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• CRMIT’s HIGH VALUE CRM++ PLUGINS FOR CRM On DEMAND

  - by Soumo Das

  Customer satisfaction and experience being the two most considerable factors, these days businesses are on the lookout for automation tools that are world class, agile and keep quality at its core. CRMIT has developed such tools using cutting edge technologies and abstracting industry best practices and R&D.  Self Service Portal  With customers being so meticulous about regular updates and reliable access to their data, administrators just cannot think of walking a thin line. Surviving without a resource that provides a track of customer requirements for services available 24 x 7 can severely affect the productivity. In such a scenario, CRMIT’s Self Service Portal (SSP) is the best solution. This not only tracks the required customer data, but also allows companies to stay in tune with their employees, vendors and stakeholders.   One can directly sign up to become a CRMOD contact and SSP user. One need not use the database, as operations and interactions are d at run time. This is a fully configurable solution that tracks results periodically, thus making it easy for end users. It also offers better security and data visibility that enables users to progress smoothly. Quote and Order Management   When dealing with quotes, contracts and orders becomes complicated, only Quote & Order Management can work as a one-stop solution. CRMIT offers this great tool for managing all this information and for taking care of customer orders and service requirements.  This CRM On Demand plug-in allows one to create a new quote or copy the existing one. Products can be directly added from the product list of CRMOD and the pricing is calculated automatically. Quote can be generated and mailed to the external users in PDF, HTML and XLS formats. This not only allows management of quotes in an enhanced manner, but also supports various billing and tax calculation features that make work effortless.    Report Scheduler  When it comes to analyzing and providing statistics of various business processes currently running in an organization, one cannot depend on manual updates, which sometimes may be inaccurate or even delayed. CRMIT provides a SaaS based powerful solution - Report Scheduler - that allows CRM users to schedule reports as per the frequencies and then receive them as email attachments at the scheduled time.   With this powerful tool, administrators can control the report scheduler for assigning specific reports to specific users. After that, users can login and schedule any assigned report for viewing at particular intervals on monthly, weekly or daily basis. Additionally, users can also copy the mail to external users and can choose the preferred format. The best part is that sharing business data with third party become easy with this and for viewing reports, users need not log into their CRMOD account.  CRM On Demand Offline Solution CRM On-Demand Offline is another great CRM++ extension that allows one to work in both online and offline modes. Synchronizing both the modes is absolutely easy and offers ease while working. CRM OD offline works as an automation tool that not only improves efficiency, but also works as a backup in most cases. It is readily available as a windows application installer and requires users to be online only while validating and synchronizing. The best part is that working in the offline mode also works as a backup. 

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• OSI Model

  - by kaleidoscope

  The Open System Interconnection Reference Model (OSI Reference Model or OSI Model) is an abstract description for layered communications and computer network protocol design. In its most basic form, it divides network architecture into seven layers which, from top to bottom, are the Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Data Link, and Physical Layers. It is therefore often referred to as the OSI Seven Layer Model. A layer is a collection of conceptually similar functions that provide services to the layer above it and receives service from the layer below it. Description of OSI layers: Layer 1: Physical Layer ·         Defines the electrical and physical specifications for devices. In particular, it defines the relationship between a device and a physical medium. ·         Establishment and termination of a connection to a communications medium. ·         Participation in the process whereby the communication resources are effectively shared among multiple users. ·         Modulation or conversion between the representation of digital data in user equipment and the corresponding signals transmitted over a communications channel. Layer 2: Data Link Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means to transfer data between network entities. ·         Detect and possibly correct errors that may occur in the Physical Layer. The error check is performed using Frame Check Sequence (FCS). ·         Addresses is then sought to see if it needs to process the rest of the frame itself or whether to pass it on to another host. ·         The Layer is divided into two sub layers: The Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Logical Link Control (LLC) layer. ·         MAC sub layer controls how a computer on the network gains access to the data and permission to transmit it. ·         LLC layer controls frame synchronization, flow control and error checking.   Layer 3: Network Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means of transferring variable length data sequences from a source to a destination via one or more networks. ·         Performs network routing functions, and might also perform fragmentation and reassembly, and report delivery errors. ·         Network Layer Routers operate at this layer—sending data throughout the extended network and making the Internet possible.   Layer 4: Transport Layer ·         Provides transparent transfer of data between end users, providing reliable data transfer services to the upper layers. ·         Controls the reliability of a given link through flow control, segmentation/de-segmentation, and error control. ·         Transport Layer can keep track of the segments and retransmit those that fail. Layer 5: Session Layer ·         Controls the dialogues (connections) between computers. ·         Establishes, manages and terminates the connections between the local and remote application. ·         Provides for full-duplex, half-duplex, or simplex operation, and establishes checkpointing, adjournment, termination, and restart procedures. ·         Implemented explicitly in application environments that use remote procedure calls. Layer 6: Presentation Layer ·         Establishes a context between Application Layer entities, in which the higher-layer entities can use different syntax and semantics, as long as the presentation service understands both and the mapping between them. The presentation service data units are then encapsulated into Session Protocol data units, and moved down the stack. ·         Provides independence from differences in data representation (e.g., encryption) by translating from application to network format, and vice versa. The presentation layer works to transform data into the form that the application layer can accept. This layer formats and encrypts data to be sent across a network, providing freedom from compatibility problems. It is sometimes called the syntax layer. Layer 7: Application Layer ·         This layer interacts with software applications that implement a communicating component. ·         Identifies communication partners, determines resource availability, and synchronizes communication. o       When identifying communication partners, the application layer determines the identity and availability of communication partners for an application with data to transmit. o       When determining resource availability, the application layer must decide whether sufficient network or the requested communication exists. o       In synchronizing communication, all communication between applications requires cooperation that is managed by the application layer. Technorati Tags: Kunal,OSI,Networking

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• ASP.NET MVC CRUD Validation

  - by Ricardo Peres

  One thing I didn’t refer on my previous post on ASP.NET MVC CRUD with AJAX was how to retrieve model validation information into the client. We want to send any model validation errors to the client in the JSON object that contains the ProductId, RowVersion and Success properties, specifically, if there are any errors, we will add an extra Errors collection property. Here’s how: 1: [HttpPost] 2: [AjaxOnly] 3: [Authorize] 4: public JsonResult Edit(Product product) 5: { 6: if (this.ModelState.IsValid == true) 7: { 8: using (ProductContext ctx = new ProductContext()) 9: { 10: Boolean success = false; 11:  12: ctx.Entry(product).State = (product.ProductId == 0) ? EntityState.Added : EntityState.Modified; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: success = (ctx.SaveChanges() == 1); 17: } 18: catch (DbUpdateConcurrencyException) 19: { 20: ctx.Entry(product).Reload(); 21: } 22:  23: return (this.Json(new { Success = success, ProductId = product.ProductId, RowVersion = Convert.ToBase64String(product.RowVersion) })); 24: } 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: Dictionary<String, String> errors = new Dictionary<String, String>(); 29:  30: foreach (KeyValuePair<String, ModelState> keyValue in this.ModelState) 31: { 32: String key = keyValue.Key; 33: ModelState modelState = keyValue.Value; 34:  35: foreach (ModelError error in modelState.Errors) 36: { 37: errors[key] = error.ErrorMessage; 38: } 39: } 40:  41: return (this.Json(new { Success = false, ProductId = 0, RowVersion = String.Empty, Errors = errors })); 42: } 43: } As for the view, we need to change slightly the onSuccess JavaScript handler on the Single view: 1: function onSuccess(ctx) 2: { 3: if (typeof (ctx.Success) != 'undefined') 4: { 5: $('input#ProductId').val(ctx.ProductId); 6: $('input#RowVersion').val(ctx.RowVersion); 7:  8: if (ctx.Success == false) 9: { 10: var errors = ''; 11:  12: if (typeof (ctx.Errors) != 'undefined') 13: { 14: for (var key in ctx.Errors) 15: { 16: errors += key + ': ' + ctx.Errors[key] + '\n'; 17: } 18:  19: window.alert('An error occurred while updating the entity: the model contained the following errors.\n\n' + errors); 20: } 21: else 22: { 23: window.alert('An error occurred while updating the entity: it may have been modified by third parties. Please try again.'); 24: } 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: window.alert('Saved successfully'); 29: } 30: } 31: else 32: { 33: if (window.confirm('Not logged in. Login now?') == true) 34: { 35: document.location.href = '<% 1: : FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl %>?ReturnURL=' + document.location.pathname; 36: } 37: } 38: } The logic is as this: If the Edit action method is called for a new entity (the ProductId is 0) and it is valid, the entity is saved, and the JSON results contains a Success flag set to true, a ProductId property with the database-generated primary key and a RowVersion with the server-generated ROWVERSION; If the model is not valid, the JSON result will contain the Success flag set to false and the Errors collection populated with all the model validation errors; If the entity already exists in the database (ProductId not 0) and the model is valid, but the stored ROWVERSION is different that the one on the view, the result will set the Success property to false and will return the current (as loaded from the database) value of the ROWVERSION on the RowVersion property. On a future post I will talk about the possibilities that exist for performing model validation, stay tuned!

