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• Silverlight Cream for March 10, 2011 -- #1058

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Ian T. Lackey, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), Martin Krüger, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Karl Shifflett, and Colin Eberhardt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics" John Papa WP7: "Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Telerik announced a special sale on their RadControls for WP7... check it out: RadControls for Windows Phone 7 - on Sale from March 16th at a Special Promo Price! From SilverlightCream.com: Prism BootStrapper Load ModuleCatalog Ansyc Ian T. Lackey has a post up about reading the module catalog for Prism from an XML file asynchronously... fun stuff... this is how we kick-started our app... XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 6 - Input (accelerometer) Peter Kuhn has Part 6 of his XNA for Silverlight devs up at SilverlightShow. This post is on the use of the accelerometer... some great diagrams and explanations of it's use along with some code to play with... including a 'problems and pitfalls' section, and some good external links. Getting Started with Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has an introduction to Unit Testing in general, and then moves into Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7, providing 3 options with links to the materials and code demonstrating the concepts. Using DockPanel in WP7 Responding to reader's questions, WindowsPhoneGeek's next post is on the DockPanel from the Silverlight Toolkit, and using it in WP7... defined declaratively and in code. Reactive Extensions–More About Chaining Jesse Liberty has post number 10 on Rx up and is a follow-on to the last one on Chaining. This time he exercises the chaining aspect of SelectMany. Yet Another Podcast #26–Walt Ritscher In his next post, Jesse Liberty has his 26th 'Yet Another Podcast' up and is chatting with my friend Walt Ritscher. If you don't know who Walt is, check out the links Jesse has on the post... I'm sure you've crossed paths. How to: Create A half square from a regular polygon (triangle) Martin Krüger demonstrates the exact placement of a half-square (isosceles right triangle), formed with a regular polygon in Blend... this is much more involved than I've made it sound... check out his post. Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics John Papa has Silverlight TV number 65 up and it's all about the 3D graphics stuff we saw at the Firestarter. John is talking with Danny Riddel, the CEO of Archetype, the company that built the awesome 3D demo we all gushed over. Jounce Part 12: Providing History-Based Back Navigation Jeremy Likness has part 12 of his Jounce exploration up... and discussing the stack of navigated pages that Jounce retains and providing a 'go back' functionality... and provides a good example of using it all. Prism 4 Region Navigation with Silverlight Frame Navigation and Unity Karl Shifflett has a post for all us Prism afficianados... Prism, Unity, and the Silverlight Frame Navigation framework. Some great external links for 'required reading' too. Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control Colin Eberhardt has an awesome tutorial up for creating a JumpList control for WP7... what a bunch of effort... this is a step-by-step description of designing the control he built and blogged about a while back... and it's still cool! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Mandatory look back at 2010

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Yeah, it's one of those posts, sorry. First, the mildly depressing: the most popular post on this blog this year with 47,000 hits was a post from last year about a fix to a bug in ASP.NET. A content-less post except for that link to the KB article that people should have found by going directly to the support site in the first place. Then, the really depressing: the second most popular post this year with 34,000 hits was a post from 2005 about how to display message boxes on a web page. I mean come on. This was kind of fun five years ago and it did solve one of the most common n00b mistakes VB programmers trying to move to the web were making. But come on, we've traveled about 4.7 billion miles around the Earth since then. Do people still do that kind of stuff? I should probably put a big red banner on top of this post. Oh [supernatural entity of your choice]. Hand me that gun, please. Third most popular post with 24,000 hits is from 2004. It's about how to set a session variable before redirecting. That problem has been fixed a long time ago. Oh well. Fourth most popular post. 21,000 hits. 2007. How to work around a stupid bug in ASP.NET Ajax 1.0. Fixed in ASP.NET 3.5? ASP.NET Ajax 1.0? Need I say more? The fifth one (20,000 hits) is an old post as well but I'm kind of fond of it: it's about that photo album handler I've been organically growing for a few years. It reminds me that I need to refresh it and make a new release. Good SEO title too. Back to insanity with the sixth one (16,000) that's about working around a bug in IE6. IE6. Please just refuse to pander to that browser any more. It's about time. Let's move on, please. Actually, the first post from 2010 is 15th in the list. We have a trio of these actually with server-side image resizing and FluentPath. So what happened? Well, I like the ad money, but not to the point that I'm going to write my stuff to inflate it. Actually I think if I tried I would fail miserably (I mean, I would fail worse). What really happened this year was new stuff: Orchard, FluentPath and the stuff with the Netduino. That stuff needs time to get off the ground but my hope is that it's going to be useful in the long run and that five years from now I'll be lamenting on how well those posts are still doing. So, no regret. 2010 was a good year. Oh, and I was on This Developer's Life this year! Yay! Anyways, thank you all for reading me. Please continue doing that. And happy 2011!

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• Welcome 2011

  - by WeigeltRo

  Things that happened in 2010 MIX10 was absolutely fantastic. Read my report of MIX10 to see why.   The dotnet Cologne 2010, the community conference organized by the .NET user group Köln and my own group Bonn-to-Code.Net became an even bigger success than I dared to dream of.   There was a huge discrepancy between the efforts by Microsoft to support .NET user groups to organize public live streaming events of the PDC keynote (the dotnet Cologne team joined forces with netug  Niederrhein to organize the PDCologne) and the actual content of the keynote. The reaction of the audience at our event was “meh” and even worse I seriously doubt we’ll ever get that number of people to such an event (which on top of that suffered from technical difficulties beyond our control).   What definitely would have deserved the public live streaming event treatment was the Silverlight Firestarter (aka “Silverlight Damage Control”) event. And maybe we would have thought about organizing something if it weren’t for the “burned earth” left by the PDC keynote. Anyway, the stuff shown at the firestarter keynote was the topic of conversations among colleagues days later (“did you see that? oh yeah, that was seriously cool”). Things that I have learned/observed/noticed in 2010 In the long run, there’s a huge difference between “It works pretty well” and “it just works and I never have to think about it”. I had to get rid of my USB graphics adapter powering the third monitor (read about it in this blog post). Various small issues (desktop icons sometimes moving their positions after a reboot for no apparent reasons, at least one game I couldn’t get run at all, all three monitors sometimes simply refusing to wake up after standby) finally made me buy a PCIe 1x graphics adapter. If you’re interested: The combination of a NVIDIA GTX 460 and a GT 220 is running in “don’t make me think” mode for a couple of months now.   PowerPoint 2010 is a seriously cool piece of software. Not only the new hardware-accelerated effects, but also features like built-in background removal and picture processing (which in many cases are simply “good enough” and save a lot of time) or the smart guides.   Outlook 2010 crashes on me a lot. I haven’t been successful in reproducing these crashes, they just happen when every couple of days on different occasions (only thing in common: I clicked something in the main window – yeah, very helpful observation)   Visual Studio 2010 reminds me of Visual Studio 2005 before SP1, which is actually not a good thing to say about a piece of software. I think it’s telling that Microsoft’s message regarding the beta of SP1 has been different from earlier service pack betas (promising an upgrade path for a beta to the RTM sounds to me like “please, please use it NOW!”).   I have a love/hate relationship with ReSharper. I don’t want to develop without it, but at the same time I can’t fail to notice that ReSharper is taking a heavy toll in terms of performance and sometimes stability. Things I’m looking forward to in 2011 Obviously, the dotnet Cologne 2011. We already have been able to score some big name sponsors (Microsoft, Intel), but we’re still looking for more sponsors. And be assured that we’ll make sure that our partners get the most out of their contribution, regardless of how big or small.   MIX11, period.    Silverlight 5 is going to be great. The only thing I’m a bit nervous about is that I still haven’t read anything official on whether C# next version’s async/await will be in it. Leaving that out would be really stupid considering the end-of-2011 release of SL5 (moving the next release way into the future).

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• PHP and Ruby: how to leverage both? and, is it worth it?

