a last resort for experienced developers and database administrators to achieve the desired results. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Hierarchical Query – SQL in Sixty Seconds #012 A CTE can be thought of as a temporary result set and are similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. A CTE is generally considered to be more readable than a derived table and does not require the extra effort of declaring a Temp Table while providing the same benefits to the user. However; a CTE is more powerful than a derived table as it can also be self-referencing, or even referenced multiple times in the same query. A recursive CTE requires four elements in order to work properly: Anchor query (runs once and the results ‘seed’ the Recursive query) Recursive query (runs multiple times and is the criteria for the remaining results) UNION ALL statement to bind the Anchor and Recursive queries together. INNER JOIN statement to bind the Recursive query to the results of the CTE. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Server Security – SQL in Sixty Seconds #011 Let’s get some basic definitions down first. Take the workplace example where “Tom” needs “Read” access to the “Financial Folder”. What are the Securable, Principal, and Permissions from that last sentence? A Securable is a resource that someone might want to access (like the Financial Folder). A Principal is anything that might want to gain access to the securable (like Tom). A Permission is the level of access a principal has to a securable (like Read). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Please leave a comment explain which one was your favorite video as that will help me understand what works and what needs improvement. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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• Silverlight Cream for January 11, 2011 -- #1024

  - by Dave Campbell

  1,000 blogposts is quite a few, but to die-hard geeks, 1000 isn't the number... 1K is the number, and today is my 1K blogpost! I've been working up to this for at least 11 months. Way back at MIX10, I approached some vendors about an idea I had. A month ago I contacted them and others, and everyone I contacted was very generous and supportive of my idea. My idea was not to run a contest, but blog as normal, and whoever ended up on my 1K post would get some swag... and I set a cut-off at 13 posts. So... blogging normally, I had some submittals, and then ran my normal process to pick up the next posts until I hit a total of 13. To provide a distribution channel for the swag, everyone on the list, please send me your snail mail (T-shirts) and email (licenses) addresses as soon as possible.   I'd like to thank the following generous sponsors for their contributions to my fun (in alphabetic order): and Rachel Hawley for contributing 4 Silverlight control sets First Floor Software and Koen Zwikstra for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Spy and Sara Faatz/Jason Beres for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Data Visualization controls and Svetla Stoycheva for contributing T-Shirts for everyone on the post and Ina Tontcheva for contributing 13 licenses for RadControls for Silverlight + RadControls for Windows Phone and Charlene Kozlan for contributing 1 combopack standard, 2 DataGrid for Silverlight, and 2 Listbox for Silverlight Standard And now finally...in this Issue: Nigel Sampson, Jeremy Likness, Dan Wahlin, Kunal Chowdhurry, Alex Knight, Wei-Meng Lee, Michael Crump, Jesse Liberty, Peter Kuhn, Michael Washington, Tau Sick, Max Paulousky, Damian Schenkelman Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties" Dan Wahlin WP7: "Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers" Nigel Sampson Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making data look cool" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers Nigel Sampson blogged about WP7 Gestures, the Toolkit, and using Gestures as Triggers, and actually makes it looks simple :) Jounce Part 9: Static and Dynamic Module Management Jeremy Likness has episode 9 of his explanation of his MVVM framework, Jounce, up... and a big discussion of Modules and Module Management from a Jounce perspective. Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties Dan Wahlin takes a page from one of his teaching opportunities, and shares his knowledge of Dependency Properties with us... beginning with what they are, defining them in code, and demonstrating their use. Customizing Silverlight ChildWindow Style using Blend Kunal Chowdhurry has a great post up about getting your Child Windows to match the look & feel of the rest of youra app... plus a bunch of Blend goodness thrown in. PathListBox: making data look cool File this post by Alex Knight in the 'holy crap' file along with the others in this series! ... just check out that cool Ticker Style Path ListBox at the top of the blog... too cool! Web Access in Windows Phone 7 Apps Wei-Meng Lee has the 3rd part of his series on WP7 development up and in this one is discussing Web Access... I mean *discussing* it... tons of detail, code, and explanation... great post. Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser. Michael Crump helps relieve stress on Silverlight developers everywhere by exploring how to avoid caching of your XAP in the browser... (WPFS) MVVM Light Toolkit: Soup To Nuts Part I Jesse Liberty continues his Windows Phone from Scratch series with a new segment exploring Laurent Bugnion's MVVMLight Toolkit beginning with acquiring and installing the toolkit, then proceeds to discuss linking the View and ViewModel, the ViewModel Locator, and page navigation. Silverlight: Making a DateTimePicker Peter Kuhn attacks a problem that crops up on the forums a lot -- a DateTimePicker control for Silverlight... following the "It's so simple to build one yourself" advice, he did so, and provides the code for all of us! Windows Phone 7 Animated Button Press Michael Washington took exception to button presses that gave no visual feedback and produced a behavior that does just that. Using TweetSharp in a Windows Phone 7 app Tau Sick demonstrates using TweetSharp to put a twitter feed into a WP7 app, as he did in "Hangover Helper"... all the instructions from getting Tweeetshaprt to the code necessary. Bindable Application Bar Extensions for Windows Phone 7 Max Paulousky has a post discussing some real extensions to the ApplicationBar for WP7.. he begins with a bindable application bar by Nicolas Humann that I've missed, probably because his blog is in French... and extends it to allow using DelegateCommand. How to: Load Prism modules packaged in a separate XAP file in an OOB application Damian Schenkelman posts about Prism, AppModules in separate XAPs and running OOB... if you've tried this, you know it's a hassle.. Damian has the solution. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Responsible BI for Excel, Even for Older Versions

