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• Drive project success & financial performance with business critical Enterprise Project Portfolio Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  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:"Times New Roman","serif";} Oracle Primavera invites you to the first in a series of three webcasts linking Enterprise Project Portfolio Management with enhanced operational performance and better financial results. Few organizations fully understand the impact projects have on their business. Consistently delivering successful projects is vital to the financial success of an asset intensive organization. Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) is not a new concept yet for many organizations it is not considered "business critical". Webcast 1: Plan – Aligning project selection and prioritization with corporate objectives This webcast will look at 2 key questions: Are you aligning portfolio decisions with strategic objectives? How do you effectively measure the success of your portfolio decisions? Hear from Accenture who'll present a compelling case for why asset intensive organizations should consider EPPM as business critical. They'll explore: How technology is being used to enhance project delivery How collaboration enhances delivery performance The major challenges associated with the planning phase of a project Next hear from Geoff Roberts, Industry Strategist from Oracle Primavera. With over 30 years experience in project management/project controls in the construction, utilities and oil & gas sectors, Geoff will investigate how EPPM is a best practice and can support an organization through project selection and prioritization ensuring that decisions are aligned with corporate objectives. Don’t miss out, register today!

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• SQL SERVER – Get Schema Name from Object ID using OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME

  - by pinaldave

  Sometime a simple solution have even simpler solutions but we often do not practice it as we do not see value in it or find it useful. Well, today’s blog post is also about something which I have seen not practiced much in codes. We are so much comfortable with alternative usage that we do not feel like switching how we query the data. I was going over forums and I noticed that at one place user has used following code to get Schema Name from ObjectID. USE AdventureWorks2012 GO SELECT s.name AS SchemaName, t.name AS TableName, s.schema_id, t.OBJECT_ID FROM sys.Tables t INNER JOIN sys.schemas s ON s.schema_id = t.schema_id WHERE t.name = OBJECT_NAME(46623209) GO Before I continue let me say I do not see anything wrong with this script. It is just fine and one of the way to get SchemaName from Object ID. However, I have been using function OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME to get the schema name. If I have to write the same code from the beginning I would have written the same code as following. SELECT OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(46623209) AS SchemaName, t.name AS TableName, t.schema_id, t.OBJECT_ID FROM sys.tables t WHERE t.name = OBJECT_NAME(46623209) GO Now, both of the above code give you exact same result. If you remove the WHERE condition it will give you information of all the tables of the database. Now the question is which one is better – honestly – it is not about one is better than other. Use the one which you prefer to use. I prefer to use second one as it requires less typing. Let me ask you the same question to you – which method to get schema name do yo use? and Why? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL System Table, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• WordPress is now nicely supported on SQL Server (and SQL Azure for that matter)

  - by Eric Nelson

  WordPress is enormously popular for blogs and full websites thanks to an awesome eco system which has built up around it, the simplicity (relatively) of getting it up and running plus the flexibility to “bend it” in all sorts of directions. When I say bend, check out the following which are all WordPress sites My “back up blog” http://iupdateable.wordpress.com/  My groups “odd site” :) http://ubelly.com My favourite “cheap games” site http://www.frugalgaming.co.uk/  WordPress users typically run their sites on Linux and MySQL, although PHP (the language in which WordPress is written) can be happily run on Windows. Both fine technologies in their own right, but for me (and probably a fair few others) I would love to use WordPress but with the technologies I know best (aka Windows, IIS and SQL Server). However, that has proven to be actually rather tricky in practice to get working – until now. Earlier last month OmniTI released a patch for WordPress which provides SQL Server and SQL Azure support.  In parallel with that some fine folks inside Microsoft have also created http://wordpress.visitmix.com which contains information about running WordPress on the Microsoft platform with a particular focus on SQL Server and SQL Azure.  Top stuff! To run WordPress with SQL Server: Download and Install the WordPress on SQL Server Distro/Patch And then you will quite likely need to migrate: Check out how to Migrate to Windows and SQL Server by Zach Owens who is moving his blog to Windows and SQL Server Enjoy Related Links Running PHP on IIS on Windows http://php.iis.net/  If PHP is not your thing, then the following Blog engines are .NET based BlogEngine http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/ DasBlog http://www.dasblog.info/ Subtext http://subtextproject.com/ (which happens to power http://geekswithblogs.net where my main blog is http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable)

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• At what point would you drop some of your principles of software development for the sake of more money?

