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• Flashing your Windows Phone Dummies

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  The rate at which vendors release new updates for the HD2 is ridiculously slow. You have to wait for Microsoft to release the new OS, then you wait for HTC to build it into a ROM, and then you have to wait up to 6 months for your operator to badly customise it for their network. Once Windows Phone 7 is released this problem should go away as Microsoft is likely to be able to update the phone over the air, but what do we do until then? I want Windows Mobile 6.5.5 now!   I’m an early adopter. If there is a new version of something then that’s the version I want. As long as you accept that you are using something on a “let the early adopter beware” and accept that there may be bugs, sometimes serious crippling bugs the go for it. Note that I won't be responsible if you end up bricking your phone, unlocking or flashing your radio or ROM can be risky. If you follow the instructions then you should be fine, I've flashed my phones (SPV, M300, M1000, M2000, M3100, TyTN, TyTN 2, HD2) hundreds of times without any problems! I have been using Windows Mobile 6.5.5 before it was called 6.5.5 and for long enough that I don’t even remember when I first started using it. I was using it on my HTC TyTN 2 before I got an HD2 a couple of months before Christmas, and the first custom ROM’s for the HD2 were a couple of months after that. I always update to the latest ROM that I like, and occasionally I go back to the stock ROM’s to have a look see, but I am always disappointed. Terms: Soft Reset: Same as pulling out the battery, but is like a reboot for your phone Hard Reset: Reinstalls the Operating system from the Image that is stored on it ROM: This is Image that is loaded onto your phone and it is used to reinstall your phone whenever you do a “hard reset”. Stock ROM: A ROM from the original vendor… So HTC Cook a ROM: Referring to Cooking a ROM is the process a ROM developer goes through to take all of the parts (OS, Drivers and Applications) that make up a running phone and compiling them into a ROM. ROM Kitchen: A place where you get an SDK and all the component parts of the phone: OD, Drivers and Application. There are usually lots of Tools for making it easier to compile and build the image. Flashing: The process of updating one of the layers of your phone with a new layer Bricked: This is what happens when flashing goes wrong. Your phone is now good for only one thing… stopping paper blowing away in a windy place. You can “cook” you own ROM using one of the many good “ROM Kitchens” or you can use a ROM built and tested by someone else. I have cooked my own ROM before, and while the tutorials are good, it is a lot of hassle. You can only Flash new ROM’s that are specifically for your phone only so find a ROM for your phone and XDA Developers is the best place to look. It has a forum based structure and you can find your phone quite easily. XDA Developer Forum Installing a new ROM does have its risks. In the past there have been stories about phones being “bricked” but I have not heard of a bricked phone for quite some years. if you follow the instructions carefully you should not have any problems. note: Most of the tools are written by people for whom English is not their first language to you will need concentrate hard to understand some of the instructions. Have you ever read a manual that was just literally translated from another language? Enough said… There are a number of layers on your phone that you will need to know about: SPL: This is the lowest level, like a BIOS on a PC and is the Operating Systems gateway to the hardware Radio: I think of this as the hardware drivers, and you will need a different Radio for CDMA than GSM networks ROM: This is like your Windows CD, but it is stored internally to the Phone. Flashing your phone consists of replacing one Image with another and then wiping your phone and automatically reinstall from the Image. Sometimes when you download an Image wither it is for a Radio or for ROM you only get a file called *.nbh. What do you do with this? Well you need an RUU application to push that Image to your phone. The RUU’s are different per phone, but there is a CustomRUU for the HD2 that will update your phone with any *.nbh placed in the same directory. Download and Instructions for CustomRUU #1 Flash HardSPL An SPL is kind of like a BIOS, and the default one has checks to make sure that you are only installing a signed ROM. This would prevent you from installing one that comes from any other source but the vendor. NOTE: Installing a HARD SPL invalidates your warranty so remember to Flash your phone with a “stock” vendor ROM before trying to send your phone in for repairs. Is the warranty reinstated when you go back to a stock ROM? I don’t know… Updating your SPL to a HardSPL effectively unlocks your phone so you can install anything you like. I would recommend the HardSPL2. Download and Instructions for HardSPL2 #2 Task29 One of the problems that has been seen on the HD2 when flashing new ROM’s is that things are left over from the old ROM. For a while the recommendation was to Flash a stock ROM first, but some clever cookies have come up with “Task29” which formats your phone first. After running this your phone will be blank and will only boot to the white HTC logo and no further. You should follow the instructions and reboot (remove battery) and hold down the “volume down” button while turning you HD2 on to enter the bootloader. From here you can run CustomRUU once the USB message appears. Download and Instructions for Task29 #2 Flash Radio You may need to play around with this one, there is no good and bad version and the latest is not always the best. You know that annoying thing when you hit “end call” on your phone and nothing happens? Well that's down to the Radio. Get this version right for you and you may even be able to make calls. From a Windows Mobile as well Download There are no instructions here, but they are the same as th ROM, but you use this *.nbh file. #3 Flash ROM If you have gotten this far then you are probably a pro by now Just download the latest ROM below and Flash to your phone. I have been really impressed by the Artemis line of ROM’s but it is no way the only choice. I like this one as the developer builds them as close to the stock ROM as possible while updating to the latest of everything. Download and Instructions for  Artemis HD2 vXX Conclusion While updating your ROM is not for the faint hearted it provides more options than the Stock ROM’s and quicker feature updates than waiting… Technorati Tags: WM6

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• Guide to Downloading Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Products

  - by Daniel Mortimer

  IntroductionThe idea of writing a blog about downloading software seems a bit strange .. right? After all, surely just give me the web download link and away I go!? Unfortunately, life is not so simple if you are a DBA or Systems Administrator tasked with staging Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g products for your chosen business technology stack. Here are the challenges: Oracle Fusion Middleware is not a single product, it is a family of products - a media pack with many many "disks" - which ones do I pick? Are the products I pick certified / supported on my chosen platform? Which download site do I use? I need to be on the latest and greatest - how do I get hold of the latest product patch set? The purpose of this blog is to give you a roadmap to get you through these challenges. Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g - A Product SuiteThe first thing to appreciate is that Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is not a single product. It is a product suite, an umbrella label for many products. Typically you don't download the whole media pack - well not unless you want to stage 124 Parts - a total of 68 Gig  - instead you pick the pieces that are required for your chosen Middleware solution. Therefore, you need to research / understand which products are required to build your solution. In this respect, before you go looking for the software pick and persue the product guide from the table below which matches your situation:  Installing a New / Vanilla FMW 11g architecture Oracle Fusion Middleware Installation Planning Guide 11g  Upgrading Oracle Application Server 10g to FMW 11g Oracle Fusion Middleware Upgrade Planning Guide 11g  Patching an existing FMW 11g architecture Oracle Fusion Middleware Patching Guide 11g Certification Information Ok, so now you have an idea of what Fusion Middleware products you need. It's time to check whether these products are certified against your chosen platform. There are two places to find this information:My Oracle Support Certification Tab PageFigure 1.1 My Oracle Support Certification Tab Page - "Search on SOA Suite" Figure 1.2 My Oracle Support Certification Tab Page - "SOA Suite Search Result" The FMW 11g Certification Central Hub (in the format of xls spreadsheet)Figure 2: Screenshot of FMW 11g Release 1 Certification xls spreadsheet Hints / Tips: Fusion Middleware 11g certification information has only recently been added into the Certification Tab page and I think it is the more friendly way to access the information. However, due to some restrictions with the Certification Tab page interface some of the more, let's say obscure certification information, is still to be only found in the Certification spreadsheet. Be aware that to find certification information via the My Oracle Support Certification Tab page you must enter the FMW 11g product name e.g. "Oracle SOA Suite". Do NOT enter "Oracle Fusion Middleware". The certification information does not exist at this product suite level.  For example, if you are building a solution which includes Oracle SOA Suite Oracle WebCenter then you will have to look up the certification information for each product in turn.After choosing the product name, select the latest patch set version. This will not only tell you whether your chosen product is available at that patch set version but provide the certification information relevant to that version.  If the product is not available under the latest patch set version, seek the information under previous patch set versions. Important: Make a careful note of the Oracle WebLogic Server version which is certified with your chosen product and patch set version. Oracle WebLogic Server is the core component of a Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g home. It is important therefore to ensure later on that you download the version of Oracle WebLogic Server which is compatible and certified with your chosen product and patch set version.Also - sorry to state the obvious, but please do not take certification information from the screenshots above. The screenshots are only good for the time they were entered into the blog. To ensure you have the latest information, interactively look up the certification details. For more information about finding certification information, bookmark and readMy Oracle Support Certification Tool for Oracle Fusion Middleware Products [Doc ID 1368736.1]How to Find Certification Details for Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g [Doc ID 431578.1] Downloading the Software Now you should be ready to download the software. There are two download locations Oracle Software Delivery Cloud (formerly known as E-Delivery)Figure 3 - Screenshot of Fusion Middleware Download from Delivery CloudOracle Fusion Middleware Download Page on Oracle Technology NetworkFigure 4 - Screenshot of OTN Product Download Screen Hints / Tips: Your choice of download location should be primarily driven by your licensing needs. Take note of the wording on the OTN site - to quote:"The downloads below are provided for evaluators under the OTN License Agreement. Licensed customers should download their software via our Oracle Software Delivery Cloud site, which offers different license terms."However, it has to be said that the presentation of the most of the product download pages on OTN does make the job easier. The Software Delivery Cloud provides you with a flat list of the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g media pack. You have to know what you are looking for and pick out the right pieces :-( The OTN product download pages present not only the download for the product you want but also its dependencies such as WebLogic Server and Repository Creation Utility. So, even if your licensing requirements drive you towards the cloud, it is still worthwhile checking the OTN pages if only as a guide to what you need to pick out from the flat list found on the cloud site. Latest Patch Set This is an area which may cause you confusion - especially if you are more familiar with the Oracle Application Server 10g patching story. From Patch Set 11.1.1.6 and higher, the majority of FMW 11g products (N.B there are exceptions) provide installers which can be used both to update existing FMW 11g product installs or build brand new ones. This is good news because, unless you are dealing with one of the exceptions, it means you do not have to download base software and a patch set. At the time of the writing, the two significant exceptions are: Portal/Forms/Reports/Discoverer 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.x) Identity Access Management 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.x) The other key message here is ensure you are grabbing a version of Oracle WebLogic Server which is compatible with your chosen product patch set version. Get this wrong and you will hit errors / problems at AS Instance Configuration Time.The go to place is this document - Oracle Fusion Middleware Download, Installation, and Configuration Readme FilesIn fact, this README document pretty much takes you through what I have blogged above. The only thing is you need to know which README to choose, and that's why planning your FMW 11g technology stack and viewing certification information comes into play beforehand. And Finally As the Oracle Fusion Middleware Download, Installation, and Configuration Readme Files states don't forget to check FMW 11g System Requirements FMW 11g Product Interoperability

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• Now Available &ndash; Windows Azure SDK 1.6

  - by Shaun

  Microsoft has just announced the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.6. Now people can download the latest product through the WebPI. After you downloaded and installed the SDK you will find that The SDK 1.6 can be stayed side by side with the SDK 1.5, which means you can still using the 1.5 assemblies. But the Visual Studio Tools would be upgraded to 1.6. Different from the previous SDK, in this version it includes 4 components: Windows Azure Authoring Tools, Windows Azure Emulators, Windows Azure Libraries for .NET 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. There are some significant upgrades in this version, which are Publishing Enhancement: More easily connect to the Windows Azure when publish your application by retrieving a publish setting file. It will let you configure some settings of the deployment, without getting back to the developer portal. Multi-profiles: The publish settings, cloud configuration files, etc. will be stored in one or more MSBuild files. It will be much easier to switch the settings between vary build environments. MSBuild Command-line Build Support. In-Place Upgrade Support.   Publishing Enhancement So let’s have a look about the new features of the publishing. Just create a new Windows Azure project in Visual Studio 2010 with a MVC 3 Web Role, and right-click the Windows Azure project node in the solution explorer, then select Publish, we will find the new publish dialog. In this version the first thing we need to do is to connect to our Windows Azure subscription. Click the “Sign in to download credentials” link, we will be navigated to the login page to provide the Live ID. The Windows Azure Tool will generate a certificate file and uploaded to the subscriptions those belong to us. Then we will download a PUBLISHSETTINGS file, which contains the credentials and subscriptions information. The Visual Studio Tool will generate a certificate and deployed to the subscriptions you have as the Management Certificate. The VS Tool will use this certificate to connect to the subscription in the next step. In the next step, I would back to the Visual Studio (the publish dialog should be stilling opened) and click the Import button, select the PUBLISHSETTINGS file I had just downloaded. Then all my subscriptions will be shown in the dropdown list. Select a subscription that I want the application to be published and press the Next button, then we can select the hosted service, environment, build configuration and service configuration shown in the dialog. In this version we can create a new hosted service directly here rather than go back to the developer portal. Just select the <Create New …> item in the hosted service. What we need to do is to provide the hosted service name and the location. Once clicked the OK, after several seconds the hosted service will be established. If we went to the developer portal we will find the new hosted service in my subscription. a) Currently we cannot select the Affinity Group when create a new hosted service through the Visual Studio Publish dialog. b) Although we can specify the hosted service name and DNS prefixing through the developer portal, we cannot do so from the VS Tool, which means the DNS prefixing would be the same as what we specified for the hosted service name. For example, we specified our hosted service name as “Sdk16Demo”, so the public URL would be http://sdk16demo.cloudapp.net/. After created a new hosted service we can select the cloud environment (production or staging), the build configuration (release or debug), and the service configuration (cloud or local). And we can set the Remote Desktop by check the related checkbox as well. One thing should be note is that, in this version when we set the Remote Desktop settings we don’t need to specify a certificate by default. This is because the Visual Studio will generate a new certificate for us by default. But we can still specify an existing certificate for RDC, by clicking the “More Options” button. Visual Studio Tool will create another certificate for the Remote Desktop connection. It will NOT use the certificate that managing the subscription. We also can select the “Advanced Settings” page to specify the deployment label, storage account, IntelliTrace and .NET profiling information, etc.. Press Next button, the dialog will display all settings I had just specified and it will save them as a new profile. The last step is to click the Publish button. Since we enabled the Remote Desktop feature, the first step of publishing was uploading the certificate. And then it will verify the storage account we specified and upload the package, then finally created the website in Windows Azure.   Multi-Profiles After published, if we back to the Visual Studio we can find a AZUREPUBXML file under the Profiles folder in the Azure project. It includes all settings we specified before. If we publish this project again, we can just use the current settings (hosted service, environment, RDC, etc.) from this profile without input them again. And this is very useful when we have more than one deployment settings. For example it would be able to have one AZUREPUBXML profile for deploying to testing environment (debug building, less roles with RDC and IntelliTrace) and one for production (release building, more roles but without IntelliTrace).   In-Place Upgrade Support Let’s change some codes in the MVC pages and click the Publish menu from the azure project node. No need to specify any settings,  here we can use the pervious settings by loading the azure profile file (AZUREPUBXML). After clicked the Publish button the VS Tool brought a dialog to us to indicate that there’s a deployment available in the hosted service environment, and prompt to REPLACE it or not. Notice that in this version, the dialog tool said “replace” rather than “delete”, which means by default the VS Tool will use In-Place Upgrade when we deploy to a hosted service that has a deployment already exist. After click Yes the VS Tool will upload the package and perform the In-Place Upgrade. If we back to the developer portal we can find that the status of the hosted service was turned to “Updating…”. But in the previous SDK, it will try to delete the whole deployment and publish a new one.   Summary When the Microsoft announced the features that allows the changing VM size via In-Place Upgrade, they also mentioned that in the next few versions the user experience of publishing the azure application would be improved. The target was trying to accomplish the whole publish experience in Visual Studio, which means no need to touch developer portal any more. In the SDK 1.6 we can see from the new publish dialog, as a developer we can do the whole process, includes creating hosted service, specifying the environment, configuration, remote desktop, etc. values without going back the the developer portal.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Robotic Arm &ndash; Hardware