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• SQL SERVER – Sends backups to a Network Folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3

  - by pinaldave

  Let me tell you about one of the most useful SQL tools that every DBA should use – it is SQLBackupAndFTP. I have been using this tool since 2009 – and it is the first program I install on a SQL server. Download a free version, 1 minute configuration and your daily backups are safe in the cloud. In summary, SQLBackupAndFTP Creates SQL Server database and file backups on schedule Compresses and encrypts the backups Sends backups to a network folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3 Sends email notifications of job’s success or failure SQLBackupAndFTP comes in Free and Paid versions (starting from $29) – see version comparison. Free version is fully functional for unlimited ad hoc backups or for scheduled backups of up to two databases – it will be sufficient for many small customers. What has impressed me from the beginning – is that I understood how it works and was able to configure the job from a single form (see Image 1 – Main form above) Connect to you SQL server and select databases to be backed up Click “Add backup destination” to configure where backups should go to (network, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3) Enter your email to receive email confirmations Set the time to start daily full backups (or go to Settings if you need Differential or  Transaction Log backups on a flexible schedule) Press “Run Now” button to test You can get to this form if you click “Settings” buttons in the “Schedule section”. Select what types of backups and how often you want to run them and you will see the scheduled backups in the “Estimated backup plan” list A detailed tutorial is available on the developer’s website. Along with SQLBackupAndFTP setup gives you the option to install “One-Click SQL Restore” (you can install it stand-alone too) – a basic tool for restoring just Full backups. However basic, you can drag-and-drop on it the zip file created by SQLBackupAndFTP, it unzips the BAK file if necessary, connects to the SQL server on the start, selects the right database, it is smart enough to restart the server to drop open connections if necessary – very handy for developers who need to restore databases often. You may ask why is this tool is better than maintenance tasks available in SQL Server? While maintenance tasks are easy to set up, SQLBackupAndFTP is still way easier and integrates solution for compression, encryption, FTP, cloud storage and email which make it superior to maintenance tasks in every aspect. On a flip side SQLBackupAndFTP is not the fanciest tool to manage backups or check their health. It only works reliably on local SQL Server instances. In other words it has to be installed on the SQL server itself. For remote servers it uses scripting which is less reliable. This limitations is actually inherent in SQL server itself as BACKUP DATABASE command  creates backup not on the client, but on the server itself. This tool is compatible with almost all the known SQL Server versions. It works with SQL Server 2008 (all versions) and many of the previous versions. It is especially useful for SQL Server Express 2005 and SQL Server Express 2008, as they lack built in tools for backup. I strongly recommend this tool to all the DBAs. They must absolutely try it as it is free and does exactly what it promises. You can download your free copy of the tool from here. Please share your experience about using this tool. I am eager to receive your feedback regarding this article. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – Follow up on – Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together

  - by pinaldave

  Last month I had a fantastic time with lots of puzzles and brain teasers, the amount of participation which I have received on the blog is indeed inspiring to write more. One of the blog post was about how to replace a column name in all the stored procedures. The article had very interesting conversation as a follow up. Please read the original article Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together before reading this blog further as they are connected. Let us start few of the interesting comments. SQL Server Expert Imran Mohammed had a wonderful first and excellent note. I suggest all of you to read it. Imran stresses on the Data Modelling and Logical as well as Physical Design. Developers must create a logical design and get approval on naming convention, data types, references, constraints, indexes etc. He further suggested that one should not cut steps but must follow all the industry standards and guidelines. Here extended my blog post with following note – “Extending Pinal’s answer, what you can do is go to database properties, all tasks, scripts objects, in scripting wizard select all the stored procedure for which you want to change column name, export the query to a new window and then do find and replace, all in once window and execute the script. But make sure you check what you are replacing, sometimes column names are also used in table names, for ex:Table Name: Product and Column Name: ProductId, ProductName”. Thanks Imran Great Points!  Gatej Alexandru suggested that it is not good idea to DROP or CREATE but rather use ALTER as quite possible there may be permissions issue as well. Very good point let me see if I can write blog post over it. Vinay Kumar and SQLStudent144 have proposed another method to achieve the same. I am combining their solution and writing them here. Step 1. Press Ctrl+T or change “Result to Text” mode. Step 2. Execute below commands.SELECT 'EXEC sp_helptext [' + referencing_schema_name + '.' + referencing_entity_name + ']' FROM sys.dm_sql_referencing_entities('schema.objectname','OBJECT') Where schema.objectname is the object or table you are searching for. Step 3. Now copy the result and paste in new window. Again Press Ctrl+T or change “Result to Text” mode. Step 4. Copy the result and paste in new window. Execute the query. Step 5. Copy the result and paste in new window. Step 6. Now find your searching text in the script, make necessary changes and execute this script. Do not forget to remove the code which is generated in resultset which are not relevant to the T-SQL Script. Digitqr suggest we can do this for other objects besides Stored Procedure as well. Iosif suggests to use tool SQL Search from RedGate. I guess this sums it well. We have an alternative perspective to our original issue of replacing the column name in multiple stored procedure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Installing SharePoint 2010 in one machine with built in database

  - by sreejukg

  It is very easy to deploy SharePoint 2010 in a single server using the built-in database. Normally one need to choose such installation for evaluation purposes. When installing with default settings, setup installs Microsoft SQL server 2008 express database along with SharePoint. After installing SharePoint, you need to run SharePoint products and technology configuration wizard which will install central admin website and creates the configuration database and content database for SharePoint sites. Limitations 1. You can not perform this installation on a domain controller 2. The maximum size for express edition database is 4 GB SharePoint 2010 only supports 64 bit operating systems. The installation steps are for windows server r2 64 bit enterprise edition. Installation steps The first screen for the installation is as follows As a first step you need to install the s/w prerequisites. Click on the corresponding link Click next, here you have to agree on the license terms. Select the checkbox and then click next. The installation will starts. The progress will be updated in the screen. This may take some time as during this process, there are some components needs to be downloaded from internet. Make sure you are connected to the internet, then only the installation will become a success. If any error occurs, it will display the error, you need to configure in order to continue. If everything ok you will receive the following success page. Click finish to exit the installation window. Now from the first screen, select Install SharePoint server. This will install SharePoint and SQL server 2008 express edition. First you need to enter the product key for SharePoint. Enter the product key and clicks continue. Now you need to accept the license agreement. Select the checkbox and click on continue. Select the installation type you want.   Now click on the standalone button. In production scenario, you need to select the server farm installation. This article only cover the first option, installing server farm is not in the scope of this article. Once you click on the standalone, the installation starts and you can view the progress as below. If any error occurred during installation, you will get the details and link to the log file. Refer log file and fix the corresponding issue and then start the installation again. If installation completes without any error, you will see the below screen. Make sure you selected the check box “Run the SharePoint products Configuration Wizard now” and click close. The SharePoint products configuration wizard starts. Click next; you will get the following warning Click yes and the configuration steps starts. You can view the progress for each step. Once completed the below screen appears to the user. Click finish to complete the installation. Now SharePoint installation is completed. You can navigate to SharePoint central administration website from the administrative tools and start building your portal. Good luck

