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• CRM@Oracle Series: CRM Analytics

  - by tony.berk

  What is the most important factor that leads to a successful CRM deployment? Is it the overall strategy, strong governance, defined processes or good data quality? Well, it's definitely a combination of all these, but the most important differentiator from our experience is Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence or Analytics is commonly mentioned as a key aspect to successful CRM and other enterprise deployments. The good news is that Oracle provides pre-built analytics dashboards, which provide real-time, actionable insight, and tools to build custom analyses. However, success with analytics, especially in a large enterprise, still requires a strong strategy, clean data for analysis, and performance. Today's CRM@Oracle slidecast covers Oracle's strategy, architecture and key success factors for deploying CRM Analytics internally at Oracle. CRM@Oracle: CRM Analytics Click here to learn more about Oracle CRM products and here to learn about Oracle Business Intelligence Applications. Have you read our other postings in the CRM@Oracle Series? If you have a particular CRM area or function which you'd like to hear how Oracle implemented it internally, post a comment and we'll get it on our list.

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• Declarative programming vs. Imperative programming

  - by EpsilonVector

  I feel very comfortable with Imperative programming. I never have trouble expressing algorithmically what I want the computer to do once I figured out what is it that I want it to do. But when it comes to languages like SQL or Relational Algebra I often get stuck because my head is too used to Imperative programming. For example, suppose you have the relations band(bandName, bandCountry), venue(venueName, venueCountry), plays(bandName, venueName), and I want to write a query that says: all venueNames such that for every bandCountry there's a band from that country that plays in venue of that name. In my mind I immediately go "for each venueName iterate over all the bandCountries and for each bandCountry get the list of bands that come from it. If none of them play in venueName, go to next venueName. Else, at the end of the bandCountries iteration add venueName to the set of good venueNames". ...but you can't talk like that in SQL and I actually need to think about how to formulate this, with the intuitive Imperative solution constantly nagging in the back of my head. Did anybody else had this problem? How did you overcome this? Did you figured out a paradigm shift? Made a map from Imperative concepts to SQL concepts to translate Imperative solutions into Declarative ones? Read a good book? PS I'm not looking for a solution to the above query, I did solve it.

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• Cool SQL formatter tool

  - by AndyScott

  I have to deal with all types of code that was written by people from different organizations, different countries, using different languages, obviously standards are different across these sources.  One of the biggest headaches that I ahve come across is how people differ in the formatting of their SQL statements, specifically stored procs.  When you regularly get over 500 lines in a sproc, if the code is not formatted correctly, you can get lost trying to figure out where one nested BEGIN begins, and another nested END ends.  One of my co-workers showed me this site today that does a pretty damn good job of making sense of that type of code: http://www.dpriver.com/pp/sqlformat.htm.   This is a free website that offers a box to enter your nasty code, and click "Format SQL" and have it clean it for you.  I am sure that there are situations where this may not work, but given the code that I have been working with recently, it does a really good job.  There is a pay version with more options, including VS add-in, desktop component (with quickkeys to clean text in programs like notepad), the ability to output in HTML, and other stuff.  Heck, I watched a demo where the purchased version will take formatted SQL code and turn it into a generic Stringbuilder object embedded in a formatted. Yes, this seems like a shameless plug, but no, I have no relation/knowledge of anyone involved in the development of this product, it just seems useful.  Either way, I recommend checking out the free version.