  - by MeshMan

  I'd like to throw this question out there to interestingly see where the medium is. I'm going to admit that in my last 12 months, I picked up TDD and a lot of the Agile values in software development. I was so overwhelmed with how much better my development of software became that I would never drop them out of principle. Until...I was offered a contracting role that doubled my take home pay for the year. The company I joined didn't follow any specific methodology, the team hadn't heard of anything like code smells, SOLID, etc., and I certainly wasn't going to get away with spending time doing TDD if the team had never even seen unit testing in practice. Am I a sell out? No, not completely... Code will always been written "cleanly" (as per Uncle Bob's teachings) and the principles of SOLID will always be applied to the code that I write as they are needed. Testing was dropped for me though, the company couldn't afford to have such a unknown handed to the team who quite frankly, even I did create test frameworks, they would never use/maintain the test framework correctly. Using that as an example, what point would you say a developer should never drop his craftsmanship principles for the sake of money/other benefits to them personally? I understand that this can be a very personal opinion on how concerned one is to their own needs, business needs, and the sake of craftsmanship etc. But one can consider that for example testing can be dropped if the company decided they would rather have a test team, than rather understand unit testing in programming, would that be something you could forgive yourself for like I did? So given that there is something you would drop, there usually should be an equal cost in the business that makes up for what you drop - hopefully, unless of course you are pretty much out for lining your own pockets and not community/social collaborating ;). Double your money, go back to RAD? Or walk on, and look for someone doing Agile, and never look back...

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• Critical Threads Optimization

  - by Rafael Vanoni

  Background One of the more common issues we've been seeing in the field is the growing difficulty in optimizing performance of multi-threaded applications. A good portion of this difficulty is due to the increasing complexity of modern processors that present various degrees of sharing relationships between hardware components. Take any current CMT processor and you'll find any number of CPUs sharing execution pipelines, floating point units, caches, etc. Consequently, applying the traditional recipe of one software thread for each CPU will have varying degrees of success, according to the layout of the underlying hardware. On top of this increasing complexity we've also seen processors with features that aim at dynamically resourcing software threads according to their utilization. Intel's Turbo Boost allows processors to increase their operating frequency if there is enough thermal headroom available and the processor isn't fully utilized. More recently, the SPARC T4 processor introduced dynamic threading, allowing each core to dynamically allocate more resources to its active CPUs. Both cases are in essence recognizing that current processors will be running a wide mix of workloads, some will be designed for throughput, others for low latency. The hardware is providing mechanisms to dynamically resource threads according to their runtime behavior. We're very aware of these challenges in Solaris, and have been working to provide the best out of box performance while providing mechanisms to further optimize applications when necessary. The Critical Threads Optimzation was introduced in Solaris 10 8/11 and Solaris 11 as one such mechanism that allows customers to both address issues caused by contention over shared hardware resources and explicitly take advantage of features such as T4's dynamic threading. What it is The basic idea is to allow performance critical threads to execute with more exclusive access to hardware resources. For example, when deploying an application that implements a producer/consumer model, it'll likely be advantageous to give the producer more exclusive access to the hardware instead of having it competing for resources with all the consumers. In the case of a T4 based system, we may want to have a producer running by itself on a single core and create one consumer for each of the remaining CPUs. With the Critical Threads Optimization we're extending the semantics of scheduling priorities (which thread should run first) to include priority over shared resources (which thread should have more "space"). Now the scheduler will not only run higher priority threads first: it will also provide them with more exclusive access to hardware resources if they are available. How does it work ? Using the previous example in Solaris 11, all you'd have to do would be to place the producer in the Fixed Priority (FX) scheduling class at priority 60, or in the Real Time (RT) class at any priority and Solaris will try to give it more "hardware space". On both Solaris 10 8/11 and Solaris 11 this can be achieved through the existing priocntl(1,2) and priocntlset(2) interfaces. If your application already assigns these priorities to performance critical threads, there's no additional step you need to take. One important aspect of this optimization is that it requires some level of idleness in the system, either as a result of sizing the application before hand or through periods of transient idleness during runtime. If the system is fully committed, the scheduler will put all the available CPUs to work.Best practices If you're an application developer, we encourage you to look into assigning the right priorities for the different threads in your application. Solaris provides different scheduling classes (Time Share, Interactive, Fair Share, Fixed Priority and Real Time) that offer different policies and behaviors. It is not always simple to figure out which set of threads are critical to the performance of a workload, and it may not always be feasible to take advantage of this optimization, but we believe that this can be correctly (and safely) done during development. Overall, the out of box performance in Solaris should meet your workload's requirements. If you are looking into that extra bit of performance, then the Critical Threads Optimization may be what you're looking for.

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• How to achieve a loosely coupled REST API but with a defined and well understood contract?