  - by dukeofgaming

  As you might have noticed from the title, this is not a "PHP or Ruby", or a "PHP vs. Ruby" question. This is a question on how to leverage PHP + Ruby in the same business. I myself am a PHP developer, I love the language because of its convenience and I specially love the ecosystem of resources that surround it: Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, Symfony2, Doctrine2, etc. However, the language itself can be a little disappointing sometimes. OTOH, Ruby looks like a very beautiful language and —from studying it superficially in several aspects— I could say it is leaner than Python as a language per se. However, from what I've seen there is pretty much only RoR making noise, and I don't like RoR so much (mainly because its model layer). As Co-CEO and CTO at my company I'm trying to think outside of the box since I want to start to focus on the human side of technology and see if its sane to use both PHP and Ruby. Here are some random thoughts: Ruby folk seem to be generally better suited programmers than PHP folk (in terms of averages), I know the previous statement is somewhat baloney because very good and well architected PHP can be written, but I'd say the Ruby programmer culture is better than PHP's. The thing about Ruby is that it seems better suited for rapid development, I don't really know if this is only the case for RoR, but I do know that there are certain practices (perhaps not so good) like monkey patching that let business needs be satified quicker. From a marketing point of view (yep, sometimes you need to leverage the marketing BS for the sake of your company) Ruby seems better while PHP carries some stigmas. PHP 5.4 is bringing traits, and that is better/cleaner than mixins. That could really make PHP as lean as Ruby —or more— for certain stuff. Now, concretely, my questions: Would a PHP programmer want to learn Ruby?, I know I do, but conversely, would a Ruby programmer want to learn PHP?. What kinds of projects or situations would be better suited for Ruby that are not suited for PHP?. What is the actual ecosystem of Ruby?, aside from RoR, I have not seen other hyped technologies/frameworks (I've seen RSpec, but I confess being a total noob on what BDD really consists of and its implications). Supposing there are a certain type of projects ideal for Ruby, would there be a moment that its better to move it to PHP?. I know PHP can handle lots of stuff, but I've read that Ruby has its limitations when scaling (or is that RoR?, or is that baloney for both?). Finally and most importantly, would it be sane to maintain projects in two languages?, or is that just stupid. As I said, it looks like Ruby is leaner on the short term and that can make a project happen and succeed, but I'm not so sure about that on the long run. I'm looking for insights mainly from people that know well the strengths and weaknesses of the languages —preferably both of them— and Ruby's ecosystem in real practice, meaning: frameworks and applications like the ones I quoted from PHP's ecosystem. Best regards and thanks for your time.

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• HSSFS Part 2.1 - Parsing @@VERSION

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  For Part 2 of the Handy SQL Server Function Series I decided to tackle parsing useful information from the @@VERSION function, because I am an idiot.  It turns out I was confused about CHARINDEX() vs. PATINDEX() and it pretty much invalidated my original solution.  All is not lost though, this mistake turned out to be informative for me, and hopefully for you. Referring back to the "Version" view in the prelude I started with the following query to extract the version number: SELECT DISTINCT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, 12) VerNum FROM VERSION I used PATINDEX() to find the first hyphen "-" character in the string, since the version number appears 2 positions after it, and got these results: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- ------------ 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.3080.00 2005 9.00.4053.00 2008 10.50.1600.1 As you can see it was good enough for most of the values, but not for the SQL 2000 @@VERSION.  You'll notice it has only 3 version sections/octets where the others have 4, and the SUBSTRING() grabbed the non-numeric characters after.  To properly parse the version number will require a non-fixed value for the 3rd parameter of SUBSTRING(), which is the number of characters to extract. The best value is the position of the first space to occur after the version number (VN), the trick is to figure out how to find it.  Here's where my confusion about PATINDEX() came about.  The CHARINDEX() function has a handy optional 3rd parameter: CHARINDEX (expression1 ,expression2 [ ,start_location ] ) While PATINDEX(): PATINDEX ('%pattern%',expression ) Does not.  I had expected to use PATINDEX() to start searching for a space AFTER the position of the VN, but it doesn't work that way.  Since there are plenty of spaces before the VN, I thought I'd try PATINDEX() on another character that doesn't appear before, and tried "(": SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)) FROM VERSION Unfortunately this messes up the length calculation and yields: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- --------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (Intel X86) Dec 16 2008 19:4 2005 9.00.3080.00 (Intel X86) Sep 6 2009 01: 2005 9.00.4053.00 (Intel X86) May 26 2009 14: 2008 10.50.1600.1 (Intel X86) Apr 2008 10.50.1600.1 (X64) Apr 2 20 Yuck.  The problem is that PATINDEX() returns position, and SUBSTRING() needs length, so I have to subtract the VN starting position: SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)-PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)) VerNum FROM VERSION And the results are: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- -------------------------------------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.4053.00 (I Msg 537, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function. Ummmm, whoops.  Turns out SQL Server 2008 R2 includes "(RTM)" before the VN, and that causes the length to turn negative. So now that that blew up, I started to think about matching digit and dot (.) patterns.  Sadly, a quick look at the first set of results will quickly scuttle that idea, since different versions have different digit patterns and lengths. At this point (which took far longer than I wanted) I decided to cut my losses and redo the query using CHARINDEX(), which I'll cover in Part 2.2.  So to do a little post-mortem on this technique: PATINDEX() doesn't have the flexibility to match the digit pattern of the version number; PATINDEX() doesn't have a "start" parameter like CHARINDEX(), that allows us to skip over parts of the string; The SUBSTRING() expression is getting pretty complicated for this relatively simple task! This doesn't mean that PATINDEX() isn't useful, it's just not a good fit for this particular problem.  I'll include a version in the next post that extracts the version number properly. UPDATE: Sorry if you saw the unformatted version of this earlier, I'm on a quest to find blog software that ACTUALLY WORKS.

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• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I were more intuitive

  - by pjohnson

  I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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• Silverlight Cream for March 08, 2011 -- #1056

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Joost van Schaik, Manas Patnaik, Kevin Hoffman, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata, Dhananjay Kumar, Dennis Delimarsky, Samuel Jack, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jfo. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How I let the trees grow" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior" Joost van Schaik Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 from last week posted, plus the ECOContest is ready to be voted on: SilverlightShow for Feb 28 - March 06, 2011 Drew DeVault is a young man involved with the Microsoft Student Insiders. He gave a WP7 presentation at RMTT and has posted his material: Post-Session: Windows Phone 7 @ RMTT Rui Marinho has an app in the ECO Contest called Forest Findr. is based on the BIng Map Control for silverlight and Sql Spatial data, and helps you find Forests and get geolocated pictures and wikipedia information, and has a post up with a bunch of info on it here: Forest Findr. my entry on the SilverlightShow EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior Joost van Schaik has a behavior that makes *anything* draggable and 'flickable' in WP7 ... read the intro, scroll to the bottom to watch the demo, and then grab up the code... cool stuff, Joost! Data Aggregation Using Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4 Manas Patnaik sent me a link to his blog, and it appears he's got lots of Silverlight goodness out there so you'll be hearing more about him. This first post is on the Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4... good discussion, diagrams and code... good job, Manas! WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Advanced UI Kevin Hoffman has part 3 of an ambitious 12-part tutorial series up on WP7 development ... this go-around is concentrating on Advanced UI - Panorama/Pivot controls, DataBinding, ObservableCollections, and Converters... whew! Sterling DB on top of Isolated Storage – 2 Jesse Liberty has part 2 of his Sterling series up... this time setting up the database in App.xaml so it can be used for dealing with tombstoning. Silverlight Charting: Formatting the Tick Marks Deborah Kurata's next chart tutorial is all about showing you how to continue to dress up your charts.. this time by formatting the tick marks... if you don't know what that is... check out the first image in the post. Stored Procedure in WCF Data Service Dhananjay Kumar has a very nice tutorial up on using a stored proc with WCF Data Services... I happen to know someone working on just that at this time. If you have this in mind, here's a step-by-step guide to getting it done. Windows Phone 7 – Episode 5 – Pages Dennis Delimarsky has part 5 of his WP7 tutorial series up and is discussing Pages in this 17 minute video. Unpacking Simon Squared: My mini framework-independent animation library Samuel Jack has not only Open-Sourced the WP7 game he built and blogged about, but he's now explaining some of the structure of the game in posts such as this one about the animation library he wrote that his game is built on. How I let the trees grow Peter Kuhn shares with us the code he used for the tree animation in his ECO Contest entry. There's a lot to learn in this post about performance ... the fully-animated tree has about 20K elements... 5K branches and 20K leaves... check it out. WP7 ToastPrompt in depth WindowsPhoneGeek takes a deep dive into the ToastPrompt control in the Coding4fun Toolkit... everything you need to completely use the control including sample code. Beware the loaded event Jfo talks about another frustration point she had with WP7 development, and that is around the use of the loaded event... read these tips from someone that's been there. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Why is my RAID /dev/md1 showing up as /dev/md126? Is mdadm.conf being ignored?

