Search Results

Search found 14405 results on 577 pages for 'great circle'.

Page 397/577 | < Previous Page | 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404  | Next Page >

• Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here.  The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features.  Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.  You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach.  Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries.  ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server.  This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends.  We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project).  Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios).  We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation).  Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3.  This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4.  ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated.  This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model.  We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute  with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC.  This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications.  These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support).  The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project.  It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers).  You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing.  This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server.  The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site.  It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers.  You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner.  Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead.  Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3.  The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release.  MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes.  Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your  existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English.  We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days.  I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries).  You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.  The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects.  NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet.  The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others.  You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today.  We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.  You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server.  The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables.  SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4).  SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables.  Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2.  These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0.  Orchard is a free, open source, community based project.  It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard).  Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage).  Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.  WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development.  It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla).  Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites.  WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination.  It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer.  Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better.  A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Summary of Month – Wait Type – Day 28 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  I am glad to announce that the month of Wait Types and Queues very successful. I am glad that it was very well received and there was great amount of participation from community. I am fortunate to have some of the excellent comments throughout the series. I want to dedicate this series to all the guest blogger – Jonathan, Jacob, Glenn, and Feodor for their kindness to take a participation in this series. Here is the complete list of the blog posts in this series. I enjoyed writing the series and I plan to continue writing similar series. Please offer your opinion. SQL SERVER – Introduction to Wait Stats and Wait Types – Wait Type – Day 1 of 28 SQL SERVER – Signal Wait Time Introduction with Simple Example – Wait Type – Day 2 of 28 SQL SERVER – DMV – sys.dm_os_wait_stats Explanation – Wait Type – Day 3 of 28 SQL SERVER – DMV – sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks and sys.dm_exec_requests – Wait Type – Day 4 of 28 SQL SERVER – Capturing Wait Types and Wait Stats Information at Interval – Wait Type – Day 5 of 28 SQL SERVER – CXPACKET – Parallelism – Usual Solution – Wait Type – Day 6 of 28 SQL SERVER – CXPACKET – Parallelism – Advanced Solution – Wait Type – Day 7 of 28 SQL SERVER – SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD – Wait Type – Day 8 of 28 SQL SERVER – PAGEIOLATCH_DT, PAGEIOLATCH_EX, PAGEIOLATCH_KP, PAGEIOLATCH_SH, PAGEIOLATCH_UP – Wait Type – Day 9 of 28 SQL SERVER – IO_COMPLETION – Wait Type – Day 10 of 28 SQL SERVER – ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION – Wait Type – Day 11 of 28 SQL SERVER – PAGELATCH_DT, PAGELATCH_EX, PAGELATCH_KP, PAGELATCH_SH, PAGELATCH_UP – Wait Type – Day 12 of 28 SQL SERVER – FT_IFTS_SCHEDULER_IDLE_WAIT – Full Text – Wait Type – Day 13 of 28 SQL SERVER – BACKUPIO, BACKUPBUFFER – Wait Type – Day 14 of 28 SQL SERVER – LCK_M_XXX – Wait Type – Day 15 of 28 SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Jonathan Kehayias – Wait Type – Day 16 of 28 SQL SERVER – WRITELOG – Wait Type – Day 17 of 28 SQL SERVER – LOGBUFFER – Wait Type – Day 18 of 28 SQL SERVER – PREEMPTIVE and Non-PREEMPTIVE – Wait Type – Day 19 of 28 SQL SERVER – MSQL_XP – Wait Type – Day 20 of 28 SQL SERVER – Guest Posts – Feodor Georgiev – The Context of Our Database Environment – Going Beyond the Internal SQL Server Waits – Wait Type – Day 21 of 28 SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Jacob Sebastian – Filestream – Wait Types – Wait Queues – Day 22 of 28 SQL SERVER – OLEDB – Link Server – Wait Type – Day 23 of 28 SQL SERVER – 2000 – DBCC SQLPERF(waitstats) – Wait Type – Day 24 of 28 SQL SERVER – 2011 – Wait Type – Day 25 of 28 SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Glenn Berry – Wait Type – Day 26 of 28 SQL SERVER – Best Reference – Wait Type – Day 27 of 28 SQL SERVER – Summary of Month – Wait Type – Day 28 of 28 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• The Business case for Big Data

  - by jasonw

  The Business Case for Big Data Part 1 What's the Big Deal Okay, so a new buzz word is emerging. It's gone beyond just a buzzword now, and I think it is going to change the landscape of retail, financial services, healthcare....everything. Let me spend a moment to talk about what i'm going to talk about. Massive amounts of data are being collected every second, more than ever imaginable, and the size of this data is more than can be practically managed by today’s current strategies and technologies. There is a revolution at hand centering on this groundswell of data and it will change how we execute our businesses through greater efficiencies, new revenue discovery and even enable innovation. It is the revolution of Big Data. This is more than just a new buzzword is being tossed around technology circles.This blog series for Big Data will explain this new wave of technology and provide a roadmap for businesses to take advantage of this growing trend. Cases for Big Data There is a growing list of use cases for big data. We naturally think of Marketing as the low hanging fruit. Many projects look to analyze twitter feeds to find new ways to do marketing. I think of a great example from a TED speech that I recently saw on data visualization from Facebook from my masters studies at University of Virginia. We can see when the most likely time for breaks-ups occurs by looking at status changes and updates on users Walls. This is the intersection of Big Data, Analytics and traditional structured data. Ted Video Marketers can use this to sell more stuff. I really like the following piece on looking at twitter feeds to measure mood. The following company was bought by a hedge fund. They could predict how the S&P was going to do within three days at an 85% accuracy. Link to the article Here we see a convergence of predictive analytics and Big Data. So, we'll look at a lot of these business cases and start talking about what this means for the business. It's more than just finding ways to use Hadoop + NoSql and we'll talk about that too. How do I start in Big Data? That's what is coming next post.

  Read the article

• Grounded in Dublin

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Friday's hands-on workshop in the Oracle office in Dublin was quite good fun for everybody - except for Mick who has just recognized that his Ryanair flight back to Cork has been canceled (So I hope you've returned home well!) and me as my flights back to Munich via London City had been canceled as well. It's always good to have somebody in the workshop from Air Lingus so I've got hourly information what's going in in the Irish airspace (and now I know that the system dealing with such situations is an well prepared Oracle database which runs just like a switch watch - Thanks again for all your support!!! Was great to talk to you!!!). But to be honest, there are worse places to be grounded for a few days than Dublin. At least it gave me the chance to do something which I never had time enough before when visiting Oracle Ireland: a bit of sightseeing. When I've realized that nothing seems to move over the weekend I started organizing my travel back yesterday. It was no fun at all because there's no single system to book such a travel. Figuring out all possibilities and options going back to Munich was the first challange. Irish Ferries webpage was moaning with all the unexpected load (currently it's fully down). Hotel booking websites showed vacancies in Holyhead but didn't let me book. And calling them just reveiled that there are no rooms left. Haven't stayed overnight in a train station for quite a while ;-) The website of VirginTrains puzzled me with offering a seat at an enormous price for a train ride from Holyhead to London Euston (Thanks, Sir Richard Branson!) just to tell me after I booked a ticket that there are no seats left (but I traveled German railsways a few weeks ago from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt sitting on the floor as well). Eurostar's website let me choose tickets through the tunnel to tell me in the final step that the ticket cannot be confirmed as there are no seats left - but the next check again showed bookable seats - must be a database from some other vendor which has no proper row level locking ... hm ...?! Finally the TGV page for the speed train to Stuttgart and then the ICE to Munich was not allowing searches for quite a while - but ultimately ... after 4.5 hours of searching, waiting, sending credit card information again and again ... So if you have a few spare fingers please keep them crossed :-) And good luck to all my colleagues traveling back from the Exadata training in Berlin. As Mike Appleyard, my colleague from the UK presales team wrote: "Dublin and Berlin aren't too bad a place to get stuck... ;-)"