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• Keyboard input system handling

  - by The Communist Duck

  Note: I have to poll, rather than do callbacks because of API limitations (SFML). I also apologize for the lack of a 'decent' title. I think I have two questions here; how to register the input I'm receiving, and what to do with it. Handling Input I'm talking about after the fact you've registered that the 'A' key has been pressed, for example, and how to do it from there. I've seen an array of the whole keyboard, something like: bool keyboard[256]; //And each input loop check the state of every key on the keyboard But this seems inefficient. Not only are you coupling the key 'A' to 'player moving left', for example, but it checks every key, 30-60 times a second. I then tried another system which just looked for keys it wanted. std::map< unsigned char, Key keyMap; //Key stores the keycode, and whether it's been pressed. Then, I declare a load of const unsigned char called 'Quit' or 'PlayerLeft'. input-BindKey(Keys::PlayerLeft, KeyCode::A); //so now you can check if PlayerLeft, rather than if A. However, the problem with this is I cannot now type a name, for example, without having to bind every single key. Then, I have the second problem, which I cannot really think of a good solution for: Sending Input I now know that the A key has been pressed or that playerLeft is true. But how do I go from here? I thought about just checking if(input-IsKeyDown(Key::PlayerLeft) { player.MoveLeft(); } This couples the input greatly to the entities, and I find it rather messy. I'd prefer the player to handle its own movement when it gets updated. I thought some kind of event system could work, but I do not know how to go with it. (I heard signals and slots was good for this kind of work, but it's apparently very slow and I cannot see how it'd fit). Thanks.

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• How do I manage the technical debate over WCF vs. Web API?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  I'm managing a team of like 15 developers now, and we are stuck at a point on choosing the technology, where the team is broken into two completely opposite teams, debating over usage of WCF vs. Web API. Team A which supports usage of Web API, brings forward these reasons: Web API is just the modern way of writing services (Wikipedia) WCF is an overhead for HTTP. It's a solution for TCP, and Net Pipes, and other protocols WCF models are not POCO, because of [DataContract] & [DataMember] and those attributes SOAP is not as readable and handy as JSON SOAP is an overhead for network compared to JSON (transport over HTTP) No method overloading Team B which supports the usage of WCF, says: WCF supports multiple protocols (via configuration) WCF supports distributed transactions Many good examples and success stories exist for WCF (while Web API is still young) Duplex is excellent for two-way communication This debate is continuing, and I don't know what to do now. Personally, I think that we should use a tool only for its right place of usage. In other words, we'd better use Web API, if we want to expose a service over HTTP, but use WCF when it comes to TCP and Duplex. By searching the Internet, we can't get to a solid result. Many posts exist for supporting WCF, but on the contrary we also find people complaint about it. I know that the nature of this question might sound arguable, but we need some good hints to decide. We're stuck at a point where choosing a technology by chance might make us regret it later. We want to choose with open eyes. Our usage would be mostly for web, and we would expose our services over HTTP. In some cases (say 5 to 10 percent) we might need distributed transactions though. What should I do now? How do I manage this debate in a constructive way?

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• Dutch ACEs SOA Partner Community Award Celebration

  - by JuergenKress

  When you win you need to celebrate. This was the line of thinking when I found out that I was part of a group that won the Oracle SOA Community Country Award. Well – thinking about a party is one thing, preparing it and finally having the small party is something completely different. It starts with finding a date that would be suitable for the majority of invited people. As you can imagine the SOA ACEs and ACE Directors have a busy life, that takes them places. Alongside that they are engaged with customers who want to squeeze every bit of knowledge out of them. So everybody is pretty busy (that’s what makes you an ACE). After some deliberation (and checks of international Oracle events, Trip-it, blogs and tweets) a date was chosen. Meeting on a Friday evening for some drinks is probably not a Dutch-only activity. But as some of the ACEs are self-employed they miss the companies around them to organize such events. Come the day a turn-out of almost 50% was great – although I expected some more folks . This was mainly due to some illness and work overload. Luckily the mini-party got going, (alcoholic) beverages were consumed, food was appreciated, a decent picture was made (see below) and all had a good chat and hopefully a good time. (Above from left to right: Eric Elzinga, Andreas Chatziantoniou, Mike van Aalst, Edwin Biemond) All in all a nice evening and certainly a "meeting" which can be repeated.  For the full article please visit Andreas's blog Want to organize a local SOA & BPM community? Let us know we are more than happy to support you! To receive more information become a member of the SOA & BPM Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Eric Elzinga,Andreas Chatziantoniou,Mike van Aalst,Edwin Biemond,Dutsch SOA Community,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress,ACE

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• What happened to Alan Cooper's Unified File Model?