  - by mmorris

  I created a RAID with: sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md1 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md2 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb Which I appended it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, see below: # mdadm.conf # # Please refer to mdadm.conf(5) for information about this file. # # by default (built-in), scan all partitions (/proc/partitions) and all # containers for MD superblocks. alternatively, specify devices to scan, using # wildcards if desired. #DEVICE partitions containers # auto-create devices with Debian standard permissions CREATE owner=root group=disk mode=0660 auto=yes # automatically tag new arrays as belonging to the local system HOMEHOST <system> # instruct the monitoring daemon where to send mail alerts MAILADDR root # definitions of existing MD arrays # This file was auto-generated on Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:06:12 -0500 # by mkconf $Id$ ARRAY /dev/md1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md2 : active raid1 sdb2[0] sdc2[1] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md1 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 1 Oct 30 11:06 md1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 2 Oct 30 11:06 md2 So I think all is good and I reboot. After the reboot, /dev/md1 is now /dev/md126 and /dev/md2 is now /dev/md127????? sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md/ion:1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md/ion:2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md126 : active raid1 sdc2[1] sdb2[0] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md127 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Oct 30 11:18 md brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 126 Oct 30 11:18 md126 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 127 Oct 30 11:18 md127 All is not lost, I: sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md126 sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md127 sudo mdadm --assemble --verbose /dev/md1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 sudo mdadm --assemble --verbose /dev/md2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 and verify everything: sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md2 : active raid1 sdb2[0] sdc2[1] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md1 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 1 Oct 30 11:26 md1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 2 Oct 30 11:26 md2 So once again, I think all is good and I reboot. Again, after the reboot, /dev/md1 is /dev/md126 and /dev/md2 is /dev/md127????? sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md/ion:1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md/ion:2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md126 : active raid1 sdc2[1] sdb2[0] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md127 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Oct 30 11:42 md brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 126 Oct 30 11:42 md126 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 127 Oct 30 11:42 md127 What am I missing here?

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part IV

  - by Tara Kizer

  This is the final blog for my PASS Summit 2011 series.  Well okay, a mini-series, I guess. On the last day of the conference, I attended Keith Elmore’ and Boris Baryshnikov’s (both from Microsoft) “Introducing the Microsoft SQL Server Code Named “Denali” Performance Dashboard Reports, Jeremiah Peschka’s (blog|twitter) “Rewrite your T-SQL for Great Good!”, and Kimberly Tripp’s (blog|twitter) “Isolated Disasters in VLDBs”. Keith and Boris talked about the lifecycle of a session, figuring out the running time and the waiting time.  They pointed out the transient nature of the reports.  You could be drilling into it to uncover a problem, but the session may have ended by the time you’ve drilled all of the way down.  Also, the reports are for troubleshooting live problems and not historical ones.  You can use Management Data Warehouse for historical troubleshooting.  The reports provide similar benefits to the Activity Monitor, however Activity Monitor doesn’t provide context sensitive drill through. One thing I learned in Keith’s and Boris’ session was that the buffer cache hit ratio should really never be below 87% due to the read-ahead mechanism in SQL Server.  When a page is read, it will read the entire extent.  So for every page read, you get 7 more read.  If you need any of those 7 extra pages, well they are already in cache.  I had a lot of fun in Jeremiah’s session about refactoring code plus I learned a lot.  His slides were visually presented in a fun way, which just made for a more upbeat presentation.  Jeremiah says that before you start refactoring, you should look at your system.  Investigate missing or too many indexes, out-of-date statistics, and other areas that could be leading to your code running slow.  He talked about code standards.  He suggested using common abbreviations for aliases instead of one-letter aliases.  I’m a big offender of one-letter aliases, but he makes a good point.  He said that join order does not matter to the optimizer, but it does matter to those who have to read your code.  Now let’s get into refactoring! Eliminate useless things – useless/unneeded joins and columns.  If you don’t need it, get rid of it! Instead of using DISTINCT/JOIN, replace with EXISTS Simplify your conditions; use UNION or better yet UNION ALL instead of OR to avoid a scan and use indexes for each union query Branching logic – instead of IF this, IF that, and on and on…use dynamic SQL (sp_executesql, please!) or use a parameterized query in the application Correlated subqueries – YUCK! Replace with a join Eliminate repeated patterns Last, but certainly not least, was Kimberly’s session.  Kimberly is my favorite speaker.  I attended her two-day pre-conference seminar at PASS Summit 2005 as well as a SQL Immersion Event last December.  Did I mention she’s my favorite speaker?  Okay, enough of that. Kimberly’s session was packed with demos.  I had seen some of it in the SQL Immersion Event, but it was very nice to get a refresher on these, especially since I’ve got a VLDB with some growing pains.  One key takeaway from her session is the idea to use a log shipping solution with a load delay, such as 6, 8, or 24 hours behind the primary.  In the case of say an accidentally dropped table in a VLDB, we could retrieve it from the secondary database rather than waiting an eternity for a restore to complete.  Kimberly let us know that in SQL Server 2012 (it finally has a name!), online rebuilds are supported even if there are LOB columns in your table.  This will simplify custom code that intelligently figures out if an online rebuild is possible. There was actually one last time slot for sessions that day, but I had an airplane to catch and my kids to see!

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• HTML5 Boilerplate template for ASP.NET with Visual Studio 2010

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  This is the 5th post in the series of HTML5 for ASP.NET Developers  Support for HTML5 in Visual Studio 2010 has been quite good with Visual Studio Service Pack 1 However, HTML5 Boilerplate template has been one of the most popular HTML5 templates out in the internet.  Now, there is one for your favorite ASP.NET Webforms as well as ASP.NET MVC 3 Projects (even for ASP.NET MVC 2).  And its available in the most optimal place, i.e. NuGet. Lets see it in action.  Let us fire up Visual Studio 2010 and create a “File – New Project – ASP.NET Web Application” and leave the default name to create the project.  The default project template creates Site.Master, Default.aspx and the Account (membership) files. When you run the project without any changes, it shows up the default Master Page with the Home and About placeholder pages. Also, just to check the rendering on devices, lets try running the same page in Windows Phone 7 Emulator.  You can download the SDK from here Clearly, it looks bad on the emulator and if we were to publish the application as is, its going to be the same experience when users browse this app. Close the browser and then switch to Visual Studio.   Right click on the project and select “Manage NuGet Packages” The NuGet Package Manager dialog opens up.  Search for HTML5 Boilerplate.  The options for MVC & Web Forms show up.  Click on Install corresponding to the “Add HTML5 Boilerplate to Web Forms” options. It installs the template in a few seconds.   Once installed, you will be able to see a lot of additional Script files and also the all important HTML5Boilerplate.Master file.  This would be the replacement for the default Site.Master.  We need to change the Content Pages (Default.aspx & other pages) to point to this Master Page.  Example <%@ <% Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Html5Boilerplate.Master.cs" Inherits="WebApplication14.SiteMaster" %> would be the setting in the Default.aspx Page. You can do a Find & Replace for Site.Master to HTML5Boilerplate.Master for the whole solution so that it is changed in all the locations. With this, we have our Webforms application ready with HTML5 capabilities.  Needless to say, we need to wire up HTML5 mark up level code, canvas, etc., further to use the actual HTML5 features, but even without that, the page is now HTML5’ed.   One of the advantages of HTML5 (here HTML5 is collectively referred for CSS3, Javascript enhancements etc.,)  is the ability to render the pages better on mobile and hand held devices. So, now when we run the page from Visual Studio, the following is what we get.  Notice the site.icon automatically added.  The page otherwise looks similar to what it was earlier. Now, when we also check this page on the Windows Phone Emulator, here below is what, we get. As you can see, we definitely get a better experience now.  Of course, this is not the only HTML5 feature that we can use.  We need to wire up additional code for using Canvas, SVG and other HTML5 features.  But, definitely, this is a good starting point. You can also install the HTML5boilerplate Template for your ASP.NET MVC 3 and ASP.NET MVC 2 from the NuGet packages and get them ready for HTML5. Cheers !!!