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• Book Review: Programming Windows Identity Foundation

  - by DigiMortal

  Programming Windows Identity Foundation by Vittorio Bertocci is right now the only serious book about Windows Identity Foundation available. I started using Windows Identity Foundation when I made my first experiments on Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service. I wanted to generalize the way how people authenticate theirselves to my systems and AppFabric ACS seemed to me like good point where to start. My first steps trying to get things work opened the door to whole new authentication world for me. As I went through different blog postings and articles to get more information I discovered that the thing I am trying to use is the one I am looking for. As best security API for .NET was found I wanted to know more about it and this is how I found Programming Windows Identity Foundation. What’s inside? Programming WIF focuses on architecture, design and implementation of WIF. I think Vittorio is very good at teaching people because you find no too complex topics from the book. You learn more and more as you read and as a good thing you will find that you can also try out your new knowledge on WIF immediately. After giving good overview about WIF author moves on and introduces how to use WIF in ASP.NET applications. You will get complete picture how WIF integrates to ASP.NET request processing pipeline and how you can control the process by yourself. There are two chapters about ASP.NET. First one is more like introduction and the second one goes deeper and deeper until you have very good idea about how to use ASP.NET and WIF together, what issues you may face and how you can configure and extend WIF. Other two chapters cover using WIF with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) band   Windows Azure. WCF chapter expects that you know WCF very well. This is not introductory chapter for beginners, this is heavy reading if you are not familiar with WCF. The chapter about Windows Azure describes how to use WIF in cloud applications. Last chapter talks about some future developments of WIF and describer some problems and their solutions. Most interesting part of this chapter is section about Silverlight. Who should read this book? Programming WIF is targeted to developers. It does not matter if you are beginner or old bullet-proof professional – every developer should be able to be read this book with no difficulties. I don’t recommend this book to administrators and project managers because they find almost nothing that is related to their work. I strongly recommend this book to all developers who are interested in modern authentication methods on Microsoft platform. The book is written so well that I almost forgot all things around me when I was reading the book. All additional tools you need are free. There is also Azure AppFabric ACS test version available and you can try it out for free. Table of contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Windows Identity Foundation for Everybody 1 Claims-Based Identity 2 Core ASP.NET Programming Part II Windows Identity Foundation for Identity Developers 3 WIF Processing Pipeline in ASP.NET 4 Advanced ASP.NET Programming 5 WIF and WCF 6 WIF and Windows Azure 7 The Road Ahead Index

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• Routes for IIS Classic and Integrated Mode

  - by imran_ku07

       Introduction:             ASP.NET MVC Routing feature makes it very easy to provide clean URLs. You just need to configure routes in global.asax file to create an application with clean URLs. In most cases you define routes works in IIS 6, IIS 7 (or IIS 7.5) Classic and Integrated mode. But in some cases your routes may only works in IIS 7 Integrated mode, like in the case of using extension less URLs in IIS 6 without a wildcard extension map. So in this article I will show you how to create different routes which works in IIS 6 and IIS 7 Classic and Integrated mode.       Description:             Let's say that you need to create an application which must work both in Classic and Integrated mode. Also you have no control to setup a wildcard extension map in IIS. So you need to create two routes. One with extension less URL for Integrated mode and one with a URL with an extension for Classic Mode.   routes.MapRoute( "DefaultClassic", // Route name "{controller}.aspx/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults ); routes.MapRoute( "DefaultIntegrated", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults );               Now you have set up two routes, one for Integrated mode and one for Classic mode. Now you only need to ensure that Integrated mode route should only match if the application is running in Integrated mode and Classic mode route should only match if the application is running in Classic mode. For making this work you need to create two custom constraint for Integrated and Classic mode. So replace the above routes with these routes,     routes.MapRoute( "DefaultClassic", // Route name "{controller}.aspx/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }, // Parameter defaults new { mode = new ClassicModeConstraint() }// Constraints ); routes.MapRoute( "DefaultIntegrated", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }, // Parameter defaults new { mode = new IntegratedModeConstraint() }// Constraints );            The first route which is for Classic mode adds a ClassicModeConstraint and second route which is for Integrated mode adds a IntegratedModeConstraint. Next you need to add the implementation of these constraint classes.     public class ClassicModeConstraint : IRouteConstraint { public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection) { return !HttpRuntime.UsingIntegratedPipeline; } } public class IntegratedModeConstraint : IRouteConstraint { public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection) { return HttpRuntime.UsingIntegratedPipeline; } }             HttpRuntime.UsingIntegratedPipeline returns true if the application is running on Integrated mode; otherwise, it returns false. So routes for Integrated mode only matched when the application is running on Integrated mode and routes for Classic mode only matched when the application is not running on Integrated mode.       Summary:             During developing applications, sometimes developers are not sure that whether this application will be host on IIS 6 or IIS 7 (or IIS 7.5) Integrated mode or Classic mode. So it's a good idea to create separate routes for both Classic and Integrated mode so that your application will use extension less URLs where possible and use URLs with an extension where it is not possible to use extension less URLs. In this article I showed you how to create separate routes for IIS Integrated and Classic mode. Hope you will enjoy this article too.   SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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• Device being used by VxVM

  - by Onur Bingul

  If you are using vxvm, you may have issues when you try to unconfigure a disk root@techsupport2 # cfgadm -c unconfigure c1::dsk/c1t3d0cfgadm: Component system is busy, try again: failed to offline:     Resource             Information       ----------------       -------------------------/dev/dsk/c1t3d0   Device being used by VxVM“cfgadm unconfigure” command fails here.The way to resolve this is to disable the disks path from DMP control. Since there is only one path to this disk, the “-f” (for force) option needs to be used:root@techsupport2 # vxdmpadm -f disable path=c1t3d0s2root@techsupport2 # vxdmpadm getsubpaths NAME         STATE[A]   PATH-TYPE[M] DMPNODENAME  ENCLR-NAME   CTLR   ATTRS================================================================================c1t6d0       ENABLED(A)   -          disk_0       disk         c1       -c1t3d0       DISABLED(M)   -          disk_1       disk         c1       -c1t0d0s2     ENABLED(A)   -          disk_2       disk         c1       -c1t1d0       ENABLED(A)   -          disk_3       disk         c1       -c3t47d0      ENABLED(A)   -          sun35100_0   sun35100     c3       -c3t47d1      ENABLED(A)   -          sun35100_1   sun35100     c3       -c3t47d2s2    ENABLED(A)   -          sun35100_2   sun35100     c3       -c3t47d3s2    ENABLED(A)   -          sun35100_3   sun35100     c3       -You can see the path now disabled from DMP.root@techsupport2 # cfgadm -c unconfigure c1::dsk/c1t3d0Now you can unconfigure the disk

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• I spy a Live Framework portal