  - by andrewbrust

  On Wednesday, I will have the honor of co-presenting, for both The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) and the New York Technology Council. on the subject of Excel and BI. My co-presenter will be none other than Bill Baker, who was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, essentially, the father of BI at that company.  Details on the events are here and here. We'll be talking about PowerPivot, of course, but that's not all. Probably even more important than any one product, will be our discussion of whether the usual characterization of Excel as the nemesis of IT, the guilty pleasure of business users and the antithesis of formal BI is really valid and/or hopelessly intractable. Without giving away our punchline, I'll tell you that we are much more optimistic than that. There are huge upsides to Excel and while there are real dangers to using it in the BI space, there are standards and practices you can employ to ensure Excel is used responsibly. And when those practices are followed, Excel becomes quite powerful indeed. One of the keys to this is using Excel as a data consumer rather than data storage mechanism. Caching data in Excel is OK, but only if that data is (a) not modified and (b) configured for automated periodic refresh. PowerPivot meets both criteria -- it stores a read-only copy of your data in the form of a model, and once workbook containing a PowerPivot model is published to SharePoint, it can be configured for scheduled data refresh, on the server, requiring no user intervention whatsoever. Data refresh is a bit like hard drive backup: it will only happen reliably if it's automated, and super-easy to configure. PowerPivot hits a real home run here (as does Windows Home Server for PC backup, but I digress). The thing about PowerPivot is that it's an add-in for Excel 2010. What if you're not planning to go to that new version for quite a while? What if you’ve just deployed Office 2007 in your organization? What if you're still on Office 2003, or an even earlier version? What can you do immediately to share data responsibly and easily? As it turns out, there's a feature in Excel that's been around for quite a while, that can help: Web Queries.  The Web Query feature was introduced, ostensibly, to allow Excel to pull data in from Internet Web pages…for example, data in a stock quote history table will come in nicely, as will any data in a Web page that is displayed in an HTML table.  To use the feature In Excel 2007 or 2010, click the Data Tab or the ribbon and click the “From Web” button towards the left; in older versions use the corresponding option in  the menu or  toolbars.  Next, paste a URL into the resulting dialog box and tap Enter or click the Go button.  A preview of the Web page will come up, and the dialog will allow you to select the specific table within the page whose data you’d like to import.  Here’s an example: Now just click the table, click the Import button, and the Import Data dialog appears.  You can simply click OK to bring in your data or you can first click the Properties… button and configure the data import to be refreshed at an interval in minutes that you select.  Now your data’s in the spreadsheet and ready to worked with: Your data may be vulnerable to modification, but if you’ve set up the data refresh, any accidental or malicious changes will be corrected in time anyway. The thing about this feature is that it’s most useful not for public Web pages, but for pages behind the firewall.  In effect, the Web Query feature provides an incredibly easy way to consume data in Excel that’s “published” from an application.  Users just need a URL.  They don’t need to know server and database names and since the data is read-only, providing credentials may be unnecessary, or can be handled using integrated security.  If that’s not good enough, the Web Query can be saved to a special .iqy file, which can be edited to provide POST parameter data. The only requirement is that the data must be provided in an HTML table, with the first row providing the column names.  From an ASP.NET project, it couldn’t be easier: a simple bound GridView control is totally compatible.  Use a data source control with it, and you don’t even have to write any code.  Users can link to pages that are part of an application’s UI, or developers can create pages that are specially designed for the purpose of providing an interface to the Web Query import feature.  And none of this is Microsoft- or .NET-specific.  You can create pages in any language you want (PHP comes to mind) that output the result set of a query in HTML table format, and then consume that data in a Web Query.  Then build PivotTables and charts on the data, and in Excel 2007 or 2010 you can use conditional formatting to create scorecards and dashboards. This strategy allows you to create pages that function quite similarly to the OData XML feeds rendered when .NET developers create an “Astoria” WCF Data Service.  And while it’s cool that PowerPivot and Excel 2010 can import such OData feeds, it’s good to know that older versions of Excel can function in a similar fashion, and can consume data produced by virtually any Web development platform. As a final matter, instead of just telling you that “older versions” of Excel support this feature, I’ll be more specific.  To discover what the first version of Excel was to support Web queries, go to http://bit.ly/OldSchoolXL.

