Search Results

Search found 10751 results on 431 pages for 'fast forward'.

Page 380/431 | < Previous Page | 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387  | Next Page >

• SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

  What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Juniper Strategy, LLC is hiring SharePoint Developers&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Isn’t everybody these days? It seems as though there are definitely more jobs than qualified devs these days, but yes, we are looking for a few good devs to help round out our burgeoning SharePoint team. Juniper Strategy is located in the DC area, however we will consider remote devs for the right fit. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a bright company that truly “gets it” when it comes to SharePoint, Project Management, and Information Assurance. We need like-minded people who “get it”, enjoy it, and who are looking for more than just a job. We have government and commercial opportunities as well as our own internal product that has a bright future of its own. Our immediate needs are for SharePoint .NET developers, but feel free to submit your resume for us to keep on file as it looks as though we’ll need several people in the coming months. Please email us your resume and salary requirements to [email protected] Below are our official job postings. Thanks for stopping by, we look forward to  hearing from you. Senior SharePoint .NET Developer Senior developer will focus on design and coding of custom, end-to-end business process solutions within the SharePoint framework. Senior developer with the ability to serve as a senior developer/mentor and manage day-to-day development tasks. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. For selected development path, prepare technical specification and build the solution. Assist project manager with defining development task schedule and level-of-effort. Lead technical solution deployment. Job Requirements Minimum of 7 years experience in agile development, with at least 3 years of SharePoint-related development experience (SPS, SharePoint 2007/2010, WSS2-4). Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Experience with using multiple data sources/repositories for database CRUD activities, including relational databases, SAP, Oracle e-Business. Experience with designing and deploying performance-based solutions in SharePoint for business processes that involve a very large number of records. Experience designing dynamic dashboards and mashups with data from multiple sources (internal to SharePoint as well as from external sources). Experience designing custom forms to facilitate user data entry, both with and without leveraging Forms Services. Experience building custom web part solutions. Experience with designing custom solutions for processing underlying business logic requirements including, but not limited to, SQL stored procedures, C#/ASP.Net workflows/event handlers (including timer jobs) to support multi-tiered decision trees and associated computations. Ability to create complex solution packages for deployment (e.g., feature-stapled site definitions). Must have impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal. Seeking a "tinkerer"; proactive with a thirst for knowledge (and a sense of humor). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. Applicants must pass a skills assessment test. MCP/MCTS or comparable certification preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable SharePoint Project Lead Define project task schedule, work breakdown structure and level-of-effort. Serve as principal liaison to the customer to manage deliverables and expectations. Day-to-day project and team management, including preparation and maintenance of project plans, budgets, and status reports. Prepare technical briefings and presentation decks, provide briefs to C-level stakeholders. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. The SharePoint Project Lead will be working with SharePoint architects and system owners to perform requirements/gap analysis and develop the underlying functional specifications. Once we have functional specifications as close to "final" as possible, the Project Lead will be responsible for preparation of the associated technical specification/development blueprint, along with assistance in preparing IV&V/test plan materials with support from other team members. This person will also be responsible for day-to-day management of "developers", but is also expected to engage in development directly as needed.  Job Requirements Minimum 8 years of technology project management across the software development life-cycle, with a minimum of 3 years of project management relating specifically to SharePoint (SPS 2003, SharePoint2007/2010) and/or Project Server. Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Ability to interact and collaborate effectively with team members and stakeholders of different skill sets, personalities and needs. General "development" skill set required is a fundamental understanding of MOSS 2007 Enterprise, SP1/SP2, from the top-level of skinning to the core of the SharePoint object model. Impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal, and a sense of humor are required. The projects will require being at a client site at least 50% of the time in Washington DC (NW DC) and Maryland (near Suitland). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. PMP certification, PgMP preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable

  Read the article

• Connection Pooling is Busted

  - by MightyZot

  A few weeks ago we started getting complaints about performance in an application that has performed very well for many years.  The application is a n-tier application that uses ADODB with the SQLOLEDB provider to talk to a SQL Server database.  Our object model is written in such a way that each public method validates security before performing requested actions, so there is a significant number of queries executed to get information about file cabinets, retrieve images, create workflows, etc.  (PaperWise is a document management and workflow system.)  A common factor for these customers is that they have remote offices connected via MPLS networks. Naturally, the first thing we looked at was the query performance in SQL Profiler.  All of the queries were executing within expected timeframes, most of them were so fast that the duration in SQL Profiler was zero.  After getting nowhere with SQL Profiler, the situation was escalated to me.  I decided to take a peek with Process Monitor.  Procmon revealed some “gaps” in the TCP/IP traffic.  There were notable delays between send and receive pairs.  The send and receive pairs themselves were quite snappy, but quite often there was a notable delay between a receive and the next send.  You might expect some delay because, presumably, the application is doing some thinking in-between the pairs.  But, comparing the procmon data at the remote locations with the procmon data for workstations on the local network showed that the remote workstations were significantly delayed.  Procmon also showed a high number of disconnects. Wireshark traces showed that connections to the database were taking between 75ms and 150ms.  Not only that, but connections to a file share containing images were taking 2 seconds!  So, I asked about a trust.  Sure enough there was a trust between two domains and the file share was on the second domain.  Joining a remote workstation to the domain hosting the share containing images alleviated the time delay in accessing the file share.  Removing the trust had no affect on the connections to the database. Microsoft Network Monitor includes filters that parse TDS packets.  TDS is the protocol that SQL Server uses to communicate.  There is a certificate exchange and some SSL that occurs during authentication.  All of this was evident in the network traffic.  After staring at the network traffic for a while, and examining packets, I decided to call it a night.  On the way home that night, something about the traffic kept nagging at me.  Then it dawned on me…at the beginning of the dance of packets between the client and the server all was well.  Connection pooling was working and I could see multiple queries getting executed on the same connection and ethereal port.  After a particular query, connecting to two different servers, I noticed that ADODB and SQLOLEDB started making repeated connections to the database on different ethereal ports.  SQL Server would execute a single query and respond on a port, then open a new port and execute the next query.  Connection pooling appeared to be broken. The next morning I wrote a test to confirm my hypothesis.  Turns out that the sequence causing the connection nastiness goes something like this: Make a connection to the database. Open a result set that returns enough records to require multiple roundtrips to the server. For each result, query for some other data in the database (this will open a new implicit connection.) Close the inner result set and repeat for every item in the original result set. Close the original connection. Provided that the first result set returns enough data to require multiple roundtrips to the server, ADODB and SQLOLEDB will start making new connections to the database for each query executed in the loop.  Originally, I thought this might be due to Microsoft’s denial of service (ddos) attack protection.  After turning those features off to no avail, I eventually thought to switch my queries to client-side cursors instead of server-side cursors.  Server-side cursors are the default, by the way.  Voila!  After switching to client-side cursors, the disconnects were gone and the above sequence yielded two connections as expected. While the real problem is the amount of time it takes to make connections over these MPLS networks (100ms on average), switching to client-side cursors made the problem go away.  Believe it or not, this is actually documented by Microsoft, and rather difficult to find.  (At least it was while we were trying to troubleshoot the problem!)  So, if you’re noticing performance issues on slower networks, or networks with slower switching, take a look at the traffic in a tool like Microsoft Network Monitor.  If you notice a high number of disconnects, and you’re using fire-hose or server-side cursors, then try switching to client-side cursors and you may see the problem go away. Most likely, Microsoft believes this to be appropriate behavior, because ADODB can’t guarantee that all of the data has been retrieved when you execute the inner queries.  I’m not convinced, though, because the problem remains even after replacing all of the implicit connections with explicit connections and closing those connections in-between each of the inner queries.  In that case, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why ADODB can’t use a single connection from the connection pool to make the additional queries, bringing the total number of connections to two.  Instead ADO appears to make an assumption about the state of the connection. I’ve reported the behavior to Microsoft and am awaiting to hear from the appropriate team, so that I can demonstrate the problem.  Maybe they can explain to us why this is appropriate behavior.  :)