  - by BestPractices

  I am new to REST and am struggling to understand how one would properly design a REST system to both allow for loose coupling but at the same time allow a consumer of a REST API to understand the API. If, in my client code, I issue a GET request for a resource and get back XML, how do I know what to do with that xml? e.g. if it contains <fname>John</fname><lname>Smith</lname> how do I know that these refer to the concept of "first name", "last name"? Is it up to the person writing the REST API to define in documentation some place what each of the XML fields mean? What if producer of the API wants to change the implementation to be <firstname> instead of <fname>? How do they do this and notify their consumers that this change occurred? Or do the consumers just encounter the error and then look at the payload and figure out on their own that it changed? I've read in REST in Practice that using a WADL tool to create a client implementation based on the WADL (and hide the fact that you're doing a distributed call) is an "anti-pattern". But I was planning to do this-- at least then I would have a statically typed API call that, if it changed, I would know at compile time and not at run time. Why is this a bad thing to generate client code based on a WADL? And how do I know what to do with the links that returned in the response of a POST to a REST API? What defines this contract and gives true meaning to what each link will do? Please help! I dont understand how to go from statically-typed or even SOAP/RPC to REST!

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• My father is a doctor. He is insisting on writing a database to store non-critical patient information, with no programming background

  - by Dominic Bou-Samra

  So, my father is currently in the process of "hacking" together a database using FileMaker Pro, a GUI based databasing tool for his small (4 doctor) practice. The database will be used to help ease the burden on reporting from medical machines, streamlining quite a clumsy process. He's got no programming background, and seems to be doing everything in his power to not learn things correctly. He's got duplicate data types, no database-enforced relationships (foreign/primary key constraints) and a dozen other issues. He's doing it all by hand via GUI tool using Youtube videos. My issue is, that whilst I want him to succeed 100%, I don't think it's appropriate for him to be handling these types of decisions. How do I convince him that without some sort of education in these topics, a hacked together solution is a bad idea? He's can be quite stubborn and I think he sees these types of jobs as "childs play" How should I approach this? Is it even that bad an idea - or am I correct in thinking he should hire a proper DBA/developer to handle this so that it doesn't become a maintenance nightmare? NB: I am a developer consultant of 4 years and I've seen my share of painful customer implementations.

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• Session serialization in JavaEE environment

  - by Ionut

  Please consider the following scenario: We are working on a JavaEE project for which the scalability starts to become an issue. Up until now, we were able to scale up but this is no longer an option. Therefore we need to consider scaling out and preparing the App for a clustered environment. Our main concern right now is serializing the user sessions. Sadly, we did not consider from the beginning the issue and we are encountering the following excetion: java.io.WriteAbortedException: writing aborted; java.io.NotSerializableException: org.apache.catalina.session.StandardSessionFacade I did some research and this exception is thrown because there are objects stored on the session which does not implement the Serializable interface. Considering that all over the app there are quite a few custom objects which are stored on the session without implementing this interface, it would require a lot of tedious work and dedication to fix all these classes declaration. We will fix all this declarations but the main concern is that, in the future, there may be a developer which will add a non Serializable object on the session and break the session serialization & replication over multiple nodes. As a quick overview of the project, we are developing using a home grown framework based on Struts 1 with the Servlet 3.0 API. This means that at this point, we are using the standard session.getAttribute() and session.setAttribute() to work with the session and the session handling is scattered all over the code base. Besides updating the classes of the objects stored on session and making sure that they implement the Serializable interface, what other measures of precaution should we take in order to ensure a reliable Session replication capability on the Application layer? I know it is a little bit late to consider this but what would be the best practice in this case? Furthermore, are there any other issues we should consider regarding this transition? Thank you in advance!

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• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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• How to handle multiple effect files in XNA

