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• Coexistence of projects between Visual Studio 2010 and 2012

  - by sreejukg

  Microsoft has released another version of Visual Studio named Visual Studio 2012. As you can see there are user interface (UI) changes in all/most of the Microsoft applications as Microsoft is moving towards Windows 8 and changing the UI scheme for all of the applications. Visual Studio 2012 is a move to adapt the new interface requirements that are in coherent with Windows 8. Not only this Visual Studio 2012 has lots of improvements in several areas and it supports .Net framework 4.5. In the past, whenever a new version of Visual Studio launches, developers needed to upgrade the project to new version of Visual Studio which was a pain, especially when you are working with a team of developers. Once a solution is upgraded to a newer version, it was not possible to going back. With Visual studio 2012, you can avoid the pain of upgrading. Developers will be able to open their project in Visual Studio 2012 along with Visual Studio 2010 SP 1. This means if you create a project using Visual Studio 2012, you will be able to open it with Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 and vice versa. There are some exceptions (as always!). Visual Studio 2012 supports some new project types, which was not there in 2010 version. Such project, you will not be able to open in Visual Studio 2010. For e.g. Visual Studio 2012 brings a new project type named “Windows 8 Modern Applications”, such projects you will not be able to open using the 2010 version of Visual Studio. Just to prove the said subject, I am going to perform some simple operations. I installed Visual Studio 2010 with SP 1 and Visual Studio 2012 on my PC. See the snapshots for both the installations. Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2012 Now I am going to perform two test cases. First create a project in 2010 Version and open it in 2012 version and vice versa. If you are interested, you can continue scrolling down, otherwise just say bye bye to this article. Case 1: Open a solution created using Visual Studio 2010 in 2012 version. I created a project in VS 2010 named TestProject2010 using empty ASP.Net web application template. Once created the project appears in VS 2010 as follows. I closed Visual Studio and opened the solution file using VS 2012 by using the Open Project dialog(File -> Open Project/Solution). Surprisingly, there is not even a warning message, just the project opened fine in Visual Studio 2012. Case 2: Open a solution created using Visual Studio 2012 in 2010 version. I have created a project in Visual Studio 2012 named testProject2012. See the screenshot of the project in VS 2012 below. Now try opening the solution in Visual Studio 2010. The solution loaded successfully, but Visual Studio failed to load project. See the screenshot. At first I was surprised. The Web application project template is available in both versions, So there should not be any problem. What is making the incompatibility? Is it ASP.Net version? Yes it is. VS 2012 assign ASP.Net 4.5 as the default version that was causing the trouble for Visual Studio 2010. I changed the version to .Net framework 4.0 and saved the project after that I was able to open the project in Visual Studio 2010. This as an excellent move from Visual Studio Team and allows enterprises to perform gradual upgrade to the new version. Now developers can work in any version based on availability and preference, simply I can use Visual Studio 2012 as my IDE while my colleague working on the same project can still use Visual Studio 2010.

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• Looking into ASP.Net MVC 4.0 Mobile Development - part 1

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will be looking how ASP.Net MVC 4.0 helps us to create web solutions that target mobile devices.We all experience the magic that is the World Wide Web through mobile devices. Millions of people around the world, use tablets and smartphones to view the contents of websites,e-shops and portals.ASP.Net MVC 4.0 includes a new mobile project template and the ability to render a different set of views for different types of devices.There is a new feature that is called browser overriding which allows us to control exactly what a user is going to see from your web application regardless of what type of device he is using.In order to follow along this post you must have Visual Studio 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 installed in your machine.Download and install VS 2012 using this link.My machine runs on Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 works just fine.It will work fine in Windows 7 as well so do not worry if you do not have the latest Microsoft operating system.1) Launch VS 2012 and create a new Web Forms application by going to File - >New Project - > ASP.Net MVC 4 Web Application and then click OKHave a look at the picture below  2) From the available templates select Mobile Application and then click OK.Have a look at the picture below 3) When I run the application I get the mobile view of the page. I would like to show you what a typical ASP.Net MVC 4.0 application looks like. So I will create a new simple ASP.Net MVC 4.0 Web Application. When I run the application I get the normal page view.Have a look at the picture below.On the left is the mobile view and on the right the normal view. As you can see we have more or less the same content in our mobile application (log in,register) compared with the normal ASP.Net MVC 4.0 application but it is optimised for mobile devices. 4) Let me explain how and when the mobile view is selected and finally rendered.There is a feature in MVC 4.0 that is called Display Modes and with this feature the runtime will select a view.If we have 2 views e.g contact.mobile.cshtml and contact.cshtml in our application the Controller at some point will instruct the runtime to select and render a view named contact.The runtime will look at the browser making the request and will determine if it is a mobile browser or a desktop browser. So if there is a request from my IPhone Safari browser for a particular site, if there is a mobile view the MVC 4.0 will select it and render it. If there is not a mobile view, the normal view will be rendered.5) In the  ASP.Net MVC 4.0 (Internet application) I created earlier (not the first project which was a mobile one) I can run it once more and see how it looks on the browser. If I want to view it with a mobile browser I must download one emulator like Opera Mobile.You can download Opera Mobile hereWhen I run the application I get the same view in both the desktop and the mobile browser. That was to be expected. Have a look at the picture below 6) Then I create another version of the _Layout.mobile.cshtml view in the Shared folder.I simply copy and paste the _Layout.cshtml  into the same folder and then rename it to _Layout.mobile.cshtml and then just alter the contents of the _Layout.mobile.cshtml.When I run again the application I get a different view on the desktop browser and a different one on the Opera mobile browser.Have a look at the picture below ?he Controller will instruct the ASP.Net runtime to select and render a view named _Layout.mobile.cshtml when the request will come from a mobile browser.?he runtime knows that a browser is a mobile one through the ASP.Net browser capability provider. Hope it helps!!!

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• ASP.NET Web API - Screencast series with downloadable sample code - Part 1

  - by Jon Galloway

  There's a lot of great ASP.NET Web API content on the ASP.NET website at http://asp.net/web-api. I mentioned my screencast series in original announcement post, but we've since added the sample code so I thought it was worth pointing the series out specifically. This is an introductory screencast series that walks through from File / New Project to some more advanced scenarios like Custom Validation and Authorization. The screencast videos are all short (3-5 minutes) and the sample code for the series is both available for download and browsable online. I did the screencasts, but the samples were written by the ASP.NET Web API team. So - let's watch them together! Grab some popcorn and pay attention, because these are short. After each video, I'll talk about what I thought was important. I'm embedding the videos using HTML5 (MP4) with Silverlight fallback, but if something goes wrong or your browser / device / whatever doesn't support them, I'll include the link to where the videos are more professionally hosted on the ASP.NET site. Note also if you're following along with the samples that, since Part 1 just looks at the File / New Project step, the screencast part numbers are one ahead of the sample part numbers - so screencast 4 matches with sample code demo 3. Note: I started this as one long post for all 6 parts, but as it grew over 2000 words I figured it'd be better to break it up. Part 1: Your First Web API [Video and code on the ASP.NET site] This screencast starts with an overview of why you'd want to use ASP.NET Web API: Reach more clients (thinking beyond the browser to mobile clients, other applications, etc.) Scale (who doesn't love the cloud?!) Embrace HTTP (a focus on HTTP both on client and server really simplifies and focuses service interactions) Next, I start a new ASP.NET Web API application and show some of the basics of the ApiController. We don't write any new code in this first step, just look at the example controller that's created by File / New Project. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; namespace NewProject_Mvc4BetaWebApi.Controllers { public class ValuesController : ApiController { // GET /api/values public IEnumerable<string> Get() { return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } // GET /api/values/5 public string Get(int id) { return "value"; } // POST /api/values public void Post(string value) { } // PUT /api/values/5 public void Put(int id, string value) { } // DELETE /api/values/5 public void Delete(int id) { } } } Finally, we walk through testing the output of this API controller using browser tools. There are several ways you can test API output, including Fiddler (as described by Scott Hanselman in this post) and built-in developer tools available in all modern browsers. For simplicity I used Internet Explorer 9 F12 developer tools, but you're of course welcome to use whatever you'd like. A few important things to note: This class derives from an ApiController base class, not the standard ASP.NET MVC Controller base class. They're similar in places where API's and HTML returning controller uses are similar, and different where API and HTML use differ. A good example of where those things are different is in the routing conventions. In an HTTP controller, there's no need for an "action" to be specified, since the HTTP verbs are the actions. We don't need to do anything to map verbs to actions; when a request comes in to /api/values/5 with the DELETE HTTP verb, it'll automatically be handled by the Delete method in an ApiController. The comments above the API methods show sample URL's and HTTP verbs, so we can test out the first two GET methods by browsing to the site in IE9, hitting F12 to bring up the tools, and entering /api/values in the URL: That sample action returns a list of values. To get just one value back, we'd browse to /values/5: That's it for Part 1. In Part 2 we'll look at getting data (beyond hardcoded strings) and start building out a sample application.

