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  • Using Pandora in Boxee

    - by Mysticgeek
    Boxee is a very cool multimedia app that lets you access and stream your digital media in many different ways. There’s also a lot of extra apps included with it, and today we take a look at the Pandora application in Boxee. Pandora has been a favorite free music streaming service that’s been around for some time now. Though there are new services like Grooveshark and Spotify that are competing, Pandora is still a reliable choice. It’s now included in Boxee, and here we take a look at using it. Create a Pandora Account If you don’t already have a Pandora account, you can easily create one at their website (link below). Pandora in Boxee To start using Pandora from Boxee, launch Boxee and from the main menu select Apps. Now from the My Apps section select Pandora. When the Pandora app menu comes up, select Start. Now you need to log into your Pandora account. After signing in you can starting listening to your stations, viewing artist info, and cover art. All while enjoying some cool visuals in the background. From the controls at the top you can control playback, skip songs, control volume, get information on why a song was picked, and give a song a thumbs up or down. Of course you can also pull up your stations and switch between them and add more. The same features you’ve come to expect from Pandora are available. One thing we noticed missing is not being able to click on the band or artist to get additional information about them –which you can do on the Pandora site and desktop app. But that isn’t a deal breaker by any means, and we’re hoping the feature will be added in the future. Then while you’re checking out other apps, shows, and setting within Boxee, the cool visuals continue and the songs from you stations keep playing. Conclusion Pandora is a great streaming music service and a welcome edition to Boxee. If you’re a fan of Pandora now you can listen to it on your home theater system. If you’re new to Boxee, make sure to check out our article on getting started with Boxee. Create a Pandora Account Download Boxee Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Integrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Getting Started with BoxeePandora One is a Worthwhile Upgrade for Your Current Pandora AccountCreate Music Video Playlists with TubeRadio.fmSpotify is an Awesome Music Streaming Service 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Draw Online using Harmony How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually

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  • The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Retire Phase

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
     Originally posted by John Brunswick. Good news - the Retire Phase is actually more fun than the Manage Phase. During the Retire Phase our content management team should not have to track down content creators if the Request Phase of this process was completed successfully. The ownership meta data, success criteria and time stamp that was applied to the original content submission will help to manage content at the end of the content life cycle. The Retire Phase will provide the opportunity for us to prune irrelevant content items through archiving or deletion, keeping the content system clear of irrelevant information, streamlining users ability to browse and search for content.   1. Act on Metrics Established during the Request Phase Why - Some information is only relevant for a given amount of time. In Content Platform Migration Strategy - Artifacts vs Perishable Content we examined two content types - Artifacts and Perishable content. Understanding the differences between Artifacts and Perishable content will allow us to explicitly respect their various lifespans. Additionally, some content may have been part of a project that failed to meet the success criteria outlined in the Request Phase. Any content that did not meet the metrics outlined in the Request Phase should be considered for deletion. How - Thankfully by adhering to to The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance our content should have some level of meta data associated with it that will allow us to quickly sort and understand how to deal with it. Content Management Systems like Oracle's Universal Content Management (UCM) natively allow you to create and save advanced searches that can use content meta data like folders, author, expiration date, security settings and custom meta data to pull back listings of content for examination. Additionally, analytics are available for all content items that allow us to determine if the usage is meeting success criteria that may have been previously outlined during the request phase. The lists that are produced from these approaches can be quickly reviewed for each project with the content owners and based on the nature of the content and success criteria undergo archiving or deletion. Impact - Retiring content that is no longer relevant will allow end users to have fast and relevant access to information across your enterprise. As we mentioned in our first post in this series - it is easy to quickly start producing content, but the challenge is ensuring that the environment is easy to navigate and use on the third week and during the third year. The light level of effort that was placed into the Request Phase of this process will set us up to keep content clean and relevant for a long time to come. With an up-to-date content repository users will be able to quickly find access to the information that is critical to their work processes. You might not get a holiday named in your honor managing the content system, but will appreciate their quick access to quality information.

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  • DevConnections jQuery Session Slides and Samples posted

    - by Rick Strahl
    I’ve posted all of my slides and samples from the DevConnections VS 2010 Launch event last week in Vegas. All three sessions are contained in a single zip file which contains all slide decks and samples in one place: www.west-wind.com/files/conferences/jquery.zip There were 3 separate sessions: Using jQuery with ASP.NET Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors to select document elements, manipulate these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The session also covers AJAX interaction between jQuery and the .NET server side code using several different approaches including sending HTML and JSON data and how to avoid user interface duplication by using client side templating. This session relies heavily on live examples and walk-throughs. jQuery Extensibility and Integration with ASP.NET Server Controls One of the great strengths of the jQuery Javascript framework is its simple, yet powerful extensibility model that has resulted in an explosion of plug-ins available for jQuery. You need it - chances are there's a plug-in for it! In this session we'll look at a few plug-ins to demonstrate the power of the jQuery plug-in model before diving in and creating our own custom jQuery plug-ins. We'll look at how to create a plug-in from scratch as well as discussing when it makes sense to do so. Once you have a plug-in it can also be useful to integrate it more seamlessly with ASP.NET by creating server controls that coordinate both server side and jQuery client side behavior. I'll demonstrate a host of custom components that utilize a combination of client side jQuery functionality and server side ASP.NET server controls that provide smooth integration in the user interface development process. This topic focuses on component development both for pure client side plug-ins and mixed mode controls. jQuery Tips and Tricks This session was kind of a last minute substitution for an ASP.NET AJAX talk. Nothing too radical here :-), but I focused on things that have been most productive for myself. Look at the slide deck for individual points and some of the specific samples.   It was interesting to see that unlike in previous conferences this time around all the session were fairly packed – interest in jQuery is definitely getting more pronounced especially with microsoft’s recent announcement of focusing on jQuery integration rather than continuing on the path of ASP.NET AJAX – which is a welcome change. Most of the samples also use the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit and the support tools contained within it – a snapshot version of the toolkit is included in the samples download. Specicifically a number of the samples use functionality in the ww.jquery.js support file which contains a fairly large set of plug-ins and helper functionality – most of these pieces while contained in the single file are self-contained and can be lifted out of this file (several people asked). Hopefully you'll find something useful in these slides and samples.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery  

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  • Announcing Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g