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• Answers to “What source control system do you use?” (and some winners)

  - by jamiet

  About a month ago I posed a question here on my blog SQL Server devs–what source control system do you use, if any? (answer and maybe win free stuff) in which I asked SQL Server developers to answer the following questions: Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? Why did you make those particular software choices? Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? I had some really great responses (I highly recommend going and reading them). I promised that the five best, most thought-provoking, responses (as determined by me) would win one of five pairs of licenses for Red Gate SQL Source Control and Red Gate SQL Connect; here are the five that I chose (note that if you responded but did not leave a means of getting in touch then you weren’t considered for one of the prizes – sorry): In general, I don't think the management overhead and licensing cost associated with TFS is worthwhile if all you're doing is using source control. To get value from TFS, at a minimum you need to be using team build, and possibly other stuff as well, such as the sharepoint integration. If that's all you need, then svn with Tortoise would be my first choice. If you want to add build automation later, you can do this with cruisecontrol (is it still called that?), JetBrains, etc. For a long time I thought that Redgate's claims about "bridging the SSMS-VS divide" were a load of hot air, since in my experience anyone who knew what they were doing was using Visual Studio, in particular SSDT and its predecessors. However, on a recent client I was putting in source control for the first time, and I discovered that the "divide" really does exist. That client has ended up using svn with Redgate SQL Source Control, with no build automation, but with scope to add it in the future. Gavin Campbell I think putting the DB under source control is a great idea.  I have issues with the earlier versions of SQL Source Control in that it provides little help in versioning the DB. I think the latest version merges SQL Compare and SQL Source Control together.  Which is how it should have been all along. Sure I have the DB scripts in SVN, but I can't automate DB builds and changes without more tools.  Frankly I'm surprised databases don't have some sort of versioning built into them. Nick Portelli Source control has been immensely useful and saved me from a lot of rework on more than one occasion.  I have learned that you have to be extremely careful checking in data.  Our system is internal only so during the system production run once a week, if there is a problem that I can fix easily(for example, a control table points to a file in the wrong environment), I'll do it directly in production so the run can continue as soon as possible since we have a specified time window.  We do full test runs to minimize this but it has come up once or twice.  We use Red-Gate source control to "push" from the test environment to the production environment.  There have been a couple of occasions where the test environment with the wrong setting was pushed back over the production environment because the change was made only in production.  Gotta keep an eye on that. Alan Dykes Goodness is it manual.  And can be extremely painful at times.  Not only are we running thin, we are constrained on the tools we can get ($$ must mean free).  Certainly no excuse, and a great opportunity to improve my skills by learning new things.  But...  Getting buy in a on a proven process or methodology is hard, takes time, and diverts us from development.  If SQL Source Control is easy to use and proven oh boy could you get some serious fans around here!  Seriously though, as the "accidental dba" of this shop any new ideas / easy to implement tools can make a world of difference in productivity and most importantly accuracy.  Manual = bad. :) John Hennesey (who left his email address) The one thing I would love to know more about is the unique challenges of working with databases as source code - you can store scripts, but are they written as deployment scripts with all the logic about how to apply them to an existing DB? Where is that baseline DB? Where's the data? How does a team share the data and the code? It's a real challenge. Merrill Aldrich Congratulations to the five of you. Red Gate will be in touch with you soon about your free licenses. Thank you to all those that responded. And again, go and check out all the responses – those above are only small proportion from what is a very interesting comment thread. @Jamiet