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• PetaPoco with parameterised stored procedure and Asp.Net MVC

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I have been playing with Micro ORMs as this is very interesting things that are happening in developer communities and I already liked the concept of it. It’s tiny easy to use and can do performance tweaks. PetaPoco is also one of them I have written few blog post about this. In this blog post I have explained How we can use the PetaPoco with stored procedure which are having parameters.  I am going to use same Customer table which I have used in my previous posts. For those who have not read my previous post following is the link for that. Get started with ASP.NET MVC and PetaPoco PetaPoco with stored procedures Now our customer table is ready. So let’s Create a simple process which will fetch a single customer via CustomerId. Following is a code for that. CREATE PROCEDURE mysp_GetCustomer @CustomerId as INT AS SELECT * FROM [dbo].Customer where CustomerId=@CustomerId Now  we are ready with our stored procedures. Now lets create code in CustomerDB class to retrieve single customer like following. using System.Collections.Generic; namespace CodeSimplified.Models { public class CustomerDB { public IEnumerable<Customer> GetCustomers() { var databaseContext = new PetaPoco.Database("MyConnectionString"); databaseContext.EnableAutoSelect = false; return databaseContext.Query<Customer>("exec mysp_GetCustomers"); } public Customer GetCustomer(int customerId) { var databaseContext = new PetaPoco.Database("MyConnectionString"); databaseContext.EnableAutoSelect = false; var customer= databaseContext.SingleOrDefault<Customer>("exec mysp_GetCustomer @customerId",new {customerId}); return customer; } } } Here in above code you can see that I have created a new method call GetCustomer which is having customerId as parameter and then I have written to code to use stored procedure which we have created to fetch customer Information. Here I have set EnableAutoSelect=false because I don’t want to create Select statement automatically I want to use my stored procedure for that. Now Our Customer DB class is ready and now lets create a ActionResult Detail in our controller like following using System.Web.Mvc; namespace CodeSimplified.Controllers { public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; return View(); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } public ActionResult Customer() { var customerDb = new Models.CustomerDB(); return View(customerDb.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult Details(int id) { var customerDb = new Models.CustomerDB(); return View(customerDb.GetCustomer(id)); } } } Now Let’s create view based on that ActionResult Details method like following. Now everything is ready let’s test it in browser. So lets first goto customer list like following. Now I am clicking on details for first customer and Let’s see how we can use the stored procedure with parameter to fetch the customer details and below is the output. So that’s it. It’s very easy. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more..Happy Programming

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• Framework 4 Features: Support for Timed Jobs

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the new features of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 is the ability for the batch framework to support Timed Batch. Traditionally batch is associated with set processing in the background in a fixed time frame. For example, billing customers. Over the last few versions their has been functionality required by the products required a more monitoring style batch process. The monitor is a batch process that looks for specific business events based upon record status or other pieces of data. For example, the framework contains a fact monitor (F1-FCTRN) that can be configured to look for specific status's or other conditions. The batch process then uses the instructions on the object to determine what to do. To support monitor style processing, you need to run the process regularly a number of times a day (for example, every ten minutes). Traditional batch could support this but it was not as optimal as expected (if you are a site using the old Workflow subsystem, you understand what I mean). The Batch framework was extended to add additional facilities to support times (and continuous batch which is another new feature for another blog entry). The new facilities include: The batch control now defines the job as Timed or Not Timed. Non-Timed batch are traditional batch jobs. The timer interval (the interval between executions) can be specified The timer can be made active or inactive. Only active timers are executed. Setting the Timer Active to inactive will stop the job at the next time interval. Setting the Timer Active to Active will start the execution of the timed job. You can specify the credentials, language to view the messages and an email address to send the a summary of the execution to. The email address is optional and requires an email server to be specified in the relevant feature configuration. You can specify the thread limits and commit intervals to be sued for the multiple executions. Once a timer job is defined it will be executed automatically by the Business Application Server process if the DEFAULT threadpool is active. This threadpool can be started using the online batch daemon (for non-production) or externally using the threadpoolworker utility. At that time any batch process with the Timer Active set to Active and Batch Control Type of Timed will begin executing. As Timed jobs are executed automatically then they do not appear in any external schedule or are managed by an external scheduler (except via the DEFAULT threadpool itself of course). Now, if the job has no work to do as the timer interval is being reached then that instance of the job is stopped and the next instance started at the timer interval. If there is still work to complete when the interval interval is reached, the instance will continue processing till the work is complete, then the instance will be stopped and the next instance scheduled for the next timer interval. One of the key ways of optimizing this processing is to set the timer interval correctly for the expected workload. This is an interesting new feature of the batch framework and we anticipate it will come in handy for specific business situations with the monitor processes.

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• 11 Types of Developers

  - by Lee Brandt

  Jack Dawson Jack Dawson is the homeless drifter in Titanic. At one point in the movie he says, “I figure life’s a gift, and I don’t intend on wasting it.” He is happy to wander wherever life takes him. He works himself from place to place, making just enough money to make it to his next adventure. The “Jack Dawson” developer clings on to any new technology as the ‘next big thing’, and will find ways to shoe-horn it in to places where it is not a fit. He is very appealing to the other developers because they want to try the newest techniques and tools too, He will only stay until the new technology either bores him or becomes problematic. Jack will also be hard to find once the technology has been implemented, because he will be on to the next shiny thing. However, having a Jack Dawson on your team can be beneficial. Jack can be a great ally when attempting to convince a stodgy, corporate entity to upgrade. Jack usually has an encyclopedic recall of all the new features of the technology upgrade and is more than happy to interject them in any conversation. Tom Smykowski Tom is the neurotic employee in Office Space, and is deathly afraid of being fired. He will do only what is necessary to keep the status quo. He believes as long as nothing changes, his job is safe. He will scoff at anything new and be the naysayer during any change initiative. Tom can be useful in off-setting Jack Dawson. Jack will constantly be pushing for change and Tom will constantly be fighting it. When you see that Jack is getting kind of bored with a new technology and Tom has finally stopped wetting himself at the mere mention of it, then it is probably the sweet spot of beginning to implement that new technology (providing it is the right tool for the job). Ray Consella Ray is the guy who built the Field of Dreams. He took a risk. Sometimes he screwed it up, but he knew he didn’t want to end up regretting not attempting it. He constantly doubted himself, but he knew he had to keep going. Granted, he was doing what the voices in his head were telling him to do, but my point is he was driven to do something that most people considered crazy. Even when his friends, his wife and even he told himself he was crazy, somewhere inside himself, he knew it was the right thing to do. These are the innovators. These are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world. The take risks, they fail, they learn and the get better. Obviously, this kind of person thrives in start-ups and smaller companies, but that is due to their natural aversion to bureaucracy. They want to see their ideas put into motion quickly, and withdrawn quickly if it doesn’t work. Short feedback cycles are essential to Ray. He wants to know if his idea is working or not. He wants to modify or reverse his idea if it is not working or makes things worse. These are the agilistas. May I always be one.

