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  • Base de Datos Oracle, su mejor opción para reducir costos de IT

    - by Ivan Hassig
    Por Victoria Cadavid Sr. Sales Cosultant Oracle Direct Uno de los principales desafíos en la administración de centros de datos es la reducción de costos de operación. A medida que las compañías crecen y los proveedores de tecnología ofrecen soluciones cada vez más robustas, conservar el equilibrio entre desempeño, soporte al negocio y gestión del Costo Total de Propiedad es un desafío cada vez mayor para los Gerentes de Tecnología y para los Administradores de Centros de Datos. Las estrategias más comunes para conseguir reducción en los costos de administración de Centros de Datos y en la gestión de Tecnología de una organización en general, se enfocan en la mejora del desempeño de las aplicaciones, reducción del costo de administración y adquisición de hardware, reducción de los costos de almacenamiento, aumento de la productividad en la administración de las Bases de Datos y mejora en la atención de requerimientos y prestación de servicios de mesa de ayuda, sin embargo, las estrategias de reducción de costos deben contemplar también la reducción de costos asociados a pérdida y robo de información, cumplimiento regulatorio, generación de valor y continuidad del negocio, que comúnmente se conciben como iniciativas aisladas que no siempre se adelantan con el ánimo de apoyar la reducción de costos. Una iniciativa integral de reducción de costos de TI, debe contemplar cada uno de los factores que  generan costo y pueden ser optimizados. En este artículo queremos abordar la reducción de costos de tecnología a partir de la adopción del que según los expertos es el motor de Base de Datos # del mercado.Durante años, la base de datos Oracle ha sido reconocida por su velocidad, confiabilidad, seguridad y capacidad para soportar cargas de datos tanto de aplicaciones altamente transaccionales, como de Bodegas de datos e incluso análisis de Big Data , ofreciendo alto desempeño y facilidades de administración, sin embrago, cuando pensamos en proyectos de reducción de costos de IT, además de la capacidad para soportar aplicaciones (incluso aplicaciones altamente transaccionales) con alto desempeño, pensamos en procesos de automatización, optimización de recursos, consolidación, virtualización e incluso alternativas más cómodas de licenciamiento. La Base de Datos Oracle está diseñada para proveer todas las capacidades que un área de tecnología necesita para reducir costos, adaptándose a los diferentes escenarios de negocio y a las capacidades y características de cada organización.Es así, como además del motor de Base de Datos, Oracle ofrece una serie de soluciones para optimizar la administración de la información a través de mecanismos de optimización del uso del storage, continuidad del Negocio, consolidación de infraestructura, seguridad y administración automática, que propenden por un mejor uso de los recursos de tecnología, ofrecen opciones avanzadas de configuración y direccionan la reducción de los tiempos de las tareas operativas más comunes. Una de las opciones de la base de datos que se pueden provechar para reducir costos de hardware es Oracle Real Application Clusters. Esta solución de clustering permite que varios servidores (incluso servidores de bajo costo) trabajen en conjunto para soportar Grids o Nubes Privadas de Bases de Datos, proporcionando los beneficios de la consolidación de infraestructura, los esquemas de alta disponibilidad, rápido desempeño y escalabilidad por demanda, haciendo que el aprovisionamiento, el mantenimiento de las bases de datos y la adición de nuevos nodos se lleve e cabo de una forma más rápida y con menos riesgo, además de apalancar las inversiones en servidores de menor costo. Otra de las soluciones que promueven la reducción de costos de Tecnología es Oracle In-Memory Database Cache que permite almacenar y procesar datos en la memoria de las aplicaciones, permitiendo el máximo aprovechamiento de los recursos de procesamiento de la capa media, lo que cobra mucho valor en escenarios de alta transaccionalidad. De este modo se saca el mayor provecho de los recursos de procesamiento evitando crecimiento innecesario en recursos de hardware. Otra de las formas de evitar inversiones innecesarias en hardware, aprovechando los recursos existentes, incluso en escenarios de alto crecimiento de los volúmenes de información es la compresión de los datos. Oracle Advanced Compression permite comprimir hasta 4 veces los diferentes tipos de datos, mejorando la capacidad de almacenamiento, sin comprometer el desempeño de las aplicaciones. Desde el lado del almacenamiento también se pueden conseguir reducciones importantes de los costos de IT. En este escenario, la tecnología propia de la base de Datos Oracle ofrece capacidades de Administración Automática del Almacenamiento que no solo permiten una distribución óptima de los datos en los discos físicos para garantizar el máximo desempeño, sino que facilitan el aprovisionamiento y la remoción de discos defectuosos y ofrecen balanceo y mirroring, garantizando el uso máximo de cada uno de los dispositivos y la disponibilidad de los datos. Otra de las soluciones que facilitan la administración del almacenamiento es Oracle Partitioning, una opción de la Base de Datos que permite dividir grandes tablas en estructuras más pequeñas. Esta aproximación facilita la administración del ciclo de vida de la información y permite por ejemplo, separar los datos históricos (que generalmente se convierten en información de solo lectura y no tienen un alto volumen de consulta) y enviarlos a un almacenamiento de bajo costos, conservando la data activa en dispositivos de almacenamiento más ágiles. Adicionalmente, Oracle Partitioning facilita la administración de las bases de datos que tienen un gran volumen de registros y mejora el desempeño de la base de datos gracias a la posibilidad de optimizar las consultas haciendo uso únicamente de las particiones relevantes de una tabla o índice en el proceso de búsqueda. Otros factores adicionales, que pueden generar costos innecesarios a los departamentos de Tecnología son: La pérdida, corrupción o robo de datos y la falta de disponibilidad de las aplicaciones para dar soporte al negocio. Para evitar este tipo de situaciones que pueden acarrear multas y pérdida de negocios y de dinero, Oracle ofrece soluciones que permiten proteger y auditar la base de datos, recuperar la información en caso de corrupción o ejecución de acciones que comprometan la integridad de la información y soluciones que permitan garantizar que la información de las aplicaciones tenga una disponibilidad de 7x24. Ya hablamos de los beneficios de Oracle RAC, para facilitar los procesos de Consolidación y mejorar el desempeño de las aplicaciones, sin embrago esta solución, es sumamente útil en escenarios dónde las organizaciones de quieren garantizar una alta disponibilidad de la información, ante fallo de los servidores o en eventos de desconexión planeada para realizar labores de mantenimiento. Además de Oracle RAC, existen soluciones como Oracle Data Guard y Active Data Guard que permiten replicar de forma automática las bases de datos hacia un centro de datos de contingencia, permitiendo una recuperación inmediata ante eventos que deshabiliten por completo un centro de datos. Además de lo anterior, Active Data Guard, permite aprovechar la base de datos de contingencia para realizar labores de consulta, mejorando el desempeño de las aplicaciones. Desde el punto de vista de mejora en la seguridad, Oracle cuenta con soluciones como Advanced security que permite encriptar los datos y los canales a través de los cueles se comparte la información, Total Recall, que permite visualizar los cambios realizados a la base de datos en un momento determinado del tiempo, para evitar pérdida y corrupción de datos, Database Vault que permite restringir el acceso de los usuarios privilegiados a información confidencial, Audit Vault, que permite verificar quién hizo qué y cuándo dentro de las bases de datos de una organización y Oracle Data Masking que permite enmascarar los datos para garantizar la protección de la información sensible y el cumplimiento de las políticas y normas relacionadas con protección de información confidencial, por ejemplo, mientras las aplicaciones pasan del ambiente de desarrollo al ambiente de producción. Como mencionamos en un comienzo, las iniciativas de reducción de costos de tecnología deben apalancarse en estrategias que contemplen los diferentes factores que puedan generar sobre costos, los factores de riesgo que puedan acarrear costos no previsto, el aprovechamiento de los recursos actuales, para evitar inversiones innecesarias y los factores de optimización que permitan el máximo aprovechamiento de las inversiones actuales. Como vimos, todas estas iniciativas pueden ser abordadas haciendo uso de la tecnología de Oracle a nivel de Base de Datos, lo más importante es detectar los puntos críticos a nivel de riesgo, diagnosticar las proporción en que están siendo aprovechados los recursos actuales y definir las prioridades de la organización y del área de IT, para así dar inicio a todas aquellas iniciativas que de forma gradual, van a evitar sobrecostos e inversiones innecesarias, proporcionando un mayor apoyo al negocio y un impacto significativo en la productividad de la organización. Más información http://www.oracle.com/lad/products/database/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=otnes 1Fuente: Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide 2011 by Colleen Graham, Joanne Correia, David Coyle, Fabrizio Biscotti, Matthew Cheung, Ruggero Contu, Yanna Dharmasthira, Tom Eid, Chad Eschinger, Bianca Granetto, Hai Hong Swinehart, Sharon Mertz, Chris Pang, Asheesh Raina, Dan Sommer, Bhavish Sood, Marianne D'Aquila, Laurie Wurster and Jie Zhang. - March 29, 2012 2Big Data: Información recopilada desde fuentes no tradicionales como blogs, redes sociales, email, sensores, fotografías, grabaciones en video, etc. que normalmente se encuentran de forma no estructurada y en un gran volumen

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  • Integrating Flickr with ASP.Net application

    - by sreejukg
    Flickr is the popular photo management and sharing application offered by yahoo. The services from flicker allow you to store and share photos and videos online. Flicker offers strong API support for almost all services they provide. Using this API, developers can integrate photos to their public website. Since 2005, developers have collaborated on top of Flickr's APIs to build fun, creative, and gorgeous experiences around photos that extend beyond Flickr. In this article I am going to demonstrate how easily you can bring the photos stored on flicker to your website. Let me explain the scenario this article is trying to address. I have a flicker account where I upload photos and share in many ways offered by Flickr. Now I have a public website, instead of re-upload the photos again to public website, I want to show this from Flickr. Also I need complete control over what photo to display. So I went and referred the Flickr documentation and there is API support ready to address my scenario (and more… ). FlickerAPI for ASP.Net To Integrate Flicker with ASP.Net applications, there is a library available in CodePlex. You can find it here http://flickrnet.codeplex.com/ Visit the URL and download the latest version. The download includes a Zip file, when you unzip you will get a number of dlls. Since I am going to use ASP.Net application, I need FlickrNet.dll. See the screenshot of all the dlls, and there is a help file available in the download (.chm) for your reference. Once you have the dll, you need to use Flickr API from your website. I assume you have a flicker account and you are familiar with Flicker services. Arrange your photos using Sets in Flickr In flicker, you can define sets and add your uploaded photos to sets. You can compare set to photo album. A set is a logical collection of photos, which is an excellent option for you to categorize your photos. Typically you will have a number of sets each set having few photos. You can write application that brings photos from sets to your website. For the purpose of this article I already created a set Flickr and added some photos to it. Once you logged in to Flickr, you can see the Sets under the Menu. In the Sets page, you will see all the sets you have created. As you notice, you can see certain sample images I have uploaded just to test the functionality. Though I wish I couldn’t create good photos so please bear with me. I have created 2 photo sets named Blue Album and Red Album. Click on the image for the set, will take you to the corresponding set page. In the set “Red Album” there are 4 photos and the set has a unique ID (highlighted in the URL). You can simply retrieve the photos with the set id from your application. In this article I am going to retrieve the images from Red album in my ASP.Net page. For that First I need to setup FlickrAPI for my usage. Configure Flickr API Key As I mentioned, we are going to use Flickr API to retrieve the photos stored in Flickr. In order to get access to Flickr API, you need an API key. To create an API key, navigate to the URL http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/ Click on Request an API key link, now you need to tell Flickr whether your application in commercial or non-commercial. I have selected a non-commercial key. Now you need to enter certain information about your application. Once you enter the details, Click on the submit button. Now Flickr will create the API key for your application. Generating non-commercial API key is very easy, in couple of steps the key will be generated and you can use the key in your application immediately. ASP.Net application for retrieving photos Now we need write an ASP.Net application that display pictures from Flickr. Create an empty web application (I named this as FlickerIntegration) and add a reference to FlickerNet.dll. Add a web form page to the application where you will retrieve and display photos(I have named this as Gallery.aspx). After doing all these, the solution explorer will look similar to following. I have used the below code in the Gallery.aspx page. The output for the above code is as follows. I am going to explain the code line by line here. First it is adding a reference to the FlickrNet namespace. using FlickrNet; Then create a Flickr object by using your API key. Flickr f = new Flickr("<yourAPIKey>"); Now when you retrieve photos, you can decide what all fields you need to retrieve from Flickr. Every photo in Flickr contains lots of information. Retrieving all will affect the performance. For the demonstration purpose, I have retrieved all the available fields as follows. PhotoSearchExtras.All But if you want to specify the fields you can use logical OR operator(|). For e.g. the following statement will retrieve owner name and date taken. PhotoSearchExtras extraInfo = PhotoSearchExtras.OwnerName | PhotoSearchExtras.DateTaken; Then retrieve all the photos from a photo set using PhotoSetsGetPhotos method. I have passed the PhotoSearchExtras object created earlier. PhotosetPhotoCollection photos = f.PhotosetsGetPhotos("72157629872940852", extraInfo); The PhotoSetsGetPhotos method will return a collection of Photo objects. You can just navigate through the collection using a foreach statement. foreach (Photo p in photos) {     //access each photo properties } Photo class have lot of properties that map with the properties from Flickr. The chm documentation comes along with the CodePlex download is a great asset for you to understand the fields. In the above code I just used the following p.LargeUrl – retrieves the large image url for the photo. p.ThumbnailUrl – retrieves the thumbnail url for the photo p.Title – retrieves the Title of the photo p.DateUploaded – retrieves the date of upload Visual Studio intellisense will give you all properties, so it is easy, you can just try with Visual Studio intellisense to find the right properties you are looking for. Most of hem are self-explanatory. So you can try retrieving the required properties. In the above code, I just pushed the photos to the page. In real time you can use the retrieved photos along with JQuery libraries to create animated photo galleries, slideshows etc. Configuration and Troubleshooting If you get access denied error while executing the code, you need to disable the caching in Flickr API. FlickrNet cache the photos to your local disk when retrieved. You can specify a cache folder where the application need write permission. You can specify the Cache folder in the code as follows. Flickr.CacheLocation = Server.MapPath("./FlickerCache/"); If the application doesn’t have have write permission to the cache folder, the application will throw access denied error. If you cannot give write permission to the cache folder, then you must disable the caching. You can do this from code as follows. Flickr.CacheDisabled = true; Disabling cache will have an impact on the performance. Take care! Also you can define the Flickr settings in web.config file.You can find the documentation here. http://flickrnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=ExampleConfigFile&ProjectName=flickrnet Flickr is a great place for storing and sharing photos. The API access allows developers to do seamless integration with the photos uploaded on Flickr.

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  • Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!

    - by mbcrump
    Infragistics recently released their new Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. I saw a couple of samples and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. I first noticed the hospital floor-plan demo shown on their site and started thinking of ways that I could use this in my own organization. I emailed them asking if I could give away the Silverlight Data Visualization controls on my site and they said, Yes! They also wanted to throw in the standard Silverlight Line of Business controls. (combined they are worth about $3000 US). I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization ($3000 Value) Random winner will be announced on January 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) For extra entries simply: Retweet a link to this page using the following URL [ http://mcrump.me/iscfree ]. It does not matter what the tweet says, just as long as the URL is the same. Unlimited tweets, but please don’t go crazy! This URL will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Infragistics because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The Silverlight Line of Business Control page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. The Data Visualization page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. You can install all of that to your local HDD when you are installing it. I am going to walk you through the Silverlight Controls recently released by Infragistics. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the executable. If you downloaded the Complete bundle then you will have the following options to pick from. I like having help documentation and samples on my local HDD in case I do not have access to the internet and want to code. After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. Look for NetAdvantage 10.3 Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. I wanted to highlight a few of the controls that I liked the most: Grid – After using the Infragistics grid you will wonder how you ever survived using the grid supplied by Microsoft standard controls.  This grid was designed to get your application up and running very fast. It’s simple to bind, it handles LARGE DataSets, easy to filter and allows endless possibilities of formatting data. The screenshot below is an example of the grid. For a real-time updating demo click here. SpellChecker- If your users are creating emails or performing any other function that requires Spell Checking then this control is great. Check out the screenshots below: In this first screen, I have a word that is not in the dictionary [DotNet]. The Spell Checker finds the word and allows the user to correct it. What is so great about Infragistics controls is that it only takes a few lines of code to have a full-featured Spell Checker in your application. TagCloud – This is a control that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It allows you to create keywords for popular search terms. This is very similar to TagCloud seen all over the internet.  Below is a screenshot that shows “Facebook” being a very popular item in the cloud. You can link these items to a hyperlink if you wanted. Importing/Exporting from Excel – I work with data a majority of the time. We all know the importance of Excel in our organizations, its used a lot. With Infragistics controls it make importing and exporting data from a Grid into Excel a snap. One of the things that I liked most about this control was the option to choose the Excel format (2003 or 2007). I haven’t seen this feature in other controls. Creating/Saving/Extracting/Uploading Zip Files – This is another control that I haven’t seen many others making. It allows you to basically manipulate a zip file in any way you like. You can even create a password on the zip file. Schedule – The Schedule that Infragistics provides resembles Outlook’s calendar. I think that it’s important for a user to see your app for the first time and immediately be able to start using because they are already familiar with the UI. The Schedule control accomplishes that in my opinion. I have just barely scratched the surface with the Infragistics Silverlight Line of Business controls. To check all of them then click here. A quick thing to note is that this giveaway also comes with the following Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. Below is a screenshot that list all of them:   I wanted to highlight 2 of the controls that I liked the most: xamBarcode– The xamBarcode supports the following Symbologies: Below is an example of the barcode generated by Infragistics controls. This is a high resolution barcode that you will not have to wonder if your scanner can read it. As long as you have ink in your printer your barcode will read it. I used a Symbol barcode reader to test this barcode. xamTreemap– I’ve never seen a way of displaying data like this before, but I like it. You can style this anyway that you like of course and it also comes with an Office 2010 Theme. Thanks to Infragistics for providing the controls to one lucky reader. I hope that you enjoyed this post and good luck to those that entered the contest.  Subscribe to my feed

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  • Top tweets SOA Partner Community – October 2012