  - by PAUL Mansour

  For a long time Alan Cooper (in the 3 versions of his book "About Face") has been promoting a "unified file model" to, among other things, dispense with what he calls the most idiotic message box ever invented - the one the pops up when hit the close button on an app or form saying "Do you want to discard your changes?" I like the idea and his arguments, but also have the knee-jerk reaction against it that most seasoned programmers and users have. While Cooper's book seems quite popular and respected, there is remarkably little discussion of this particular issue on the Web that I can find. Petter Hesselberg, the author of "Programming Industrial Strength Windows" mentions it but that seems about it. I have an opportunity to implement this in the (desktop) project I am working on, but face resistance by customers and co-workers, who are of course familiar with the MS Word and Excel way of doing things. I'm in a position to override their objections, but am not sure if I should. My questions are: Are there any good discussions of this that I have failed to find? Is anyone doing this in their apps? Is it a good idea that it is unfortunately not practical to implement until, say, Microsoft does it?

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• How much system and business analysis should a programmer be reasonably expected to do?

  - by Rahul

  In most places I have worked for, there were no formal System or Business Analysts and the programmers were expected to perform both the roles. One had to understand all the subsystems and their interdependencies inside out. Further, one was also supposed to have a thorough knowledge of the business logic of the applications and interact directly with the users to gather requirements, answer their queries etc. In my current job, for ex, I spend about 70% time doing system analysis and only 30% time programming. I consider myself a good programmer but struggle with developing a good understanding of the business rules of a complex application. Often, this creates a handicap because while I can write efficient algorithms and thread-safe code, I lose out to guys who may be average programmers but have a much better understanding of the business processes. So I want to know - How much business and systems knowledge should a programmer have ? - How does one go about getting this knowledge in an immensely complex software system (e.g. trading applications) with several interdependent business processes but poorly documented business rules.

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• Python or Ruby for freelance?

  - by Sophia

  Hello, I'm Sophia. I have an interest in self-learning either Python, or Ruby. The primary reason for my interest is to make my life more stable by having freelance work = $. It seems that programming offers a way for me to escape my condition of poverty (I'm on the edge of homelessness right now) while at the same time making it possible for me to go to uni. I intend on being a math/philosophy major. I have messed with Python a little bit in the past, but it didn't click super well. The people who say I should choose Python say as much because it is considered a good first language/teaching language, and that it is general-purpose. The people who say I should choose Ruby point out that I'm a very right-brained thinker, and having multiple ways to do something will make it much easier for me to write good code. So, basically, I'm starting this thread as a dialog with people who know more than I do, as an attempt to make the decision. :-) I've thought about asking this in stackoverflow, but they're much more strict about closing threads than here, and I'm sort of worried my thread will be closed. :/ TL;DR Python or Ruby for freelance work opportunities ($) as a first language? Additional question (if anyone cares to answer): I have a personal feeling that if I devote myself to learning, I'd be worth hiring for a project in about 8 weeks of work. I base this on a conservative estimate of my intellectual capacities, as well as possessing motivation to improve my life. Is my estimate necessarily inaccurate? random tidbit: I'm in Portland, OR I'll answer questions that are asked of me, if I can help the accuracy and insight contained within the dialog.

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• Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, now available for download

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for general download for almost a week now.  The Beta of SP1 came couple of months back and it did a lot of performance enhancements, added support for HTML5 tags and few other stuff related to web development.  Now, the final release of SP1 is available.  The good part is that, if you had installed the SP1 beta, you don’t have to remove the Beta and start all over again.  You can apply the final release on top of the Beta and it works like a charm. So, in simplified terms, what is new in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Before I start listing it down, I was checking if there was an MSDN article available on this and found http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg442059.aspx  While it reads (Beta), the same holds good for the release candidate as well.  Unlike VS 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 (which came together), this release doesn’t add any new project templates/item templates. However, there are lot of enhancements related to Web Deployment, Debugging and Unit Testing for .NET 3.5 applications. So, how does one find if you are running the correct version of SP1 final release. While the SP1 Beta (Help – About Visual Studio) reads Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Version 10.0.3118.1 SP1 Rel, once you install the SP1 RTM release, it should read as below The download link for SP1 Beta is here Cheers!!!