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• How to Sync Any Browser’s Bookmarks With Your iPad or iPhone

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Apple makes it easy to synchronize bookmarks between the Safari browser on a Mac and the Safari browser on iOS, but you don’t have to use Safari — or a Mac — to sync your bookmarks back and forth. You can do this with any browser. Whether you’re using Chrome, Firefox, or even Internet Explorer, there’s a way to sync your browser bookmarks so you can access your same bookmarks on your iPad. Safari on a Mac Apple’s iCloud service is the officially supported way to sync data with your iPad or iPhone. It’s included on Macs, but Apple also offers similar iCloud bookmark syncing features for Windows. On a Mac, this should be enabled by default. To check whether it’s enabled, you can launch the System Preferences panel on your Mac, open the iCloud preferences panel, and ensure the Safari option is checked. If you’re using Safari on Windows — well, you shouldn’t be. Apple is no longer updating Safari for Windows. iCloud allows you to synchronize bookmarks between other browsers on your Windows system and Safari on your iOS device, so Safari isn’t necessary. Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome via iCloud To get started, download Apple’s iCloud Control Panel application for Windows and install it. Launch the iCloud Control Panel and log in with the same iCloud account (Apple ID) you use on your iPad or iPhone. You’ll be able to enable Bookmark syncing with Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. Click the Options button to select the browser you want to synchronize bookmarks with. (Note that bookmarks are called “favorites” in Internet Explorer.) You’ll be able to access your synced bookmarks in the Safari browser on your iPad or iPhone, and they’ll sync back and forth automatically over the Internet. Google Chrome Sync Google Chrome also has its own built-in sync feature and Google provides an official Chrome app for iPad and iPhone. If you’re a Chrome user, you can set up Chrome Sync on your desktop version of Chrome — you should already have this enabled if you have logged into your Chrome browser. You can check if this Chrome Sync is enabled by opening Chrome’s settings screen and seeing whether you’re signed in. Click the Advanced sync settings button and ensure bookmark syncing is enabled. Once you have Chrome Sync set up, you can install the Chrome app from the App Store and sign in with the same Google account. Your bookmarks, as well as other data like your open browser tabs, will automatically sync. This can be a better solution because the Chrome browser is available for so many platforms and you gain the ability to synchronize other browser data, such as your open browser tabs, between your devices. Unfortunately, the Chrome browser is slower than Apple’s own Safari browser on iPad and iPhone because of the way Apple limits third-party browsers, so using it involves a trade-off. Manual Bookmark Sync in iTunes iTunes also allows you to sync bookmarks between your computer and your iPad or iPhone. It does this the old-fashioned way, by initiating a manual sync when your device is plugged in via USB. To access this option, connect your device to your computer, select the device in iTunes, and click the Info tab. This is the more outdated way of synchronizing your bookmarks. This feature may be useful if you want to create a one-time copy of your bookmarks from your PC, but it’s nowhere near ideal for regular syncing. You don’t have to use this feature, just as you really don’t have to use iTunes anymore. In fact, this option is unavailable if you’ve set up iCloud syncing in iTunes. After you set up bookmark syncing via iCloud or Chrome Sync, bookmarks will sync immediately after you save, remove, or edit them.     

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• Collaborate10 &ndash; THEconference

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  After spending a few days in Mandalay Bay's THEHotel, I guess I now call everything THE... Seriously, they even tag their toilet paper with THEtp... I guess the brand builders in Vegas thought that once you are on to something you keep on doing it, and granted it is a nice hotel with nice rooms. THEanalytics Most of my collab10 experience was in a room called Reef C, where the BIWA bootcamp was held. Two solid days of BI, Warehousing and Analytics organized by the BIWA SIG at IOUG. Didn't get to see all sessions, but what struck me was the high interest in Analytics. Marty Gubar's OLAP session was full and he did some very nice things with the OLAP option. The cool bit was that he actually gets all the advanced calculations in OLAP to show up in OBI EE without any effort. It was nice to see that the idea from OWB where you generate an RPD is now also in AWM. I think it makes life so much simpler to generate these RPD's from your data model. Even if the end RPD needs some tweaking, it is all a lot less effort to get something going. You can see this stuff for yourself in this demo (click here). OBI EE uses just SQL to get to the calculations, and so, if you prefer APEX, you can build you application there and get the same nice calculations in an APEX application. Marty also showed the Simba MDX driver used with Excel. I guess we should call that THEcoolone... and it is very slick and wonderfully useful for all of you who actually know Excel. The nice thing is that you leverage pure Excel for all operations (no plug-ins). That means no new tools to learn, no new controls, all just pure Excel. THEdatabasemachine Got some very good questions in my "what makes Exadata fast" session and overall, the interest in Exadata is overwhelming. One of the things that I did try to do in my session is to get people to think in new patterns rather than in patterns based on Oracle 9i running on some random hardware configuration. We talked a little bit about the often over-indexing and how everyone has to unlearn all of that on Exadata. The main thing however is that everyone needs to get used to the shear size of some of the components in a Database machine V2. 5TB of flash cache is a lot of very fast data storage, half a TB of memory gets quite interesting as well. So what I did there was really focus on some of the content in these earlier posts on Upward ILM and In-Memory processing. In short, I do believe the these newer media point out a trend. In-memory and other fast media will get cheaper and will see more use. Some of that we do automatically by adding new functionality, but in some cases I think the end user of the system needs to start thinking about how to leverage all this new hardware. I think most people got very excited about these new capabilities and opportunities. THEcoolkids One of the cool things about the BIWA track was the hand-on track. Very cool to see big crowds for both OLAP and OWB hands-on. Also quite nice to see that the folks at RittmanMead spent so much time on preparing for that session. While all of them put down cool stuff, none was more cool that seeing Data Mining on an Apple iPAD... it all just looks great on an iPAD! Very disappointing to see that Mark Rittman still wasn't showing OWB on his iPAD ;-) THEend All in all this was a great set of sessions in the BIWA track. Lots of value to our guests (we hope) and we hope they all come again next year!

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• ASP.NET Performance tip- Combine multiple script file into one request with script manager

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  We all need java script for our web application and we storing our JavaScript code in .js files. Now If we have more then .js file then our browser will create a new request for each .js file. Which is a little overhead in terms of performance. If you have very big enterprise application you will have so much over head for this. Asp.net Script Manager provides a feature to combine multiple JavaScript into one request but you must remember that this feature will be available only with .NET Framework 3.5 sp1 or higher versions.  Let’s take a simple example. I am having two javascript files Jscrip1.js and Jscript2.js both are having separate functions. //Jscript1.js function Task1() { alert('task1'); } Here is another one for another file. ////Jscript1.js function Task2() { alert('task2'); } Now I am adding script reference with script manager and using this function in my code like this. <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ScriptManager ID="myScriptManager" runat="server" > <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/JScript1.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/JScript2.js" /> </Scripts> </asp:ScriptManager> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> Task1(); Task2(); </script> </form> Now Let’s test in Firefox with Lori plug-in which will show you how many request are made for this. Here is output of that. You can see 5 Requests are there. Now let’s do same thing in with ASP.NET Script Manager combined script feature. Like following <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ScriptManager ID="myScriptManager" runat="server" > <CompositeScript> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/JScript1.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/JScript2.js" /> </Scripts> </CompositeScript> </asp:ScriptManager> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> Task1(); Task2(); </script> </form> Now let’s run it and let’s see how many request are there like following. As you can see now we have only 4 request compare to 5 request earlier. So script manager combined multiple script into one request. So if you have lots of javascript files you can save your loading time with this with combining multiple script files into one request. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more!!!.. Happy programming.. Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,ScriptManager,Microsoft Ajax