    - by JuergenKress
    Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community Deploying Fusion Order Demo on 11.1.1.6 by Antony Reynolds http://wp.me/p10C8u-vA leonsmiers ?Cant wait to test it >> 't waiRT @OracleSOA: Case Management patterns, session coverage from #OOW #OracleBPM #ACM #BPM http://bit.ly/OdcZL6 Danilo Schmiedel Bye bye San Francisco. #oow was a great conference in a wonderful city! Thanks! @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/lcYSe9xC OPITZ CONSULTING ?The Journey towards #Oracle #BPM @OpenWorld 2012 - Slides by @t_winterberg & H. Normann: http://ow.ly/edkWE #oow demed Full house at the SOA Customer Advisory Board! #oow12 http://instagr.am/p/QX9B8eLMLS/ Danilo Schmiedel "@whitehorsesnl: Had some great talks with the BPM guys at the DEMOgrounds. It is one of the best things at #oow" -> I agree!! @soacommunity Mark Simpson ?Fusion Middleware Global Innovation Awards: nice to pick up a soa and bpm with our customer. #oow Mark Simpson ?RT @SOASimone: #oraclesoa #oow hands on lab fully booked pic.twitter.com/pwI94Ew7 <--quick, provision some more compute power on the cloud! Oracle SOA ?Join us for BPM and Analytics: Process Dashboards. BAM, and Intelligent OptimizationMoscone South - 308#OracleBPM #OOW Oracle SOA ?Real-time public safety demo! License plate recognition and processing in London via Oracle Event Processing. #oow pic.twitter.com/WufesDBq Marc ?Nice session on customer success stories on #SOA11g on with @SOASimone Pro and cons and architectural overview. #oow pic.twitter.com/bzuhsujm Lucas Jellema Full length Keynote on Middleware #oow : http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/1873556035001 … #oow_amis OracleBlogs ?Why Fusion Middleware matters to Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications customers? http://ow.ly/2stVQ0 OracleBlogs ?Open World Session - BPM, SOA and ADF Combined:Patterns learned from Fusion Applications http://ow.ly/2suhzf Ronald Luttikhuizen ?VENNSTER BLOG | Presentations at OpenWorld 2012 | http://blog.vennster.nl/2012/10/presentations-at-openworld-2012.html … Andrejus Baranovskis @dschmied @soacommunity next OOW for sure, and may be SOA community event ! @soacommunity Danilo Schmiedel ?@andrejusb Thanks Andrejus - I really enjoyed having a session with you at #oow. When is next time :-) ? @soacommunity Lionel Dubreuil ?@soacommunity #oow12 Today-1:15pm-Marriott Marquis Salon 7 Jump-starting Integration with Oracle Foundation Pack http://bit.ly/QKKJzF Ronald Luttikhuizen ?Impression from our fault handling session in OSB and SOA Suite from the audience @soacommunity @gschmutz #oow pic.twitter.com/WSg1Z89E Marc Nice session on Oracle Virtual Assembly for #SOA11g, @soacommunity Works with #exalogic but not required SOA Community ?Send your #soacommunity #oow pictures and blog posts @soacommunity or http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity Enjoy OOW ;-) Jon petter hjulstad Oracle BPM- Big leap forward in 11.1.1.7 ! Whitehorses ?Common BPM Use Cases from Oracle #bpm #oow pic.twitter.com/ofOv04EF Whitehorses ?Oracle BPM 11.1.1.7 top new features. Interesting #oow #oowbenelux pic.twitter.com/HY9QN5un SOA Community Industrialized SOA - topic of Business Technology Magazine http://wp.me/p10C8u-vi orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: The curious case of SOA Human tasks' automatic completion http://ow.ly/1mq6YU Simone Geib Look for this sign #oow #oraclesoa pic.twitter.com/MJsPV4PO Lucas Jellema My summary of Larry Ellison's keynote at #oow on the AMIS Blog: http://technology.amis.nl/2012/10/01/oow-2012-larry-ellisons-keynote-announcements-exa-cloud-database/ … #oow_amis gschmutz ?Join my #oow session "Five Cool Use Cases for the Spring Component" to see the power of Spring and SOA Suite combined! Moscone 310 - 3:15 PM Ronald Luttikhuizen Thanks to @soacommunity for great SOA/BPM dinner event yesterday night! #oow pic.twitter.com/v7x3i0DC OracleBlogs ?OSB, Service Callouts and OQL http://ow.ly/2sq6B2 OracleBlogs ?Cloud and On-Premises Applications Integration using Oracle Integration Adapters http://ow.ly/2sqiDy OracleBlogs ?Adapters, SOA Suite and More @Openworld 2012 http://ow.ly/2srdTg Eric Elzinga ?OSB, Service Callouts and OQL - Part 3, http://see.sc/JodzEx #oracleservicebus Donatas Valys interesting articles about soa industrialization to read #soa #industrialization http://it-republik.de/business-technology/bt-magazin-ausgaben/Industrialized-SOA-000516.html … gschmutz ?“@techsymp: 2012 Symposium Presentation Download Page Now Available! 75% of presentations published. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com ” find mine there.. Oracle BPM Customer Experience and BPM – From Efficiency to Engagement #bpm #oraclebpm #processmanagement #socialbpm http://pub.vitrue.com/Tahi SOA Community ?@soacommunity SOA Community Newsletter September 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-wa SOA Community again again again.... it is Oracle Open World 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-wk OracleBlogs ?SOA Proactive support http://ow.ly/2smrSJ demed ?@gschmutz on NoSQL at @techsymp http://lockerz.com/s/247601661 demed ?Just finished "#BigData and its impact on #SOA" talk @techsymp. Really enjoyed getting out of beaten path. #london #oep http://lockerz.com/s/247636974 OTNArchBeat ?Need help selling SOA to business stakeholders? Give them this free eBook. #soasuite http://pub.vitrue.com/hsQY SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; September 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-vc SOA Community Move Data into the grid for scalable, predictable response times http://wp.me/p10C8u-vv ServiceTechSymposium ?The September issue of the Service Technology Magazine is now published with six new items! Read them at http://www.servicetechmag.com Marc ?Reviewed @Packt_OracleFMW new book on SOA11g administration! Very good ! http://tinyurl.com/8pzd5ww SOA Community ?BPM Solution Catalogue&ndash;promote your process templates http://wp.me/p10C8u-vt OTNArchBeat ?BPM ADF Task forms: Checking whether the current user is in a BPM Swimlane | @ChrisKarlChan http://pub.vitrue.com/aPMG OTNArchBeat ?Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | @JoeMcKendrick http://pub.vitrue.com/hNPv Simon Haslam ?Looking for "oak style"(!) advanced content but you're a middleware specialist? See #ukoug2012 #middlewaresunday http://2012.ukoug.org/default.asp?p=9355 … Simon Haslam ?The #ukoug2012 agenda is "go, go, go!" (as Murray would say!) http://2012.ukoug.org/agendagrid Germán Gazzoni SOA Spezial II verfügbar – Industralized SOA: Die überarbeitete und ergänzte Neuauflage des SOA Spezial Sonderhe... http://bit.ly/PAWwN9 Oracle SOA ?Flip thru new interactive "Oracle SOA Suite eBook-In the Customers Words" #middleware #soa #oraclesoa http://pub.vitrue.com/NzFZ SOA Community Follow SOA Community on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity #opn SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Company Review: Google Products

    Google, Inc offers an array of products and services to all of its end-users. However their search capabilities are the foundation for Google’s current success and their primary business focus. Currently, Google offers over twenty different search applications that allow users to search the internet for books, maps, videos, images, products and much more. Their product decisions have allowed users demands to be met while focusing on the free based model. This allows users to access Google data free of charge and indirectly gives Google a strong competitive advantage of other competitors along with the accuracy of the search results. According to Google, Inc, they offer the following types of searching capabilities: Alerts Get email updates on the topics of your choice Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics  Books Search the full text of books  Custom Search Create a customized search experience for your community  Desktop Search and personalize your computer  Dictionary Search for definitions of words and phrases Directory Search the web, organized by topic or category Earth Explore the world from your computer Finance Business info, news and interactive charts GOOG-411 Find and connect for free with businesses from your phone  Images Search for images on the web Maps View maps and directions News Search thousands of news stories Patent Search Search the full text of US Patents Product Search Search for stuff to buy Scholar Search scholarly papers Toolbar Add a search box to your browser Trends Explore past and present search trends Videos Search for videos on the web Web Search Search billions of web pages Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books and more mapping Google’s free based business model is only one way it differentiates itself from its competition. There is also a strong focus on the accuracy of search results and the speed in which they are returned to the end-user. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a structured method used to help connect user needs to the design features of a project proposed to address those needs. This method is particularly useful in accounting for needs that are not easily articulated or precisely defined according to the U. S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. Due to the fact that QFD is so customer driven Google is always in a constant state of change in attempt to reengineer its search algorithms, and other dependant systems so that end-users requirements are constantly being met. Value engineering is a key example of this, Google is constantly trying to improve all aspects of its products, improve system maintainability, and system interoperability. Bridgefield Group defines value engineering as an organized methodology that identifies and selects the lowest lifecycle cost options in design, materials and processes that achieves the desired level of performance, reliability and customer satisfaction. In addition, it seeks to remove unnecessary costs in the above areas and is often a joint effort with cross-functional internal teams and relevant suppliers. Common issues that appear when developing large scale systems like Google’s search applications include modular design of a product and/or service and providing accurate value analysis. A design approach that adheres to four fundamental tenets of cohesiveness, encapsulation, self-containment, and high binding to design a system component as an independently operable unit subject to change is how the Open System Joint Task Force defines modular design. More specifically M. S. Schmaltz defines modular software design as having a large collection of statements strung together in one partition of in-line code; we segment or divide the statements into logical groups called modules. Each module performs one or two tasks, and then passes control to another module. By breaking up the code into "bite-sized chunks", so to speak, we are able to better control the flow of data and control. This is especially true in large software systems. Value analysis is a process to evaluate products and services based on effectiveness, safety, and cost. Value analysis involves assessing the quality as well as the cost of a product or service as defined by the Healthcare Financial Management Association.  “Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.” (MIT,2010) Google, Inc encourages an open environment between all employees, also known as Googlers. This is reinforced by a cross-section team or cross-functional teams comprised from multiple departments assigned to every project so that every department like marketing, finance, and quality assurance has input on every project. In addition, Google is known for their openness to new ideas regardless of the status or seniority of an employee. In fact, Google allows for 20% of an employee’s time can be devoted to developing new ideas and/or pet projects. HumTech.com defines a cross-functional team as a collection of people with varied levels of skills and experience brought together to accomplish a task. As the name implies, Cross-Functional Team members come from different organizational units. Cross-Functional Teams may be permanent or ad hoc. Google’s search application product strategy primarily focuses on mass customization. This is allows Google to create a base search application and allows results to be returned to the end-users quickly based on specific parameters and search settings. In addition, they also store the data that is returned in case other desire the same results based on other end-users supplying the same customized settings. This allows Google to appear to render search results in virtually real-time to the user while allowing for complete customization of the searching criteria. Greg Vogl, a professor at Uganda Martyrs University, defines mass customization as when a business gives its customers the opportunity to tailor its products or services to the customer's specifications. The IT staff at Google play a key role in ensuring that the search application’s product strategy is maintained simply because the IT staff designs, develops, and maintains all of their proprietary applications. In fact, they also maintain all network infrastructure to ensure that it is available to all end-users. References: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/publications/ftat_user_guide/sec5.htm http://www.bridgefieldgroup.com/bridgefieldgroup/glos9.htm#V http://www.acq.osd.mil/osjtf/termsdef.html http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~mssz/Pascal-CGS2462/prog-dsn.html http://www.hfma.org/publications/business_caring_newsletter/exclusives/Supply+and+Inventory+Terms+Defined.htm http://mitsloan.mit.edu/omg/om-definition.php http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/ols/ols3.cfm http://www.gregvogl.net/courses/mis1/glossary.htm

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  • Customize the Default Screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista

    - by Matthew Guay
    Windows 7 and Vista include a nice set of backgrounds, but unfortunately most of them aren’t configurable by default.  Thanks to a free app and some registry changes, however, you can make the default screensavers uniquely yours! Customize the default screensavers If you’ve ever pressed the Customize button on most of the default screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista, you were probably greeted with this message: A little digging in the registry shows that this isn’t fully correct.  The default screensavers in Vista and 7 do have options you can set, but they’re not obvious.  With the help of an app or some registry tips, you can easily customize the screensavers to be uniquely yours.  Here’s how you can do it with an app or in the registry. Customize Windows Screensavers with System Screensavers Tweaker Download the System Screensavers Tweaker (link below), and unzip the folder.  Run nt6srccfg.exe in the folder to tweak your screensavers.  This application lets you tweak the screensavers’ registry settings graphically, and it works great in all editions of Windows Vista and 7, including x64 versions. Change any of the settings you want in the screensaver tweaker, and click Apply. To preview the changes to your screensaver, open the Screen Saver settings window as normal by right-clicking on the desktop, and selecting Personalize. Click on the Screensaver button on the bottom right. Now, select your modified screensaver, and click Preview to see your changes. You can change a wide variety of settings for the Bubbles, Ribbons, and Mystify screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista, as well as the Aurora screensaver in Windows Vista.  The tweaks to the Bubbles screensaver are especially nice.  Here’s how the Bubbles look without transparency. And, by tweaking a little more, you get a screensaver that looks more like a screen full of marbles. Ribbons and Mystify each have less settings, but still can produce some unique effects.   How’s that for a brilliant screensaver? And, if you want to return your screensavers to their default settings, simply run the System Screensavers Tweaker and select Reset to defaults on any screensaver you wish to reset. Customize Windows Screensavers in the Registry If you prefer to roll up your sleeves and tweak Windows under-the-hood, then here’s how you can customize the screensavers yourself in the Registry.  Type regedit into the search box in the Start menu, browse to the key for each screensaver, and add or modify the DWORD values listed for that screensaver using the Decimal base. Please Note: Tweaking the Registry can be difficult, so if you’re unsure, just use the tweaking application above. Also, you’ll probably want to create a System Restore Point.   Bubbles To edit the Bubbles screensaver, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Bubbles Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: MaterialGlass – enter 0 for solid or 1 for transparent bubbles Radius – enter a number between 1090000000 and 1130000000; the larger the number, the larger the bubbles’ radius ShowBubbles – enter 0 to show a black background or 1 to show the current desktop behind the bubbles ShowShadows – enter 0 for no shadow or 1 for shadows behind the bubbles SphereDensity – enter a number from 1000000000 to 2100000000; the higher the number, the more bubbles on the screen. TurbulenceNumOctaves – enter a number from 1 to 255; the higher the number, the faster the bubble colors will change. Ribbons To edit the Ribbons screensaver, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Ribbons Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: Blur – enter 0 to prevent ribbons from fading, or 1 to have them fade away after a few moments. Numribbons – enter a number from 1 to 100; the higher the number, the more ribbons on the screen. RibbonWidth – enter a number from 1000000000 to 1080000000; the higher the number, the thicker the ribbons. Mystify To edit the Mystify screensaver, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Mystify Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: Blur – enter 0 to prevent lines from fading, or 1 to have them fade away after a few moments. LineWidth – enter a number from 1000000000 to 1080000000; the higher the number, the wider the lines. NumLines – enter a number from 1 to 100; the higher the value, the more lines on the screen. Aurora – Windows Vista only To edit the Aurora screensaver in Windows Vista, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Aurora Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: Amplitude – enter a value from 500000000 to 2000000000; the higher the value, the slower the motion. Brightness – enter a value from 1000000000 to 1050000000; the higher the value, the brighter the affect. NumLayers – enter a value from 1 to 15; the higher the value, the more aurora layers displayed. Speed – enter a value from 1000000000 to 2100000000; the higher the value, the faster the cycling. Conclusion Although the default screensavers are nice, they can be boring after awhile with their default settings.  But with these tweaks, you can create a variety of vibrant screensavers that should keep your desktop fresh and interesting. Link Download the System Screensavers Tweaker Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create Icons to Start the Screensaver on Windows 7 or VistaMake Your Windows XP Logon Screen Look Like Windows VistaSpeed up Windows Vista Start Menu Search By Limiting ResultsRoundup: 16 Tweaks to Windows Vista Look & FeelSet XP as the Default OS in a Windows Vista Dual-Boot Setup TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor

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  • Silverlight Recruiting Application Part 6 - Adding an Interview Scheduling Module/View