  - by Szymon Kobalczyk

  This is first in series of articles about project I've been building  in my spare time since last Summer. Actually it all began when I was researching a topic of modeling human motion kinematics in order to create gesture recognition library for Kinect. This ties heavily into motion theory of robotic manipulators so I also glanced at some designs of robotic arms. Somehow I stumbled upon this cool looking open source robotic arm: It was featured on Thingiverse and published by user jjshortcut (Jan-Jaap). Since for some time I got hooked on toying with microcontrollers, robots and other electronics, I decided to give it a try and build it myself. In this post I will describe the hardware build of the arm and in later posts I will be writing about the software to control it. Another reason to build the arm myself was the cost factor. Even small commercial robotic arms are quite expensive – products from Lynxmotion and Dagu look great but both cost around USD $300 (actually there is one cheap arm available but it looks more like a toy to me). In comparison this design is quite cheap. It uses seven hobby grade servos and even the cheapest ones should work fine. The structure is build from a set of laser cut parts connected with few metal spacers (15mm and 47mm) and lots of M3 screws. Other than that you’d only need a microcontroller board to drive the servos. So in total it comes a lot cheaper to build it yourself than buy an of the shelf robotic arm. Oh, and if you don’t like this one there are few more robotic arm projects at Thingiverse (including one by oomlout). Laser cut parts Some time ago I’ve build another robot using laser cut parts so I knew the process already. You can grab the design files in both DXF and EPS format from Thingiverse, and there are also 3D models of each part in STL. Actually the design is split into a second project for the mini servo gripper (there is also a standard servo version available but it won’t fit this arm).  I wanted to make some small adjustments, layout, and add measurements to the parts before sending it for cutting. I’ve looked at some free 2D CAD programs, and finally did all this work using QCad 3 Beta with worked great for me (I also tried LibreCAD but it didn’t work that well). All parts are cut from 4 mm thick material. Because I was worried that acrylic is too fragile and might break, I also ordered another set cut from plywood. In the end I build it from plywood because it was easier to glue (I was told acrylic requires a special glue). Btw. I found a great laser cutter service in Kraków and highly recommend it (www.ebbox.com.pl). It cost me only USD $26 for both sets ($16 acrylic + $10 plywood). Metal parts I bought all the M3 screws and nuts at local hardware store. Make sure to look for nylon lock (nyloc) nuts for the gripper because otherwise it unscrews and comes apart quickly. I couldn’t find local store with metal spacers and had to order them online (you’d need 11 x 47mm and 3 x 15mm). I think I paid less than USD $10 for all metal parts. Servos This arm uses five standards size servos to drive the arm itself, and two micro servos are used on the gripper. Author of the project used Modelcraft RS-2 Servo and Modelcraft ES-05 HT Servo. I had two Futaba S3001 servos laying around, and ordered additional TowerPro SG-5010 standard size servos and TowerPro SG90 micro servos. However it turned out that the SG90 won’t fit in the gripper so I had to replace it with a slightly smaller E-Sky EK2-0508 micro servo. Later it also turned out that Futaba servos make some strange noise while working so I swapped one with TowerPro SG-5010 which has higher torque (8kg / cm). I’ve also bought three servo extension cables. All servos cost me USD $45. Assembly The build process is not difficult but you need to think carefully about order of assembling it. You can do the base and upper arm first. Because two servos in the base are close together you need to put first with one piece of lower arm already connected before you put the second servo. Then you connect the upper arm and finally put the second piece of lower arm to hold it together. Gripper and base require some gluing so think it through too. Make sure to look closely at all the photos on Thingiverse (also other people copies) and read additional posts on jjshortcust’s blog: My mini servo grippers and completed robotic arm  Multiply the robotic arm and electronics Here is also Rob’s copy cut from aluminum My assembled arm looks like this – I think it turned out really nice: Servo controller board The last piece of hardware I needed was an electronic board that would take command from PC and drive all seven servos. I could probably use Arduino for this task, and in fact there are several Arduino servo shields available (for example from Adafruit or Renbotics).  However one problem is that most support only up to six servos, and second that their accuracy is limited by Arduino’s timer frequency. So instead I looked for dedicated servo controller and found a series of Maestro boards from Pololu. I picked the Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller. It has many nice features including native USB connection, high resolution pulses (0.25µs) with no jitter, built-in speed and acceleration control, and even scripting capability. Another cool feature is that besides servo control, each channel can be configured as either general input or output. So far I’m using seven channels so I still have five available to connect some sensors (for example distance sensor mounted on gripper might be useful). And last but important factor was that they have SDK in .NET – what more I could wish for! The board itself is very small – half of the size of Tic-Tac box. I picked one for about USD $35 in this store. Perhaps another good alternative would be the Phidgets Advanced Servo 8-Motor – but it is significantly more expensive at USD $87.30. The Maestro Controller Driver and Software package includes Maestro Control Center program with lets you immediately configure the board. For each servo I first figured out their move range and set the min/max limits. I played with setting the speed an acceleration values as well. Big issue for me was that there are two servos that control position of lower arm (shoulder joint), and both have to be moved at the same time. This is where the scripting feature of Pololu board turned out very helpful. I wrote a script that synchronizes position of second servo with first one – so now I only need to move one servo and other will follow automatically. This turned out tricky because I couldn’t find simple offset mapping of the move range for each servo – I had to divide it into several sub-ranges and map each individually. The scripting language is bit assembler-like but gets the job done. And there is even a runtime debugging and stack view available. Altogether I’m very happy with the Pololu Mini Maestro Servo Controller, and with this final piece I completed the build and was able to move my arm from the Meastro Control program.   The total cost of my robotic arm was: $10 laser cut parts $10 metal parts $45 servos $35 servo controller ----------------------- $100 total So here you have all the information about the hardware. In next post I’ll start talking about the software that I wrote in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. Stay tuned!

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• Currency Conversion in Oracle BI applications

  - by Saurabh Verma

  Authored by Vijay Aggarwal and Hichem Sellami A typical data warehouse contains Star and/or Snowflake schema, made up of Dimensions and Facts. The facts store various numerical information including amounts. Example; Order Amount, Invoice Amount etc. With the true global nature of business now-a-days, the end-users want to view the reports in their own currency or in global/common currency as defined by their business. This presents a unique opportunity in BI to provide the amounts in converted rates either by pre-storing or by doing on-the-fly conversions while displaying the reports to the users. Source Systems OBIA caters to various source systems like EBS, PSFT, Sebl, JDE, Fusion etc. Each source has its own unique and intricate ways of defining and storing currency data, doing currency conversions and presenting to the OLTP users. For example; EBS stores conversion rates between currencies which can be classified by conversion rates, like Corporate rate, Spot rate, Period rate etc. Siebel stores exchange rates by conversion rates like Daily. EBS/Fusion stores the conversion rates for each day, where as PSFT/Siebel store for a range of days. PSFT has Rate Multiplication Factor and Rate Division Factor and we need to calculate the Rate based on them, where as other Source systems store the Currency Exchange Rate directly. OBIA Design The data consolidation from various disparate source systems, poses the challenge to conform various currencies, rate types, exchange rates etc., and designing the best way to present the amounts to the users without affecting the performance. When consolidating the data for reporting in OBIA, we have designed the mechanisms in the Common Dimension, to allow users to report based on their required currencies. OBIA Facts store amounts in various currencies: Document Currency: This is the currency of the actual transaction. For a multinational company, this can be in various currencies. Local Currency: This is the base currency in which the accounting entries are recorded by the business. This is generally defined in the Ledger of the company. Global Currencies: OBIA provides five Global Currencies. Three are used across all modules. The last two are for CRM only. A Global currency is very useful when creating reports where the data is viewed enterprise-wide. Example; a US based multinational would want to see the reports in USD. The company will choose USD as one of the global currencies. OBIA allows users to define up-to five global currencies during the initial implementation. The term Currency Preference is used to designate the set of values: Document Currency, Local Currency, Global Currency 1, Global Currency 2, Global Currency 3; which are shared among all modules. There are four more currency preferences, specific to certain modules: Global Currency 4 (aka CRM Currency) and Global Currency 5 which are used in CRM; and Project Currency and Contract Currency, used in Project Analytics. When choosing Local Currency for Currency preference, the data will show in the currency of the Ledger (or Business Unit) in the prompt. So it is important to select one Ledger or Business Unit when viewing data in Local Currency. More on this can be found in the section: Toggling Currency Preferences in the Dashboard. Design Logic When extracting the fact data, the OOTB mappings extract and load the document amount, and the local amount in target tables. It also loads the exchange rates required to convert the document amount into the corresponding global amounts. If the source system only provides the document amount in the transaction, the extract mapping does a lookup to get the Local currency code, and the Local exchange rate. The Load mapping then uses the local currency code and rate to derive the local amount. The load mapping also fetches the Global Currencies and looks up the corresponding exchange rates. The lookup of exchange rates is done via the Exchange Rate Dimension provided as a Common/Conforming Dimension in OBIA. The Exchange Rate Dimension stores the exchange rates between various currencies for a date range and Rate Type. Two physical tables W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are used to provide the lookups and conversions between currencies. The data is loaded from the source system’s Ledger tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores the exchange rates between currencies with a date range. On the other hand, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G stores the currency conversions between the document currency and the pre-defined five Global Currencies for each day. Based on the requirements, the fact mappings can decide and use one or both tables to do the conversion. Currency design in OBIA also taps into the MLS and Domain architecture, thus allowing the users to map the currencies to a universal Domain during the implementation time. This is especially important for companies deploying and using OBIA with multiple source adapters. Some Gotchas to Look for It is necessary to think through the currencies during the initial implementation. 1) Identify various types of currencies that are used by your business. Understand what will be your Local (or Base) and Documentation currency. Identify various global currencies that your users will want to look at the reports. This will be based on the global nature of your business. Changes to these currencies later in the project, while permitted, but may cause Full data loads and hence lost time. 2) If the user has a multi source system make sure that the Global Currencies and Global Rate Types chosen in Configuration Manager do have the corresponding source specific counterparts. In other words, make sure for every DW specific value chosen for Currency Code or Rate Type, there is a source Domain mapping already done. Technical Section This section will briefly mention the technical scenarios employed in the OBIA adaptors to extract data from each source system. In OBIA, we have two main tables which store the Currency Rate information as explained in previous sections. W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are the two tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores all the Currency Conversions present in the source system. It captures data for a Date Range. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G has Global Currency Conversions stored at a Daily level. However the challenge here is to store all the 5 Global Currency Exchange Rates in a single record for each From Currency. Let’s voyage further into the Source System Extraction logic for each of these tables and understand the flow briefly. EBS: In EBS, we have Currency Data stored in GL_DAILY_RATES table. As the name indicates GL_DAILY_RATES EBS table has data at a daily level. However in our warehouse we store the data with a Date Range and insert a new range record only when the Exchange Rate changes for a particular From Currency, To Currency and Rate Type. Below are the main logical steps that we employ in this process. (Incremental Flow only) – Cleanup the data in W_EXCH_RATE_G. Delete the records which have Start Date > minimum conversion date Update the End Date of the existing records. Compress the daily data from GL_DAILY_RATES table into Range Records. Incremental map uses $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY as an extra parameter. Generate Previous Rate, Previous Date and Next Date for each of the Daily record from the OLTP. Filter out the records which have Conversion Rate same as Previous Rates or if the Conversion Date lies within a single day range. Mark the records as ‘Keep’ and ‘Filter’ and also get the final End Date for the single Range record (Unique Combination of From Date, To Date, Rate and Conversion Date). Filter the records marked as ‘Filter’ in the INFA map. The above steps will load W_EXCH_RATE_GS. Step 0 updates/deletes W_EXCH_RATE_G directly. SIL map will then insert/update the GS data into W_EXCH_RATE_G. These steps convert the daily records in GL_DAILY_RATES to Range records in W_EXCH_RATE_G. We do not need such special logic for loading W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. This is a table where we store data at a Daily Granular Level. However we need to pivot the data because the data present in multiple rows in source tables needs to be stored in different columns of the same row in DW. We use GROUP BY and CASE logic to achieve this. Fusion: Fusion has extraction logic very similar to EBS. The only difference is that the Cleanup logic that was mentioned in step 0 above does not use $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY parameter. In Fusion we bring all the Exchange Rates in Incremental as well and do the cleanup. The SIL then takes care of Insert/Updates accordingly. PeopleSoft:PeopleSoft does not have From Date and To Date explicitly in the Source tables. Let’s look at an example. Please note that this is achieved from PS1 onwards only. 1 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 45 31 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 46 PSFT stores records in above fashion. This means that Exchange Rate of 45 for USD to INR is applicable for 1 Jan 2010 to 30 Jan 2010. We need to store data in this fashion in DW. Also PSFT has Exchange Rate stored as RATE_MULT and RATE_DIV. We need to do a RATE_MULT/RATE_DIV to get the correct Exchange Rate. We generate From Date and To Date while extracting data from source and this has certain assumptions: If a record gets updated/inserted in the source, it will be extracted in incremental. Also if this updated/inserted record is between other dates, then we also extract the preceding and succeeding records (based on dates) of this record. This is required because we need to generate a range record and we have 3 records whose ranges have changed. Taking the same example as above, if there is a new record which gets inserted on 15 Jan 2010; the new ranges are 1 Jan to 14 Jan, 15 Jan to 30 Jan and 31 Jan to Next available date. Even though 1 Jan record and 31 Jan have not changed, we will still extract them because the range is affected. Similar logic is used for Global Exchange Rate Extraction. We create the Range records and get it into a Temporary table. Then we join to Day Dimension, create individual records and pivot the data to get the 5 Global Exchange Rates for each From Currency, Date and Rate Type. Siebel: Siebel Facts are dependent on Global Exchange Rates heavily and almost none of them really use individual Exchange Rates. In other words, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G is the main table used in Siebel from PS1 release onwards. As of January 2002, the Euro Triangulation method for converting between currencies belonging to EMU members is not needed for present and future currency exchanges. However, the method is still available in Siebel applications, as are the old currencies, so that historical data can be maintained accurately. The following description applies only to historical data needing conversion prior to the 2002 switch to the Euro for the EMU member countries. If a country is a member of the European Monetary Union (EMU), you should convert its currency to other currencies through the Euro. This is called triangulation, and it is used whenever either currency being converted has EMU Triangulation checked. Due to this, there are multiple extraction flows in SEBL ie. EUR to EMU, EUR to NonEMU, EUR to DMC and so on. We load W_EXCH_RATE_G through multiple flows with these data. This has been kept same as previous versions of OBIA. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G being a new table does not have such needs. However SEBL does not have From Date and To Date columns in the Source tables similar to PSFT. We use similar extraction logic as explained in PSFT section for SEBL as well. What if all 5 Global Currencies configured are same? As mentioned in previous sections, from PS1 onwards we store Global Exchange Rates in W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G table. The extraction logic for this table involves Pivoting data from multiple rows into a single row with 5 Global Exchange Rates in 5 columns. As mentioned in previous sections, we use CASE and GROUP BY functions to achieve this. This approach poses a unique problem when all the 5 Global Currencies Chosen are same. For example – If the user configures all 5 Global Currencies as ‘USD’ then the extract logic will not be able to generate a record for From Currency=USD. This is because, not all Source Systems will have a USD->USD conversion record. We have _Generated mappings to take care of this case. We generate a record with Conversion Rate=1 for such cases. Reusable Lookups Before PS1, we had a Mapplet for Currency Conversions. In PS1, we only have reusable Lookups- LKP_W_EXCH_RATE_G and LKP_W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. These lookups have another layer of logic so that all the lookup conditions are met when they are used in various Fact Mappings. Any user who would want to do a LKP on W_EXCH_RATE_G or W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G should and must use these Lookups. A direct join or Lookup on the tables might lead to wrong data being returned. Changing Currency preferences in the Dashboard: In the 796x series, all amount metrics in OBIA were showing the Global1 amount. The customer needed to change the metric definitions to show them in another Currency preference. Project Analytics started supporting currency preferences since 7.9.6 release though, and it published a Tech note for other module customers to add toggling between currency preferences to the solution. List of Currency Preferences Starting from 11.1.1.x release, the BI Platform added a new feature to support multiple currencies. The new session variable (PREFERRED_CURRENCY) is populated through a newly introduced currency prompt. This prompt can take its values from the xml file: userpref_currencies_OBIA.xml, which is hosted in the BI Server installation folder, under :< home>\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\userpref_currencies.xml This file contains the list of currency preferences, like“Local Currency”, “Global Currency 1”,…which customers can also rename to give them more meaningful business names. There are two options for showing the list of currency preferences to the user in the dashboard: Static and Dynamic. In Static mode, all users will see the full list as in the user preference currencies file. In the Dynamic mode, the list shown in the currency prompt drop down is a result of a dynamic query specified in the same file. Customers can build some security into the rpd, so the list of currency preferences will be based on the user roles…BI Applications built a subject area: “Dynamic Currency Preference” to run this query, and give every user only the list of currency preferences required by his application roles. Adding Currency to an Amount Field When the user selects one of the items from the currency prompt, all the amounts in that page will show in the Currency corresponding to that preference. For example, if the user selects “Global Currency1” from the prompt, all data will be showing in Global Currency 1 as specified in the Configuration Manager. If the user select “Local Currency”, all amount fields will show in the Currency of the Business Unit selected in the BU filter of the same page. If there is no particular Business Unit selected in that filter, and the data selected by the query contains amounts in more than one currency (for example one BU has USD as a functional currency, the other has EUR as functional currency), then subtotals will not be available (cannot add USD and EUR amounts in one field), and depending on the set up (see next paragraph), the user may receive an error. There are two ways to add the Currency field to an amount metric: In the form of currency code, like USD, EUR…For this the user needs to add the field “Apps Common Currency Code” to the report. This field is in every subject area, usually under the table “Currency Tag” or “Currency Code”… In the form of currency symbol ($ for USD, € for EUR,…) For this, the user needs to format the amount metrics in the report as a currency column, by specifying the currency tag column in the Column Properties option in Column Actions drop down list. Typically this column should be the “BI Common Currency Code” available in every subject area. Select Column Properties option in the Edit list of a metric. In the Data Format tab, select Custom as Treat Number As. Enter the following syntax under Custom Number Format: [$:currencyTagColumn=Subjectarea.table.column] Where Column is the “BI Common Currency Code” defined to take the currency code value based on the currency preference chosen by the user in the Currency preference prompt.