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• Today's Links (6/29/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Event-Driven SOA: Events meet Services | Guido Schmutz Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz shows you how to achieve extreme loose coupling within a Service-Oriented Architecture by using event-driven interactions. Misconceptions About Software Architecture | Sanjeev Kumar A concise, to-the-point, and informative article by Sanjeev Kumar. Good Leaders Acknowledge What Can't Be Done - Jeffrey Pfeffer - Harvard Business Review "None of us likes to admit to bad decisions," says Jeffrey Pfeffer. "But imagine how much harder that is for someone who has been chosen to lead a large organization precisely because he or she is thought to have the power to see the future more clearly and chart a wise course." Suboptimal Thinking within Enterprise Architecture | James McGovern McGovern says: "We need to remember that enterprises live and thrive beyond just the current person at the helm." Boundaryless Information Flow | Richard Veryard "If all the boundaries are removed or porous, then the (extended) enterprise or ecosystem becomes like a giant sponge, in which all information permeates the whole," Veryard says. "Some people may think that's a good idea, but it's not what I'd call loose coupling." Coming to a City Near You: Oracle Business Analytics Summits | Rob Reynolds This series of events includes a Technology and Architecture track. New Date for Implementation of Sun Hands-On Course Requirement (Oracle Certification) As announced on the Oracle Certification website, Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification tracks will include a new mandatory course attendance requirement. VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now available for download | Bob Netherton Netherton shares information on the new release. Updated Technical Best Practices whitepaper | Anthony Shorten The Technical Best Practices whitepaper has been updated with the latest advice. "New advice includes new installation advice, advanced settings, new security settings and advice for both Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere installations," says Shorten. Kscope 11 ADF, AIA and Business Rules | Peter Paul van de Beek Whitehorses Solution Architect Peter Paul van de Beek shares his impressions of KScope11 presentations by Markus Eisele, Sten Vesterli, and Edwin Biemond. Amazon AWS for the learning experience | Andrej Koelewijn "Using AWS changes your expectations how your internal data center should operate," says Koelewijn. BPMN is dead, long live BPEL! (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jürgen Kress shares information -- including a long list of speakers -- for the SOA & BPM Integration Days 2011 conference, October 12th & 13th 2011 in Düsseldorf. InfoQ: HTML5 and the Dawn of Rich Mobile Web Applications James Pearce introduces cross-platform web apps development using HTML5 and web frameworks, such as jQTouch, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, outlining what makes a good framework. InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Development "Frameworks like TOGAF are used to define an architecture that aligns IT assets and resources to support key business needs and processes of key stakeholders," says SEI's Mike Konrad. "But the individual application systems, capabilities, services, networks, and other IT assets and infrastructure still need to be acquired, developed, or sustained." InfoQ: Architecting a Cloud-Scale Identity Fabric | Eric Olden "The most cited reason for not moving to the cloud is concern about security," says Olden. "In particular, managing user identity and access in the cloud is a tough problem to solve and a big security concern for organizations."

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

  - by Simon Cooper

  There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly.

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

  - by simonc

  There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly. Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• SharePoint 2010 release date - is it that important?

  - by CharlesLee

  There has been lots of excitement in the SharePoint community over the last few days as Microsoft have announced the official release date of SharePoint 2010. May 12th is the date for your diaries (RTM in April.) The twittersphere has been telling everyone for the last few days about this news and there is much excitement. The major conferences this year all seem to have a SharePoint 2010 focus and some are entirely focussed on the new product (e.g. SharePoint Evolution Conference.)  Now by all accounts Microsoft have plugged some significant functionality gaps that exist in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 and provided some exciting new functionality.  You don't need me to tell you about these as the MVPs (and other community members) are doing a sterling job, after all that is why Microsoft has MVPs in the first place. Lets get real for a second though as there is a significant investment involved in moving to SharePoint 2010:  Firstly you need 64 bit architecture across the board, now for some environments that is no inconsequential hurdle, that's a pretty significant roadblock.   The development farm, test farm and UAT farm are all going to require the same infrastructure upgrades. To take advantage of the tooling for SP2010 you will need to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and your development team is going to require 64 bit hardware/OS too.  I would not recommend installing SP 2010 in client installation mode (i.e. for Windows 7) on your developer machines, I would use this for demo machines only. Something that lots of people seem to forget in all their whooping and hollering about the new release is that there is a large amount of end user training going to be required as the browser UI has now adopted the omnipotent ribbon interface and there are other new and more complicated features. SharePoint Designer has also entirely changed in both look and feel and some significant feature changes have taken place. Lest we should forget that some companies have not long upgraded to MOSS 2007 and are yet to see a significant ROI for that project. And the reticence that most companies feel about implementing v1 Microsoft products.  This is only the surface of the deeper issues which would be involved in any upgrade process, so I guess I share a small part of the concern voiced by Mark Miller of EndUserSharePoint.com.  Is SharePoint 2010 relevant? I don't share this sentiment in its entirety as I firmly believe that all companies should be looking at SharePoint 2010 from day one, however most large scale existing implementations of MOSS 2007 are going to be several years away from a serious upgrade project.  So should the conference organisers and the SharePoint community as a whole be a little more understanding of the real world issues?  It's easy to get carried away in the excitement of a new product and new tools to play with but there needs to be a focus on the real world issues that most people are facing day to day and at the moment and for the short term future (at the very least the next 12 months) that is fairly and squarely in the WSS 2.0/3.0 and SPS 2003/MOSS 2007 camps. Don't get me wrong, I am very very excited about getting to grips with SharePoint 2010 in the real world and I cannot wait for my first real project to come along, but for now I am just being realistic about the reality for most people who work with SharePoint. I have been spending a lot of time on www.sharepointoverflow.com recently as there is a community of people building up who are committed to answering the real world questions that folks are dealing with every day.  I urge you to take a look and either ask or answer some questions direct from the front line of the SharePoint world.

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• Visual Studio 2010 SP1

  - by ScottGu

  Last week we shipped Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio Express Tools.  In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, SP1 includes a number of feature enhancements.  This includes improved local help support, IntelliTrace support for 64-bit applications and SharePoint, built-in Silverlight 4 Tooling support in the box, unit testing support when targeting .NET 3.5, a new performance wizard for Silverlight, IIS Express and SQL CE Tooling support for web projects, HTML5 Intellisense for ASP.NET, and more.  TFS 2010 SP1 was also released last week, together with a new TFS Project Server Integration Pack and Load Test Feature Pack.  Brian Harry has a good blog post about the TFS updates here. VS 2010 SP1 Download Click here to download and install SP1 for all versions of Visual Studio (including express).  This installer examines what you have installed on your machine, and only downloads the servicing downloads necessary to update them to SP1.  The time it takes to download and update will consequently depend on what all you have installed.  Jon Galloway has a good blog post on tips to speed up the SP1 install by uninstalling unused components. Web Platform Installer Bundles In addition to the core VS 2010 SP1 installer, we have also put together two Web Platform Installer (WebPI) bundles that automate installing SP1 together with additional web-specific components: VS 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle The above WebPI bundles automate installing: VS 2010/VWD 2010 SP1 ASP.NET MVC 3 (runtime + tools support) IIS 7.5 Express SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 (runtime + tools support) Web Deployment 2.0 Only the components that are not already installed on your machine will be downloaded when you use the above WebPI bundles.  This means that you can run the WebPI bundle at any time (even if you have already installed SP1 or ASP.NET MVC 3) and not have to worry about wasting time downloading/installing these components again. Earlier this year I did two posts that discussed how to use IIS Express and SQL CE with ASP.NET projects in SP1.  Read the below posts to learn more about how to use them after you run the above bundles: Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and IIS Express Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and SQL CE for ASP.NET The above feature additions work with any web project type – including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Additional SP1 Notes Two additional notes about VS 2010 SP1: 1) One change we made between RTM and SP1 is that by default Visual Studio now uses software rendering instead of hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP.  We made this change because we’ve seen reports of (often inconsistent) performance issues caused by older video drivers.  Running in software mode eliminates these and delivers consistent speeds.  You can optionally re-enable hardware acceleration with SP1 using Visual Studio’s Tools->Options menu command – we did not remove support for HW acceleration on XP, we simply changed the default setting for it.  Jason Zander has written more details on the change and how to re-enable HW acceleration inside VS here. 2) We have discovered an issue where installing SP1 can cause TSQL intellisense within SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 to stop working (typing still works – but intellisense doesn’t show up).  The SQL team is investigating this now and I’ll post an update on how to fix this once more details are known.  Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• A temporary disagreement