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• Transform your Oracle Tutor Documents to Your Corporate Standard

  - by mary.keane

  You have all of your company's processes documented in Oracle Tutor, and now you want to get the HTML files to reflect your company's corporate look and feel. How are you going to do this without having an HTML guru to change every HTML page? The good news is you do not need to be an HTML expert to make minor changes to your documents. All Tutor HTML files are attached to a group of style sheets, so any changes you make to the style sheets will immediately be reflected in all of your HTML documents. If you want to give it a try, here's what you do (please note that these tips are applicable to release Oracle Tutor 12.2 and greater): Navigate to your Tutor HTML directory, and copy into a draft folder a representative group of HTML files (don't forget the flowchart image files that are associated with the procedures). You'll also need to copy the following files: tutor.css tutor_notabs.css tutor_scripts.js tutor_tabs.css flow_icon.gif Here's the default look to the Oracle Tutor desk manual. Let's say I want to use my company's corporate style in the HTML documents. At Oracle, we use Oracle Red (FF0000), Oracle Black (000000), and Oracle Gray (666666). So I want to incorporate those colors into the Tutor HTML files. I open tutor.css from the draft folder in a text editor. My preference is to use Notepad, but there are others. Make sure, however, that it is a text editor, and not a word processing program. I want to change the headings to Oracle Red. The desk manual title is listed as the DMPAGETITLE, so I find that in tutor.css. The style names in the style sheets are descriptive, but sometimes you may have to experiment to find the right style (this is why you're working in a draft folder). I change the color attribute to FF00000, and then I save the document. Now I look at one of the desk manuals in my draft folder. I've successfully changed the title of the desk manual, so, now that I have more confidence that I can do this, I start changing other styles. I need to make changes in the tutor_tabs.css file as well, so I open that document. Then I look at one of the procedures. Oops! All that red is distracting, and the users may not be able to follow their procedures. So I go back to the corporate style guide, and I find some shades of gray that have been approved. So I use that, and it is now more readable. It's good enough for a first draft, and I would show it to my colleagues at this point to get their input. On my next blog, I'll discuss how to change the flowchart colors to match your corporate look and feel. Have you used the cascading styles sheets to change the look of your Tutor documents? If so, let us know what you've done in your post. Mary R. Keane Senior Development Manager, Oracle Tutor & UPK Content

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• Knowledge Management Feedback

  - by Robert Schweighardt

  Did you know that you can provide feedback on Knowledge Management (KM) articles? It's nice to read a technical article that is well-written, the grammar and spelling are correct, the information is up to date, concise, to the point, easy to understand and it flows from one paragraph to another.  And though we always strive for a well-written article, it doesn't always come out that way. Knowledge Management articles are written by Oracle Support Engineers and we welcome your feedback.  Providing feedback helps to improve Oracle's Knowledge Base.  If you're reading a KM article and you have a comment, please let us know about it.  Maybe it's just to fix a spelling or grammatical error.  Maybe there's a broken link that needs to be fixed.  Maybe it's a suggestion to provide additional information.  Maybe the article contains incorrect information.  Maybe some information in the article is outdated.  Maybe something is not clear in the article.  Whatever it is, we want to hear about it.  We value your input! When you provide feedback it goes directly to the owner of the article.  The owner carefully reviews the comment and decides whether or not to implement it.  Most comments are implemented and we strive to implement them within a week!  For those comments that are not implemented, there is normally a good reason.  It may not be feasible to implement the suggestion or the suggestion may not be correct.  We don't take the decision lightly! So how do you provide feedback? Providing feedback on a KM article depends on whether you're a customer or an Oracle Employee. Customer 1. In the upper right hand corner of the article, click on the little +/- Rate this document icon: Note: The grayed out Comments (0) link will only show a number when there are open comments that are still being evaluated. 2. In the Article Rating window, complete as many of the following optional fields as you like and then click the Send Rating button: Rate the article as Excellent, Good or Poor Specify whether the article helped you or not Specify the ease of finding the article Provide whatever comments you have Employee The interface for Oracle Employees is a little bit different, there are more options. 1. The +/- Rate this document icon is also available to employees and is identical to what the customers have.  Please see Customer section above. 2. The Show document comments link shows all comments that have ever been submitted for the article 3. Employees have an additional way to submit a comment.  Click on the little + Add Comment icon: 4. Fill out the Add Comment fields and click the Add Comment button: We look forward to your feedback!

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• ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple (Book Review)

  - by Frank Nimphius

    Sten E. Vesterli wrote the "Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development – Made Simple" book published by Packt Publishing in 2011 http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-adf-enterprise-application-development/book A common question on OTN, but also when talking to clients or customers is about where and how to start your ADF application development. Especially when the current programming background is not in Java, but 4 GL or PLSQL, developers often look for answers to the following questions: · How long does it take to learn Oracle ADF ? · How long does it take to replace a Forms application with ADF ? · How many developers do I need? · Do I need to know Java to use ADF and if yes, how good do I need to know this? · How do I structure my programming files, organizing them in JDeveloper work spaces, projects and libraries? · What is best practices for naming Java packages and how to void naming conflicts in ADF in general? · How many Application Modules do I need or should I create? · How to test applications? Sten Vesterli answers all of the above questions and more in his book http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-adf-enterprise-application-development/book , which makes it great value add to the 3 existing Oracle ADF books. In order of complexity (which also is the order in which reading the available Oracle ADF books makes sense), in my opinion, Sten's book should come second – though it also is useful to those that are already more advanced with Oracle ADF. So if you are absolutely new to Oracle ADF, then the order of books to read to get you up on an expert level should be: 1. Grant Ronald; "Quick Start Guide to Oracle Fusion Development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF" (McGraw Hill 2010) 2. Sten Vesterli; "Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development – Made Simple" (Packt Publishing 2011) 3. Duncan Mills, Peter Koletzke; " Oracle JDeveloper 11g Handbook: A Guide to Fusion Web Development" (McGraw Hill 2009) 4. Frank Nimphius, Lynn Munsinger; " Oracle Fusion Developer Guide: Building Rich Internet Applications with Oracle ADF Business Components and Oracle ADF Faces" (McGraw Hill 2010) If you are not new to Oracle ADF and Orace JDeveloper, then buy Sten Vesterli's book anyway. It is worth it and you want to have it on your book shelf. See below the table of content to get a better idea of what this book covers: · Chapter 1: The ADF Proof of Concept · Chapter 2: Estimating the Effort · Chapter 3: Getting Organized · Chapter 4: Productive Teamwork · Chapter 5: Prepare to Build · Chapter 6: Building the Enterprise Application · Chapter 7: Testing your Application · Chapter 8: Look and Feel · Chapter 9: Customizing the Functionality · Chapter 10: Securing your ADF Application · Chapter 11: Package and Deliver · Appendix: Internationalization The book is written with a lot of good humor, which makes the read very enjoyable (from a geek's perspective, of course). My favorite quote – just in case you are interested - is from page 97, when Sten talks about getting organized: " Stop sending e-mails to your team. Just stop it. E-mail is so last century.…" So true, so true! This quote's runner up is the "boss key" on page 128 where Sten talks about productivity and how Oracle Team Productivity Center (TPC) can help you with this. Quotes like these stick to your brains and make sure you never forget. Go for it!