    - by [email protected]
    Today Oracle announced Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g. This is a major release for us, and reinforces our three key themes at Oracle: Complete New in this release - Oracle ECM Suite 11g is built on a single, unified repository. Every piece of content - documents, HTML pages, digital assets, scanned images - is stored and accessbile directly from the repository, whether you are working on websites, creating brand logos, processing accounts payable invoices, or running records and retention functions. It makes complete, end-to-end management of content possible, from the point it enters the organization, through its entire lifecycle. Also new in this release, the installation, access, monitoring and administration of Oracle ECM Suite 11g is centralized. As a complete system, organizations can lower the costs of training and usage by having a centralized source of information that is easily administered. As part of this new unified repository release, Oracle has released a benchmarking white paper that shows the extreme performance and scalability of Oracle ECM Suite. When tested on a two node UCM Server running on Sun Oracle DB Machine Half Rack Hardware with an Exadata storage server, Oracle ECM Suite 11g is able to ingest over 178 million documents per day. Open Oracle ECM Suite 11g is built on a service-oriented architecture. All functions are available through standards-based services calls in Web Services or Java. In this release Oracle unveils Open Web Content Management. Open Web Content Management is a revolutionary approach to web content management that decouples the content management process from the process of creating web applications. One piece of this approach is our one-click web content management. With one click, a web application builder can drag content services into their application, enabling their users to also edit content with just one click. Open Web Content Management is also open because it enables Web developers to add Web content management to new and existing JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces applications Open content distribution - Oracle ECM Suite 11g offers flexible deployment options with a built-in smart cache so organizations can deliver Web sites or Web applications without requiring Oracle ECM Suite as part of the delivery system Integrated Oracle ECM Suite 11g also offers a series of next generation desktop integrations, providing integrations such as: New MS Office integration with menus to access managed content, insert managed links, and compare managed documents using standard MS Office reviewing tools Automatic identity tagging of documents on download - to help users understand which versions they are viewing and prevent duplicate content items in the content repository. New "smart productivity folders" to show a users workflow inbox, saved searches and checked out content directly from Windows Explorer Drag and drop metadata pop-ups Check in and check out for all file formats with any standard WebDAV server As part of Oracle's Enterprise Application Documents initiative, Oracle Content Management 11g also provides certified application integrations with solution templates You can read the press release here. You can see more assets at the launch center here. You can sign up for the announcement webinar and hear more about the new features here. You can read the benchmarking study here.

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 28, 2010 -- #1017

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Davide Zordan, Alex Golesh, Michael S. Scherotter, Andrej Tozon, Alex Knight, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Jeremy Likness, and Laurent Bugnion. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "My “What’s new in Silverlight 4 demo” app" Andrej Tozon WP7: "Taking a screenshot from within a Silverlight #WP7 application" Laurent Bugnion Expression Blend: "PathListBox: getting started" Alex Knight Shoutouts: If you haven't seen this SurfCube app demo on YouTube yet... check it out now: SurfCube V1.0 Windows Phone 7 Browser Want to get a free WP7 class from Shawn Wildermuth? Check this out: Webinar: Writing your first Windows Phone 7 Application Koen Zwikstra announed the next preview of his great tool: Silverlight Spy Preview 2 From SilverlightCream.com: Using the Multi-Touch Behavior in a Windows Phone 7 Multi-Page application Davide Zordan has a post up responding to questions he receives about multi-touch on WP7 in applications spanning more than one page. Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Quick Tip: Fix missing icons while using DatePicker/TimePicker controls Alex Golesh discusses the use of the DatePicker control from the WP7 toolkit and found an unpleasant surprise associated with the Done/Cancel icons in the ApplicationBar, and has a solution for us. Updated SMF Thumbnail Scrubbing Sample Code Michael S. Scherotter has a post up about an update he's done to Silverlight 4 of code that allows thumbnail views of a video while 'scrubbing' ... don't know what that is? read the post :) My “What’s new in Silverlight 4 demo” app Andrej Tozon admits he's a little behind with this post, but as he points out, it might be a good time to review Silverlight 4 features, on the eve of 5. PathListBox: getting started One half the Knight team -- Alex Knight this time, has the first post of a series on the PathListBox up ... some real Expression Blend goodness. What I Learned in WP7 – Issue #9 Two more from Jeff Blankenburg today, in his number 9, he starts off demonstrating passing data between pages when navigating and fnishes up with some excellent info for submitting apps to the marketplace. What I Learned in WP7 – #Issue 10 Jeff Blankenburg's number 10 elaborates on the query string data he discussed in number 9. Using Sterling in Windows Phone 7 Applications Who better than the author?? Jeremy Likness has an end-to-end WP7/Sterling app up on his blog... begin with downloading Sterling, discuss what's needed to support Tombstoning, even custom serialization. Taking a screenshot from within a Silverlight #WP7 application Laurent Bugnion has a post up describing something people have been looking for: getting a screenshot of a WP7 application's page. 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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  • Silverlight Cream for March 15, 2011 -- #1061

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Peter Kuhn, Emil Stoychev, Viktor Larsson(-2-), Kevin Hoffman, Rudi Grobler, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty(-2-), and Martin Krüger. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Image comparison using a GridSplitter" Martin Krüger WP7: "Using WP7 accent color effectively" Viktor Larsson XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 7 - Collision detection" Peter Kuhn From SilverlightCream.com: XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 7 - Collision detection Peter Kuhn has part 7 of his XNA for Silverlight devs tutorial series up at SilverlightShow... discussing Collision detection... something you need to get your head around if you're going to do a game. Interview with John Papa about the upcoming MIX11 event and the Open Source Fest Emil Stoychev of SilverlightShow reverses the roles with John Papa and interviews John on this MIX11 and Open Source Fest discussion they had at the MVP Summit Debugging Videos or Camera in WP7 Viktor Larsson has a quick post up on the 3 ways of debugging a WP7 app and why and under what circumstances you should change debug method. Using WP7 accent color effectively Viktor Larsson's next post is about the 10 accent colors available on WP7 devices. He shows how to make best use of that capability in XAML and runtime code. WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Hardware and Device Services Kevin Hoffman's part 4 of a 12-part tutorial series at SilverlightShow on WP7 for iPhone/Android devs is up ... this oe concentrates on Hardware and Device Services... Launchers/Choosers/Sensors. How to publish WP7 applications if you live in the Middle-east & Africa region Rudi Grobler has a short post up on a legit way to publish WP7 apps if you are in the MEA region. Creating WP7 Custom Theme – Sample Theme Implementation WindowsPhoneGeek has a new post up and he's starting a series of 3 articles on Creating Wp7 Custom Themes... first up is this tutorial on Basic Theme Implementation... and use it as well. From Android to Windows Phone For "Windows Phone from Scratch #43", Jesse Liberty begins a series on moving apps from Android to WP7, beginning with a tip calculating program. Yet Another Podcast #28–Jeremy Likness Jesse Liberty's next post is his "Yet Another Podcast #28" with Jeremy Likness this time around... the list of all things fun that Jeremy's involved in is getting long... should be a good podcast! Image comparison using a GridSplitter Martin Krüger posted a cool 'Clip Splitter' for comparing images, and what a great set of example images he's using... pretty darn cool lining them up with a grid-splitter. 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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  • Oracle ADF Core Functionality Now Available for Free - Presenting Oracle ADF Essentials