  Read the article

• View Maps and Get Directions in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Every so often we all need to look at a map for reference purposes or to get directions. If you are looking for a great quick reference app then join us as we look at the Mini Google Maps extension for Google Chrome. Mini Google Maps in Action While this may look like a rather basic map extension there is more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Here is the default view when you open Mini Google Maps for the first time. Things that we really liked about this extension were: Three different aerial views available (Map, Satellite, & Terrain) Three different viewing sizes available (and the extension remembers your chosen size) The ability to get directions in combination with a map We decided to try each of the viewing sizes available…here you can see the “Medium Setting”. Notice that the scale stays the same but you get more territory included to view. Then the “Large Setting”…which we infinitely preferred to the others. Once again look at the amount of territory included by default…very nice. Switching over to the “Satellite View”… Followed by the “Terrain View”. For our first example we decided to peek at Vancouver, British Columbia. After zooming out a little bit we had a very nice looking map. For the next test we asked for directions from Vancouver to Toronto. Both the directions and map turned out very well. And just for fun we looked up Paris, France with the “Satellite View”. Conclusion If you find yourself needing to view a map or get directions often then the Mini Google Maps extension will be a very useful tool for you. Links Download the Mini Google Maps extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007Stupid Geek Tricks: Browse the Web from OutlookView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

  Read the article

• Managing Database Clusters - A Whole Lot Simpler

  - by mat.keep(at)oracle.com

  Clustered computing brings with it many benefits: high performance, high availability, scalable infrastructure, etc.  But it also brings with it more complexity.Why ?  Well, by its very nature, there are more "moving parts" to monitor and manage (from physical, virtual and logical hosts) to fault detection and failover software to redundant networking components - the list goes on.  And a cluster that isn't effectively provisioned and managed will cause more downtime than the standalone systems it is designed to improve upon.  Not so great....When it comes to the database industry, analysts already estimate that 50% of a typical database's Total Cost of Ownership is attributable to staffing and downtime costs.  These costs will only increase if a database cluster is to hard to properly administer.Over the past 9 months, monitoring and management has been a major focus in the development of the MySQL Cluster database, and on Tuesday 12th January, the product team will be presenting the output of that development in a new webinar.Even if you can't make the date, it is still worth registering so you will receive automatic notification when the on-demand replay is availableIn the webinar, the team will cover:    * NDBINFO: released with MySQL Cluster 7.1, NDBINFO presents real-time status and usage statistics, providing developers and DBAs with a simple means of pro-actively monitoring and optimizing database performance and availability.    * MySQL Cluster Manager (MCM): available as part of the commercial MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, MCM simplifies the creation and management of MySQL Cluster by automating common management tasks, delivering higher administration productivity and enhancing cluster agility. Tasks that used to take 46 commands can be reduced to just one!    * MySQL Cluster Advisors & Graphs: part of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and available in the commercial MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, the Enterprise Advisor includes automated best practice rules that alert on key performance and availability metrics from MySQL Cluster data nodes.You'll also learn how you can get started evaluating and using all of these tools to simplify MySQL Cluster management.This session will last round an hour and will include interactive Q&A throughout. You can learn more about MySQL Cluster Manager from this whitepaper and on-line demonstration.  You can also download the packages from eDelivery (just select "MySQL Database" as the product pack, select your platform, click "Go" and then scroll down to get the software).While managing clusters will never be easy, the webinar will show hou how it just got a whole lot simpler !

  Read the article

• Older SAS1 hardware Vs. newer SAS2 hardware

  - by user12620172

  I got a question today from someone asking about the older SAS1 hardware from over a year ago that we had on the older 7x10 series. They didn't leave an email so I couldn't respond directly, but I said this blog would be blunt, frank, and open so I have no problem addressing it publicly. A quick history lesson here: When Sun first put out the 7x10 family hardware, the 7410 and 7310 used a SAS1 backend connection to a JBOD that had SATA drives in it. This JBOD was not manufactured by Sun nor did Sun own the IP for it. Now, when Oracle took over, they had a problem with that, and I really can’t blame them. The decision was made to cut off that JBOD and it’s manufacturer completely and use our own where Oracle controlled both the IP and the manufacturing. So in the summer of 2010, the cut was made, and the 7410 and 7310 had a hardware refresh and now had a SAS2 backend going to a SAS2 JBOD with SAS2 drives instead of SATA. This new hardware had two big advantages. First, there was a nice performance increase, mostly due to the faster backend. Even better, the SAS2 interface on the drives allowed for a MUCH faster failover between cluster heads, as the SATA drives were the bottleneck on the older hardware. In September of 2010 there was a major refresh of the rest of the 7000 hardware, the controllers and the other family members, and that’s where we got today’s current line-up of the 7x20 series. So the 7x20 has always used the new trays, and the 7410 and 7310 have used the new SAS2 trays since last July of 2010. Now for the bad news. People who have the 7410 and 7310 from BEFORE the July 2010 cutoff have the models with SAS1 HBAs in them to connect to the older SAS1 trays. Remember, that manufacturer cut all ties with us and stopped making the JBOD, so there’s just no way to get more of them, as they don’t exist. There are some options, however. Oracle support does support taking out the SAS1 HBAs in the old 7410 and 7310 and put in newer SAS2 HBAs which can talk to the new trays. Hey, I didn’t say it was a great option, I just said it’s an option. I fully realize that you would then have a SAS1 JBOD full of SATA drives that you could no longer connect. I do know a client that did this, and took the SAS1 JBOD and connected it to another server and formatted the drives and is using it as a plain, non-7000 JBOD. This is not supported by Oracle support. The other option is to just keep it as-is, as it works just fine, but you just can’t expand it. Then you can get a newer 7x20 series, and use the built-in ZFSSA replication feature to move the data over. Now you can use the newer one for your production data and use the older one for DR, snaps and clones.