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• DC Comics Identifies Krypton on the Star Map

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This week Action Comics Superman #14 hits the stands and DC comics reveals the actual location of Kyrpton, delivered by none other than beloved astrophysicist Neil Tyson. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy reports on the resolution of fans’ long standing curiosity about the location of Krypton: Well, that’s about to change. DC comics is releasing a new book this week – Action Comics Superman #14 – that finally reveals the answer to this stellar question. And they picked a special guest to reveal it: my old friend Neil Tyson. Actually, Neil did more than just appear in the comic: he was approached by DC to find a good star to fit the story. Red supergiants don’t work; they explode as supernovae when they are too young to have an advanced civilization rise on any orbiting planets. Red giants aren’t a great fit either; they can be old, but none is at the right distance to match the storyline. It would have to be a red dwarf: there are lots of them, they can be very old, and some are close enough to fit the plot. I won’t keep you in suspense: the star is LHS 2520, a red dwarf in the southern constellation of Corvus (at the center of the picture here). It’s an M3.5 dwarf, meaning it has about a quarter of the Sun’s mass, a third its diameter, roughly half the Sun’s temperature, and a luminosity of a mere 1% of our Sun’s. It’s only 27 light years away – very close on the scale of the galaxy – but such a dim bulb you need a telescope to see it at all (for any astronomers out there, the coordinates are RA: 12h 10m 5.77s, Dec: -15° 4m 17.9 s). 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• Receiving an MVP Award and Credibility

  - by Joe Mayo

  The post titled, The Problem with MVPs, by Steve Barbour was interesting because it makes you think about the thousands of MVPs around the world and what their value really is. Having been the recipient of multiple MVP awards, it’s an opportunity to reflect and judge my own performance. This is not a dangerous thing to do, but quite the opposite. If a person believes in self improvement, then critical analysis is an important part of that process. A lot of MVPs will tell you that they would be doing the same thing, regardless of whether they were an MVP or not; helping others in the community, which is also where I prefer to hang my hat. I’ve never defined myself as an expert and never will; this determination is left to others. In fact, let me just come out and say it, “I don’t know everything”. Shocked? Sometimes the gap between expectations and reality extends beyond a reasonable measure. Being labeled as a technical expert feels good for one's self esteem and is certainly a useful motivational technique. A problem can emerge though when an individual believes, too much, in what they are told. The problem is not with a pat on the back, but with a person does with the positive reinforcement. Is narcissism too strong a word? How often have you been in a public forum reading a demeaning response to a question that only serves in attempt to raise the stature of the person providing the response? Such behavior compromises one’s credibility, raises questions about validity of the MVP award, and is limited in community value. I’m currently under consideration for another MVP award on April 1st. If it happens, it will be good. Otherwise, I’ll keep writing articles, coding open source software, and whatever else I enjoy doing; with the best reward being that people find value in what I do. Joe

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• BizTalk: mapping with Xslt

  - by Leonid Ganeline

  BizTalk Map Editor (Mapper) is a good editor, especially in the last 2010 version of the BizTalk. But still sometimes it cannot do the tasks easily. It is time for the Xslt code, It is time to remember that the maps are executed by the Xslt engine.  Right-click the Mapper Grid (a field between the source and target schemas) and choose Properties /Custom XSLT Path.  Input here a name of the file with Xslt code. Only this code will be executed, forget the picture in the Mapper, all those links and functoids.  Let’s see the real-life example. There are two source Addresses. One is on the top level and the second is inside the Member_Address record with MaxOccurs=* . The target address is placed inside the Locator record with MaxOccurs=*. The requirement is to map all source address to the one target address structure. The source Xml document looks like: The result Xml should be like this: Try to do this mapping with the Mapper and you will spent good amount of time and the result map would be tricky. If we use the Xslt code, the mapping will be simple and unambiguous, like this: Simple, elegant.