    Between the last post and this one I went ahead and carried the ideas for the Jobs module and view into the Applicants module and view- they're both doing more or less the same thing, except with different objects being at their core.  Made for an easy cut-and-paste operation with a few items being switched from one to another.  Now that we have the ability to add postings and applicants, wouldn't it be nice if we could schedule an interview?  Of course it would! Scheduling Module I think you get the drift from previous posts that these project structures start looking somewhat similar.  The interview scheduling module is no different than the rest- it gets a SchedulingModule.cs file at the root that inherits from IModule, and there is a single SchedulerView.xsml and SchedulerViewModel.cs setup for our V+VM.  We have one unique concern as we enter into this- RadScheduler deals with AppointmentsSource, not ItemsSource, so there are some special considerations to take into account when planning this module. First, I need something which inherits from AppointmentBase.  This is the core of the RadScheduler appointment, and if you are planning to do any form of custom appointment, you'll want it to inherit from this.  Then you can add-on functionality as needed.  Here is my addition to the mix, the InterviewAppointment: 01.public class InterviewAppointment : AppointmentBase 02.{ 03.    private int _applicantID; 04.    public int ApplicantID 05.    { 06.        get { return this._applicantID; } 07.        set 08.        { 09.            if (_applicantID != value) 10.            { 11.                _applicantID = value; 12.                OnPropertyChanged("ApplicantID"); 13.            } 14.        } 15.    } 16.   17.    private int _postingID; 18.    public int PostingID 19.    { 20.        get { return _postingID; } 21.        set 22.        { 23.            if (_postingID != value) 24.            { 25.                _postingID = value; 26.                OnPropertyChanged("PostingID"); 27.            } 28.        } 29.    } 30.   31.    private string _body; 32.    public string Body 33.    { 34.        get { return _body; } 35.        set 36.        { 37.            if (_body != value) 38.            { 39.                _body = value; 40.                OnPropertyChanged("Body"); 41.            } 42.        } 43.    } 44.   45.    private int _interviewID; 46.    public int InterviewID 47.    { 48.        get { return _interviewID; } 49.        set 50.        { 51.            if (_interviewID != value) 52.            { 53.                _interviewID = value; 54.                OnPropertyChanged("InterviewID"); 55.            } 56.        } 57.    } 58.   59.    public override IAppointment Copy() 60.    { 61.        IAppointment appointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 62.        appointment.CopyFrom(this);             63.        return appointment; 64.    } 65.   66.    public override void CopyFrom(IAppointment other) 67.    {             68.        base.CopyFrom(other); 69.        var appointment = other as InterviewAppointment; 70.        if (appointment != null) 71.        { 72.            ApplicantID = appointment.ApplicantID; 73.            PostingID = appointment.PostingID; 74.            Body = appointment.Body; 75.            InterviewID = appointment.InterviewID; 76.        } 77.    } 78.} Nothing too exciting going on here, we just make sure that our custom fields are persisted (specifically set in CopyFrom at the bottom) and notifications are fired- otherwise this ends up exactly like the standard appointment as far as interactions, etc.  But if we've got custom appointment items... that also means we need to customize what our appointment dialog window will look like. Customizing the Edit Appointment Dialog This initially sounds a lot more intimidating than it really is.  The first step here depends on what you're dealing with for theming, but for ease of everything I went ahead and extracted my templates in Blend for RadScheduler so I could modify it as I pleased.  For the faint of heart, the RadScheduler template is a few thousand lines of goodness since there are some very complex things going on in that control.  I've gone ahead and trimmed down the template parts I don't need as much as possible, so what is left is all that is relevant to the Edit Appointment Dialog.  Here's the resulting Xaml, with line numbers, so I can explain further: 001.<UserControl.Resources> 002.    <!-- begin Necessary Windows 7 Theme Resources for EditAppointmentTemplate --> 003.    <helpers:DataContextProxy x:Key="DataContextProxy" /> 004.       005.    <telerik:Windows7Theme x:Key="Theme" /> 006.    <SolidColorBrush x:Key="DialogWindowBackground" 007.                     Color="White" /> 008.    <SolidColorBrush x:Key="CategorySelectorBorderBrush" 009.                     Color="#FFB1B1B1" /> 010.    <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="RadToolBar_InnerBackground" 011.                         EndPoint="0.5,1" 012.                         StartPoint="0.5,0"> 013.        <GradientStop Color="#FFFDFEFF" 014.                      Offset="0" /> 015.        <GradientStop Color="#FFDDE9F7" 016.                      Offset="1" /> 017.        <GradientStop Color="#FFE6F0FA" 018.                      Offset="0.5" /> 019.        <GradientStop Color="#FFDCE6F4" 020.                      Offset="0.5" /> 021.    </LinearGradientBrush> 022.    <Style x:Key="FormElementTextBlockStyle" 023.           TargetType="TextBlock"> 024.        <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" 025.                Value="Right" /> 026.        <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" 027.                Value="Top" /> 028.        <Setter Property="Margin" 029.                Value="15, 15, 0, 2" /> 030.    </Style> 031.    <Style x:Key="FormElementStyle" 032.           TargetType="FrameworkElement"> 033.        <Setter Property="Margin" 034.                Value="10, 10, 0, 2" /> 035.    </Style> 036.    <SolidColorBrush x:Key="GenericShallowBorderBrush" 037.                     Color="#FF979994" /> 038.    <telerik:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter" /> 039.    <telerikScheduler:ImportanceToBooleanConverter x:Key="ImportanceToBooleanConverter" /> 040.    <telerikScheduler:NullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="NullToVisibilityConverter" /> 041.    <telerikScheduler:InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter" /> 042.    <scheduler:ResourcesSeparatorConverter x:Key="ResourcesSeparatorConverter" /> 043.    <DataTemplate x:Key="IconDataEditTemplate"> 044.        <Image Source="/Telerik.Windows.Controls.Scheduler;component/Themes/Office/Images/cal.png" 045.               Margin="3,3,0,0" 046.               Width="16" 047.               Height="16" /> 048.    </DataTemplate> 049.    <DataTemplate x:Key="SingleSelectionTemplate"> 050.        <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 051.              HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 052.            <Grid.RowDefinitions> 053.                <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 054.            </Grid.RowDefinitions> 055.            <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 056.                <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 057.                                  MinWidth="84" /> 058.                <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 059.                                  MinWidth="200" /> 060.            </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 061.            <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 062.                       Margin="0,13,4,2" 063.                       Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 064.                       Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" 065.                       Grid.Column="0" /> 066.            <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 067.                                      Width="185" 068.                                      Margin="5,10,20,2" 069.                                      HorizontalAlignment="Left" 070.                                      Grid.Column="1" 071.                                      ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 072.                                      ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 073.                                      DisplayMemberPath="Resource.DisplayName" 074.                                      telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 075.                                      SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedItem, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 076.        </Grid> 077.    </DataTemplate> 078.    <DataTemplate x:Key="MultipleSelectionTemplate"> 079.        <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 080.              HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 081.            <Grid.RowDefinitions> 082.                <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 083.            </Grid.RowDefinitions> 084.            <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 085.                <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 086.                                  MinWidth="84" /> 087.                <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 088.                                  MinWidth="200" /> 089.            </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 090.            <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 091.                       Grid.Column="0" 092.                       Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 093.                       Margin="0,13,4,2" 094.                       Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 095.            <telerikInput:RadComboBox Grid.Column="1" 096.                                      Width="185" 097.                                      HorizontalAlignment="Left" 098.                                      Margin="5,10,20,2" 099.                                      ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 100.                                      SelectedIndex="{Binding SelectedIndex, Mode=TwoWay}" 101.                                      ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 102.                                      ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 103.                                      telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 104.                <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 105.                    <DataTemplate> 106.                        <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 107.                              VerticalAlignment="Stretch"> 108.                            <CheckBox VerticalAlignment="Center" 109.                                      HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" 110.                                      VerticalContentAlignment="Center" 111.                                      IsChecked="{Binding IsChecked, Mode=TwoWay}" 112.                                      Content="{Binding Resource.DisplayName}"> 113.                                <CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 114.                                    <DataTemplate> 115.                                        <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 116.                                                   VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 117.                                                   Text="{Binding Content, RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent}}" /> 118.                                    </DataTemplate> 119.                                </CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 120.                            </CheckBox> 121.                        </Grid> 122.                    </DataTemplate> 123.                </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 124.            </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 125.        </Grid> 126.    </DataTemplate> 127.    <scheduler:ResourceTypeTemplateSelector x:Key="ItemTemplateSelector" 128.                                            MultipleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource MultipleSelectionTemplate}" 129.                                            SingleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource SingleSelectionTemplate}" /> 130.    <!-- end Necessary Windows 7 Theme Resources for EditAppointmentTemplate -->  131.       132.    <ControlTemplate x:Key="EditAppointmentTemplate" 133.                     TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 134.        <StackPanel Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" 135.                    UseLayoutRounding="True"> 136.            <StackPanel Grid.Row="0" 137.                        Orientation="Horizontal" 138.                        Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 139.                        Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 140.                        Height="0"> 141.                <!-- Recurrence buttons --> 142.                <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 143.                        Background="#50000000" 144.                        HorizontalAlignment="Left" 145.                        VerticalAlignment="Center" 146.                        Width="2" 147.                        Height="16"> 148.                    <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 149.                            Background="#80FFFFFF" 150.                            HorizontalAlignment="Left" 151.                            Width="1" /> 152.                </Border> 153.                <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 154.                        Background="#50000000" 155.                        HorizontalAlignment="Left" 156.                        VerticalAlignment="Center" 157.                        Width="2" 158.                        Height="16"> 159.                    <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 160.                            Background="#80FFFFFF" 161.                            HorizontalAlignment="Left" 162.                            Width="1" /> 163.                </Border> 164.                <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="ShowAs" 165.                           VerticalAlignment="Center" 166.                           Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 167.                <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding TimeMarkers}" 168.                                          Width="100" 169.                                          Height="20" 170.                                          VerticalAlignment="Center" 171.                                          Margin="5,0,0,0" 172.                                          ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 173.                                          ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear" 174.                                          SelectedItem="{Binding TimeMarker,RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent},Mode=TwoWay}" 175.                                          telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 176.                    <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 177.                        <DataTemplate> 178.                            <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> 179.                                <Rectangle Fill="{Binding TimeMarkerBrush}" 180.                                           Margin="2" 181.                                           Width="12" 182.                                           Height="12" /> 183.                                <TextBlock Text="{Binding TimeMarkerName}" 184.                                           Margin="2" /> 185.                            </StackPanel> 186.                        </DataTemplate> 187.                    </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 188.                </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 189.                <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="High" 190.                                         BorderThickness="0" 191.                                         Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 192.                                         DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 193.                                         telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 194.                                         IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=High}" 195.                                         Margin="2,2,0,2" 196.                                         Width="23" 197.                                         Height="23" 198.                                         HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 199.                                         ToolTipService.ToolTip="High importance" 200.                                         CommandParameter="High" 201.                                         Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 202.                    <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center"> 203.                        <Path Stretch="Fill" 204.                              Height="10" 205.                              HorizontalAlignment="Center" 206.                              VerticalAlignment="Top" 207.                              Width="5.451" 208.                              Data="M200.39647,58.840393 C200.39337,58.336426 201.14566,57.683922 202.56244,57.684292 C204.06589,57.684685 204.73764,58.357765 204.72783,58.992363 C205.04649,61.795574 203.04713,64.181099 202.47388,66.133446 C201.93753,64.154961 199.9471,61.560352 200.39647,58.840393 z"> 209.                            <Path.Fill> 210.                                <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 211.                                                     StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 212.                                    <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 213.                                                  Offset="0.609" /> 214.                                    <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 215.                                                  Offset="0.927" /> 216.                                </LinearGradientBrush> 217.                            </Path.Fill> 218.                        </Path> 219.                        <Ellipse Height="3" 220.                                 HorizontalAlignment="Center" 221.                                 Margin="0,-1,0,0" 222.                                 VerticalAlignment="Top" 223.                                 Width="3"> 224.                            <Ellipse.Fill> 225.                                <RadialGradientBrush> 226.                                    <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 227.                                                  Offset="0" /> 228.                                    <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 229.                                                  Offset="1" /> 230.                                </RadialGradientBrush> 231.                            </Ellipse.Fill> 232.                        </Ellipse> 233.                    </StackPanel> 234.                </telerik:RadToggleButton> 235.                <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="Low" 236.                                         HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 237.                                         BorderThickness="0" 238.                                         Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 239.                                         DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 240.                                         IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=Low}" 241.                                         Margin="0,2,0,2" 242.                                         Width="23" 243.                                         Height="23" 244.                                         ToolTipService.ToolTip="Low importance" 245.                                         CommandParameter="Low" 246.                                         telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 247.                                         Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 248.                    <Path Stretch="Fill" 249.                          Height="12" 250.                          HorizontalAlignment="Center" 251.                          VerticalAlignment="Top" 252.                          Width="9" 253.                          Data="M222.40353,60.139881 L226.65768,60.139843 L226.63687,67.240196 L229.15347,67.240196 L224.37816,71.394943 L219.65274,67.240196 L222.37572,67.219345 z" 254.                          Stroke="#FF0365A7"> 255.                        <Path.Fill> 256.                            <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 257.                                                 StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 258.                                <GradientStop Color="#FFBBE4FF" /> 259.                                <GradientStop Color="#FF024572" 260.                                              Offset="0.836" /> 261.                                <GradientStop Color="#FF43ADF4" 262.                                              Offset="0.466" /> 263.                            </LinearGradientBrush> 264.                        </Path.Fill> 265.                    </Path> 266.                </telerik:RadToggleButton> 267.            </StackPanel > 268.            <Border DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 269.                    Background="{Binding Category.CategoryBrush}" 270.                    Visibility="{Binding Category,Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 271.                    CornerRadius="3" 272.                    Height="20" 273.                    Margin="5,10,5,0"> 274.                <TextBlock Text="{Binding Category.DisplayName}" 275.                           VerticalAlignment="Center" 276.                           Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 277.            </Border> 278.            <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 279.                  HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 280.                  DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 281.                  Background="{TemplateBinding Background}"> 282.                <Grid.RowDefinitions> 283.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 284.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 285.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 286.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 287.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 288.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 289.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 290.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 291.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 292.                    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 293.                </Grid.RowDefinitions> 294.                <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 295.                    <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 296.                                      MinWidth="100" /> 297.                    <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 298.                                      MinWidth="200" /> 299.                </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 300.                <!-- Subject --> 301.                <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectLabel" 302.                           Grid.Row="0" 303.                           Grid.Column="0" 304.                           Margin="0,15,0,2" 305.                           telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Subject" 306.                           Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 307.                <TextBox x:Name="Subject" 308.                         Grid.Row="0" 309.                         Grid.Column="1" 310.                         MinHeight="22" 311.                         Padding="4 2" 312.                         Width="340" 313.                         HorizontalAlignment="Left" 314.                         Text="{Binding Subject, Mode=TwoWay}" 315.                         MaxLength="255" 316.                         telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 317.                         Margin="10,12,20,2" /> 318.                <!-- Description --> 319.                <TextBlock x:Name="DescriptionLabel" 320.                           Grid.Row="1" 321.                           Grid.Column="0" 322.                           Margin="0,13,0,2" 323.                           telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Body" 324.                           Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 325.                <TextBox x:Name="Body" 326.                         VerticalAlignment="top" 327.                         Grid.Row="1" 328.                         Grid.Column="1" 329.                         Height="Auto" 330.                         MaxHeight="82" 331.                         Width="340" 332.                         HorizontalAlignment="Left" 333.                         MinHeight="22" 334.                         Padding="4 2" 335.                         TextWrapping="Wrap" 336.                         telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 337.                         Text="{Binding Body, Mode=TwoWay}" 338.                         AcceptsReturn="true" 339.                         Margin="10,10,20,2" 340.                         HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" 341.                         VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" /> 342.                <!-- Start/End date --> 343.                <TextBlock x:Name="StartDateLabel" 344.                           Grid.Row="2" 345.                           Grid.Column="0" 346.                           Margin="0,13,0,2" 347.                           telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="StartTime" 348.                           Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 349.                <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="StartDateTime" 350.                                                 Height="22" 351.                                                 Grid.Row="2" 352.                                                 Grid.Column="1" 353.                                                 HorizontalAlignment="Left" 354.                                                 Margin="10,10,20,2" 355.                                                 Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 356.                                                 SelectedDateTime="{Binding Start, Mode=TwoWay}" 357.                                                 telerikScheduler:StartEndDatePicker.EndPicker="{Binding ElementName=EndDateTime}" 358.                                                 IsTabStop="False" 359.                                                 IsEnabled="False" /> 360.                <TextBlock x:Name="EndDateLabel" 361.                           Grid.Row="3" 362.                           Grid.Column="0" 363.                           Margin="0,13,0,2" 364.                           telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="EndTime" 365.                           Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 366.                <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="EndDateTime" 367.                                                 Height="22" 368.                                                 Grid.Row="3" 369.                                                 Grid.Column="1" 370.                                                 HorizontalAlignment="Left" 371.                                                 Margin="10,10,20,2" 372.                                                 Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 373.                                                 IsTabStop="False" 374.                                                 IsEnabled="False" 375.                                                 SelectedDateTime="{Binding End, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 376.                <!-- Is-all-day selector --> 377.                <CheckBox x:Name="AllDayEventCheckbox" 378.                          IsChecked="{Binding IsAllDayEvent, Mode=TwoWay}" 379.                          Grid.Row="4" 380.                          Grid.Column="1" 381.                          Margin="10,10,20,2" 382.                          HorizontalAlignment="Left" 383.                          telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 384.                          telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="AllDayEvent"> 385.                    <telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 386.                        <telerik:InputBindingCollection> 387.                            <telerik:MouseBinding Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.ChangeTimePickersVisibility" 388.                                                  Gesture="LeftClick" /> 389.                        </telerik:InputBindingCollection> 390.                    </telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 391.                </CheckBox> 392.                <Grid Grid.Row="5" 393.                      Grid.ColumnSpan="2"> 394.                    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 395.                        <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 396.                                          MinWidth="100" /> 397.                        <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 398.                                          MinWidth="200" /> 399.                    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 400.                    <Grid.RowDefinitions> 401.                        <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 402.                        <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 403.                    </Grid.RowDefinitions> 404.                    <TextBlock Text="Applicant" 405.                               Margin="0,13,0,2" 406.                               Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 407.                    <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 408.                                              Grid.Column="1" 409.                                              Height="24" 410.                                              VerticalAlignment="Center" 411.                                              ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.ApplicantList}" 412.                                              SelectedValue="{Binding ApplicantID, Mode=TwoWay}" 413.                                              SelectedValuePath="ApplicantID" 414.                                              DisplayMemberPath="FirstName" /> 415.                       416.                    <TextBlock Text="Job" 417.                               Margin="0,13,0,2" 418.                               Grid.Row="1" 419.                               Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 420.                    <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 421.                                              Grid.Column="1" 422.                                              Grid.Row="1" 423.                                              Height="24" 424.                                              VerticalAlignment="Center" 425.                                              ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.JobsList}" 426.                                              SelectedValue="{Binding PostingID, Mode=TwoWay}" 427.                                              SelectedValuePath="PostingID" 428.                                              DisplayMemberPath="JobTitle"/> 429.                </Grid> 430.                    <!-- Resources --> 431.                <Grid x:Name="ResourcesLayout" 432.                      Grid.Row="7" 433.                      Grid.Column="0" 434.                      Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 435.                      MaxHeight="130" 436.                      Margin="20,5,20,0"> 437.                    <Border Margin="0" 438.                            BorderThickness="1" 439.                            BorderBrush="{StaticResource GenericShallowBorderBrush}" 440.                            Visibility="{Binding ElementName=ResourcesScrollViewer, Path=ComputedVerticalScrollBarVisibility}"></Border> 441.                    <ScrollViewer x:Name="ResourcesScrollViewer" 442.                                  IsTabStop="false" 443.                                  Grid.Row="6" 444.                                  Grid.Column="0" 445.                                  Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 446.                                  Margin="1" 447.                                  telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 448.                                  VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto"> 449.                        <scheduler:ResourcesItemsControl x:Name="PART_Resources" 450.                                                         HorizontalAlignment="Left" 451.                                                         Padding="0,2,0,5" 452.                                                         IsTabStop="false" 453.                                                         ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding ResourceTypeModels}" 454.                                                         ItemTemplateSelector="{StaticResource ItemTemplateSelector}" /> 455.                    </ScrollViewer> 456.                </Grid> 457.                <StackPanel x:Name="FooterControls" 458.                            Margin="5 10 10 10" 459.                            Grid.Row="8" 460.                            Grid.Column="1" 461.                            HorizontalAlignment="Left" 462.                            Orientation="Horizontal"> 463.                    <telerik:RadButton x:Name="OKButton" 464.                                       Margin="5" 465.                                       Padding="10 0" 466.                                       MinWidth="80" 467.                                       Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SaveAppointment" 468.                                       telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 469.                                       telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Accept" 470.                                       telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="SaveAndCloseCommandText"> 471.                    </telerik:RadButton> 472.                    <telerik:RadButton x:Name="CancelButton" 473.                                       Margin="5" 474.                                       Padding="10 0" 475.                                       MinWidth="80" 476.                                       telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Cancel" 477.                                       telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 478.                                       telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Cancel" 479.                                       Command="telerik:WindowCommands.Close"> 480.                    </telerik:RadButton> 481.                </StackPanel> 482.            </Grid> 483.            <vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 484.                <vsm:VisualStateGroup x:Name="RecurrenceRuleState"> 485.                    <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNull"> 486.                        <Storyboard> 487.                            <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 488.                                                           Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 489.                                                           Duration="0"> 490.                                <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 491.                                                        Value="True" /> 492.                            </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 493.                            <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 494.                                                           Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 495.                                                           Duration="0"> 496.                                <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 497.                                                        Value="True" /> 498.                            </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 499.                            <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 500.                                                           Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 501.                                                           Duration="0"> 502.                                <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 503.                                                        Value="True" /> 504.                            </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 505.                        </Storyboard> 506.                    </vsm:VisualState> 507.                    <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNotNull"> 508.                        <Storyboard> 509.                            <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 510.                                                           Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 511.                                                           Duration="0"> 512.                                <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 513.                                                        Value="False" /> 514.                            </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 515.                            <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 516.                                                           Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 517.                                                           Duration="0"> 518.                                <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 519.                                                        Value="False" /> 520.                            </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 521.                            <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 522.                                                           Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 523.                                                           Duration="0"> 524.                                <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 525.                                                        Value="False" /> 526.                            </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 527.                        </Storyboard> 528.                    </vsm:VisualState> 529.                </vsm:VisualStateGroup> 530.            </vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 531.        </StackPanel> 532.    </ControlTemplate> 533.    <DataTemplate x:Key="AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate"> 534.        <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" 535.                    MaxWidth="400"> 536.            <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Event" 537.                       Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 538.            <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Appointment" 539.                       Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource InvertedBooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 540.            <TextBlock Text=" - " /> 541.            <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectTextBlock" 542.                       Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 543.                       Text="{Binding Appointment.Subject}" /> 544.            <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Untitled" 545.                       Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 546.        </StackPanel> 547.    </DataTemplate> 548.    <Style x:Key="EditAppointmentStyle" 549.           TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 550.        <Setter Property="IconTemplate" 551.                Value="{StaticResource IconDataEditTemplate}" /> 552.        <Setter Property="HeaderTemplate" 553.                Value="{StaticResource AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate}" /> 554.        <Setter Property="Background" 555.                Value="{StaticResource DialogWindowBackground}" /> 556.        <Setter Property="Template" 557.                Value="{StaticResource EditAppointmentTemplate}" /> 558.    </Style> 559.</UserControl.Resources> The first line there is the DataContextProxy I mentioned previously- we use that again to work a bit of magic in this template. Where we start getting into the dialog in question is line 132, but line 407 is where things start getting interesting.  The ItemsSource is pointing at a list that exists in my ViewModel (or code-behind, if it is used as a DataContext), the SelectedValue is the item I am actually binding from the applicant (note the TwoWay binding), and SelectedValuePath and DisplayMemberPath ensure the proper applicant is being displayed from the collection.  You will also see similar starting on line 420 where I do the same for the Jobs we'll be displaying. Just to wrap-up the Xaml, here's the RadScheduler declaraction that ties this all together and will be the main focus of our view: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02.                  Grid.Row="1" 03.                  Grid.Column="1" 04.                  Width="800" 05.                  MinWidth="600" 06.                  Height="500" 07.                  MinHeight="300" 08.                  AppointmentsSource="{Binding Interviews}" 09.                  EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 10.                  command:AppointmentAddedEventClass.Command="{Binding AddAppointmentCommand}" 11.                  command:ApptCreatedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptCreatingCommand}" 12.                  command:ApptEditedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptEditedCommand}" 13.                  command:ApptDeletedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptDeletedCommand}"> 14.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Now, we get to the ViewModel and what it takes to get that rigged up.  And for those of you who remember the jobs post, those command:s in the Xaml are pointing to attached behavior commands that reproduce the respective events.  This becomes very handy when we're setting up the code-behind version. ;) ViewModel I've been liking this approach so far, so I'm going to put the entire ViewModel here and then go into the lines of interest.  Of course, feel free to ask me questions about anything that isn't clear (by line number, ideally) so I can help out if I have missed anything important: 001.public class SchedulerViewModel : ViewModelBase 002.{ 003.    private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator; 004.    private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; 005.   006.    public RecruitingContext context; 007.   008.    private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 009.    public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 010.    { 011.        get { return _interviews; } 012.        set 013.        { 014.            if (_interviews != value) 015.            { 016.                _interviews = value; 017.                NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 018.            } 019.        } 020.    } 021.   022.    private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 023.    public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 024.    { 025.        get { return this._jobsList; } 026.        set 027.        { 028.            if (this._jobsList != value) 029.            { 030.                this._jobsList = value; 031.                this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 032.            } 033.        } 034.    } 035.   036.    private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 037.    public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 038.    { 039.        get { return _applicantList; } 040.        set 041.        { 042.            if (_applicantList != value) 043.            { 044.                _applicantList = value; 045.                NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 046.            } 047.        } 048.    } 049.   050.    public DelegateCommand<object> AddAppointmentCommand { get; set; } 051.    public DelegateCommand<object> ApptCreatingCommand { get; set; } 052.    public DelegateCommand<object> ApptEditedCommand { get; set; } 053.    public DelegateCommand<object> ApptDeletedCommand { get; set; } 054.   055.    public SchedulerViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAgg, IRegionManager regionmanager) 056.    { 057.        // set Unity items 058.        this.eventAggregator = eventAgg; 059.        this.regionManager = regionmanager; 060.   061.        // load our context 062.        context = new RecruitingContext(); 063.        LoadOperation<Interview> loadOp = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 064.        loadOp.Completed += new EventHandler(loadOp_Completed); 065.   066.        this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 067.        context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 068.   069.        this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 070.        context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 071.   072.        AddAppointmentCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.AddAppt); 073.        ApptCreatingCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptCreating); 074.        ApptEditedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptEdited); 075.        ApptDeletedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptDeleted); 076.   077.    } 078.   079.    void loadOp_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 080.    { 081.        LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 082.   083.        foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 084.        { 085.            _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 086.        } 087.    } 088.   089.    #region Appointment Adding 090.   091.    public void AddAppt(object obj) 092.    { 093.        // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 094.        InterviewAppointment newInterview = obj as InterviewAppointment; 095.   096.        this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 097.        this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 098.        { 099.            ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 100.            myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 101.            myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 102.            myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 103.            myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 104.            myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 105.            eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 106.        } 107.            , null); 108.    } 109.   110.    public void ApptCreating(object obj) 111.    { 112.        // handled in the behavior, just a placeholder to ensure it runs :) 113.    } 114.   115.    #endregion 116.   117.    #region Appointment Editing 118.   119.    public void ApptEdited(object obj) 120.    { 121.        Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 122.                            where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 123.                            select x).SingleOrDefault(); 124.   125.        CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, obj as InterviewAppointment); 126.   127.        context.SubmitChanges((s) => { 128.            ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 129.            myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 130.            myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 131.            myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 132.            myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 133.            myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 134.            eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); } 135.            , null); 136.    } 137.   138.    #endregion 139.   140.    #region Appointment Deleting 141.   142.    public void ApptDeleted(object obj) 143.    { 144.        Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 145.                                      where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 146.                                      select x).SingleOrDefault(); 147.   148.        context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 149.        context.SubmitChanges((s) => 150.        { 151.            ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 152.            myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 153.            myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 154.            myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 155.            myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 156.            myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 157.            eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 158.        } 159.            , null); 160.    } 161.   162.    #endregion 163.   164.    #region Appointment Helpers :) 165.   166.    public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 167.    { 168.        Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 169.        newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 170.        newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 171.        newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 172.        newInterview.End = ia.End; 173.        newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 174.        newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 175.        newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 176.   177.        return newInterview; 178.    } 179.   180.    public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 181.    { 182.        InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 183.        newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 184.        newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 185.        newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 186.        newInterview.End = ia.End; 187.        newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 188.        newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 189.        newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 190.   191.        return newInterview; 192.    } 193.   194.    public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 195.    { 196.        entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 197.        entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 198.        entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 199.        entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 200.        entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 201.        entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 202.    } 203.   204.    #endregion 205.} One thing we're doing here which you won't see in any of the other ViewModels is creating a duplicate collection.  I know this is something which will be fixed down the line for using RadScheduler, simplifying this process, but with WCF RIA changing as it does I wanted to ensure functionality would remain consistent as I continued development on this application.  So, I do a little bit of duplication, but for the greater good.  This all takes place starting on line 79, so for every entity that comes back we add it to the collection that is bound to RadScheduler.  Otherwise, the DelegateCommands that you see correspond directly to the events they are named after.  In each case, rather than sending over the full event arguments, I just send in the appointment in question (coming through as the object obj in all cases) so I can add (line 91), edit (line 119), and delete appointments (line 142) like normal.  This just ensures they get updated back to my database.  Also, the one bit of code you won't see is for the Appointment Creating (line 110) event- that is because in the command I've created I simply make the replacement I need to: 1.void element_AppointmentCreating(object sender, AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 2.{ 3.    e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 4.    base.ExecuteCommand(); 5.} And the ViewModel is none the wiser, the appointments just work as far as it is concerned since as they are created they become InterviewAppointments.  End result?  I've customized my EditAppointmentDialog as follows: And adding, editing, and deleting appointments works like a charm.  I can even 'edit' by moving appointments around RadScheduler, so as they are dropped into a timeslot they perform their full edit routine and things get updated. And then, the Code-Behind Version Perhaps the thing I like the most about doing one then the other is I get to steal 90% or more of the code from the MVVM version.  For example, the only real changes to the Code-Behind Xaml file exist in the control declaration, in which I use events instead of attached-behavior-event-commands: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02.                  Grid.Row="1" 03.                  Grid.Column="1" 04.                  Width="800" 05.                  MinWidth="600" 06.                  Height="500" 07.                  MinHeight="300" 08.                  EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 09.                  AppointmentAdded="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded" 10.                  AppointmentCreating="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating" 11.                  AppointmentEdited="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited" 12.                  AppointmentDeleted="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted"> 13.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Easy, right?  Otherwise, all the same styling in UserControl.Resources was re-used, right down to the DataContextProxy that lets us bind to a collection from our viewmodel (in this case, our code-behind) to use within the DataTemplate.  The code conversion gets even easier, as I could literally copy and paste almost everything from the ViewModel to my Code-Behind, just a matter of pasting the right section into the right event.  Here's the code-behind as proof: 001.public partial class SchedulingView : UserControl, INotifyPropertyChanged 002.{ 003.    public RecruitingContext context; 004.   005.    private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 006.    public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 007.    { 008.        get { return this._jobsList; } 009.        set 010.        { 011.            if (this._jobsList != value) 012.            { 013.                this._jobsList = value; 014.                this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 015.            } 016.        } 017.    } 018.   019.    private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 020.    public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 021.    { 022.        get { return _applicantList; } 023.        set 024.        { 025.            if (_applicantList != value) 026.            { 027.                _applicantList = value; 028.                NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 029.            } 030.        } 031.    } 032.   033.    private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 034.    public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 035.    { 036.        get { return _interviews; } 037.        set 038.        { 039.            if (_interviews != value) 040.            { 041.                _interviews = value; 042.                NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 043.            } 044.        } 045.    } 046.   047.    public SchedulingView() 048.    { 049.        InitializeComponent(); 050.   051.        this.DataContext = this; 052.   053.        this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(SchedulingView_Loaded); 054.    } 055.   056.    void SchedulingView_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 057.    { 058.        this.xJobsScheduler.AppointmentsSource = Interviews; 059.   060.        context = new RecruitingContext(); 061.           062.        LoadOperation loadop = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 063.        loadop.Completed += new EventHandler(loadop_Completed); 064.   065.        this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 066.        context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 067.   068.        this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 069.        context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 070.    } 071.   072.    void loadop_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 073.    { 074.        LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 075.   076.        _interviews.Clear(); 077.   078.        foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 079.        { 080.            _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 081.        } 082.    } 083.   084.    private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentAddedEventArgs e) 085.    { 086.        // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 087.        InterviewAppointment newInterview = e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment; 088.   089.        this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 090.        this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 091.        { 092.            ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 093.            myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 094.            myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 095.            myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 096.            myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 097.            myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 098.            context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 099.            context.SubmitChanges(); 100.        } 101.            , null); 102.    } 103.   104.    private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 105.    { 106.        e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 107.    } 108.   109.    private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentEditedEventArgs e) 110.    { 111.        Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 112.                                     where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 113.                                     select x).SingleOrDefault(); 114.   115.        CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment); 116.   117.        context.SubmitChanges((s) => 118.        { 119.            ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 120.            myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 121.            myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 122.            myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 123.            myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 124.            myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 125.            context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 126.            context.SubmitChanges(); 127.        } 128.            , null); 129.    } 130.   131.    private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentDeletedEventArgs e) 132.    { 133.        Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 134.                                      where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 135.                                      select x).SingleOrDefault(); 136.   137.        context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 138.        context.SubmitChanges((s) => 139.        { 140.            ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 141.            myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 142.            myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 143.            myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 144.            myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 145.            myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 146.            context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 147.            context.SubmitChanges(); 148.        } 149.            , null); 150.    } 151.   152.    #region Appointment Helpers :) 153.   154.    public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 155.    { 156.        Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 157.        newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 158.        newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 159.        newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 160.        newInterview.End = ia.End; 161.        newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 162.        newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 163.        newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 164.   165.        return newInterview; 166.    } 167.   168.    public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 169.    { 170.        InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 171.        newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 172.        newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 173.        newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 174.        newInterview.End = ia.End; 175.        newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 176.        newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 177.        newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 178.   179.        return newInterview; 180.    } 181.   182.    public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 183.    { 184.        entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 185.        entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 186.        entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 187.        entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 188.        entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 189.        entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 190.    } 191.   192.    #endregion 193.   194.    #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members 195.   196.    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; 197.   198.    public void NotifyChanged(string propertyName) 199.    { 200.        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyName)) 201.            throw new ArgumentException("propertyName"); 202.   203.        PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); 204.    } 205.   206.    #endregion 207.} Nice... right? :) One really important thing to note as well.  See on line 51 where I set the DataContext before the Loaded event?  This is super important, as if you don't have this set before the usercontrol is loaded, the DataContextProxy has no context to use and your EditAppointmentDialog Job/Applicant dropdowns will be blank and empty.  Trust me on this, took a little bit of debugging to figure out that by setting the DataContext post-loaded would only lead to disaster and frustration.  Otherwise, the only other real difference is that instead of sending an ActionHistory item through an event to get added to the database and saved, I do those right in the callback from submitting.  The Result Again, I only have to post one picture because these bad boys used nearly identical code for both the MVVM and the code-behind views, so our end result is... So what have we learned here today?  One, for the most part this MVVM thing is somewhat easy.  Yeah, you sometimes have to write a bunch of extra code, but with the help of a few useful snippits you can turn the process into a pretty streamlined little workflow.  Heck, this story gets even easier as you can see in this blog post by Michael Washington- specifically run a find on 'InvokeCommandAction' and you'll see the section regarding the command on TreeView in Blend 4.  Brilliant!  MVVM never looked so sweet! Otherwise, it is business as usual with RadScheduler for Silverlight whichever path you're choosing for your development.  Between now and the next post, I'll be cleaning up styles a bit (those RadComboBoxes are a little too close to my labels!) and adding some to the RowDetailsViews for Applicants and Jobs, so you can see all the info for an appointment in the dropdown tab view.  Otherwise, we're about ready to call a wrap on this oneDid 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.