  - by Tony Davis

  Last month, Phil Factor caused a furore amongst some MVPs with an article that attempted to offer simple advice to developers regarding the use of table variables, versus local and global temporary tables, in their code. Phil makes clear that the table variables do come with some fairly major limitations.no distribution statistics, no parallel query plans for queries that modify table variables.but goes on to suggest that for reasonably small-scale strategic uses, and with a bit of due care and testing, table variables are a "good thing". Not everyone shares his opinion; in fact, I imagine he was rather aghast to learn that there were those felt his article was akin to pulling the pin out of a grenade and tossing it into the database; table variables should be avoided in almost all cases, according to their advice, in favour of temp tables. In other words, a fairly major feature of SQL Server should be more-or-less 'off limits' to developers. The problem with temp tables is that, because they are scoped either in the procedure or the connection, it is easy to allow them to hang around for too long, eating up precious memory and bulking up the shared tempdb database. Unless they are explicitly dropped, global temporary tables, and local temporary tables created within a connection rather than within a stored procedure, will persist until the connection is closed or, with connection pooling, until the connection is reused. It's also quite common with ASP.NET applications to have connection leaks, as Bill Vaughn explains in his chapter in the "SQL Server Deep Dives" book, meaning that the web page exits without closing the connection object, maybe due to an error condition. This will then hang around in the heap for what might be hours before picked up by the garbage collector. Table variables are much safer in this regard, since they are batch-scoped and so are cleaned up automatically once the batch is complete, which also means that they are intuitive to use for the developer because they conform to scoping rules that are closer to those in procedural code. On the surface then, an ideal way to deal with issues related to tempdb memory hogging. So why did Phil qualify his recommendation to use Table Variables? This is another of those cases where, like scalar UDFs and table-valued multi-statement UDFs, developers can sometimes get into trouble with a relatively benign-looking feature, due to way it's been implemented in SQL Server. Once again the biggest problem is how they are handled internally, by the SQL Server query optimizer, which can make very poor choices for JOIN orders and so on, in the absence of statistics, especially when joining to tables with highly-skewed data. The resulting execution plans can be horrible, as will be the resulting performance. If the JOIN is to a large table, that will hurt. Ideally, Microsoft would simply fix this issue so that developers can't get burned in this way; they've been around since SQL Server 2000, so Microsoft has had a bit of time to get it right. As I commented in regard to UDFs, when developers discover issues like with such standard features, the database becomes an alien planet to them, where death lurks around each corner, and they continue to avoid these "killer" features years after the problems have been eventually resolved. In the meantime, what is the right approach? Is it to say "hammers can kill, don't ever use hammers", or is it to try to explain, as Phil's article and follow-up blog post have tried to do, what the feature was intended for, why care must be applied in its use, and so enable developers to make properly-informed decisions, without requiring them to delve deep into the inner workings of SQL Server? Cheers, Tony.

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• Floating Panels and Describe Windows in Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  One of the challenges I face as I try to share tips about our software is that I tend to assume there are features that you just ‘know about.’ Either they’re so intuitive that you MUST know about them, or it’s a feature that I’ve been using for so long I forget that others may have never even seen it before. I want to cover two of those today - Describe (DESC) – SHIFT+F4 Floating Panels My super-exciting desktop SQL Developer and Describe DESC or Describe is an Oracle SQL*Plus command. It shows what a table or view is composed of in terms of it’s column definition. Here’s an example: SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Fri Sep 21 14:25:37 2012 Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle. All rights reserved. Connected to: Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - Production With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options SQL> desc beer; Name Null? Type ----------------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- BREWERY NOT NULL VARCHAR2(100) CITY VARCHAR2(100) STATE VARCHAR2(100) COUNTRY VARCHAR2(100) ID NUMBER SQL> You can get the same information – and a good bit more – in SQL Developer using the SQL Developer DESC command. You invoke it with SHIFT+F4. It will open a floating (non-modal!) window with the information you want. Here’s an example: I can see my column definitions, constratins, stats, privs, etc A few ‘cool’ things you should be aware of: I can open as many as I want, and still work in my worksheet, browser, etc. I can also DESC an index, user, or most any other database object I can of course move them off my primary desktop display The DESC panel’s are read-only. I can’t drop a constraint from within the DESC window of a given table. But for dragging columns into my worksheet, and checking out the stats for my objects as I query them – it’s very, very handy. Try This Right Now Type ‘scott.emp’ (or some other table you have), place your cursor on the text, and hit SHIFT+F4. You’ll see the EMP object open. Now click into a column name in the columns page. Drag it into your worksheet. It will paste that column name into your query. This is an alternative for those that don’t like our code insight feature or dragging columns off the connection tree (new for v3.2!) Got it? SQL Developer’s Floating Panels Ok, let’s talk about a similar feature. Did you know that any dockable panel from the View menu can also be ‘floated?’ One of my favorite features is the SQL History. Every query I run is recorded, and I can recall them later without having to remember what I ran and when. And I USUALLY use the keyboard shortcuts for this. Let your trouble float away…if only it were so easy as a right-click in the real world. But sometimes I still want to see my recall list without having to give up my screen real estate. So I just mouse-right click on the panel tab and select ‘Float.’ Then I move it over to my secondary display – see the poorly lit picture in the beginning of this post. And that’s it. Simple, I know. But I thought you should know about these two things!

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• SOA Community Newsletter June 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear SOA partner community member Thanks for showing us your interest to rerun the Fusion Middleware Summer Camps! After knowing your suggestions we are happy to announce the 3rd edition of our advanced Fusion Middleware training. The camps will take place from August 26th - 30th 2013 in Lisbon Portugal. Topics will include Adaptive Case Management (ACM) as part of BPM Suite, b2b, Advanced SOA and SOA Governance. Please make sure you plan and book your seat in advance - (Booking is on the basis of first come first seat!). Thanks for all your efforts to become certified and Specialized. For all the experts who achieved the SOA Suite 11g Essentials or BPM Suite 11g Certified Implementation Specialist, you can download a logo for your blog or business card at the Competence Center. For all the companies who achieved a SOA or BPM specialization you can request a nice Plaques for your office. As part of our Industrial SOA article services we published “Canonizing a Language for Architecture” in the Service Technology Magazine and on Oracle Technology Network. If you write books or a blog - make sure you share it with us! Cloud Computing is the hottest topic in IT, specially as an architect you should be aware of the concepts and technology, therefore I highly recommend you Thomas Erl’s latest book named “Cloud Computing”. In the BPM space, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is the hottest topic, with BPM PS6 the backend ACM functionality and an ACM sample application are available. You can even combine this hype with Customer Experience. The BPM section in this newsletter reflects the high importance of the topic and includes BPM PS6 video showing process lifecycle,BPM Resource Kit, Functional Testing, Introduction to Web Forms, Customized Workspace Application and Instance Patching Demo. B2B also become more and more popular in the Oracle SOA Suite. If you could not attend the training organized in the month May, we offer you an additional B2B training as a part of the Summer Camps or you can download the B2B training material from our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). Thanks to all for sharing the valuable SOA content with our community! Special thanks to ec4u for the new reference of SOA Suite and AIA Foundation Pack at a Swiss insurance company. It is time to submit a SOA and BPM  reference request today! In this edition of the newsletter you will see Guido and Ronald's second part of OSB article series and Kathiravan Udayakumar's published an exclusive article on SOA Suite best practice. If you want to submit your content for the next edition of the Newsletter then please feel free to submit it to myself. The A-Team is an excellent contributor to the best practice - make sure you visit the new A-Team page and read their articles such as Getting to know Maven. Also on the SOA side, we have published many new articles from the community Oracle SOA Suite for the Busy IT Professional by Frank Munz, SOA Suite Knowledge - Polyglot Service Implementation with Groovy by Alexander Suchier, QA82 Analyzer - Automated Quality Assurance for Oracle SOA Suite Projects, Verifying the Target by Anthony Reynolds and a new book called Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation book by Luis Augusto Weir. Two new SOA on-demand training courses NEW - Oracle Business Rules Self-Study Course & Introduction Human Workflow online course are available now! Make use of the Summer Time and get trained - hope to see you in Lisbon for the Summer Camps! Jürgen Kress Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsJune2013 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress,SOA,BPM