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• Silverlight Cream for December 07, 2010 -- #1004

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: András Velvárt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), AvraShow, Gill Cleeren, Ian T. Lackey, Richard Waddell, Joe McBride, Michael Crump, Xpert360, keyboardP, and Pete Vickers(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Grouping Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "Phone 7 Back Button and the ListPicker control" Ian T. Lackey Shoutouts: Colin Eberhardt has some Silverlight 5 Adoption Predictions you may want to check out. Michael Crump has a post up showing lots of the goodness of Silverlight 5 from the Firestarter... screenshots, code snippets, etc: Silverlight 5 – What’s New? (Including Screenshots & Code Snippets) Kunal Chowdhury has a pretty complete Silverlight 5 feature set from the Firestarter and an embedded copy of Scott Guthrie's kenote running on the page: New Features Announced for Silverlight 5 Beta From SilverlightCream.com: Just how productive is WP7 development compared to iOS, Android and mobile Web? András Velvárt blogged about a contest he took part in to build a WP7 app in 1-1/2 hours without any prior knowledge of it's funtion. He and his team-mate were pitted against other teams on Android, IOS, and mobile Web... guess who got (almost) their entire app running? ... just too cool Andras! ... Grouping Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView Kunal Chowdhury has a couple good posts up, this first one is on using the PagedCollectionView to group the records in a DataGrid... code included. Filtering Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView Kunal Chowdhury then continues with another post on the PagedCollectionView only this time is showing how to do some filtering. DeepZoom Tips and Techniques AvraShow has a post up discussing using DeepZoom to explore, in his case, a Printed Circuit Board, with information about how he proceeded in doing that, and some tips and techniques along the way. The validation story in Silverlight (Part 2) Gill Cleeren has Part 2 of his Silverlight Validation series up at SilverlightShow. This post gets into IDataErrorInfo and INotifyDataErrorInfo. Lots of code and the example is available for download. Phone 7 Back Button and the ListPicker control Ian T. Lackey has a post up about the WP7 backbutton and what can get a failure from the Marketplace in that area, and how that applies to the ListPicker as well. Very Simple Example of ICommand CanExecute Method and CanExecuteChanged Event Richard Waddell has a nice detailed tutorial on ICommand and dealing with CanExecute... lots of Blend love in this post. Providing an Alternating Background Color for an ItemsControl Joe McBride has a post up discussing putting an alternating background color on an ItemsControl... you know, how you do on a grid... interesting idea, and all the code... Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter Michael Crump has a great Firestarter post up ... where and how to get the videos, the labs... a good Firestarter resource for sure. Adventures with PivotViewer Part 7: Slider control Xpert360 has part 7 of the PivotViewer series they're doing up. This time they're demonstrating taking programmatic control of the Zoom slider. Creating Transparent Lockscreen Wallpapers for WP7 I don't know keyboardP's name, but he's got a cool post up about getting an image up for the WP7 lock screen that has transparent regions on it... pretty cool actually. Windows Phone 7 Linq to XML 'strangeness' Pete Vickers has a post up describing a problem he found with Linq to XML on WP7. He even has a demo app that has the problem, and the fix... and it's all downloadable. Windows Phone 7 multi-line radio buttons Pete Vickers has another quick post up on radio buttons with so much text that it needs wrapping ... this is for WP7, but applies to Silverlight in general. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for January 12, 2011 -- #1025

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Amyo Kabir, Rob Eisenberg, Doug Rathbone, John Papa, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Mike Taulty, Peter Kuhn, Laurent Bugnion, Vangos Pterneas, and Senthil Kumar. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Popup sample" Amyo Kabir WP7: "Navigation in a #WP7 application with MVVM Light" Laurent Bugnion XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 - Why should I care?" Peter Kuhn Shoutouts: Mohamed Mosallem posted a video of an Expression Blend demo he gave recently: Expression Blend Demo Rob Eisenberg posted the winners of the Caliburn.Micro Contest he was running .. and a nice bunch of swag too! Announcing the Caliburn.Micro Contest Winners! Dan Moyer is a LightSwitch enthusiast and writes Why I Believe Visual Studio LightSwitch will be a Win... good well-thought-out and written take on Lightswitch. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Popup sample Amyo Kabir has a post up that is short on description but long on demo and the code is available... put this in the 'a picture is worth 1,000 words category' :) Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 7 - All About Conventions The 7th episode of Rob Eisenberg's tutorial series on Caliburn.Micro is up. This episode about some of the conventions that you get out-of-the-box with Caliburn.Micro, what it'll do for you, and how you can modify the behavior of the convention to suit your own taste/style. Two little tips for working with Silverlight chart DateTime Axes Doug Rathbone has been working with the Toolkit Charts for WP7 and finding it difficult to get the info he needs, and now that he's worked it out... he's sharing... particularly information about DateTimeAxis. Silverlight TV 56: WCF RIA Services and Azure The first Silverlight TV of 2011 was John Papa discussing WCF RIA Services and Azure with Saurabh Plant. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 14 As usual, Jeff Blankenburg is a couple ahead of me... his Issue 14 is about some panorama trickery... like navigating to a specific place in one, or preventing wrapping. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 15 In Jeff Blankenburg's latest WP7 post, he's sharing some interesting insight into Trial Mode and app sales... from the standpoint of someone selling apps. Blend Bits 20–Group Into Mike Taulty has Part 20 of his Blend Bits series up. This one is demonstrating grouping, and what all can be accomplished (or not) with grouping in Blend. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 - Why should I care? Peter Kuhn has the beginning of a series on WP7 and XNA up at SilverlightShow... this looks to be a good intro and way to get your head wrapped around XNA on the phone. Navigation in a #WP7 application with MVVM Light Laurent Bugnion discusses WP7 navigation via MVVM Light, resolving many of the communication/navigation complexities you can get involved in without a tool like his. Motion detection in Silverlight Vangos Pterneas has a followup postto the one on facial detection... this one is on Motion Detection in Silverlight. If you've got a webcam hooked up, you can give a demo app a dance via a link he has in the post. Adding ApplicationBar in Windows Phone 7 using Expression Blend Senthil Kumar follows up a post about using VS to add an application bar to a WP7 app with this one using Expression Blend Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• T-SQL Tuesday - the swag