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• Delving into design patterns, and what that means for the Oracle user experience

  - by Kathy.Miedema

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience George Hackman, Senior Director, Applications User Experiences The Oracle Applications User Experience team has some exciting things happening around Fusion Applications design patterns. Because we’re hoping to have some new offerings soon (stay tuned with VoX to see what’s in the pipeline around Fusion Applications design patterns), now is a good time to talk more about what design patterns can do for the individual user as well as the entire company. George Hackman, Senior Director of Operations User Experience, says the first thing to note is that user experience is not just about the user interface. It’s about understanding how people do things, observing them, and then finding the patterns that emerge. The Applications UX team develops those patterns and then builds them into Oracle applications. What emerges, Hackman says, is a consistent, efficient user experience that promotes a productive workplace. Creating design patterns What is a design pattern in the context of enterprise software? “Every day, people use technology to get things done,” Hackman says. “They navigate a virtual world that reaches from enterprise to consumer apps, and from desktop to mobile. This virtual world is constantly under construction. New areas are being developed and old areas are being redone. As this world is being built and remodeled, efficient pathways and practices emerge. “Oracle's user experience team watches users navigate this world. We measure their productivity and ask them about their satisfaction. We take the most efficient, most productive pathways from the enterprise and consumer world and turn them into Oracle's user experience patterns.” Hackman describes the process as combining all of the best practices from every part of a user’s world. Members of the user experience team observe, analyze, design, prototype, and measure each work task to find the best possible pattern for a particular work flow. As the team builds the patterns, “we make sure they are fully buildable using Oracle technology,” Hackman said. “So customers know they can use these patterns. There’s no need to make something up from scratch, not knowing whether you can even build it.” Hackman says that creating something on a computer is a good example of a user experience pattern. “People are creating things all the time,” he says. “On the consumer side, they are creating documents. On the enterprise side, they are creating expense reports. On a mobile phone, they are creating contacts. They are using different apps like iPhone or Facebook or Gmail or Oracle software, all doing this creation process.” The Applications UX team starts their process by observing how people might create something. “We observe people creating things. We see the patterns, we analyze and document, then we apply them to our products. It might be different from phone to web browser, but we have these design patterns that create a consistent experience across platforms, and across products, too. The result for customers Oracle constantly improves its part of the virtual world, Hackman said. New products are created and existing products are upgraded. Because Oracle builds user experience design patterns, Oracle's virtual world becomes both more powerful and more familiar at the same time. Because of design patterns, users can navigate with ease as they embrace the latest technology – because it behaves the way they expect it to. This means less training and faster adoption for individual users, and more productivity for the business as a whole. Hackman said Oracle gives customers and partners access to design patterns so that they can build in the virtual world using the same best practices. Customers and partners can extend applications with a user experience that is comfortable and familiar to their users. For businesses that are integrating different Oracle applications, design patterns are key. The user experience created in E-Business Suite should be similar to the user experience in Fusion Applications, Hackman said. If a user is transitioning from one application to the other, it shouldn’t be difficult for them to do their work. With design patterns, it isn’t. “Oracle user experience patterns are the building blocks for the virtual world that ensure productivity, consistency and user satisfaction,” Hackman said. “They are built for the enterprise, but incorporate the best practices from across the virtual world. They empower productivity and facilitate social interaction. When you build with patterns, you get all the end-user benefits of less training / retraining from the finished product. You also get faster / cheaper development.” What’s coming? You can already access design patterns to help you build Dashboards with OBIEE here. And we promised you at the beginning that we had something in the pipeline on Fusion Applications design patterns. Look for the announcement about when they are available here on VoX.

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• Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Software as a Service (SaaS)