  - by jamiet

  Those that have followed my blogs for a while may know that I have a slightly banal interest in Windows Live and, more specifically, the Live Services developer platform'; if that doesn’t sound interesting to you then stop reading now. My interest mainly stems from the Live Mesh technology that was announced a couple of years ago and the data synchronisation platform API that underpins it; that platform is called the Live Framework or LiveFX for short. At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2008 Microsoft made LiveFX available to the public as a Tech Preview and I spent some time learning to use it and also built a few test apps on it too. In August 2009 an announcement came that that tech preview was getting shut down: "At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live. Your feedback continues to help us build the best possible offerings for Windows Live users, for you and for your customers. " Since then news on LiveFX has disappeared save for a throwaway session at PDC09 and I was hoping that news was going to appear at this week’s MIX conference but nothing was forthcoming. Instead though today I stumbled upon an unannounced portal for future LiveFX applications on Microsoft’s Azure portal at http://live.azure.com. Check it out: I consider this to be very good news. This Azure portal was built after the LiveFX tech preview was decommissioned so seeing Live Services existing so prominently alongside Microsoft’s other cloud efforts like Windows Azure and SQL Azure vindicates my early investment in the platform and gives me hope that we’re going to see something get released very very soon. I believe that the potential uses for this platform are extremely compelling and I’m looking forward to trying some out in the near future. I am also expecting LiveFX to have a heavy dependency on the OData protocol that I talked about yesterday in my post OData.org updated - gives clues about future sql azure enhancements so you can tell where my interest in that stems from. In case you’re wondering the projects that you see listed above (Basic List Sample, JT-proj etc…) are projects that I built on the old Tech Preview platform so clearly that stuff has not gone for good which is also good news; not just because it means I’ll have access to the code I wrote before but I also assume it means that LiveFX won’t have changed much since its tech preview incarnation. I know there are other LiveFX buffs out there and hopefully this news reaches some of them. If you are one of them the please put a comment below and let me know your thoughts! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Calling XAI Inbound Services from Oracle BI Publisher

  - by ACShorten

  Note: This technique requires Oracle BI Publisher 1.1.3.4.1 which supports Service Complex Types. Web Services require credentials for authentication. Note: The deafults for the product installation are used in this article. If your site uses alternative values then substitute those alternatives where applicable. Note: Examples shown in this article are examples for illustrative purposes only. When building a report in Oracle BI Publisher it may be necessary to call an XAI Inbound Service to get information via the object rather than directly calling the database tables for various reasons: The CLOB fields used in the Object are accessible for a report. Note: CLOB fields cannot be used as criteria in the current release. Objects can take advantage of algorithms to format or calculate additional data that is not stored in the database directly. For example, Information format strings can automatically generated by the object which gives consistent information between a report and the online screens. To use this facility the following process must be performed: Ensure that the product group, cisusers by default, is enabled for the SPLServiceBean in the console. This allows BI Publisher access to call Web Services directly. To ensure this follow the instructions below: Logon to the Oracle WebLogic server console using an appropriate administrator account. By default the user system or weblogic is provided for this purpose. Navigate to the Security Realms section and select your configured realm. This is set to myrealm by default. In the Roles and Policies section, expand the SPLService section of the Deployments option to reveal the SPLServiceBean roles. If there is no role associated with the SPLServiceBean, create a new EJB role and specify the cisusers role, by default. For example:   Add a Role Condition to the role just created, with a Predicate List of Group and specify cisusers as the Group Argument Name. For example: Save all your changes. The XAI Inbound Services to be used by BI Publisher must be defined prior to using the interface. Refer to the XAI Best Practices (Doc Id: 942074.1) from My Oracle Support or via the online help for more information about this process. Inside BI Publisher create your report, according to the BI Publisher documentation. When specifying the dataset, under the Data Model Report option, specify the following to use an XAI Inbound Service as a data source: Parameter Comment Type Web Service Complex Type true Username Any valid user name within the product. This user MUST have security access to the objects referenced in the XAI Inbound Service Password Authentication password for Username Timeout Timeout, in seconds, set for the Web Service call. For example 60 seconds. WSDL URL Use the WSDL URL on the XAI Inbound Service definition as your WSDL URL. It will be in the following format by default:http://<host>:<port>/<server>/XAIApp/xaiserver/<service>?WSDLwhere: <host> - Host Name of Web Application Server <port> - Port allocated to Web Application Server for product access <server> - Server context for server <service> - XAI Inbound Service Name Note: For customers using secure transmission should substitute https instead of http and use the HTTPS port allocated to the product at installation time. Web Service Select the name of the service that shows in the drop-down menu. If no service name shows up, it means that Publisher could not establish a connection with the server or WSDL name provided in the above URL in order to get the service name. See BI Publisher server log for more information. Method Select the name of the Method that shows in the drop-down menu. A method name should show in the Method drop-down menu once the Web Service name is selected. For example: Additionally, filters can be used from the Web Service that can be generated, required or optional, from the WSDL in the Parameter List. For example:

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• Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

  - by Dain C. Hansen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Restyling RadDataPager for WPF and Silverlight

    A small but powerful control has joined the great family of Telerik XAML controls with the recent release. RadDataPager is a result of an increasing demand from our customers who needed to work with large amounts of server data presented in small portions at the client side.  The primary goal was to make a powerful data paging control to be used in any scenarios requiring getting and presenting portions of data. How good is RadDataPager in working with paged data you can see in Rossen's announcement. Yet being a XAML control it challenged us with making one more visually appealing and highly customizable control. It offers a slick look in all available WPF/Silverlight Telerik themes:     As you can see the default design is targeting mainly business scenarios. At the same time being an example for a truly lookless XAML control RadDataPager allows restyling with minimal efforts this way widening the possible range of applications.  Lets see what we can doo with a few lines of XAML : <Style x:Key="buttonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" > <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="ButtonBase"> <Grid Width="40" Background="Black"> <Ellipse StrokeThickness="2" VerticalAlignment="Center" Width="15" Height="15" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Fill="Gray" /> <Ellipse Visibility="{Binding IsCurrent, Converter={StaticResource VisibilityConverter}}" VerticalAlignment="Center" Height="16" Fill="White" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Width="16"/> </Grid> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> ... <telerik:RadDataPager NumericButtonStyle="{StaticResource buttonStyle}" ... And the result: The IPhone-style-thing bellow the RadCoverFlow is actually our RadDataPager.       With a few more lines of XAML we may get  almost any imaginable look of the pager control including the fascinating result demonstrated in the short video on the top.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Make Your Mouse Pointers Left-hand Friendly