  - by Rob Farley

  This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Kendal van Dyke (@SQLDBA), and is on the topic of swag. He asks about the best SQL Server swag that we’ve ever received from a conference. I can’t say I ever focus on getting the swag at conferences, as I see some people doing. I know there are plenty of people that get around all the sponsors as soon as they’ve arrived, collecting whatever goodies they can, sometimes as token gifts for those at home, sometimes as giveaways for the user groups they attend. I remember a few years ago at my first PASS Summit, the SQLCAT team gave me a large pile of leftover SQL Server swag to give away to my user group – piles of branded things to stop your phone sliding off your car dashboard, and other things. The user group members thought it was great, and over the course of a few months, happily cleared me out of it all. I tend to consider swag to be something that you haven’t earned except by being at a conference, and there was no winning associated with it, it was simply a giveaway item at a sponsor booth. That means I don’t include the HP Mini laptop that was given away at TechEd Australia a few years ago to every attendee, or the SQL Server bag and Camelbak bottle that I was given as a thank-you for writing a guest blog post (which I use as my regular laptop bag and water bottle for work). I don’t even include the copy of Midtown Madness that I got as a door prize at my vey first TechEd event in 1999 (that was a really good game, and even meant that when I went to Chicago last year, I felt a strange familiarity about the place). I don’t want to include shirts in the mix either. I was given a nice SQL Server shirt about five years ago TechEd Australia. It’s a business shirt (buttons, cuffs, pocket on the chest), black with the SQL Server logo on it. It was such a nice shirt that I commented about it to the Product Marketing Manager for Australia (Christine, at the time), who unexpectedly arranged for me to get another one. That was certainly an improvement on the tent I was given at one of the MVP conference I attended. So when I consider these ‘rules’, two pieces of swag come to mind, and I think both were at PASS Summits (although I can’t be sure). One was a hand-warmer from HP, one of the “crystallisation-type” ones, which proved extremely popular when I got home, until one day when it didn’t survive being recharged – not overly SQL related, but still it was good swag. The other was an umbrella, from expressor, which was from the PASS Summit in 2010, my first PASS Summit. I remember it well – Blythe Morrow (now Gietz) (@blythemorrow) was working the booth, having stopped working for PASS some time before, but she’d been on my list of people to meet, as I’d had plenty of contact with her while she’d worked at PASS, my being a chapter leader and general volunteer. There had been an expressor dinner on one of the first evenings, which I’d been asked to be at, which is when I’d met lots of SQL people in person for the first time, including Ted Krueger (@onpnt), Jessica Moss (@jessicamoss) and Blythe. Anyway, at some point the next day I swung by their booth to say hello and thank them for the dinner, and Blythe says “Oh, we have the best swag – here!” and handed me an umbrella. And she was right. It’s excellent. @rob_farley

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• Getting Started with StreamInsight 2.1

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  If you're just beginning to get familiar with StreamInsight, you may be looking for a way to get started. What are the basics? How can I get my first StreamInsight application running so I can see how it works? Where is the 'front door' that will get me going? If that describes you, then this blog entry might be just what you need. If you're already a StreamInsight wiz, keep reading anyway - you may find some helpful links here that you weren't aware of. But here's what we'd like from you experienced readers in particular: if you know of other good resources that we missed, please feel free to add them in the comments below. We appreciate you sharing your expertise. The Book The basic documentation for StreamInsight is located in the MSDN Library (Microsoft StreamInsight 2.1). You'll notice that previous versions of StreamInsight are still there (1.2 and 2.0), but if you're just getting started you can stick to the 2.1 section. The documentation has been organized to function as reference material, which is fine after you're familiar with the technology. But if you're trying to learn the basics, you might want to take a different path instead of just starting at the top. The following is one map you can use. What Is StreamInsight? Here is a sequence of topics that should give you a good overview of what StreamInsight is and how it works: Overview answers the question, "what is it?" StreamInsight Server Architecture gives you a quick look at a high-level architectural drawing StreamInsight Concepts lays out an overview of the basic components Deploying StreamInsight Entities to a StreamInsight Server describes the mechanics of how these components work together Getting an Example Running Once you have this background, go ahead and install StreamInsight and get a basic example up and running: Installation download and install the software StreamInsight Examples walk through a set of 3 simple StreamInsight applications that work together to demonstrate what you learned in the topics above; you can copy and paste the code into Visual Studio, compile, and run That's it - you now have a real, functioning StreamInsight system! Now that you have a handle on the basics, you might want to start digging deeper. Digging Deeper Here's a suggested path through the documentation to help you understand the next layer of StreamInsight technologies: Using Event Sources and Event Sinks sources supply data and sinks consume it; this topic gives you an overview of how they work Publishing and Connecting to the StreamInsight Server practical details on how to set up a StreamInsight server A Hitchhiker’s Guide to StreamInsight 2.1 Queries queries are the heart of how StreamInsight performs data analytics, and this whitepaper will help you really understand how they work Using StreamInsight LINQ root through this section for technical details on specific query components Using the StreamInsight Event Flow Debugger in addition to troubleshooting, the debugger is a great way to learn more about what goes on inside a StreamInsight application And Even Deeper Finally, to get a handle on some of the more complex things you can do with StreamInsight, dig into these: Input and Output Adapters adapters can be useful for handling more complex sources and sinks Building Resilient StreamInsight Applications a resilient application is able to recover from system failures Operations this section will help you monitor and troubleshoot a running StreamInsight system The StreamInsight Community As you're designing and developing your StreamInsight solutions, you probably will find it helpful to see working examples or to learn tips and tricks from others. Or maybe you need a place to post a vexing question. Here are some community resources that we have found useful. If you know of others, please add them in the comments below. Code samples and tools Official StreamInsight code samples Introduction to LinqPad Driver for StreamInsight 2.1 - LinqPad is a very useful tool for developing queries The following case studies are based on earlier versions of StreamInsight, but they still are useful examples: Microsoft Media Analytics - real-time monitoring and analytic Edgenet - responding to information from multiple source ICONICS - managing energy usage Blogs Microsoft StreamInsight Ruminations of J.net Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings pluralsight Forums MSDN StreamInsight Forum stackoverflow Training Microsoft StreamInsight Fundamentals (“Introducing StreamInsight” is free) from pluralsight Twitter @streaminsight   You’re a StreamInsight Expert That should get you going. Please add any other resources you have found useful in the comments below.   Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• Five geeky things you must do with your Android Smartphone

  - by Gopinath

  Android is the Windows of next generation. Its open, free, widely adopted and smart enough to outsmart Apple’s iOS. It’s a stolen product and cheap imitation of iOS, but Steve Job’s once quoted saying good artists copy and great artists steal. Alright, this post is not about Android vs iOS or is it really stolen or not. Android is a great OS for mobile devices and it lets you do amazing through mobiles.  In this post I want to write about the geeky things we can do with an Android Smartphone. Control your computer using mobile Assume that it is a lazy weekend and you are on a couch watching movies on a laptop which is a meter away. Now you want to adjust volume or skip a scene/song. How to control your laptop without moving out of couch? Just install Universal Remote free app on your smartphone and start control your computer using phone. Universal Remove app controls computers over Wifi or Bluetooth networks with dedicated remote controls for various media players and applications like YouTube, VLC & Spotify.  The application is very easy to use and works amazingly well in controlling computers. Few of the remote controls provided in the app are – Mouse, Keyboard, Media Controls, Power, Start, Windows Media Player, VLC Player,  YouTube. There is also paid version of this app with additional remotes, but for most of the users Free version is good enough. Stream YouTube videos playing on you mobile to computer You can stream YouTube videos playing on your mobile to computer/smart tv. This is something similar to Apple’s most popular AirPlay feature, but works only with YouTube videos. To start streaming videos install Google’s YouTube Remote on your smartphone, open youtube.com/leanback on your computer  and pair up mobile with computer. Once the pairing is done, videos played on YouTube Remote app will be streamed on to your computer. Access your mobile using any web browser – send/receive SMS, view photos/call logs, etc. Want to control your mobile phone using a computer? Install AirDroid app on your phone and start controlling your phone using computer browser – send and receive messages, view call logs, play music, upload/download files, edit contacts and many more. At times it’s lot of fun to access mobile using a big screen devices like laptops. Launch a webpage on your mobile browser using your computer With Google Chrome to Phone installed on your computer and mobile, you can send links and other information from Chrome browser to your Android device. With a click on Chrome browser, the current webpage of Chrome browser will be automatically launched on Android device. This is very handy when you want to send links, send driving direction to mobile using Google Maps and launch phone dialer with number selected on webpage. Install Apps on mobile using computer To install apps on your smartphone you really don’t need to touch it. Open any web browser, sing in to Google Play with your Google id that is associated with smartphone and start installing apps on to your phone right from the browser. As you browse apps on Google Play store, you find Install button and all you need to do is to just click Install. Google will automatically installs app on your mobile within few seconds.