  Read the article

• Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

  - by Rob Farley

  Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

  Read the article

• How to get sound on macbook pro 4,1

  - by Thomas

  I have just installed Xubuntu 12.04.2. My soundcard is detected: thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Everything is put to max in alsamixer and nothing is muted (all the sliders are on OO. My speakers do not work, but when I plug in a headphone I hear it very soft. When I connect my stereo and put the sound VERY loud (3-blocks-of-complaining-neighbours loud) I hear it on a normal level but crackling. I added options snd-hda-intel model=mbp5 amixer set IEC958 off to at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. When it's still not working I tried everything here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting 1 >>> list-sinks 1 sink(s) available. * index: 0 name: <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo> driver: <module-alsa-card.c> flags: HARDWARE HW_MUTE_CTRL HW_VOLUME_CTRL DECIBEL_VOLUME LATENCY DYNAMIC_LATENCY state: SUSPENDED suspend cause: IDLE priority: 9959 volume: 0: 100% 1: 100% 0: 0.00 dB 1: 0.00 dB balance 0.00 base volume: 100% 0.00 dB volume steps: 65537 muted: no current latency: 0.00 ms max request: 0 KiB max rewind: 0 KiB monitor source: 0 sample spec: s16le 2ch 44100Hz channel map: front-left,front-right Stereo used by: 0 linked by: 0 configured latency: 0.00 ms; range is 0.50 .. 371.52 ms card: 0 <alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1b.0> module: 4 properties: alsa.resolution_bits = "16" device.api = "alsa" device.class = "sound" alsa.class = "generic" alsa.subclass = "generic-mix" alsa.name = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.id = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.subdevice = "0" alsa.subdevice_name = "subdevice #0" alsa.device = "0" alsa.card = "0" alsa.card_name = "HDA Intel" alsa.long_card_name = "HDA Intel at 0x9b500000 irq 46" alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel" device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:1b.0" sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0" device.bus = "pci" device.vendor.id = "8086" device.vendor.name = "Intel Corporation" device.product.name = "82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller" device.form_factor = "internal" device.string = "front:0" device.buffering.buffer_size = "65536" device.buffering.fragment_size = "32768" device.access_mode = "mmap+timer" device.profile.name = "analog-stereo" device.profile.description = "Analog Stereo" device.description = "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" alsa.mixer_name = "Realtek ALC889A" alsa.components = "HDA:10ec0885,106b3a00,00100103" module-udev-detect.discovered = "1" device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci" ports: analog-output-speaker: Speakers (priority 10000, available: unknown) properties: analog-output-headphones: Headphones (priority 9000, available: no) properties: active port: <analog-output-speaker> 2 and 3: Doesn't seem an permission issue, the sound is very far away (See opening paragraph). 4 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 5 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-hwdep.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-pcm.ko [.. huge lists continues ..] /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/pdaudiocf/snd-pdaudiocf.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/vx/snd-vxpocket.ko thomas@thomas-pc:~$ 6 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device 00a4 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46 Memory at 9b500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 7 I guess it's supported. Linux mint and Xubuntu 13.04 had no trouble with sounds. Everything worked out of the box Thanks in advance Edit: alsa-info.sh output: WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' ALSA Information Script v 0.4.62 -------------------------------- This script visits the following commands/files to collect diagnostic information about your ALSA installation and sound related hardware. dmesg lspci lsmod aplay amixer alsactl /proc/asound/ /sys/class/sound/ ~/.asoundrc (etc.) See './alsa-info.sh --help' for command line options. WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' Automatically upload ALSA information to www.alsa-project.org? [y/N] : y Uploading information to www.alsa-project.org ... Done! Your ALSA information is located at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=6cffc584284d4c0b266eb53249824ef83d6c4e3e Please inform the person helping you. thomas@thomas-pc:~$

  Read the article

• TDD and WCF behavior

  - by Frederic Hautecoeur

  Some weeks ago I wanted to develop a WCF behavior using TDD. I have lost some time trying to use mocks. After a while i decided to just use a host and a client. I don’t like this approach but so far I haven’t found a good and fast solution to use Unit Test for testing a WCF behavior. To Implement my solution I had to : Create a Dummy Service Definition; Create the Dummy Service Implementation; Create a host; Create a client in my test; Create and Add the behavior; Dummy Service Definition This is just a simple service, composed of an Interface and a simple implementation. The structure is aimed to be easily customizable for my future needs.   Using Clauses : 1: using System.Runtime.Serialization; 2: using System.ServiceModel; 3: using System.ServiceModel.Channels; The DataContract: 1: [DataContract()] 2: public class MyMessage 3: { 4: [DataMember()] 5: public string MessageString; 6: } The request MessageContract: 1: [MessageContract()] 2: public class RequestMessage 3: { 4: [MessageHeader(Name = "MyHeader", Namespace = "http://dummyservice/header", Relay = true)] 5: public string myHeader; 6:  7: [MessageBodyMember()] 8: public MyMessage myRequest; 9: } The response MessageContract: 1: [MessageContract()] 2: public class ResponseMessage 3: { 4: [MessageHeader(Name = "MyHeader", Namespace = "http://dummyservice/header", Relay = true)] 5: public string myHeader; 6:  7: [MessageBodyMember()] 8: public MyMessage myResponse; 9: } The ServiceContract: 1: [ServiceContract(Name="DummyService", Namespace="http://dummyservice",SessionMode=SessionMode.Allowed )] 2: interface IDummyService 3: { 4: [OperationContract(Action="Perform", IsOneWay=false, ProtectionLevel=System.Net.Security.ProtectionLevel.None )] 5: ResponseMessage DoThis(RequestMessage request); 6: } Dummy Service Implementation 1: public class DummyService:IDummyService 2: { 3: #region IDummyService Members 4: public ResponseMessage DoThis(RequestMessage request) 5: { 6: ResponseMessage response = new ResponseMessage(); 7: response.myHeader = "Response"; 8: response.myResponse = new MyMessage(); 9: response.myResponse.MessageString = 10: string.Format("Header:<{0}> and Request was <{1}>", 11: request.myHeader, request.myRequest.MessageString); 12: return response; 13: } 14: #endregion 15: } Host Creation The most simple host implementation using a Named Pipe binding. The GetBinding method will create a binding for the host and can be used to create the same binding for the client. 1: public static class TestHost 2: { 3: 4: internal static string hostUri = "net.pipe://localhost/dummy"; 5:  6: // Create Host method. 7: internal static ServiceHost CreateHost() 8: { 9: ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(typeof(DummyService)); 10:  11: // Creating Endpoint 12: Uri namedPipeAddress = new Uri(hostUri); 13: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IDummyService), GetBinding(), namedPipeAddress); 14:  15: return host; 16: } 17:  18: // Binding Creation method. 19: internal static Binding GetBinding() 20: { 21: NamedPipeTransportBindingElement namedPipeTransport = new NamedPipeTransportBindingElement(); 22: TextMessageEncodingBindingElement textEncoding = new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement(); 23:  24: return new CustomBinding(textEncoding, namedPipeTransport); 25: } 26:  27: // Close Method. 28: internal static void Close(ServiceHost host) 29: { 30: if (null != host) 31: { 32: host.Close(); 33: host = null; 34: } 35: } 36: } Checking the service A simple test tool check the plumbing. 1: [TestMethod] 2: public void TestService() 3: { 4: using (ServiceHost host = TestHost.CreateHost()) 5: { 6: host.Open(); 7:  8: using (ChannelFactory<IDummyService> channel = 9: new ChannelFactory<IDummyService>(TestHost.GetBinding() 10: , new EndpointAddress(TestHost.hostUri))) 11: { 12: IDummyService svc = channel.CreateChannel(); 13: try 14: { 15: RequestMessage request = new RequestMessage(); 16: request.myHeader = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); 17: request.myRequest = new MyMessage(); 18: request.myRequest.MessageString = "I want some beer."; 19:  20: ResponseMessage response = svc.DoThis(request); 21: } 22: catch (Exception ex) 23: { 24: Assert.Fail(ex.Message); 25: } 26: } 27: host.Close(); 28: } 29: } Running the service should show that the client and the host are running fine. So far so good. Adding the Behavior Add a reference to the Behavior project and add the using entry in the test class. We just need to add the behavior to the service host : 1: [TestMethod] 2: public void TestService() 3: { 4: using (ServiceHost host = TestHost.CreateHost()) 5: { 6: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(new MyBehavior()); 7: host.Open();¨ 8: …  If you set a breakpoint in your behavior and run the test in debug mode, you will hit the breakpoint. In this case I used a ServiceBehavior. To add an Endpoint behavior you have to add it to the endpoints. 1: host.Description.Endpoints[0].Behaviors.Add(new MyEndpointBehavior()) To add a contract or an operation behavior a custom attribute should work on the service contract definition. I haven’t tried that yet.   All the code provided in this blog and in the following files are for sample use. Improvements I don’t like to instantiate a client and a service to test my behaviors. But so far I have' not found an easy way to do it. Today I am passing a type of endpoint to the host creator and it creates the right binding type. This allows me to easily switch between bindings at will. I have used the same approach to test Mex Endpoints, another post should come later for this. Enjoy !