  - by Clint Edmonson

  The cloud was tailor built for aspiring companies to create innovative internet based applications and solutions. Whether you’re a garage startup with very little capital or a Fortune 1000 company, the ability to quickly setup, deliver, and iterate on new products is key to capturing market and mind share. And if you can capture that share and go viral, having resiliency and infinite scale at your finger tips is great peace of mind. Drivers Cost avoidance Time to market Scalability Solution Here’s a sketch of how a basic Software as a Service solution might be built out: Ingredients Web Role – this hosts the core web application. Each web role will host an instance of the software and as the user base grows, additional roles can be spun up to meet demand. Access Control – this service is essential to managing user identity. It’s backed by a full blown implementation of Active Directory and allows the definition and management of users, groups, and roles. A pre-built ASP.NET membership provider is included in the training kit to leverage this capability but it’s also flexible enough to be combined with external Identity providers including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The provider model provides extensibility to hook into other industry specific identity providers as well. Databases – nearly every modern SaaS application is backed by a relational database for its core operational data. If the solution is sold to organizations, there’s a good chance multi-tenancy will be needed. An emerging best practice for SaaS applications is to stand up separate SQL Azure database instances for each tenant’s proprietary data to ensure isolation from other tenants. Worker Role – this is the best place to handle autonomous background processing such as data aggregation, billing through external services, and other specialized tasks that can be performed asynchronously. Placing these tasks in a worker role frees the web roles to focus completely on user interaction and data input and provides finer grained control over the system’s scalability and throughput. Caching (optional) – as a web site traffic grows caching can be leveraged to keep frequently used read-only, user specific, and application resource data in a high-speed distributed in-memory for faster response times and ultimately higher scalability without spinning up more web and worker roles. It includes a token based security model that works alongside the Access Control service. Blobs (optional) – depending on the nature of the software, users may be creating or uploading large volumes of heterogeneous data such as documents or rich media. Blob storage provides a scalable, resilient way to store terabytes of user data. The storage facilities can also integrate with the Access Control service to ensure users’ data is delivered securely. Training & Examples These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and examples where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Developing Applications for the Cloud, 2nd Edition (eBook) This book demonstrates how you can create from scratch a multi-tenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud using the latest versions of the Windows Azure Platform and tools. The book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud. Fabrikam Shipping (SaaS reference application) This is a full end to end sample scenario which demonstrates how to use the Windows Azure platform for exposing an application as a service. We developed this demo just as you would: we had an existing on-premises sample, Fabrikam Shipping, and we wanted to see what it would take to transform it in a full subscription based solution. The demo you find here is the result of that investigation See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including more links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing, and what does that have to do with ERP?

  - by user709270

  Tier One Defined By Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle JD Edwards Group Vice President and General Manager  I recently became aware of the latest Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing tactic. Wait now, what is Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing and what does that have to do with ERP? Well if you grew up in USA during the 50’s, 60’s and maybe a bit in the early 70’s there was a unifying media of culture known as the comic book. I was a big Iron Man fan. I always liked the troubled hero aspect of Tony Start and hey he was a technologist. This is going somewhere, just hold on. Of course comic books like most media contained advertisements. Ninety pound weakling transformed by Charles Atlas in just 15 minutes per day. Baby Ruth, Juicy Fruit Gum and all assortments of Hostess goodies were on display. The best ad was for the “Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys – The real live fun-pets you grow yourself!” These ads set the standard for exaggeration and half-truth; “…they love attention…so eager to please, they can even be trained…” The cartoon picture on the ad is of a family of royal looking sea creatures – daddy, mommy, son and little sis – sea monkey? There was a disclaimer at the bottom in fine print, “Caricatures shown not intended to depict Artemia.” Ok what ten years old knows what the heck artemia is? Well you grow up fast once you’ve been separated from your buck twenty five plus postage just to discover that it is brine shrimp. Really dumb brine shrimp that don’t take commands or do tricks. Unfortunately the technology industry is full of sea monkey sales and marketing. Yes believe it or not in some cases there is subterfuge and obfuscation used to secure contracts. Hey I get it; the picture on the box might not be the actual size. Make up what you want about your product, but here is what I don’t like, could you leave out the obvious falsity when it comes to my product, especially the negative stuff. So here is the latest one – “Oracle’s JD Edwards is NOT tier one”. Really? Definition please! Well a whole host of googleable and reputable sources confirm that a tier one vendor is large, well known, and enjoys national and international recognition. Let me see large, so thousands of customers? Oh and part of the world’s largest business software and hardware corporation? Check and check JD Edwards has that and that. Well known, enjoying national and international recognition? Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is available in 21 languages and is directly localized in 33 countries that support some of the world’s largest multinationals and many midsized domestic market companies. Something on the order of half the JD Edwards customer base is outside North America. My passport is on its third insert after 2 years and not from vacations. So if you don’t mind I am going to mark national and international recognition in the got it column. So what else is there? Well let me offer a few criteria. Longevity – The JD Edwards products benefit from 35+ years of intellectual property development; through booms, busts, mergers and acquisitions, we are still here Vision & innovation – JD Edwards is the first full suite ERP to run on the iPad as just one example Proven track record of execution – Since becoming part of Oracle, JD Edwards has released to the market over 20 deliverables including major release, point releases, new apps modules, tool releases, integrations…. Solid, focused functionality with a flexible, interoperable, extensible underlying architecture – JD Edwards offers solid core ERP with specialty modules for verticals all delivered on a well defined independent tools layer that helps enable you to scale your business without an ERP reimplementation A continuation plan – Oracle’s JD Edwards offers our customers a 6 year roadmap as well as interoperability with Oracle’s next generation of applications Oh I almost forgot that the expert sources agree on one additional thing, tier one may be a preferred vendor that offers product and services to you with appealing value. You should check out the TCO studies of JD Edwards. I think you will see what the thousands of customers that rely on these products to run their businesses enjoy – that is the tier one solution with the lowest TCO. Oh and if you get an offer to buy an ERP for no license charge, remember the picture on the box might not be the actual size. 