  Read the article

• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

  Read the article

• Forbes Announcing The World’s Top 20 Billionaires

  - by Suganya

  Forbes company recently conducted a survey to figure out the world’s Billionaires list and has released it listing the top 20 names of the Billionaires. The company says that for the third time in the last three years the world has a new richest man for this year. So it means that Bill Gates was beaten up by someone else in world. Who is the new richest man in the world?   Forbes.Com announced the richest man in world and this time it is not Bill Gates. But it is Carlos Slim Helu who is into Telecom industry. Carlos lives in Mexico and he had the third richest man’s place last year. Having shown a Net worth of $ 53.5 Billion, Carlos has increased $18.5 Billion in a year. Carlos swooped on the privatization of Mexico’s national telephone service during the last decade and now has achieved the world’s first richest man. Following Carlos, in the second position is Bill Gates with the Nett worth of $53 Billion. As Bill Gates requires no great introduction, lets move on to the next place. The third place is occupied by Warren Buffett followed by Mukesh Ambani and Lakshmi Mittal in fourth and fifth places respectively. The top 20 names of world’s richest people, their occupation and the Nett worth that they hold are S.No Name Nett Worth (in $ Billion) Source of Income 1 Carlos Slim Helu 53.5 Telecom 2 Bill Gates 53 Microsoft 3 Warren Buffett 47 Investments 4 Mukesh Ambani 29 Petrochemical, Oil and Gas 5 Lakshmi Mittal 28.7 Steel 6 Lawrence Ellison 28 Oracle 7 Bernard Arnault 27.5 Luxury Goods 8 Eike Batista 27 Mining, Oil 9 Amancio Ortega 25 Fashion, Retail 10 Karl Albrecht 23.5 Supermarkets 11 Ingvar Kamprad and Family 23 IKEA 12 Christy Walton and Family 22.5 Wal-Mart 13 Stefan Persson 22.4 H & M 14 Li Ka-shing 21 Diversified 15 Jim C. Walton 20.7 Wal-Mart 16 Alice Walton 20.6 Wal-Mart 17 Liliane Bettencourt 20 L’Oreal 18 S. Robson Walton 19.8 Wal-Mart 19 Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Alsaud 19.4 Diversified 20 David Thomson and Family 19 Thomson Reuters   Source: Forbes and Image Credit : kevindooley Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

  Read the article

• JavaScript Data Binding Frameworks

  - by dwahlin

  Data binding is where it’s at now days when it comes to building client-centric Web applications. Developers experienced with desktop frameworks like WPF or web frameworks like ASP.NET, Silverlight, or others are used to being able to take model objects containing data and bind them to UI controls quickly and easily. When moving to client-side Web development the data binding story hasn’t been great since neither HTML nor JavaScript natively support data binding. This means that you have to write code to place data in a control and write code to extract it. Although it’s certainly feasible to do it from scratch (many of us have done it this way for years), it’s definitely tedious and not exactly the best solution when it comes to maintenance and re-use. Over the last few years several different script libraries have been released to simply the process of binding data to HTML controls. In fact, the subject of data binding is becoming so popular that it seems like a new script library is being released nearly every week. Many of the libraries provide MVC/MVVM pattern support in client-side JavaScript apps and some even integrate directly with server frameworks like Node.js. Here’s a quick list of a few of the available libraries that support data binding (if you like any others please add a comment and I’ll try to keep the list updated): AngularJS MVC framework for data binding (although closely follows the MVVM pattern). Backbone.js MVC framework with support for models, key/value binding, custom events, and more. Derby Provides a real-time environment that runs in the browser an in Node.js. The library supports data binding and templates. Ember Provides support for templates that automatically update as data changes. JsViews Data binding framework that provides “interactive data-driven views built on top of JsRender templates”. jQXB Expression Binder Lightweight jQuery plugin that supports bi-directional data binding support. KnockoutJS MVVM framework with robust support for data binding. For an excellent look at using KnockoutJS check out John Papa’s course on Pluralsight. Meteor End to end framework that uses Node.js on the server and provides support for data binding on  the client. Simpli5 JavaScript framework that provides support for two-way data binding. WinRT with HTML5/JavaScript If you’re building Windows 8 applications using HTML5 and JavaScript there’s built-in support for data binding in the WinJS library.   I won’t have time to write about each of these frameworks, but in the next post I’m going to talk about my (current) favorite when it comes to client-side JavaScript data binding libraries which is AngularJS. AngularJS provides an extremely clean way – in my opinion - to extend HTML syntax to support data binding while keeping model objects (the objects that hold the data) free from custom framework method calls or other weirdness. While I’m writing up the next post, feel free to visit the AngularJS developer guide if you’d like additional details about the API and want to get started using it.

  Read the article

• ARM TechCon 2013: Oracle, ARM expand collaboration on servers, Internet of Things

  - by Henrik Stahl

  If you have been following Java news, you are already aware of the fact that there has been a lot of investment in Java for ARM-based devices and servers over the last couple of years (news, more news, even more, and lots more). We have released Java ME Embedded binaries for ARM Cortex-M micro controllers, Java SE Embedded for ARM application processors, and a port of the Oracle JDK for ARM-based servers. We have been making Java available to the Beagleboard, Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorms/LeJOS communities and worked with them and the Java User Groups to evangelize Java as a great development environment for IoT devices. We have announced commercial relationships with Freescale, Qualcomm, Gemalto M2M, SIMCom to name a few. ARM and Freescale on their side have joined the JCP, recently been voted in as members of the Executive Committee, and have worked with Oracle to evangelize Java in their ecosystem. It is with this background, Nandini Ramani, Vice President, Java Platform at Oracle, announced a expanded collaboration with ARM in a TechCon 2013 keynote titled "Enabling Compelling Services for IoT". To summarize the announcement: ARM and Oracle will work together on interoperability between the ARM Sensinode communications stack (based on CoAP, DTLS and 6LoWPAN) and Oracle's Java ME, Java SE and middleware products. ARM will donate the Sensinode CoAP protocol engine to OpenJDK to stimulate broad adoption of the CoAP protocol, and work with Oracle to extend the relevant Java specifications with CoAP support. CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) is an IETF specification that provides a low-bandwidth request/response protocol suitable for IoT applications. ARM will work with Oracle and Freescale to enable the mbed Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to act as a portability layer for Java ME Embedded. Oracle will enable mbed as a tier one platform for Java ME Embedded. Over time, this effort will allow any mbed-enabled platforms (mostly based on Cortex-M microcontrollers) to work with off the shelf Java ME Embedded binaries, extending the reach of Java ME into IoT edge nodes. In Nandini's keynote, Oracle showed a roadmap to port the Oracle JDK for Linux on 64-bit ARMv8 servers in the 2015 time frame, preceded by an extended early access program. We expect this binary to have full feature parity with Oracle JDK on other platforms, and be available under the same royalty-free license. This effort has been going on for some time, but is now accelerated due to availability of hardware from Applied Micro. Oracle will be working with Applied Micro on the ARMv8 port, and on optimizing Java for their X-Gene products. Oracle and ARM will work closely on IoT architecture, and on evangelizing Java on ARM for both servers and IoT devices. These announcements reinforce Java's position as a first-class citizen in the ARM ecosystem, and signal a commitment from us to collaborate on driving standards and open ecosystem for the Internet of Things. If you are active in this area and not already in touch with us, or interested in learning more - please reach out to us!