    - by Shay Shmeltzer
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE HE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;} We are happy to announce the new Oracle ADF Essentials - a free to develop and deploy version of the core technologies at the base of Oracle ADF – Oracle’s strategic development framework that was used, among other things, to build the new generation of the enterprise Oracle Fusion Applications. This release is aligned with the new Oracle JDeveloper 11.1.2.3 version that we released today. Oracle ADF Essentials enables developers to use the following free: Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client components –over 150 JSF 2.0 components that include extensive charting and data visualization components, supports skinning, internalization, accessibility and touch gestures and providing advanced Ajax, windowing, drag and drop and other UI capabilities in a declarative way. Oracle ADF Controller – an extension on top of the JSF controller providing complete process flow definition and enabling advanced reusability of flows inside page’s regions. Oracle ADF Binding – a declarative way to bind various business services to JSF user interfaces eliminating tedious managed-beans coding. Oracle ADF Business Components – a declarative layer for building Java based business services on top of relational databases. The main goal of Oracle ADF Essentials is to bring the benefits of Oracle ADF to a broader community of developers. If you are already using Oracle ADF, a key new functionality for you would be the ability to deploy your application on GlassFish. Several other interesting points: We provide instructions for deployment of Oracle ADF Essentials on GlassFish and officially support this platform for Oracle ADF Essentials deployment. Developers can choose to use the whole Oracle ADF Essentials, or just pieces of the technology. Visual development for Oracle ADF Essentials is provided in Oracle JDeveloper. Eclipse support via Oracle Enterprise for Eclipse (OEPE) is also planned. Want to learn more? Here is a quick overview and development demo of Oracle ADF Essentials For more visit the Oracle ADF Essentials page on OTN

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  • Make Your Coworker’s Day in Ubuntu

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    It can be difficult to express your appreciation for your coworkers in person – what if they take it the wrong way, or think you’re fishing for a compliment of your own? If you use Ubuntu in your office, here’s a quick way to show your appreciation while avoiding the social pitfalls of face-to-face communication. Make sure their computer is locked An unlocked computer is a vulnerable computer. Vulnerable to malware sure, but much more vulnerable to the local office prankster, who thinks it’s hilarious to make a screenshot of your desktop, change your background to that screenshot, then hide all of your desktop icons. These incidents have taught us that you should lock your computer when taking a break. Hopefully your coworker has learned the same lesson, and pressed Ctrl+Alt+L before stepping out for a coffee. Leave a carefully worded message Now is your opportunity to leave your message of appreciation on your coworker’s computer. Click on the Leave Message button and type away! Click on Save. Wait, possibly in the shadows If you sit near your coworker, then wait for them to return. If you sit farther away, then try to listen for their footsteps. Eventually they will return to their computer and enter their password to unlock it. Observe smile Once they return to their desktop, they will be greeted with the message you left. Look to see if they appreciated the message, and if so, feel free to take credit. If they look annoyed, or press the Cancel button, continue on with your day like nothing happened. You may also try to slip into a conversation that you saw Jerry tinkering with their computer earlier. Conclusion Leaving your coworkers a nice message is easy and can brighten up their dull afternoon. We’re pretty sure that this method can only be used for good and not evil, but if you have any other suggestions of messages to leave, let us know in the comments! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Ubuntu Automatically Save Changes to Your SessionAdding extra Repositories on UbuntuInstall IceWM on Ubuntu LinuxInstall Blackbox on Ubuntu LinuxMake Firefox Display Large Images Full Size 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper Live PDF Searches PDF Files and Ebooks Converting Mp4 to Mp3 Easily

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  • Quickly Preview Songs in Windows Media Center 12 in Windows 7

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Do you ever wish you could quickly preview a song without having to play it? Today we look at a quick and easy way to do that in Windows Media Player 12. Open Windows Media Player in Library Mode and select your Music library. Hover your cursor over the Title of the song and a Preview pop-up window will appear after a few seconds.    Click on the Preview in the pop-up window and the song will begin to play. As the preview begins to play, you will see the Skip link and a song timer. Click on Skip to jump ahead 15 seconds in the song. When you are finished previewing the song, simply move your mouse away from the preview window to stop playback. Automatically Preview Songs You can adjust settings in Windows Media Player to automatically preview songs when you hover your cursor over the title. Select Tools  from the menu and click Options. On the Options window, select the Library tab and click on Automatically preview songs on title hover. Click OK.   Now when you simply hover your cursor over the song title the preview window will appear and playback will begin automatically. This feature works just as well in Details view as it does in Expanded Tile view. Would you like to stream your music to other computers on your network? Check out our article on how to stream media to other Windows 7 computers. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideSchedule Updates for Windows Media CenterIntegrate Hulu Desktop and Windows Media Center in Windows 7Integrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites

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  • Week 21: FY10 in the Rear View Mirror