  - by Adam 'Pi' Burch

  So I'm using ModelMesh and it's built in Effects parameter to draw a mesh with some shaders I'm playing with. I have a simple GUI that lets me change these parameters to my heart's desire. My question is, how do I handle shaders that have unique parameters? For example, I want a 'shiny' parameter that affects shaders with Phong-type specular components, but for an environment mapping shader such a parameter doesn't make a lot of sense. How I have it right now is that every time I call the ModelMesh's Draw() function, I set all the Effect parameters as so foreach (ModelMesh m in model.Meshes) { if (isDrawBunny == true)//Slightly change the way the world matrix is calculated if using the bunny object, since it is not quite centered in object space { world = boneTransforms[m.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateScale(scale) * rotation * Matrix.CreateTranslation(position + bunnyPositionTransform); } else //If not rendering the bunny, draw normally { world = boneTransforms[m.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateScale(scale) * rotation * Matrix.CreateTranslation(position); } foreach (Effect e in m.Effects) { Matrix ViewProjection = camera.ViewMatrix * camera.ProjectionMatrix; e.Parameters["ViewProjection"].SetValue(ViewProjection); e.Parameters["World"].SetValue(world); e.Parameters["diffuseLightPosition"].SetValue(lightPositionW); e.Parameters["CameraPosition"].SetValue(camera.Position); e.Parameters["LightColor"].SetValue(lightColor); e.Parameters["MaterialColor"].SetValue(materialColor); e.Parameters["shininess"].SetValue(shininess); //e.Parameters //e.Parameters["normal"] } m.Draw(); Note the prescience of the example! The solutions I've thought of involve preloading all the shaders, and updating the unique parameters as needed. So my question is, is there a best practice I'm missing here? Is there a way to pull the parameters a given Effect needs from that Effect? Thank you all for your time!

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• Tracking feature requests for small-scale components

  - by DXM

  I'm curious how other development teams (especially those that work in moderate to large development groups) track "future" features/wishlists for functionality for internally developed frameworks or components. I know the standard advice is that a development team should find one good tool for tracking bugs/features and use that for everything and I agree with that if the future requests are for the product itself. In my company we have an engineering department, which is broken up into multiple groups and within each there can be one to several agile teams. The bug tracking product we use has been "a leader since 1997" (their UI/usability seems to also be evaluated against that year even today) but my agile team or even group doesn't really control what is being used by the whole department. What we are looking to track is not necessarily product features but expansion/nice to have functionality for internal components that go into our product. So to name a few for example... framework/utility library on top of CppUnit which our developers share low-level IPC communications framework Common development SDK that myself and several other team leads started to help share some common code/tools at the department-wide level (this SDK is released as internal "product" to each of the groups). Is the standard practice to use the one bug tracking tool? Or would it make more sense to setup something more localized specifically for our needs and maintain it ourselves? It's also unclear how management will feel if developers start performing "IT" roles of maintaining software and servers. At the same time, right now, we use excel files, internal wiki and MS OneNote for this kind of stuff and that just doesn't feel right. (I'm afraid to ask for actual software recommendations, since that might make this question more localized or something. Also developers needs this way more than management, so it would be nice to find something either free or no more than the cost of a happy hour).

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• SQLAuthority News – Advantages of Distance Learning

  - by Pinal Dave

  Distance education is extremely popular – almost overnight, it seems.  Almost everyone has taken an online course, or knows someone who has, or is considering joining an online school.  There are many advantages and disadvantages to attending an online school – but the same can be said of attending a physical school!  Let’s take a look at the top reasons to use distance education. 1) Flexibility.  Physical universities are usually willing to make some concessions to student – like night classes, study hours, and online networks.  However, nothing is going to beat the flexibility of distance education.  You can attend classes and take notes anytime, anywhere, wearing anything you’d like! 2) Affordability.  We don’t need to get into hard numbers to understand how an expensive university can be.  Students are taking on more and more debt just to get an education.  Many of these fees pay for room, board, and facilities.   Distance education cuts out all these costs, and makes attending school much more affordable for the average student. 3) Try before you buy.  Did you know that the average college student changes his or her major 10 times before they graduate?  You can imagine that this kind of indecision plays a huge part in WHEN you graduate – not being able to make up your mind can cost you big bucks if you have to stay in school for extra years!  Distance education allows you to take different classes from a wide range of disciplines.  Do you want to study forensic science or English literature?  Now you don’t have to pay for classes you can’t afford just to find out. 4) Pace yourself.  Some students struggle in a traditional classroom setting – classes can be taught too fast, too slow, or there are too many distractions.  Distance education allows mature students to set the pace themselves.  They can rewatch lectures they didn’t catch the first time, or go through classes quickly if they are already familiar with the material – cutting out the chance of burning out or getting bored. 5) Lifelong learning.  Maybe you already have a degree, but would like to learn more about your field, or a related field, or maybe even about something completely unrelated – just because you are curious!  Distance education allows you to learn whatever you want ,whenever you want (and yes, wearing anything you’d like!). 6) Attend whatever college you want.  Because of the popularity of distance education, physical campuses are getting in on the game by offering online courses – often just uploaded versions of classes already taught at their campus.  Ever wanted to attend Harvard, but knew you couldn’t get in?  Take a class online!  Of course, you probably should not attempt to lie and say you have a Harvard degree, but Ivy League colleges are prestigious because they are the best in their field – take advantage of the best by taking an online course! I am a big believer in continuing education, whether it is online courses, returning to school, or even take informal classes online.  Distance education can be a great way to accomplish these goals and become a lifelong learner. My friends at provides training through virtual classrooms for students who want to avoid travelling. Distance learning course allows IT aspirants to connect with trainers using the internet.  I encourage everyone to check it out! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• How to create and administer multi-architecture PPAs?