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – An Efficiency Tool to Compare and Synchronize SQL Server Databases

  - by Pinal Dave

  There is no need to reinvent the wheel if it is already invented and if the wheel is already available at ease, there is no need to wait to grab it. Here is the similar situation. I came across a very interesting situation and I had to look for an efficient tool which can make my life easier and solve my business problem. Here is the scenario. One of the developers had deleted few rows from the very important mapping table of our development server (thankfully, it was not the production server). Though it was a development server, the entire development team had to stop working as the application started to crash on every page. Think about the lost of manpower and efficiency which we started to loose.  Pretty much every department had to stop working as our internal development application stopped working. Thankfully, we even take a backup of our development server and we had access to full backup of the entire database at 6 AM morning. We do not take as a frequent backup of development server as production server (naturally!). Even though we had a full backup, the solution was not to restore the database. Think about it, there were plenty of the other operations since the last good full backup and if we restore a full backup, we will pretty much overwrite on the top of the work done by developers since morning. Now, as restoring the full backup was not an option we decided to restore the same database on another server. Once we had restored our database to another server, the challenge was to compare the table from where the database was deleted. The mapping table from where the data were deleted contained over 5000 rows and it was humanly impossible to compare both the tables manually. Finally we decided to use efficiency tool dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server from DevArt. dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server is a powerful, fast and easy to use SQL compare tool, capable of using native SQL Server backups as metadata source. (FYI we Downloaded dbForge Data Compare) Once we discovered the product, we immediately downloaded the product and installed on our development server. After we installed the product, we were greeted with the following screen. We clicked on the New Data Comparision to start our new comparison project. It brought up following screen. Here is the best part of the product, we just had to enter our database connection username and password along with source and destination details and we are done. The entire process is very simple and self intuiting. The best part was that for the source, we can either select database or even backup. This was indeed fantastic feature. Think about this, if you have a very big database, it will take long time to restore on the server. Once it is restored, you will be able to work with it. However, when you are working with dbForge Data Compare it will accept database backup as your source or destination. Once I click on the execute it brought up following screen where it displayed an excellent summary of the data compare. It has dedicated tabs for the what is changing in what table as well had details of the changed data. The best part is that, once we had reviewed the change. We click on the Synchronize button in the menu bar and it brought up following screen. You can see that the screen has very simple straight forward but very powerful features. You can generate a script to synchronize from target to source or even from source to target. Additionally, the database is a very complicated world and there are extensive options to configure various database options on the next screen. We also have the option to either generate script or directly execute the script to target server. I like to play on the safe side and I generated the script for my synchronization and later on after review I deployed the scripts on the server. Well, my team and we were able to get going from our disaster in less than 10 minutes. There were few people in our team were indeed disappointed as they were thinking of going home early that day but in less than 10 minutes they had to get back to work. There are so many other features in  dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server, I am already planning to make this product company wide recommended product for Data Compare tool. Hats off to the team who have build this product. Here are few of the features salient features of the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server Perform SQL Server database comparison to detect changes Compare SQL Server backups with live databases Analyze data differences between two databases Synchronize two databases that went out of sync Restore data of a particular table from the backup Generate data comparison reports in Excel and HTML formats Copy look-up data from development database to production Automate routine data synchronization tasks with command-line interface Go Ahead and Download the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server right away. It is always a good idea to get familiar with the important tools before hand instead of learning it under pressure of disaster. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Fundamentals of Columnstore Index

  - by pinaldave

  There are two kind of storage in database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data is relevant or not, column store queries need only to search much lesser number of the columns. This means major increases in search speed and hard drive use. Additionally, the column store indexes are heavily compressed, which translates to even greater memory and faster searches. I am sure this looks very exciting and it does not mean that you convert every single index from row store to column store index. One has to understand the proper places where to use row store or column store indexes. Let us understand in this article what is the difference in Columnstore type of index. Column store indexes are run by Microsoft’s VertiPaq technology. However, all you really need to know is that this method of storing data is columns on a single page is much faster and more efficient. Creating a column store index is very easy, and you don’t have to learn new syntax to create them. You just need to specify the keyword “COLUMNSTORE” and enter the data as you normally would. Keep in mind that once you add a column store to a table, though, you cannot delete, insert or update the data – it is READ ONLY. However, since column store will be mainly used for data warehousing, this should not be a big problem. You can always use partitioning to avoid rebuilding the index. A columnstore index stores each column in a separate set of disk pages, rather than storing multiple rows per page as data traditionally has been stored. The difference between column store and row store approaches is illustrated below: In case of the row store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple rows of the columns spanning across multiple pages. In case of column store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple single columns. This will lead only the columns needed to solve a query will be fetched from disk. Additionally there is good chance that there will be redundant data in a single column which will further help to compress the data, this will have positive effect on buffer hit rate as most of the data will be in memory and due to same it will not need to be retrieved. Let us see small example of how columnstore index improves the performance of the query on a large table. As a first step let us create databaseset which is large enough to show performance impact of columnstore index. The time taken to create sample database may vary on different computer based on the resources. USE AdventureWorks GO -- Create New Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail]( [SalesOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesOrderDetailID] [int] NOT NULL, [CarrierTrackingNumber] [nvarchar](25) NULL, [OrderQty] [smallint] NOT NULL, [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL, [SpecialOfferID] [int] NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] [money] NOT NULL, [UnitPriceDiscount] [money] NOT NULL, [LineTotal] [numeric](38, 6) NOT NULL, [rowguid] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create clustered index CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [CL_MySalesOrderDetail] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] ( [SalesOrderDetailID]) GO -- Create Sample Data Table -- WARNING: This Query may run upto 2-10 minutes based on your systems resources INSERT INTO [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] SELECT S1.* FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail S1 GO 100 Now let us do quick performance test. I have kept STATISTICS IO ON for measuring how much IO following queries take. In my test first I will run query which will use regular index. We will note the IO usage of the query. After that we will create columnstore index and will measure the IO of the same. -- Performance Test -- Comparing Regular Index with ColumnStore Index USE AdventureWorks GO SET STATISTICS IO ON GO -- Select Table with regular Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO -- Table 'MySalesOrderDetail'. Scan count 1, logical reads 342261, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0. -- Create ColumnStore Index CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [MySalesOrderDetail] (UnitPrice, OrderQty, ProductID) GO -- Select Table with Columnstore Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO It is very clear from the results that query is performance extremely fast after creating ColumnStore Index. The amount of the pages it has to read to run query is drastically reduced as the column which are needed in the query are stored in the same page and query does not have to go through every single page to read those columns. If we enable execution plan and compare we can see that column store index performance way better than regular index in this case. Let us clean up the database. -- Cleanup DROP INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GO TRUNCATE TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO DROP TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO In future posts we will see cases where Columnstore index is not appropriate solution as well few other tricks and tips of the columnstore index. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

  When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control.   Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos.   One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion.  The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues.  Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience.  When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos.  The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect.  This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D.  Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/.  One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation.  The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger.  The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge.  That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below.   Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues.  This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application.  1.  Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components :  The background image, the Title, and the Content.  You can imagine each  these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect.  2.  Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control.  To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping.  Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction.    3.  Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers.  The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward.  There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event :  (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone.   And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event:  Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects.  Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be.  The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture.  By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control.  And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches.  1.  A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself.   In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2.  Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content.  Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly.  3.  Background and content wrapping.  The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list.  In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone).  It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience.     Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think.  You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery  Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Optimizing collision engine bottleneck