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• Why I&rsquo;m Getting an iPad

  - by andrewbrust

  I have never purchased an Apple product in my life.  That’s a “true fact.”  And, for that matter, the last Apple product I really wanted was an Apple IIe, back in the 1980s.  I couldn’t afford it though (I was in high school), so I got a Commodore 64 instead…it had the same microprocessor, after all.  If the iPhone were on Verizon, I probably would have picked one up in December, when I got my Droid.  And if the iPod Touch worked with my Napster subscription (which of course it does not, but my Sonos does) I might have picked on of those instead. That’s three strikes, but Apple’s not out.  I’ve decided I want the iPad.  Why?  Well, to start with, my birthday is March 31st…the iPad comes out on April 3rd, and my wife wanted to know what to get me.  Also, my house is a 7-minute walk from the Apple Store on West 14th Street in Manhattan.  This makes it easy to get my pre-ordered device on launch day, and get home quickly with it.  Oh, and I agreed to write an article for Redmond Magazine, the fee for which will pay for the device…that way the birthday present doesn’t have to be an extravagant expense.  Plus, I’m a contrarian, so I want to buy the one device from Apple that the fanboys have actually panned. Think those are bad reasons? How about this: I want to experience iPhone and iPad development and, although my app will probably never hit the App Store and run on the actual device, I still think owning one will help me develop something better.  i want to see if the slate form factor has good business usage scenarios.  I want to see if Business Intelligence technology on a device like this can work.  Imagine a dashboard on this thing. And, for the consumer experience, I really want a touch device on which I can surf the Web while I’m in the kitchen, or on the couch.  I don’t want the small form factor of my phone, I don’t want to use my TV, and I don’t want a keyboard that will get dirty or in my way. I don’t want to watch movies on it (my TV is good for that), so I don’t care that the iPad has a 4:3 screen.  I don’t want to read books on it, so I don’t care that the display is backlit LCD, rather than eInk. But really what I want is to understand, first hand, why people have such brand loyalty to Apple.  I know the big reasons; I’m not detached from society.  But I want to know the subtle points of what Apple does really well, and also what they do poorly.  And I’d like to know, once and for all, if Microsoft can beat Apple, if Microsoft can think the right way to beat Apple and if Microsoft should  even try to beat Apple. I expect to share my thoughts on these questions, as they develop.

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• ORACLE is WEB 2.0

  - by anca.rosu

  You never know what to expect in life, where it can take you and what kind of fulfillment it can offer you. It’s just like an amazing lottery with millions of winning tickets. My name is Paula, I am an Online Marketing Specialist at Oracle University and this is my story. Having graduated from a technical profile college, it seemed almost normal to follow the same career path. But I said no. I wanted to try something else, so I took an Advertising Masters Program and I really became in love with this entire industry. Advertising and the new impact of the Internet through social networking is my current fascination. I knew I had to work to incorporate both my skills intro one dream job. I want to believe that I have come to work at Oracle as part of a great plan that life has for me. It’s not the most glamorous job in advertising or in the fashion industry, but it’s everything you need to start investing in your development and to build relationships. A normal day at work begins at 9.30 at our Oracle Office in Bucharest. After a short chit-chat, coffee and some conference calls, marketing gets to work! Some of the members of my team are working besides me but others are based all over Europe. This is extremely useful when coordinating the EMEA Marketing for Oracle University, because this way it’s easier to keep an eye on these various locations. Even though it’s a team play, you need to speak up and make your mark. I am the kind of person that never stands-by and waits to be given directions, I am curious and intuitive. This makes things easier. In Oracle you really need to find your own way and to discover how to organize your time and how to get involved with people. People to people, this is the focus. But everything is up to you and it strongly depends on the type of personality that you have. I try to get involved in various activities, participate in Oracle Days Events, interact and meet all kinds of people. For those who are newly graduates or interns, Oracle has lots of trainings and webcasts you can attend to help you develop your career shape and to understand better the way the business works. You can also be awarded for ideas and setting the trends so that makes it worth it. What I like most about my job is the fact that I can come with ideas and bring them to life. For example Oracle University has a special seminar program called “Celebrity Seminars” where top industry speakers teach 1-day or 2-day condensed seminars. We thought of creating something exclusive and a video was the best idea. So my colleague and I became reporters for a day and interviewed this well-known speaker regarding his seminar. I think this is a good way to market this business. Live footage is a very good marketing tool so we are planning to use the video to target our online audiences via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This can even go in the newsletters that marketing sends regarding the Celebrity Seminars. This is what I meant when I said Oracle is a free spirited organization and you can surely find your place here among us. The best way to describe my job is WEB 2.0. The modern online approach comes to life while we are trying to sell our business. We need to be out there and we are responsible of spreading the buzz regarding our training offerings and our official courseware materials. There are so many new ways to interact with the target audience nowadays and I am so eager to discover the best online techniques! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com Technorati Tags: WEB 2.0,Online Marketing,Oracle University,Bucharest,events,graduates,interns,training,webcast,seminar,newsletters,business,Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn

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• Kill all the project files!

  - by jamiet

  Like many folks I’m a keen podcast listener and yesterday my commute was filled by listening to Scott Hunter being interviewed on .Net Rocks about the next version of ASP.Net. One thing Scott said really struck a chord with me. I don’t remember the full quote but he was talking about how the ASP.Net project file (i.e. the .csproj file) is going away. The rationale being that the main purpose of that file is to list all the other files in the project, and that’s something that the file system is pretty good at. In Scott’s own words (that someone helpfully put in the comments): A file that lists files is really redundant when the OS already does this Romeliz Valenciano correctly pointed out on Twitter that there will still be a project.json file however no longer will there be a need to keep a list of files in a project file. I suspect project.json will simply contain a list of exclusions where necessary rather than the current approach where the project file is a list of inclusions. On the face of it this seems like a pretty good idea. I’ve long been a fan of convention over configuration and this is a great example of that. Instead of listing all the files in a separate file, just treat all the files in the directory as being part of the project. Ostensibly the approach is if its in the directory, its part of the project. Simple. Now I’m not an ASP.net developer, far from it, but it did occur to me that the same approach could be applied to the two Visual Studio project types that I am most familiar with, SSIS & SSDT. Like many people I’ve long been irritated by SSIS projects that display a faux file system inside Solution Explorer. As you can see in the screenshot below the project has Miscellaneous and Connection Managers folders but no such folders exist on the file system: This may seem like a minor thing but it means useful Solution Explorer features like Show All Files and Open Folder in Windows Explorer don’t work and quite frankly it makes me feel like a second class citizen in the Microsoft ecosystem. I’m a developer, treat me like one. Don’t try and hide the detail of how a project works under the covers, show it to me. I’m a big boy, I can handle it! Would it not be preferable to simply treat all the .dtsx files in a directory as being part of a project? I think it would, that’s pretty much all the .dtproj file does anyway (that, and present things in a non-alphabetic order – something else that wildly irritates me), so why not just get rid of the .dtproj file? In the case of SSDT the .sqlproj actually does a whole lot more than simply list files because it also states the BuildAction of each file (Build, NotInBuild, Post-Deployment, etc…) but I see no reason why the convention over configuration approach can’t help us there either. Want to know which is the Post-deployment script? Well, its the one called Post-DeploymentScript.sql! Simple! So that’s my new crusade. Let’s kill all the project files (well, the .dtproj & .sqlproj ones anyway). Are you with me? @Jamiet

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• Inside Red Gate - Experimenting In Public

  - by Simon Cooper

  Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem!