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  • How to Organize a Programming Language Club

    - by Ben Griswold
    I previously noted that we started a language club at work.  You know, I searched around but I couldn’t find a copy of the How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook. Maybe it’s sold out?  Yes, Stack Overflow has quite a bit of information on how to learn and teach new languages and there’s also a good number of online tutorials which provide language introductions but I was interested in group learning.  After   two months of meetings, I present to you the Unofficial How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook.  1. Gauge interest. Start by surveying prospects. “Excuse me, smart-developer-whom-I-work-with-and-I-think-might-be-interested-in-learning-a-new-coding-language-with-me. Are you interested in learning a new language with me?” If you’re lucky, you work with a bunch of really smart folks who aren’t shy about teaching/learning in a group setting and you’ll have a collective interest in no time.  Simply suggesting the idea is the only effort required.  If you don’t work in this type of environment, maybe you should consider a new place of employment.  2. Make it official. Send out a “Welcome to the Club” email: There’s been talk of folks itching to learn new languages – Python, Scala, F# and Haskell to name a few.  Rather than taking on new languages alone, let’s learn in the open.  That’s right.  Let’s start a languages club.  We’ll have everything a real club needs – secret handshake, goofy motto and a high-and-mighty sense that we’re better than everybody else. T-shirts?  Hell YES!  Anyway, I’ve thrown this idea around the office and no one has laughed at me yet so please consider this your very official invitation to be in THE club. [Insert your ideas about how the club might be run, solicit feedback and suggestions, ask what other folks would like to get out the club, comment about club hazing practices and talk up the T-shirts even more. Finally, call out the languages you are interested in learning and ask the group for their list.] 3.  Send out invitations to the first meeting.  Don’t skimp!  Hallmark greeting cards for everyone.  Personalized.  Hearts over the I’s and everything.  Oh, and be sure to include the list of suggested languages with vote count.  Here the list of languages we are interested in: Python 5 Ruby 4 Objective-C 3 F# 2 Haskell 2 Scala 2 Ada 1 Boo 1 C# 1 Clojure 1 Erlang 1 Go 1 Pi 1 Prolog 1 Qt 1 4.  At the first meeting, there must be cake.  Lots of cake. And you should tackle some very important questions: Which language should we start with?  You can immediately go with the top vote getter or you could do as we did and designate each person to provide a high-level review of each of the proposed languages over the next two weeks.  After all presentations are completed, vote on the language. Our high-level review consisted of answers to a series of questions. Decide how often and where the group will meet.  We, for example, meet for a brown bag lunch every Wednesday.  Decide how you’re going to learn.  We determined that the best way to learn is to just dive in and write code.  After choosing our first language (Python), we talked about building an application, or performing coding katas, but we ultimately choose to complete a series of Project Euler problems.  We kept it simple – each member works out the same two problems each week in preparation of a code review the following Wednesday. 5.  Code, Review, Learn.  Prior to the weekly meeting, everyone uploads their solutions to our internal wiki.  Each Project Euler problem has a dedicated page.  In the meeting, we use a really fancy HD projector to show off each member’s solution.  It is very important to use an HD projector.  Again, don’t skimp!  Each code author speaks to their solution, everyone else comments, applauds, points fingers and laughs, etc.  As much as I’ve learned from solving the problems on my own, I’ve learned at least twice as much at the group code review.  6.  Rinse. Lather. Repeat.  We’ve hosted the language club for 7 weeks now.  The first meeting just set the stage.  The next two meetings provided a review of the languages followed by a first language selection.  The remaining meetings focused on Python and Project Euler problems.  Today we took a vote as to whether or not we’re ready to switch to another language and/or another problem set.  Pretty much everyone wants to stay the course for a few more weeks at least.  Until then, we’ll continue to code the next two solutions, review and learn. Again, we’ve been having a good time with the programming language club.  I’m glad it got off the ground.  What do you think?  Would you be interested in a language club?  Any suggestions on what we might do better?