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• Top Reasons You Need A User Engagement Platform

  - by Michael Snow

  Guest post by: Amit Sircar, Senior Sales Consultant, Oracle Deliver complex enterprise functionality through a simple intuitive and unified User Interface (UI) The modern enterprise contains a wide range of applications that are used to manage the business and drive competitive advantages. Organizations respond by creating a complex structure that results in a functional and management grouping of users. Each of these groups of users requires access to multiple applications and information sources in order to perform their job functions. This leads to the lack of a unified view of enterprise information, inconsistent user interfaces and disjointed security. To be effective, portals must be designed from the end-user perspective, enabling the user to accomplish as many tasks as possible while visiting the fewest number of portals. This requires rethinking the way that portals are built, moving from a functional business unit perspective to a user-focused, process-oriented point of view. Oracle WebCenter provides the Common User Experience Architecture that allows organizations to seamlessly present a unified view of enterprise information tailored to a particular user’s role and preferences. This architecture provides the best practices, design patterns and delivery mechanism for myriad services, applications, and data sources.  In order to serve as a primary system of access, Oracle WebCenter also provides access to unstructured content and to other users via integrated search, service-oriented artifacts, content management, and collaboration tools. Provide a modern and engaging experience without modifying the core business application Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums or social media sites are having a profound impact in the public internet.  These technologies can be leveraged by enterprises to add significant value to the business. Organizations need to integrate these technologies directly into their business applications while continuing to meet their security and governance needs. To deliver richer connections and become a more agile and intelligent business, WebCenter provides an enterprise portal platform that contains pre-integrated, standards-based Enterprise 2.0 services. These Enterprise 2.0 services can be easily accessed, integrated and utilized by users. By giving users the ability to use and integrate Enterprise 2.0 services such as tags, links, wikis, activities, blogs or social networking directly with their portals and applications, they are empowered to make richer connections, optimize their productivity, and ultimately increase the value of their applications. Foster a collaborative experience The organizational workplace has undergone a major change in the last decade. With increasing globalization and a distributed workforce, project teams may be physically separated by large distances. Online collaboration technologies are becoming a critical resource to enable virtual teams to share information and work together effectively. Oracle WebCenter delivers dynamic business communities with rich Services to empower teams to quickly and efficiently manage their information, applications, projects, and people without requiring IT assistance. It brings together the latest technology around Enterprise 2.0 and social computing, communities, personal productivity, and ad-hoc team interactions without any development effort. It enables the sharing and collaboration on team content, focusing an organization’s valuable resources on solving business problems, tapping into new ideas, and reducing time-to-market. Mobile Support The traditional workplace dynamics that required employees to access their work applications from their desktops have undergone a fundamental shift. Employees were used to primarily working from company offices and utilized an IT-issued computer for performing their job functions. With the introduction of flexible work hours and the growth of remote workers, more and more employees need the ability to remain productive even when they do not have access to a computer via the use of tablets and smartphones.  In addition, customers and citizens have come to expect 24x7 access to resources and websites from wherever they are located. Tablets and smartphones have empowered everyone to quickly access services they need anytime and from any place.  WebCenter provides out of the box capabilities to deliver the mobile experience in a seamless manner. Seeded device profiles and toolkits within WebCenter can be used to render the same web pages into multiple target devices such iPads, iPhones and android devices. Web designers can preview the portal using the built in simulator, make necessary updates and then deploy their UI design for the targeted device. Conclusion The competitive economy and resource constraints facing organizations today require them to find ways to make their applications, portals and Web sites more agile and intelligent and their knowledge workers more productive no matter where they are located. Organizations need to provide faster access to relevant information and resources, enhance existing applications and business processes with rich Enterprise 2.0 services, and seamlessly deliver content to mobile platforms. Oracle WebCenter successfully meets these challenges by providing the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web.