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• Silverlight Cream for February 21, 2011 -- #1049

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rob Eisenberg(-2-), Gill Cleeren, Colin Eberhardt, Alex van Beek, Ishai Hachlili, Ollie Riches, Kevin Dockx, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), and John Papa. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight 4: Creating useful base classes for your views and viewmodels with PRISM 4" Alex van Beek WP7: "Google Sky on Windows Phone 7" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: My friends at SilverlightShow have their top 5 for last week posted: SilverlightShow for Feb 14 - 20, 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: Rob Eisenberg MVVMs Us with Caliburn.Micro! Rob Eisenberg chats with Carl and Richard on .NET Rocks episode 638 about Caliburn.Micro which takes Convention-over-Configuration further, utilizing naming conventions to handle a large number of data binding, validation and other action-based characteristics in your app. Two Caliburn Releases in One Day! Rob Eisenberg also announced that release candidates for both Caliburn 2.0 and Caliburn.Micro 1.0 are now available. Check out the docs and get the bits. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 6) Gill Cleeren has Part 6 of his series on getting ready for the Silverlight Exam up at SilverlightShow.... this time out, Gill is discussing app startup, localization, and using resource dictionaries, just to name a few things. Google Sky on Windows Phone 7 Colin Eberhardt has a very cool WP7 app described where he's using Google Sky as the tile source for Bing Maps, and then has a list of 110 Messier Objects.. interesting astronomical objects that you can look at... all with source! Silverlight 4: Creating useful base classes for your views and viewmodels with PRISM 4 Alex van Beek has some Prism4/Unity MVVM goodness up with this discussion of a login module using View and ViewModel base classes. Windows Phone 7 and WCF REST – Authentication Solutions Ishai Hachlili sent me this link to his post about WCF REST web service and authentication for WP7, and he offers up 2 solutions... from the looks of this, I'm also putting his blog on my watch list WP7Contrib: Isolated Storage Cache Provider Ollie Riches has a complete explanation and code example of using the IsolatedStorageCacheProvider in their WP7Contrib library. Using a ChannelFactory in Silverlight, part two: binary cows & new-born calves Kevin Dockx follows-up his post on Channel Factories with this part 2, expanding the knowledge-base into usin parameters and custom binding with binary encoding, both from reader suggestions. All about UriMapping in WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has a post up about URI mappings in WP7 ... what it is, how to enable it in code behind or XAML, then using it either with a hyperlink button or via the NavigationService class... all with code. Passing WP7 Memory Consumption requirements with the Coding4Fun MemoryCounter tool WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is a tutorial on the use of the Memory Counter control from the Coding4Fun toolkit and WP7 Memory consumption. Getting Started With Linq Jesse Liberty gets into LINQ in his Episode 33 of his WP7 'From Scratch' series... looks like a good LINQ starting point, and he's going to be doing a series on it. Linq with Objects In his second post on LINQ, Jesse Liberty is looking at creating a Linq query against a collection of objects... always good stuff, Jesse! Silverlight TV Silverlight TV 62: The Silverlight 5 Triad Unplugged John Papa is joined by Sam George, Larry Olson, and Vijay Devetha (the Silverlight Triad) on this Silverlight TV episode 62 to discuss how the team works together, and hey... they're hiring! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• What Counts For A DBA: ESP

  - by Louis Davidson

  Now I don’t want to get religious here, and I’m not going to, but what I’m going to describe in this ‘What Counts for a DBA’ installment sometimes feels like magic. Often  I will spend hours thinking about the solution to a design issue or coding problem, working diligently to try to come up with a solution and then finally just give up with the feeling that I’m not even qualified to be a data entry clerk, much less a data architect.  At this point I often take a walk (or sometimes a nap), and then it hits me. I realize that I have the answer just sitting in my brain, ready to implement.  This phenomenon is not limited to walks either; it can happen almost any time after I stop my obsession about a problem. I call this phenomena ESP (or Extra-Sensory Programming.)  Another term for this could be ‘sleeping on it’, and while the idiom tends to mean to let time pass to actively think about a problem, sleeping on a problem also lets you relax and let your brain do the work. I first noticed this back in my college days when I would play video games for hours on end. We would get stuck deep in some dungeon unable to find a way out, playing for days on end until we were beaten down tired. Once we gave up and walked away, the solution would usually be there waiting for one of us before we came back to play the next day.  Sometimes it would be in the form of a dream, and sometimes it would just be that the problem was now easy to solve when we started to play again.  While it worked great for video games, it never occurred when I studied English Literature for hours on end, or even when I worked for the same sort of frustrating hours attempting to solve a homework problem in Calculus.  I believe that the difference was that I was passionate about the video game, and certainly far less so about homework where people used the word “thou” instead of “you” or x to represent a number. This phenomenon occurs somewhat more often in my current work as a professional data programmer, because I am very passionate about SQL and love those aspects of my career choice.  Every day that I get to draw a new data model to solve a customer issue, or write a complex SELECT statement to ferret out the answer to a complex data question, is a great day. I hope it is the same for any reader of this blog.  But, unfortunately, while the day on a whole is great, a heck of a lot of noise is generated in work life. There are the typical project deadlines, along with the requisite project manager sitting on your shoulders shouting slogans to try to make you to go faster: Add in office politics, and the occasional family issues that permeate the mind, and you lose the ability to think deeply about any problem, not to mention occasionally forgetting your own name.  These office realities coupled with a difficult SQL problem staring at you from your widescreen monitor will slowly suck the life force out of your body, making it seem impossible to solve the problem This is when the walk starts; or a nap. Maybe you hide from the madness under your desk like George Costanza hides from Steinbrenner on Seinfeld.  Forget about the problem. Free your mind from the insanity of the problem and your surroundings. Then let your training and education deep in your brain take over and see if it will passively do the rest for you. If you don’t end up with a solution, the worst case scenario is that you have a bit of exercise or rest, and you won’t have heard the phrase “better is the enemy of good enough” even once…which certainly will do your brain some good. Once you stop expecting whipping your brain for information, inspiration may just strike and instead of a humdrum solution you find a solution you hadn’t even considered, almost magically. So, my beloved manager, next time you have an urgent deadline and you come across me taking a nap, creep away quietly because I’m working, doing some extra-sensory programming.

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• So You Want to Be a Social Media Director

  - by Mike Stiles

  Do you want to be a Social Media Director? Some say the title is already losing its relevance; that social should be a basic skill that is required and used no matter what your position is inside the enterprise. I suppose that’s visionary, and a fun thing for thought leaders to say. But in the vast majority of business organizations, we’re so far away from that reality that the thought of not having someone driving social’s implementation and guiding its proper usage conjures up images of anarchy. That said, social media has become so broad, so catch-all, and so extended across business functions, that today’s Social Media Director, depending on the size of their staff, must make jacks-of-all-trades look like one-trick-ponies. Just as the purview of the CMO has grown all-encompassing, the disciplines required of their heads of social are stacking up. Master of Content Every social pipeline you build must stay filled, with quantity and quality. Content takes time, and the job never stops. Never. And no, it’s not true that anybody can write. Master of Customer Experience You must have a passion for hearing from customers and making them really happy. Master of PR You must know how to communicate and leverage the trust you’ve built when crises strike. Couldn’t hurt to be a Master of Politics. Master of Social Technology So many social management tools on the market. You have to know what social tech ecosystem makes sense and avoid piecemeal point solutions. Master of Business Development Social for selling and prospecting is hot, and you have to know how to use social to do it. Master of Analytics Nothing else matters if you can’t prove social is helping the brand. That’s right, creative content guy has to also be a math and stats geek. Good luck with that. Master of Paid Media You’ve got to learn the language, learn the tactics, learn the vendors and learn how to measure results. Master of Education Guess who gets to teach everyone who has no clue how to use social for business. Master of Personal Likability You’ll be leading the voice, tone, image and personality of the brand. If you don’t instinctively know how to be liked by actual people, the brand will be starting from a deficit. How deep must you go in this parade of masteries? Again, that depends on your employer’s maturity level in social. Serious players recognize these as distinct disciplines requiring true experts for maximum effect. Less serious players will need you to execute personally in many of these areas. Do the best you can, and try to grow quickly at each. If you’re the sole person executing all social…well…you’re in the game of managing expectations and trying to socially educate your employer. The good news is, you should be making a certifiable killing. If you’re alone and your salary is modest, time to understand how many brands out there crave what you’ve mastered. Not to push back against thought leaders, but the need for brand social leadership has not gone away…not even a little bit. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Stefan Wagner, freeimages.com

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