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• Azure WNS to Win8 - Push Notifications for Metro Apps

  - by JoshReuben

  Background The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 allows you to build a Windows Azure Cloud Service that can send Push Notifications to registered Metro apps via Windows Notification Service (WNS). Some configuration is required - you need to: Register the Metro app for Windows Live Application Management Provide Package SID & Client Secret to WNS Modify the Azure Cloud App cscfg file and the Metro app package.appxmanifest file to contain matching Metro package name, SID and client secret. The Mechanism: These notifications take the form of XAML Tile, Toast, Raw or Badge UI notifications. The core engine is provided via the WNS nuget recipe, which exposes an API for constructing payloads and posting notifications to WNS. An application receives push notifications by requesting a notification channel from WNS, which returns a channel URI that the application then registers with a cloud service. In the cloud service, A WnsAccessTokenProvider authenticates with WNS by providing its credentials, the package SID and secret key, and receives in return an access token that the provider caches and can reuse for multiple notification requests. The cloud service constructs a notification request by filling out a template class that contains the information that will be sent with the notification, including text and image references. Using the channel URI of a registered client, the cloud service can then send a notification whenever it has an update for the user. The package contains the NotificationSendUtils class for submitting notifications. The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 (WAT) provides the PNWorker sample pair of solutions - The Azure server side contains a WebRole & a WorkerRole. The WebRole allows submission of new push notifications into an Azure Queue which the WorkerRole extracts and processes. Further background resources: http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/ - Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Push%20Notification%20Worker%20Sample - WAT WNS sample setup http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Using%20the%20Windows%208%20Cloud%20Application%20Services%20Application – using Windows 8 with Cloud Application Services A bit of Configuration Register the Metro apps for Windows Live Application Management From the current app manifest of your metro app Publish tab, copy the Package Display Name and the Publisher From: https://manage.dev.live.com/Build/ Package name: <-- we need to change this Client secret: keep this Package Security Identifier (SID): keep this Verify the app here: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index - so this step is done "If you wish to send push notifications in your application, provide your Package Security Identifier (SID) and client secret to WNS." Provide Package SID & Client Secret to WNS http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465407.aspx - How to authenticate with WNS https://appdev.microsoft.com/StorePortals/en-us/Account/Signup/PurchaseSubscription - register app with dashboard - need registration code or register a new account & pay $170 shekels http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868184.aspx - Registering for a Windows Store developer account http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868187.aspx - Picking a Microsoft account for the Windows Store The WNS Nuget Recipe The WNS Recipe is a nuget package that provides an API for authenticating against WNS, constructing payloads and posting notifications to WNS. After installing this package, a WnsRecipe assembly is added to project references. To send notifications using WNS, first register the application at the Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect portal to obtain Package Security Identifier (SID) and a secret key that your cloud service uses to authenticate with WNS. An application receives push notifications by requesting a notification channel from WNS, which returns a channel URI that the application then registers with a cloud service. In the cloud service, the WnsAccessTokenProvider authenticates with WNS by providing its credentials, the package SID and secret key, and receives in return an access token that the provider caches and can reuse for multiple notification requests. The cloud service constructs a notification request by filling out a template class that contains the information that will be sent with the notification, including text and image references.Using the channel URI of a registered client, the cloud service can then send a notification whenever it has an update for the user. var provider = new WnsAccessTokenProvider(clientId, clientSecret); var notification = new ToastNotification(provider) {     ToastType = ToastType.ToastText02,     Text = new List<string> { "blah"} }; notification.Send(channelUri); the WNS Recipe is instrumented to write trace information via a trace listener – configuratively or programmatically from Application_Start(): WnsDiagnostics.Enable(); WnsDiagnostics.TraceSource.Listeners.Add(new DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener()); WnsDiagnostics.TraceSource.Switch.Level = SourceLevels.Verbose; The WAT PNWorker Sample The Azure server side contains a WebRole & a WorkerRole. The WebRole allows submission of new push notifications into an Azure Queue which the WorkerRole extracts and processes. Overview of Push Notification Worker Sample The toolkit includes a sample application based on the same solution structure as the one created by theWindows 8 Cloud Application Services project template. The sample demonstrates how to off-load the job of sending Windows Push Notifications using a Windows Azure worker role. You can find the source code in theSamples\PNWorker folder. This folder contains a full version of the sample application showing how to use Windows Push Notifications using ASP.NET Membership as the authentication mechanism. The sample contains two different solution files: WATWindows.Azure.sln: This solution must be opened with Visual Studio 2010 and contains the projects related to the Windows Azure web and worker roles. WATWindows.Client.sln: This solution must be opened with Visual Studio 11 and contains the Windows Metro style application project. Only Visual Studio 2010 supports Windows Azure cloud projects so you currently need to use this edition to launch the server application. This will change in a future release of the Windows Azure tools when support for Visual Studio 11 is enabled. Important: Setting up the PNWorker Sample Before running the PNWorker sample, you need to register the application and configure it: 1. Register the app: To register your application, go to the Windows Live Application Management site for Metro style apps at https://manage.dev.live.com/build and sign in with your Windows Live ID. In the Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect page, enter the following information. Package Display Name PNWorker.Sample Publisher CN=127.0.0.1, O=TESTING ONLY, OU=Windows Azure DevFabric 2. 3. Once you register the application, make a note of the values shown in the portal for Client Secret,Package Name and Package SID. 4. Configure the app - double-click the SetupSample.cmd file located inside the Samples\PNWorker folder to launch a tool that will guide you through the process of configuring the sample. setup runs a PowerShell script that requires running with administration privileges to allow the scripts to execute in your machine. When prompted, enter the Client Secret, Package Name, and Package Security Identifier you obtained previously and wait until the tool finishes configuring your sample. Running the PNWorker Sample To run this sample, you must run both the client and the server application projects. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 as an administrator. Open the WATWindows.Azure.sln solution. Set the start-up project of the solution as the cloud project. Run the app in the dev fabric to test. 2. Open Visual Studio 11 and open the WATWindows.Client.sln solution. Run the Metro client application. In the client application, click Reopen channel and send to server. à the application opens the channel and registers it with the cloud application, & the Output area shows the channel URI. 3. Refresh the WebRole's Push Notifications page to see the UI list the newly registered client. 4. Send notifications to the client application by clicking the Send Notification button. Setup 3 command files + 1 powershell script: SetupSample.cmd –> SetupWPNS.vbs –> SetupWPNS.cmd –> SetupWPNS.UpdateWPNSCredentialsInServiceConfiguration.ps1 appears to set PackageName – from manifest Client Id package security id (SID) – from registration Client Secret – from registration The following configs are modified: WATWindows\ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg WATWindows\ServiceConfiguration.Local.cscfg WATWindows.Client\package.appxmanifest WatWindows.Notifications A class library – it references the following WNS DLL: C:\WorkDev\CountdownValue\AzureToolkits\WATWindows8\Samples\PNWorker\packages\WnsRecipe.0.0.3.0\lib\net40\WnsRecipe.dll NotificationJobRequest A DataContract for triggering notifications:     using System.Runtime.Serialization; using Microsoft.Windows.Samples.Notifications;     [DataContract]     [KnownType(typeof(WnsAccessTokenProvider))] public class NotificationJobRequest     {               [DataMember] public bool ProcessAsync { get; set; }          [DataMember] public string Payload { get; set; }         [DataMember] public string ChannelUrl { get; set; }         [DataMember] public NotificationType NotificationType { get; set; }         [DataMember] public IAccessTokenProvider AccessTokenProvider { get; set; }         [DataMember] public NotificationSendOptions NotificationSendOptions{ get; set; }     } Investigated these types: WnsAccessTokenProvider – a DataContract that contains the client Id and client secret NotificationType – an enum that can be: Tile, Toast, badge, Raw IAccessTokenProvider – get or reset the access token NotificationSendOptions – SecondsTTL, NotificationPriority (enum), isCache, isRequestForStatus, Tag   There is also a NotificationJobSerializer class which basically wraps a DataContractSerializer serialization / deserialization of NotificationJobRequest The WNSNotificationJobProcessor class This class wraps the NotificationSendUtils API – it periodically extracts any NotificationJobRequest objects from a CloudQueue and submits them to WNS. The ProcessJobMessageRequest method – this is the punchline: it will deserialize a CloudQueueMessage into a NotificationJobRequest & send pass its contents to NotificationUtils to SendAsynchronously / SendSynchronously, (and then dequeue the message).     public override void ProcessJobMessageRequest(CloudQueueMessage notificationJobMessageRequest)         { Trace.WriteLine("Processing a new Notification Job Request", "Information"); NotificationJobRequest pushNotificationJob =                 NotificationJobSerializer.Deserialize(notificationJobMessageRequest.AsString); if (pushNotificationJob != null)             { if (pushNotificationJob.ProcessAsync)                 { Trace.WriteLine("Sending the notification asynchronously", "Information"); NotificationSendUtils.SendAsynchronously( new Uri(pushNotificationJob.ChannelUrl),                         pushNotificationJob.AccessTokenProvider,                         pushNotificationJob.Payload,                         result => this.ProcessSendResult(pushNotificationJob, result),                         result => this.ProcessSendResultError(pushNotificationJob, result),                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationType,                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationSendOptions);                 } else                 { Trace.WriteLine("Sending the notification synchronously", "Information"); NotificationSendResult result = NotificationSendUtils.Send( new Uri(pushNotificationJob.ChannelUrl),                         pushNotificationJob.AccessTokenProvider,                         pushNotificationJob.Payload,                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationType,                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationSendOptions); this.ProcessSendResult(pushNotificationJob, result);                 }             } else             { Trace.WriteLine("Could not deserialize the notification job", "Error");             } this.queue.DeleteMessage(notificationJobMessageRequest);         } Investigation of NotificationSendUtils class - This is the engine – it exposes Send and a SendAsyncronously overloads that take the following params from the NotificationJobRequest: Channel Uri AccessTokenProvider Payload NotificationType NotificationSendOptions WebRole WebRole is a large MVC project – it references WatWindows.Notifications as well as the following WNS DLL: \AzureToolkits\WATWindows8\Samples\PNWorker\packages\WnsRecipe.0.0.3.0\lib\net40\NotificationsExtensions.dll Controllers\PushNotificationController.cs Notification related namespaces:     using Notifications;     using NotificationsExtensions;     using NotificationsExtensions.BadgeContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.RawContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.TileContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.ToastContent;     using Windows.Samples.Notifications; TokenProvider – initialized from the Azure RoleEnvironment:   IAccessTokenProvider tokenProvider = new WnsAccessTokenProvider(         RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("WNSPackageSID"),         RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("WNSClientSecret")); SendNotification method – calls QueuePushMessage method to create and serialize a NotificationJobRequest and enqueue it in a CloudQueue [HttpPost]         public ActionResult SendNotification(             [ModelBinder(typeof(NotificationTemplateModelBinder))] INotificationContent notification,             string channelUrl,             NotificationPriority priority = NotificationPriority.Normal)         {             var payload = notification.GetContent();             var options = new NotificationSendOptions()             {                 Priority = priority             };             var notificationType =                 notification is IBadgeNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Badge :                 notification is IRawNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Raw :                 notification is ITileNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Tile :                 NotificationType.Toast;             this.QueuePushMessage(payload, channelUrl, notificationType, options);             object response = new             {                 Status = "Queued for delivery to WNS"             };             return this.Json(response);         } GetSendTemplate method: Create the cshtml partial rendering based on the notification type     [HttpPost]         public ActionResult GetSendTemplate(NotificationTemplateViewModel templateOptions)         {             PartialViewResult result = null;             switch (templateOptions.NotificationType)             {                 case "Badge":                     templateOptions.BadgeGlyphValueContent = Enum.GetNames(typeof( GlyphValue));                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType);                     break;                 case "Raw":                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_Raw");                     break;                 case "Toast":                     templateOptions.TileImages = this.blobClient.GetAllBlobsInContainer(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("TileImagesContainer")).OrderBy(i => i.FileName).ToList();                     templateOptions.ToastAudioContent = Enum.GetNames(typeof( ToastAudioContent));                     templateOptions.Priorities = Enum.GetNames(typeof( NotificationPriority));                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType);                     break;                 case "Tile":                     templateOptions.TileImages = this.blobClient.GetAllBlobsInContainer(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("TileImagesContainer")).OrderBy(i => i.FileName).ToList();                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType);                     break;             }             return result;         } Investigated these types: ToastAudioContent – an enum of different Win8 sound effects for toast notifications GlyphValue – an enum of different Win8 icons for badge notifications · Infrastructure\NotificationTemplateModelBinder.cs WNS Namespace references     using NotificationsExtensions.BadgeContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.RawContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.TileContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.ToastContent; Various NotificationFactory derived types can server as bindable models in MVC for creating INotificationContent types. Default values are also set for IWideTileNotificationContent & IToastNotificationContent. Type factoryType = null;             switch (notificationType)             {                 case "Badge":                     factoryType = typeof(BadgeContentFactory);                     break;                 case "Tile":                     factoryType = typeof(TileContentFactory);                     break;                 case "Toast":                     factoryType = typeof(ToastContentFactory);                     break;                 case "Raw":                     factoryType = typeof(RawContentFactory);                     break;             } Investigated these types: BadgeContentFactory – CreateBadgeGlyph, CreateBadgeNumeric (???) TileContentFactory – many notification content creation methods , apparently one for every tile layout type ToastContentFactory – many notification content creation methods , apparently one for every toast layout type RawContentFactory – passing strings WorkerRole WNS Namespace references using Notifications; using Notifications.WNS; using Windows.Samples.Notifications; OnStart() Method – on Worker Role startup, initialize the NotificationJobSerializer, the CloudQueue, and the WNSNotificationJobProcessor _notificationJobSerializer = new NotificationJobSerializer(); _cloudQueueClient = this.account.CreateCloudQueueClient(); _pushNotificationRequestsQueue = _cloudQueueClient.GetQueueReference(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("RequestQueueName")); _processor = new WNSNotificationJobProcessor(_notificationJobSerializer, _pushNotificationRequestsQueue); Run() Method – poll the Azure Queue for NotificationJobRequest messages & process them:   while (true)             { Trace.WriteLine("Checking for Messages", "Information"); try                 { Parallel.ForEach( this.pushNotificationRequestsQueue.GetMessages(this.batchSize), this.processor.ProcessJobMessageRequest);                 } catch (Exception e)                 { Trace.WriteLine(e.ToString(), "Error");                 } Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("Sleeping for {0} seconds", this.pollIntervalMiliseconds / 1000)); Thread.Sleep(this.pollIntervalMiliseconds);                                            } How I learned to appreciate Win8 There is really only one application architecture for Windows 8 apps: Metro client side and Azure backend – and that is a good thing. With WNS, tier integration is so automated that you don’t even have to leverage a HTTP push API such as SignalR. This is a pretty powerful development paradigm, and has changed the way I look at Windows 8 for RAD business apps. When I originally looked at Win8 and the WinRT API, my first opinion on Win8 dev was as follows – GOOD:WinRT, WRL, C++/CX, WinJS, XAML (& ease of Direct3D integration); BAD: low projected market penetration,.NET lobotomized (Only 8% of .NET 4.5 classes can be used in Win8 non-desktop apps - http://bit.ly/HRuJr7); UGLY:Metro pascal tiles! Perhaps my 80s teenage years gave me a punk reactionary sense of revulsion towards the Partridge Family 70s style that Metro UX seems to have appropriated: On second thought though, it simplifies UI dev to a single paradigm (although UX guys will need to change career) – you will not find an easier app dev environment. Speculation: If LightSwitch is going to support HTML5 client app generation, then its a safe guess to say that vnext will support Win8 Metro XAML - a much easier port from Silverlight XAML. Given the VS2012 LightSwitch integration as a thumbs up from the powers that be at MS, and given that Win8 C#/XAML Metro apps tend towards a streamlined 'golden straight-jacket' cookie cutter app dev style with an Azure back-end supporting Win8 push notifications... --> its easy to extrapolate than LightSwitch vnext could well be the Win8 Metro XAML to Azure RAD tool of choice! The hook is already there - :) Why else have the space next to the HTML Client box? This high level of application development abstraction will facilitate rapid app cookie-cutter architecture-infrastructure frameworks for wrapping any app. This will allow me to avoid too much XAML code-monkeying around & focus on my area of interest: Technical Computing.

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• The Proper Use of the VM Role in Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in 2010 we announced an addition to the Computational Roles in Windows Azure, called the VM Role. This new feature allows a great deal of control over the applications you write, but some have confused it with our full infrastructure offering in Windows Hyper-V. There is a proper architecture pattern for both of them. Virtualization Virtualization is the process of taking all of the hardware of a physical computer and replicating it in software alone. This means that a single computer can “host” or run several “virtual” computers. These virtual computers can run anywhere - including at a vendor’s location. Some companies refer to this as Cloud Computing since the hardware is operated and maintained elsewhere. IaaS The more detailed definition of this type of computing is called Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) since it removes the need for you to maintain hardware at your organization. The operating system, drivers, and all the other software required to run an application are still under your control and your responsibility to license, patch, and scale. Microsoft has an offering in this space called Hyper-V, that runs on the Windows operating system. Combined with a hardware hosting vendor and the System Center software to create and deploy Virtual Machines (a process referred to as provisioning), you can create a Cloud environment with full control over all aspects of the machine, including multiple operating systems if you like. Hosting machines and provisioning them at your own buildings is sometimes called a Private Cloud, and hosting them somewhere else is often called a Public Cloud. State-ful and Stateless Programming This paradigm does not create a new, scalable way of computing. It simply moves the hardware away. The reason is that when you limit the Cloud efforts to a Virtual Machine, you are in effect limiting the computing resources to what that single system can provide. This is because much of the software developed in this environment maintains “state” - and that requires a little explanation. “State-ful programming” means that all parts of the computing environment stay connected to each other throughout a compute cycle. The system expects the memory, CPU, storage and network to remain in the same state from the beginning of the process to the end. You can think of this as a telephone conversation - you expect that the other person picks up the phone, listens to you, and talks back all in a single unit of time. In “Stateless” computing the system is designed to allow the different parts of the code to run independently of each other. You can think of this like an e-mail exchange. You compose an e-mail from your system (it has the state when you’re doing that) and then you walk away for a bit to make some coffee. A few minutes later you click the “send” button (the network has the state) and you go to a meeting. The server receives the message and stores it on a mail program’s database (the mail server has the state now) and continues working on other mail. Finally, the other party logs on to their mail client and reads the mail (the other user has the state) and responds to it and so on. These events might be separated by milliseconds or even days, but the system continues to operate. The entire process doesn’t maintain the state, each component does. This is the exact concept behind coding for Windows Azure. The stateless programming model allows amazing rates of scale, since the message (think of the e-mail) can be broken apart by multiple programs and worked on in parallel (like when the e-mail goes to hundreds of users), and only the order of re-assembling the work is important to consider. For the exact same reason, if the system makes copies of those running programs as Windows Azure does, you have built-in redundancy and recovery. It’s just built into the design. The Difference Between Infrastructure Designs and Platform Designs When you simply take a physical server running software and virtualize it either privately or publicly, you haven’t done anything to allow the code to scale or have recovery. That all has to be handled by adding more code and more Virtual Machines that have a slight lag in maintaining the running state of the system. Add more machines and you get more lag, so the scale is limited. This is the primary limitation with IaaS. It’s also not as easy to deploy these VM’s, and more importantly, you’re often charged on a longer basis to remove them. your agility in IaaS is more limited. Windows Azure is a Platform - meaning that you get objects you can code against. The code you write runs on multiple nodes with multiple copies, and it all works because of the magic of Stateless programming. you don’t worry, or even care, about what is running underneath. It could be Windows (and it is in fact a type of Windows Server), Linux, or anything else - but that' isn’t what you want to manage, monitor, maintain or license. You don’t want to deploy an operating system - you want to deploy an application. You want your code to run, and you don’t care how it does that. Another benefit to PaaS is that you can ask for hundreds or thousands of new nodes of computing power - there’s no provisioning, it just happens. And you can stop using them quicker - and the base code for your application does not have to change to make this happen. Windows Azure Roles and Their Use If you need your code to have a user interface, in Visual Studio you add a Web Role to your project, and if the code needs to do work that doesn’t involve a user interface you can add a Worker Role. They are just containers that act a certain way. I’ll provide more detail on those later. Note: That’s a general description, so it’s not entirely accurate, but it’s accurate enough for this discussion. So now we’re back to that VM Role. Because of the name, some have mistakenly thought that you can take a Virtual Machine running, say Linux, and deploy it to Windows Azure using this Role. But you can’t. That’s not what it is designed for at all. If you do need that kind of deployment, you should look into Hyper-V and System Center to create the Private or Public Infrastructure as a Service. What the VM Role is actually designed to do is to allow you to have a great deal of control over the system where your code will run. Let’s take an example. You’ve heard about Windows Azure, and Platform programming. You’re convinced it’s the right way to code. But you have a lot of things you’ve written in another way at your company. Re-writing all of your code to take advantage of Windows Azure will take a long time. Or perhaps you have a certain version of Apache Web Server that you need for your code to work. In both cases, you think you can (or already have) code the the software to be “Stateless”, you just need more control over the place where the code runs. That’s the place where a VM Role makes sense. Recap Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.