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• Two Copies of Pete Brown's "Silverlight 5 In Action" to Give Away

  - by Dave Campbell

  Yes... you read that correctly... I have two copies of Pete Brown's excellent book "Silverlight 5 In Action" to give away... if you're not familiar with Pete's book, here is a short synopsis for a large book: Silverlight 5 in Action teaches you how to build desktop-quality applications you can deploy on the web. Beginners will appreciate the progression from simple examples to full applications that employ good design and coding practices. Seasoned . NET developers will love how the sample code embraces and extends what they already know. As with other give-aways I've done on my blog, rather than me trying to pick the most worthy 2 people of all submittals, what I'm going to do is randomly select 2 entries from those that are submitted. Email address for Submittals I have a special email address for submittals: mailto:[email protected]?Subject=Giveaway. Deadline for Submittals I will take submittals dated from the time this post hits until midnight Sunday night, June 17, 2012 - Arizona time. That means sometime Monday morning June 18th, I will announce the winners. Send in an email and good luck... it's a great book! But wait, there's more! If you don't want to wait until next Tuesday to get into Pete's book, or you don't figure you're that lucky to get one of the two I'm giving away, I also have a 39% off discount code for "Silverlight 5 In Action" if used at Manning.com!! Just order your book online, and use the discount code 12s5sc and you'll get the book on it's way immediately. Either way you go... you won't be disappointed. I've been reading this as it goes and it is a treasure-trove of information. Grab your copy, and Stay in the 'Light!

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• mpirun -np N, what if N is larger than my core number?

  - by Daniel

  Say I have a 4-core workstation, what would linux (Ubuntu) do if I execute mpirun -np 9 XXX Q1. Will 9 run immediately together, or they will run 4 after 4? Q2. I suppose that using 9 is not good, because the remainder 1, it will make the computer confused, (I don't know is it going to be confused at all, or the "head" of the computer will decide which core among the 4 cores will be used?) Or it will be randomly picked. Who decide which one core to call? Q3. If I feel my cpu is not bad and my ram is okay and large enough, and my case is not very big. Is it a good idea in order to fully use my cpu and ram, that I do mpirun -np 8 XXX, or even mpirun -np 12 XXX. Q4. Who decides all of these effciency optimization, Ubuntu, or linux, or motherboard or cpu? Your enlightenment would be really appreciated.

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• ASP.NET developers turning to Visual WebGui for rich management system

  - by Webgui

  When The Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) decided they needed a web application to allow easy access to the expenses management system they initially went to ASP.NET web forms combined with CSS. The outcome, however, was not satisfying enough as it appeared bland and lacked in richness. So in order to enrich the UI and give the web application some glitz, Visual WebGui was selected. Visual WebGui provided the needed richness and the familiar Windows look and feel also made the transition for the desktop users very easy. The richer GUI of Visual WebGui compared to ASP.NET conveyed some initial concerns about performance. But the Visual WebGui performance turned out to be a surprising advantage as the website maintained good response times. Working with Visual WebGui required a paradigm shift for the development process as some of the usual methods of coding with ASP.NET did not apply. However, the transition was fairly easy due to the simplicity and intuitiveness of Visual WebGui as well as the good support and documentation. “The shift into a different development paradigm was eased by the Visual WebGui web forums which are very active thanks to a large, involved community. There are also several video and web pages dedicated to answering the most commonly asked questions and pitfalls" Dave Bhatia, Systems Engineer who added "A couple of issues such as deploying on IIS7 seemed to be show stoppers at first, however the solution was readily available in a white paper on the Gizmox website.” The full story is found on the Visual WebGui website: http://www.visualwebgui.com/Gizmox/Resources/CaseStudies/tabid/358/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/964/The-Center-for-Organ-Recovery-Education-gets-a-web-based-expenses-management-system.aspx

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• Is it possible for beginner to learn and develop an application in rails in 4 months?