    - by sandra.haan
    FY10 is coming to a close and before we dive into FY11 we thought we would take a walk down memory lane and reminisce on some of our favorite Oracle PartnerNetwork activities. June 2009 brought One Red Network to partners offering access to the same virtual kickoff environment used by Oracle employees. It was a new way to deliver valuable content to key stakeholders (and without the 100+ degree temperatures). Speaking of hot, Oracle also announced in June new licensing options for our ISV partners. This model enables an even broader community of ISVs to build, deploy and manage SaaS applications on the same platform. While some people took the summer off, the OPN Program team was working away to deliver a brand new partner program - Oracle PartnerNetwork Specialized - at Oracle OpenWorld in October. Specialized. Recognized. Preferred. If you haven't gotten the message yet, we may need an emergency crew to pull you out from that rock you've been hiding under. But seriously, the announcement at the OPN Forum drew a big crowd and our FY11 event is shaping up to be just as exciting. OPN Specialized was announced in October and opened our doors for enrollment in December 2009. To mark our grand opening we held our first ever social webcast allowing partners from around the world to interact with us live throughout the day. We had a lot of great conversations and really enjoyed the chance to speak with so many of you. After a short holiday break we were back at it - just a small announcement - Oracle's acquisition of Sun. In case you missed it, here is a short field report from Ted Bereswill, SVP North America Alliances & Channels on the partner events to support the announcement: And while we're announcing things - did we mention that both Ted Bereswill and Judson Althoff were named Channel Chiefs by CRN? Not only do we have a couple of Channel Chiefs, but Oracle also won the Partner Program 5 Star Programs Award and took top honors at the CRN Channel Champion Awards for Financial Factors/Financial Performance in the category of Data and Information Management and the and Xchange Solution Provider event in March 2010. We actually caught up with Judson at this event for a quick recap of our participation: But awards aside, let's not forget our main focus in FY10 and that is Specialization. In April we announced that we had over 35 Specializations available for partners and a plan to deliver even more in FY11. We are just days away from the end of FY10 but hope you enjoyed our walk down memory lane. We are already planning lots of activity for our partners in FY11 starting with our Partner Kickoff event on June 29th. Join us to hear the vision and strategy for FY11 and interact with regional A&C leaders. We look forward to talking with you then. The OPN Communications Team

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  • SQL SERVER – DMV – sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info – Statistics of Optimizer

    - by pinaldave
    Incredibly, SQL Server has so much information to share with us. Every single day, I am amazed with this SQL Server technology. Sometimes I find several interesting information by just querying few of the DMV. And when I present this info in front of my client during performance tuning consultancy, they are surprised with my findings. Today, I am going to share one of the hidden gems of DMV with you, the one which I frequently use to understand what’s going on under the hood of SQL Server. SQL Server keeps the record of most of the operations of the Query Optimizer. We can learn many interesting details about the optimizer which can be utilized to improve the performance of server. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info WHERE counter IN ('optimizations', 'elapsed time','final cost', 'insert stmt','delete stmt','update stmt', 'merge stmt','contains subquery','tables', 'hints','order hint','join hint', 'view reference','remote query','maximum DOP', 'maximum recursion level','indexed views loaded', 'indexed views matched','indexed views used', 'indexed views updated','dynamic cursor request', 'fast forward cursor request') All occurrence values are cumulative and are set to 0 at system restart. All values for value fields are set to NULL at system restart. I have removed a few of the internal counters from the script above, and kept only documented details. Let us check the result of the above query. As you can see, there is so much vital information that is revealed in above query. I can easily say so many things about how many times Optimizer was triggered and what the average time taken by it to optimize my queries was. Additionally, I can also determine how many times update, insert or delete statements were optimized. I was able to quickly figure out that my client was overusing the Query Hints using this dynamic management view. If you have been reading my blog, I am sure you are aware of my series related to SQL Server Views SQL SERVER – The Limitations of the Views – Eleven and more…. With this, I can take a quick look and figure out how many times Views were used in various solutions within the query. Moreover, you can easily know what fraction of the optimizations has been involved in tuning server. For example, the following query would tell me, in total optimizations, what the fraction of time View was “reference“. As this View also includes system Views and DMVs, the number is a bit higher on my machine. SELECT (SELECT CAST (occurrence AS FLOAT) FROM sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info WHERE counter = 'view reference') / (SELECT CAST (occurrence AS FLOAT) FROM sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info WHERE counter = 'optimizations') AS ViewReferencedFraction Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DMV, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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  • Guidance and Pricing for MSDN 2010

    - by John Alexander
    Sorry for the rather lengthy post here. I get asked this all the time so I decided to post it…Visual Studio 2010 editions will be available on April 12, 2010. Product Features Professional with MSDN Essentials Professional with MSDN Premium with MSDN Ultimate with MSDN Test Professional with MSDN Debugging and Diagnostics IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger)         Static Code Analysis       Code Metrics       Profiling       Debugger   Testing Tools Unit Testing   Code Coverage       Test Impact Analysis       Coded UI Test       Web Performance Testing         Load Testing1         Microsoft Test Manager 2010       Test Case Management2       Manual Test Execution       Fast-Forward for Manual Testing       Lab Management Configuration3       Integrated Development Environment Multiple Monitor Support   Multi-Targeting   One Click Web Deployment   JavaScript and jQuery Support   Extensible WPF-Based Environment Database Development Database Deployment       Database Change Management2       Database Unit Testing       Database Test Data Generation       Data Access   Development Platform Support Windows Development   Web Development   Office and SharePoint Development   Cloud Development   Customizable Development Experience   Architecture and Modeling Architecture Explorer         UML® 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity, Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component)         Layer Diagram and Dependency Validation         Read-only diagrams (UML, Layer, DGML Graphs)         Lab Management Virtual environment setup & tear down3       Provision environment from template3       Checkpoint environment3       Team Foundation Server Version Control2   Work Item Tracking2   Build Automation2   Team Portal2   Reporting & Business Intelligence2   Agile Planning Workbook2   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010   Test Case Management2       MSDN Subscription – Software and Services for Production Use Windows Azure Platform 20 hrs/mo † 50 hrs/mo † 100 hrs/mo † 250 hrs/mo † n/a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL   1 1 1 1 Microsoft Expression Studio 3       Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Project Professional 2010, Visio Premium 2010 (following Office 2010 launch)       MSDN Subscription – Software for Development and Testing 4 Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 Toolkits, Software Development Kits, Driver Development Kits Previous versions of Windows (client and server operation systems)   Previous versions of Microsoft SQL Server   Microsoft Office       Microsoft Dynamics       All other Servers       Windows Embedded operating systems       Teamprise         MSDN Subscription – Other Benefits Technical support incidents 0 2 4 4 2 Priority support in MSDN Forums Microsoft e-learning collections (typically 10 courses or 20 hours) 0 1 2 2 1 MSDN Flash newsletter MSDN Online Concierge MSDN Magazine   System Requirements View View View View View Buy from (MSRP) $799 $1,199 $5,469 $11,899 $2,169 Renew from (MSRP) $549 (upgrade) $799 $2,299 $3,799 $899 † Availability varies by country and subscription level.  Details available on the MSDN site 1. May require one or more Microsoft Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 2. Requires Team Foundation Server and a Team Foundation Server CAL 3. Requires Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 4. Per-user license allows unlimited installations and use for designing, developing, testing, and demonstrating applications. UML is a registered trademark of Object Management Group, Inc. Windows is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