  - by maxschlepzig

  I have a program that needs to be recompiled for every ubuntu version. Currently I am packaging it using Ubuntu's PPA just for the current distribution. Eventually, I have to provide packages for the previous ubuntu version. I am not sure how to accomplish this. How does the Ubuntu PPA build server works - does it just look at the distribution field in the most current changelog entry (in the debian/changelog file) to determine for what distribution the package should be build? The debian specification allows to add multiple distributions into the distribution field. But this does not seam to help me. Some ubuntu documents talk about encoding the distribution name into the version number (in the debian changelog file). But how does this work in practice? A new version of the program is available, then what? Do I add for each distribution a new changelog entry and the PPA buildserver builds automatically for each distribution new packages after dput'ing it up? Or does the PPA buildserver just looks at the first changelog entry?

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• C++11 Tidbits: access control under SFINAE conditions

  - by Paolo Carlini

  Lately I have been spending quite a bit of time on the SFINAE ("Substitution failure is not an error") features of C++, fixing and tweaking various bits of the GCC implementation. An important missing piece was the implementation of the resolution of DR 1170 which, in a nutshell, mandates that access checking is done as part of the substitution process. Consider: class C { typedef int type; }; template <class T, class = typename T::type> auto f(int) - char; template <class> auto f(...) -> char (&)[2]; static_assert (sizeof(f<C>(0)) == 2, "Ouch"); According to the resolution, the static_assert should not fire, and the snippet should compile successfully. The reason being that the first f overload must be removed from the candidate set because C::type is private to C. On the other hand, before the resolution of DR 1170, the expected behavior was for the first overload to remain in the candidate set, win over the second one, to eventually lead to an access control error (*). GCC mainline (would be 4.8) finally implements the DR, thus benefiting the many modern programming techniques heavily exploiting SFINAE, among which certainly the GNU C++ runtime library itself, which relies on it for the internals of <type_traits> and in several other places. Note that the resolution of the DR is active even in C++98 mode, not just in C++11 mode, because it turned out that the traditional behavior, as implemented in GCC, wasn't fully consistent in all the possible circumstances. (*) In practice, GCC didn't really implement this, the static_assert triggered instead.

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• Library Organization in .NET

  - by Greg Ros

  I've written a .NET bitwise operations library as part of my projects (stuff ranging from get MSB set to some more complicated bitwise transformations) and I mean to release it as free software. I'm a bit confused about a design aspect of the library, though. Many of the methods/transformations in the library come with different endianness. A simple example is a getBitAt method that regards index 0 as the least significant bit, or the most significant bit, depending on the version used. In practice, I've found that using separate functions for different endianness results in much more comprehensible and reusable code than assuming all operations are little-endian or something. I'm really stumped regarding how best to package the library. Should I have methods that have LE and BE versions take an enum parameter in their signature, e.g. Endianness.Little, Endianness.Big? Should I have different static classes with identically named methods? such as MSB.GetBit and LSB.GetBit On a much wider note, is there a standard I could use in cases like this? Some guide? Is my design issue trivial? I have a perfectionist bent, and I sometimes get stuck on tricky design issues like this... Note: I've sort of realized I'm using endianness somewhat colloquially to refer to the order/place value of digital component parts (be they bits, bytes, or words) in a larger whole, in any setting. I'm not talking about machine-level endianness or serial transmission endianness. Just about place-value semantics in general. So there isn't a context of targeting different machines/transmission techniques or something.

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• What is the precise definition of programming paradigm?

  - by Kazark

  Wikipedia defines programming paradigm thus: a fundamental style of computer programming which is echoed in the descriptive text of the paradigms tag on this site. I find this a disappointing definition. Anyone who knows the words programming and paradigm could do about that well without knowing anything else about it. There are many styles of computer programming at many level of abstraction; within any given programming paradigm, multiple styles are possible. For example, Bob Martin says in Clean Code (13), Consider this book a description of the Object Mentor School of Clean Code. The techniques and teachings within are the way that we practice our art. We are willing to claim that if you follow these teachings, you will enjoy the benefits that we have enjoyed, and you will learn to write code that is clean and professional. But don't make the mistake of thinking that we are somehow "right" in any absolute sense. Thus Bob Martin is not claiming to have the correct style of Object-Oriented programming, even though he, if anyone, might have some claim to doing so. But even within his school of programming, we might have different styles of formatting the code (K&R, etc). There are many styles of programming at many levels. So how can we define programming paradigm rigorously, to distinguish it from other categories of programming styles? Fundamental is somewhat helpful, but not specific. How can we define the phrase in a way that will communicate more than the separate meanings of each of the two words—in other words, how can we define it in a way that will provide additional meaning for someone who speaks English but isn't familiar with a variety of paradigms?