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  • A Look Back at 2010 Predictions

    - by David Dorf
    Now is the time of year people make their predictions for next year, but before I start thinking about 2011 it's worth a look back to see how my predictions for 2010 fared. 1. Borders and Blockbuster bite the dust. I would have never predicted a strong brand such as Circuit City could die, but now I know it can happen to anyone. Borders has lost the battle with Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster has lost to Netflix. And just to be sure, Amazon put an extra nail in each coffin. Borders received additional investment from Bennett LeBow to keep it afloat, but the stock is down around $1.25 with no profits in sight. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy back in September. 2. Every retailer finally has a page on Facebook... but very few figure out how to keep fans engaged. Retailer postings become noise, and fans start to unsubscribe. Twitter goes in the same direction. A few standout retailers will figure out how to use social media, and the rest will remain dumbfounded. Most retailers are on the Facebook bandwagon, and their fan bases seem to be increasing thanks to promotions like The Gap's logo redesign, Lowes' black Friday sneak peak, and Walmart's Crowd Savers. There are several examples of f-commerce advancements, including some interesting integrations from Amazon.3. Smartphones consolidate and grow. More and more people will step-up to smartphones, most of which will choose iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones. Other smartphones will vanish, and networks will start to strain. But retailers will finally embrace mobile as the next big channel. Retail marketing departments will build mobile apps without the help of their IT department, and eventually they will get into a bind. Android has been on a tear lately stealing market share from Blackberry. Palm and Microsoft are trending down, and Apple is holding steady. Smartphone sales are up 15% and expected to continue. Retailers understand the importance of mobile, and some innovative applications have been produced this year. 4. Google helps the little guys. Google will push its Favorite Places project to help give exposure to small retailers and restaurants. They will enable small retailers to act like big ones by providing storefronts, detailed product information, and coupons for consumers. Google will find a way to bring augmented reality to the masses. I can't say I've seen much new from Google regarding Favorite Places, but they've continued to push local product search. From the PC or smartphone, consumers can search for products and see which nearby stores have it stock. Oracle Retail even productized an integration to Google to support this effort. I suppose if Google ever buys Groupon then it will bring them even closer to local shopping. Google talked about augmented humanity, but that has nothing to do with augmented reality. 5. Steve Jobs Is Bugs Bunny and Steve Ballmer is Elmer Fudd. (OK, I stole that headline from an InformationWeek article. I couldn't resist.) Both Apple and Microsoft will continue to open new stores, but only Apple will show real growth. POSReady 2009 (formerly WEPOS) will continue to share the POS market with Linux. The iPhone and iPod will continue to capture market share, but there won't be an Apple tablet. There won't be an Apple tablet? What was I thinking? While Apple has well over 300 stores, there are less than 10 Microsoft stores. Initial impressions show that even though Microsoft is locating its store near Apple Stores, they are not converting customers, with shoppers citing a lack of assortment and high prices. 6. Consolidation of e-commerce software providers. Software vendors in the areas of search, reviews, online call-centers, payments, and e-commerce will consolidate, partly driven by the success of m-commerce and SaaS. Amazon will find someone else to buy, and eBay will continue to lose momentum. Consolidation of e-commerce providers continued with IBM acquiring Sterling Commerce and CoreMetrics, and Oracle recently announcing the acquisition of ATG. Amazon grabbed Zappos, Woot, and Diapers.com to continue its dominance of online selling. While eBay's Marketplace growth may have slowed, its PayPal division is doing quite well, fueled in part by demand for mobile payments. 7. Book publishers mirror music labels. Just as the iPod brought digital downloads to the masses, the Kindle and Nook will power the e-book revolution. Books will continue to use DRM for a few more years before following the path of music. Publishers will try to preserve the margins of hardbacks by associating e-book releases with paperbacks. Amazon has done a good job providing e-reader clients for smartphones, PCs, and tablets. Competition from Barnes & Noble has forced Amazon to support book loaning, and both companies are making it easier for people to publish ebooks (with or without DRM). Progress is slow but steady. 8. NFC makes inroads, RFID treads water. Near Field Communications start to appear in mobile phones, and retailers beta test its use for payments and loyalty programs. RFID tag costs come down a bit, but not enough to spur accelerated adoption.Nokia announced plans to offer NFC-enabled phones in 2011, and rumors are swirling about NFC in the upcoming iPhone.  I think NFC is heading in the right direction, and I've heard more interest from retailers about specialized uses for RFID.9. Digital Signage goes the way of augmented reality. People use their camera phones to leave geo-tagged notes all over cities, rating stores and restaurants, and "painting" graffiti. But people get tired of holding their phones in front of their faces, so AR glasses are offered in much the same way bluetooth headsets emerged. Retailers experiement with in-store advertising using AR. Several retailers like Pizza Hut, Benetton, and Target have experimented with AR but its still somewhat of a gimmick used by marketing.  I think this prediction is a year or two too early. 10. JDA flip-flops again. After announcing their embracing of the .Net architecture, then switching to J2EE after the Manugistics acquisition, JDA will finally decide to standardize on Apple's Objective C. Everything will be ported to the iPhone and be available on the AppStore. After all, there's not much left to try. This was, of course, a joke but the sentiment is still valid.  JDA seems more supply-chain focused than retail focused, which is a an outcrop if their i2 acquisition.  Of the 10 predictions, I'm going to say I got 6 somewhat correct.  (Don't you just love grading your own paper?)  Soon I'll post my predictions for 2011 so be on the lookout.  Until then here's one more prediction:  Va Tech beats Stanford in the Orange Bowl -- count on it!

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  • Finding a person in the forest

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved finding a person in the forest or Limiting the AD result in SharePoint People Picker There are times when we need to limit the SharePoint audience of certain farms or servers or site collections to a particular audience. One of my experiences involved limiting access to US citizens, another to a particular location. Now, most of us – your humble servant included – are not Active Directory experts – but we must be able to handle the “audience restrictions” as required. So here is how it’s done in a nutshell. Important note. Not all could be done in PowerShell (at least not yet)! There are no Windows PowerShell commands to configure People Picker. The stsadm command is: stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery -pv ADQuery –url http://somethingOrOther Note the long-hyphenated property name. Now to filling the ADQuery.   LDAP Query in a nutshell Syntax LDAP is no older than SQL and an LDAP query is actually a query against the LDAP Database. LDAP attributes are the equivalent of Database columns, so why do we have to learn a new query language? Beats me! But we must, so here it is. The syntax of an LDAP query string is made of individual statements with relational operators including: = Equal <= Lower than or equal >= Greater than or equal… and memberOf – a group membership. ! Not * Wildcard Equal and memberOf are the most commonly used. Checking for absence uses the ! – not and the * - wildcard Example: (SN=Grant) All whose last name – SurName – is Grant Example: (!(SN=Grant)) All except Grant Example: (!(SN=*)) all where there is no SurName i.e SurName is absent (probably Rappers). Example: (CN=MyGroup) Common Name is MyGroup.  Example: (GN=J*) all the Given Names that start with J (JJ, Jane, Jon, John, etc.) The cryptic SN, CN, GN, etc. are attributes and more about them later All the queries are enclosed in parentheses (Query). Complex queries are comprised of sets that are in AND or OR conditions. AND is denoted by the ampersand (&) and the OR is denoted by the vertical pipe (|). The general syntax is that of the Prefix polish notation where the operand precedes the variables. E.g +ab is the sum of a and b. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which both A and B are true. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which A, B and C are true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which either A or B are true. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which at least one of A, B and C is true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. More complex queries have both types of conditions and the parentheses determine the order of operations. Attributes Now let’s get into the SN, CN, GN, and other attributes of the query SN – is the SurName (last name) GN – is the Given Name (first name) CN – is the Common Name, usually GN followed by SN OU – is an Organization Unit such as division, department etc. DC – is a Domain Content in the AD forest l – lower case ‘L’ stands for location. Jerusalem anybody? Or Katmandu. UPN – User Principal Name, is usually the first part of an email address. By nature it is unique in the forest. Most systems set the UPN to be the first initial followed by the SN of the person involved. Some limit the total to 8 characters. If we have many ‘jsmith’ we have to somehow distinguish them from each other. DN – is the distinguished name – a name unique to AD forest in which it lives. Usually it’s a CN with some domain or group distinguishers. DN is important in conjunction with the memberOf relation. Groups have stricter requirement. Each group has to have a unique name - its CN and it has to be unique regardless of its place. See more below. All of the attributes are case insensitive. CN, cn, Cn, and cN are identical. objectCategory is an element that requires special consideration. AD contains many different object like computers, printers, and of course people and groups. In the queries below, we’re limiting our search to people (person). Putting it altogether Let’s get a list of all the Johns in the SPAdmin group of the Jerusalem that local domain. (&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local)) The memberOf=cn=SPAdmin uses the cn (Common Name) of the SPAdmin group. This is how the memberOf relation is used. ‘SPAdmin’ is actually the DN of the group. Also the memberOf relation does not allow wild cards (*) in the group name. Also, you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ entry. Let’s add Marvin Minsky to the search above. |(&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local))(CN=Marvin Minsky) Here I added the or pipeline at the beginning of the query and put the CN requirement for Minsky at the end. Note that if Marvin was already in the prior result, he’s not going to be listed twice. One last note: You may see a dryer but more complete list of attributes rules and examples in: http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5667 And finally (thus negating the claim that my previous note was last), to the best of my knowledge there are 3 more ways to limit the audience. One is to use the peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter property using the same ADQuery. This works only in SP1 and above. The second is to limit the search to users within this particular site collection – the property name is peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection and the value is yes (-pv yes) And the third is –pn peoplepicker-serviceaccountdirectorypaths –pv “OU=ou1,DC=dc1…..” Again you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ phrase – no OU=ou1,OU=ou2… And now the real end. The main property discussed in this sprawling and seemingly endless monogram – peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery - is the most general way of getting the job done. Here are a few examples of command lines that worked and some that didn’t. Can you see why? C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (!Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,OU=OUMid,OU=OUTop,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Command line error. Too many OUs C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully.   That’s all folks!

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  • LLBLGen Pro feature highlights: grouping model elements

    - by FransBouma
    (This post is part of a series of posts about features of the LLBLGen Pro system) When working with an entity model which has more than a few entities, it's often convenient to be able to group entities together if they belong to a semantic sub-model. For example, if your entity model has several entities which are about 'security', it would be practical to group them together under the 'security' moniker. This way, you could easily find them back, yet they can be left inside the complete entity model altogether so their relationships with entities outside the group are kept. In other situations your domain consists of semi-separate entity models which all target tables/views which are located in the same database. It then might be convenient to have a single project to manage the complete target database, yet have the entity models separate of each other and have them result in separate code bases. LLBLGen Pro can do both for you. This blog post will illustrate both situations. The feature is called group usage and is controllable through the project settings. This setting is supported on all supported O/R mapper frameworks. Situation one: grouping entities in a single model. This situation is common for entity models which are dense, so many relationships exist between all sub-models: you can't split them up easily into separate models (nor do you likely want to), however it's convenient to have them grouped together into groups inside the entity model at the project level. A typical example for this is the AdventureWorks example database for SQL Server. This database, which is a single catalog, has for each sub-group a schema, however most of these schemas are tightly connected with each other: adding all schemas together will give a model with entities which indirectly are related to all other entities. LLBLGen Pro's default setting for group usage is AsVisualGroupingMechanism which is what this situation is all about: we group the elements for visual purposes, it has no real meaning for the model nor the code generated. Let's reverse engineer AdventureWorks to an entity model. By default, LLBLGen Pro uses the target schema an element is in which is being reverse engineered, as the group it will be in. This is convenient if you already have categorized tables/views in schemas, like which is the case in AdventureWorks. Of course this can be switched off, or corrected on the fly. When reverse engineering, we'll walk through a wizard which will guide us with the selection of the elements which relational model data should be retrieved, which we can later on use to reverse engineer to an entity model. The first step after specifying which database server connect to is to select these elements. below we can see the AdventureWorks catalog as well as the different schemas it contains. We'll include all of them. After the wizard completes, we have all relational model data nicely in our catalog data, with schemas. So let's reverse engineer entities from the tables in these schemas. We select in the catalog explorer the schemas 'HumanResources', 'Person', 'Production', 'Purchasing' and 'Sales', then right-click one of them and from the context menu, we select Reverse engineer Tables to Entity Definitions.... This will bring up the dialog below. We check all checkboxes in one go by checking the checkbox at the top to mark them all to be added to the project. As you can see LLBLGen Pro has already filled in the group name based on the schema name, as this is the default and we didn't change the setting. If you want, you can select multiple rows at once and set the group name to something else using the controls on the dialog. We're fine with the group names chosen so we'll simply click Add to Project. This gives the following result:   (I collapsed the other groups to keep the picture small ;)). As you can see, the entities are now grouped. Just to see how dense this model is, I've expanded the relationships of Employee: As you can see, it has relationships with entities from three other groups than HumanResources. It's not doable to cut up this project into sub-models without duplicating the Employee entity in all those groups, so this model is better suited to be used as a single model resulting in a single code base, however it benefits greatly from having its entities grouped into separate groups at the project level, to make work done on the model easier. Now let's look at another situation, namely where we work with a single database while we want to have multiple models and for each model a separate code base. Situation two: grouping entities in separate models within the same project. To get rid of the entities to see the second situation in action, simply undo the reverse engineering action in the project. We still have the AdventureWorks relational model data in the catalog. To switch LLBLGen Pro to see each group in the project as a separate project, open the Project Settings, navigate to General and set Group usage to AsSeparateProjects. In the catalog explorer, select Person and Production, right-click them and select again Reverse engineer Tables to Entities.... Again check the checkbox at the top to mark all entities to be added and click Add to Project. We get two groups, as expected, however this time the groups are seen as separate projects. This means that the validation logic inside LLBLGen Pro will see it as an error if there's e.g. a relationship or an inheritance edge linking two groups together, as that would lead to a cyclic reference in the code bases. To see this variant of the grouping feature, seeing the groups as separate projects, in action, we'll generate code from the project with the two groups we just created: select from the main menu: Project -> Generate Source-code... (or press F7 ;)). In the dialog popping up, select the target .NET framework you want to use, the template preset, fill in a destination folder and click Start Generator (normal). This will start the code generator process. As expected the code generator has simply generated two code bases, one for Person and one for Production: The group name is used inside the namespace for the different elements. This allows you to add both code bases to a single solution and use them together in a different project without problems. Below is a snippet from the code file of a generated entity class. //... using System.Xml.Serialization; using AdventureWorks.Person; using AdventureWorks.Person.HelperClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.FactoryClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.RelationClasses; using SD.LLBLGen.Pro.ORMSupportClasses; namespace AdventureWorks.Person.EntityClasses { //... /// <summary>Entity class which represents the entity 'Address'.<br/><br/></summary> [Serializable] public partial class AddressEntity : CommonEntityBase //... The advantage of this is that you can have two code bases and work with them separately, yet have a single target database and maintain everything in a single location. If you decide to move to a single code base, you can do so with a change of one setting. It's also useful if you want to keep the groups as separate models (and code bases) yet want to add relationships to elements from another group using a copy of the entity: you can simply reverse engineer the target table to a new entity into a different group, effectively making a copy of the entity. As there's a single target database, changes made to that database are reflected in both models which makes maintenance easier than when you'd have a separate project for each group, with its own relational model data. Conclusion LLBLGen Pro offers a flexible way to work with entities in sub-models and control how the sub-models end up in the generated code.