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• Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on this blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• MVVM in Task-It

  As I'm gearing up to write a post about dynamic XAP loading with MEF, I'd like to first talk a bit about MVVM, the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, as I will be leveraging this pattern in my future posts. Download Source Code Why MVVM? Your first question may be, "why do I need this pattern? I've been using a code-behind approach for years and it works fine." Well, you really don't have to make the switch to MVVM, but let me first explain some of the benefits I see for doing so. MVVM Benefits Testability - This is the one you'll probably hear the most about when it comes to MVVM. Moving most of the code from your code-behind to a separate view model class means you can now write unit tests against the view model without any knowledge of a view (UserControl). Multiple UIs - Let's just say that you've created a killer app, it's running in the browser, and maybe you've even made it run out-of-browser. Now what if your boss comes to you and says, "I heard about this new Windows Phone 7 device that is coming out later this year. Can you start porting the app to that device?". Well, now you have to create a new UI (UserControls, etc.) because you have a lot less screen real estate to work with. So what do you do, copy all of your existing UserControls, paste them, rename them, and then start changing the code? Hmm, that doesn't sound so good. But wait, if most of the code that makes your browser-based app tick lives in view model classes, now you can create new view (UserControls) for Windows Phone 7 that reference the same view model classes as your browser-based app. Page state - In Silverlight you're at some point going to be faced with the same issue you dealt with for years in ASP.NET, maintaining page state. Let's say a user hits your Products page, does some stuff (filters record, etc.), then leaves the page and comes back later. It would be best if the Products page was in the same state as when they left it right? Well, if you've thrown away your view (UserControl or Page) and moved off to another part of the UI, when you come back to Products you're probably going to re-instantiate your view...which will put it right back in the state it was when it started. Hmm, not good. Well, with a little help from MEF you can store the state in your view model class, MEF will keep that view model instance hanging around in memory, and then you simply rebind your view to the view model class. I made that sound easy, but it's actually a bit of work to properly store and restore the state. At least it can be done though, which will make your users a lot happier! I'll talk more about this in an upcoming blog post. No event handlers? Another nice thing about MVVM is that you can bind your UserControls to the view model, which may eliminate the need for event handlers in your code-behind. So instead of having a Click handler on a Button (or RadMenuItem), for example, you can now bind your control's Command property to a DelegateCommand in your view model (I'll talk more about Commands in an upcoming post). Instead of having a SelectionChanged event handler on your RadGridView you can now bind its SelectedItem property to a property in your view model, and each time the user clicks a row, the view model property's setter will be called. Now through the magic of binding we can eliminate the need for traditional code-behind based event handlers on our user interface controls, and the best thing is that the view model knows about everything that's going on...which means we can test things without a user interface. The brains of the operation So what we're seeing here is that the view is now just a dumb layer that binds to the view model, and that the view model is in control of just about everything, like what happens when a RadGridView row is selected, or when a RadComboBoxItem is selected, or when a RadMenuItem is clicked. It is also responsible for loading data when the page is hit, as well as kicking off data inserts, updates and deletions. Once again, all of this stuff can be tested without the need for a user interface. If the test works, then it'll work regardless of whether the user is hitting the browser-based version of your app, or the Windows Phone 7 version. Nice! The database Before running the code for this app you will need to create the database. First, create a database called MVVMProject in SQL Server, then run MVVMProject.sql in the MVVMProject/Database directory of your downloaded .zip file. This should give you a Task table with 3 records in it. When you fire up the solution you will also need to update the connection string in web.config to point to your database instead of IBM12\SQLSERVER2008. The code One note about this code is that it runs against the latest Silverlight 4 RC and WCF RIA Services code. Please see my first blog post about updating to the RC bits. Beta to RC - Part 1 At the top of this post is a link to a sample project that demonstrates a sample application with a Tasks page that uses the MVVM pattern. This is a simplified version of how I have implemented the Tasks page in the Task-It application. Youll notice that Tasks.xaml has very little code to it. Just a TextBlock that displays the page title and a ContentControl. <StackPanel>     <TextBlock Text="Tasks" Style="{StaticResource PageTitleStyle}"/>     <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource StandardSpacerStyle}"/>     <ContentControl x:Name="ContentControl1"/> </StackPanel> In List.xaml we have a RadGridView. Notice that the ItemsSource is bound to a property in the view model class call Tasks, SelectedItem is bound to a property in the view model called SelectedItem, and IsBusy is bound to a property in the view model called IsLoading. <Grid>     <telerikGridView:RadGridView ItemsSource="{Binding Tasks}" SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedItem, Mode=TwoWay}"                                  IsBusy="{Binding IsLoading}" AutoGenerateColumns="False" IsReadOnly="True" RowIndicatorVisibility="Collapsed"                IsFilteringAllowed="False" ShowGroupPanel="False">         <telerikGridView:RadGridView.Columns>             <telerikGridView:GridViewDataColumn Header="Name" DataMemberBinding="{Binding Name}" Width="3*"/>             <telerikGridView:GridViewDataColumn Header="Due" DataMemberBinding="{Binding DueDate}" DataFormatString="{}{0:d}" Width="*"/>         </telerikGridView:RadGridView.Columns>     </telerikGridView:RadGridView> </Grid> In Details.xaml we have a Save button that is bound to a property called SaveCommand in our view model. We also have a simple form (Im using a couple of controls here from Silverlight.FX for the form layout, FormPanel and Label simply because they make for a clean XAML layout). Notice that the FormPanel is also bound to the SelectedItem in the view model (the same one that the RadGridView is). The two form controls, the TextBox and RadDatePicker) are bound to the SelectedItem's Name and DueDate properties. These are properties of the Task object that WCF RIA Services creates. <StackPanel>     <Button Content="Save" Command="{Binding SaveCommand}" HorizontalAlignment="Left"/>     <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource StandardSpacerStyle}"/>     <fxui:FormPanel DataContext="{Binding SelectedItem}" Style="{StaticResource FormContainerStyle}">         <fxui:Label Text="Name:"/>         <TextBox Text="{Binding Name, Mode=TwoWay}"/>         <fxui:Label Text="Due:"/>         <telerikInput:RadDatePicker SelectedDate="{Binding DueDate, Mode=TwoWay}"/>     </fxui:FormPanel> </StackPanel> In the code-behind of the Tasks control, Tasks.xaml.cs, I created an instance of the view model class (TasksViewModel) in the constructor and set it as the DataContext for the control. The Tasks page will load one of two child UserControls depending on whether you are viewing the list of tasks (List.xaml) or the form for editing a task (Details.xaml). // Set the DataContext to an instance of the view model class var viewModel = new TasksViewModel(); DataContext = viewModel;   // Child user controls (inherit DataContext from this user control) List = new List(); // RadGridView Details = new Details(); // Form When the page first loads, the List is loaded into the ContentControl. // Show the RadGridView first ContentControl1.Content = List; In the code-behind we also listen for a couple of the view models events. The ItemSelected event will be fired when the user clicks on a record in the RadGridView in the List control. The SaveCompleted event will be fired when the user clicks Save in the Details control (the form). Here the view model is in control, and is letting the view know when something needs to change. // Listeners for the view model's events viewModel.ItemSelected += OnItemSelected; viewModel.SaveCompleted += OnSaveCompleted; The event handlers toggle the view between the RadGridView (List) and the form (Details). void OnItemSelected(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Show the form     ContentControl1.Content = Details; }   void OnSaveCompleted(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Show the RadGridView     ContentControl1.Content = List; } In TasksViewModel, we instantiate a DataContext object and a SaveCommand in the constructor. DataContext is a WCF RIA Services object that well use to retrieve the list of Tasks and to save any changes to a task. Ill talk more about this and Commands in future post, but for now think of the SaveCommand as an event handler that is called when the Save button in the form is clicked. DataContext = new DataContext(); SaveCommand = new DelegateCommand(OnSave); When the TasksViewModel constructor is called we also make a call to LoadTasks. This sets IsLoading to true (which causes the RadGridViews busy indicator to appear) and retrieves the records via WCF RIA Services.         public LoadOperation<Task> LoadTasks()         {             // Show the loading message             IsLoading = true;             // Get the data via WCF RIA Services. When the call has returned, called OnTasksLoaded.             return DataContext.Load(DataContext.GetTasksQuery(), OnTasksLoaded, false);         } When the data is returned, OnTasksLoaded is called. This sets IsLoading to false (which hides the RadGridViews busy indicator), and fires property changed notifications to the UI to let it know that the IsLoading and Tasks properties have changed. This property changed notification basically tells the UI to rebind. void OnTasksLoaded(LoadOperation<Task> lo) {     // Hide the loading message     IsLoading = false;       // Notify the UI that Tasks and IsLoading properties have changed     this.OnPropertyChanged(p => p.Tasks);     this.OnPropertyChanged(p => p.IsLoading); } Next lets look at the view models SelectedItem property. This is the one thats bound to both the RadGridView and the form. When the user clicks a record in the RadGridView its setter gets called (set a breakpoint and see what I mean). The other code in the setter lets the UI know that the SelectedItem has changed (so the form displays the correct data), and fires the event that notifies the UI that a selection has occurred (which tells the UI to switch from List to Details). public Task SelectedItem {     get { return _selectedItem; }     set     {         _selectedItem = value;           // Let the UI know that the SelectedItem has changed (forces it to re-bind)         this.OnPropertyChanged(p => p.SelectedItem);         // Notify the UI, so it can switch to the Details (form) page         NotifyItemSelected();     } } One last thing, saving the data. When the Save button in the form is clicked it fires the SaveCommand, which calls the OnSave method in the view model (once again, set a breakpoint to see it in action). public void OnSave() {     // Save the changes via WCF RIA Services. When the save is complete, call OnSaveCompleted.     DataContext.SubmitChanges(OnSaveCompleted, null); } In OnSave, we tell WCF RIA Services to submit any changes, which there will be if you changed either the Name or the Due Date in the form. When the save is completed, it calls OnSaveCompleted. This method fires a notification back to the UI that the save is completed, which causes the RadGridView (List) to show again. public virtual void OnSaveCompleted(SubmitOperation so) {     // Clear the item that is selected in the grid (in case we want to select it again)     SelectedItem = null;     // Notify the UI, so it can switch back to the List (RadGridView) page     NotifySaveCompleted(); } Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Using Table-Valued Parameters in SQL Server