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• Experience the iPad UI On Your PC

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to test drive iPad without heading over to an Apple store?  Here’s a way you can experience some of the iPad UI straight from your browser! The iPad is the latest gadget from Apple to wow the tech world, and people even waited in line all night to be one of the first to get their hands on one.  Thanks to a simple JavaScript trick, however, you can get a feel for some of its new features without leaving your computer.  This won’t let you try out everything on the iPad, but it will let you see how the new lists and pop-over menus work just like they do in the new apps. Test drive the iPad’s UI from your browser Normally, the Apple iPhone developer library online looks like a standard webpage. But, on the iPad, it looks and feels like a full-blown native iPad app.  With a nifty JavaScript trick from boredzo.org you can use this same interface on your PC.  Since the iPad uses the Safari browser, we ran this test in Safari for Windows.  If you don’t already have it installed, you can download it from Apple (link below) and setup as normal. Now, open Safari and browse to Apple’s developer page at: http://www.developer.apple.com   Now, enter the following in the address bar, and press Enter. javascript:localStorage.setItem('debugSawtooth', 'true')   Finally, click this link to go to the iPhone OS documentation. http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/iPad/ After a short delay, it should open in full iPad style! The left menu works just like the menus on the iPad, complete with transitions.  It feels entirely like a native application, instead of a webpage.  To scroll through text, click and pull up or down similar to the way you would use it on a touch screen. Some pages even include a pop-over menu like many of the new iPad apps use. Note that the page will be rendered for the size of your browser, and if you resize your window the page will not resize with it.  Simply press F5 to reload the page, and it will resize to fit the new window size.  If you resize your window to be tall and narrow, like the iPad in horizontal mode, the webpage will change and the left menu will disappear in lieu of a drop-down menu just like it would if you rotated the iPad. This works in Chrome as well, since it, like Safari, is based on Webkit.  However, it didn’t seem to work in our test on Firefox or other browsers. We’ve previously covered how you can experience some of the iPhone’s UI with the online iPhone user guide.  Check it out if you haven’t yet: View Mobile Websites in Windows with Safari 4 Developer Tools Conclusion Although this doesn’t let you really try out all of the iPad’s interface, it at least gives you a taste of how it works.  It’s exciting to see how much functionality can be packed into webapps today.  And don’t forget, How-to Geek is giving away an iPad to a random fan!  Head over to our Facebook page and fan How-to Geek if you haven’t already done so. Win an iPad on the How-To Geek Facebook Fan Page Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Want an iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away!Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and TutorialsShare Your Windows Vista Experience Index ScoreAnother Blog You Should Subscribe To TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses

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• Oracle WebCenter: Extending Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Applications

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} -- Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter extends Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications.When we talk about the new release of Oracle WebCenter, we really emphasize to customers that they can leverage their existing investments and benefit from WebCenter’s Complete, Open and Integrated platform. To summarize what we mean here, Oracle WebCenter is:COMPLETEComprehensive platform for Portals/Websites, Composite Applications with integrated Social/Collaboration services and Content Management infrastructureOPENStandards support improves reuse of existing resources and extends the value of existing systemsINTEGRATEDImplicit integration with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Applications & other enterprise applicationsWith all the existing enterprise applications in Oracle’s application portfolio, in the new release of WebCenter we’ve got a set of pre-built catalogs that customers can use directly to get at all the portlet resources certified and available from Oracle.  It provides customers with a ready-to-use view of their application resources.  And since WebCenter provides seamless support for building these portlets/components in a professional IDE like JDeveloper or from within a Browser, developers and business analysts can quickly assemble the information they require for their existing application investment.  In addition, we’ve taken all the user flows and patterns that we’ve learned in building Fusion Applications and focused on making it dramatically easier to use tools to create reusable application UI components. In this way, one team in the organization using an application can share their components with other teams.  And more importantly, the new team can make changes to the component without breaking the original component.  When tied to enterprise applications, this capability is extremely powerful.  This is what Oracle means when they talk about Enterprise Mashups.  And finally, we’ve provided an innovative way to go well beyond traditional “on the glass” integration by enabling business transactions for the existing applications direct integration using activity streams. This delivers aggregated and “on time” delivery of information to the business users based on what‘s happening in the enterprise that is relevant to their particular job function.  Most importantly, it ties into the personalization interactions discussed earlier so that it can help target information to you directly based on past interactions.  Application integration is key to making businesses function more efficiently with these new Enterprise 2.0 technologies.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how WebCenter is the most complete, open and integrated modern user experience platform and show key ways WebCenter can extend Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Applications.

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• Copy TFS Build Definitions between Projects and Collections

  - by Jakob Ehn

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2014/06/05/copy-tfs-build-definitions-between-projects-and-collections.aspxThe last couple of years it has become apparent that using multiple team projects in TFS is generally a bad idea. There are of course exceptions to this, but there are a lot ot things that becomes much easier to do when you put all of your projects and team in the same team project. Fellow ALM MVP Martin Hinshelwood has blogged about this several times, as well as other people in the community. In particular, using the backlog and portfolio management tools makes much more sense when everything is located in the same team project. Consolidating multiple team projects into one is not that easy unfortunately, it involves migrating source code, work items, reports etc.  Another thing that also need to be migrated is build definitions. It is possible to clone build definitions within the same team project using the TFS power tools. The Community TFS Build Manager also lets you clone build definitions to other team projects. But there is no tool that allows you to clone/copy a build definition to another collection. So, I whipped up a simple console application that let you do this. The tool can be downloaded from https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=EE034C9F620CD58D!8162&authkey=!ACTr56v1QVowzuE&ithint=file%2c.zip   Using CopyTFSBuildDefinitions You use the tool like this: CopyTFSBuildDefinitions  SourceCollectionUrl  SourceTeamProject  BuildDefinitionName  DestinationCollectionUrl  DestinationTeamProject [NewDefinitionName] Arguments SourceCollectionUrl The URL to the TFS collection that contains the team project with the build definition that you want to copy SourceTeamProject The name of the team project that contains the build definition BuildDefinitionName Name of the build definition DestinationCollectionUrl The URL to the TFS collection that contains the team project that you want to copy your build definition to DestinationTeamProject The name of the team project in the destination collection NewDefinitionName (Optional) Use this to override the name of the new build definition. If you don’t specify this, the name will the same as the original one Example: CopyTFSBuildDefinitions  https://jakob.visualstudio.com DemoProject  WebApplication.CI https://anotheraccount.visualstudio.com     Notes Since we are (potentially) create a build definition in a new collection, there is no guarantee that the various paths that are defined in the build definition exist in the new collection. For example, a build definition refers to server paths in TFVC or repos + branches in TFGit. It also refers to build controllers that definitely don’t exist in the new collection. So there will be some cleanup to do after you copy your build definitions. You can fix some of these using the Community TFS Build Manager, for example it is very easy to apply the correct build controller to a set of build definitions The problem stated above also applies to build process templates. However, the tool tries to find a build process template in the new team project with the same file name as the one that existed in the old team project. If it finds one, it will be used for the new build definition. Otherwise is will use the default build template If you want to run the tool for many build definitions, you can use this SQL scripts, compliments of Mr. Scrum/ALM MVP Richard Hundhausen to generate the necessary commands: USE Tfs_Collection GO SELECT 'CopyTFSBuildDefinitions.exe http://SERVER:8080/tfs/collection "' + P.ProjectName + '" "' + REPLACE(BD.DefinitionName,'\','') + '" http://NEWSERVER:8080/tfs/COLLECTION TEAMPROJECT'   FROM tbl_Project P        INNER JOIN tbl_BuildGroup BG on BG.TeamProject = P.ProjectUri        INNER JOIN tbl_BuildDefinition BD on BD.GroupId = BG.GroupId   ORDER BY P.ProjectName, BD.DefinitionName   Hope that helps, let me know if you have any problems with the tool or if you find it useful