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• SQL Authority News – Presenting at SQL Bangalore on May 3, 2014 – Performing an Effective Presentation

  - by Pinal Dave

  SQL Bangalore is a wonderful community and we always have a great response when we present on technology. It is SQL User Group and we discuss everything SQL there. This month we have SQL Server 2014 theme and we are going to have a community launch on this subject. We have the best of the best speakers presenting on SQL Server 2014 technology. Looking at the whole line of celebrity speakers, I have decided not to present on SQL Server. I will be presenting on the performance tuning subject, but with the twist of soft skills. I will be presenting on “Performing an Effective Presentation“. Trust me, you do not want to miss this presentation, I will be presenting on how to present effectively when presenting SQL Server topics. What this session will NOT have I personally believe that we all are good presenters most of the time. We can all easily call out if someone is bad presenter. There is no point talking about basics like bigger bullet points, talk loudly, talk with confidence, use better analogies etc. In simple words – this is not going to some philosophy session and boring notes. What this session will have Well, this session will tell stories of my life. It will tell how we can present about technology and SQL Server with the help of stories and personal experience. I am going to tell stories about two legends  who have inspired me. Right after that we will be doing two exercises together where we will learn quickly and effectively, how to become better speaker – instantly! There is no video recording of this session. If you want to get resources from this session, please sign up my newsletter at http://bit.ly/sqllearn Here are few of the slides from this presentation: Here is the details about the event and location Venue:Microsoft Corporation, Signature Building,Embassy Golf Links Business Park, Intermediate Ring Road, Domlur, Bangalore – 560071 The agenda is amazing – we have top line SQL Speakers. Everyone is welcome and don’t forget to get your friend along for this event. Loads to learn and tons to share !!! Keynote (20 mins) by Anupam Tiwari – Business Program Manager – GTSC Backup Enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Amit Banerjee – PFE Microsoft Performance Enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Sourabh Agarwal - PFE Microsoft LUNCH BREAK Performing an effective Presentation by Pinal Dave – Community Member (SQLAuthority.com) InMemory Enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Balmukund Lakhani – Support Escalation Engg. Microsoft Some more lesser known enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Vinod Kumar – Technical Architect Microsoft MTC Power Packed – Power BI with SQL Server by Kane Conway – Support Escalation Engg. Microsoft I am very big fan of Amit, Balmukund and Vinod – I have always watched their session and this time, I am going to once again attend their session without missing a single min. They are SQL legends, I am going to be there and learn when they are sharing their knowledge.  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL

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• Prevent oversteering catastrophe in racing games

  - by jdm

  When playing GTA III on Android I noticed something that has been annoying me in almost every racing game I've played (maybe except Mario Kart): Driving straight ahead is easy, but curves are really hard. When I switch lanes or pass somebody, the car starts swiveling back and forth, and any attempt to correct it makes it only worse. The only thing I can do is to hit the brakes. I think this is some kind of oversteering. What makes it so irritating is that it never happens to me in real life (thank god :-)), so 90% of the games with vehicles inside feel unreal to me (despite probably having really good physics engines). I've talked to a couple of people about this, and it seems either you 'get' racing games, or you don't. With a lot of practice, I did manage to get semi-good at some games (e.g. from the Need for Speed series), by driving very cautiously, braking a lot (and usually getting a cramp in my fingers). What can you do as a game developer to prevent the oversteering resonance catastrophe, and make driving feel right? (For a casual racing game, that doesn't strive for 100% realistic physics) I also wonder what games like Super Mario Kart exactly do differently so that they don't have so much oversteering? I guess one problem is that if you play with a keyboard or a touchscreen (but not wheels and pedals), you only have digital input: gas pressed or not, steering left/right or not, and it's much harder to steer appropriately for a given speed. The other thing is that you probably don't have a good sense of speed, and drive much faster than you would (safely) in reality. From the top of my head, one solution might be to vary the steering response with speed.