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  • B2B and B2C alike… but a little different – Oracle Commerce named Leader in Forrester B2B Commerce Wave

    - by Katrina Gosek
    We weren’t surprised to see Oracle Commerce positioned as a Leader in Forrester Research, Inc.’s first Commerce Wave focused on B2B, “The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q4 2013,” released earlier this month. We believe that the report validates much of what we’ve heard from our largest customers – the world’s largest distribution, manufacturing and high-tech customers who sell billions of dollars of goods and services to other businesses through their Web channels. More importantly, we feel that the report confirms something very important: B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… but a little different. B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… Clearly, B2C experiences have set expectations for B2B. Every B2B buyer is a consumer at home and brings the same expectations to a website selling electronic components, aftermarket parts, or MRO products. Forrester calls these rich consumer-based capabilities that help B2B customers do their jobs “table stakes”: front-office content, community, and commerce features that meet customer expectations for 24x7x365 ordering, real-time customer service, and expedited shipping — both online and on mobile devices: “Whether they are just beginning to sell online or are in the late stages of launching a next-generation site, B2B eCommerce operations today must: offer a customer experience standard comparable to what leading b2c sites now offer; address the growing influence that mobile devices are having in the workplace; make a qualitative and quantitative business case that drives sustained investment.” Just five years ago, many of our B2B customers’ online business comprised only 5-10% of their total revenue. Today, when we speak to those same brands, we hear about double and triple digit growth in their online channels. Many have seen the percentage of the business they perform in their web channels cross the 30-50% threshold. You can hear first-hand from several Oracle Commerce B2B customers about the success they are seeing, and what they’re trying to accomplish (Carolina Biological, Premier Farnell, DeliXL, Elsevier). It seems that this market momentum is likely the reason Forrester broke out the separate B2B Commerce Wave from the B2C Wave. In fact, B2B is becoming the larger force in commerce, expected to collect twice the online dollars of B2C this year ($559 billion). But a little different… Despite the similarities, there is a key and very important difference between B2C and B2B. Unlike a consumer shopping for shoes, a business shopper buying from a distributor or manufacturer is coming to the Web channel as a part of their job. So in addition to a rich, consumer-like experience this shopper expects, these B2B buyers need quoting tools and complex pricing capabilities, like eProcurement, bulk order entry, and other self-service tools such as account, contract and organization management. Forrester also is emphasizing three additional “back-end” tools and capabilities their clients say they need to drive growth in their B2B online channels: i) product information management (PIM), which provides a single system of record for large part lists and product catalogs; ii) web content management (WCM), needed to manage large volumes of unstructured marketing information, and iii) order management systems (OMS), which manage and orchestrate the complex B2B order life cycle from quote through approval, submission to manufacturing, distribution and delivery. We would like to expand on each of these 3 areas: As Forrester suggests, back-end PIM is definitely needed by B2B Commerce providers. Most B2B companies have made significant investments in enterprise-grade PIMs, given the importance of product data management for aggregation and syndication of content, product attribution, analytics, and handling of complex workflows. While in principle it may sound appealing to have a PIM as part of a commerce offering (especially for SMBs who have to do more with less), our customers have typically found that PIM in a commerce platform is largely redundant with what they already have in-place, and is not fully-featured or robust enough to handle the complexity of the product data sets that B2B distributors and manufacturers usually handle. To meet the PIM needs for commerce, Oracle offers enterprise PIM (Product Hub/Fusion PIM) and a robust enterprise data quality product (EDQP) integrated with the Oracle Commerce solution. These are key differentiators of our offering and these capabilities are becoming even more tightly integrated with Oracle Commerce over time. For Commerce, what customers really need is a robust product catalog and content management system for enabling business users to further enrich and ready catalog and content data to be presented and sold online.  This has been a significant area of investment in the Oracle Commerce platform , which continue to get stronger. We see this combination of capabilities as best meeting the needs of our customers for a commerce platform without adding a largely redundant, less functional PIM in the commerce front-end.  On the topic of web content management, we were pleased to see Forrester cite Oracle’s differentiated digital experience capability in this area and the “unique opportunity in the market to lead the convergence of commerce and content management with the amalgamation of Oracle Commerce with WebCenter Sites (formally FatWire).” Strong content management capabilities are critical for distributors and manufacturers who are frequently serving an engineering audience coming to their websites to conduct product research in search of technical data sheets, drawings, videos and more. The convergence of content, commerce, and experience is critical for B2B brands selling online. Regarding order management, Forrester notes that many businesses use their existing back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage order life cycles.  We hear the same from most of our B2B customers, as they already have an ERP system—if not several of them—and are not interested in yet another one. So what do we take away from the Wave results? Forrester notes that the Oracle Commerce Platform “has always had strong B2B commerce capabilities and Oracle certainly has an exhaustive list of B2B customers using the solution.”  What makes us excited about developing leading B2B solutions are the close relationships with our customers and the clear opportunity in the market – which we'll address in an exciting new release planned for the next 12 months. Oracle has one of the world’s largest B2B customer bases, providing leading solutions across key business-to-business functions – from marketing, sales automation, and service to master data management, and ERP. To learn more about Oracle’s Commerce product vision and strategy, visit our website and check out these other B2B Commerce Resources: -       2013 B2B Commerce Trends Report -       B2B Commerce Whitepaper: Consumerization, Complexity, Change -       B2B Commerce Webcast: What Industry Trend Setters Do Right -       Internet Retailer, Web Drives Sales for B2B Companies -       Internet Retailer Article, The Web Means Business: B2B Companies Beef Up Their Websites,        borrowing from b2c retailers and breaking new ground -       Internet Retailer Article, B2B e-Commerce is poised for growth

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  • Developer’s Life – Attitude and Communication – They Can Cause Problems – Notes from the Field #027

    - by Pinal Dave
    [Note from Pinal]: This is a 27th episode of Notes from the Field series. The biggest challenge for anyone is to understand human nature. We human have so many things on our mind at any moment of time. There are cases when what we say is not what we mean and there are cases where what we mean we do not say. We do say and things as per our mood and our agenda in mind. Sometimes there are incidents when our attitude creates confusion in the communication and we end up creating a situation which is absolutely not warranted. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Mike Walsh explains a very crucial issue we face in our career, which is not technical but more to relate to human nature. Read on this may be the best blog post you might read in recent times. In this week’s note from the field, I’m taking a slight departure from technical knowledge and concepts explained. We’ll be back to it next week, I’m sure. Pinal wanted us to explain some of the issues we bump into and how we see some of our customers arrive at problem situations and how we have helped get them back on the right track. Often it is a technical problem we are officially solving – but in a lot of cases as a consultant, we are really helping fix some communication difficulties. This is a technical blog post and not an “advice column” in a newspaper – but the longer I am a consultant, the more years I add to my experience in technology the more I learn that the vast majority of the problems we encounter have “soft skills” included in the chain of causes for the issue we are helping overcome. This is not going to be exhaustive but I hope that sharing four pieces of advice inspired by real issues starts a process of searching for places where we can be the cause of these challenges and look at fixing them in ourselves. Or perhaps we can begin looking at resolving them in teams that we manage. I’ll share three statements that I’ve either heard, read or said and talk about some of the communication or attitude challenges highlighted by the statement. 1 – “But that’s the SAN Administrator’s responsibility…” I heard that early on in my consulting career when talking with a customer who had serious corruption and no good recent backups – potentially no good backups at all. The statement doesn’t have to be this one exactly, but the attitude here is an attitude of “my job stops here, and I don’t care about the intent or principle of why I’m here.” It’s also a situation of having the attitude that as long as there is someone else to blame, I’m fine…  You see in this case, the DBA had a suspicion that the backups were not being handled right.  They were the DBA and they knew that they had responsibility to ensure SQL backups were good to go – it’s a basic requirement of a production DBA. In my “As A DBA Where Do I start?!” presentation, I argue that is job #1 of a DBA. But in this case, the thought was that there was someone else to blame. Rather than create extra work and take on responsibility it was decided to just let it be another team’s responsibility. This failed the company, the company’s customers and no one won. As technologists – we should strive to go the extra mile. If there is a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities and we know it – we should push to get it resolved. Especially as the DBAs who should act as the advocates of the data contained in the databases we are responsible for. 2 – “We’ve always done it this way, it’s never caused a problem before!” Complacency. I have to say that many failures I’ve been paid good money to help recover from would have not happened had it been for an attitude of complacency. If any thoughts like this have entered your mind about your situation you may be suffering from it. If, while reading this, you get this sinking feeling in your stomach about that one thing you know should be fixed but haven’t done it.. Why don’t you stop and go fix it then come back.. “We should have better backups, but we’re on a SAN so we should be fine really.” “Technically speaking that could happen, but what are the chances?” “We’ll just clean that up as a fast follow” ..and so on. In the age of tightening IT budgets, increased expectations of up time, availability and performance there is no room for complacency. Our customers and business units expect – no demand – the best. Complacency says “we will give you second best or hopefully good enough and we accept the risk and know this may hurt us later. Sometimes an organization will opt for “good enough” and I agree with the concept that at times the perfect can be the enemy of the good. But when we make those decisions in a vacuum and are not reporting them up and discussing them as an organization that is different. That is us unilaterally choosing to do something less than the best and purposefully playing a game of chance. 3 – “This device must accept interference from other devices but not create any” I’ve paraphrased this one – but it’s something the Federal Communications Commission – a federal agency in the United States that regulates electronic communication – requires of all manufacturers of any device that could cause or receive interference electronically. I blogged in depth about this here (http://www.straightpathsql.com/archives/2011/07/relationship-advice-from-the-fcc/) so I won’t go into much detail other than to say this… If we all operated more on the premise that we should do our best to not be the cause of conflict, and to be less easily offended and less upset when we perceive offense life would be easier in many areas! This doesn’t always cause the issues we are called in to help out. Not directly. But where we see it is in unhealthy relationships between the various technology teams at a client. We’ll see teams hoarding knowledge, not sharing well with others and almost working against other teams instead of working with them. If you trace these problems back far enough it often stems from someone or some group of people violating this principle from the FCC. To Sum It Up Technology problems are easy to solve. At Linchpin People we help many customers get past the toughest technological challenge – and at the end of the day it is really just a repeatable process of pattern based troubleshooting, logical thinking and starting at the beginning and carefully stepping through to the end. It’s easy at the end of the day. The tough part of what we do as consultants is the people skills. Being able to help get teams working together, being able to help teams take responsibility, to improve team to team communication? That is the difficult part, and we get to use the soft skills on every engagement. Work on professional development (http://professionaldevelopment.sqlpass.org/) and see continuing improvement here, not just with technology. I can teach just about anyone how to be an excellent DBA and performance tuner, but some of these soft skills are much more difficult to teach. If you want to get started with performance analytics and triage of virtualized SQL Servers with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Code excavations, wishful invocations, perimeters and domain specific unit test frameworks

    - by RoyOsherove
    One of the talks I did at QCON London was about a subject that I’ve come across fairly recently , when I was building SilverUnit – a “pure” unit test framework for silverlight objects that depend on the silverlight runtime to run. It is the concept of “cogs in the machine” – when your piece of code needs to run inside a host framework or runtime that you have little or no control over for testability related matters. Examples of such cogs and machines can be: your custom control running inside silverlight runtime in the browser your plug-in running inside an IDE your activity running inside a windows workflow your code running inside a java EE bean your code inheriting from a COM+ (enterprise services) component etc.. Not all of these are necessarily testability problems. The main testability problem usually comes when your code actually inherits form something inside the system. For example. one of the biggest problems with testing objects like silverlight controls is the way they depend on the silverlight runtime – they don’t implement some silverlight interface, they don’t just call external static methods against the framework runtime that surrounds them – they actually inherit parts of the framework: they all inherit (in this case) from the silverlight DependencyObject Wrapping it up? An inheritance dependency is uniquely challenging to bring under test, because “classic” methods such as wrapping the object under test with a framework wrapper will not work, and the only way to do manually is to create parallel testable objects that get delegated with all the possible actions from the dependencies.    In silverlight’s case, that would mean creating your own custom logic class that would be called directly from controls that inherit from silverlight, and would be tested independently of these controls. The pro side is that you get the benefit of understanding the “contract” and the “roles” your system plays against your logic, but unfortunately, more often than not, it can be very tedious to create, and may sometimes feel unnecessary or like code duplication. About perimeters A perimeter is that invisible line that your draw around your pieces of logic during a test, that separate the code under test from any dependencies that it uses. Most of the time, a test perimeter around an object will be the list of seams (dependencies that can be replaced such as interfaces, virtual methods etc.) that are actually replaced for that test or for all the tests. Role based perimeters In the case of creating a wrapper around an object – one really creates a “role based” perimeter around the logic that is being tested – that wrapper takes on roles that are required by the code under test, and also communicates with the host system to implement those roles and provide any inputs to the logic under test. in the image below – we have the code we want to test represented as a star. No perimeter is drawn yet (we haven’t wrapped it up in anything yet). in the image below is what happens when you wrap your logic with a role based wrapper – you get a role based perimeter anywhere your code interacts with the system: There’s another way to bring that code under test – using isolation frameworks like typemock, rhino mocks and MOQ (but if your code inherits from the system, Typemock might be the only way to isolate the code from the system interaction.   Ad-Hoc Isolation perimeters the image below shows what I call ad-hoc perimeter that might be vastly different between different tests: This perimeter’s surface is much smaller, because for that specific test, that is all the “change” that is required to the host system behavior.   The third way of isolating the code from the host system is the main “meat” of this post: Subterranean perimeters Subterranean perimeters are Deep rooted perimeters  - “always on” seams that that can lie very deep in the heart of the host system where they are fully invisible even to the test itself, not just to the code under test. Because they lie deep inside a system you can’t control, the only way I’ve found to control them is with runtime (not compile time) interception of method calls on the system. One way to get such abilities is by using Aspect oriented frameworks – for example, in SilverUnit, I’ve used the CThru AOP framework based on Typemock hooks and CLR profilers to intercept such system level method calls and effectively turn them into seams that lie deep down at the heart of the silverlight runtime. the image below depicts an example of what such a perimeter could look like: As you can see, the actual seams can be very far away form the actual code under test, and as you’ll discover, that’s actually a very good thing. Here is only a partial list of examples of such deep rooted seams : disabling the constructor of a base class five levels below the code under test (this.base.base.base.base) faking static methods of a type that’s being called several levels down the stack: method x() calls y() calls z() calls SomeType.StaticMethod()  Replacing an async mechanism with a synchronous one (replacing all timers with your own timer behavior that always Ticks immediately upon calls to “start()” on the same caller thread for example) Replacing event mechanisms with your own event mechanism (to allow “firing” system events) Changing the way the system saves information with your own saving behavior (in silverunit, I replaced all Dependency Property set and get with calls to an in memory value store instead of using the one built into silverlight which threw exceptions without a browser) several questions could jump in: How do you know what to fake? (how do you discover the perimeter?) How do you fake it? Wouldn’t this be problematic  - to fake something you don’t own? it might change in the future How do you discover the perimeter to fake? To discover a perimeter all you have to do is start with a wishful invocation. a wishful invocation is the act of trying to invoke a method (or even just create an instance ) of an object using “regular” test code. You invoke the thing that you’d like to do in a real unit test, to see what happens: Can I even create an instance of this object without getting an exception? Can I invoke this method on that instance without getting an exception? Can I verify that some call into the system happened? You make the invocation, get an exception (because there is a dependency) and look at the stack trace. choose a location in the stack trace and disable it. Then try the invocation again. if you don’t get an exception the perimeter is good for that invocation, so you can move to trying out other methods on that object. in a future post I will show the process using CThru, and how you end up with something close to a domain specific test framework after you’re done creating the perimeter you need.

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  • SQL Server Master class winner

    - by Testas
     The winner of the SQL Server MasterClass competition courtesy of the UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine!    Steve Hindmarsh     There is still time to register for the seminar yourself at:  www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql     More information about the seminar     Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London  When: Thursday 17th June 2010  This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will: Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour    Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data    Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to change  Sessions Abstracts  KEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production    Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.   SESSION ONE: SQL Server Mythbusters  It's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained.   SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest  Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted!   SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward   Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys!   SESSION 4: Essential Database Maintenance  In this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well. Speaker Biographies     Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.   Speaker Testimonials  "To call them good trainers is an epic understatement. They know how to deliver technical material in ways that illustrate it well. I had to stop Paul at one point and ask him how long it took to build a particular slide because the animations were so good at conveying a hard-to-describe process." "These are not beginner presenters, and they put an extreme amount of preparation and attention to detail into everything that they do. Completely, utterly professional." "When it comes to the instructors themselves, Kimberly and Paul simply have no equal. Not only are they both ultimate authorities, but they have endless enthusiasm about the material, and spot on delivery. If either ever got tired they never showed it, even after going all day and all week. We witnessed countless demos over the course of the week, some extremely involved, multi-step processes, and I can’t recall one that didn’t go the way it was supposed to." "You might think that with this extreme level of skill comes extreme levels of egotism and lack of patience. Nothing could be further from the truth. ... They simply know how to teach, and are approachable, humble, and patient." "The experience Paul and Kimberly have had with real live customers yields a lot more information and things to watch out for than you'd ever get from documentation alone." “Kimberly, I just wanted to send you an email to let you know how awesome you are! I have applied some of your indexing strategies to our website’s homegrown CMS and we are experiencing a significant performance increase. WOW....amazing tips delivered in an exciting way!  Thanks again” 

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  • API Message Localization

    - by Jesse Taber
    In my post, “Keep Localizable Strings Close To Your Users” I talked about the internationalization and localization difficulties that can arise when you sprinkle static localizable strings throughout the different logical layers of an application. The main point of that post is that you should have your localizable strings reside as close to the user-facing modules of your application as possible. For example, if you’re developing an ASP .NET web forms application all of the localizable strings should be kept in .resx files that are associated with the .aspx views of the application. In this post I want to talk about how this same concept can be applied when designing and developing APIs. An API Facilitates Machine-to-Machine Interaction You can typically think about a web, desktop, or mobile application as a collection “views” or “screens” through which users interact with the underlying logic and data. The application can be designed based on the assumption that there will be a human being on the other end of the screen working the controls. You are designing a machine-to-person interaction and the application should be built in a way that facilitates the user’s clear understanding of what is going on. Dates should be be formatted in a way that the user will be familiar with, messages should be presented in the user’s preferred language, etc. When building an API, however, there are no screens and you can’t make assumptions about who or what is on the other end of each call. An API is, by definition, a machine-to-machine interaction. A machine-to-machine interaction should be built in a way that facilitates a clear and unambiguous understanding of what is going on. Dates and numbers should be formatted in predictable and standard ways (e.g. ISO 8601 dates) and messages should be presented in machine-parseable formats. For example, consider an API for a time tracking system that exposes a resource for creating a new time entry. The JSON for creating a new time entry for a user might look like: 1: { 2: "userId": 4532, 3: "startDateUtc": "2012-10-22T14:01:54.98432Z", 4: "endDateUtc": "2012-10-22T11:34:45.29321Z" 5: }   Note how the parameters for start and end date are both expressed as ISO 8601 compliant dates in UTC. Using a date format like this in our API leaves little room for ambiguity. It’s also important to note that using ISO 8601 dates is a much, much saner thing than the \/Date(<milliseconds since epoch>)\/ nonsense that is sometimes used in JSON serialization. Probably the most important thing to note about the JSON snippet above is the fact that the end date comes before the start date! The API should recognize that and disallow the time entry from being created, returning an error to the caller. You might inclined to send a response that looks something like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   While this may seem like an appropriate thing to do there are a few problems with this approach: What if there is a user somewhere on the other end of the API call that doesn’t speak English?  What if the message provided here won’t fit properly within the UI of the application that made the API call? What if the verbiage of the message isn’t consistent with the rest of the application that made the API call? What if there is no user directly on the other end of the API call (e.g. this is a batch job uploading time entries once per night unattended)? The API knows nothing about the context from which the call was made. There are steps you could take to given the API some context (e.g.allow the caller to send along a language code indicating the language that the end user speaks), but that will only get you so far. As the designer of the API you could make some assumptions about how the API will be called, but if we start making assumptions we could very easily make the wrong assumptions. In this situation it’s best to make no assumptions and simply design the API in such a way that the caller has the responsibility to convey error messages in a manner that is appropriate for the context in which the error was raised. You would work around some of these problems by allowing callers to add metadata to each request describing the context from which the call is being made (e.g. accepting a ‘locale’ parameter denoting the desired language), but that will add needless clutter and complexity. It’s better to keep the API simple and push those context-specific concerns down to the caller whenever possible. For our very simple time entry example, this can be done by simply changing our error message response to look like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100}] 3: }   By changing our error error from exposing a string to a numeric code that is easily parseable by another application, we’ve placed all of the responsibility for conveying the actual meaning of the error message on the caller. It’s best to have the caller be responsible for conveying this meaning because the caller understands the context much better than the API does. Now the caller can see error code 100, know that it means that the end date submitted falls before the start date and take appropriate action. Now all of the problems listed out above are non-issues because the caller can simply translate the error code of ‘100’ into the proper action and message for the current context. The numeric code representation of the error is a much better way to facilitate the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate. An API Does Have Human Users While APIs should be built for machine-to-machine interaction, people still need to wire these interactions together. As a programmer building a client application that will consume the time entry API I would find it frustrating to have to go dig through the API documentation every time I encounter a new error code (assuming the documentation exists and is accurate). The numeric error code approach hurts the discoverability of the API and makes it painful to integrate with. We can help ease this pain by merging our two approaches: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100, "message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   Now we have an easily parseable numeric error code for the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate and a human-readable message for programmers working with the API. The human-readable message here is not intended to be viewed by end-users of the API and as such is not really a “localizable string” in my opinion. We could opt to expose a locale parameter for all API methods and store translations for all error messages, but that’s a lot of extra effort and overhead that doesn’t add a lot real value to the API. I might be a bit of an “ugly American”, but I think it’s probably fine to have the API return English messages when the target for those messages is a programmer. When resources are limited (which they always are), I’d argue that you’re better off hard-coding these messages in English and putting more effort into building more useful features, improving security, tweaking performance, etc.