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• Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v5.0) is Released

  - by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

  Ever wanted to have a simple jQuery menu bound with ASP.NET web site map file? Ever wanted to have cool css design stuffs implemented on your ASP.NET data bound controls? Ever wanted to let Visual Studio generate logical layers for you, which can be easily tested, customized and bound with ASP.NET data controls? If your answers with respect to above questions are ‘yes’, then you will probably happy to try out latest release (v5.0) of Employee Starter Kit, which is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, the current release illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 Web Form Data Controls, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context. Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source ASP.NET project template that is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. This project template is titled as “Employee Info Starter Kit”, which was initially hosted on Microsoft Code Gallery and been downloaded 1, 50,000+ of copies afterword.  The latest version of this starter kit is hosted in Codeplex. Release Highlights User End Functional Specification The user end functionalities of this starter kit are pretty simple and straight forward that are focused in to perform CRUD operation on employee records as described below. Creating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Architectural Overview Simple 3 layer architecture (presentation, business logic and data access layer) ASP.NET web form based user interface Built-in code generators for logical layers, implemented in Visual Studio default template engine (T4) Built-in Entity Framework entities as business entities (aka: data containers) Data Mapper design pattern based Data Access Layer, implemented in C# and Entity Framework Domain Model design pattern based Business Logic Layer, implemented in C# Object Model for Cross Cutting Concerns (such as validation, logging, exception management) Minimum System Requirements Visual Studio 2010 (Web Developer Express Edition) or higher Sql Server 2005 (Express Edition) or higher Technology Utilized Programming Languages/Scripts Browser side: JavaScript Web server side: C# Code Generation Template: T-4 Template Frameworks .NET Framework 4.0 JavaScript Framework: jQuery 1.5.1 CSS Framework: 960 grid system .NET Framework Components .NET Entity Framework .NET Optional/Named Parameters (new in .net 4.0) .NET Tuple (new in .net 4.0) .NET Extension Method .NET Lambda Expressions .NET Anonymous Type .NET Query Expressions .NET Automatically Implemented Properties .NET LINQ .NET Partial Classes and Methods .NET Generic Type .NET Nullable Type ASP.NET Meta Description and Keyword Support (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Routing (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Grid View (CSS support for sorting - (new in .net 4.0)) ASP.NET Repeater ASP.NET Form View ASP.NET Login View ASP.NET Site Map Path ASP.NET Skin ASP.NET Theme ASP.NET Master Page ASP.NET Object Data Source ASP.NET Role Based Security Getting Started Guide To see Employee Info Starter Kit in action is pretty easy! Download the latest version. Extract the file. From the extracted folder click the C# project file (Eisk.Web.csproj) to open it in Visual Studio 2010 Hit Ctrl+F5! The current release (v5.0) of Employee Info Starter Kit is properly packaged, fully documented and well tested. If you want to learn more about it in details, just check the following links: Release Home Page Installation Walkthrough Hand on Coding Walkthrough Technical Reference Enjoy!

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• SQL SERVER – Read Only Files and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

  - by pinaldave

  Just like any other Developer or DBA SQL Server Management Studio is my favorite application. Any any moment of the time I have multiple instances of the same application are open and I am working on it. Recently, I have come across a very interesting feature in SSMS related to “Read Only” files. I believe it is a little unknown feature as well so decided to write a blog about the same. First create a read only SQL file. You can make any file read by Right Click >> Properties >> Select Attribute Read Only. Now open the same file in SQL Server Management Studio. You will find that besides the file name there is a small ‘lock’ icon. This small icon indicates that the file is read only. Now let us attempt to edit the read only file. It will let us edit the file any way we want, however when we attempt to save it, it gives following pop-up value. The options in the pop-up are self explanatory and I liked it. The goal of the read only file is to prevent users to make un-intended changes. However, when a user should have complete control over the user file. User should be aware that the file is read only but if he wants to edit the file or save as a new file the choices should be present in front of it and the pop-up menu precisely captures the same. Now let us check option related to this feature in SSMS. Go to Menu >> Options >> Environment >> Documents You will find the third option which is “Allow editing of read-only files; warn when attempt to save”. In the above scenario it was already checked. Let us uncheck the same and do the same exercise which we have done earlier. I closed all the earlier window to avoid confusion. With the new option selected when I attempt to even modify the Read Only file, it gives me totally different pop up screen. It gives me an option like “Edit In-Memory”, “Make Writeable” etc. When you select “Edit In-Memory” it allows you to edit the file and later you can save as new file – just like the earlier scenario which we have discussed. . If clicked on the Make Writeable it will remove the restriction of the Read Only and file can be edited as pleased. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• C# 4 Named Parameters for Overload Resolution

  - by Steve Michelotti

  C# 4 is getting a new feature called named parameters. Although this is a stand-alone feature, it is often used in conjunction with optional parameters. Last week when I was giving a presentation on C# 4, I got a question on a scenario regarding overload resolution that I had not considered before which yielded interesting results. Before I describe the scenario, a little background first. Named parameters is a well documented feature that works like this: suppose you have a method defined like this: 1: void DoWork(int num, string message = "Hello") 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Inside DoWork() - num: {0}, message: {1}", num, message); 4: } This enables you to call the method with any of these: 1: DoWork(21); 2: DoWork(num: 21); 3: DoWork(21, "abc"); 4: DoWork(num: 21, message: "abc"); and the corresponding results will be: Inside DoWork() - num: 21, message: Hello Inside DoWork() - num: 21, message: Hello Inside DoWork() - num: 21, message: abc Inside DoWork() - num: 21, message: abc This is all pretty straight forward and well-documented. What is slightly more interesting is how resolution is handled with method overloads. Suppose we had a second overload for DoWork() that looked like this: 1: void DoWork(object num) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Inside second overload: " + num); 4: } The first rule applied for method overload resolution in this case is that it looks for the most strongly-type match first.  Hence, since the second overload has System.Object as the parameter rather than Int32, this second overload will never be called for any of the 4 method calls above.  But suppose the method overload looked like this: 1: void DoWork(int num) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Inside second overload: " + num); 4: } In this case, both overloads have the first parameter as Int32 so they both fulfill the first rule equally.  In this case the overload with the optional parameters will be ignored if the parameters are not specified. Therefore, the same 4 method calls from above would result in: Inside second overload: 21 Inside second overload: 21 Inside DoWork() - num: 21, message: abc Inside DoWork() - num: 21, message: abc Even all this is pretty well documented. However, we can now consider the very interesting scenario I was presented with. The question was what happens if you change the parameter name in one of the overloads.  For example, what happens if you change the parameter *name* for the second overload like this: 1: void DoWork(int num2) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Inside second overload: " + num2); 4: } In this case, the first 2 method calls will yield *different* results: 1: DoWork(21); 2: DoWork(num: 21); results in: Inside second overload: 21 Inside DoWork() - num: 21, message: Hello We know the first method call will go to the second overload because of normal method overload resolution rules which ignore the optional parameters.  But for the second call, even though all the same rules apply, the compiler will allow you to specify a named parameter which, in effect, overrides the typical rules and directs the call to the first overload. Keep in mind this would only work if the method overloads had different parameter names for the same types (which in itself is weird). But it is a situation I had not considered before and it is one in which you should be aware of the rules that the C# 4 compiler applies.