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• The Healthy Tension That Mobility Creates

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps In my previous post, I talked about the value of the mobile revolution on businesses and workers. Now let me put on a different hat and view the world from the IT department and the IT leader’s viewpoint. The IT leader has different concerns – around privacy, potential liability of information leakage, and intellectual property protection. These concerns and the leader’s goals create a healthy tension with the users. For example, effective device management becomes a must have for the IT leader, especially if you look at the Android ecosystem as an example. There are benefits to the Android strategy, but there are also drawbacks, such as uniformity – in device management, in operating systems, and in the application taxonomy and capabilities. Whereas, if you compare Android to iOS, Apple's operating system, iOS is more unified, more streamlined, and easier to manage. In either case, this is where mobile device management in the cloud makes good sense. I don't think IT departments should be hosting device management and managing that complexity. It should be a cloud service and I predict it's going to be key for our customers. A New Focus for IT Departments So where does that leave the IT departments? I think their futures are in governance, which is a more strategic play than a tactical one. Device management is tactical and it's the “now” topic. But the mobile phenomenon, if you will, is going to drive significant change in terms of how IT plans, hosts, and deploys enterprise applications. For example, opening up enterprise applications for mobile users presents some challenges unless you deploy more complicated network topologies, such as virtual private networks and threat protection technology. If you really want employees to be mobile you need to remove those kinds of barriers. But I don’t think IT departments want to wrestle with exposing their private enterprise data centers and being responsible for hosted business applications – applications in a sense that they’re making vulnerable to the public world. This opens up a significant need and a significant driver for cloud applications. However, it's not just about taking away the complexity – it's also about taking away the responsibility. Why should every business have to carry the responsibility and figure out all the nuts and bolts of how to protect themselves in this public, mobile world? When you use apps in the cloud, either your vendor or your hosting partner should have figured all that out. They need to assure the business that they are adhering to all sorts of security and compliance regulations so users can be connected and have access to information anywhere anytime. More Ideas and Better Service What’s more interesting is the world of possibilities that the connected, cloud-based world enables. I believe that the one-size-fits-all, uber-best practices, lowest-common denominator-like capabilities will go away. IT will now be able to solve very specific business challenges for the different corporate functions it serves. In this new world, IT will play a key role in enabling different organizations within a company to be best in class and delivering greater value to the line of business managers. IT will actually help to differentiate. Net result is a more agile workforce and business because each department is getting work done its own way.

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• Should a link validator report 302 redirects as broken links?

  - by Kevin Vermeer

  A while ago, sparkfun.com changed their URL structure from /commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9266 to /products/9266 This is nice, right? We don't need to know that it is (or was) a PHP page, and commerce, product_info, and products_id all tell us that we're looking at some products. The latter form seems like a great improvement. However, the change would have broken existing links. So, nicely, they stuck in 302 redirects. Visit http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9266 and your browser will issue GET /commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9266 HTTP/1.1 to which Sparkfun's servers reply HTTP/1.1 302 Found Location: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9266 This 302 redirect is caught by Stack Exchange's link validator as a broken link. It's not broken it works just fine. Here, try it: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9266 I understand that a 302 redirect is intended to be a temporary redirect, while a 301 should be used for permanent changes per RFC 2616. That said, Wikipedia and common practice use it as a redirect. Who is in error in this situation? Is this an error in Sparkfun's redirect implementation or in Stack Exchange's URL validator?

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• Code structure for multiple applications with a common core