  - by Matthew Guay

  It’s a right-centric world, with everything from pencils to computer mice expecting you to be right-handed.  Here’s how you can train your mouse and cursors in Windows 7 and Vista to respect your left-handedness. Using your Left Hand the Right Way It’s easy to switch your mouse to left-handed mode.  Enter “mouse” in your Start menu search, and select the first entry. Check the “Switch primary and secondary buttons” box to make your mouse more left-hand friendly.  Now your primary select button is your right button, and the secondary button (commonly referred to as right-click) is the left button. But, it can still be awkward to select items on screen with your left hand using the default cursors.  MSDN has a free set of cursors designed for left-handed users, that can fix this problem for you.  These cursors are exactly like the default Aero cursors in Windows 7 and Vista, except they are reversed to make them better for left-handed use. The cursors are available in 3 sizes: normal, large, and extra large.  The normal ones are the same size as the default ones in Windows 7; feel free to choose the other sizes if you prefer them.  Click each link to download all 6 cursors for your size (link below). Click “I Agree” after selecting the cursors to accept the license agreement and download them. Once you have all 6 cursors downloaded, select the Pointers tab in the Mouse Properties dialog.  Click the cursor to change, and then click Browse to select the new cursor. Browse to the folder you downloaded your new cursors to, select the correct cursor, and click Open. Do this for each of the 6 cursors to be changed.  Strangely, the Busy cursor (the spinning blue orb) is a static cursor, so you may not wish to change it.  All the other ones look and act like their standard counterparts. Here’s the cursors to be changed, and their equivalents in the default cursors: Normal Select: aero_arrow_left.cur Help Select: aero_helpsel_left.cur Working in Background: aero_working_left.ani Busy: aero_busy_left.cur Handwriting: aero_pen_left.cur Link Select: aero_link_left.cur After changing all the cursors, click Save As… to save this mouse scheme so you can easily select it in the future.  Finally click Ok to close the Mouse Properties dialog and accept the changes. Now your pointers will be easier to use left-handed! Conclusion Whether you’re right-handed or left-handed, you can enjoy the Aero cursors in Windows 7 or Vista in the way that works best for you.  Unfortunately, many mice are still designed for right-handed people, but this trick will help you make the best out of your mouse. We included all of the 6 cursors for you in a zip file you can download Here. This will make it easier for you to get them all together without having to download them individually. Link Download Left-Handed Mouse Pointers from MSDN Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Prevent Themes From Modifying Icons and Cursors in Windows 7How To Personalize Windows 7 StarterShow Two Time Zones in Your Outlook 2007 CalendarMake Mouse Navigation Faster in WindowsWhy Doesn’t Tab Work for Drop-down Controls in Firefox on OS X? TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff

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• Expert F# &ndash; Pattern Matching with Adam and Eve

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am loving my Expert F# book. I wish I had more time with it, but the little time I get I really enjoy. However today I was completely stumped by what the book was trying to get across with regards to pattern matching. On Page 38 – Chapter 3, it briefly describes F# option values. On this page it gives the code snippet along the code lines below and then goes on to speak briefly about pattern matching... open System type 'a option = | None | Some of 'a let people = [ ("Adam", None); ("Eve", None); ("Cain", Some("Adam", "Eve")); ("Abel", Some("Adam", "Eve")) ] let showParents(name, parents) = match parents with | Some(dad, mum) -> printfn "%s has father %s, mother %s" name dad mum | None -> printfn "%s has no parents!" name Console.WriteLine(showParents("Adam", None))   Originally when I read this code I think I misunderstood the purpose of the example code. I for some reason thought that the showParents function would magically be parsing the people array and looking for a match of name and then showing the parents. But obviously it cannot do this since there is no reference to the people array in the showParents method. After rereading the page I realized that I had just combined the two segments of code together, possibly incorrectly, and that a better example would have been to have a code snippet like the following. let showParents(name, parents) = match parents with | Some(dad, mum) -> printfn "%s has father %s, mother %s" name dad mum | None -> printfn "%s has no parents!" name Console.WriteLine(showParents("Adam", None)) Console.WriteLine(showParents("Cain", Some("Adam", "Eve"))) Console.ReadLine()   However, what if I wanted to have a function that was passed a list of people and a name would then show the parents of the name if there were any, and if not would show that they had no parents… so that doesnt seem to difficult does it… lets look at my very unoptimized noob F# code to try and achieve this… open System let people = [ ("Adam", None); ("Eve", None); ("Cain", Some("Adam", "Eve")); ("Abel", Some("Adam", "Eve")) ] // // returns the name of the person // let showName(person : string * (string * string) option) = let name = fst(person) name // // Returns a string with the parents details or not // let showParents(itemData : string * (string * string) option) = let name = fst(itemData) let parents = snd(itemData) match parents with | Some(dad, mum) -> "Father " + dad + " and Mother " + mum | None -> "Has no parents!" // // Prints the details // let showDetails(person : string * (string * string) option) = Console.WriteLine(showName(person)) Console.WriteLine(showParents(person)) // // Check if the name matches the first portion of person // if so, return true, else return false // let nameMatch(name : string , person : string * (string * string) option) = match name with | x when x = fst(person) -> true | _ -> false // // Searches an array of people and looks for a match of names // let findPerson(name : string, people : (string * (string * string) option) list) = let o = Seq.tryFind(fun x -> nameMatch(name, x)) people if Option.isSome o then o else Option.None // // Try and find a person, if found show their details // else show no match // let FoundPerson = findPerson("Cain", people) match FoundPerson with | None -> Console.WriteLine("Not found") | Some(x) -> showDetails(x) Console.ReadLine() So, my code isn’t the cleanest but it did teach me a bit more F#. The area that I learnt about was the option keyword. The challenge being, if a match of the name isn’t found – and if a name is found but the person doesn’t have parents it should react accordingly. I’m pretty sure I can optimize this code quite a bit more and I think I may come back to it sometime in the future and relook at it, but for now at least I was able to achieve what I wanted.. and my brain has gone just that wee little bit more functional.

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• Enable Full Screen Mode in Media Center Without Trapping the Mouse

  - by DigitalGeekery

  If you have a dual monitor setup and use Windows Media Center, you’re probably aware that when WMC is in full screen mode, it traps the mouse so you can’t work on a second monitor. Here we look at how to solve the annoyance. The Maxifier is an application that allows you to open Media Center in full screen mode without restricting the mouse. It relieves the annoyance of WMC capturing your mouse on a dual monitor setup. Note: If you don’t have two monitors attached, most of The Maxifier’s functions won’t work. Installation and Use Download, extract, and install The Maxifier. (See the download link below) The Maxifier runs minimized in the system tray and you access the options by right-clicking on the icon. If Media Center is not already open, you can choose Start Media Center to start WMC on the main start screen. Or, choose one of the other selections to open another area of Media Center. By default, Maxifier opens Media Center in full screen mode on the secondary monitor. When Media Center is open in full screen mode, you’ll notice you can now freely move your mouse around your multi-monitor setup. When Media Center is open, you’ll see five additional options. The Fit Screen options simply fits Media Center to the full screen, but still show the Windows borders. Full screen options put WMC in full screen mode.   The Maxifier Options allow you to choose from the various start up options. Selecting Watch for Media Center starting will prompt Maxifier to open WMC to the main start page in full screen mode on the secondary monitor automatically, even if you open Media Center without using The Maxifier.  (You may need to restart for this to take effect) If you have more than 2 monitors, you can define on which monitor to open Media Center, and which monitor you consider to be the main screen.   You can also define a number of Hotkeys in The Maxifier settings. First, select the Enable Hotkeys checkbox. To create a Hotkey, click in the text field and then press the keys to use as the Hotkey. To remove a Hotkey, click in the field and press the Delete key.   Conclusion The Maxifier is a simple program that enables Media Center users to take full advantage of a multi-monitor workspace. It works with both Vista and Windows 7. Version 1.4 is a stable application for Vista, and Version 1.5b is a beta application for Windows 7. Looking for more Media Center tips and tweaks? Check out some startup customizations for Windows 7 Media Center, how to automatically mount and view ISO’s in WMC, and how to add background images and themes to Windows 7 Media Center. Link Download the Maxifier Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Startup Customizations for Media Center in Windows 7Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Lock The Screen While in Full-Screen Mode in Windows Media PlayerSwitch Windows by Hovering the Mouse Over a Window in Windows 7 or VistaIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video Watch World Cup Online On These Sites Speed Up Windows With ReadyBoost Awesome World Cup Soccer Calendar Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites