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• Tablet design guide, Endeca patterns now available

  - by JuergenKress

  UX Direct, an Oracle program that offers consultants, partners, and customers the same scientifically proven and reusable user experience best practices that Oracle uses to build Oracle Applications, recently added links to a new design guide for creating tablet-based solutions for enterprise applications, and to the recently published Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library. The tablet design guide is available from the UX Direct Home page. Tap the button under “Latest patterns & tools” for “Oracle Applications UX Tablet Guide.” It provides basic help for designers, developers, and project managers trying to approach tablet design and testing from an enterprise point of view. To hear what developers are saying about it, follow the links from this post on the User Experience Assistance blog. The newly released Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library is also available from the UX Direct Home page and from a post on the User Experience Assistance blog. It describes principled ways to solve common user interface (UI) design problems related to search, faceted navigation, and discovery. The link between Simplified UI and Oracle UX strategy, plus content you can share on the cloud, ADf, tailoring, and more Simplified User Interface in Oracle Fusion Applications Fronts Oracle Cloud Offerings This new article on Simplified UI has just been posted on Usable Apps. Learn about the three themes - simplicity, mobility, and extensibility – that Simplified UI embodies. These same principles are guiding the development of the next generation of the Oracle user experience. Oracle's Applications User Experience Strategy: One Cloud User Experience, with Optimized UIs Where and How You Want This podcast from Misha Vaughan, Director, User Experience, is now available on the Oracle University Knowledge Center. It is available for partners and Oracle employees at this iLearning Link. Oracle Partner Builds User Experience That Hits Right Note for New Employees This new article on the Usable Apps website explores the experience of consultants at IntraSee as they implement a PeopleSoft onboarding process for Invesco, a global asset management company. The Feng Shui of Fusion This article in Oracle Scene is from Grant Ronald, Director of Product Management, on the Tools of Fusion: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF. Hands-On Workshop with Fusion Applications and ADF UX Desktop Design Patterns This post on the Voice of User Experience, or VoX, blog from Misha Vaughan describes a new kind of workshop for partners and a handful of internal Oracle sales folks on extending Oracle Fusion Applications and building custom applications with Application Development Framework (ADF) while maintaining the Oracle user experience. To learn more about the content that was delivered during this three-day workshop, visit the Usable Apps blog. Recent posts from a new blog series take a look at several of the topics discussed during the workshop. Applications User Experience Fundamentals Visual Design for any Enterprise User Interface / Art School in a Box Wireframing / Blueprinting Usable Applications Concepts. Tailoring videos This blog post from Richard Bingham, Applications Architect, on the Fusion Applications Developer Relations blog provides links to several videos that show many customization and development tasks using the Oracle Fusion Applications platform. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: UX,Architecture,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Siebel CRM: Alive and Jamming at OpenWorld

  - by Tony Berk

  Yes, a rock 'n roll reference in a CRM/Customer Experience blog entry! Sorry, but we are getting excited about OpenWorld and all of the great CRM and Customer Experience sessions we've been planning for the past 6 months (yes, we really do start planning in March!). I also heard that some band named Pearl Jam is making an appearance. Who's tried the Rock Band guitar solo for Alive? Way too difficult for an amateur like me. Anyhow, we are supposed to be highlighting Siebel CRM at OpenWorld. Yes, Siebel will once again have a major presence at OpenWorld and there is a lot of new things to tell you about. If you search the OpenWorld Content Catalog with the tag "siebel", you'll find over 75 sessions. That's over 75 hours of opportunity to hear from Siebel customers, product managers, and implementers. While I invite you to read through the descriptions of all 75+ sessions or check out the OpenWorld Focus On Siebel document, I'd like to try and help with some highlights. The roadmap and strategy session was mentioned in my previous post, but it is important enough to mention again. Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap (CON9700) - Oct 1, 12:15PM. Come to this session to learn about the Siebel product roadmap and how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value for its customers on this platform. Additionally, the session covers how Siebel customers can leverage many Oracle assets such as Oracle WebCenter Sites; InQuira, RightNow, and ATG/Endeca applications, and Oracle Policy Automation in conjunction with their current Siebel investments. This session was FULL last year, so I strongly suggest you pre-register via the OpenWorld Schedule Builder. Every year, my favorites are the customer panels, where you get hear 2, 3 or even 4 customers talk about their implementations and often share best practices and lessons learned. Customer Panel: Business Benefits of Deploying Siebel CRM (Session ID: CON9717) - Oct 1, 10:45AM featuring GlaxoSmithKline, PNC Bank and Southwest Airlines. Maximizing User Adoption Rates for Siebel Sales and Siebel Partner Relationship Management (CON9690) Oct 1, 12:15PM featuring CSL Behring, Intuit and McKesson. Best Practices for Upgrading Your Siebel CRM Implementations: Customer Successes (CON9715) - Oct 1, 3:15PM featuring Citrix, Sunlife Financial and Oracle experts. Driving Great Customer Experiences with Siebel Service Applications (CON9604) - Oct 1, 4:45 featuring Farmers Insurance, US Department of Homeland Security and Waste Management There are also a number of customer case study sessions including: Lowe's (CON9740), American Red Cross (CON6535), Ontario Lottery & Gaming's Siebel Marketing and Loyalty (CON4114), and LexisNexis (CON9551). Also, an interesting session on optimizing Siebel on Oracle with ACCOR (CON4289). Have you heard about the new Open UI for Siebel? If you haven't, you should! There are sessions focused on introducing you to the new functionality and how you can unleash the power of the new user interface: User Interface Innovations with the New Siebel “Open UI” (CON9703) Oct 2, 10:15AM and Unleash the Power of “Open UI” (CON9705) - Oct 3, 11:45AM. Other Siebel-related topics you might want to check out: Knowledge Management: Increasing Return on Your CRM Investments with Knowledge (CON9779) - Oct 1, 3:15PM Mobile: Mobile Solutions for Siebel CRM (CON9697) - Oct 2, 5:00PM Siebel Loyalty: Best Practices for Maximizing the Success of Your Loyalty Program with Siebel Loyalty (CON9588) - Oct 2, 5:00PM  Siebel Marketing: Next-Generation Cross-Channel Insight-Driven Customer Dialogue with Siebel Marketing (CON9600) - Oct 3, 10:15AM Integrating with Oracle Commerce: Administer Once and Deploy Everywhere: Integrating the Siebel, ATG, and Endeca Platforms (CON9761) - Oct 2 5:00PM Finally, don't forget the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Special Interest Group for Siebel on Sunday, September 30 at 2:15PM. And of course, the Demogrounds in Moscone West will be full of Oracle and partner demos and information on new solutions. Wow! I told you there was a lot! Good luck finding the best sessions for you and have a great time at OpenWorld. Don't forget to sing along with Pearl Jam!

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