  Read the article

• IIS 7&rsquo;s Sneaky Secret to Get COM-InterOp to Run

  - by David Hoerster

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/DavidHoerster/archive/2013/06/17/iis-7rsquos-sneaky-secret-to-get-com-interop-to-run.aspxIf you’re like me, you don’t really do a lot with COM components these days.  For me, I’ve been ‘lucky’ to stay in the managed world for the past 6 or 7 years. Until last week. I’m running a project to upgrade a web interface to an older COM-based application.  The old web interface is all classic ASP and lots of tables, in-line styles and a bunch of other late 90’s and early 2000’s goodies.  So in addition to updating the UI to be more modern looking and responsive, I decided to give the server side an update, too.  So I built some COM-InterOp DLL’s (easily through VS2012’s Add Reference feature…nothing new here) and built a test console line app to make sure the COM DLL’s were actually built according to the COM spec.  There’s a document management system that I’m thinking of whose COM DLLs were not proper COM DLLs and crashed and burned every time .NET tried to call them through a COM-InterOp layer. Anyway, my test app worked like a champ and I felt confident that I could build a nice façade around the COM DLL’s and wrap some functionality internally and only expose to my users/clients what they really needed. So I did this, built some tests and also built a test web app to make sure everything worked great.  It did.  It ran fine in IIS Express via Visual Studio 2012, and the timings were very close to the pure Classic ASP calls, so there wasn’t much overhead involved going through the COM-InterOp layer. You know where this is going, don’t you? So I deployed my test app to a DEV server running IIS 7.5.  When I went to my first test page that called the COM-InterOp layer, I got this pretty message: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {81C08CAE-1453-11D4-BEBC-00500457076D} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). It worked as a console app and while running under IIS Express, so it must be permissions, right?  I gave every account I could think of all sorts of COM+ rights and nothing, nada, zilch! Then I came across this question on Experts Exchange, and at the bottom of the page, someone mentioned that the app pool should be running to allow 32-bit apps to run.  Oh yeah, my machine is 64-bit; these COM DLL’s I’m using are old and are definitely 32-bit.  I didn’t check for that and didn’t even think about that.  But I went ahead and looked at the app pool that my web site was running under and what did I see?  Yep, select your app pool in IIS 7.x, click on Advanced Settings and check for “Enable 32-bit Applications”. I went ahead and set it to True and my test application suddenly worked. Hope this helps somebody out there from pulling out your hair.

  Read the article

• What&rsquo;s new in RadChart for 2010 Q1 (Silverlight / WPF)

  Greetings, RadChart fans! It is with great pleasure that I present this short highlight of our accomplishments for the Q1 release :). Weve worked very hard to make the best silverlight and WPF charting product even better. Here is some of what we did during the past few months.   1) Zooming&Scrolling and the new sampling engine: Without a doubt one of the most important things we did. This new feature allows you to bind your chart to a very large set of data with blazing performance. Dont take my word for it give it a try!   2) New Smart Label Positioning and Spider-like labels feature: This new feature really helps with very busy graphs. You can play with the different settings we offer in this example.     3) Sorting and Filtering. Much like our RadGridview control the chart now allows you to sort and filter your data out of the box with a single line of code!   4) Legend improvements Weve also been paying attention to those of you who wanted a much improved legend. It is now possible to customize the look and feel of legend items and legend position with a single click.     5) Custom palette brushes. You have told us that you want to easily customize all palette colors using a single clean API from both XAML and code behind. The new custom palette brushes API does exactly that.   There are numerous other improvements as well, as much improved themes, performance optimizations and other features that we did. If you want to dig in further check the release notes and changes and backwards compatibility topics.   Feel free to share the pains and gains of working with RadChart. Our team is always open to receiving constructive feedback and beer :-)Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• What&rsquo;s new in RadChart for 2010 Q1 (Silverlight / WPF)

  Greetings, RadChart fans! It is with great pleasure that I present this short highlight of our accomplishments for the Q1 release :). Weve worked very hard to make the best silverlight and WPF charting product even better. Here is some of what we did during the past few months.   1) Zooming&Scrolling and the new sampling engine: Without a doubt one of the most important things we did. This new feature allows you to bind your chart to a very large set of data with blazing performance. Dont take my word for it give it a try!   2) New Smart Label Positioning and Spider-like labels feature: This new feature really helps with very busy graphs. You can play with the different settings we offer in this example.     3) Sorting and Filtering. Much like our RadGridview control the chart now allows you to sort and filter your data out of the box with a single line of code!   4) Legend improvements Weve also been paying attention to those of you who wanted a much improved legend. It is now possible to customize the look and feel of legend items and legend position with a single click.     5) Custom palette brushes. You have told us that you want to easily customize all palette colors using a single clean API from both XAML and code behind. The new custom palette brushes API does exactly that.   There are numerous other improvements as well, as much improved themes, performance optimizations and other features that we did. If you want to dig in further check the release notes and changes and backwards compatibility topics.   Feel free to share the pains and gains of working with RadChart. Our team is always open to receiving constructive feedback and beer :-)Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 Zooming – Keyboard Commands, Global Zoom

  - by Jon Galloway

  One of my favorite features in Visual Studio 2010 is zoom. It first caught my attention as a useful tool for screencasts and presentations, but after getting used to it I’m finding that it’s really useful when I’m developing – letting me zoom out to see the big picture, then zoom in to concentrate on a few lines of code. Zooming without the scroll wheel The common way you’ll see this feature demonstrated is with the mouse wheel – you hold down the control key and scroll up or down to change font size. However, I’m often using this on my laptop, which doesn’t have a mouse wheel. It turns out that there are other ways to control zooming in Visual Studio 2010. Keyboard commands You can use Control+Shift+Comma to zoom out and Control+Shift+Period to zoom in. I find it’s easier to remember these by the greater-than / less-than signs, so it’s really Control+> to zoom in and Control+< to zoom out. Like most Visual Studio commands, you can change those the keyboard buttons. In the tools menu, select Options / Keyboard, then either scroll down the list to the three View.Zoom commands or filter by typing View.Zoom into the “Show commands containing” textbox. The Scroll Dropdown If you forget the keyboard commands and you don’t have a scroll wheel, there’s a zoom menu in the text editor. I’m mostly pointing it out because I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 for months and never noticed it until this week. It’s down in the lower left corner. Keeping Zoom In Sync Across All Tabs Zoom setting is per-tab, which is a problem if you’re cranking up your font sizes for a presentation. Fortunately there’s a great new Visual Studio Extension called Presentation Zoom. It’s a nice, simple extension that just does one thing – updates all your editor windows to keep the zoom setting in sync. It’s written by Chris Granger, a Visual Studio Program Manager, in case you’re worried about installing random extensions. See it in action Of course, if you’ve got Visual Studio 2010 installed, you’ve hopefully already been zooming like mad as you read this. If not, you can watch a 2 minute video by the Visual Studio showing it off.

  Read the article

• WPF vs. WinForms - a Delphi programmer's perspective?