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• Add the Vista Style Sidebar Back to Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you are moving from Vista to Windows 7, you might miss the Sidebar which was introduced in Vista. Today we take a look at a couple options for getting a Sidebar back in Windows 7. Copy Files from Vista Note: In this example we are using 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7. Make sure you are logged in with Administrator credentials. If you have a Vista machine running, we can copy the Windows Sidebar files over to the Windows 7 machine. On the Vista machine navigate to C:\Program Files and copy the Windows Sidebar folder and all of its contents over to a flash drive or network location. On the Windows 7 machine go to C:\Program Files and rename the Windows Sidebar folder to something like Windows Sidebar_old. Now copy the Vista Windows Sidebar folder into C:\Program Files… Now you will have both folders…Windows Sidebar and Windows Sidebar_old in your C:\Program Files folder. Right-click on the desktop and select Gadgets. There you are…the Original Vista Sidebar is back and will act as it did in Vista. Move Sidebar Gadgets Another work around if you don’t have a copy of Vista, you can simply move the Desktop Gadgets you want over to the right side of the screen and they will stay there…no dock needed. Type gadgets into the Search box in the Windows Start Menu and click on Desktop Gadgets. Then drag the included Gadgets you want over to the right side of the screen. Or click on the link to Get more gadgets online to find more. Once you have them where you want, each time you reboot they will still be in the same location. This holds true no matter where you place them on your desktop as well. Install Desktop Sidebar If you want an enhanced sidebar that includes a lot of different features, and don’t have a copy of Vista, you might want to check out Desktop Sidebar Beta (link below). This is a freeware application that works with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. After installation you can access it from the Start Menu… Here is how it will look after you launch it… It includes several pre-installed panels including a clock, Media Player, Search Bar, Slideshow, Messenger, Outlook inbox, Tasks, Quick Launch, Performance…and a lot more. It is highly customizable and allows you to change skins, add various levels of transparency, and a lot more. One caveat with going with Desktop Sidebar is we didn’t find a way to add Windows Gadgets to it (though there might be a plugin for it that we’re not aware of). But there are so many options, you may not mind. However, you can still use the desktop gadgets as you normally would in Windows 7. Believe it or not, some people actually prefer the Vista style Sidebar and would like it back in Windows 7. With these options you can get the Vista Sidebar back if you have a copy of Vista, place the Gadgets on the desktop, or go the freeware route. Download Desktop Sidebar (freeware) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable Windows Sidebar in VistaHow To Repair Your Crashed or Hanging Vista SidebarApplying Themes To Your Windows Vista SidebarDisable Sidebar / Desktop Gadgets on Windows 7Put AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) In your Windows Sidebar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox)

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• It’s the thought that counts…

  - by Tony Davis

  I recently finished editing a book called Tribal SQL, and it was a fantastic experience. It’s a community-sourced book written by first-timers. Fifteen previously unpublished authors contributed one chapter each, with the seemingly simple remit to write about “what makes them passionate about working with SQL Server, something that all SQL Server DBAs and developers really need to know”. Sure, some of the writing skills were a bit rusty as one would expect from busy people, but the ideas and energy were sheer nectar. Any seasoned editor can deal easily with the problem of fixing the output of untrained writers. We can handle with the occasional technical error too, which is why we have technical reviewers. The editor’s real job is to hone the clarity and flow of ideas, making the author’s knowledge and experience accessible to as many others as possible. What the writer needs to bring, on the other hand, is enthusiasm, attention to detail, common sense, and a sense of the person behind the writing. If any of these are missing, no editor can fix it. We can see these essential characteristics in many of the more seasoned and widely-published writers about SQL. To illustrate what I mean by enthusiasm, or passion, take a look at the work of Laerte Junior or Fabiano Amorim. Both authors have English as a second language, but their energy, enthusiasm, sheer immersion in a technology and thirst to know more, drives them, with a little editorial help, to produce articles of far more practical value than one can find in the “manuals”. There’s the attention to detail of the likes of Jonathan Kehayias, or Paul Randal. Read their work and one begins to understand the knowledge coupled with incredible rigor, the willingness to bend and test every piece of advice offered to make sure it’s correct, that marks out the very best technical writing. There’s the common sense of someone like Louis Davidson. All writers, including Louis, like to stretch the grey matter of their readers, but some of the most valuable writing is that which takes a complicated idea, or distils years of experience, and expresses it in a way that sounds like simple common sense. There’s personality and humor. Contrary to what you may have been told, they can and do mix well with technical writing, as long as they don’t become a distraction. Read someone like Rodney Landrum, or Phil Factor, for numerous examples of articles that teach hard technical lessons but also make you smile at least twice along the way. Writing well is not easy and it takes a certain bravery to expose your ideas and knowledge for dissection by others, but it doesn’t mean that writing should be the preserve only of those trained in the art, or best left to the MVPs. I believe that Tribal SQL is testament to the fact that if you have passion for what you do, and really know your topic then, with a little editorial help, you can write, and people will learn from what you have to say. You can read a sample chapter, by Mark Rasmussen, in this issue of Simple-Talk and I hope you’ll consider checking out the book (if you needed any further encouragement, it’s also for a good cause, Computers4Africa). Cheers, Tony  

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• Hello World - My Name is Christian Finn and I'm a WebCenter Evangelist

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Good Morning World! I'd like to introduce a new member of the Oracle WebCenter Team, Christian Finn. We decided to let him do his own intros today. Look for his guest posts next week and he'll be a frequent contributor to WebCenter blog and voice of the community. Hello (Oracle) World! Hi everyone, my name is Christian Finn. It’s a coder’s tradition to have “hello world” be the first output from a new program or in a new language. While I have left my coding days far behind, it still seems fitting to start my new role here at Oracle by saying hello to all of you—our customers, partners and my colleagues. So by way of introduction, a little background about me. I am the new senior director for evangelism on the WebCenter product management team. Not only am I new to Oracle, but the evangelism team is also brand new. Our mission is to raise the profile of Oracle in all of the markets/conversations in which WebCenter competes—social business, collaboration, portals, Internet sites, and customer/audience engagement. This is all pretty familiar turf for me because, as some of you may know, until recently I was the director of product management at Microsoft for Microsoft SharePoint Server and several other SharePoint products. And prior to that, I held management roles at Microsoft in marketing, channels, learning, and enterprise sales. Before Microsoft, I got my start in the industry as a software trainer and Lotus Notes consultant. I am incredibly excited to be joining Oracle at this time because of the tremendous opportunity that lies ahead to improve how people and businesses work. Of all the vendors offering a vision for social business, Oracle is unique in having best of breed strength in market (or coming soon) in all three critical areas: customer experience management; the middleware and back-end applications that run your business; and in the social, collaboration, and content technologies that are the connective tissue between them. Everyone else can offer one or two of the above, but not all three unified together. So it is a great time to come board and there’s a fantastic team of people hard at work on building great products for you. In the coming weeks and months you’ll be hearing much more from us. For now, we’ll kick things off with some blog posts here on the WebCenter blog. Enjoy the reads and please share your thoughts with me over Twitter on @cfinn.