  - by Vittorio Romeo

  Foreword: I'm aware that optimizing this bottleneck is not a necessity - the engine is already very fast. I, however, for fun and educational purposes, would love to find a way to make the engine even faster. I'm creating a general-purpose C++ 2D collision detection/response engine, with an emphasis on flexibility and speed. Here's a very basic diagram of its architecture: Basically, the main class is World, which owns (manages memory) of a ResolverBase*, a SpatialBase* and a vector<Body*>. SpatialBase is a pure virtual class which deals with broad-phase collision detection. ResolverBase is a pure virtual class which deals with collision resolution. The bodies communicate to the World::SpatialBase* with SpatialInfo objects, owned by the bodies themselves. There currenly is one spatial class: Grid : SpatialBase, which is a basic fixed 2D grid. It has it's own info class, GridInfo : SpatialInfo. Here's how its architecture looks: The Grid class owns a 2D array of Cell*. The Cell class contains two collection of (not owned) Body*: a vector<Body*> which contains all the bodies that are in the cell, and a map<int, vector<Body*>> which contains all the bodies that are in the cell, divided in groups. Bodies, in fact, have a groupId int that is used for collision groups. GridInfo objects also contain non-owning pointers to the cells the body is in. As I previously said, the engine is based on groups. Body::getGroups() returns a vector<int> of all the groups the body is part of. Body::getGroupsToCheck() returns a vector<int> of all the groups the body has to check collision against. Bodies can occupy more than a single cell. GridInfo always stores non-owning pointers to the occupied cells. After the bodies move, collision detection happens. We assume that all bodies are axis-aligned bounding boxes. How broad-phase collision detection works: Part 1: spatial info update For each Body body: Top-leftmost occupied cell and bottom-rightmost occupied cells are calculated. If they differ from the previous cells, body.gridInfo.cells is cleared, and filled with all the cells the body occupies (2D for loop from the top-leftmost cell to the bottom-rightmost cell). body is now guaranteed to know what cells it occupies. For a performance boost, it stores a pointer to every map<int, vector<Body*>> of every cell it occupies where the int is a group of body->getGroupsToCheck(). These pointers get stored in gridInfo->queries, which is simply a vector<map<int, vector<Body*>>*>. body is now guaranteed to have a pointer to every vector<Body*> of bodies of groups it needs to check collision against. These pointers are stored in gridInfo->queries. Part 2: actual collision checks For each Body body: body clears and fills a vector<Body*> bodiesToCheck, which contains all the bodies it needs to check against. Duplicates are avoided (bodies can belong to more than one group) by checking if bodiesToCheck already contains the body we're trying to add. const vector<Body*>& GridInfo::getBodiesToCheck() { bodiesToCheck.clear(); for(const auto& q : queries) for(const auto& b : *q) if(!contains(bodiesToCheck, b)) bodiesToCheck.push_back(b); return bodiesToCheck; } The GridInfo::getBodiesToCheck() method IS THE BOTTLENECK. The bodiesToCheck vector must be filled for every body update because bodies could have moved meanwhile. It also needs to prevent duplicate collision checks. The contains function simply checks if the vector already contains a body with std::find. Collision is checked and resolved for every body in bodiesToCheck. That's it. So, I've been trying to optimize this broad-phase collision detection for quite a while now. Every time I try something else than the current architecture/setup, something doesn't go as planned or I make assumption about the simulation that later are proven to be false. My question is: how can I optimize the broad-phase of my collision engine maintaining the grouped bodies approach? Is there some kind of magic C++ optimization that can be applied here? Can the architecture be redesigned in order to allow for more performance? Actual implementation: SSVSCollsion Body.h, Body.cpp World.h, World.cpp Grid.h, Grid.cpp Cell.h, Cell.cpp GridInfo.h, GridInfo.cpp

  Read the article

• Not so long ago in a city not so far away by Carlos Martin

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is the story of how the EMEA Presales Center turned an Oracle intern into a trusted technology advisor for both Oracle’s Sales and customers. It was the summer of 2011 when I was finishing my Computer Engineering studies as well as my internship at Oracle when I was offered what could possibly be THE dream job for any young European Computer Engineer. Apart from that, it also seemed like the role was particularly tailored to me as I could leverage almost everything I learned at University and during the internship. And all of it in one of the best cities to live in, not only from my home country but arguably from Europe: Malaga! A day at EPC As part of the EPC Technology pillar, and later on completely focused on WebCenter, there was no way to describe a normal day on the job as each day had something unique. Some days I was researching documentation in order to elaborate accurate answers for a customer’s question within a Request for Information or Proposal (RFI/RFP), other days I was doing heavy programming in order to bring a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a customer to life and last not but least, some days I presented to the customer via webconference the demo I built for them the past weeks. So as you can see, the role has research, development and presentation, could you ask for more? Well, don’t worry because there IS more! Internationality As the organization’s name suggests, EMEA Presales Center, it is the Center of Presales within Europe, Middle East and Africa so I got the chance to work with great professionals from all this regions, expanding my network and learning things from one country to apply them to others. In addition to that, the teams based in the Malaga office are comprised of many young professionals hailing mainly from Western and Central European countries (although there are a couple of exceptions!) with very different backgrounds and personalities which guaranteed many laughs and stories during lunch or coffee breaks (or even while working on projects!). Furthermore, having EPC offices in Bucharest and Bangalore and thanks to today’s tele-presence technologies, I was working every day with people from India or Romania as if they were sitting right next to me and the bonding with them got stronger day by day. Career development Apart from the research and self-study I’ve earlier mentioned, one of the EPC’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is that 15% of your time is spent on training so you get lots and lots of trainings in order to develop both your technical product knowledge and your presentation, negotiation and other soft skills. Sometimes the training is via webcast, sometimes the trainer comes to the office and sometimes, the best times, you get to travel abroad in order to attend a training, which also helps you to further develop your network by meeting face to face with many people you only know from some email or instant messaging interaction. And as the months go by, your skills improving at a very fast pace, your relevance increasing with each new project you successfully deliver, it’s only a matter of time (and a bit of self-promoting!) that you get the attention of the manager of a more senior team and are offered the opportunity to take a new step in your professional career. For me it took 2 years to move to my current position, Technology Sales Consultant at the Oracle Direct organization. During those 2 years I had built a good relationship with the Oracle Direct Spanish sales and sales managers, who are also based in the Malaga office. I supported their former Sales Consultant in a couple of presentations and demos and were very happy with my overall performance and attitude so even before the position got eventually vacant, I got a heads-up from then in advance that their current Sales Consultant was going to move to a different position. To me it felt like a natural step, same as when I joined EPC, I had at least a 50% of the “homework” already done but wanted to experience that extra 50% to add new product and soft skills to my arsenal. The rest is history, I’ve been in the role for more than half a year as I’m writing this, achieved already some important wins, gained a lot of trust and confidence in front of customers and broadened my view of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio. I look back at the 2 years I spent in EPC and think: “boy, I’d recommend that experience to absolutely anyone with the slightest interest in IT, there are so many different things you can do as there are different kind of roles you can end up taking thanks to the experience gained at EPC” /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

  Read the article

• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Hylton

  Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

  Read the article

• Preview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PC

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to look over a new book, or buy it immediately in ebook format?  Here’s how you can preview and purchase most new books from your PC the easy way. Most new books, including almost all New York Times Bestsellers, are available in ebook format from Amazon’s Kindle store.  The Kindle store also includes numerous free ebooks, including out-of-print classics and a surprising amount of recent books.  With the free Kindle for PC reader, you can read any of these ebooks without having to purchase a Kindle device. Preview Ebooks Before you Purchase Sometimes, it can be hard to know if you want to purchase a new book without reading some of it first.  With Kindle for PC, however, you can download a sample of any ebook available for free.  The sample usually includes the table of contents, forward or introduction, and often part or all of the first chapter. To get an ebook sample, find the book you want in the Kindle store (link below). Now, under the Try it free box, select the correct computer or device to send the sample to, and click Send Sample now. Amazon will thank you for your order, even though this is only a free preview.  Click the Go to Kindle for PC button to open Kindle and read your ebook preview.   Or, if Kindle is already running, press the Refresh button in the top right corner to check for new ebooks and previews. Kindle will synchronize and download the previews you selected. The most recently downloaded items show up on the top left.  All sample books have a red “Sample” bar on the bottom of their cover, and they also include links to Buy or view more info about it on it’s cover.  Double-click your sample to start reading it. Your ebook sample will usually open at the introduction or beginning of the first chapter, but you can also view the index, cover, and more. When you reach the end of the sample book, you can click a link to buy the book or view more details about it.  Strangely, both of these links currently take you to the ebook’s page on Amazon.com, but perhaps in the future the Buy link will directly let you purchase the book. Or, you can also click Buy Now on a sample book directly from your Kindle library. If you clicked one of these links, you will be returned to the ebook’s page on Amazon.  Choose the PC or Kindle you want the book delivered to, and this time, select Buy Now with 1-Click. Add your payment info if you’re not already setup for 1-Click Shopping, and then you’ll be shown the same Thank you page as before.  Refresh Kindle for PC, and your new ebook will automatically download.  Strangely, the sample ebook is not automatically removed, so you can right-click on the sample and select Delete this Book.  Additionally, your last-read page in the sample is not synced to the purchased book, so you may have to find your place again. Now, enjoy your full ebook! Download Free Books for Kindle The Kindle Store has an amazing amount of free ebooks.  Some free books may only be free for a limited time as a promotion, while others, such as old classics, may always be free.  Either which way, once you download it, you can keep it forever. When you find a free ebook you want, select the Kindle or PC you want to download it to and click “Buy now with 1-Click”.  Notice that this book shows it’s price is $0.00, but the button still says Buy now.  Rest assured, if the book’s price show up as $0.00, you will not be charged anything for downloading it. Your ebook will download as usual after your next refresh.  Note that you can still download the sample first if you want, but since the book is free, just download the whole thing and delete it if you don’t want it. Redownload your Purchased or Free Books If you install Kindle on a new PC or delete a book from your library, you can always re-download it from your Amazon account.  Browse to the Manage your Kindle page on Amazon (link below) sign in with your Amazon account, and scroll down to the list of your purchased content. Select the book you wish to download, then choose the Kindle or PC you want to download it to and press Go. Note: There is a “Delete this title” button right below this.  If you press the Delete button, you will not ever be able to re-download it. Or, you can download the book directly from the Archived Items tab in Kindle on your other PC. And, if you have your Kindle content on multiple computers, your reading will be synced via Whispersync.  You can start reading on your desktop, and then resume where you left off from your laptop. Conclusion With these tips and tricks, it is much easier to preview and purchase new books, find and download free ebooks, and re-download any you’ve deleted from your PC.  Have fun filling up your digital library! Links Manage your Kindle account Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Read Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PCRead Kindle Books On Your Computer with Kindle for PCHow to See Where a TinyUrl Is Really Linking ToEdit Microsoft Word 2007 Documents in Print PreviewWhy Can’t I Turn the Details/Preview Panes On or Off in Windows Vista Explorer? 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 Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides