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  • MAXDOP in SQL Azure

    - by Herve Roggero
    In my search of better understanding the scalability options of SQL Azure I stumbled on an interesting aspect: Query Hints in SQL Azure. More specifically, the MAXDOP hint. A few years ago I did a lot of analysis on this query hint (see article on SQL Server Central:  http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Configuring/managingmaxdegreeofparallelism/1029/).  Here is a quick synopsis of MAXDOP: It is a query hint you use when issuing a SQL statement that provides you control with how many processors SQL Server will use to execute the query. For complex queries with lots of I/O requirements, more CPUs can mean faster parallel searches. However the impact can be drastic on other running threads/processes. If your query takes all available processors at 100% for 5 minutes... guess what... nothing else works. The bottom line is that more is not always better. The use of MAXDOP is more art than science... and a whole lot of testing; it depends on two things: the underlying hardware architecture and the application design. So there isn't a magic number that will work for everyone... except 1... :) Let me explain. The rules of engagements are different. SQL Azure is about sharing. Yep... you are forced to nice with your neighbors.  To achieve this goal SQL Azure sets the MAXDOP to 1 by default, and ignores the use of the MAXDOP hint altogether. That means that all you queries will use one and only one processor.  It really isn't such a bad thing however. Keep in mind that in some of the largest SQL Server implementations MAXDOP is usually also set to 1. It is a well known configuration setting for large scale implementations. The reason is precisely to prevent rogue statements (like a SELECT * FROM HISTORY) from bringing down your systems (like a report that should have been running on a different in the first place) and to avoid the overhead generated by executing too many parallel queries that could cause internal memory management nightmares to the host Operating System. Is summary, forcing the MAXDOP to 1 in SQL Azure makes sense; it ensures that your database will continue to function normally even if one of the other tenants on the same server is running massive queries that would otherwise bring you down. Last but not least, keep in mind as well that when you test your database code for performance on-premise, make sure to set the DOP to 1 on your SQL Server databases to simulate SQL Azure conditions.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 138: Paul Perrone on Life Saving Embedded Java

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Paul Perrone, founder and CEO of Perrone Robotics, on using Java Embedded to test autonomous vehicle operations for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that will save lives. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JDK 8 is Feature Complete Java SE 7 Update 25 Released What should the JCP be doing? 2013 Duke's Choice Award Nominations Another Quick update to Code Signing Article on OTN Events June 24, Austin JUG, Austin, TX June 25, Virtual Developer Day - Java, EMEA, 10AM CEST Jul 16-19, Uberconf, Denver, USA Jul 22-24, JavaOne Shanghai, China Jul 29-31, JVM Summit Language, Santa Clara Sep 11-12, JavaZone, Oslo, Norway Sep 19-20, Strange Loop, St. Louis Sep 22-26 JavaOne San Francisco 2013, USA Feature Interview Paul J. Perrone is founder/CEO of Perrone Robotics. Paul architected the Java-based general-purpose robotics and automation software platform known as “MAX”. Paul has overseen MAX’s application to rapidly field self-driving robotic cars, unmanned air vehicles, factory and road-side automation applications, and a wide range of advanced robots and automaton applications. He fielded a self-driving autonomous robotic dune buggy in the historic 2005 Grand Challenge race across the Mojave desert and a self-driving autonomous car in the 2007 Urban Challenge through a city landscape. His work has been featured in numerous televised and print media including the Discovery Channel, a theatrical documentary, scientific journals, trade magazines, and international press. Since 2008, Paul has also been working as the chief software engineer, CTO, and roboticist automating rock star Neil Young’s LincVolt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental retro-fitted as a fully autonomous extended range electric vehicle. Paul has been an engineer, author of books and articles on Java, frequent speaker on Java, and entrepreneur in the robotics and software space for over 20 years. He is a member of the Java Champions program, recipient of three Duke Awards including a Gold Duke and Lifetime Achievement Award, has showcased Java-based robots at five JavaOne keynotes, and is a frequent JavaOne speaker and show floor participant. He holds a B.S.E.E. from Rutgers University and an M.S.E.E. from the University of Virginia. What’s Cool Shenandoah: A pauseless GC for OpenJDK

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  • Running Windows Phone Developers Tools CTP under VMWare Player - Yes you can! - But do you want to?

    - by Liam Westley
    This blog is the result of a quick investigation of running the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP under VMWare Player.  In the release notes for Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP it mentions that it is not supported under VirtualPC or Hyper-V.  Some developers have policies where ‘no non-production code’ can be installed on their development workstation and so the only way they can use a CTP like this is in a virtual machine. The dilemma here is that the emulator for Windows Phone itself is a virtual machine and running a virtual machine within another virtual machine is normally frowned upon.  Even worse, previous Windows Mobile emulators detected they were in a virtual machine and refused to run.  Why VMWare? I selected VMWare as a possible solution as it is possible to run VMWare ESXi under VMWare Workstation by manually setting configuration options in the VMX configuration file so that it does not detect the presence of a virtual environment. I actually found that I could use VMWare Player (the free version, that can now create VM images) and that there was no need for any editing of the configuration file (I tried various switches, none of which made any difference to performance). So you can run the CTP under VMWare Player, that’s the good news. The bad news is that it is incredibly slow, bordering on unusable.  However, if it’s the only way you can use the CTP, at least this is an option. VMWare Player configuration I used the latest VMWare Player, 3.0, running under Windows x64 on my HP 6910p laptop with an Intel T7500 Dual Core CPU running at 2.2GHz, 4Gb of memory and using a separate drive for the virtual machines. I created a machine in VMWare Player with a single CPU, 1536 Mb memory and installed Windows 7 x64 from an ISO image.  I then performed a Windows Update, installed VMWare Tools, and finally the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP After a few warnings about performance, I configured Windows 7 to run with Windows 7 Basic theme rather than use Aero (which is available under VMWare Player as it has a WDDM driver). Timings As a test I first launched Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, and created a default Windows Phone Application project.  I then clicked the run button, which starts the emulator and then loads the default application onto the emulator. For the second test I left the emulator running, stopped the default application, added a single button to change the page title and redeployed to the already running emulator by clicking the run button.   Test 1 (1st run) Test 2 (emulator already running)   VMWare Player 10 minutes  1 minute   Windows x64 native 1 minute  < 10 seconds   Conclusion You can run the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP under VMWare Player, but it’s really, really slow and you would have to have very good reasons to try this approach. If you need to keep a development system free of non production code, and the two systems aren’t required to run simultaneously, then I’d consider a boot from VHD option.  Then you can completely isolate the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP and development environment into a single VHD separate from your main development system.