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  • Prioritizing Product Features

    - by Robert May
    A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization.  Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company.  This is unfortunate.  Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner!  Most features built into software are never even used.  Clearly, not much return for features that go unused. So how does a company avoid building features that add little value to the company?  This is a tough question to answer, but usually, this prioritization starts at the top with the executives of the company.  After all, they’re responsible for the overall vision of the company. Here’s what I recommend: Know your market. Know your customers and users. Know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. Implement the Vision Know Your Market We often see companies that don’t know their market.  Personally, I’m surprised by this.  These companies don’t know who their competitors are, don’t know what features make their product desirable in the market, and in many cases, get by with saying, “I’ve been doing this for XX years.  I know what the market wants!”  In many cases, they equate “marketing” with “advertising” and don’t understand the difference. This is almost never true.  Good companies will spend significant amounts of time and money finding out who they’re competing against and what makes their competitors successful in the marketplace.  Good companies understand that marketing involves more than just advertising.  Often, marketing is mostly research and analysis, not sales.  Until you understand your market, you cannot know what features will give you the best return on your investment dollar. Good companies have a marketing department and can answer the next important step which is to know your customers and your users. Know your Customers and Users First, note that I included both customers and users.  They’re often not the same thing.  Users use the product that you build.  Customers buy the product that you build.  It’s a subtle difference, but too often, I’ve seen companies that focus exclusively on one or the other and are not successful simply because they ignore an important part of the group. If your company is doing appropriate marketing, you know that these are two different aspects of your product and that both deserve attention to have a product that is successful in your target market.  Your marketing department should be spending a lot of time understanding these personas and then conveying that information to the company. I’m always surprised when development teams think that they can build a product that people want to use without understanding the users of that product.  Developers think differently than most people in the world.  They know what the computer is doing.  The computer isn’t magic to them.  So when they assume that they know how to build something, they bring with them quite a bit of baggage.  Never assume that you know your customer unless you’re regularly having interaction with them.  Also, don’t just leave this to Marketing or Product Management.  Take them time to get your developers out with the customers as well.  Developers are very smart people, and often, seeing how someone uses their software inspires them to make a much better product. Very often, because the users and customers aren’t know, teams will spend a significant amount of time building apps that are super flexible and configurable so that any possible combination of feature can be used.  This demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the customer.  Most configuration questions can quickly be answered by talking to the customer.  In most cases, if your software requires significant setup and configuration before its usable, you probably don’t know your customers and users very well. Until you know your customers, you cannot know what features will be most valuable to your customers and you cannot build those features in a way that your customers can use. Know Where You’re Going and What You Want to Achieve Many companies suffer from not having a plan.  Executives will tell the team to make them a plan.  The team, not knowing their market and customers and users, will come up with a plan that doesn’t reflect reality and doesn’t consider ROI.  Management then wonders why the product is doing poorly in the market place. Instead of leaving this up to the teams, as executives, work with Marketing to understand what broad categories of features will sell the most product in the marketplace.  Then, once you’ve determined that, give this vision to the team and let them run with it.  Revise the vision as needed, but avoid changing streams frequently.  Sure, sometimes you need to, but often, executives will change priorities many times a month, leading to nothing more than confusion.  If the team has a vision, they’ll be able to execute that vision far better than they could otherwise. By knowing what products are most important, you can set budgetary goals and guidelines that will help you achieve the vision that was created. Implement the Vision Creating the vision is often where the general executives stop participating in the plan.  The team is responsible for implementing that vision.  Executives should attend showcases and and should remain aware of the progress that the team is making towards meeting the vision, however. Once a broad vision has been created, the team should break that vision down into minimal market features (MMF).  These MMFs should be sized using story points so that, using the team’s velocity, an estimated cost can be determined for each feature.  The product management team should then try to quantify the relative value of the MMFs based on customer feedback and interviews.  Once the value and cost of creating the feature is understood, a return on investment can be calculated.  The features should then be prioritized with the MMF’s that have the highest value and lowest cost rising to the top of features to implement.  Don’t let politics get in the way! Once the MMF’s have been prioritized, they should go through release planning to schedule them for implementation. Conclusion By having a good grasp on the strategy of the company, your Agile teams can be much more effective.  Each and every story the team is implementing will roll up into features that matter to the company and provide ROI to them.  The steps outlined in this post should be repeated on a regular basis.  I recommend reviewing them at least once per quarter to make sure that the vision hasn’t shifted and that the teams are still working on what matters most to the company. Technorati Tags: Agile,Product Owner,ROI

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  • MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 2 Silverlight + Windows 7 Phone

    - by GeekAgilistMercenary
    Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay.  Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote. Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing. The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together.  Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps of various environments. Silverlight Scott Guthrie, as one would guess, kicked off the keynote.  His first point was that user experience has become a priority at Microsoft.  This can be seen by any observant soul with the release and push of Expression, Silverlight, and the other tools.  This is even more apparent when one takes note of Microsoft bringing in people that can actually do good design and putting them at the forefront. The next thing Scott brought up was a few key points about Silverlight.  Currently Silverlight is a little over 2 years old and has achieved a pretty solid 60% penetration.  Silverlight has all sorts of capabilities that have been developed and are now provided as open source including;  ad injection, smoothing, playback editing, and more.  Another thing he showed, which really struck me as awesome being in the analytics space, was the Olympics and a quick glimpse of the ad statistics, viewer experience, video playback performance, audience trends, and overall viewer participation.  All of it rendered in Silverlight in beautiful detail. The key piece of Scott's various points were all punctuated with the fact that all of this code is available as open source.  Not only is Microsoft really delving into this design element of things, they're getting involved in the right ways. One of the last points I'll bring up about Silverlight 4 is the ability to have HD video on a monitor, and an entirely different activity being done on the other monitor, effectively making Silverlight the only RIA framework that supports multi-monitor support.  Overall, Silverlight is continuing to impress – providing superior capabilities tit-for-tat with the competition. Windows 7 Phone The Windows 7 Phone has 3 primary buttons (yes, more than the iPhone, don't let your mind explode!!).  Start, Search, and Back control all of the needed functionality of the phone.  At the same time, of course, there is the multi-touch, touch, and other interactive abilities of the interface.  The intent, once start is pressed is to have all the information that a phone owner wants displayed immediately.  Avoiding the scrolling through pages of apps or rolling a ball to get through multitudes of other non-interactive phone interfaces.  The Windows 7 Phone simply has the data right in front of you, basically a phone dashboard.  From there it is easy to dive into the interactive areas of the phone. Each area of the interface of the phone is broken into hubs.  These hubs include applications, data, and other things based on a relative basis.  This basis being determined by the user.  These applications interact on many other levels, and form a kind of relationship between each other adding more and more meta-data to the phone user, their interactions between the applications, and of course the social element of their interactions on the phone.  This makes this phone a practical must have for a marketer involved in social media.  The level of wired together interaction is massive, and of course, if you've seen Office Outlook 2010 you know that the power that is pulled into the phone by being tied to Outlook is massive. Joe Belfiore also showed several UI & specifically UX elements of the phone interface that allows paging to be instinctual by simple clipped items, flipping page to page, and other excellent user experience advances for phone devices.  Belfiore's also showed how his people hub had a massive list of people, with pictures, all from various different social networks and other associated relations.  The rendering, speed, and viewing of these people's, their pictures, their social network information, and other characteristics was smooth and in some situations unbelievably rendered.  This demo showed some of the great power of the beta phone, which isn't even as powerful as the planned end device. Joe finished up by jumping into the music, videos, and other media with the Zune Component of the Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This was all good stuff, but I'll get to what really sold me on the media element in a moment. When Joe was done, Scott Guthrie stepped back up to walk through building a Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This is were I have to give serious props.  He built this application, in Visual Studio 2010, in front of 2000+ people.  That was cool, but what really was amazing that he build the application in about 2 minutes.  The IDE, side by side design that is standard in Visual Studio is light years ahead of x-Code or any of the iPhone IDEs.  The Windows 7 Mobile System, if it can get market penetration, poses a technologically superior development and phone platform over anything on the market right now.  The biggest problem with the phone, is it just isn't available yet.  I personally can't wait for a chance to build some apps for the new Windows Phone. Netflix, I May Start Up an Account Again! When I get my Windows 7 Phone device, I am absolutely getting a Netflix account again.  The Vertigo crew, as I wrote on Twitter "#MIX10 Props @seesharp on @netflix demo", displayed an application on the phone for Netflix that actually ran HD Video of Rescue Me (with Dennis Leary).  The video played back smooth as it would on a dedicated computer, I was instantly sold.  So this didn't actually sell me on the phone, because I'm already sold, but it did sell me whole heartedly on the media capabilities of the pending phone. Anyway, I try not to do this but I may double post today.  Lunch is over and I'm off to another session very near and dear to the heart of my occupation, Analytics Tracking.  Stay tuned and I should have that post up by the end of the day. Original Post – Check out my other blog for even more technical ramblings and reads.

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  • Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

    - by FransBouma
    Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

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  • Product Development Investment: A Measure of Vendor Performance

    - by Jim Mcglothlin
    The relationship between a large, complex organization and its key suppliers of information technology is normally more than just "strategic". Expectations about the duration of the relationship typically exceed 20 years. Enterprise applications and technology infrastructure are not expected to be changed out like petunias. So how would you rate the due diligence processes as performed in Higher Education when selecting critical, transformational information technology? My observation: I see a lot of effort put into elaborate demonstration of basic software functionality. I see a lot of attention paid to the cost element of technology acquisition, including the contracted cost of implementation consulting services. But the factor that receives only cursory analysis and due diligence is long-term performance--the ability of a vendor to grow, expand, and develop, and bring its customers along with it. So what should you look for in a long-term IT supplier? Oracle has a public track record for product development. The annual investment has been on a run rate of almost $3 Billion organic product development. Oracle's well-publicized acquisitions and mergers have been supplemental to its R&D. This is important for Higher Education. Another meaningful way to evaluate a company is to look at the tangible track record of enhancement. Consider the Oracle-PeopleSoft enterprise business platform since acquired by Oracle 6 years ago: Product or Technology Enhancement Customer or User Impact Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) 300+ new web services delivered in versions 9.0 & 9.1 provide flexibility, so that customers can integrate PeopleSoft with other applications. Campus Solutions has added Admissions and Constituent Web Services. Constituent Relationship Management PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 for Higher Education introduced new process flows for student recruiting and retention to support "Student Success" initiatives. A 360 view of the constituent is now delivered, and the concept of a single-stop Student Services Center is now in CRM 9.1 with tight integration to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. Human Capital Management Contract Pay for Education, with flexibility for configuration and calculation, has been extended in HCM 9.1. New chartfield integration among Project Costing - Time & Labor - Payroll to serve the labor distribution requirements for Grants / Sponsored Research. Talent Management PeopleSoft 9.0 and 9.1 feature an integrated talent management approach centered on definitions in "Profile Manager", with all new usability improvements. Internal and external candidate pools, and the entire recruitment process, are driven by delivered configurable selection and on-boarding processes. Interview scheduling, and online job offers are newly delivered processes. Performance Management PeopleSoft HCM ePerformance 9.1 will include significant new functionality designed to help organizations more effectively align business objectives with employee goals. Using an Organization Chart view, your business goals can flow down to become tangible objectives per employee. Succession Planning / Workforce Development New in HCM 9.0, enhanced in 9.1, is a planning capability for regular or unusual (major organizational change) succession of internal or external candidates. PeopleSoft supports employee-based career planning, which ultimately increases the integrity of the succession planning process (identify their career needs, plans, preferences, and interests). Dashboards / Oracle Business Intelligence Application Suite Oracle Human Resources Analytics provides the workforce information foundation that integrates data from HR functional areas and Finance. Oracle Human Resources Analytics delivers 9 dashboards and over 200 reports. Provide your HR professionals and front-line managers the tools to analyze workforce staffing, retention, productivity, to better source high-quality applicants, and to reduce absence costs. Multi-year Planning and Commitment Control External funding sources, especially Grants, require a multi-year encumbrance business process. PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 adds multi-year funding and commitment control, including budget checking. The newly designed Real Time Budget Checking will provide the customer with an updated snapshot of their budget and encumbrances at any given time. Position Budgeting with Hyperion Hyperion Planning world-class products now include delivered integration to PeopleSoft HCM. Position Budgeting is available in the new Public Sector Planning module of Hyperion. Web 2.0 features for the latest in usability PeopleSoft 9.1 features a contemporary internet user experience: Partial-page refreshing Drag and drop pagelets New menu structure Navigation pagelets Modal popup message windows Favorites & recently used links Type-ahead Drag and drop grid columns, pop-out grids Portal Workspaces Enterprise 2.0 for your collaborative web communities, using new content management, along with Wikis, blogs, and discussion forums in PeopleSoft Portal 9.1. PeopleTools enhanced by Oracle Fusion Middleware Standards-based tools have been added to the PeopleTools application infrastructure: BI (XML) Publisher, Java tools. Certified for use with PeopleSoft: Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE), Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Weblogic Server, Oracle SOA Suite. Hosting for PeopleSoft applications A solid new deployment option: Oracle On Demand remote hosting center for high scalability, security, and continuity of operations. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) for HCM / Payroll functions Partnership with AT&T provides hosting of HR/Payroll application along with payroll business process operations, and subscription-based service fees (SaaS). AT&T BPO full service includes pay sheet processing, bank and 3rd party file transfer, payroll tax handling, etc. Continuous Delivery Model Feature Packs provide faster time-to-benefit; new features become available in PeopleSoft 9.1 (or Campus Solutions 9.0) without need to perform upgrade. Golden person data model across all campus applications Oracle Higher Education Constituent Hub provides synchronization and data governance of person data across any application, e.g. HR/ Payroll, Student Information System, Housing, Emergency Contact, LMS, CRM. Oracle's aggressive enhancement plans within the "Applications Unlimited" program continue, as new functionality is under development for a new version of a PeopleSoft release planned for 2012. Meanwhile, new capabilities are planned on an annual basis in Feature Packs. PeopleSoft just delivered the HCM 2010 Feature Pack and another is planned for 2011. In February we plan to have over 100 customers from our Customer Advisory Boards at our PeopleSoft Development Center in California to review designs for all of these releases. For those of you near New York City The investment and progressive development story described above is the subject of an Oracle road show event on February 9, 2011. Charting Your Course with Oracle Applications is a global event series designed to help business and IT executives assess the impact of new inflection points on their business and applications roadmap: changing workforces, shifting customer and constituent bases, and increased volatility. Learn how innovations ranging from new deployment models like cloud computing to the introduction of social applications and smart devices are delivering results across all areas of business and industry. THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND MAY NOT BE INCORPORATED INTO A CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT.

