Monday, May 22, 2006

Friend Assemblies

I havent been able to blog, because the internet connection at my place is screwed up. The BT line has been disconnected. And i am not allowed to access blogspot at my workplace.
Recently i worked with friend assemblies in .NET framework 2.0. In some cases we need to limit the use of some classes to the assemblies in wihch they are defined. The "internal" keyword in C# allows us to do that. It hides the specification of these classes even when you refer these assemblies in a project.
But in some cases we might need to use these classes in some other assemblies. But on the other hand we do not want to declare these classes as public. here comes the sweet part of the .NET framework. We can use the "InternalsVisibleToAttribute" to specify as to which assemblies can use the internal classes.


The usage would be something like:

[assembly:InternalsVisibleToAttribute("MyFriendAssembly”)]

This attribute when applied to an assembly indicates that all internal types in that assembly would be visible to another assembly, whose name is specified in the attribute constructor.

Monday, May 15, 2006

GooglePages

Today i came across Google Page Creator.

It is a free online tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and publish web pages in just minutes.

- No technical knowledge required.
Build high-quality web pages without having to learn HTML or use complex software.
- What you see is what you'll get.
Edit your pages right in your browser, seeing exactly how your finished product will look every step along the way.
- Don't worry about hosting.
The web pages will live on your own site at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com

And the best part is that you can use the "Edit HTML" link to view the HTML code behind your page and even tweak it futher

Check out my Googlepages.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

.NET vs Java World on Google Trends

Recently, I came across Google Trends. I have been playing with it for a while analysing the various trends.

It just popped in my mind, "why not try google trends to see as to what it reveals for .NET and Java".
The result was bit of a surpirse to me because i thought was .NET was much closer to Java in terms of usage for especially enterprise software development.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

25 Things I Learned on Google Trends

i came acroos an entry on Micro Persuasion (Steve Rubel's) blog.

To give you a sense of its tremendous power for tapping into the world psyche, here are 25 things I learned on Google Trends.

1) Almost all of the ten biggest US markets for MySpace are on the West Coast

2) There's more interest in Bluetooth than in Wifi

3) PR is starting to come close to catching advertising. AdAge still bests PR Week

4) David Hasselhoff's popularity in Germany is declining

5) Jerry Lewis's popularity in France is rising

6) Blackberry is widening its lead over the Treo

7) Zacharias Moussaoui finally beat OJ Simpson in searches

8) Hockey is starting to surpass baseball in popularity, but they fall way behind football (no matter which way it is defined)

9) New York still tops LA!

10) The Kryptonite Lock got more PR from the blog blow-up than any other event during the past two years

11) TV is kicking the movies butt

12) Dogs are by far killing all other pets while cats and fish battle for second place

13) Democrats vs. Republicans? Yup, they're neck and neck and on my screen red and blue!

14) YouTube is huge in the Philippines. Call it the Mike Abundo effect.

15) Blogs have caught up to newspapers. Boing Boing and Gizmodo are close to catching the WSJ

16) The beach is more popular than the mountains

17) Wikipedia is huge in Eastern Europe and it started to lead Britannica, Encarta and Webster's in 2004

18) Digg is still way behind CNET but it caught up to Slashdot. MySpace speed ahead of AOL last year

19) Interest in blogs and RSS is much higher than in podcasting and wikis

20) Flickr is the king of tagging, followed by del.icio.us and furl

21) Web 2.0 is huge in Korea - even bigger than in San Francisco

22) Elvis and The Beatles are in a dead heat

23) Word is more popular than any other Office app. Outlook and Excel are in a tie, followed by Powerpoint.

24) Bill Gates is slaughtering Steve Jobs in searches

25) Google is bigger than God?

Monday, May 08, 2006

Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now

While going through previous MSDN magazines, I came across a list of must-have tools for a developer using Visual Studio.

Ten Essential Tools

Sunday, May 07, 2006

It would be a day to remember for lots of people.

Spurs & Arsenal face Euro destiny - It is probably the biggest game of Martin Jol's managerial career. Manager Arsene Wenger believes West Ham could do Arsenal a favour

The final salute - Arsenal will end 93 years at Highbury with a closing ceremony after todays game against Wigan Athletic. if you don't have a ticket for the game you can watch a live stream of the post-match celebrations on Arsenal TV Online.

Alonso beats Schumi to Euro pole - World champion Fernando Alonso won a battle with Michael Schumacher for pole position at the European Grand Prix. But Schumacher is anticipating an exciting race in front of his home fans. Best of luck schumi.

Saturday, May 06, 2006

Pattern for resolving Association classes many - many relationship

On Thursday, i had one of the most satisfying coding expereinces since i started working. Not many people have heard of IAA , but i tell you it is becoming the de-facto standard for Architecting the Insurance Applications.
My designer gave me the class diagram and sequence diagram for implementing a particular part of Payment use case. There was a situation where we had a many to many assosciation relationship between two classes Payment and PaymentDue. These two classes are derived from an abstract base class called FinancialTransaction.
Now we had to establish the relationship between each payment made again a particular paymentdue. Thus a paymentdue can have multiple payments associated with it and also a payment can have multiple payments associated with it in case of Direct Debit transactions. So in orderto uniquely identify each payments association with a paymentdue, i created a link entity called financial transaction relationship and represented it as a class with attributes as amount and settlement date. In financial transaction class i had two lists as attributes of type financial transaction relationship called relatedTpFinancialTransaction and relatedFrom FinancialTransaction. Thus i was able to attach each unique payment against its corresponding paymentdue and vice versa.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

(Mis)Uses of Technology

Recently came across an article on Techdirt regading the (Mis)Uses of Technology. The following scenario came to my mind, which has been recreated from that article.

Someone asked me how I could possibly read the screen on the mobile device I was using. It never really seemed that difficult, but apparently I (and many others) are doing quite a bit of damage to our eyes. At least that's what a new article is claiming, saying that the nation's obsession with reading things on mobile devices is generating new levels of eye strain, going beyond the typical eye strain found by people who are simply staring at a computer screen all day. To blame, of course, is the tiny text combined with the quality of the screens. Apparently, doctors are finding that people are coming in and asking for prescription glasses just for the sake of reading email on their Blackberry devices.

This isn't the first time, of course, that mobile devices have been called out for creating potential health problems. We've already heard too many stories about texter's thumb,

But even considering all these, i just love reading mails, appointments,calenders and other documents on my device. It is jsut so convenient to browse and read while on the move. There are times when conveniene matters most. Please note that i am not denying the fact that convenience should come at the cost of health, but there is a thin line and we need to maintain that line. I would like to know as to what do you feel about it. Let me know your views.