  - by Robert Oschler

  I have read most of the major threads on WPF vs. WinForms and I find myself stuck in the unfortunate ambivalence you can fall into when deciding between the tried and true previous tech (Winforms), and it's successor (WPF). I am a veteran Delphi programmer of many years that is finally making the jump to C#. My fellow Delphi programmers out there will understand that I am excited to know that Anders Hejlsberg, of Delphi fame, was the architect behind C#. I have a strong addiction to Delphi's VCL custom components, especially those involved in making multi-step Wizards and components that act as a container for child components. With that background, I am hoping that those of you that switched from Delphi to C# can help me with my WinForms vs. WPF decision for writing my initial applications. Note, I am very impatient when coding and things like full fledged auto-complete and proper debugger support can make or break a project for me, including being able to find readily available information on API features and calls and even more so, workarounds for bugs. The SO threads and comments in the early 2009 date range give me great concern over WPF when it comes to potential frustrations that could mar my C# UI development coding. On the other hand, spending an inordinate amount of time learning an API tech that is, even if it is not abandoned, soon to be replaced (WinForms), is equally troubling and I do find the GPU support in WPF tantalizing. Hence my ambivalence. Since I haven't learned either tech yet I have a rare opportunity to get a fresh start and not have to face the big "unlearning" curve I've seen people mention in various threads when a WinForms programmer makes the move to WPF. On the other hand, if using WPF will just be too frustrating or have other major negative consequences for an impatient RAD developer like myself, then I'll just stick with WinForms until WPF reaches the same level of support and ease of use. To give you a concrete example into my psychology as a programmer, I used VB and subsequently Delphi to completely avoid altogether the very real pain of coding with MFC, a Windows UI library that many developers suffered through while developing early Windows apps. I have never regretted my luck in avoiding MFC. It would also be comforting to know if Anders Hejlsberg had a hand in the architecture of WPF and/or WinForms, and if there are any disparities in the creative vision and ease of use embodied in either code base. Finally, for the Delphi programmers again, let me know how much "IDE schock" I'm in for when using WPF as opposed to WinForms, especially when it comes to debugger support. Any job market comments updated for 2011 would be appreciated too. -- roschler

  Read the article

• WPF vs. WinForms - a Delphi programmer's perspective?

  - by Robert Oschler

  Hello all. I have read most of the major threads on WPF vs. WinForms and I find myself stuck in the unfortunate ambivalence you can fall into when deciding between the tried and true previous tech (Winforms), and it's successor (WPF). I am a veteran Delphi programmer of many years that is finally making the jump to C#. My fellow Delphi programmers out there will understand that I am excited to know that Anders Hejlsberg, of Delphi fame, was the architect behind C#. I have a strong addiction to Delphi's VCL custom components, especially those involved in making multi-step Wizards and components that act as a container for child components. With that background, I am hoping that those of you that switched from Delphi to C# can help me with my WinForms vs. WPF decision for writing my initial applications. Note, I am very impatient when coding and things like full fledged auto-complete and proper debugger support can make or break a project for me, including being able to find readily available information on API features and calls and even more so, workarounds for bugs. The SO threads and comments in the early 2009 date range give me great concern over WPF when it comes to potential frustrations that could mar my C# UI development coding. On the other hand, spending an inordinate amount of time learning an API tech that is, even if it is not abandoned, soon to be replaced (WinForms), is equally troubling and I do find the GPU support in WPF tantalizing. Hence my ambivalence. Since I haven't learned either tech yet I have a rare opportunity to get a fresh start and not have to face the big "unlearning" curve I've seen people mention in various threads when a WinForms programmer makes the move to WPF. On the other hand, if using WPF will just be too frustrating or have other major negative consequences for an impatient RAD developer like myself, then I'll just stick with WinForms until WPF reaches the same level of support and ease of use. To give you a concrete example into my psychology as a programmer, I used VB and subsequently Delphi to completely avoid altogether the very real pain of coding with MFC, a Windows UI library that many developers suffered through while developing early Windows apps. I have never regretted my luck in avoiding MFC. It would also be comforting to know if Anders Hejlsberg had a hand in the architecture of WPF and/or WinForms, and if there are any disparities in the creative vision and ease of use embodied in either code base. Finally, for the Delphi programmers again, let me know how much "IDE schock" I'm in for when using WPF as opposed to WinForms, especially when it comes to debugger support. Any job market comments updated for 2011 would be appreciated too. -- roschler

  Read the article

• Book Review: Inside Windows Communicat?ion Foundation by Justin Smith

  - by Sam Abraham

  In gearing up for a new major project, I have taken it upon myself to research and review various aspects of our Microsoft stack of choice seeking new creative ways for us to leverage in our upcoming state-of-the-art solution projected to position us ahead of the competition. While I am a big supporter of search engines and online articles as a quick and usually reliable source of information, I have opted in my investigative quest to actually “hit the books”.  I have also made it a habit to provide quick reviews for material I go over hoping this can be of help to someone who may be looking for items others may have had success using for reference. I have started a few months ago by investigating better ways to implementing, profiling and troubleshooting SQL Server 2008. My reference of choice was Itzik Ben-Gan et al’s “Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008” series. While it has been a month since my last book review, this by no means meant that I have been sitting idle. It has been pretty challenging to balance research with the continuous flow of projects and deadlines all while balancing that with my family duties which, of course, always comes first. In this post, I will be providing a quick review of my latest reading: Inside Windows Communication Foundation by Justin Smith. This book has been on my reading list for a very long time and I am proud to have finally tackled it. Justin’s book presents a great coverage of WCF internals. His simple, concise and well-worded style has simplified the relatively complex internals of WCF and made it comprehensible. Justin opted to organize the book into three parts: an introduction to WCF, coverage of the Channel Layer and a look at WCF internals at the ServiceModel layer. Part I introduced the concepts and made the case behind WCF while covering a simplified version of WCF’s message patterns, endpoints and contracts. In Part II, Justin provided a thorough coverage of the internals of Messages, Channels and Channel Managers. Part III concluded this nice reading with coverage of Bindings, Contracts, Dispatchers and Clients. While one would not likely need to extend WCF at that low level of the API, an understanding of the inner-workings of WCF is a must to avoid pitfalls mainly caused by misinformation or erroneous assumptions. Problems can quickly arise in high-traffic hosted solutions, but most can be easily avoided with some minimal time investment and education. My next goal is to pay a closer look at WCF from the programmer’s API perspective now that I have acquired a better understanding of its inner working.   Many thanks to the O’Reilly User Group Program and its support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group.   Stay tuned for more… All the best, --Sam

  Read the article

• The Importance of a Security Assessment - by Michael Terra, Oracle

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Today's Blog was written by Michael Terra, who was the Subject Matter Expert for the recently announced Oracle Online Security Assessment. You can take the Online Assessment here: Take the Online Assessment Over the past decade, IT Security has become a recognized and respected Business discipline.  Several factors have contributed to IT Security becoming a core business and organizational enabler including, but not limited to, increased external threats and increased regulatory pressure. Security is also viewed as a key enabler for strategic corporate activities such as mergers and acquisitions.Now, the challenge for senior security professionals is to develop an ongoing dialogue within their organizations about the importance of information security and how it can impact their organization's strategic objectives/mission. The importance of conducting regular “Security Assessments” across the IT and physical infrastructure has become increasingly important. Security standards and frameworks, such as the international standard ISO 27001, are increasingly being adopted by organizations and their business partners as proof of their security posture and “Security Assessments” are a great way to ensure a continued alignment to these frameworks.Oracle offers a number of different security assessment covering a broad range of technologies. Some of these are short engagements conducted for free with our strategic customers and partners. Others are longer term paid engagements delivered by Oracle Consulting Services or one of our partners. The goal of a security assessment, (also known as a security audit or security review), is to ensure that necessary security controls are integrated into the design and implementation of a project, application or technology.  A properly completed security assessment should provide documentation outlining any security gaps that exist in an infrastructure and the associated risks for those gaps. With that knowledge, an organization can choose to either mitigate, transfer, avoid or accept the risk. One example of an Oracle offering is a Security Readiness Assessment:The Oracle Security Readiness Assessment is a practical security architecture review focused on aligning an organization’s enterprise security architecture to their business principals and strategic objectives. The service will establish a multi-phase security architecture roadmap focused on supporting new and existing business initiatives.Offering OverviewThe Security Readiness Assessment will: Define an organization’s current security posture and provide a roadmap to a desired future state architecture by mapping  security solutions to business goals Incorporate commonly accepted security architecture concepts to streamline an organization’s security vision from strategy to implementation Define the people, process and technology implications of the desired future state architecture The objective is to deliver cohesive, best practice security architectures spanning multiple domains that are unique and specific to the context of your organization. Offering DetailsThe Oracle Security Readiness Assessment is a multi-stage process with a dedicated Oracle Security team supporting your organization.  During the course of this free engagement, the team will focus on the following: Review your current business operating model and supporting IT security structures and processes Partner with your organization to establish a future state security architecture leveraging Oracle’s reference architectures, capability maps, and best practices Provide guidance and recommendations on governance practices for the rollout and adoption of your future state security architecture Create an initial business case for the adoption of the future state security architecture If you are interested in finding out more, ask your Sales Consultant or Account Manager for details.