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  • Handling HumanTask attachments in Oracle BPM 11g PS4FP+ (I)

    - by ccasares
    Adding attachments to a HumanTask is a feature that exists in Oracle HWF (Human Workflow) since 10g. However, in 11g there have been many improvements on this feature and this entry will try to summarize them. Oracle BPM 11g 11.1.1.5.1 (aka PS4 Feature Pack or PS4FP) introduced two great features: Ability to link attachments at a Task scope or at a Process scope: "Task" attachments are only visible within the scope (lifetime) of a task. This means that, initially, any member of the assignment pattern of the Human Task will be able to handle (add, review or remove) attachments. However, once the task is completed, subsequent human tasks will not have access to them. This does not mean those attachments got lost. Once the human task is completed, attachments can be retrieved in order to, i.e., check them in to a Content Server or to inject them to a new and different human task. Aside note: a "re-initiated" human task will inherit comments and attachments, along with history and -optionally- payload. See here for more info. "Process" attachments are visible within the scope of the process. This means that subsequent human tasks in the same process instance will have access to them. Ability to use Oracle WebCenter Content (previously known as "Oracle UCM") as the backend for the attachments instead of using HWF database backend. This feature adds all content server document lifecycle capabilities to HWF attachments (versioning, RBAC, metadata management, etc). As of today, only Oracle WCC is supported. However, Oracle BPM Suite does include a license of Oracle WCC for the solely usage of document management within BPM scope. Here are some code samples that leverage the above features. Retrieving uploaded attachments -Non UCM- Non UCM attachments (default ones or those that have existed from 10g, and are stored "as-is" in HWK database backend) can be retrieved after the completion of the Human Task. Firstly, we need to know whether any attachment has been effectively uploaded to the human task. There are two ways to find it out: Through an XPath function: Checking the execData/attachment[] structure. For example: Once we are sure one ore more attachments were uploaded to the Human Task, we want to get them. In this example, by "get" I mean to get the attachment name and the payload of the file. Aside note: Oracle HWF lets you to upload two kind of [non-UCM] attachments: a desktop document and a Web URL. This example focuses just on the desktop document one. In order to "retrieve" an uploaded Web URL, you can get it directly from the execData/attachment[] structure. Attachment content (payload) is retrieved through the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function: This example shows how to retrieve as many attachments as those had been uploaded to the Human Task and write them to the server using the File Adapter service. The sample process excerpt is as follows:  A dummy UserTask using "HumanTask1" Human Task followed by a Embedded Subprocess that will retrieve the attachments (we're assuming at least one attachment is uploaded): and once retrieved, we will write each of them back to a file in the server using a File Adapter service: In detail: We've defined an XSD structure that will hold the attachments (both name and payload): Then, we can create a BusinessObject based on such element (attachmentCollection) and create a variable (named attachmentBPM) of such BusinessObject type. We will also need to keep a copy of the HumanTask output's execData structure. Therefore we need to create a variable of type TaskExecutionData... ...and copy the HumanTask output execData to it: Now we get into the embedded subprocess that will retrieve the attachments' payload. First, and using an XSLT transformation, we feed the attachmentBPM variable with the name of each attachment and setting an empty value to the payload: Please note that we're using the XSLT for-each node to create as many target structures as necessary. Also note that we're setting an Empty text to the payload variable. The reason for this is to make sure the <payload></payload> tag gets created. This is needed when we map the payload to the XML variable later. Aside note: We are assuming that we're retrieving non-UCM attachments. However in real life you might want to check the type of attachment you're handling. The execData/attachment[]/storageType contains the values "UCM" for UCM type attachments, "TASK" for non-UCM ones or "URL" for Web URL ones. Those values are part of the "Ext.Com.Oracle.Xmlns.Bpel.Workflow.Task.StorageTypeEnum" enumeration. Once we have fed the attachmentsBPM structure and so it now contains the name of each of the attachments, it is time to iterate through it and get the payload. Therefore we will use a new embedded subprocess of type MultiInstance, that will iterate over the attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: In every iteration we will use a Script activity to map the corresponding payload element with the result of the XPath function getTaskAttachmentContents(). Please, note how the target array element is indexed with the loopCounter predefined variable, so that we make sure we're feeding the right element during the array iteration:  The XPath function used looks as follows: hwf:getTaskAttachmentContents(bpmn:getDataObject('UserTask1LocalExecData')/ns1:systemAttributes/ns1:taskId, bpmn:getDataObject('attachmentsBPM')/ns:attachment[bpmn:getActivityInstanceAttribute('SUBPROCESS3067107484296', 'loopCounter')]/ns:fileName)  where the input parameters are: taskId of the just completed Human Task attachment name we're retrieving the payload from array index (loopCounter predefined variable)  Aside note: The reason whereby we're iterating the execData/attachment[] structure through embedded subprocess and not, i.e., using XSLT and for-each nodes, is mostly because the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function is currently not available in XSLT mappings. So all this example might be considered as a workaround until this gets fixed/enhanced in future releases. Once this embedded subprocess ends, we will have all attachments (name + payload) in the attachmentsBPM variable, which is the main goal of this sample. But in order to test everything runs fine, we finish the sample writing each attachment to a file. To that end we include a final embedded subprocess to concurrently iterate through each attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: On each iteration we will use a Service activity that invokes a File Adapter write service. In here we have two important parameters to set. First, the payload itself. The file adapter awaits binary data in base64 format (string). We have to map it using XPath (Simple mapping doesn't recognize a String as a base64-binary valid target):  Second, we must set the target filename using the Service Properties dialog box:  Again, note how we're making use of the loopCounter index variable to get the right element within the embedded subprocess iteration. Handling UCM attachments will be part of a different and upcoming blog entry. Once I finish will all posts on this matter, I will upload the whole sample project to java.net.

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  • Coming to OpenWorld? A must attend session…

    - by Ruma Sanyal
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE NTT Docomo, Inc. is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} One of the most important of NTT Docomo’s systems is ALADIN, which is a nationwide operating system shared with its eight regional subsidiaries. ALADIN has five primary functions: customer management, phone number management, information processing and storage, sales information management, and credit investigation. To enhance cost efficiency and help ensure stable operation of ALADIN, NTT Docomo has employed Oracle WebLogic Server as a new application platform. Further information on this can be found here. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Last year at OpenWorld, NTT Docomo was honored as an Innovation Award Winner for: · Implementing real time sales and contract management system enabling all services requested by customers for immediate activations before customer leaves the Docomo store · A robust disaster recovery strategy, room to grow the business, and ability to move custom Java development to a platform with built in standards - WebLogic · Better performance, better reliability, better stability, and smooth migration v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet This Year's Most Impressive Innovators! This year we continue to honor customers for their most innovative and cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Join us in celebrating award recipients’ great achievements and commitment to innovation.   Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Innovators Session ID: CON7029 Tuesday September 30, 2014 @ 5-5:45 pm (PST) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts  YBCA Theater (next to Moscone North) 700 Howard St., San Francisco, CA, 94103 /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Replication Services as ETL extraction tool

    - by jorg
    In my last blog post I explained the principles of Replication Services and the possibilities it offers in a BI environment. One of the possibilities I described was the use of snapshot replication as an ETL extraction tool: “Snapshot Replication can also be useful in BI environments, if you don’t need a near real-time copy of the database, you can choose to use this form of replication. Next to an alternative for Transactional Replication it can be used to stage data so it can be transformed and moved into the data warehousing environment afterwards. In many solutions I have seen developers create multiple SSIS packages that simply copies data from one or more source systems to a staging database that figures as source for the ETL process. The creation of these packages takes a lot of (boring) time, while Replication Services can do the same in minutes. It is possible to filter out columns and/or records and it can even apply schema changes automatically so I think it offers enough features here. I don’t know how the performance will be and if it really works as good for this purpose as I expect, but I want to try this out soon!” Well I have tried it out and I must say it worked well. I was able to let replication services do work in a fraction of the time it would cost me to do the same in SSIS. What I did was the following: Configure snapshot replication for some Adventure Works tables, this was quite simple and straightforward. Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication on demand and waits for its completion. This is something that you can’t do with out of the box functionality. While configuring the snapshot replication two SQL Agent Jobs are created, one for the creation of the snapshot and one for the distribution of the snapshot. Unfortunately these jobs are  asynchronous which means that if you execute them they immediately report back if the job started successfully or not, they do not wait for completion and report its result afterwards. So I had to create an SSIS package that executes the jobs and waits for their completion before the rest of the ETL process continues. Fortunately I was able to create the SSIS package with the desired functionality. I have made a step-by-step guide that will help you configure the snapshot replication and I have uploaded the SSIS package you need to execute it. Configure snapshot replication   The first step is to create a publication on the database you want to replicate. Connect to SQL Server Management Studio and right-click Replication, choose for New.. Publication…   The New Publication Wizard appears, click Next Choose your “source” database and click Next Choose Snapshot publication and click Next   You can now select tables and other objects that you want to publish Expand Tables and select the tables that are needed in your ETL process In the next screen you can add filters on the selected tables which can be very useful. Think about selecting only the last x days of data for example. Its possible to filter out rows and/or columns. In this example I did not apply any filters. Schedule the Snapshot Agent to run at a desired time, by doing this a SQL Agent Job is created which we need to execute from a SSIS package later on. Next you need to set the Security Settings for the Snapshot Agent. Click on the Security Settings button.   In this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. This is not recommended as a security best practice. Fortunately there is an excellent article on TechNet which tells you exactly how to set up the security for replication services. Read it here and make sure you follow the guidelines!   On the next screen choose to create the publication at the end of the wizard Give the publication a name (SnapshotTest) and complete the wizard   The publication is created and the articles (tables in this case) are added Now the publication is created successfully its time to create a new subscription for this publication.   Expand the Replication folder in SSMS and right click Local Subscriptions, choose New Subscriptions   The New Subscription Wizard appears   Select the publisher on which you just created your publication and select the database and publication (SnapshotTest)   You can now choose where the Distribution Agent should run. If it runs at the distributor (push subscriptions) it causes extra processing overhead. If you use a separate server for your ETL process and databases choose to run each agent at its subscriber (pull subscriptions) to reduce the processing overhead at the distributor. Of course we need a database for the subscription and fortunately the Wizard can create it for you. Choose for New database   Give the database the desired name, set the desired options and click OK You can now add multiple SQL Server Subscribers which is not necessary in this case but can be very useful.   You now need to set the security settings for the Distribution Agent. Click on the …. button Again, in this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. Read the security best practices here   Click Next   Make sure you create a synchronization job schedule again. This job is also necessary in the SSIS package later on. Initialize the subscription at first synchronization Select the first box to create the subscription when finishing this wizard Complete the wizard by clicking Finish The subscription will be created In SSMS you see a new database is created, the subscriber. There are no tables or other objects in the database available yet because the replication jobs did not ran yet. Now expand the SQL Server Agent, go to Jobs and search for the job that creates the snapshot:   Rename this job to “CreateSnapshot” Now search for the job that distributes the snapshot:   Rename this job to “DistributeSnapshot” Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication We now need an SSIS package that will take care of the execution of both jobs. The CreateSnapshot job needs to execute and finish before the DistributeSnapshot job runs. After the DistributeSnapshot job has started the package needs to wait until its finished before the package execution finishes. The Execute SQL Server Agent Job Task is designed to execute SQL Agent Jobs from SSIS. Unfortunately this SSIS task only executes the job and reports back if the job started succesfully or not, it does not report if the job actually completed with success or failure. This is because these jobs are asynchronous. The SSIS package I’ve created does the following: It runs the CreateSnapshot job It checks every 5 seconds if the job is completed with a for loop When the CreateSnapshot job is completed it starts the DistributeSnapshot job And again it waits until the snapshot is delivered before the package will finish successfully Quite simple and the package is ready to use as standalone extract mechanism. After executing the package the replicated tables are added to the subscriber database and are filled with data:   Download the SSIS package here (SSIS 2008) Conclusion In this example I only replicated 5 tables, I could create a SSIS package that does the same in approximately the same amount of time. But if I replicated all the 70+ AdventureWorks tables I would save a lot of time and boring work! With replication services you also benefit from the feature that schema changes are applied automatically which means your entire extract phase wont break. Because a snapshot is created using the bcp utility (bulk copy) it’s also quite fast, so the performance will be quite good. Disadvantages of using snapshot replication as extraction tool is the limitation on source systems. You can only choose SQL Server or Oracle databases to act as a publisher. So if you plan to build an extract phase for your ETL process that will invoke a lot of tables think about replication services, it would save you a lot of time and thanks to the Extract SSIS package I’ve created you can perfectly fit it in your usual SSIS ETL process.

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  • Generate Strongly Typed Observable Events for the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

    - by Bobby Diaz
    I must have tried reading through the various explanations and introductions to the new Reactive Extensions for .NET before the concepts finally started sinking in.  The article that gave me the ah-ha moment was over on SilverlightShow.net and titled Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight.  The author did a good job comparing the "normal" way of handling events vs. the new "reactive" methods. Admittedly, I still have more to learn about the Rx Framework, but I wanted to put together a sample project so I could start playing with the new Observable and IObservable<T> constructs.  I decided to throw together a whiteboard application in Silverlight based on the Drawing with Rx example on the aforementioned article.  At the very least, I figured I would learn a thing or two about a new technology, but my real goal is to create a fun application that I can share with the kids since they love drawing and coloring so much! Here is the code sample that I borrowed from the article: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp");       var draggingEvents = from pos in mouseMoveEvent                              .SkipUntil(mouseLeftButtonDown)                              .TakeUntil(mouseLeftButtonUp)                              .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) =>                                  new                                  {                                      X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y,                                      Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y                                  })).Repeat()                          select pos;       draggingEvents.Subscribe(p =>     {         Line line = new Line();         line.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black);         line.StrokeEndLineCap = PenLineCap.Round;         line.StrokeLineJoin = PenLineJoin.Round;         line.StrokeThickness = 5;         line.X1 = p.X1;         line.Y1 = p.Y1;         line.X2 = p.X2;         line.Y2 = p.Y2;         this.LayoutRoot.Children.Add(line);     }); One thing that was nagging at the back of my mind was having to deal with the event names as strings, as well as the verbose syntax for the Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>() method.  I came up with a couple of static/helper classes to resolve both issues and also created a T4 template to auto-generate these helpers for any .NET type.  Take the following code from the above example: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp"); Turns into this with the new static Events class: var mouseMoveEvent = Events.Mouse.Move.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this); Or better yet, just remove the variable declarations altogether:     var draggingEvents = from pos in Events.Mouse.Move.On(this)                              .SkipUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this))                              .TakeUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this))                              .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) =>                                  new                                  {                                      X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y,                                      Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y                                  })).Repeat()                          select pos; The Move, LeftButtonDown and LeftButtonUp members of the Events.Mouse class are readonly instances of the ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> class that provide type-safe access to the events via the On() method.  Here is the code for the class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq;   namespace System.Linq {     /// <summary>     /// Represents an event that can be managed via the <see cref="Observable"/> API.     /// </summary>     /// <typeparam name="TTarget">The type of the target.</typeparam>     /// <typeparam name="TEventArgs">The type of the event args.</typeparam>     public class ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> where TEventArgs : EventArgs     {         /// <summary>         /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="ObservableEvent"/> class.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param>         protected ObservableEvent(String eventName)         {             EventName = eventName;         }           /// <summary>         /// Registers the specified event name.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public static ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> Register(String eventName)         {             return new ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs>(eventName);         }           /// <summary>         /// Creates an enumerable sequence of event values for the specified target.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="target">The target.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public IObservable<IEvent<TEventArgs>> On(TTarget target)         {             return Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>(target, EventName);         }           /// <summary>         /// Gets or sets the name of the event.         /// </summary>         /// <value>The name of the event.</value>         public string EventName { get; private set; }     } } And this is how it's used:     /// <summary>     /// Categorizes <see cref="ObservableEvents"/> by class and/or functionality.     /// </summary>     public static partial class Events     {         /// <summary>         /// Implements a set of predefined <see cref="ObservableEvent"/>s         /// for the <see cref="System.Windows.System.Windows.UIElement"/> class         /// that represent mouse related events.         /// </summary>         public static partial class Mouse         {             /// <summary>Represents the MouseMove event.</summary>             public static readonly ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs> Move =                 ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs>.Register("MouseMove");               // additional members omitted...         }     } The source code contains a static Events class with prefedined members for various categories (Key, Mouse, etc.).  There is also an Events.tt template that you can customize to generate additional event categories for any .NET type.  All you should have to do is add the name of your class to the types collection near the top of the template:     types = new Dictionary<String, Type>()     {         //{ "Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.Map, Microsoft.Maps.MapControl", null }         { "System.Windows.FrameworkElement, System.Windows", null },         { "Whiteboard.MainPage, Whiteboard", null }     }; The template is also a bit rough at this point, but at least it generates code that *should* compile.  Please let me know if you run into any issues with it.  Some people have reported errors when trying to use T4 templates within a Silverlight project, but I was able to get it to work with a little black magic...  You can download the source code for this project or play around with the live demo.  Just be warned that it is at a very early stage so don't expect to find much today.  I plan on adding alot more options like pen colors and sizes, saving, printing, etc. as time permits.  HINT: hold down the ESC key to erase! Enjoy! Additional Resources Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight DevLabs: Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) Rx Framework Part III - LINQ to Events - Generating GetEventName() Wrapper Methods using T4

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 20, 2010

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In this incarnation, snakes may eat 3 types of powerups: standard berries, causing them to grow; sawberries, caus...Playground TDrouen: Tjerk's PlaygroundPower Plan Chooser: This is my first endeavor into a C# Windows application with XAML. The program sits in the notification area (task bar) and lets you quickly activa...Search IMDB in C#: In lack of an IMDB API most of us resort to screen scraping utilities to query the Internet Movie Database. This one is written in C# (.NET 2.0 sta...SIGPRO Desktop: FUNCERNSql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: Pequena aplicação para Corrigir o seguinte erro de Instalação do...TwiztedTracker: TwiztedTracker designed to make your bug tracking easy.UmbracoXsltLogHelper: I needed a way to easily add log rows from my xslt macros, and added a single-line-extension for that reason. Then I played around with the umbraco...VisualStock: VisualStock is stock data visualization, analysis application build on the Micorsoft Composite Application Library.WHS File Mover: A Windows Home Server Plugin to move files from a local directory ("drop" or "staging" directory to a folder share)XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: XML based Content Deployment in Sharepoint helps you to easy deploy content into SharePoint, including webs, lists, items, files and folder. You wi...New ReleasesASP.Net RIA Controls: Version 1.0 Beta: The first functionnal version.BMap.NET: BMap.NET 1: This is the 1st version of BMap.NETDigital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor 1.0: All features implemented. Added: clipping imageFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.1.0: Version 1.3.1.0 Added a cancel button to marriage and children IGI Searches Opening Results window now automatically shows first record Updated IGI...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.5 Released: Hi, This release contains fix for the following bug: * Chart threw exception if ZoomingEnabled property was set to True at real-time. You ca...Homework Helper: Homework Helper v.1.1: Sorry but the latest release didn't seem to be the latest. This should be the right one!Image Ripper: Image Ripper: Image Ripper based on HtmlAgilityPack and GData library.ManPowerEngine: 0.1: UpdatesSound System added. Bitmap Collider in Physics System works now. Improved the performance of HTTP download in images Physics Framework...NIPO Data Processing Component Framework: NIPO 1.0: The first release of NIPO. Includes the NIPO binary dll and documentation. 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Changes the red ball and green ball images to red cross a...Sql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Sql2008FIx_PerfMonCounter.zip: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956 Rule Name PerfMonCounter...UmbracoXsltLogHelper: 0.9 Working Beta: First version. XsltLogHelper09 is the installable package.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30319.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF RIA Services Contrib: RIA Services Contrib RC Release: This version is recompiled against the RC release of WCF RIA Services.XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: SPContentDeployment 1.0.0.0: The first link contains the resources and a sample project. The second link contains everything included in the first package and an additional fo...Yet Another GPS: YAGPS Alfa.2: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows Mobile Speed Guage, Sat Count number, KML for google map file formatZGuideTV.NET: ZGuideTV.NET 0.92: Vendredi 19 mars 2010 (ZGuideTV.NET bêta 9 build 0.92) - English below Corrections : - Gestion de certains contrôles dans l'écran principal. - Div...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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