  Read the article

• A Graduate&rsquo;s Journey at Oracle &ndash; Bhaskar Ghosh From Oracle India

  - by david.talamelli

  I am Bhaskar Ghosh, and I work as an Applications Engineer with Oracle. Well, it was three years ago when my journey with one of the largest software companies started. It was a fine day and a decisive moment, when I was placed in Oracle as a campus recruit from College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University, Chennai! I always thought of looking back, the time that helped me learn beyond my boundaries, think broader and ahead, and grow – technically, professionally and personally. Hmmn! Let me recall the eventful moments once again. My first day as an intern at Oracle started in late 2007. I met one of the Oracle Managers at the Oracle Campus in Hyderabad and on the same day I also met another Oracle employee who was to later to become my first manager. I was charged and thrilled with the environment and the wonderful people around me! I was joined by two other interns, who also had a Masters in Computer Applications. We formed a very friendly group with all the interns and the new hires, and shared our excitement and learning. Myself and one of the other Graduates started working on a very interesting project on Semantic technology. We finally had our names added as co-developers for this very project. This phase of five months was the time and we learnt tremendously and worked very hard, partly because we had to travel back and forth to our colleges to submit reports and present for the Masters in Computer Applications final year project reviews. After completing my MCA, I joined as a full-time employee in 2008. During the next year, we worked on interesting and bleeding edge technologies - OWL, RDF, SPARQL, Visualization, J2EE, Social Web features, Semantic Web technologies, Web Services and many more! We developed cool, rich internet and desktop applications. Little did I know at that time, that this learning would help me tremendously for my the next project in Oracle. The following year saw me being assigned a role in a different project that my other team members were working on for the last two years. It took me two months to understand and get into a flow with this new task. I was fortunate that this phase helped me enhance my inter-personal and communication skills, as much as it helped me grow professionally with better ability to tackle multiple priorities and switch between tasks based on the team’s requirements. I was made the POC for all communications with our team and other product teams. I personally feel that this time enhanced me tremendously in technologies like Oracle Forms, J2EE, and Java and Web Services. The last six months, saw myself becoming an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer member, and continuing my higher education International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. Oracle supports its employees becoming members of professional bodies, and higher studies are supported by management, I think it is tremendously helpful in the professional and technical growth of the employees. Last three months, I have been working on great and useful enhancements to our product. Ah beautiful! All these years, there have been other moments and events of fun that are too worth mentioning. Clubs and groups at Oracle such as Employee Club, Oracle Volunteers, Football Club, etc. have always kept on organizing numerous events and competitions, full of fun and entertainment. I really enjoyed participating, even if it was small, in the intra-Oracle football tourney, Oracle Volunteer Days, OraFora, OraOvations, and a few more. Those ‘Seasons of Sharing’, those ‘Blood Donation camps’, those ‘Diwali and Christmas gifts and events’, those ‘fun events at the annual function called OraOvations’, those ‘books and cycle stalls’, and those so many other things… It only fills my mind with pleasure. The last three years have been very eventful:they have been full of learning and growth, and under the very able and encouraging guidance of my manager. I have got the opportunity to know about and/or interact with many wonderful personalities, and learn from them, here at Oracle. The environment, the people, and the fellow developers have been so friendly, and always ever ready to help, when we were in doubt.. I really love the big office space, and the flexible timings, and the caring people around. I look forward to a beautiful, learning and motivating journey with Oracle.

  Read the article

• Lync Server 2010

  - by ManojDhobale

  Microsoft Lync Server 2010 communications software and its client software, such as Microsoft Lync 2010, enable your users to connect in new ways and to stay connected, regardless of their physical location. Lync 2010 and Lync Server 2010 bring together the different ways that people communicate in a single client interface, are deployed as a unified platform, and are administered through a single management infrastructure. Workload Description IM and presence Instant messaging (IM) and presence help your users find and communicate with one another efficiently and effectively. IM provides an instant messaging platform with conversation history, and supports public IM connectivity with users of public IM networks such as MSN/Windows Live, Yahoo!, and AOL. Presence establishes and displays a user’s personal availability and willingness to communicate through the use of common states such as Available or Busy. This rich presence information enables other users to immediately make effective communication choices. Conferencing Lync Server includes support for IM conferencing, audio conferencing, web conferencing, video conferencing, and application sharing, for both scheduled and impromptu meetings. All these meeting types are supported with a single client. Lync Server also supports dial-in conferencing so that users of public switched telephone network (PSTN) phones can participate in the audio portion of conferences. Conferences can seamlessly change and grow in real time. For example, a single conference can start as just instant messages between a few users, and escalate to an audio conference with desktop sharing and a larger audience instantly, easily, and without interrupting the conversation flow. Enterprise Voice Enterprise Voice is the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) offering in Lync Server 2010. It delivers a voice option to enhance or replace traditional private branch exchange (PBX) systems. In addition to the complete telephony capabilities of an IP PBX, Enterprise Voice is integrated with rich presence, IM, collaboration, and meetings. Features such as call answer, hold, resume, transfer, forward and divert are supported directly, while personalized speed dialing keys are replaced by Contacts lists, and automatic intercom is replaced with IM. Enterprise Voice supports high availability through call admission control (CAC), branch office survivability, and extended options for data resiliency. Support for remote users You can provide full Lync Server functionality for users who are currently outside your organization’s firewalls by deploying servers called Edge Servers to provide a connection for these remote users. These remote users can connect to conferences by using a personal computer with Lync 2010 installed, the phone, or a web interface. Deploying Edge Servers also enables you to federate with partner or vendor organizations. A federated relationship enables your users to put federated users on their Contacts lists, exchange presence information and instant messages with these users, and invite them to audio calls, video calls, and conferences. Integration with other products Lync Server integrates with several other products to provide additional benefits to your users and administrators. Meeting tools are integrated into Outlook 2010 to enable organizers to schedule a meeting or start an impromptu conference with a single click and make it just as easy for attendees to join. Presence information is integrated into Outlook 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) provides several integration features. Users can see if they have new voice mail within Lync 2010. They can click a play button in the Outlook message to hear the audio voice mail, or view a transcription of the voice mail in the notification message. Simple deployment To help you plan and deploy your servers and clients, Lync Server provides the Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Planning Tool and the Topology Builder. Lync Server 2010, Planning Tool is a wizard that interactively asks you a series of questions about your organization, the Lync Server features you want to enable, and your capacity planning needs. Then, it creates a recommended deployment topology based on your answers, and produces several forms of output to aid your planning and installation. Topology Builder is an installation component of Lync Server 2010. You use Topology Builder to create, adjust and publish your planned topology. It also validates your topology before you begin server installations. When you install Lync Server on individual servers, the installation program deploys the server as directed in the topology. Simple management After you deploy Lync Server, it offers the following powerful and streamlined management tools: Active Directory for its user information, which eliminates the need for separate user and policy databases. Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Control Panel, a new web-based graphical user interface for administrators. With this web-based UI, Lync Server administrators can manage their systems from anywhere on the corporate network, without needing specialized management software installed on their computers. Lync Server Management Shell command-line management tool, which is based on the Windows PowerShell command-line interface. It provides a rich command set for administration of all aspects of the product, and enables Lync Server administrators to automate repetitive tasks using a familiar tool. While the IM and presence features are automatically installed in every Lync Server deployment, you can choose whether to deploy conferencing, Enterprise Voice, and remote user access, to tailor your deployment to your organization’s needs.