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  • Finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure

    - by ScottGu
    Today, I am pleased to announce the ten finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure powered by TechStars. These startups are about to launch into a three-month program where they will develop new products and businesses using Windows Azure. The response to the program has been fantastic - we received nearly 600 applications from entrepreneurs in 69 countries around the world, spanning a host of industries including retail, travel, entertainment, banking, real estate and more.  There were so many innovative ideas and amazing teams that it really made the selection process hard.  We finally landed on 10 finalists, based on their experience, qualifications, and innovative business ideas built on the cloud. This fall’s Windows Azure class includes: Advertory – Berlin, Germany. Advertory helps local businesses increase revenue and build customer loyalty. Appetas – Seattle, WA. Appetas' mission is to make restaurants look as beautiful online as they do on the plate! BagsUp – Sydney, Australia. Find great places from people you trust. Embarke – San Diego, CA. Embarke allows developers and companies the ability to integrate with any human communication channel (Facebook, Email, Text Message, Twitter) without having to learn the specifics, write code, or spend time on any of them. Fanzo – Seattle, WA. Fanzo puts sports fans in the spotlight. Find other fans, show off your fanswagger and get rewarded for your passion. MetricsHub – Bellevue, WA. A service providing cloud monitoring with incident detection and prebuilt workflows for remedying common problems. Mobilligy – Bellevue, WA. Mobilligy revolutionizes how people pay their bills by bringing convenient, secure, and instant bill payment support to mobile devices. Realty Mogul – Los Angeles, CA. Realty Mogul is a crowdfunding platform for real estate where accredited investors pool capital and invest in properties that are acquired, managed and eventually resold by professional private real estate companies and their management teams. Staq – San Francisco, CA. Back-end as a service for APIs. Socedo – Bellevue, WA. A simple and effective web application for lead generation and relationship management on Twitter. Each startup will be hosted in Seattle and mentored by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as well as leaders from Windows Azure and other Microsoft organizations. The teams will spend the first month ideating and refining their business concepts with input and advice from their mentors as well as Microsoft customers, followed by two months of design and development. They will present their results to investors and Microsoft partners at an event in mid-January. We are really looking forward to seeing how their businesses evolve.  These teams have demonstrated incredible energy, passion, and innovative capabilities – and they are ready to show the world what’s possible with Windows Azure. Thanks, Scott P.S. And if you are new to Twitter you can also optionally follow me: @scottgu

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  • Link To Work Item &ndash; Visual Studio extension to link changeset(s) to work item directly from VS history window

    - by Utkarsh Shigihalli
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/onlyutkarsh/archive/2014/08/11/link-to-work-item-ndash-visual-studio-extension-to-link.aspxBy linking work items and other objects, you can track related work, dependencies, and changes made over time. As the following illustration shows, specific link types are used to track specific work items and actions. (– via MSDN) While making a check-in, Visual Studio 2013 provides you a quick way to search and assign a work item via pending changes section in Team Explorer. However, if you forget to assign the work item during your check-in, things really get cumbersome as Visual Studio does not provide an easy way of assigning. For example, you usually have to open the work item and then link the changeset which involves approx. 7-8 mouse clicks. Now, you will really feel the difficulty if you have to assign work item to multiple changesets, you have to repeat the same steps again. Hence, I decided to develop a small Visual Studio extension to perform this action of linking work item to changeset bit easier. How to use the extension? First, download and install the extension from VS Gallery (Supports VS 2013 Professional and above). Once you install, you will see a new "Link To Work Item" menu item when you right click on a changeset in history window. Clicking Link To Work Item menu, will open a new dialog with which you can search for a work item. As you can see in below screenshot, this dialog displays the search result and also the type of the work item. You can also open work item from this dialog by right clicking on the work item and clicking 'Open'. Finally, clicking Save button, will actually link the work item to changeset. One feature which I think helpful, is you can select multiple changesets from history window and assign the work item to all those changesets.  To summarize the features Directly assign work items to changesets from history window Assign work item to multiple changesets Know the type of the work item before assigning. Open the work item from search results It also supports all default Visual Studio themes. Below is a small demo showcasing the working of this extension. Finally, if you like the extension, do not forget to rate and review the extension in VS Gallery. Also, do not hesitate to provide your suggestions, improvements and any issues you may encounter via github.

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  • JavaFX Dialogs, Anyone?

    - by HecklerMark
    A common question about JavaFX, especially for those coming from a Swing background, is "How do I do Dialogs?" The reason this is a question at all is that, currently, there is no baked-in capability to do dialog boxes within a pure JavaFX 2.x application. But come on...you wouldn't be reading about this at all if you weren't a resourceful programmer. You have ways of making things happen.  :-) I ran across a decent patch of code recently that handles many of the dialog chores for you. Pros and cons follow, but pointing your browser to this link on Github (appropriately named JavaFXDialog) will get you off to a good start. Here are some screen shots the original code author, Anton Smirnov, provided: Nothing fancy, just clean and functional. Now, about those pros and cons. From my perspective, here's the bottom line: Pros Already developed. Time required to implement is limited to downloading and decompressing the file, doing a bit of reading, and writing a few lines of code to try things out. Easy. Most of the work is done, and the interface is pretty simple. Open source. If you want to make changes - and I'm already thinking along those lines, so you may as well admit you will, too - you can do it. Cons Documentation. What you see on the Wiki page is the extent of it. Lack of activity. As of the date this article was published, the code hasn't been updated in several months...so the project is a bit stale. To be fair, the cons listed above won't cause anyone to lose sleep. After all, you don't expect constant revisions against something that works well enough for most purposes, and if your needs exceed what is there, it's easy to mod the code yourself or "roll your own" if you prefer. The lack of documentation isn't a show-stopper either due to the limited functionality and complexity of the code. Wrapping It Up If you need a quick, drop-in dialog capability for your JavaFX 2.x app, give it a try and see what you think. And if you're already using something you like, please share it as well! I'd love to hear from you, take a look at what you pass along, and maybe do a "dialog shoot-out" article in the future. So..what works for you?  :-) All the best, Mark