  - by Azrael Seraphin

  I want to create two applications that will have a lot of common functionality. Basically, one system is a more advanced version of the other system. Let's call them Simple and Advanced. The Advanced system will add to, extend, alter and sometimes replace the functionality of the Simple system. For instance, the Advanced system will add new classes, add properties and methods to existing Simple classes, change the behavior of classes, etc. Initially I was thinking that the Advanced classes simply inherited from the Simple classes but I can see the functionality diverging quite significantly as development progresses, even while maintaining a core base functionality. For instance, the Simple system might have a Project class with a Sponsor property whereas the Advanced system has a list of Project.Sponsors. It seems poor practice to inherit from a class and then hide, alter or throw away significant parts of its features. An alternative is just to run two separate code bases and copy the common code between them but that seems inefficient, archaic and fraught with peril. Surely we have moved beyond the days of "copy-and-paste inheritance". Another way to structure it would be to use partial classes and have three projects: Core which has the common functionality, Simple which extends the Core partial classes for the simple system, and Advanced which also extends the Core partial classes for the advanced system. Plus having three test projects as well for each system. This seems like a cleaner approach. What would be the best way to structure the solution/projects/code to create two versions of a similar system? Let's say I later want to create a third system called Extreme, largely based on the Advanced system. Do I then create an AdvancedCore project which both Advanced and Extreme extend using partial classes? Is there a better way to do this? If it matters, this is likely to be a C#/MVC system but I'd be happy to do this in any language/framework that is suitable.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 27, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Eventing Hello World | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen shares the slides, source code, and other information from his recent presentation at the DOAG conference in Nürnberg. How to Create Virtual Directory in Weblogic Server | Zeeshan Baig Oracle ACE Zeeshan Baig shows you how in six easy steps. ADF Mobile - Secured Web Service Access | Andrejus Baranovskis "There are good tutorials how to consume open Web Service in ADF Mobile," says Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis, "but in practice almost every Web Service exposed for the mobile must be secured - who wants to expose open Web Service on the public internet?" His blog post will set you on the right course. How-to: Starting with Oracle Service Bus | Dr. Frank Munz Dr. Frank Munz shares advice and resources for those interested in getting started with Oracle Service Bus. One-Stop Shop for Oracle Webcasts Webcasts can be a great way to get information about Oracle products without having to go cross-eyed reading yet another document off your computer screen. Oracle's new Webcast Center offers selectable filtering to make it easy to get to the information you want. Yes, you have to register to gain access, but that process is quick, and with over 200 webcasts to choose from you know you'll find useful content. Thought for the Day "There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience." — Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Complimentary Refills

  - by onefloridacoder

  My son and I were out to dinner and right after we sat down, he combs the menu to locate the soda  selection.  Then he looks up at me and says “Looks like we get free refills here, sweet!”  While we were sitting there I was thinking where that statement came from and I remember one time where he was helping to figure out the tip and saw that were we charged for six sodas, but there were only four of us at the table.  I would say that’s when this started for eateries he’s not familiar with. I was talking a friend of mine this week and this thought came to me, why can’t we manage expectations like my son – find out before the order is placed.  Find out what’s expected first then use the other bits of guidance to move forward.  But how many times have we all paid way to much for something we thought was free on a project – me, plenty.  This quote is going up in my work space, next to one I picked up Corey Haines’ Software Craftsmanship talk at Open Agile Romania - “Work != Practice”.  So if anyone else has gotten burnt, maybe check the menu, it will be in the area where the customer will pick two from the list of “Price, Quality, or Speed”.  Refills will be listed just beneath that.

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• Is it correct to fix bugs without adding new features when releasing software for system testing?

  - by Pratik

  This question is to experienced testers or test leads. This is a scenario from a software project: Say the dev team have completed the first iteration of 10 features and released it to system testing. The test team has created test cases for these 10 features and estimated 5 days for testing. The dev team of course cannot sit idle for 5 days and they start creating 10 new features for next iteration. During this time the test team found defects and raised some bugs. The bugs are prioritised and some of them have to be fixed before next iteration. The catch is that they would not accept the new release with any new features or changes to existing features until all those bugs fixed. The test team says that's how can we guarantee a stable release for testing if we also introduce new features along with the bug fix. They also cannot do regression tests of all their test cases each iteration. Apparently this is proper testing process according to ISQTB. This means the dev team has to create a branch of code solely for bug fixing and another branch where they continue development. There is more merging overhead specially with refactoring and architectural changes. Can you agree if this is a common testing principle. Is the test team's concern valid. Have you encountered this in practice in your project.

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• Connecting Clinical and Administrative Processes: Oracle SOA Suite for Healthcare Integration

  - by Mala Ramakrishnan

  One of the biggest IT challenges facing today’s health care industry is the difficulty finding reliable, secure, and cost-effective ways to exchange information. Payers and providers need versatile platforms for enterprise-wide information sharing. Clinicians require accurate information to provide quality care to patients while administrators need integrated information for all facets of the business operation. Both sides of the organization must be able to access information from research and development systems, practice management systems, claims systems, financial systems, and many others. Externally, these organizations must share claims data, patient records, pharmaceutical data, lab reports, and diagnostic information among third party entities—all while complying with emerging standards for formatting, processing, and storing electronic health records (EHR). Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables developers to integrate many types of software applications, databases and computing platforms within a particular health network as well as with community, state, and national health information exchanges. The Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration is designed to provide healthcare organizations with comprehensive integration capabilities within a unified middleware platform, as well as with healthcare libraries and templates for streamlining healthcare IT projects. It reduces the need for specialized skills and enforces an enterprise-wide view of critical healthcare data.  Here is a new white paper that details more about this offering: Oracle SOA Suite for Healthcare Integration

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