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• Reflections on GiveCamp

  - by Reed

  I participated in the Seattle GiveCamp over the weekend, and am entirely impressed.  GiveCamp is a great event – I especially like how rewarding it is for everybody involved.  I strongly encourage any and all developers to watch for future GiveCamp events, and consider participating, for many reasons… GiveCamp provides real value to organizations that truly need help.  The Seattle event alone succeeded in helping sixteen non-profit organizations in many different ways.  The projects involved varied dramatically, including website redesigns, SEO, reworking data management workflows, and even game development.  Many non-profits have a strong need for good, quality technical help.  However, nearly every non-profit organization has an incredibly limited budget.  GiveCamp is a way to really give back, and provide incredibly valuable help to organizations that truly benefit. My experience has shown many developers to be incredibly generous – this is a chance to dedicate your energy to helping others in a way that really takes advantage of your expertise.  Your time as a developer is incredibly valuable, and this puts something of incredible value directly into the hands of places its needed. First, and foremost, GiveCamp is about providing technical help to non-profit organizations in need. GiveCamp can make you a better developer.  This is a fantastic opportunity for us, as developers, to work with new people, in a new setting.  The incredibly short time frame (one weekend for a deliverable project) and intense motivation to succeed provides a huge opportunity for learning from peers.  I’d personally like to thank off the developers with whom I worked – I learned something from each and every one of you.  I hope to see and work with all of you again someday. GiveCamp provides an opportunity for you to work outside of your comfort zone. While it’s always nice to be an expert, it’s also valuable to work on a project where you have little or no direct experience.  My team focused on a complete reworking of our organizations message and a complete new website redesign and deployment using WordPress.  While I’d used WordPress for my blog, and had some experience, this is completely unrelated to my professional work.  In fact, nobody on our team normally worked directly with the technologies involved – yet together we managed to succeed in delivering our goals.  As developers, it’s easy to want to stay abreast of new technology surrounding our expertise, but its rare that we get a chance to sit down and work on something practical that is completely outside of our normal realm of work.  I’m a desktop developer by trade, and spent much of the weekend working with CSS and Photoshop.  Many of the projects organizations need don’t match perfectly with the skill set in the room – yet all of the software professionals rose to the occasion and delivered practical, usable applications. GiveCamp is a short term, known commitment. While this seems obvious, I think it’s an important aspect to remember.  This is a huge part of what makes it successful – you can work, completely focused, on a project, then walk away completely when you’re done.  There is no expectation of continued involvement.  While many of the professionals I’ve talked to are willing to contribute some amount of their time beyond the camp, this is not expected. The freedom this provides is immense.  In addition, the motivation this brings is incredibly valuable.  Every developer in the room was very focused on delivering in time – you have one shot to get it as good as possible, and leave it with the organization in a way that can be maintained by them.  This is a rare experience – and excellent practice at time management for everyone involved. GiveCamp provides a great way to meet and network with your peers. Not only do you get to network with other software professionals in your area – you get to network with amazing people.  Every single person in the room is there to try to help people.  The balance of altruism, intelligence, and expertise in the room is something I’ve never before experienced. During the presentations of what was accomplished, I felt blessed to participate.  I know many people in the room were incredibly touched by the level of dedication and accomplishment over the weekend. GiveCamp is fun. At the end of the experience, I would have signed up again, even if it was a painful, tedious weekend – merely due to the amazing accomplishments achieved throughout the event.  However, the event is fun.  Everybody I talked to, the entire weekend, was having a good time.  While there were many faces focused into a near grimace at times (including mine, I’ll admit), this was always in response to a particularly challenging problem or task.  The challenges just added to the overall enjoyment of the weekend – part of why I became a developer in the first place is my love for challenge and puzzles, and a short deadline using unfamiliar technology provided plenty of opportunity for puzzles.  As soon as people would stand up, it was another smile.   If you’re a developer, I’d recommend looking at GiveCamp more closely.  Watch for an event in your area.  If there isn’t one, consider building a team and organizing an event.  The experience is worth the commitment. 

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