  - by Jesse

  I work with stored procedures in SQL Server pretty frequently and have often found myself with a need to pass in a list of values at run-time. Quite often this list contains a set of ids on which the stored procedure needs to operate the size and contents of which are not known at design time. In the past I’ve taken the collection of ids (which are usually integers), converted them to a string representation where each value is separated by a comma and passed that string into a VARCHAR parameter of a stored procedure. The body of the stored procedure would then need to parse that string into a table variable which could be easily consumed with set-based logic within the rest of the stored procedure. This approach works pretty well but the VARCHAR variable has always felt like an un-wanted “middle man” in this scenario. Of course, I could use a BULK INSERT operation to load the list of ids into a temporary table that the stored procedure could use, but that approach seems heavy-handed in situations where the list of values is usually going to contain only a few dozen values. Fortunately SQL Server 2008 introduced the concept of table-valued parameters which effectively eliminates the need for the clumsy middle man VARCHAR parameter. Example: Customer Transaction Summary Report Let’s say we have a report that can summarize the the transactions that we’ve conducted with customers over a period of time. The report returns a pretty simple dataset containing one row per customer with some key metrics about how much business that customer has conducted over the date range for which the report is being run. Sometimes the report is run for a single customer, sometimes it’s run for all customers, and sometimes it’s run for a handful of customers (i.e. a salesman runs it for the customers that fall into his sales territory). This report can be invoked from a website on-demand, or it can be scheduled for periodic delivery to certain users via SQL Server Reporting Services. Because the report can be created from different places and the query to generate the report is complex it’s been packed into a stored procedure that accepts three parameters: @startDate – The beginning of the date range for which the report should be run. @endDate – The end of the date range for which the report should be run. @customerIds – The customer Ids for which the report should be run. Obviously, the @startDate and @endDate parameters are DATETIME variables. The @customerIds parameter, however, needs to contain a list of the identity values (primary key) from the Customers table representing the customers that were selected for this particular run of the report. In prior versions of SQL Server we might have made this parameter a VARCHAR variable, but with SQL Server 2008 we can make it into a table-valued parameter. Defining And Using The Table Type In order to use a table-valued parameter, we first need to tell SQL Server about what the table will look like. We do this by creating a user defined type. For the purposes of this stored procedure we need a very simple type to model a table variable with a single integer column. We can create a generic type called ‘IntegerListTableType’ like this: CREATE TYPE IntegerListTableType AS TABLE (Value INT NOT NULL) Once defined, we can use this new type to define the @customerIds parameter in the signature of our stored procedure. The parameter list for the stored procedure definition might look like: 1: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.rpt_CustomerTransactionSummary 2: @starDate datetime, 3: @endDate datetime, 4: @customerIds IntegerListTableTableType READONLY   Note the ‘READONLY’ statement following the declaration of the @customerIds parameter. SQL Server requires any table-valued parameter be marked as ‘READONLY’ and no DML (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) statements can be performed on a table-valued parameter within the routine in which it’s used. Aside from the DML restriction, however, you can do pretty much anything with a table-valued parameter as you could with a normal TABLE variable. With the user defined type and stored procedure defined as above, we could invoke like this: 1: DECLARE @cusomterIdList IntegerListTableType 2: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (1) 3: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (2) 4: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (3) 5:  6: EXEC dbo.rpt_CustomerTransationSummary 7: @startDate = '2012-05-01', 8: @endDate = '2012-06-01' 9: @customerIds = @customerIdList   Note that we can simply declare a variable of type ‘IntegerListTableType’ just like any other normal variable and insert values into it just like a TABLE variable. We could also populate the variable with a SELECT … INTO or INSERT … SELECT statement if desired. Using The Table-Valued Parameter With ADO .NET Invoking a stored procedure with a table-valued parameter from ADO .NET is as simple as building a DataTable and passing it in as the Value of a SqlParameter. Here’s some example code for how we would construct the SqlParameter for the @customerIds parameter in our stored procedure: 1: var customerIdsParameter = new SqlParameter(); 2: customerIdParameter.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input; 3: customerIdParameter.TypeName = "IntegerListTableType"; 4: customerIdParameter.Value = selectedCustomerIds.ToIntegerListDataTable("Value");   All we’re doing here is new’ing up an instance of SqlParameter, setting the pamameters direction, specifying the name of the User Defined Type that this parameter uses, and setting its value. We’re assuming here that we have an IEnumerable<int> variable called ‘selectedCustomerIds’ containing all of the customer Ids for which the report should be run. The ‘ToIntegerListDataTable’ method is an extension method of the IEnumerable<int> type that looks like this: 1: public static DataTable ToIntegerListDataTable(this IEnumerable<int> intValues, string columnName) 2: { 3: var intergerListDataTable = new DataTable(); 4: intergerListDataTable.Columns.Add(columnName); 5: foreach(var intValue in intValues) 6: { 7: var nextRow = intergerListDataTable.NewRow(); 8: nextRow[columnName] = intValue; 9: intergerListDataTable.Rows.Add(nextRow); 10: } 11:  12: return intergerListDataTable; 13: }   Since the ‘IntegerListTableType’ has a single int column called ‘Value’, we pass that in for the ‘columnName’ parameter to the extension method. The method creates a new single-columned DataTable using the provided column name then iterates over the items in the IEnumerable<int> instance adding one row for each value. We can then use this SqlParameter instance when invoking the stored procedure just like we would use any other parameter. Advanced Functionality Using passing a list of integers into a stored procedure is a very simple usage scenario for the table-valued parameters feature, but I’ve found that it covers the majority of situations where I’ve needed to pass a collection of data for use in a query at run-time. I should note that BULK INSERT feature still makes sense for passing large amounts of data to SQL Server for processing. MSDN seems to suggest that 1000 rows of data is the tipping point where the overhead of a BULK INSERT operation can pay dividends. I should also note here that table-valued parameters can be used to deal with more complex data structures than single-columned tables of integers. A User Defined Type that backs a table-valued parameter can use things like identities and computed columns. That said, using some of these more advanced features might require the use the SqlDataRecord and SqlMetaData classes instead of a simple DataTable. Erland Sommarskog has a great article on his website that describes when and how to use these classes for table-valued parameters. What About Reporting Services? Earlier in the post I referenced the fact that our example stored procedure would be called from both a web application and a SQL Server Reporting Services report. Unfortunately, using table-valued parameters from SSRS reports can be a bit tricky and warrants its own blog post which I’ll be putting together and posting sometime in the near future.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011Popular ReleasesAgFx Windows Phone Application Data Caching Framework: AgFx November Update: This update is primarily a bug fix release, which provides a number of stability and performance enhancements to AgFx. Available as a NuGet package here. Release Notes Fix IsoStore exceptions during shutdown (Changelist 81729) Thread safety and sequencings issues (Changelists 78682,79252, 80707) Fix landscape layout issue in auth sample Fix async keyword collision Supporting overlapping/multiple notifications for Load requestsiTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.4.4322: Added German (unverified, apologies if incorrect) Properly source invariant resources with correct resIDs Replaced obsolete lyric providers with working providers Fix Pseudolater to correctly morph every third char Fix null reference in CatalogBaseDevpad: 4.6: Whats new for Devpad 4.6: New Recent Files New Run in Safari Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWindows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: Microsoft.Activities v1.8.8: Microsoft.Activities Overview How do I install Microsoft.Activities? Updates in this release9318Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine 1.25: What's new in the 1.25 release (2011-11-01): - Added Williams %R indicator - Added Moving Average Envelopes indicatorBF3Rcon.NET: BF3Rcon 3.0: This release is targeted for RCON documentation based on R3. Everything should be beta stable, but it's alpha because I haven't been able to fully test it. When a stable release is ready, a proper changelog will be kept. Important Edit: There's one method that will keep this from working in Mono. GeneratePasswordHash uses void HashAlgorithm.Dispose(), which isn't in Mono. This will have to be changed to Clear() in the next release. If anyone needs a Mono version of this immediately, you can...BoxWorld: BoxWorld_2011.10.30: BoxWorld - 8.0.1110.30 This is the initial release of BoxWorld. I'd recommend downloading the installer as it contains the compiled code and everything all nicely contained. By default, you end up with this directory structure: C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Data C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Interface C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Source In the root you have the compiled EXE files, one for the main release, one for the LITE release ...VidCoder: 1.2.1: Fixed a couple regressions: video encoder was blank in queue and crashes with the High Profile preset when opening the Settings window. Fixed problem with auto-update introduced in 1.2.0. If you have 1.2.0 you will need to update manually to get this.AssaultCube Reloaded: Release 2.3: THE RELEASE YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR! IT CAN NOW BE CONSIDERED STABLE Linux has Debian 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for linux (source included) If you are using Windows and require the source code, download the source package!Koober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.A Microblog API (SINA weibo.com open API in C#, .Net???????API): AMicroblogAPI v1.0: AMicroBlogAPI is a C# implementation, a strong-typed deep encapsulation, a easy-to-use .net wrapper of SINA microblog API v1.0. App developers no longer need to parse various HTTP responses -- all responses are parsed into strong types; No longer need to construt the request query strings -- just simply gives the values of parameters; No longer need to implement the OAuth -- a single call could logs the user on. In this release (AMicroblogAPI v1.0), all basic data APIs are implemented. For ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Media Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngNew ProjectsarlTH: "Airport Link Thailand" Application for Windows Phone 7.1Audio Tags Editor For Excel: The purpose of the project is to create a tool to edit tags of audio files through the excel application. The program is an Excel add-in.AW Load Tester: AW Load Tester is a simple and easy to use website load tester that very closely mimics a regular users browsing session on your website. Many popular load tester only download HTML. AW Load Tester downloads all the related items on a page simultaneously. AzMan - Be Good Do Right !: The AzMan is a collection of reusable software components designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. http://bbs.fengshupo.com/BestWayWP7UI: The User interface of best wat wp7 applicationCheckout Subsystem Optimizer: Checkout Subsystem OptimizerDBScripter - Library for scripting SQL Server database objects: This project is library that allows users to script SQL Server database objects. Library uses dynamic management views for extracting data about databases objects. This library could be used in various situations. The most interesting areas are comparing database objects and generation database documentation. For both cases examples have been prepared.Dependency Checker: Dependency Checker is a utility for verifying that a set of prerequisites is present on a machine. The set of dependencies is defined in a configuration file. For more information, see http://dependencychecker.codeplex.com/documentation DibTer: DibTer is a brand new CMS for ASP.NET Mainly features are NHibernate MVC JQuery HTML5Dynamics CRM Entity Based Stress Tool: Entity Based Stress Tool, is command line program that creates configurable server agents in order to stress a defined entity at a defined Message/Stage. This tool allows CRM Application Stressing, Plugin Stressing, and enlaborate an execution report.Edinger: Edinger is a simple text editor.FreeboxHDVideoPlayer: FreeboxHDVideoPlayer makes it easier for free.fr french ISP users to play and manage videos stored on the HDD of the Freebox HD. FreeboxHDVideoPlayer simplifie, pour les utilisateurs de free.fr, la lecture et la gestion des vidéos stockées sur le disque du boitier Freebox HD.guglex - google docs xtraz: my studying project for asp.net mvc 3. now displaying spreadsheet rows in card viewIP-Camera MJPEG HTTP Web-Server Emulator: Turns web-camera into IP-camera with mjpeg streaming and access it over network. Usage of i-Lids (Imagery Library for Intelligent Detection Systems) and other data for surveillance systems development. Sends WMV, folder with images, web-camera data over the wire.LIM: LIM is .net software for archive manage.Luminji.CorWeb: luminji's company web.Map Generator: Map Generator for your Civ/Col/Roguelike games in VB.NET.Microformat Parsers for .NET: Microformat's Parsers for .NET helps you to collect information you run into on the web, that is stored by means of microformats. It's written in C# 3.0.Mini Rx: Mini Rx provides LINQ like queries over events for C# and F# using extension methods, somewhat like the Reactive Extensions (Rx) but in a lightweight open source package with one non-strong named assembly.MVC Music Store by NNT: Demo Music Store Follow tut from Microsoft. Team Explorer VS 2010 .NET 4PHP MySQL Web Site Creator: PHP MySQL Web Site Creator helps you create a basic template for your web site using a UI form. I creates all PHP, CSS, HTML basic pages to connect to MySQL database.PQLRD: Paco KLk!Project Web And Application: Project MobileStore in ASP use ASP.NET MVC 3RoboZip: RoboZip combines MS Robocopy and Zip-functionality. Create a job and RoboZip will zip all files (from a list of filetypes) within a time span in the past. The zip file name can contain date and time values of the time period it covers. It's developed in C#. The zip component is the DotNetZip Library from http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com. The logging is done using Apache log4net from http://logging.apache.org/log4net. The idea here is not to only present the code, but also to document how the de...Scriptster Gearbox: Scriptster Gearbox is a full C# scripting system based on Scriptster (also on CodePlex). It is aimed at Visual Studio developers and power users who need to automate the sorts of things that DOS is generally good at, but which using C# can make more powerful and more familiar.Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine is a .NET based library for technical analysis. It is fast, free, easy to use and provides functionality for financial market analysis.ValidationDSL: A Fluent validation engine with ease to use and reusable around the multi-tenant applicationsWebFormsUtilities: WebFormsUtilities is a collection of tools that assist in using MVC/MVP functionality to webforms in an unobtrusive manner. This differs from a hybrid MVC/WebForms page in that you can use methods like UpdateModel() or TryValidateModel() in a WebForms Page class.Wen - WPF 3D Navigator: Control the camera and the lights of a WPF 3D application without any code modification.WindStudios: WindStudiosWrite My Expect Statement: Have Rhino Mocks automatically generate your expect() and return() statements for you.zion xtraz: some basic helpful classes for use in every project

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• IntelliSense for Razor Hosting in non-Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  When I posted my Razor Hosting article a couple of weeks ago I got a number of questions on how to get IntelliSense to work inside of Visual Studio while editing your templates. The answer to this question is mainly dependent on how Visual Studio recognizes assemblies, so a little background is required. If you open a template just on its own as a standalone file by clicking on it say in Explorer, Visual Studio will open up with the template in the editor, but you won’t get any IntelliSense on any of your related assemblies that you might be using by default. It’ll give Intellisense on base System namespace, but not on your imported assembly types. This makes sense: Visual Studio has no idea what the assembly associations for the single file are. There are two options available to you to make IntelliSense work for templates: Add the templates as included files to your non-Web project Add a BIN folder to your template’s folder and add all assemblies required there Including Templates in your Host Project By including templates into your Razor hosting project, Visual Studio will pick up the project’s assembly references and make IntelliSense available for any of the custom types in your project and on your templates. To see this work I moved the \Templates folder from the samples from the Debug\Bin folder into the project root and included the templates in the WinForm sample project. Here’s what this looks like in Visual Studio after the templates have been included:   Notice that I take my original example and type cast the Context object to the specific type that it actually represents – namely CustomContext – by using a simple code block: @{ CustomContext Model = Context as CustomContext; } After that assignment my Model local variable is in scope and IntelliSense works as expected. Note that you also will need to add any namespaces with the using command in this case: @using RazorHostingWinForm which has to be defined at the very top of a Razor document. BTW, while you can only pass in a single Context 'parameter’ to the template with the default template I’ve provided realize that you can also assign a complex object to Context. For example you could have a container object that references a variety of other objects which you can then cast to the appropriate types as needed: @{ ContextContainer container = Context as ContextContainer; CustomContext Model = container.Model; CustomDAO DAO = container.DAO; } and so forth. IntelliSense for your Custom Template Notice also that you can get IntelliSense for the top level template by specifying an inherits tag at the top of the document: @inherits RazorHosting.RazorTemplateFolderHost By specifying the above you can then get IntelliSense on your base template’s properties. For example, in my base template there are Request and Response objects. This is very useful especially if you end up creating custom templates that include your custom business objects as you can get effectively see full IntelliSense from the ‘page’ level down. For Html Help Builder for example, I’d have a Help object on the page and assuming I have the references available I can see all the way into that Help object without even having to do anything fancy. Note that the @inherits key is a GREAT and easy way to override the base template you normally specify as the default template. It allows you to create a custom template and as long as it inherits from the base template it’ll work properly. Since the last post I’ve also made some changes in the base template that allow hooking up some simple initialization logic so it gets much more easy to create custom templates and hook up custom objects with an IntializeTemplate() hook function that gets called with the Context and a Configuration object. These objects are objects you can pass in at runtime from your host application and then assign to custom properties on your template. For example the default implementation for RazorTemplateFolderHost does this: public override void InitializeTemplate(object context, object configurationData) { // Pick up configuration data and stuff into Request object RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration config = configurationData as RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration; this.Request.TemplatePath = config.TemplatePath; this.Request.TemplateRelativePath = config.TemplateRelativePath; // Just use the entire ConfigData as the model, but in theory // configData could contain many objects or values to set on // template properties this.Model = config.ConfigData as TModel; } to set up a strongly typed Model and the Request object. You can do much more complex hookups here of course and create complex base template pages that contain all the objects that you need in your code with strong typing. Adding a Bin folder to your Template’s Root Path Including templates in your host project works if you own the project and you’re the only one modifying the templates. However, if you are distributing the Razor engine as a templating/scripting solution as part of your application or development tool the original project is likely not available and so that approach is not practical. Another option you have is to add a Bin folder and add all the related assemblies into it. You can also add a Web.Config file with assembly references for any GAC’d assembly references that need to be associated with the templates. Between the web.config and bin folder Visual Studio can figure out how to provide IntelliSense. The Bin folder should contain: The RazorHosting.dll Your host project’s EXE or DLL – renamed to .dll if it’s an .exe Any external (bin folder) dependent assemblies Note that you most likely also want a reference to the host project if it contains references that are going to be used in templates. Visual Studio doesn’t recognize an EXE reference so you have to rename the EXE to DLL to make it work. Apparently the binary signature of EXE and DLL files are identical and it just works – learn something new everyday… For GAC assembly references you can add a web.config file to your template root. The Web.config file then should contain any full assembly references to GAC components: <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true"> <assemblies> <add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> <add assembly="System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> <add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> </assemblies> </compilation> </system.web> </configuration> And with that you should get full IntelliSense. Note that if you add a BIN folder and you also have the templates in your Visual Studio project Visual Studio will complain about reference conflicts as it’s effectively seeing both the project references and the ones in the bin folder. So it’s probably a good idea to use one or the other but not both at the same time :-) Seeing IntelliSense in your Razor templates is a big help for users of your templates. If you’re shipping an application level scripting solution especially it’ll be real useful for your template consumers/users to be able to get some quick help on creating customized templates – after all that’s what templates are all about – easy customization. Making sure that everything is referenced in your bin folder and web.config is a good idea and it’s great to see that Visual Studio (and presumably WebMatrix/Visual Web Developer as well) will be able to pick up your custom IntelliSense in Razor templates.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in Razor  

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• Workshops, online content show how Oracle infuses simplicity, mobility, extensibility into user experience

  - by mvaughan

  By Kathy Miedema & Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle has made a huge investment into the user experience of its many different software product families, and recent releases showcase big changes and features that aim to promote end user engagement and efficiency by streamlining navigation and simplifying the user interface. But making Oracle’s enterprise software great-looking and usable doesn’t stop when Oracle products go out the door. The Applications User Experience (UX) team recognizes that our customers may need to customize software to fit their work processes. And that’s why we provide tools such as user experience design patterns to help you maintain the Oracle user experience as you tailor your application to fit your business needs. Often, however, customers may need some context around user experience. How has the Oracle user experience been designed and constructed? Why is a good user experience important for users? How does understanding what goes into the user experience benefit the people who purchase the software for users? There’s a short answer to these questions, and you can read about it on Usable Apps. But truly understanding Oracle’s investment and seeing how it applies across product families occasionally requires a deeper dive into the Oracle user experience, especially if you’re an influencer or decision-maker about Oracle products. To help frame these decisions, the Communications & Outreach team has developed several targeted workshops that explore what Oracle means when it talks about user experience, and provides a roadmap into where the Oracle user experience is going. These workshops require non-disclosure agreements, and have been delivered to Oracle sales folks, Oracle partners, Oracle ACE Directors and ACEs, and a few customers. Some of these audience members have been developers or have a technical background; just as many did not. Here’s a breakdown of the kind of training you can get around the Oracle user experience from the OAUX Communications & Outreach team.For Partners: George Papazzian, Principal, Naviscent with Joyce Ohgi, Oracle Oracle Fusion Applications HCM Pre-Sales Seminar:  In concert with Worldwide Alliances  and  Channels under Applications Partner Enablement Director Jonathan Vinoskey’s guidance, the Applications User Experience team delivers a two-day workshop.  Day one focuses on Oracle Fusion Applications HCM and pre-sales strategy, and Day two focuses on positioning and leveraging Oracle’s investment in the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience.  The next workshops will occur on the following dates: December 4-5, 2013 @ Manchester, UK January 29-30, 2014 @ Reston, Virginia February 2014 @ Guadalajara, Mexico (email: Shannon Whiteman) March 11-12, 2014 @ Dubai, United Arab Emirates April 1-2, 2014 @ Chicago, Illinois Partner Advisory Board: A two-day board meeting in the U.S. and U.K. to discuss four main user experience areas for Oracle Fusion Applications: simplicity, visualization & analytics, mobility, & futures. This event is limited to Oracle Diamond Partners, UX bloggers, and key UX influencers and requires legal documentation.  We will be talking about the Oracle applications UX strategy and roadmap. Partner Implementation Training on User Interface: How to Build Great-Looking, Usable Apps:  In this two-day, hands-on workshop built around Oracle’s Application Development Framework, learn how to build desktop and mobile user interfaces and mobile user interfaces based on Oracle’s experience with Fusion Applications. This workshop is for partners with a technology background who are looking for ways to tailor Fusion Applications using ADF, or have built their own custom solutions using ADF. It includes an introduction to UX design patterns and provides tools to build usability-tested UX designs. Nov 5-6, 2013 @ Redwood Shores, CA, USA January 28-29th, 2014 @ Reston, Virginia, USA February 25-26, 2014 @ Guadalajara, Mexico March 9-10, 2014 @ Dubai, United Arab Emirates To register, contact [email protected] Simplified UI Customization & Extensibility:  Pilot workshop:  We will be reviewing the proposed content for communicating the user experience tool kit available with the next release of Oracle Fusion Applications.  Our core focus will be on what toolkit components our system implementors and independent software vendors will need to respond to customer demand, whether they are extending Fusion Applications, or building custom applications, that will need to leverage the simplified UI. Dec 11th, 2013 @ Reading, UK For information: contact [email protected] Private lab tour and demos: Interested in seeing what’s going on in the Apps UX Labs?  If you are headed to the San Francisco Bay Area, let us know. We can arrange a spin through our usability labs at headquarters. OAUX Expo: This open-house forum gives partners a look at what the UX team is working on, and showcases the next-generation user experiences in a demo environment where attendees can see and touch the applications. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For CustomersAngela Johnston, Gozel Aamoth, Teena Singh, and Yen Chan, Oracle Lab tours: See demos of soon-to-be-released products, and take a spin on usability research equipment such as our eye-tracker. Watch this video to get an idea of what you’ll see. Get our newsletter: Learn about newly released products and see where you can meet us at user group conferences. Participate in a feedback session: Join a focus group or customer feedback session to get an early look at user experience designs for the next generation of software, and provide your thoughts on how well it will work. Join the OUAB: The Oracle Usability Advisory Board meets several times a year to discuss trends in the workforce and provide direction on user experience designs. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For Developers (customers, partners, and consultants): Plinio Arbizu, SP Solutions, Richard Bingham, Oracle, Balaji Kamepalli, EiSTechnoogies, Praveen Pillalamarri, EiSTechnologies How to Build Great-Looking, Usable Apps: This workshop is for attendees with a strong technology background who are looking for ways to tailor customer software using ADF. It includes an introduction to UX design patterns and provides tools to build usability-tested UX designs.  See above for dates and times. UX design patterns web site: Cut the length of your project down by months. Use these patterns to build out the task flow you need to develop for your users. The patterns have already been usability-tested and represent the best practices that the Oracle UX research team has found in its studies. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For Oracle Sales Mike Klein, Jeremy Ashley, Brent White, Oracle Contact your local sales person for more information about the Oracle user experience and the training available from the Applications User Experience Communications & Outreach team. See customer-friendly user experience collateral ranging from the new simplified UI in Oracle Fusion Applications Release 7, to E-Business Suite user experience highlights, to Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards user experience highlights.   Receive access to the same pre-sales and implementation training we provide to partners. For Oracle Sales only: Oracle-only training on the Oracle Fusion Applications UX Innovation Sales Kit.