  - by Parth

  I want to develop a web application or a website using rails. My current knowledge includes 1. HTML 2. CSS 3. C 4. Java And I am currently going through 5th chapter of the well grounded rubyist book by David A. Thomas. I came to know that learning ruby is beneficial for good knowledge of rails. So currently I am going through the basics of ruby. And learning rails in parallel. I want to know if in this scenario is it practically feasible to understand rails and develop an application/website in it within the time frame of 4 months. I need to develop an application which have atleast 3 complexity (complex functionality). Any ideas of good application for rails beginners is welcomed. But the application should be large or if it is small than it should have some complexity. Time is a constraint for me. I would have to develop application for college work but rails technology is my choice as I want to learn it.

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• Visual web page designer for Django?

  - by Robert Oschler

  I'm just starting my Django learning so pardon me if any part of this question is off-base. I have done a lot of web searching for information on the equivalent of a visual web page designer for Django and I don't seem to be getting very far. I have experience with Delphi (Object Pascal), C, C++, Python, PHP, Java, and Javascript and have created and maintained several web sites that included MySQL database dependent content. For the longest time I've been using one of the standard WYSIWIG designers to design the actual web pages, with any needed back end programming done via Forms or AJAX calls that call server side PHP scripts. I have grown tired of the quirks, bugs, and other annoyances associated with the program. Also, I find myself hungry for the functionality and reliability a good MVC based framework would provide me so I could really express myself with custom code easily. So I am turning to Django/Python. However, I'm still a junkie for a good WYSIWIG designer for the layout of web pages. I know there are some out there that thrive on opening up a text editor, possibly with some code editor tools to assist, and pounding out pages. But I do adore a drag and drop editor for simple page layout, especially for things like embedded images, tables, buttons, etc. I found a few open source projects on GitHub but they seem to be focused on HTML web forms, not a generic web page editor. So can I get what I want here? The supreme goal would be to find not only a web page editor that creates Django compatible web pages, but if I dare say it, have a design editor that could add Python code stubs to various page elements in the style of the Delph/VCL or VB design editors. Note, I also have the Wing IDE Professional IDE, version 2.0. As a side note, if you know of any really cool, fun, or time-saving Python libraries that are designed for easy integration into Django please tell me about them. -- roschler

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• How to Best Optimize up Model Transforms, Import 3DS Animations Into XNA 4.0?

  - by Jason R. Mick

  Relative beginner to XNA, but trying to build a multi-purpose (3D) game frameworking in XNA 4. Been using the Reed (O'Reilly) and Cawood/McGee (McGraw Hill) guides. My question is multi-faceted and involves how to most efficiently handle models. I'm using 3DS Max 2010 with kw-Xport to ship out my models as .X files. Solved an early problem by using my depth stencil state. My models are now loading properly (yay!) and I have basic bounding working, I just want to optimize transforming models and get animations working as a next step. My questions on models are: 1. Do you have any suggestions for good resources on exporting 3DS animations to XNA? I've seen some resources on how to handle animations in XNA, but most skimp on basic topics of how to convert multi-animation 3DS files. For example how do I take one big long string of keyframed animations (say running, frame 5-20, climbing frames 25-45, etc.) and turned them into named XNA animations. To my understanding every XNA animation has to have a name, but I haven't seen any tutorials on creating a new named animation from a subset of frames. 2. Is it faster to load a model once and animate/transform that base model on the fly @ draw time, or to load multiple models? My game will have multiple enemies, and I've already seen some lagginess in XNA, so II want to make my code efficient... 3. I've heard people on app hub talking about making custom content processors for models-- what is the benefit of this? Does it speed up transforming or animating the models? If so, can you point me towards any good (model-centric) tutorials? (I've built a custom height map content processor to generate terrain, following Cawood's examples, I'm just a bit confused as to how a model content processor would be implemented.)