  Read the article

• Desktop Fun: Triple Monitor Wallpaper Collection Series 1

  - by Asian Angel

  Triple monitor setups provide spacious amounts of screen real-estate but can be extremely frustrating to find good wallpapers for. Today we present the first in a series of wallpaper collections to help decorate your triple monitor setup with lots of wallpaper goodness. Note: Click on the picture to see the full-size image—these wallpapers vary in size so you may need to crop, stretch, or place them on a colored background in order to best match them to your screen’s resolution. Special Note: The screen resolution sizes available for each of these wallpapers has been included to help you match them up to your individual settings as easily as possible. All images shown here are thumbnail screenshots of the largest size available for download. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, 5760*1200, and 7680*1600. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 5760*1200. More Triple Monitor Goodness Beautiful 3 Screen Multi-Monitor Space Wallpaper Span the same wallpaper across multiple monitors or use a different wallpaper for each. Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop in Windows 7, Vista or XP For more wallpapers be certain to see our great collections in the Desktop Fun section. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

  Read the article

• [MINI HOW-TO] Change the Default Color Scheme in Office 2010

  - by Mysticgeek

  Like in Office 2007 the default color scheme for 2010 is blue. If you are not a fan of it, here we show you how to change it to silver or black. In this example we are using Microsoft Word, but it works the same way in Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint as well. Once you change the color scheme in one Office application, it will change it for all of the other apps in the suite. Change Color Scheme To change the color scheme click on the File tab to access Backstage View and click on Options. In Word Options the General section should open by default…use the dropdown menu next to Color Scheme to change it to Silver, Blue, or Black then click OK. Here is what Black looks like…who knows why Microsoft decided to leave the blue around the edges. This is the default Blue color scheme… And finally we take a look at the Silver color scheme in Excel… That is all there is to it! It would be nice if they would incorporate other color schemes to Office 2010, as some of you may not be happy with only three choices. If you’re using Office 2007 check out our article on how to change the color scheme in it. Also, The Geek has a cool article on how to set the Color Scheme of Office 2007 with a quick registry hack. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Office 2007 Color Scheme With a Quick Registry HackChange The Default Color Scheme In Office 2007Maximize Space by "Auto-Hiding" the Ribbon in Office 2007How To Personalize the Windows Command PromptOrganize & Group Your Tabs in Firefox the Easy Way 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

  Read the article

• Are you cashing in on the MVP complimentary subscriptions ?

  - by Tarun Arora

  The two most asked questions in the Microsoft technology communities around the Microsoft MVP program are, 1. How do I become a Microsoft MVP? 2. What benefits do I get as an MVP? The answer to the first question has been well answered here. In this blog post, I’ll try and answer the second question.           Please find a comprehensive list of Not for Resale personal subscriptions of various products that Microsoft MVP’s are eligible for Product Description Details JetBrains Resharper, dotTrace, dotCover & WebStorm  https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy/mvp.html RedGate Sql server development, database administration, .net development, azure development (merged with Cerebrata), mySQL development, Oracle development http://www.red-gate.com/community/mvp-program Pluralsight Pluralsight on demand training http://blog.pluralsight.com/2011/02/28/pluralsight-for-mvp/ Cerebrata Cloud storage studio and Azure Diagnostic Manager (part of redgate now) https://www.cerebrata.com/Offers/mvp.aspx Telerik Telerik Ultimate collection & Telerik TeamPulse http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/posts/11-03-01/telerik-gift-for-microsoft-mvps.aspx Developer Express DevEx controls http://www.devexpress.com/Home/Community/mvp.xml InnerWorking 600 hours of .net training catalogue http://www.innerworkings.com/mvp Typemock Typemock Isolator, Typemock Isolator for Sharepoint developers, Typemock Isolator for web developers, TestDriven.NET http://www.typemock.com/mvp SpeakFlow A suite of tools for creating, managing, and delivering non-linear presentations http://www.speakflow.com/ TechSmith Camtasia Studio, SnagIt, screen cast http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html Altova Altova XML spy http://www.altova.com/xml-editor/ Visual SVN VisualSVN Subversion integration plug-in for Visual Studio http://www.visualsvn.com/visualsvn/purchase/mvp/ PreEmptive Solution Professional PreEmptive Analytics, Dotfuscator http://www.preemptive.com/landing/mvp Armadillo Armadillo Adaptive Bug Prevention http://www.armadilloverdrive.com/ IS Decisions NFR license to Userlock, RemoteExec, FileAudit & WinReporter http://www.isdecisions.com/download/mvp-mct-program.htm Idera SQL tools http://www.idera.com/Content/Home.aspx West Wind Help Builder Help builder solution http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2005/Mar/09/Are-you-a-Microsoft-MVP-Get-a-FREE-copy-of-West-Wind-Html-Help-Builder Bamboo Sharepoint tools http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/partner-advantage-program/archive/2008/08/01/partner-advantage-program-mvp.aspx Nitriq Nitriq code analysis http://blog.nitriq.com/FreeLicensesForMicrosoftMVPs.aspx ByteScout Components, Libraries and Developer Tools http://bytescout.com/buy/purchase_nfr_for_mvp.html YourKit Java and .net Profiler http://yourkit.com/.net/profiler/index.jsp Aspose .NET components http://www.aspose.com/corporate/community/2012_05_08_nfr-licenses-for-community-leaders.aspx Apart from google bing fu; stackoverflow and breathtech were a great help in compiling the above list. If you know of any other benefits, offers or complimentary subscriptions on offer for MVPs not cover in the list above, please add to the comment thread and I’ll have it updated in the list. Enjoy