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• SQL SERVER – Thinking about Deprecated, Discontinued Features and Breaking Changes while Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 – Guest Post by Nakul Vachhrajani

  - by pinaldave

  Nakul Vachhrajani is a Technical Specialist and systems development professional with iGATE having a total IT experience of more than 7 years. Nakul is an active blogger with BeyondRelational.com (150+ blogs), and can also be found on forums at SQLServerCentral and BeyondRelational.com. Nakul has also been a guest columnist for SQLAuthority.com and SQLServerCentral.com. Nakul presented a webcast on the “Underappreciated Features of Microsoft SQL Server” at the Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Exclusive Webcast series (May 02-06, 2011) on May 06, 2011. He is also the author of a research paper on Database upgrade methodologies, which was published in a CSI journal, published nationwide. In addition to his passion about SQL Server, Nakul also contributes to the academia out of personal interest. He visits various colleges and universities as an external faculty to judge project activities being carried out by the students. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are his own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Google+ Let us hear the thoughts of Nakul in first person - Those who have been following my blogs would be aware that I am recently running a series on the database engine features that have been deprecated in Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Based on the response that I have received, I was quite surprised to know that most of the audience found these to be breaking changes, when in fact, they were not! It was then that I decided to write a little piece on how to plan your database upgrade such that it works with the next version of Microsoft SQL Server. Please note that the recommendations made in this article are high-level markers and are intended to help you think over the specific steps that you would need to take to upgrade your database. Refer the documentation – Understand the terms Change is the only constant in this world. Therefore, whenever customer requirements, newer architectures and designs require software vendors to make a change to the keywords, functions, etc; they ensure that they provide their end users sufficient time to migrate over to the new standards before dropping off the old ones. Microsoft does that too with it’s Microsoft SQL Server product. Whenever a new SQL Server release is announced, it comes with a list of the following features: Breaking changes These are changes that would break your currently running applications, scripts or functionalities that are based on earlier version of Microsoft SQL Server These are mostly features whose behavior has been changed keeping in mind the newer architectures and designs Lesson: These are the changes that you need to be most worried about! Discontinued features These features are no longer available in the associated version of Microsoft SQL Server These features used to be “deprecated” in the prior release Lesson: Without these changes, your database would not be compliant/may not work with the version of Microsoft SQL Server under consideration Deprecated features These features are those that are still available in the current version of Microsoft SQL Server, but are scheduled for removal in a future version. These may be removed in either the next version or any other future version of Microsoft SQL Server The features listed for deprecation will compose the list of discontinued features in the next version of SQL Server Lesson: Plan to make necessary changes required to remove/replace usage of the deprecated features with the latest recommended replacements Once a feature appears on the list, it moves from bottom to the top, i.e. it is first marked as “Deprecated” and then “Discontinued”. We know of “Breaking change” comes later on in the product life cycle. What this means is that if you want to know what features would not work with SQL Server 2012 (and you are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2), you need to refer the list of breaking changes and discontinued features in SQL Server 2012. Use the tools! There are a lot of tools and technologies around us, but it is rarely that I find teams using these tools religiously and to the best of their potential. Below are the top two tools, from Microsoft, that I use every time I plan a database upgrade. The SQL Server Upgrade Advisor Ever since SQL Server 2005 was announced, Microsoft provides a small, very light-weight tool called the “SQL Server upgrade advisor”. The upgrade advisor analyzes installed components from earlier versions of SQL Server, and then generates a report that identifies issues to fix either before or after you upgrade. The analysis examines objects that can be accessed, such as scripts, stored procedures, triggers, and trace files. Upgrade Advisor cannot analyze desktop applications or encrypted stored procedures. Refer the links towards the end of the post to know how to get the Upgrade Advisor. The SQL Server Profiler Another great tool that you can use is the one most SQL Server developers & administrators use often – the SQL Server profiler. SQL Server Profiler provides functionality to monitor the “Deprecation” event, which contains: Deprecation announcement – equivalent to features to be deprecated in a future release of SQL Server Deprecation final support – equivalent to features to be deprecated in the next release of SQL Server You can learn more using the links towards the end of the post. A basic checklist There are a lot of finer points that need to be taken care of when upgrading your database. But, it would be worth-while to identify a few basic steps in order to make your database compliant with the next version of SQL Server: Monitor the current application workload (on a test bed) via the Profiler in order to identify usage of features marked as Deprecated If none appear, you are all set! (This almost never happens) Note down all the offending queries and feature usages Run analysis sessions using the SQL Server upgrade advisor on your database Based on the inputs from the analysis report and Profiler trace sessions, Incorporate solutions for the breaking changes first Next, incorporate solutions for the discontinued features Revisit and document the upgrade strategy for your deployment scenarios Revisit the fall-back, i.e. rollback strategies in case the upgrades fail Because some programming changes are dependent upon the SQL server version, this may need to be done in consultation with the development teams Before any other enhancements are incorporated by the development team, send out the database changes into QA QA strategy should involve a comparison between an environment running the old version of SQL Server against the new one Because minimal application changes have gone in (essential changes for SQL Server version compliance only), this would be possible As an ongoing activity, keep incorporating changes recommended as per the deprecated features list As a DBA, update your coding standards to ensure that the developers are using ANSI compliant code – this code will require a change only if the ANSI standard changes Remember this: Change management is a continuous process. Keep revisiting the product release notes and incorporate recommended changes to stay prepared for the next release of SQL Server. May the power of SQL Server be with you! Links Referenced in this post Breaking changes in SQL Server 2012: Link Discontinued features in SQL Server 2012: Link Get the upgrade advisor from the Microsoft Download Center at: Link Upgrade Advisor page on MSDN: Link Profiler: Review T-SQL code to identify objects no longer supported by Microsoft: Link Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 by Vinod Kumar: Link Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Upgrade

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• .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

  - by RobertChipperfield

  One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

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• The Data Scientist

  - by BuckWoody

  A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term itself in that definition is redundant. There is no science that I know of that does not work with analyzing lots of data. But the term seems to refer to more than the common practices of looking at data visually, putting it in a spreadsheet or report, or even using simple coding to examine data sets. The term Data Scientist (as far as I can make out this early in it’s use) is someone who has a strong understanding of data sources, relevance (statistical and otherwise) and processing methods as well as front-end displays of large sets of complicated data. Some - but not all - Business Intelligence professionals have these skills. In other cases, senior developers, database architects or others fill these needs, but in my experience, many lack the strong mathematical skills needed to make these choices properly. I’ve divided the knowledge base for someone that would wear this title into three large segments. It remains to be seen if a given Data Scientist would be responsible for knowing all these areas or would specialize. There are pretty high requirements on the math side, specifically in graduate-degree level statistics, but in my experience a company will only have a few of these folks, so they are expected to know quite a bit in each of these areas. Persistence The first area is finding, cleaning and storing the data. In some cases, no cleaning is done prior to storage - it’s just identified and the cleansing is done in a later step. This area is where the professional would be able to tell if a particular data set should be stored in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), across a set of key/value pair storage (NoSQL) or in a file system like HDFS (part of the Hadoop landscape) or other methods. Or do you examine the stream of data without storing it in another system at all? This is an important decision - it’s a foundation choice that deals not only with a lot of expense of purchasing systems or even using Cloud Computing (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS) to source it, but also the skillsets and other resources needed to care and feed the system for a long time. The Data Scientist sets something into motion that will probably outlast his or her career at a company or organization. Often these choices are made by senior developers, database administrators or architects in a company. But sometimes each of these has a certain bias towards making a decision one way or another. The Data Scientist would examine these choices in light of the data itself, starting perhaps even before the business requirements are created. The business may not even be aware of all the strategic and tactical data sources that they have access to. Processing Once the decision is made to store the data, the next set of decisions are based around how to process the data. An RDBMS scales well to a certain level, and provides a high degree of ACID compliance as well as offering a well-known set-based language to work with this data. In other cases, scale should be spread among multiple nodes (as in the case of Hadoop landscapes or NoSQL offerings) or even across a Cloud provider like Windows Azure Table Storage. In fact, in many cases - most of the ones I’m dealing with lately - the data should be split among multiple types of processing environments. This is a newer idea. Many data professionals simply pick a methodology (RDBMS with Star Schemas, NoSQL, etc.) and put all data there, regardless of its shape, processing needs and so on. A Data Scientist is familiar not only with the various processing methods, but how they work, so that they can choose the right one for a given need. This is a huge time commitment, hence the need for a dedicated title like this one. Presentation This is where the need for a Data Scientist is most often already being filled, sometimes with more or less success. The latest Business Intelligence systems are quite good at allowing you to create amazing graphics - but it’s the data behind the graphics that are the most important component of truly effective displays. This is where the mathematics requirement of the Data Scientist title is the most unforgiving. In fact, someone without a good foundation in statistics is not a good candidate for creating reports. Even a basic level of statistics can be dangerous. Anyone who works in analyzing data will tell you that there are multiple errors possible when data just seems right - and basic statistics bears out that you’re on the right track - that are only solvable when you understanding why the statistical formula works the way it does. And there are lots of ways of presenting data. Sometimes all you need is a “yes” or “no” answer that can only come after heavy analysis work. In that case, a simple e-mail might be all the reporting you need. In others, complex relationships and multiple components require a deep understanding of the various graphical methods of presenting data. Knowing which kind of chart, color, graphic or shape conveys a particular datum best is essential knowledge for the Data Scientist. Why I’m excited I love this area of study. I like math, stats, and computing technologies, but it goes beyond that. I love what data can do - how it can help an organization. I’ve been fortunate enough in my professional career these past two decades to work with lots of folks who perform this role at companies from aerospace to medical firms, from manufacturing to retail. Interestingly, the size of the company really isn’t germane here. I worked with one very small bio-tech (cryogenics) company that worked deeply with analysis of complex interrelated data. So  watch this space. No, I’m not leaving Azure or distributed computing or Microsoft. In fact, I think I’m perfectly situated to investigate this role further. We have a huge set of tools, from RDBMS to Hadoop to allow me to explore. And I’m happy to share what I learn along the way.

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• Using Node.js as an accelerator for WCF REST services

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform "for easily building fast, scalable network applications". It's built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine and uses an (almost) entirely async event-driven processing model, running in a single thread. If you're new to Node and your reaction is "why would I want to run JavaScript on the server side?", this is the headline answer: in 150 lines of JavaScript you can build a Node.js app which works as an accelerator for WCF REST services*. It can double your messages-per-second throughput, halve your CPU workload and use one-fifth of the memory footprint, compared to the WCF services direct.   Well, it can if: 1) your WCF services are first-class HTTP citizens, honouring client cache ETag headers in request and response; 2) your services do a reasonable amount of work to build a response; 3) your data is read more often than it's written. In one of my projects I have a set of REST services in WCF which deal with data that only gets updated weekly, but which can be read hundreds of times an hour. The services issue ETags and will return a 304 if the client sends a request with the current ETag, which means in the most common scenario the client uses its local cached copy. But when the weekly update happens, then all the client caches are invalidated and they all need the same new data. Then the service will get hundreds of requests with old ETags, and they go through the full service stack to build the same response for each, taking up threads and processing time. Part of that processing means going off to a database on a separate cloud, which introduces more latency and downtime potential.   We can use ASP.NET output caching with WCF to solve the repeated processing problem, but the server will still be thread-bound on incoming requests, and to get the current ETags reliably needs a database call per request. The accelerator solves that by running as a proxy - all client calls come into the proxy, and the proxy routes calls to the underlying REST service. We could use Node as a straight passthrough proxy and expect some benefit, as the server would be less thread-bound, but we would still have one WCF and one database call per proxy call. But add some smart caching logic to the proxy, and share ETags between Node and WCF (so the proxy doesn't even need to call the servcie to get the current ETag), and the underlying service will only be invoked when data has changed, and then only once - all subsequent client requests will be served from the proxy cache.   I've built this as a sample up on GitHub: NodeWcfAccelerator on sixeyed.codegallery. Here's how the architecture looks:     The code is very simple. The Node proxy runs on port 8010 and all client requests target the proxy. If the client request has an ETag header then the proxy looks up the ETag in the tag cache to see if it is current - the sample uses memcached to share ETags between .NET and Node. If the ETag from the client matches the current server tag, the proxy sends a 304 response with an empty body to the client, telling it to use its own cached version of the data. If the ETag from the client is stale, the proxy looks for a local cached version of the response, checking for a file named after the current ETag. If that file exists, its contents are returned to the client as the body in a 200 response, which includes the current ETag in the header. If the proxy does not have a local cached file for the service response, it calls the service, and writes the WCF response to the local cache file, and to the body of a 200 response for the client. So the WCF service is only troubled if both client and proxy have stale (or no) caches.   The only (vaguely) clever bit in the sample is using the ETag cache, so the proxy can serve cached requests without any communication with the underlying service, which it does completely generically, so the proxy has no notion of what it is serving or what the services it proxies are doing. The relative path from the URL is used as the lookup key, so there's no shared key-generation logic between .NET and Node, and when WCF stores a tag it also stores the "read" URL against the ETag so it can be used for a reverse lookup, e.g:   Key Value /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3 "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3    In Node we read the cache using the incoming URL path as the key and we know that "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" is the current ETag; we look for a local cached response in /caches/28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6.body (and the corresponding .header file which contains the original service response headers, so the proxy response is exactly the same as the underlying service). When the data is updated, we need to invalidate the ETag cache – which is why we need the reverse lookup in the cache. In the WCF update service, we don't need to know the URL of the related read service - we fetch the entity from the database, do a reverse lookup on the tag cache using the old ETag to get the read URL, update the new ETag against the URL, store the new reverse lookup and delete the old one.   Running Apache Bench against the two endpoints gives the headline performance comparison. Making 1000 requests with concurrency of 100, and not sending any ETag headers in the requests, with the Node proxy I get 102 requests handled per second, average response time of 975 milliseconds with 90% of responses served within 850 milliseconds; going direct to WCF with the same parameters, I get 53 requests handled per second, mean response time of 1853 milliseconds, with 90% of response served within 3260 milliseconds. Informally monitoring server usage during the tests, Node maxed at 20% CPU and 20Mb memory; IIS maxed at 60% CPU and 100Mb memory.   Note that the sample WCF service does a database read and sleeps for 250 milliseconds to simulate a moderate processing load, so this is *not* a baseline Node-vs-WCF comparison, but for similar scenarios where the  service call is expensive but applicable to numerous clients for a long timespan, the performance boost from the accelerator is considerable.     * - actually, the accelerator will work nicely for any HTTP request, where the URL (path + querystring) uniquely identifies a resource. In the sample, there is an assumption that the ETag is a GUID wrapped in double-quotes (e.g. "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6") – which is the default for WCF services. I use that assumption to name the cache files uniquely, but it is a trivial change to adapt to other ETag formats.

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• Converting projects to use Automatic NuGet restore

  - by terje

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/terje/archive/2014/06/11/converting-projects-to-use-automatic-nuget-restore.aspxDownload tool In version 2.7 of NuGet automatic nuget restore was introduced, meaning you no longer need to distort your msbuild project files with nuget target information.   Visual Studio and TFS 2013 build have this enabled by default.  However, if your project was created before this was introduced, and/or if you have used the “Enable NuGet Package Restore” afterwards, you now have a series of unwanted things in your projects, and a series of project files that have been modified – and – you no longer neither want nor need this !  You might also get into some unwanted issues due to these modifications.  This is a MSBuild modification that was needed only before NuGet 2.7 ! So: DON’T USE THIS FUNCTION !!! There is an issue https://nuget.codeplex.com/workitem/4019 on this on the NuGet project site to get this function removed, renamed or at least moved farther away from the top level (please help vote it up!).  The response seems to be that it WILL BE removed, around version 3.0. This function does nothing you need after the introduction of NuGet 2.7.  What is also unfortunate is the naming of it – it implies that it is needed, it is not, and what is worse, there is no corresponding function to remove what it does ! So to fix this use the tool named IFix, that will fix this issue for you   - all free of course, and the code is open source.  Also report issues there:  https://github.com/OsirisTerje/IFix    IFix information DOWNLOAD HERE This command line tool installs using an MSI, and add itself to the system path.  If you work in a team, you will probably need to use the  tool multiple times.  Anyone in the team may at any time use the “Enable NuGet Package Restore” function and mess up your project again.  The IFix program can be run either in a  check modus, where it does not write anything back – it only checks if you have any issues, or in a Fix mode, where it will also perform the necessary fixes for you. The IFix program is used like this: IFix <command> [-c/--check] [-f/--fix]  [-v/--verbose] The command in this case is “nugetrestore”.  It will do a check from the location where it is being called, and run through all subfolders from that location. So  “IFix nugetrestore  --check” , will do the check ,  and “IFix nugetrestore  --fix”  will perform the changes, for all files and folders below the current working directory. (Note that --check  can be replaced with only –c, and --fix with –f, and so on. ) BEWARE: When you run the fix option, all solutions to be affected must be closed in Visual Studio ! So, if you just want to DO it, then: IFix nugetrestore --check to see if you have issues then IFix nugetrestore  --fix to fix them. How does it work IFix nugetrestore  checks and optionally fixes four issues that the older enabling of nuget restore did.  The issues are related to the MSBuild projess, and are: Deleting the nuget.targets file. Deleting the nuget.exe that is located under the .nuget folder Removing all references to nuget.targets in the solution file Removing all properties and target imports of nuget.targets inside the csproj files. IFix fixes these issues in the same sequence. The first step, removing the nuget.targets file is the most critical one, and all instances of the nuget.targets file within the scope of a solution has to be removed, and in addition it has to be done with the solution closed in Visual Studio.  If Visual Studio finds a nuget.targets file, the csproj files will be automatically messed up again. This means the removal process above might need to be done multiple times, specially when you’re working with a team, and that solution context menu still has the “Enable NuGet Package Restore” function.  Someone on the team might inadvertently do this at any time. It can be a good idea to add this check to a checkin policy – if you run TFS standard version control, but that will have no effect if you use TFS Git version control of course. So, better be prepared to run the IFix check from time to time. Or, even better, install IFix on your build servers, and add a call to IFix nugetrestore --check in the TFS Build script.    How does it look As a first example I have run the IFix program from the top of a set of git repositories, so it spans multiple repositories with multiple solutions. The result from the check option is as follows: We see the four red lines, there is one for each of the four checks we talked about in the previous section. The fact that they are red, means we have that particular issue. The first section (above the first red text line) is the nuget targets section.  Notice  No.1, it says it has found no paths to copy.  What IFix does here is to check if there are any defined paths to other nuget galleries.  If there are, then those are copied over to the nuget.config file, where is where it should be in version 2.7 and above.   No.2 says it has found the particular nuget.targets file,  No.3  states it HAS found some other nuget galleries defines in the targets file, which then it would like to copy to the config.file. No.4 is the section for nuget.exe files, and list those it has found, and which it would like to delete. No 5 states it has found a reference to nuget.targets in the solution file.  This reference comes from the fact that the .nuget folder is a solution folder, and the items within are described in the solution file. It then checks the csproj files, and as can be seen from the last red line, it ha found issues in 96 out of 198 csproj files.  There are two possible issues in a csproj files.  No.6 is the first one, and the most common and most important one, an “Import project” section.  This is the section that calls the nuget.targets files.  No.7 is another issue, which seems to sometimes be there, sometimes not, it is a RestorePackages property, which also should go away. Now, if we run the IFix nugetrestore –fix command, and then the check again after that, the result is: All green !