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• Add Spell Checking to Your Favorite Windows Apps

  - by Asian Angel

  Some but not all Windows apps have built-in spell checking of some sort. If you want to add spell checking to all of your apps (or a select group) then join us as we look at tinySpell. Note: There is a paid version of this software (tinySpell+) available as well for those who want extra functionality. tinySpell in Action The installation process is simple and straightforward…as soon as you have finished installing tinySpell you will see your new “System Tray Icon”. You can see tinySpell’s “Context Menu” here. Before going any further you may want to have a look through the settings to make any desired display modifications. During our tests we found it very helpful to modify the Spelling Tip options…it will make for a much nicer and easier to read display when you have a spelling error. Clicking on the Applications… Command in the Context Menu will bring up the following window. You can really finesse how active tinySpell will be here: Create a special list of apps that tinySpell will not monitor Create a custom list of apps that tinySpell will monitor If you have any particular or unique words that you would like to add to tinySpell’s Dictionary ahead of time you can do that by clicking on the Dictionary… Command in the Context Menu. Want to check the spelling of a word ahead of time or find that you are just curious about how it is spelled? Click on Open spelling window in the Context Menu to access a special spell check window. For our example we misspelled “spelling” on purpose…notice that the word has turned red. Clicking on the Check Mark Button will open a drop-down list with suggested spellings for the word that you are inquiring about. Click on the appropriate listing if you intend to copy and paste the word. Next we moved on to Notepad. As we were typing tinySpell alerted us when we typed the word “app”. You will hear a small default system sound and see a small popup as shown here if tinySpell thinks a word has been misspelled. The System Tray Icon will also change to a yellow color. You can access the list of suggested spellings by either left clicking on the small popup or the System Tray Icon. If the word is a properly spelled “abbreviation” (or special/custom) like our word here you can select Add to dictionary. Going further in our text document we once again purposely misspelled “spelling”… Left clicking on the popup gave us access to the drop-down list of suggested spellings… And clicking on the correct spelling automatically inserted it into our document in place of the misspelled word. As you can see here tinySpell was even monitoring file names when we went to save the document. Very thorough indeed. Conclusion If your favorite app does not have built-in spell checking, then tinySpell will definitely be a welcome (and very helpful) addition to your Windows system. They offer a portable version as well so you can take it with you to any PC. Links Download tinySpell *Note: The download link is located approximately half-way down the page. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Spell Check Firefox Text Input FieldsEdit the Windows Live Writer Custom DictionaryAccess Your Favorite Google Services in Chrome the Easy WayLaunch External Apps from FirefoxNinite Makes Installing Software Incredibly Simple TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app

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• WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 Active Directory Forms Based Authentication PeoplePicker no users found

  - by John Haigh

  WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 Active Directory Forms Based Authentication PeoplePicker no users found After finding these steps online from http://dattard.blogspot.com/2008/11/active-directory-forms-based.html in order to setup Active Directory Forms Based Authentication I was all set to complete this task, except for one problem. These steps are missing one very important vital step in order for FBA to work with Active Directory. A supplement to step 3 before granting access in step 5 through the people picker. You need to specify the Active Directory Provider Name to the people picker, otherwise you will not be able specify users through the Policy for Web Application. <PeoplePickerWildcards>       <clear />          <add key="ADMembershipProvider" value="%" />     </PeoplePickerWildcards> Recently we needed to use Forms Based Authentication with Active Directory from an Extranet. This is how we got it to work. 1. Extend the Web Application Instead of tweaking the internal web app, Extend the web application you want to expose to the Extranet, giving it the required host headers etc. 2. Configure SharePoint Central Admin to use FBA for the "new" Web Applications Login to SharePoint Central Admin Go to Application Management / Application Security / Authentication Providers and Change the Web Application to the one which needs to be configured for Forms Based Authentication Click zone / default, change authentication type to forms and enter ActiveDirectoryMemebershipProvider under membership provider name ( for example , "ADMembershipProvider") and save this change 3. Update the web.config of SharePoint Central admin site under configuration node <connectionStrings> <add name="ADConnectionString" connectionString="LDAP://DynamicsAX.local/CN=Users,DC=DynamicsAX,DC=local /> </connectionStrings> under system.web node <membership defaultProvider="ADMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="ADMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider,System.Web,Version=2.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" connectionStringName="ADConnectionString" connectionUsername="xxx" connectionPassword="yyy" enableSearchMethods="true" attributeMapUsername="sAMAccountName"/> </providers> </membership> 4.Update the web.config of SharePoint Web application Repeat step 3 for the web.config of the SharePoint webapplication to be configured for Forms Based Authentication Change the authentication in web.config to <authentication mode="Forms"> <forms loginUrl="/_layouts/login.aspx"></forms> </authentication> 5. Grant Access on the extended Web Application Your extranet web application is now configured to use FBA. However, until users, who will be accessing the site via FBA, are given permissions for the site, it will be inaccessible to them. To get started, open your browser and navigate to your farm’s Central Administration site. Click on Application Management and then click on Policy for Web Application. Make sure that you are working on the extranet web application. Do the following steps: Click on Add Users. In the Zones drop down, select the appropriate Extranet zone. IMPORTANT: If you select the incorrect zone, you may not be able to resolve user names. Hence, the zone you select must match the zone of the web application that is configured to use FBA. Click the Next button. In the Users edit box, type the name of the FBA user whom you wish to have full control for the site. Click the Resolve link next to the Users edit box. If the web application's FBA information has been configured correctly, the name will resolve and become underlined. Check the Full Control checkbox. Click the Finish button.

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• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Performance on SPARC T4-2

  - by Brian

  The Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is optimized to run on Oracle's SPARC T4 processor platforms running Oracle Solaris 11 providing unsurpassed scalability, performance, upgradability, protection of investment and return on investment. The following demonstrate the value of combining Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database with SPARC T4 servers and Oracle Solaris 11: On a Mobile Call Processing test, the 2-socket SPARC T4-2 server outperforms: Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M4000 server (4 x 2.66 GHz SPARC64 VII+) by 34%. Oracle's SPARC T3-4 (4 x 1.65 GHz SPARC T3) by 2.7x, or 5.4x per processor. Utilizing the TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM), the SPARC T4-2 server protects investments with: 2.1x the overall performance of a 4-socket SPARC Enterprise M4000 server in read-only mode and 1.5x the performance in update-only testing. This is 4.2x more performance per processor than the SPARC64 VII+ 2.66 GHz based system. 10x more performance per processor than the SPARC T2+ 1.4 GHz server. 1.6x better performance per processor than the SPARC T3 1.65 GHz based server. In replication testing, the two socket SPARC T4-2 server is over 3x faster than the performance of a four socket SPARC Enterprise T5440 server in both asynchronous replication environment and the highly available 2-Safe replication. This testing emphasizes parallel replication between systems. Performance Landscape Mobile Call Processing Test Performance System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 218,400 M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 162,900 SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 80,400 TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM) Read-Only System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 7.9M SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 6.5M M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 3.1M T5440 SPARC T2+, 1.4 GHz 4 32 256 3.1M TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM) Update-Only System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 547,800 M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 363,800 SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 240,500 TimesTen Replication Tests System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Asynchronous 2-Safe SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 38,024 13,701 SPARC T5440 SPARC T2+, 1.4 GHz 4 32 256 11,621 4,615 Configuration Summary Hardware Configurations: SPARC T4-2 server 2 x SPARC T4 processors, 2.85 GHz 256 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 1 x 6 Gbs SAS HBA 4 x 300 GB internal disks Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 x 24 GB flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head SPARC T3-4 server 4 x SPARC T3 processors, 1.6 GHz 512 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 8 x 146 GB internal disks 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head SPARC Enterprise M4000 server 4 x SPARC64 VII+ processors, 2.66 GHz 128 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 1 x 6 Gbs SAS HBA 2 x 146 GB internal disks Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 x 24 GB flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle TimesTen 11.2.2.4 Benchmark Descriptions TimesTen Performance Throughput BenchMark (TPTBM) is shipped with TimesTen and measures the total throughput of the system. The workload can test read-only, update-only, delete and insert operations as required. Mobile Call Processing is a customer-based workload for processing calls made by mobile phone subscribers. The workload has a mixture of read-only, update, and insert-only transactions. The peak throughput performance is measured from multiple concurrent processes executing the transactions until a peak performance is reached via saturation of the available resources. Parallel Replication tests using both asynchronous and 2-Safe replication methods. For asynchronous replication, transactions are processed in batches to maximize the throughput capabilities of the replication server and network. In 2-Safe replication, also known as no data-loss or high availability, transactions are replicated between servers immediately emphasizing low latency. For both environments, performance is measured in the number of parallel replication servers and the maximum transactions-per-second for all concurrent processes. See Also SPARC T4-2 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 1 October 2012.