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• Ajax application: using SOAP vs REST ?

  - by coder

  I'm building an ajax heavy application (client-side strictly html/css/js) which will be getting all the data and using server business logic via webservices. I know REST seems to be the hot topic but I can't find any good arguments. The main argument seems to be its "light-weight". My impression so far is that wsdl/soap based services are more expressive and allow for more a more complex transfer of data. It appears that soap would be more useful in the application I'm building where the only code consuming the services will be the js downloaded in the client browser. REST on the other hand seems to have a smaller entry barrier and so can be more useful for services like twitter in allowing other developers to consume these services easily. Also, REST seems to Te better suited for simple data transfers. So in summary SOAP is useful for complex data transfer and REST is useful in simple data transfer. I'm currently under the impression that using SOAP would be best due to the complexity of the messages but perhaps there's other factors. What are your thoughts on the pros/cons of soap/rest for a heavy ajax web app? EDIT: While the wsdl is in xml, the data I'm transferring back and forth is actually in JSON. It just appears more natural to use wsdl/soap here due to the nature of the app. The verbs GET and POST may not be enough. I may want to say something like: processQueue, or executeTimer. This is why my conclusion has been wsdl/soap would be good for bridging a complex layer between two applications (client and server) whereas REST would be better (due to its simplicity) for allowing many developer-users to consume resources programmatically. So you could say the choice falls along two lines Will the app be verb-oriented (completing tasks: use soap) or noun-oriented (consuming resources: use REST) Will the api be consumed by few developers or many developers (REST is strong for many developers)? Since such an ajax heavy app would potentially use many verbs and would only be used by the client developer it appears soap/wsdl would be the best fit.

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• NetBeans Sources as a Platform

  - by Geertjan

  By default, when you create a new NetBeans module, the 'development IDE' is the platform to which you'll be deploying your module. It's a good idea to create your own platform and check that into your own repo, so that everyone working on your project will be able to work with a standardized platform, rather than whatever happens to be beneath the development IDE your using. Something else you can do is use the NetBeans sources as your platform, once you've checked them out. That's something I did the other day when trying to see whether adding 'setActivatedNodes' to NbSheet was sufficient for getting UndoRedo enabled in the Properties Window. So that's a good use case, i.e., you'd like to change the NetBeans Platform somehow, or you're fixing a bug, in other words, in some way you need to change the NetBeans Platform sources and then would like to try out the result of your changes as a client of your changes. In that scenario, here's how to set up and use a NetBeans Platform from the NetBeans sources. Run 'ant build platform' on the root of the NetBeans sources. You'll end up with nbbuild/netbeans containing a subfolder 'platform' and a subfolder 'harness'. There's your NetBeans Platform. Go to Tools | NetBeans Platform and browse to nbbuild/netbeans', registering it as your NetBeans Platform. Create a new NetBeans module, using the new NetBeans Platform as the platform. Now the cool thing is you can open any of the NetBeans modules from the NetBeans Platform modules in the NetBeans sources. When you change the source code of one of these modules and then build that module, the changed JAR will automatically be added to the right place in the nbbuild/netbeans folder. And when you do a 'clean' on a NetBeans Platform module, the related JAR will be removed from nbbuild/netbeans. In other words, in this way, by changing the NetBeans sources, you're directly changing the platform that your custom module will be running on when you deploy it. That's pretty cool and gives you a more connected relationship to your platform, since you're able to change it in the same way as the custom modules you create.