  Read the article

• The Art of Productivity

  - by dwahlin

  Getting things done has always been a challenge regardless of gender, age, race, skill, or job position. No matter how hard some people try, they end up procrastinating tasks until the last minute. Some people simply focus better when they know they’re out of time and can’t procrastinate any longer. How many times have you put off working on a term paper in school until the very last minute? With only a few hours left your mental energy and focus seem to kick in to high gear especially as you realize that you either get the paper done now or risk failing. It’s amazing how a little pressure can turn into a motivator and allow our minds to focus on a given task. Some people seem to specialize in procrastinating just about everything they do while others tend to be the “doers” who get a lot done and ultimately rise up the ladder at work. What’s the difference between these types of people? Is it pure laziness or are other factors at play? I think that some people are certainly more motivated than others, but I also think a lot of it is based on the process that “doers” tend to follow - whether knowingly or unknowingly. While I’ve certainly fought battles with procrastination, I’ve always had a knack for being able to get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. I think a lot of my “get it done” attitude goes back to the the strong work ethic my parents instilled in me at a young age. I remember my dad saying, “You need to learn to work hard!” when I was around 5 years old. I remember that moment specifically because I was on a tractor with him the first time I heard it while he was trying to move some large rocks into a pile. The tractor was big but so were the rocks and my dad had to balance the tractor perfectly so that it didn’t tip forward too far. It was challenging work and somewhat tedious but my dad finished the task and taught me a few important lessons along the way including persistence, the importance of having a skill, and getting the job done right without skimping along the way. In this post I’m going to list a few of the techniques and processes I follow that I hope may be beneficial to others. I blogged about the general concept back in 2009 but thought I’d share some updated information and lessons learned since then. Most of the ideas that follow came from learning and refining my daily work process over the years. However, since most of the ideas are common sense (at least in my opinion), I suspect they can be found in other productivity processes that are out there. Let’s start off with one of the most important yet simple tips: Start Each Day with a List. Start Each Day with a List What are you planning to get done today? Do you keep track of everything in your head or rely on your calendar? While most of us think that we’re pretty good at managing “to do” lists strictly in our head you might be surprised at how affective writing out lists can be. By writing out tasks you’re forced to focus on the most important tasks to accomplish that day, commit yourself to those tasks, and have an easy way to track what was supposed to get done and what actually got done. Start every morning by making a list of specific tasks that you want to accomplish throughout the day. I’ll even go so far as to fill in times when I’d like to work on tasks if I have a lot of meetings or other events tying up my calendar on a given day. I’m not a big fan of using paper since I type a lot faster than I write (plus I write like a 3rd grader according to my wife), so I use the Sticky Notes feature available in Windows. Here’s an example of yesterday’s sticky note: What do you add to your list? That’s the subject of the next tip. Focus on Small Tasks It’s no secret that focusing on small, manageable tasks is more effective than trying to focus on large and more vague tasks. When you make your list each morning only add tasks that you can accomplish within a given time period. For example, if I only have 30 minutes blocked out to work on an article I don’t list “Write Article”. If I do that I’ll end up wasting 30 minutes stressing about how I’m going to get the article done in 30 minutes and ultimately get nothing done. Instead, I’ll list something like “Write Introductory Paragraphs for Article”. The next day I may add, “Write first section of article” or something that’s small and manageable – something I’m confident that I can get done. You’ll find that once you’ve knocked out several smaller tasks it’s easy to continue completing others since you want to keep the momentum going. In addition to keeping my tasks focused and small, I also make a conscious effort to limit my list to 4 or 5 tasks initially. I’ve found that if I list more than 5 tasks I feel a bit overwhelmed which hurts my productivity. It’s easy to add additional tasks as you complete others and you get the added benefit of that confidence boost of knowing that you’re being productive and getting things done as you remove tasks and add others. Getting Started is the Hardest (Yet Easiest) Part I’ve always found that getting started is the hardest part and one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. Getting started working on tasks is a lot like getting a large rock pushed to the bottom of a hill. It’s difficult to get the rock rolling at first, but once you manage to get it rocking some it’s really easy to get it rolling on its way to the bottom. As an example, I’ve written 100s of articles for technical magazines over the years and have really struggled with the initial introductory paragraphs. Keep in mind that these are the paragraphs that don’t really add that much value (in my opinion anyway). They introduce the reader to the subject matter and nothing more. What a waste of time for me to sit there stressing about how to start the article. On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour trying to come up with 2-3 paragraphs of text.  Talk about a productivity killer! Whether you’re struggling with a writing task, some code for a project, an email, or other tasks, jumping in without thinking too much is the best way to get started I’ve found. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have an overall plan when jumping into a task, but on some occasions you’ll find that if you simply jump into the task and stop worrying about doing everything perfectly that things will flow more smoothly. For my introductory paragraph problem I give myself 5 minutes to write out some general concepts about what I know the article will cover and then spend another 10-15 minutes going back and refining that information. That way I actually have some ideas to work with rather than a blank sheet of paper. If I still find myself struggling I’ll write the rest of the article first and then circle back to the introductory paragraphs once I’m done. To sum this tip up: Jump into a task without thinking too hard about it. It’s better to to get the rock at the top of the hill rocking some than doing nothing at all. You can always go back and refine your work.   Learn a Productivity Technique and Stick to It There are a lot of different productivity programs and seminars out there being sold by companies. I’ve always laughed at how much money people spend on some of these motivational programs/seminars because I think that being productive isn’t that hard if you create a re-useable set of steps and processes to follow. That’s not to say that some of these programs/seminars aren’t worth the money of course because I know they’ve definitely benefited some people that have a hard time getting things done and staying focused. One of the best productivity techniques I’ve ever learned is called the “Pomodoro Technique” and it’s completely free. This technique is an extremely simple way to manage your time without having to remember a bunch of steps, color coding mechanisms, or other processes. The technique was originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s and can be implemented with a simple timer. In a nutshell here’s how the technique works: Pick a task to work on Set the timer to 25 minutes and work on the task Once the timer rings record your time Take a 5 minute break Repeat the process Here’s why the technique works well for me: It forces me to focus on a single task for 25 minutes. In the past I had no time goal in mind and just worked aimlessly on a task until I got interrupted or bored. 25 minutes is a small enough chunk of time for me to stay focused. Any distractions that may come up have to wait until after the timer goes off. If the distraction is really important then I stop the timer and record my time up to that point. When the timer is running I act as if I only have 25 minutes total for the task (like you’re down to the last 25 minutes before turning in your term paper….frantically working to get it done) which helps me stay focused and turns into a “beat the clock” type of game. It’s actually kind of fun if you treat it that way and really helps me focus on a the task at hand. I automatically know how much time I’m spending on a given task (more on this later) by using this technique. I know that I have 5 minutes after each pomodoro (the 25 minute sprint) to waste on anything I’d like including visiting a website, stepping away from the computer, etc. which also helps me stay focused when the 25 minute timer is counting down. I use this technique so much that I decided to build a program for Windows 8 called Pomodoro Focus (I plan to blog about how it was built in a later post). It’s a Windows Store application that allows people to track tasks, productive time spent on tasks, interruption time experienced while working on a given task, and the number of pomodoros completed. If a time estimate is given when the task is initially created, Pomodoro Focus will also show the task completion percentage. I like it because it allows me to track my tasks, time spent on tasks (very useful in the consulting world), and even how much time I wasted on tasks (pressing the pause button while working on a task starts the interruption timer). I recently added a new feature that charts productive and interruption time for tasks since I wanted to see how productive I was from week to week and month to month. A few screenshots from the Pomodoro Focus app are shown next, I had a lot of fun building it and use it myself to as I work on tasks.   There are certainly many other productivity techniques and processes out there (and a slew of books describing them), but the Pomodoro Technique has been the simplest and most effective technique I’ve ever come across for staying focused and getting things done.   Persistence is Key Getting things done is great but one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that persistence is key especially when you’re trying to get something done that at times seems insurmountable. Small tasks ultimately lead to larger tasks getting accomplished, however, it’s not all roses along the way as some of the smaller tasks may come with their own share of bumps and bruises that lead to discouragement about the end goal and whether or not it is worth achieving at all. I’ve been on several long-term projects over my career as a software developer (I have one personal project going right now that fits well here) and found that repeating, “Persistence is the key!” over and over to myself really helps. Not every project turns out to be successful, but if you don’t show persistence through the hard times you’ll never know if you succeeded or not. Likewise, if you don’t persistently stick to the process of creating a daily list, follow a productivity process, etc. then the odds of consistently staying productive aren’t good.   Track Your Time How much time do you actually spend working on various tasks? If you don’t currently track time spent answering emails, on phone calls, and working on various tasks then you might be surprised to find out that a task that you thought was going to take you 30 minutes ultimately ended up taking 2 hours. If you don’t track the time you spend working on tasks how can you expect to learn from your mistakes, optimize your time better, and become more productive? That’s another reason why I like the Pomodoro Technique – it makes it easy to stay focused on tasks while also tracking how much time I’m working on a given task.   Eliminate Distractions I blogged about this final tip several years ago but wanted to bring it up again. If you want to be productive (and ultimately successful at whatever you’re doing) then you can’t waste a lot of time playing games or on Twitter, Facebook, or other time sucking websites. If you see an article you’re interested in that has no relation at all to the tasks you’re trying to accomplish then bookmark it and read it when you have some spare time (such as during a pomodoro break). Fighting the temptation to check your friends’ status updates on Facebook? Resist the urge and realize how much those types of activities are hurting your productivity and taking away from your focus. I’ll admit that eliminating distractions is still tough for me personally and something I have to constantly battle. But, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut back on my visits and updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Sure, my Klout score has suffered as a result lately, but does anyone actually care about those types of scores aside from your online “friends” (few of whom you’ve actually met in person)? :-) Ultimately it comes down to self-discipline and how badly you want to be productive and successful in your career, life goals, hobbies, or whatever you’re working on. Rather than having your homepage take you to a time wasting news site, game site, social site, picture site, or others, how about adding something like the following as your homepage? Every time your browser opens you’ll see a personal message which helps keep you on the right track. You can download my ubber-sophisticated homepage here if interested. Summary Is there a single set of steps that if followed can ultimately lead to productivity? I don’t think so since one size has never fit all. Every person is different, works in their own unique way, and has their own set of motivators, distractions, and more. While I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject of productivity, I do think that if you learn what steps work best for you and gradually refine them over time that you can come up with a personal productivity process that can serve you well. Productivity is definitely an “art” that anyone can learn with a little practice and persistence. You’ve seen some of the steps that I personally like to follow and I hope you find some of them useful in boosting your productivity. If you have others you use please leave a comment. I’m always looking for ways to improve.