  Read the article

• Big Data – Evolution of Big Data – Day 3 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we answered what is the Big Data. Today we will understand why and how the evolution of Big Data has happened. Though the answer is very simple, I would like to tell it in the form of a history lesson. Data in Flat File In earlier days data was stored in the flat file and there was no structure in the flat file.  If any data has to be retrieved from the flat file it was a project by itself. There was no possibility of retrieving the data efficiently and data integrity has been just a term discussed without any modeling or structure around. Database residing in the flat file had more issues than we would like to discuss in today’s world. It was more like a nightmare when there was any data processing involved in the application. Though, applications developed at that time were also not that advanced the need of the data was always there and there was always need of proper data management. Edgar F Codd and 12 Rules Edgar Frank Codd was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He presented 12 rules for the Relational Database and suddenly the chaotic world of the database seems to see discipline in the rules. Relational Database was a promising land for all the unstructured database users. Relational Database brought into the relationship between data as well improved the performance of the data retrieval. Database world had immediately seen a major transformation and every single vendors and database users suddenly started to adopt the relational database models. Relational Database Management Systems Since Edgar F Codd proposed 12 rules for the RBDMS there were many different vendors who started them to build applications and tools to support the relationship between database. This was indeed a learning curve for many of the developer who had never worked before with the modeling of the database. However, as time passed by pretty much everybody accepted the relationship of the database and started to evolve product which performs its best with the boundaries of the RDBMS concepts. This was the best era for the databases and it gave the world extreme experts as well as some of the best products. The Entity Relationship model was also evolved at the same time. In software engineering, an Entity–relationship model (ER model) is a data model for describing a database in an abstract way. Enormous Data Growth Well, everything was going fine with the RDBMS in the database world. As there were no major challenges the adoption of the RDBMS applications and tools was pretty much universal. There was a race at times to make the developer’s life much easier with the RDBMS management tools. Due to the extreme popularity and easy to use system pretty much every data was stored in the RDBMS system. New age applications were built and social media took the world by the storm. Every organizations was feeling pressure to provide the best experience for their users based the data they had with them. While this was all going on at the same time data was growing pretty much every organization and application. Data Warehousing The enormous data growth now presented a big challenge for the organizations who wanted to build intelligent systems based on the data and provide near real time superior user experience to their customers. Various organizations immediately start building data warehousing solutions where the data was stored and processed. The trend of the business intelligence becomes the need of everyday. Data was received from the transaction system and overnight was processed to build intelligent reports from it. Though this is a great solution it has its own set of challenges. The relational database model and data warehousing concepts are all built with keeping traditional relational database modeling in the mind and it still has many challenges when unstructured data was present. Interesting Challenge Every organization had expertise to manage structured data but the world had already changed to unstructured data. There was intelligence in the videos, photos, SMS, text, social media messages and various other data sources. All of these needed to now bring to a single platform and build a uniform system which does what businesses need. The way we do business has also been changed. There was a time when user only got the features what technology supported, however, now users ask for the feature and technology is built to support the same. The need of the real time intelligence from the fast paced data flow is now becoming a necessity. Large amount (Volume) of difference (Variety) of high speed data (Velocity) is the properties of the data. The traditional database system has limits to resolve the challenges this new kind of the data presents. Hence the need of the Big Data Science. We need innovation in how we handle and manage data. We need creative ways to capture data and present to users. Big Data is Reality! Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer discuss Basics of Big Data Architecture. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

  Read the article

• Oracle SQL Developer v3.2.1 Now Available

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Oracle SQL Developer version 3.2.1 is now available. I recommend that everyone now upgrade to this release. It features more than 200 bug fixes, tweaks, and polish applied to the 3.2 edition. The high profile bug fixes submitted by customers and users on our forums are listed in all their glory for your review. I want to highlight a few of the changes though, as I recognize many of you lack the time and/or patience to ‘read the docs.’ That would include me, which is why I enjoy writing these kinds of blog posts. I’m lazy – just like you! No more artificial line breaks between CREATE OR REPLACE and your PL/SQL In versions 3.2 and older, when you pull up your stored procedural objects in our editor, you would see a line break inserted between the CREATE OR REPLACE and then the body of your code. In version 3.2.1, we have removed the line break. 3.1 3.2.1 Trivia Did You Know? The database doesn’t store the ‘CREATE’ or ‘CREATE OR REPLACE’ bit of your PL/SQL code in the database. If we look at the USER_SOURCE view, we can see that the code begins with the object name. So the CREATE OR REPLACE bit is ‘artificial’ The intent is to give you the code necessary to recreate your object – and have it ‘compile’ into the database. We pretty much HAVE to add the ‘CREATE OR REPLACE.’ From now on it will appear inline with the first line of your code. Exporting Tables & Views When exporting data from your tables or views, previous versions of SQL Developer presented a 3 step wizard. It allows you to choose your columns and apply data filters for what is exported. This was kind of redundant. The grids already allowed you to select your columns and apply filters. Wouldn’t it be more intuitive AND efficient to just make the grids behave in a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) fashion? In version 3.2.1, that is exactly what will happen. The wizard now only has two steps and the grid will export the data and columns as defined in the visible grid. Let the grid properties define what is actually exported! And here is what is pasted into my worksheet: "BREWERY"|"CITY" "3 Brewers Restaurant Micro-Brewery"|"Toronto" "Amsterdam Brewing Co."|"Toronto" "Ball Brewing Company Ltd."|"Toronto" "Big Ram Brewing Company"|"Toronto" "Black Creek Historic Brewery"|"Toronto" "Black Oak Brewing"|"Toronto" "C'est What?"|"Toronto" "Cool Beer Brewing Company"|"Toronto" "Denison's Brewing"|"Toronto" "Duggan's Brewery"|"Toronto" "Feathers"|"Toronto" "Fermentations! - Danforth"|"Toronto" "Fermentations! - Mount Pleasant"|"Toronto" "Granite Brewery & Restaurant"|"Toronto" "Labatt's Breweries of Canada"|"Toronto" "Mill Street Brew Pub"|"Toronto" "Mill Street Brewery"|"Toronto" "Molson Breweries of Canada"|"Toronto" "Molson Brewery at Air Canada Centre"|"Toronto" "Pioneer Brewery Ltd."|"Toronto" "Post-Production Bistro"|"Toronto" "Rotterdam Brewing"|"Toronto" "Steam Whistle Brewing"|"Toronto" "Strand Brasserie"|"Toronto" "Upper Canada Brewing"|"Toronto" JUST what I wanted And One Last Thing Speaking of export, sometimes I want to send data to Excel. And sometimes I want to send multiple objects to Excel – to a single Excel file that is. In version 3.2.1 you can now do that. Let’s export the bulk of the HR schema to Excel, with each table going to it’s own workbook in the same worksheet. Select many tables, put them in in a single Excel worksheet If you try this in previous versions of SQL Developer it will just write the first table to the Excel file. This is one of the bugs we addressed in v3.2.1. Here is what the output Excel file looks like now: Many tables - Many workbooks in an Excel Worksheet I have a sneaky suspicion that this will be a frequently used feature going forward. Excel seems to be the cornerstone of many of our popular features. Imagine that!

  Read the article

• doubleTwist is an iTunes Alternative that Supports Several Devices

  - by Mysticgeek

  There are a lot of iTunes users out there, but unfortunately you can’t use it with all of your portable devices. Today we take a look at doubleTwist, which allows you to sync your media with a multitude of portable devices and easily share it as well. Note: You can run doubleTwist on Windows or Mac, and here we take a look at the Windows version. Install & Setup doubleTwist Download and install doubleTwist using the defaults in the wizard… Installation takes several moments and you’ll see the progress while it finishes up. After installation is complete, sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. If you do have an account you can login right away. Enter in your username, email address, and password then click Sign Up.   You’ll get an confirmation email and need to activate the account before you can sign in. Once you’re all signed up, launch doubleTwist and you’ll be ready to start using it. doubleTwist Music The default music store is Amazon MP3 store which might appeal to those of you who are tired of the iTunes music store. A lot of times the music is cheaper and available at higher bit rates. You can start searching for music in the Amazon Music Store and previewing songs. To purchase anything though you will need to sign into your Amazon account.   Under Playlists it allows you to import your playlists from iTunes and Windows Media Player, which is a handy feature if you don’t want to set them up again. Of course you can play your songs through the music player on your desktop. Devices One of the coolest things about doubleTwist is that it supports a lot of different portable media devices including iPod, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, PSP, Smartphones, and much more. Unfortunately for Zune users…there isn’t any support for the Zune of Zune HD yet. Here we have a Creative Zen attached and can sync songs, pictures, and podcasts. An HTC-S620 Smartphone running Windows Mobile… Even a simple USB drive will be recognized and you can transfer your media to it as well.   Podcasts Finding your favorite audio and video podcasts is easy with the search feature. You can easily manage and subscribe to podcasts in the subscriptions section.   You can watch the video podcasts directly in doubleTwist. Sharing Media Also you can share digital media with your friends or add it to Flickr and YouTube. You can send any pictures, videos, or music in your library to other people by dragging it over. You can email users individually… Or access contacts from your Gmail and Yahoo accounts. There is a limit to how much you can send of video podcasts… only the first 10 minutes. The person you send it to will get a link in their email that points to your My Feed page on the doubleTwist site.   There they can access the media you sent…in this example it’s a video podcast but you can share any media. Other Features Under My Profile you can change your avatar and personal information.   In Preferences you can choose where media is stored, its startup actions, podcast subscriptions, and manage device syncing. Conclusion It’s still in beta stage so expect some bugs, but overall doubleTwist is a solid media player that is easy to use with a clean interface. It’s simple and doesn’t try to do too much so is fairly easy on system resources. The main annoyance is it tries to catalog all of your media out of the box. Which may be alright for some users with smaller media collections, but very irritating to advanced users with large collections. Also there is currently no support for the Zune, but according to their forums, it’s on the way. At the time of this writing it’s in public beta and can be downloaded for XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit), and Mac OSX. If you’re looking for an iTunes alternative that works with several different portable devices, you might want to give DoubleTwist a try. Download DoubleTwist Public Beta See If Your Media Device is Supported by doubleTwist Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips MusicBee is a Fast and Powerful Music ManagerAvoid the Apple QuickTime Bloat with QT LiteBeginner Geek: Set Default Programs in Windows 7 and VistaBeginner Geeks: OpenOffice is a Free Cross Platform Alternative to MS OfficeManage Devices the Easy Way with Device Stage 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