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 09, 2010 -- #1006

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Adam Kinney, Jonathan van de Veen, René Schulte(-2-), Vikas, Chad Campbell, Chris Koenig, John Papa, and Martin Krüger. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight TV #54: Introducing 11 Brand New Labs" John Papa WP7: "Gestures in Windows Phone 7" Chris Koenig Training: "New Windows Phone 7 tutorials for Designers on toolbox!" Adam Kinney Shoutouts: Jesse Liberty posted ways to get help when you get stuck: Top 10 Tips To Getting Help With Silverlight From SilverlightCream.com: New Windows Phone 7 tutorials for Designers on toolbox! Adam Kinney posted about some WP7 design goodness he's had the opportunity to take part in putting together that is now available for all of us on the Microsoft design Toolbox site.... detailed info about what's there. Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application part #39 Jonathan van de Veen has his latest Silverlight coding adventure detailed on his blog... in the final throes of releasing, he came across some issues surrounding CRUD operations... Windows Phone Unplugged - How to Detect the Zune Software René Schulte has a post up about my two favorite devices: Zune and WP7 ... and how to detect if the Zune software is running when the device is connected to the PC. Issue with the WP7 PictureDecoder and Workaround René Schulte has a second post up today about strange behavior with the PictureDecoder DecodeJpeg method... he describes the problem and a workaround for it. Performance Wizard for Silverlight Vikas reports some Silverlight goodness in the VS2010 SP1 beta that's out ... a Performance Wizard... and he's ratted out it's use and sharing that info... Submitting an App to the Windows Phone Marketplace Chad Campbell details the user experience of getting an app through the marketplace to users... from the standpoint of someone that's been there. Gestures in Windows Phone 7 Chris Koenig is talking about Gestures in WP7, documenting how he used some XNA to get some side-to-side image scrolling going on... and gave us the source! Silverlight TV #54: Introducing 11 Brand New Labs John Papa has his latest Silverlight TV up and he's talking to two great guys: Dan Wahlin and Corey Schuman who have produced the labs you've seen referenced... awesome stuff guys... WP7: precisely position the text cursor when writing text Martin Krüger has a quick WP7 usage tip up for precisely positioning the text cursor in a textbox ... I could have used that today when "Nick's Frame Shop" came up as "Nix Frame Shop" in a search. 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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  • Add a Cache Clearing Button to Firefox

    - by Asian Angel
    While emptying your browser’s cache may not be something that you need to worry with often or at all there are times when clearing it can be helpful. The Empty Cache Button extension lets you have instant on-demand cache clearing in Firefox. Some reasons why you might want or need to clear your browser’s cache: Clear out older (or out of date) versions of images, etc. from your favorite websites Free up disk space Clearing the cache may help fix browser behavior issues Help protect privacy (i.e. images, etc. displayed within a personal account) Before For our example we loaded three webpages in order to add content to our browser’s cache. Using the “CacheViewer” we were able to easily see the contents of our browser’s cache after the webpages finished loading. What if you need to clear your cache immediately without restarting your browser (if the options are set to empty the cache on browser exit)? Note: CacheViewer is available via a separate extension and can be found here. Empty Cache Button in Action Once you install the extension all that you need to do is right click on any of your browser’s toolbars and select “Customise”. Drag the “Toolbar Button” to an appropriate location in your browser’s UI and you are ready to go. To clear your browser’s cache simply click the button…that is all there is to it. When the cache is empty you will see this small message window appear in the lower right corner of your “Desktop”. Opening up the “CacheViewer” again shows that everything has been cleared out. Terrific! Conclusion If you ever find yourself needing to clear your browser’s cache immediately then the Empty Cache Button extension provides an easy way to do so without restarting your browser (if the options are set to empty the cache on browser exit). Links Download the Empty Cache Button extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change SuperFetch to Only Cache System Boot Files in VistaTroubleshoot Browsing Issues by Reloading the DNS Client Cache in VistaSearch for Install Packages from the Ubuntu Command LineQuick Tip: Empty Internet Explorer 7 Cache when Browser is ClosedRemove the New Tab Button in Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Use Quick Translator to Translate Text in 50 Languages (Firefox) Get Better Windows Search With UltraSearch Scan News With NY Times Article Skimmer SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone

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  • Paying by Cash

    - by David Dorf
    I'll grant you paying by cash in the context of stores isn't particularly interesting, but in my quest to try new payment methods I decided to pay by cash at an online store. Using a credit card means I have to hoist myself off the couch, find the card, and enter all those digits. Google Checkout certainly makes that task easier by storing my credit card information, but what happens to all those people that don't have a credit card? What about the ones that are afraid to use credit cards over the internet. There are three main options for cash payment, not all of which are accepted by every merchant. The most popular is PayPal. The issue I have with them is that returns and disputes have to be handled with PayPal, not the merchant. I once used PayPal at a shady online store and lost my money. Yeah, my bad but they wouldn't help me at all. PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002. BillMeLater is best for larger purchases, because at checkout they actually run a credit check to make sure you're credit worthy. Assuming you are, they pay the merchant on your behalf and mail you a bill, which you better pay quickly or interest will start to accrue. That's nice for the merchant because they get paid right away, and I presume there's no charge-backs. BillMeLater was purchased by eBay in 2008. Last night I tried eBillMe for the first time. After checkout, they send you a bill via email and expect you to pay either via online banking (they provide the instructions to set everything up) or walk-in locations across the US (typically banks). The process was quick and easy. The merchant doesn't ship the product until the bill is paid, so there's a day or two delay. For the merchant there are no charge-backs, and the fees are less than credit cards. For the shopper, they provide buyer protection similar to that offered by credit cards, and 1% cashback on purchases. Once the online bill-pay is setup, its easy to reuse in the future. Seems like a win-win for merchants and shoppers.

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 17, 2010 -- #839

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: ITLackey, SilverLaw, Max Paulousky, Alex Yakhnin, Paul Sheriff, Douglas, Jeremy Likness, Tomasz Janczuk, Anoop Madhusudanan, Adam Kinney, and Ashish Shetty. Shoutout: If you haven't already seen it, CrocusGirl did a great job of summarizing Day 2 of DevConnections with her Silverlight 4 Launch Notes From SilverlightCream.com: RIA Services - IIS6 Virtual Directory Deployment ITLackey has a post up building on his previous post on Windows Authentication with RIA Services and discusses deploying to an IIS Virtual Directory. How To: Determine ChildWindow Position At Runtime - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a post up about determining the position of a ChildWindow at run-time, for example after the user moves it. Modularity in Silverlight Applications - An Issue With ModuleInitializeException – Part 2 Max Paulousky has part 2 of his series up on Modularity in Silverlight... he discusses using XAML as a catalog and registering modules at runtime, and compares to WPF. Creating LINQ Data Provider for WP7 (Part 1) Alex Yakhnin has a first cut at a LINQ Data Provider for WP7 ... I was expecting this to hit pretty soon, because we're all going to want it... check out the code and d/l the project. Synchronize Data between a Silverlight ListBox and a User Control Paul Sheriff demonstrates databinding in XAML between local data in a ListBox and a UserControl. The beginnings of Silverlight development with Expression Blend Douglas has a good post up on beginning your Silverlight development with Expression Blend. He covers a lot of ground in this post. Converting Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 4 Jeremy Likness has a video up demonstrating converting Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 4 with download links and also using commanding on buttons. Debugging WCF RIA Services with WCF traces Tomasz Janczuk has a post up discussing the use of WCF RIA Services traces to help diagnose and debug problems in a deployed service. Bing Maps + oData + Windows Phone 7 - Nerd Dinner Client For Windows Phone 7 Check out what Anoop Madhusudanan has provided... Nerd Dinner for WP7, including OData and BingMaps... just very cool! A few cool new features added in Expression Blend 4 RC Adam Kinney announced the availability of the new Expression Blend and highlights some of the new features... like MakeLayoutPath... FTW! Of Crashing and Sometimes Burning Ashish Shetty has a discourse posted about where the causes of errors might come from, what to expect from the platform, where to find crash dumps, and links to more reading. 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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  • The Missing Post