  Read the article

• Mark Messages As Read in the Outlook 2010 Reading Pane

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you ever feel annoyed that Outlook 2010 doesn’t mark messages as Read as soon as you click and view them in the Reading Pane?  Here we show you how to make Outlook mark them as read as soon as they’re opened. Mark as Read By default, Outlook will not mark a message as read until you select another message.  This can be annoying, because if you read a message and immediately click Delete, it will show up as an unread message in our Deleted Items folder. Let’s change this to make Outlook mark messages as read as soon as we view them in the Reading Pane.  Open Outlook and click File to open Backstage View, and select Options. In Options select Mail on the left menu, and under Outlook panes click on the Reading Pane button. Check the box Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane to make Outlook mark your messages as read when you view them in the Reading Pane.  By default, Outlook will only mark a message read after you’ve been reading it for 5 seconds, though you can change this.  We set it to 0 seconds so our messages would be marked as read as soon as we select them. Click OK in both dialogs, and now your messages will be marked as read as soon as you select them in the reading pane, or soon after, depending on your settings. Conclusion Outlook 2010 is a great email client, but like most programs it has its quirks.  This quick tip can help you get rid of one of Outlook’s annoying features, and make it work like you want it to. And, if you’re still using Outlook 2007, check out our article on how to Mark Messages as Read When Viewed in Outlook 2007. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Outlook 2007 Mark Items as Read When Viewed in Reading PaneMake Mail.app’s Reading Pane More Like OutlookIntegrate Twitter With Microsoft OutlookSort Your Emails by Conversation in Outlook 2010Find Emails With Attachments with Outlook 2007’s Instant Search 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 All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app

  Read the article

• Force.com presents Database.com SQL Azure/Amazon RDS unfazed

  - by Sarang

  At the DreamForce 2010 event in San Francisco Force.com unveiled their next big thing in the Fat SaaS portfolio "Database.com".  I am still wondering how would they would've shelled out for that domain name. Now why would a already established SaaS player foray into a key building block like Database? Potentially allowing enterprises to build apps that do not utilize the Force.com stack! One key reason is being seen as the Fat SaaS player with evey trick in the SaaS space under his belt. You want CRM come hither, want a custom development PaaS like solution welcome home (VMForce), want all your apps to talk to a cloud DB and minimize latency by having it reside closer to you cloud apps? You've come to the right place sire! Other is potentially killing foray of smaller DB players like Oracle (Not surprisingly, the Database.com offering is a highly customized and scalable Oracle database) from entering the lucrative SaaS db marketplace. The feature set promised looks great out of the box for someone who likes to visualize cool new architectures. The ground realities are certainly going to be a lot different considering the SOAP/REST style access patterns in lieu of the comfortable old shoe of SQL. Microsoft suffered heavily with SDS (SQL Data Services) offering in early 2009 and had to pull the plug on the product only to reintroduce as a simple SQL Server in the cloud, SQL Windows Azure. Though MSFT is playing cool by providing OData semantics to work with SQL Windows Azure satisfying atleast some needs of the Web-Style to a DB. The other features like Social data models including Profiles, Status updates, feeds seem interesting as well. (Although I beleive social is just one of the aspects of large scale collaborative computing). All these features start "Free" for devs its a good news but the good news stops here. The overall pricing model of $ per Users per Transactions / Month is highly disproportionate compared to Amazon RDS (Based on MySQL) or SQL Windows Azure (Based on MSSQL). Roger Jennigs of Oakleaf did an interesting comparo based on 3, 10, 100, 500 users and it turns out that Database.com going by current understanding is way too expensive for the services on offer. The offering may not impact the decision for DotNet shops mulling their cloud stategy or even some Java/MySQL shops thinking about Amazon RDS, however for enterprises having already invested in other force.com offerings this could be a very important piece in the cloud strategy jigsaw. One which would address a key cloud DB issue of "Latency" for them at least it will help having the DB in the neighborhood. The tooling and "SQL like" access provider drivers (Think ODBC/JDBC) will be available later this year. Progress Software has already announced their JDBC driver stack for Database.com. It remains to be seen how effective the overall solutions proves to be in the longer run but for starts its a important decision towards consolidating Force.com's already strong positioning in the SaaS space. As always contrasting views are welcome! :)

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404  | Next Page >