  Read the article

• Oracle Database 12c Spatial: Vector Performance Acceleration

  - by Okcan Yasin Saygili-Oracle

  Most business information has a location component, such as customer addresses, sales territories and physical assets. Businesses can take advantage of their geographic information by incorporating location analysis and intelligence into their information systems. This allows organizations to make better decisions, respond to customers more effectively, and reduce operational costs – increasing ROI and creating competitive advantage. Oracle Database, the industry’s most advanced database,  includes native location capabilities, fully integrated in the kernel, for fast, scalable, reliable and secure spatial and massive graph applications. It is a foundation for deploying enterprise-wide spatial information systems and locationenabled business applications. Developers can extend existing Oracle-based tools and applications, since they can easily incorporate location information directly in their applications, workflows, and services. Spatial Features The geospatial data features of Oracle Spatial and Graph option support complex geographic information systems (GIS) applications, enterprise applications and location services applications. Oracle Spatial and Graph option extends the spatial query and analysis features included in every edition of Oracle Database with the Oracle Locator feature, and provides a robust foundation for applications that require advanced spatial analysis and processing in the Oracle Database. It supports all major spatial data types and models, addressing challenging business-critical requirements from various industries, including transportation, utilities, energy, public sector, defense and commercial location intelligence. Network Data Model Graph Features The Network Data Model graph explicitly stores and maintains a persistent data model withnetwork connectivity and provides network analysis capability such as shortest path, nearest neighbors, within cost and reachability. It loads partitioned networks into memory on demand, overcomingthe limitations of in-memory analysis. Partitioning massive networks into manageable sub-networkssimplifies the network analysis. RDF Semantic Graph Features RDF Semantic Graph has native support for World Wide Web Consortium standards. It has open, scalable, and secure features for storing RDF/OWL ontologies anddata; native inference with OWL 2, SKOS and user-defined rules; and querying RDF/OWL data withSPARQL 1.1, Java APIs, and SPARQLgraph patterns in SQL. Video: Oracle Spatial and Graph Overview Oracle spatial is embeded on oracle database product. So ,we can use oracle installer (OUI).The Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) is used to install Oracle Database software. OUI is a graphical user interface utility that enables you to view the Oracle software that is installed on your machine, install new Oracle Database software, and delete Oracle software that you no longer need to use. Online Help is available to guide you through the installation process. One of the installation options is to create a database. If you select database creation, OUI automatically starts Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) to guide you through the process of creating and configuring a database. If you do not create a database during installation, you must invoke DBCA after you have installed the software to create a database. You can also use DBCA to create additional databases. For installing Oracle Database 12c you may check the Installing Oracle Database Software and Creating a Database tutorial under the Oracle Database 12c 2-Day DBA Series.You can always check if spatial is available in your database using  "select comp_id, version, status, comp_name from dba_registry where comp_id='SDO';"   One of the most notable improvements with Oracle Spatial and Graph 12c can be seen in performance increases in vector data operations. Enabling the Spatial Vector Acceleration feature (available with the Spatial option) dramatically improves the performance of commonly used vector data operations, such as sdo_distance, sdo_aggr_union, and sdo_inside. With 12c, these operations also run more efficiently in parallel than in prior versions through the use of metadata caching. For organizations that have been facing processing limitations, these enhancements enable developers to make a small set of configuration changes and quickly realize significant performance improvements. Results include improved index performance, enhanced geometry engine performance, optimized secondary filter optimizations for Spatial operators, and improved CPU and memory utilization for many advanced vector functions. Vector performance acceleration is especially beneficial when using Oracle Exadata Database Machine and other large-scale systems. Oracle Spatial and Graph vector performance acceleration builds on general improvements available to all SDO_GEOMETRY operations in these areas: Caching of index metadata, Concurrent update mechanisms, and Optimized spatial predicate selectivity and cost functions. These optimizations enable more efficient use of: CPU, Memory, and Partitioning Resulting in substantial query performance improvements.UsageTo accelerate the performance of spatial operators, it is recommended that you set the SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION database system parameter to the value TRUE. (This parameter is authorized for use only by licensed Oracle Spatial users, and its default value is FALSE.) You can set this parameter for the whole system or for a single session. To set the value for the whole system, do either of the following:Enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SYSTEM SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;Add the following to the database initialization file (xxxinit.ora):   SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;To set the value for the current session, enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SESSION SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE; Checkout the complete list of new features on Oracle.com @ http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/spatialandgraph/overview/index.html Spatial and Graph Data Sheet (PDF) Spatial and Graph White Paper (PDF)

  Read the article

• Selling Visual Studio ALM

  - by Tarun Arora

  Introduction As a consultant I have been selling Application Lifecycle Management services using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. I’ve been contacted various times by friends working in organization telling me that ALM processes in their company were benchmarked when dinosaurs walked the earth. Most of these individuals already know the great features Microsoft ALM tools offer and are keen to start a conversation with the CIO but don’t exactly know where to start. It is very important how you engage in your first conversation, if you start the conversation with ‘There is this great tooling from Microsoft which offers amazing features to boost developer productivity, … ‘ from experience I can tell you the reply from your CIO would be ‘I already know! Our existing landscape has a combination of bleeding edge open source and cutting edge licensed tools which already cover these features quite well, more over Microsoft products have a high licensing cost associated to them.’ You will always find it harder to sell by feature, the trick is to highlight the gap in the existing processes & tools and then highlight the impact of these gaps to the overall development processes, by now you would have captured enough attention to show off how the ALM tooling offered by Microsoft not only fills those gaps but offers great value adds to take their development practices to the next level. Rangers ALM Assessment Guide Image 1 – Welcome! First look at the Rangers ALM assessment guide Most organization already have some processes in place to cover aspects of ALM. How do you go about proving that there isn’t enough cover in place? This is where Visual Studio ALM Rangers ALM Assessment guide can help. The ALM assessment guide is really a tool that helps you gather information about Development practices and processes within a customer's environment. Several questionnaires are used to identify the current state of individual development lifecycle areas and decide on a desired state for those processes. It also presents guidance and roll-up summaries to help with recommendations moving forward. The ALM Rangers assessment guide can be downloaded from here. Image 2 – ALM Assessment guide divided into different functions of SDLC The assessment guide is divided into different functions of Software Development Lifecycle (listed below), this gives you the ability to access how mature the company is in different areas of SDLC. Architecture & Design Requirement Engineering & UX Development Software Configuration Management Governance Deployment & Operations Testing & Quality Assurance Project Planning & Management Each section has a set of questions, fill in the assessment by selecting “Never/Sometimes/Always” from the Answer column in the question sheets.  Each answer has weightage to the overall score. Each question has a link next to it, clicking the link takes you to the Reference sheet which gives you more details about the question along with a reason for “why you need to ask this question?”, “other ways to phrase the question” and “what to expect as an answer from the customer”. The trick is to engage the customer in a discussion. You need to probe a lot, listen to the customer and have a discussion with several team members, preferably without management to ensure that you receive candid feedback. This reminds me of a funny incident when during an ALM review a customer told me that they have a sophisticated semi-automated application deployment process, further discussions revealed that deployment actually involved 72 manual configuration steps per production node. Such observations can be recorded in the Issue Brainstorming worksheet for further consideration later. It is also worth mentioning the different levels of ALM maturity to the customer. By default the desired state of ALM maturity is set to Standard, it is possible to set a desired state by area, you should strive for Advanced or Dynamic, it always helps by explaining the classification and advantages. Image 3 – ALM levels by description The ALM assessment guide helps you arrive at a quantitative measure of the company’s ALM maturity. The resultant graph plotted on a spider’s web shows you the company’s current state of ALM maturity and the desired state of ALM maturity. Further since the results are classified by area you can immediately spot the areas where the customer needs immediate help. Image 4 – The spiders web! The red cross icons are areas shouting out for immediate attention, the yellow exclamation icons are areas that need improvement. These icons are calculated on the difference between the Current State of ALM maturity VS the Desired state of ALM maturity. Image 5 – Results by area Conclusion To conclude the Rangers ALM assessment guide gives you the ability to, Measure the customer’s current ALM maturity level Understand the ALM maturity level the customer desires to achieve Capture a healthy list of issues the customer wants to brainstorm further Now What’s next…? Download and get started with the Rangers ALM Assessment Guide. If you have successfully captured the above listed three pieces of information you are in a great state to make recommendations on the identified areas highlighting the benefits that Visual Studio ALM tools would offer. In the next post I will be covering how to take the ALM assessment results as the base to actually convert your recommendation into a sell.  Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. *** A special thanks goes out to fellow ranges Willy, Ethem and Philip for reviewing the blog post and providing valuable feedback. ***