    - by Joe Mayo
    It’s somewhat of a mystery how the writing process can conjure up results that weren’t initially intended. Case in point is the fact that another post was planned to be in place of this one, but it never made the light of day.  This particular post started off as an introduction to a technology I had just learned, used, and wanted to share the experience with others.  The beginning was fun and demonstrated how easy it was to get started.  One of the things I’ve been pondering over time is that the Web is filled with introductions to new technologies and quick first looks, so I set out to add more depth, share lessons learned, and generally help you avoid the problems I encountered along the way; problems being a key theme of why you aren’t reading that post at this very minute.  Problems that curiously came from nowhere to thwart my good intentions. Success was sweet when using the tool for the prototypical demo scenario. The thing is, I intended the tool to accomplish a real task.  Having embarked on the path toward getting the job done, glitches began creeping into the process.  Realizing that this was all a bit new, I had patience and found a suitable work-around, but this was to be short lived. As in marching ants to a freshly laid out picnic, the problems kept coming until I had to get up and walk away.  Not to be outdone, sheer will and brute force manual intervention led to mission accomplishment.  Though I kept a positive outlook and was pleased at the final result, the process of using the tool had somewhat soured. Regardless of a less than stellar experience with the tool, I have a great deal of respect for the company that produced it and the people who built it. Perhaps I empathize for what they might feel after reading a post that details such deficiencies in their product.  Sure, if you’re in this business, you’ve got to have a thick skin; brush it off, fix the problem, and move on to greatness. But, today I feel like they’re people and are probably already aware of any issues I would seemingly reveal.  Anyone who builds a product or provides a service takes a lot of pride in what they do.  Sometimes they screw up and if their worth a dime, they make it up. I think that will happen in this case and there’s no reason why I should post information that has the potential to sound more negative than helpful.  While no one would ever notice or care either way, I’m posting something that won’t harm. Joe

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  • Make Windows Position Your Dual Monitors Correctly

    - by Mysticgeek
    If you have a dual monitor setup and each monitor is a different size or height, it can be annoying trying to move the mouse pointer between them. Here is a quick tip that will help make the process easier. Align Monitors In our example, we’re using Windows 7, but the process is essentially the same in all versions, but getting to Display Settings is different. In Windows 7 open the Start menu and type display settings into the search box and hit Enter. In Vista right-click the desktop and click Personalize. Then from the Personalize appearance and sounds menu click on Display Settings. In XP right-click on the desktop and select Properties then in Display Properties click the Settings tab. Now here is where you can change the appearance of your monitors. In this example we have a larger 22” LCD and a smaller 19” and it can be annoying getting the mouse pointer from one to another depending where you are on each monitor. So what you want to do is simply move each display around to a particular height so it’s easier to get the pointer over. For example with this setting we know we’ll have no problem moving the pointer to the other screen at the top of each display.   Of course here you can flip your monitors around, change the display resolution, orientation, etc. If you have dual monitors where one might be larger or set up higher than the other, then this is a great way to get them finely tuned. You will have to play around with the settings a bit to settle on what works best for you. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips GeekNewb: Get to Know These Windows 7 HotkeysDual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each DesktopSet Windows as Default OS when Dual Booting UbuntuEasily Set Default OS in a Windows 7 / Vista and XP Dual-boot SetupSet XP as the Default OS in a Windows Vista Dual-Boot Setup 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3 Yes, it’s Patch Tuesday Generate Stunning Tag Clouds With Tagxedo Install, Remove and HIDE Fonts in Windows 7 Need Help with Your Home Network?

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  • Sending Parameters with the BizTalk HTTP Adapter

    - by Christopher House
    I've never had occaison to use the BizTalk HTTP adapter since I've always needed SOAP rather than just POX (plain old XML).  Yesterday we decided that we're going to expose some data via a Java servlet that will accept an HTTP post and respond with POX.  I knew BizTalk had an HTTP adapter but I had no idea what it's capabilities were. After a quick read through the BizTalk docs, it was apparent that the HTTP send adapter does in fact do posts.  The concern I had though was how we were going to supply parameters to the servlet.  The examples I had seen using the HTTP adapter all involved posting an XML message to some HTTP location.  Our Java guy, however didn't want to take that approach.  He wanted us to provide a query string via post, much like you'd expect to see on an HTTP get.  I decided to put together a little test scenario and see what I could come up with.  We didn't have a test servlet I could go against and my Java experience is virtually nill, so I decided to put together an ASP.Net project to act as the servlet.  It didn't need to be fancy, just one HttpHandler that accepts a post, reads a parameter and returns XML.  With the HttpHandler done, I put together a simple orchestration to send a message to the handler.  I started by having the orch send a message of type System.String to see what it would look like when the handler received it. I set a breakpoint in my handler and kicked off the orchestration.  Below is what I saw: As I suspected, because of BizTalk's XML serialization, System.String was not going to work.  I thought back to my BizTalk 2004 days and I project I worked on that required sending HTML formatted emails via the SMTP adapter.  To acomplish that, I had used a .Net class with a custom serialization formatter that I got from a Microsoft sample.  The code for the class, RawString can be found here. I created a new class library with the RawString class as well as a static factory class, referenced that in my orchestration project and changed my message type from System.String to RawString.  Below is what the code in my message construction looks like: After deploying the updated orchestration, I fired it off again and checked the breakpoint in my HttpHandler.  This is what I saw: And there you have it.  The RawString message type allowed me to pass a query string in the HTTP post without wrapping it in XML.

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