Posted by Brian Fending on December 4th, 2007 — Posted in Reviews, Technology
I had my company buy the ubiquitous Dundas components for me to fulfill some reporting requirements in a C# application, and I don’t regret it one bit. The Enterprise Edition bells/whistles came in particularly handy, so I recommend the upsell if you ahve the budget. I didn’t have occasion to work with the OLAP stuff (included with the Enterprise bundle), but have proposed that for consideration in the the scoping of some upcoming projects utilizing these and SSAS.
The coolest things about the tool are (a) tight integration with VS2005 IDE and (b) the point at which they stop the declarative code overhead and push you to the codebehind. It’s a fine line, this latter thing, but they dance on it well - just enough to satisfy rapid “you mean like this?” prototypes for peers and project managers with the flexibility to databind and do whatever custom manipulations you want in the background. A black box for sure, but at least it’s open on one side. And that was plenty.
One disappointment, and it’s really a minor one in the grand scheme of things, was with their Gantt charting options. I worked with the declarative and set tons of variables behind the scenes, but wound up abandoning it Sunday night to build my own C# Gantt library using GDI+ (at the absolute inside of everything) with nested gridviews. I had two people advise me on separate occasions, one before and one after I wrote the GDI components, to “just build a table and fill in the cells.” But we’re talking about 100+ projects with lots of resources, along with a complicated color scheme on the bars for individuals->depts->project roles. (And did I mention unique shades per resource name? 
Managing (and rendering!) that much HTML, when I could do it better in managed code, makes no sense to me.
I was thinking to myself, “I wonder if I can port this app to PHP…” the entire time and of course the answer is yes (likely with fewer function calls), but all in all the Dundas product gave me a good start on producing glossy, extensible charts from an ever-dynamic dataset. Now if I could just get these GDI-rendered labels to line up…
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Posted by Brian Fending on December 4th, 2007 — Posted in Reviews, Technology
My company sent me to Oracle OpenWorld in November, held annually in San Francisco, CA at the Moscone Center and other large venues about town. I stayed at the Hotel Bijou several blocks away but spent most of my time in sessions, doing work-work on the convention’s wireless network, and talking to peers and arguably the most excited vendors in the world.
This is, after all, a very large event. About 50,000 people large, from what I’m told. And Oracle is the largest database and middleware vendor in the world, citing the richest and most successful organizations as clients (read: sets of disciples). There were some great presentations (about five that I attended) and some real bombs (wow, I saw a lot of those, too), but it was all-in-all a good experience. So much money was being influenced there, I have no way to express.
I think I’ll spare some details for later posts, but here are one high- and low-light each. The session names were butchered, I’m sure, but are representative.
Visual Studio Integration with Oracle Data Provider (ODP.NET)
This has GOT to be a highlight, right? Well, it would have been. Granted, I’ve seen this functionality specification and know how slick it is to have only tablespace and user creation over the DBA side of the house and everything else on the developer side in your IDE. That’s awesome.
Want to know what’s not awesome? Your presenter - an alleged product manager - installed the Visual Studio 2008 Beta the night before the presentation expecting everything to work seamlessly. Forget that the latest and greatest is hitting the streets in a couple of weeks as a free oracle.com download. Hard to displace, but try for me. The night before, people. Needless to say, virtually nothing work but that which did work was really cool. It was nothing I didn’t expect it to do, and will be great when it’s done, but the demos, as they were, weren’t. It was a tense hour in a packed room.
Building Applications That Rock with ApEx
One of the execs from Washington Mutual (WaMu) card services presented their approach to deploying Application Express (formerly “HTML DB”, now adoringly called “ApEx”) in multiple business units. It started with a proof of concept that turned 24 disparate Excel, Access, and other manual processes into 13 (or so) ApEx applications. In eight weeks, including UAT. That’s the amazing part.
(Full disclosure: The part that was scary to me was running the database - a single instance for every app that’s being built and migrated to production - on the same box as the Web-serving Apache components. &%$^# EEEK. That’s an easy fix for my environment, though.)
What do I see at my company? I see business cases that would save a couple thousand a year get serious consideration. But replacing 24 processes in the field with something extensible, faster, and supportable that would equal thousands per instance? That is strategic, and I really, really look forward to doing something like that. Even if it means more of these crazy-arse weekend hours and all-nighters I’ve been pulling to do it, I think that it would ultimately be a win-win for the business units and IT, and potentially free up some time in the business units to conceive of more strategic projects.
Needless to say, I walked out ready to propose that to my directors. When I have a working model out at apex.oracle.com, of course.
There were two other presentations on designing with ADF (AWESOME presenter) and Scaling Your PHP App to 10,000 Connections using the new OCI8 extension and multithreading, but I think I’ll give each of those their own posts.
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Posted by Brian Fending on December 2nd, 2007 — Posted in Music, Personal, Technology
Take, for instance, my radio silence over the last several months. Is it possible - as would appear to be the case from the number of blog entries in that time (0) - to have no static, no occasional signal or noise? The answer to the question in either case is probably a firm No, but at least I have a set a of plausible excuses.
Let’s see… Last post = 4 Mar 2007. Roughly nine months for the base-12 challenged. In that time, I changed jobs, my little girl learned to babble, walk, and pee in the tub, and I got into Oracle and C# app development. My grandmother died while I was on the West coast for a wedding in July, and I’m an uncle. I lost twenty pounds and gained ten back. Oh, and played a concert of PDQ Bach’s The Abduction of Figaro (with Peter Schickele as narrator, to boot) and two (2) miscellaneous jazz gigs.
Wow, that was a lot of stuff, right?
Okay, so no more excuses. You’ve been updated and I need to start backfilling some content in addition to keeping up.
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