  Read the article

• 2d tank movement and turret solution

  - by Phil

  Hi! I'm making a simple top-down tank game on the ipad where the user controls the movement of the tank with the left "joystick" and the rotation of the turret with the right one. I've spent several hours just trying to get it to work decently but now I turn to the pros :) I have two referencial objects, one for the movement and one for the rotation. The referencial objects always stay max two units away from the tank and I use them to tell the tank in what direction to move. I chose this approach to decouple movement and rotational behaviour from the raw input of the joysticks, I believe this will make it simpler to implement whatever behaviour I want for the tank. My problem is 1; the turret rotates the long way to the target. With this I mean that the target can be -5 degrees away in rotation and still it rotates 355 degrees instead of -5 degrees. I can't figure out why. The other problem is with the movement. It just doesn't feel right to have the tank turn while moving. I'd like to have a solution that would work as well for the AI as for the player. A blackbox function for the movement where the player only specifies in what direction it should move and it moves there under the constraints that are imposed on it. I am using the standard joystick class found in the Unity iPhone package. This is the code I'm using for the movement: public class TankFollow : MonoBehaviour { //Check angle difference and turn accordingly public GameObject followPoint; public float speed; public float turningSpeed; void Update() { transform.position = Vector3.Slerp(transform.position, followPoint.transform.position, speed * Time.deltaTime); //Calculate angle var forwardA = transform.forward; var forwardB = (followPoint.transform.position - transform.position); var angleA = Mathf.Atan2(forwardA.x, forwardA.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleB = Mathf.Atan2(forwardB.x, forwardB.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleDiff = Mathf.DeltaAngle(angleA, angleB); //print(angleDiff.ToString()); if (angleDiff > 5) { //Rotate to transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (-turningSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); } else if (angleDiff < 5) { transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (turningSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); } else { } transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, 0, transform.position.z); } } And this is the code I'm using to rotate the turret: void LookAt() { var forwardA = -transform.right; var forwardB = (toLookAt.transform.position - transform.position); var angleA = Mathf.Atan2(forwardA.x, forwardA.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleB = Mathf.Atan2(forwardB.x, forwardB.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleDiff = Mathf.DeltaAngle(angleA, angleB); //print(angleDiff.ToString()); if (angleDiff - 180 > 1) { //Rotate to transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (turretSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); } else if (angleDiff - 180 < -1) { transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (-turretSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); print((angleDiff - 180).ToString()); } else { } } Since I want the turret reference point to turn in relation to the tank (when you rotate the body, the turret should follow and not stay locked on since it makes it impossible to control when you've got two thumbs to work with), I've made the TurretFollowPoint a child of the Turret object, which in turn is a child of the body. I'm thinking that I'm making it too difficult for myself with the reference points but I'm imagining that it's a good idea. Please be honest about this point. So I'll be grateful for any help I can get! I'm using Unity3d iPhone. Thanks!

  Read the article

• 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards - Part 2

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Moazzam Chaudry Continuing from Friday's blog on 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards, this blog (Part 2) will provide more details around the customers. It was a tremendous honor to be in single room of winners. We only wish we could have had more time to share stories from all the winners.  We received great insight from all the innovative solutions that our customers deploy and would like to share them broadly, so that others can benefit from best practices. There was a customer panel session joined by Ingersoll Rand, Nike and Motability and here is what was discussed: Barry Bonar, Enterprise Architect from Ingersoll Rand shared details around their solution, comprised of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite. This combined solutoin enabled their business transformation to increase decision-making, speed and efficiency, resulting in 40% reduced IT spend, 41X Faster response time and huge cost savings. Ashok Balakrishnan, Architect from Nike shared how they leveraged Oracle Coherence to analyze their digital "footprint" of activities. This helps them compete, collaborate and compare athletic data over time. Lastly, Ashley Doodly, Head of IT from Motability shared details around their solution compromised of Oracle SOA Suite, Service Bus, ADF, Coherence, BO and E-Business Suite. This solution helped Motability achieve 100% ROI within the first few months, performance in seconds vs. 10's of minutes and tremendous improvement in throughput that increased up to 50%.  This year's winners by category are: Oracle Exalogic Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Netshoes ATG on Exalogic: 6X Reduced H/W foot print, 6.2X increased throughput and 3 weeks time to market Claro Part of America Movil, running mission critical Java Application on Exalogic with 35X Faster Java response time, 5X Throughput Underwriters Laboratories Exalogic as an Apps Consolidation platform to power tremendous growth Ingersoll Rand EBS on Exalogic: Up to 40% Reduction in overall IT budget, 3x reduced foot print Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  Mazda Motor Corporation Tuxedo ART Batch runtime environment to migrate their batch apps on new open environment and reduce main frame cost. HOTELBEDS Technology Open Source to WebLogic transformation Globalia Corporation Introduced Oracle Coherence to fully reengineer DTH system and provide multiple business and technical benefits Nike Nike+, digital sports platform, has 8M users and is expecting an 5X increase in users, many of who will carry multiple devices that frequently sync data with the Digital Sport platform Comcast Corporation The solution is expected to increase availability, continuity, performance, and simplify and make the code at the application layer more flexible. Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM Customer Results using Fusion Middleware NTT Docomo Network traffic solution based on Oracle event processing and coherence - massive in scale: 12M users (50M in future) - 800,000 events/sec. Schneider National, Inc. SOA/B2B/ADF/Data Integration to orchestrate key order processes across Siebel, OTM & EBS.  Platform runs 60M trans/day and  50 million composite SOA instances per day across 10G and 11G Amadeus Oracle BPM solution: Business Rules and processes vary across local (80), regional (~10) and corporate approval process. Up to 10 levels of approval. Plans to deploy across 20+ markets Navitar SOA solution integrates a fully non-Oracle legacy application/ERP environment using Oracle’s SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Motability Uses SOA Suite to synchronize data across the systems and to manage the vehicle remarketing process Oracle WebCenter Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  News Limited Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers University of Louisville “Facebook for Medicine”: Oracle Webcenter platform and Oracle BIEE to analyze patient test data and uncover potential health issues. Expecting annualized ROI of 277% China Mobile Jiangsu Company portal (25k users) to drive collaboration & productivity Life Technologies Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments LA Dept. of Water & Power Oracle WebCenter Portal to power ladwp.com on desktop and mobile for 1.6million users Oracle Identity Management Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Education Testing Service Identity Management platform for provisioning & SSO of 6 million GRE, GMAT, TOEFL customers Avea Oracle Identity Manager allowing call center personnel to quickly change Identity Profile to handle varying call loads based on a user self service interface. Decreased Admin Cost by 30% Oracle Data Integration Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Raymond James Near real-time integration for improved systems (throughput & performance) and enhanced operational flexibility in a 24 X 7 environment Wm Morrison Supermarkets Electronic Point of Sale integration handling over 80 million transactions a day in near real time (15 min intervals) Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Development Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Qualcomm Incorporated Solution providing  immediate business value enabling a self-service model necessary for growing the new customer base, an increase in customer satisfaction, reduced “time-to-deliver” Micros Systems, Inc. ADF, SOA Suite, WebCenter  enables services that include managing distribution of hotel rooms availability and rates to channels such as Hotel Web-site, Expedia, etc. Marfin Egnatia Bank A new web 2.0 UI provides a much richer experience through the ADF solution with the end result being one of boosting end-user productivity    Business Analytics (Oracle BI, Oracle EPM, Oracle Exalytics) Customer Results using Fusion Middleware INC Research Self-service customer portal delivering 5–10% of the overall revenue - expected to grow fast with the BI solution Experian Reduction in Time to Complete the Financial Close Process Hologic Inc Solution, saving months of decision-making uncertainty! We look forward to seeing many more innovative nominations. The nominatation process for 2013 begins in April 2013.    Additional Information: Blog: Oracle WebCenter Award Winners Blog: Oracle Identity Management Winners Blog: Oracle Exalogic Winners Blog: SOA, BPM and Data Integration will be will feature award winners in its respective areas this week Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

  Read the article

• BPM Suite 11gR1 Released

  - by Manoj Das

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

  Read the article

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

  - by honestduane

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

  Read the article

• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387  | Next Page >