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• Java JRE 1.6.0_65 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  The latest Java Runtime Environment 1.6.0_65 (a.k.a. JRE 6u65-b14) and later updates on the JRE 6 codeline are now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12 for Windows-based desktop clients. Effects of new support dates on Java upgrades for EBS environments Support dates for the E-Business Suite and Java have changed.  Please review the sections below for more details: What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? All JRE 6 and 7 releases are certified with EBS upon release Our standard policy is that all E-Business Suite customers can apply all JRE updates to end-user desktops from JRE 1.6.0_03 and later updates on the 1.6 codeline, and from JRE 7u10 and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline.  We test all new JRE 1.6 and JRE 7 releases in parallel with the JRE development process, so all new JRE 1.6 and 7 releases are considered certified with the E-Business Suite on the same day that they're released by our Java team.  You do not need to wait for a certification announcement before applying new JRE 1.6 or JRE 7 releases to your EBS users' desktops. What's new in in this Java release?Java 6 is now available only via My Oracle Support for E-Business Suite users.  You can find links to this release, including Release Notes, documentation, and the actual Java downloads here: All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Note 1439822.1) 32-bit and 64-bit versions certified This certification includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit JRE versions. 32-bit JREs are certified on: Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Service Pack 2 (SP2) Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) 64-bit JREs are certified only on 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Worried about the 'mismanaged session cookie' issue? No need to worry -- it's fixed.  To recap: JRE releases 1.6.0_18 through 1.6.0_22 had issues with mismanaging session cookies that affected some users in some circumstances. The fix for those issues was first included in JRE 1.6.0_23. These fixes will carry forward and continue to be fixed in all future JRE releases.  In other words, if you wish to avoid the mismanaged session cookie issue, you should apply any release after JRE 1.6.0_22. Implications of Java 6 End of Public Updates for EBS Users The Support Roadmap for Oracle Java is published here: Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap The latest updates to that page (as of Sept. 19, 2012) state (emphasis added): Java SE 6 End of Public Updates Notice After February 2013, Oracle will no longer post updates of Java SE 6 to its public download sites. Existing Java SE 6 downloads already posted as of February 2013 will remain accessible in the Java Archive on Oracle Technology Network. Developers and end-users are encouraged to update to more recent Java SE versions that remain available for public download. For enterprise customers, who need continued access to critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 or older versions, long term support is available through Oracle Java SE Support . What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? EBS users fall under the category of "enterprise users" above.  Java is an integral part of the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, so EBS users will continue to receive Java SE 6 updates from February 2013 to the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. In other words, nothing changes for EBS users after February 2013.  EBS users will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 until the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017.  How can EBS customers obtain Java 6 updates after the public end-of-life? EBS customers can download Java 6 patches from My Oracle Support.  For a complete list of all Java SE patch numbers, see: All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Note 1439822.1) Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? This upgrade is highly recommended but remains optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JRE 6 desktop clients.  Java 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All E-Business Suite customers must upgrade to JRE 7 by June 2017. Coexistence of JRE 6 and JRE 7 on Windows desktops The upgrade to JRE 7 is highly recommended for EBS users, but some users may need to run both JRE 6 and 7 on their Windows desktops for reasons unrelated to the E-Business Suite. Most EBS configurations with IE and Firefox use non-static versioning by default. JRE 7 will be invoked instead of JRE 6 if both are installed on a Windows desktop. For more details, see "Appendix B: Static vs. Non-static Versioning and Set Up Options" in Notes 290807.1 and 393931.1. Applying Updates to JRE 6 and JRE 7 to Windows desktops Auto-update will keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with JRE 7 installed. Auto-update will only keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with both JRE 6 and 7 installed.  JRE 6 users are strongly encouraged to apply the latest Critical Patch Updates as soon as possible after each release. The Jave SE CPUs will be available via My Oracle Support.  EBS users can find more information about JRE 6 and 7 updates here: Information Center: Installation & Configuration for Oracle Java SE (Note 1412103.2) The dates for future Java SE CPUs can be found on the Critical Patch Updates, Security Alerts and Third Party Bulletin.  An RSS feed is available on that site for those who would like to be kept up-to-date. What do Mac users need? Mac users running Mac OS 10.7 or 10.8 can run JRE 7 plug-ins.  See this article: EBS 12 certified with Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 with Safari 6 and JRE 7 Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? JRE is used for desktop clients.  JDK is used for application tier servers JDK upgrades for E-Business Suite application tier servers are highly recommended but currently remain optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JDK 6 for application tier servers.  Java SE 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All EBS customers with application tier servers on Windows, Solaris, and Linux must upgrade to JDK 7 by June 2017. EBS customers running their application tier servers on other operating systems should check with their respective vendors for the support dates for those platforms. JDK 7 is certified with E-Business Suite 12.  See: Java (JDK) 7 Certified for E-Business Suite 12 Servers References Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1) Upgrading Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) with Oracle Applications 11i for Windows Clients (Metalink Note 290807.1) Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1) Upgrading JRE Plugin with Oracle Applications R12 (MetaLink Note 393931.1) Related Articles Mismanaged Session Cookie Issue Fixed for EBS in JRE 1.6.0_23 Roundup: Oracle JInitiator 1.3 Desupported for EBS Customers in July 2009

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 13, 2012Popular ReleasesPublic Key Infrastructure PowerShell module: PowerShell PKI Module v1.8: Installation guide: Use default installation path to install this module for current user only. To install this module for all users — enable "Install for all users" check-box in installation UI Note: if previous module installations are detected, they are removed during upgrade. Note: PowerShell 3.0 RC is now supported. Note: Windows Server 2012 is partially supported (output formatting is not working for me). Release notes for version 1.8.0: Version 1.8 introduces a set of new .NET clas...Metodología General Ajustada - MGA: 02.07.02: Cambios Parmenio: Corrección para que se generen los objetivos en el formato PRO_F03. Se debe ejcutar el script en la BD. Cambios John: Soporte técnico telefónico y por correo electrónico. Integración de código fuente. Se ajustan los siguientes formatos para que no dupliquen los anexos al hacer clic dos veces en Actualizar: FORMATO ID 03 - ANALISIS DE PARTICIPANTES, FORMATO ID 05 - OBJETIVOS.Generación de instaladores: Conectado y Desconectado.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.4: 2012.06.13 Ver5.6.4 　(1) Web???????、???POST??????????????????Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.0.0.0 - Ferret: - Merging both 3.5 and 2.0 codebases to a single .NET 2.0 assembly. - MSBuild Task. - NAnt Task.ExcelFileEditor: .CS File: nothingBizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter: Release 4.0: Works with BizTalk Server 2010. Compiled in .NET Framework 4.0. In this new version are available small improvements compared to the current version (3.0). We can highlight the following improvements or changes: 24 hours support in “start time” property. Previous versions had an issue with setting the start time, as it shown 12 hours watch but no AM/PM. Daily scheduler review. Solved a small bug on Daily Properties: unable to switch between “Every day” and “on these days” Installation e...Weapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0 RC: - Upgrade to Entity Framework 4.3.1 - Added AutoMapper custom version (by nopCommerce Team) - Added missed model properties and localization resources of Plugin Definitions - Minor changes - Fixed some bugsQTP FT Uninstaller: QTP FT Uninstaller v3: - KnowledgeInbox has made this tool open source - Converted to C# - Better scanning & cleaning mechanismWebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.7: Changes included in this release: updated ClientEngine added proper exception handling code added state support for callback added property AllowUnstrustedCertificate for JsonWebSocket added properties for sending ping automatically improved JsBridge fixed a uri compatibility issueXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0 Beta: Catalog and Publication reviews and ratings Store language packs in data base Improve reporting system Improve Import/Export system A lot of WebAdmin app UI improvements Initial implementation of the WebForum app DB indexes Improve and simplify architecture Less abstractions Modernize architecture Improve, simplify and unify API Simplify and improve testing A lot of new unit tests Codebase refactoring and ReSharpering Utilize Castle Windsor Utilize NHibernate ORM ...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.55: Properly handle IE extension to CSS3 grammar that allows for multiple parameters to functional pseudo-class selectors. add new switch -braces:(new|same) that affects where opening braces are placed in multi-line output. The default, "new" puts them on their own new line; "same" outputs them at the end of the previous line. add new optional values to the -inline switch: -inline:(force|noforce), which can be combined with the existing boolean value via comma-separators; value "force" (which...Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework: MMP Player Framework 2.7 (Silverlight and WP7): Additional DownloadsSMFv2.7 Full Installer (MSI) - This will install everything you need in order to develop your own SMF player application, including the IIS Smooth Streaming Client. It only includes the assemblies. If you want the source code please follow the link above. Smooth Streaming Sample Player - This is a pre-built player that includes support for IIS Smooth Streaming. You can configure the player to playback your content by simplying editing a configuration file - no need to co...Liberty: v3.2.1.0 Release 10th June 2012: Change Log -Added -Liberty is now digitally signed! If the certificate on Liberty.exe is missing, invalid, or does not state that it was developed by "Xbox Chaos, Open Source Developer," your copy of Liberty may have been altered in some (possibly malicious) way. -Reach Mass biped max health and shield changer -Fixed -H3/ODST Fixed all of the glitches that users kept reporting (also reverted the changes made in 3.2.0.2) -Reach Made some tag names clearer and more consistent between m...AutoUpdaterdotNET : Autoupdate for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.0: Everything seems perfect if you find any problem you can report to http://www.rbsoft.org/contact.htmlMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.503b: It has been a while, so it's about time we release another build! Major effort has been for fixing trailer downloads, plus a little bit of work for episode guide tag in TV show NFOs.Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2.zip contains several reports include Sales Reason Comparisons SQL2008R2.rdl which uses Adventure Works DW 2008R2 as a data source reference. For more information, go to Sales Reason Comparisons report.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 7: Fix - Fixed Metro build to pass Windows Application Certification Kit on Windows 8 Release Preview Fix - Fixed Metro build error caused by an anonymous type Fix - Fixed ItemConverter not being used when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed an incorrect object being passed to the Error event when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed decimal properties not being correctly ignored with DefaultValueHandlingLINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.3.0: New to release 1.0.3.0:Combinatronics: Combinations (unique) Combinations (with repetition) Permutations (unique) Permutations (with repetition) Convert jagged arrays to fixed multidimensional arrays Convert fixed multidimensional arrays to jagged arrays ElementAtMax ElementAtMin ElementAtAverage New set of array extension (1.0.2.8):Rotate Flip Resize (maintaing data) Split Fuse Replace Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) Ne...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 1: 6?12????? ??? - ?????.net2.0?.net4.0????Winform?Web???????。 NET2 - .net 2.0?Winform?Web???? NET4 - .net 4.0?Winform?Web???? Libs - SDK ???，??2.0?4.0?SDK??? 6?11????? ??? - ?Entities???????????EntityBase，???ToString()???????json???，??????4.0???????。2.0?3.5???！ ??? - Request????????AccessToken??????source=appkey?????。????，????????，???????public_timeline?????????。 ?? - ???ClinetLogin??????????RefreshToken???????false???。 ?? - ???RepostTimeline????Statuses???null???。 ?? - Utility?Bui...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 4.5.0: Added Instruments tab for modules Open folder content feature Some bug fixesNew Projects4SQ - Foursquare for WP7: This is a public Foursquare App, designed for the COMMUNITY for WP7.Alert Management Web Part: Business Problem: In a Project management site, When new project sites created, Project Manager creates alerts for all team members in multiple Lists/Libraries. Pain point is: He need to manually create alerts by going to each and every list/library >> Alert Me >> and then adding users to keep them informed. Yes, Its a pain for them to add users one by one in all of the lists and libraries, Solution: we started creating Custom Alert Management web part which will solve this problem. K...An Un-sql SQL Database Installer: D.E.M.O.N SQL Database Installer is an Un-SQL(SQL means boring here) Database server installer for many types of Database :MySQL, SQLite and others.Aqzgf: android for qzgfbaoming: ????????????，???dbentry.net 4.2??????。Comdaybe 2012_knockoutjs examples: This is a visual studio 2012 project containing all the demo's of #comdaybe 2012. more information on: http://www.communityday.be/ETExplorer: This application is a replacement for the standard windows explorer. When I began working with Windows 7 I noticed that some of the features I liked from XP were missing. After trying many freeware replacements and not finding any of them having all the features I needed, I decided to develop my own explorer replacement.ExamAnalysis: Exam Analysis Website (building...)FizzBuzz: FizzBuzzImproved Dnn Event Log Email Notification provider: The email notifications for log events in Dnn are poor. This project aims to improve them through a new logging provider. The initial work uses the existing logging provider and just overrides the SendLogNotifications method. Over time hopefully this will be improved to enhance the email sending capabilities of Dnn.InfoMap: a framework for mapsiTextSharp MPL for Silverlight & Windows Phone: This is a port of the iText Sharp (4.2) that was the last version published under the Mozilla Public License for Silverlight and Windows Phone. You can use this version in a commercial application and it does not require your app to be released as open source. You do not need any kind of license from anyone to use this unless you want to change the publishing information (where it sets iText as the publisher)ModifyMimeTypes: In Exchange 2007 and 2010, the Content-Type encoding for MIME attachments is determined by a list which is stored in the Exchange Organization container in Active Directory within the msExchMimeTypes property. The list can be easily viewed in the Exchange Management Shell using: •(Get-OrganizationConfig).MimeTypes The list is order specific. So if two entries exist for the same attachment type, the one earlier in the list will be the one that is used. One example of this is the encod...Monitor Reporting Services with PowerPivot: PowerPivot workbook with a connection to Reporting Service log. Several built in reports are already created in the workbook. You will need to connect to the execution log 2 view in your report server database. Typically the report server Database is named ReportServer. The view to query is named is ExecutionLog2. You may need to add a where clause to the query in the workbook to limit the data you want to see. I already have a where cluase that limits it to only rendered reports. The Date...QCats: QCats put hearts into socail relationship.Rad sa bazom: Ovo je samo proba, brsem brzoREJS: An easy to use, easy to implement Razor preparser for CSS and JS with support for caching, external data, LESS and much more.RexSharp: RexSharp is a relatively new web framework, that can easily be integrated with ASP.NET. It is based largely on the Websharper framework, written in F# - but with significant additions and optimizations. Like Websharper, RexSharp aims to make web and mobile app development a lot more fun, with F#. This is a preliminary release - detailed instructions for using the framework will be made available in a short while. ShareDev.Webparts: Coming soon...SharePoint Common Framework: SharepointCommon is a framework for Microsoft SharePoint 2010© Server and Foundation. It allows to map list items to simple hand-writen POCO classes and perform actions by manipulate with entities.Solution Extender for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Solution Extender makes it easier for Dynamics CRM 2011 integrators to export/import components that can't be included in solutions. You will be able to export/import Duplicate detection rules, Saved views and more to come It's developed in C#.System Center 2012 - Orchestrator Integration Packs and Utilities: System Center 2012 - Orchestrator Integration Packs and UtilitiesTalkBack: A small library to enable decoupled communication between different components.Tomson Scattering for GDT: Tomson is a software used on Gas Dynamic Trap setup in Institute of Nuclear Physics of Russian Academy of Sciences for electron temperature calculation in plasma based on tomson scattering method measurements.tony first project: first projectVirtual Card Table: This is a classroom project for explaining TDD.WellFound Yachts: WellFound Yachts

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - "Is It Time for an Upgrade?"