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• Silverlight Cream for May 29, 2010 -- #872

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Chris Koenig, Kunal Chowdhury, SilverLaw, Shayne Burgess, Ian T. Lackey, Alan Beasley, Marlon Grech. Shoutouts: Ozymandias has a post up that's not Silverlight necessarily, but it's pretty cool: Typeface Selection Flowchart Damian Schenkelman posted about the latest: Prism 2.2 Release available. Get it at Codeplex. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4 OData Paging with RX Extensions Michael Washington continues with this OData and Rx post using the View Model Style. Michael has some good external links, good info, and all the code. WP7 Part 4: Morphing and Mapping Chris Koenig has the 4th in his WP7 series he's doing, and this one is on MVVMLight and BingMaps ... code included. Silverlight 4: Interoperability with Excel using the COM Object Kunal Chowdhury has a post up about Excel Interoperability using the COM object including opening an Excel Workbook and writing data out, then modifying the data in the spreadsheet and seeing it updated in the app. Creating A Flexible Surface Effect – Silverlight 4 (Part 1) SilverLaw put up a demo of an awesome 'water ripple' SL4 demo a couple days ago, and now he's got part 1 of a great tutorial explaining it all. Service Operations and the WCF Data Services Client Shayne Burgess has a post up about Service Operations and how they can be used by the WCF Data Services client. Role Based Silverlight Behaviors Also from the Open Light Group, Ian T. Lackey has a post up about Behaviors that takes a list of roles and updates the UI appropriatetly. How to Toggle (Show/Hide) using Behaviours (Behaviors) between Visual States or Storyboards in Expression Blend for Windows Phone Alan Beasley has a quick post up talking about the solution he found to a problem he was having with state switching in a WP7 app. MEFedMVVM: Testability Marlon Grech has another MEFedMVVM post up and he's discussing Testability all rolled in there with everything else :) 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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• How far to go with Domain Driven Design?

  - by synti

  I've read a little about domain driven design and the usage of a rich domain model, as described by Martin Fowler, and I've decided to put it in practice in a personal project, instead of using transaction scripts. Everything went fine until UI implementation started. The thing is some views will use rich components that are backed up by unusual models and, thus, I must transform the domain model into what is used by those components. And that transformation is specially "complex" in the view-to-domain portion, up to the point that some business logic is involved. Wich brings me to the questioning: where should I do these adaptations? So far I've got the following conclusions: Doing it in the presentation layer is good because, well, if that layer imposes restrictions in it's model, then it should be the one to handle them. But it's bad because there'll be some business leakage. If I do it on the services objects (controllers, actions, whatever), then it'd be good because there won't be any change to the domain API just because of presentation layer, but it's bad because then I'd have transaction scripts, wich is not the intended design. Finally, if I do it on the domain model, there'd be no leakage of business logic at all. But in the future I could expect an explosion of the API into a series of methods designed just to handle that view-model <- domain-model adaptation. I hope I could make myself clear on this.

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• Am I wrong to disagree with A Gentle Introduction to symfony's template best practices?

  - by AndrewKS

  I am currently learning symfony and going through the book A Gentle Introduction to symfony and came across this section in "Chapter 4: The Basics of Page Creation" on creating templates (or views): "If you need to execute some PHP code in the template, you should avoid using the usual PHP syntax, as shown in Listing 4-4. Instead, write your templates using the PHP alternative syntax, as shown in Listing 4-5, to keep the code understandable for non-PHP programmers." Listing 4-4 - The Usual PHP Syntax, Good for Actions, But Bad for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test) { echo "<p>".time()."</p>"; } ?> (The ironic thing about this is that echo statement would look even better if time was variable declared in the controller, because then you could just embed the variable in the string instead of concatenating) Listing 4-5 - The Alternative PHP Syntax, Good for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test): ?> <p><?php echo time(); ?> </p><?php endif; ?> I fail to see how listing 4-5 makes the code "understandable for non-PHP programmers", and its readability is shaky at best. 4-4 looks much more readable to me. Are there any programmers who are using symfony that write their templates like those in 4-4 rather than 4-5? Are there reasons I should use one over the other? There is the very slim chance that somewhere down the road someone less technical could be editing it the template, but how does 4-5 actually make it more understandable to them?

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