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• Clone a Hard Drive Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Whether you’re setting up multiple computers or doing a full backup, cloning hard drives is a common maintenance task. Don’t bother burning a new boot CD or paying for new software – you can do it easily with your Ubuntu Live CD. Not only can you do this with your Ubuntu Live CD, you can do it right out of the box – no additional software needed! The program we’ll use is called dd, and it’s included with pretty much all Linux distributions. dd is a utility used to do low-level copying – rather than working with files, it works directly on the raw data on a storage device. Note: dd gets a bad rap, because like many other Linux utilities, if misused it can be very destructive. If you’re not sure what you’re doing, you can easily wipe out an entire hard drive, in an unrecoverable way. Of course, the flip side of that is that dd is extremely powerful, and can do very complex tasks with little user effort. If you’re careful, and follow these instructions closely, you can clone your hard drive with one command. We’re going to take a small hard drive that we’ve been using and copy it to a new hard drive, which hasn’t been formatted yet. To make sure that we’re working with the right drives, we’ll open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and enter in the following command sudo fdisk –l We have two small drives, /dev/sda, which has two partitions, and /dev/sdc, which is completely unformatted. We want to copy the data from /dev/sda to /dev/sdc. Note: while you can copy a smaller drive to a larger one, you can’t copy a larger drive to a smaller one with the method described below. Now the fun part: using dd. The invocation we’ll use is: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc In this case, we’re telling dd that the input file (“if”) is /dev/sda, and the output file (“of”) is /dev/sdc. If your drives are quite large, this can take some time, but in our case it took just less than a minute. If we do sudo fdisk –l again, we can see that, despite not formatting /dev/sdc at all, it now has the same partitions as /dev/sda.  Additionally, if we mount all of the partitions, we can see that all of the data on /dev/sdc is now the same as on /dev/sda. Note: you may have to restart your computer to be able to mount the newly cloned drive. And that’s it…If you exercise caution and make sure that you’re using the right drives as the input file and output file, dd isn’t anything to be scared of. Unlike other utilities, dd copies absolutely everything from one drive to another – that means that you can even recover files deleted from the original drive in the clone! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow to Browse Without a Trace with an Ubuntu Live CDRecover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveWipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7

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• Install Oracle Configuration Manager's Standalone Collector

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document The Why and the How If you have heard of Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM), but haven’t installed it, I’m guessing this is for one of two reasons. Either you don’t know how it helps you or you don’t know how to install it. I’ll address both of those reasons today. First, let’s take a quick look at how My Oracle Support and the Oracle Configuration Manager work together to gain a good understanding of what their differences and roles are before we tackle the install.   Oracle Configuration Manger is the tool that actually performs the data collection task. You deploy this lightweight piece of software into your system to collect configuration information about the system and OCM uploads that data to Oracle’s customer configuration repository. Oracle Support Engineers then have the configuration data available when you file a service request. You can also view the data through My Oracle Support. The real value is that the data Oracle Configuration Manager collects can help you avoid problems and get your Service Requests solved more quickly. When you view the information in My Oracle Support’s user interface to OCM, it may help you avoid situations that create problems. The proactive tools included in Oracle Configuration Manager help you avoid issues before they occur. You also save time because you didn’t need to open a service request. For example, you can use this capability when you need to compare your system configuration at two points in time, or monitor the system health. If you make the configuration data available to Oracle Support Engineers, when you need to open a Service Request the data helps them diagnose and resolve your critical system issues more quickly, which means you get answers more quickly too. Quick Installation Process Overview Before we dive into the step-by-step details, let me provide a quick overview. For some of you, this will be all you need. Log in to My Oracle Support and download the data collector from Collector tab. If you don’t see the Collector tab, click the More tab gain access. On the Collector tab, you will find a drop-down list showing which platforms are available. You can also see more ways to the Collector can help you if you click through the carousel of benefits. After you download the software for your platform, use FTP to move that file (.zip) from your PC to the server that hosts the Oracle software. Once you have that file on the server, locate the $ORACLE_HOME directory, and unzip the file within that directory. You can then use the command line tool to start the installation process. The installation process requires the My Oracle Support credential (Support Identifier, username, and password) Proxy specification (Host IP Address, Port number, username and password) Installation Step-by-Step Download the collector zip file from My Oracle Support and place it into your $Oracle_Home Unzip the zip file you downloaded from My Oracle Support – this will create a directory named CCR with several subdirectories Using the command line go to “$ORACLE_HOME/CCR/bin” and run the following command “setupCCR” Provide your My Oracle Support credential: login, password, and Support Identifier The installer will start deploying the collector application You have installed the Collector Post Installation Now that you have installed successfully, the scheduler is ready to collect configuration information for the software available in your Oracle Home. By default, the first collection will take place the day after the installation. If you want to run an instrumentation script to start the configuration collection of your Oracle Database server, E-Business Suite, or Enterprise Manager, you will find more details on that in the Installation and Administration Guide for My Oracle Support Configuration Manager. Related documents available on My Oracle Support Oracle Configuration Manager Installation and Administration Guide [ID 728989.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Prerequisites [ID 728473.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Network Connectivity Test [ID 728970.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Collection Overview [ID 728985.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Security Overview [ID 728982.5] Oracle Software Configuration Manager: Disconnected Mode Collection [ID 453412.1]

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• Review: ComponentOne Studio for Entity Framework

  - by Tim Murphy

  While I have always been a fan of libraries that improve coding efficiency and reduce code redundancy I have mostly been using ones that were in the public domain.  As part of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program a got my hands on ComponentOne’s Studio for Entity Framework.  Below are my thought after working with the product for several weeks. My coding preference has always been maintainable code that is reusable across an enterprises protfolio.  Because of this my focus in reviewing this product is less on the RAD components and more on its benefits for layered applications using code first Entity Framework. Before we get into the pros and cons here is a summary of the main feature listed for SEF. Unified Data Context Virtual Data Access More Powerful Data Binding Pros The first thing that I found to my liking is the C1DataSource. It basically manages a cache for your Entity Model context.  Under RAD conditions this is setup automatically when you drop the object on a your design surface.  If you are like me and want to abstract you data management into a library it takes a little more work, but it is still acceptable and gains the same benefits. The second feature that I found beneficial is the definition of views with improved sorting and filtering.  Again the ease of use of these features is greater on the RAD side but no capabilities are missing when manipulating object in code. Linq has become my friend over the last couple of years and it was great to see that ComponentOne had ensured that it remained a first class citizen in their design.  When you look into this product yourself I would suggest taking a dive into LiveLinq which allow the joining of different data source types. As I went through discovering the features of this framework I appreciated the number of examples that they supplied for different uses.  Besides showing how to use SEF with WinForms, WPF and Silverlight they also showed how to accomplish tasks both RAD, code only and MVVM approaches. Cons The only area that I would really like to see improvement is in there level of detail in their documentation.  Specifically I would like to have seen some of the supporting code explained, such as what some supporting object did, in the examples instead of having to go to the programmer’s reference. I did find some times where currently existing projects had some trouble determining scope that the RAD controls were allowed, but I expect this is something that is in part end user related. Summary Overall I found the Studio for Entity Framework capable and well thought out.  If you are already using the Entity Framework this product will fit into your environment with little effort in return for greater flexibility and greater robustness in your solutions. Whether the $895 list price for a standard version works for you will depend on your return on investment. Smaller companies with only a small number of projects may not be able to stomach it, you get a full featured product that is supported by a well established company.  The more projects and the more code you have the greater your return on investment will be. Personally I intend to apply this product to some production systems and will probably have some tips and tricks in the future. del.icio.us Tags: ComponentOne,Studio for Entity Framework,Geeks With Blogs,Influencers,Product Reviews

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