  - by Tanu Sood

  Is your organization debating their next step with regard to Identity Management? While all the stakeholders are well aware that the one-size-fits-all doesn’t apply to identity management, just as true is the fact that no two identity management implementations are alike. Oracle’s recent release of Identity Governance Suite 11g Release 2 has innovative features such as a customizable user interface, shopping cart style request catalog and more. However, only a close look at the use cases can help you determine if and when an upgrade to the latest R2 release makes sense for your organization. This post will describe a few of the situations that PwC has helped our clients work through. “Should I be considering an upgrade?” If your organization has an existing identity management implementation, the questions below are a good start to assessing your current solution to see if you need to begin planning for an upgrade: Does the current solution scale and meet your projected identity management needs? Does the current solution have a customer-friendly user interface? Are you completely meeting your compliance objectives? Are you still using spreadsheets? Does the current solution have the features you need? Is your total cost of ownership in line with well-performing similar sized companies in your industry? Can your organization support your existing Identity solution? Is your current product based solution well positioned to support your organization's tactical and strategic direction? Existing Oracle IDM Customers: Several existing Oracle clients are looking to move to R2 in 2013. If your organization is on Sun Identity Manager (SIM) or Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and if your current assessment suggests that you need to upgrade, you should strongly consider OIM 11gR2. Oracle provides upgrade paths to Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2 from SIM 7.x / 8.x as well as Oracle Identity Manager 10g / 11gR1. The following are some of the considerations for migration: Check the end of product support (for Sun or legacy OIM) schedule There are several new features available in R2 (including common Helpdesk scenarios, profiling of disconnected applications, increased scalability, custom connectors, browser-based UI configurations, portability of configurations during future upgrades, etc) Cost of ownership (for SIM customers)\ Customizations that need to be maintained during the upgrade Time/Cost to migrate now vs. waiting for next version If you are already on an older version of Oracle Identity Manager and actively maintaining your support contract with Oracle, you might be eligible for a free upgrade to OIM 11gR2. Check with your Oracle sales rep for more details. Existing IDM infrastructure in place: In the past year and half, we have seen a surge in IDM upgrades from non-Oracle infrastructure to Oracle. If your organization is looking to improve the end-user experience related to identity management functions, the shopping cart style access request model and browser based personalization features may come in handy. Additionally, organizations that have a large number of applications that include ecommerce, LDAP stores, databases, UNIX systems, mainframes as well as a high frequency of user identity changes and access requests will value the high scalability of the OIM reconciliation and provisioning engine. Furthermore, we have seen our clients like OIM's out of the box (OOB) support for multiple authoritative sources. For organizations looking to integrate applications that do not have an exposed API, the Generic Technology Connector framework supported by OIM will be helpful in quickly generating custom connector using OOB wizard. Similarly, organizations in need of not only flexible on-boarding of disconnected applications but also strict access management to these applications using approval flows will find the flexible disconnected application profiling feature an extremely useful tool that provides a high degree of time savings. Organizations looking to develop custom connectors for home grown or industry specific applications will likewise find that the Identity Connector Framework support in OIM allows them to build and test a custom connector independently before integrating it with OIM. Lastly, most of our clients considering an upgrade to OIM 11gR2 have also expressed interest in the browser based configuration feature that allows an administrator to quickly customize the user interface without adding any custom code. Better yet, code customizations, if any, made to the product are portable across the future upgrades which, is viewed as a big time and money saver by most of our clients. Below are some upgrade methodologies we adopt based on client priorities and the scale of implementation. For illustration purposes, we have assumed that the client is currently on Oracle Waveset (formerly Sun Identity Manager).   Integrated Deployment: The integrated deployment is typically where a client wants to split the implementation to where their current IDM is continuing to handle the front end workflows and OIM takes over the back office operations incrementally. Once all the back office operations are moved completely to OIM, the front end workflows are migrated to OIM. Parallel Deployment: This deployment is typically done where there can be a distinct line drawn between which functionality the platforms are supporting. For example the current IDM implementation is handling the password reset functionality while OIM takes over the access provisioning and RBAC functions. Cutover Deployment: A cutover deployment is typically recommended where a client has smaller less complex implementations and it makes sense to leverage the migration tools to move them over immediately. What does this mean for YOU? There are many variables to consider when making upgrade decisions. For most customers, there is no ‘easy’ button. Organizations looking to upgrade or considering a new vendor should start by doing a mapping of their requirements with product features. The recommended approach is to take stock of both the short term and long term objectives, understand product features, future roadmap, maturity and level of commitment from the R&D and build the implementation plan accordingly. As we said, in the beginning, there is no one-size-fits-all with Identity Management. So, arm yourself with the knowledge, engage in industry discussions, bring in business stakeholders and start building your implementation roadmap. In the next post we will discuss the best practices on R2 implementations. We will be covering the Do's and Don't's and share our thoughts on making implementations successful. Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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• Cloud Computing = Elasticity * Availability

  - by Herve Roggero

  What is cloud computing? Is hosting the same thing as cloud computing? Are you running a cloud if you already use virtual machines? What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a cloud provider? And the list goes on… these questions keep coming up and all try to fundamentally explain what “cloud” means relative to other concepts. At the risk of over simplification, answering these questions becomes simpler once you understand the primary foundations of cloud computing: Elasticity and Availability.   Elasticity The basic value proposition of cloud computing is to pay as you go, and to pay for what you use. This implies that an application can expand and contract on demand, across all its tiers (presentation layer, services, database, security…).  This also implies that application components can grow independently from each other. So if you need more storage for your database, you should be able to grow that tier without affecting, reconfiguring or changing the other tiers. Basically, cloud applications behave like a sponge; when you add water to a sponge, it grows in size; in the application world, the more customers you add, the more it grows. Pure IaaS providers will provide certain benefits, specifically in terms of operating costs, but an IaaS provider will not help you in making your applications elastic; neither will Virtual Machines. The smallest elasticity unit of an IaaS provider and a Virtual Machine environment is a server (physical or virtual). While adding servers in a datacenter helps in achieving scale, it is hardly enough. The application has yet to use this hardware.  If the process of adding computing resources is not transparent to the application, the application is not elastic.   As you can see from the above description, designing for the cloud is not about more servers; it is about designing an application for elasticity regardless of the underlying server farm.   Availability The fact of the matter is that making applications highly available is hard. It requires highly specialized tools and trained staff. On top of it, it's expensive. Many companies are required to run multiple data centers due to high availability requirements. In some organizations, some data centers are simply on standby, waiting to be used in a case of a failover. Other organizations are able to achieve a certain level of success with active/active data centers, in which all available data centers serve incoming user requests. While achieving high availability for services is relatively simple, establishing a highly available database farm is far more complex. In fact it is so complex that many companies establish yearly tests to validate failover procedures.   To a certain degree certain IaaS provides can assist with complex disaster recovery planning and setting up data centers that can achieve successful failover. However the burden is still on the corporation to manage and maintain such an environment, including regular hardware and software upgrades. Cloud computing on the other hand removes most of the disaster recovery requirements by hiding many of the underlying complexities.   Cloud Providers A cloud provider is an infrastructure provider offering additional tools to achieve application elasticity and availability that are not usually available on-premise. For example Microsoft Azure provides a simple configuration screen that makes it possible to run 1 or 100 web sites by clicking a button or two on a screen (simplifying provisioning), and soon SQL Azure will offer Data Federation to allow database sharding (which allows you to scale the database tier seamlessly and automatically). Other cloud providers offer certain features that are not available on-premise as well, such as the Amazon SC3 (Simple Storage Service) which gives you virtually unlimited storage capabilities for simple data stores, which is somewhat equivalent to the Microsoft Azure Table offering (offering a server-independent data storage model). Unlike IaaS providers, cloud providers give you the necessary tools to adopt elasticity as part of your application architecture.    Some cloud providers offer built-in high availability that get you out of the business of configuring clustered solutions, or running multiple data centers. Some cloud providers will give you more control (which puts some of that burden back on the customers' shoulder) and others will tend to make high availability totally transparent. For example, SQL Azure provides high availability automatically which would be very difficult to achieve (and very costly) on premise.   Keep in mind that each cloud provider has its strengths and weaknesses; some are better at achieving transparent scalability and server independence than others.    Not for Everyone Note however that it is up to you to leverage the elasticity capabilities of a cloud provider, as discussed previously; if you build a website that does not need to scale, for which elasticity is not important, then you can use a traditional host provider unless you also need high availability. Leveraging the technologies of cloud providers can be difficult and can become a journey for companies that build their solutions in a scale up fashion. Cloud computing promises to address cost containment and scalability of applications with built-in high availability. If your application does not need to scale or you do not need high availability, then cloud computing may not be for you. In fact, you may pay a premium to run your applications with cloud providers due to the underlying technologies built specifically for scalability and availability requirements. And as such, the cloud is not for everyone.   Consistent Customer Experience, Predictable Cost With all its complexities, buzz and foggy definition, cloud computing boils down to a simple objective: consistent customer experience at a predictable cost.  The objective of a cloud solution is to provide the same user experience to your last customer than the first, while keeping your operating costs directly proportional to the number of customers you have. Making your applications elastic and highly available across all its tiers, with as much automation as possible, achieves the first objective of a consistent customer experience. And the ability to expand and contract the infrastructure footprint of your application dynamically achieves the cost containment objectives.     Herve Roggero is a SQL Azure MVP and co-author of Pro SQL Azure (APress).  He is the co-founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (www.bluesyntax.net), a company focusing on cloud computing technologies helping customers understand and adopt cloud computing technologies. For more information contact herve at hroggero @ bluesyntax.net .

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• Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

  - by [email protected]

  A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

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• Java JRE 1.7.0_45 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  Java Runtime Environment 7u45 (a.k.a. JRE 7u45-b18) and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline are now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12.0, 12.1, and 12.2 for Windows-based desktop clients. Effects of new support dates on Java upgrades for EBS environments Support dates for the E-Business Suite and Java have changed.  Please review the sections below for more details: What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? All JRE 6 and 7 releases are certified with EBS upon release Our standard policy is that all E-Business Suite customers can apply all JRE updates to end-user desktops from JRE 1.6.0_03 and later updates on the 1.6 codeline, and from JRE 7u10 and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline.  We test all new JRE 1.6 and JRE 7 releases in parallel with the JRE development process, so all new JRE 1.6 and 7 releases are considered certified with the E-Business Suite on the same day that they're released by our Java team.  You do not need to wait for a certification announcement before applying new JRE 1.6 or JRE 7 releases to your EBS users' desktops. What's needed to enable EBS environments for JRE 7? EBS customers should ensure that they are running JRE 7u17, at minimum, on Windows desktop clients. Of the compatibility issues identified with JRE 7, the most critical is an issue that prevents E-Business Suite Forms-based products from launching on Windows desktops that are running JRE 7.  Customers can prevent this issue -- and all other JRE 7 compatibility issues -- by ensuring that they have applied the latest certified patches documented for JRE 7 configurations to their EBS application tier servers.  These patches are compatible with JRE 6 and 7, production ready, and fully-tested with the E-Business Suite.  These patches may be applied immediately to all E-Business Suite environments. All other Forms prerequisites documented in the Notes above should also be applied.  Where are the official patch requirements documented? All patches required for ensuring full compatibility of the E-Business Suite with JRE 7 are documented in these Notes: For EBS 11i: Deploying Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i (Note 290807.1) Upgrading Developer 6i with Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (Note 125767.1) For EBS 12.0, 12.1, 12.2 Deploying Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 393931.1) Upgrading OracleAS 10g Forms and Reports in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 437878.1) EBS + Discoverer 11g Users JRE 1.7.0_45 is certified for Discoverer 11g in E-Business Suite environments with the following minimum requirements: Discoverer (11g) 11.1.1.6 plus Patch 13877486 and later  Reference: How To Find Oracle BI Discoverer 10g and 11g Certification Information (Document 233047.1) Worried about the 'mismanaged session cookie' issue? No need to worry -- it's fixed.  To recap: JRE releases 1.6.0_18 through 1.6.0_22 had issues with mismanaging session cookies that affected some users in some circumstances. The fix for those issues was first included in JRE 1.6.0_23. These fixes will carry forward and continue to be fixed in all future JRE releases on the JRE 6 and 7 codelines.  In other words, if you wish to avoid the mismanaged session cookie issue, you should apply any release after JRE 1.6.0_22 on the JRE 6 codeline, and JRE 7u10 and later JRE 7 codeline updates. Implications of Java 6 End of Public Updates for EBS Users The Support Roadmap for Oracle Java is published here: Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap The latest updates to that page (as of Sept. 19, 2012) state (emphasis added): Java SE 6 End of Public Updates Notice After February 2013, Oracle will no longer post updates of Java SE 6 to its public download sites. Existing Java SE 6 downloads already posted as of February 2013 will remain accessible in the Java Archive on Oracle Technology Network. Developers and end-users are encouraged to update to more recent Java SE versions that remain available for public download. For enterprise customers, who need continued access to critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 or older versions, long term support is available through Oracle Java SE Support . What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? EBS users fall under the category of "enterprise users" above.  Java is an integral part of the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, so EBS users will continue to receive Java SE 6 updates from February 2013 to the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. In other words, nothing changes for EBS users after February 2013.  EBS users will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 until the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. How can EBS customers obtain Java 6 updates after the public end-of-life? EBS customers can download Java 6 patches from My Oracle Support.  For a complete list of all Java SE patch numbers, see: All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Note 1439822.1) Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? This upgrade is highly recommended but remains optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JRE 6 desktop clients.  Java 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All E-Business Suite customers must upgrade to JRE 7 by June 2017. Coexistence of JRE 6 and JRE 7 on Windows desktops The upgrade to JRE 7 is highly recommended for EBS users, but some users may need to run both JRE 6 and 7 on their Windows desktops for reasons unrelated to the E-Business Suite. Most EBS configurations with IE and Firefox use non-static versioning by default. JRE 7 will be invoked instead of JRE 6 if both are installed on a Windows desktop. For more details, see "Appendix B: Static vs. Non-static Versioning and Set Up Options" in Notes 290807.1 and 393931.1. Applying Updates to JRE 6 and JRE 7 to Windows desktops Auto-update will keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with JRE 7 installed. Auto-update will only keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with both JRE 6 and 7 installed.  JRE 6 users are strongly encouraged to apply the latest Critical Patch Updates as soon as possible after each release. The Jave SE CPUs will be available via My Oracle Support.  EBS users can find more information about JRE 6 and 7 updates here: Information Center: Installation & Configuration for Oracle Java SE (Note 1412103.2) The dates for future Java SE CPUs can be found on the Critical Patch Updates, Security Alerts and Third Party Bulletin.  An RSS feed is available on that site for those who would like to be kept up-to-date. What do Mac users need? Mac users running Mac OS 10.7 or 10.8 can run JRE 7 plug-ins.  See this article: EBS 12 certified with Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 with Safari 6 and JRE 7 Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? JRE is used for desktop clients.  JDK is used for application tier servers JDK upgrades for E-Business Suite application tier servers are highly recommended but currently remain optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JDK 6 for application tier servers.  Java SE 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All EBS customers with application tier servers on Windows, Solaris, and Linux must upgrade to JDK 7 by June 2017. EBS customers running their application tier servers on other operating systems should check with their respective vendors for the support dates for those platforms. JDK 7 is certified with E-Business Suite 12.  See: Java (JDK) 7 Certified for E-Business Suite 12 Servers References Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1) Upgrading Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) with Oracle Applications 11i for Windows Clients (Metalink Note 290807.1) Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1) Upgrading JRE Plugin with Oracle Applications R12 (MetaLink Note 393931.1) Related Articles Mismanaged Session Cookie Issue Fixed for EBS in JRE 1.6.0_23 Roundup: Oracle JInitiator 1.3 Desupported for EBS Customers in July 2009

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• Get Information to Your Blog with Microsoft Broadcaster

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you often have people ask you for advice about technology, or do you write tech-focused blog or newsletter?  Here’s how you can get information to share with your readers about Microsoft technology with Microsoft Broadcaster. Microsoft Broadcaster is a new service from Microsoft to help publishers, bloggers, developers, and other IT professionals find relevant information and resources from Microsoft.  You can use it to help discover things to write about, or simply discover new information about the technology you use.  Broadcaster will also notify you when new resources are available about the topics that interest you.  Let’s look at how you could use this to expand your blog and help your users. Getting Started Head over to the Microsoft Broadcaster site (link below), and click Join to get started. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new account if you don’t already have one. Near the bottom of the page, add information about your blog, newsletter, or group that you want to share Broadcaster information with.  Click Add when you’re done entering information.  You can enter as many sites or groups as you wish. When you’ve entered all of your information, click the Apply button at the bottom of the page.  Broadcaster will then let you know your information has been submitted, but you’ll need to wait several days to see if you are approved or not. Our application was approved about 2 days after applying, though this may vary.  When you’re approved, you’ll receive an email letting you know.  Return to the Broadcaster website (link below), but this time, click Sign in. Accept the terms of use by clicking I Accept at the bottom of the page. Confirm that your information entered previously is correct, and then click Configure my keywords at the bottom of the page. Now you can pick the topics you want to stay informed about.  Type keywords in the textbox, and it will bring up relevant topics with IntelliSense. Here we’ve added several topics to keep up with. Next select the Microsoft Products you want to keep track of.  If the product you want to keep track of is not listed, make sure to list it in the keywords section as above. Finally, select the types of content you wish to see, including articles, eBooks, webcasts, and more. Finally, when everything’s entered, click Configure My Alerts at the bottom of the page. Broadcaster can automatically email you when new content is found.  If you would like this, click Subscribe.  Otherwise, simply click Access Dashboard to go ahead and find your personalized content. If you choose to receive emails of new content, you’ll have to configure it with Windows Live Alerts.  Click Continue to set this up. Select if you want to receive Messenger alerts, emails, and/or text messages when new content is available.  Click Save when you’re finished. Finally, select how often you want to be notified, and then click Access Dashboard to view the content currently available. Finding Content For Your Blog, Site, or Group Now you can find content specified for your interests from the dashboard.  To access the dashboard in the future, simply go to the Broadcaster site and click Sign In. Here you can see available content, and can search for different topics or customize the topics shown. You’ll see snippets of information from various Microsoft videos, articles, whitepapers, eBooks, and more, depending on your settings.  Click the link at the top of the snippet to view the content, or right-click and copy the link to use in emails or on social networks like Twitter. If you’d like to add this snippet to your website or blog, click the Download content link at the bottom.   Now you can preview what the snippet will look like on your site, and change the width or height to fit your site.  You can view and edit the source code of the snippet from the box at the bottom, and then copy it to use on your site. Copy the code, and paste it in the HTML of a blog post, email, webpage, or anywhere else you wish to share it.  Here we’re pasting it into the HTML editor in Windows Live Writer so we can post it to a blog. After adding a title and opening paragraph, we have a nice blog post that only took a few minutes to put together but should still be useful for our readers.  You can check out the blog post we created at the link below. Readers can click on the links, which will direct them to the content on Microsoft’s websites. Conclusion If you frequently need to find educational and informative content about Microsoft products and services, Broadcaster can be a great service to keep you up to date.  The service worked quite good in our tests, and generally found relevant content to our keywords.  We had difficulty embedding links to eBooks that were listed by Broadcaster, but everything else worked for us.  Now you can always have high quality content to help your customers, coworkers, friends, and more, and you just might find something that will help you, too! Link Microsoft Broadcaster (registration required) Example Post at Techinch.com with Content from Microsoft Broadcaster Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPAnnouncing the How-To Geek BlogsNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineHow To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Fix Common Inkjet Printer Errors Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 What is HTML5? 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